The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Predictably, the regime was popular amongst the poor, but nationalization antagonized the middle classes, whilst relations with the United States were also tense. The Sandinistas were mainly interested in developing their country, but they did welcome welfare aid from Cuba, and the Ortega brothers were keen on supporting the guerrilla groups in El Salvador and elsewhere. Even so, initially there were no hostilities between Washington and Managua; it was only with the intensification of the Cold War after the victory of Ronald Reagan in the US presidential elections in 1980 that Washington unleashed a guerrilla war against the Sandinistas, and Daniel Ortega began to receive aid from Moscow.

  By 1979, therefore, the Soviets were becoming increasingly disappointed with their efforts to spread Communism in the Third World, whilst their military interventions – together with the violent Stalinism of some of their clients – were reinforcing the conviction of many of its remaining allies that Marxism-Leninism was too brutal, and Marxism had to be united with pluralism. But despite the increasing lack of confidence in the Communist world, many in the West, frightened by Soviet behaviour, were convinced that the expansion would continue. At the end of 1978, the British right-liberal journal The Economist gave an alarming prognosis for the next ‘singularly dangerous seven years’. After describing the high level of ‘political-military will’ of the Russians, Cubans, East Germans and Vietnamese to spread Communism throughout the world, the editorial declared: ‘It is not possible to stop the Soviet Union from expanding its military power… [But] it is essential to prevent that Soviet expansion from proceeding to the point where it controls the commanding heights, whether nuclear or non-nuclear.’ The Economist declared this was feasible, but asked, pessimistically, ‘can the Americans find in their allies – or in themselves – even a fraction of the will essential to prevent that Soviet expansion from proceeding to the point where it controls the commanding heights, whether nuclear or non-nuclear’.125

  Twin Revolutions

  I

  On 11 October 1986, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev, met President Reagan, for the second time, in a government conference house in Reykjavik. Reagan’s style was rather low-key, compared with Gorbachev’s garrulous intensity, yet they had much in common. Both leaders were performers: Reagan had appeared in Hollywood B-films, whilst Gorbachev once had thespian ambitions and several of his colleagues commented on his dramatic skills.1 They were also idealists, true believers in their own systems – Reagan a Christian and militant liberal capitalist, Gorbachev an atheist and convinced Communist. And so paradoxically, and despite their sharp ideological differences, there was an affinity between these two actors on the international stage. Reagan even persuaded himself Gorbachev might be a believer – he told his aide Michael Deaver: ‘I don’t know, Mike, but I honestly think he believes in a higher power.’2

  At first the intensity of their particular ideological commitments made agreement difficult. For example, on the morning of the summit’s second day a bitter row broke out, as Reagan accused Communists of seeking world domination and Gorbachev angrily defended the Soviet record on human rights.3 In the afternoon, though, the atmosphere mellowed. Gorbachev proposed sharp reductions in nuclear weapons, and after some wrangling over precisely what was meant, Reagan made an extraordinary declaration: ‘It would be fine with me if we eliminate all nuclear weapons.’ Gorbachev’s response was, ‘We can do that. We can eliminate them.’4 They then agreed to leave their negotiators to draft a treaty. Much to the disappointment of both, the agreement slipped through their fingers, the Russians objecting to the Americans’ development of their space-age missile defence system, ‘Star Wars’. But the agreement, which shocked many of Reagan’s advisers, showed how far things had changed since the 1970s. The tone of these debates was very different to the measured Nixon–Brezhnev talks. Both leaders took ideas seriously and were keen fighters in the ideological struggle. But they also agreed on one fundamental thing: they had to abandon the old realpolitik that had brought a massive build-up of nuclear weapons and had threatened the very future of humanity.

