Idealists, Dupes, and Liars

Intellectuals and activists in the struggle to sustain the center.

British historian Eric Hobsbawm, author of 'The Age of Empire', 'The Age of Capital' and 'The Age of Revolution,' at his typewriter in 1976. (Photo by Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images)

by Daniel Chirot

Why do some well-informed, intelligent people refuse to abandon ideologies once those ideologies have proven cruelly oppressive?

In 1993, at a conference on the fall of European communism, the noted British-American historian Robert Conquest, who was by then 75 or 76, lit into me, claiming that sociologists were apologists for communism and incapable of understanding it. (Conquest died aged 98 in 2015.) I had never met him before, though I had always greatly admired his pathbreaking work about the horrors of Stalinism, and he certainly did not know me or any of the relatively obscure articles and books I had written. I had never praised communism; on the contrary, I had been criticized by some leftist academics for being too negative about Soviet kinds of regimes. So what did Conquest, who was a justly famous and courageous historian, have against me?

After a few minutes, it became clear. Conquest somehow associated sociology with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Though they considered themselves economists, the Webbs, co-founders the London School of Economics in the late nineteenth-century, inspired a generation of class-minded social reformers. Sidney Webb served as a one-time member of parliament for the Labour Party and went on to become a peer as Lord Passfield. The couple are remembered today as defenders of working-class interests. Conquest hated them, along with a whole series of intellectuals who had excused the excesses of communism, or even praised Stalin. George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre (two very different kinds of leftist sympathizers) were among the most prominent, as were many others like the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Some were real communists, some were outright liars, and others were simply naïve dupes.

After the conference with Conquest, I read Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s notorious 1942 book, The Truth About Soviet Russia. Based in large part on the couple's travel to the USSR in the 1930s, the book featured an extraordinarily laudatory introduction by George Bernard Shaw, a longtime supporter of much more moderate, Fabian socialism rather than of Leninism.

The book’s main essay is truly shocking. The Soviet Union of the 1930s, the Webbs claimed, was more democratic than were both the United States and the United Kingdom. Stalin was no more than one among equals, an elected delegate to the Supreme Soviet from a Moscow constituency. He was chosen by his peers for higher office but always remained subject to recall and certainly never became a dictator, unlike Franklin Roosevelt. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 was a model of democracy, granting equal rights to all. True, there was only one party, but within it there were so many different strands and political tendencies that it was more open and genuinely democratic than the stale political parties in the United States. On and on the essay went with all sorts of bizarre asides about how colonialism was bad but less civilized people should be tutored so they would be able to be democratic. That, according to the Webbs, is what the Soviet Union was doing with its many different “less civilized” ethnic groups and peasants.

During the period when Russia became more open, from about 1990 to the late 2000s when Putin began to seriously clamp down, many details emerged about the Stalinist period. Conquest’s estimation of conditions under Stalin, as it turned out, had been surprisingly accurate based on interviews with refugees and intelligence estimates he was able to see. Arguments may continue about exactly how many millions were imprisoned, tortured, or killed, but the fact is that there were tens of millions. The Holodomor, the famine imposed on Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 (about which Conquest also wrote), is well-remembered to this day in Ukraine but denied by Russian propaganda. About four million were starved to death; pictures exist of emaciated corpses being rounded up each day in cities across Ukraine. Kazakhstan also suffered immensely. That does not count the millions more killed during the great purges, the mass deportations of ethnic minorities from frontier areas, and other atrocities that are now well documented.

That raises a question that goes beyond controversies about Stalin and Soviet communism. Why do those who presumably should know better remain supportive of ideologies and leaders whose policies visibly contradict their own ideals? That is a question which should concern all of us now in a way I did not anticipate in the 1990s.

Eric Hobsbawm and the Dilemma of Party Loyalty

First, however, I’d like to go back to someone else whose distinguished career can give us insights into how sometimes just knowing the facts is not nearly enough to override one’s personal ideology or political activism. I refer to one of the most charming, brilliant, persuasive, and successful historians of our times, the late Eric Hobsbawm. Born in the same year as Conquest, he died at 95 in 2012. In his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Hobsbawm explains why he was a lifelong Communist Party member. In addition, there are revealing interviews available online, most notably one with Michael Ignatieff in 1994 about the publication of Hobsbawm’s book on twentieth-century history, The Age of Extremes.

In 1986, I invited Hobsbawm to a conference I had organized at the Rockefeller Foundation’s spectacular Bellagio research center on the causes of economic backwardness in Eastern Europe. A dozen leading scholars from America, Western Europe, (still communist) Poland, and Hungary were scheduled to appear. To my surprise, Hobsbawm, whom I had never met, agreed to come as a commentator. Perhaps it was the location that tempted him. The town of Bellagio, below the vast hilltop Rockefeller Center palace and its grounds overlooking Lake Como, is one of the most desirable resort sites in Europe and was a favorite of, among others, Winston Churchill.

From the start of the conference, Hobsbawm was the star and center of attention. He was a careful reader and his comments about the papers were very helpful. I edited the best of those in a book first published in 1989 called The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century. What I remember most about the conference, however, is Hobsbawm’s charisma. 

At dinner, both those in our group and several other artists and scholars staying at the Rockefeller Center asked Hobsbawm about his life and work. The most important questions were the same ones raised by Conquest’s denunciation of communist sympathizers: why, after so many disappointments, ranging from the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to the suppression of communist reform movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, did Hobsbawm never leave the Party? Surely he must have known about the purges, the deadly labor camps, the deliberate mass starvations, and the propaganda lies. 

Hobsbawm’s defense of his own communism in these dinners shed some important light, and, in conjunction with the Ignatieff interview, clarifies issues that are highly relevant today. Having recently looked again at the interview and at my old notes about the 1986 Bellagio conference, I now see something I had never fully understood about the power of deeply divisive ideologies.

In 1986, Hobsbawm’s answers to questions about his loyalty to the Communist Party were both appealingly evasive and meaningful. After a particularly sharp question, he got a sort of dreamy, nostalgic look and said that as a very young man he had had a wonderful girlfriend, a Communist Party member and activist. It was evident she was no longer alive, but he didn’t say why. He would never betray her memory, he said, and leave the Party just because he disagreed with some of its policies. To do so would have been a betrayal of his friends, his youth, and his ideals. The girlfriend reference may have been meant to disarm criticism, and it worked. But I have no doubt it was true too.

In the Ignatieff interview, eight years later, Hobsbawm answered the same question about why he had never left the Party in a less romantic, but similar way. One reason for his persisting membership, he explained, was that to leave would have been to betray his many friends who had died for the cause. “I have had an easy life,” he said. Those who could enjoy being radicals in the safety of a relatively tolerant democracy like Britain’s had to respect those who had a much harder time struggling against the Nazis. Unmentioned, however, was the fact that probably some of the activists he had known died at the hands of Stalinist purges, particularly ones who had fought in Spain’s civil war as communists.

Hobsbawm said much more in this interview. He told Ignatieff he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but was sent to live with a relative in Germany shortly after. In the early 1930s, as a teenager living in Berlin, he witnessed the rise of the Nazis and became a political activist. In 1933 he was sent to Britain from where his deceased father originally came. The failure of major Western democracies to stop Hitler’s rise, and the failure of pre-1933 moderate opposition within Germany itself, appalled him. As a young, aspiring Jewish intellectual, he knew from an early age that there was no choice but to oppose Nazism. But why join the Communist Party, rather than some other anti-fascist political faction? As he put it in the interview, “There was no other game in town.” So in the mid-1930s, not long after he moved to the UK, he joined the Communist Party in Great Britain.

Hobsbawm was not like the notorious “Cambridge (University) Five” spies who betrayed Britain. The most successful of them, Kim Philby, was from birth a member of the upper class, and became a top official in Britain’s intelligence service. The cover and prestige his origins gave him deflected any suspicions, allowing him to provide the Soviet Union a huge cache of classified British and American intelligence. Many were killed because of his information. The other Cambridge Five were not all from upper-class families, but one way or the other had entered into those ranks by having good connections and being smart. Hobsbawm was certainly very smart, but he was also a Jew—one who was so suspect that during World War II he was kept away from any potentially dangerous information. Hobsbawm never hid his Party membership, he never had access to classified intelligence, and he wasn’t a spy. He attended demonstrations and wrote and spoke in favor of Party positions, but not in any direct way in his academic work.

When Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm how he dealt with Communist Party positions that were obviously untrue from as early as the 1930s, like its accusation that Trotsky was a British spy, Hobsbawm answered that he kept quiet. That was why, until after the fall of the USSR, he had never written professionally about Russia or its satellites. He didn’t want to lie, but neither did he want to dwell on the Party’s dishonesty and mistakes. Eventually he even praised Conquest’s rough estimates of the catastrophic deadliness of Stalin’s policies, though he emphasized that no one could have known how many millions had perished, and considered that perhaps Conquest’s numbers were too high.

