It is striking that of the five states in the world today which count as Communist (though the degree to which they embody the main attributes of a Communist system varies), four are in Asia. Apart from China, they are Vietnam, North Korea and Laos.* Moreover, in 2008 a Maoist party came to power in Nepal, although it would be, to say the least, premature to count Nepal as a Communist state. Two other countries which did have Communist systems, and no longer have them, are in Asia: Cambodia (known as Kampuchea during the Communist period) and Mongolia, a much longer-lasting Communist regime. Another Asian country which, for a time, came close to establishing a Communist system was Afghanistan, although it was not held to be a ‘socialist country’ by the Soviet Union and other members of the international Communist movement.
This chapter is mainly concerned with the evolution of Asian Communist states up to the mid-1980s. Less attention will be devoted to Communism in Africa, for no African country has ever had a fully fledged Communist system. None was recognized as such by the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement, although some were considered to be states ‘of socialist orientation’, as distinct from being ‘socialist’ (i.e. Communist) countries.
In Asia and Africa, unlike Europe, the advance of Communism has been linked not only with class struggle but, at least as crucially, with the movement for national liberation and with anti-colonialism. Communist parties, in the countries in which they came to power in Asia, have been able to tap into patriotic and anti-imperialist sentiments as well as to the desire of the poor to reduce inequality and take revenge on those perceived to be their class oppressors. Communist rule, however, put new forms of exploitation in place and, especially in Cambodia and North Korea, imposed infinitely more suffering on the great majority of the population than the regimes they displaced. Communist governments which have come to power indigenously, rather than by courtesy of Soviet bayonets, have been difficult to dislodge, and Asia has provided examples of these. However, though making your own revolution was a good way to start for Communists wishing to have a long lease on government, it was not the only way. As the case of North Korea has demonstrated, ruthless exercise of totalitarian state power can sustain a Communist regime, even though initially Soviet support may have been more important than a negligible domestic power base.
The first Asian country to become Communist, as noted in Chapter 5, was Mongolia. It is still sometimes known as Outer Mongolia, inner Mongolia being part of China. If Mongolia had not been under the protection and ultimate political control of the Soviet Union, it would hardly have survived as a sovereign state during its lengthy period of Communist rule. China had long regarded the whole of Mongolia as being part of its domain and it was not until 1946 that the Nationalist government in China recognized the Mongolian People’s Republic as an independent state. Its satellite status in relation to the Soviet Union made it the odd one out among the Asian Communist countries. The other Communist states in Asia sooner or later stopped following so closely Moscow’s lead. It was in keeping with Mongolia’s dependence on its Soviet neighbour that it ceased to be a Communist state at the same time as the Soviet Union itself was wound up.
The Communist party in Mongolia was known from 1924 until the end of Communist rule as the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party – MAKN in its Mongolian acronym. In the inter-war period, collectivization of agriculture had been resisted by a reluctant and, in large part, nomadic population. However, the party leader and the country’s ruler from the 1920s until his death in 1952, Horloogiyn Choybalsan, ruthlessly followed the Soviet example, earning himself the sobriquet of the ‘Stalin of Mongolia’. Although the Mongolian economy remained predominantly agricultural, it adopted a series of five-year plans of economic development after the Second World War. In 1949 the leadership proclaimed that Mongolia was now a ‘socialist’ state – as distinct from merely building, or aspiring to, socialism. Internationally, Mongolia’s leaders had good relations with the Chinese Communists after the latter came to power in 1949, but their Soviet satellite status was confirmed when the Sino-Soviet dispute made equally harmonious relations with the Chinese People’s Republic and the USSR impossible. Mongolia continued, in all essentials, to support the Soviet Union, its main trading partner, from whom it also received substantial economic aid.
North Korea
The emergence of North Korea as a Communist state after 1945 owed much to the occupation of that part of Korea by the Soviet army as the Japanese were driven out. While Communists generally came to power without widespread support from their own populations, the takeovers count as indigenous if power is seized without decisively important outside help. Even on those grounds, North Korea’s path to Communist rule was hardly indigenous. Not only were the country’s Communist groups small and lacking in popular support, but Soviet troops provided crucial backing for the North Korean Communists in the years in which the latter acquired power. Nevertheless, in the establishment, and especially consolidation, of North Korea’s Communist regime there was a strong nationalist component. The Soviet military left Korea in 1948, making it more imperative for the new regime to develop its system of control and means of mobilizing domestic support.
Korea had been annexed as a colony by Japan in 1910 and remained so throughout the Second World War, becoming a battleground only at the end of the war. There were various Korean resistance groups against Japanese occupation, and the future Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung, was but one of many who had at various times been involved in guerrilla activity against the Japanese. He did enough, however, to make a favourable impression on some senior Soviet officers, and he was brought to Russia for further military and political training.1 Kim, on his return to his homeland, became, with Soviet support, the leader of the North Korean Communists and, in due course, of the new state. He made use of the tradition of national liberation, and an exaggerated version of his own role in it, as one of the main sources of his legitimacy.
The partition of Korea at the 38th Parallel was agreed between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1945, leaving North Korea occupying approximately 55 per cent of the Korean peninsula. Koreans were one of the minority nationalities in the Soviet Union, and several hundred of them, especially from the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, were brought over to join forces with the group led by Kim.2 The early stages of the Communist takeover of North Korea had much in common with what happened in Eastern Europe. The military and the administrative apparatus were brought under the control of the Communists. Other political parties were merged with the Communist party, the membership of which reached 600,000 by December 1946. This was already close to 10 per cent of the adult population, although almost all the members had been recruited since the end of the war.3 They were led by Kim, who from December 1945 headed the North Korean branch of the Korean Communist party. As chairman of what was called the Interim People’s Committee, he held also the highest administrative position in the North. It was not until September 1948 that a North Korean state was formed. It was named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and it followed the declaration two months earlier of the statehood of South Korea, called simply the Republic of Korea. That country was led by the conservative nationalist, Rhee Syngman, who at the time enjoyed the support of the United States administration and the American occupying forces. Both Rhee and Kim Il-sung, who agreed on nothing else, shared a belief that before long Korea could be united, and each aspired to be the leader of that state. South Korea for the next several decades was at best a flawed and corrupt democracy and, for much of the time, a conservative authoritarian state. However, a serious and successful democratization process got under way in the 1980s. North Korea, in contrast, became – even by the standards of Communist states – one of the harshest and grimmest of totalitarian regimes.
A peculiarity not only of the takeover of North Korea but also of Kim Il-sung’s assumption of power in the North Korean revolutionary party is that to most of Korea’s prominent Communists, who were in the South, Kim was a virtual unknown. Envisaging a reunification of Korea in which they would resume their place in the leadership of the Communist movement, these senior party members made no attempt to block Kim’s leadership of what in December 1945 was no more than the North Korean branch of the party.4 By the time two separate states were formed in 1948, it was too late to stop Kim Il-sung. The Korean War began in 1950, when Stalin finally acquiesced with Kim’s desire to mount an attack on the South, something he had been urging on Stalin since March 1949.5 Mao Zedong also gave his agreement, and Chinese forces, as noted in Chapter 11, played a prominent part in the conflict. The war ended in July 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death. Korea, though, remains a part of the world where the Cold War continues to the present day, with one nation divided into two hostile states.
More than three million Koreans managed to move from the North to the South in the course of the war. After it ended, Kim set about strengthening the patriotic support for his state by injecting a strong element of strident nationalism into the official ideology. Another distinctive feature of North Korea was that Stalinism long survived the death of Stalin. Indeed, the glorification of Kim Il-sung exceeded even that accorded the Soviet leader, especially since the personification of power led him to groom his son, Kim Jong-il, to succeed him. The younger Kim became a Politburo member in the early 1970s and was officially designated as the future successor in 1980. He duly succeeded as North Korean leader when Kim Il-sung died in 1994, although it was 1997 before he assumed all of the offices that had been held by his father. The elder Kim had been universally referred to in the North Korean mass media as the ‘Great Leader’. His son became the ‘Dear Leader’. Surrounded by a court, and with personal access to every luxury the West can offer, Kim Jong-il has presided over extreme measures to eliminate any possibility of foreign influence on the population as a whole. The major responsibility of one party department is to send officials into people’s homes to check that the dials of their radios are tuned to fixed frequencies, thus ensuring that they are on no account able to receive foreign broadcasts.6 Ruthless use of coercion by both father and son, with elimination of even potential opponents, and systematic social controls combined with constant propaganda, have kept in place a regime which, on most measures, has been a grotesque failure.7 By 1978 the GDP of South Korea was almost four times that of the North. Yet the poverty of the people did not deter either the Great Leader or the Dear Leader from spending disproportionately vast sums on the military as well as on grandiose construction projects.8 And there is no automatic link between economic failure and collapse of a Communist regime if all the resources of an oppressive state are brought to bear to keep its rulers in office.
In comparison with the rest of the population, those who are key to keeping Kim Jong-il in power – senior army generals and leading party and police officials among them – have been well rewarded. Even the most stringent autocrat has to win the support, either through ideological persuasion or an appeal to their interests, of the groups necessary to sustain him and the regime. That is as true of Communist rulers, including those who have taken personification of power to extremes such as the Kims, father and son, as of despots of an earlier age. In the early sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince, noted the importance of what subjects thought about even an autocratic ruler. ‘The prince’, he argued, ‘is highly esteemed who conveys this impression of himself, and he who is highly esteemed is not easily conspired against.’9 A little over 200 years later, David Hume reflected on the necessity for tyrannical rulers to influence the opinions people hold, since coercion alone is not enough to guarantee their security. Hume observed that ‘the bodily force’ even of a tyrant as an individual could ‘reach but a small way’. If, therefore, he was obeyed, this depended in part on his influence on the opinions of other people, including what they presumed to be the opinions of yet others.10 One can be certain that neither Kim Il-sung nor Kim Jong-il ever read Hume, and it is improbable that they read Machiavelli. However, the cult of personality in North Korea, and in other Communist states (though rarely taken to such extremes as by the Kims), had a logic similar to that elaborated by Machiavelli and Hume. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin contained no words of support for the glorification of leaders, but the classics of Marxism-Leninism were not widely read in the peasant societies of Asia in which Communists seized power. A quicker way to secure compliance, and a necessary supplement to physical coercion, was to instil adulation of the Great Leader.
Vietnam and Laos
For many Asian Communists, hostility to colonialism and hostility to capitalism went together, for the kind of capitalist system they first encountered was one which seemed to radical intellectuals to involve extreme exploitation of the local population by foreign business. The euphemism for this used by staunch supporters of the British Empire was that ‘trade follows the flag’. The reality was that companies from the colonial rulers’ mother country were granted privileges not accorded to nationals of other countries or to the indigenous population. In this context, therefore – even though, intellectually, nationalism and Marxism are poles apart – a significant minority of young intellectuals in Asian countries in the first half of the twentieth century linked in their own minds national liberation with the replacement of capitalism by a socialist or Communist system. This was true of a number of Vietnamese radicals, among them the person who has the strongest claim to be regarded as the father of the Vietnamese revolution and of the Communist state in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. When he read Lenin’s ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’ in French translation in the newspaper L’Humanité, in July 1920, the young Ho was overjoyed. Lenin seemed to be providing a key to understanding the plight of Indochina, where Western capitalist countries found both markets and raw materials to sustain a system which exploited the peoples of the region. It is significant that it was Lenin’s writings on colonialism specifically which set Ho Chi Minh (who at that time went under the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc) ‘on a course that transformed him from a simple patriot with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary’.11 Of this work of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh later wrote: ‘What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled in me!’12
The ‘confidence’ of which Ho spoke was important. When the odds seemed to an individual discontented with imperial rule to be stacked on the side of the colonial powers, the writings of Marx and Lenin provided not only an explanation of their woes but also the conviction that it was only a matter of time before they prevailed over their foreign exploiters. We have seen in earlier chapters how the consolation offered by belief in the inevitability of the downfall of capitalism and the triumph of ‘socialism’ (as that concept was understood by the Communist Party) gave heart to party members in advanced Western countries, in which they often seemed marginal to the political life of their nation. For Third World revolutionaries, the firm belief that history was on their side was even more inspiring. Although, contrary to the predictions of Marx, it turned out that Communism had a broader appeal in peasant societies than in the most advanced industrialized countries of the world, this worked to the advantage of Communists in Asia. Why there should have been more indigenous revolutions, leading to Communist rule, in predominantly peasant than in industrialized societies is an interesting question. The idea of factories belonging to the people as a whole had a romantic appeal for a minority, but the actual experience of nationalization was more prosaic. However, land redistribution within what were highly unequal peasant societies turned out to be an altogether more effective instrument for mobilizing support for Communist parties. In the first stage of the revolutionary struggle, and in the earliest implementation of Communist rule, the emphasis was invariably on redistributing land from wealthy landlords and the richest peasants to the majority who hungered after more land. It was, as a rule, only significantly later that collectivized or state farms were introduced. These evoked much more hostile sentiments in the countryside. By that time, however, a Communist power structure had been established and resistance to the policies of the ruling party had become difficult and dangerous.
