The Rise and Fall of Communism

by Archie Brown

Book Overview

"A work of considerable delicacy and nuance....Brown has crafted a readable and judicious account of Communist history...that is both controversial and commonsensical." --Salon.com "Ranging wisely and lucidly across the decades and around the world, this is a splendid book." --William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era The Rise and Fall of Communism is the definitive history from the internationally renowned...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061138797
• ISBN13: 9780061138799
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 736 Pages
• Weight: 2.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A very solid overview of Communism's arc, but a tad thin

Brown has several strong areas, above all the Gorbachev years. In fact, I'd love to see him do a separate book called "The Last Years of the Soviet Union" or similar. That said, the book has other strong points, primarily in some of the specifics of how different Eastern European parties interacted with Moscow, and in raising some philosophical questions about just what makes a country communist and whether or not a country like today's China is still communist. That said, without exactly feeling crammed, I would have loved to have seen another 60-100 pages in this book, and perhaps trimmed the Marx-Engels introductory material, which one would think any reader of this book would already know. That relative thinness, for a book this important, is the main reason it doesn't quite get a fifth star. It's a definite four-star, if not 4.5, but plenty of other reviewers, besides the disgruntled Kindle reader, will give it five anyway.

Why Communism Fell

One of the current debates is what ended the cold war. American's have suggested that Ronald Reagan played a decisive role by accelerating the arms race. The inefficient Soviet economy could not keep up and the Soviet leaders had to divert an increasing share of production to military spending. This eventually lead to the collapse of the Soviet Economy. This book discusses the rise and the fall of communism and the reasons for them both. Brown takes the opposite approach from that of American triumphalism. He suggests that intensification of the cold war generally entrenched the position of communist hard liners in the Soviet Union. It turned attention away from the question of whether things were working. Also the collapse of the economy is not itself sufficient to lead to the collapse of a communist state. Look at North Korea an economic basket case but one in which the regime is currently rock solid. This due to the huge amount of state resources invested in the security organs and very tight controls over the flow of information to the population as a whole. What led to the collapse of communism in Europe was one thing and that was the role of Gorbachev. He decided to reform the political structure of the Soviet State. One this happened and the party was not kept in power by force the old structures melted away. The communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been kept in place by the threat of invasion from the Soviets as had happened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. One Gorbachev signalled that this was not going to happen those regimes fell quickly. Market reform followed on from political change. Brown points out that one of the major success of communist regimes was the huge spread of literacy and the increase in the numbers of people who received tertiary education. This in turn led to a huge dissatisfaction and intellectual rejection of the basis of the regime. You couldn't pull the wool over peoples eyes. Rather than power being lost due to violent overthrow reform in Europe was by those in power deciding that the system was not working and needed change. In the East things worked differently. China and Vietnam kept in place an authoritarian state but introduced a market economy. The success of the market economy in raising living standards was such that it diminished the clamour for reform of the political systems. In an aside Brown speculates whether economic reform might have saved the communists in Russia. He sees the key to China's success as the reversal of the collectivisation of agriculture and allowing the peasants to not only have their own farms but to run whatever business they chose. He quotes one of the former rules of Russia who said that the Russian farm workers had been in collectives so long that they had any personal initiative or enterprise knocked out of them. The book is good and it explains how the communists, at all times a tiny minority were able to punch above their weight. It was their ruthlessness an

Excellent book

This is an excellent text on the history and political science of Communism. The text is suitable for novices and for scholars of Communism. Brown describes the history of Communism from its roots to the modern day events in an interesting and nicely written style.

Re-Reading History 20 Years After the Fall

November 9, 2009 signifies the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; for this day, Archie Brown has given us an in-depth account of "Communist" history--from before Marx and Engels to the present day--through decades of research and two years of writing. As we live in a period in which the "final collapse of Capitalism" looms as a possible threat and sales of //The Communist Manifesto// and //Das Kapital// are on the rise on one end of the spectrum, along with Ayn Rand's //Atlas Shrugged// in opposition, Brown has given us a valuable look at how the "last" revolutionary experiment failed (for the majority). The book itself reads simply as a narrative, condensed with information that is both well-researched and well-placed within the structure of history. At times, information on the inner-workings of governments overwhelm the larger picture, focusing instead on the intricate and subjective workings of individuals, but this fails to undermine the work in the long run. Well-paced, intricate without falling into over-complexity, and lined with enough humanity to raise it from the drab floor of textbook history, the book is a rewarding read. It is an important book for the time--a sober reflection on the physical, objective results of ideological thought. However, as a critique of Communist ideology itself, the book does very little; this book should not be read as a final answer to the political system (the "You see, it doesn't work, so let's stick with ours" mentality) but as a look at the simplicity of final reality. It is another reminder that there is always a terrible barrier between the written utopia of our words and the actualized revolution of our actions. Reviewed by Dylan Popowicz

deep perspective

Mr. Brown puts together a deep perspective on the Communist phenomena touching on the writings of Marx and Engles in the nineteenth century and those who were precursors of the "founding fathers"; loosely like Locke's influence on America's "Founding Fathers". Obviously the prime focus is in the twentieth century but also somewhat in this past decade. Although the author looks at the final five survivors of Communism (Cuba, China, North Korea, Viet Nam and Laos) and their attempts for footholds in Africa and the Caribbean, the tome mostly focuses on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe Bloc behind the Iron Curtain, which Mr. Brown admits has been his major area of study. The insight into the Gorbachev-Yeltsin transition period is especially powerful and enlightening as Mr. Brown insists that Gorbachev's reforms led to unintended consequences for the party and the empire. In every case except for the rather short Prague Spring, Trotsky's theory of the party substituting for the workers always led to harsh dictatorships and usually to internal power struggles especially when change at the top occurred. Well written throughout the large volume, the conclusions are profound based on solid arguments; for instance the surviving nations all claim the purest form of communism, as each governs differently and that the utopian socialist workers' state has never been attained. However, once again it is the fall of the Iron Curtain that is the most insightful section of a fascinating look at THE RISE AND FALL OF COMMUNISM. Harriet Klausner