The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The Hungarian events could not have been more painful for Khrushchev. ‘Budapest was like a nail in my head,’ he remembered.43 Intent on transforming Stalin’s empire into a fraternity of nations, he now had to make a stark choice between brutal imperialism and humiliating retreat. The choice was made all the more embarrassing because simultaneously the old colonial powers, Britain and France, were secretly helping Israel against Nasser in Egypt, in their ill-fated attempt to restore neo-imperial influence in the Middle East. On 30 October the Presidium took an extraordinary decision: to accept that Hungary could go its own way; they would rule out force, withdraw troops and negotiate.44 But this idealistic line lasted for precisely one day. As the Presidium met, violence on both sides in Hungary was escalating. Nagy could no longer channel popular resentment into reformist Communism and had bowed to popular pressure, calling for the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and the creation of a multi-party Popular Front government. From Moscow’s point of view there was now a real risk of revolutionary contagion. Disturbances broke out throughout the region, and Romania closed its border with Hungary as students from its Hungarian minority demonstrated in Transylvania. Khrushchev was terrified that the West would intervene; his whole reforming project would collapse and the Stalinist hard-liners would have been proved right. According to one witness, Khrushchev told Tito that people would say ‘when Stalin was in command everybody obeyed and there were no big shocks, but that now, ever since they had come to power… Russia had suffered defeat and the loss of Hungary.’45

  On 31 October, Khrushchev reversed his earlier decision. János Kádár, a reformist who had been imprisoned by the Stalinists, was taken to Moscow and persuaded to return to Hungary with Soviet tanks, on condition that there would be no return to the old order once the rebellion had been put down. On 4 November Warsaw Pact forces entered Hungary and Nagy fled to the Yugoslav embassy. Resistance was heavy. By the 7th – the thirty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution – Kádár had established his new regime after some 2,700 had died in the fighting. Repression was harsh. Twenty-two thousand were sentenced, 13,000 imprisoned, about 350 executed, most of them young workers. Some 200,000 managed to escape to the West.46 Nagy was not so lucky. He was tricked into leaving the Yugoslav embassy and arrested, imprisoned and finally executed in 1958.

  Nineteen fifty-six devastated the reputation of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe; harsh repression of workers’ councils and revolutionary committees looked like counter-revolution, not progress. For many East Europeans, Russia and its satellites seemed the very reincarnation of the reactionary post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance.

  V

  Nineteen fifty-six was also damaging for Communism in Western Europe. Khrushchev looked like an ageing imperialist, not that different from the Socialist French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and his Conservative British counterpart Anthony Eden, who had invaded Egypt at the same time. The Hungarian invasion triggered mass defections in all parties. The Italian Communist Party lost 10 per cent of its membership and Eric Hobsbawm, who remained a Communist after 1956, remembered how difficult it was to deal with the reality of Soviet violence, both past and present. He and his fellow party members ‘lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown’:

  It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but also the memory of that traumatic year… Even after half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries…47

  The party that had the greatest difficulty, though, was the one most closely identified with High Stalinism – the French. Maurice Thorez did his best to limit the effect of the Secret Speech. He had, in fact, been shown it before it was delivered but kept its contents secret; when it was published five months later he even denied its authenticity. The French party was eventually forced to accept that Stalin had made errors, but insisted that he had also achieved much. The term ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’ was abandoned, redolent as it was of Stalin’s cult of personality, but Communist leaders supported the invasion of Hungary, precipitating the defection of Sartre and other intellectuals. The French party remained workerist, loyal to the USSR and relatively closed, though it did make some concessions, finally accepting that a ‘peaceful transition to socialism’ was possible. Thorez even moved towards a form of alliance with the Socialists, and on his death in 1964, Waldeck Rochet established a much more consensual leadership style. By 1968, the party’s membership was creeping up again, to 350,000.