Ho Chi Minh, in common with the Indian Communist M.N. Roy (with whom, though, he had difficult relations), maintained as early as the 1920s that ‘communism could acclimatize itself more easily in Asia than in Europe’.13 Ho, like so many of the early leaders of revolutionary movements, was of middle-class origin. His father was a civil servant of scholarly disposition, and Ho himself acquired a good education, including knowledge of several languages. Early radicalism, however, caused him to be expelled from more than one school as a troublemaker and he embarked on many different careers – including a sailor, a photographer’s technician in Paris, and an assistant chef in London. He adopted numerous pseudonyms – Ho Chi Minh was just one of dozens, but the name by which he was to become known to the world. After spending several years in the early 1920s in Paris, where he joined the French Communist Party, he went to Moscow in 1923 to work for the Comintern. He was on good terms with Borodin, who, as noted in earlier chapters, became the chief representative of the Comintern in China. Ho joined Borodin there later in 1923 and remained in China for two and a half years, getting to know some of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party, among them Zhou Enlai.
In the remaining years of the inter-war period Ho moved between Moscow and Asia. He was the main organizer of the founding conference of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 in Hong Kong, but the following year was arrested there by the British police. By 1934, however, he was back in Moscow, from where in 1938 he set out on the hazardous journey to the Yan’an province of northern China, where those who had survived the Long March were encamped. Throughout these years Ho was in close touch with the major underground Communist movements in Asia. He was arrested in China in 1942 but released by the Nationalist Chinese authorities in September of the following year, although with limits on his freedom of movement. Long years as a professional revolutionary, changing his residence and his name at frequent intervals and disappearing from the view of police forces in different countries who thought they had him in their sights, had prepared him well for the new opportunities which were to arise at the end of the Second World War.
The French rulers of Vietnam had dealt rigorously with sporadic strikes and demonstrations organized by the Communists in the inter-war period, but with the Japanese surrender in August 1945 there was a power vacuum into which Ho Chi Minh and the Communists moved rapidly. They formed a National Liberation Committee, with Ho as chairman, and issued an ‘appeal to the people’, demanding independence. Signing the appeal, Ho used for the last time his pseudonym, Nguyen Ai Quoc (which means Nguyen the Patriot).14 By September 1945 the committee had been transformed into a provisional government, chaired by Ho Chi Minh. It was, characteristically, a Communist-dominated coalition. When Ho addressed a vast crowd in Hanoi on 2 September, he calculatedly quoted from both the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. His emphasis on national liberation and democracy was aimed partly at engaging the sympathy of the United States. He hoped that anti-colonialist sentiments in Washington would lead them to support Vietnamese demands for independence from French rule. Whereas, however, President Roosevelt had spoken up for the liberation of Asians and Africans from colonial rule, his successor, Harry Truman, was more concerned with rising tensions between Washington and Moscow. He was receptive to the argument of the Division of European Affairs in the State Department that American opposition to French control of Indochina would complicate relations with Paris.15
Talks in France between representatives of the provisional Vietnamese government and the French government broke down without any agreement to grant Vietnam independence. Ho Chi Minh made numerous compromises in the endeavour to get a promise of independence, and his prestige at home was lowered by the failure of that mission. Having not succeeded in securing liberation from French colonial rule by peaceful means, Ho and the Vietnamese Communists turned to force. What became known as the First Indochina War (the American war in Vietnam was the Second) began on 19 December 1946 when, under the direction of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese units launched attacks on French installations throughout Hanoi, including the municipal power station. By late evening the French had regained control over central Hanoi, but Ho escaped capture. The Communist Party Politburo could no longer safely remain in Hanoi, so they took to the hills and embarked on guerrilla warfare.16 In the course of the war, which was to last until 1954, Ho changed his living quarters regularly. A prisoner of war reported in 1952 that Ho, then aged sixty-two, was moving from one place to another every three to five days and that he could still walk thirty miles a day with a pack on his back.17
As well as using guerrilla tactics against the French, the Communists were fomenting class war in the countryside. Kangaroo courts were set up in which landlords were condemned, deprived of their property, and often executed on the spot. Since, however, their property was redistributed among the neediest peasants, there were more winners than losers from this ruthless process. In early 1950, first China and then the Soviet Union recognized Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as the sole legal government of the country. In fact, the Communists controlled much of the North of Vietnam and were able to pass legislation which could be implemented in that territory. In late 1953 they passed a law enforcing rent reductions and ‘extending the confiscation of landholdings to the entire landlord class’.18 The Communists’ dominance in the North was eventually conceded by the French and recognized internationally. At a conference in Geneva in 1954, agreement was reached on the partition of Vietnam. Both the Soviet and Chinese foreign ministers, Molotov and Zhou Enlai, favoured this compromise. The head of the DRV delegation, Pham Van Dong, only reluctantly agreed. Zhou helped to persuade him that this was a necessary, and temporary, price to pay for French withdrawal and that the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, needed a face-saving formula. Moreover, the Eisenhower administration in the United States had watched the negotiations with concern and had resolved not to accept any agreement which did not retain at least part of the future Vietnam under non-Communist rule. Zhou’s assurance to Pham Van Dong that it would be a simple matter to take over the whole of Vietnam once the French had departed turned out to be overoptimistic. The Vietnamese Communists, though, remained determined to achieve the goal of national unity under their leadership and saw partition as but a short-term setback.19
By the mid-1950s the United States had emerged as the main backer of the non-Communist South Vietnamese government, whose headquarters were in Saigon, while in the North the Chinese had become increasingly influential. Following the Chinese example meant an intensification of class war in the countryside, with several thousand people executed and many more severely harassed. The tilt of the Vietnamese Communists in the direction of China was reinforced by some of the actions of Moscow. There was no enthusiasm in Hanoi for the emphasis at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU on ‘peaceful co-existence’, since it was feared this might lead to Soviet disapproval of the resumption of revolutionary war to unite Vietnam. Even more worrying was a Soviet proposal, made without consulting Hanoi, that both the South (the Republic of Vietnam) and the North (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) be admitted to membership of the United Nations.20 With the reinstatement of the DRV in 1954, about a million people fled to the South. Since those who left included many of the better-off and most anti-Communist Vietnamese, this exodus – as well as the intimidation of landowners – greatly reduced the possibility of serious resistance to the Communists within the territory they administered.21
Moreover, when they took their struggle to the South, the Communists were able to attract substantial peasant support, as they had done in the North. A Vietnamese-speaking American, Jeffrey Race, who served with the United States army in Vietnam as a specialist adviser, came to the conclusion that the Communists had a better-thought-out strategy than the government in Saigon which American troops had been sent to support. Revolutionary war was for the Communists part of a broader social process. They had some success in presenting as their ultimate goal a more just society. In the meantime, their redistribution of land in areas they controlled brought immediate benefits to many. The Communist guerrillas were also able to instil fear in those who supported the Saigon government. Race concluded, nevertheless, that in the first half of the 1960s the South Vietnamese government ‘terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement’ – by, for example, artillery and ground attacks on ‘communist villages’. Their methods led to a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the revolutionary movement.22
The United States was drawn into the conflict in Vietnam partly because of what it did not do in Laos. Vietnam is today a country of over eighty million people – a population over ten times greater than that of the economically backward, land-locked and mountainous Laos. It would be reasonable to conclude that it was of greater consequence both to Western countries and to the Communist world which way Vietnam went. Nevertheless, when President Eisenhower handed over power to John F. Kennedy in 1960, he spent more time talking to him about Laos than about either Cuba or Vietnam.23 Already during the Eisenhower presidency the United States was dropping supplies to anti-Communist forces in Laos, but for more than one reason it avoided direct military involvement there. The difficult terrain would have made it a ‘logistical nightmare’, but no less important was the assessment in Washington that the Lao people would not put up much of a fight to resist a Communist takeover. Sweeping generalizations and ethnic stereotypes portrayed the Lao people as ‘drowsy’, ‘diffident’, ‘docile’ and ‘dreamy’.24 The CIA director Allen Dulles informed the National Security Council that there were ‘few people of any courage’ in Laos and that the population had ‘a long tradition of not liking bloodshed’. An American journalist, Oden Meeker, put a much more positive spin on the same stereotype, saying that the Lao were ‘gentle’ and ‘utterly charming’.25 For Henry Kissinger, reflecting on his years as US secretary of state, the people of Laos were distinguished by ‘the grace of their life-style rather than martial qualities’.26 The Washington consensus was, indeed, that the Lao people were ‘incorrigible pacifists’ and far from ideal allies with whom to make a stand against the march of Communism.27 The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, at a time when he was US ambassador to India, wrote from New Delhi to Kennedy, sarcastically declaring: ‘As a military ally, the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.’28
The United States backed a compromise solution on Laos in 1962, abandoning their support for the most anti-Communist forces and settling for a neutralist government headed by the nationalist Prince Souvanna Phouma. The Communist insurgents in Laos, the Pathet Lao, with the support of the North Vietnamese, were gradually able to take over the country territorially and to establish Communist rule by the mid-1970s. Souvanna, in a speech at a dinner on the outskirts of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, in honour of Henry Kissinger in 1973, pointed out that as a result of war and loss of territory, the population of the country, which at one time had been seventeen million, was down to three million. In Souvanna’s eyes, too, the Lao people were ‘pacific by tradition and by religion’. All they asked for was peace and sovereignty.29 The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and French President Charles de Gaulle had been among those who in the early 1960s pressed for a neutral Laos under the leadership of Souvanna. However, in the coalition government which was formed, the Communists exercised increasing influence. That finally gave way to outright Communist rule in 1975. The Vietnamese influence was very evident, for this followed fast upon the victory of the Viet Cong and the unification of the whole of Vietnam under Communist rule. Although the regime in Laos turned out to be milder than other Communist systems in Asia – with few executions in comparison with Vietnam, not to speak of Cambodia – almost 10 per cent of the people fled from the country. This was a higher proportion of the population than that constituted by the ‘boat people’ who left by sea from Vietnam. The size of the exodus from Laos is partly to be explained by the relative ease of crossing the Mekong river into Thailand.30
How important giving up on Laos was for the United States embroilment in Vietnam has been shown by recent scholarship. At the time of the Eisenhower – Kennedy handover, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, had been left with the impression that ‘if Laos were lost, all of Southeast Asia would fall’ to Communism. Eisenhower’s warnings, he said, ‘heavily influenced our subsequent approach to Southeast Asia’. Kennedy, though, decided that Laos was not the place to make a stand – and possibly suffer a humiliation comparable to the recent Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sought to reassure anxious members of his administration in 1961 by saying: ‘If we have to fight for Southeast Asia, we’ll fight in South Vietnam.’31 The American president had decided that a neutral Laos, with an uncertain future, was as good a result as he could obtain in that country. However, as Seth Jacobs has observed, this meant that ‘Kennedy’s Laos policy came with a hidden trip wire. He did not believe he could retreat any further in Southeast Asia. If the Viet Cong pressed their advantage against the US-sponsored Saigon regime, America would have to fight. By cutting his losses in Laos, Kennedy narrowed the range of options for himself and future presidents attempting to cope with Vietnam.’32
The Vietnam War divided the allies of the United States and, ultimately, opinion in America itself. West European governments did not question the desirability of non-Communist government in Vietnam, but harboured doubts as to whether this could be achieved by military means, and also about how significant the Vietnamese system of government was for Western safety.33 The officials in Washington with special responsibility for defence and security were much more eager to escalate American involvement in Vietnam than were either Presidents Kennedy or Johnson. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense McNamara implicitly warned Johnson that he could not count on their support unless he did something to avert a humiliating American defeat in Vietnam.34 Ultimately, Johnson heeded the advice of those who urged escalation of the bombing of Vietnam, although he had been given a very different, and more prescient, warning by his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, in a document written in February 1965. In a memorandum which long remained secret, the vice-president wrote that it was time for the administration to cut its losses, for disengagement in that year would be better than the alternative of deeper embroilment. Humphrey predicted that ‘political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign involvement generally – with direct spill-over effects politically for all the Democratic internationalist programs to which we are committed – AID, UN, disarmament, and activist world policies generally.’35 Nevertheless, the United States was driven both by fears of growing Chinese influence throughout South-East Asia and by the ‘domino theory’ which had first been voiced by President Eisenhower at the time the French were forced out of Indochina in 1954.36
From 1966, with the Cultural Revolution under way in China, there were arguments within the Vietnamese Communist party as well as within the administration in Washington. Even Ho Chi Minh, who lost some of his influence from 1963 (and died in 1969), began to be criticized by a number of party members. He was blamed both for ‘allowing’ the French back into Vietnam in 1945 and for accepting the partition of the country in 1954.37 The divisions among Vietnamese Communists in significant part reflected the Sino-Soviet dispute, with some party members supporting the Chinese line and others leaning towards Moscow. The fact that the Soviet Union overtook China by the end of 1968 as the main supplier of aid, including military equipment, made it the more important for the Vietnamese Communists to maintain good relations with the Soviet leadership. One of the assets of the aged Ho Chi Minh in the later 1960s was that he was able to command respect in both Beijing and Moscow.38 By the early 1970s, however, the relative attraction of the Soviet Union for Vietnamese Communists was enhanced by worrying signs of rapprochement between China and the United States.39
When improved US relations with China were followed by an improvement also in American relations with the USSR, the Hanoi government had to curb their intransigence. They were urged by the Soviet leadership not to launch another offensive but to concentrate on diplomacy.40 By 1972, as both the major Communist powers favoured a peace settlement in Vietnam which would not, at least initially, lead to a unification of Vietnam under the Communists, there were Hanoi politicians who perceived this as Soviet and Chinese kowtowing to America. Both the USSR and China did put pressure on Hanoi to reach a negotiated settlement, but neither the North nor the South Vietnamese governments had any faith in the peace agreement reached in Paris in January 1973 or the will to make it a lasting settlement.41 Nor, even after making temporary concessions, did Communist Vietnam ever become a mere satellite of the Soviet Union or of China.
Although the Vietnamese Communists emerged in 1975 as the winners in their struggle, and the United States and its Vietnamese allies as the losers, that victory was obtained at a very high cost. There were some 700,000 Vietnamese casualties, and 45 per cent of the country’s towns were destroyed. David Elliott, who arrived in Saigon with the US army in 1963 as an intelligence officer, and in the post-war period went on to become a major scholar on Vietnam, has noted that successive administrations in Washington ‘thought that the Vietnamese were irrelevant to the big picture’. Having been complicit in the removal of the ally they initially entered the conflict to help, Ngo Dinh Diem, the Johnson administration in 1965 ‘thought so little of its nominal ally, the government of the Republic of South Vietnam, that it did not even bother to inform its own ally that America would escalate the war and send in combat troops’.42 Moreover, Elliott has argued persuasively, Vietnamese society was divided not only between revolutionaries and their opponents but ‘between the entire “political class” on both sides of this divide’ and ‘the risk averse, whose constant refrain was “do whatever you like, I’ll still be a simple citizen”’.43
The Hanoi government was even more repressive than that in Saigon. Nevertheless, the South Vietnamese rulers lost credibility with a substantial section of their own population by having to rely on foreign troops, with their massive firepower, to assist them in a civil war. In the end it became clear that the anti-Communist forces in Vietnam could not win with United States active military support and could not win without it.44 Reflecting on more than forty years of involvement with Vietnam, starting with his time as an American soldier there, David Elliott observed. ‘…self-deception is the surest road to disaster…the main reason I concluded that the U.S. presence was damaging to Americans as well as to the people we were trying to help was that for America, the Vietnam War was never about Vietnam, but always about some larger abstraction of concern to the United States – containing China, dominos, credibility’.45
Cambodia
The idea that Asian countries would fall like a stack of dominoes into the hands of Marxist-Leninists if Communism were to prevail in Vietnam turned out to be wholly fanciful, and a vast amount of blood was shed on the basis of that false premise. Most of Asia remained resolutely non-Communist. One country which did, however, for a time turn Communist, and for part of that period was run by a regime of exceptional viciousness, was Cambodia. Between 1976 and 1979, under Khmer Rouge rule, Cambodia slaughtered a higher proportion of its own citizens than any other Communist – or fascist – state in the twentieth century. During the period in which the country was run by the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, the idea of class war was taken to perverse extremes; the purges of the Communist party itself exceeded the worst excesses of Stalin and Mao Zedong; and an attempt was made to leap into communism even faster than in China’s Great Leap Forward. In both cases the result was famine, but in Cambodia it was accompanied by far more killings for a vast range of offences than in China. Even sexual relations outside marriage and the consumption of alcohol were punishable by death.46
Cambodia had been part of French Indochina, but gained its independence in 1953. For over fifty years a key figure in the politics of the country was Prince Norodom Sihanouk. When not yet twenty he became King of Cambodia, having been placed on the throne by the French governor-general. Although he was a nationalist who aspired to independence, he bided his time, and when the French departed in 1953 he became prime minister. From 1960 until 1970 he governed as president. An authoritarian but not especially repressive ruler, Sihanouk managed to keep his country neutral between the United States and the Soviet Union, a task which became increasingly difficult as the Vietnam War unfolded. He was ousted by members of his own government in a coup in 1970 which had the backing, although not the active involvement, of the CIA. Sihanouk was made welcome in China and spent the first half of the 1970s there, during which time he established a National United Front of Cambodia. Meanwhile, in Cambodia there was civil war going on which lasted until 1975. The main antagonists were the government, which had become more pro-Western following the ousting of Prince Sihanouk, and the Communists. In 1973 the Cambodian Communists (Khmer Rouge)–who had, presumably, not read George Orwell – renamed their party ‘Big Brother’. Between 1970 and 1973 they were joined in their struggle by Vietnamese forces. The stated goal of both Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge was the return to power of Sihanouk, who had allied himself with the Communists in angry outrage at his removal from office. Accordingly, the government troops, led by General – subsequently Marshal – Lon Nol, found themselves in the odd position of fighting ‘royalist Communists’. Both the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge were, at that time, paying lip-service to Sihanouk, while being careful not to accord him any decision-making power.47
Before Congress cut off funds for this in 1973, the Nixon administration authorized the massive bombing of Cambodia to slow down the progress of the Khmer Rouge. Although this did interrupt supply routes, as well as killing many people, the main political effect of dropping over 540,000 tons explosives in the Cambodian countryside was to win recruits for the Communists and to foster extreme hostility to the United States. It also caused an inflow of refugees from the rural areas to the cities.48 In 1973 the North Vietnamese drastically cut back their support for the Khmer Rouge because the latter had refused to join the Paris peace talks which led to an end of the Vietnam War and which could have extended to negotiations over Cambodia. Thus, when the Kampuchean Communist party, in the shape of the Khmer Rouge, came to power, it was essentially an indigenous takeover. Though what was to occur later was often described as ‘genocide’, insofar as that term normally means the attempt to eliminate the people of a particular nation or ethnic group, it was a misnomer. Most of the violent deaths were of Cambodians killed by the Cambodian fanatics who had seized power, although it is true that the Vietnamese were killed in proportionately even larger numbers.49 The Khmer Rouge killed Vietnamese wherever they came across them in Cambodia in a way which was close to what later would be termed ‘ethnic cleansing’.50 In their brutality during the civil war the Khmer Rouge had provided many foretastes of what was to come. When, for instance, they captured the former royal capital, Oudong, in 1974, they massacred tens of thousands of the inhabitants.51
The Communists took governmental power in April 1975 when the capital, Phnom Penh, fell to them. Sihanouk became the nominal head of state, but from 1976 he was put under house arrest. Hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from the cities, for which the Khmer Rouge seemed to have developed a special hatred.52 This anti-urbanism was an odd interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. However, although Pol Pot had become a Marxist in the early 1950s, Marx and Lenin were little quoted during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Even Mao, to whom the Pol Pot branch of the Communist movement was closest, was not much cited. In many ways what occurred in Cambodia – called Democratic Kampuchea in those years – was a caricature of Communism. It had enough affinity with the Maoism of the Great Leap Forward to be not a totally new phenomenon, but it was worse by several degrees. There is no agreement on the exact numbers who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge – mostly by assassination, although also of hunger – but a figure of about two million is widely regarded as likely. In the space of five years in the mid-and late 1970s, it is probable that one in five of the population perished prematurely as a result of Khmer Rouge barbarism. As of 1979, 42 per cent of Cambodia’s children had lost at least one parent. In 1989, 38 per cent of adult women in Cambodia were widows, as compared with the 10 per cent of men who were widowers, for though many women were also executed, men were killed in much larger numbers.53
Like Mao, Pol Pot was attracted to the idea of starting the rebuilding of society with a ‘blank slate’. He rewrote even the most recent history of his country, decreeing that Cambodia’s revolutionary struggle began with the founding of the Kampuchean Communist Party in 1960. He himself became a member of its Central Committee then, and from 1963 was a secretary of that body. Rather than working in a bureaucracy, this meant operating from secret hideouts in the jungle and countryside. The Khmer Rouge version of history conveniently airbrushed out of the narrative the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party by Ho Chi Minh in 1951. The Cambodian Communists formed part of that organization, but its headquarters were in Vietnam.54 Thus, it did not make a suitable founding myth for the society the Khmer Rouge wished to create. The extremism of the Khmer Rouge in the second half of the 1970s was out of kilter with what was happening in the rest of the Communist world at the time. The rule by systematic terror got under way around the time of the death of Mao and at the end, therefore, of even the later and somewhat milder variant of China’s Cultural Revolution. From the point of view of the Khmer Rouge fanatics, ‘revisionism’ had become rampant – from the Soviet Union to Vietnam. Now it was rearing its head even within China. If there was any logic to the apparent madness of the Pol Pot regime’s attempt to remodel Cambodian society through terror, it is perhaps that drawn out by the French scholar Jean-Louis Margolin:
China’s Great Leap Forward had failed; so had the Cultural Revolution. The reason, in the Khmer Rouge’s view, must be that the Chinese had stopped at half-measures; they had failed to sweep away every counterrevolutionary obstacle: the corrupt and uncontrollable towns, intellectuals who were proud of their knowledge and presumed to think for themselves, money and all financial transactions, the last traces of capitalism, and ‘traitors who had infiltrated the heart of the Party’.55
In his style of rule, quite apart from the scale of the executions, Pol Pot was very different from Mao, not to speak of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Rather than promoting a personality cult, he kept in the shadows, while making sure that any possible threat to his power was eliminated. His real name was Saloth Sar and he had a relatively privileged upbringing, partly spent within the circle of the monarchy. It included study in Paris from 1949 until 1953. He had, however, in common with other Communist leaders who became tyrants – among them Stalin, Mao and the North Korean Kims – a belief in his own genius. In reality, no one deserved more to be brought to justice for crimes against humanity – not even Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung. Like them, however, Pol Pot died a natural death, in his case one month short of his seventieth birthday in 1998. Fortunately, he had by then been out of power for many years.*
The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge government was very largely the work of the Vietnamese. After almost two years of border clashes, Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia/Kampuchea at the end of December 1978.56 Their intention was to dislodge the Khmer Rouge – not, of course, to put an end to Communist rule. Most of the Cambodian population welcomed them as liberators, and in the course of that year a more ‘normal’ Communist government than Pol Pot’s was established, under Vietnamese supervision. For the next decade – until the Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989–Cambodia had a more orthodox Communist system, with far less arbitrary violence. The system was still highly authoritarian, but it was unquestionably a vast improvement on the regime it replaced. As Margolin observes, ‘given the increasing murderousness of the Khmer Rouge…the Vietnamese incursion saved an incalculable number of lives’.57
The Vietnamese military intervention, although undertaken of their own volition, was supported by the Soviet Union and opposed by a strange coalition which included China, the United States and most of the countries of Western Europe. Even the Carter administration, which ceased to overlook manifest abuses of human rights by some of the more dubious of America’s allies in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, opposed the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, seeing Hanoi purely as a proxy for Moscow. In a summit meeting in Vienna with Leonid Brezhnev in June 1979, President Carter, after complaining about the presence of Cuban troops in Africa, was critical of the fact that the ‘Soviet Union has also encouraged and supported the Vietnamese in their invasion of Kampuchea’.58 In response, as Carter notes, Brezhnev ‘claimed that in Kampuchea the citizens were thankful to the Vietnamese for overthrowing the abhorrent regime of Pol Pot’ and that it was understandable that the Soviet Union should support the intervention.59 On this occasion Brezhnev happened to be right. The Communist government with which the Vietnamese replaced the regime of Pol Pot was manifestly a lesser evil than its predecessor.
However, when the Chinese decided to teach the Vietnamese a lesson and, after informing the American president in advance of their intentions, launched a limited military action against Vietnam, this was met with understanding by the Carter administration.60 The Chinese incursion caused the Vietnamese subsequently to place more troops on their border with China and fewer in Cambodia. Although Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his memoirs, refers to the ‘Cambodian regime that the Vietnamese displaced’ as that of ‘the murderous Pol Pot’, he evinced no doubts about the policy of opposing Vietnam’s intervention against the Khmer Rouge. The fact that Vietnam was allied with the Soviet Union, and that China (with whom the US was now developing good relations) regarded Pol Pot as an ally, overrode humanitarian considerations.61 Military invasion frequently makes a bad situation worse, but that was not the case with Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia. As the former Under-Secretary-General of the UN in charge of Peacekeeping, Marrack Goulding, wrote at the beginning of the twenty-first century: ‘by today’s humanitarian standards, [Vietnam’s action] can be justified as something that had to be done, like Tanzania’s military intervention in Uganda in 1979 to topple the monster Idi Amin’. At the time, however, the Western powers, having recognized the Pol Pot regime as the legitimate government of Cambodia/Kampuchea, denied recognition to the government installed by the Vietnamese which itself lasted for more than another decade before Cambodia ceased to be a Communist state.62
The Vietnamese withdrew all their troops from Cambodia in 1989, partly in response to promptings from the Soviet Union, by that time led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The withdrawal was a consequence also of the improved relationship between the Soviet Union and China, and that in turn helped to ease the tensions between China and Vietnam. Cambodia was the last country in the twentieth century to become Communist, although well before the century’s end it had ceased to be a Communist state. The takeover, as we have seen, occurred as late as 1975, and the system lasted – as a different type of Communist regime from 1979–until 1991. The Khmer Rouge, after being ousted from power, became once again an underground organization, but at the beginning of the 1990s the United Nations was able to oversee a peace process which led to elections in 1993 and a non-Communist Cambodia.
Afghanistan
The only country which might conceivably be regarded as Communist and which came to Communism later than Cambodia was Afghanistan. However, it was never considered socialist by the Soviet Union, and what Moscow meant by ‘socialist’ is very close to what, as I have already argued (especially in Chapter 6), it is less imprecise to call Communism. The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was not, as was widely believed in Western capitals at the time, the beginning of a major new attempt at expansion, but part of a policy aimed at ensuring that Afghanistan would not acquire a regime hostile to the USSR. The seizure of power by Communists in Afghanistan came as a surprise to the Soviet leadership, who subsequently had the greatest difficulty in controlling the personal rivalries and bloodletting among their supposed close allies. Having failed to get their way by diplomatic means, the Soviet leaders made matters worse for themselves by invading their southern neighbour. The large-scale Soviet military incursion into Afghanistan failed, in the first instance, because of the strength and persistence of domestic Afghan opposition. It backfired also, in significant part, because of the assistance given to the coalition of oppositional forces by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan’s neighbour, Pakistan, employing all means short of overtly joining in the fighting. American support for Islamist guerrilla fighters – Osama Bin Laden among them – against the Soviet occupying forces was also, however, far from a success story in the long term. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan, with its aftermath of Taliban rule followed by further war, turned out to be one with no winners.
