3. Spain Week Bulletin No, 1, n.d. (October 1938).
4. H. S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History , Foreword by Malcolm Muggeridg (University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 116.
5. CUSC Weekly Bulletin, 25 May 1937.
6. CUSC Faculty and Study Groups Bulletin, Lent Term, 1939.
7. Eric Hobsbawm, ’In Defence of the Thirties’ in Jim Philip, John Simpson and Nicholas Snowman (eds), The Best of Granta 1889–1966 (London, 1967), p. 119.
H. S. Ferns, op.cit., p. 113.
9. Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (London, 1994), pp. 100–101.
9. Being Communist
1. Alessandro Bellassai, ’II caffé dell’ Unita. Pubblico e Privato nella Famiglia Comunista degli anni 50’, Societa e Storia XXII, No. 84, 1999, pp. 327–8.
2. Anthony Read and David Fisher, Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring of the Second World War (London, 1980), pp. 204–5.
3. Theodor Prager, Zwischen London und Moskaw: Bekenntnisse eines Revisionisten (Vienne, 1975), pp. 56–7.
4. B. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), pp. 60–62.
5. Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London, 1945), p. 39.
6. Agnes Heller, Der Affe auf dem Fahread (Berlin-Vienna, 1999), pp. 91–2.
7. How scarce real information in these fields was before the Cold War and how sceptically it was received by the eminent medieval numismatist who compiled it can be seen from Philip Grierson, Books on Soviet Russia 1917–1942: A Bibliography and a Guide to Reading (London, 1943).
8. Quoted in P. Malvezzi and G. Pirelli (eds), Lettere di Gondonnati a Morte della Resistenza Europea (Turh, 1954), p. 250. The name as transcribed in the book. ’Feuerlich’ should probahly be ’Feuerlicht’.
9. Zdenek Mlynar, Postscript to leopold Spira, Kommunismus Adieu: Eine ideologische Autobiographie (Vienna, 1992), p. 158.
10. Fritz Klein, Drinnen und Draussen: Ein Historiker in der D D R Erinnerungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000), pp. 169–213.
11. Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997), p. 20.
12. Ibid., pp. 128–9.
10. War
1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London, 2001), vol. II, p. 302.
2. Ibid., p. 298.
3. Theodor Prager, Zwischen London und Moskaw: Bekenntnisse eines Revisionisten (Vienna, 1975), p. 59.
4. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 55.
11. Cold War
1. Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London, 2002), chapter 1.
2. In any case, if any such problem impinged on British immediately, it was not Soviet but American behaviour, namely the ruthless terms on which Washington made dependent the grant of its 1946 loan to Britain. (See R. Skidelsky, Keynes, vol. III.
3. It included Bernard Floud, who was later hounded into suicide as a suspected spy or recruiter of Soviet spies by the security services. (He was found dead by his son, Roderick Floud, an economic historian who later became my colleague at Birkbeck, and is now head of the London Guildhall University.) Ironically, as he told me, the CP functionary David Springhall had once tried to recruit him as an agent, and he had told him he had no authority to do so. In any case it is unlikely that a man who attended Party branch meeting after the war was engaged in the kind of activity which usually implied breaking contact with the Party.
4. On the day in August 1947 I went there I estimated the number of travellers to the ’green frontier’ at c. 500, of travellers back at c. 7–800. There were then three trains a day.
5. The words of a British prisoner of war, escaped from a camp in Poland, who fought his way back with the advancing Red Army. I owe citation to George Barnsby of Wolverhampton.
6. Professor Reinhard Koselleck.
7. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extrems ( paperback), p. 189.
8. Its title For a Lasting Peace and o People’s Democracy [sic] was usually shortened to ’Forfor’. It disappeared from sight in 1956.
9. R. W. Johnson, ’Do they eat people here much still? Rarement, Trés rarement’, London Review of Books, 14 december 2000, pp. 30–31. Hodgkin, whose heart was in the Third World, abandoned the delegacy during his travels in Africa, whither he had gone to extend its work. he returned to Oxford in the 1960s as a Fellow of Balliol College, which also elected the dean of Marxist historians, Christopher Hil, as Master. His widow, the Nobel Laureate (Chemistry) Dorothy Hodgkin, continued the family tradition, for in 1984 I found myself with her on a visit of solidarity to Bir Zeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.
10. ’Academic Freedom’ in University Newsletter, Cambridge, November 1953, p. 2. I edited and wrote most of the ten issues of this Nesletter, ’published on behalf of a group of Communist graduates by the Cambridge Communist Party’ (i.e. the Graduate branch of the CP) which appeared between October 1951 and November 1954.
11. I am grateful to Nina Fishman for the relevant documents from the BBC archives, Controller, Talks to D.S.W., 20 September 1950 and G.22/48 circulated on 13 March 1948, THE TREATMENT OF COMMUNISM AND COMMUNIST SPEAKERS, NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE SPOKEN WORD. The director appears to have regarded the famous physicist, later Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society, P. Blackett, as a communist, presumably because of this hostility to nuclear warfare.
12. The guinea, a notional currency unit of £1 is, was a convenient way for shopkeepers to charge more. It disappeared with the decimalization of the currency.
13.W. C. Lubrenow, The Cambridge Apostles 1820–1914; Imagination and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1998).
14. Alan Ryan, ’The Voice from the Hearth-Rug’, London Review of Books , 28 October 1999, p. 19.
15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historiches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (1945–2000) (Göttingen, 2001) pp.29–30.
16. Robert Conquest’s pionering The Great Terror was not published until 1968.
17. See Hennessy, op. cit., p. 30.
12. Stalin and After
1. Ken Coates, ’How not to Reappraise the New Left’ in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register (Merlin Press, London, 1976), p. 112.
2. Thus in the rules of the British CP the right of members to take part in the ’formation of policy’ had been changed into the mere right to its ’discussion’.
3. Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti (Milan, 1996); Felix Tchouev, Conversations avec Molotov; 140 Entretiens avec le Bras Droit de Staline (Paris, 1995); Robert Levy, Anna Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, 2000); K. Morgan, Harry Pollit (Manchester, 1993).
4. Letter from E.J. Hobsbawm, World News, 26 January 1957, p. 62.
5. See Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the communist Party’ in M. Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L, Morton (London, 1978), p. 42.
6. Francis Becket, Enemy Within The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), p. 139.
7. It may be useful to cite the main part of this document. Here it is: All of us have for many years advocated Marxist ideas both in our special fiels and in political discussion in the Labour movement. We feel therefore that we have a respnsability to express our views as Marxists in the present crisis of intenational socialism. We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Commitee of the communist party to the Soviet action in hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, anf failure by british Communists to think out political problems for themselves. We ahd hoped that the revelations made at the Twentieh congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet union would have made our leadership and press realisz that Marxist ideas will only be aceptable in the British labour movement if they arise from the truth about the world we live in. The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Commun
ist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts — not an out-of-date theory, for we still consider the Marxist method to be correct. If the left-wing and Marxist trend in our Labour movement is to win support, as it must for the achievement of socialism, this past must be utterly repudiated. This includes the repudiation of the latest outcome of this evil past, the Executive Commutee’s underwriting of the current errors of Soviet policy.
Sent to Daily Worker on 18 November 1956; published in the New Statesman and Tribute on 1 December 1956.
8. Eric Hobsbawm, ’The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’ in Cornforth, op, cit., p. 41.
9. Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party an Moscow 1920–1943 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 238–41.
10. Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1958).
11. See chapter 1, ’Problems of Communist History’, of my Revolutionaries (London, 1973).
12. See my Memoir of him in Proceedings of the British Academy 90 (1995), pp. 524–5.
13. Ibid., p. 539.
14. A recent version may be found in my book (with Antonio Pollito) The New Century (London, 2000), on pp. 158–61.
13. Watershed
1. Tony Gould, Insider Outsider: The life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London, 1983), p. 183.
2. Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1974 edn), art.: Darwin.
3. Francis Newton, The Jazz Scene (London, 1959), Introduction, p. 1.
4. It was published in the USA in 1960 by a small left-wing publishing house, republished in an updated edition by Penguin Books in 1961, and subsequently translated into French for a series edited by Fernand Braudel, into Italian and into Czech.
14. Under Cnicht
1. Richard Haslam in Country Life, 21 July 1983, p. 131.
2. As I write this chapter, my son Andy tells me for the first time of the occasion, presumably in the 1970s, when, after two other Croesor boys had left them, his friend told him apologetically: ’The others told me to beat you up, but I don’t want to. Could you pretend I did, when they show up?’ Even so, the friendship faded as the mother made him increasingly unwelcome in the farm.
15. The Sixties
1. For my contemporary judgement of the May events, see ’May 1968’, written later taht year in E.J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London, 1999, and earlier editions), chapter 24.
2. MAGNUM PHOTOS: 1968 Magnum Throughout the World, texts by Eric Hobsbawm and Marc Weitzmann (Paris, 1998).
3. I did not consciously note this at the time, but the point is well taken by Yves Pagès, who has edited the complete record of the graffiti in the Sorbonne, collected and preserved by five university employees at the time. See No Copyright. Sorbonne 1968: Graffiti (Editions verticales, 1998), p. 11.
4. Quoted in H. Stuart Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988), p. 6.
5. Alain Touraine, Le Mouvement de Mai ou le Communisme Utopique (Paris, 1968).
6. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Les Primitifs de la Révolte dans l’Europe Moderne (Paris, 1966).
7. This article is cahpter 22 in my Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London, 1973, and various editions since).
8. Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London, 2000), pp.n 118, 203–4, 208.
9. Ibid., p. 203.
10. Ibid., p. 196.
11. Carlo Feltrinelli, Senior Service (Milan, 1999), p. 314.
12. Rowbotham, op. cit., p. 196.
13. New Left Review, 1977.
16. A Watcher in Politics
1. Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981); Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left (London, 1989).
2. ’Labour’s Lost Millions’, written after the 1983 British General Election, in Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rationam Left, p. 63.
3. Ibid., p. 65.
4. ’Out of the Wilderness’ (October 1987), Politics for a Rational Left ., p. 207.
5. Marxism Today, April 1985, pp. 21–36 and cover.
6. Geoff Mulgan in Marxism Today, November-December 1998 (Special Issue), pp. 15–16.
7. Leader in Marxism Today, Sptember 1991, p. 3.
8. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (UK paperback edition), pp. 481, 484.
9. ’After the Fall’ in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall, The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London, 1991), pp. 122–3.
17. Among the Historians
1. For the substance of the following paragraphs, see also Eric Hobsbawm, ’75 Years of the Economic History Society: Some Reflections’ in that Pat Hudson (ed.), Liying Economic and Social History: Essays to MArk the 75th Anniversary of the Economic History Society (Glagow, 2001), pp. 136–40.
2. Information from Professor Zvi Razi, Postan’s biographer, to whom, as well as to the late Isaiah Berlin and Chimen abramsky, I also owe the data about his early life.
3. IX Congres International des Sciences Historiques: Paris 28 Aout-3 Septembre 1950, vol. II, ACTES (Paris, 1951), p. v,
4. Professor Van Dillen of Amsterdam, in Ibid., p. 142.
5. Jacques Le Goff in Past & Present 100, August 1983, p. 15.
6. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts: 1945–2000 (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 29, 30.
7. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Winter 1971), ’HIstorical Studies Today’. The French contributors, all linked to the Braudel empire, were Jacques Le Goff, Francois Furet and Pierre Goubert, the British — two of them linked to Past & Present — werer Lawrence Stone, Moses Finley and myself, the US ones mainly had links with Princeton and included Robert Darnton and the only specialist on a non-western region, Benjamin Schwarz of Harvard.
8. Ibid., p. 24.
9. For Braudel his obituary in Annales, 1986 n. I; for my own inaugural lecture: Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), p. 64.
10. In Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).
11. Lawrence Stone, ’The Revival of Narrative’, Past & Present 85, November 1979, pp. 9, 21.
12. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio ed I verni [The cheese and the worms] (Turin, 1976). Curiously enough, though it was reviewed (by me) in the TLS ten years earlier, the more interesting, in my opinion, study of a case of beneficent witches, I Benandanti, had not then attracted attention.
13. See chapter 21 of my On History (London, 1997), originally published as ’The Historian Between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity’.
14. Pierre Bourdieu, Choses Dites (Paris, 1987), p. 38.
18. In the Global Village
1. Noel Annan, Our Age (London, 1990), p. 267 n.
2. The Estado, the local Times, wrote of a ’a packed auditorium…, ending with enthusiastic and prolonged applause’, Estado de Sao Paulo, 28 May 1975.
3. Julio Caro Baroja, quoted in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London, 1995), p. I.
19. Marseillaise
1. See the biography of this remarkable figure by Annie Kriegel and S. Courtois, Engen Fried; Le Grand Secret du PCF (Paris, 1997). The relative roles of Moscow and Paris in the genesis of the Popular Front have been much discussed, but it now seems clear that its real innovation, the readiness by communists to extend the so-called ’United Front’ from other socialits to frankly non-socialist Liberals, and eventually to all antifascists, however opposed to communism, originated in France.
2. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les Intellocrates: Expédition en Haute Intelligentsia (Paris, 1981), p. 330.
3. On the French Revolution, see my Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (Rutgers, 1990) and ’Histoire et Illusion’ in Le Débat 89, march-April 1996, pp. 128–38.
20. From Franco to Berlusconi
1. Primitive reberls: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movemment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester Univ
ersity Press, 1959).
2. E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Comtemporary Essays (London, 1973), ’Reflections on Anarchism’, p. 84.
3. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1943), Preface, For obvious reasons the first edition, published during the Second World War, attracted little notice.
4. The results are in chapter 5 of Primitive Rebels and chapter 8 of Bandits (1968).
5. These form the basis for the present account of my first visit.
6. ’Franco in Rettrat’, New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1951, p. 415. This article, which I wrote on my return, was described as ’some extracts from the notebook of an Englishman in Barcelona’.
7. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive rebels (1959 edn), Preface, p. v.
8. For a biography of this lifelong militant (1900–1973), ’always one of the most esteemed leaders of the Communist Federazione of Palermo’, see the article ’Sala, Michele’ in Franco Andreucci and Tommaso Detti (eds), Il movimento operaio italiano; dizionario biografico, vol. 4 (Rome, 1978).
9. ’The vast bulk of scholarly and sensible literature about Mafia appeared between 1890 and 1910, and the comparative dearth of modern analyses is much to be deplored’, Primitive Rebels, p. 31, fn 3.
10. Giorgio Napolitano and Eric Hobsbawm, Intervista sul PCI (Bari, 1975).
21. Third World
1. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Revolutionary Situation in Colombia’, The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs), June 1963, p. 248.
2. Andres Villaveces, ’A comparative Statistical Note on Homicide rates in Colombia’ in Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Penaranda and Gonzalo Sanchez G. ’eds), Violence in Colombia 1990–2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace (Wilmington, Delaware, 2001), pp. 275–80.
3. Monsignor G. Guzman, Orlando Fals Borda and E. Umana Luna, La Violencia en Colombia 2 vols (Bogota, 1962, 1964).
4. Eduardo Pizarro Leongomez, Las FARC (1949–1966): De la Autodefensa a la Combinacion de Todas las Formas de Lucha (Bogota, 1991) p. 57.
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