The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  This kind of ‘social work’, though, was not done by everybody. Like party culture more generally, it penetrated the upper echelons of society to a much greater extent than society as a whole: in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, it was compulsory for party members, whatever job they did, whilst 60–80 per cent of educated people participated, compared with 40–50 per cent of industrial workers and 30–40 per cent of farm workers.57 Motives were mixed. Many believed social work – especially committee meetings – were pointless and only participated because they were pressured to do so, or because they hoped for benefits. As Zinoviev explained: ‘If someone avoids social work, then that fact is noted and measures are taken. And there are several measures, ranging from pay rises and promotion to the solution of accommodation problems, the possibility of trips abroad or the chance of having one’s work published.’58

  Even so, Zinoviev denied that ‘social work’ was always an empty formality that people were forced or bribed to perform. He insisted that it was often taken seriously: many people did it because it was good in itself, and it raised the reputation of the whole collective. It could also be a displacement activity. Surveys of academics found that older academics who had lost interest in their own research tended to be keener on social work than their younger colleagues.59

  Like the ‘service aristocrats’ of old, therefore, some people laboured both for reward and for an ideal of service. For some, this was the essence of mature socialism. One young Komsomol organizer in the early 1980s, interviewed by the ethnologist Alexei Yurchak, though critical of the boring and pointless meetings, insisted:

  Basically, as far as I was concerned, the government’s policy was correct. It consisted simply of caring for people, free hospitals, good education. My father was an example of this policy. He was our region’s chief doctor and worked hard to improve the medical services for the people. And my mother worked hard as a doctor. We had a fine apartment from the state.60

  But not everybody was as convinced of the fairness of the system. Frau Hildegard B. from Magdeburg in the GDR was one. In 1975 after a very long wait, she finally received an allotment she had applied for, but at a far higher price than she was expecting. Furious, she protested to the authorities that she deserved better because she had loyally served the state as Chair of the Factory Trade Union Executive Committee. The Chair of the District section of the Association of Small Gardeners, Settlers and Small Animal Breeders wrote back to deny that she had been unfairly treated: all of those ahead of her had been virtuous ‘activists’ and deserved their privileges. Even so, ultimately he came to a compromise, and gave her a cheaper allotment elsewhere.61

  The lengthy official response demonstrates the regime’s concern to be seen to be acting justly. Any suspicion that privilege was not closely attached to good citizenship was bound to erode general placidity and willingness to play by the rules. However, the more the state abandoned its ambitions to transform society, the more difficult it was to ensure a direct link between reward and service. This was increasingly the paternalism of the acquisitive boss and his clients, not of the loving father and his children. Meanwhile, subordinates realized that they were rewarded more for unswerving loyalty and sycophancy to their superiors rather than more abstract socialist virtue. For even though they no longer aspired to mobilize their workers to build the socialist utopia, bosses still exercised power over the details of everyday life.

  When in 1983 the sociologist Michael Burawoy went to work in Hungary’s Bánki heavy-vehicle plant, he was struck by the contrasts between it and the Allied plant in Chicago where he had worked a decade earlier. Relations between managers and workers were very different. In the United States, jobs were not secure, but pay was; in Hungary, the reverse was true. It was very difficult to sack people, but workers were paid strictly according to piece rates: if they only produced 50 per cent of their ‘norm’, they were paid 50 per cent of their wage; in the United States, independent trade unions ensured that workers were guaranteed a minimum of 100 per cent of their wage, whatever they produced. The Hungarian system gave managers and foremen a great deal of power, for they could set the work norms, and therefore pay, and they could allocate the best machines and the easiest work to their friends. So Burawoy, who, as a foreign interloper was given an old machine and a difficult job, only ever achieved 82 per cent of his norm, and earned 3,600 forints, unlike his favoured fellow worker who earned 8,480 forints.62 The Hungarian poet and leftist dissident-turned-Margaret-Thatcher-admirer Miklós Haraszti, who spent some time in the Red Star Tractor Factory in the early 1970s, described the role of the foreman:

  The foreman doesn’t just organize our work: first and foremost he organizes us. The foremen fix our pay, our jobs, our overtime, our bonuses, and the deductions for excessive rejects [i.e. low-quality goods]. They decide when we go on holiday; write character reports on us for any arm of the state which requests them…63

  The power of managers varied across the Soviet bloc. In China, factories had a great deal of control over food supplies and housing, and so workers were forced to stay on good terms with bosses. During the 1970s the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution period continued, but it now turned not on ideology but on personal connections. In Hungary in the 1970s, managers had less power over perks such as accommodation, but more over wages. In the GDR, in contrast, piece-rate systems were weaker, but even here managers used incentive structures that divided the workforce between different shifts and brigades. So whilst worker protests did occur, they were isolated and rarely led to factory-wide strikes.

  However, it would be wrong to conclude that bosses were all-powerful. As in most paternalistic societies, ‘fathers’ and ‘children’ were bound together in a web of informal rules, customs and reciprocities, which meant that managers could not behave entirely as they wished. One worker presented a rather extraordinary picture, in which managers were wholly at the mercy of personal connections:

  One’s actual power depended on these kinds of ties. A vice-director transferred into our factory had a difficult time getting his orders carried out because he had no connections. It took a long time for him to build up these connections before people would listen to his orders. Friendship facilitated the carrying out of orders, kind of a way of helping out your friends by carrying out their requests.64

  There were also other, more fundamental reasons for the weakness of managers in late socialist societies. They may have had total control over wages and perks, but in the Soviet bloc there were simply not enough workers, and the discontented did not find it too difficult to quit and find another job. Also managers relied on workers’ cooperation and goodwill to be flexible in an economy marked by chaotic supplies and shortages. If workers did not cooperate, the factory would not fulfil the plan and managers would suffer. Collective farm chairmen were in a similar position. One chief of a collective farm in Romanian Olt Land explained how difficult it was to get peasants to work for him when there were other opportunities in local industry and they could work on their private plots. It was especially difficult to find people to act in positions of responsibility:

  The hardest part of my job is to get other people to work. There are never enough team chiefs, so I have to go jawing from house to house, making promises to get people to be chiefs. This one needs bottled gas, that one wants meat. I can’t satisfy them all, but we need chiefs.65

  This picture – of officials with limited powers, forced to compromise with their subordinates – is reinforced by the Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev’s devastating satire on the Soviet system, The Yawning Heights of 1976. For Zinoviev, the dominant force in Soviet society was not the Kremlin but the kollektiv – whether the workshop in a factory, the collective farm, the academic institute or the apartment block. While officially appointed from above, managers and officials tended to identify with the collective, not with their bosses. Though managers might constantly try to exceed their authority and abuse their power, they were constrained by the
fact that their career prospects depended on how well their subordinates worked, and by the surveillance of the local party cell and ‘the rank and file of citizens who write complaints and anonymous letters to all sorts of organs’. The power of managers therefore tended to be limited to feathering their own nests and those of their ‘henchmen’ and ‘toadies’. It was virtually impossible to change the organization of the enterprise: ‘even a small initiative costs managers immense efforts, and quite often the result is a heart attack.’66

  Zinoviev’s account must be treated carefully, for the lives of the academic elite were a world away from those of the ordinary worker or peasant. Even so, he helps to explain the paradox of the mature socialist system: its legitimacy was constantly undermined by endless popular complaints about injustice and hypocrisy, and yet it was remarkably stable (except in a few cases like Poland).

  One reason was that people developed a sense of security in the collective, for it was very difficult to sack workers. Moreover Zinoviev could reasonably talk of the ‘simplicity of life’ compared with the West, for, paradoxically, in these supposedly bureaucratic societies people were in general much less burdened by red-tape than under modern capitalism. Everything was looked after by their workplace, obviating the need to deal with a whole range of separate private institutions (such as banks and insurance and energy companies). Whilst acquiring desirable goods took a lot of time and energy, in most places and at most times a basic standard of living could be counted on. Furthermore, people generally did not have to work very hard (though where a significant black economy emerged, people often worked very hard indeed). And yet the collective was not a stagnant, static place, nor was competitiveness absent. Hard work and overt ambition might not pay off, but there were many opportunities for self-advancement by politicking and forging good relations with bosses.67

  The relatively undemanding nature of work permitted people to devote time to personal relationships. As Horváth and Szakolczai commented in 1992, whilst the party ‘successfully discouraged a large number of people from being able to lead their own lives, express their opinions, and discuss public issues and their interests in a civilised form’, its failure to imbue people with a work ethic did leave people with time and space for themselves and their personal relations:

  ‘People don’t work here’, said Western experts. But it was precisely this distance [from an internal work ethic] that made it possible for a long time, up to the 1970s, for people to preserve in their everyday life, in what remained relatively free from the official world, their personal connections, the trust toward each other, the immediacy, the inner harmony and autonomy, the ability to live and feel. The ‘fight of all against all’ mentality which today characterises all strata of society was earlier restricted to only those groups that were close to the internal power struggles.68

  Alongside the official collective, therefore, was the unofficial collective: friends and family. Indeed, the intrusiveness of Communist regimes, and their ambition to change friendship into a politically acceptable ‘comradeship’, only increased the importance of friends as a refuge. Friends were people you could trust, people who would not report something you had said or done to the party activists. This was most important during periods of radicalism, like the Cultural Revolution. As Chinese remembered about their schooldays in the Mao period, you could trust friends to mention only ‘small things’ and ‘minor mistakes’ in self-criticism sessions.69 Even in more normal times, friendship was probably more important in socialist than other societies. When asked in 1985 which institution had the most authority in their lives, 23 per cent of the 3,500 Belorussian and Estonian young people questioned cited the collective, 33 per cent said friends, and 41 per cent family. Friendship in the USSR seems to have been taken much more seriously than in the West, and indeed there was much more time for it: 16 per cent of people met friends every day, 32 per cent once or several times a week, and 31 per cent several times a month. American single men, in contrast, met friends on average four times a month.70

