The Red Flag: A History of Communism (2 page)

Russian transliteration accords with the Library of Congress system (while suppressing soft and hard signs) except for a few well-known proper names (such as ‘Trotsky’ and ‘Yeltsin’); similarly, Chinese transliteration generally follows the pinyin system, except for a few well-known names (such as ‘Chiang Kaishek’).

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall – the concrete and graffiti-daubed symbol of division between the Communist East and the capitalist West – was breached; joyful demonstrators from both sides danced and clambered on the wreckage of Europe’s ideological wars. Earlier that year Communism had been dealt another blow by popular protests (though on that occasion brutally suppressed) in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. And so, exactly a century after the ascendancy of organized international Communism was marked by the foundation of the ‘Second International’ of Communist parties, and two hundred years after the Parisian populace had stormed another symbol of authoritarian order – the Bastille – revolution had again erupted in the world’s capitals. These new revolutions, however, were aimed not at toppling the bastions of traditional wealth and aristocratic privilege, but at destroying states supposedly dedicated to the cause of the poor and oppressed. The dramatic, and largely unpredicted, fall of Communism in 1989 was, then, much more than the collapse of an empire: it was the end of a two-century-long epoch, in which first European and then world politics was powerfully affected by a visionary conception of modern society, in which the wretched of the earth would create a society founded on harmony and equality.

For many, Communism could now be consigned to Trotsky’s ‘rubbish-heap of history’ – a hopeless detour into a cul-de-sac, an awful mistake. The American academic Francis Fukuyama’s claim that ‘history’, or the struggle between ideological systems, had ‘ended’ with the victory of liberal capitalism was greeted with much scepticism, but deep down, many believed it.
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Liberalism, not class struggle, was the only
way to resolve social conflict, and capitalism was the only economic system that worked. And for some time, the world seemed to lose interest in Communism. It seemed to be a fading set of sadly fossilized attitudes surviving amongst a generation that would soon be crushed by the forces of ‘reform’. It was a phenomenon best left to dry scholarship, an ancient civilization akin perhaps to the Ancient Persians, with its own Ozymandian wreckage reminding us of past delusions. In the mid-1980s, when I began to research Communism, at the height of Cold War tensions, it seemed an exciting subject, but within a decade it seemed irrelevant in a new world of triumphant liberal capitalism.

However, two events in this decade have brought Communism back to the foreground of public attention. The first – the destruction of New York’s twin towers on 11 September 2001 – had no direct connection with Communism at all. Indeed, the Islamist terrorists responsible were militantly anti-Marxist. Nevertheless, the Islamists, like the Communists, were a group of angry radicals who believed they were fighting against ‘Western imperialism’, and parallels were soon being drawn, by politicians, journalists and historians. Though the term ‘Islamofascism’ was more commonly used than ‘Islamocommunism’, Islamism has been widely depicted as the latest manifestation of ‘totalitarianism’ – a violent, anti-liberal and fanatical family of ideologies that includes both fascism and Communism. For American neo-conservatives, these threats demanded an ideological and military struggle every bit as determined as the one Ronald Reagan waged against Communism in the Third World.
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In 2004 the European Parliament’s centre-right parties sought to condemn Communism as a movement on a par with fascism, whilst in June 2007 President George W. Bush dedicated a memorial to the victims of Communism in Washington DC.

If the 11 September attacks showed that the post-1989 political order had not resolved serious conflicts in the Middle East, the fall of the American bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 and the financial crisis it triggered demonstrated that the post-1989 economic order had failed to create stable, sustainable and enduring prosperity. The lessons drawn from these latter events, however, have differed from those learnt after 2001. Whilst nobody is calling for the return of the rigid Soviet economic model, Marx’s critique of the inequality and instability brought by unfettered global capital has seemed prescient; sales of
Capital
, his masterwork, have soared in his German homeland.

