The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The failure coincided with Lenin’s terminal illness and the resultant power struggle within the Soviet party leadership. Trotsky’s rivals, including Stalin, fully exploited the disaster, and the humiliation was used as an excuse to centralize power and curtail local radicalism. In 1924 the Kremlin launched the ‘Bolshevization’ of the Comintern, meaning that member parties had to become ‘Bolshevik parties’, all part of a ‘homogeneous Bolshevik world party permeated with the ideas of Leninism’.51 In practice, this meant that Communist parties were increasingly transformed into tools of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin did not pretend otherwise: ‘An internationalist is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended and promoted without defending the USSR.’52

  The actual degree and effect of Moscow’s interventions in national Communist parties is a complex, and controversial, question.53 The Comintern, a relatively small organization, clearly could not monitor and control the activities of all Communist parties at all levels. Also, in several places Communist subcultures emerged, founded on local radical left-wing traditions, which had little to do with Moscow.54 However, the Comintern did try to establish control over the parties’ leaderships, and it had several ways of exerting influence – by sending agents to ‘fraternal’ parties, by supporting party factions against opponents, and, at the other extreme, by expelling recalcitrants and closing parties down (as happened to the Polish Communist Party in 1938). Financial aid also played a role.55 However, perhaps as important in sustaining Moscow’s power was the USSR’s prestige amongst Communists, and the national parties’ weaknesses. Whilst there was resentment at Moscow’s arrogance, the Western parties had to accept that the Bolsheviks had brought Communists to power whilst they had not. And defeat convinced many that strict discipline, imposed by Moscow, was even more crucial than in the past.56

  One way the Bolsheviks controlled the movement was by summoning leading international Communists to report regularly to Moscow, and a close network was formed around the inappropriately named Hotel Lux.57 A grand fin-de-siècle building on Moscow’s central Tverskaia (later Gorkii) Street, it had, however, passed its prime and was now a notoriously shabby and spartan hostel. It was to be a temporary home to many Communist leaders, from the Bulgarian Dimitrov to the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, from the German Ulbricht to the Italian Togliatti. Communist activists ran into each other in the cold showers – the Yugoslav Tito first met the American party leader Earl Browder in these unpromising circumstances.58

  Moscow’s International Lenin School for Western Communists, founded in 1926, was another tool by which the Kremlin attempted to exert influence over the movement. Thousands of party members studied there between the wars, most of them young, male and working class. Compulsory courses included academic classes in Marxism and the ‘History of the Workers’ Movement’, and the study of political tactics and how to organize strikes and insurrections. The wisdom of Lenin was supplemented by the insights of the classic German military theorist Clausewitz. Students also visited factories – a rather riskier event for the Comintern authorities: some visitors were shocked at the low living standards of Russian workers compared with their fellow proletarians in capitalist countries, and asked awkward questions.59 But most important for the Comintern, especially after Stalin’s rise to power, was the inculcation of a Bolshevik party culture of discipline and ‘conspiracy’, much like that described by Brecht. Students were given new names and were forbidden from telling friends or family where they were. One Welsh miner engaged in ‘self-criticism’ for neglecting these principles. His connections with the Labour party, he accepted, had left him with ‘Social Democratic remnants I have brought with me from my own country. [I] ended up by committing this gross breach of Party discipline and conspiracy which is impermissible in our Party as a Party of a new type.’60

  Life for the Comintern student was tough and intense. Wolfgang Leonhard, a German Communist who was at the school during World War II when it was evacuated eastwards to the Urals city of Ufa, remembered his rigorous lessons on Nazi ideology and how to refute it. He spent so much time learning about Nazism that when he returned to Germany after the war and met real Nazis he found he was better versed in their beliefs and mores than they were themselves.61 Much of the rest of his time was taken up with either exercise or improving manual labour; students had to maintain their links with the working class:

  Our working time was so full up that the only free time we had was on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. At the weekends we were allowed to do whatever we wanted – except to drink, fall in love, leave the school compound, admit our real names, tell anything about our previous life, or write anything about our present life in our letters.62

  Relaxation was rare and consisted largely of regimented folk singing. Some students, like the Yugoslav leader Tito’s son, Zharko, who had an affair with an ‘enchanting Spanish girl’, refused to submit to the discipline and were expelled.63 Most survived though, and several went on to be fully committed Leninists and Stalinists, becoming future leaders of European Communist parties.64 Efforts were being made to ‘forge’ the young, radical and chaotic parties of the revolutionary period according to a new template issued in Moscow.

