The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The story of Geng Changsuo and Wugong village encapsulates many of the hopes and disappointments of what was called the ‘Soviet model’ in China. Some aspects of collectivization could appeal to some peasants: the tractors and the large-scale agriculture all promised the riches small-scale agriculture could not deliver, whilst education and welfare promised integration and opportunities in the broader national community. But collectivization soon created a new hierarchy: a powerful privileged stratum which often behaved arbitrarily and exploitatively. The peasantry, as a whole, remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy, isolated from the rest of China and tied to the land, over which they exercised much less control than they had before. Meanwhile, rural resources were sucked out of agriculture and pumped into heavy industry, whilst the incentive system damaged productivity, laying the ground for food crises in the longer term.

  Soviet Eastern Europe had experienced collectivization in a similar, though even more traumatic way. China escaped violent ‘dekulakization’; the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in persuading (or pressuring) peasants into joining collectives without a full-blown class-struggle campaign. (In all probability this was because peasant resistance had been broken earlier during the violent land reform campaigns.) Eastern Europe, however, following the Soviet 1930s blueprint more closely, launched collectivization and dekulakization simultaneously.

  Pressure to join the collective was often intense, and in some areas, coercion was explicit. In others, it was less direct: peasants would find that they could only buy non-agricultural goods in state shops if they were collective-farm members. As one Bulgarian peasant put it, ‘Of course, you did not have to join the cooperative, unless you wanted shoes on your feet and a shirt on your back.’89 Even so, as in the USSR of the 1930s, there was a good deal of resistance. Peasants mistrusted the detachments of officials sent from the towns to impose the collectives, and refused to give inspectors information about who owned what. It was not, moreover, easy to persuade peasants to denounce their influential wealthy neighbours: in the Romanian village of Hîrseni in the Olt Land region of south-eastern Transylvania, for instance, party officials tried to persuade the poor peasant Nicolae R. to denounce his allegedly kulak (chiabur) neighbour Iosif Oltean, who had promised him 20 kilograms of wool and 10 of cheese in return for work, but had only delivered a nugatory quantity of poor-quality wool. Nevertheless, Nicolae defended his neighbour: ‘Oltean was a good man who helps us poor people, even if he was greedy.’90

  Peasants were profoundly alienated by the loss of their land. The new Marxist-Leninist ideology, which regarded labour as the prime virtue, was diametrically opposed to the moral economy of many peasants, which saw landowning and economic independence as a mark of status. But the high food-delivery quotas demanded by the state to feed workers and finance industrialization were, if anything, even more unpopular than dekulakization or collectivization. One woman peasant from the Hungarian village of Sárosd, south of Budapest, remembered her misplaced hopes that she could deliver enough tax to the state by growing 1.7 hectares of sunflower seeds: ‘One came home without a penny. Everything went to taxes, not enough was left even to buy an apron.’91 On the collective farm itself, pay was low and conditions were poor. One peasant from the Bulgarian village of Zamfirovo remembered:

  It was terrible. I remember nearly collapsing in the fields one day during the wheat harvest. We worked all day in unbearable heat, doing everything by hand just like before… The work was hard and the pay very low – only 80 stotinki a day and any pay in kind was deducted from that. People were worse off. Even the poorest people who joined the cooperative with little land felt worse off. I remember one summer somebody came to the fields to sell beer and sodas and even though we were dying of thirst no one could afford to buy them.92

  As in China, the weakly constrained power of the new village political elite inflamed peasant anger further. Quotas depended on the whims of collective farm officials. Meanwhile peasants found that people higher up in the political hierarchy were given more credit for their collective-farm work than others. Life became intensely political, as villagers’ future became dependent on relationships with the new bosses.

  Some resisted the harsh policies, and rebellions and demonstrations broke out in several areas. One of the most violent and disruptive was in the Bosnian Bihač region in May 1950, though elsewhere they rarely posed any real threat to the authorities. A more common way of resisting collectivization was simply to leave agriculture altogether – something that some East European governments, desperate for industrial labour, encouraged.

  Resistance and resentment slowed the pace of collectivization, and by the time of Stalin’s death it had made surprisingly little headway in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, only 43 per cent of the agricultural population were employed on collective farms of some sort, whilst in Poland the figure was a mere 17 per cent. Indeed, it was only in the early 1960s that collectivization was completed, and then only after serious concessions had been made to the peasantry – allowing private plots and giving peasant households the right to organize the use of labour, for example. In Poland and Yugoslavia, collectivization was simply scrapped, and the countryside reverted to small private farms.

  In 1949, the Communist Party organization in the East German town of Plauen drew up one of its regular reports on popular opinion. It concluded that whilst the highly qualified workers and technical intelligentsia were reasonably content, the ‘broad masses’ of the population – workers and peasants – were not.93 And by 1953 there is a great deal of evidence that this distribution of happiness held for much of Soviet Eastern Europe. Efforts to break peasant cultures were inevitably unpopular. Meanwhile the High Stalinist system, in which a ‘new class’ of bureaucrats was set above the labouring classes as official resource-extractors for the ever-ravenous state, could not be sustained for long, especially in societies with indigenous socialist traditions of a pre-Soviet provenance.

  In the closing years of the High Stalinist era, the Soviet satellite regimes became increasingly reliant on naked coercion to force through unpopular economic policies. In 1950 in Poland, and 1952–3 in Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, currency reforms effectively confiscated people’s savings, and in Czechoslovakia they led to a wave of protests.94 By 1953, it has been estimated that between 6 and 8 per cent of all adult males in Soviet Eastern Europe were in prison. It was no surprise that the High Stalinist system did not long survive its architect’s demise.

  Parricide

  I

  On a bright summer’s day in June 1962, beneath the shadow of the monumental Moscow University building, a good-humoured and avuncular Nikita Khrushchev released a goldfish into a newly constructed pond. Shortly afterwards, a young child was given a giant key on behalf of all Pioneers – the ‘Key to the Land of the Romantics’, as the press put it. Both were part of the opening ceremonies for the new Pioneer Palace – a centre for the party’s children’s organization on the Lenin Hills. The massive 56-hectare park and large, airy building were to be a children’s wonderland – a ‘children’s republic’, where the ‘children are masters’ and adult discipline was to be as light as possible. The project’s creators claimed that children would teach each other, using peer pressure to maintain discipline.1

  This was all a long way from late Stalinism. Stalin loved to be shown patting children’s heads but handling goldfish in public would have been beneath his dignity. The building itself was also a sharp contrast to its forbidding Stalinist neighbour. In the modernist ‘International style’ created in the 1920s, it was decorated with modern sculptures and reliefs, some in a primitivist, child-like style, not with the old neoclassical figures of muscle-bound workers. It was low-rise and deliberately ‘democratic’, with large glass windows and doors on all sides – open to the joyful children running in from the surrounding park.

  The Pioneer Palace was ideology in concrete. It showed the form of Communism Khrushchev wanted to tak
e the place of High Stalinism: modern and internationalist; free of the archaic nationalism of the early 1950s;2 and yet also Romantic, full of the possibilities of human creativity. According to the journalists of Komsomolskaia Pravda, it was built ‘by people who are Romantics, and this Romantic Pioneer style of life must splash over the walls of the palace’.3 It was centred round the welfare of its people, rather than the power of the state. Most importantly, though, it was to be a building for children free of parental restraint. It embodied the values of equality and fraternity and was to be inhabited by children who disciplined themselves. Khrushchev loathed the old ‘aristocratic’, status-obsessed Stalinist style. He thought the Moscow University building was church-like, ‘an ugly, formless mass’.4

  Khrushchev was only one of the Communist leaders to seek an alternative to the harshness and hierarchy of Stalinism. Once the old patriarch of Communism was dead, the heirs realized that the old system must change. Coercion was no longer working and growing privileges and inequality were causing anger. At the same time, the legacy of mass violence and the Stalinist party’s continuing commitment to ‘struggle’ against ‘enemies’ were narrowing the regime’s base of support. The system had to become more inclusive. More generally, many reacted powerfully against the Stalinist economic determinism – the view that everything, including values, morality and human lives, had to be sacrificed to building a modern, industrial society. The old cruel dogmatism, they argued, had to be replaced by a more ‘humane’ socialism.

  What, though, was this to mean in practice? Some called for a more Pragmatic Communism of limited markets and individual rights. This was especially appealing in Soviet Eastern Europe but most party leaders were not ready for this compromise. For it would undermine the ruling party and threaten its ‘leading role’ in politics, whilst challenging the old command economies. Others sought a more technocratic, Modernist model. Another answer, more appealing to Communist leaders, was to seek to broaden the regime, whilst restoring its revolutionary dynamism. The band of brothers had to be reassembled and the spirit of collective will revived. The great ideological innovators of the 1950s – Tito, Khrushchev and Mao – all embarked on a ‘great leap backwards’ to the Radical Lenin of 1917 or even the Romantic Marx of the 1840s.

  Yet the photographs of the Pioneer Palace’s opening ceremony present a rather different picture to the image of relaxed self-discipline depicted in Komsomolskaia Pravda. To the modern eye the atmosphere looks distinctly militaristic: uniformed children stand in ordered ranks, bearing flags and drums. And here lay the difficulty facing Stalin’s ‘sons’. Whilst their ideal might have been a people working creatively and cooperating in an easy spirit of peace and harmony, they hoped to achieve this whilst constructing powerful states and efficient economies. In the absence of market incentives, a resort to semi-military mobilization therefore remained attractive. This was Mao’s solution, and a military, guerrilla Communism, complete with accompanying ‘class struggle’, became the foundation of his strategy. Khrushchev was determined to avoid violence, but even he found it impossible to pursue a Radical Communism whilst escaping the bullying, military party culture of his youth; only Tito really broke from it, but at the cost of drifting towards the market and into the Western sphere of influence.

  It is therefore no surprise that the death of Stalin brought not peace, but a ‘thaw’ that exposed some of the ‘frozen’ tensions within the Communist world, whilst fragmenting his vast empire. Indeed the fifteen years after Stalin’s death were some of the most turbulent in the Communist history and the most dangerous of the Cold War, when the world came closest to nuclear conflagration. The first challenge to Stalin’s orthodoxy, though, had come whilst he still lived – with the break with Tito in 1948.

  II

  In his memoirs, Milovan Djilas recalls:

  One day – it must have been in the spring of 1950 – it occurred to me that we Yugoslav Communists were now in a position to start creating Marx’s free association of producers. The factories would be left in their hands, with the sole proviso that they should pay a tax for military and other States’ needs ‘that remained essential’.

  He then revealed his new idea to the ideologist Edvard Kardelj and the economic chief Boris Kidrič ‘while we sat in a car parked in front of the villa where I lived’. Kidrič was sceptical, but eventually they took it to the boss:

  Tito paced up and down, as though completely wrapped up in his own thoughts. Suddenly he stopped and exclaimed ‘Factories belonging to workers – something that has never yet been achieved!’ With these words, the theories worked out by Kardelj and myself seemed to shed their complications and seemed, too, to find better prospects of being workable. A few months later, Tito explained the workers’ self-management bill to the [Yugoslav] National Assembly.5

  Djilas was describing the first of many ‘returns to Marx’ of the 1950s, as Communists tried to find an alternative to Stalinism. Djilas’s account of eureka moments, fevered discussions about Marxism in the backs of cars and sudden decisions in party villas tells us a great deal about the closed nature of Tito’s leadership. Yet his story of the origins of the new Yugoslav model of Communism is not entirely convincing. Tito and the leadership had been looking for new models for some time before the break with the USSR. More importantly, the rhetoric of ‘self-management’ was highly misleading. Djilas and his friends were doubtless sincere in trying to find a democratic Marxism, and their ideas caused enormous excitement amongst Western socialists. But in practice, Yugoslav self-management had little to do with the Romantic Marx’s ideas of democratic participation in management, or even the workers’ control of Lenin’s State and Revolution. The reforms were the beginning of Tito’s move towards the market, and the Yugoslav model showed how difficult it was to re-radicalize Marxism in Europe after Stalin.

  As in China, the roots of the Yugoslav Communism are to be found as much in the experience of partisan warfare as in Moscow and the Comintern. But in Yugoslavia, with its ethnic and economic diversity, two models of governance emerged as the War ended. The first, in the relatively peaceful and prosperous Slovenia (where most fighting had finished with Italy’s collapse in 1943), was moderate and pragmatic. Local assemblies were relatively democratic, land redistribution was limited, and the state used money to give people incentives. The second, in the poorer, war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, was more radical and egalitarian. Here shortages and inflation had destroyed the value of money. Communists resorted to rationing, ideological enthusiasm, and the mobilization of labour teams to keep the economy going.6

  Tito’s objective in the first few years of Communist rule was to combine the Pragmatic Slovenian and Radical Bosnian models and apply them to the rest of Yugoslavia. Many policies of the early years echoed Lenin’s NEP. Tito, apprehensive about alienating his peasant supporters, eschewed collectivization, whilst Kidrič’s Five-Year Plan of 1947 (an enormous set of documents weighing one and a half tons) was not modelled on Stalin’s. It was an amalgam of hundreds of local plans; the centre used financial incentives, not political commands, and budgets were expected to balance. At the same time, however, Tito wanted rapid development for his poor and vulnerable country – something moderate NEP-style policies would not achieve. So the Communists decided to rely on voluntary, unpaid ‘shock work’ to push the economy forward. The Communist Youth League was particularly active, and led 62,000 young people in building the Brčko–Banovići Youth Railway. Several idealistic Communists from around the world also joined the labour platoons, much as their predecessors had flocked to Spain in the 1930s – one of them was the future Cambodian Communist leader Pol Pot, who was studying in France at the time. For Yugoslavs, however, participation was not always voluntary, and conditions were poor. Nevertheless some enthusiasm persisted; as one worker declared, ‘although we are tired, together, and with song, it is easier’.7 This type of mobilization, though, had its disadvantages for Tito. In its enthusiasm for social transformation,
the Youth League often encouraged the unauthorized persecution of ‘class aliens’, something the leadership did not want.

  This schizophrenic combination of two very different approaches continued until 1947, at which stage Tito understood his real vulnerability. A wily operator, Tito had secured foreign aid from both the Americans and the Soviets after 1945. With the beginning of the Cold War, though, Western aid stopped, and following the break with Moscow in 1948 Yugoslavia was left friendless and threatened by a possible Stalinist coup. Paradoxically, Tito resisted Stalin by emulating him with a much more centralized, militaristic strategy. These years saw some of the harshest repressions of the period, including purges of ‘Cominternists’ and the foundation of the ‘Naked Island’ (Goli Otok) prison camp for political opponents. The old idealism came under severe strain. Djilas commented angrily to the security chief Aleksandar Ranković: ‘Now we are treating Stalin’s followers as we treated his enemies’, to which Ranković replied despairingly, ‘Don’t say that! Don’t talk about it!’8 Repression, though, was combined with pro-worker campaigns rather similar to Stalin’s in the early 1930s. The party encouraged workers to criticize managers and experts, at the cost of losing control of the workforce.