The history of Communism therefore seems to be more relevant to today’s concerns than it was in the early 1990s. However, we have found it difficult to grasp the nature of Communism – much more so than other aspects of our recent history; whilst many warned of the Nazis’ aggression and their persecution of the Jews, very few predicted the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin’s Terror, Khrushchev’s ‘de-Stalinization’, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s ‘killing fields’, or the collapse of the USSR. In part, the obsessive secrecy of Communist regimes accounts for this, but more important has been the enormous gap between the outlook of historians and commentators today, and Communist views of the world at the time. Explaining Communism demands that we enter a very different mental world – that of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Gorbachev, as well as those who supported or tolerated them.

This book is the product of many years of thinking about Communism. I had my first glimpse of the Communist world in the summer of that Orwellian year, 1984. I was then a nineteen-year-old student and had taken the cheapest route to Russia – a Russian-language course run by sovietophile ‘friendship societies’ throughout Europe, in a dingy Moscow institute for civil engineers. I knew little about either Russia or Communism, but they seemed to me, as to many people in that era, to be the most important issue of the time. That year was, in retrospect, an unusually turbulent one. I was visiting the capital of Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ at the height of what is now known as the ‘second Cold War’, as relations between East and West deteriorated after the brief détente of the 1970s. Debate was raging over NATO’s decision to deploy cruise missiles in Western Europe, and the previous autumn West Germany experienced its largest demonstrations of the post-World War II era. I went to Russia, at least in part, so that I could answer for myself some of the questions that obsessed Western opinion at the time: what was Communism, and what was the Soviet leadership trying to do? Was the USSR really an evil empire run by Leninist fanatics who, having broken their own people, were now intent on imposing their repressive system on the West? Or was it a regime which, regardless of its many shortcomings, enjoyed genuine popular support?

I arrived in the sinister gloom of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport burdened with teenage intellectual as well as physical baggage – an ill-thought-out jumble of preconceptions and prejudices. Though I was sceptical of Reagan’s rhetoric, I was also apprehensive of finding the grim and fearful dystopia of Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
or John le Carré’s spy novels. From childhood I had been aware of the moral objections to nuclear weapons; my mother had joined the Aldermaston marches in the early 1960s. But at the same time I found the triumphalist demonstrations of military hardware in Red Square, shown proudly on Soviet TV, frightening enough to justify a defensive response.

My sojourn in Moscow merely increased my confusion. Orwell had, in some ways, been right. I did encounter fear. Some of the Russians I met smuggled me into their apartments, terrified lest their neighbours hear my foreign accent; the atmosphere in Moscow was drab – under Gorbachev these years were to be dubbed the ‘period of stagnation’. I also encountered cynicism about the regime, and criticisms of its hypocrisy and corruption. Nevertheless in many ways Russia could not have been more different to the world portrayed by Orwell. Everyday life for most people was relatively relaxed, if devoid of creature comforts. I also sensed a genuine nationalist pride in Russia’s strength and achievements under Communism, and a real emotional commitment to world peace and global harmony.

My first visit to Moscow answered few of the questions that bothered me, and on my return to Britain I read all that I could find about Russia and Communism. A few years later, it seemed that I would have a real chance of understanding this enigmatic society. I was a graduate student at Moscow State University for the year 1987–8, studying (in secret) that most mysterious event of Soviet history, Stalin’s Terror fifty years before, with a room high up in Stalin’s massive ‘wedding-cake’ skyscraper on the Lenin Hills. I lived at the ideological centre of a curious Communist civilization: my neighbours had come from all corners of the Communist world – from Cuba to Afghanistan, from East Germany to Mozambique, from Ethiopia to North Korea – to take degrees in science or history, but also to study ‘Scientific Communism’ and ‘Atheism’, the better to propagate Communist ideology back home. Moreover this was an extraordinary period in Russian history. Gorbachev’s
glasnost’
(openness), whilst still limited, was encouraging debate and the expression of a wide range of opinions. If there was a time to discover the attitudes that underlay Communism, at least in its mature phase, this seemed to be it. The system was unravelling and revealing its secrets, but it was still Communist.

Again, what I saw left me confused. Russians’ reactions to the idealistic Gorbachev and his reforming policy of
perestroika
(‘restructuring’) were myriad. Some of my Russian friends believed that Communism was fundamentally flawed and they could hardly wait to join the capitalist world. Yet I found others far from ready to hold a wake for an alien ideology, but optimistic that Russia had finally found a path to a reformed ‘Communism’ and a better and more just society. Communism, some seemed to believe, was a positive, moral force which, though sadly corrupted by bureaucrats, could yet be reformed and harmonized in some obscure way with liberal democracy. It seemed that a version of the Communist ideal had established real roots in Russian life.

Now traditional Communism is all but dead. Mao Zedong still gazes serenely over Tian’anmen Square, but the Chinese Communist Party has jettisoned most of its Marxist principles, and Vietnam and Laos have followed its example. Yet the sudden demise of Communism merely added to the mystery. Which impression of Communism was the right one? Was it the nationalism I saw in 1984, the socialist idealism of 1987, or just the conservative authoritarianism of an ageing generation, manifest in the dwindling band of pensioners we see demonstrating in Moscow on the anniversary of the October Revolution?

A great deal has been written about Communism, addressing these and other questions, but efforts to understand it have sometimes been hindered by the highly politicized nature of the literature and the large number of contradictory interpretations this has yielded. At root, though, the various approaches may be reduced to three powerful, competing narratives.

The first – derived from Marx’s writings – became the official credo of all Communist regimes: in one country after another, the story went, heroic workers and peasants, led by visionary Marxist thinkers,
overthrew an evil and exploitative bourgeoisie, and embarked on the path to ‘Communism’. Communism itself was an earthly paradise where humankind would not merely luxuriate in material plenty, but would also live in the most perfect democracy, harmonious, self-regulating and with no man subordinate to another. It was also a rational system, and would come about as the result of the laws of historical development. This story, the centrepiece of Marxist-Leninist ideology, remained inscribed in the dogma of all Communist states right up to their sudden demise. As late as 1961, for instance, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev predicted that the Soviet Union would reach the promised land of ‘Communism’ by 1980.
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Since the beginning of the Cold War, few outside the Communist bloc or Communist parties have been convinced by this story, and Western commentators have preferred, in its stead, one of two alternatives. The first, most popular amongst the centre-left, might be dubbed the ‘modernization’ story, in which the Communists were not so much heroic liberators as rational, technically minded modernizers, committed to developing their poor and backward countries. Though undoubtedly and regrettably violent in their early stages (as was inevitable given the resistance they faced and the enormous economic and social changes that they proposed), they swiftly abjured extreme repression. Indeed, Khrushchev’s foreswearing of terror following Stalin’s death proved that Communism could reform. And in the 1960s and 1970s some even talked of the gradual ‘convergence’ between the now modernized Communist East and the Social Democratic West around a common set of values based on welfare states and state-regulated markets.
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The second account might, perhaps, be called the ‘repression’ narrative, and is popular amongst harsher critics of Communism.
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For them, Communism was a dark horror story of extreme violence, followed by continuing repression, inflicted by an unrepresentative minority on a cowed majority. Within the ‘repression’ story there was some disagreement over the nature of the Communist minority. For some, they were essentially non-ideological political bosses who sought to recreate a version of the conservative bureaucracies and tyrannies of old under the guise of ‘modern’ Communism. Stalin’s butchering of his opponents in the party, is seen, therefore, not so much as the work of a Marxist ideologue as that of a new tsar.
⁶
A version of this account became especially popular on the anti-Stalinist left. It was most fully developed by
Trotsky in his famous denunciation of Stalinism,
The Revolution Betrayed
, and was most successfully popularized in Orwell’s fable
Animal Farm
.
⁷
For others more hostile to socialism, however, the Communists were not reincarnations of the strongmen of the past, but were genuinely driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology.
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They were imposing an unnatural order on their populations, seeking to indoctrinate ‘new socialist men and women’ and establish totalitarian control. Violent repression of anybody who refused to submit was the inevitable result of this utopianism.
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