“The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire”, by Brian Crozier

848 pages, Prima Lifestyles, ISBN-13: 978-0761520573

In The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire author Brian Crozier paints quite a dismal portrait of the collectivist powers that squashed all forms of dissent and pushed forward their grandiose vision for the world. This book lays out in plain view for all the world to see that, after decades of debates, the anti-Communists were right: Marxists the world over were fomenting revolution, terror, war and a plethora of inhumane practices through their ideology, their satellites and their allies, knowing and otherwise. Comrades and fellow travelers at home, similarly, were not the humanitarians they prided themselves on claiming to be; instead, they were vicious thugs with no minds of their own who were obediently following the orders barked at them by the mad dogs of the Kremlin, despite knowledge of Communism’s crimes against humanity, peace and culture – indeed, they turned their backs on all these because it is the Marxist nature to put ideology before all else. But don’t just take my word for it, for the best indication of the blinding truth this book lays bare – which is backed by nigh-irrefutable evidence such as documents from the archives of the fallen Communist regimes themselves – is the response it engenders from the far leftist crowd.

You see, Marxism is in a most twisted sense the “intellectual” religion of modern times: otherwise quite rational people who surrender to its totalitarian charms abandon all earthly rationality and participation in logical discourse; instead, everything in life is placed into two categories – “progressive” (good) and “reactionary” (bad! bad!); to put it more bluntly: if you’re not with us then you’re against us. How odd, then, that these self-described nihilists should bemoan such a philosophy on the part of the free-marketers and the true democrats. This is why their best prepared and unified defense against this book is to point out that it is written by a right-winger – and one that used to work for the British government, no less – and that this somehow makes the book false and untrustworthy, or that it has been praised by other right-wingers, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Edwin J. Feulner, Henry Kissinger, Richard Pipes, Herbert Romerstein and Margaret Thatcher. One can only ask what they would say to a book that is similarly condemning of the Soviet system and all fellow travelers, yet written by leftists (in fact, this book has already written: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, an equally damning look at the reality of Communism – and also reviewed by me on September 16, 2013).

Leftists criticize Crozier for his introspection and “bias”, but I’m apt to question their own biases considering they ignore Soviet Stalinist atrocities, repression in Eastern Europe and the Third World, as well as their state-sponsored terrorist campaigns. Crozier finds no fault with the CIA for whatever hand they may have had in Augusto Pinochet’s coup to overthrow the Marxist Allende, for Pinochet did, after all, bring stability and prosperity to Chile and saved it the perils of economic hardship from collectivization (it must be said, however, that a light must be shed on his own brutality in doing so). American interests were served in stopping the spread of communism. Crozier poignantly chronicles the turning point of the Cold War where the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is foiled and becomes their own Vietnamese quagmire; thereafter, Ronald Reagan stifles the Red takeover of Grenada and then comes the period of glasnost (publicity) and perestroika (restructuring; that is, as Crozier goes at great pains to point out, restructuring “the whole vast apparatus of propaganda and ‘Active Measures’”, the KGB term for political warfare) and thence the waning years of Soviet hegemony, all covered with amazing clarity.

My own perusal of the hate directed at this book shows that it is mostly launched by embittered leftists, American college-campus Marxists and fellow-traveling liberals in denial about Communist crimes and the inhumane nature of Communist systems the world over. Crozier is blunt and finds no fault with West and the United States for efforts to thwart Soviet expansion, a government Ronald Reagan was right in calling an “evil empire”. So, in the end, anyone can go through the book and find points where they disagree with the conclusions that Crozier has drawn…such is human nature. But, similarly, they know that he has the facts on his side: the documentation; the statistics; the reasoning…this is what makes them hysterical, and it is only to their utter disgrace.