The cult of sober routine

From Perry Anderson's book Spectrum. From right to left in the world of ideas"

In 2005, historian and sociologist Perry Anderson collected in one book a gallery of portraits of thinkers of the 20th century, aiming to present a wide panorama of ideas, from conservative to progressive. We are publishing a fragment dedicated to the autobiography of historian Eric Hobsbawm and his difficult relationship with the communist movement.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Perry Anderson. Spectrum. From right to left in the world of ideas. M.: Publishing House of the Higher School of Economics, 2026. Translation from English by Dmitry Kralechkina. Content

Who else but historians should write autobiographies? They have been trained to study the past with dispassionate eyes, to pay attention to the oddities of context and the tricks of narrative, so they seem ideal candidates for the difficult task of self-describing life. But the strange thing is that it was not they, but philosophers who shone in this genre - in fact, they even invented it. In principle, autobiography is the most intimate and private of all forms of writing, while philosophy is the most abstract and impersonal. They should be like ice and fire. But the first sexual and personal confessions were presented to us by Augustine and Rousseau, and the first “history of one’s mind” was offered by Descartes. Mill and Nietzsche, Collingwood and Russell, Sartre and Quine, wrote memoirs of themselves more impressive than anything others have written about them. On the other hand, the number of historians who left behind more or less remarkable autobiographies is surprisingly small. In the 19th century, the somewhat presumptuous memoirs of Guizot and Tocqueville, which are rarely consulted today, are of interest mainly as evidence of political resourcefulness. Closer to home is Marc Bloch's posthumously published essay on 1940, which combines personal narrative and general indictment, but is a powerful but too limited document to offer more than isolated glimmers of candor. In relatively recent times, examples of this kind include the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and the chatter of A. J. P. Taylor, which he himself said indicated the exhaustion of historical topics. On the whole, in a genre to which the craft of the historian would seem so well suited, it seems to have produced only two classics - the graceful mirror image created by Gibbon in his autobiography at the end of the 18th century, and that baroque cabinet of curiosities of the early 20th century that is The Education of Henry Adams.

In this generally disappointing field, Eric Hobsbawm has come up with a work that he proposes to read as the "underside" of his great twentieth-century history, the "Age of Extremes": "not the history of the world illustrated by the experience of the individual, but the history of the world as shaped by that experience" - and the life choices it enables him to make. Although Interesting Times was published when Hobsbawm was eighty-five years old, it is a book so energetic and clear that it could have been written at forty. Reading it, you inevitably want to turn again to the historical works of Hobsbawm - there are so many hypotheses in it, accidentally or intentionally shedding light on his work as a whole. Before us is a kind of fifth volume of a long-standing project, written in a rather personal vein. It might simply be called "The Age of Eric John Hobsbawm."

The book contains an autobiography consisting of three rather disparate parts. The first of them, telling about the early years of the author's life before entering university, can rightfully be considered one of the most elegant texts written by this outstanding stylist. Tactfully and reservedly, but at the same time with captivating directness, Hobsbawm tells us how he happened to be born in Alexandria; about a difficult childhood in post-war Vienna; about the short but spiritual period of schooling in Berlin during the Weimar Republic; about fleeing Nazism to England and finally entering Cambridge on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents - an unlucky English father and a fragile Austrian mother, who died by the time he was fourteen years old - form one psychological background; being Jewish in one of the most anti-Semitic cities in Europe is another. He explains that he inherited from his mother a peculiar loyalty to his family background, and as a result, he does not feel “any emotional obligation to a militaristic, culturally disappointing, and politically aggressive nation-state that demands of me solidarity on the basis of race.”

Moving to Berlin, where his dissolute uncle (on the English side) worked in the film industry, Hobsbawm describes how, at the age of fifteen, in a traditional Prussian gymnasium, he discovered communism on the eve of Hitler's rise to power. There are few such vivid memories of the electric atmosphere that reigned among the revolutionary left in Germany in those months. It is not surprising that the memory of the funeral procession of the German Communist Party, doomed to death in the twilight of Berlin, made a deeper impression on him than studying in the pacified London under the national government. He writes about his subsequent time at St Mary's Grammar School with gentle humor ("I became addicted to exams like ice cream"). In creating these contrasting scenes, the historian's mind is constantly at work to fit the incidents of individual life into the cross-currents of vividly drawn space and time. The result is a skillful portrait of a boy who does not resemble the usual image of a man: a lover of solitude, at first fascinated by nature more than politics, prone to abstraction and introspection, gradually realizing his own talents. The tone of the self-portrait with which he completes the description of his childhood is a little reminiscent of the horoscope compiled for himself by Kepler: “Eric John Ernst Hobsbawm, a lanky, angular, ugly fair-haired fellow of eighteen and a half years old, sharp-witted, with a large, albeit superficial, stock of knowledge and many original ideas of a general and theoretical nature. An incorrigible poser, which is all the more dangerous and at times effective, since he himself begins to believe his antics... No moral sense, an egoist to the core. Some people find him extremely unpleasant, others likeable, others (the majority) - just a joke... He is vain and smug. Coward. Sincerely loves nature. And he forgets the German language.”

Thus ends the first part of Interesting Times. From a literary point of view, the book could have ended there. Then we would have something like fragmentary masterpieces, equally touching and alluring, that Constant or Sartre left us, that is, wanderings that end when the hero reaches the age of reason or passion, wanderings that leave us on the threshold of this age. This is not such a strange comparison, because instead of preparing the way for a portrait of the historian in his youth, the passage quoted above cuts off the possibility of further exploration of the inner world, which would be carried out in the same vein. A deeply felt, imaginative portrait of the young man as he once was suddenly gives way to a project of a completely different kind. We will no longer see the same inner landscape. Without warning of a change of gear, the next chapter takes us into the second part of Interesting Times, which chronicles Hobsbawm's membership of the British Communist Party from the late 1930s until its dissolution in the early 1990s. Here he recounts his time at Cambridge at a time when student enthusiasm for communism was at its height; about how he was pushed aside during the war, when he was under suspicion by the authorities; about his partisanship and some marginalization in academia during the Cold War; about the reaction to the crisis that erupted in the communist movement after the revelations of Khrushchev and the Hungarian uprising of 1956; about the reasons why he remained in the party after most of his colleagues, Marxist historians, left it and why he believes that his choice was more productive; and finally how, over time, he believed he helped save the Labor Party even as the Communist Party of Great Britain perished.

These chapters are characterized by a radical change of register. The difference is felt from the very first page, where Hobsbawm, before going on to describe his time at Cambridge, considers it his duty to say that he was almost unfamiliar with Burgess and Maclean, Philby and Blunt, who studied at the university before him. To his credit, he adds that if he had been asked later if he would be willing to undertake the same mission, he would have agreed. However, an unpleasant aftertaste remains, as if another type of reader was looming on the horizon. The following description of Cambridge provides vivid sketches of the archaism of its teachers and educational organization, as well as the motives and heroes of student radicalism. Noting that at the height of the movement, the left made up about 1/5 of all students, among whom the communists, in turn, did not exceed 1/10, Hobsbawm emphasizes that at the university, despite everything, the informal influence of the party was felt, which was the product of active propaganda work and a focus on academic success, as well as the militant energy of novice activists. The picture he paints is convincing, but too general. Hobsbawm says little about his personal journey: almost nothing about intellectual development, almost nothing about emotional life, not even a hint of political ideas. From now on, the narrative is dominated by the anonymous “we,” denoting his generation. The first person singular is reserved for quieter moments, such as when the regular curriculum is raised: “My last semester in May-June 1939 went well. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles, and achieved a top grade in my BA, which also won me a scholarship to King's College."

That this suppression of subjectivity can be deceptive can be seen in the fact that crucial episodes from this phase of the author's life were strangely relegated to much later chapters, separated from the account of his student years by hundreds of pages. At the end of the chapter on Cambridge, in connection with Margot Heinemann, summer holidays in Paris and work with James Klugmann in an organization that served as a front for the Comintern are casually mentioned. Of Klugmann, Hobsbawm presciently observes: “What was known about him? He didn't give anything away,” and Heineman simply says, “She probably influenced me more than any other person I've ever known,” but after this terse homage she doesn't appear in the story again. Only at the very end of the book, when it comes to a series of final memoirs about different parts of the world where he happened to visit, behind the objective headings of “France” and “Spain”, a guess flashes about what personal feelings could be hidden behind these meager phrases.

But nothing in the Cambridge story can match the intensity of his description of the Bastille Day celebrations in the first year of the Popular Front, when he drove around jubilant Paris with the Socialist Party newsreel crew: “It was one of those rare days when my brain was on autopilot. I just felt and lived” - after which I drank and danced until the morning, and this is a completely different type of trance than a funeral procession in Berlin. It would be strange if these trips to Paris, work as a translator in the then center in which communist networks throughout Europe converged, in the thick of the Popular Front, meant less to him than party assignments at the Socialist Club of Cambridge. Perhaps as a result of some unconscious association in this different setting, he even uncharacteristically opened up (he speaks very sparingly about this in his memoirs) and spoke about sexual initiation, “in a bed surrounded by mirrors,” in a brothel in the Sevastopol Boulevard area. Having previously entered Spain illegally shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, around the same time that John Cornford volunteered for the International Brigade in Barcelona, ​​had he also thought about taking up arms and joining the ranks of the Republicans? Once again, the page where he wonders in hindsight about a possible fork in his own destiny is full of mysterious depth and beauty, contrasting with the duller tale of England. What is missing here - or perhaps what he deliberately avoids - is an attempt to bring together all these scattered elements from which a portrait of the young revolutionary can be constructed. As the narrative develops, for the sake of the growing external position of the observer, one has to sacrifice the monolithic nature of the work.

Chronologically, Cambridge was followed by war - a rather useless experience for Hobsbawm, as he quite rightly complained: the War Office first locked him up in an engineer regiment, then sent him to Singapore, and after that to formal service in the Education Corps in Britain, for the reason, perhaps, that he was not only a communist, but also a native of Austria. But since his service in the engineering units, he had learned from his own experience to respect the traditional qualities of English workers, which aroused his “constant, although sometimes irritated, admiration.” This was the beginning of the sympathy, nourished by imagination, which marked everything he has since written about the popular classes. In any case, the difficult economic situation of his own family in Vienna, at times bordering on poverty, brought him closer to the life of the proletariat than most English intellectuals of his generation. In addition, it was during the war that he married for the first time - to a civil servant, his comrade-in-arms in the Communist Party, whom he barely mentions. Discharged late, he began working as a historian, soon gaining a position at Birkbeck. But then he learned that his future brilliant career, which might have been expected given its turbulent beginning at King's College, deviated from its natural trajectory due to the Cold War, when the career growth of members of the Communist Party began to be deliberately slowed down. Hobsbawm hints very discreetly and with dignity that he was hurt by being denied a place at Cambridge, which he had expected.

But if you read between the lines, there seem to be some mysteries in this tale of a career turnaround. Hobsbawm admits that he not only took part in the restoration of the Apostles, a veritable clique of initiates, after the war, but actually ran it as a social organizer and continued to recruit new students into it until the mid-1950s. Was there any connection between this role and the scholarship he was awarded to King's College in 1949 - not before the Cold War, but at the height of it - or how quickly, as he himself noted, suitable accommodation was found for him after his first marriage broke down? That this whole story is more complicated than it seems is hinted at by the strange absence from the book of the name of Noel Annan, a member of the board and later vice-chancellor of this educational institution, his close friend.

Although such questions are important for autobiography, they are of little importance for further exposition. Central to the story of these years for Hobsbawm is politics. Three substantive chapters are devoted to explaining what it meant to be a communist in that era, in or out of power; what problems the evolution of the Soviet system during the Cold War posed for British communists and how de-Stalinization caused a crisis in the Communist Party of Great Britain, as a result of which Hobsbawm was among the few intellectuals remaining in the party. In all these chapters, he returns again and again to the question of why he stayed until the sad end. These lengthy reflections leave me with a mixed feeling. Considering the choice of communism on a very general level, from the October Revolution to the end of the Second World War, Hobsbawm, interspersing social observations with individual examples, both heroic and everyday, makes an eloquent apologia and shows what it could mean for those who made this choice. He especially emphasizes the ethos of selfless obedience and practicality - "business efficiency", as he puts it, which he sees as the main distinguishing features of the Third International. “Communist parties are not for romantics. On the contrary, they are designed for organization and routine... The secret of the Leninist party is not in the dreams of barricades or even in Marxist theory. It can be boiled down to two phrases: “decisions must be verified” and “party discipline.” The attractiveness of the party was that it got things done when others didn’t.”

It should be noted that from a historical point of view this is a somewhat distorted picture. Isn’t a movement that counted in its ranks such revolutionaries as Victor Serge or Trotsky, Manabendra Roy or José Mariátegui, Henk Sneevliet or Richard Sorge for romantics? What then of Mao, who, whether we like it or not, was a more important figure in the history of communism than any of the stalwart European functionaries or activists Hobsbawm introduces us to? In another of his works, he denounced Mao as a “romantic.” But the point is that the contrast between the barricades and the theory of business efficiency and the ability to do things after the fact turns out to be a rhetoric that can at best say something about the self-understanding of the Stalinist European Comintern after 1926, in whose midst Hobsbawm was formed, but which even in his case fails to express the more paradoxical aspects. This cult of sober routine and practicality expressed here was often another form of romanticism and by no means the most effective. Fortunately, Hobsbawm himself did not always adhere to it consistently, as shown by the sympathetic portrayal of the Austrian revolutionary Franz Marek, which forms the moral core of his reflections on what it means to “be a communist.”

What then were his own, his individual convictions during the time not of the Comintern, dissolved in 1943, but of the Cominform, assembled by Zhdanov in 1948 to participate in the Cold War? It is not easy to answer this question. This is partly because, in discussing his communist views in Interesting Times, Hobsbawm avoids precise chronology. His general reflections on the communist experience, covering the entire period from Lenin to Gorbachev, but without clear dates, are placed in the book immediately after the story about Cambridge, even before the description of the war period. Returning to this theme in a discussion of his personal history, he writes about the attitude of intellectuals from the British Communist Party to the changes that occurred during the Cominform period and caused him concern - the expulsion of Tito, the show trials of Kostov, Rajk and Slansky. Here, too, the narrative is dominated by the collective “we”: “What should we have thought?” - “None of us believed” - “We obviously underestimated” - “People like me” - “We also admitted.”

We learn little about Hobsbawm's personal views, except that he was skeptical that Basil Davidson, whom he knew personally, could be a British agent, as he and Ryke were accused of. It is impossible to understand how he himself felt about the Moscow trials of the 1930s, in which the old Bolsheviks were eliminated and which served as a model for similar trials in Sofia, Budapest and Prague after the war. He nowhere mentions the significant scientific literature devoted to these events. The gist of his story is that British communists, or at least party intellectuals, did not believe the official versions of any of these trials. But this is not the same as knowing that all this was a lie, since along with the official ones, unofficial versions also circulated. When Khrushchev eventually laid bare the foundations of the grotesque edifice of confessions in Stalin's torture chambers, Hobsbawm emphasizes that these revelations (which in fact contained little new compared to what was already known) sent shockwaves through the international communist movement. “The reason for this,” he writes, “is obvious. We were not told any truth about something that should have affected the very nature of communist beliefs." Although the pronoun "we" again creates some ambiguity, it can be concluded that Hobsbawm himself continued to believe in Stalin to some extent. How? The narrative is structured in such a way that it is impossible to understand. One thing is clear: it was assumed that the truth was to be learned not from critically verified independent sources, but from the lips of official authorities. Whatever one may say, the activist and the historian in this case remain different identities.

The crisis caused within the ranks of the British Communist Party by Khrushchev's speech in April 1956, followed a few months later by the Hungarian Uprising, is described by Hobsbawm using the image of emotional turmoil. "For more than a year, British communists lived on the verge of a political nervous breakdown." The party's group of historians, of which he was chairman, became the center of opposition to the official dogma; by the summer of 1957, virtually all of its members, with the exception of Hobsbawm himself, had left the party. Why did he stay? He offers two answers and one addition: “I came to communism not as a young Briton, but as a Central European who lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic. And when I came to it, being a communist meant fighting not only against fascism, but also for the world revolution. I still belong to the last members of the first generation of communists, to those for whom the October Revolution was the origin of coordinates in the political universe.” Thus, he wrote, “it was more difficult for a person born where and when I was born to break with the party than for those who came later and were born in other places.”

This is, of course, pure biographical truth, truly beautifully formulated. But if he was brought into the communist movement by a more extraordinary situation and more ardent hopes than those of his English peers, it is not clear why the difference in time is more important than the difference in space, as he tries to make us believe. Was the October Revolution a minor event for Christopher Hill, who joined the party in 1932, learned Russian (as Hobsbawm explains, he never did) and wrote a book about Lenin? However, in explaining the more important difference of time rather than place, Hobsbawm makes another insightful observation about himself. “Politically”, having joined the Communist Party in 1936, he belongs to the era of the Popular Front, which sought an alliance between labor and capital that still defines his strategic thinking. "Emotionally," however, having converted to Communism as a teenager in Berlin in 1932, he maintained a connection with the original revolutionary program of Bolshevism. It was this dichotomy that had many important consequences for his work as a whole.