The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Similar differences can be found in the end of Communist rule in the Soviet informal empire outside Europe. Gorbachev, once determined to compete with the United States outside Europe, increasingly saw his Third World allies as a liability. His advisers had indeed been losing faith in the possibility of Communism in the developing world for some time. They were convinced that Communist ambitions were just too radical, given the level of development of their societies. But with the Reagan revolution and the economic crises of the early 1980s, the USSR found itself in an even more difficult situation. There were now significant numbers of Marxist regimes, and they all demanded subsidies at a time when Soviet citizens were themselves suffering hardship. Moreover, as they came under mounting economic pressure, regimes split between moderate liberalizers and radicals, and – in contrast with the situation in Europe – radicals often had a good deal of support; their victories increased disillusionment in a Moscow that had lost faith in fundamental social transformation. In Grenada, Maurice Bishop, who had been seeking rapprochement with the United States, was toppled by the radical Bernard Coard (a former student at Sussex University and teacher for the left-wing Inner London Education Authority), precipitating the American invasion in 1983. Similarly in South Yemen, three years later, the reformist Soviet-trained Ali Nasir Muhammed was removed by the more doctrinaire Marxist ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, in a bloody coup. Gorbachev would have agreed entirely with Honecker’s comment: ‘just like in Grenada, the events in Yemen show what left-wing childishness can lead to’.87

  Equally unpopular in Moscow was Ethiopia’s Mengistu. The Ethiopian famine had damaged the reputation of Third World Marxism, especially amongst Eurocommunists, and Gorbachev had little love for the regime. In 1988 he told Mengistu that aid would be dependent on liberalization and the peaceful settlement of wars in Eritrea and Tigray, and soon afterwards the Ethiopian party split between reformers and hard-liners. The now ex-Marxist Eritrean and Tigray separatists joined together and advanced against the Mengistu regime. In 1990 Mengistu formally renounced Marxism-Leninism, and in 1991 was forced to flee the country for exile in Zimbabwe. On his departure the huge bronze statue of Lenin in Addis Ababa was unceremoniously destroyed.

  Nevertheless, Gorbachev was reluctant to cut off aid to his allies, partly because he still believed in some of them, and partly because the Americans were continuing to support anti-Marxist forces. In Afghanistan, the Soviets removed the hard-line Babrak Karmal, and replaced him with the more pragmatic Najibullah, who then tried to forge a broad alliance against the Islamists. The Soviets were desperate to withdraw their troops, but Reagan was implacable and refused to make a deal. As the war became increasingly unpopular in the USSR, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would leave in February 1989. Najibullah’s remained one of the most long-lasting Communist regimes, surviving until 1992. With his demise, the way was open for a succession of Islamist regimes, culminating in the victory of the radically puritan Taliban.

  The civil war in Angola also continued until the fall of the USSR. The Cubans and South Africans withdrew in 1988, and the MPLA abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1990, but the Americans continued to fund Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA group. Only in 1992, once the MPLA had won elections, did the United States switch sides and support the former Marxists. The civil war, however, lasted until 2002, when Savimbi was killed.

  In 1985, Gorbachev had not wanted to divest the USSR of its Third World allies, or of its East European satellites. Yet by 1989, he stood by passively as the Soviet bloc disintegrated. But even had he wanted to intervene, he could have done very little. He was embroiled in the drama of Soviet reform and presided over an empty treasury. However, he could not ignore the forces pulling Eastern Europe to the West for they were also acting on the USSR itself. Nationalist forces were now corroding the Union. The Communist Party had been the main force holding the Union together, and once it began to decay and freer elections were allowed to state parliaments, separatists were given a powerful political platform. In March 1990 the Lithuanian parliament voted to secede from the USSR, whilst Latvia and Estonia also announced they would eventually seek independence. In June the Russian Republic declared its sovereignty and now claimed that its own laws took precedence over the USSR’s. Other republics rapidly sought independence. It says much for Gorbachev’s extraordinary radicalism that he responded not by moderating his course but by loosening the reins even further. He proposed that a new, more liberal Union Treaty be signed to replace that of 1922, and endorsed Petrakov’s neo-liberal shock-therapy plan – a plan for complete marketization and privatization within 500 days, one of whose effects would have been to destroy the USSR’s tax-raising powers.88

