The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  A curious mixture of High Stalinism and Korean tradition was also evident in the social order. The post-war Stalinist model of the factory was replicated, complete with Stakhanovism and sharp wage differentials, but the inequalities and social distinctions were to become much more rigid than in the USSR or China. Korean political culture may have been influential here. Although influenced by Confucianism, the Korean Chosn dynasty (which ruled until the Japanese took power in 1910) had preserved a hereditary aristocratic elite, unlike in China, where Confucian ideas of educational merit were much stronger.72 The rigid Communist hierarchy of ‘core class’, ‘wavering class’ and ‘hostile class’ was therefore reminiscent of the Chosn dynasty’s tripartite division of society into the yangban (literary and martial classes), commoners and outcastes or slaves, and heredity remained crucial in determining people’s life-chances.73 As will be seen, these hereditary hierarchies had also emerged in China, but Mao was determined to undermine them. Kim, in contrast, buttressed them, a hierarchical outlook which was reflected in the extraordinary use of two different words for ‘comrade’: ‘tongmu’ for equals and ‘tongji’ for superiors (the Chinese Communist Party only used one word – ‘tongzhi’).

  Kim and his fellow Communist leaders were to create a form of Communism with strong local roots that were to prove remarkably resilient. It was to become one of the most ancien régime-like of all Communist powers, and its social structure proved unusually rigid. But all Communist societies in the late Stalinist period had strong elements of hierarchy, and they inevitably undermined the hopes of many potential supporters for a new era of modern social relationships and justice.

  VI

  At the age of seventeen, Edmund Chmieliński left his home village in Central Poland to join a youth labour brigade and work in the new ‘socialist city’ of Nowa Huta, outside Krakow. Chmieliński had been traumatized by war: his father had been killed and at the age of eleven he had been interned in a Nazi slave labour camp. On his return to his home village he was confronted by poor prospects: he was at the bottom of the village hierarchy, treated badly by his teachers and the local priest. His uncle, a Communist youth organizer, offered him an escape route, even though his mother tried to keep him in the village:

  My decision was unalterable. I wanted to live and work like a human being, be treated the same as others and not like an animal… There was no force or might that could keep me in the village that I hated so much, which had looked down on me throughout my childhood.74

  When he arrived, Chmieliński was issued with a new khaki uniform, complete with cap and red tie. ‘Sometimes I furtively looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn’t get over how different I now appeared.’ He was now an equal, part of a new army of labour. Equal rations were given to everybody at dinner, and ‘all of us were equal’. For the first time, he fell asleep ‘completely happy’. Although the work was hard, and Chmieliński was surprised that his brigade was expected to build a huge plant with only very basic tools, he became an enthusiastic Stakhanovite labourer, engaging in heroic ‘socialist competition’ to reconstruct the country after the War:

  I firmly believed that with a common effort we would build in a few years a splendid city in which I would live and work… I didn’t count the hours of work. I built as though I was building my own house. I believed that I was working for myself and my children.75

  However, his story ended in tragedy. He won a scholarship to study at a vocational school, but even so he could not afford all the fees. He had a nervous breakdown, blaming trade union and party bosses for the injustice, and ended up a homeless alcoholic. He rejoiced when the old regime was removed after the rebellion against the Stalinist order in October 1956.

  Chmieliński’s memoir, written in 1958, after the High Stalinist period but still under Communism, was undoubtedly influenced by the ideological nostrums of the time, but its account of youthful enthusiasm is corroborated by others, and indeed makes sense. Chmieliński believed Communist promises of a new system, of a semi-militarized ‘guerrilla’ society of equals, all striving for the common good, which would bring personal education and advancement, and it is no surprise he was taken with the vision. However, like many others he found the new order much more stratified, unjust and harsh towards the poor than was promised. The dreams of many young Communists like Chmieliński foundered when confronted with the reality of the hungry state and the ‘new class’.

  Young and ambitious people like Chmieliński, desperate to escape from rural backwaters, were precisely the sort of people willing to be forged into new socialist people – much as they had been in the USSR of the 1930s. And there were real benefits to conformity. Large numbers of managerial and technical positions were waiting to be filled in post-war Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and the GDR, and levels of social mobility in this period were much higher even than in the West (which was witnessing its own golden age of mobility). Chmieliński may have found that mobility had its limits, but many others were able to afford an education and join the ranks of middle-management.

  Established, older workers, however, had fewer incentives to become part of the regime’s new labour army. They remained loyal to older working-class cultures that the Communists were trying to break.76 The late-Stalinist order in industry was an even more authoritarian and non-egalitarian version of the one developed in the USSR in the mid-1930s. It was founded on a rigid hierarchy: plans and work-targets (norms) were laid down by the ministry at the centre, and then communicated down the line of command to be implemented by managers and fore-men. Each worker was given what was effectively a mini-plan to fulfil, and was paid according to how much he or she produced. Bosses were therefore given even greater powers than they had wielded under the capitalist system. In practice, shortages of labour, and the bosses’ need to secure workers’ cooperation, prevented managers from throwing their weight around too much. But workers still resented their powers, especially over the allocation of jobs, where they could show favouritism. For example, a worker’s pay very much depended on whether the norm was easy to fulfil or not, and shortages of materials could make it impossible for the worker, however heroic, to make a reasonable wage.

  Unequal pay was also a source of resentment. It was common to pay workers on a piece-rate system; and this gave power to foremen and bosses who could decide who was to be given the easy and who the difficult jobs. And at the same time that technicians and bosses were given higher pay and privileges (such as special shops), older, more equal wage scales were scrapped. This was particularly controversial in the GDR where many of the technical specialists were former Nazis who had been fired in 1945 and then rehired. According to one party report, party members were deeply hostile to these policies: ‘The intelligentsia must be brought to account once and for all. The preferential treatment of the intelligentsia is bullshit. The stores where the intelligentsia have the right to go shopping must be smashed.’77

  Especially unpopular were the Stakhanovites who cooperated with managers to over-fulfil their norms, and, just as in the USSR in the 1930s, this put pressure on all workers to do the same. One worker at the United Lighting and Electrics Factory in Northern Budapest, János Sztankovits, had been deported to the USSR after 1945 and worked in a Soviet factory, where he became a Stakhanovite worker. On his return to Hungary he resisted becoming a Stakhanovite there as well, telling party agitators that ‘Stalin could stick his shift up his arse, I worked for him for three years for free, I wasn’t even given proper clothes, I was freed, and why should I work for him again?’ He was now in serious trouble, and had no option but to cooperate and become a Stakhanovite, and he received the higher wages that came with it. His fellow workers were naturally angry that he was prepared to over-fulfil the norm, telling him to ‘go back to the Soviet Union, if you like it so much there’.78

  The Communists could, of course, justify this inequality according to Marx’s ideological scheme: in the lower phase of socialism, the principle ‘to each accor
ding to his work’ would operate. But, understandably, many saw the new order as a betrayal of the socialist values the party proclaimed so loudly, and Marxism gave them a ready-made language of protest. One anonymous letter of January 1949 from a worker to Hilary Minc, the Polish Minister of Industry, signed ‘A follower of the Teachings of Marx and Engels’, declared:

  You announce that the factories in which we work are our exclusive property, only ours – and how does it turn out that we are only miserable servants with a lower wage rate than in private factories. And after all, if this is our property, then the income which the factory gives should be divided among the workers, and we would pay a tax like the private factories pay. You don’t like it, do you? For then there wouldn’t be money to build you palaces in which there are dozens of square metres of space for each bureaucrat…79

  There was one area of life, though, where the regime was too egalitarian for many workers’ tastes: the place of women. The Communists pressed for women to be employed in all jobs – even those that were traditionally done by men. Some women did become party activists and hero-workers, but the obstacles were enormous. Male workers often successfully resisted the employment of women, and women tended to be confined to traditionally female roles, whilst earning less than men. Meanwhile, the life of the hero-labourer, working all shifts to over-fulfil the plan, was difficult to reconcile with family life.80

  This was not the only concession the regime had to make to East European workers. In many places, pre-existing socialist cultures gave workers the confidence to resist the Communists; in the GDR, for instance, old Social Democratic workers were at the forefront of complaints.81 In some cases, the ideal of creating a ‘new socialist man’, full of enthusiasm for Communist ideology, was more or less abandoned. The Polish sociologist Hanna Świda-Ziemba noted that as long as workers worked, ideological incorrectness was permissible:

  In my contacts with workers at the time I was struck by their freedom of expression, their aggressive attitudes toward their superiors and the system of the time – shown sometimes very sharply at public meetings… This was not a matter of personal courage in that community, but the result of the ruling ideology, and also the social practice of the Stalinist system.

  In contrast with the intelligentsia, who were expected to follow the party line, ‘The duty of the workers instead was essentially work, the realisation of the six-year plan. Views and opinions could be expressed without punishment, and instead the slightest sign of real refusal to work could be dealt with under many different types of regulations…’82

  If East European Communist regimes, dealing with a pre-existing industrial workforce, had to make compromises with workers, the Chinese Communists were in a much stronger position. In 1949, manufacturing had largely taken place in small-scale workshops. It was the Communists themselves who created large-scale industry – much as the Soviets had done in the 1930s – and their large factories and plants were modelled on those found in Soviet textbooks. This made it much easier for the regime to mould its workforce. Moreover, as the gulf between rural and urban economies was even greater than it had been in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the Chinese economy enjoyed a huge labour surplus. Nevertheless, the regime could not provide industrial jobs for all-comers, but those who did find work with relatively high wages and benefits soon rose to the top of the labour hierarchy. Below them was a group of less privileged and unprotected workers in smaller plants, whilst at the very bottom came the mass of the peasants, who after 1955 were effectively tied to the land. Realizing their privilege, the urban working class proved far more receptive to the party’s intensive propaganda effort.

  Despite this, many aspects of High Stalinism became deeply unpopular in Chinese factories. The Soviet piece-rate and wage system, introduced between 1952 and 1956, was not only difficult to organize in circumstances where skilled managers au fait with its complexities were scarce, but also caused intense hostility amongst workers used to more egalitarian wage regimes. A rigid, Soviet-style eight-grade scheme that was applied throughout China’s various regions was endlessly criticized for its arbitrariness. Efforts to categorize the labour force according to the eight grades reached absurd lengths: the managers of one Shanghai department store tried to determine salespeople’s ‘skill levels’ by giving them a ‘blind taste test’ designed to assess their judgement of a range of tobaccos – non-smokers were naturally disgruntled.83 Meanwhile the powers given to managers fed smouldering resentments, especially in the case of formerly private-sector firms where the old ‘capitalist’ owner was officially dubbed a new ‘socialist’ manager. These various grievances constituted a powder-keg of anger, which would explode the moment Mao began to question the hierarchies of the so-called ‘Soviet model’ of management in the late 1950s.

  This kind of crisis came much earlier in Eastern Europe, as the governing regimes ratcheted up pressure on workers whilst real wages fell. In Hungary, for example, wages declined by an estimated 16.6 per cent between 1949 and 1953. Workers tended to express their dissatisfaction indirectly, for example by going AWOL, frequently changing jobs, and foot-dragging. But occasionally full-blown strikes would break out, necessitating forcible repression; 31.6 per cent of those imprisoned in Czechoslovak jails for ‘political crimes’ were workers.84 By the early 1950s, it had become clear that the Communists’ attempts to mobilize workers into their new army of labour had stalled badly. If they were so singularly unsuccessful in their appeals to the supposed labour vanguard, it was hardly likely that the ‘backward’ peasantry would prove more willing recruits to the new Communist project.

  VII

  In April 1952 a Chinese traveller, far more humble than either Mao or Liu, visited the Soviet Union. Geng Changsuo, a peasant from the village of Wugong (about 120 miles south of Beijing) first reached Moscow, where he enthusiastically celebrated May Day in Red Square, and then travelled to Ukraine, where he and his delegation inspected various collective farms, including the model October Victory Collective. Geng and his fellow Chinese were flabbergasted by the riches on show: the water, electricity, plentiful food and clean solid houses equipped with telephones. Geng was even more impressed by what was presented as the source of this wealth – the miraculous tractor – which achieved what 150 Wugong peasants with 150 animals and 150 ploughshares would struggle to complete.85

  Geng was an earnest party member, committed not only to helping his own family and clan, but the village as a whole. He neither smoked nor drank or gambled, and with his low, confident voice and down-to-earth manner, he was the ideal Communist village leader. During the War he had organized a voluntary cooperative of poor peasant families who pooled their resources and were able to diversify into rope production, which they then sold on local markets. The cooperative prospered in the early 1950s as more and more families joined, and Geng soon attracted the attentions of the party leadership. From 1951 Mao had been trying to coax Chinese peasants into embracing fully socialized agriculture, and Geng, after his state-sponsored study-tour in the USSR, returned a convert and true believer, not only in Soviet collectivism, but more generally to the Soviet version of modernity. Advertising his passion for all things ‘modern’, he shaved off his beard and moustache, sported Western-style tailoring, and began to learn to read and write. He soon embarked on a mission of proselytization, explaining how collectivization and mechanization – and especially the ‘traktor’, transliterated as ‘tuolaji’, a word the Wugong peasants had never heard before – had brought the USSR prosperity. These same villagers were exhorted to join an expanded, village-size cooperative.86

  When Mao pressed for full Soviet-style collectivization (the consolidation of small farms into large state-owned units) in the summer of 1955, Geng became one of the first collective farm chairmen. However, the policy was a step too far for Geng and his fellow peasants, and the collective farm proved to be a very different proposition from the much less ambitious peasant cooperative. Peasants’ income, which had hitherto come f
rom selling their produce, now came entirely in the form of wages from the labour they gave to the collective farm. Under this system only a few large families with many wage-earners could earn the income they had enjoyed before. Moreover, the Chinese drew directly from the Soviet model, using the collectives to extract more and more resources from the countryside for industrial investment. Peasant living standards suffered accordingly. Even so, Geng and the other Wugong leaders, desperate to retain their status as model villagers, banned all private plots, and pressed on with full-scale collectivization.

  More revolutionary, perhaps, than even its economic consequences was the political impact of collectivization. The power of Geng and people like him over peasants’ lives (already considerable) now became vast. Village leaders exercised exclusive control over all of the land; they allocated jobs to peasants; and they gained privileged access to all state resources. One popular verse tersely captured the new relationship between rank and resources:

  First rank folk

  Have things sent to the gate.

  Second rank folk

  Rely on others.

  Third rank folk

  Only fret.87

  Geng was one of the more honest and altruistic officials, and put much effort not only into persuading peasants of the advantages of the collective farm but into making the system work. Education was expanded, and unlike many villages, Wugong acquired, for the first time, a rudimentary welfare system. However, even the virtuous Geng was soon wrapped in all the trappings of local bossdom, for alongside schools and welfare, Wugong could also now boast its own village security apparatus. The new police force was led by the feared ‘Fierce Zhang’, a former poor peasant, who recruited a rough and ready cadre of local toughs to keep order. When, for example, a group of villagers uprooted 1,500 cotton plants in protest at the low price for cotton being offered, this security force used torture to flush out the culprits. In other Chinese villages abuses by officials could be even worse. Now village leaders’ powers fused with traditional patriarchal attitudes into a new quasi-feudal code, which could include an informal droit de seigneur over mainly poor women. Rapes were widespread: two of Mao’s former bodyguards, for instance, rewarded with high office in Tianjin, used their power to terrorize local women. They were ultimately executed for their crimes, but many others escaped justice.88