  Yet however much one might create one’s own informal ‘collective’ outside the system, the official collective mattered, and there was a clear tension between the justice and egalitarianism that were supposed to reign there, and the managerial and party hierarchy that frequently operated according to personal favours. Workers, especially, tended to see the power and perks of managers as unjust. Miklós Haraszti found workers making a very clear distinction between themselves and the privileged managerial stratum – just as the workers of Stalin’s USSR had in the 1930s:

  They, them, theirs: I don’t believe that anyone who has worked in a factory, or even had a relatively superficial discussion with workers, can be in any doubt about what these words mean… the management, those who give orders and take the decisions, employ labour and pay wages, the men and their agents who are in charge – and remain inaccessible even when they cross our field of vision.71

  As Haraszti admitted, whilst all workers felt very separate from managers, they were not necessarily hostile to them. Some accepted that, as technical specialists, they were valuable and necessary, but in all work-places it was common to find the Radical Marxist view that managers, especially those without obvious expertise, were merely parasites, feeding off the surplus produced by workers. One young worker echoed Lenin’s claim in State and Revolution that administrative work could be done by a barely literate worker – and could be done better because the worker would be fair:

  ‘That lot, what they do, I mean what they really do, could be done just as well by an unskilled labourer, all on his own… if someone taught him to count. Every morning he could distribute the jobs fairly, working from the list of runs, and take them to the machines…’72

  Industrial and farm-workers were not alone in believing that others were benefiting from unjust privilege. White-collar workers increasingly felt hard done by, especially from the 1970s onwards as the income gap between workers and the educated narrowed. As one East German teacher, Friedrich Jung, recalled, ‘he who had neither money nor connections was in poor shape’; and for him industrial workers at large wealthy plants were in a particularly good position because they earned more than teachers and their food and accommodation were subsidized.73

  So even as incomes became more equal, resentment at unjust economic privilege was endemic, as was revealed by the few independent opinion polls conducted during the 1970s and 1980s. A poll taken in Poland in 1981 showed that 86 per cent of the population saw income differences as ‘flagrant’, and in Hungary most of the population believed that the party acted ‘to a large extent’ in the interests of the top party leadership and apparatchiks.74 Indeed, it seems that as incomes became more equal, people perceived unjust privileges to be greater. Research on Soviet opinion in the Brezhnev era showed that younger generations were more likely than the older to see their era as the most unjust.75

  Michael Burawoy certainly found anger at inequalities much stronger amongst workers in the Communist world than in capitalist countries. The workers of the Lenin Steel Works in Miskolc, Hungary, and those of the Allied plant in Chicago all complained about the closure of the old steel furnaces. But whilst the American workers were faced with losing their jobs, ‘they still find little fault with capitalism’. Meanwhile ‘paradoxically, the furnacemen of the October Revolution Brigade, although more or less insulated from the ravages of the world market and unable to comprehend what it means to be without a job, nevertheless know only too well how to criticize their system’, and spent a great deal of time condemning the hypocrisies of socialism.76 The solution to this paradox lies in yet another paradox: despite the political secrecy and distorting propaganda that suffused Communist regimes, the system was actually much more transparent than capitalism. Zola, rightly, described Capital as a mysterious god, hidden in a tabernacle, rarely questioned or even noticed by ordinary people. In Communist regimes, by contrast, workers were constantly made aware of the principles of socialism through p
ropaganda, socialist competition, ‘voluntary’ social work and production campaigns, and could always contrast the ideal with the reality. Also the economic mechanisms of socialism were well understood: the state invested in a factory and workers produced a ‘surplus’, which was then taken by the state, which claimed to distribute it justly for the good of society. So when workers saw bosses awarding themselves privileges, apparently unearned, they felt angry and exploited. Under capitalism, it is very difficult to see where the profit is going or how justly it is being distributed. It is no surprise that workers normally criticized socialist systems for not being socialist enough.

  But, as in the past, not only did Communism’s paternalistic practices clash with its commitment to equality, but they also contradicted the ‘modern’ values which the regimes claimed to champion. If ‘traditional’ societies typically involve non-egalitarian, hierarchical social relations of dependence, deference and immobility whilst in ‘modern’ societies individuals are supposedly independent and are judged according to their achievements, then we can certainly see elements of a ‘traditional’ order under Communism. Paternalistic relationships governed collectives; people were often dependent on bosses, and in some socialist societies, people were trapped in their collectives (as in post-Great Leap China and the USSR, where internal passports sometimes made it difficult to move). Meanwhile, women continued to be discriminated against, despite official rhetoric. The militant messianic party could believe in its role when it was building socialism and fighting the class enemy, but when that task had been achieved its function was less clear. It increasingly looked like a traditional status group, less able to run the country than real experts.