Communism: A TLS Companion (The TLS Companions Series)

ISBN: 0226543234

Author: Mount, Ferdinand

Condition: New

Product Description From the overthrow of the tsars until the sudden collapse of Soviet communism, the most influential Western analysts have reflected on and debated the rise and fall of communism in the pages of the TLS. The diverse opinions gathered in Communism: A TLS Companion reflect the succession of Western attitudes to the birth, growth, and death of communism. Contributors to this volume include Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Pipes, Hugh Seton-Watson, Robert Conquest, Geoffrey Hosking, C. M. Woodhouse, Max Hayward, Leszek Kolakowski, Timothy Garton Ash, and many others of equal distinction. The volume is arranged in four sections covering the period leading to the Russian Revolution, the post-Revolution era of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; the Soviet Union from World War II to 1968; and the final period of disillusionment and collapse. From Publishers Weekly Several distinguished British academics and commentators are featured in this collection of 52 reviews and essays, dating from 1904 to 1991, from the Times Literary Supplement. As TLS editor Mount acknowledges, the magazine's pages included "amazing perspicacity" as well as "evasions and misinterpretations," and he reflects on how some intellectuals, like regular contributor E. H. Carr, "succumbed to enthusiasm for Soviet planning." Two brief sections track events from 1902-1917 and 1918-1939; there are engaging critiques of Marx's bourgeois origins and Trotsky's propagandist description of the revolution. In a section covering 1940-1968, critics take on Koestler, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. The longest section covers 1969-1991, with Simon Leys savaging Ross Terrill as a Maoist apologist, Timothy Garton Ash exploring how ideologues of both the right and left invoke Orwell, and Robert Conquest arguing, post-coup, that "no, we have nothing to learn from the Soviet system." Other than a 1953 review of Whittaker Chambers's book on Alger Hiss, events in the United States are ignored. Also, while contributors explore Communism in Europe, they steer clear of the Third World. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.