  By September 1990 Gorbachev had second thoughts, and began trying to recentralize power. The following year saw him vacillate, alternately cracking down and then loosening control. He was desperate to preserve the USSR, but was reluctant to use violence, and he was also being outflanked by pro-market radicals in the person of the impulsive former Moscow party boss, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin used the Russian Republic as a base from which to challenge the USSR’s President Gorbachev; in June 1991 Yeltsin was elected President of Russia. Gorbachev, severely weakened politically, was forced to agree to a new Union Treaty that gave most powers to the republics. But two days before it was due to be signed, the forces of reaction Gorbachev had been warning against finally acted. A group of conservative leaders, including the KGB boss Vladimir Kriuchkov, made a last-ditch attempt to save the Union – and the Communist Party. They confronted Gorbachev in his Crimean dacha and demanded that either he impose martial law or hand over power to Vice-President Ianaev. He refused, and they imprisoned him. The USSR was now ruled by a ‘State Emergency Committee’ whilst Gorbachev recovered from an ‘illness’.

  On 19 August 1991 Muscovites woke up to see tanks rumbling into Moscow, leaving deep track marks on the warm tarmac. Was this a repeat of the removal of Khrushchev, or the crushing of the Prague Spring? It looked like the former but it was a sorry excuse for a coup. Rejected by Gorbachev, the coup-leaders’ confidence seemed to collapse. At their TV press conference Ianaev stumbled over his words, seemingly drunk. They failed to attract support from the mass of police and KGB, and could not prevent Yeltsin reaching the headquarters of the Russian government, the White House, where he stood on a tank in flamboyant defiance of the putschists. The coup leaders decided they had to use force against a White House full of civilian defenders, and in the early hours of 21 August they ordered an attack. The military commanders, however, refused to obey, and the leaders lost the will to continue. Later that day, they ended the coup, and Gorbachev was released. The putsch of 1991 had strong echoes of the Kornilov coup of 1917. As before, the conspirators failed to secure the support of middle-ranking officers, and a coup designed to save the old order simply hastened its end.89

  Gorbachev tried to pick up where he had left off, but everything had changed. Both the USSR and the Communist Party had been discredited. Yeltsin rapidly moved to take advantage of the situation, banning the Communist Party in Russia, and taking all of the USSR’s Russian assets into the hands of his Russian government. In 1990 few, not even Yeltsin, had wanted to destroy the USSR; by 1991 the old Soviet elites saw that it had disintegrated, and scrambled to restore their power on new foundations – the USSR’s former republics. The USSR’s defenders – Gorbachev and the coup leaders – had lacked the ruthlessness to hold the Union together. On 25 December 1991 Gorbachev gave up the presidency of the USSR. The red flag with hammer and sickle flying over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time. After seventy-four years the Communist experiment in the USSR was over.

  In 1985 the Soviet bloc had confronted a hostile West, each side armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world. Six years later the Soviet imperial system had collapsed with barely a skirmish. Its break-up caused sporadic violence throughout much of the 1990s, and tensions continue to this day – most recently in Georgia. But few, if any, powerful mult
i-ethnic empires have ended so peacefully. Gorbachev himself deserves much of the credit for this outcome, just as he deserves some of the blame for the economic and political collapse of the 1990s. However, even though he can seem like an extraordinary figure, he was in truth the embodiment of broader trends: the continuing appeal of Romantic Marxism in the Soviet party and the attraction of neo-liberalism and the West. Gorbachev’s main contribution was his extraordinary confidence and his political skill. He was prepared to press ahead with a deeply contradictory programme, even though it was destroying the system he was trying so hard to save.

