Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 5 April 2002

The farrago that now appears likely to end in the complete collapse of ITV Digital puts the government in a very difficult position.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the government had invested all its hopes for the roll-out of digital TV on the channel. There are still the BBC’s digital efforts, after all — although I’ve yet to meet anyone who has seen the much-hyped BBC Four, not least because no one I know has found a shop selling the promised £99 set-top boxes that would allow those of us who don’t want pay-TV to receive the BBC digital channels.

But ITV Digital was key to preventing Rupert Murdoch having a monopoly on commercial digital TV in Britain — and in the short run a near-monopoly of the platform for all digital TV in Britain. If it goes under, the Government will have the stark choice of either accepting Murdoch’s monopoly or legislating to remove his control of what TV is broadcast digitally. The first option would outrage everyone who cares about diversity of media ownership, including most Labour MPs; the second would outrage Murdoch, whose support has been so assiduously courted over the years by Tony Blair.

That’s not all, though. The final straw for ITV Digital was its stupid decision to pay over the odds — a whopping £315 million — for television rights to Nationwide League football. It went into administration after failing to persuade the football clubs to accept a much-reduced sum for the remaining years of its contract. And the upshot is that, because so many clubs have come to rely on TV money, ITV Digital’s demise will almost certainly result in several of them going under.

This is a problem for the government because so many of the 30 or so clubs that are in danger are in towns that have marginal Labour seats. Just a little Tory opportunism (“We won’t let English football go under”) would have the Government squirming — and quite right too, because the failure of ITV Digital
is at least in part a failure of Government policy.

For these reasons, last week’s confident assertion by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, that there will be no Government bail-outs for either ITV Digital or the football clubs deserves to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. So too does her claim that the timetable remains the same for the switch-off of the analogue signal and the sale of its waveband to the highest bidder.

She is, of course, right, to argue that football needs have its house put in order before anything else happens. But the way to do that is to legislate to end the “winner takes everything” economics of the Premiership, whereby Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and a couple of other clubs get ever-richer and everyone else — particularly in the Nationwide but also the smaller Premiership clubs — is forced to pick up the scraps. And that is the last thing that this supposedly football-friendly Government would ever consider.

***

Given how bad it could have been, the national outpouring of bullshit following the death of the Queen Mother last Saturday has so far been remarkably restrained. By comparison with the hoo-hah that came after the death of Diana in 1997, it has been entirely avoidable if you don’t bother to read the papers or watch the TV — no one but no one is talking about it outside media land. And there have even been some critical pieces on the “matriarch of the nation” in the Guardian and elsewhere, which have pointed to the reasons the Queen Mother does not deserve to be lauded despite her morale-boosting role during the blitz: her (and her husband’s) shabby pro-appeasement stance in the late 1930s, her opposition to decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, her generally reactionary views on just about everything, her snobbery.

What no one has brought up, however, at least as far as I’m aware, is the question of how much it cost us, the British taxpayer, to keep her in the opulent style to which she became accustomed after marrying the future George VI in 1923.

Unless I’ve got something horribly wrong about the way we paid for the monarchy in those far-off days, she lived the best part of 80 years at least partly at the taxpayers’ expense (admittedly with more than a little help from the House of Windsor’s extraordinary, nominally private, wealth).

We helped her buy and keep up several country homes, employ hundreds of servants and maintain a serious gambling habit. Of course, you could argue that it was all worth it – but, now we’ve enjoyed the meal, it would be good to know the bill.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 March 2002

I have always found it faintly amusing when lefties attack other lefties for committing the venal crime of attacking lefties — but only faintly. I can’t help but think of the old Popular Front slogan “no enemy on the left”, a mendacious Stalinist device to isolate those left-wing critics of the Soviet Union in the 1930s who could not be silenced by incarceration or assassination.

Not that I believe those Tribune correspondents who have denounced me in recent weeks for having a go at the Morning Star are right now sharpening their ice picks. It’s just that alarm bells start ringing in my head whenever people claim immunity from criticism from the left on the grounds that they are on the left themselves. Because declaring oneself to be on the left is not in itself a guarantee of virtue or intelligence — far from it. Indeed, over the years, the self-styled British left has shown itself as capable as anyone of massive errors of judgment, sometimes in the best possible faith, but often through wilful refusal to face reality.

