Opium of the intellectuals.

[Comrades!: A History of World Communism, Robert Service, Harvard University Press, 571 pages]

SINCE THE COLLAPSE of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, scholars have busied themselves with a wealth of previously restricted archival material. In the process, they have made some important discoveries concerning, for example, Lenin's personal responsibility for mass murder and the Soviet decision to crush the Hungarian Revolution. But none of this has forced a dramatic rethinking of communist history. As a professor of Russian history at Oxford, Robert Service is aware of this, yet he seems to have believed that the time was right for a scholarly and comprehensive review of communism's career around the world. In Comrades!: A History of World Communism, comprehensiveness is the key, as Service seeks to answer a still open question: were there, despite undeniable national differences, enough similarities to justify treating communist parties and states as a single order?

Many thoughtful students of the subject have given "no" as the answer. In their view, Stalin, for example, should be understood as a latter-day Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, a "Red Tsar" or an "oriental despot." In other words, Koba belonged to what Tibor Szamuely called "the Russian tradition." Service himself calls our attention to the Sino-Soviet conflict and Vietnam's war against their comrades in Cambodia. Others have pointed out that communist leaders almost invariably sought to identify their regimes with "progressive" traditions in their countries' pasts.

One could lend further support to the nationalist view by observing that communist brotherhood did little or nothing to lessen ethnic hostilities--it only drove them underground. In the 1970s, Hungarians relegated "Bucharest Street" to a remote section of Budapest; they had to pretend to recognize Romanians as comrades, but it was a pretense. Or consider the bad blood that existed between Czechs and Slovaks within the Czechoslovakian Party leadership. General Secretary Antonin Novotn y, a Czech, never bothered to disguise his dislike of Slovaks, while Slovak comrades regarded Novotn y and the other Czech communists as Svejks--a contemptuous reference to the cunning but passive "good soldier" in Jaroslav Hasek's celebrated novel of World War I.

Although he does not examine these matters point by point, Service wisely concedes, "the national aspects of each communist order have always been of importance." Yet he argues, "communism's characteristics have been basically similar wherever it has lasted any length of time." And so they have. In virtually every case, one finds one-party dictatorship, adulation of a supreme leader, forced labor camps, expropriation of large sectors of the economy, central economic planning, persecution of religion, destruction or co-optation of intermediate institutions between the state and individuals, vituperative attacks upon designated enemies, and a sadistic political police.

Most importantly, communist regimes have been as one in their ambition to bring heaven to earth, to create a "perfect"--that is an egalitarian--society and a "new man." Peter the Great would not have imagined such a project; Stalin tried to enact it. Without exception, this utopian drive resulted in mass murder on a ghastly scale. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward alone claimed the lives of some 30 million Chinese.

It is another question whether, as Service maintains, the foundations of the Soviet order, as laid down by Lenin, "lasted unreformed under his successors through to the late 1980s." They did last until 1953, the year Stalin died, but Service's own account of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev tells a different story. Each retained or sought to retain the one-party system and, with the exception of Gorbachev, was determined to preserve the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe--hence the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt and the shutting down of the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring. But Khrushchev (in 1956) and Brezhnev (in 1968) acted reluctantly, and their regimes cannot be equated with that of the pitiless Stalin.

After the Man of Steel went to his reward, communism in Eastern Europe began a slow but discernable movement away from the reign of terror. Khrushchev's famous call for de-Stalinization--his "secret speech" to the Party Congress in 1956--only quickened the pace of change. It brought Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in Poland and Imre Nagy in Hungary. Both men, it is important to note, had been victims of Stalinists in their own countries. As a reformer, Gomulka turned out to be a disappointment, but he was an improvement over his predecessor, Boleslaw Bierut. Nagy had long been a loyal comrade, but as prime minister he stood for far-reaching reforms of the communist system. Even Janos Kadar, whom Moscow installed to replace Nagy, insisted upon Nagy's execution, but over time Kadar dismantled the terror regime and permitted greater liberty--in part no doubt because he had suffered at the hands of Matyas Rakosi, Stalin's "best pupil."

To be sure, things moved more slowly in East Germany and post-Prague Spring Czechoslovakia, but even though the regimes in these countries continued to harass and jail dissenters, including the now famous Vaclav Havel, they did not shoot them. Romania, where the unhinged Nicolae Ceausescu held court, and Albania, where the equally unbalanced Enver Hoxha outlawed all religious observance, were exceptions to the rule. Outraged by Soviet de-Stalinization, the Albanian dictator turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration.

As long as Mao was alive, Chinese communism set the standard for ideological rigidity. A pathological tyrant, the "Great Helmsman," as he preferred to be called, made of China a hell on earth. Service makes this clear, but for some reason, he felt bound to note Mao's "achievements." "In a break with pre-revolutionary culture," he informs us, "nearly all urban inhabitants acquired a bicycle." And Mussolini made the trains run on time, but it was only when the despot departed this world that sanity began to return to the land of Confucius.

Recognizing that the Great Leap Forward and the euphemistically styled Cultural Revolution had been catastrophes, Deng Xiaoping, a veteran communist, charted an ambitious course of renewal. Like so many reformers in Eastern Europe, he had narrowly escaped liquidation for his alleged heresies. In his seventies, when he assumed power, Deng pressed for rapid economic reform and a "communism with Chinese characteristics." Fearful of unleashing uncontrollable forces, he preserved the one-party state, but advanced a cautious program of political liberalization. As the clouds of fear began to lift, some rashly thought it was safe to express open opposition to the regime.

In the spring of 1989, students and intellectuals occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing and demanded democracy. Eventually, the government lost patience and suppressed the demonstration decisively. It is not without interest that many of those in the West who continue to express outrage over what they call the Tiananmen "massacre" had either remained silent or demonstrated sympathy as Mao ordered savage reprisals against millions who never challenged his authority.

In fact, Western intellectuals seem to lose interest in communist states that have ceased to project utopian visions and to will them--by means of terror--into being. Those whom Paul Hollander has called political pilgrims stood in line to see the Soviet "experiment" with their own eyes--but only as long as Stalin lived; disappointed by the lack of revolutionary elan under Brezhnev, they removed the USSR from their travel itineraries. Mao attracted them; Deng did not. Ho Chi Minh excited them; his successors hardly at all. Because he still poses as a bold revolutionary, Fidel Castro continues to fascinate. Service himself gives El Jefe credit for Cuba's achievements in the medical field, joining the king of pop agitprop, Michael Moore.

Other judgments are open to challenge. Service believes that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent (though they deserved a new trial, Sacco, at least, was almost certainly guilty); that General Franco and Dr. Salazar were "fascists" (they were traditional authoritarians of the Right); and that Italian Fascism and Nazism were rightist political movements (they were revolutionary movements of the national socialist Left).

Service also argues that the appeal of communism grows "in direct proportion to shortages in food, shelter, employment and chances of individual and collective betterment." However plausible, such a claim is misleading. It has always been intellectuals, most of whom never experienced poverty, who, in a search for meaning and direction in life, worshipped the god of communism and created in the mass of men an appetite for equality and a belief that they are entitled to it. Because this belief is so widespread, Service may well be right when he predicts that communism, under a new name perhaps, "will have a long afterlife even when the last communist state has disappeared."

Lee Congdon is the author, most recently, of Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism.