The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The January Storm buffeted the whole country. The young Gao Yuan, a child of the party establishment, now became a victim of the violence he had previously meted out to others. When he awoke one morning and went out to buy food, he was shocked to see notices posted around the town centre, declaring that ‘the time is ripe to seize power from the counter-revolutionary Party Committee and government’ – an elite that included his father. The rival ‘black’ red guard group, the so-called ‘Mao Zedong Thought Red Guards’, broke into his house and held his father in the painful ‘jet-plane’ position for two hours – kneeling down, his arms outstretched and a red guard foot on his back. They then ceremonially ‘crowned’ him with the cap of an old-style feudal official, as worn by actors in traditional operas, to symbolize his ejection from office.102 Across the land, political factions subjected their enemies to similar public humiliations, torture and even death. Meanwhile in Beijing a secret police-style organization established by Mao, the Central Case Examination Group, investigated and purged the so-called enemies of the Cultural Revolution Group. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were now denounced as ‘China’s Khrushchevs’.

  The high point of Mao’s radicalism came in the summer of 1967, when, realizing that the conservatives were winning, he ordered local military authorities to ‘arm the left’. The results were predictable: the casualties in local battles between conservatives and radicals rose to the thousands. By the end of August Mao had begun to accept that the ‘great chaos’ had become too dangerous, and he launched a new campaign to ‘support the military and cherish the people’ – using the army, which had previously allowed the radicals free rein, to restore central control. Mao toured China establishing new revolutionary committees, thus restoring the shattered party organization, but it was a lengthy process. Competing factions had to be united and radical red guard movements suppressed. The army itself now embarked on a campaign of purging and killing – rather more systematically than the red guards had. This was the period when the Cultural Revolution was at its most bloody and brutal. It was only in September 1968 that the last of the stabilizing revolutionary committees was put in place.

  Alongside political centralization went a restoration of cultural order – especially when it came to the thorny question of Mao’s own cult. As was often the case in Communist regimes, Mao’s cult had emerged during periods of threat, when the leadership needed to consolidate its power – in Yan’an in the early 1940s, and during the leadership crisis surrounding the Great Leap Forward. However, with the Cultural Revolution the leadership began to lose control of a cult that was becoming ever more extravagant – far outstripping that of Stalin.103 As political power crumbled, rival red guards outdid each other to show loyalty to the Chairman, and competitive sycophancy pushed the cult to extreme levels. In some places life became dominated by expressions of loyalty to the Chairman: ‘Quotation gymnastics’ were held, in which participants competed to show their knowledge of Quotations from Chairman Mao, and many meetings began with a ‘loyalty dance’. Some rural expressions of devotion had even more explicitly ritual or religious overtones, with the building of ‘Quotation Pagodas’ housing ‘instruction tablets’. Mao’s words were being treated as if they were Buddhist sutras. The Cultural Revolution leadership in Beijing disapproved of the uncontrolled use of the cult, recognizing that it was really being used to further the ambition of local bosses, and so ultimately weakening Mao. As Kang Sheng explained:

  At present the loyalty dance is being danced everywhere. They say it is loyal [to] Chairman Mao, but in reality it is opposing Chairman Mao… There further exists ‘loyalize’ this, ‘loyalize’ that, wasting the nation’s wealth. This is loyal [to] oneself, giving oneself political capital.104

  Soon, the army made serious efforts to control the cult, imposing rigid codes and practices on its use and thus depriving it of spontaneity. The new ‘three loyalties and four boundless loves’ movement encouraged revolutionary committees to establish strict liturgies, setting out precisely how citizens should show their devotion to Mao. Most extraordinary were the authorities in the Hebei city of Shijiazhuang, who prescribed a detailed set of rituals for all shop sales staff. Before shops opened in the morning, they were to ‘seek instruction’ from the Chairman’s works and in the evening they were to ‘report back’ on the day’s events before a portrait of the Chairman. They were also given a catechism of Mao’s quotations, suitable for opening conversations between salesperson and customer. A sales-clerk welcoming a worker customer, for instance, might say, ‘Vigorously grasp revolution’, whilst the customer would respond, ‘Energetically promote production’, completing the quotation; an elderly person, on the other hand, would be greeted with the phrase ‘Let us wish Chairman Mao a long life!’, and would be expected to reply, ‘Long live Chairman Mao! Long live, long live!’ Naturally these rituals caused deep anxiety, for punishments could be harsh for those who made mistakes. One teacher from Fucheng County in Hebei Province was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment because he had initially written in his diary that a Mao quotation had given him ‘boundless energy’, and then changed the phrase to ‘very much energy’.

  In the cities, the ‘three loyalties and four boundless loves’ movement ended in June 1969, and by then the worst of the violence was over. Nevertheless many remained in prison or exiled to the countryside until the official end of the Cultural Revolution, with Mao’s death in 1976. Estimates suggest that at least a million people died and many more suffered through torture or humiliation in the Cultural Revolution. The lives and the prospects of millions of others were blighted, as a generation of youths was deprived of education. Feng Jicai, the son of a former banker, stressed the long-lasting psychological damage wrought by the persecutions:

  The greatest tragedy of the Cultural Revolution was its torture of people’s souls… My father suffered badly… In the seventies, after countless struggle sessions, he developed a strange problem. At night, he would wake from his nightmares and begin to scream. It was a small place. When he screamed, no one could sleep. But he dragged on until 1989.105

  However, the Cultural Revolution had resolved absolutely nothing. Mao, like Stalin, had hoped to remobilize the country to build a new society, but only violent chaos had ensued. Political leadership in Beijing remained weak and the economy had been wrecked. The Cultural Revolution officially may have continued until 1976, but it was already clear as early as 1968 that the old Radical class struggle waged against the Communist bureaucracy had brought disaster to China and its people.

  With sputnik’s launch in October 1957, the international reputation and self-confidence of Communist regimes reached their zenith. As in Frazer’s Golden Bough, it seemed as if the sacrifice of Stalin, the mythical king, had permitted a reinvigoration of the system. The use of rocket technology to conquer space for the whole of mankind suggested that Communists really had devoted their energy to the service of peace and humanity rather than war and division. By the late 1960s, however, it was clear that efforts in Yugoslavia, the USSR and China to expand the appeal of the regime beyond the rigid Stalinist party, whilst finding new forms of radical mobilization to achieve economic successes, had failed. Tito had, to all intents and purposes, abandoned mobilization and was beginning his journey to the market and the West; Khrushchev found it difficult to escape the crude militarized methods of the 1930s; whilst Mao’s extremism had demonstrated how fearsome and destructive a highly radical, egalitarian Communism could be. But at the same time as these three Communist regimes were finding it difficult to transform their own societies, they found new opportunities abroad, in Latin America and an Africa in the throes of decolonization. And they were joined by a new Communist competitor in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Third World: Cuba.

  Guerrillas

  I

  Early in 1954, a young Argentinian was to be found in the centre of Guatemala City peddling bulb-illuminated pictures of Guatemala’s ‘black Christ’. As the icon partic
ularly appealed to the numerous poor Indians of the city, the trade was surprisingly lucrative. The idea of manufacturing the icons had originally come from Antonio ‘Ñico’ López, a Cuban exile and sometime participant in Fidel Castro’s failed coup of 1953. But it was the Argentinian Ernesto Guevara (nicknamed ‘Che’ after his frequent use of the indigenous Guaraní term meaning ‘hey, you’) who sold them. Though a qualified doctor, Che had been unable to get a job, and he was forced to make ends meet however he could. In a letter home, Guevara described his sales patter: ‘I am selling a precious image of the Lord of Esquipulas, a black Christ who makes amazing miracles… I have a rich list of anecdotes of the Christ’s miracles and I am constantly making up new ones to see if they will sell.’1

  Guevara and López were just two of an eclectic group of Latin American leftists – from Venezuelan Social Democrats to Nicaraguan Communists, from opponents of the Argentinian strong-man Juan Perón to rebels against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista – who had come to see the new radical Republic of Guatemala. Rather like the Europeans who had flocked to Republican Spain eighteen years before, many Latin Americans on the progressive left saw Guatemala, ruled by the socialist Jacobo Arbenz, as the hope of the continent. Guevara himself, still only twenty-six, was a charismatic figure, brave or reckless depending on one’s perspective. But he could also be a tough disciplinarian; he endorsed the Stalinist position on the legitimacy of violence, and his brusque and moralistic manner alienated some. This austere demeanour, however, was leavened by a self-satirizing sense of humour: one of his favourite literary characters was Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the ridiculous would-be knight errant, fighting for hopelessly lost causes.2

  Born to an aristocratic but now impoverished family, Che was a sickly child, whose severe asthma had turned him bookish – he often retreated to read in the family bathroom to escape his chaotic environment. Though physically fragile, he was determined to overcome his physical weakness through willpower and brain-power, and as a youth he set off on his now-famous motorcycle tours of the Latin American continent, when he saw the enormous inequalities between indigenous Indians and affluent whites.

  However, for Che such inequalities were not merely about race, or even class. Like many Latin American intellectuals, he saw them as the consequence of imperialism and colonialism, and of the power of the United States over the continent: its companies’ capitalist exploitation of natural resources, and its cadre of local dictators who maintained semi-imperial control. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Communist-sympathizer and Che’s favourite poet, captured this anger in his 1950 poem ‘The United Fruit Co.’, in which he painted a picture of swarms of tyrant-flies feasting on the rotten fruit of imperialism and corruption.3

  It was Arbenz’s attempts to nationalize the vast lands of el polpo (‘the octopus’) that had attracted many radicals to Guatemala, including Guevara:

  I had the opportunity to pass through the domains of United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala I will perfect myself and achieve what I need to be an authentic revolutionary.4

  El polpo, however, proved resilient, and it was not United Fruit that capitulated but the Arbenz regime. Local conservatives fought back, assisted by the American CIA, which directed a year-long campaign of political and military subversion against Arbenz. Guevara was determined to stay and defend the ‘Guatemalan revolution’, braving the aerial bombing of Guatemala City just as the Communists had defended Madrid. But Arbenz refused to fight and fled the country. Guevara himself, sheltering in the Argentinian embassy, only narrowly avoided arrest at the behest of the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who was determined to stop revolutionaries regrouping elsewhere. In September 1954 he fled to Mexico.

  The fall of Arbenz galvanized the Latin American left, just as the fall of Republican Spain had radicalized it in the 1930s, and Communists took advantage. As in the 1930s, Moscow allowed Communists to ally themselves with other ‘bourgeois’ forces and Communists argued that their combination of modernity and hard-headed discipline could best rid their countries of foreign imperialism. For Che Guevara, certainly, Soviet-style Communism provided the answers, and he criticized Arbenz for failing to embrace Stalinist ruthlessness and organization. His uncompromising approach might have been expected given his upbringing. His father had led campaigns to support the Spanish Republic and, as a child, Che had named their family pet dog Negrina after the pro-Moscow Spanish President Juan Négrin.5

  Even so, there were naturally enormous differences between 1950s Latin America – with its history of foreign interventions – and 1930s Europe, as there were between the Communisms of the period. Communism had become a much more diverse movement, and the success of Asian Communism offered an alternative, rural guerrilla model of revolution to the Third World. From the mid-1950s Moscow began to lose control of international Communism to rival capitals, and Havana, following Castro’s and Che’s Cuban revolution of 1959, was to be one of them. Che, who had once signed a youthful letter to his aunt ‘Stalin II’, gradually became disillusioned with the Soviet tradition, and his nom de guerre certainly suggested he had a different revolutionary style. ‘Hey, You’ was no ‘Man of Steel’, but a much more Radical, even Romantic Marxist.