For much of the 20th century, the biggest blind spot was the Soviet Union, which from the 1920s until well into the 1960s was seen by a substantial minority of Brit leftists, even non-communists, as a socialist utopia in the making — despite all the evidence, incontrovertible by the early 1930s at the very latest, that it was a vicious police state. As regular readers of this column will be aware, I think that failure of judgment is still important, not least because it is replicated today by apologists for Cuba, China and other scumbag dictatorships.

But leave that aside for now: the Soviet Union and various other supposed socialist paradises are by no means the only big things the Brit left (or a large part of it) has got wrong in the past 100 years.

Take Europe after the Versailles treaty. Back in the 1920s, the view that the greatest threat to peace in Europe came from France was almost universal in Labour and other left circles, a misjudgment that paved the way for the left consensus of the 1930s that rearmament was an inappropriate response to Hitler’s militarist expansionism. Ahem.

Or take the dynamics of the economy after the second world war. From 1945, with a handful of exceptions, the left consistently misread what was happening to the British economy, time and again predicting a repeat of the economic crises of the 1930s. In fact, Britain, like the rest of the western capitalist world, enjoyed an almost uninterrupted post-war boom that lasted 30 years. And it was followed not by a catastrophic crash but by a decade of slow or no growth, then the Tory boom and bust of the late 1980s and early 1990s, then a decade of growth that is only now coming to an end. For a system that much of the left has long diagnosed as being on its last legs, capitalism has shown, and continues to show, remarkable resilience and vigour.

Or take Europe in the same period. Most of the left has barked up the wrong tree since at least the 1950s. Remember the prophecies of doom in Tribune and elsewhere at the prospect of British membership of the Common Market? Remember, more recently, all those confident predictions that the single European currency could not possibly be launched on time? Is it any accident, as the Marxists used to say, that the very same doomsters are now the ones who say British membership of the euro would be a disaster?

Now, you could argue that none of these examples — and there are plenty more of the same kind — is any more than an intellectual or moral failure: embarrassing, damaging to the credibility of the left, but of marginal importance otherwise. I disagree, because I believe that what we think about the world matters, in part because I’m still enough of a Marxist to believe that it cannot be disentangled from the way we act. And even if a case can be made that some of the left’s biggest intellectual and moral faux pas had little direct effect on the everyday lives of the British people, there are other left misjudgments that are less easily shrugged off: the 1960s enthusiasm for system-built tower blocks that became prisons for their inhabitants, for example, or the pedagogic fashion, from the same era, for abandoning the teaching of formal grammar, with disastrous effects on basic literacy. (Again, I could go on.)

My point is simple. No one has perfect foresight. But lefties have got it wrong so profoundly in the past that we should take it as axiomatic that at any time the left consensus incorporates a large measure of utter bollocks. No enemy on the left? There are always plenty, and there’s never any excuse not to get stuck in.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 February 2002


I appear to have upset the editor of the Morning Star, John Haylett, by referring in passing in this column to the Communist Party of Britain as the publisher of his organ (Letters, January 30).

I apologise for misleading readers: the Star is, of course, published by the People’s Press Printing Society, a company set up by the Communist Party of Great Britain (not the same thing as the CPB) many moons ago in order to persuade the rest of the Left that it did not in fact control its daily paper — even though the sole purpose of the paper was to disseminate the CPGB’s (and Moscow’s) view of the world.

No one was convinced at the time or indeed for many years later, but the scam went sour for the CPGB in the 1980s, when its Eurocommunist leadership discovered too late that the PPPS had fallen into the hands of diehard Stalinists opposed to what they saw as the Eurocommunist dilution of the party line. The Euros failed in an attempt to oust them from the PPPS but subsequently expelled them from the party, and the Stalinists set up the CPB, which had roughly the same position in the PPPS – de facto but not formal control – that the CPGB had when the company was set up.

Since then, the CPB – never a large organisation, not least because its Stalinism is deeply unattractive to all but psychopaths – has declined in membership, and there have been several spats over the Star‘s relationship with it. But unless I’ve missed something (and I might well have done, because there are several more important things in my life than following the vituperative world of British Stalinism), the CPB remains the dominant force in the PPPS to this day.

