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Article: The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- July 31, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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WITHIN the former Soviet bloc, nobody of any repute has appeared to defend Communism or to lament its demise. It has been left to a veteran Communist in the West, Eric Hobsbawm, to do that. Often he refers to Communism as ``socialism,'' but that is word-play. A key sentence of his book reads: ``The failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism.'' The whole murderous enterprise would start again, if he had his way.
Hobsbawm has lived through all but a few years of what he calls the Short Twentieth Century, the period from 1914 to 1991. The historian, he writes, has the high calling of being a professional remembrancer of ...