HISTORY

European life as deeply as Beethoven or Shakespeare. Other historians followed suit. Niall Ferguson, for example, struck a similar pose in last year’s The War of the World, another chronicle of twentieth-century brutality, although on a global scale; again ethnicity, not class conflict, played the central role. Since Wasserstein generally follows the same line (blaming ‘not class ... but ethnicity’ for the outbreak of the Great War, for instance), his argument is not quite as fresh and exciting as his publisher’s blurb would have it. Even so, this is a very impressive historical synthesis, as sure-footed on the Edwardian peasantry as it is on the consumer boom of the 1990s. The book is pretty enormous, mind you, but it would be a shame if that put readers off, because Wasserstein has a lovely brisk, dry style that keeps the pages turning. He is also a fine storyteller: his accounts of the great military and diplomatic set-pieces are not just well researched and thoughtful but fast-moving and exciting. As narrative histories of the last century go, this is as good as it gets. War, of course, dominates the book, and Wasserstein proves a masterful guide to the two great conflagrations of the century: his summary of the causes of the Great War, in particular, is a model of nuance and precision. Unlike Ferguson, he makes no effort to present the two world wars as a single conflict: instead, he emphasises the relative peacefulness and stability of the interval between 1923 and 1929. On the other hand, he is no slave to the conventions of schoolroom chronology. Rather than confining the Great War to a single chapter on the period 1914–18, he takes 1917 as a key turning point and therefore stretches the war out until 1921, incorporating the Russian Civil War, the Polish–Soviet War and the various nasty border conflicts, notably that between Greece and Turkey – all of which seems eminently sensible. The revolutionary year of 1917, in fact, is probably the pivotal moment in the entire book. Although Wasserstein is unsparing in his dissection of the corrupt, repressive Tsarist regime, he proves a justly harsh critic of the Bolshevik ideologues whose revolution overshadowed the rest of the century. As he shows, terrorism and brutality were built into the Bolshevik regime from the very beginning: he quotes, for example, a terrifying directive from Lenin in August 1918, ordering the public hanging in Penza province of ‘no fewer than one hundredknown kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’. For good measure, Lenin added: ‘Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are stranglingand will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.’ Frightening stuff, and as Wasserstein points out, fear of Communism, just as much as faith

in its revolutionary possibilities, was a guiding force of much twentieth-century history. He is a pithy and sensible guide to the horrors of Nazism, drawing on Ian Kershaw in particular, but he warns against a ‘false parallelism’ between the two creeds. Nazism, he argues, was inherently reactionary, anti-intellectual, imbued with ‘the spurious solidarity of the street gang’. By contrast, Communism was not some ‘manic delusion’ but ‘a modern transformation of the utopian chiliasm of the most enlightened elements in European thought since the seventeenth century’. Like Nazism, it descended into demented violence and horrendous bloodshed, but it was always more sophisticated and coherent: that explains why it lasted longer, and inspired so much genuine passion among otherwise sensible people. Given the enormous suffering of the Continent during the twentieth century, it seems only right that war and ideology play such key roles in Wasserstein’s account. But he is not blind to the other side of the coin, the civilisation promised in his title. It is arresting to be reminded that in 1900 most Europeans (four out of five in Southern and Eastern Europe) were rural peasants, often scratching a living in muddy little villages without electricity or running water, clad in filthy rags and subsisting on bread and gruel. Few could have imagined how much their world would be changed during the next hundred years: from motor cars and paved roads to personal computers and mobile phones. By any standards, this was an immense achievement, and Wasserstein’s chapters on the changing patterns of daily life, interspersed every now and then amidst the battles and diplomatic intrigues, are fascinating and thorough. Yet what lingers on in the mind after eight hundred pages is not, after all, the civilisation, but the barbarism. Passages on, say, the origins of the Swedish social model make pleasant and interesting reading, but they pale by comparison with the appalling savagery visited on millions of people, from the institutionalised genocide of the Holocaust to the casual shooting of opposition politicians in the early days of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. And Wasserstein’s conclusion, perhaps appropriately, could hardly be more pessimistic. The last century, he argues, quoting Anna Akhmatova, was ‘worse than any other’, but who can say that the next will be any better? With organised religion in retreat and society in thrall to vulgarised consumerism, he argues, the barriers protecting us from renewed barbarism have already been weakened. ‘Evil stalked the earth in this era,’ reads his last line, ‘moving men’s minds, ruling their actions, and begetting the lies, greed, deceit and cruelty that are the stuff of history in our time.’ To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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