The Red Flag: A History of Communism
Read The Red Flag: A History of Communism Online
Authors: David Priestland
Communism and the Making
of the Modern World
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
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First published 2009
Copyright © David Priestland, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-141-95738-8
In memory of my mother
Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.
4.
A still from Sergei Eisenstein’s
October
(Ronald Grant Archive, London)
5.
Russian civil war poster, 1919 (Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine, Paris)
6.
Starvation in the Ukraine, 1921 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)
8.
D. S. Moor,
Death to World Imperialism
, 1919 (private collection)
11.
Poster of the International Red Aid, 1930s (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)
12.
The young Mao Zedong, late 1920s (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)
14.
Stalin in a poster Gustav Klutsis,
Cadres Decide Everything
, 1935 (copyright © Plakat)
19.
Red Army soldier and proletarian shaking hands, poster, 1928 (copyright © akg-images)
20.
Members of the English Tom Mann Brigade, Barcelona, 1936 (copyright © AP/Press Association Images)
22.
A French Communist Party poster from 1946 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)
26.
V. Ivanov,
Vigilance is Our Weapon
(poster), 1953 (copyright © Plakat)
27.
Wojciech Fangor,
Figures
, 1950, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (photograph: Piotr Tomczyk)
34.
A young soldier of the MPLA in Huambo, Angola, 23 February 1976 (copyright © AFP/ Getty Images)
36.
East Germans strengthening the Berlin wall (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)
38.
Pol Pot leads a column of his men (copyright © AP Photo/Kyodo News)
39.
Killing field south of Phnom Penh, 1996 (copyright © Bruno Barbey/ Magnum Photos)
40.
Propaganda billboard of Colonel Mengistu, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1984 (copyright © Rex Features)
41.
Istvan Orosz,
Comrades, It’s Over!
(poster), Hungary, 1990 (copyright © Istvan Orosz)
42.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, 11 November 1989 (copyright © Raymond Depardon/Magnum Photos)
Writing global history is a challenge, but I have benefited from the enormous amount of exciting new scholarship published in the last twenty years, much of it based on newly available archival sources. I am also extemely grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have given me advice and helped me avoid errors. Tom Buchanan, Martin Conway, Mary McAuley, Rory Macleod, Rana Mitter, Mark Pittaway and Stephen Whitefield all read substantial parts of the manuscript; Steve Smith was especially generous with his time and read nearly all of it. Ron Suny has shown me unpublished work on Stalin, Steve Heder shared material on the Khmer Rouge and Laurence Whitehead gave me advice on Cuba. The Cambridge History of the Cold War project, led by Mel Leffler and Arne Westad, was an ideal group in which to discuss the international role of Communism.
The fellows of St Edmund Hall and the History Faculty of Oxford University have provided me with a stimulating and congenial working environment and granted me periods of study leave to work on the book. I am also grateful to the British Academy and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (both in Shanghai and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought in Beijing) for arranging a fruitful study trip to China; to Shio Yun Kan for his brilliant Chinese-language teaching; and to the archivists and librarians at the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History in Moscow, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library, and the Russian State Library in Moscow.
Gill Coleridge was an ideal agent, and played a major role in the project from the very beginning; I am very grateful to her for her encouragement and advice. I have also been very fortunate in my publishers. Simon Winder at Penguin was an extremely incisive and impressively knowledgeable editor. Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic was also very supportive, as was Stuart Proffitt at Penguin, and both gave me invaluable comments on the text. I would also like to thank Jofie Ferrari-Adler and Amy Hundley at Grove Atlantic. Thomass Rathnow at Siedler, and Alice Dawson, Richard Duguid and Mari Yamazaki at Penguin. Charlotte Ridings was an extremely effective and patient copy-editor and Amanda Russell’s extensive knowledge of the visual sources was a great help with the illustrations.
My greatest thanks go to Maria Misra, who made an enormous contribution to the book. Her knowledge of Asian and African history helped me to range far more widely than I otherwise would have done, and she read the whole manuscript, saving the reader from a good deal of clumsy prose.