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economics expert explained in 1921 what, in the ruins of 1918–19, had led him ‘into the camp of the Bolsheviks’. It was the conviction that ‘a return to peaceful capitalism seems excluded’. ‘The class struggle would end with the common ruin of the contending classes if the revolutionary reconstruction of all society does not succeed.’ 4
    Eugene Varga was obviously mistaken, as we now know. Indeed, the real illusion of communism – and of 1930s capitalism about the USSR of the Five Year Plans – was the belief that interwar capitalism was beyond salvation. And yet who in large areas of central Europe in 1919 would have placed large bets on the long-term survival of capitalism? As late as 1942 that very central-European work by a great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
foresaw the eventual triumph of a socialist economy, though – typically – for exactly the opposite reasons given by marxists, and without enthusiasm.
    A glance at the curve of intellectual support for communism over the period with which Furet deals suggests that it reflects a practical response to situations rather than ‘a pure choice’. (
Le passé d’une illusion
unfortunately shows no interest in the questions ‘how much?’ and ‘how many?’ which many historians still find relevant.)
    Britain may serve as an example. The small band of post-1917 intellectual communists shrank rapidly in the early 1920s.Numbers rose significantly under the impact of the economic cataclysm after 1929, against which the Labour Party, then in government, proved helpless. Hence the conversion of the Webbs, arch-prophets of gradual reform, to the USSR of the Plan and the effective birth of British student communism in 1930–31 – well before the impact of Hitler. University communism – of which Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were not typical, even in Cambridge – grew in the anti-fascist era, for what seemed reasons of common sense. Who else was fighting appeasement and helping Spain? The collapse of the enterprise launched in Petrograd in October 1917, the unrealisability of the aims it set itself to achieve by the means regarded as appropriate by socialists and under the historic conditions in which it was undertaken, cannot be denied. Outside the USSR and (after 1945) the other states in which communist parties took power and gave their citizens no choice in the matter, the appeal of this enterprise in Europe was always limited to minorities and, in the case of intellectuals, usually to quite small minorities, though in some periods talented ones. The only period when communism may be regarded as hegemonic and then only in two or three countries was a brief one, say from 1943 to the early 1950s. This, is seems to me, must be the base-line of any discussion of the history of communist influence in the West. Nevertheless, the hope and fear of communism was real, and far larger than the actual strength of communist movements warranted. Both the hope and the fear belong equally to the ‘illusion’ of communism. There is a strange, but not insignificant asymmetry in Furet’s treatment of it, for we learn little of ‘the communist idea’ as it existed, not in the heads of communists, but of those for whom, far more than in 1848, communism was ‘the spectre that haunted Europe’. For them it was the image of a force dedicated to the conquest of the world, nay, poised to cross the frontiers of freedom at
any
moment, if not deterred by nuclear armaments ready for action within minutes. Once victorious anywhere itinevitably spread – ‘the domino theory’. Once established anywhere, it was irreversible by internal forces, for that was the very essence of totalitarianism. (Conversely, it was sometimes seriously argued that no communist regime had ever or could ever come to power by democratic vote.) In