The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Freston was condemning the disciplined societies of the 1950s West as much as Communism, and the end of the Cold War saw the dissolution of the old Revolutionary Liberal alliance, the triumph of the neo-liberals and the end of the neo-conservative era – at least temporarily. In part, neo-conservatism was too expensive. Reagan’s combination of military build-up and tax cuts had led to enormous state deficits, which threatened a serious crisis.6 But electorates were also pleased to see the end of Cold War militancy and the moralistic neo-conservatives, and they welcomed a new 1960s generation.

  The neo-liberal revolution, now separated from its neo-conservative twin, was therefore conducted not by the nationalistic right but by the cosmopolitan centre-left. The American Bill Clinton, the German Gerhard Schröder and the British Tony Blair, all products of the counter-cultural shifts of the 1960s, announced their discovery of a ‘Third Way’ – steering a path between social justice and the market. However, this turned out to be a path that veered rather more sharply in the direction of the market. Free-market capitalism now had a new and more appealing set of champions: the relaxed, jeans-wearing, 1960s left rather than the angry, be-suited right of the 1940s and 1950s. By the end of the decade, ‘Second International’ parties ruled virtually every West European country, but few ideological connections remained with the organization founded in 1889.

  Beyond the developed world, neo-liberalism was a much more revolutionary force – its vanguard the IMF and the World Bank, and behind them their chief financiers, the United States. Former Communist Eastern Europe was especially affected, though not everybody accepted the IMF’s recipe. The results of such a revolutionary onslaught were predictable: exposing inefficient Communist industry to the rigours of the market overnight brought severe recessions, high unemployment and pockets of extreme poverty and inequality. Economies contracted sharply throughout the former Soviet bloc, shrinking by an average of 17 percent in 1992, and only beginning to recover three years later. By 1997 every East European country bar Poland still had a smaller economy than in 1990.7

  The results, though, differed sharply. In countries where there was a reasonably strong state machine and where elites had already begun to disengage from Communism by the 1980s, such as Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the newly split Czech Republic and Slovakia, neo-liberal ‘shock therapies’ were largely implemented and were successful in restoring growth, although at the cost of poverty for many. The promise of European Union membership – with its emphasis on the rule of law – also helped. By the new millennium, these economies were emerging from the slump. In much of the former Soviet bloc, however, states were already very weak and neo-liberal assaults on them merely enfeebled them further. Governments therefore lacked the power and authority to enforce market reforms and instead corrupt kleptocratic economies emerged – unhappy half-way houses between state control and the market. Businessmen and ex-officials soon ‘captured’ these struggling states, bribing officials to give them preferential treatment; taxes were left uncollected, foreigners refused to invest, and capital, rather than flowing in, poured out into shady offshore accounts.8

  The greatest failure of neo-liberal experiments came in Russia itself. By 2000 Russia’s economy had shrunk to less than two thirds of its 1989 level – a more devastating recession than America’s Great Depression.9 The collapse of the Soviet state and the theft of its economy had already begun under Gorbachev but the neo-liberal policies pursued by the post-Communist Yeltsin government intensified the problem.10 Rapid privatization amounted to little more than the asset-stripping of state enterprises by government crony capitalists, and lawlessness deterred investment and encouraged capital flight. The problem lay, as before, in the weakness of the state, which could not raise taxes, impose legal norms and contracts, or prevent organized crime and bureaucratic-cum-capitalist larceny. The collapse finally came following a further fall in the oil price in 1998. Foreign investors financing the now vast government debt lost faith and fore-closed. The Russian state was forced to default on its debts, bringing with it humiliation for its key adviser, the IMF, and laying the grounds for a backlash against the West and liberal democracy in the 2000s. President Vladimir Putin – the grandson of one of Lenin’s and Stalin’s cooks and a former KGB officer – combined capitalist economics with an increasingly authoritarian politics, whilst rehabilitating some of the symbols of the Stalinist past; one of his earliest acts was to bring back the tune (though not the words) of the old 1944 Soviet national anthem, abandoned by Yeltsin in 1990.

  If the end of Soviet Communism brought one of the great economic failures of the twentieth century, the effective end of Chinese Communism brought one of the century’s – and indeed history’s – great economic successes. The Chinese regime, whatever its other failings, lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than any other government in modern history, with the help of the new globalized economy which allowed it to export to the West. After a brief freeze after the Tian’anmen massacre, Deng Xiaoping pressed ahead with market reforms from the early 1990s. And in 1993 the archetypical command economy was finally abandoned and the plan abolished. But in China, unlike the Soviet bloc, encouraging markets did not mean undermining the state; on the contrary, the Communists strengthened it. Both their own experience in the 1980s and that of Yeltsin’s USSR convinced them that, paradoxically, to flourish markets needed a powerful state, controlled by a powerful party.11 Corruption still remained embedded within the system, and inequality has increased, but the newly assertive market-state laid the foundations for the extraordinary take-off that made China the most dynamic economy in the world throughout the 2000s. At the same time the repressive machinery of the old Communist state remains, including the old penal ‘reform through labour’ system (laogai).12

  II

  The global neo-liberal revolution of the 1990s and 2000s was naturally traumatic for Communists, and they engaged in a number of diverse adaptations – some embracing the market, others battening down the hatches and resisting the forces of globalization. Where neo-liberalism was reasonably successful and political collapse avoided, Communists quietly ditched their Marxism and signed up to the market. In Central Eastern Europe they abjured red for pink and refashioned themselves as pro-capitalist Social Democrats. Though they criticized shock therapy and promised to soften the effects of economic liberalization, when they were returned to power in the mid-1990s (in Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria) they did little to challenge the new system. The high point of the pink revanche came in the Polish presidential election of 1995 when former Communist Aleksandr Kwaśniewski defeated the anti-Communist hero Lech Wałęsa. The most successful Communists-turned-Social-Democrats were, predictably, the Italians; most Italian Communists joined the new Democratic Party of the Left, which dominated coalition governments in the late 1990s and in 2006. The old symbols of activism and labour – the hammer and sickle – were combined with a distinctly conservative image of rootedness: the oak tree.

  In Asia, similarly, a successful capitalism reconciled Chinese, Vietnamese and Laotian Communists to the market, if not to liberal democracy, and elected Communist governments in the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal pursued free-market policies. Mao’s mummified corpse still occupies the mausoleum on Tian’anmen Square and he still stares from the banknotes, but his ideological influence has been reduced to a negligible amount. The official ideology is still Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought, and a Beijing academic institute is dedicated to its study. However, this is a technocratic Marxism, stripped of any radical commitment to equality. The official line is that once China has become rich, it can then think about Communism. Nobody predicts when this might happen. Meanwhile, efforts to infuse the party with ideological commitment have failed. In 2005 President Hu Jintao launched a Mao-style campaign, demanding that all party members spend every Thursday afternoon and Saturday studying party history and engaging in self-criticism. He was disconcerted to find that they were not taking it seriously, and that comm
ercial websites were doing a brisk trade in pre-prepared self-criticisms. A new rule was introduced requiring that they be written by hand, but the campaign was generally agreed to have been a failure.13

  The resulting ideological vacuum has been filled with a potent nationalism and by the strange reappearance of official Confucianism. After spending decades trying to root out this ancient ideology of patriarchy, obedience and order, the party is now assiduously embedding it. In 2004 the Chinese government set up the first of a planned hundred or so Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture abroad – a far cry indeed from Mao’s propagation of international Marxism in the 1960s.14

  Even so, the Chinese Communists are apprehensive. That a Communist party presides over rampant and red-blooded capitalism is, of course, rather difficult to justify. Levels of inequality in China (largely between urban and rural households, and between different regions) exceed that of the United States. The choice made in the 1970s – to embrace market reforms with the support of the bureaucrats – avoided a Soviet-style collapse, but it left local officials with enormous economic power. Bosses and their children – the new Communist ‘princelings’ – have leveraged their political clout into extreme privilege. Predictably, many ordinary people are disillusioned, especially in the poorer rural areas, and most peasants have a very negative view of their local rulers.15

  Political interference can also have a damaging impact on the economy. Local party pressure on banks to help friendly businesses means that investment decisions are often made on political, not economic grounds. The Chinese Communists’ dilemma is a common one: how can a political elite, however expert, control and direct an economy when there is no independent non-party authority – democratic or legal – to curtail officials? Campaigns against corruption may work for a while, but soon run out of steam.

  In the rest of the former Soviet bloc, Communist parties refused to adapt to the neo-liberal revolution, and their response combined resentment and nostalgia. East Germany’s successor Communists, who attracted a great deal of support in the eastern regions of the newly reunited Germany, were highly ambivalent about the market. In much of the former USSR, a strong hostility to capitalism has also become the norm. Gennadii Ziuganov’s Russian Communist Party adopted a highly nationalistic version of High Stalinism; his mixture of a yearning for the USSR as a Russian empire, social egalitarianism, and hatred of the West and resentment of the plundering oligarchs, was a heady brew. By the mid-1990s disillusionment with the West and economic collapse fuelled popular support, and in the parliamentary elections in 1995 the Communist Party won the largest number of votes. This, however, was to be the high point of Communist support. In the presidential election of 1996 Yeltsin narrowly defeated Ziuganov, though in somewhat dubious circumstances. In effect, old-style Communists had been trounced by an ex-Communist, presiding over a highly corrupt semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian regime, bankrolled by friendly businessmen.

  This became the pattern throughout the former USSR, as former Communist bosses tried to rebuild their power without the old Communist parties. Many embraced a mixture of crony capitalism, nationalism and authoritarianism. But from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, a second wave of democratization swept the region. In Bulgaria and Romania, then in Slovakia, Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro, mass protests at electoral fraud and corruption forced elections and removed ex-Communist bosses.16 These democratic revolutions became an exportable package. Serbia’s ‘Otpor’ (‘Resistance’) pioneered a model of revolution for a post-modern, ironic and media-driven age. Using a combination of rock music, 1980s ‘Orange Alternative’-style stunts and irreverent catchy slogans, such as ‘Gotov je’ (‘He’s finished’) (applied successfully to Milošević in 2000), they brought their model of revolution to the former USSR, spawning the ‘Kmara’ (‘Enough’) movement in Georgia and ‘Pora’ (‘It’s time’) in Ukraine. Although they had a great deal of domestic support, they were also helped by a United States anxious to reduce Russian influence over the region, which funnelled funding to the protestors through various non-governmental organizations. The ‘colour revolutions’ – ‘Rose’ in Georgia in 2003, ‘Orange’ in Ukraine in 2004 and ‘Tulip’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 – all succeeded in toppling old orders dominated by former Communists. But they found it far less easy to replace the nexus of crony capitalists and bosses with genuinely liberal democracies; new rulers soon found themselves dependent on the power structures that had existed before.

  Ex-Communists have been noticeably more resilient in former Soviet Central Asia. But in the absence of the old Communist parties, political leaders found themselves increasingly dependent on traditional clans.17 Only Askar Akayev, the ex-Communist leader of Kyrgyzstan, seriously tried to liberalize politics in the early 1990s, but even so local notables eventually returned to power. Nursultan Nazarbayev of energy-rich Kazakhstan established an authoritarian, clan-based regime more rapidly, as did the eccentric former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niiazov. Niiazov had initially supported the Russian coup leaders of 1991, but when they failed, the newly fashioned ‘Turkmenbashi’ (leader of the Turkmen) compensated for the weakness of his support amongst the clans by creating an extreme leadership cult. His Ruhnama, or the ‘Book of the Soul’ – a mixture of moral principles, dubious nationalist history and sufism – became compulsory reading in all schools. A giant mechanical model of the Ruhnama graces the capital, Ashgabat. The book opens at 8 p.m. every day and recorded readings are broadcast, rather like the Muslim call to prayer. Niiazov, in true Jacobin style, also renamed the days and months, although the new nomenclature was more narcissistic than rationalistic: September became ‘Ruhnama’, whilst April became ‘Gurbansoltan’ – his mother’s name. Since Niiazov’s death in 2006 his successor, formerly his personal dentist, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, has continued the old regime, though he has moderated some of the more idiosyncratic manifestations of the personality cult. These ex-Communists still found the old Stalinist tools essential if they were to shore up their regimes, even though they had long abandoned Stalinist ideology.

