Stalin's Cheerleader

Stalin's Cheerleader
The fellow-traveling of historian Eric Hobsbawm.
by David Evanier
The Weekly Standard
05/19/2003, Volume 008, Issue 35

Interesting Times
A Twentieth-Century Life
by Eric J. Hobsbawm
Knopf, 250 pp., $30

IN "Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life," Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who was named by the Queen of England in 1998 a Companion of Honor on the recommendation of Prime Minister Tony Blair, records his love affair with communism. The marriage lasted from Hobsbawm's coming to political consciousness in the early 1930s to the collapse of the evil empire in 1991. And, in truth, Hobsbawm's ardor hasn't really abated, even yet. He writes that to this day he has "an indulgence and tenderness" toward "the memory and tradition of the USSR." He cherishes his tattered Communist party song pamphlets from the Communist rallies of his Berlin days. "The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me."

Interestingly, nowhere except in writing such autumnal reflections of his salad days does Hobsbawm reveal much semblance of having spent his life as a human being. As he writes, from childhood onward, "Human beings did not appear to interest me much, either singly or collectively; certainly much less than birds." His coldness and lack of curiosity extends to his entire family; of his sister he writes, "We had very little in common, . . . and my intellectualism and lack of interest in the world of people gave me a protection she lacked."

In a recent interview, Hobsbawm stated that the horrors of the Gulag did not affect his belief as a Communist. An interviewer asked, "What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm's answer was "Yes"--although he granted that the sacrifice of the murdered millions was "excessive."

Eric Hobsbawm was born in Egypt in 1917; his Jewish parents moved to Vienna when he was two. Both died during the depression, and Hobsbawm moved to Berlin in 1931, living with his uncle. His childhood was marked by these peripatetic moves and the insecurity they engendered, as well as the rising specter of Hitler. In 1933 his family regrouped in London, and he joined the Communist party while at King's College in Cambridge.

"The months in Berlin made me a lifelong Communist," Hobsbawm says. It was the apocalyptic atmosphere of the last days of the Weimar Republic in January 1933 that appealed to him, the clash of Communists and Nazis (when they were not working together), Hitler taking power, the Reichstag fire, the flaming street posters with images of violence. He experienced what he defined as the "mass ecstasy" of marching with his comrades in the freezing cold on dark wintry streets between shadowy buildings, an experience he defines as akin to sex, "and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours."

Hobsbawm began to enjoy the benefits of Western democracy as soon as he reached England, with a scholarship to King's College followed by a teaching appointment at Birkbeck College in London. He makes clear his passionate identification with the Soviet Union, even his sympathy for the Cambridge spies ("One minor spin-off from 1930's Communism," he pooh poohs), but his prose glides over most of the horrific events in the history of communism, including the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which he disposes of with one mention as "the line-change of the autumn of 1939." Hobsbawm writes that his love of jazz (a subject he coyly refers to as a passion, but with no real explication) "replaced first love," because he was "ashamed" of his physical appearance. But communism was his only real love. He was struck by Stalin's execrable "Short History," "which made Marxism so irresistible." Perhaps embedded in that "love" was a self-hatred that found revenge in supporting one of the most bestial murder machines in history.

ONE CAN LEARN almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm's "Interesting Times"--nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain. Hobsbawm's stunted, euphemistic language reveals more than he intends. Communists are always good, and anti-Communists are "dreadful," "hysterical," "ill-tempered." Opposition to communism is, in Hobsbawm's words, "espionage mania" (though he acknowledges Soviet espionage existed, he seems not to disapprove of it). He admits that the Soviet Union "was a monstrous all-embracing bureaucracy"--only to add immediately: "The new society they were building was not a bad society...good people doing an honest day's work . . . no class distinctions."

Hobsbawm's prose is always at a distance from reality. He writes of "the hecatombs of the Stalin era," not torture chambers and concentration camps. An old Hungarian Communist, Tibor Szamuely, "claimed to have had the usual spell in a camp during the dictator's final lunacies." Note "claimed," as if it's probably not true; note "lunacies," which is another glideover.

The Doctors' Plot show trials had "an anti-Semitic tinge." Hobsbawm writes of Stalin as "a terrible old man." Does this mean he was nicer when he was young or middle-aged? That he got grouchy? In the USSR, Hobsbawm writes, there was "almost paranoiac fear of espionage." Get that "almost." He writes that he stayed in the party because of the "titanic achievements [of the USSR] and still with the unlimited potential of socialism"--an unconsciously apt phrase, considering the fate of the Titanic. The attacks of September 11 led America to decide "implausibly" on a life-and-death struggle, but they were in truth "certainly no cause for alarm for the globe's only superpower. . . . Public mouths flooded the western world with froth as hacks searched for words about the unsayable and unfortunately found them." Who is the real threat? "The enemies of reason . . . the heirs of fascism . . . who sit in the governments of India, Israel, and Italy."

THERE IS NO DOUBT that Hobsbawm has acquired a remarkable worldwide academic cachet as a historian with his scholarly books, essays, and lectures. He holds many honorary degrees and has won a bevy of other honors, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now, at eighty-two, he is being showered with encomiums. Hobsbawm explains his success as due to the consolidation of the left in the academies and the Third World.

But another reason is surely that many liberals have never come to grips with the fact that Stalin was as evil as Hitler, and that Soviet socialism was as deadly as Nazism. The New York literati would not be currently flocking to readings at the KGB Bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan--premises once occupied by a Ukrainian branch of the Communist party--if it were called the Gestapo Bar.

David Evanier is the author of "Red Love," a novel about the Rosenberg case.