Stalin's Professor - The awful, influential career of E. J. Hobsbawm - communist and historian

David Pryce-Jones

The present-day tyrant always sends out two kinds of emissaries: armed men and forgers of ideas; robust individuals and thin men with glasses and sunken chests; rowdies who beat the nation and other rowdies who give thanks for the beating in the name of the nation. The policeman is followed-and sometimes also preceded-by the liar.

Ferdinand Peroutka wrote these words, and they are to be found in Arch Puddington's informative book Broadcasting Freedom, about Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. An outstanding Czech democrat, Peroutka was in a position to speak for the victims of totalitarianism. First the Nazis had imprisoned him, then the Communists had chased him out of his country. Twentieth-century political rowdies were bent on terror and murder, but they depended on intellectuals to devise justifications for them. And one such is the historian E. J. Hobsbawm, almost a caricature of the thin, bespectacled forger of ideas whose role Peroutka evoked so powerfully from personal experience.

A Communist since his long-ago student days in the early Thirties, Hobsbawm has defended tyranny and attacked the nation continuously. Nothing that has happened in the real world, and especially not the moral and physical bankruptcy of Communism, causes him to rethink, let alone to apologize. He insists that he was always willing to do whatever the Party might ask of him, and that this still constitutes "the moral high ground." In 1994, on a television show, he told his interviewer Michael Ignatieff that Soviet mass-murdering made no difference to his Communist commitment, at the time or now. Ignatieff pressed him: "What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" To which Hobsbawm shot back, "Yes."

Who knows where such an unhappy and inhuman deformation of character begins. Born in 1917, the child of uprooted Jewish parents from central Europe, Hobsbawm reached England soon after Hitler seized power in Germany. Perhaps a sense of exclusion and persecution led him in turn to wish to exclude and persecute others. Perhaps he was in need of some stronger or more protective identity. I have myself heard him propose that a nuclear bomb be dropped on Israel because-as another matter of arithmetic-it is better to kill a few million Jews now rather than 200 million people in the nuclear exchange that is bound eventually to occur in the Middle East.

Arriving at Cambridge as an undergraduate, he instantly found his milieu among a little group of Communists drawn from the privileged classes. They included the future traitors Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Leo Long, as well as James Klugmann, a member of the Party's Central Committee, who as a wartime intelligence agent falsified the evidence coming from the field in Yugoslavia, and so helped to betray Serb patriots in favor of Tito's Communists. A year younger than Hobsbawm and destined to become a keystone of the Establishment, Noel Annan moved in this circle, and typically he was to write in his memoir Our Age that Hobsbawm's Marxism was always "sophisticated, illustrated by reading in many languages and brilliant in its range of references and sources."

One day somebody will write the definitive study of fellow-traveling, that strange phenomenon which throughout the West created a climate of opinion favorable to Communism and Communists. Hyperbole about Hobsbawm will feature in such a study. For most of his career, he has taught in London at Birkbeck College. In the style of Annan, fellow left-wing historians such as A. J. P. Taylor and Sir Keith Thomas, president of an Oxford college, naturally helped to manufacture his reputation, and lesser professors and hacks today treat him as "the greatest living historian." Even conservatives-for instance Hugh Trevor-Roper, who certainly knows better-seem obliged to be deferential.

In reality, Hobsbawm has mastered only some of the main European languages, a feat shared by lots of restaurant waiters, never mind academics. He is proud to proclaim that he does no original research, and his sources are often no more impressive than statistical yearbooks. As for the sophistication of his Marxism, he and Raymond Williams, another Cambridge Communist, defended the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. He defended the Soviet attack on Finland. He and Arnold Kettle, yet another Cambridge Communist, rejoiced at the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. His is the authentic voice of Stalinism.

Two of his books depict various outlaws and bandits, mostly rather obscure criminals whom he romanticizes as half-formed revolutionaries. But his main work consists of several volumes of 19th-century history, which seek to prove the usual Marxist dogmas that capitalism leads to imperialism and war; that the nation-state, with its nationalism and tradition, is a fraudulent invention; and that the class struggle moves history forward to its final Communist revolution.

