Fiona Lali, left, was accused of advocating an “old myth” by Professor Orlando Figes
A leading historian has warned against the moral relativism promoted at some universities after a Marxist student claimed on the BBC that communism only failed in the Soviet Union because it did not have the “chance to develop”.
Fiona Lali, president of the Marxist society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) at the University of London, was invited on to Radio 4’s Today programme, after research indicated that young people regard capitalism as a greater threat than communism.
Ms Lali with Jeremy Corbyn
Twenty-four per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds view big businesses as a serious danger to the world, compared with 9 per cent who are worried about communism, a ComRes survey found. Among those aged 25 to 34, 6 per cent list communism as a danger. Those who remember the Soviet era still regard communism as a bigger threat than large corporations, the research found.
Ms Lali, a third-year law and development student and National Union of Students delegate, said that young people were losing faith in capitalism.
John Humphrys, the presenter, challenged her on poverty in the Soviet Union and Russia’s decision to abandon communism. Ms Lali said: “It would be inaccurate and unfair to say that communism has failed because it hasn’t actually had the chance to develop.
“In the Soviet Union, for example, you can’t say that it was allowed to develop or flourish in the way that it could have done because the US, the British, they were all involved in attacking it. They still have major gains. There’s a lot of advantages, there’s a lot of gains from the Soviet Union.”
Most historians accept that tens of millions of people died in forced collectivisations and famines during the decades after the Russian communists took power in 1917. Stalin’s Great Purge in the late 1930s is thought to have claimed more than a million lives.
Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924, said that blaming the West for the problems of communist Russia was an “old myth”.
He warned that the drive for balance and moral relativism in universities risked minimising Stalin’s crimes. “Even textbooks contribute to this way of thinking, by saying things like Stalin needs to be understood in terms of pros and cons — he did good things like industrialise the country and bad things like the Terror,” he said. “That sort of moral equivalence is unhelpful, because even the ‘good’ things he did were done with such rates of murder and destruction that they can’t be counted as good.”
Marxism, however, is attracting millennials. The Marxist Student Federation said that more than 3,000 students signed up to its societies at 32 universities last year. Weekly or fortnightly meetings are held on 25 campuses.
Ms Lali told Today: “We’re the first generation that’s going to have a living standard worse than our parents. I’m unlikely to ever own my own home and I’m going to graduate £40,000 in debt.
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