Argues that Communism produced a complex culture with a dialectical relation to both modernism and itself. Offering examples ranging from the Stalinist show trial to Franz Kafka's posthumous career as a dissident writer, this book says that Communism was an aesthetic project.

Review

For half a century, the cold war between the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union defined world politics. And then, in 1989, everything changed. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated, the USSR collapsed, and the Berlin Wall came down. Soon there was (almost) no communist culture left on the planet, just the cultural detritus of a "Communist utopia which, in fact, never existed." J. Hoberman of the Village Voice sifts through the wreckage of that culture, in a series of illuminating essays that take on everything from the Socialist Realist art movement to the novels of Victor Serge. Among the highlights is his "History of Communism in Twenty-Four Scenarios," a batch of film reviews that draws a line through Sergei Eisenstein's October ("the Soviet equivalent of the Sistine Chapel") and the original 1950s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the Reagan-era Red Dawn.

There's also a splendid essay on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted by the U.S. government of giving H-bomb secrets to the Reds and--amidst much controversy--executed, and who, Hoberman concludes, "were framed for an activity that all available circumstantial and psychological evidence suggests that they committed." It's one of the most effective displays of Hoberman's grasp of history and culture, not to mention his erudite wit: "Someone must have denounced Julius Rosenberg, for without his having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine evening by the FBI." --Ron Hogan

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