The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Bandung saw the birth of the ‘Third World’ as a new entity, independent of both the ‘First’ West and the ‘Second’ East. The conference agreed on the need to escape economic dependence on the First World – described by Sukarno as colonialism in modern dress – through economic cooperation. It also resolved to fight against the dangers of nuclear war. In his rousing speech to the conference, Sukarno urged the African and Asian South to deploy the ‘moral violence of nations in favour of peace’, standing up to the militarism of the two Cold War blocs.10

  The Bandung Conference marked the entry of an identifiable ‘South’ into world politics, and the power of anti-imperialism. Though the old empires were clearly waning, many were clearly determined to hang on, or at least retain influence after decolonization by shaping the politics of the successor states. By the early 1960s, only a few states remained under white control – the Portuguese colonies, mostly in Africa, South Africa and Rhodesia. Nevertheless, many Third World leaders still saw imperialism as a powerful force, and notions of ‘neo-colonialism’ and informal empire were much discussed, especially in connection with the United States and its prominent role as the new supporter of old, pro-Western collaborators.

  However, debates at Bandung also underlined how far Stalin’s Communism was tarred with the imperialist brush, opening the way for the Chinese and the Yugoslavs to challenge the USSR as the true and legitimate leader of global Communism. Even more worrying for the Soviets was a meeting the following year on the Yugoslav island of Brijuni between Tito, Nehru and Nasser. There plans were made to turn the Third World into a foreign policy bloc with a ‘plague on both your houses’ stance towards the superpowers. The founding of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ in 1961 in Belgrade was the result.11

  Khrushchev was swift to respond to the challenge. He and his ideologists were convinced that decolonization provided enormous opportunities for Soviet socialism. The USSR, he believed, could provide an attractive model to Third World nationalists – one that combined a long record of anti-imperialism, a commitment to social justice, and technological progress symbolized by the Virgin Lands project and sputnik. With Soviet encouragement, he argued, bourgeois ‘progressive’ nationalists would gradually move into the socialist camp; meanwhile, as their economies developed and working classes became stronger, anti-imperialism would become anti-capitalism. This transition, Khrushchev insisted, could be peaceful; it need not necessarily be a violent, revolutionary one, involving vanguard parties and class struggle. The progressive Third World was to be a ‘zone of peace’.12

  Shortly after Bandung, therefore, Khrushchev hurriedly organized a series of state visits to Yugoslavia, India and Burma, aimed at restoring the Soviets’ image amongst the anti-imperialist left; he also sent an emissary to the Middle East to forge links with Nasser. This marked a dramatic departure from the late-Stalinist view of all non-aligned leaders as potential enemies,13 and it necessitated a major change in Soviet doctrine, for with the end of the Popular Front in 1947 the USSR had seen the world as divided into ‘two camps’. Khrushchev announced the end of the old Stalinist worldview at the twentieth party congress in 1956. The USSR, he proclaimed in 1960, was happy to see ‘national democratic states’, in which Communists forged alliances with left-wing ‘bourgeois’ nationalists.14

  This was, in effect, a version of the old ‘united front’ policy, with ‘bourgeois’ nationalist governments taking the place of nationalist parties. The new policy took the form of increased aid to Nehru’s India, Nkrumah’s Ghana, Sukarno’s Indonesia and Ben Bella’s Algeria. But from a propaganda perspective, Khrushchev’s most effective intervention was in formerly Belgian Congo (Congo-Léopoldville, later Zaire). On giving the Congo independence in 1960, the Belgians, with the support of the Americans, had backed an insurgency against the elected left-wing nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba’s capture and assassination in 1961 was a setback to Soviet policy, but he became a martyr to the cause of Soviet-backed anti-imperialism, and his death resonated throughout Africa.

  Following the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, meanwhile, the Chinese provided stiff competition to Moscow in its quest for Third World influence. In the early 1960s, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi crisscrossed Africa and Asia, and visited large numbers of non-aligned leaders from Burma to Egypt, from Algeria to Ethiopia. The Chinese now presented themselves as a radical alternative to the Soviets and strong opponents of the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West. In 1965, Lin Biao, the radical military leader, argued that Chinese guerrilla experience was much more suited to freedom struggles in agrarian societies than the Soviet model. Their old strategy of ‘encircling the cities by first liberating the countryside’ could be applied to the whole world: the West constituted the ‘world’s cities’, whilst Latin America, Africa and Asia were the ‘world’s countryside’.15 People’s wars had to be fought against feudalism and imperialism.

  The Chinese message was an appealing one for many Third World Communists. As the head of the powerful Indonesian Communist Party, Dipa Aidit, told a foreign Communist delegation, Communist regimes like the Soviet one would inevitably become ‘“rich fat cats” at the expense of backward countries and will lose their revolutionary spirit’. He was particularly exercised by the fact that he had paid much more for a shirt in Moscow than in New York, and even then the quality had been distinctly inferior – proof-positive that the Russians were even more money-grubbing than the Americans.16 The Indonesian party was one of the main allies of the Chinese, but Beijing also funded the Vietnamese and a number of African and Middle Eastern non-Communist regimes and independence movements.

  The 1960s Third World ‘united front’ of indigenous socialists and Communists, like its 1920s predecessor, was highly unstable, for the renewed prestige of international Marxism increased Communist support in many post-colonial societies, which inevitably threatened nationalist leaders. Nasser responded by brutally suppressing the Egyptian Communists in 1959, and Abdel Karim Qassim of Iraq, a left-wing nationalist leader who came to power in 1958 in collaboration with the Communists, soon began to regret the alliance. For whilst there were only about 25,000 Iraqi Communist Party members, affiliated mass organizations boasted some million members, about a fifth of the population.17 One of the most striking examples of tensions between left nationalists and Communists occurred in India, where the Communist Party of India (CPI) won elections in the highly caste-divided southwestern state of Kerala in 1957, partly with the support of low-caste groups. The CPI, with Moscow’s support, pursued a non-revolutionary set of policies. Indeed its plans for land reform were strikingly similar to Nehru’s own ideas. Nevertheless, it soon encountered serious opposition from conservative groups, and especially from the powerful Catholic Church, which opposed its education policies. The Catholics formed a ‘Liberationist’ militia, and local Communists responded. In 1959 the threat of a Catholic coup d’état forced the Communist Chief Minister Elamkulam Namboodiripad to call on the centre for help, and Nehru took advantage of the crisis to dismiss the government in July.18

  Khrushchev’s efforts to improve the image of the USSR amongst Third World leaders benefited enormously from the Americans’ deep mistrust of Third World nationalism. In the years after the War, the United States agonized over how to deal with the radical South. Its leaders understood that European imperialists and conservative local elites were fuelling popular radicalism, and yet they were afraid that nationalists – many of whom were demanding land redistribution and other social changes – might ally with Moscow. In the early years, the Americans generally maintained their anti-imperial position. In 1949, for example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned the Netherlands that it would be deprived of Marshall Plan aid and military help if it used force to re-impose its rule on Indonesia. Indonesian independence rapidly followed.

  However the ‘loss’ of China to Communism in 1949 had a major impact on American policy – it was a devastating trauma, and loomed over American foreign polic
y for years. Washington’s belief that it could ‘contain’ Communism throughout the world was shaken, and policy-makers increasingly moved from idealism to realpolitik; from the optimistic belief that Third World states could be converted to American-style liberal democracy, to a pessimistic fear that anybody who did not fully support private property, the free market and the American alliance was likely to defect to Moscow. The result was a tendency to exaggerate the Communist threat and regard all socially radical nationalisms as potentially dangerous. This attitude led in turn to a strategy of supporting European empires or narrowly based conservative elites, which naturally fuelled Third World fears of ‘neo-colonialism’, a condition in which the vintage European empires seemed merely to have been replaced by a new American model. Unsurprisingly, this apparently seamless connection between European empire and American hegemony helped Moscow and Beijing increase their influence amongst Third World nationalists.

  Perhaps the most long-lasting result of this change in Washington was the jettisoning of serious efforts to lessen economic inequalities between the First and the Third Worlds. Whilst there was never any serious chance of a Marshall Plan for the South, the British liberal economist John Maynard Keynes had persuaded the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 to extend the benefits of the new financial system in that direction, by establishing an International Trade Organization with the power to stabilize the commodity prices on which poor countries depended so greatly. However, the ratification of Keynes’s plan by the United States Congress was delayed, and after 1949 suspicion of international organizations in the United States was such that it was never passed. Its replacement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), offered no support for commodity prices. The result was growing economic inequality between the industrial North and agrarian South, as improving technology depressed agricultural prices whilst industrial prices rose. The economies of the South did grow during the 1950s and 1960s, but much more slowly than those of the industrialized North.19 Many poor countries found themselves trapped, unable to rise up the ladder of development.

  Of more immediate importance, though, was the change in American foreign policy. In 1953, as the USSR began to move away from Stalin’s Manichaean power politics, the new administration of President Eisenhower embraced realpolitik – at least insofar as the Third World was concerned. The administration accepted that anti-Western feelings were growing, and were the result of ‘racial feelings, anti-colonialism, rising nationalism, popular demand for rapid social and economic progress’ and other deep-seated causes.20 And it was sometimes acknowledged that the United States needed to win hearts and minds, to wean nationalists away from Communism. But ‘soft power’ was less central to American policy under the Eisenhower administration than the use of force, often in the form of military aid to strong men and dictators. Secretary of State Dulles was convinced that Communism was an ‘internationalist conspiracy, not an indigenous movement’ (even in Latin America where there was, as yet, little Soviet involvement), and he favoured firm action.21

  One of the main features of Eisenhower’s Cold War strategy in the Third World, therefore, was the use of the CIA to stage coups d’état against nationalists deemed to be too close to Communism. The first attack on a popularly elected government targeted that of the nationalist President of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq. Fearing that he would deliver oil supplies to the Soviets, the CIA organized a successful coup in 1953.

  Mossadeq, however, was not alone. The United States found itself facing a whole series of popular nationalist leaders in the Middle East, committed to destroying European influence, and willing to make tactical alliances with the USSR. Sometimes the Americans intervened successfully, for instance saving the regime of the Lebanese President Camille Chamoun against radical challengers. Other cases were more difficult: Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, provoking the bungled British, French and Israeli invasion.