I’m sure Mr Haylett or one of his comrades will put me right on this if I’ve got it wrong. But even if the CPB these days has only the tiniest of roles in the PPPS, it’s impossible to take seriously his claim that the Star is now a paper of the broad left that deserves the support of the whole labour movement.

I accept that it carries some good journalism. I read it every day for its industrial coverage, which, although a pale shadow of its former self, remains more comprehensive than that of any other daily apart from the Financial Times.

But the Star‘s politics stink. It is the last refuge of the worst of the old British Left. It remains sickeningly nostalgic for the police states of formerly existing socialism in east-central Europe and the Soviet Union. It consistently fawns over the vile dictatorships that run Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and China. It was shamefully enthusiastic for Slobodan Milosevic. On Britain’s relationship with Europe – surely the most important single question facing the British Left right now – it is as relentlessly and bone-headedly Europhobic as any right-wing Tory paper. It has nothing intelligent to say about how to revitalise our flagging democracy. It has no understanding of how the world has been changed by information technology. Its coverage of cultural politics is laughable. And even in the area its reporting is strongest, industrial relations, its editorial attitude is ludicrously confrontational.

In short, the Star is precisely the left daily the British left doesn’t need. Which is not to say that I wish it dead – but I’ve had enough of its people whingeing that the left owes it a living. It doesn’t. To get the respect and circulation it wants, it has to earn it. And it won’t do that with its current neanderthal politics.

***

On a different matter entirely, I find myself in the distressing position of agreeing with Gerald Kaufman on an issue of policy. This week, he forced Jack Straw on to the defensive in the House of Commons over the government’s plans to give Spain a share of sovereignty in Gibraltar. Mr Kaufman argued – with reason – that the wishes of the people of Gibraltar should be paramount in determining the territory’s status, and demanded that Mr Straw promised to abide by the results of a planned referendum on the imminent deal with Spain. Mr Straw pointedly refused. So much for democracy, it seems, if it gets in the way of cosying up to Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s right-wing prime minister and Tony Blair’s closest political ally in Europe.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 January 2002

The other day in the pub, the local Trot took time off failing to persuade two rather attractive women students to go to a meeting on the rail dispute in order to beard me for this column’s line on Afghanistan. “Your trouble is you don’t understand imperialism,” he declared. “You see, this war is all about America securing access to oil.”

It was hardly an original point. Indeed, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard it from various Lefties. But leave that aside. The real problem was that he was talking fatuous nonsense.

Yes, I know that American oil companies are interested in exploiting the vast oil reserves of the former Soviet republics of central Asia and that a pipeline through Afghanistan would be a means of getting the oil out that doesn’t run through Russia or Iran. And yes, I know that George W Bush is an oil man and that one of the results of the Afghan war could be a substantial permanent American military presence in central Asia.

But the US did not launch its military action because of oil. It did so – to risk stating the obvious – because of the September 11 attacks and the role of the Taliban regime in sustaining the perpetrators. It was necessary to overthrow the Taliban in order to deny al-Qaida its most important supporter and to reduce (though of course not eliminate) its ability to mount further outrages. Oil had nothing to do with it.

Which is not to say that oil will not be a very important factor in American policy towards central Asia and Afghanistan from now on. Indeed, it might even be the determining factor, with Washington using all its influence to get governments in the region to agree to allow American oil companies in.

This, of course, is what the Trot denounces as “imperialism”. To me, however, it is by no means obvious that big oil companies descending on central Asia would be a bad thing. Afghanistan’s economy has been destroyed by years of war; and, largely because of the disastrous legacy of Soviet-style “socialism”, the countries of central Asia are economic basket cases. Oil is just about their only hope of prosperity in the medium term – but they need large-scale investment to be able to benefit from it. And, like it or not, American oil companies have the capital they desperately need.

Of course, the oil companies would certainly strike as hard a bargain as possible. And it is undoubtedly the case that, unless there is fundamental democratic reform of the central Asian states, the benefits of oil revenues coming into their hands will not be felt by all their citizens equally. There is a real danger that, as in the Middle East, America will use its muscle to prop up corrupt oligarchical regimes with appalling records on human rights.

All things considered, however, people in central Asia and Afghanistan are likely to be better off if American oil companies move in big time than if they don’t. As the old joke has it – I think it’s from Tanzania circa 1970, though it might be Polish: “There’s only one thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism. Not being exploited by multinational capitalism.”

***

The Trot also told me some interesting news about the Socialist Alliance, the ragbag of Leninist sects that fought the general election last year and won a derisory 57,553 votes for socialism in England and Wales. (Its Scottish counterpart did much better, but that’s another story.)

It has now split, with its second-biggest constituent sect, the Socialist Party — that’s the former Militant Tendency, otherwise known as the Revolutionary Socialist League – deciding it doesn’t like being bossed around by the Alliance’s biggest constituent sect, the Socialist Workers’ Party. Meanwhile, nearly all the non-aligned lefties who joined the Alliance during the election campaign in the belief that it would prove a genuinely pluralist democratic organisation have left in disgust at the sects’ antics.

The upshot is that the Socialist Alliance is now little more than the SWP and a handful of the looniest loonies in left politics, among them Socialist Organiser and the Stalinist fruitcakes who call themselves the Communist Party of Great Britain. (Aficionados of this sort of stuff will know that they are not in fact the Communist Party of Great Britain, which turned itself into Democratic Left, then into the New Times Network and subsequently into the New Politics Network. Nor are they to be confused with the Communist Party of Britain, the weird Stalinist organisation that publishes the Morning Star. But that’s yet another story.)

As regular readers of this column will know, I hate to crow when I’m proved right by the turn of events. But just this once, didn’t I say that the Alliance would end in tears?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 11 January 2002

If anyone had suggested even five years ago that the Tories would adopt a more democratic stance than Labour on reforming the House of Lords, he or she would have been dismissed as a fool.

But that is precisely what is happening today. As the second stage of Lords reform, the Government wants a second chamber with just one-fifth of members elected. The Tories have yet to declare their hand, but it is increasingly clear they will push for at least 50 per cent of members of the new Lords to be elected.

How on earth did things come to this? Part of the story is Tory opportunism. The Conservatives are aware that 177 MPs, nearly all Labour and Liberal Democrat, have signed a Commons motion calling for a wholly or substantially elected upper house. And they reckon that by playing the democratic card they will be able to attract enough support to defeat a Government Lords reform bill in the Commons.

But the only reason the Tories are in a position to be opportunist is the mix of pusillanimous caution and cynical love of patronage that has characterised Tony Blair’s approach to changing the Lords ever since his (completely unnecessary) retreat from removal of all hereditary peers during the first stage of reform.

On Blair’s initiative, each step the Government has taken in defining its proposals for the second stage of reform – from the appointment of Lord Wakeham, a known opponent of an elected second chamber, at the head of a Royal Commission on the Lords, through to Lord Irvine’s White Paper last year – has taken it further away from support for a democratic upper house.

The Government says that it wants a largely appointed Lords because it does not want to undermine the primacy of the democratically elected Commons. But this argument is fatuous. A largely elected upper house could easily be prevented from sabotaging the decisions of the lower house.

Most obviously, its powers could be limited by law, as the powers of elected second chambers are everywhere else in the world. Alternatively, or in addition, its democratic legitimacy could be diluted by making it indirectly elected, for example by regional assemblies (as in Germany or Holland) – though in Britain’s case this would clearly require the completion of the process of devolution left unfinished by Labour in the last parliament.

Of course, even an indirectly elected second chamber would have the democratic legitimacy to force the Commons and the Government to listen to it and to account for their actions – which a largely appointed second chamber, stuffed with the washed-up cronies of party leaders along with a smattering of the non-party great-and-good, could never have. Which is the reason that Blair and his fellow control-freaks want a largely appointed second chamber – and the reason that their anti-democratic scheme should be scuppered.

***

On a related theme – well, it’s related insofar as it’s about the Labour leadership’s control-freakery and contempt for democracy – I was somewhat surprised to hear that the editor of this organ has been omitted from the shortlist in the selection of the Labour candidate to fight the forthcoming by-election in the late Ray Powell’s seat of Ogmore.