  Italy’s Togliatti, predictably, had a very different response to de-Stalinization. He welcomed Khrushchev’s speech, and indeed went further in his critique (though he still supported the Hungarian invasion). The Soviet model, he declared, was no longer to be obligatory; the Communist world should become ‘polycentric’ – allowing a number of diverse approaches to Communism. The denunciation of Stalin in 1956 weakened the hard-liners, but Togliatti now had to hold the ring between reformists surrounding Giorgio Amendola, who called for the party to forge alliances with the socialists, and a left-wing associated with Pietro Ingrao that favoured a more populist and radical politics. Both sides were demanding a more inclusive party, but this tension, between a more pragmatic, parliamentary road, and a more radical, participatory Marxism, was to divide the party for some time to come.

  The party retained a large membership, and its culture remained vibrant and relatively inclusive at a local level. At its heart lay the ‘festival’ (festa). Initiated to finance and distribute the party newspaper, L’Unità, the feste de l’Unità were modelled on the church feste and competed with them, as a boastful Communist pamphlet from the Bologna region makes clear:

  What incenses the clerics!

  – 276 sectional feste

  – 1500 cell feste

  – an unprecedented Provincial festa

  – 28 million [lire] in contributions48

  The Communist festivals were a mixture of community bonding, entertainment and politics, in that order. They would begin with a procession, the people bearing red flags and banners rather than statues of the Virgin. They would then enter the site of the festa, filled with propaganda stalls and posters on the struggle for justice, in Italy and internationally. But at its centre would be long tables laden with local food and drink, cooked by the comrades (both women and men). To add to the egalitarian atmosphere, party bosses would serve ordinary members at table.49

  The feste reinforced the bonds of community, and Italian Communism was expert at making itself the centre of working-class and peasant neighbourhoods. In some areas, such as Emilia-Romagna in central Italy, a very high proportion of the adult population joined the party. This was far from the Leninist party – a vanguard committed to ideology and revolution. One joined the party to indicate broadly defined socialist values, and because your friends and neighbours were also members. The party might also be able to help out with housing and welfare. The Italian party had similarities with the nineteenth-century German Social Democrats: excluded from power at the top (though not in local councils), it abandoned revolutionary goals, and created its own cultural world.

  Even so, from the 1950s economic change began to erode the party’s support, which had hitherto relied on traditional impoverished groups such as Central Italian sharecroppers.50 Its culture also came under assault from a new consumerism, and it did not always respond well to the challenge. Togliatti had concentrated on securing high cultural prestige and winning over intellectuals, and the Communists were less willing to make concessions to popular culture than their rival Catholics. So, whilst they did organize a series of beauty contests for the coveted title of ‘Miss New Life’ (Miss Vie Nuove), their contest was less popular than the Church’s. Communist intellectuals were unable to hide their suspicion of consumerism and popular music, raging,
for instance, against the music of Elvis Presley and the ‘hysteria and paroxism’ it allegedly caused.51

  Despite the events of 1956, both the French and Italian Communist parties remained powerful political forces. In France, the mass of the membership seemed unperturbed by Hungary, and in Italy membership remained above 2 million for much of the Cold War era, with a youth wing of some 400,000. In the Eastern bloc, too, the violence of that year if anything stabilized politics, and led to a more viable modus vivendi between Communist regimes and society over the next decade. Most East European governments established a more liberal, less austere form of Communism from the late 1950s, and after a period of repression Hungary itself was to become one of the most relaxed countries in the bloc. For their part, potential rebels in Eastern Europe realized they had to make the best of the situation. American covert actions before 1956 had encouraged some to believe that they might intervene, but their refusal to do so in that year showed there was no real plan to ‘roll back’ Communism. The lake had refrozen and the cracks could no longer be seen, but the ice would never again be so thick.

  Eastern Europe was the first region to be ‘stabilized’ after the revolutionary period that followed Stalin’s death. Yet it was some time before the turbulence in the USSR itself was to come to an end. The forces Khrushchev unleashed in Eastern Europe were so powerful he had to use violence to suppress them. But he had barely started his project to transform the Soviet Union.

