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A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism. Edited by silvio pons and robert service. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. 944 pp. $99.50 (cloth).
Translated into English from an original 2006 publication in Italian, this work is much more than a "dictionary" of brief definitions. Running about nine hundred pages of text, containing more than four hundred entries (ranging from around eight hundred to four thousand words per entry), and written by an international group of some 160 specialists, this publication might be more accurately defined as an "encyclopedia" of twentieth-century communism. It represents a retrospective analysis of one of the defining features of recent world history and reflects the greater access to archival sources, which has accompanied the end of the Cold War.
This volume has much to recommend it, particularly for world historians. The range of its articles is genuinely global in scope. Some 41 entries trace the history of communist parties in countries and regions around the world. Dozens of others contain brief biographies of leading figures including the obvious, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Gorbachev, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Min, as well as less prominent persons such as Zinoviev, Liu Shaoqi, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adam Michnik. Coverage of major events and processes provides...