  Che became an iconic figure, and for a time Cuba became one of the most attractive models for radical nationalists. But the Cubans were not alone: the ‘parricidal’, post-Stalin regimes of Tito and Mao were competing fiercely to attract the new, nationalist Third World leaders. And under Khrushchev, the Soviets themselves were presenting a more idealistic face. They had also abandoned their old Stalinist sectarianism and adopted a more inclusive strategy, forging alliances with non-Marxist-Leninist groups. This was a fluid era in which Soviets, Chinese and Cubans supported an eclectic range of left-wing groups – Radical Marxist guerrillas, Soviet-style modernizers, moderate Communists willing to collaborate with nationalists, and non-Marxist nationalists. After a long period of Stalinist neglect, Communism was now speaking to a wider audience in the Third World at a time when the West was also presenting a more attractive face under the leadership of John F. Kennedy. However, Cuba’s guerrilla Communism was no more successful in sustaining itself than the other Romantic Communisms of the 1960s, whilst the new Communist activism in the Third World caused instability and frightened its opponents, leading to a backlash and a string of Communist defeats. The era of optimism, on both sides of the ideological divide, was not to last.

  II

  Almost a year after the fall of Arbenz, on 18 April 1955, twenty-nine delegates from Asian and African countries assembled in the West Javan city of Bandung to hear Indonesian President Sukarno’s thunderous welcoming speech:

  Yes, there has indeed been a ‘Sturm über Asien’ [Storm over Asia] – and over Africa too… Nations, states have awoken from the sleep of centuries. The passive peoples have gone, the outward tranquillity has made place for struggle and activity… Hurricanes of national awakening and reawakening have swept over the land, shaking it, changing it, changing it for the better.6

  Sukarno’s ‘Storm over Asia’ was a reference to Pudovkin’s 1928 film of that name, a drama about a Mongolian descendant of Genghis Khan who, in 1918, switches allegiance from the imperialist British to the Bolsheviks.7 There were, then, echoes of the old Comintern in Bandung, and, like the Baku conference of ‘Peoples of the East’ of 1920, it was seeking to unite the global ‘South’ in the struggle against imperialism. However, this was categorically not a Communist congress. The Mongolians had not been invited, nor had any other nationalities deemed too close to the Soviets – whether the Soviet Asian republics or the North Koreans. Of the Communist regimes, only the Chinese and North Vietnamese were there. And whilst some of the leading delegates – India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesia’s Ahmed Sukarno – were socialists
(and Nehru had a great deal of sympathy for Soviet-style planning), they were indigenous nationalist socialists, determined to meld socialism with local political traditions, rather than Marxist-Leninists. Being nationalists, they also refused to identify themselves too closely with any bloc, whether Eastern or Western. Indeed, some delegates were strongly anti-Communist – six of the twenty-nine had recently aligned themselves with the United States and Britain. Carlos Romulo, representative of the Filipino regime that had recently suppressed the Communist Huk rebellion, famously quipped: ‘The empires of yesterday on which it used to be said the sun never set are departing one by one from Asia. What we fear now is the new empire of Communism on which we know the sun never rises.’8

  The Chinese refused to accept that their Soviet allies had an empire in Eastern Europe, and the meeting was a fraught one, as delegates argued about the conference’s attitude towards the superpowers. However, Zhou Enlai made a masterful attempt to charm the Bandung leaders, presenting China as a moderate, tolerant friend of the global underdog. He recognized that Marxism-Leninism was a rarity in the new decolonized world, and that compromises were required if China was to have any influence. Romulo complained that he behaved as if he had ‘taken a leaf from Dale Carnegie’s tome on How to Win Friends and Influence People’.9 But Zhou had more respectable theoretical backing for his charm offensive than Dale Carnegie: the Chinese Communists were in their ideologically moderate ‘New Democracy’ phase, and were happy to sanction Communist alliances with bourgeois nationalists.