It’s not just that Mark Seddon is a member of the Labour National Executive Committee (albeit a Left-wing trouble-maker), has already been a Labour parliamentary candidate (albeit in unwinnable Buckingham) and has all of the things that Ogmore needs – a battered Jaguar, a lifelong passion for all things Welsh, good looks et cetera.

It’s also that the decision to stitch him up can only rebound on Labour. At the last general election, Ogmore was a safe Labour seat: Powell held it with a majority of 14,000. But that doesn’t mean it will be safe in the by-election – any more than many supposedly safe Labour seats turned out to be so in the elections to the Welsh assembly in 1999, when Plaid Cymru won unprecedented victories in south Wales.

Lest we forget, the main reason for that debacle was contemptuous, heavy-handed fixing by the Labour leadership in London, which demoralised Labour activists in Wales and turned off the voters in droves. Refusing the members of Ogmore constituency Labour Party the right to choose or reject Comrade Seddon – and I’m told the chances that they wouldn’t have picked him were high – is likely to have a similar effect. It’s a bit of a long shot still, but I’m going to bet a fiver on a shock Plaid victory.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, January-February 2002

In purely economic terms, the launch of euro notes and coins on 1 January does not matter a great deal. Monetary union has been in place three years, and business transactions in euros have long been commonplace. The only significant economic effect of the new money is greater price transparency for consumer goods — though it remains to be seen how far that will translate into levelling down of prices.

But the arrival of euro notes and coins is massively important symbolically. Up to now, monetary union has been intangible to most citizens of the euro-zone. Now they are dealing with it physically all the time. Euro notes and coins cannot but make them aware of the central importance of European Union institutions in their everyday lives.

The impact of the changeover in Britain is harder to assess. Pro-Europeans in the government are hoping that its arrival will soften British opposition to joining the single currency. They believe that, as Brits use the euro on their holidays this summer, they will come to realise that it is nothing to be afraid of.

With the help of a little judicious campaigning by the government, their argument goes, the opinion polls will start to show the gap narrowing between those against and those in favour of joining. The Treasury will then conclude that Gordon Brown’s famous “five economic tests” have been passed — and everything will be set fair for a referendum on British euro membership some time in 2003 or 2004, which the “yes” campaign will win at a canter. The Tories will be left in disarray and Labour will romp home in a third successive landslide in 2005 . . .

This is a plausible scenario — but it is a touch optimistic. For a start, it is by no means certain that Brits using the euro on holiday will do anything to reduce opposition to British membership of the single currency. The anti-euro camp’s prophecies of chaos might have been made to look foolish by the smoothness of the changeover in early January, but it remains a powerful and articulate lobby with a simple, emotionally attractive case and, most important, the means to get it across to the public.

Back in the 1970s, the anti-Common Market lobby had little support in the press and the backing of no major political party. Today, the anti-euro camp enjoys the unconditional and vigorous support of the right-wing press — Rupert Murdoch’s four titles, the Mail and its Sunday sister paper, the two Telegraphs — as well as the Conservative party. With economic growth in the euro-zone sluggish and likely to remain so, it will not be hard for them to mount a case for staying out.

In such circumstances, it is questionable whether anything other than a major populist campaign in favour of euro entry, with the explicit backing of the government and emphasising the benefits of the continental model of “social capitalism”, has any hope of changing public opinion. Yet this is something the government has so far shied away from.

If public opinion on the euro doesn’t show any sign of shifting, it is most unlikely that the government will risk a referendum. And it has a ready-made means of wriggling out of its commitment to one by deciding that the five economic tests have not been passed.

There was a lot of fuss at the beginning of January about the remarks of the most senior civil servant in the team doing the economic assessment, Gus O’Donnell, to the effect that economics was not clear and unambiguous and that the decision on euro entry would have to be taken by politicians. But he was doing no more than stating the obvious: ultimately, joining the euro is a political, not an economic, decision. And it would be very easy to adapt the economic assessment to support either entry or staying out (at least for now), depending on what makes most sense politically.

