The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Even so, Communist regimes had built societies that were ‘modern’ in some other ways: they had promoted urbanization, mass education systems and welfare states. Socialist regimes also encouraged a ‘modern’ attitude towards life, where individuals and families strove to better themselves as part of a broader, national community. As the anthropologist David Kideckel has argued, the peasants of the Romanian Olt Land developed much broader and more diverse networks, covering a wider geographical area, than they had before the War, and peasants were well aware of the importance of bettering oneself. The concept of ‘preparedness’ (pregtire) – the need to do well at school and know about one’s work – became much more important under socialism than before. As one worker explained, ‘In the past leaders had pregtire and workers and peasants didn’t. Now it’s the opposite.’77 The older, almost aristocratic aspiration to be a domn (‘lord’) – the generous, stylish and charismatic person who did not work – was still present, but it coexisted with newer models of behaviour. Peasants also adopted a much more pragmatic, utilitarian attitude towards work. The anthropologist Martha Lampland found that between the wars the Hungarian peasants of Sárosd, south of Budapest, were relatively uninterested in markets; status came with independence from others, and the peasants’ ideal was to acquire enough land to secure it – a goal that most were too poor to achieve. Socialism, therefore, was unpopular amongst many peasants because it made them dependent on officials. But it also helped to transform their attitudes. Now work was measured and paid for, they developed a much more commercial view of their labour. By the 1980s, the Hungarian village was a place of ‘rampant economism and utilitarianism’.78

  Communist regimes, of course, were perfectly happy with these attitudes, as long as peasants placed the collective above the individual. They had sought to create a new type of modern individual – rational, free from the social ties of the past, and collectivist. And they enjoyed some success. In some cases, Soviet-bloc citizens seem to have been more collectivist than their Western contemporaries, and as will be seen in Chapter Twelve, many citizens of Soviet bloc societies had more egalitarian views than Westerners.79 However, there were strong forces undermining that collectivism. Opinion surveys in Poland showed that the principle of self-sacrifice for the collective became less important for ordinary people between 1966 and 1977 (although that of equality became more so).80 Commitment to the collective was also threatened by a new enemy: consumerism. Communist societies were still far from the consumerism of the West, but some were beginning to measure their status by the goods they acquired, rather than by their service to the state.

  VII

  In 1983, a new, genuinely amusing romantic comedy was released in the USSR, though one with a strong ideological message. The Blonde Round the Corner told the story of the romance between Nikolai, an astrophysicist who decides to become a warehouseman in a large Moscow shop, and the real heroine of the film, the shop-worker Nadia, a larger-than-life wheeler-dealer who can fix anything through Moscow’s black economy.81 Her life and relationships turn on her ability to secure ‘deficit’ goods: she introduces her friends to Nikolai not by name, but by what they can get for her – one is ‘theatre tickets’, another ‘holidays on the Black Sea’, and so on. In this parallel consumerist universe, the materialistic Nadia, not the party secretary, is boss. She has so much faith in her influence that she tries to find out whether she might be able to procure the Nobel Prize for Nikolai by bribing the committee members with caviar and other luxuries. Light comedy ends in heavy moralizing: Nikolai, at first captivated by this new world, abandons the monstrous Nadia on the eve of their marriage and, by implication, the selfish and shallow pleasures of consumerism.

  The Blonde Round the Corner displayed all of the Communists’ anxieties about consumerism: it was a rival universe, with its own hierarchy and values antithetical to those of Communism. Soviet bloc countries all had flourishing black economies by the 1970s; some, such as those of the USSR, Poland and Hungary, were largely tolerated; others, such as the East German, were treated less liberally, but flourished all the same. These parallel economies covered a significant proportion of economic activity – surveys showed that in the USSR of the 1980s, 60 per cent of all car repairs, 50 per cent of shoe repairs and 40 per cent of apartment renovations were done on the black market, many by people moonlighting from their official jobs.82 But socialist states also legitimized this corrosive consumer culture by establishing special shops where luxury goods could be bought. For instance the GDR’s Exquisit and Delikat shops sold such goods for much higher prices than in normal shops, and the Intershops sold goods for Western currency, acquired from relatives in the West.