  Two particularly vulnerable former Soviet allies have retained not only the tools but also much of the substance of Marxist-Leninist ideology: North Korea and Cuba. Both were severely hit by the collapse of the USSR. They not only lost crucial economic assistance, but were now also internationally and ideologically isolated. Even so, they have shown the willpower to survive, as both see themselves as Davids in confrontations with neighbouring Goliaths. Both have also used a mixture of repression and nationalism to stave off collapse.

  In the case of North Korea, Kim Il Sung bequeathed the old guerrilla mentality to his son and successor from 1994, Kim Jong Il, and the economic crisis that came with the end of Soviet support, together with the success of South Korea, only convinced the Kims that they should make no serious concessions. In the mid-1990s bad weather and rigid agrarian policies led to famine, causing an estimated 2–3 million deaths.18 Nevertheless, North Korea has been able to attract aid – partly through blackmail. Fear of Korea’s nuclear weapons, and of the chaos caused by its economic collapse, has persuaded foreigners to open their chequebooks. The economy remains depressed, but there have been no signs that the regime is losing control.

  The fall of the USSR was an even greater blow for Cuba, because it depended so much on trade with the Eastern bloc. Since 1991 the regime has been beleaguered, but it has remained resilient. Continuing American hostility and the economic embargo, extended under President Clinton in 1999, have helped the regime exploit nationalist resentment at their big neighbour’s bullying tactics. Cuba’s economic strategy, though, has been very different to North Korea’s. By allowing private citizens to participate in the international economy – receiving money from relatives abroad or tourists at home – the Cuban regime has acquired valuable dollar earnings. It has thus stayed afloat, though at the cost of losing control over a substantial part of the economy. Inequalities,
especially between blacks and whites, have increased; the state sector is losing talented people to a private, black-market sector; and cynicism has grown, as the gap between ideals and reality widens.19

  In February 2008 Castro handed over power to his brother Raúl and economic liberalization has continued, though the economic downturn has also forced Raúl to impose new austerity measures. As Cuba celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Castro’s entry into Havana, the mood is pessimistic. But regime change in Washington may have the greatest effect on the state: if President Obama restores relations with Cuba he may well hasten the regime’s collapse.

  Communists and ex-Communists therefore preside over some of the world’s most and least successful economies. But in both cases, the old Radical Marxism has disappeared. Only in poor, peasant societies, where economic inequalities were reinforced with the sharper inequalities of status and race, could revolutionary Marxism still appeal.

  III

  In April 1980, Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor teaching in the poor, remote Peruvian town of Huamanga, made a rousing appeal:

  Comrades. Our labour has ended, the armed struggle has begun… The invincible flames of the revolution will glow, turning to lead and steel… There will be a great rupture and we will be the makers of the new dawn… We shall convert the black fire into red and the red into pure light.20

  With this, Guzmán – nicknamed ‘President Gonzalo’ – launched the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). His intense, apocalyptic language was highly idiosyncratic, far from both orthodox Soviet and Maoist rhetoric, and he did indeed claim to be creating a new Marxism designed to appeal to his Peruvian Indian supporters. As the party’s slogan went: ‘Uphold, defend and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, Mainly Gonzalo Thought!’ However, in practice, Gonzalo Thought was pretty close to Maoism, and Guzmán had visited China at least three times during the Cultural Revolution. His one notable departure from Maoism was his attitude towards violence, which was glorified as an almost redemptive force. One Sendero anthem contained the gruesome line: ‘the people’s blood has a rich perfume, like jasmine, daisies, geraniums and violets’.21