Eric Hobsbawm outlived the ‘short twentieth century’ of 1917–1991 by more than twenty years. Right to the end, he was still an object of scandal for having been a Communist for much too long. ‘You see’, he might have said—‘you see’ was one of his habitual verbal tics—‘You see, there have been many Communists among major historians, but they quit. Some, like Edward Thompson, stayed on the left; some moved right, like Annie Kriegel or François Furet. I stayed until the bitter end.’ Since even the mainstream media agreed that Hobsbawm was a great historian—some even said, ‘the greatest living historian’, which he found unconvincing and a little embarrassing—the question was unavoidable: how could an impenitent Communist be a great historian?

Whenever Hobsbawm was interviewed, especially in Britain or the United States, the issue would be raised; sometimes with the implicit sub-text: ‘The producer insisted I should ask you this because it would look odd if I didn’t.’ Why had he supported the ussr? Why had he stayed so long in the Communist Party? Tacitly, the interviewer would be offering a challenge: ‘Here is the opportunity to denounce your past, to repent, to say sorry. Take the chance—admit it: you were wrong!’ Hobsbawm consistently refused to abjure, but he freely admitted mistakes or erroneous interpretations, and his belated realization of the gravity of Stalin’s crimes: Khrushchev’s speech was to him a revelation. However, on the substance, ‘Are you sorry to have been a Communist?’, he always remained unrepentant.

What kind of Communist was he? He belonged, he explained in his autobiography Interesting Times, to the generation for whom the hope of world revolution was so strong that to abandon the Party would have been like giving in to despair. But he must have been tempted. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary a letter was sent to the Daily Worker, then the Party paper. It was signed by Hobsbawm as well as other cp intellectuals such as Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Ronald Meek, Rodney Hilton, Doris Lessing and the remarkable Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, who somewhat eccentrically is supposed to have rejoined the Party over Hungary on the grounds that one does not desert friends in need. The letter declared:

We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure of the British Communists to think out political problems for themselves . . . The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the ussr, and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts.

Of course the Party refused to publish it, so it appeared instead in the New Statesman. Other statements made at the time suggest that Hobsbawm, unlike perhaps the majority of his co-signatories, thought the intervention was a regrettable necessity, a kind of humanitarian intervention ante litteram. (We know the formula: if the ussr had not intervened, fascism would have prevailed.)

By then Hobsbawm had already lost any admiration he might have had for Soviet society. In Interesting Times he explained that his first trip to the ‘Socialist Camp’ in 1954–55 had proved disappointing. He found the ussr and the system depressing and though he continued to defend the Party line, his scepticism grew as supporters were increasingly asked to believe the unbelievable. As he said, Communists of his generation regarded themselves ‘as combatants in an omnipresent war’. Like their counterparts on the anti-Communist side, they were prepared to disregard human rights in order to fight against what they regarded as a greater evil. But how else could one tolerate evil, if not by believing that the alternative would have been much worse? This does not justify anything; but it explains much, including Hobsbawm’s fondness for Brecht’s famous poem written in the 1930s, An die Nachgeborenen, ‘To Those Born After Us’:

Alas, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when the time comes
When man can be a helper to his fellow man
Remember us
With forbearance.