  Consumerism established a different world. People spent a great deal of their time tracking down ‘deficit’ goods for their apartments, or finding fashionable clothes – especially Western ones. It is no surprise that those jobs which gave access to consumer goods became much more popular in the 1970s. Sociologists found that shop sales jobs like Nadia’s, looked down on in the early 1960s, were now much more attractive, whilst conversely higher education was becoming less popular. White-collar workers still generally earned more than their blue-collar counterparts, and some groups, such as the army and top party bosses, were relatively well paid in money and perks. But a new status hierarchy, founded on access to consumer goods, began to rival the old paternalistic one based on service. A survey of Soviet teenagers in 1987 showed that they regarded black-marketeering as the most lucrative job in Soviet society, followed by work for the military, car servicing and bottle-recycling; at the bottom came pilots, actors and university teachers.83 Similarly, in the GDR, where access to foreign currency sent by relatives was so crucial, the joke went that German socialism had reached a new phase in the Marxist scheme: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to the residence of his aunt’.84

  As The Blonde Round the Corner showed, this challenge to the old order was resented by those without access to consumer goods. In Poland, where party apparatchiks were themselves involved in the black market, it damaged their prestige. Elsewhere, it was more difficult for middle-ranking party officials to nurture foreign contacts, and consumerism antagonized those who did not have the opportunity or desire to participate in the parallel economy; whilst they had status in the old hierarchy, they were very lowly in the new one.

  It was perhaps inevitable that consumer goods would become so central to people’s lives when they became more widely available. Most people, in most societies, try to acquire status. But that status was only likely to become associated with consumerism when official socialist hierarchies became less important, and, crucially, when consumer goods were within the reach of ordinary people. People compete with their peers; when the very top elite, remote from most people, had these goods, it was less important to have them, but from the 1950s Communist regimes created the ideal conditions for an obsession with consumer goods. They made greater efforts to spread these goods around, but failed to produce nearly enough to meet demand.

  Fascination with consumer goods clearly showed that many Soviet bloc citizens were moving into the Western cultural orbit. Youth culture revolved around Western clothes and music; even though socialist states produced their own clothes (sometimes with Western brand logos on them, such as ‘Marlboro’ or ‘Levi-Strauss’), only foreign-produced clothes were fashionable. However, we should not exaggerate the power of consumerism; Communism was not brought low by the Marlboro cowboy. A survey of attitudes to social prestige in Hungary – the socialist economy with one of the most developed market economies – showed that jobs associated with knowledge (like doctors) had the most prestige attached to them. Commerce and high incomes were much less prestigious.85

  Also, an interest in consumer goods did not necessarily lead to anti-socialist attitudes. A minority of people were actively involved in the black market – an estimated 15 per cent in the USSR – and they were generally regarded as being an unusual group, mo
re materialistic than normal people.86 So even though official propaganda relentlessly attacked youths obsessed with Western clothes as materialistic and work-shy, the youths themselves did not see the world in such Manichaean, black-and-white terms. Enthusiastic Komsomol activists were as likely to buy jeans from black-marketeers as dissidents.

  The same can be said of that other hugely influential Western import: rock music, though in this case Communists did sometimes have more cause for concern. Rock music was, of course, strongly associated with the youth rebellions of the 1960s, and its lyrics were often imbued with a hedonistic Romanticism – as hostile to the principles of state socialism as technocratic capitalism. In some countries rock music became explicitly oppositional. The punk group Perfect provided the sound-track to Poland’s Solidarity movement in the early 1980s, and the post-invasion Czechoslovak group The Plastic People of the Universe was explicitly dissenting. One of its 1973 songs included the verse:

  Bring your kilogram of paranoia into balance!

  Throw off the horrible dictatorship!