  VI

  On 13 May 1957, Khrushchev attended a day-long discussion of Soviet writing at the Writers’ Union – a sign of the extraordinary seriousness with which the party treated literature. A number of novels, including Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone of 1956, had elicited vicious attacks from influential Stalinists. The writers listened in trepidation, not knowing which side the leader would take. They were to be disappointed. Khrushchev gave a typically rambling two-hour-long speech, which descended into farce when an elderly Armenian writer interrupted to complain about the shortage of meat in her homeland. Yet the message of the speech was clear: Dudintsev and other writers had been taking their criticism of Stalin too far. It was evident that Khrushchev had not read the book, but had been briefed on it by conservative advisers. Mikoian tried to convince him that Dudintsev was actually on Khrushchev’s side, but failed. He stuck to the view that the novel was slandering the Soviet system. But within two years he had changed his mind; though still critical of the novel, he now declared that it was, nevertheless, ideologically acceptable.52

  It was no surprise that Khrushchev should have spent so much time worrying about Not by Bread Alone. It was an extraordinarily popular novel: ‘Everywhere, in the subway, in the streetcars, in the trolley-buses – young people, adults, and seniors’ were reading it. Mounted police, fearful of unrest, patrolled meetings organized by readers to discuss it. Journals were flooded with letters calling for a purge of the targets of the book – the bureaucrats. Some used language strongly reminiscent of the 1937 Terror. A bricklayer from Tashkent wrote that the novel showed the need for struggle against ‘hidden enemies, the survivals of capitalism in the people’s and our own mind’.53

  It is unsurprising that Khrushchev and his advisers found the novel so difficult to categorize, for it was a roman à thèse (and rather a crude one at that) which understood and sympathized with Khrushchev’s almost Romantic ideas, but also explained why it would always fail. The novel is the story of Lopatkin, an idealistic young physics teacher of the late 1940s. He designs a machine for the centrifugal casting of drainpipes, but although the machine is excellent, he is thwarted at every turn by Stalinist bureaucrats. Chief villain is the ambitious careerist Drozdov. Drozdov is a typical Stalinist of the post-Stalin imagination. He is socially aspirant and a lover of luxury who refuses to associate with ordinary people. He is also a philistine technocrat, whose bed-time reading includes Stalin’s very un-idealistic chapter on dialectical materialism in his Short Course of party history. Drozdov describes his philosophy thus: ‘I belong to the producers of material values. The main spiritual value of our time is the ability to work well, to create the greatest possible quantity of necessary things… The more I strengthen the [economic] base [of society], the firmer our state will be.’54 For Lopatkin, this is an extreme form of ‘vulgar Marxism’. Men need ideals; they cannot live ‘by bread alone’. Lopatkin, though, is in a small minority: cynical bureaucrats hound him and steal his ideas, and eventually succeed in having him banished to a prison camp. Whilst he is there, his friend Professor Galitskii constructs his machine and shows that it works, and when he is released, he is rehabilitated and given a prestigious job. But the corrupt circle of bureaucrats – a ‘hidden empire’, as Dudintsev calls it – remains in power, as materialistic and cynical as ever. They accuse Lopatkin of being a selfish individualist. Now he is a success, why doesn’t he reenter the ‘Soviet collective’ of good ol’ boys, and buy himself a car and a dacha?55 The novel ends with Lopatkin leaving industry to enter politics, vowing to fight the bureaucrats.

  Not by Bread Alone was typical of the novels of its time. It condemned the callous technocracy it saw as typical of late Stalinism, and called for a new Romantic Marxism of creativity, feeling and democracy. This was also the message of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Thaw of 1954, whose title came to define the whole period. The theme chimed with Khrushchev’s view that in everybody lay an innate creativity. If only officials encouraged it to flourish, economic miracles would ensue. In many ways, of course, this Romantic message was close to Stalin’s campaigns against bureaucracy in the late 1920s. But Dudintsev, like Khrushchev, refused to return to the old class-struggle rhetoric of the 1930s. As in the past, the villains were the bureaucrats, but the hero was now an educated person, not a horny-handed worker. Even so, the novel’s overall message was deeply disturbing for Khrushchev. Dudintsev was implying that the elite could not be reformed. The system would be saved by individual creativity; the Soviet ‘collective’ had been corrupted by greed and selfishness.

  It turned out that Dudintsev’s pessimism was more realistic than Khrushchev’s utopianism. Khrushchev hoped to revive the idealistic campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, stripping them of class conflict and workerist exclusivity whilst purging them of the old Stalinist austerity. But he and his allies found themselves confronting a bureaucracy intent on preserving its power; a population more interested in bread than Marxist enthusiasm; and a disaffected intelligentsia, often idealistic but slowly losing its faith in the virtues of the collective spirit.

  Khrushchev outlined his new vision of Communism in a long speech at the twenty-second party congress in 1961. Like Tito, he was appealing to a radical Marxism with some elements of Romantic utopianism, and it is notable that editions of the early Romantic Marx were now appearing in Russian for the first time. For Khrushchev, Lenin and Stalin had, in effect, postponed Communism to the distant future. ‘Socialism’, with its inequalities of income, its use of money to incentivize people to work, and its all-powerful state, would continue for some time. But Khrushchev was impatient, and believed the Soviet people had waited long enough. In 1959 he set up a commission to look into how the USSR might speed up the journey to Communism. It came up with a new party programme, which predicted that the party would build Communism ‘in the main’ by 1980. Khrushchev had hoped that the programme could promise all of Marx’s desiderata, the withering away of the state included. But wiser heads prevailed, and all talk of withering was removed. ‘Communism’ in the 1961 USSR denoted a combination of collectivism, a society in which work would become ‘genuine creativity’, and consumption (a rather loose translation of Marx’s material ‘abundance’). Even so, this was a far cry from the Romantic thinking of the 1840s. Society would be disciplined, but ‘that discipline will depend not on any coercive means, but on fostering a feeling of duty to fulfil one’s obligations’.56 This would transpire within the next twenty years, but Khrushchev insisted that the time was ripe for the end of repression immediat
ely. Indeed, the ‘class struggle’ was formally ended. The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, founded by Lenin, was abolished. The USSR now included all classes, and was described as an ‘All-People’s State’; one class, the proletariat, and its vanguard, the party, no longer lorded it over the others.

  How, though, could Khrushchev reconcile the dream of creative work and the promise of outpacing Western living standards? Marx’s Communism did indeed promise material abundance: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ But the principles of Western consumerism had more to do with desires than need. Also, Western consumer culture – with its focus on the home, the nuclear family and the individual – was deeply corrosive of Communist collectivism. The Czech Zdeněk Mlynář understood how dangerous Khrushchev’s new consumerist goal was for the Communist system:

  Stalin never permitted comparisons of socialism or Communism with capitalist reality because he argued that an entirely new world was being built here that could not be compared with any preceding system. Khrushchev, with his slogan ‘Catch up with and surpass America’, changed the situation fundamentally for the average Soviet citizen… After that… a comparison was indeed made… He wanted to strengthen people’s faith in the Soviet system, but in fact the practical comparison with the West had the opposite effect and constantly weakened that faith.57

  The scale of the task confronting Khrushchev became evident in the dramatic ‘kitchen debate’ between Khrushchev and US Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1959. As part of Khrushchev’s new ‘peaceful competition’ between ideologies, the Americans were allowed to stage an exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, which included a model six-room ranch house, its kitchen packed with the latest appliances. The two leaders, equally brittle and belligerent, found themselves confronting one another. Khrushchev was rattled when told that a typical American steelworker could buy this $14,000 house. In a reply that convinced no one he blustered: ‘You think the Russians are dumbfounded by this exhibition. But the fact is that nearly all newly-built Russian houses have this equipment. You need dollars in the United States to get this house, but here all you need is to be born a citizen.’58