New Books In History

When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember hiding in the back of all my classes reading it while my teachers talked about something I know not what.  I was hooked on World War I, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The Great War was such a strange and tragic thing. It seems to have been started for no good reason, been fought without reason, and ended unreasonably. It’s just hard to make sense of. Which is why–if you are as confused as I am–you should pick up Norman Stone’s terrific World War One. A Short History (Basic Books, 2009). The book explains the inexplicable in the fewest words imaginable. More than that, it’s wonderfully written. Stone has clearly thought long and hard about the war and he is full of pithy observations, sharp opinions, and harsh verdicts. No one really comes out unscathed, which, given the way the war was started, fought and ended, makes good sense indeed. If you don’t know anything about World War One, you should read this book. There is no better introduction. If you know everything about World War One, you should also read this book. There is no more challenging book on the subject.

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Tags: 20th Century, Artillery, Bolsheviks, Empires, Foriegn Policy, France, Gallipoli, Historiography, Imperialism, Lenin, Marne, Nationalism, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Tanks, Tannenberg, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of Versaille, Trenches, United Kingdom, Verdun, War, World War I, Ypres by Marshall Poe
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Most people know what “appeasement” is. You know, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Anschluss with Austria, the Sudeten Crisis, Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in Our Time.” The Western democracies went (as Margaret Thatcher might have said) all “wobbly” on Fascism, with tragic results. But not everyone was fooled by the Fascists. Socialist and Communist parties all over the world recognized it as a dire threat as early as the 1920s, and they never wavered in this conviction (until the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, of course). So as much as we might want to blame the radical left for the many woes of the twentieth century, we should remember to give credit where credit is due. Joel Lewis does in his illuminating new book Youth Against Fascism: Young Communists in Britain and the United States, 1919-1939 (VDM, 2007). In the book, Joel tells the story of the communist youth movement in the UK and US. It’s a fascinating topic, and one that is little understood. Of particular interest is Joel’s excellent treatment of the transition from the Leninist generation of communists (1917-1933) to the Popular Front generation (1934-1941). The switch from the one to the other has too often been seen as entirely directed by Moscow. Joel tells a slightly different tale, one in which pressure from below among young communists played an important role in creating the Popular Front. It’s too bad this pressure wasn’t strong enough to convince the right and center parties to take Hitler more seriously than they did. If they had, World War II might have been avoided. (By the way, the Young Communist League is still around if you want to fight Fascism. And who doesn’t?)

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Tags: 20th Century, Anti-Fascism, Bolsheviks, Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Foriegn Policy, Historiography, Hitler, Ideology, Intellectuals, Lenin, Nationalism, Nazis, Popular Front, Radicalism, Russia, Socialism, Stalin, Trotsky, War, World War I, World War II, Youth Movements by Marshall Poe
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It’s hard to know what to think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Was it a military coup led by a band of ideological fanatics bent on the seizure of power? Was it a popular uprising led by an iron-willed party against a bankrupt political order? Or something else?  The debate began immediately after the October Revolution and continues to this day. No one is in a better position to answer these and related questions about early Soviet power than Alex Rabinowitch. For over forty years he has been at the forefront of scholars trying to figure out just what happened in 1917 and the years that followed. His Prelude to Revolution. The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana UP, 1968) was “revisionist” before Revisionism and remains a classic of Soviet history today. The same might be said of his follow up book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power. The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Norton, 1976; Haymarket, 2004). Now Professor Rabinowitch has treated us with yet a third installment in what is destined to become the standard work on the Bolsheviks in the Revolutionary period: The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana UP, 2008). The book, as we might well expect, is terribly impressive. It does all the things critical history should: debunks myths, establishes facts, and sets the story in a framework that makes what happened understandable. Thanks to Professor Rabinowitch’s work, it’s now much easier to know what to think about the Russian Revolution.

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Tags: 20th Century, Bolsheviks, Communism, Eastern Europe, Ideology, Intelligentsia, Lenin, Russia, Soviet Union, St. Petersburg, Stalin, Trotsky, World War I by Marshall Poe
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A number of years ago I read Robert Service’s excellent biography of Lenin and came away thinking “We don’t really know enough about the women who surrounded Lenin throughout his life.” Katy Turton, a lecturer in modern European history at Queen’s University Belfast, has fixed that. Her Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 (Palgrave, 2007) does a wonderful job of filling in the many blanks. She shows that the Lenin’s sisters, as well as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia, were not merely caretakers. Rather, they were powerful political actors in their own right. It’s a terrific book.

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, Intellectuals, Intelligentsia, Lenin, Politics, Radicalism, Russia, Soviet Union, Stalin, Women by Marshall Poe
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Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (Sage Publications, 1974), The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1990), and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Today we’ll be discussing his most recent work Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Richard Pipes says of the book: “A most impressive account of the tragedies that befell the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Not the least merit of the book is that, unlike most historians who treat Lenin as a well-meaning idealist, he places him along side Stalin and Hitler as a founder of modern barbarism.” I couldn’t agree more.

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Tags: 20th Century, Communism, Genocide, Hitler, Lenin, Nazis, Politics, Soviet Union, Stalin by Marshall Poe
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