The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Georghiu-Dej gradually began to distance Romania from the Soviet Union, negotiating the withdrawal of Red Army troops in 1958 and refusing to take sides on the Sino-Soviet split. The final break came in 1962 when Khrushchev tried to launch his new division of labour within Comecon. The Romanians responded by issuing a ‘declaration of autonomy’ in 1964 and began to pursue an independent foreign policy (though within the Warsaw Pact), forging links with Yugoslavia, France and even the United States. On the death of Gheorghiu-Dej the following year, his successor Ceauşescu continued the new nationalist line, which he justified with an intensely chauvinistic ideology.

  Ceauşescu, born in 1918, the son of poor, ethnically Romanian peasants and apprenticed to a cobbler at the age of eleven, had little education. By the age of fifteen, however, he had been elected to the Communist-led Anti-Fascist Committee. From then on he was in and out of prison, where he received an education in Marxism and became part of the Dej faction. On becoming premier in 1965 it seemed that Ceauşescu would probably combine a new nationalist ethos with some form of cultural and economic liberalization, and he tried to gain the support of intellectuals through a limited cultural relaxation. But this was always likely to be temporary. Ceauşescu had been committed to heavy industrial development, quoting the nineteenth-century historian A. D. Xenopol – ‘to remain only agricultural is… to make ourselves for all time the slaves of foreigners’ – and many agreed with him.5 Meanwhile, the Prague Spring convinced Ceauşescu of the dangers of liberal political reforms, and the popularity of his opposition to the Soviet invasion demonstrated the power of Romanian nationalism.

  The tenth party congress of 1969, at which Ceauşescu delivered a marathon speech lasting five and a half hours (punctuated every half an hour by a waiter in a white jacket bringing a glass of water), marked the beginning of his complete control of the party, and the launch of an exceptionally extravagant leadership cult.6 By 1974 he was being compared to Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Pericles, Cromwell, Peter the Great and Napoleon.7 In many ways this was just a more extreme version of Tito’s multifaceted cult, in which the leader posed both as ascetic revolutionary for the party members, and as new king for the peasantry. The principal difference was the elevation of various relatives to high positions, and of his wife, Elena, to cultic status. This was, of course, typically monarchical; as the joke went, if Stalin had created Socialism in One Country, Ceauşescu had established Socialism in One Family. Yet Elena’s virtues were not merely uxorious, but, importantly, scientific. She pursued a career as a research chemist, and from the 1970s was described as ‘eminent personage of Romanian and international science’, ‘Academician Doctor Engineer [Ingener] Elena Ceauşescu’ (hence commonly called ‘Adie’ by the impertinent).8 She was also credited with the invention of a major new polymer, though when asked to discuss her researches in public she became mysteriously tongue-tied.

  Like other Communist leaders in Balkan societies, then, Ceauşescu projected an eclectic mixture of political messages: monarchical, scientific and Communist. He even briefly flirted with Maoism, visiting China in 1971, though he did this largely to establish his independence from Moscow. But trumping all these conflicting attributes of Romanian Communist ideology was ethnic nationalism. In the 1970s, Ceauşescu set about creating an ethnically homogeneous state. Jews were allowed to emigrate, as were Germans (for a price, paid by the West German government), whilst efforts were made to assimilate the resentful Hungarians. Ceauşescu’s chauvinism was clearly difficult to marry with Marxism, though the Romanians did their best, dredging up some obscure jottings by Marx which seemed to condone Romanian claims to Bessarabia.9 But it seems to have been very popular, and the Romanian regime was remarkably successful in attracting intellectuals to its cause.

  On the other side of the Balkans, the Albanian Communists did not espouse such a crudely ethnic nationalism. They had little interest, for instance, in the rights of the Kosovar Albanian minority in Yugoslavia. But like the Romanians, they welcomed the Stalinist model as a way of building national strength.

  Born ten years before Ceauşescu in 1908, Enver Hoxha was a small landowner’s son from southern Albania, and he always claimed that his uncle, an old Albanian patriot, had imbued him with an ardent belief in ‘Albanianism’. Hoxha won a government scholarship to study sciences at Montpellier University, and from there he went to the Sorbonne to study philosophy. He was one of the many Communist leaders of the developing world – including Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai and Pol Pot – who were inducted into Communist culture by the French Communist Party, and it was there that he began to see Stalinism as a solution to Albania’s backwardness. When he returned to Albania, he briefly taught French. But when he refused to join the Fascist Party during the Italian occupation he was sacked. He then set up a tobacconist’s shop which became a centre of undercover Communist activism.

  He was a confident, articulate figure, who, like Tito, liked to dress well. Indeed, sartorial issues lay behind his conflict with the equally vain Tito: when he visited Tito in June 1946, Hoxha was appalled at his arrogance and jealous of his extravagance – his palatial surroundings, white and gold uniform and ‘haughty’ manner. He and his fellow Albanians felt humiliated and patronized. So whilst Tito complained about Soviet imperialistic arrogance, Hoxha saw Tito as the real imperialist. Yugoslav attempts to dominate the region soured the relationship further, and Albania was delighted when Tito broke from the USSR in 1948. Inevitably, therefore, the Soviet–Yugoslav rapprochement of 1955 spoiled Soviet relations with Albania, and Hoxha was further angered at Khrushchev’s attempt, as he saw it, to consign Albania to the status of a permanent agricultural ghetto within Comecon. From 1960 relations between Albania and the USSR deteriorated. The formal break came in 1961, with Hoxha denouncing Khrushchev in typically vituperative language as ‘the greatest counter-revolutionary charlatan and clown the world has ever known’.10 In that year the Third Five-Year Plan launched an intensive programme of Albanian industrialization, and industrial output rose from 18.2 per cent of national income in 1960 to a massive 43.3 per cent in 1985.

  To his orthodox Stalinism Hoxha added a number of other elements. The first was the ethnic and clan politics of Albania. The party systematically favoured the southern Tosks, of whom Hoxha was one – a group that had resented the suzerainty of the northern Ghegs for some time. And within the Tosks, Hoxha depended on a close-knit group of clans. Of sixty-one members of the Central Committee in 1961, there were five married couples (including Hoxha and his wife), and twenty were related as sons-in-law or cousins.11 In glaring contrast to this traditional ‘tribal’ politics was an adherence to Maoism, a tendency that emerged in the 1960s as Albania forged links with China in one of the more curious alliances of the era. Hoxha’s ‘Maoism’, however, was rather closer in spirit to late Stalinism than Chinese Communism. The works of Mao were used to justify his purges, and he also shared Mao’s love of and talent for vitriolic invective. His campaigns, however, were highly controlled, and bore few signs of Mao’s populism.

  The most controlled of the High Stalinist states, however, was undoubtedly North Korea. After the end of the Korean War, and Stalin’s death, direct Soviet influence declined, but Kim continued to use High Stalinist policies, combined with Japanese and indigenous traditions for nationalist objectives. The Korean War had left a deep, unhealed wound in the form of the border dividing North and South; Kim Il Sung faced a threat from the American-backed South, and he himself continued to dream of reunification under his control. After the end of the war a technocratic ‘right’ emerged within the leadership, which argued for a more balanced, consumer-oriented economy, but they were soon defeated and purged. Kim insisted on an industrial and military buildup under the slogan, ‘Arms in the one hand and a hammer and sickle in the other!’12 It was unclear how one hand could manipulate both a hammer and a sickle but in 1958 – the year of China’s Great Leap Forward – Kim believed ‘Great Break’-style storming could overcome any
obstacles. He called this the ‘Chollima’ campaign, after the magical winged horse from Korean mythology that could cover extraordinary distances at great speed.

  Kim was worried about threats from his Communist neighbours to the North – the USSR and China – as much as from the capitalist South; he was therefore determined to build up his defences during the turbulent years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin left him dangerously exposed. Setting out to free himself from the vagaries of Communist-bloc politics, in 1955 Kim began to marginalize Marxism-Leninism, and his philosophy of Juche (usually translated as ‘self-reliance’), became the new ideology of the regime. Juche, in effect, meant national spirit. The main evil in the Juche universe was ‘flunkeyism’ (literally ‘serving the great-ism’ (sadae jui)) – sycophancy towards foreigners and their culture. This echoed the High Stalinist crime of ‘servility to the West’, but this time the targets were the Russians themselves. Kim decried ‘poets who worshipped Pushkin and musicians who adored Tchaikovsky’; ‘flunkeyism was so rampant that some artists drew foreign landscapes instead of our beautiful mountains and rivers’ – he was particularly outraged to find a painting of a Siberian bear in a local hospital.13 His old connections with the Soviets and the Red Army were downplayed, and Kim Jong Il’s official biography was doctored – now he had been born in Korea itself, not the USSR. Iurii Irsenovich Kim had never existed.

