Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Agents of the Revolution: New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp.320. ISBN 3-03910-075-0.

The communist movement, by its very name, seems to discourage the study of individual cases; but this very repression indicates rich territory to be urgently uncovered. After all, the theoretical and practical battles that have marked communism’s violent and passionate history have hung on oppositions that imply the personal and the specific: idealism versus materialism; the subjective versus the objective; agency and determinism — all of these expressed in a movement both national and international, appealing and appalling to various social and ethnic groups. This collection of essays, based on a conference at Manchester University, is an admirable contribution to the growing prosopographical literature on communism. It also brings into dialectical relation the ‘demonological’ historiography promoted by Stephane Courtois and others — with its ‘criminogenic’, ‘total’ institution of communism — and a more ‘pluralist’ approach, typified by Wolikow et al’s Century of Communisms, whose emphasis on diversity could be suspected of a certain indulgence towards its subject-matter.

Autobiography, biography and evaluative reports on cadres were techniques of control used by the Comintern and individual parties. In addition to this, prominent party militants used memoir to construct themselves as examples of ‘people of a special mould’. The ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ were therefore inextricably, sometimes tragically, intertwined. Communism was, in the words of De Rooy, a ‘jealous movement’, offering both sacrifice and solace.

Some of these essays look at the functioning of communist institutions: the use of autobiography and biography in the promotion and purge of cadres, notably in the French and Finnish parties. Other essays look at the communist cultures that were created in the course of the twenties and thirties: the ‘moral community’ of the stridently sectarian Dutch CP; what Kevin Morgan calls ‘iconoclastic consanguinity’ in the CPGB. The Dutch counter-community apart, communist cultures emerge as sometimes difficult to separate from the rest of society. The families of Austrian communists in Vorarlberg before and after the war may have come across as ‘red fortresses’, but the desire of party members to, scandalously, seek marriages and funerals in the Catholic rite indicated that walls could be porous. The sociological make-up of the CPNZ was well in line with mainstream Kiwi society. Individual cases offer suggestive explanations of political trajectories: Rose Kerrigan’s stances could be explained more by her Jewish rather than Celtic roots; while the wonderful and frightening roaming cadre, Jozsef Pogany/John Pepper is, it is argued, another example of the ‘Hungarian genius’, his Magyar background explaining his chameleon-like qualities.

Contrary to Cold War psycho-babble, the cadres studied here do not display personality disorders any more shocking than those found outside the communist movement. But the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ do not always coexist smoothly. The men and women of steel can be flaky. Hence, one of the greatest figures of the CPUSA, William Z Foster, so identifies with a certain idea of the working class, imagining himself to be that messianic collectivity, that, at one point, he is reduced to a gibbering, autistic wreck. The demands of the institution produce a certain bolshevik melancholia: Clara Zetkin’s misgivings at ‘Class Against Class’; her indignation at the smashing of the KPD, her pining for the days of Luxemburg and Liebknecht; Willie Gallacher torn apart by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But if these often fascinating vignettes make such products of Lenin’s What is to be Done? ‘human’, that, necessarily, does not make them entirely sympathetic. Zetkin never publicly challenged Stalin’s policies, and it is convincingly suggested that she is a product of her authoritarian German background. Gallacher censures himself, both in memoir and party activity. On the face of it, the purging of Pogany/Pepper, the Comintern’s answer to Bela Lugosi, is de bonne guerre. Maurice Thorez’s Son of the People plays a seminal role in the creation of a new type of French communist, but this mandated personal myth-making seems to shade effortlessly into the cult of Stalin’s personality as well as his own.

And (in classically marxist fashion?) there is always the cruelty of history: the external forces that make the best-laid plans of revolutionaries ‘gang aglae’. However much cadres were moulded through autobiographical questionnaires and other techniques, and partly because of this processes of control, the French and Finnish apparatuses, as elsewhere, could not stand up to vast social, economic and political changes. The events of 1989-1991 were a death in the family, in more ways than one. The ‘jealous movement’ had a love that hurt.

Gavin Bowd