410
Silvio Pons
History as Autobiography: Communism in EJHʼs «Short Century»
EJH never was an historian of twentieth-century communism. Before writing The
Age of Extremes in the early 1990s (well into his seventies), he devoted quite limited
scholarly attention to single, if crucial aspects of communist history. His articles
collected in the book on Revolutionaries, written in the 1960s and early 1970s, were
mostly focused on Marxism and on the social characters of modern revolutions,
and his remarks about German, French, and Italian communism were not developed later.1 Even his essays on the Popular Front and the relationship between intellectuals and anti-fascism in the 1930s were not the prelude to extensive writing.2
Though as early as 1969 he maintained that it was time to analyse the history of the
communist parties – as the historical age opened by the fall of the Second International and the Bolshevik revolution had come to an end –, he left to others such a
task. He did not engage himself as a professional historian, not even partially, in
the field of studies on the Russian revolution, the Soviet experience, or Western
communism.
Nevertheless, communism plays a fundamental role in EJH’s view of the past
century. The twentieth century was a «short century» because of communism, as
the periodization adopted in The Age of Extremes shows. His basic argument is
clarified as follows: «the history of the Short twentieth century cannot be understood without the Russian Revolution and its direct and indirect effects. Not least
because it proved to be the saviour of liberal capitalism, both by enabling the West
to win the Second World War against Hitler’s Germany and by providing the incentive for capitalism to reform itself».3 Even acknowledging that the role of communism as an incentive to reform capitalism – by instigating fear and promoting planning – was an «irony» of the «strange century», he emphasizes above all the very
point of «indirect effects». As Charles Maier has written, EJH’s Short Century
1 E. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, London 1973, New 3 Idem, Age of Extremes. The Short 20th century
York 2001.
1914–1991, London 1994, 84.
2 Idem, How To Change the World. Marx and Marxism 1840–2011, London 2011, chapter 11.
Communism in EJHʼs «Short Century»
411
«spans the rise and fall of the socialist project, including its Soviet incarnation,
justified finally by having helped to rescue, then stabilise, liberal capitalism».4 As
this is probably the most influent argument raised in his book, let us examine it in
more detail. 1. The Modernising Strength of Communism
As a first remark, we should notice that EJH distances himself from the classic argument of many historians of the Russian revolution, particularly E. H. Carr, who
in the late 1960s still connected the Russian to the French revolution in a linear
notion of progress.5 Writing in the aftermath of the fall of European and Soviet
Communism, EJH seems to give up the idea of a direct relationship between the
two revolutions, which was established as a leitmotiv by the Bolsheviks in power
and became for decades a milestone (or a question mark) to Marxist and leftist intellectuals. Nevertheless, not only maintains he that the intellectual sources of communism were strictly associated to the tradition of enlightenment, but also establishes an analogy between the French and the Russian revolutions under the light
of their respective global impact. Though the heritage of the French revolution
outlasts the Bolshevik revolution – EJH tells us – the «practical consequences» of
1917 «were far greater and more lasting than those of 1789» because the «global
expansion» of the communist movement «has no parallel since the conquests of
Islam in its first century».6 In other words, the relationship between the two revolutions is not abandoned. It is still a key to historical understanding for him, as it has
recently been for another Marxist historian like Arno Mayer.7 His emphasis on the
world impact of communism – as compared with the French revolution – is obviously connected with the «irony» of its role as a saviour of capitalism.
In his 1997 Deutscher Lecture, EJH makes a distinction between the «two histories» produced by the revolution’s impact on Russia and on the rest of the world.
Their puzzling connection, in his view, was that many outside the Soviet Union
were able to see Stalin as a liberator partly because he was a tyrant inside the Soviet
Union. From the perspective of writing after the end of the Soviet experience, EJH
dismisses counter-factual approaches to Bolshevik history – such as Bukharin’s alternative, sponsored even by Gorbachev in the 1980s. He imagines himself as a
Bukharinite in 1920s Russia, and even wishes he could say there was an alternative
to Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, only to conclude that there was none.8 Stalin’s military
approach to industrialization was the only possibility, given the rural backwardness
4 C. S. Maier, «Consigning the Twentieth Century 7 A. Mayer, The Furies. Violence and Terror in the
to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern
French and Russian Revolutions, Princeton/NJ
Era», in: American Historical Review 105 (2000) 3,
2001.
8 E. Hobsbawm, On History, London 1998 (De hisJune 2000, 813.
5 E. H. Carr, 1917. Before and After, London 1969.
toria, Milano 1997, 279–91).
6 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 55.
412
Silvio Pons
of the country and also «the circumstances of the times» – which means Soviet
isolation and the hostility of the outside world.9 On the other hand, the very features of communist modernization explain its failure – as in Marxist terms, the
productive forces came eventually to clash with the institutions and relations that
had transformed «backward agrarian economies into advanced industrial economies».10 These relations could not adequately stand global standards. Though the
Soviet effort to build socialism had produced «remarkable results» – including
post-war reconstruction in the Soviet Union and East Central Europe – it caused
«quite enormous and intolerable human cost» and shaped «a dead-end economy
and a political system for which there was nothing to be said». Nevertheless, EJH
seems less absorbed in any inquiry on how history might have gone differently than
in demonstrating the impact and image – even if cruel and failed – of communism’s modernisation programme.
