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Communists and National Socialists: The Foundations of a Century, 1914-39. By Ken Post. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. xii, 222 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $65.00, hard bound.

This is a fascinating book. After its remarkable academic popularity during the 1970s and early 1980s, Marxist theory has been remarginalized with a vengeance, so that few avowedly Marxist voices can be heard any longer in the seminar room. Although the legitimacy attained by Marxist analyses earlier on may be exaggerated—particularly among German historians, as opposed to historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, the two groups covered by the book under review—Marxist approaches were certainly a significant presence and joined the plurality of traditions available to European historians after the 1960s. But in our postcommunist age, a time of drastic recession in the influence and currency of Marxist theory, this is no longer true. Now along comes Ken Post with this parallel account of German and Soviet history, revisiting European history between the world wars in an unrepentantly Marxist manner, as though nothing had changed after all. He does so, moreover, with deftness and wide learning, drawing on both a lifetime of familiarity with the internalist complexities of the tradition and an astute knowledge of recent historical work.