  Quickly! Live, drink, puke!

  The bottle, the Beat!

  Shit in your hand.87

  Some of the group were arrested and tried, accused of ‘extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism’. During the trial, the defence did not deny their vulgarity, but ingeniously argued that they were just following Lenin’s Bolshevik forthrightness, quoting his supposed maxim of 1922, ‘bureaucracy is shit’.88 They failed to convince the judge, however. The musicians were imprisoned, and their case became a cause célèbre, attracting international attention; it also led to the creation of Charter 77, a dissident group committed to forcing the regime to observe law and the constitution, whose most famous member was the playwright Václav Havel.

  Most pop and rock music, however, was not so explicitly anti-Communist, and most Soviet bloc regimes in the 1970s were willing to tolerate it – as they rather had to, given the huge numbers who listened to Western radio stations. The East German party sponsored ‘socialist realist rock’, whilst the Soviets had their own anodyne, politically correct bands, like the Happy Guys – named after the 1930s socialist realist comedy film. The Komsomol produced long lists of banned groups: the heavy metal group Black Sabbath was accused of promoting ‘violence’ and ‘religious obscurantism’, whilst the crooner Julio Iglesias, bizarrely, was categorized as a promoter of ‘neo-fascism’.89 However, the implication was that other bands were fine, and Komsomol organizations themselves organized rock concerts. Alexei Yurchak tells of Aleksandr, formerly Komsomol secretary of a school in Yakutsk and then a student at the University of Novosibirsk, who was both unusually committed to the Communist ideal, and enthusiastic about prog rock and the British group Uriah Heep. He wrote, somewhat self-importantly, to a friend whose philosophy teacher had condemned rock music:

  Tell your professor of aesthetics that one cannot look at the surrounding world from a prehistoric position… ‘The Beatles’ is an unprecedented phenomenon of our life that in its impact on the human mind is, perhaps, comparable with space flights and nuclear physics.90

  There was, then, no necessary contradiction between Communism and modern popular culture, but Communist parties still reacted to it in a ‘prehistoric’ way. Khrushchev and his generation had dragged Communism into the space and nuclear age. But modernity had moved on, and the ageing Communist leaders looked increasingly ‘prehistoric’, just as their politics seemed conservative.

  VIII

  ‘I like rightists.’ Thus did the ne plus ultra of Communist radicalism, Mao Zedong, address the notorious anti-Communist, American President Richard Nixon, during their summit in Beijing on 21 February 1972. Equally implausibly, Nixon, not known for his interest in theory, claimed a desire to discuss ‘philosophic problems [sic]’ with Mao.91 A mere two years earlier, few would have predicted this extraordinary rapprochement between the most radical force in the Communist world and the ‘jittery chieftain of US imperialism’, as the Chinese press had dubbed Nixon.

  Just over three months later, on 29 May, Nixon met the other Communist bloc leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in the distinctly unrevolutionary surroundings of the Kremlin’s St Catherine Hall, an architectural orgy of gilt and crystal. They had come together to sign a range of treaties, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and a document outlining new foundations for US–Soviet relations.

  Brezhnev’s willingness to make peace was no surprise, given his character and the changes in Soviet thinking since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also, the détente of 1972 achieved much of what Stalin had hoped for in 1945. The world was formally carved up into spheres of superpower influence. Now that East and West were more equal – at least in military and geopolitical terms – Brezhnev had succeeded in securing the recognition of the Communist empire in Eastern Europe which the Americans had denied for so long.

  Mao’s reincarnation as a peacemaker is, of course, more unexpected. But both Communist leaders were facing similar difficulties, weakened as they were by the revolutionary explosions of the late 1960s and strategically vulnerable. As Brezhnev was trying to stabilize his bloc after the Prague Spring of 1968, Mao was still restoring order after his own Cultural Revolution, whilst anxious about military threats from the USSR and India. He therefore had good reasons to turn to the ‘right’.

