The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  These years were grim ones for Tito and his circle, constantly terrified of assassination, Soviet invasion and economic collapse. But in 1950 salvation arrived in the form of American aid. It was the United States, keen to have an ally in the Communist world, that decided to ‘keep Tito afloat’, and the Americans, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank all provided loans. Loans, of course, had to be repaid, and that meant that budgets had to be balanced, which in turn made more radical socialist experiment impossible. Military-style mobilization had to give way to strict accounting and efficiency. Meanwhile the regime decentralized power, and officially transferred all property from the state to so-called ‘worker councils’. The Yugoslav Communist Party was renamed, in a bow to democratic sensibilities, the ‘League of Communists of Yugoslavia’. But this was still a one-party state, and ‘worker self-management’ was not management by workers at all. In practice managers and officials were in control, and they had to keep within budgets set by the centre. This much-trumpeted democratization of the workplace was actually a reversion to the Slovenian wartime model, and far from being a return to Marx, this was rule by managers and financial controls.

  After 1950, Yugoslavia was neither a command nor a market economy but something in between; the state managed the economy by regulating prices and issuing credits rather than by political diktat. In some ways, it continued to behave like a typical Communist state: the regime poured money into heavy industry, and used redistribution to soften inequalities, especially between the richer Croatia and Slovenia and the poorer Macedonia and Montenegro. But it had scrapped collectivization, and was, to all intents and purposes, part of the Western economic world. For a time, this mixture of markets, socialism and American aid was remarkably successful, and in the 1950s Yugoslavia posted the highest growth rate in Eastern Europe. The country was also the most open and liberal of all Communist states. Western tourists visited and Yugoslavs worked abroad, bringing back Western influences with them. At the same time, tensions between the republics were held in check by memories of wartime blood-letting, and by Tito himself. Tito, Serbian Orthodox and Croat, embodied ‘Yugoslavism’, and his almost monarchical style appealed to many, even as it alienated others. Djilas, a puritan and intellectual, excoriated Tito’s vanity and love of luxury – his thirty-two palaces, his lavish banquets and receptions, his perma-tan, dyed hair and dazzling false teeth.9 But he conceded it had a rationale:

  By taking up residence in palaces, by ruling from them, he attached himself to the monarchic tradition and to traditional concepts of power… Pomp was indispensable to him. It satisfied his strong nouveau riche instincts; it also compensated for his ideological deficiency, his inadequate education.10

  Djilas was expelled from the Central Committee for his democratic scruples in 1954. But he acknowledged that Tito’s monarchical style appealed to a rural population accustomed to traditional forms of authority. Tito’s regime, caught as it was between the East and West, the urban and the rural, presented a remarkably diverse set of faces to the world. To the urban intelligentsia, party idealists and the Western left it was the home of an authentic democratic Marxism; to the United States and Western business, it had reconciled socialism with the market; and to the peasants, it was a government of ancient heroes. Folk poets celebrated the break with the Soviet bloc (and the Hungarian Communist leader Rákosi) in pseudo-epic verse:

  O Rákosi, where were you

  When Tito spilled his blood?

  You rested in the coolness of Moscow,

  Whilst Tito fought the war.

  Pretend now to be a democrat!

  If a battle develops again,

  The old story will repeat:

  Our Tito will be the leader,

  And you will hide again.11

  As will be seen, beneath the prosperity and Tito’s bravura confidence, all was not as happy as it seemed. Nevertheless, by 1956 Tito could afford to be satisfied. Since the perilous and gloomy days of 1948–9, he had steered Yugoslavia towards independence and wealth. He had even gained international prestige with his own special form of Marxism. He became a major figure in the ‘Non-Aligned’ movement of states outside the Soviet and Western alliances, and by 1955 he had made peace with the USSR. The transition from the Stalinist model was to be rather more traumatic in other East European states.

