Communism: A Tls Companion

Several distinguished British academics and commentators are featured in this collection of 52 reviews and essays, dating from 1904 to 1991, from the Times Literary Supplement. As TLS editor Mount acknowledges, the magazine's pages included ``amazing perspicacity'' as well as ``evasions and misinterpretations,'' and he reflects on how some intellectuals, like regular contributor E. H. Carr, ``succumbed to enthusiasm for Soviet planning.'' Two brief sections track events from 1902-1917 and 1918-1939; there are engaging critiques of Marx's bourgeois origins and Trotsky's propagandist description of the revolution. In a section covering 1940-1968, critics take on Koestler, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. The longest section covers 1969-1991, with Simon Leys savaging Ross Terrill as a Maoist apologist, Timothy Garton Ash exploring how ideologues of both the right and left invoke Orwell, and Robert Conquest arguing, post-coup, that ``no, we have nothing to learn from the Soviet system.'' Other than a 1953 review of Whittaker Chambers's book on Alger Hiss, events in the United States are ignored. Also, while contributors explore Communism in Europe, they steer clear of the Third World. (Apr.)