I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand i think it is a scathing anti USSR book, clearly written in the aftermath of the cold war with lots of scepticalism placed on the Soviet sphere that is not given to the US, and i also think it is heavily steeped in western chauvinism. Ie how Hobsbawm posited that much of the unrest and instability after 1990 was the result of Western states falling and not drawing out state lines and being the arbiters of nation state hood, when in reality the drawing of such borders down divide and rule tactics in the colonial epoch was a ticking time bomb for instability and uprising. On the other hand it was an interesting, relatively personal view of the short twentieth century, written very well and with poignant views to the future which reflected ideas in the period of which Fukuyama described as "the end of history". I think it was conflicted and represented an inner turmoil, in the Marxist historian who never gave up his membership of the communist party throughout the Cold War, and yet who was susceptible to Western chauvinism.