Communism

In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Kotkin, a history professor at Princeton, offers a reading list on communism. You know it is promising when it begins with Leszek Kolakowski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There are books here I did not know about. For example, Mao’s Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, which Kotkin describes this way:

MacFarquhar and Schoenhals have provided a definitive account of China’s insane Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a self-inflicted bloodbath that was colossal even by communist standards. An unintentional casualty of the upheaval was the mechanism of state economic planning, whose ruination opened the way for China’s southern peasants to reestablish market ties as a means of survival.
The only thing I see missing are books on communists outside of communist states. Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is a classic, but I would have like to see on Kotkin’s list something about communists in the west. Some are deranged fanatics, but many are simply parasites, wealthy communists who live comfortable wealthy lives in the west, while prattling on about the joys of living under the terror of Stalin or Mao. Think George Galloway, a good buddy of tyrants from Saddam to Castro, in the UK (he is called Gorgeous George, not for his looks,but for his taste in expensive suits), or Vincent Browne, the wealthy Irish journalist whose specialty is defending tyrants.