I am not suggesting that EJH displays indifference toward violence and oppression in Soviet history. His picture of Stalin’s terror as «total war» against society is
quite clear-cut – though he could have devoted more attention to the crimes of collectivization and to the social consequences of repression. However, his idea is that
the revolution could only have produced such «kind of brutal, ruthless, command
socialism» and that the forms of forceful modernization characterising communist
regimes played a role no less important of capitalism in destroying old regimes and
forging the bases of industrial societies. What he adds to this perspective on the
Russian revolution is that Soviet modernization was significant on a world scale –
as its model or myth inspired imitation and adaptation in the Third World – to the
point of exerting influence over the capitalist system. EJH combines an approach
describing as unavoidable the limits and the price of the Soviet experience – quite a
traditional approach in terms of historiography – with the assumption that even so
the role of communism was a major one – though conceding that it left no significant legacy. Communism was too feeble to keep its promise to challenge capitalism
by representing a global alternative, but that very struggle affected the nature of the
winner. Communism may have never had a human face, but it forced its antagonist
to build up its own human face. Though EJH’s favourite Marxist thinker, Antonio
Gramsci, would have hardly defined such a role in terms of hegemony, still he
places it to centre-stage – while largely overlooking the bases of American global
hegemony, as some critics remarked and he later in part acknowledged.11
EJH focuses on the mutual relationship between the demiurgic forces of the
century, as he sees them. His appraisal of communism is seemingly associated
with an understanding of early twentieth-century capitalism as a phenomenon that
9 Idem, Age of Extremes, 380.
10 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 577.
11 S. Pons (ed.), L’età degli estremi. Discutendo con
Hobsbawm del Secolo breve, Roma 1998, 19–20,
126.
Communism in EJHʼs «Short Century»
413
could not be reformed by internal dynamics and forces. In other words, communism as a system of states and societies, as a world network of militants, and as an
external agency was more effective than Western reformist and social democratic
forces – though the effects it produced were not those prophesised by the Bolsheviks. We may notice that evidence can be found to support both this argument and
its opposite – namely, that the threatening presence of communism favoured more
conservatives than reformers in the West. For sure, EJH’s view makes some sense
in the context of an interpretation entirely built on the bipolarity between Soviet
communism and Liberal capitalism. The main problem is whether such interpretation sounds convincing as an historical framework for the twentieth century, twenty
years after the publication of The Age of Extremes.
2. The Intellectual Legacy of the October Revolution
Even though he was aware of the limits of a «binary division» between communism
and capitalism,12 it still appeared useful to him at the time when he wrote his autobiography and in the last years of his life. This is the point I wish to focus on in the
second part of my paper. Much more than the influence of specific historiographical currents or the outcome of analytical investigation – which is significant in
EJH’s retrospective interpretation of communism – is, in my opinion, the apparent
blend of historical appraisal and personal memory. The vision of the historian of
nineteenth century capitalism and empire overlaps with the memory of the twentiethcentury intellectual who made his basic political choice in Berlin in the aftermath
of the Great Depression and embraced for most of his lifetime what he calls the
«dream» of the October revolution.13 And it is not difficult to see how his interpretation of the Short Century may vindicate the biographies of those who trusted in
communism, not because their belief was well founded, but because their failed
revolutionary commitment helped to bring about change and welfare in the capitalist system – while the disappearance of communism coincided with resurgent free
market capitalism and a catastrophic «landslide» of the world order.
We should not blame EJH for interlacing historiography and memory. More or
less openly, contemporary historians share such an approach, even when less
suited for grand narratives than he was. He himself declares to have benefited from
the fact of writing on the twentieth century «not only as a scholar but as what the
anthropologists call a participant observer», and warns the reader of Interesting
Times that «in one sense, this book is the flip side of The Age of Extremes: not world
history illustrated by the experiences of the individual, but world history shaping
that experience, or rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices».14
