The 166 contributors are drawn from some thirty countries. About a quarter of them are Italian, but more than thirty are based in the United States, and a score in the United Kingdom. There are five Australian contributors: David Chandler writes on the Communist Party of Cambodia, the ‘Killing Fields’, the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot; Graeme Gill on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, constitutions, elections, and the ‘Single-Party System’; Rick Kuhn on the communist parties of Australia and New Zealand; and Stephen Wheatcroft on ‘Famine under Communism’. Luigi Tomba, a Chinese specialist at the Australian National University, is the most prolific with articles on the communist parties of China, Mongolia, and South-East Asia, the Sino–Soviet split, the China–Vietnam War, ‘Beijing Spring’, and ‘Socialist Market Economy’, as well as six biographical entries.

These names are sufficient to establish the reputability of the exercise. One of the editors, Robert Service, is an authority on Soviet history, though his recent excursion into a world history of communism, Comrades (2007) was marred by tendentious judgements and simple errors of fact. Here he operates within his area of expertise. Silvio Pons, his co-editor, is a distinguished historian of Italian and European communism. The list of contributors includes many of the leading scholars who span a variety of standpoints: hence Bob Davies, the doyen of historians of the Soviet economy, appears alongside Norman Davies, a trenchant champion of Poland.

The editors are surely right to say that a work of this kind could not have been written until recently. The demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites opened up the archives to researchers. The collapse of communism as a world movement and a political system made it possible to see it as a historical phenomenon. I think that Pons and Service are too sanguine about both of these developments. In themselves, the official records cannot resolve some of the most challenging questions about the subject, and the archives are in any case subject to restriction and manipulation by the post-communist régimes that control them. While communism has expired in the West, the governments of Cuba, China, North Korea, and Vietnam still formally adhere to it.

The coverage of those countries and their regions is weak, for this is an overwhelmingly European dictionary. It has thirty-nine entries for Soviet communists but just six for Chinese leaders. There are ten Germans, seven Czechs, six Hungarians, and six Poles, yet Castro is the only Cuban, Kim Il Sung the only Korean, and Ho Chi Minh the sole representative of Vietnam. The precise status of China receives interesting discussion in entries on that country, but it is seldom integrated into the more ambitious thematic entries. At best, those on topics such as class, labour, the ‘National Question’ and the ‘Cult of Personality’, purges and propaganda, append brief Chinese codas to a Soviet treatment. Others, such as architecture, cinema, collectivisation, and iconography, simply treat the subject as a Soviet phenomenon.

The end of communism in Europe allows us to treat it as a homogeneous movement that operated from 1917 to 1989–91. The success of the Bolsheviks coincided with the failure of similar uprisings in Eastern and Central Europe. The survival of communism in the Soviet Union created a régime that was isolated and dictatorial, and the centre of a world revolutionary movement. Throughout its existence, the Communist International failed to effect revolution in any country before it was formally dissolved during World War II.

In its own terms, the Comintern was an abject failure, yet it commanded the loyalty of communists around the world. The nature of this loyalty is brought out well in a series of entries on subjects such as ‘Communist Autobiography’, ‘Messianism’, and ‘Myths of Revolution’. It required a total devotion to the USSR and absolute respect for its supreme authority, obedience to directives, and intense activity to implement them. It carried a heavy price: a willingness to give one’s life for the cause.

Marc Lazar’s entry on ‘Militancy’ captures the paradoxical effects of such a regimen. Communists were expected to work in unions and a wide range of auxiliaries. They created an intense solidarity with a language of esoteric words and expressions, invented rites and liturgies, celebrated their leaders and heroes, and practised a distinct lifestyle and form of asceticism. Yet the discipline and conformity of this life of politics went with a defiance of authority and social norms that often carried over into mockery of party conventions.

It was World War II that made the Soviet Union a great power and established the belt of people’s republics on its western boundaries. Postwar decolonisation brought communist successes in Asia. And it was at this point, as movements of liberation became communist states, that the paradox of revolutionary discipline turned inexorably into leaden dictatorship. Once in power, movements of emancipation imposed complete control. Having themselves suffered repression, they incarcerated their opponents and dispatched party dissidents in show trials and summary executions.

The transformation was made possible by the agreement hammered out at Yalta between the three wartime allies – Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill – at the beginning of 1945. It was followed quickly by the Cold War, which is given comprehensive treatment both in its international and domestic forms. As the editors point out, the bipolar rhetoric of the Cold War was belied by the increasing disunity of world communism. For while the Soviet control of the communist régimes in Eastern Europe fatally damaged their legitimacy, these satellites were shaken by rebellion after the death of Stalin. The breach with Yugoslavia was followed by the Sino–Soviet split, and then by the growing restlessness of the major European communist parties in France and Italy.

The fragmentation of communism rebutted earlier notions of a monolithic world movement, but they were symptomatic of its decline. Just as Cold War interpretations of totalitarianism, the subject of a perceptive entry by Abbott Gleason, gave way to the revisionist interpretations of Western scholars, so Soviet communism lost whatever attraction it had possessed after Stalin was discredited. The growing nationalism of the Western communist parties in the 1960s and 1970s was anticipated by Stalin’s own recourse to patriotism.

This aspect of communism is not well served by the organisation of the Dictionary. As has been noted, both the thematic and biographical entries are heavily concentrated on the Soviet Union. Chinese communism is commonly treated as a variant rather than as a political system with its own dynamics, and while the entries on China are helpful, there are too few of them. The same surely holds for Vietnam, a communist régime of greater longevity than those in Eastern Europe that receive far closer attention.

The entries that deal with national communist parties – there are forty-one – suffer from a similar imbalance. More than half are European, while there is a single entry on the Indian subcontinent and portmanteau entries for South-East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. The coverage of these surveys is inevitably restricted; they provide summary narratives of the creation, development, and fortunes of the party in that country, with some attention to internal debates over the chief phases of policy. They would benefit from greater attention to membership, composition, and circumstances, and the list of cognate entries given under ‘See also’ at the end of each entry is incomplete. Nor does the index gather the relevant biographical entries for each country.

Rick Kuhn uses his 800 words on the ‘Communist Party in Australia and New Zealand’ as effectively as possible, but inevitably is forced to compress the story. Noting the success of Australian communists in trade unions during the 1930s, he states that they won control of the ‘Left of the Australian Labor Party’; I think this is a covert reference to the resolution passed at the conference of the New South Wales branch of the ALP in 1940 calling for an end to Australia’s involvement in World War II, but of course that was followed immediately by a three-way split that left the communist-led remnant without any parliamentary membership.

Both the national and biographical entries treat communism from the top down, while thematic ones are left to discuss communist doctrine and its realisation as a way of life. Many of them are full of interest, and the list of further reading well chosen. Because of the Soviet orientation, there is a neglect of intellectual and cultural dimensions outside the communist bloc.

The editors take as their purpose an evaluation of the failure of communism and an understanding of it as a historical phenomenon. With substantial entries on censorship, enemies of the people, ethnic cleansing, famine, the ‘Great Terror’, ‘Gulag’, the Katyn massacre, purges, the ‘Red Terror’, self-criticism, and terrorism, they cannot be accused of scamping the first responsibility. The other endeavour is a partial success.