Ignatieff also asked Hobsbawm if as a member he had to follow the Party’s orders in every respect, even in his personal life. Seeing Hobsbawm smile and say yes, at least in theory, is at once seductively disarming and frightening. That is presumably what “totalitarian” means—not just total political loyalty to the Party, its head, and the State it rules, but loyalty in one’s personal, everyday life.

“There Is No Other Game in Town”

In how many other situations do well-informed people accept the seamy side of their ideological community because, in Hobsbawm’s words, “there is no other game in town”? 

Take, for example, some of the prominent Republican supporters of Donald Trump, who have stated clearly that they understand his many flaws but support him nonetheless. Former Attorney General William Barr, for example, speaks openly about seeing Trump’s narcissism and lies up close—including claims of a stolen election—but has indicated he will still vote for him. “The threat to freedom and democracy,” he remarked in a CNN interview in April 2024, “has always been on the left. I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.” This is not the opportunism of some Republicans who still support Trump in order to hold on to office, or to gain some advantage. Barr is not seeking to stay in power, or to get a job with a future Trump administration. It is because “there is no other game in town.” There are millions of other loyal Trump followers who agree.

This example is anything but unique. In the 1930s, how many Germans who went along with Hitler, despite understanding what he was about, did so because they saw the Nazis as the only game in town able to redeem Germany and put down the dangerous left? If the German Social Democrats (SPD) were no better than the German Communist Party (KPD), then a populist like Hitler, who could get votes from conservatives, was the only choice possible. That, at least, was the excuse the German architect Albert Speer offered in his memoirs for joining the Nazi Party in 1931. No matter that in the early 1930s the KPD, following Stalin’s and the Comintern’s dictates, called the SPD “social fascists” and considered them their worst enemy. It was only a few years after Hitler took power that Communists belatedly realized that they had better unite with Social Democrats and liberals in a Popular Front to combat the threat of real fascism. By then it was too late for Germany. The left and center had been eliminated.

Anti-colonial revolts, when the colonial power fought back and eliminated more moderate reformists, offer truer examples of there being no other game in town. ln Algeria’s war of independence against France from 1954 to 1962, for example, the radical FLN (National Liberation Front) became the only viable independence party after the French systematically refused to compromise with and had destroyed the more moderate independence movements.

But such political scarcity was not what Eric Hobsbawm faced in 1930s Britain. The Labour Party never closed its eyes to what Hitler was about, though many British (and let it be said, American) conservatives did. After World War II, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats joined with conservatives to oppose Stalinist tyranny and their own domestic communist parties. The Soviet army’s 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising was a turning point for many communists in the West, but none of this changed Hobsbawm. What might have been a reasonable position in the 1930s no longer was after 1956, even less so after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By 1986, when I first heard Hobsbawm explain his continuing loyalty to the Communist Party by referring to old and presumably dead comrades, Soviet communism had so decayed that it no longer posed a threat.

How much harm did a great historian like Hobsbawm do by never denouncing communist brutality? He never held a position of political power, so he was not like Kim Philby or Albert Speer or the more benign but still harmful William Barr. Nevertheless, by keeping quiet when he was so widely read and admired, he merited Conquest’s scorn. He could have done something to delegitimize what had become the exact opposite of what he presumably wanted—a fair, humane, egalitarian society. He chose not to.

At the end of his interview with Ignatieff, Hobsbawm returned to what he had written, and continued to write. He was pessimistic about the future because he saw support for the Enlightenment waning. He feared the coming of a new dark age. Were he alive today he would certainly be just as pessimistic, if not more.

To reject the center, to believe that one extreme or the other is “the only game in town,” makes it impossible to support and strengthen all that has been valuable about the Enlightenment’s best values. That is the lesson: those of us who write, who teach, who engage in politics, or who hold ourselves up as models need to be clear. There are usually many games in town that can help preserve sanity and broadly liberal center-right and center-left ideals. Let us never close those off because they are insufficient or imperfect. And let us never fall into the trap of thinking that moderates who are to our right or our left are so contemptible that we need to join the extremists on our side. If that happens to too many in the world’s democracies, then all is lost.

Daniel Chirot is Emeritus Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School. He is founder of the journal East European Politics and Societies.

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