The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Despite these setbacks, Communists had established a powerful position in East and South-East Asia by 1950. On the face of it, they had benefited from the very forces that had helped Communists in Europe in the 1940s: they were at the forefront of a struggle against imperialist occupiers and their collaborators amongst local elites. They had also used similar guerrilla or partisan strategies, retreating from the cities into the countryside and harrying their more powerful enemies. But the outcomes were very different, much depending on the role of the Red Army. In the West, Communist parties were defeated electorally and returned to political isolation; the Central, Soviet zone embarked on projects to build Soviet-style socialism; and in South-Eastern Europe and Asia, more independent, radical Communisms emerged.

  The Communist ‘bloc’ was therefore highly diverse – much more so than many in the West appreciated at the time. Even so, for a few years from 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the earth’s population. Few would have predicted such an extraordinary outcome only eight years before, when the Nazis were at the gates of Moscow and Communism was on the verge of collapse.

  Empire

  I

  Like Shelley’s Ozymandias, all great imperial rulers have built monuments to celebrate their power, from the Roman emperors’ aqueducts and triumphal arches to the grand memorials and gothic railway stations of the British Empire. The Soviet empire was no exception. Despite the removal of most of the Marx and Lenin statues that adorned (or blighted) the former Communist world, remarkably prominent monuments are still scattered throughout the former Soviet sphere of influence. The most recognizable of all are the Stalinist ‘tall buildings’. These colossi of Stalinist gothic were planned between 1948 and 1953, and had Stalin lived longer there would have been many more. Eight were planned for Moscow, though only seven were actually built (a nostalgic pastiche of the eighth, the luxurious ‘Triumph Palace’ apartment building, was built in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow in 2003). The most monumental is the massive 5,000-roomed Moscow State University building on the Lenin Hills.

  Similar enormous buildings, ‘gifts from Comrade Stalin’, were planned for the satellite states. Only one, the Stalin Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, was completed (built to accommodate 12,000 people, it now houses, amongst other things, a bowling alley). But the ex-Communist world contains a number of smaller versions, from the Hotel International in Prague to the Soviet Friendship buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. Scores of other grand buildings were also built in a similar style; amongst the most striking were the Casa Scînteii in Bucharest and the Stalinallee (today Karl-Marx-Allee) in East Berlin.1 These symbols of Communist power were the pointes d’appui of the Soviet sphere of influence at its most extensive, when it encompassed much of the Eurasian landmass, from the Baltic to the South China Sea in the period between Mao’s victory in 1949 and the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s.

  Moscow’s tall buildings also tell us much about post-war Stalinism. Gargantuan hybrids of Manhattan-skyscraper gothic and neo-classical bombast, studded with ornamentation from the medieval Muscovite past, they combined modernity, empire and nationalism.2 But they also indicated a politics that was increasingly emphasizing local, mostly Slavic cultures over internationalism and universalism.3 Stalinist buildings in every state tried to incorporate, in a minor way, ‘national forms’ – whether Byzantine features in Romania or Renaissance motifs in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They were also designed to boost the prestige and power of elites; these offices and apartment blocks were clearly not designed to provide housing for the cramped masses after the destruction of war.

  All of these massive structures were stone embodiments of a post-war ‘High Stalinism’, an exaggerated version of the order first seen in the mid-1930s, both paternalistic and technocratic. The remnants of Radical, anti-bureaucratic Marxism, still evident even during the Terror, had now largely disappeared. This hierarchical model was also applied to the whole of the Soviet bloc. Indeed there was something distinctly imperial about it. Of course, the USSR never called itself an empire, and it was deeply hostile to ‘imperialism’, which, following Lenin, was still seen as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. Unlike many empires, it did not justify hierarchy on the grounds of ethnicity but as a reflection of different levels of socialist attainment. Russians were at the top of the tree because they were the most progressive people, not because they were racially or culturally superior. In practice, however, the USSR’s relationship with its satellites in Eastern Europe was typically imperial, and its politics and culture were increasingly those of an imperial state. A hierarchy of power, centred in Moscow, extended to all Soviet-bloc states; Russians had higher status than other nationalities; and socialist societies were becoming highly stratified, with the most loyal (or at least politically reliable) party members at the top. In some parts of the bloc, such a system required high levels of coercion and intimidation to keep it in place.

  Anxiety about maintaining control over a USSR and Eastern Europe devastated by war and lessons learnt from the Terror all fed the Soviet leadership’s appetite for a fixed and ordered culture. At the same time, fears of foreign invasion and the desperate desire to raise international status reinforced inequalities at home. Khrushchev remembered, with some contempt, Stalin’s anxieties that Westerners would look down on the Soviet Union: ‘What will happen if they [foreign visitors] walk around Moscow and find no skyscrapers? They will make unfavourable comparisons with capitalist cities.’4

  According to the Stalinist post-war vision, then, top officials were to live and work high above the ordinary people – a service aristocracy of technical experts and ideological visionaries, guiding the state machine towards a glorious future. At the same time, however, the Soviet leadership hoped to combine discipline with dynamism. Alongside the tall buildings, the Communist-bloc regimes built vast squares to accommodate huge parades of supposedly enthusiastic people. Assembling the people, or as many of the people as possible, in elaborate state festivals and marches was, of course, reminiscent of Jacobin France. But the ceremonies of the late Stalin era acquired a particularly Soviet colouring. The original model was the Lenin Mausoleum – repository of the great man’s mummified corpse – which served as a tribune on which leaders stood to welcome the masses processing though Red Square. Bulgaria followed the Soviet example most closely, with the construction of Dimitrov’s Mausoleum in 1949 and the ceremonial September 9th Square in front of it. Tribunes and squares were also built in Budapest, Bucharest and East Berlin. Only Prague, relatively undamaged by war, escaped Comrade Stalin’s generosity.5 Meanwhile the Chinese built their own Stalinist spaces on their own initiative, with Soviet assistance. During the 1950s the vast space in front of the Tian’anmen gate podium – what is now Tian’anmen Square – was built, destroying countless ancient buildings and walls.

  How, though, could mass enthusiasm be generated within such a rigid political hierarchy? The contradiction was most visible in Warsaw, where the base of the enormous Palace of Culture served as the tribune for the mass parades. This highly unpopular building, symbolizing, as it did, not only Russian domination but also party and bureaucratic privilege, was hardly going to generate feelings of commitment amongst the ordinary workers marching past every May Day. Stalin had, of course, wrestled throughout the 1930s with the problem of how to mobilize the masses whilst subjecting them to discipline, and he had sought to do so through appeals to inclusive patriotism rather than class. The Stalinist regimes therefore sought to merge local nationalisms with Soviet Communism, but inevitably the task was a difficult one.

  The Stalinists were therefore left with a problem: the economic system demanded high levels of heroism and self-sacrifice from workers and peasants, but it depended on repression and harsh discipline, wielded by white-collar workers and officials. Even more than in the USSR of the 1930s, the post-war Soviet system seemed to operate in the interests of the ‘socialist intelligentsia’ rather than t
he workers and peasants. This had its advantages, as it attracted young, ambitious people eager to advance themselves and develop their countries. At the same time, however, many ordinary people were deeply alienated, as were the non-Communist middle classes. The socialism Stalin exported throughout his empire therefore, like his buildings, looked monumental, but had serious cracks behind the façade.

  The balance between repression and mobilization, and levels of support, differed in the various parts of the Communist bloc, however. It was at its most rigidly disciplinarian in the USSR itself. In Eastern Europe, in contrast, Communist parties were more dynamic, for they were transforming their societies and ‘building socialism’ from scratch. But the violence inevitably alienated many, and the be-medalled patriarchs found it increasingly difficult to inspire ordinary people. And as the hoped-for dynamism turned to stasis, Soviet socialism looked less like universal progress and more like Russian imperialism. The late-Stalinist model was most appealing in China – part of the USSR’s ‘informal’ empire – for it was seen as more effective in building a modern state than the more egalitarian ‘guerrilla’ socialism of the civil-war period. But here also the drawbacks soon became abundantly clear, and the way was soon prepared for a sharp rejection of the Stalinist vision.

  II

  In 1951 a certain Mishchenko, of the Molotov military academy in the city of Kalinin (formerly, and now, Tver), reported on the visible poverty in its centre:

  If the secretaries of the… party committees take a walk along the streets of the regional centre [Kalinin], they would notice that some kind of beggar is sitting on almost every street corner. It gives the impression that the centre of the town of Kalinin is beggarly. Citizens of the countries of the [Communist] people’s democracies study at the Molotov Academy. There is one indigent near the post office, who without fail seeks them out and begs. They will go home and say that the town of Kalinin is full of beggars.6

  Mishchenko’s priorities were typical of the late-Stalinist elite. Poverty and inequality within the USSR were less important than international status, and after World War II Stalin sacrificed the living standards of Soviet citizens to the needs of the crippling Cold War arms race. The Soviet Union was, of course, a victorious power, but its triumph had been a Pyrrhic one. At the end of the conflict it was at a huge disadvantage in its competition with the enormously wealthier United States: with a massive 23 per cent of its assets destroyed and 27 million lives lost, it was faced with the task of rebuilding with a devastated population.7 Labour shortages were especially bad in the countryside, and contributed – together with drought and harsh state grain requisitions – to the famine of 1946–7 in which between 1 and 1.5 million died. The Soviet state was barely able to cope with the chaos, disorder, poverty and criminality in the aftermath of war. And at the same time it was faced with the task not only of rebuilding but also of creating a virtually new, technologically advanced military complex. By the end of the 1930s, the USSR had more or less eliminated the technological gap with Germany, but the challenge was far greater in the mid-1940s now that American weaponry had become atomic.

  The USSR faced all of these tasks at a time when the ‘ideological preparedness’ of the population, as the official jargon put it, was seriously dilapidated. The wartime experiences of many Soviet soldiers presented a major challenge to the values of the regime. Some had fought in partisan units, where they had become used to a degree of equality and autonomy. More importantly, millions of soldiers had visited the West, and were in a position to question official propaganda. One political officer, charged with repatriating Soviet citizens who had sought sanctuary in neutral Sweden, reported that, ‘After they have seen the untroubled life [in Sweden], certain individuals among our repatriated [citizens] draw the incorrect conclusion that Sweden is a rich country and that people live well.’8 But some even claimed that they were better fed and treated as German prisoners of war than they had been in the Red Army. Unsurprisingly Stalin suspected all ex-prisoners of war of anti-Soviet thinking, and on their homecoming many were despatched to the Gulag.

  Faced with deteriorating relations with the West and disunity at home, the Stalinists imposed a regime that reinforced the nakedly coercive elements of the pre-war order and depended on patriotic, rather than class mobilization. The speech which George Kennan saw as an attack on the West signalled the end of wartime liberalization in the spring of 1946. The entire country was now to be mobilized to reconstruct the economy. Problems of labour shortage were addressed by increasing the levels of unfree labour beyond those already seen before the War. About 4 million students aged between fourteen and seventeen, mainly from the countryside, were conscripted into factory jobs, where they worked for nothing but their board and lodging.9 One of the greatest contributions was made by the Gulag – the vast archipelago of labour camps, most of them in remote Siberia. Prison labour had also played a major part in the economy in the 1930s, but the system now became much more extensive under their post-Terror boss, the secret police chief Lavrentii Beria. The whole prison system, which is estimated to have included some 5 million in 1947, provided some 20 per cent of the industrial labour force and over 10 per cent of the USSR’s industrial output.10 But Stalin’s firm belief in the economic importance of the camps was wrong: they were extremely wasteful and unproductive – inevitably given that conditions were so poor and the prisoners treated so callously. Certainly, in comparison with the mid-1930s, the Gulag was more technocratically organized, but this was hardly a rational way to run an economy. In her brilliant pen-portrait of one Gulag director, Kaldymov, Evgenia Ginzburg, a worker on his Siberian state farm during the War, vividly illustrated how technocracy and a belief in the Stalinist hierarchy combined to produce extraordinary cruelty. Kaldymov, a child of peasants, had benefited from the inter-war social mobility and had become a teacher of Dialectical Materialism before an embarrassing family scandal led him to move to Siberia. Nevertheless, in the eyes of his bosses he was a good director:

  judging from fulfilment of the plan – he made quite a respectable job of running a state farm in the taiga with its convict labour force… [He] used to run his enterprise on a work-intensive basis, relying on slave labour and a rapid turnover of ‘worked out contingents’.

  He was totally oblivious to his own cruelty… Take, for example, his dialogue with Orlov, our zootechnician, which one of our female workers who was forking manure near the dairy farm happened to overhear:

  ‘What about this building? Why has it been left empty?’ inquired Kaldymov.

  ‘It had bulls in it,’ Orlov replied, ‘but we have had to put them elsewhere. The roof leaks, the eaves are iced up, so it isn’t safe to put cattle in it. We will be doing a proper repair job on it in due course.’

  ‘It’s not worth wasting money on such a pile of old lumber. The best thing would be to use it as a hut for women.’

  ‘What are you saying, Comrade Director? Why, even the bulls couldn’t stand it and began to fall ill here!’

  ‘Yes, but they were bulls! No question, of course, of risking the bulls!’

  This was not a joke, nor a witticism, nor even a sadistic jibe. It was simply the profound conviction of a good husbandman that bulls were the foundation of the state farm’s life and that only extreme thoughtlessness on the part of Orlov had prompted him to put them on an equal footing with female prisoners.

  In his sanguine swinishness, his fixed belief in the solidity and infallibility of the dogmas and quotations he had learned by heart, Kaldymov would, I think, have been fearfully surprised if anyone had called him to his face a slave owner or slave driver. The Jacob’s ladder that supported on its lowest rungs the prisoners and near the top the Wise and Great One, with the official cadre members like the state farm director somewhere in between, seemed to him utterly irreversible and sempiternal. His firm conviction of the unchangeability of this world, with its hierarchy and its accepted rituals, could be sensed in every word and gesture of the director.11 />
  Given these attitudes to prisoners, it is no surprise that millions died of starvation and over-work. Figures remain uncertain and one based on official archives – of 2.75 million for the whole Stalin era – is certainly too low.12

  Conditions, though not quite so harsh in ordinary factories, were certainly grim, with workers much poorer than before the war; prices were raised and rations cut in September 1946. In many ways, the regime was returning to the strategies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, forcing workers to finance industrialization through low living standards, but the methods were different: the leadership eschewed populist appeals for fear of undermining managers. And whilst Stakhanovism survived, the leadership largely relied on coercion. Managers were given more powers over workers than in the 1930s and labour discipline was harsh. Workers were no longer free to change jobs, and anyone who tried to was liable to be punished for ‘labour desertion’. However, the system was less draconian in practice than the legislation suggested. Managers did not always enforce their powers because they needed the cooperation of the workforce. Moreover, there was remarkably little sign of labour unrest. Workers undoubtedly resented the post-war hierarchical order, but protests were muted, and demoralized workers and peasants tried to evade controls by going slow or running away from their jobs.13 A letter of complaint sent to Moscow gives a sense of the dire conditions and the inequalities in the city of Vodsk: