At the time he wrote this in 1920, Karl Radek was a loyal Bolshevik. This short book, like Trotsky’s more famous Terrorism and Communism, was written in rebuttal to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same title. Radek had the same politics as Trotsky but none of his skill as a writer. This book is a hatchet job, dismissing Kautsky — once known as ‘Pope of Marxism’ — as senile, decrepit, irrelevant, cowardly, a tool of the international bourgeoisie, and so on. Of course one wonders why bother writing a response to Kautsky if he was so unimportant. Clearly the Bolshevik leadership considered Kautsky’s critical writings about their new Soviet state as a threat — which is why Lenin, Trotsky and Radek all dropped what they were doing in the middle of a civil war to write rebuttals of varying length and quality. Much of the discussion in this book follows Kautsky’s own work, focussing on the French Revolution of the late 18th century and on the Paris Commune of 1871. Radek did his best to defend the Soviet regime, but in the end he died in one of Stalin’s labour camps after having confessed to treason at one of the Moscow show trials – a victim of the terror he defended in these pages. ( )

Radek raises the proverbial "one man's nourishment is another man's poison" by comparing Stalin's purging to the treatment of Irish revolutionaries by the British in the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921. This brochure was written by Radek in about 1920 (the English translations came later) and was endorsed by [a:Leon Trotsky|65974|Leon Trotsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238477754p2/65974.jpg] as a suitable response to [a:Karl Kautsky|110380|Karl Kautsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1298508226p2/110380.jpg], a German social-democrat, and his critique of Trotsky's [b:Dictatorship vs. Democracy|19167995|Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism)|Leon Trotsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429810530s/19167995.jpg|1767785], among other works. It is interesting that the title of which Trotsky was most fond was "Terrorism or Communism", but this was toned down for an American audience. And here I discover a whole can of historical worms. Communists in America, communists in the UK, critiques of Bolshevism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and so on. And then much later Trotsky in exile and a major critic of Stalin and the self-serving bureaucracy that was to become the antithesis of socialism, as the lowest level of communism. The great communist experiment was of global interest, despite the Western Allies' support of the anti-Bolshevik White Russians in the Russian Civil War of 1919-1923. Even a small contingent of Australian soldiers fought against the Bolsheviks. Yet there remained support from socialists in the West through various trade union and communist movements. This "support" seemed an ideal rather than a plausible solution to humanity's problems. I recall reading that Lionel Murphy's parents (according to [a:Jenny Hocking|170619|Jenny Hocking|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] in [b:Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography|3513918|Lionel Murphy A Political Biography|Jenny Hocking|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266657412s/3513918.jpg|4461581]) visited Russia after the Second World War but never spoke of the great socialist experiment ever again after lifting the veil on the propaganda. Reading this has provided me with several historical insights, aside from the Soviet Union, into the Irish War of Independence and the French Revolution, and for these alone it was worth the discovery, if not for the intellectual debating that went on between the Soviet intelligentsia and their detractors in the 1920s. ( )