The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  However, the leadership was determined that this did not become a reprise of the ‘Great Break’. They resolutely tried to ensure that any ‘self-criticism’ remained under strict control, even if that proved difficult in practice.

  In the spring of 1937 the Terror moved into its second phase, and the arrests of the party bosses and their clients began. Stalin may have planned this all along, but the NKVD also responded to evidence, often the result of denunciations, that the ‘little Stalins’ were not fulfilling economic targets.118 In the spring of 1937 Stalin may also have been convinced, possibly by Gestapo disinformation, that Marshal Tukhachevskii and the military high command were conspiring with the Germans. So despite the threat of war, the cream of the officer corps was arrested. And from that summer Stalin sent his close allies from Moscow to the regions to preside over the arrest and replacement of most of the powerful regional party bosses.

  The bosses themselves, however, were closely involved in the Terror. Under pressure to find enemies (and desperate to save themselves), they tried to emphasize the threat from ‘class aliens’ and anybody with a ‘spoiled’ past, especially the former kulaks. Moreover, Stalin accepted the regional bosses’ demands for a mass repression of ordinary people with ‘bad’ backgrounds. He was also probably afraid of a ‘fifth column’ of anti-Soviet kulaks who might join the Nazis if they invaded.119 In the summer of 1937 the Terror entered a new, third phase, that of the ‘mass operations’. Stalin and the Politburo, in collaboration with regional bosses, issued secret quotas of arrests and executions, based on class, political and ethnic background. Most of these victims were former kulaks, priests and tsarist officials; they also included vagrants and other ‘undesirable’ groups. ‘Unreliable’ ethnic minorities who were thought to be in danger of allying themselves with enemies across the border – such as Germans, Poles and Koreans – were also persecuted. The mass operations were responsible for by far the largest number of those executed and imprisoned during the period; official figures, almost certainly underestimates, record 681,692 executed and 1,575,259 imprisoned in 1937–8, many, though not all, for political crimes.120

  The result was chaos and economic crisis, as managers and officials fell victim to the arrests. Labour discipline collapsed, as officials refused to impose their authority on workers for fear of being criticized. The first serious attempt to rein in the ideological purge of the party came in January 1938. But the trials continued, including the third Moscow trial of Bukharin and other leaders. Meanwhile mass operations against kulaks and ethnic minorities went on well into 1938, and it was only towards the end of the year that Stalin effectively halted the Terror, though repressions continued on a smaller scale. Nikolai Ezhov was blamed for the ‘excesses’ and he was arrested and executed, charged, amongst other things, with ‘leftist overreaction’. He went to his execution convinced of the rightness of the Terror.

  VIII

  Eisenstein’s response to the Terror was naturally much more ambivalent and sophisticated than the true-believer Ezhov’s, and he dealt with this difficult, and dangerous, issue in his last films, the historical dramas Ivan the Terrible parts I (1944) and II (1946).121 The reputation of the sixteenth-century tsar Ivan IV had been rehabilitated in the 1930s as a ruler who had defeated Russia’s enemies and unified the country. His deployment of his personal bodyguards, the oprichniki, to wage a war of terror against the disloyal boyar nobility was commonly seen as a ‘progressive’ development in the building of the Russian state. Naturally, parallels between Ivan and Stalin, between the oprichnina and the Terror, were obvious to the intelligentsia and party elite.

  Eisenstein sought to justify Ivan/Stalin. But at the same time he wanted to give some tragic complexity to the character. In Part I, Ivan is shown having doubts about the violence he was unleashing, even against his own family. But these are soon overcome; he easily convinces himself that his personal sentiments must be sacrificed to Russia’s greatness. But the sequel’s atmosphere is very different. Ivan is now overtly self-lacerating, and the film wallows in an expressionist world of claustrophobic interiors, sinister intrigue and extreme emotion. In the projected Part III, Ivan is even shown banging his head on the floor in remorse beneath a fresco of the Day of Judgement, as his confessor and henchmen read out lists of his victims.

  Eisenstein’s friends were astounded at his extreme foolhardiness. How could he take such risks? And unsurprisingly Stalin, who had welcomed the first part, was outraged at the second and projected third. He excoriated the film for portraying the oprichniki as some kind of ‘Ku Klux Klan’, and presenting Ivan as if he were a vacillating Hamlet. Yet Eisenstein did not totally misjudge the vozhd. After a course of self-criticism he was permitted to remake the films, but died before he could restart the project.122

  Eisenstein had little insight into Stalin’s own psyche; the vozhd felt no guilt about the violence he had unleashed. But Ivan the Terrible Part II does capture some aspects of the world created by the Terror. October’s simple emotions of class struggle and vengeance had yielded to a far less confident, interior politics – one in which men’s souls had to be interrogated in search of inner doubts and hidden heresy.

  Stalin used show trials and purges until his death in 1953, but he was never to repeat the Terror on such a scale. Throughout the 1930s the regime had oscillated between the militant desire to transform society and a willingness to live with society as it was, and that tension continued. Ideological campaigns continued after the War, but the Terror was the last time the USSR experienced such an intrusive effort to force ideological unity on the party and society as a whole. The Terror also marked the end of populist attacks on officialdom, so evident in the late 1920s and more muted in the later 1930s. In 1938 and 1940 labour discipline laws restored the power of managers and technicians, and the regime increasingly emphasized the more inclusive principles of ethnicity and nation, rather than class. The system known as ‘high Stalinism’ – highly repressive, xenophobic and hierarchical – was emerging from the violence and tumult of the 1930s, to become so powerful on the world stage.

  The Terror remained a blot on Soviet Communism’s escutcheon until its demise. Khrushchev, in admitting its injustice in his ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, seriously damaged the reputation, and the legitimacy, of the Soviet model of socialism, but at the time the Terror did not have as great an effect on views of the Stalinist regime, within the USSR or outside, as one might expect. Those who were already hostile – particularly on the Trotskyist left – denounced the bloodletting. But there were strong reasons amongst the Western centre-left not to make the Terror a significant issue: at a time of appeasement, the USSR was the only real ally against the radical right. The struggle against Nazism was to give Soviet Communism another chance.

  Popular Fronts

  I

  In May 1937, as Stalin and Hitler fought a proxy war in Spain, Paris was the setting for an International Exposition designed to promote peace and reconciliation. A ‘Monument to Peace’ was constructed in the Place du Trocadéro, and an ‘Avenue of Peace’ linked it to the pavilions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. On one side, Boris Iofan’s Soviet pavilion was topped by Vera Mukhina’s statue of a worker and a woman collective-farmer, marching together and purposefully brandishing a hammer and a sickle. Opposite loomed Albert Speer’s massive neoclassical tower, crowned by an imperial eagle grasping a swastika. Speer (who seems to have had a secret preview of the Soviet plans) deliberately designed his edifice as a riposte to the Communist pavilion.

  Some have seen both pavilions as manifestations of ‘totalitarian art’, and they undoubtedly showed a certain monumental bombast; both embraced a populist, and indeed somewhat conventional, aesthetic, and the German exhibition showed an obsession with work and heroism every bit as intense as the Soviet one.1 Yet despite the similarities, the differences were striking.2 The German eagle was a symbol of empire, and within the pavilion society was shown as a static, peaceful hierarchy. The huge and prom
inent painting Comradeship, by Rudolf Hengstenberg, may have suggested parallels with Communist collectivism, but it portrayed building workers clearly subordinate to a dominant architect in an old-fashioned artisanal setting. By contrast, the USSR’s pavilion, with its monuments to machines and striving workers, sought to present itself as a more dynamic society, albeit one presided over by the great leader Stalin. There were also subtle differences in the pavilions’ depiction of reason and progress. The Soviets crammed their building with worthy and didactic exhibits lauding economic development and social change. The Nazi pavilion, though filled with the latest German technology, adopted a consistently mystical and religious mise en scène – the building itself an odd mixture of classical temple, church and mausoleum. Indeed, the overall aesthetic of each pavilion recreated stark differences in values. Whilst the Nazi pavilion was self-consciously conservative, its sculptures and architecture neo-classical, and its interior evoking the heavy nineteenth-century bourgeois style, the Soviet pavilion mixed neo-classicism with modernist touches; its architecture suggested an American skyscraper rather than a classical temple, whilst within, modern photomontage jostled with more conventional socialist realist painting.3

  The Soviet pavilion represented several crucial features of Stalinist ideology to the outside world. Bolshevism was the force of progress, bringing Enlightenment to the world (though the images of Stalin himself looked distinctly cultic). The ideal society was one devoted to collectivism, work and production, and its creation – the industrial working class – was now the hero of history. In this vision economics was paramount, and little, if anything, was left of the earlier utopian dream of liberation. All of these themes were reprised in the Short Course of party history (1938), largely written by Stalin himself and propagated throughout the Communist world. Here one found the approved version of Marxism outlined in crude, dogmatic form. History followed its determined course: the Soviet Union had achieved ‘socialism’, Marx’s lower phase of Communism, and the rest of the world would follow. This was a system where wage inequalities remained, and the state was all-powerful. Any plans for its withering away were postponed to the very distant future.

  Both the German and Soviet pavilions were much larger and more grandiose than those of the other countries; visitors complained about ‘the bad manners, the excess of pride and the vain pretensions’ they displayed.4 In striking contrast to both was the pavilion of the Spanish Republican government, which displayed a rather different approach to the ideological struggles of the time. Much more modest in scale, it was built in an unalloyed modernist style. Like the Soviet pavilion, it used photomontage to teach its visitors about the government’s worthy social programmes.5 But unlike the USSR’s effort, it also embraced the artistic avant-garde, displaying works by some of Spain’s leading artists, including, most famously, Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica. Picasso, an artist of the left who became a fully paid-up Communist in 1944, had produced the painting as a condemnation of fascist aggression, showing the sufferings of the Basque town as it was bombed to destruction by German aircraft only a month before the exhibition opened.

  The pavilion was built by the ruling Spanish Popular Front – an alliance of Communists, socialists and left-liberals – who had tried to bury their differences to resist General Franco’s nationalists and their Nazi and Italian Fascist allies. It was just one of a number of Popular Fronts established in the mid-1930s when the Comintern, fearful of fascism, abandoned its harsh anti-Social Democratic line of 1928. The Spanish pavilion reveals a great deal about the ethos of the Popular Fronts. They attracted the support of some of the most prominent intellectuals and artists, and embraced people of diverse political and aesthetic schools: from left-liberal to Communist, from avant-garde to populist, from ‘bourgeois’ liberal to social democratic.

  There was, however, a rather less radical interpretation of the Popular Front embodied at the Exposition by the French exhibitions. At that time, the French government was headed by the socialist Léon Blum with the support of liberals and Communists. The French did not have a pavilion of their own, but various galleries and museums mounted shows, amongst which was a huge exhibition of French art since the Gallo-Roman period.6 The message was unashamedly patriotic – a patriotism conspicuously endorsed by Communists. Moscow, it now seemed, was happy for Communists not only to adopt a pragmatic, gradualist road to socialism, but also to embrace nationalist rhetoric along the way.

  The Popular Front governments, of which there were three before World War II – in Spain, France and Chile – were short-lived. However, during World War II anti-fascist Popular Fronts of the left were revived, and they remained strong until the onset of the Cold War in 1946–7. Their popularity was a consequence of a far more violent phase of European social conflict. The economic crisis of the 1930s radicalized both right and left as a bitter struggle broke out over who was to bear the brunt of the Depression. Radical nationalists argued that organized labour was using democracy to undermine the state, and called for a new authoritarian politics to impose social and racial hierarchy, which they achieved on the Nazis’ victory in Germany in 1933. In these conditions, a more Modernist and seemingly more inclusive version of Communism became attractive to many on the left. Only Communist discipline, they believed, was capable of confronting such a powerful right-wing force, and now Moscow was no longer so sectarian, that discipline could be used to defend democracy and the values of Enlightenment.

  The period between 1934 and 1947, therefore, was one of considerable Communist success in the West – especially in France and Italy – and in parts of Latin America. This was the era when Communism, and with it the USSR, became fashionable amongst the West European and American intelligentsias. But despite such enthusiasm, the Popular Fronts were always shaky edifices, ready to splinter into many factions, as illustrated by the stark differences between the various Expo pavilions. The Spanish embrace of the avant-garde coexisted uneasily with the Soviet-style realist agitprop, displaying in aesthetic form the continuing tensions between a disciplinarian Stalinist Communism and a more Romantic and radical left. Meanwhile French hopes that the Exposition would embody a rallying of the left and liberal centre were crushed when a wave of strikes disrupted work, and on the opening day several of the pavilions were fenced off or covered in scaffolding – an ominous portent of the social tensions that were starting to destroy the French Popular Front itself.

  Despite these difficulties, the Popular Fronts remained appealing to some. As long as the radical right was the main threat, much of the liberal left was prepared to overlook Bolshevik authoritarianism and Stalin’s cynical foreign policy. After 1946–7, however, the tensions between the culture of Stalinist Bolshevism and that of the non-Communist left became too sharp. With the defeat of the Nazis, the aggressive behaviour of the Soviets and local Communists in Central and Eastern Europe, and the creation of a new form of capitalism more favourable to labour in the West, Communism seemed neither so necessary nor so attractive. It is no surprise that the Popular Fronts were not to survive the War for long.

  II

  The Comintern’s sectarian ‘class against class’ policy of 1928 was founded on a profound misinterpretation of Western politics. It assumed that the workers of the West were becoming more revolutionary; that capitalism was on the verge of collapse; and that fascism – the last gasp of a dying bourgeoisie – was a fleeting phenomenon that would soon crumble along with capitalism. Given this erroneous analysis, it made sense for the Comintern to urge Communists to intensify the struggle against the bourgeoisie, including the Social Democrats, and thus hasten the end of liberal regimes. This is why, at a time when the radical right, and especially the Nazis, were going from strength to strength, the Communists’ fire was, puzzlingly for many, directed against the moderate left, not the right.

  Even at the time, some Communist leaders, especially those in small parties which needed broad alliances, despaired of this policy. Representatives from the American
Communist Party, the CPUSA, threatened to ignore Moscow’s instructions in 1929, but were met with threats from Stalin.7 The party was soon purged and the ‘rightists’ expelled, as were all foreign Communists who opposed the new line. In several countries, the policy was another disaster for Communist parties. Almost half of the members of the pro-Communist Czech ‘Red Unions’ left to join the Social Democrats;8 in Britain, party membership collapsed, from 10,800 in 1926 to 2,555 in 1930. The new policy of fomenting revolution and encouraging unofficial strikes simply made it more likely that Communists would be thrown out of work.

  Nevertheless, the new policy had some supporters amongst local Communists desperate to believe that the time was ripe for revolution. And in Germany, the confrontational politics of the ‘Third Period’ was particularly popular in the Communist party, as was the denunciation of the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’. Membership of the party soared, from 130,000 in 1928 to 360,000 by the end of 1932, when it received over 5 million votes, almost 17 per cent of the electorate. The vicious internecine struggles between the Social Democrats and the Communists simply reinforced Communists’ view that the Comintern policy was right. On May Day 1929, the Communists ignored a ban on outdoor marches, imposed by the Social Democratic Berlin police chief, Zörgiebel. The result was a battle between Communists and the police, over thirty deaths and 1,228 arrests. To the Communists, it was clear that the Social Democrats were tantamount to fascists.