David Reynolds or Simon Schama: These very different historians show the best and worst of the BBC

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 11:04 GMT, 11 April 2012 | Updated: 21:22 GMT, 13 April 2012

Two programmes put out by the BBC this week illustrate the best and the worst of that infuriating organisation. 

In 'Man of Steel' a weighty 90-minute documentary on BBC4, superbly presented by the Cambridge historian David Reynolds, we learned why Stalin, great dictator of the USSR, was both stupid enough to allow Hitler to attack and very nearly destroy his state, and astute enough to lead the eventually successful fightback that crushed Nazism - but also enslaved eastern Europe for half a century.

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Clear and balanced: David Reynolds's excellent documentary 'Man of steel'

This film was all that an intelligent documentary should be - punchy, informative, sometimes surprising, but clear eyed and balanced - showing that in Reynolds' view Stalin was both a ruthless, mass murdering monster - a perverted sadist who enjoyed inflicting unimaginable pain on even those closest to him - and a cunning statesman who outwitted all comers and made his terror state into the world's second superpower.

Then, this Saturday, Radio 4 is treating us to 'A Life in History' a doubtless softball inquisition of the veteran nonagenarian 'Marxist' historian Eric Hobsbawm by Simon Schama, the BBC's tame house-trained historian.

A cunning monster: David Reynolds's documentary portrays Stalin as he really was

As this has not yet been broadcast, I cannot say much about it. But if the programme is anything like the trailers that the Corporation has been running, this will be like any other in the long line of BBC productions featuring Hobsbawm: fawning, obsequious and faintly nauseating in its sycophancy. It will treat the unapologetic ex-Communist not as an apologist for an indefensible system of terror and murder who should not be given the time of day, let alone airtime, but as a revered Pope of history whose perverse opinions should be received with awed respect. So why does the BBC roll out the red carpet - emphasis on the 'red' -  for this old man's vile views?

Fawning: Radio 4 is to broadcast an interview with nonagenarian Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm

I think that it is because it blindly believes, with Hobsbawm, that essentially liberalism and Communism are much the same thing, rather than the antithesis of each other; and that anyone with 'Progressive' leftist views who happens to have lived into their ninth decade should be placed on a pedestal and worshipped without being asked too closely just what he has represented throughout his long life.

The ghastly, shameful truth about Hobsbawm is this: from joining the Stalinist Communist Youth movement in Germany in 1931 to leaving the Communist Party of Great Britain as it folded following the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, Eric Hobsbawm has been a proud supporter of the totalitarian madness that killed around 100 million human beings in the 20th century. Even in his dotage, he refuses to apologise for his sixty years as a card-carrying Communist, because, according  to his friend, the journalist Neal Ascherson 'Eric doesn't feel the need to apologise. He's not that sort of person'. So that's alright, then.

Let us be clear, then, exactly what it is that Hobsbawm supported for all those  years (and, we must assume, since he has never recanted, still supports). Indeed, in the BBC trailer he tells Schama that the history of the 20th century did not turn out as he had hoped it would. If this has any meaning (and, when it suits him Hobsbawm is as slippery and evasive as an eel when he doesn't want to be pinned down) it must mean that his beloved Communism was utterly defeated and discredited, and that this is a matter for profound regret.

Card-carrying Communist: Hobsbawm was a Soviet apologist in earlier life

Eric, who, needless to say has never actually lived  under a Communist regime, told a TV interviewer in 1994 that the lives of the 20 million people slaughtered by Stalin would have been a price well worth paying if the 'radiant tomorrow' promised by Communism had actually materialised.

A price worth paying? Millions were slaughtered in Stalin's Terror

So Professor Eric, Companion of Honour, and President of Birkbeck College, from his elevated mansion high on the hills of Hampstead, loftily tells us that the parents who ate their own children in the deliberately induced Ukrainian famine; the peasants butchered for hoarding grain;  the loyal Communist lackeys shot in the back of the neck in the cellars of the Lubyanka; the millions of slaves worked to death in the Gulag; the 'enemies' tortured into making their false confessions before execution; the entire army groups exterminated because his hero Stalin trusted Hitler - all those sacrifices would have been OK for a few radiant tomorrows. Have I got that right?

Worked to death: Millions of political prisoners were sent to the gulags

Turning away in disgust, I thought about another elderly historian, by strange coincidence born exactly a month after Hobsbawm, whose life, in contrast to the accolades shamefully heaped by British academia on his Communist contemporary, has been a shining example of honesty and courage in the face of neglect and vilification.

Like Hobsbawm, Professor Robert Conquest was born in the summer of 1917 - that fateful year when the Bolshevik revolution ushered in the long nightmare of Communism. Like Hobsbawm, he joined the Communist party as a youth in the 1930s. Unlike Hobsbawm, Conquest saw the error of his Marxist ways, after a wartime spell in Bulgaria - then in the process of being swallowed by Stalin - showed him  the brute reality of Communism in action. From then on, Conquest did what he could to counter the Communist plague.

Summer 1968: As Soviet troops rolled into Prague, Robert Conquest (below) published 'The Great Terror'

In 1968, the year when 'fun revolutionaries'  were marching with Marxist banners in the streets of the West as Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring (Hobsbawm remained in the Communist party throughout, as he had during the even bloodier repression of Hungary a decade earlier) Conquest published 'The Great Terror' the fullest account yet of Stalin's murderous purges. The book was met with indifference, even hostility, while Hobsbawm's tomes were lavished with praise and prizes.

According to Conquest, Hobsbawn's defence of Communism in the Soviet Union is a 'denial of reality'. Following the fall of the Wall, Conquest was asked whether he wanted to update the book, and if so, if he wished to re-title it. He thought for a moment before suggesting the title: 'I told you so you ******* Fools'.

As the BBC falls once again at Hobsbawm's feet, I think we can safely assume that they will not be paying a similar tribute to Robert Conquest. Sadly, there are still far too many ******* Fools (or worse) in Academia and in the Corporation for that. 

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