  Two and a half years later, on 15 May 1989, when Gorbachev went to meet the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, the atmosphere was very different. This was the first Soviet visit since the Sino-Soviet rift. However, whilst Gorbachev and Deng did sign a treaty, unlike Gorbachev and Reagan in Reykjavik, there was not much meeting of minds. The atmosphere was tense. Students were demonstrating in Tian’anmen Square in support of democracy, and were looking to Gorbachev for support. The technocratic Deng, moreover, was a very different Communist to Gorbachev. The meeting was friendly enough, but there was little real engagement. Gorbachev wrote blandly in his memoirs, ‘I think the key to his [Deng’s] great influence… lies in his enormous experience and healthy pragmatism.’5

  The two sharply contrasting meetings illustrate how much the three blocs – Soviet, Chinese and American – had changed since the last flurry of summits of 1971–2. Then, as in 1989, the Americans and Soviets had most in common: Nixon and Brezhnev were arch-pragmatists; Mao, the ageing utopian, had been reluctantly forced into pragmatic retreat by the disasters of the Cultural Revolution. By the mid-1980s the new leaders of all three blocs had disowned their predecessors. Reactions against cynical realpolitik in the United States and the USSR had brought two idealists to power – Reagan and Gorbachev; in China, by contrast, the hard-nosed Deng represented the absolute opposite of Mao’s destructive utopianism. Just as China was losing its revolutionary élan, the United States and the Soviet Union were regaining theirs.

  Reagan and Gorbachev embodied the two revolutions that were to change the world in the late 1980s: the liberal capitalist and the reform Communist. Though the second was largely responsible for the final collapse of Communism in its Soviet heartland, it was the first which ultimately won the struggle for global pre-eminence. Both, however, learnt from each other. Cold War hawks adopted some of the strategies (and even the language) of the Marxist-Leninists, whilst Gorbachev was increasingly swayed by liberal ideas.

  The Reagan presidency marked the beginning of a renewed Western liberal ideological ascendancy. In the 1980s it looked as if it would achieve world domination, overwhelming China as well. Yet the liberal force that had stormed the citadels of the Kremlin ultimately failed to breach Beijing’s Zhongnanhai – the home of China’s elite. China’s pragmatic leaders had little enthusiasm for any revolutionary talk, whether Maoist or liberal. China also had another model of development to fall back on – the authoritarian capitalism of the so-called ‘Asian tigers’. Since Stalin’s death the world’s tectonic plates had been gradually shifting. The gulf between the West and the Soviet bloc had been narrowing, whilst both had been moving away from China. Gorbachev and Deng may have signed a Sino-Soviet agreement, but in truth 1989 marked a parting, not a meeting, of the two worlds.

  II

  In the late 1970s, a new genre emerged in China: ‘reportage’. A literary form of journalism, it was often highly critical of the Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution. One of the most controversial pieces, ‘People or Monsters?’, written in 1979, was a fiercely sardonic account of a notorious corruption case in Bin County, Heilongjiang Province. The anti-heroine was the brazenly cynical Wang Shouxin. A sort of Communist Becky Sharp, she had started off as the humble cashier of the local coal company. When the Cultural Revolution arrived it unexpectedly ‘brought out in her political urges that had lain dormant for many years’. Deciding to use the momentous changes to her own advantage, she teamed up with a ‘former bandit’, Zhang Feng, and created a new red guard unit, the ‘Smash-the-Black-Nest Combat Force’. She then launched her own personal Cultural Revolution against the main obstacle to her advancement, the company’s planner and accountant Liu Changchun – a member of the ruling ‘Red Rebel Corps’. Fortunately Wang had ingratiated herself with a top official, who approved a ‘debate’ between the two. She accused Liu of favouring the ‘power-holders’
and stressing production rather than revolution. The authorities took her side and Liu was publicly humiliated and then arrested. The way was now open for Wang to become manager and party secretary of the firm. She then began her reign of corruption, using her control of local coal supplies to bribe and bully her way to wealth and power. Shrewd as always, she managed to survive Mao’s death, but she eventually fell victim to the party’s decision to allow criticisms of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s.6

  The Cultural Revolution, of course, caused many forms of suffering, both physical and emotional. But one of the most long-lasting effects was disillusionment. The regime had used ideals of virtue and self-sacrifice to enthuse the population, and many had taken them at face value. When people decided that their idealism had been exploited by cynics like Wang Shouxin they became bitter. By the early 1970s, Radical Marxism-Leninism had been seriously discredited. Never again would the Chinese Communists return to Maoist class struggle. In fact, the end of the Cultural Revolution was to mark the beginning of a long, serpentine journey from Communism to capitalism.

