[close] Comrades tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Comrades ranges across not only the high politics and ideology of the most prominent communist regimes but also daily life under communism, culture, and propaganda. Service ends by showing that there was more to communism than mere brutality and demonstrates the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people (economic poverty and political oppression) have not vanished. The lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form.