  By the 1950s, the United States even found itself moving closer to a state that was regarded by Third World nationalists as the most egregious example of imperialism and racism: South Africa. Despite CIA warnings about increasing African opposition to apartheid, American relations with South Africa actually strengthened during the 1950s as Washington sought strategic and economic advantages.

  But it was Vietnam that offered the most stark example of the United States’ assumption of the mantle of the old European empires. President Roosevelt had been hostile to the continuation of French rule after World War II, but in 1950 Truman performed an about-turn: fearful that Communist victory in Vietnam would lead to the serial collapse of pro-Western regimes throughout South-East Asia, the Americans reluctantly compromised their anti-imperialist principles and recognized the French-backed South Vietnamese Bao Dai regime. In 1953 Eisenhower went further and approved the financing of most of the French campaign. But even that could not stop the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and their withdrawal from Vietnam. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese wanted war to continue against the Americans, and they therefore pressed a reluctant Ho Chi Minh to agree to a temporary partition of Vietnam into North and South, pending elections (which were never held). He would control the North, whilst the South would be run by the American-backed Ngo Dinh Diem – a nationalist politician who had parted from Bao Dai in the early 1930s.

  For some time it looked as if the American strategy had worked. Diem, who had good anti-French credentials and local support from the Catholic Church, had some initial success in entrenching his government.22 And for some time neither Moscow nor Beijing was eager to revive the war, whilst the North Vietnamese were distracted by a Chinese-style land reform whose violent excesses had become deeply unpopular within the party.23 However, Hanoi became increasingly worried that the division of the country would become permanent, and at the same time the underground Communists in the South, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, sometimes called the ‘Viet Cong’), exploited resentment at the heavy-handed policies of Diem. In 1959, under pressure from the Viet Cong, the North decided to escalate the war.

  The United States may have succeeded in distancing itself from European imperialism by backing Diem’s temporarily stable regime in South Vietnam in 1954, but in the same year it seemed as if Washington were following a Marxist-Leninist manual on how to be an imperialistic capitalist: it really did look as if it was promoting imperialism, and that imperialism really was the highest stage of capitalism. Jacobo Arbenz’s threat to the interests of United Fruit led to lobbying in Washington – the company’s tentacles reached the New York law firm of John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the head of the CIA. More worrying to the White House, however, was Arbenz’s willingness to work with the Guatemalan Communist Party, and despite minimal Soviet involvement, the administration was convinced that Guatemala threatened to become a launching-pad for Communism across the continent. The covert CIA campaign of subversion, ‘Operation Success’, finally toppled Arbenz in 1954.24 The operation may have lived up to its name in the short term, but it would eventually have a profoundly damaging effect on America’s image. In Latin America, it helped to push some of the post-Bandung generation towards radicalism, and the first sign of this process was evident only 90 miles from the shores of the United States, in Cuba.

  III

  As the Americans had feared, after his fall, Arbenz’s radical supporters merely fled the country and continued their struggle elsewhere. Flushed out of Guatemala, Che Guevara, his Cuban friend Ñico López and other radicals made their way to the Mexican capital. Mexico City hosted a number of revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who were in exile but planning to return to Cuba. Che, unlike Fidel, was now a convinced Marxist, but he was still willing to join Fidel’s liberation movement. As Castro remembered:

  Our little group there in Mexico liked him immediately… He knew that in our movement there were even some petit-bourgeois members and a bit of everything. But he saw that we were going to fight a revo
lution of national liberation, an anti-imperialist revolution; he didn’t yet see a socialist revolution, but that was no obstacle – he joined right up, he immediately signed on.25

  The son of a Spanish immigrant who had leased land from United Fruit and planted sugar, Fidel Castro was from a wealthy, but far from aristocratic or well-connected background. He was a rebellious child, and his politics were profoundly different from those of his Franco-sympathizing father. Nevertheless, he valued the ‘military spirit’ of his Jesuit boarding school, and he enjoyed the ‘kind of healthy, austere life I lived in those schools’.26 Whilst studying law in Havana, he became involved in radical politics – though he had little in common with the Cuban Communist party (PSP), which had forged alliances with Batista in the 1940s. Rather, he joined the Ortodoxo party with its roots in the radical nationalism of the nineteenth-century poet-cum-revolutionary José Martí.

  Cuban intellectuals felt the power of American neo-imperialism and capitalism particularly keenly. Following the end of Spanish rule in 1898, Cuba was occupied for four years by the United States, and even after formal independence it remained tightly tied to its northern neighbour. Indeed, its economy was almost wholly integrated into that of the United States. It was highly dependent on income from sugar exports to the United States (and sugar quotas depended on the goodwill of the American Congress), and foreigners owned a large number of the plantations. Havana itself was a cosmopolitan city, full of American expatriates, who were blamed by nationalist moralizers for transforming the city into a centre for organized crime, gambling and sex tourism. It seemed to many educated Cubans that their country was trapped by sugar and the United States in a position of permanent subordination. Only radical change could restore its self-respect.