by Kevin Reilly
Eastern Europe . For 30 years, the Soviet Union remained the sole world outpost of an alternative to capitalism. But then in the late 1940s, communism began to spread as communist parties took power in eastern Europe after the end of World War II. Unlike the Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks initially had considerable popular support, eastern European communist governments were created largely by occupying Soviet troops, determined to impose “friendly” communist states in an area through which Russia had been repeatedly invaded from the West.
China . Even more significant was the triumph of communism in China in 1949 in a revolutionary process quite different from that of Russia. Socialist parties had existed in Russia for decades before the collapse of the tsarist system, and the Bolsheviks came to power less than a year after the tsar abdicated. But few Chinese had even heard of Karl Marx or socialism when the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912. The Chinese Communist Party was founded only in 1921 and then had to struggle for 28 years before coming to power. Furthermore, it was a struggle occurring largely in the countryside with communists finding their chief supporters among impoverished peasants, while Russia’s communists were based in the cities among industrial workers. Finally, Russian communists gained support by taking their country out of a much-despised World War I, while China’s Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, gained credibility by leading China’s heroic resistance to Japanese aggression in World War II.
When Mao triumphantly proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949, communism became a global movement with an enormous foothold in Asia. And over the next several decades, communism also took hold in North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. At its high point in the 1970s, communist rule encompassed perhaps a third of the world’s population. And even where they did not seize power, communist parties attracted considerable support, for example, in France, Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Africa. While democratic socialist parties remained active in these and other countries, the political success of communist parties often gave them the upper hand. Democratic socialists argued that the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, and eastern Europe lacked all the ingredients of socialist revolutions since they did not emerge from advanced capitalist societies, but power seduced many who were eager to find an alternative to capitalism. On the other side of the political spectrum, capitalist media found the communists to be an easy stand-in to discredit all socialist parties and critics. Russian commissars and American capitalists could agree that there was only one kind of socialism, and that was practiced in the Soviet Union and China.
Making Communist Societies
Even though the Russian and Chinese revolutions were distortions of the Marxist vision of superseding advanced capitalism, they changed Russian and Chinese societies in ways that others found worth emulating. In their language at least, they echoed Marx and European socialists. The social promise of these revolutions was equality—the end of a humiliating domination by landowners and capitalists and the birth of new opportunities for peasants and workers in a socialist society. In eliminating these old elites of landlords and capitalists, the communist regimes went some distance toward fulfilling those promises. For example, in the course of the Chinese Communist Party’s long revolutionary struggle, party officials encouraged ordinary peasants to confront landlords, to “speak the bitterness” of their personal experience with oppression, and to “settle accounts” with their class enemies. In the process, men and women who had long been passive or inarticulate in the face of landlord oppression became politically conscious and active, while large numbers of landlords, perhaps a million or more, were killed. In the rural areas of both China and the Soviet Union, peasants got access to land that they had previously worked as serfs or tenants.
Rural Communism . The end of landlord domination soon brought a kind of communalism to the countryside in both societies as Communist Party organizers established large collective farms as the centerpiece of the new agriculture. Large-scale farming was thought to be more modern and efficient, while collective or state ownership and the end of most private property in land made it more equal. Heavily resisted in the Soviet Union, collectivization occurred more peacefully in China, where the Communist Party had a much longer and more deeply rooted rural presence than in Russia.
In the Soviet Union, young urban activists sent to the countryside to assist in collectivization were enthusiastic about its potential. One young woman wrote to a friend,
I am off in villages with a group of other brigadiers organizing kolhozy [collective farms]. It is a tremendous job, but we are making amazing progress. . . . [O]ur muzhik [peasant] is yielding to persuasion. He is joining the kolhozy and I am confident that in time not a peasant will remain on his own land. We shall yet smash the last vestiges of capitalism and forever rid ourselves of exploitation. . . . The very air here is afire with a new spirit and a new energy.2
To many peasants, it was a very different story, and collective farms were widely viewed as a “second serfdom.” Furthermore, collectivization in the Soviet Union was accompanied by an assault on the churches that had long nurtured peasant life and by the deportation of a million or more kulaks, or rich peasants. A huge famine in the early 1930s, caused by the state’s relentless efforts to force more grain out of the countryside to support its industrialization drive, cost millions of lives. Active resistance soon gave way to lingering resentment at the second-class status to which collectivized farmers were subjected. Through very low prices paid for their compulsory deliveries of food products, they were exploited for decades on behalf of the country’s industrialization effort. Until the 1970s, they were denied the internal passports that permitted legal movement within the country. The results of this resentment were described by an outside observer in 1971:
The collective farm “serf” discharges his labor obligation to the “master” carelessly, grudgingly. He refuses to concern himself with the fertility of the “collective” land. It is not his. He does not see the public weeds, nor the rust on the collective machinery, nor the private cow that grazes just inside the collective cornfield. He steals from the collective or habitually turns a blind eye when his fellows do so.3
Broadly similar patterns, including an even greater famine in the late 1950s, occurred in China. Peasant discontent there was dramatically evident when reforms in the late 1970s permitted private farming, and millions of Chinese immediately abandoned collectivized agriculture in favor of their own family farms.
