Red Eric

When the historian Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012, at the age of 95, his family arranged for him to be buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery near the grave of Karl Marx. It was an appropriate resting place for one of the 20th century’s leading Marxist historians, whose work focused on the emergence of capitalism from feudalism and the rise of the modern working class. Hobsbawm made his reputation in the 1960s with books on the history of labor, including influential studies of how bandits, Luddites, and other “primitive rebels” articulated working-class resistance to power. He went on to win a broad readership with a series of broad-gauge histories—The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes—that synthesized the political and economic history of the modern world from 1789 to 1991. By the turn of the century, Hobsbawm was possibly the best-known English-language historian in the world.

But many historians learned from Marx; fewer could say, like Hobsbawm, that they were actually communists, committed not just to studying the class struggle but to furthering it. And still fewer could claim to have remained communists till the end of their lives. Many intellectuals who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, at a time when it seemed like the only bulwark against fascism, were eventually shocked out of their allegiance by one or another of the Soviet Union’s crimes and betrayals. There were exoduses from the party in the late 1930s, following Stalin’s purge and show trials; in 1939, after the USSR declared an alliance with Nazi Germany; in the late 1940s, after Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe; and in 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest.

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