12 Hobsbawm, On History (De historia, 276–77).
14 Ibid., 127.
13 E. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth Century Life, London 2003, 55.
414
Silvio Pons
The invaluable contribution of EJH’s memoirs is that, after having adopted the
«critical distance» recommended to historians in his book on the past century, he
has provided a remarkable example of what Walter Benjamin called «critical proximity» – stemming from the conviction that «the question why communism attracted so many of the best men and women of my generation, and what being
communists meant to us, has to be a central theme in the history of the twentieth
century».15
3. The Historian and his Communism
EJH raises a central point when he argues in his 1993 conference «The present as
history» against anachronism as a serious danger for historians. He claims the
generational advantage over younger historians of knowing well «how much things
have changed». At the same time, he maintains that an historian of the contemporary world should be able to check and change his views even in a very short frame
of time – as he assumes he did by adopting Ivan Berend’s definition of the Short
Century in the aftermath of 1989.16 Unfortunately, the question to find a balance
between struggling against anachronism and being ready to modify one’s view of
the past was not further developed by EJH. In his memoirs, the generational argument comes back as the prevailing one, reflecting a sense of self-indulgence. «It is
difficult for those who have not experienced the Age of Catastrophe of the twentieth
century in central Europe», EJH writes, «to see what it meant to live in a world that
was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a provisional way-station between a dead past and
a future not yet born, unless perhaps in the depth of revolutionary Russia». As the
nationalist option was unthinkable for a cosmopolitan British with Jewish roots, he
became «a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life lose its nature and significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I now know, was
bound to fail».17
Some remarks of EJH are really crucial to younger historians – as the political
and existential experience he depicts is amazingly far from those of our times. His
rationally «chosen life» (a formulation taken from the Italian communist Giorgio
Amendola) meant an option for total politics that preceded Marxist learning – a
common paradigm to pre-war communist generations – and entailed a lifelong
commitment, at least as a project. The resulting set of values and worldviews would
last in fact – in its basic components – for so many people regardless of their subsequently different paths and choices – even dissident choices. Their common
ground was, in his words, the idea that «no change was beyond their reach», an idea
15 Ibid.
16 Hobsbawm, On History (De historia, 271–273).
17 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 47, 55.
Communism in EJHʼs «Short Century»
415
strengthened by the sense of being engaged in a «total war», the construction of an
imagined international community, and the commitment to sacrifice and to a tragic
destiny for the progress of mankind.18 In his case, of course, the long duration is
particularly visible, as he did not abandon communism, let alone Marxism, even
after 1956. Not by chance, he firmly maintains a distinction between communist
subjectivity and other revolutionary experiences late in the century, to begin with
the romantic rebels of 1968.
However, one cannot fail to notice ambivalence when confronting EJH’s historical writing and memoirs. The presence of the Soviet Union, the building of a
socialist society and its «alternative modernity» were a substantial part of communist distinctiveness. It was not simply a matter of loyalty as, again, of identity. But
while the Soviet experience provides a major key to the Short Century, it contributes only little to assessing some of the main passages of his own biography. The
exception is represented by the years of anti-fascism and the Second World War.
Though EJH’s adhesion to communism came earlier, those years were crucial to
his intellectual and political formation in Great Britain – though surely less to his
emotions and passions, as he admits.19 His emphasis – and obvious overestimation20 – of Stalin’s anti-fascist coherence and the Soviet anti-fascist role as a turning
point of the twentieth century should be read in this light. Nevertheless, the presence and image of the Soviet Union – and especially its attraction in terms of «modernity» – almost vanish in the pages of his autobiography devoted to the post-Stalin era.
Such incongruity is quite probably only superficial. EJH provides a very simple
explanation of his choice to stay in the party even after 1956 – quite differently from
other intellectuals and historians, such as E. P. Thompson. He became a communist in the collapsing Weimar Republic, which meant being attached to a stronger
revolutionary identity than people experiencing militancy in Popular Front France
or in post-war Britain. Apparently, this also means that such original mark proved
to be resilient to the demise of Soviet myths. However, something is perhaps left
unsaid here. The marginality of post-Stalin Soviet Union in his memoirs may be
seen as the testimony of removal applied by Western communists – and particularly Western Marxist intellectuals – who increasingly found it difficult to square
the Soviet bureaucratic and imperial image with their personal experience and political identity. For some of them, disenchantment led to the New Left and to the
search for substitutive myths; for others, like EJH, to omission till Gorbachev’s rise
to power – the last «glimmer of hope» in the upheld conviction that what the late
Soviet Union could do was nothing more than «frighten the rich and the rulers of
the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor».21
18 Ibid., 136–138.
19 Ibid., 218.
20 Pons (ed.), L’età degli estremi, 17, 75, 124.
21 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 279.
416
Silvio Pons
This peculiar restraint from engaging with post-Stalin Soviet Union is reproduced in EJH’s memories, though not entirely. He acknowledges its influence on
his professional choices. «My history finished at Sarajevo in June 1914», he writes,
because «one could not write anything later than 1917 without the likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic».22 His abstention from dealing with historical
subjects of the twentieth century as a scholar up to the early 1990s reflected, however, a broader problem. In fact, while his autobiography provides important insights on the choice to become a communist in the first half of the past century, it
offers very little evidence on the erosion of communist identity in its second half.23
So we are left with his epitaph which once again, and conclusively, connects history
and memory: «The dream of the October revolution is still somewhere inside me,
as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere in the hard
disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR
with an indulgence and tenderness which I do not feel towards Communist China,
because I belong to the generation for whom the October revolution represented
the hope of the world, as China never did.»24 These words also throw light on EJH’s
view of the past century as an historian.
Silvio Pons
University of Rome «Tor Vergata»
Department of Historical Sciences
Via Columbia 1
I-00133 Roma
e-mail: [email protected]
22 Ibid., 291.
23 T. Judt, Reappraisals. Reflections on the Forgotten
Twentieth Century, New York 2008, 125.
24 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 55–56.