The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Not all Communist states were affected: China, together with other East Asian states, had little debt and benefited from a new liberal trade regime. It was allowed to export cheap industrial goods to the United States, and by the 2000s China was to take the place of Japan as the main source of capital for an indebted Washington. But the USSR’s satellites in Eastern Europe and its allies in the South were less fortunate. Their industrial goods were not in demand, and as a group they were the most indebted of all countries. In 1979 Poland’s debt service ratio was a massive 92 per cent, and the GDR’s 54 per cent, compared with Mexico’s 55 per cent and Brazil’s 31 per cent, and much higher than a prudent 25 per cent.43 They now faced crippling interest rates and the withdrawal of loans. As Stalin had anticipated when he rejected Marshall Aid, succumbing to the lure of Western credit was dangerous. East European Communists were to rue the day they took the Western shilling.

  Poland and Romania effectively became bankrupt and suffered the humiliation of having to beg Western capitalists to reschedule their debt; Hungary and the GDR were in less serious trouble, and survived with temporary financing. All had to cut living standards, particularly for the industrial working class – something they found painful. Communist states were weak, and their regimes had little legitimacy. The debt crisis was to corrode it even further.

  Predictably, unreformed Stalinism was best able to impose austerity. When Romania defaulted on its debt in 1981 and was forced to request rescheduling, bread rationing was introduced; energy was only available intermittently, and the use of refrigerators and vacuum-cleaners banned. Work was intensified and extended to Sundays and holidays. When petrol became scarce the government, supposedly a harbinger of modernity, was humiliatingly forced to encourage a return to horse-drawn transport. The Securitate developed a Stasi-style network of informants to enforce discipline, and the state intruded ever further into private life, including the notorious compulsory examinations of women to stop abortions and reverse the falling birth-rate.

  In the more liberal and decentralized Yugoslavia, in contrast, the federal state’s austerity programme only accelerated political disintegration. Deeply indebted, it was forced to go cap in hand for loans to the IMF, which imposed tight conditions in 1982. A previous supporter of decentralization, the IMF now declared, understandably, that if austerity measures were to work, the republics had to be stripped of their autonomous powers to borrow and create money. The wealthier republics – especially Slovenia and Croatia – objected, and struggles between them and their poorer neighbours continued throughout the 1980s, setting the scene for the apocalyptic breakdown of the 1990s.44 Communist leaders increasingly acted as republican, rather than all-Yugoslav politicians, and local nationalisms replaced Marxist Yugoslavism. Tito’s death in 1980 had dissolved some of the country’s unifying glue, but the consequences of international debt and IMF intervention did the rest. The bonds holding Yugoslavia together were disintegrating.

  In Poland, the debt crisis brought the almost complete collapse of Communist power. When in 1980 the government was forced to impose austerity measures and reduce the distribution of meat, it was met by strikes. The stoppage at the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdańsk was one of the best organized and the workers soon moved from economic to political demands. They erected a wooden cross outside the factory in memory of four workers killed in 1970 and launched a broader movement, ‘Solidarity’, to fight for social justice and independent trade unions. The strikes, joined by people across the social spectrum, spread and the economy was soon paralysed. The Communists, now led by Stanislaw Kania, had no option but to permit trade union activity entirely free of party control. In August 1980, Solidarity and the party signed agreements which, for the first time since the end of the Popular Fronts of the 1940s, gave non-Communists real power. For the next sixteen months, the Communists and Solidarity faced each other in a tense stand-off.

  This could not last for ever. Solidarity was becoming more assertive, and a planned strike in December 1981 raised Soviet fears of rebellion. The Kremlin put pressure on Kania, and the leader of the army, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to rescue the decaying party by imposing military rule. The Polish leadership was naturally reluctant to take responsibility for an unpopular crackdown, and Kania even seems to have become sympathetic to Solidarity.45 Moscow decided he had to go, and he was replaced as first secretary by Jaruzelski, who, threatened by a Red Army invasion, agreed to Moscow’s wishes.

  The military now took power following Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law, killing about a hundred people. Solidarity activists were arrested, and stability was restored. As Jaruzelski had predicted, the measure removed any remaining legitimacy the party still possessed. This was barely a Communist state any more. The military man Jaruzelski, with his signature dark glasses, looked more like an austere version of a Latin American dictator than a Communist party leader; the state and the army now ruled, not the party.46 Most importantly, the events of 1981 made clear that the limits of Soviet support for Eastern Europe were being reached. The Soviets made it clear to Communist elites (though not to the rest of the world) that the Brezhnev doctrine and the promise of military support for Soviet-bloc regimes were now dead.47 And although the USSR was forced to give huge credits to Poland in 1981–2, Soviet patience with its unstable East European clients was running out, partly because it was itself feeling poorer; whilst the oil price was still high, it had been falling since 1981. In response to threats that the East Germans would have to borrow more money from the West unless it received greater infusions from the USSR, Nikolai Baibakov, the head of the Soviet planning organization, told them that they had to cut investment:

  I have to think about the People’s Republic of Poland! When I cut back on oil there (I am going there next week) that would be unbearable for socialism… And Vietnam is starving. We have to help. Should we just give away South-East Asia? Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen. We carry them all. And our own standard of living is extraordinarily low. We really must improve it.48

  Communists in Eastern Europe were not the only ones to suffer in the new international economic order. Many Third World states, of all ideologies, were hit by the rises in interest rates and the world recession, as raw material prices fell and debt became expensive. Some Communist regimes in the Third World, though, were especially vulnerable because they were more likely to pursue ambitious policies of economic development and welfare. The debt problem, therefore, especially affected them.

