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The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917-1991. By silvio pons. Translated by allan cameron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 400 pp. $25.00 (hardcover).
Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas (Debates in World History). By jack r. censer. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 224 pp. $19.95 (paper).
A History of the Barricade. By eric hazan. Translated by david fernbach. New York: Verso Books, 2015. 132 pp. $17.95 (hardcover).
Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Edited by keith michael baker and dan EDELSTEIN. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 448 pp. $29.95 (paper).
A Publisher's Cliché? Global Approaches to the History of Revolution
In 2015 Natalie Zemon Davis observed that "global" was becoming something of a publishers' cliché.1 For the first book under review here, Silvio Pons's The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917-1991, it is a case of guilty as charged. Originally published in Italian as Stato e Rivoluzione (State and Revolution), Pons's book is not a global history of revolution. It is largely a study of the leadership of the Soviet Union. How did Soviet decision makers think about their state's relations with the communist movement beyond the borders of the Soviet Union? Was revolution coming in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s? What international organization should exist to manage the relations between communist parties? Should the Soviet state's security take precedence over the need to spread revolution elsewhere? Why was there a breakdown in unity between the communist countries during the cold War? These are the questions that dominate Pons's narrative. He explores them through an examination of the positions of key actors, placing those positions within a wider context provided by a traditional history of international relations.
The book's six chapters are organized chronologically: Revolution (1917-1923); State (1924-1939); War (1939-1945); Empire (19451953); Decline (1953-1968); and Crisis (1968-1991). With a key role in three of the six chapters, Stalin is the book's dominant figure. Indeed, up to 1945, the roles of Communist leaders outside of Russia remain largely peripheral to Pons's story. It is only really in the book's final chapters, when a combination of the rise of Third Worldism and Communist China force Pons away from his central preoccupation with Europe. But even...