People in all walks of life, but especially intellectuals, used to believe that the Soviet Union was a place of wonders. Eric Hobsbawm was an outstanding example of the type. A professor of history, he wrote as if Karl Marx were looking over one shoulder and Joseph Stalin over the other. Capitalism was always about to collapse. The United States was “unfortunately” a great danger to one and all (which didn’t prevent him from teaching at the New School in New York). The disappearance into thin air of the Soviet Union and all it stood for did not make him change his mind, even if that meant yet more defense of mass murder. Asked on a television show in 1994 whether creating “the radiant tomorrow” would justify the death of 15 or 20 million people, he answered, “Yes.” He remained a Communist to the end because “the Party . . . got things done,” but what those things were he made sure to distort or leave unsaid. At the age of 95, he has just died, and the enigma remains that a man with such an inhuman and mendacious record had an international reputation as a historian, garlanded with honorary degrees and awards.
London being what it is, I could not help running into him. At a dinner to which we were both invited, he first glorified Castro’s Cuba to another guest, the British ambassador there at the time, and then went on to say that a nuclear bomb ought to be dropped on Israel, because it was better to kill 5 million Jews now than 200 million innocent people in a world war later. The last person who had reduced genocide to mathematics was Joseph Goebbels, I replied, whereupon Hobsbawm got up from the meal and left the house. And as luck would have it, he had a cottage in the tiny village on the next hilltop to mine in Wales. At unlikely rural occasions, we might have words. Once when I encountered him at a local show, he began snarling (expletives included) with his face contorted in anger that I was wrong to think that the peoples of the Soviet bloc preferred freedom to Communism. A commissar manqué, he would gladly have sentenced me to be executed, and I haven’t any doubt that in the event of his beloved revolution his Soviet colleagues would soon have executed him. Stalinist secret policemen were cynics; he was a true believer.
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