  Exacerbating the economic and debt crises was the fact that Communist regimes were forced to deal with a newly assertive IMF and World Bank. In contrast to the 1970s, when these international institutions counselled state-led development, the United States now used them to impose its neo-liberal vision on the world. In February 1980, Robert McNamara, head of the World Bank, introduced the long-term ‘Structural Adjustment Loan’ programme for countries in economic trouble. This programme, together with those of the IMF, became one of the most effective weapons of neo-liberalism in the Second and Third Worlds. Under the slogan ‘stabilize, privatize and liberalize’, money was given only if the state was cut back, the economy was privatized and markets were unleashed.

  There were now strong incentives for Communists in the Third World to abandon their economic model. But forces from within the Communist world also influenced them, notably the Chinese embrace of the market in 1978. The defection of the regime which had previously espoused hard-line Communist purism in the Third World, influenced by the success of the East Asian tigers, was a major blow to Marxist-Leninists. The failures of socialist planning also played their part. By the mid-1980s, several pro-Soviet states were introducing market reforms. In 1984 Guinea-Bissau began cooperating with the IMF, as did Mozambique in 1987, the year after the death of Samora Machel in a plane crash. Even Angola, still involved in civil war with American allies and therefore excluded from IMF aid, introduced market reforms in 1985.

  By the mid-1980s, debt and
financial crisis had weakened Communism, and had a devastating effect on regimes in the South. But they did not destroy it in its Soviet and East European heartland. Indeed, conservative Communists in the USSR, hostile to economic reform, pointed to debt as evidence of the dangers of capitalism and collaboration with the West. The results of Ronald Reagan’s neo-conservative revolution in American foreign policy were similar: they had a major impact in the South, but a much more ambiguous one on the USSR and Eastern Europe.

  The mid-1980s was an era of war-scares, on both sides of the iron curtain, and in the United States several popular films and TV series were screened on the theme of Soviet attacks and invasions. One of the most implausible – and violent – was Red Dawn (1984).49 The plot is far-fetched: the perfidious Europeans – with the exception of loyal Albion – have abandoned Washington; a revolutionary regime controls Mexico; and the Soviets and their allies (the Cubans and Nicaraguans) occupy vast swathes of the central United States. Rather like the inhabitants of 1950s Mosinee, Americans are subjected to the grim propagandizing of Soviet culture, and cinema-goers have to put up with screenings of Aleksandr Nevskii. Nevertheless, many Americans collaborate, and the Soviets become entrenched. But there is one thing the Reds did not foresee: ‘the invading armies planned for everything – except for eight kids called “The Wolverines”’. The Wolverines, most of whom are members of a small-town high-school football team in Calumet, Colorado, wage a guerrilla war against the occupying forces in the name of freedom, and become a serious threat to the Soviets. They are eventually defeated, but when America is finally liberated their names are remembered, inscribed on the ‘Partisan Rock’.

  The film was financed by Hollywood, not sponsored by government. But it did capture a new American self-image that became increasingly influential during the second Cold War. No longer was the United States Nixon’s global policeman, maintaining order against Communist revolutionaries through a network of regional gendarmes. It was the underdog, the partisan and the freedom fighter, struggling against the totalitarian monolith. And whilst the elderly Reagan was hardly a capitalist Che Guevara, he was determined to bring an idealism and militancy to the American cause that had hitherto been the preserve of the Communist guerrillas.

  Reagan, the son of a poor shoe salesman from Illinois, was not a conventional neo-conservative. His contemporaries found him unfathomable, and he remains something of an enigma to this day. He possessed an idealistic and optimistic disposition, inherited from his Evangelical Christian mother, which was very popular amongst American voters. And yet he was also a liberal militant, determined to resist the dangers to the ‘free world’ posed by the Communist ‘evil empire’. In his fundamental optimism he was closer to the neo-liberals. He was convinced that Communism would ultimately fall because it was economically irrational, and he had a genuine commitment to nuclear disarmament. Nevertheless, he shared much of the belligerence of the neo-conservatives, especially in the early years of his presidency. He was a passionate anti-Communist ideologue, and he presided over the largest peacetime rearmament in American history, with defence spending absorbing 30 per cent of the federal budget between 1981 and 1985. He also appointed neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to junior positions (though ‘doves’ were also powerful in his administration), and his Marxist-inflected language echoed theirs. As he told the British parliament in 1982:

  In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with the political order. But the crisis is happening in… the home of Marxism-Leninism… It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history.50

