Thousands of books and monographs have been published on the communist states since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and few scholars have attempted to integrate this vast amount of material. Professor George Breslauer's survey provides an extraordinarily effective synthesis that is extremely useful for both the general reader and the regional specialists responsible for providing the vast bulk of scholarly and journalistic analyses of communist states. Breslauer provides a concise and coherent summary of Marxist, Leninist, Maoist and other theories and the varied practices of communist states. His detailed explanation of both the initial basic unity of communist state practice during the period of Iosif Stalin's rule and the extraordinary diversity that emerged in both theory and practice after his death is particularly effective. The text is dramatic and coherent and its focus on the “interaction of their ideology and organization, the world communist movement and the broad global context” (4) is successful at every point. Regional specialists will benefit immensely by the surveys of theory and practice in regions beyond their area of expertise. (Trained as a specialist in the USSR and the Russian federation, my knowledge of communist state practice in Asia had become obsolete and this survey allowed me to “catch up” on recent developments in Asian communist states.) The text draws a clear distinction between the “bureaucratic Leninism” practiced in the USSR, the east European peoples’ democracies, Cuba, and the “Market Leninism” developed in China, Vietnam, Laos, Yugoslavia, and Hungary (in the 1960s–80s.) Breslauer seems to conclude that the development of markets will not change the basic character of the Leninist political system.
The effort to cover so many developments in a single volume invariably leads to some omissions and overly compressed surveys of critical events. For example, the author's discussion of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s refers to the intervention of Germany and Italy to support Franco's insurrection against the republican government but (probably inadvertently) fails to refer to the USSR's effort to support the republic with direct military support and the mobilization of international assistance (74). In some instance the chronology is misleading. The author notes that “In the Soviet Union itself, in
1991, the USSR was dissolved and the Communist party dispossessed, in a bloodless coup led by Boris Yeltsin” (22). In fact, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary and suspended the activity of the CPSU in August 1991 and Yeltsin banned both the CPSU and the Russian Communist Party in November 1991, or before the collapse of the USSR in December 1991. In similar fashion, the author notes that “Gorbachev had been selected by the Supreme Soviet as President of the Soviet Union in 1990. Several months later, Yeltsin engineered the creation of a presidency of the Russian republic” (242). This omits the election of Yeltsin as the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in May 1990 and his use of this position to challenge Gorbachev's policies on every level even before he was elected as President of the RSFSR in June 1991. Furthermore, it is not completely accurate to describe Yeltsin's position as “left” (243).
Some explanations seem overly simplified. For example, he concludes “In the spring of 1962 Khrushchev secretly hatched a risky plan to prevent another USA invasion of Cuba” (176). Others would give more weight to his effort to overcome the American lead in nuclear capacity. (In fairness, he quickly modifies his original conclusion.) In the introduction the author declares that he will introduce “many novel interpretations” (7). Unfortunately, they are not always clearly identified in the text itself. As a result, his various important challenges to the “conventional wisdom” are intelligible only to those readers with an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the controversies in the field. The author's occasional use of “counter-factuals” to generate “hypothetical conclusions” do not seem to add much to the illumination of actual developments. Finally, Chapter 41, which summarizes the various reasons for the growth of diversity in communist practice after Stalin's death is far more useful than Chapter 42 that attempts to determine whether the communist experience was a tragedy or achievement. But none of this detracts from the excellence of the project as a whole.
