When he first visited the Soviet Union in 1954, Eric Hobsbawm discovered that the theory of a workers’ state and the practice of a Moscow still bleeding from Stalin’s last purge did not quite gel. “It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals,” he recalled in his autobiography, “for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves.”
Wrong part of Russia, Eric. If he had gone to Siberia, alongside the corpses of “anti-Soviet” Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Chechens, Tartars and Poles, of tsarists, kulaks, Mensheviks and social revolutionaries and of merely unlucky citizens who had been denounced by malicious neighbours, or rounded up by the secret police to meet an arrest quota, Hobsbawm would have found the bodies of communist intellectuals – just like him.
Carry on reading
Reivew of “How to Change the World” by Eric Hobsbawm
5 Responses to “Reivew of “How to Change the World” by Eric Hobsbawm”
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Excellent review, unerring.
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Nick, I see your biographer has reviewed the same book.
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Peter Hitchens. His Cameron Delusion is more about you than him, it seems.
Nick Cohen