  IX

  It could, though, have been so much worse, and in the other European country ruled by an indigenous Communist regime – Yugoslavia – it was. Yugoslavia suffered from many of the same problems of the USSR: a weak central state lacking the will or the power to reform the economy; a congeries of ethnic groups at odds with the centre; and the pressure of the neo-liberal IMF. But in Yugoslavia all were present to an extreme degree: Belgrade had been weaker for longer, nationalists had been organizing for years, and the IMF had a much greater hold over the economy. Throughout the 1980s, the IMF had persuaded an already weakened Belgrade to impose austerity on a fragmented country, and this had only intensified the resentments and rivalries dividing the republics. Communist politicians continued to use nationalist appeals to attract support; nationalisms were strong in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, but it was Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević who excelled in the art of populist rabble-rousing.

  Even so, as late as the spring of 1990 there was still widespread support for a united Yugoslavia, and the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, the Communist Ante Markovič, was the most popular politician in the state – more so than Milošević and the Croat nationalist Franjo Tudjman. This did not last for long, as this was the high point of the neo-liberal revolution. Markovič, encouraged by the IMF, decided to embark on a programme of ‘shock therapy’, coinciding with the first multi-party elections. Inevitably, the only force for Yugoslav political unity was now linked with a deeply unpopular economic programme.90 Markovič’s party was wiped out, and nationalist parties opposing shock therapy, elected in Croatia and Slovenia, began to plan for independence from Yugoslavia.

  The sudden break-up of Yugoslavia, without protection for any ethnic minorities within each republic, was bound to bring war. With the exception of Slovenia, the republics were ethnically mixed, and minorities felt increasingly threatened. In Croatia 12.2 per cent of the population were ethnically Serb, and they feared Tudjman – a revisionist historian with a nostalgia for the violent Nazi collaborators, the Croat Ustaša. All of this played into Milošević’s hands, and at the end of 1990 he won elections in Serbia, promising to defend Serbs throughout Yugoslavia. Even so, the Slovenes and the Croats continued the march towards independence, encouraged by international support and recognition from Germany, Austria and others.

  When Croatia and Slovenia finally did declare independence in June 1991, the Yugoslav army, directed by Milošević, marched in. Both sides drew back in Slovenia, but in Croatia the fighting was vicious and bloody as civil war broke out between the Croats and the Serb minority supported by the Yugoslav army. The war ended in January 1992, but by then Yugoslavia as a state was effectively dead. Milošević’s ambition was now to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, and he encouraged a Serb rebellion in the ethnically mixed republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The brutal Bosnian war began in April 1992 and lasted for over two years. The West was reluctant to intervene, but eventually horrific pictures of ethnic cleansing and concentration camps forced it to act and Milošević, crippled economically, was compelled to negotiate. The result was the unstable Dayton peace agreement of 1995. Three years later, the process of fragmentation restarted, as the Albanian Kosovars rebelled against a weakened Milošević. In 1999 NATO bombing forced Milošević to accept United Nations administration in Kosovo, which damaged his political position irreparably. The following year popular demonstrations – in which students played a major role – finally brought his resignation in October 2000. However, now that the West has recognized Kosovo as an independent state, the issue continues to fuel resentful nationalism in Serbia.

  Yugoslavia’s was the one transition from Communism where Western governments and the IMF were involved from the very beginning, and they did not acquit themselves with much credit. Radical neo-liberal reforms destabilized Yugoslavia, whilst foreign-policy interventions were at first ignorantly destructive, and then inadequate. The problem lay in the perceptions of Communism and its aftermath. In the late 1980s, the West was still in its militantly neo-liberal and neo-conservative phase, fighting the righteous war against Communism. It was determined to impose markets and defeat Communists like Markovič, with little regard for the likely consequences. But by the 1990s, Western politicians believed that the old ideological struggle was over, and were frustrated that the Yugoslavs were still fighting. The Yugoslavs’ conflict was now implausibly cast as the result of ‘ancient tribal hatreds’, artificially suppressed by Communism, and thus something the West could do little about. In reality, the conflicts in Yugoslavia were a more extreme form of those that affected all multi-ethnic Communist states. Understanding, political engagement and careful management might have avoided some of the worst violence in Europe since World War II.

