It does not get much more damning than this statement.
“...he was a Communist for most of his adult life ...”
Not much of a historian then, or a judge of good governments.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/14/biography.history
[snip] Eric Hobsbawm was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power. He knew he stood at a turning-point in history. “It was impossible to remain outside politics,” he says. “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist.” They may also have shaped his moral universe. When asked on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1995 whether he thought the chance of bringing about a communist utopia was worth any sacrifice, he answered “yes”. “Even the sacrifice of millions of lives?” he was asked. “That’s what we felt when we fought the second world war,” he replied.
Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, discussing a perceived “asymmetry of indulgence” in attitudes towards Hitler’s crimes and Stalin’s Great Terror, characterises Hobsbawm’s “yes” as “disgraceful”. Interesting Times, Hobsbawm’s autobiography, also out this month, offers an insight into the adherence to communism of many of the brightest of his generation, from an “unrepentant communist”: Hobsbawm, who joined the party in 1936, remained in it until he let his membership lapse not long before the party’s dissolution in 1991. His book - taking its title from the Chinese curse - traces his communist faith in “the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history”.
“I’ve never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn’t realise,” says Hobsbawm. “In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine - we knew of the Volga famine of the early ‘20s, if not the early ‘30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.”
He says of Stalin’s Russia: “These sacrifices were excessive; this should not have happened. In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a long time to realise this.” Yet he appears to argue that some goals are worth any sacrifice. “I lived through the first world war, when 10 million-to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can’t say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolph Hitler.” [/snip]