  Stalin’s Terror of 1936–8 had brought a similar disillusionment. But the war against the Nazis had restored the Communist regime’s raison d’être. Stalin was able to call forth popular sacrifice again in the interests of national survival, and thereafter Soviet Communism was inextricably linked with victory. This redemption was not possible in early 1970s China. One option, of course, was to go back to the orderly, Modernist Marxism of the 1950s. But much had changed since then: the Soviet model was looking worn, and whilst China had been engrossed in internecine struggles, its neighbouring rivals had been stealing a march on it. Taiwan and South Korea, the Asian tigers, with their unique blend of authoritarianism, capitalism and export-led growth, had actually achieved ‘great leaps forward’ and were now far ahead of their stagnating neighbour. Communists – especially those who had suffered in the Cultural Revolution – began to question the Soviet model fundamentally.

  The first signs of change could be seen even during the last years of Mao. Officially the Cultural Revolution continued until his death, and its principles were stoutly defended by its four main supporters – including Mrs Mao, Jiang Qing. But the army, under its leader Lin Biao, had brought an end to its ultra-revolutionary phase by 1969, and after Lin’s own fall in 1971, politics entered a period of uneasy calm. The agreement with the United States in 1971 showed that Mao was rethinking his strategy, and the change was confirmed by the rehabilitation of the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping and his appointment as Vice-Premier.

  Nothing much would happen as long as Mao lived, and indeed towards the end of 1975 the radicals launched a successful attack on Deng, as a ‘revisionist’ and ‘capitalist roader’. The ailing Mao lined up the colourless Hua Guofeng as his successor – the leader of the so-called ‘whatever’ faction, whose main guiding principle was that ‘whatever’ Mao said was correct. Hua still clung to the economic policies of the 1950s and 1960s, but the backlash against the Cultural Revolution became too intense.7 He arrested Jiang Qing and the other members of the vilified ‘Gang of Four’ and in 1977 allowed Deng to return to his post as Vice-Premier. Deng was then helped by popular pressure to rehabilitate the victims of the purges, and defeated Hua and the ‘whateverists’ at the end of 1978.

  Deng in 1978 was in the same position as Khrushchev in 1956. He needed to criticize the past to justify political change, but knew that if it went too far it could destroy the entire regime. During the power struggle at the top, students put several so-called ‘big-character posters’ on a wall west of Tian’anmen Square, attacking the ‘whateverists’ and the Gang of Four. Deng was very happy to have this popular support from ‘Democracy Wall’ – many of the posters were sycophantic in their praise for him – though he warned the students off targeting Mao himself. But as the criticisms became more radical, he ordered a crackdown in 1979. Deng was establishing clear limits to change and made it clear that he was no political liberal.

  Deng’s marriage of market reform with strict political control has, in essence, lasted to this day. The ‘Four Modernizations’ (as the project was called) was an extension of Lenin’s Pragmatic Marxist NEP of the 1920s. It contrasted starkly with the Romantic reform Communist tradition that was born with Khrushchev and reached its culmination with Gorbachev. The Chinese leadership had one eye on the success of the capitalist Asian tigers, and another on the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. Mao, he concluded, by assailing the bureaucracy and stirring up mass democracy from below, had hastened civil war and collapse. Deng was determined not to repeat the mistake. He insisted on keeping the heavy-industrial and party bureaucrats on side, winning them over by persuasion, not violent confrontation.