  It was Nixon, however, who had most reason to compromise. For after its apparent success in suppressing revolutions in the Third World in the mid-1960s, American power was shaken by resistance in Vietnam. As in 1945 – and indeed 1919 – statesmen negotiating in grand residences and palatial halls could not impose their will on the turbulent South. And even more worryingly for Washington, it found that its opponents in the Third World had attracted sympathizers closer to home – on its own university campuses and in its inner cities. In 1968, from Washington to Istanbul, from Paris to Mexico City, politicians anxiously looked on as a new generation of revolutionaries took to the streets.

  High Tide

  I

  In March 1968 a charity fashion show was held in Addis Ababa University’s Ras Makonnen Hall in an atmosphere of high tension.1 It was organized by Linda Thistle, an American Peace Corps volunteer who ran extracurricular activities at the girls’ hostel, and followed a show the previous year when a Californian firm had donated modish creations from ‘Salon Exquisite’ and ‘La Merveilleuse’ – including the fashionable miniskirt. The 1967 show had generated critical articles in the Ethiopian student press; miniskirts were especially controversial. Whilst some of the arguments were nationalistic or Africanist – fashion shows were ‘un-Ethiopian’, an ‘opium that has contaminated Europe’ – denunciations also carried a distinctively Marxist tone. Indeed, such rhetoric had become pervasive in student circles at the time. ‘The fashion show is nothing but [an]… agency for neo-colonialism… an instrument for the creation of [a] favourable market for [Western] luxury goods,’ one article thundered.2 Thistle responded to the criticism by excluding mini-skirts and transforming the event into the first African fashion show on the continent, featuring only ‘African fabrics’. But the radical students were not to be so easily appeased. Some argued that no fashion show, however nationalistic, could be justified in such a poor country. But questions of gender, and power relations between the male and female students, were also at issue. The men saw the event as evidence that Ethiopian women, seduced by Western mores and decadent lifestyles, were neglecting the more serious business of political discussion and activism. As one, Wellelign Makonnen, explained, ‘Our sisters’ heads have been washed with western soap… American philosophy of life leads nowhere.’3

  The dispute eventually erupted into a small but violent demonstration. About fifty angry male students gathered outside the hall, abused and slapped the women, jostled foreign visitors, threw rotten eggs at some of the guests, and dragged others from their cars. Soon the police were summoned, violence escalat
ed and the police arrested a number of radical students, including the editor of the student journal, Struggle. Meanwhile the University authorities – with the American University Vice-President at the forefront – decided to close the institute. Marxism and anti-Americanism had been a palpable sentiment amongst Ethiopian students for some time. Americans were associated with the increasingly unpopular regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, and a couple of months before the fashion show, the US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had been prevented from speaking to students by a rowdy anti-Vietnam War demonstration.4 But the events at the Ras Makonnen Hall signalled the final breach between the student movement and the Selassie regime; many of the students involved would go on to play a central role in the Ethiopian revolution of 1974.

  A couple of weeks before, in New York, a young Berkeley graduate, Dona Fowler, read out a petition with sixty-six signatures, which championed the miniskirt and threatened to picket department stores with banners demanding ‘Down with the Maxi!’ But whilst Thistle’s and Fowler’s generation was just as angry about Vietnam and ‘American imperialism’ as its Ethiopian peers (and were indeed just as fond of Marxist sloganeering), their immediate concerns and overall vision of politics could not have been more different. For Fowler and her sisterly protestors, miniskirts symbolized personal and gender liberation, a rejection of the disciplined and masculine culture they believed had prevailed in the United States since World War II. But for Wellelign Makonnen, these garments flaunted a decadent attitude that was holding Ethiopia back; rigorous discipline, not frivolous liberation, was precisely what was needed. Both groups of youth voiced Marxist slogans, but those of the Ethiopians, which harked back to the militant Radical Marxism of late 1920s Russia, contrasted rather sharply with the more democratic, Romantic Marxism of the Americans.