The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Khrushchev’s attitude towards Stalin’s legacy was therefore more complex and ambiguous than that of his colleagues. Beria and Malenkov saw Stalin’s repressions as irrational, and had no trouble cutting themselves loose from the Boss. Khrushchev, in contrast, had a more emotional reaction: Burlatskii remembered that he was always moved by the fate of individuals, and frequently launched into long, guilt-ridden monologues on the victims of the Terror.29 He was as determined as his colleagues to replace Stalinist dogmatism and xenophobia with a new world of science and modernity, but he had been forged by the party of the 1920s and 1930. He was a true believer in the ideals of military-style Radical Communism – the collective, socialism, achieving great things by force of will. So whilst determined to abandon violence, he tried to revive the mass mobilizing spirit that had so often been its progenitor.

  The differences between Malenkov’s and Khrushchev’s reform programmes soon became obvious. Whilst Malenkov was willing to sacrifice guns for butter Khrushchev insisted that it was perfectly possible to have both. To square the circle he looked to the mass mobilization methods of 1930s Moscow, proposing a massive expansion of the area devoted to grain and maize, especially in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan – the so-called ‘Virgin Lands Programme’ of 1954. This was a typical Khrushchev solution. It was massively ambitious, claiming to solve the food problem at a stroke; and it relied on the self-sacrifice of some 300,000 young Komsomol ‘volunteers’ who were sent to these remote regions in specially chartered trains. And for a time it appeared to be a huge success – the 1958 harvest was almost 70 per cent above the 1949–53 average.

  Khrushchev’s solutions may have seemed naïvely optimistic to some, but they were, in fact, in greater accord with the party’s culture than Malenkov’s, which appealed principally to the urban managerial and educated classes. This popularity was easy to explain: Khrushchev was not asking the USSR to retreat before a more powerful West, risking a ‘roll-back’ of Communism. Nor was he challenging entrenched military and heavy industrial interests. And he was also giving the leading role to the Communist Party and the Central Committee. After 1945, Stalin’s lack of interest in grand ideological campaigns had led to a decline in the party’s influence in relation to state administrative bodies, but Khrushchev promised to put it back at the very centre of Soviet politics. It is no surprise that he had no trouble winning over the party’s Central Committee in engineering the fall of Malenkov.

  Khrushchev now had the power to impose his new vision, and he did so in a momentous act of parricide: his denunciation of Stalin at the twentieth party congress in February 1956. As Mao justly commented, Khrushchev did not just criticize Stalin, he ‘killed’ him. There were various reasons for this brave, if reckless, step. In part, Khrushchev was motivated by raw politics: although Khrushchev had taken part in the Terror, his rivals, Molotov and Kaganovich, were far more closely implicated, and any attack on Stalin was effectively an attack on them. Nevertheless, there was clearly an idealistic motive to the speech. Khrushchev was convinced that the party’s moral stature was central to its success, and the only way to restore that stature was to admit the horrors of the past and start anew.

  On 25 February, after an exhausting ten days of Congress speeches, the Soviet delegates were asked to stay for an extra meeting. The speech Khrushchev gave at this ‘secret’ session was probably the most extraordinary in the history of the Soviet Communist Party. His excoriating denunciation of the vozhd lasted for four hours. In it he detailed Stalin’s responsibility for the torture and murder of ‘honest and innocent Communists’; his cruel deportation of whole peoples; his vainglorious recklessness during the war; and his treachery towards Leninist principles. Khrushchev delivered the speech at a highly emotional pitch, at one point even berating Stalin’s old associates: ‘Hey you, Klim,’ he sneered at Kliment Voroshilov, ‘cut out the lying. You should have done it long ago. You’re old and decrepit by now. Can’t you find the courage and conscience to tell the truth about what you saw with your own eyes?’30 Yet despite this language, Khrushchev’s was a controlled and calculated attack. Stalin alone, with his ‘cult of personality’, was responsible for the Terror; he had gone to the bad from the mid-1930s, after which he had built the foundations of the Stalinist system. The party had been his victim, and now he had gone, it would be resurrected, pure in spirit.31 It was evident that neither the party, nor the Plan, nor the collective farm would be threatened by Khrushchev’s denunciation.

  The audience was stunned. Accustomed to achingly dull speeches larded with ideological clichés, they could not believe their ears. Ageing party bosses, realizing its incendiary impact, reached for their heart medication. But the speech was also, of course, fundamentally implausible, for it would be extremely difficult to condemn the post-1934 Stalin without also discrediting the whole system which he, and Lenin before him, had built. Moreover, as Khrushchev well knew, the ‘secret’ speech could not be confined to Communist Party circles and was bound to become widely known. Soon there was a rash of ‘demagogic’ speeches and Stalin statues were vandalized. Meanwhile demonstrations broke out in Georgia, in defence of its disgraced son.32 But the greatest impact, predictably, was on the region where the hold of Soviet Communism was at its weakest – in Eastern Europe.

  IV

  In 1953 a Russian theatre company staged a production of Hamlet in Budapest. Even though few would understand the Russian-language performance, this was an important ceremonial occasion, when the imperial power would demonstrate its generosity and cultural prestige to the cream of Hungarian society – on this occasion, the Communist ideology chief, József Révai, was in attendance. This time, though, there was one major difference from the past. Although the old Communist leaders were still in power, Stalin was dead. A journalist, sent to cover the performance, remembers:

  Everybody knew that nobody would understand anything, but it was packed, and I was there from the radio. We were behind Révai’s box and there was a scene where the ghost is talking to Hamlet and the actor was just repeating ‘Gamlet, Gamlet’ [the Russian pronunciation of ‘Hamlet’], and there was an incredible murmur of ‘Gamlet, Gamlet, idi siuda, davai chasy!’ [Russian for: ‘Hamlet, Hamlet. Come here. Give me your watch!’]… everybody in the audience thought they alone were murmuring that stupid thing, and then the actor also said, ‘Gamlet, Gamlet, idi siuda, davai chasy!’ That was the Russians in forty-five: idi siuda, davai chasy! I’ll never forget Révai’s face; it lengthened and paled. Then the entire audience was whispering, ‘Gamlet, Gamlet, idi siuda, davai chasy!’33

  This may have been a minor revolution, but it was a revolution all the same. The Hungarian intelligentsia were telling the Soviets what they thought of them: they were not the high-minded missionaries of a superior civilization they claimed to be; they were crass imperialists, no different from the Red Army occupiers of 1945 who had seized Hungarians’ valuables – including their watches – as war booty.

  In Hungary, especially, such anti-imperialist mutterings amongst the middle classes following Stalin’s death were predictable. Hungary, along with Poland, presented the most united opposition to Moscow. All social classes could identify with their powerful nationalisms, in which anti-Russian feeling featured strongly. Elsewhere societies were more divided. In East Germany – where much of the old elite had been killed or had fled to the West, and Czechoslovakia – where indigenous Communism still had a hold – middle-class groups were less angry. Here it was workers who rebelled. And paradoxically it was generally not hard-line Stalinists who provoked these revolts but Malenkov-appointed reformists. For Moscow’s liberalizing reforms often helped the middle classes and peasants rather than the workers. Workers may have been disadvantaged under High Stalinism, but they did not do well from market reforms either.

  Stalin’s death put all of the ‘little Stalins’ under pressure. Beria and Malenkov had an extensive intelligence network and realized how fragile Soviet rule was in Eastern Europe. Reform was deemed
essential to shore up the crumbling empire. East European leaders were bullied into adopting a ‘New Course’ – a mixture of technocratic and decentralizing reforms. East Germany, the biggest worry for Moscow, was the first in line. The rigid Ulbricht – whom even the conservative Molotov thought ‘somewhat blunt and lacked flexibility’ – was summoned and told of the Kremlin’s ‘grave concern about the situation in the GDR’.34 In June 1953 he reluctantly introduced reforms, which helped small and medium-scale enterprises, lessened discrimination against the bourgeoisie, and relaxed controls in the countryside. They did not, however, improve workers’ wages or reduce Plan targets. On 16 June the labourers building the monumental Stalinallee boulevard protested, sparking two days of working-class strikes and risings throughout East Germany. Only Soviet troops rescued the regime. Ulbricht beat a rapid retreat and made concessions to the workers, but the incident was profoundly embarrassing for this alleged workers’ state.

  Czechoslovakia witnessed similar unrest in the same month and for much the same reasons. Shortly after attending Stalin’s funeral, Klement Gottwald died (probably from an alcohol-related illness), and a new collective leadership took power. The veteran trade unionist Antonín Zápotocký, a Malenkov protégé, became President, and Antonín Novotný, a member of Khrushchev’s client network, party boss. Zápotocký pleased peasants with the end of forced collectivization, but his simultaneous currency reform hit workers’ living standards. The result was serious unrest in the Lenin (now, and formerly, Škoda) car plant in Plzeň – strikes, the burning of Soviet flags and demands for free elections. Repression was swift and brutal, but again the workers ultimately got their way and received higher wages.

  All leaders in the Eastern bloc were forced to bend to the winds of change coming from Moscow. Collective agriculture was relaxed, whilst in some places collective leaderships replaced the little Stalins, at least in theory. Even so, old Stalinist regimes remained in control, and in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Poland reforms were limited.

  It seemed, by late 1954, that the East European regimes had largely weathered the storm of Stalin’s demise with a mixture of concessions and repression. There was one notable exception – Hungary – and here the problem was Moscow’s indecision. Like Ulbricht, the Hungarian leader Rákosi was summoned to Moscow and forced to accept the Malenkov ally, Imre Nagy, as Prime Minister. Nagy, his avuncular bourgeois appearance only marred by a luxuriant Stalin-style moustache, was a veteran Comintern official who, like Béla Kun, converted to Bolshevism whilst imprisoned by the Russians during World War I and was a resident of Moscow in the 1930s. Unlike Kun, however, he was a more Pragmatic Marxist and a follower of Bukharin’s pro-peasant ideas.35 A struggle between Nagy and Rákosi ensued, Nagy seeking to push through the New Course and Rákosi, supported by much of officialdom, seeking to sabotage it. The conflict ended in 1955 with Malenkov’s, and with him Nagy’s, fall, and the return of Rákosi. But the obvious instability at the top quickly spread to all classes and bred popular dissent. The Hungarian intelligentsia, who had been relatively passive, high up in Stalin’s imperial edifices, now seemed willing to join the workers. The young poet Sándor Csoóri expressed their feelings of guilt in 1953, remembering how he had lived ‘on the topmost heights’ ignoring the ‘harsher reality’ of his people staggering ‘among over-fulfillings’ and ‘miraculous’ Plan targets.36

  The apparent stabilization of the old order in Eastern Europe after Stalin’s death was therefore rather fragile. Even so, Khrushchev still tried to replace the old paternalistic relationship between the USSR and its satellites with a more fraternal one – for both moral and economic reasons. In April 1956 he abolished Stalin’s instrument of control, the Cominform, and he also sought to repair relations with Yugoslavia. From 1955 he wooed Tito assiduously, trusting that their common hatred of Stalin would persuade Tito to rejoin the Soviet bloc. He sincerely hoped that the Secret Speech would draw a line under the past, reunify the bloc, and legitimize a new cohort of East European leaders committed to the New Course.

  However, it proved difficult to heal the wounds inflicted by Stalinist imperialism. Tito welcomed the diplomatic rapprochement, but he refused to give up his ideological independence, and continued to promote the Yugoslav model as an alternative to the Soviet one. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe itself, Moscow’s more liberal policy threatened to destabilize Communism, and Soviet control.

  The first crisis developed in Poland. The Secret Speech had killed not only Stalin’s reputation, but also Poland’s party leader Bierut, who was ill in hospital; on reading the text after the session he was so shocked by Khrushchev’s lèse-majesté that he succumbed to a fatal heart attack and died. The new leader, Edvard Ochab, bent to the Malenkovian line and implemented moderate New Course reforms, but they failed to prevent popular rebellion.

  As in East Berlin and Plzeň, it was workers who started the protests, this time in Poznań. Low living standards lay at the root of the discontent, and as so often in Communist systems, workers condemned Communists from the ‘left’ for exploiting them as the capitalists had done. As one older worker complained:

  I have slaved all my life. I’ve been told that before the war it was the capitalists who profited from my work. Who profits now? … It is a treat when I give the children butter on their bread on Sundays. It was never so bad as that before the war.37

  Many believed that the Russians, not the Polish Communists, were really profiting from the exploitative system. Butter, it was alleged, was being shipped eastwards; ‘Glory to our Polish railway workers!’ Poles joked. ‘If it weren’t for them, we’d have to carry our coal to the east on our backs.’38

  The Poznań riots of June 1956 were put down, but war then broke out within the party between the Stalinists and reformers led by Gomułka, now released from gaol. Pressed by an increasingly angry public opinion, the Polish Communist Party planned to install Gomułka as First Secretary and remove the Soviet-imposed Minister of Defence, Marshal Rokossovskii. The Soviets were seriously concerned. They regarded Gomułka as anti-Soviet and Khrushchev even feared that ‘Poland might break away from us at any moment.’ On the morning of the crucial Central Committee meeting on 19 October, a delegation including Khrushchev, Mikoian, Molotov, Kaganovich and Marshal Koniev (the commander of the new Warsaw military pact of Communist states) flew to Warsaw in a dramatic move to forestall the reformist coup. At the same time Soviet troops were moved to the border. Talks between the Russians and the Gomułkists continued into the night. The explosive Khrushchev was furious at what he saw as the Poles’ rude resistance; indeed he was so incensed that on his arrival in Warsaw he had shouted and shaken his fist at Ochab in full view of the airport staff.39 However, despite his apparent weakness, Gomułka prevailed. He may not have had superior military power, but he had the party, the secret services and much of the nation behind him. He insisted, moreover, that he had no intention of ending party control or taking Poland out of the Soviet bloc. Reform would be limited to decollectivization, liberalizing economic reforms, freedoms for the influential Catholic Church, and limited ‘socialist democracy’. The uninvited guests returned to Moscow, apparently reassured, but the following day Khrushchev’s anger returned and he ordered that troops be sent in. Mikoian, realizing that he might regret it, managed to delay the final decision, and Khrushchev again changed his mind.40 An invasion had been averted – just.

  Hungary was less fortunate because the party was more divided. Hard-liners had more influence, convinced by the failures of 1919 that only harsh, Stalinist methods could break the reactionary classes. The reformist Communists, unlike their Polish comrades, therefore did not have the power to defuse popular discontent. Khrushchev forced Rákosi to resign in July 1956, but imposed another leader with hard-line connections, Ernö Gerö. Unrest continued, and on 23 October demonstrating workers raided the civil defence weapons stores in their factories. Gerö panicked, and Soviet troops were called in, which only stoked the unrest. The Communist power stru
cture, highly divided, disintegrated within a few days; revolutionary committees and worker councils filled the vacuum. Gerö tried to recover the situation by appointing Nagy as Prime Minister but it was too late. Nagy could no more control the popular anger than Gerö; if he was to stay on the crest of the revolutionary wave he had to become ever more radical.

  Delacroix would have recognized the Budapest of October 1956. As Miklós Molnár, a Communist and participant in the Hungarian Uprising, has written, this was ‘perhaps the last of the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Europe will probably never see again this familiar and romantic picture of the rebel, gun in hand, cries of freedom on his lips, fighting for something.’41 Hungary’s was a genuinely spontaneous, cross-class revolution; it included many different political strands, from radical left to radical right. There was no time to develop a coherent programme. Initially, the rebels had no plans to destroy one-party rule but only to modify it; to transform an austere, unforgiving and imperial socialism into a more humane and national one. The rebels’ first manifesto of 23 October even adopted the rhetoric of Leninism to condemn the current regime. Béla Kovács, a former chair of the old peasant Small-holder Party, urged that the changes of 1945–8 be preserved: ‘no one should dream of the old order. The world of counts, bankers and capitalists is gone for good; anyone who sees things now as if it were 1939 or 1945 is no authentic Smallholder.’42 Doubtless, had the insurgents actually formed a government, tensions between democratic socialists and nationalists would have surfaced rapidly.