Neil Davidson, Tribune:

Hobsbawm’s attachment to “Communism” seems to have had two main sources.

One was his admiration for the role played by the USSR, first in defeating fascism and then in acting as a counterweight to US imperialism. This did not mean that he regarded the USSR as a model for socialism, although perhaps he only felt able to voice the extent of his objections once the regime had collapsed.

Evans refers to an interview with Hobsbawm conducted by Paul Barker for the Independent on Sunday soon after of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here, he said of the Soviet Union (in a passage not quoted by Evans) that it “obviously wasn’t a workers’ state . . . nobody in the Soviet Union ever believed it was a workers’ state, and the workers knew it wasn’t a workers’ state.” Hobsbawm never explained his position on the nature of the USSR in positive terms, but it is clear that his residual support for it was based on what it did, rather than on what it was.

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