Communist Industrialization . In the cities, rapid industrialization was the goal, and state planning, nationalization of industry, and priority to heavy industry were the means. “We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” declared the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1931. “We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we shall perish.” In many ways, they did it. In both the Soviet Union in the 1930s and China in the 1950s, industrial growth rates were astonishing. Iron, steel, and coal production leaped ahead. New cities and industries boomed, and the urban workforce expanded rapidly. The contrast between a rapidly growing Soviet economy and the Great Depression in the capitalist countries was particularly striking. By the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union was clearly one of the world’s modern industrial states, an achievement that went a long way to explaining its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Centralized planning by an authoritarian state seemed to work, and many people—some intellectuals in the West and some political leaders in European colonies—saw communism as the wave of the future and capitalism as exhausted.
In the cities of communist societies, a rapidly growing urban working class gained much in terms of educational opportunities and social mobility. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s desire to create a technically competent and thoroughly communist elite, drawn from the working class, provided great opportunity for hundreds of thousands of these young people—manual laborers and low-level white-collar workers—who streamed into the new technical schools
that opened after 1928. Those who graduated (mostly in engineering of some kind) in the early 1930s experienced rapid promotion in the party, state, or industrial bureaucracies and considerable upward social mobility. Here was the basis for some of the support and even enthusiasm that Soviet communism was able temporarily to generate. “I am a Tatar,” wrote one grateful Soviet citizen:
In old tsarist Russia we weren’t even considered people. We couldn’t even dream about education, or getting a job in a state enterprise. And now I’m a citizen of the USSR. Like all citizens, I have the right to a job, to education, to leisure. . . . From a common laborer I have turned into a skilled worker. I was elected a member of the city soviets. . . . I live in a country where one feels like living and learning. . . . I will sacrifice my life in order to . . . save my country.4
But some people clearly benefited more than others from communism. A “new class” of party leaders, industrial managers, technical experts, and bureaucrats emerged in all the communist countries, eroding socialist commitments to equality. This new class was privileged in many ways: its members gained access to special stores, hospitals, schools, and apartments; luxurious vacations and country homes; higher salaries; servants and chauffeurs; and high social status. But these privileges derived from their positions in the hierarchy as communist officials, not from their ownership of property as in capitalist societies. And those positions were highly insecure, dependent on the approval of party authorities, as millions discovered in wave after wave of party purges.
Confronting Privilege and Inequality in China . The Chinese Communist Party faced the same problem as a new elite took shape, but unlike the Soviet Union, which largely accepted this reality, the Chinese leadership under Mao Zedong tried to combat it. They sent high-ranking officials out to the farms to renew their relationship with the “masses” and purged from the party those who resisted this effort to continue the revolutionary tradition. By the mid-1960s, Mao became convinced that many within the Communist Party itself, including top officials, had become complacent, were focusing on their own careers, and had lost touch with the ordinary people of the country. He launched a so-called Cultural Revolution in which millions of young people, organized as Red Guards, were encouraged to “make revolution” against such people, including often their own teachers, party leaders, and even their parents. The chaos that this movement generated finally came to an end only after Mao died and a new communist leadership decisively repudiated the Cultural Revolution.
Any modern industrial society, whether capitalist or communist, seems to require some kind of elite—managers, technicians, administrators, and experts. This reality flew in the face of more radical socialist visions of equality. In one early Soviet experiment, Russian orchestras tried to perform without a conductor. Mao Zedong famously dismissed the need for professionals with the dictum “Better red than expert.” But the Soviet revolution was based not on the Marxist vision of the withering away of the state; it relied on Lenin’s conviction that revolution in an undemocratic society could be accomplished only by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” and a secret and centralized party. In addition, the Soviet effort to industrialize the economy and modernize the society required a wide range of experts and administrators.