  Yet perhaps that is too optimistic. There was one place where Communists explicitly rejected the advice of the West and ignored the moralism of the twin revolutions – China. But there, too, violence ensued.

  X

  On 15 May 1989, Gorbachev arrived at Beijing airport. The Chinese Communist Party, like its East European counterparts, was rightly apprehensive. Welcoming Gorbachev in 1989 was rather like encountering the Grim Reaper on the doorstep, complete with cloak, hood and sickle – a warning of imminent political death. His timing could not have been worse for the CCP. Since mid-April, students had been demonstrating throughout China, and on the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th movement, Beijing University students broke through police cordons and marched to Tian’anmen Square. The Chinese Communist leadership was divided over what to do. The reformer Zhao Ziyang wanted talks; the hard-liner Li Peng favoured repression. The imminent arrival of Gorbachev – whom the students hoped would be an ally – seemed to effectively scupper Zhao’s strategy.91 Protesters decided to escalate the conflict by occupying the square and staging a hunger strike to coincide with the Soviet leader’s visit. On 13 May more than 1,000 students began a hunger strike in the square, singing the ‘Internationale’ and anti-Japanese war songs, whilst raising banners declaring ‘The country will have no peace so long as dictatorship lives’ and ‘Corruption is the cause of turmoil’.92 By the evening of the 14th, 100,000 onlookers had joined them.

  Deng was furious. The international press had flocked to Beijing to cover the visit. ‘When Gorbachev’s here,’ Deng told his colleagues, ‘we have to have order at Tian’anmen. Our international image depends on it. What do we look like if the Square’s a mess?’93 By 17 May, Deng had thrown in his lot with the hard-liners, and approved the use of force in principle. Embarrassingly, Gorbachev’s welcome had had to be moved to the airport and his motorcade rerouted. He did not intervene on the students’ side, and his visit went off without incident. Indeed, oddly, his memoirs suggest that he had more sympathy with his hosts than the protesters.94 Yet his presence did threaten to spread his brand of revolution to China; as the intellectual Yan Jiaqi told the French newspaper Libération, the winds of democratization blowing from Moscow could not be resisted.95

  Gorbachev received such an enthusiastic reception because Chinese intellectuals had been germinating their own reformist ideas, rather similar to his, from the mid-1980s – often in dialogue with East European reformers. Dissatisfaction with Deng’s market authoritarianism was widespread. Economic liberalization was leading to sharp inequalities. Whilst entrepreneurial party bosses and peasants flourished, poorly paid students and urban workers suffer
ed. Corruption flourished and demonstrations and strikes soon became commonplace. The student protesters, though, did not seek solace in a return to the Maoist past. Nor were they Western-style liberal democrats, demanding free pluralistic elections and constitutions. They were instead closer in their sentiments to the Romantic perestroika Communism of Gorbachev: they demanded a democracy that would energize the united, patriotic ‘people’; they called for the removal of corrupt and repressive bureaucrats; and, like Gorbachev (and his successor Yeltsin), they embraced the West as a dynamic, modern society. They even supported the market, although many of them were suffering from it. They saw Deng’s Communist Party much as Gorbachev saw Brezhnev’s – as old-fashioned, repressive and xenophobic.

  Their worldview was captured in a poetic but highly polemical TV documentary series of 1988, River Elegy. The films – a carefully selected set of powerful images with didactic voiceover – were a head-on assault on three enemies, each represented by a well-known emblem of Chinese identity: Chinese traditional culture, symbolized by the Yellow River; political authoritarianism, symbolized by the Chinese dragon; and isolation from the West, symbolized by the Great Wall. As the voiceover solemnly intoned at the end of the first film: