The Red Flag: A History of Communism
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NEP rescued the Communists by appeasing the peasantry. The Bolsheviks, a tiny sect within the revolutionary intelligentsia, had ridden to power on the back of a popular revolution, but they found the construction of their Marxist state much more challenging. Their early revolutionary methods proved too disruptive, the Modernist vision was impractical, and the martial politics of the civil war created too much opposition. The Bolsheviks did find supporters, not so much within the urban working class, as amongst the young peasants who made up the Red Army. Nevertheless, the regime’s appeal was too narrow; and indeed, their economic system was unsustainable. Recognizing the need for greater support, the Bolsheviks moderated their old sectarianism and concessions were made to the mass of the rural population.
The Bolsheviks may have avoided becoming victims of a new socialist revolution, but the crisis seems to have taken its toll on Lenin’s health. From 1920 to 1921 his exhaustion was evident. In May 1922 he had his first stroke, and he remained seriously ill until his death in January 1924. It is tempting to link his deteriorating health with the failure of his revolutionary hopes. Lenin’s unique contribution to Marxism in 1917 had lain in his ability to combine a hard-nosed commitment to modernization with a furious revolutionary impatience. In March 1921 this project was in ruins. Lenin was forced to accept that the semi-capitalism of NEP would last for a long time. Socialism would only be feasible once the working class had undergone a ‘cultural revolution’, by which Lenin seems to have meant education and the successful inculcation of the work ethic that he had himself learnt from his parents.119 He never admitted the charge of the Second International and the Mensheviks, that his revolution had been premature. But in practice he had reverted to a Marxism that had distinct echoes of Kautsky’s ‘revolutionary waiting’.
In 1920 the painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin was commissioned to design a building for the Third ‘Communist’ International (‘Comintern’), which Lenin had founded the previous year to rival the Second International of Social Democratic Parties. A ‘productivist’ artist, who sought to combine mathematical and geometrical forms with social usefulness, Tatlin did a good job of representing Modernist Marxism’s hierarchical and technocratic vision of politics. The monument was to be a Communist successor to the Eiffel Tower: it would demonstrate that the capital of the world revolution had moved from Paris to Moscow. It was a cross between a spiral and a pyramid. There were to be three rooms on top of each other, which were designed to rotate at different speeds. The largest, on the bottom, was for legislative assemblies, and was to rotate once a year; the next storey, designed for executive bodies, would turn once a month; the smallest room at the top would rotate daily, and would be ‘reserved for centres of an informative character: an information office, a newspaper, the issuing of proclamations, pamphlets and manifestoes’ by means of radio.120
The model became a classic of modern design, representing Soviet creativity to the avant-garde intelligentsia of the West. At a time of shortages and poverty it was a clearly utopian project. The model had to be made of wood, not the metal and glass planned for the actual building. And in place of the intended machinery, a small boy manipulated the ropes and pulleys that rotated the rooms. The avant-garde poet Maiakovskii welcomed it as an alternative to the pompous busts going up around Moscow – the ‘first monument without a beard’ – but it is unlikely that Lenin approved.121 Even so, Lenin’s mechanical state had much in common with Tatlin’s tower. It was hollow and ramshackle. But it did provide a symbol of a modern, non-capitalist system, controlled by a disciplined ‘vanguard party’ issuing ‘proclamations’ to the workers of the world. It was this party that was to appeal to so many future Communists, eager to find some Promethean force capable of fomenting revolutions and forging modernity. And at a time when the old order was in crisis, many on the left saw Tatlin’s tower as a beacon, showing the way to the future.
Under Western Eyes
I
In February 1919 one of the most prominent Communist-sympathizing intellectuals of the inter-war era, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, wrote the play Spartakus. Later entitled Drums in the Night, it was published for the first time in 1922 and told the story of a soldier, Andreas Kragler, who has returned from the war to find a Germany full of venality and corruption. His girlfriend, Anna, encouraged by her grasping parents, is planning to marry a bourgeois war profiteer, Murk. Kragler wins Anna back, but in the meantime he has become a revolutionary, leading the denizens of Glubb’s Gin Mill onto the streets in support of the insurgent Marxist ‘Spartacists’. Anna, seeing him in the demonstrations, rushes out, and urges him to leave the revolution and choose love instead. Kragler gives in. He hands over responsibility for the revolution to the audience and decides on Anna.1
Brecht wrote Spartakus during the third, and most radical, revolutionary conflagration to engulf Europe, following those of 1789 and 1848. Much, though, had changed since the previous revolutionary eras. Now, for a vocal minority, government without the bourgeoisie seemed not only possible but necessary; Russia, and the Bolsheviks, had actually created a viable ‘proletarian’ government; and the imperialism and nationalism of Europe’s elites – both aristocratic and bourgeois – had killed millions. Many believed the old order had forfeited its right to rule.