  III

  On the morning of 1 March 1953, after a boisterous evening of food, drink and cinema that lasted until 4 a.m., Stalin was discovered on the floor of his bedroom. He had suffered a severe stroke. Members of the party’s inner circle – Georgii Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Red Army boss Nikolai Bulganin – were called to his bedside, but it was some time before they summoned the doctors. This may have been deliberate. They had become increasingly worried about Stalin’s unpredictability and vindictiveness in his final years. But it is more likely that they were too frightened to act.12 In the poisonous atmosphere of the Soviet leadership, overt ambition and pushiness could attract severe punishment. The extreme centralization of power Stalin had spent so much of his life perfecting may well have killed him.

  Stalin’s death came as an emotional shock to friends and enemies alike. For Stalin was not just a political boss; he was the embodiment of a whole system – ideological, cultural, political and economic. Fedor Burlatskii, later one of Khrushchev’s main advisers and, privately, no admirer of Stalin’s, tried to sum up his mixed feelings:

  His death shook everyone in the Soviet Union to the core, even if the emotions it aroused were varied. Something that had seemed unshakeable, eternal and immortal was gone. The simple thought that a man had died and his body had to be consigned to the earth hardly entered anyone’s head. The institution of power, which lay at the very foundation of our society, had crumbled and collapsed. What would life be like now, what would happen to us and to the country?13

  Burlatskii’s thoughts were probably shared by many of the middle-aged lieutenants of world Communism who attended the funeral, including Togliatti, Thorez and Zhou Enlai, as well as the Soviet inner circle. All were aware that the USSR was in a poor state. Living standards were low, there was little new housing, and consumer goods were scarce. Agriculture was a disaster – harvests were poorer than before World War I – and much of the nation’s food was produced outside the collectives on the tiny proportion of land given over to individual plots. The prison system was massive, and Beria, charged with making the Gulag pay, despaired at the cost of managing the 300,000 guards and the low productivity of the prison labour.14 Riots and protests in the camps were common: in early 1954 inmates in the Kengir prison in Kazakhstan took over the camp for forty days before being eventually subdued by tanks and aerial bombing. Relations with the West were also tense, forcing the regime to expend scarce resources on guns, not butter. The Korean War dragged on, only repression kept Eastern Europe stable, and the USSR lagged behind the United States in airpower and nuclear capability. Stalin’s successors all agreed that his security-obsessed world-view had merely caused fear and resentment abroad, and had ultimately undermined Soviet security.

  There was, however, no agreement on what was to replace Stalin’s old order. Of the influential leaders that succeeded Stalin – Beria, Malenkov and, very much in the rear, the poorly educated party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev – Beria and Malenkov had most in common. They were on the Modernist side of the party, and believed that repression and persecutions, especially of intellectuals and experts, were counterproductive – economically and politically. On Stalin’s death they probably worked together to install Malenkov as head of the state apparatus and senior leader.

  It was Lavrentii Beria who took the initiative in the days after the funeral, and he immediately launched a radical programme of change. At first sight, he was an unlikely reformer. As Ezhov’s successor as head of the secret police, he was directly involved in torture. But he was a talented administrator and was largely responsible for the success of the Soviet atomic project. He also had a deep con
tempt for the party apparatus – it was full of useless ‘prattlers’ and ‘parasites’.15 Power, not agitprop, would make the USSR great.

  Beria had no moral qualms about repression, but he realized how economically irrational it was. On Stalin’s death he began to review Stalin’s fabricated cases. He told his fellow party leaders that over 2.5 million people were languishing in the Gulag who were no threat to the state, and proposed the release of over a million non-political inmates. Forced labour, he argued, was less efficient than free; the Gulag had to be drastically reduced.16 At the same time, he challenged the Russian chauvinist and imperialist elements of late Stalinism, condemning discrimination in favour of Russian personnel and language – something he felt keenly as a Georgian.17

