How could so many people get it so wrong?

Tibor Fischer is impressed by the scale of this new world history of Communism
Comrades: A World History of Communism by Robert Service, Macmillan £25 Just the idea of writing something as comprehensive as Robert Service's Comrades makes me feel ill. He's to be congratulated that, though the labours must have been gruelling, the reading is easy.
Some Communist Parties are more equal than others. The entry on the Derg for instance, the Ethiopian Communist flowering (the organisation that gave Bob Geldof his big "Do they know it's Christmas?" break), is but a blink compared to the space devoted to the "evil empire", the Soviet Union. This is partly a reflection of Robert Service's speciality (he is the Professor of Russian History at Oxford) and due tribute to the entity that nearly imposed Marx on the whole world.
Francis Fukuyama might regret his "end of history" remark made shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, but there's no doubt that it was the end of Communism. Only bumpkins in backward parts of Nepal haven't heard the news.
What's interesting about MarxistLeninism or any of its spin-offs is that it lasted so long and was taken so seriously. As the ubiquitous joke in Eastern Europe went: "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man Communism is the opposite."
I'm old enough to remember how in the early 1970s (through observation of friends' older brothers) attendance at a university required a Jimi Hendrix album and the Penguin edition of Marx's Das Kapital (thumbed but rarely read). Marx was part of general culture, whether you agreed with him or not.
By the time I got to university at the end of the decade, only the historians were reading him (reluctantly) and the few members of Militant or the Socialist Workers' Party were viewed as pitiable.
As Robert Service points out, Marx (when you can understand what he's saying) was wrong about nearly everything. And in practice, almost all the Communist regimes were extraordinarily incompetent and extraordinarily brutal.
Pride of place in the lunacy stakes goes, of course, to Cambodia's Pol Pot, who lacked the wisdom and patience of a more accomplished despot like Stalin. When Beria informed Stalin that Russian nuclear scientists needed to use Einstein's work in order to build a bomb (Stalin having earlier dismissed E=mc2 as "bourgeois mystification"), Stalin pronounced: "Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later."
Stalin and Mao ruled through terror, but their regimes were aided by well-wishers outside. Although evidence was always available about the great Ukrainian famine for example, or the insanity of Mao's Cultural Revolution, many educated, intelligent people just didn't want to know because they were so wedded to the ideal of a "perfect" society.
Castro in Cuba still benefits from this goodwill because of the talk of socialism and his anti-American stance, although he's no different from Pablo Escobar or Alfredo Stroessner.
Service does a good job of depicting the conned: the procession of high-minded dupes from the West who fell for the propaganda (step forward George Bernard Shaw) or who went along with it because it was lucrative (such as the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty).
The failed Communist parties in the West are skilfully sized up. The story of the Workers Party of America in particular is a great comedy waiting to be written. Various national sections were created because of the different immigrant groups. "The Slays caused endless trouble" and Max Eastman wrote to Trotsky and Lenin urging the party to cut its links with them. But "the Jews were the most disputatious, always saying the worst of each other and arguing with the party leaders (nearly half of whom were themselves Jewish)". Service has a decent stab at explaining the preeminence of Jews in the Communist movement (a subject that deserves fuller treatment, though it should be noted that the most hardened opponents of the Left or of the Soviet Empire were often also Jews).
I only noticed one small slip in the book. Service states Imre Nagy, the Communist who ended up as the figurehead of the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution was "shot" he was in fact hanged. However, I don't quite understand why Service refers to the "October events" of 1956 as either a revolt or an uprising. The Hungarians call it a revolution, and if you look up the definition of the word in the OED, you'll see they are quite justified in doing so. For the intellectual background of Marxism-Leninism, Leszek Kolakowski's three-volume study Main Currents of Marxism (albeit with a Polish slant) is still the Daddy. However, when it comes to praxis, Service's book has no competition. Solid, readable and with great illustrations, Comrades is an admirable achievement.
Tibor Fischer 's latest novel, Voyage to the End of the Room, is published by Vintage (16.99)