The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Between 1944 and 1945 Stalin was a firm supporter of Popular Fronts. Indeed, he was even more willing for Communists to take part in bourgeois governments than in the 1930s, especially in Italy and France, where he wanted them to oppose any attempts by the British or the Americans to interfere. He continued to believe that Communist takeovers in the West would be unlikely for some time, and he insisted that Communists avoid frightening talk of world revolution. For Stalin in 1945, as in 1935, the security of the USSR was paramount, and despite the defeat of the Germans he concluded there was no room for complacency. The Soviet economy had been shattered by the war; estimates suggest it lost about 23 per cent of its physical capital.71 Stalin was terrified that an aggressive Germany would rise, yet again, from the ashes. But he was also facing a new rival, both wealthier and intent on shaping the post-war order – the United States. In 1945, however, Stalin still believed that peace, and even collaboration, between East and West would be possible for some time to come.

  The gilded wartime reputation of the USSR was reinforced by the new, emerging centre-left consensus in much of Europe. The Nazi experience had discredited the radical right, but efforts were also made to learn lessons from further back in history. The extreme radicalization of politics of the 1930s was blamed on the laissez-faire economics of the 1920s. The emerging post-war consensus viewed markets tempered by regulation and planning as a better model; states were also to spend money on social welfare. These intellectual shifts benefited the moderate Popular Front Communists. They even gained substantial numbers of votes where they had previously been very weak – 10.6 per cent of the electorate in Holland and 12.5 per cent in Denmark.

  However, Communists were strongest in those West European countries which had seen significant resistance movements. In France and Italy (and, briefly, Finland), Communists took over from the socialists as the main party of the left, where they remained for some decades. By 1946, the French Communists had gained 28.6 per cent of the vote, the Italians 19 per cent, and the Finnish Communist-led alliance 23.5 per cent. All three parties took part in post-war Popular Front governments reflecting, in part, a benign ‘Uncle Joe’s’ lionization in the West.

  The cultural and ideological trade went the other way as well. Soviet citizens had little contact with the outside world in the 1930s, but during and after the war millions of soldiers saw the world of capitalism with their own eyes. They were stunned. The gap in living standards was enormous. The Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov described the encounter as an ‘emotional and psychological shock’.72 This could generate anger: the defeated Germans were still living better than the victors. But it also exposed soldiers to the attractions of a less austere way of life. The Western films taken from the Germans as reparations or ‘trophies’, and widely shown in the USSR, also portrayed Western culture, music and fashion. Soviet youth – contemptuously labelled the ‘stylish’ (stiliagi) by party activists – were particularly smitten.

  In 1945–6 it looked as if the ‘second’ Popular Front would be more successful than its failed predecessor. It is perhaps worth imagining what a Paris Exposition after the War would have looked like, had a shattered France had the resources and confidence to organize one. The pavilions would have been constructed and arranged very differently from 1937. The German tower would have been in ruins; Italy, France and Czechoslovakia would have built edifices along the lines of the left-patriotic French exhibitions of 1937. And close to them would have been a refurbished Soviet pavilion. It might have looked as if the Popular Front had won. But two other pavilions would have told a different story. The old Spanish pavilion, which showed so strikingly the tensions between radical leftism and the authoritarian Soviet Communism, would have survived, but would have been taken over by the new Communist regime in South-Eastern Europe – Tito’s Yugoslavia. And a new and immense American building would have replaced the old German pavilion as the main rival to the Soviets. This competitor was to be much more successful than the Nazis in destroying the Popular Front project, and with it Soviet influence in Western Europe.

  VII

  In 1944 Stalin had such faith in the Popular Front model that he decided to make it the centrepiece of his East European policy. As in the past, security lay at the heart of Stalin’s thinking. He wanted a buffer zone to protect the Soviet Union, and the advances of the Red Army in 1944 and 1945 gave him one. The Americans and the British accepted that the Soviets were to have some sort of sphere of influence. Churchill and Stalin concluded the secret October 1944 percentages agreement, which allowed the Soviets to dominate Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, in exchange for British power in Greece. It was also accepted, implicitly, that the USSR would dominate Poland, whilst the Anglo-Americans had France and Italy. Yet Stalin, anxious to remain on good terms with the Allies, also agreed at the Yalta conference in 1945 to allow free elections in the countries occupied by the Red Army.

  How could these very different agreements be reconciled? Stalin thought the answer lay in the creation of pro-Soviet leftist governments – ‘people’s democracies’. Like the Spanish Republican government of 1936–9, they would be broad coalitions of non-fascist forces, elected through the ballot box; they would not try to establish radical socialism, limiting themselves to redistribution of the large gentry estates, whilst control of internal security and intelligence would make sure that they pursued the foreign-policy interests of the USSR. And to Stalin, a Soviet-led Popular Front in Central and Eastern Europe looked far more feasible than it had in Spain. Ideas of pan-Slavic unity could marry local nationalisms with Soviet interests; the USSR, for instance, supported the creation of homogeneous ethnic states and the expulsions of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Also the experience of fascism had driven liberals to the left. As Stalin put it in a conversation with the Bulgarian Dimitrov at his dacha in January 1945:

  The crisis of capitalism is evident in the division of the capitalists into two factions – one fascist, the other democratic. The alliance between ourselves and the democratic faction of the capitalists came about because the latter had an interest in preventing Hitler’s domination, for that brutal state would have driven the working class to extremes and to the overthrow of capitalism itself.73

  Did Stalin think that Popular Fronts were for the long term, or did he plan rapidly to sovietize Eastern Europe? Ultimately he expected Popular Front democracies to become fully socialist states, but in countries under the occupation of the Red Army he thought this process would be a peaceful rather than a revolutionary one. Communist parties would gradually take over, though the timetable was left unclear. As he told Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communists were only to adopt a ‘minimum programme’, as it would give them a ‘broader basis’ of support and would be a ‘fitting mask for the present period’, but later the ‘maximum programme’ would be appropriate.74

  In 1945 the prospects for Communists in the Soviet sphere of Europe looked rosy, especially in three countries: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. It is likely that had the Yugoslav Communists held an election, they would have won it, and it has been estimated that the Bulgarian Communists had the support of between a quarter and a third of the population (though they won the elections through intimidation), whilst in 1946 the Czechoslovak Communists took a massive 37.9 per cent of the vote (and did even better than that in the Czech regions). Even in less hospitable lands, such as Hungary, Communists were strong; the Hungarian party secured almost 17 per cent of the vote. The War had pushed Eastern Europe to the left as it had the Western half of the continent, discrediting Nazi imperialism and Western liberal appeasement. Moreover, the inter-war Central and Eastern European regimes had not made much of a success of development: neither the more liberal policies of the 1920s nor the economic nationalism of the 1930s had helped the region to catch up with the West. The Communists’ confidence in state action, planning and welfare thus seemed very appealing.

  But there were also serious obstacles to the planting of pro-Communist Popul
ar Fronts on East European soil. Most countries had been deeply suspicious of the USSR before 1945: Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria had taken the German side in the War, and Poland had a long history of poisonous relations with Russia. But everywhere, centre-right parties were reluctant to work with Communists. On their side too, local Communists did not help the process of coalition-building, as they were often deeply unhappy about sharing power. The German Communist Gerhard Eisler, for instance, remarked of democracy: ‘Free elections? So that the Germans could again elect Hitler?’75 Local Communists often saw the Popular Front as a brief transitional phase on the way to imminent socialism, and naturally tried to persuade the Soviets of the advantages of pure Communist rule.

  However, the Soviets themselves had a significant share of responsibility for the failure of the Popular Fronts. As in the 1930s, their insistence on giving absolute priority to the interests of the USSR turned many potential sympathizers into enemies. To begin with, Soviet determination to enforce reparations on Germany by dismantling factories in the Eastern sector and exporting them to the USSR was deeply unpopular. In the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, administrators consistently placed economic exploitation over winning German hearts and minds. On one occasion, Red Army soldiers even interrupted a showing of the uplifting Circus, marching its worker audience off to dismantle a German factory for shipping to the USSR.76 In addition, widespread and unpunished rape, committed by Soviet soldiers, created deep loathing of the occupier, especially in Germany. At the same time (as had happened in Spain) Communist-controlled security services launched purges not only of collaborators but, increasingly, of any opponents of the Communists.

  The Russians even began to alienate close friends. Jakub Berman, a Polish Communist leader who had been one of Wolfgang Leonhard’s instructors at the Comintern School during the War, found Soviet high-handedness irritating, but tried to explain it to a sceptical interviewer in the early 1980s:

  the Soviets were only doing this, and giving us advice, out of concern for us; they wanted our revolution in Poland to take the form they were familiar with, the best one in their view, because it was victorious. They couldn’t, after all, shed their mentality and jump into someone else’s. I’m deeply convinced of that and I wish you would enter into their way of thinking. I know it’s not easy…77

  Other Communists were less understanding, and saw the Russians as imperialists, pure and simple. For Milovan Djilas, a leader of the Yugoslav Communists, the Russian response to complaints about Red Army behaviour displayed ‘arrogance and a rebuff typical of a big state towards a small one, of the strong toward the weak’.78

  It was, however, by no means clear in 1945 that the Popular Fronts would be so short-lived. Their development depended on local circumstances. In Poland, it was clear before the War ended that Stalin was determined to impose a decisive Communist influence. Mistrusting the London-based Polish government, he sent Moscow-based Polish Communists with the Red Army to set up a government in Lublin, recognized by the USSR. The Soviets then systematically repressed all elements of the non-Communist resistance.79 Even so, Communist control did not mean the imposition of the full Soviet system – plans, collectivization and the end of all independent organizations. This did not happen in most of Central and Eastern Europe until 1947–9.

  In Eastern Germany, similarly, the decisive role of the Red Army ruled out the creation of a serious Popular Front. Communists led by Walter Ulbricht, amongst others, were flown in from the Hotel Lux, and told to forge alliances with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). However, the army itself was the main authority in the Soviet zone, and as the revived German Communist Party failed to establish itself, the Russians forced a ‘merger’ between the two parties, to create a Communist-dominated Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Russians increasingly ruled through the Communists, who were widely regarded as their stooges.

  In Romania, the Soviets had hoped that their moderate social policies, and willingness to work with those parts of the elite untainted with pro-German sympathies, would win over local opinion. Yet liberals, socialists and elites resisted Soviet demands and were reluctant to work with Communists, some of whom were pushing for radical land redistribution. The Popular Front on the ground clearly was not working, and each side tried to secure the support of the great powers: the Communists told the Soviets that the West was intervening on the side of the liberals and undermining the Yalta agreements, whilst the liberals alleged that the Soviets were Communizing Romania. In February 1945 negotiations had ceased, and the Soviet emissary, former show-trial judge Andrei Vyshinskii, angrily instructed King Michael to install a Communist-dominated government. Storming out of the meeting, he slammed the door so hard that he cracked the plaster on the wall.80

  More solidly based were the Popular Fronts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian Communists, part of a leftist government, presented themselves as nationalists and did not press for radical social change. Meanwhile in Czechoslovakia, the Communists were the strongest in the region. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers at Munich and the victory of the Red Army over the Nazis gave the Czechs a particular reason to feel sympathetic to a new socialist course. There was also a great deal of sympathy for Stalin’s Slavic nationalist project after the Nazis’ imperial racism.81 As Zdeněk Mlynář explained when he described why he had become a Communist in 1946 at the age of sixteen:

  during the German occupation… I lived in a state of unconscious fear. As a Czech, I knew that the Nazis considered the Czech people an inferior race, and if Hitler emerged victorious, my fate might be the same as that of my Jewish classmates… The main victor in the war had been Stalin; those in power in the Soviet Union were Communists… At that time I automatically considered this system better, more just, and stronger than the one under which I had lived up to that point. I had a rather vague notion, but one I couldn’t get rid of, that most likely this was the prototype of the future.82

  Yet here also the Popular Fronts lost support as they were beset from left and right. Workers and poor peasants wanted more radical change, whilst the majority of the population feared Communist redistribution. It was no surprise that the conservative smallholders’ party won the Hungarian elections of 1945 with 57 per cent of the vote, compared with the Communists’ almost 17 per cent.83 The Czech Communists also lost support. The Soviets and their Communist allies soon realized that only rigged elections and intimidation would secure the Popular Front’s power.

  The main threat to the Popular Front model in Central and Eastern Europe therefore came from the centre and right – as it did in Western Europe. Here, the 1939–45 War had different effects from those of 1914–18. Whereas World War I had mobilized workers and peasants in vast armies, who then demanded compensation once the fighting was over, the Nazi occupations had shattered working-class organizations, already weakened by Depression and right-wing regimes; and whilst World War I had discredited the failed, aristocratic elites, the chaos of World War II had given local notables a new role in defending their communities, at the same time creating a new group of officials and bureaucrats.84 Perhaps most importantly, the violence, which had affected civilians as well as soldiers, had shown at its most devastating the consequences of the social conflict that had lasted since 1918. Most wanted a quiet, private life; they might have wanted planning and welfare, but there was little desire for a radical transformation of society. Figures like Togliatti and Thorez understood this, and were intent on remaining within a liberal political consensus.

  Yet the Popular Front was also challenged from the left, by a more Radical Communism – largely in Southern and South-Eastern Europe. Here Communists led the partisan struggle against the Nazis. They had mobilized peasants who favoured land redistribution, and supported a more radical social revolution. Conditions were closer to Western Europe in 1917–19 than elsewhere: old, narrowly based elites had been seriously discredited and the Communists alone seemed untainted. This world favoured not masters of the �
��war of position’ like Togliatti, but militants of the Béla Kun type. In Greece, the Communists created a powerful resistance organization, EAM-ELAS, which could not reach a compromise with the British-backed monarchist resistance. The conflict led to a vicious civil war. Stalin refused to help the rebels, sticking to the percentages agreement, and the fighting continued until 1949.

  The Communists were more successful in Bulgaria. Though not as large a group as in Greece, they had been actively involved in resistance. Stalin tried to persuade them to include their rival Agrarians in a Popular Front, but they only did so reluctantly, and were determined to destroy their opponents and rule alone.85 The Bulgarian Communists’ room for manoeuvre was, however, limited by the occupying Red Army. Tito’s Yugoslav Communists, in contrast, had liberated the country themselves, and were in a stronger position to ditch the Popular Front. They also had the confidence to challenge Stalin’s unrevolutionary but politically overbearing model of Communism.

  Tito’s friend-turned-enemy, Milovan Djilas, began his work on Tito’s life with the sentence: ‘Tito was born a rebel.’86 Tito came from a family of respectable, though indebted Croatian peasants, and he was proud of their history of rebellion against the Hungarian gentry.87 He was a charismatic man with a quick intellect and a dandyish style – as a child he wanted to be a tailor. He was, however, apprenticed to a locksmith. As a youth he travelled around Europe looking for work, ending up in the Daimler-Benz factory south of Vienna, where he mutilated his finger in an accident – a badge of his working-class origins. However, as with so many Communists of his generation, it was the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution that radicalized him. Like Béla Kun, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, taken prisoner by the Russians, and joined the Red Guards in Russia during the revolution. He then returned to Yugoslavia, where he joined the Communist party, was imprisoned in 1928 and tortured, and on his release became an organizer for the Com-intern in the Balkans. He spent some time in Moscow ensconced in the Hotel Lux, and gave lectures at the Lenin School on trade unionism. One of his tasks was to organize the (illegal) transport of volunteers to fight in Spain. He based his office in Paris. Fighters could secure visas on the pretext of seeing the 1937 Exposition, and it was then easy to smuggle them into Spain. Later in 1937, he benefited from Stalin’s purge of the Comintern, and was appointed head of the Yugoslav Communist Party. From this position he led the resistance to the Germans.