I have to confess that the _Age of Extremes_ *annoyed* me. It annoyed me because Hobsbawm broke temporal sequence: he moved the discussion of Stalin far away from his narrative of interwar Europe. He did this because he did not focus on Stalin until sometime after 1956. Thus in terms of Hobsbawm's personal experiential timeline, the nature of Stalin's rule falls after successful social-democratic reconstruction in post-WWII western Europe.
But this means that the history of the 1930s is not told as it really happened: much of the tragedy and drama comes from people trying to figure out which is worse, Hitler or Stalin, and to which they should cling as a refuge from the other. I don't assign the "1930s" sections of _Age of Extremes_ when I teach twentieth century history; instead I assign Alan Furst's very fine novel _Dark Star_, whose protagonist is an Old Bolshevik foreign correspondent for Pravda.
But with that preamble aside...
I don't think anyone can dispute that we all owe an enormous debt to the people of Russia for their extraordinary sacrifices between June 21, 1941 and May 8, 1945. I think it is astonishingly shameful that western Europe and the United States do not acknowledge the magnitude of this debt--I remember trying to get Dee Dee Myers to even *think* about the fact that Boris Yeltsin should be invited to Normandy '94, and that the commemoration should be a twin commemoration of Operations Overlord and Bagration.
It sticks in my craw to assign any of that debt to Marshall Stalin or to the CPSU, however. With sane initial deployments, a failure to offer Hitler the chance to end the Western front before fighting began on the Eastern, and with Tukhachevsky commanding and his officer corps to hand, the War in the East would have been much, much shorter. As it was, it was a near-run thing--even with the GULAG being opened up for officers to return after June 21. Didn't Rokossovsky and Vatutin go straight from prison camps to Front command?
?Stephen? Glantz has been writing some very fine books about the Great Patriotic War. He has a new one on Kursk that I have not read.
State planning... I'm of the Keynesian view that nationalizing the commanding heights is counterproductive for a whole bunch of reasons, chief among which is that it is unnecessary if your monetary and fiscal policy makers understand what they are doing. Lenin's and Stalin's forms of planning were... unappetizing... except in the immediate shadow of the Great Depression, and were not implemented in the west.
So I never understood that part of Hobsbawm's argument.
There was a third argument in _The Age of Extremes_: that the threat of really existing socialism eliminated wholesale repression of the working class as a possibility: because the political allegiance of the workers needed to be maintained, the only possible forms of regime in western Europe after World War II were mixed-economy social-democratic ones. This argument seemed to me to make no sense at all--for the existence of a really-existing-socialist alternative provokes a leftward move in politics in all those cases except when it doesn't. In Latin America and in South Asia, the existence of Communist regimes and threats after World War II fueled an authoritarian-fascist shift in politics. Only in western Europe did the Communist threat cause a few steps to be taken to the left. And Hobsbawm doesn't explain--doesn't understand--why the existence of really-existing-socialism had such widely divergent consequences in western Europe and elsewhere.
Brad DeLong