Red Star Over the Third World

This is an explosive little book that admirably conveys the profound impact of the October Revolution and its continued influence for communist movements in the Third World – with a focus here on Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

What Prashad lacks in focus and depth of analysis (this is a very short introduction, with the pros and cons of a bird's-eye view), he makes up for in the strength of his associative vignettes of revolutionaries, artists, poets, peasants, workers, and religious figures who found their grounding in the events of 1917. (The book is worth it just for the bits of revolutionary poetry, pulled from a multitude of nationalities and languages, which appear throughout.)

Nothing could be the same in the world after 1917, for "what should never have been became real" – a society where the oppressed masses had overthrown the oppressing class.

Prashad's narrative is a compelling alternative to both a unilaterally triumphalist or defamatory assessment of the Soviet legacy. Rather, we are given brief but well-defined glimpses of honest, hard-won expressions of "polycentric communism" beyond Russia, which took the Soviet experience as inspiration but which forged unique paths. True to Lenin's form, these are movements born out of "concrete analyses of concrete conditions," and they are worthy of study in their own right as part of the legacy of twentieth-century communism.

What is clear from this book is that pessimistic appraisals of the Left and its decline over the last 50 years are largely a Western phenomenon. For the places where the memory of the October Revolution remains present, the red flag is as vibrant as ever. I highly recommend this book as a short, accessible introduction to the immense contribution of communism and the lasting revolutionary influence of events that dared to remake the world.