  In the Third World, there were strong practical reasons for Reagan to adopt a revolutionary idealism. Nixon’s gendarmes had failed to stem the tide of Communist success, as had Jimmy Carter’s efforts to force them to respect human rights. Reagan was determined to use military force to roll back Communism – especially in Central America. He refused to accept that Communism was a response to local injustices; guerrillas were ‘military personnel’, trained by the USSR.51 However, he was still constrained by Vietnam, and there was little public support for a return to sustained all-out warfare in the Third World. Reagan could fight conventional wars where victory was easy – as in the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 – but such cases were few. The use of guerrilla strategies, developed by Communists, was therefore an excellent solution. They allowed pro-American movements to appear indigenous; they were cheap; and they could be carried out in secret, without congressional oversight. The new policy, pursued in Nicaragua, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia and El Salvador, was blandly dubbed ‘Low Intensity Conflict’, but it owed a great deal to the tactics of Maoism and the guerrilla tradition.52 Rather than supporting military dictators, the United States would support local insurgent groups. Warfare was to be ‘civilianized’ – the Maoist ‘people’s war’ – whilst ‘psyops’ (‘agitprop’ in Communist language) was central to the new strategy. Leftist and Communist regimes were to be undermined using sabotage and assassinations. But efforts were also made to win the political argument and build up ‘third forces’, against the Communists and the old dictators. Anti-Communists amongst the urban middle classes and conservative churches were mobilized, and sometimes old authoritarian allies, like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, were abandoned. By 1985 the strategy was being justified ideologically, as the ‘Reagan Doctrine’, a policy of ‘anti-Communist revolution’ designed to bring democracy to the world.53

  Reagan began his military counter-offensive against Communism in Central America, and Low Intensity Conflict was pursued most consistently in Nicaragua. The Americans supported a number of opposition groups, including a ‘third force’ of liberals and conservatives and the insurgent ‘Contras’. Many of the Contras were linked with the old ruler, Somoza, but covert American trainers and advisers refashioned them into a modern guerrilla force. Some CIA officials secretly issued them a manual in 1983, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, whole passages of which could have been written by Mao or Che Guevara. The pamphlet began with the sentence ‘Guerrilla war is essentially a political war’, and went on to explain how the Contras were to politicize their own forces, so they could wage a campaign of subversion against the regime. ‘Political cadres’ would organize the rank and file, making sure that they became motivated through ‘self-criticism’ and ‘group discussions’ which would ‘raise the spirit and improve the unity of thought’. The guerrillas would then carry out ‘armed propaganda’, kidnapping and assassinating government officials as ‘enemies of the people’. At the same time, they would give the peasant population ‘ideological training’ mixed with ‘folkloric songs’, impressing on them the Russo-Cuban imperialist nature of the Sandinista regime.54

  In practice, the Contras relied much more on violence, intimidation and economic sabotage than winning hearts and minds. By 1988 the Sandinistas were defeating the Contras militarily, but the war and an American embargo had wrecked the economy, and the Sandinistas themselves alienated some. When elections were held in 1990, a majority, some sick of war and believing that it would only end when the regime fell, others antagonized by the Sandinistas’ overly ambitious programmes of reform and hostility to criticism, voted for the pro-American, neo-liberal candidate, Violetta Barrios de Chamorro. Extreme violence was used elsewhere in Central America to suppress Marxist insurgencies, this time unleashed by local dictators’ paramilitaries and aided by Washington. In Guatemala, death squads with names like Ojo por Ojo (‘Eye for Eye’) massacred tens of thousands, mainly indigenous Indians, whilst the El Salvadorean civil war was particularly brutal.55 By the end of the 1980s, the death toll in the Central American wars was enormous: almost 1 per cent of the Nicaraguan population died in the Contra wars.56

  The prospects for anti-Communist guerrilla war were even rosier in other regions of 1970s Communist expansion. The United States, w
orking closely with South Africa, continued to promote UNITA’s war of attrition in Angola, in which some 800,000 died and almost a third of the population of 10 million were displaced.57 The Mozambican regime, meanwhile, was brought to its knees by the South Africans and RENAMO, and it made peace in 1984. But the centre of the guerrilla strategy lay in the struggle against the USSR in Afghanistan. Even before the Soviet invasion, the Afghan Communists were faced with powerful, Islamist insurgents – the Mujahedin. The Carter administration had given the insurgents limited military help, supplementing Saudi and Pakistani support, but aid was substantially increased in 1983. Young men from throughout the Muslim world flocked to join the jihad or holy war, including the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden; this was their Spanish Civil War. For Reagan, on the other hand, supporting the Mujahedin fitted perfectly into the strategy of anti-Communist guerrilla war. Unlike the Iranian brand of Islamism, which had a strongly socialist colouring, the Mujahedin were socially conservative. They were also an anti-imperialist movement, with genuine popular support. As CIA Director William Casey enthused, ‘Here is the beauty of the Afghan operation. Usually it looks as if the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys.’58 The Americans, of course, were deeply to regret their support for the Mujahedin in the 1990s when they turned on their erstwhile patron. But according to the Kirkpatrick doctrine it mattered little that they were not liberals, so long as they opposed Communist totalitarianism.