The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  In the city from early morning all the people are on the search for water, the pumps don’t work, we take water from the open man-holes wherever they are… For a population of 50 thousand we have only one functioning bathhouse… there are huge queues to get into the bath and they are only made up of the damned directors of the city…14

  As this complaint suggests, the early 1950s were a much better time for bosses. Efforts by the police to control them were discouraged, and corruption flourished.

  From 1946 Stalin did launch ideological campaigns of purification against ‘deviations’ amongst the ‘socialist intelligentsia’, but rather than anti-elite, they were nationalistic and xenophobic in content. The first victims of the post-war ideological campaigns were two literary journals – Leningrad and Zvedza (Star) – and two writers: the poet Anna Akhmatova and the humorous short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. In a major decree on patriotism in literature in August 1946, the ideological chief Andrei Zhdanov described Akhmatova as a ‘mixture of nun and harlot… a crazy gentlewoman dashing backwards and forwards between her boudoir and her chapel’; Zoshchenko was denounced as a ‘vulgar and trivial petty-bourgeois’, who ‘oozed anti-Soviet poison’. But the centre of the charges was that they, and other literary figures, had ‘slipped into a tone of servility and cringing before philistine foreign literature’.15 However, it was the beginning of the Cold War proper in early 1947 that led to full-scale patriotic campaigns. Purge commissions, now given the distinctly retro name of ‘honour courts’ (named after tsarist military courts), were set up in offices and bureaus to ‘eliminate servility to the West’.16

  This new cultural xenophobia blighted several areas of intellectual life, and most famously affected genetics, in the person of the notorious bogus ‘biologist’ Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko came from a peasant family and had no scientific training, but he claimed that his practical knowledge as a peasant more than made up for the absence of formal education. During the late 1920s and 1930s he had been a beneficiary of the Radical Marxist idea that ideologically inspired scientists ‘from the people’ were superior to academically trained specialists. His main invention was ‘vernalization’ – soaking and chilling winter wheat so that it would grow in the spring. The results were unimpressive, but Lysenko skilfully exploited the political atmosphere of the time. He also developed an ideological justification for his new approach. Changes in the environment, not just genes, could improve plants – a doctrine that accorded with Marxist ideas on the importance of the environment over heredity (genetics was damned by association with eugenics and Nazism). Lysenko fought a long-running battle with geneticists in the Academy of Sciences throughout the later 1930s, but failed to secure political support; Stalin was not then prepared to endanger economic development by subordinating scientific research to Marxist speculation. However, by the summer of 1948, at the height of the Berlin crisis, he was more willing to sacrifice science to patriotism. At that point Stalin was determined to establish a clear difference between a ‘progressive’ Soviet science and a ‘reactionary’ bourgeois science.17 Soon after this Lysenkoism became the new orthodoxy, blighting Soviet biology for two decades.

  Stalin was, however, more circumspect about subjecting physics to such ideological tampering because he was unwilling to risk the atomic project. Even so, science became increasingly bound up with national pride. The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia informed its readers that Aleksandr Mozhaiskii, not the Wright brothers, built the first aeroplane; Grigorii Ignatiev invented the telephone; A. S. Popov the radio; V. A. Manassein and A. G. Polotebnov penicillin; P. N. Iablochkov and A. N. Lodygin the light-bulb.

  Stalin and his propagandists were of course tending the seed of a nationalism they had planted some time before, in the mid-1930s. This was not Russian nationalism pure and simple, but a Soviet–Russian amalgam, intended to integrate all official Soviet nationalities into a single harmonious whole. But the Russian element in the mixture became far greater after the War, and in one respect particularly it came strikingly close to the state nationalism of Tsar Nicholas II – its anti-Semitism.

  Jews, as an ethnic group, had not been victimized by the Soviet regime before World War II, and were not specifically targeted by the 1936–8 Terror. Indeed, as has been seen, Jews were one of the most pro-Communist peoples in the USSR, and throughout the world. As a highly educated and urban group, they were also overrepresented in the upper echelons of professional and cultural life. Nevertheless Stalin frequently manifested crude prejudices about many ethnic groups, including Jews. Khrushchev, hardly a model of political correctness himself, described him as having a ‘hostile attitude towards the Jewish people’, recalling Stalin’s mimicking of a Jewish accent ‘in the same way that thick-headed backward people who despise Jews talk when they mock the negative Jewish traits’.18 But this was no ideological racism, Nazi-style. Jews were numbered amongst Stalin’s closest associates (and he would tolerate no anti-Jewish prejudice when the Jewish Kaganovich was within earshot). Anti-Semitism was, he said in 1931, ‘an extreme form of racial chauvinism’, ‘the most dangerous rudiment of cannibalism’.19 And during the War, the Soviet leadership set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – a typical Popular Front-style organization designed to attract worldwide Jewish support for the Soviet war effort, chaired by Solomon Mikhoels. Even so, the War strained relations between Jews and Slavic nationalities: the sufferings of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis – and their collaborators – intensified the sense of their ethnicity, whilst the revived Russian nationalist messages of the period encouraged a popular anti-Semitism.20

  Initially the Soviet leadership was happy merely to indulge this traditional anti-Semitism. But Stalin took more extreme measures when international politics intervened. The USSR had supported the foundation of Israel in 1948. The Zionists, after all, were socialists, and many had been born in the Russian empire; Stalin hoped that Israel would become a bridgehead for Soviet influence in the Middle East. But he also worried that Israel might act as a magnet for the loyalties of Soviet Jews. The arrival of Golda Meyerson (later Meir) in Moscow – born in Kiev but brought up a three-hour drive from Mosinee in Wisconsin – as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR caused particular anxiety when it provoked spontaneous Jewish demonstrations of support. And when it became clear in 1949 that Israel was firmly in the American sphere of influence, Soviet Jews were transformed, overnight, into potential fifth columnists, and became victims of discrimination and even repression. Like the Germans, Poles and Koreans in the 1930s, they were seen as conduits for foreign influence, in this case Israeli, and therefore American. According to Stalin, ‘Jewish nationalists believe that their nation has been saved by the United States (there they can become rich, bourgeois and so on)’.21

  Many were caught up in the witch-hunt. The Anti-Fascist Committee was closed down, and Mikhoels murdered by the secret police. The film Circus was re-edited and Mikhoels’ performance of the Yiddish lullaby verse excised. Jews who embraced Yiddish culture were now ‘bourgeois nationalists’, those who were more assimilated were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. Various ‘conspiracies’ were discovered; some leading figures were arrested, including Molotov’s Jewish wife; many more lost jobs or were unable to continue their studies. Most worrying for Soviet Jews was the ‘discovery’ of a supposed plot by a ‘spy group of doctor-murderers’. These ‘monsters in human form’ – all of them Jews – had allegedly assassinated Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov (who had died of a heart attack in 1948). The so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was made public at the beginning of 1953, months before Stalin’s death; fortunately for Soviet Jews, the anti-Semitic campaigns did not survive him.

  Some have seen these events as a fresh outbreak of the purges of the 1930s. They did have some similarities with the ethnic cleansings of the earlier period, but they were very different from many of the repressions, which had at their core the revival of ‘class struggle’. They were much more targeted and there were many fewer victims. Also the
new message now being broadcast was of patriotic unity, not class division. These purges then were not a threat to the vast majority of party bosses, technical experts and other previously suspect elites. Stalin had learnt the lessons of the 1930s Terror. Never again would he allow mass ‘criticism from below’, nor would he try to mobilize the population with campaigns for ideological purity. The carrot of unequal wages and the managers’ stick was replacing appeals to worker heroism.

  The new balance of power between elites and masses was reflected in the continuing embourgeoisement of culture. Paintings dwelt lovingly on elaborate lampshades and curtains, and soft pink replaced red as the dominant colour. Novelistic heroes were no longer puritanical scourges of bureaucracy, but bluff and easy-going pragmatists. Whilst the appearance of a piano in a 1920s novel was always a sure sign that its owner was a bourgeois enemy, in the 1940s and 1950s pianos were approved of as markers of culture and education. Even Pasha Angelina, the famous Stakhanovite woman tractor-driver of the 1930s, had transferred her enthusiasms from the cultivation of wheat to cultivating her daughters’ pianistic virtuosity. In 1948 she wrote a magazine article in which she related that her youngest daughter, the delightfully named Stalinka, wanted to follow in her sister’s footsteps:

  ‘Mama, mama, when I grow up like Svetlana, will I play the piano too?’

  ‘Of course you will.’ I listened to Stalinka with excitement and happiness. My childhood was different: I couldn’t even think of music.22

  It would be misleading to see late Stalinism as a restoration of the tsarist ancien régime, populated with a new elite; this was a much more modern society – integrated, socially fluid and welfarist – than tsarist Russia. But after the War, Stalin went further than many other Communist leaders in jettisoning the remnants of radical socialism and embracing hierarchy, bolstered by ancien régime trappings and symbols. It was this model that was, at least in principle, exported to the USSR’s empire and its spheres of influence. However, the circumstances in Eastern Europe were rather different. East European Communists were introducing a wholly new social and political system, and inevitably pursued a more revolutionary politics, eliciting much opposition, but also some enthusiasm for the new order, at least for a time.

  III

  The Joke, the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel, is the story of Ludvik, a bright and popular student during the Stalinist period of Czechoslovak history, whose life is ruined by a minor mistake. He is a keen party member, and a true believer, though his motives are mixed:

  The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.23

  Yet far from being history’s master, he becomes its victim. For a ‘tiny crack’ opened up ‘between the person I had been and the person I should (according to the spirit of the times) and tried to be’.24 Whilst he can be earnest and committed at party meetings, he adopts a teasing, cynical persona when flirting with his fellow student Marketa. Marketa is a very different type of true believer, a straightforward, unsophisticated and humourless enthusiast. Much to Ludvik’s chagrin, she sends him a postcard praising the ‘healthy atmosphere’ of callisthenics, discussions and songs. Upset that she prefers party propagandizing to him, he sends a jokey riposte: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.’ But for the party this is no joke, and he is denounced as a Trotskyist and a cynic, whose nihilistic attitudes are sabotaging socialism. Stripped of party membership and with it his university place, he is forced to work in a labour brigade in the mines. Initially he attempts to rehabilitate himself – but he ultimately lapses into angry contempt for the shallow, folksy nationalism now being propagated by the party. The bitterness stays with him, and lays the ground for another series of disastrous jokes.

  Kundera’s novel was loosely based on his own experience. The son of a famous pianist, he joined the party in 1948, a true believer, and has even been accused of informing on a Western spy; he was then expelled in 1950 for making a politically incorrect comment. He was therefore ideally placed to capture the atmosphere amongst educated youth during the revolutionary years of the early 1950s. For whilst the old Popular Front generation of Communist leaders was either assiduously conforming to the Moscow line or enduring purges and show trials, a younger group of enthusiastic Communists was coming to the fore. In part this was typical of the swing to the left in many countries amongst an anti-Nazi post-war youth, East and West. But their place on the periphery of a more successful Western Europe also explains their choices. The Stalinist model could appeal to young and educated people in developing countries, for whatever its failings it seemed to provide a recipe for catching up. The conservative counts and generals and liberal professionals who had ruled most of Eastern Europe between the wars had been strikingly unsuccessful in improving their economies. After the disasters of the inter-war period, when the poor, weak and divided countries of the region had been at the mercy of an aggressive Nazi Germany, loss of liberty seemed to some to be a price worth paying for development and Soviet protection.

  Moreover, Communism promised free education and an expanded state with large numbers of professional jobs – precisely what the ambitious, self-improving middle classes were seeking after the deprivations of Depression and war. Some groups with a middle-class background did suffer under late Stalinism. Class quotas were applied to education – the playwright and future dissident (and President of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel was one of the victims. Others suffered more directly in deportations and other persecutions. In 1951, for instance, many thousands of bourgeois were deported from Budapest to make way for workers in the new industrial plants.25 But High Stalinism never permitted class struggle to threaten economic productivity. The educated generally retained high status as long as they were loyal. And except in Poland (where over 70 per cent of the professional and business class had been killed during the War) and East Germany (where many fled to the West), the old middle classes were remarkably successful in clinging on to their dominant positions. In Czechoslovakia there was relatively little anti-bourgeois discrimination. In Hungary there was some, but in 1956 60–70 per cent of professionals still came from the old middle and upper classes. The regime, desperate to fill technical jobs, was often happy to turn a blind eye to the air-brushing of biographies. One girl, expelled from grammar school because she was labelled a member of the dangerous element of the bourgeoisie – the ‘x-class’ as it was informally called – was told that if she worked as a labourer for a time she could shed her bad background and return to school.26

  The Captive Mind – an analysis of the thinking of the Polish intelligentsia by the dissident Czesław Miłosz – explored these mixed motives: a sense that history was on Communism’s side, a moral commitment to national development, and self-advancement. He described the attitude of ‘Alpha’, a well-known writer:

  Alpha did not blame the Russians. What was the use? They were the force of History. Communism was fighting Fascism; and the Poles, with their ethical code based on nothing but loyalty, had managed to thrust themselves between these two forces… A moralist of today, Alpha reasoned, should turn his attention to social goals and social results… The country was ravaged. The new government went energetically to work reconstructing, putting mines and factories into operation, and dividing estates among the peasants. New responsibilities faced the writer. His books were eagerly awaited by a human ant-hill, shaken out of its torpor and stirred up by the big stick of war and of social reforms. We
should not wonder, then, that Alpha, like the majority of his colleagues, declared at once his desire to serve the new Poland that had risen out of the ashes of the old.27

  For people like Alpha and Marketa, therefore, the regime seemed to be the harbinger not only of modernity, but also of morality. The Stalinist social model elevated self-sacrificing labour over all else. Production, not selfish consumption, was to lie at the centre of life. As if to prove the point, the numbers of shops fell and advertising entirely disappeared. And what shops there were became bill-boards for the regime of labour. The façades of the shops in Warsaw’s 1952 Marszałowska Residential District bore a huge narrative sculpture, depicting the heroic workers who had built the complex; there was no representation of the products sold inside.28 Production also lay at the centre of the massive new socialist cities of the period, like Nowa Huta outside Krakow in Poland, and Sztálinváros in Hungary, both built around huge steelworks.29 In the latter, the whole city plan was arranged around the twin poles of political and productive power: at one end of the main street lay the party headquarters and city hall and at the other the steel plant. The ideal of the large, collectivist factory was also brought to the countryside, through collectivization. As in the USSR, these campaigns were accompanied by repression of ‘kulaks’, and were also highly unpopular amongst the small-holding peasantry, now corralled into collectives and forced to give more food to the state for lower prices.