  Most dramatic and controversial, though, were Beria’s foreign policy proposals. He and Malenkov were convinced that the health of the economy depended on serious concessions to the West, and they had some success in winning over their colleagues. Soon after Stalin’s death, the USSR helped to bring the Korean War to an end and restored relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia. More controversial, however, were Beria’s proposals for the future of the GDR, where unrest was rife and thousands were continuing to leave for the West in response to Walter Ulbricht’s harsh policies. Beria, it seems, proposed that the Soviets cut their losses and abandon socialism there completely: ‘Why should socialism be built in the GDR? Let it just be a peaceful country. That is sufficient for our purposes.’18

  Malenkov probably had sympathy with Beria’s ideas, but the old Stalinist Molotov was strongly opposed, as was Khrushchev. Beria became vulnerable on the issue, partly for ideological reasons, but largely because his colleagues did not trust him. They were right not to. He was clearly manoeuvring for the top job and might well have killed them had he succeeded. Once Khrushchev and Malenkov had come to this conclusion, they began to conspire against him, securing the support of the army, together with the old guard Molotov and Kaganovich. Charged in a typically Stalinist manner with being a British spy, Beria was executed as an enemy of the people.

  The triumvirate had become a duumvirate, and Khrushchev and Malenkov were now left to fight it out. Malenkov came from an old officer family, and was academically successful. He had a technical education, and, according to his son, saw himself as an enlightened autocrat, the leader of a Soviet ‘technocracy’.19 Sophisticated and intelligent, the patrician British ambassador Sir William Hayter recorded that whilst there was ‘something creepy about his appearance, like a eunuch’, he was ‘quick, clever and subtle’, an ‘extremely agreeable neighbour at the table’.20

  Malenkov’s outlook was a broadly technocratic, Modernist one. The Plan would remain, but the regime would motivate people to work by offering higher living standards and financial incentives, not by repression, and so investment had to be reallocated from heavy industry and defence to consumer goods. Industry also needed to be more efficient, and that required less party interference in the economy and a slightly more liberal attitude towards the intelligentsia. Malenkov encouraged scientists to vent their grievances, which predictably provoked a flood of attacks on Lysenko and Stalin’s ideologized science.

  Malenkov also continued to defend a less confrontational foreign policy, and was committed to serious détente with the West – though he did not pursue Beria’s controversial proposals on East Germany. He used the testing of the new Soviet hydrogen bomb in August 1953 to argue both that the USSR was now strong enough to seek peace, and that the old East–West confrontation had to be superseded. Any war between the United States and the USSR, he declared in March 1954, would mean nuclear conflagration and ‘the destruction of world civilization’. In making this statement, Malenkov was implicitly challenging Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy: in these new conditions, he was calling for a new world of pragmatism, in which the United States and the USSR engaged in ‘long-term coexistence and peaceful competition’ between the two systems, rather than Stalin’s international ‘class struggle’ between two hostile camps.21

  The brief influence of Malenkov after the death of Stalin therefore presented the West with a real opportunity to reduce Cold War tensions, and it was an opportunity it missed – as Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador in Moscow at the time, admitted.22 The respected World War II general Dwight Eisenhower had been elected American President in 1952 in an atmosphere of recriminations over Truman’s alleged ‘loss’ of China and the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949, and he promised to wage a more vigorous, but cost-effective, struggle against Communism. A committed Christian, he saw the Cold War in highly ideological terms, as a war in which ‘the forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history’, as he declared in his inaugural address.23 His Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had a similar view, though he was, if anything, even more confrontational as he feared the power of Communism in the Third World. Containment, he argued in 1952, had had its day. The United States had to ‘roll back’ Communism.

  At first, therefore, Washington was determined to use Stalin’s death and the tensions within the Kremlin to weaken the USSR. Eventually Eisenhower did make some proposals to reduce the threat of nuclear war, but few serious efforts were made to achieve détente. It may be that any lessening of tensions was impossible because too many leaders, on both sides, saw the conflict in absolute ideological terms, and were suspicious of the motives of the rival superpower.24 Even Malenkov retained deep suspicions of the capitalist West. But had Eisenhower followed Churchill’s advice in May 1953 and held talks with Malenkov without conditions in that year, the Kremlin’s more hard-line Cold Warriors might have lost influence.

  As it was, Malenkov found himself under increasing pressure from the ambitious Khrushchev, and in January 1955 he was sacked as Prime Minister, accused of ‘rightism’ and condemned for neglecting the struggle against the international bourgeoisie. The West now had to deal with a much less easy-going leader – Nikita Khrushchev – whose vision of ‘peaceful competition’ was a more ideologically committed and confrontational one.

  Sir William Hayter’s first impression of Khrushchev at a dinner for the then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee was predictably less flattering than his view of Malenkov. He found him ‘rumbustuous, impetuous, loquacious, free-wheeling’. In a deft if patronizing pen-portrait sent to his London bosses, he described Khrushchev as a combination of a peasant from a nineteenth-century Russian novel – shrewd and contemptuous of the master (barin) – and a ‘British trades union leader of the old-fashioned kind’, with a ‘chip’ on his shoulder; the result was a leader ‘suspicious of the barin, now transformed into the capitalist powers of the West’.25 Hayter’s remarks were undoubtedly snobbish, but this product of the British class system understood the importance of hierarchy and status, in both the USSR and the international arena, better than many others.

  Of all Communist leaders, Khrushchev’s background was one of the poorest. He was born into an illiterate peasant family in Kursk province in April 1894 and for much of his youth lived in deep poverty. His father was a seasonal labourer in the mines, and at the age of fourteen, after a parish school education, Nikita followed him to work in the industrial town of Iuzovka, named after its founder, the Welsh businessman John Hughes. This was a huge cultural transition, and Khrushchev was eager to become a modern person. He began as an apprentice fitter, and like many first-generation workers developed an enthusiasm for all things mechanical that lasted for the rest of his life.26 He even built his own motorcycle out of spare parts he managed to find around the town.27 His first proper job was in a factory linked to the mines where labour radicalism was strong, and he soon became involved in illegal trade-union activities. He was the type of person likely to become a Communist leader and reminds one of Stalin and Tito – popular, gregarious, a natural leader, ambitious and eager to better himself.

  Khrushchev was a politician of a strongly populist hue. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1918 (rather lat
er than one would expect), became a political commissar in the Red Army, and after the civil war returned to the Iuzovka mines as deputy manager. He had the classic ‘democratic’ style prized at the time – spurning the office and report-writing to roll up his sleeves and help the workers out. It is no surprise that he briefly joined the Trotskyist opposition in 1923, a lapse which he managed to survive. Even though he had clearly found his niche as a party activist, he always wanted to make up for his lack of education and at one time had ambitions to become an engineer. He made two attempts to return to college: in the early 1920s he went to a party ‘workers’ faculty’ (rabfak) to prepare him for a course at mining technical college, and in 1929 he went to the Industrial Academy in Moscow. Each time he found the academic demands a struggle, and returned to full-time party work. The Radical Marxist politics of the late 1920s were especially appealing to him and the populist Khrushchev could support Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ with genuine enthusiasm. He was rapidly promoted and by 1932 was effectively running the Moscow party organization as Kaganovich’s deputy. One of his most high-profile jobs was overseeing the construction of the first two lines of the Moscow Metro, with its people’s-palace-style stations bedecked with chandeliers and statuary. He was the ideal early Stalinist party boss: enthusiastic, mobilizing, down in the tunnels day and night, driving his workers on to achieve extraordinary feats despite immense hardship and numerous accidents. He was also prepared to implement Stalin’s repressions, and benefited from them when he replaced the purged boss of the Ukrainian party in 1938. Like many other party members, however, he became disillusioned and angry as he saw people he knew to be innocent accused and killed. He reportedly told an old friend at the time, ‘When I can, I’ll settle with that Mudakshvili in full’ – combining the word for ‘prick’ (mudak) with Djugashvili (Stalin).28