Read The Red Flag: A History of Communism Online
Authors: David Priestland
The Red Flag: A History of Communism (56 page)
The Stalinist model was not, however, followed to the letter. The Chinese, so reliant on peasant support, were unwilling to exploit the peasantry too harshly in the interests of heavy industry. Overall, though, the USSR became the accepted model, and the enthusiasm for all things Soviet soon penetrated beyond the party elites. In urban areas, especially amongst the educated, the pro-intelligentsia High Stalinism of Moscow inevitably proved to be far more attractive than the peasant socialism of Yan’an. Russian novels were widely read in translation and Russian films were shown throughout the country. Ostrovskii’s
How the Steel was Tempered
had the highest sales of all, and its hero, Pavel Korchagin, became an example for all to emulate. From 1952 several schools established ‘Pavel classes’ as part of a ‘Reading good books, learning from Pavel’ campaign, whilst a 1956 Soviet film, dubbed into Chinese, was shown throughout China the following year to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution. There is some evidence that Ostrovskii’s book was genuinely inspirational amongst young people, in part because Korchagin was such a flawed hero; his poor behaviour at school and his impulsiveness made him easier to like than the remote and improbably virtuous Chinese ‘new socialist men’. Korchagin represented revolutionary romanticism, tempered with some realism.
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Cinema became a major conduit of Soviet ideas into China; by 1957, 468 Soviet films had been translated and shown in China, seen by almost 1.4 billion Chinese. These films propagated a number of messages. The heroism of the little man – people like Korchagin – was one, but the films also popularized ‘modern’ ideas, such as gender equality.
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How the Steel was Tempered
, like many other Soviet films, showed women fighting and working alongside men. China’s first female tractor driver, Liang Jun, claimed that the film inspired her to seek work. The Soviet Union, as seen through film, seemed like the acme of modernity. As the historian Wu Hung remembers:
Thinking about the early 1950s, it seems that everything new and exciting came from the Soviet Union and anything from the Soviet Union was new and exciting. Repeated over and over in schools, parks and on streets was the slogan: ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is Our Tomorrow’. It was both exhilarating
and uncanny to see your own future written on someone else’s face, especially when this ‘someone else’ had yellow hair and pink skin… My mother, along with all her colleagues at the Central Academy of Drama, immediately permed her hair into numerous curls to resemble those of the robust Russian heroines… Fused with my memory of my mother’s hair-style during that period was a kind of dress that people called a
bulaji
(a phonetic rendering of the Russian word [
plat’e
, or ‘dress’]). It had short puffed sleeves, a buttoned-up collar and a wide, floating skirt, and was always made of colourful fabric with cheerful patterns, again associated with the ‘revolutionary spirit’ of the Soviet Union.
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However, as Wu Hung illustrates, the Soviet ‘modernity’ transmitted to China was of a particular type. In fashion, as in many other areas, the official embrace of the ‘Soviet model’ after 1953 marked a transition rather similar to the one that the USSR underwent in the mid-1930s: from the more egalitarian, guerrilla socialism to a more ‘joyous’ and aspirational society. In the late 1940s, the ‘Lenin suit’ – a female version of the Sun Yat-sen suit, based on the Soviet Red Army uniform – had become popular amongst female revolutionaries, and was common attire amongst urban women in the early 1950s. But in 1955, inspired by the Soviet model and fed up with Yan’an-style austerity, several leading cultural figures, including the poet Ai Qing, launched a dress reform campaign. For Ai Qing the Sun Yat-sen and Lenin suits did not ‘harmonize at all with… the joyful tenor of life’. ‘In the Soviet Union,’ he explained, ‘if there are six or seven girls walking along together, they will all be wearing different styles of dress’, whereas Chinese children ‘dress up like little old people’.
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Despite a great deal of press coverage in 1956, the dress reform campaign was not entirely successful, and many women clung to their Lenin suits. In part, the reason was economic: full skirts demanded more material than Lenin suits. But expense was not the only reason; popular values were not yet in tune with this departure from Yan’an guerrilla socialism. One of the supporters of dress reform explained the enduring popularity of the Lenin suit amongst women:
they have linked together cadre suits and progressive thinking, cadre suits and simplicity of lifestyle, cadre suits and frugality… Although this is all erroneous, there is no denying that in it we find encompassed the desire of women for progress and for equality with men in life and work, as well as a
view of simplicity and frugality as the core elements of Chinese aesthetics.
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The conflicts over revolutionary fashion mirrored the continuing tensions within Chinese politics. Mao was willing for a time to embrace the Soviet model, but he never jettisoned his guerrilla values, and it was not long before he would turn against the tide from Moscow.
A different blending of the Chinese-style peasant guerrilla tradition with Soviet-style hierarchy is evident in Communist North Korea. Kim Il Sung himself had been immersed in both Chinese and Soviet Communist cultures, but Korean political culture was crucial in forging this very specific model of Communism.
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Like the Chinese party, the ‘Korean Workers’ Party’, as the Communist party was called, was predominantly a peasant-based party, and had secured considerable support from the poorer peasantry with its land reform of 1946 (which was very similar to the Chinese Communist land reforms in Manchuria during the civil war). Its kinship with the Chinese party was also evident in the enormous emphasis it placed on ‘self-criticism’ and ‘thought unity’. Korea’s Confucian culture contributed to the stress on ideas and thought, but the Japanese colonial administration’s efforts at ideological ‘conversion’ – something many Communists experienced in prison – may also have been influential.
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At the same time, however, Kim found the High Stalinist model attractive. The Japanese had left the North with the foundations of a heavy industrial economy, and the regime launched a typically Stalinist programme of industrialization, helped by Soviet experts and technical training. By the end of the 1940s, Korea had become part of a broader Soviet economic empire, exporting raw materials in exchange for manufactured goods.
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Kim’s personality cult also had echoes of Stalin’s and Mao’s, though its extravagance and intensity were of a different order, and here non-Communist sources were crucial.
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Stalinist and Maoist imagery and language were certainly present – Kim was compared, like Mao, with the sun (though this may also have owed something to the Japanese emperor cult) – but so was Confucian familial imagery. Kim’s ‘revolutionary lineage’ was praised, and he was presented as the father of the Korean people. Korean Shamanistic folk religion also played a part: Kim was presented as the ‘mother’ of the nation, and had a magical control over the weather and harvests. He was also, moreover, hailed as a transformative philosopher-king who gave ‘on-the-spot guidance’, advising workers how to use lathes and peasants how to improve their crop-yield. North Korea is still littered with thousands of signs commemorating his inspirational visits (including perilous raised sections on highways, which mark the many places where Kim gave ‘on-the-spot guidance’ on road construction). Finally, Christian elements penetrated the cult: his biographer wrote that a shining star marked his rise to the leadership, and he shed ‘precious blood’ to save the nation.
A curious mixture of High Stalinism and Korean tradition was also evident in the social order. The post-war Stalinist model of the factory was replicated, complete with Stakhanovism and sharp wage differentials, but the inequalities and social distinctions were to become much more rigid than in the USSR or China. Korean political culture may have been influential here. Although influenced by Confucianism, the Korean Chos
n dynasty (which ruled until the Japanese took power in 1910) had preserved a hereditary aristocratic elite, unlike in China, where Confucian ideas of educational merit were much stronger.
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The rigid Communist hierarchy of ‘core class’, ‘wavering class’ and ‘hostile class’ was therefore reminiscent of the Chosn dynasty’s tripartite division of society into the
yangban
(literary and martial classes), commoners and outcastes or slaves, and heredity remained crucial in determining people’s life-chances.
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As will be seen, these hereditary hierarchies had also emerged in China, but Mao was determined to undermine them. Kim, in contrast, buttressed them, a hierarchical outlook which was reflected in the extraordinary use of two different words for ‘comrade’: ‘
tongmu
’ for equals and ‘
tongji
’ for superiors (the Chinese Communist Party only used one word – ‘
tongzhi
’).
Kim and his fellow Communist leaders were to create a form of Communism with strong local roots that were to prove remarkably resilient. It was to become one of the most
ancien régime
-like of all Communist powers, and its social structure proved unusually rigid. But all Communist societies in the late Stalinist period had strong elements of hierarchy, and they inevitably undermined the hopes of many potential supporters for a new era of modern social relationships and justice.
At the age of seventeen, Edmund Chmieliński left his home village in Central Poland to join a youth labour brigade and work in the new ‘socialist city’ of Nowa Huta, outside Krakow. Chmieliński had been traumatized by war: his father had been killed and at the age of eleven he had been interned in a Nazi slave labour camp. On his return to his home village he was confronted by poor prospects: he was at the bottom of the village hierarchy, treated badly by his teachers and the local priest. His uncle, a Communist youth organizer, offered him an escape route, even though his mother tried to keep him in the village:
My decision was unalterable. I wanted to live and work like a human being, be treated the same as others and not like an animal… There was no force or might that could keep me in the village that I hated so much, which had looked down on me throughout my childhood.
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When he arrived, Chmieliński was issued with a new khaki uniform, complete with cap and red tie. ‘Sometimes I furtively looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn’t get over how different I now appeared.’ He was now an equal, part of a new army of labour. Equal rations were given to everybody at dinner, and ‘all of us were equal’. For the first time, he fell asleep ‘completely happy’. Although the work was hard, and Chmieliński was surprised that his brigade was expected to build a huge plant with only very basic tools, he became an enthusiastic Stakhanovite labourer, engaging in heroic ‘socialist competition’ to reconstruct the country after the War:
I firmly believed that with a common effort we would build in a few years a splendid city in which I would live and work… I didn’t count the hours of work. I built as though I was building my own house. I believed that I was working for myself and my children.
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