  Kim initially deployed Juche during the tensions with the USSR in the early 1960s. But later, during the Cultural Revolution, it was China that became more of a threat. In 1967 radical red guards, seeing in North Korea the ‘feudal’ Communism they were so eager to extirpate, and criticizing Kim for failing to be anti-Soviet enough, began to condemn the regime as ‘revisionist’ and corrupt, and a dispute simmered over the Sino-Korean border.

  Kim responded by emulating aspects of Mao’s leadership cult. North Koreans were now expected to demonstrate the passionately intense emotional attachment to the ‘Great Leader’ that the red guards showed to Mao. However, Kim never copied the chaotic populist mobilizations of Maoist China. Indeed the country has retained his hierarchical order: according to a grim Korean quip, the population was divided into ‘tomatoes’ – those who are red to the core; ‘apples’ – red on the surface but susceptible to ideological improvement; and ‘grapes’, who have no chance of redemption. Heredity and class background (songbun) still play a role in Korean society: the top ‘core class’ are largely the descendants of the workers, peasants and Communists of the 1940s and 1950s, and occupy good jobs; the ‘wavering class’ have opportunities to secure promotion, possibly through the military; whilst the ‘hostile class’ are seen as outcastes, and have lowly jobs. However, observers disagree over the strength of songbun and people’s ability to circumvent it – as over so many other aspects of this mysterious and isolated society.14

  Social hierarchy has been reinforced by ideological controls, and the population continues to be treated as a labour army. Life was, and is, hard. North Koreans generally have to leave for work at 7 a.m., attend political study sessions and meetings between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., work for eight hours with a rest period of three hours at lunchtime, and then attend more study sessions and self-criticism meetings until 10 p.m. (except for mothers with young children who are excused), returning home between 10.30 and 11 p.m. The military model extends to all aspects of everyday life. Everybody is allocated a set of clothes, suited for their work and position, once a year on Kim Il Sung’s birthday, and whilst there are subtle differences in quality according to rank, the styles are all very similar, creating an extraordinary uniformity. They are also of mediocre quality, many of them made of ‘vynalon’, a locally invented synthetic textile derived partly from limestone. Food has been rationed, and droughts, combined with agricultural mismanagement and exports of grain to earn foreign currency, have caused serious shortages and even famines.15

  Despite these crises, however, the regime has survived. After the Cultural Revolution, relations with China improved, and North Korea became more secure internationally. Domestically, too, the regime has been remarkably stable. Defectors report dissatisfaction, especially amongst those social groups that are not favoured by the songbun system, but there is a significant privileged group that benefits from the regime. The regime’s nationalist credentials, its determination to preserve its isolation from the rest of the world, the state’s intrusiveness, and the power of the leadership cult – now under the auspices of Kim Jong Il – have all contributed to its survival, despite a severe deterioration in living standards.

  All three regimes on the periphery of the Eurasian landmass found they could use their own versions of High Stalinism in pursuit of nationalist ambitions. But the Central and East European core was travelling in precisely the opposite direction. As relations between East and West gradually improved from the 1960s, the failures of Khrushchev’s Romantic Communism left them open to the influence of the market and the capitalist world.

  III

  The second part of Kundera’s The Joke is set in the 1960s. Ludvik has long been released from his mining labour battalion and has become a successful academic in a research institute. A journalist comes to interview him about his work, and it transpires that she is Helena, the wife of Zemanek – the party boss who presided over his youthful expulsion from the Communist Eden. Still bitter, Ludvik decides to take his revenge by seducing Helena and breaking up her marriage. But though he succeeds in winning Helena, he fails to wound Zemanek, who is involved in an affair himself and is delighted at Helena’s departure. He also discovers that Zemanek has become a popular reform Communist. His cruel joke aimed at his old enemy has backfired on him. A last encounter with his old friend, the folklore enthusiast Jaroslav at an ersatz folk festival – the ‘Ride of the King’ – reveals that the Slavic folk tradition, now commandeered by the Communist regime, has been emptied of all meaning; it has become a hopelessly vulgar, kitschy entertainment gawped at by uncomprehending teenagers. Though temporarily transported by their love of music, Ludvik’s and Jaroslav’s brief idyll ends when Jaroslav has a heart attack.

  Ludvik is again a victim of his incomprehension of the world around him and, more generally, mankind’s inability to control events. His first joke backfired because he did not understand the puritanism of the late 1940s, whilst his second ‘joke’ fails because he does not realize how far those ideals have decayed by the 1960s. The marriage of Helena and Zemanek, which began as an idealistic Communist union, is a sham. The folk tradition has been deeply corrupted by the state. Ludvik discovers that a world without values is as abhorrent as one of intolerant mass joy.

  Kundera, writing in 1965, captured the changes in Eastern Europe since the end of High Stalinism. In most states, the terrifyingly idealistic enthusiasms of the late 1940s had yielded to a less repressive but more cynical era. The rebellions of the mid-1950s had forced many of the socialist regimes to retreat from High Stalinism, and they had achieved some stability. However, now they had jettisoned their old ambitions, there was a danger they would merely become repressive and infinitely less successful versions of their Western counterparts.

  Immediately after the shock of 1956, it looked as if the Eastern bloc might be subject to new campaigns of revolutionary purity. Khrushchev was sensitive to Chinese criticisms, and the Moscow conference of Communist parties in 1957 launched a new push for collectivization after the brief post-Stalin pause. Except in Poland, where Gomułka managed to ditch collective farms completely, most East European countries completed collectivization by the early 1960s. Yet this was to be the last gasp of ideological optimism in the region. Never again would there be such a concerted advance along the road to Communism.

  The loosening of the imperial reins brought much greater diversity to Eastern Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s. Whilst Yugoslavia, Romania and Albania had escaped Soviet control, even within the Soviet sphere variations were large – from a liberal Hungary at one end of t
he spectrum to an immobile Bulgaria at the other. But beneath the surface they all resembled each other in one respect: Communist parties throughout the region were retreating, and in doing so they were forced to become a different type of animal. The more egalitarian militias or guerrillas of the Soviet First Five-Year Plan and of the Chinese 1950s and 1960s had never been much of a model in Eastern Europe, but even the more orderly armies of High Stalinism no longer seemed to be suitable. One Hungarian low-level party official, interviewed in 1988, put the problem starkly:

  We inherited the structure of the period when it was really a war-like goal to get this country in shape. To start something. That required a large concentration of will-power and force on the part of the party. It was possible only if the party worked with a soldier-like punctuality and discipline. Now the biggest problem of the party is peace. There are no tasks. We are a combat-troop, and there is no war… So, for the present problems, the party is like a bull in a china shop. It attacks everything, wants to fight, to battle, and so on, when the problems have been different for a long time.16

  The remaining Radical elements of High Stalinism were dropped in favour of technocracy and creeping markets. Communists were now much more likely to be professionals and managers than workers. In 1946, only 10.3 per cent of Yugoslavia’s Communists were white-collar workers; by 1968 the proportion had more than quadrupled to 43.8 per cent.17 Secret policemen remained but they were less visible.

  The Communist authorities also made fewer efforts to remould their populations and create the new socialist man. They sought, rather, to establish a workable modus vivendi with the rest of society. The first renegotiation was with the industrial working class, the most rebellious and threatening force. Stalinist efforts to bully workers into increasing productivity were abandoned, and the influential grouping of male skilled workers in heavy industry was bought off with incomes approaching those of educated white-collar employees. Rapidly, therefore, the regimes’ pro-worker rhetoric, so evidently hypocritical in the Stalinist period, began to mean something. But as will be seen, these concessions had their drawbacks. Factories became even less productive, and opposition to market-style reforms became more entrenched. The concessions also fuelled resentment amongst professionals, who felt that their educational achievements were not being recognized.