Three Revolutions by Simon Hall
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Three Revolutions:
Russia, China, Cuba, and the Epic Journeys That Changed the World
By Simon Hall
Faber & Faber 2025
As its heyday recedes further and further down the timeline, Communism’s record has become ever more disputable. To wilting alcoholics and unpublished professors it stands as a maligned ideology put poorly into practice. To trembling McCarthyites and centibillionaires it is an intellectual Ponzi scheme, defeated yet somehow pervasive, waiting to murder more agrarian serfs and boggle more economists if another nation should ever take the bait. In his new book Three Revolutions, Simon Hall attempts to calm these battling factions. From Lenin via Mao to Cuba’s Fidel Castro, readers are shown primarily how Marx’s messengers took power and how three journalists balanced their own aims to present these new governments to chastened Westerners back home.
First comes pre-revolutionary Russia, where the Romanovs are chewing bullets in cellars and the goody-goody Provisional Government limps on unheedful of the coming storm. This latest Lenin - when he’s not dreaming up more inventive ways of dismembering Kulaks - is more automated and less companionable than the Lenin often put forward. Hall quotes shabby Vlad: “we have before us a struggle of exceptional gravity and harshness,” presenting the Russian architect of socialism to be a looting bore ennobled by his own message. John Reed, the foreign correspondent trusted to jot down the happenings, inverts the ease of his own childhood by obsessing over impoverished tussles. He is a man “drawn towards stories about labour conflicts, peasant discontent and clandestine political movements.”
It is through references to the commonplace that Hall best brings Reed’s Russian account to life. Once the hammer and sickle billows atop the roof, “Reed’s party” Hall writes “made their way into the chamber where the ministers had been in session. The room ‘was just as they had left it…Before each empty seat was pen and ink and paper; the papers were scribbled over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations and manifestos. Most of these were scratched out, as their futility became evident, and the rest of the sheet covered with absent-minded geometrical designs, as the writers sat despondently listening while Minister after Minister proposed chimerical schemes.’” Here is maximised the poignancy of Reed’s findings and Hall’s project. In a dusty and distant genre nullified by pale statistics, many sections like this one make his past a chillingly proximate and instructive phenomenon. We are jealous of Reed for having seen the inky submission of Russia’s last democrats.
Another yardstick of a memorable historical review is its ability to provoke further reading, upend a blasé status quo, and triple one’s nighttime docket. When Hall covers Mao Zedong and his scamper from sleepy student to unquestionable Chinese premier, even the grimmest lefty can’t help but feel as if they’re being pushed in a certain direction. Simply put, he is far too soft on a thoroughly evil man. Mao, Hall writes, “considered a career as a policeman, a soap-maker, a jurist and an economist, and then spent several months, virtually penniless, holed up in the Human Provincial Library, where he devoured the Enlightenment works of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu.” The Chairman must have gleaned about as much from Mill as Marjorie Taylor Green would from Alexander Pope. If a mouth-breathing Martian were to select Three Revolutions as his spacecraft’s book of the month, his eight flabbergasted eyes would have to wait almost three hundred pages for Mao’s unearthly, league-topping, murderous regime to be aptly censured. Imagine a short history of Hitlerian Germany in which Auschwitz is given only ten minutes and two footnotes. The forty million lives lost to famines and persecution under Mao are not denied or legitimised in this book, but they only appear as a tired caveat at its conclusion when a more scrupulous writer should have Mao's ghoulish human rights record haunting every paragraph.
The final third sees the fewest punches pulled. Herbert Matthews is the correspondent avoiding Fulgencio Batista’s grip to interview Fidel Castro. Matthews’ 1957 New York Times piece incensed every American right-wing gadfly, and transformed Castro’s band of buffoons into a globalised political venture. By centring this part on the stateside reaction to Matthews’ reportage, readers are handed the whole spectrum of Buckley-led pearl-clutching, and are introduced to the flimsiness of objectivity when that same objectivity displeases one particular side.
Three Revolutions has fun for all the family. If you’re a disgruntled Maoist looking to sweep societal death under the carpet or a Lenin-loving sonneteer still clinging to the chap’s decency despite hefty contrapuntal evidence, you’ll have your whims satisfied. If you’re a buttoned-up conservative whose lot is made lighter when Marx and his potty pamphlets are rebuffed, you too will find solace here. And if you’re a hen-pecked centrist who cares more for the complexity of journalism and how revolutions were and are communicated, this tactile fast-paced book cannons you across the Red twentieth century as three hacks are duped by tyrants-in-training.
Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull