The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The membership of the Fourth International was tiny – optimistic official figures put it at 5,395 – and almost half of its members were members of the Socialist Workers’ Party of the United States (SWP). Trotsky’s Radical Marxism, and his defence of workers-council democracy, was predictably appealing in the more libertarian culture of America, where the discipline-obsessed Second and Third Internationals had been weakest. And Trotskyism was to be highly influential amongst American intellectuals, especially the ‘New York’ group. Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson all at one time had connections or sympathies with Trotskyism.51

  Yet many American Trotskyists found even Trotsky too indulgent towards Stalinism, and in 1939–40 the Socialist Workers’ Party was shaken by an acrimonious debate on the nature of the USSR. The party split, and Max Schachtman created a new ‘Workers’ Party’, more hostile to Stalinism than the orthodox Trotskyists. He, like several other American Trotskyists, were to become Cold Warriors, and by the 1960s were to constitute the core of an influential group of militant liberals – the ‘neo-conservatives’. Elsewhere, Trotskyism was to come into its own as a powerful force during the 1960s and 1970s, as the USSR became less attractive. Even so, the movement retained a deserved reputation for endless disputes and splits.

  The Trotskyists were the first serious champions of the idea that Nazism and Stalinist Communism had to be compared, and were both ‘totalitarian’ regimes; and their analysis appeared prescient when, on 23 August 1939, Berlin and Moscow concluded a pact. In fact, the treaty was not the product of a real friendship, but of Stalin’s belief that he had no alternative.52 The British had little real interest in a formal anti-Hitler military alliance, whilst Stalin could not risk war with Germany. But Stalin also had no qualms about the alliance, and, as in the past, hoped that socialism would benefit from a war within the ‘imperialist’ camp. Speaking to Dimitrov, he exulted that Hitler was ‘throwing the capitalist system into chaos’; ‘the pact of non-aggression helps Germany to a certain extent. In the next moment we will incite the other side.’53 At the same time, the Comintern declared the end of the Popular Front. Stalin was not planning imminent revolutions, but he did believe that war might lead to future revolutions, and the Comintern line became strongly anti-bourgeois.54 Meanwhile, the Red Army was in a position to spread socialism by force into the Baltic, Polish and other lands taken by the Soviets as a result of the pact. The Popular Front line, the Comintern now declared, was heresy; the evils of Anglo-French imperialism were denounced; and anti-fascist propaganda was banned.

  Unsurprisingly, the pact caused a crisis in Communist parties. Harry Pollitt refused to accept the new Comintern line, and was replaced by Rajani Palme Dutt as leader of the British Communist Party.55 In France, a third of the Communist Party’s parliamentary delegation resigned. Paul Nizan was one of those who left the party in disgust. Nevertheless, despite deep reservations, the Communist parties bowed down before the demands of Soviet foreign policy.

  However, the reconciliation between Moscow and Berlin was bound to be short-lived, despite Stalin’s conviction that he could successfully avoid war until the imperialist powers had weakened each other. And with Hitler’s surprise attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941, the Com-intern performed yet another volte-face. Anti-fascism was back, the USSR was now the ally of Britain and then America. And again, despite the debacle of the Nazi–Soviet pact, many on the Western left saw the Soviet Union and its brand of Communism as the only saviour of the world against an aggressive, authoritarian right. World War II was to be the Popular Front’s finest hour.

  VI

  If Tsar Nicholas II was set, and failed the ‘exam’ set by the Great War, his successors were faced with an even more difficult challenge in 1941 – an ‘all-round test’ of ‘our material and spiritual forces’ as Stalin put it. Afterwards Stalin, at least, was in no doubt that he, and the system he had created, had passed with high honours: ‘The lessons of war are that the Soviet structure is not only the best form of organization… in the years of peaceful development, but also the best form of mobilization of all forces of the people to drive off the enemy in wartime.’56 Not only that, but the USSR had saved civilization, and the West, from Nazi domination.

  Stalin’s argument was not wholly implausible. In 1914 Russia was a poor, largely agrarian country, and could not mobilize the men and materiel to defeat its invaders. By 1941, Russia was still far more agrarian and much poorer than its rivals, but despite enduring a far greater burden of fighting and casualties than in World War I, its economy did not collapse. The USSR lost about 27 million people in all, including 10 million military personnel, compared with 350,000 British and 300,000 American military losses. The old Soviet view that the USSR won World War II virtually single-handed is, of course, false. All efforts in the war were interlinked; the Soviets received significant aid, direct and indirect, from their allies; and the Axis powers were very likely to lose against a coalition that could draw upon the combined resources of the United States, the British Empire and Russia. Even so, as Stalin never tired of pointing out, the Germans had to pour many more resources into the Eastern front than other fields of battle.

  The contribution of the Communist system itself is more difficult to assess. During the war it displayed all of its weaknesses and its strengths. The narrow centralization of power in the hands of Stalin himself contributed to a catastrophic misjudgement in 1941. Stalin refused to accept the Germans were planning to attack despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.57 Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa caught the Soviets by surprise and was a huge blow that brought the Germans rapidly to the gates of Moscow.

  Compounding the problems caused by Soviet centralization was the persistent Communist mistrust of professional elites. The Red Army’s leadership lacked the depth of experience of its German rival: few tsarist officers were employed in the Red Army in the 1930s, and most of its upper echelons had only learnt their skills during the civil war. The purges of 1937–8 had further undermined the army: about 20,000 officers out of 142,000 were arrested. The ineffectual Kliment Voroshilov – one of Stalin’s inner circle and a political crony – also contributed to the disastrous defeats at the beginning of the war as Defence Commissar. Finally, the sheer harshness of the Soviet regime itself had a seriously detrimental effect, alienating many, especially in non-Russian rural areas. In 1941–2 the Red Army suffered from mass desertions as between 1 and 1.5 million recruits joined the German forces.58

  However, certain features of Soviet Communism, no matter how distasteful, proved their worth in wartime. The break-neck industrialization of the 1930s may not have been ‘necessary’ – there were alternatives – but by the late 1930s the Soviets were out-producing the Germans; by the late 1930s, the USSR was probably the largest defence producer in the world, with massively more of everything than the Germans even then, other than air power.59 The centralized administrative system also had advantages. Unlike its tsarist predecessor, the Soviet government was able to control and direct food and industrial goods throughout the war, thus avoiding mass civilian starvation whilst maintaining defence production. The regime even succeeded in organizing the transport of huge industrial plants eastwards, far beyond enemy lines. It seems, moreover, that the very ruthlessness of the regime and the efficiency of its police system helped to stem the collapse of order. ‘Blocking detachments’ shot thousands of deserting soldiers; in the course of the war 990,000 soldiers were punished by military tribunals, 158,000 of whom were sentenced to death.60

  There was a great deal of popular collaboration with the Nazis, especially amongst non-Russians, but there was also considerable support for the Soviet regime, something the Germans had not expected. German treatment of their Slavic subject populations as racial inferiors to be exploited strengthened the Soviets’ ideological claims. Communism seemed to be the only bulwark against the law of the jungle, the equation of might and right. The picture is somewhat obscured, howev
er, by the ideological shifts of the period. The ‘Communism’ of the war was not the same as the ‘Communism’ of the 1930s. War against the Germans forced the party to adopt a more inclusive politics, going even further than it had in the mid-1930s. The Communist sectarianism and ideological purism, so pronounced during the Terror of 1936–8, were much less evident. The regime began to make peace with groups it had previously stigmatized – especially peasants and priests – for this was to be a national struggle in which everybody was included, whatever their class background. Even kulaks imprisoned in the Gulag were released to fight in the Red Army, earning their reintegration into Soviet society in the process. Startlingly, Stalin’s first speech after the outbreak of war addressed his people not only as ‘comrades’ and ‘citizens’, but ‘brothers and sisters’. As the writer Ilya Ehrenburg explained in an article in Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star), the Red Army newspaper, in 1941, ‘all distinctions between Bolsheviks and non-party people, between believers and Marxists, have been obliterated’.61 Koba’s band of brothers (and sisters) was far larger and more inclusive than had been countenanced before.

  Stalin realized he needed to mobilize Russian nationalist feeling, even more so than in the past. ‘Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’ (‘For the Motherland! For Stalin!’) was the new battle-cry. And the ‘enemy’ was no longer the smug, top-hatted bourgeois but the screeching German parasite/ rodent/demon. In 1941 state persecution of Russian Orthodoxy was halted, and in 1943 Stalin restored the patriarchate, in the hope that support might be garnered amongst the Orthodox in Eastern Europe after the war. Senior Orthodox clergy now effectively became part of the nomenklatura; the three most senior churchmen were given chauffeured cars.62 As the Germans encroached on Russian soil, many were prepared to unite behind the Communist banner in the defence of hearth and homeland.

  Wartime Marxism-Leninism bore not only the savour of nationalism but also a hint of liberalism. Restrictions on private plots were relaxed, and peasants were allowed to sell produce from this land on the open market. Cultural policy too became more forgiving – big-band jazz was now fully accepted and American tunes were played by front-line groups.63 The Red Army came increasingly to resemble conventional bourgeois armed services, and officers were given more power. But the most remarkable departure from revolutionary Communism was the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. This gesture was designed to appease the Allies, proving that the USSR had no desire to spread the revolution to the West. But possibly as influential in the decision was Stalin’s waning interest in international Communism.64 Since 1941 he had seen greater potential in the All-Slavic Committee, which had enjoyed success in Eastern Europe – the centre of Stalin’s post-war ambitions.

  This more inclusive politics proved capable of attracting the support of those previously alienated by earlier ‘class struggles’. As the popular novelist Victor Nekrasov later remembered: ‘We forgave Stalin everything, collectivization, 1937, his revenge on his comrades… With open hearts we joined the party of Lenin and Stalin.’65 Yet if the war had encouraged prodigal sons to return to the Soviet family, it also produced new black sheep.66 The party still demanded ideological uniformity, and campaigns of purification and purging continued; however, the ‘enemies’ were now defined in largely ethnic rather than class terms – especially peoples accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Whole peoples were deported: the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachais. Others suffered from more limited but still traumatic purges, including the populations of the Baltic States and western Ukraine. Much of this was carried out with great brutality, and the resulting hatreds were deep and long-lasting. Indeed, the rebellions of the Balts and west Ukrainians contributed to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the Chechens and Ingush remain a thorn in Russia’s side to this day.

  It was to be some time, however, before the backlash came, and meanwhile, to the west of the Nazis, Western Popular Fronts generated support by ‘Communizing’ a politics that was, in its fundamentals, more liberal. The experience of Nazism radicalized populations subject to its rule. The Nazis’ ‘New Order’ was a far-reaching ideological project that sought to create a European empire of racial hierarchies. Hitler, captivated by the example of the British Empire, explained that what India was for the British, Ukraine would be for Germany.67 The Germans were also much assisted by collaborators, many of them from local conservative elites.

  These circumstances – an imperial power imposing its rule by force and relying on collaborators from amongst the old social elites – were, of course, ideal for Communists. Communists were militant, well-organized, and used to underground political activity. Moreover, in the chaotic conditions of war, freed from the intrusion of Moscow and the Comintern, local Communists were able to adapt their message to local conditions. Communists were amongst the most committed members of the resistance to Nazism. In some places they were indeed the only political force prepared to resist the occupations. Socialists’ response to Nazi occupation depended on particular circumstances, and they were not as consistently anti-fascist as the Communists; in Denmark they collaborated, and in France the majority of Socialists sympathized with Marshal Pétain’s anti-Communism. Communists were at the forefront of the resistance in the countries where they subsequently became prominent, especially in Italy, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Yugoslavia.

  Yet, despite their strength, Communist parties in Western Europe, with Moscow’s full agreement, were determined to remain part of a Popular Front alliance – both to win the war and, more importantly perhaps, to win the peace. They therefore had to discourage the revolutionary expectations of their followers. In 1941 the French Communist Party pursued a policy of assassination which led to bloody German reprisals and antagonized local populations. They soon decided to adopt less militant tactics, and by 1943 had joined De Gaulle’s cross-class provisional government.

  The keenest supporter of the Popular Front policy was the Italian leader Palmiro Togliatti. Indeed, his character – a mixture of shrewd, cautious politician and well-read intellectual with broad cultural interests – made him the ideal figure to navigate both the dangerous world of the Comintern high-command and the more pluralistic terrain of Italy, where Communism was always likely to be a minority force. Togliatti was the son of a lowly state clerk, born in Genoa. He was a friend of Gramsci’s and with him a member of the Radical Ordine Nuovo group after World War I.68 With Gramsci’s arrest he became leader of the Italian Communist Party, though he continued to live in exile in Moscow. He soon emerged as a major figure in the Comintern hierarchy, and was its representative in Spain during the civil war. But he combined loyalty to Stalin with a willingness to think seriously about why the Comintern’s Communism had proven to be so fragile in Western Europe. His analysis was based on a partial interpretation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks – a new sacred text for his party which he alone had seen in Moscow after Gramsci’s death in 1937.69 Gramsci, learning from the failures of the early 1920s, argued that Western Communist parties had to abandon the Bolshevik strategy because circumstances were so different. In Russia the state was all, so a Leninist seizure of power, or ‘war of movement’, was essential; in the West, civil society was much stronger, and revolution would only come through a long-lasting ‘war of position’. This ‘war’ entailed Communists and the working class campaigning to establish not only social but also cultural leadership of society. Togliatti brought Gramsci’s ideas to an Italian party that had won wide support during the resistance and was therefore well-placed to become a national party. Its strategy was to establish ‘hegemony’ (or all-encompassing influence) over society as a whole – the family, the countryside, the workplace and the arts – and not just the state. Togliatti, however, was much less radical a Communist than Gramsci. Gramsci never abandoned revolutionary politics, and he would not have approved of Togliatti’s alliances with a whole range of bourgeois groups, including middle classes and peasants, and at the highest level even the Chris
tian Democrats. Like their French comrades, the Italian Communists sought to situate themselves in the traditions of leftist nationalism – the tricolour, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento. Fundamental social transformation was to be put off to the distant future; parliaments and capitalism had to stay.

  Togliatti’s party was no more democratic than Thorez’s, and he was almost as loyal to Stalin. But the Italian Communists’ culture was new. Whilst the French party remained the sectarian, worker-oriented organization of the 1930s, Togliatti, in contrast, took advantage of Mussolini’s destruction of the old Italian party and was effectively able to refound it. He brought in a group of Communist leaders from an intellectual background who had not grown up in a Bolshevik culture, and who lent Italian Communism an air of urbanity, modernity and cosmopolitanism.70

  Togliatti’s strategy had a great deal of success; it appealed to a generation of left-leaning intellectuals, angered at Fascist collaboration; its record in the resistance was impressive; and there was a vacuum in the centre-left. The Communist party’s membership rose from 5,000 in mid-1943 to 1,771,000 in late 1945, most of whom were workers and peasants; in addition it had 5 million affiliated trade unionists. Even so, it could not deliver enough votes to be successful in elections, and remained in opposition (in alliance with the socialists).

  The other successful Popular Front Communists were the Czechs. Like the French and the Italian parties, they had already been a significant political force before the War. Leading the resistance, they joined the non-Communist President Beneš’s government. Stalin promised Beneš his backing as Prime Minister after the war, as long as he was prepared to outlaw collaborationist political forces.