Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Prague again, but would one want to retire from the West even to a relatively liberal country like Hungary? The answer was no, even though, for an old central European, it was intellectually and culturally far more lively and less provincial than its radiantly prosperous neighbour, Austria.

What did old communists and the general left expect from the USSR in the 1980s except that it should be a counterweight to the USA and by its very existence frighten the rich and the rulers of the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor? Nothing, any longer. And yet we felt a strange sense of relief, even a glimmer of hope, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. In spite of everything he seemed to represent our kind of socialism – indeed, to judge by early statements, the sort of communism represented by the Italians or the ‘socialism with a human face’ of the Prague Spring – which we had thought almost extinct there. Curiously, our admiration was not to be significantly diminished by the tragedy of his dramatic failure inside the Soviet Union, which was almost total. More than any other single man, he became responsible for destroying it. But he had also been, one might say, almost singlehandedly responsible for ending half a century’s nightmare of nuclear world war and, in Eastern Europe, for the decision to let go of the USSR’s satellite states. It was he who, in effect, tore down the Berlin Wall. Like so many in the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral approval. If there is one image from the 1980s that has stayed with me, it is the multiple face of Mikhail Gorbachev on the display screens in a TV shop which suddenly stopped me in my tracks somewhere on West 57th Street in New York. I listened to him addressing the United Nations with a sense of wonder and relief.

That he would fail at home was, alas, soon obvious; perhaps even that he and his fellow-reformers were too foolhardy or, if one prefers, neither big nor knowledgeable enough about the nature of the world they were ruling, to know quite what they were doing. Perhaps nobody was, and the best thing for the Soviet Union and its peoples would have been to continue its slow descent hoping for piecemeal improvement under a less ambitious and more realistic reformer. So, as I wrote from Helsinki in a commentary on the 1991 failed coup that ended the Gorbachev era, ‘he chose glasnost in order to force perestroika; it should have been the other way round. And neither marxism nor western economists had either experience or theory that helped.’ ⁷ Like a crippled giant tanker moving toward the reefs a rudderless Soviet Union therefore drifted towards disintegration.⁸ Finally it foundered. And the losers, in the short and medium term, were not only the peoples of the former USSR, but the poor of the world.

‘Capitalism and the rich have, for the time being, stopped being scared,’ I wrote in 1990.

Why should the rich, especially in countries like ours where they now glory in injustice and inequality, bother about anyone except themselves? What political penalties do they need to fear if they allow welfare to erode and the protection of those who need it to atrophy? This is the chief effect of the disappearance of even a very bad socialist region from the globe. ⁹

Ten years after the end of the USSR, it is possible that fear has returned. The rich and the governments whom they have convinced of their indispensability may once again discover that the poor require concessions rather than contempt. But, thanks to the weakening of the fabric of social democracy and the disintegration of communism, the danger today comes from the enemies of reason: religious and ethno-tribal fundamentalists, xenophobes, among them the heirs of fascism or parties inspired by fascism, who sit in the governments of India, Israel and Italy. It is one of the many ironies of history that, after half a century of anti-communist Cold War, the only enemies of the Washington government who have actually killed its citizens on the territory of the USA are its own ultra-right zealots and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim militants once deliberately financed by the ‘free world’ against the Soviets. The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.

17

Among the Historians

What has happened to the writing of history in my lifetime? Readers not interested in this somewhat specialized subject may skip this chapter, although it is unfortunately not as academic as it seems at first sight. There is no getting away from the past, i.e. from those who record, interpret, argue about and construct it. Our everyday lives, the states we live in, the governments we live under, are surrounded by, drenched in, the products of my profession. What goes into school textbooks and politicians’ speeches about the past, the material for writers of fiction, makers of TV programmes and videos, comes ultimately from historians. What is more, most historians, including all good ones, know that in investigating the past, even the remote past, they are also thinking and expressing opinions in terms of and about the present and its concerns. Understanding history is as important for citizens as for experts, and Britain is lucky in having a powerful tradition of serious but accessible writing by experts for a wider public: Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin, Maynard Keynes. Historians should not write only for other historians.

In my generation what Marc Bloch called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in any systematic way in Britain. We picked it up as best we could. Very much depended on whom we encountered as undergraduate students. In my days at Cambridge there was only one teacher whose lectures, though given at nine o’clock in the morning, I attended regularly, in common with most of the bright young radical history students of that time.¹ The astonishing M. M. (‘Mounia’) Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the London School of Economics, was a red-haired man who looked like a lively ape or Neanderthal survivor, which did not stand in the way of his impressive appeal to women, and he lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. Economic history was the only branch of the subject then on the Cambridge programme which was relevant to the interests of Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted even some such as the young Arthur M. Schlesinger who made no bones about his ‘lack of skill (and interest) in economic history’, not to mention his lack of interest in Marxism. Every one of those lectures – intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled and finally replaced by Postan’s own version – was a holiday from interwar British insularity, of which the Cambridge history faculty provided a particularly self-satisfied example. What other don would have told us in 1936 to read the recent French Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, not yet famous even in its own country, to invite the great Marc Bloch to lecture in Cambridge, presenting him to us, justifiably, as the greatest living medievalist? (Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except the image of a small pudgy man.) Though passionately anti- communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it. He knew nevertheless that he attracted the young Marxists, and, though denouncing their belief in Russian bolshevism, welcomed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism. ² During the Cold War, when I depended on his references as my doctoral supervisor, he also helped to keep me out of jobs by pointing out to anyone concerned that I was a communist. I cannot exactly say that he was my teacher, or indeed anyone’s teacher – he formed no school and had no disciples – but he was my bridge to the wider world of history. And he was certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history chair in Britain, or probably anywhere, between the wars – impressive, charming and absurd.

For Mounia Postan, somewhat improbably for a historian, was a lifelong fantasist and romancer. Without corroboration you could not believe a word of what he said. If he did not know the answer to a question – about the middle ages or the love-affairs of his students – he invented one. Since he was also very obviously an outsider in interwar Britain, whose highest ambition was to be an insider, the scope for fantasy was vast. Moreover, he lied with an utterly disarming shamelessness or chutzpah. Many years later when he was due to retire from his Cambridge chair but did not want to, he told the university that he was one year younger than his documented age, claiming that his birth record in what had then been Russia and was now Romania, no longer existed. As usual, he did not convince. As usual, people shook their heads, smiled, and said: ‘That’s Mounia!’

In some ways the greatest of his fantasies was the construction of a new identity in Britain, where he arrived from Soviet Russia via Romania in 1921. His early history was very much what one might have expected of a middle-class Jewish youth from the south-western borders of Tsarist Russia. He had studied at Odessa University