Intellectuals, writers and artists were at the forefront of revolution, and Brecht was one of them, but his attitude was ambivalent. He was sceptical about ideas of heroic self-sacrifice and Spartakus suggested that the German masses did not want a revolutionary, workers’ government. Kragler defeats his bourgeois rival Murk, but then retreats to the comforts of private life. Brecht’s view turned out to be realistic. The Communists did not take power in 1919 in Germany, and by 1921 it was clear that the revolutionary tide in the West had receded. Pro-Soviet Communist parties never captured the affections of the majority of the European working classes or peasants. By the mid-1920s the ruling elites had restored order and the edifice of authority and property.
Yet the hatreds unleashed by war and revolution had not entirely abated, and Communists remained significant minorities in several countries. But Communists were forced to change their style and approach. Lenin’s ‘retreat’ from revolutionary Radicalism to a Marxism of discipline and hierarchy infused the international Communist movement. This gritty realism was much more in tune with Brecht’s own sensibility. His leather-jacketed machismo, hatred of sentimentality, love of the modern, and disdain for romantic dreams all reflected the hard-nosed Communist sectarianism of Western Europe in the 1920s. The contrast with the idealism of 1918–19 could not have been greater.
II
In 1915, as Europe was consumed by violence, neutral Switzerland hosted two groups of intellectuals profoundly disgusted by the bloodshed. The first was the anti-war Social Democrats, who gathered in the holiday village of Zimmerwald in September 1915, and again in Kiental in April 1916. Attendance was sparse. Most representatives were from Russia and Eastern Europe, and included Lenin and Trotsky, although the Italian Socialists (PSI) and the Swiss Social Democrats were also important members. The large Western Social Democratic parties had supported the war and were therefore absent. Trotsky recalled bitterly that half a century following the founding of the First International Europe’s internationalists could be comfortably accommodated in four charabancs.2 It was in these inauspicious circumstances that the foundations for the international Communist movement were laid.
A couple of months before the meeting at Kiental, at a rather different type of venue – the newly opened Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich – another intellectual groupuscule expressed its horror at the war: the primitivist artistic movement, Dada. Hans Arp remembered how he and his fellow rebels thought:
In Zurich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we t
hought, save mankind from the furious folly of those times.3
Dadaists therefore differed from the Marxists in cutting themselves off from politics, at least at first. But in other ways they had much in common. They wanted to outrage the bourgeoisie, with Dadaist performances at the Cabaret Voltaire designed directly to provoke violence and bring confrontations with the police.
In 1915 both radical Social Democrats and Dadaists seemed to be whistling in the wind. The war continued. Lenin could not even persuade his fellow anti-war Marxists to approve a split in the Second International. Yet within a year, everything had changed. As the bloodshed continued, the more the left became disillusioned with the war. By 1916 the executive of the French Social Democratic SFIO was seriously divided over war credits, and soon the German Social Democratic Party itself split. The majority continued to support the war, but significant figures such as Kautsky and Bernstein now opposed it. At the same time, however, a more radical left-wing minority, led by Rosa Luxemburg and the Marxist lawyer Karl Liebknecht, emerged, calling themselves the ‘Spartacists’ after the leader of the Roman slave revolt. By April 1917 the party had split, with the foundation of the new minority radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).
In 1916, Lenin and the Dadaists would have had nothing but mutual contempt for each other. Lenin would have seen them as utopian Romantics. But by 1918 some Dadaists, especially the Germans, had embraced a radical Marxist politics, and the incongruously named ‘Revolutionary Central Committee of Dada’ had been formed. One of the most famous, the painter George Grosz, incorporated graffiti, children’s drawings and other forms of popular art into angry caricatures of arrogant militarists and greedy capitalists. Grosz was to become a leading member of the German revolutionary movement, and was a founding member of the German Communist Party, the KPD.4
The war had also dented the faith of many ordinary people in the old pre-war elites. Governments demanded enormous sacrifices in the name of patriotism. But as the fighting dragged on, resentment increased. Equal sacrifice did not seem to produce equal reward. On the home front, living standards and working conditions deteriorated, and food shortages were endemic. Meanwhile on the frontline what many believed was pointless carnage continued.
Unlike the tsarist regime, most combatant governments were willing to forge serious alliances with non-revolutionary socialists. The German Social Democrats continued to support war credits, and the French SFIO joined a ‘sacred union’ (union sacrée) with the government. In return they were given a role in running the industrial economy. As the war dragged on, however, the socialists of the Second International became increasingly compromised by their cooperation with the ruling elites. For many ordinary workers the socialists seemed little more than establishment stooges; conditions on the shop-floor were worsening as discipline tightened. A gulf soon emerged between rank-and-file workers on the one side, and moderate socialists and trade unionists on the other. The socialist establishment’s hold over workers was further weakened by an influx of new workers – women, migrants from the countryside and, in the case of Germany, foreign conscripts from occupied lands.5 These new arrivals had few links with established socialist parties and trade unions, and it was these semi-skilled workers, flooding into the new mass industries of the war, who formed the base of support for the post-war revolutions.6
Strikes reached a peak in the years 1918–25.7 In Germany in 1917, over 500 strikes involved 1.5 million workers;8 in Britain strikes remained at a high level throughout the war, and especially affected a few radical areas such as ‘Red Clydeside’. Strikes also became increasingly politicized, with protesters obsessively attentive to the unequal wartime sacrifices made by different classes. In November 1916 railwaymen’s wives in the town of Knittefeld, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, complained that they were being deprived of sugar so that the bourgeois and officers could waste their time in coffee houses.9 In the spring and summer of 1917 mass protests swept Europe and workers also began to demand an end to the war.