  The centrepiece of Deng’s programme was to develop a two-track economy. Heavy industry would remain under state control; the party did not try to dissolve the old planning hierarchy with the acid of democracy or markets. Rather, it planted the seeds of the market alongside the inflexible and inefficient state sector. Collectives were abolished and private, family-based agriculture restored. At the same time, entrepreneurs were free to set up businesses – shops, small workshops and factories – with low tax rates and the freedom to hire and fire. Private business activity exploded, and by the end of the 1980s less than 40 per cent of national income came from the state sector – similar to levels in France and Italy. Soon the bureaucrats managing state industries became worried about competition from private business. But they did not try to sabotage the private-sector reforms, as one might have expected, because Deng made a crucial concession: state managers were allowed to set up private firms alongside state firms, using some of their profits. The bureaucrats, who might have been expected to resist market reforms, had thus been given a personal stake in their success.8 At the same time a number of ‘special economic zones’ were allowed to offer foreign investors privileged tax and customs treatment. The market, originally seen as the state’s junior partner, had begun to take over.

  By the end of the 1980s, China had been transformed. The major cities were bright, bustling places; advertising hoardings had replaced the old party banners and political slogans. In place of the old Maoist workerism and austerity was a new enthusiasm for money and business. A journalist-cum-anthropologist, collecting material for a portrait of Chinese life, found how far values had changed when interviewing a garrulous Tianjin peasant woman and her anxious, cautious husband:

  WIFE: … we’ve really made it. Townies are useless. We poor and lower-middle peasants are ahead: we’ve left the working class behind. They were stinking rich for thirty years, but now they’re crawling along by oxcart.

  HUSBAND: Never mind what she says. Once she starts she doesn’t give a damn. The workers are the leading class.

  WIFE: Leaders? Sure. But would you become a worker if anyone asked you? …

  What are you laughing at? We really are rich… What’s the Communist Party for, if not to rescue the poor from their sufferings?

  HUSBAND (with a smile): That’ll do. If you go on talking any longer you’ll start singing [Cultural Revolution new model] opera.9

  The reforms certainly had a dramatic effect on the countryside, and were very successful in improving productivity. Even Song Liying, a retired party official from Dazhai in Anhui Province – a model village in the Cultural Revolution period – accepted that life had improved for peasants since the reforms of the early 1980s:

  Before the reform… we weren’t allowed to grow anything on our backyard; we weren’t allowed to produce anything for sale… As a village cadre, I would intervene myself if I knew anyone dared violate the rules. Now, you can do anything you like, raise pigs to eat or sell, make cloth tigers… In 1984, with the extra money we had, we bought a small black-and-white TV set. I still remember it was a panda brand. We all thought the electric box was magic with its sounds and images…

  Nowadays people know how to make good use of time. Before, if you came to our village, you would see
people standing around, chatting, playing cards or mahjong. Now, you simply won’t see anybody hanging around. They’re all working!10

  Underlying the reforms of 1976–89 was an intellectual opening up, especially to the West. This was to be known as the era of ‘Culture Fever’, when Chinese intellectuals were allowed to debate the merits of a whole range of previously suppressed ideas – from neo-Confucianism to liberalism. It was, however, a preference for technocracy that won out. This seems surprising as the violence of the Cultural Revolution period might have been expected to produce a yearning for ‘socialism with a human face’ – a humane socialism that did not sacrifice the individual to the greater good. And amongst some it did: a group of Marxist humanists surrounding Wang Ruoshi read a mixture of the young Marx and translations of East European critiques of High Stalinism. However, Mao’s extreme Romanticism had discredited even these modestly idealistic attitudes, and a technocratic Marxism was soon in the ascendant. Moreover, following Mao’s malign neglect of education and expertise, ‘Respect knowledge, respect talent’ became the slogan of the day. Far more influential than the young Marx was the American futurologist Alvin Toffler, whose Third Wave, published in China in 1983, was a hit; in 2006, People’s Daily counted Toffler amongst the ‘50 foreigners shaping modern China’s development’.11 Toffler’s appeal lay in his claim that the ‘second wave’ of industrial society was over, and the world was entering a new era – the ‘knowledge society’ – in which a radically decentralized economy of diversity and consumer power would be held together by information technology. For Chinese readers, this seemed to promise a new future, free of the old Soviet industrial model. China could leap from the ‘first wave’ of agrarian society directly to the third wave, by mastering these new technologies.