Totalitarianism and Terror . In both Russia and China, the Communist Party was everywhere. Education, the arts, the media, and social life—all of this, in addition to the economy and politics, was monopolized by the party and enforced by repeated purges, imprisonment, and executions in an effort to achieve almost total control of society. Membership in the party provided the chief means to status and privilege. But divisions within both communist parties triggered an escalating search for “enemies,” those who rejected or even questioned the policies of the leadership. In the Soviet Union, it was known as “the Great Terror” of 1936-1939, in which millions were arrested and hundreds of thousands executed, many of them high-ranking communist officials accused of horrendous and altogether unlikely crimes. A self-perpetuating wave of fear engulfed much of the country, particularly in elite circles, as citizens denounced one another for fear of being denounced themselves. Something similar took place during China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s as party leader Mao Zedong mobilized millions of young people, the Red Guards, and sent them streaming across the country to confront any who might be “taking the capitalist road.” Something close to civil war ensued before Mao called a halt to the upheaval. These brutal state-controlled regimes were a far cry from the humane and democratic socialism of Marx and most European socialist parties of the period.
The Communist World
and the “Free World”
On the global stage, the rise of communism split the world through the late 1980s. Known as the Cold War, that intense conflict found expression as a bitter ideological rivalry pitting Western market economies, democratic politics, and ideals of personal freedom against communist state-managed economies, singleparty politics, and ideals of social equality. On both sides, the stakes seemed total, as entire ways of life, systems of value, and alternative visions of the future were at issue. More concretely, the Cold War gave rise to military and political rivalries throughout the world. Europe, Germany, and the city of Berlin were sharply divided with their eastern halves in the Soviet bloc and their western halves allied with the United States, now the clear leader of the so-called free world. Beyond Europe, the former colonies, now becoming independent nations, became yet another arena of Soviet-American rivalry with each side attempting to recruit allies with economic enticements, military aid, and diplomatic pressure. The early economic success of the Soviet Union and China and their apparent commitment to social equality attracted favorable attention in many of the new nations. The flashpoints of these Cold War rivalries spanned the globe—Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Somalia, Angola, and elsewhere—sometimes erupting into war and other times merely threatening it.
What made these conflicts so dangerous was an escalating arms race, especially in nuclear weapons. Serious scientists and political leaders on both sides were aware of the wholly unique potential of these weapons such that their use in any widespread way meant mutual destruction at the least and possibly the extinction of life on Earth. In a nuclear war, Soviet leader Khrushchev once opined, “the living will envy the dead.” This awareness explained in large measure the surprising absence of any direct military encounter between Soviet and American forces despite the bitterness of their rivalries. In that respect, the Cold War never became hot. But the world lived on the precipice of disaster for several decades. Perhaps the most chilling confrontation occurred in 1962 when the Soviet Union attempted to install missiles with nuclear weapons in Cuba. A U.S. naval blockade of Cuba ultimately persuaded the Soviet Union to withdraw the weapons, but for a period of several weeks in October 1962, the world held its breath as nuclear war seemed imminent.
Communism, in short, was an enormous shock to the capitalist world system of the twentieth century. For those living in communist countries, it transformed conditions of life, bringing rapid economic growth, vast social upheaval, and great oppression. It threw the West on the defensive; challenged its political, economic, and religious values; and set in motion a historic confrontation between rival ideologies and social systems.
The United States
as a Global Power
If world wars, depression, and communist revolution were not enough to shake Europe’s confidence, the emergence of the United States as global superpower made up the difference. But the emergence of the United States on the global stage also suggests that European or, more broadly, Western dominance had not so much ended as acquired a new center across the Atlantic. After all, the United States was dominated by people of European origin, however much Americans might seek to distinguish themselves from the “Old World.” And Americans certainly bore the legacy of European history in their commitment to Christianity, capitalism, democracy, and i
ndustrial development. Whether the rise of the United States challenged or extended European dominance, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the United States as the world’s most powerful state. It was yet another of the major realignments that transformed the world of the twentieth century.
An American Century?
In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce, whose Time, Life, and Fortune magazines had become mainstays of American popular culture, wrote that the twentieth century would be “the American Century.” “Our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technological skills” would be shared by all peoples, he declared. The United States must become the “training center for the skilled servants of mankind.”5 An audacious boast in the wake of the Great Depression became reality by the end of World War II. The United States emerged in 1945 alone among the combatants stronger than it had been. The American flag flew over defeated Germany and Japan. Even American allies—England, France, the Soviet Union, and China—were decimated by the war. The United States led the formation of the United Nations, writing the rules and ensuring the votes; created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; and provided extensive aid packages for the rebuilding of allies and former enemies. Producing over half the world’s manufactured goods and controlling two-thirds of the world’s gold supply, the American economy dominated the world as had no other in history. As Britain, France, and other European countries abandoned their empires, the United States stepped in to exert its will and support its manufacturers.