  However, whilst Moscow did generally succeed in persuading or forcing national parties to follow the frequently changing party line, it was not always easy, for national Communists had their own agendas and could engage in passive, or even active, resistance. As has been seen, in Germany the party left objected to the united front with the socialists in the mid-1920s, whilst later in the decade, when the line moved to the left under Stalin, the right resisted. The British leadership also opposed the Kremlin from the right. In October 1927 the leader of the British Communists, blacksmith’s son Harry Pollitt, initially opposed the new Comintern demand that a harsh struggle had to be fought against the Labour Party, realizing how unpopular it would be; it was only in 1929 that the British party leadership fully accepted the new line.65

  Bolshevization therefore made life difficult for the national parties, partly because Moscow’s line could be unpopular, and partly because the Comintern’s culture could be alien. Party members not only had to learn heavy Marxist jargon (originally in German, the official Comintern language), but also new Russian Bolshevik argot (‘agitprop’, or ‘party cell’). Party propaganda was often drafted in Moscow, without local consultation, and Communists struggled to make the clotted slogans sound appealing.66 Even so, despite Bolshevization, local parties did try to blend local and Comintern cultures, and they had their distinct characteristics. In Germany, the militant culture fostered by Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democratic left before 1914 survived, whilst in Britain, and elsewhere, the puritanical morality of Communism made sense to people brought up in a Christian socialist culture of temperance and earnestness.67 Meanwhile, the Oxford-educated and half-Indian British Communist Rajani Palme Dutt persisted in referring to younger party members as ‘freshers’ – the Oxbridge slang term for first-year students.68

  Several Communist parties saw a gradual decline in membership over the 1920s and early 1930s; the membership of the French party, for instance, fell continuously between 1921 (109,391) and 1933 (28,000). This was doubtless helped by the clumsy hand of the Kremlin: in countries like France and Britain, where moderate socialist political parties were well-established, the Comintern’s sectarianism was clearly counterproductive. Yet for some party members, subject to harassment after the failure of the revolutions, Bolshevik ‘discipline’ and support could be welcomed. For activists suffering privations, the ‘Soviet Union’ represented the ideal they were fighting for, a land of milk and honey. Annie Kriegel, in her ethnographic study of French Communism, tried to capture their thinking:

  To the youth with empty hands who approached them, asking to join the movement, they [the Communists] responded by giving h
im a pile of pamphlets ‘There you are, comrade’. Shortly thereafter, hounded by the police, his name inscribed on employers’ blacklists, the neophyte found himself unemployed. From then on he had plenty of time – time to be hungry but also time to spread the good word (when he was able to eat thanks to the money he collected selling the pamphlets)… He knew with a certainty that there was one country in the world where the workers had waged a revolution and made themselves the masters of that state, the bosses of the factories, the generals of the Red Army.69

  Small, embattled Communist communities emerged throughout Europe, even where national parties were tiny. Britain had its ‘little Moscows’ in Fife, Stepney in East London and the South Wales coal-fields – homogeneous working-class communities where Communists became involved in defending jobs and union rights, whilst also organizing leisure and cultural activities.70 Communist activists reported back to Moscow, explaining why miners in South Wales were so receptive to a militant, sectarian Communism:

  Their conditions are bad, and obviously bad. They are largely free from the distracting influence of the cities. Their time is not so broken up, as it is with workers who live in the big cities, by the long journeys and the many varieties of amusement the big cities provide… Their minds are more fallow. The factor of exploitation is very obvious to them… [The] pits, themselves, provide opportunities for instant contact and the development of a sense of solidarity amongst them.71

  The party where the culture of sectarian struggle and loyalty to the USSR was most fully established was the German one. Here party membership and its popular vote remained high throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The KPD was often divided over strategy, and the culture of the party also varied by region, but under Ernst Thälmann, its leader from 1925, it combined revolutionary activism with adherence to hierarchy and loyalty to the Kremlin. It soon became the Bolsheviks’ favourite little brother, and much of its intransigent hostility to any compromise with social democracy survived the revolutionary era of 1918–19. The separation between the Communists and Social Democrats was not an absolute one: they shared the same trade unions until 1928 and sometimes attended the same festivals;72 and both Communists and Social Democrats addressed their fellows as ‘comrades’, and marched beneath the red flag. Even so, the Social Democrats’ participation in suppressing Communism had left a legacy of bitterness, as did their identification with the political status quo. In some factories in the Halle-Merseburg region, the mutual hatred was so great that Social Democratic and Communist workers even went to work on different train carriages and ate in separate parts of the company cafeteria.73 Communists tended to see Social Democrats as the bosses’ lackeys, and certainly the latter were better represented amongst the ‘respectable’ working class, whilst the former did better amongst the poorer and unskilled workers. Yet the KPD soon became a gathering of the unemployed. Communists were inevitably the most likely to be sacked in the efficiency drives of the 1920s, and by 1932 only 11 per cent of German Communist Party members had jobs.74

  Adversity only strengthened the KPD’s uncompromising attitudes. Its culture was militaristic and infused with machismo.75 Its language was often violent: one newspaper was even named Rote Peitsche (Red Whip). Propaganda was an effusion of proletarian fists, leather-coated marchers and billowing red flags. Its rallies adopted much of the style of its radical right competitors, and the uniforms and jackboots made it difficult to distinguish them from the paramilitary Stahlhelm or the Nazis. Thälmann was even described in the party press as ‘unser Führer’ (‘our leader’), in imitation of the authoritarianism of the right. At times, in 1923 and 1930, the Communist party used nationalist language as a way of attracting support away from the Nazis and others. Even so, the German Communists were not quasi-Nazis. The party was fundamentally one of class struggle, not national revival, and the Nazis themselves generally regarded Communists as their main enemies.76

  The Communist party’s militarism was not limited to propaganda. It had a paramilitary wing, the Red Front Fighters’ League (Rote Frontkämpferbund) until it was banned in 1929, and various underground groups after then. Many Communists had guns, brought back from the war, and sometimes they made their own. In 1921 workers at the Leuna plant built their own tank, which they deployed against the police. The German Communists, largely excluded from factories, became a party of the streets and, especially towards the end of the decade, engaged in brawls and shoot-outs with police.77 Unsurprisingly, this martial party was overwhelmingly (70 per cent) male, even though it had one of the most feminist programmes of all Weimar parties. Even so, it was too small and isolated to threaten the stability of the German state in the mid-1920s, at a time when the economy as a whole was recovering and a liberal politics was still able to incorporate a majority of interests. As had become clear in the USSR in 1921, militant, sectarian Communist parties were too divisive to appeal to anything more than a minority. But this only applied in normal times. Everything was to look very different when the economic downturn came.

  V

  On 13 May 1928 the New York Times published an article entitled ‘America’s “New” Civilization’, which reported on a lecture given by the French academic André Siegfried in Paris. Siegfried had argued that the ‘greatest contribution of the United States to the civilized world was “the conquest of the material dignity of life”’, through mass production techniques and prosperity, and the journalist praised Siegfried’s encomium to the United States. However, the Times believed that America’s ‘contribution to the democratic ideal’ and its export of ‘a social system free from caste’ were of even greater importance than its economic achievements.78

  Both Siegfried and the New York Times expressed a widespread belief that the newly dominant United States, and the laissez-faire democratic model it embodied, had succeeded in overcoming the social divisions of the revolutionary era of 1917–19. Within months, however, this faith proved to be misplaced. In the summer of 1928, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to restrain a share bubble fuelled by poorly regulated banks; American lending to the rest of the world collapsed. The result was a catastrophic constriction of credit in much of Europe and Latin America; heavily indebted Germany was particularly affected.79 The economies of the developing world (including that of the USSR) had been suffering for some time from low commodity prices, but the economic crisis worsened when the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 brought the fragile boom to an end in the United States itself.

  The result was a sharpening of social and international conflict, as an atmosphere of frantic sauve qui peut reigned. Social tensions intensified as workers and middle classes fought over shares of a shrinking national economic cake, whilst international collaboration broke down as states tried to save themselves with protectionist and other autarkic policies. Capitalism’s power to integrate the poor and less privileged – whether workers, peasants, or developing countries – into a liberal, free-market order was ebbing. There were now fewer incentives for Communists, Western or Soviet, to cooperate with liberal capitalism, and Communism entered a new radical phase.

  The crisis of 1928–9 was, however, only the culmination of tensions between the Communist and capitalist worlds that had been brewing for some years. The 1926 General Strike in Britain led to a deterioration in relations between the Conservative government and Moscow, and in May 1927 the British broke off diplomatic links. Meanwhile, the Guomindang’s attack on the Chinese Communists that April was an embarrassing setback for the ‘united front’ policy, and a major blow to Communist hopes in Asia. German workers were becoming more radical, and in July a failed workers’ uprising in Vienna reinforced Moscow’s belief that revolution was brewing in the West. From the spring of 1927 the Comintern began to change its line as the Soviet leadership became convinced that its security would be better served by a more militant foreign policy. Moscow began to insist that Social Democrats – especially those like the Germans who had a pro-British foreign policy – be treated as bourg
eois enemies, and in 1928 the Comintern declared that a new period of revolutionary politics had begun – the ‘Third Period’ (following the ‘first’ post-war revolutionary period and the ‘second’ stabilization period). Capitalism, it now argued, was tottering; clear lines had to be drawn between revolutionaries and reformists; and the Social Democrats had become ‘social fascists’. The new principle of national politics was ‘class against class’. Meanwhile the Kremlin became convinced that it could no longer build the economy by relying on trade with the West, but now had to depend largely on the USSR’s own resources. The stage was set for a new version of Communism that was both revolutionary and nationalistic. And this model was championed by a Bolshevik leader with a rather different culture and style from Lenin’s – Iosif Stalin.

  Men of Steel

  I

  Bolshevik bosses had to wait until March 1928 to see Sergei Eisenstein’s completed treatment of 1917 – October.1 Unlike his colleague and rival, the punctual Pudovkin, Eisenstein failed not only to produce his masterpiece on time (possibly because the censor intervened), but he also offered a treatment of the revolution at odds with Pudovkin’s Modernist Marxist tale. Whilst Pudovkin dealt with an ordinary ‘lad’ full of ‘spontaneous’ feeling who develops a disciplined, rational, socialist consciousness, Eisenstein’s film was infused with revolutionary romanticism. He declared that his goal was:

  To restore sensuality to science.

  To restore to the intellectual process its fire and passion.