Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. xxv + 304 pp. $49.95.

http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzo.html

McDermott and Agnew have sought to incorporate the latest views of Western and Soviet experts as well as their own original research into a book accessible to advanced undergraduates. Beyond presenting material on the Comintern, their book can also serve as a primer for undergraduates as to how historians go about their work, i.e., asking the "right" questions is as important as is spouting the "right" answers. Adding to its pedagogical utility, they conclude their work with extracts from nineteen of the most crucial documents in the Comintern's history.

McDermott and Agnew do a fine job of summarizing in relatively few words the major issues and ideas surrounding the Comintern—no mean feat given the frenetic political machinations, olympian intellectual gymnastics, and the vicious and vapid verbiage of which communists of this era were so capable. Equally adept at cogently presenting conflicting views and explanations offered by historians, the two authors have effectively given voice to many others.

McDermott's and Agnew's own conclusions are balanced and hardly surprising. They decide that the Comintern's failure was bound to the attempt to universalize a Bolshevik model fit only for Russia's situation. Not recognizing the transcending importance of nationalism, this model then suffered Stalinist hyper-centralization, bureaucratization, and terror. Maintaining that this Stalinist outcome was not preordained, McDermott and Agnew stress the "broad church" of early Bolshevism from which "alternate paths could have been taken." Yet, ultimately, they find "the demise of the communist ideal" within "the original Leninist prescriptions." (p. 219)

Theirs however, is not a story of unremitting failure. The authors note, in too few pages, Comintern successes: in encouraging a wide range of theoretical responses to three decades of conflict; persuading, indirectly, capitalist governments to undertake social reforms; promoting the most active anti-fascist resistance from the time of the Spanish Civil War on; and in laying the groundwork for Communist advances in Eastern Europe and Asia after World War II. Nor do they accept uncritically that the Comintern died without a bureaucratic legacy, a legacy which they again too briefly describe.

If one accepts the premises upon which McDermott and Agnew have written their book, there is much to praise and little to criticize. However, Michael Weiner's chapter, "Comintern in East Asia, 1919-39," seems out of place in style and content—the rest of the book is thoroughly rooted in Europe. And, despite their stress on the bibliographical, they do not mention some seemingly useful sources: for example, in the fleeting four pages on the Spanish Civil War, they do not employ the works of Hugh Thomas or David Cattell. Finally, unless there is a paperback edition, the price is beyond the reach of the targeted undergraduate audience.


J. Calvitt Clarke III
Jacksonville University

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