Importantly, both sides still believed in the certainty of future material progress. At its height, and in the midst of a terrifying escalation of the arms race which threatened global nuclear annihilation, and with brutal proxy wars raging in Africa and South East Asia, populations from both sides of the Iron Curtain still maintained their belief in the possibility of peaceful international cooperation. Looking back, the whole Cold War period abounds in paradox. The question of which system – capitalism or communism – offered the best means of meeting human needs was central. Though hard to imagine from today’s perspective, the Cold War was as much a competition over the best way to organise the future of humanity, as it was a race to build more nuclear missiles and tanks. After Stalin, the remaining power and authority of the Soviet system rested on its promise to harness the forces of industrial modernity to banish scarcity and ensure economic security and well-being for all. The murderous tyranny of Stalin’s Great Purge saw the execution of at least 750,000 people deemed ‘enemies of the state’ with many more sent to the Siberian Gulags. However, communism’s grand promises of peace and freedom rang hollow during the period of Soviet communism, which saw the creation of some of the world's most militarized and ruthless police states. Of all the grandiose political projects that emerged from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marxism, the ideological foundation of Soviet communism, made the most audacious claims – not least of which was the belief in its own historical necessity as part of the onward drive of human progress.
Were these grandiose visions of transformation to new and better ways of living, a genuine map to the future or nothing more than flights of fancy, designed to distract us all from the deepening political crisis? Having grown great cities of culture from the dung of deindustrialisation, were Britain’s metro mayors ditching their enthusiasm for trickle-down economics and dreaming of a return to grass-roots socialism? The world transformed by an unlooked-for natural event is an archetypal theme in utopian – and dystopian – fiction. Appealing for consensus and cooperation, Burnham called on civic leaders to get behind his strategy to ‘build back better’, based on valuing the dignity of labour and fostering mutual dependency and community support. After decades promoting the values of individual responsibility, the benefits of privatisation and the evil of state handouts, was a Tory government prepared to rip up its fiscal rule book to lay the ground for a new Jerusalem in Labour’s old northern heartlands? Similarly, Manchester’s metro mayor, Andy Burnham, warned there would be no return to ‘business as usual’, now that the pandemic had exposed the gaps in social care systems and the weaknesses of the gig economy. In the middle of Britain’s first national lockdown, the future looked grim, yet barely 12 weeks earlier, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak had pledged some £640 billion capital investment in roads, railways, schools, hospitals and power networks, promising that ‘no region will be left behind’. Two years ago, The Liverpool Salon discussed the economic future of the North, in the light of recently made election promises to level up forgotten towns and regions, where growth had lagged behind the prosperous Southeast. Addressing the Forum - with its audience of political, business and cultural leaders and its impeccably utopian mission ‘to solve the crucial problems that affect humankind today’ - Hobsbawn, a lifelong Marxist, declared that it was the visions of liberal, not socialist utopias that now epitomised the triumph of hope over historical realism. Perhaps surprisingly, ‘the last of the utopian projects’ was not an allusion to Soviet communism, but rather to the epic triumph of Western capitalism and the associated belief that liberal democracy now represented the final, ideal mode of government. Extolling the almost bloodless transition from communism to post-communism in Eastern Europe, while lamenting the social, economic and cultural catastrophe that followed, Hobsbawn proclaimed that the world had witnessed ‘ the last of the utopian projects, so characteristic of the last century’. When Eric Hobsbawn, one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, was invited to address the World Political Forum in 2005, almost fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he used his speech to express admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and architect of perestroika, who died last week, aged 91.
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