Smith, Stephen A. (ed) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 756 in literature, propaganda, and on the battlefield. Chapter six, ‘Return to Soviet Russia: Edwin Erich Dwinger and the Narratives of Barbarossa’, by Peter Fritzsche, examines a central figure in early German reporting on the Eastern Front and shows the spectrum of ideas surrounding the Nazi occupation in the east, from the ‘rational’ imperialism of German Ostforscher to the exterminationist fantasies of the radical core of the Nazi leadership. Chapter seven, ‘“The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers’, by Jochen Hellbeck, and chapter eight, ‘Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War’, by Katerina Clark, call attention to Soviet and German preoccupations with civilization and barbarism, particularly with the socialist humanist belief in the civilizing function of culture, either in cosmopolitan writers’ impassioned propaganda or in ordinary soldiers’ personal letters. The final body chapter, chapter nine, ‘The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945’, by Oleg Budnitskii, discusses the moral ambiguity experienced by educated Soviet officers crossing into Germany in the spring of 1945 during the period of the Red Army’s harshest revenge against the German civilian population. Despite variations in approach, the contributions to Fascination and Enmity serve as an outstanding primer to the new historiography of ‘entangled history’. Collectively, the chapters provide an insightful introduction to the study of continuities and divergences between the world wars and in moments of the extended German-Soviet encounter during the short twentieth century’s ‘age of extremes’. History Department Nicole Eaton Boston College Smith, Stephen A. (ed). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism. Oxford Handbooks in History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xiii + 658 pp. Tables. Notes. Select bibliographies. Index.£95.00. With the interest that is now so evident in transnational history, the need and opportunity for a global history of Communism has been met in one of two principal ways. For those, like many general readers, who prefer a singleauthored narrative, several accounts are now available by distinguished practitioners in the field. For those who as students and researchers have more specialist lines of enquiry, there are also a number of collective projects drawing on some larger body of expertise. Of these, the Oxford Handbook is in this reviewer’s judgment the most successful yet available in English. REVIEWS 757 The format adopted is that of thirty-five self-contained essays organized into sections on ideology, global moments, global Communism, Communist polities, social relations and culture. It is invidious in a short review to single out individual contributions. The authors nevertheless include a number of the leading authorities within their respective fields and a consistently high standard is maintained across the volume as a whole. Two other features serve to recommend the collection. The first is its inclusiveness of coverage both geographically and thematically. Given the particular expertise of the editor Stephen Smith, it is perhaps not surprising that the wider significance of the Chinese revolution is more fully recognized here than in some other general Communist histories. However, this is only one aspect of what might be described as the volume’s polycentric approach. This extends to chapters specificallyonEasternEurope(byPavelKolář),SouthEastAsia,LatinAmerica, Africa and the Islamic World, as well as attempts to connect these stories up, notably in the section on global moments. Only the USSR does not get its own essay, for the obvious reason that its presence is pervasive. However, it is in the Soviet case that the collection most of all reflects the conceptual breadth of current historiography, with social, political and cultural approaches all fully represented. The second impressive feature is the intellectual coherence that is achieved despite this breadth of approach. Each essay is designed to be self-standing and accessible individually online. As Smith nevertheless explains in his introduction, authors were also urged to range beyond particular cases and incorporate a comparative and transnational perspective within each contribution, and not just across the volume as a whole. It is true that some of them have entered more wholeheartedly into this than others. Among the essays clearly illustrating the benefits of...