Turning to the 20th century, in The Age of Extremes (1994) Hobsbawm was in a quandary. Vanishing without a trace, the Soviet Union had let him down, but he could not let it down without exposing that he had been its willing dupe. Forgery of ideas remained his sole recourse. The masses, he claims, supported Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution. This despiser of nationalism nevertheless praises Stalin as "a true national leader." Stalin, he says in some consummate euphemisms, "imposed order . . . [T]he police state can be the rule of law." In Hobsbawm's view, Communism alone defeated Nazism, and further so frightened capitalists that they bought off the proletariat with the welfare state. He fails to mention, or else glosses over, the brute reality of Soviet terror, from enforced collectivization to mass deportations, show trials, executions, and Gulag. Murderers like Khrushchev and Ho Chi Minh, we learn, were respectively "admirable" and "noble," while Castro's revolution "was experienced as a collective honeymoon." The Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc formed "in their own way a working economic system"-an unusual description of self-inflicted destitution. Had the Stalinist policeman Andropov been younger, Hobsbawm muses regretfully, the Soviet Union need never have collapsed.

The United States, unnecessary to say, started the Cold War. The Soviet satellites had merely "moved into the socialist camp." Reagan was surrounded by "an unusually dense screen of ideologists, fanatics, careerists, desperadoes and professional warriors." And of course Hobsbawm sees the United States polluting the world with its free market and its democracy. Crisis must follow, then revolution. As a good Marxist, Hobsbawm believes in prediction, never mind that none of his predictions have come true. Wait, though! At a recent seminar, Hobsbawm had a revelation, in light of world economic uncertainties: "In 1998 Karl Marx came back."

Imagine that someone were to defend Nazism on the grounds that millions of Germans approved of Hitler, that the Nazi revolution spread a modern form of social organization and economy across a continent in need of it, and so on. That person would be hounded, and rightly so. Paul Johnson has pointed out that Hobsbawm's denial of Soviet reality is the equivalent of David Irving's Holocaust denial. Jean-Francois Revel dismissed The Age of Extremes as "pure propagandist hocus-pocus" on the part of "an old and incurable British Stalinist." In his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Robert Conquest refutes in detail Hobsbawm's fictions about the Russian revolution and the popularity of Lenin.

But as Conquest goes on to say, "If Hobsbawm chooses to write rubbish, then good luck to him." This raises the question: Why does anyone continue to take such rubbish at face value? Far from being hounded, Hobsbawm at the age of 84 is undoubtedly an ornament of the Establishment, a member of the British Academy and honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a favorite of the international lecture circuit, winner of substantial prizes in more than one country, his books taught widely in universities. Who's Who lists 14 honorary doctorates, from colleges all over the world, including Oxford, Chicago, and Bard. He and other Communists or fellow-travelers founded a journal, Past and Present, to propagate their views. A group portrait of these men now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, as though they had spoken for the nation rather than against it. In a small touch that has much to say about present-day Britain, Prime Minister Blair awarded Hobsbawm the Companion of Honour, hitherto given to people of genuine distinction.

Fellow-traveling has evidently worked through to some consummation here. When once I put it to his fan Noel Annan that Hobsbawm was a bad man and a bad historian, he replied that anti-Communism was worse than Communism. We are supposed to admire those whose declared intention is to destroy us as they destroyed everyone else within their reach. We are invited to define murder and oppression as progress. What is this? Self-hate, fear, appeasement, a failure of will or of intellect, or all at once?

Hobsbawm, it is true, can no longer do much harm. Events have emptied his Communism of meaning, to leave a residue of odious kitsch on a par with those novels about heroic Red tractor drivers. We may be grateful, though, that in the safety of liberal democracy we were spared from discovering the point at which this liar would turn into a policeman.

COPYRIGHT 2001 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group