The Rise and Fall of Communism

Outstanding!Easily, this is in the handful of best history books on communism. The book is not too long and yet sufficiently details the story of communism and the related Cold War. OK, some of the details in some areas, like governments in East Europe, are a bit much for my interest, but Acclaimed Oxford scholar Archie Brown overall makes the right choices for the "most authoritative" book on the subject without the book being too long. This is the benchmark and is complete and incredibly educational.It is far more authoritative than other books on the Cold War or communism. Perhaps this is the benchmark,It actually starts with history before Marx and Engels so you know the historical context leading to the observations and philosophy of communism. Then the beginning of the book covers the ideas of communism and the revolutionaries that espoused them, so critical for understanding how this twisted fantasy could have been so attractive to many people and spread around the globe. The Soviet Union is the main focus of the book. Like it or not, communism was the biggest political movement of the 20th century, with a huge rise and then big collapse.The book explains how communism could have been appealing to so many people, how it did not deliver on its promises, and how it collapsed and disappeared so thoroughly. The early escalation of the Cold War is fascinating.Another strength is the detailed explanation of how communism unraveled at the end -- obviously it did not deliver on the promises when totalitarianism abused the people and economies. Gorbachev played an unwitting role in the demise of communism in USSR with his Perestroika and Glasnost reforms, which allowed freedom in the Soviet empire. This is a great book on the fall of communism in USSR.As Pulitzer Prize winning David Remnick wrote, "Once the regime eased up enough to permit a full-scale examination of the Soviet past, radical change was inevitable. Once the System showed itself for what it was and had been, it was doomed.Brown was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher for awhile and has a slight anti-communist view, but this book is very fair and scholarly. Brown is a leading scholar of the Cold War, and this book is the benchmark book on the subject.Other excellent cold war books are: The Cold War: A New History, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion Of Freedom, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, and Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union.Highest recommendation!

The title of my review says it all, but in case some need elaboration: upon writing this I am currently doing Master of Arts in history program (my second master's degree), in which I am mostly focusing on the history of political and religious ideologies. Communism and Fascism both receive a lot of attention in my work, and as a result I am becoming familiar with a lot of literature relating to those ideologies. Archie Brown's work is definitely worthy of owning and reading all on its own, but especially in relation to the topics on which I am focused.Short summary of the content: it's exactly what the title suggests.Why you should read it: because although Nazism tends to garner a lot of attention for its evils (which it absolutely should), Communism is less discussed in American academia for what it truly is, and this book is a remedy to that problem. I'll end the review with a powerful quote as to why that is so:"There has been much controversy about the numbers of those imprisoned and killed at various times in the Stalin years, but the opening of the archives has led to some convergence towards a middle (but still horrific) figure, some millions fewer than the earlier highest estimates and some millions more than the estimates of those who downplayed the scale of Stalin’s terror. Ronald Suny, the editor of a recent major volume on twentieth-century Russian history, suggests that the ‘total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s is closer to 10–11 million than the 20–30 million estimated earlier’. Anne Applebaum, the author of a detailed study of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, arrives at a figure of 28.7 million forced labourers over the whole Soviet period. She includes in that number the ‘special exiles’, such as ‘kulaks’ and particular nationalities, among them the Tatars and Volga Germans, who were deported during World War Two. Applebaum notes that a figure of around 786,000 political executions between 1934 and 1953 is now quite widely accepted, although her own view is that the true figure is probably significantly higher than that number. The Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, dedicated to investigating the cases of repression in the Soviet period, more recently came up with the figure of 1.7 million people arrested in 1937–38 alone, of whom, they say, at least 818,000 were shot."

Very interesting book, and surprisingly easy to read. You shouldn't consider though it unless you have a strong background in modern history. Communisn wasn't a monolithic movement and the author does a good job of unraveling a very complex subject, from start to finish.

Brown write a good overview of the historical process of Communistic rise and fall, appropriately named. There were many great illustrations, details, overviews, comparisons, and contrasts that provided an understanding and capacity for Westerners who hadn't experienced those days to partially internalize his messages. In general a very good read for generic context and background - I wouldn't recommend it for advanced studies or in-depth analysis.

Brown's book is an excellent history of the leadup, life, and death of Communism in the Warsaw Pact and Europe. Conversely not much and not enough of the book are set aside for the development and history of Communism in places such as Latin America and Asia. I don't think this is by intentional omission, just the author's failure to grasp the inherent problem with trying to represent all of Communism as a monolithic movement. To be fair, the author is aware of this-briefly going over the history of pre-Soviet Communism such as the American Religious Communes of the 19th century. Probably Brown's biggest mistake thus was to write a single-volume account of a subject which is far too intricate and nuanced to be expressed in a single book. Otherwise, it's a good book on the Soviet system and its failures-some of its virtues too.