The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Mao, left ‘stewing in his own juices’, as his Russian minder put it, became more and more frustrated. Used to the privations of a guerrilla army, he hated the trappings of Western comfort, moaned about the European pedestal toilet, and ordered that his soft mattress be replaced with hard planks. He repeatedly tried to arrange another meeting with Stalin, but in vain. ‘Am I here just to eat, shit and sleep?’ he complained. He even told colleagues that he was under house arrest and might never be allowed back to China.

  Stalin did, however, make a fuss of Mao at his birthday celebrations in the Bolshoi Theatre. Mao was placed at Stalin’s right hand, and was the first foreign leader to speak. Stalin clearly realized that he had a great deal to gain from association with a man who had brought Communism to a quarter of the world’s population. Eventually, fearing (unnecessarily) that Mao might do a deal with the Americans, Stalin agreed to the treaty. Mao was forced to make concessions, accepting an independent Mongolian People’s Republic, but he had got his way. Soviet aid and advisers went to China; the Chinese recognized the Soviets as their ‘elder brothers’.

  However, the tension continued. Mao decided to recognize Ho Chi Minh’s government in Vietnam, and Stalin felt he had to do the same, even though he did not want to antagonize the French. Stalin also continued to suspect Mao of colluding with the Americans. After one frosty meeting Stalin invited Mao, with a number of Soviet Politburo members, to his dacha for one of his bizarre soirées. He tried to break the ice in his customary way, by starting up the gramophone and presiding over an all-male dancing session. But Mao was not in the mood to party. As his translator remembered, ‘Although three or four men took turns trying to pull Chairman Mao onto the floor to dance, they never succeeded… The whole thing ended in bad odour.’55 A couple of weeks later the Soviets compounded the embarrassment by inviting the Chinese to Reinhold Glière’s 1920s ballet about revolutionary China, The Red Poppy. It told the story of a Soviet marine who met a Shanghai prostitute, and then converted her to Marxism-Leninism. Mao, hearing of the patronizing plot and the dubious title (to Chinese ears it seemed to be associating Communism with the evil of opium), did not attend. It is just as well he did not. His secretary, who went in his stead, was deeply offended by the yellow face-paint worn by the Russian dancers playing Chinese characters. To him it seemed that the Chinese were being portrayed as monsters.

  In this fraught visit we can see the acute tension between Stalin’s ageing Communism and the younger, Radical Communism to the East. There were, of course, strong reasons for the USSR to seek close relations with China, despite the long-standing difficulties between Stalin and Mao. Communism in Asia gave Stalin real opportunities. He already had a close ally in North Korea; in North Vietnam, Ho had drifted away from Moscow towards Beijing, but Stalin could influence events in Vietnam through China. And whilst Mao was difficult to manage, he still recognized Stalin’s suzerainty over the world Communist movement. Mao, moreover, however frustrating he found the Soviets’ patronizing attitude, still saw them as the source of the magical blueprint for transforming China. Stalin’s Short Course of party history continued to be an enormously important text for Mao: in Yan’an its stress on ideological unity and conformity had been uppermost; now it was just as valuable as a route-map for development. By 1945 the Short Course was one of the five ‘must read’ books for Chinese Communist officials for the transition to socialism.56 The USSR, it was commonly believed, was fundamentally the same as China, only about thirty years ahead; as the slogan of the mid-1950s went: ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is Our Tomorrow’. The Short Course’s narrative of Soviet history could plausibly be mapped onto China’s: there had been a revolution and civil war, and now was the time for an NEP-type period; then would come ‘socialist industrialization’ (1926–9 according to the Short Course’s idiosyncratic chronology), ‘Collectivization’ (1930–4) and finally the ‘struggle to complete the building of the socialist society’ (1935–7). China, it was widely believed, would follow the same stages, though the timetable was rather more controversial.

  In 1949 the Chinese – and Soviet – leadership were agreed that the time was not ripe for socialist ambition. China, Mao and his colleagues believed, was still vulnerable to foreign invasion. And the Communists, who had not yet conquered Tibet and Taiwan, were therefore not yet ready for internal conflict. The Guomindang officials of the old regime were kept in place whilst liberal intellectuals, with their valuable expertise, were treated well. Private ownership was retained, and whilst land was taken from landowners the objective was not equality but improvements in productivity through consolidating farm size. This was defined as the era of ‘New Democracy’: the state was a ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’ under the guidance of the proletariat but including the bourgeoisie; purges were confined to only the avowedly anti-Communist.

  As in the USSR in the 1920s, there were different views about how rapid China’s journey to socialism would be (though this time Stalin was a supporter of gradual reform). Those with the closest connections with Moscow – Liu Shaoqi, his ally and fellow Hunanese Moscow-educated Communist Ren Bishi, and Zhou Enlai (a leader with strong Soviet links since the 1920s) – all hoped that ‘New Democracy’ would last between ten and fifteen years, during which time they could build a state and economy on the Stalinist model.57 Liu was an especially important influence. He visited Moscow in June 1949, before Mao’s trip, and toured scores of ministries and institutions to learn how they worked. He then returned to China with some 220 Soviet advisers primed to set up Chinese organizations in the Soviet image. However, rather more important than the relatively modest number of advisers were translations of a wide range of Soviet ‘how to’ books.58 It was from these handy socialist manuals that the Chinese learnt how to run factories and offices. Textbooks were much more effective than tanks in exporting the Soviet model of modernity.

  Liu’s visit to Moscow turned out to be much more harmonious than Mao’s, as he shared a much closer affinity with Stalin. Mao, in contrast, with his nostalgia for the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an, continued to prefer radical solutions. He was impatient to push history forward towards industrialization and socialism.

  As in the USSR of the late 1920s, the threat of war helped the radicalization of Chinese politics. In April 1950, Stalin, uncharacteristically, agreed to support Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea, and when, after initial North Korean successes, the Americans (leading a United Nations force) landed and drove them back, the Chinese reluctantly agreed to intervene.59 The war continued for over two years. The struggle was a huge burden on China. It was a conventional war of mass armies, planned and partly financed by Moscow, but fought largely by Chinese soldiers. Three million Chinese fought there, and over 400,000 died – Mao’s eldest son, Anying, was amongst them. China itself spent between 20 and 25 per cent of its budget on the campaign and the war caused enormous hardships on the front and at home.

  The Korean War had the effect of accelerating calls for rapid industrialization, and Mao began to discuss the need for a Five-Year Plan as early as February 1951. But war legitimized radicalism more generally, and strengthened the supporters of violent ‘class struggle’. For example, the land reform of 1949 and 1950 had begun to stall as party bosses found it difficult to enforce redistribution against the opposition of landlords, clans and temples, and the war became an opportunity for the party to accuse foreign enemies of colluding with the bourgeoisie within. Land reform quickly escalated into violent ‘class struggle’. ‘Speak bitterness meetings’, public humiliations and straightforward violence – not always endorsed by the authorities – became common. Meanwhile, 43 per cent of the land was redistributed to 60 per cent of the population. Although this undoubtedly strengthened support for the new regime, it did so at an enormous human cost. It has been estimated that between 1 and 2 million died in these land reform campaigns.

  The Chinese Communists were not yet imposing collective farms on the population, but in some ways th
ey were even more radical than their Soviet predecessors in the early 1930s. Determined to root out old identities of class, clan and region, they put enormous efforts into categorizing the rural population by class, and class labels – whether landlord, rich peasant or poor peasant – became crucial in determining people’s lives. Between 1951 and 1953 the CCP extended ‘class struggle’ to the towns with the ‘Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries’, the ‘Three Antis’ campaign against corrupt officials, the ‘Five Antis’ against the big ‘national bourgeoisie’ and a thought-reform campaign against intellectuals. These campaigns often involved extreme violence.60 The suppression of counter-revolutionaries campaign alone led to between 800,000 and 2 million deaths, and countless more were dragged before mass public trials. As in the countryside, the party was often successful in mobilizing the majority against the minority; between 40 and 45 per cent of all Shanghai workers sent denunciations against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to the authorities. According to one report, 30,000 attended one accusation meeting in Beijing directed against the ‘five major tyrants’ – a group of local bosses. As they had done in the land campaigns, the Communists mobilized the respected elderly to denounce their ‘enemies’:

  As the criminals entered, suddenly mass feeling erupted with the sounds of curses and slogans that shattered the earth and sky. Some spit on the criminals. Others burst into violent tears… One eighty-year-old woman came forward on her walking stick, confronting the accused: ‘You never thought you’d see today! Hah! I never did either. The previous court system belonged to you, but now Chairman Mao will repay us our blood debts!’61

  In September 1952 Mao announced to his colleagues that the era of NEP-style reconstruction was drawing to a close and the time was ripe for China to embark on building socialism. The First Five-Year Plan, when the socialist sector of the economy would begin to squeeze out the capitalists, began in 1953. Shortly thereafter, in 1955, collectivization was launched.

  Now that he had decided on a full-blown Five-Year Plan, Mao was happier to accept the need for a move towards the High Stalinist model. In February 1953 he declared ‘there must be a great nationwide upsurge of learning from the Soviet Union to rebuild our country’.62 The graded hierarchies of the Soviet service aristocracy were now introduced wholesale; engineers were the new kings of the workplace, whilst the party organization was marginalized. Enormous industrial plants were started with Soviet help. But most striking were the changes to the People’s Liberation Army, as Soviet-style ranks and insignia replaced the old civil-war guerrilla-style of army.

  The Stalinist model was not, however, followed to the letter. The Chinese, so reliant on peasant support, were unwilling to exploit the peasantry too harshly in the interests of heavy industry. Overall, though, the USSR became the accepted model, and the enthusiasm for all things Soviet soon penetrated beyond the party elites. In urban areas, especially amongst the educated, the pro-intelligentsia High Stalinism of Moscow inevitably proved to be far more attractive than the peasant socialism of Yan’an. Russian novels were widely read in translation and Russian films were shown throughout the country. Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered had the highest sales of all, and its hero, Pavel Korchagin, became an example for all to emulate. From 1952 several schools established ‘Pavel classes’ as part of a ‘Reading good books, learning from Pavel’ campaign, whilst a 1956 Soviet film, dubbed into Chinese, was shown throughout China the following year to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution. There is some evidence that Ostrovskii’s book was genuinely inspirational amongst young people, in part because Korchagin was such a flawed hero; his poor behaviour at school and his impulsiveness made him easier to like than the remote and improbably virtuous Chinese ‘new socialist men’. Korchagin represented revolutionary romanticism, tempered with some realism.63

  Cinema became a major conduit of Soviet ideas into China; by 1957, 468 Soviet films had been translated and shown in China, seen by almost 1.4 billion Chinese. These films propagated a number of messages. The heroism of the little man – people like Korchagin – was one, but the films also popularized ‘modern’ ideas, such as gender equality.64 How the Steel was Tempered, like many other Soviet films, showed women fighting and working alongside men. China’s first female tractor driver, Liang Jun, claimed that the film inspired her to seek work. The Soviet Union, as seen through film, seemed like the acme of modernity. As the historian Wu Hung remembers:

  Thinking about the early 1950s, it seems that everything new and exciting came from the Soviet Union and anything from the Soviet Union was new and exciting. Repeated over and over in schools, parks and on streets was the slogan: ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is Our Tomorrow’. It was both exhilarating and uncanny to see your own future written on someone else’s face, especially when this ‘someone else’ had yellow hair and pink skin… My mother, along with all her colleagues at the Central Academy of Drama, immediately permed her hair into numerous curls to resemble those of the robust Russian heroines… Fused with my memory of my mother’s hair-style during that period was a kind of dress that people called a bulaji (a phonetic rendering of the Russian word [plat’e, or ‘dress’]). It had short puffed sleeves, a buttoned-up collar and a wide, floating skirt, and was always made of colourful fabric with cheerful patterns, again associated with the ‘revolutionary spirit’ of the Soviet Union.65

  However, as Wu Hung illustrates, the Soviet ‘modernity’ transmitted to China was of a particular type. In fashion, as in many other areas, the official embrace of the ‘Soviet model’ after 1953 marked a transition rather similar to the one that the USSR underwent in the mid-1930s: from the more egalitarian, guerrilla socialism to a more ‘joyous’ and aspirational society. In the late 1940s, the ‘Lenin suit’ – a female version of the Sun Yat-sen suit, based on the Soviet Red Army uniform – had become popular amongst female revolutionaries, and was common attire amongst urban women in the early 1950s. But in 1955, inspired by the Soviet model and fed up with Yan’an-style austerity, several leading cultural figures, including the poet Ai Qing, launched a dress reform campaign. For Ai Qing the Sun Yat-sen and Lenin suits did not ‘harmonize at all with… the joyful tenor of life’. ‘In the Soviet Union,’ he explained, ‘if there are six or seven girls walking along together, they will all be wearing different styles of dress’, whereas Chinese children ‘dress up like little old people’.66

  Despite a great deal of press coverage in 1956, the dress reform campaign was not entirely successful, and many women clung to their Lenin suits. In part, the reason was economic: full skirts demanded more material than Lenin suits. But expense was not the only reason; popular values were not yet in tune with this departure from Yan’an guerrilla socialism. One of the supporters of dress reform explained the enduring popularity of the Lenin suit amongst women:

  they have linked together cadre suits and progressive thinking, cadre suits and simplicity of lifestyle, cadre suits and frugality… Although this is all erroneous, there is no denying that in it we find encompassed the desire of women for progress and for equality with men in life and work, as well as a view of simplicity and frugality as the core elements of Chinese aesthetics.67

  The conflicts over revolutionary fashion mirrored the continuing tensions within Chinese politics. Mao was willing for a time to embrace the Soviet model, but he never jettisoned his guerrilla values, and it was not long before he would turn against the tide from Moscow.

  A different blending of the Chinese-style peasant guerrilla tradition with Soviet-style hierarchy is evident in Communist North Korea. Kim Il Sung himself had been immersed in both Chinese and Soviet Communist cultures, but Korean political culture was crucial in forging this very specific model of Communism.68

  Like the Chinese party, the ‘Korean Workers’ Party’, as the Communist party was called, was predominantly a peasant-based party, and had secured considerable support from the poorer peasantry with its land reform of 1946 (which was very similar to the Chinese
Communist land reforms in Manchuria during the civil war). Its kinship with the Chinese party was also evident in the enormous emphasis it placed on ‘self-criticism’ and ‘thought unity’. Korea’s Confucian culture contributed to the stress on ideas and thought, but the Japanese colonial administration’s efforts at ideological ‘conversion’ – something many Communists experienced in prison – may also have been influential.69

  At the same time, however, Kim found the High Stalinist model attractive. The Japanese had left the North with the foundations of a heavy industrial economy, and the regime launched a typically Stalinist programme of industrialization, helped by Soviet experts and technical training. By the end of the 1940s, Korea had become part of a broader Soviet economic empire, exporting raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods.70

  Kim’s personality cult also had echoes of Stalin’s and Mao’s, though its extravagance and intensity were of a different order, and here non-Communist sources were crucial.71 Stalinist and Maoist imagery and language were certainly present – Kim was compared, like Mao, with the sun (though this may also have owed something to the Japanese emperor cult) – but so was Confucian familial imagery. Kim’s ‘revolutionary lineage’ was praised, and he was presented as the father of the Korean people. Korean Shamanistic folk religion also played a part: Kim was presented as the ‘mother’ of the nation, and had a magical control over the weather and harvests. He was also, moreover, hailed as a transformative philosopher-king who gave ‘on-the-spot guidance’, advising workers how to use lathes and peasants how to improve their crop-yield. North Korea is still littered with thousands of signs commemorating his inspirational visits (including perilous raised sections on highways, which mark the many places where Kim gave ‘on-the-spot guidance’ on road construction). Finally, Christian elements penetrated the cult: his biographer wrote that a shining star marked his rise to the leadership, and he shed ‘precious blood’ to save the nation.