Book description
Communism was one of the most powerful political and intellectual
movements of the modern world; at the height of their influence
Communist regimes controlled more than a third of the earth's surface.
Given its rapid rise and extensive reach, its sudden and wholly
unpredicted collapse after 1989 seems all the more astonishing and in
need of explanation.
In The Red Flag, David Priestland tells the extraordinary
story of a movement that took hold in many societies and countries
throughout the world. He examines the ideas and motives of its
principal thinkers and leaders:from Marx to Mao, and from Stalin to
Che Guevara. Priestland asks what it was about Communism that inspired
not only its leaders but also the rank and file -whether the militants
of 1920s Russia, the guerrilla fighters of China, or the Marxist
students of Ethiopia. And he explores the experience of what it meant
to live under Communism for its millions of subjects.
The Red Flag looks at Communist regimes' efforts to build new
states and industrial economies, but also explains their grim failures
and, in some cases, their capacity to inflict extreme violence. He
shows how varied a phenomenon Communism was and the manifold nature of
its appeal across different societies: in some it flourished as a
response to internal inequalities - economic, political and cultural;
in others it became the blueprint for catching up with the
'modernized' West. And yet, while eagerly destroying old structures of
privilege, Communist regimes simultaneously built new ones, and it was
this dynamic, together with its widespread economic failure and an
escalating loss of faith in the system, that destroyed Communism in
much of the world.
Now, when a seemingly triumphant globalized capitalism is itself in
crisis and the world enters a new phase of political and economic
uncertainty, The Red Flag is essential reading.
David Priestland has studied Communism in all its forms for many
years, in both Oxford and Moscow State Universities. He is University
Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford and a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall,
and the author of
Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization.