So even before the events in Petrograd, a popular backlash was brewing against the war, but the example of the Bolshevik revolution further strengthened the radical left, and in January 1918 massive strikes and demonstrations rocked Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it was defeat in war, when it seemed that all the sacrifices had been for nothing, which was crucial in triggering the revolutions. For their radical critics, elites – aristocratic, bourgeois and moderate socialist – had led their countries along a disastrous and pointless path of aggression. As the art-nouveau artist Heinrich Vogeler declared, ‘The war has made a Communist of me. After my war experiences, I could no longer countenance belonging to a class that had driven millions of people to their deaths.’10 It was no surprise then that in October and November 1918 the old regimes should have collapsed amidst popular, often nationalist revolutions.
Superficially, German politics looked strikingly similar to Russia’s after February 1917. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up alongside a new provisional government consisting of left-wing liberals, moderate socialists (the SPD) and a minority of radicals (the USPD), under the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert. At the same time, Luxemburg and a small Spartacist group were demanding a Soviet-style revolution and the end of parliamentary democracy. In fact, most of the councils did not demand a soviet republic, and supported a liberal order; the radicals were a small minority.11 The sharp division between ‘people’ and elites present in Russia did not exist in Germany – predictably given the profound differences between German and Russian politics before the war. But Ebert was convinced that he was under threat from a new Bolshevik revolution, and was determined not to become another Kerenskii. He therefore acted more decisively than his Russian predecessor, believing that only an alliance with the military and the old imperial elites would ward off the revolutionary danger and guarantee liberal democracy.
Ebert’s willingness to ally his government with the right against the workers’ councils has generated a great deal of debate, and in retrospect it seems to have been an overreaction that contributed to the damaging polarization of German politics between the wars.12 But at the time, the prospects for European Bolshevik revolutions did not look far-fetched, either to the left or to the right. The Bolsheviks themselves were certainly full of optimism. In March 1919 the foundation of the Third ‘Communist’ International (Comintern) formalized the split within Marxism between Communists and Social Democrats and brought together the more radical, pro-Soviet parties. Soviet republics were declared in Hungary (in March), Bavaria (April) and Slovakia (June), and seemed to show that there was a real chance that Bolshevism would spread, although the Hungarian government of the pro-Moscow journalist Béla Kun was the only Communist regime fully to take power in the West. Strikes and radical protest continued throughout the period 1919–21. In the June 1920 elections in Germany, the radical left were at rough parity with the moderate socialists (20.3 per cent of the vote, compared with the Social Democrats’ 21.6 per cent). The red wave also affected southern Europe, and the years 1918–20 were to be dubbed the ‘Trieno Bolchevista’ in Spain, whilst Italy experienced its ‘biennio rosso’ in 1919–20. In Northern Italy it briefly seemed as if the factory council movement and the ‘occupation of the factories’ would really bring about an Italian Communist revolution. Worker unrest, some inspired by the Wobblies and other leftists, was especially widespread in the United States, and 1919 and 1920 saw the most powerful strike wave in American history, as workers demanded improvements in conditions and more factory democracy.
Communist parties benefited from this grassroots radicalism. Their members were generally young, and often unskilled or semi-skilled: a majority of the participants in the Second Comintern Congress of July 1920 were under forty and few had played important roles in the pre-war Social Democratic movement.13 Many had emerged from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of wartime, rather than through organized parties or trade unions, and were reacting against what they saw
as a middle-aged, stodgy and excessively compliant Social Democratic culture.14
Communists were in part driven by economic concerns, but several were also radicalized by their experience of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, with their rigid hierarchies and harsh discipline. Walter Ulbricht was typical of these Communist activists. Born in Leipzig, his father a tailor and his mother a seamstress and Social Democrat, he was brought up within the all-embracing culture of Marxist socialism and Kautsky’s party. But it was the outbreak of war that led him to embrace militant leftist socialism. His experience of the German army gave him a life-long hatred of ‘the spirit of the Prussian military’. He certainly had a difficult four years, suffering both from disease (he caught malaria) and punishments for distributing Spartacist literature. He finally escaped military prison and returned to Leipzig, becoming active in KPD politics. He then swiftly rose in the Communist hierarchy, becoming party leader in Thuringia, and a delegate to the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1921, where he met Lenin.15 It was this generation of Communists – born into the proletarian, Marxist subculture of imperial Germany, and radicalized by war – that was to dominate the Communist East German regime after World War II; Ulbricht himself rose to be General Secretary of the ruling Communist party between 1950 and 1971.