Here, public opinion on the euro — though crucial — is not the only factor. The government is also aware that a euro referendum could be used by disgruntled voters to register an anti-government protest. Up to now, the Blair government has had a remarkably easy ride from the British public. But this will not necessarily last forever. On all sorts of issues — the health service, the railways, education — there are signs that the public is growing impatient. Add an economic downturn (by no means impossible despite the current talk that Britain has escaped the world recession), and it could easily be that by 2003 the government is really struggling.

In other words, it is still worth taking claims that the referendum will happen this parliament with a large pinch of salt. Put simply, there’s too much that could go wrong in the next couple of years.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 December 2001

The death last week at the age of 86 of Vernon Richards, who edited the anarchist paper Freedom for what seemed like aeons, brings an era to an end.

Of course, there are plenty of people still around who played a part with Richards in the myriad adventures with which he and Freedom were associated from 1945 onwards. There are even a few survivors from what you might call the “George Orwell left” of the 1940s, that strange marginal milieu of anarchists and democratic socialists – including Tribune – that kept the critical libertarian impulses of the British left alive at a time when most self-proclaimed socialists were singing the praises of technocratic social democracy or totalitarian communism. Richards first became a minor public figure in 1945 when, with two anarchist comrades, he was imprisoned for incitement to disaffection of the armed forces. Orwell and Tribune, although disagreeing with their view of the war, backed them to the hilt on civil libertarian grounds.

But now Richards has gone, there is no one left, as far as I’m aware, who actively participated with Orwell and others in an earlier defining moment: the libertarian left’s struggle in the late 1930s to publicise Stalinist treachery in the Spanish civil war.

The son of an Italian anarchist exile, Richards responded to the social revolution in Spain in 1936 by resurrecting Freedom, then moribund, and renaming it Spain and the World. Its purpose was unashamedly propagandist – to highlight the revolutionary achievements of the Spanish anarchists. But, along with the similarly small-circulation press of the Independent Labour Party and the Trotskyists, it was exceptional among left publications in Britain in telling the truth about the attempt by the Soviet Union, through its proxies in Spain, to hijack the Republican war against Franco’s Nationalist uprising, destroy the revolution and create a pliant puppet state – a course of action that did as much to ensure Franco’s eventual victory as the refusal of France and Britain to support the Republic.

(Anyone in any doubt about that this is what happened should read the documentation from the Soviet archives published this year in the marvellous Yale University Press Annals of Communism series, Spain Betrayed, which makes an incontrovertible case against Moscow.)

At the time, most of the left in Britain – as elsewhere – simply looked away, preferring to see the struggle in Spain as a simple one between democracy and fascism, with the Soviet Union and the Spanish communists on the side of good against evil. Victor Gollancz turned down Orwell’s offer of the book that became Homage to Catalonia, which blew the gaffe on the whole story; Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman refused to publish a review by Orwell that denounced the communists as a counter-revolutionary force. At Tribune, set up by Stafford Cripps and others as part of a campaign to unify the Labour Party, the Communist Party and the ILP, the thorny question was dealt with by the simple expedient of not referring to it in print – much to the consternation of the ILP.

The wilful refusal of the British left to face up to what the Soviet Union was doing in Spain, combined with its simultaneous failure protest against the show trials and the Great Terror in the Soviet Union itself, remains perhaps its most shameful episode – as many left-wingers came to realise after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.

Yet the refusal still stubbornly endures: in the current exhibition on the Spanish civil war at the Imperial War Museum, to take just one example, Moscow’s perfidy barely warrants a mention. One reason, undoubtedly, is the fact that so many Britons, most of them working-class communists, died fighting for the Republic in the International Brigades: 526 of the 2,400 who volunteered. Faced with their sacrifice – and with the conviction of their surviving comrades that theirs was an uncomplicatedly good fight – many on the left still think it indecent to point out that the anti-fascist struggle was sabotaged from within by the Soviet Union’s machinations.

Here, however, Richards was unsentimental. Throughout his life, he argued that the idealism and bravery of the Brigadiers should not be an excuse for evading the truth about Spain. And however much you might disagree with everything else he stood for – Richards was an inveterate critic of parliamentary reformism and much else that is at the core of Tribune’s democratic socialism – on that he was surely right. The left could have done with a few more like him.

• Spain Betrayed : The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, is published by Yale at £27.50