Comrades

Resumen del libro

From Marx to Mao, from Engels to Allende, from Lenin and Stalin to Ceaucescu and Castro, Comrades tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Ranging across not only the high politics and ideology of the most prominent communist regimes but also daily life under communism, culture and propaganda, Service analyses communism's appeal abroad as well as local attempts to set up communist administrations. He ends by showing that there was more to communism than mere brutality and demonstrates that while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. And the lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form. It is a highly readable, compellingly argued and an exciting work of history, if not always a comforting one.

Biografía del autor

Robert Service es un historiador británico especializado en Rusia y profesor en el St Antony's College de Oxford. Sus últimas obras publicadas son Lenin: una biografía (2001), Rusia, experimento con un pueblo: de 1991 a la actualidad (2005), Stalin: una biografía (2006), Camaradas: breve historia del comunismo (2009), Trotski (2010), Spies and Commissars (2011) The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991 (2015), The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (2017) y Russia and Its Islamic World, From the Mongol Conquest to the Syrian Intervention (2017).