CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

there, and eaten them. There is to be sure a dead zone in the middle of the sea but this is due to its
depth and high sulphur content (which may well give the Black Sea its name) and has existed from
time immemorial. Peter Taafe was not the leader of the Militant group, he was a leading figure and
the editor of its newspaper, but the founder and leader was Ted Grant (p400). The most startling
error of all occurs on page 373 where Service writes that, ‘Althusser claimed that Marx’s analytical
superiority lay in the scientific method and the corpus of Marx’s early writings; he argued that the
later corpus lacked the same rigour’ – which is the exact opposite of Althusser’s view.
On page 60 Service refers to Lenin receiving money from Berlin. To any reader unfamiliar with the
background, the context in which this is placed – the Russian Revolution – suggests that money
was supplied by the German authorities, the ‘Lenin is a German spy’ accusation used by the
bolsheviks’ enemies. That may not be Service’s intention, but it reads that way (the same point
reappears on p422). In reality any finance the bolsheviks received from Germany came not from
the government or the general staff but from Alexander Helphand (Parvus), a socialist eccentric
who financed various sorts of revolutionary enterprises.
On page 129 Service writes that skilled workers ‘became – in the Marxist jargon – a “labour
aristocracy” ’. That may well be so, but the jargon was (is) not confined by any means to marxists
but widely used by labour historians. On page 162 we learn that, ‘the NKVD was not renowned for
its investigative scruples, especially at times when it was under pressure to fulfil its arrest quotas’.
Again, not literally untrue, but as J Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov with massive documentation
demonstrate in The Road to Terror (1999), the NKVD functionaries frequently rejected anonymous
delations which they considered to be without foundation.
On page 312 it is pointed out that ‘no communist regime (in Eastern Europe) had come to power
through the ballot box’ – which is indeed the case, but what is not recorded is that in the first
general election following the liberation the Czechoslovak CP received the highest vote of any party
and would certainly have come to undivided power if the British voting system had been in use,
instead of having to content itself for the time being with the leading role in a popular front
coalition government. When recounting the extreme horrors of the Pol Pot regime (to be fair he
acknowledges that it was supported by the USA) Service writes that ‘Cambodia had experienced
continuous civil war’ but omits to mention that the central cause of the Khmer Rouge ascendancy
was the massive US bombing campaign in Cambodia ordered by Kissinger and Nixon.
All the errors and distortions might be regarded as trivial matters and to dwell upon them as mere
quibbling, but the character and extent of these blots and blemishes is not accidental, they all tend
in the same direction and taken together suggest a remarkable degree of sloppiness and inaccuracy
such as to badly undermine the credibility of the volume and its depiction of the communist
movement. An annoying habit is his frequent citing of his own previous books as sources, which
makes it impossible to check many of his assertions without having these to hand. There appears to
be a sour animus against Isaac Deutscher, with rather gloating references to the latter’s mistaken
estimate of the USSR’s future.
As mentioned, this is a narrative history and does not pretend to a great depth of analysis, what
there is of that would not be out of place in the Readers’ Digest – indeed it sometimes makes the
Readers’ Digest appear sophisticated by comparison – particularly the case in his account of
Marx’s writings. It recycles the hairy chestnut of the communist movement being comparable with
religious ones – I first encountered that in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy,
published in 1946 – and though some party members certainly assumed attitudes which imitated
religious devotion, to attach religious meaning to Marx’s or Lenin’s ideas would, if true, require
another word to be invented for what we’ve hitherto thought of as religion. No account is taken of
the importance of Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet Imperialism (it isn’t even mentioned) nor the
circumstances in which the concept of ‘marxism-leninism’ was dreamed up.
The tone is one of relentless hostility. Scarcely any communist, revolutionary or sympathiser is
introduced without a sneer, though, again to be fair, the second half of the volume is relatively
more balanced and a number of the achievements of certain communist regimes are acknowledged,
if grudgingly; Service’s tank of bile here becomes somewhat depleted, though never entirely
exhausted. The paradigm in which he places the movement is the ‘totalitarian’ one, well discredited
some decades ago, but now experiencing strenuous efforts at resuscitation.
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