The Soviet leadership were quite relaxed about having a non-Communist and neutral Afghanistan, even when it was under monarchical rule from 1919 until 1973. (I happened to be in central Moscow at a moment in the late 1960s when the King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was passing by in the course of a state visit. A rather bored rent-a-crowd of Muscovite spectators duly waved their government issue of welcoming Afghan flags.) When the king was deposed while he was out of the country in July 1973 by his prime minister (and cousin), General Mohammad Daoud, the Soviet Union had no hand in this conversion of Afghanistan into a republic. The new government continued to have unproblematic relations with its Soviet neighbour, although from 1976, on the advice of the Shah of Iran (whose own regime was overthrown just a few years later), Daoud began to take a tough line against potential opponents. These he identified as Communists and radical Islamists, and in 1977 he cracked down on the more extreme elements in both groups.63
The Afghan Communist party – the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)–had been formed as recently as 1965 and was composed of two factions. The more radical of them, which became known as the Khalq (meaning ‘the masses’), was headed by Nur Mohammad Taraki, whose closest colleague was Hafizullah Amin. The other group, called the Parcham (meaning ‘flag’), was led by Babrak Karmal, an intellectual Marxist of aristocratic background. The Parchamis had been relatively supportive of Daoud, who had made a start on land reform.64 The Soviet ambassador in the Afghan capital of Kabul, Alexander Puzanov, informed Moscow that the Parcham and the Khalq were almost like two different parties and that there was a great deal of animosity between them.65 It was Karmal’s faction which those in Moscow with responsibility for Afghanistan, whether within the CPSU Central Committee, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the KGB, favoured. Their policy during the period of Daoud’s rule was a cautious one. They urged the Communists to achieve an accommodation with the Daoud government, so that their influence might be felt but without causing any violent rupture. It came as a complete surprise to Puzanov, and to his superiors in Moscow, when in April 1978 Daoud was assassinated in a coup successfully carried out by the Communist Khalq faction of Taraki and Amin. The Soviet ambassador reported, with some disapproval, that Taraki and Amin were prone to take ultra-leftist initiatives, although, on the brighter side, he noted that the new government would be ‘more sympathetic toward the USSR’.66 Indeed, in emphasizing the Khalq domination of the new regime, Amin stressed that not only would they be closer to the Soviet Union than the Daoud government, but that they would also be more faithful than the Parcham faction of the PDPA. In the event of disagreement between the leaders of the Khalq and ‘Soviet comrades’, Amin claimed, ‘the Khalquis will say without a moment’s hesitation that the Soviet comrades are right’. In contrast, he added, ‘the Parchamis will say that their leaders are right’.67
In fact, relations soon soured both between Amin and Moscow and between Amin and his nominal superior, Taraki. The latter had become president and Amin prime minister. They began by excluding from power virtually the whole of the Parcham group, many of whom were imprisoned or killed. Karmal became Afghanistan’s ambassador to Prague, a form of dignified exile. The Soviet Union, forced to deal with the Khalq faction because it held the reins of power in Kabul, supplied economic assistance and arms to the new government. However, the Afghan leaders, and, in particular, Taraki – who was Communist party first secretary as well as president – wanted more direct military assistance from the Soviet Union. They became conscious during their first year in power of the growing opposition to their regime. Taraki had an important meeting in Moscow on 20 March 1979 with the Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers Aleksey Kosygin, Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, Defence Minster Dmitry Ustinov and Central Committee International Department head Boris Ponomarev. Kosygin presided and made very plain his view that the Afghan Communists should be able, through their own efforts, to defend their regime. More than once in the course of the meeting he held up to Taraki the example of the Vietnamese, who had seen off both the Americans and the Chinese.68 Kosygin was firmly against direct involvement of Soviet troops in the fighting in Afghanistan, although ready to agree to the supply of arms and technical assistance. He went so far as to say to Taraki: ‘Our common enemies are just waiting for the moment when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan.’69 While the reaction in Western capitals was not, in fact, one of joy when Soviet troops did move in later that same year, before long the evidence that the Soviet Union was getting bogged down in a morass analogous to the American experience in Vietnam evoked, especially in Washington, the reaction Kosygin predicted.
Taraki was reluctant to take Kosygin’s ‘no’ for an answer, and since Kosygin was the senior Politburo member most opposed to direct Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan, he may have had hopes of persuading others. Taraki told Kosygin, Gromyko, Ustinov and Ponomarev that they badly needed helicopters and it would be even better if they came with pilots. Kosygin’s response was to say that they could send specialists who would be able to service the helicopters, but ‘of course’ not fighting personnel, as he had already informed him.70 Towards the end of the meeting Taraki tried Kosygin’s patience further by asking if the Afghans could not be sent pilots and tank-drivers ‘from other socialist countries’. Kosygin replied that he could not understand why this question about pilots and tank personnel kept being raised. It was quite unexpected and a very sharp political issue, and he doubted if the response of the ‘socialist countries’ would be any different.71 Kosygin ended the meeting by questioning what he euphemistically called the ‘personnel policy’ of the Kabul regime, having in mind the number of people they had dismissed from office or thrown into prison. These included senior military officers and politicians. Kosygin said he didn’t wish to interfere in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, but he could offer some advice on the basis of Soviet experience. Under Stalin, he told Taraki, many Soviet officers were imprisoned, but when war came Stalin released them and sent them to the front. Kosygin continued: ‘These people showed themselves to be real heroes. Many of them rose to the highest positions of military command.’72
If Taraki seemed obtuse, it was not long before the Soviet leadership came to the conclusion that Amin was dangerous. The latter’s promises of total loyalty to the Soviet Union were not matched by his actions. Some Soviet leaders, and in particular the KGB chief, Yury Andropov, began to fear that Amin would ‘do a Sadat’ on Moscow.73 This was a reference to the change of direction taken by Egypt, which, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, had leaned towards the Soviet Union, whereas his successor, Anwar Sadat, moved closer to the United States. The Soviet leadership continued to be alarmed at the scale of arrests being carried out on Amin’s orders and the extent to which he was alienating more and more groups instead of building a broader coalition. KGB officers in Kabul in the late summer of 1979 made clear to Taraki that good relations with the Soviet Union required the arrest of Amin. That was taken a step further when Amin was invited to Taraki’s residence on 14 September for a meeting attended also by Soviet representatives. Taraki’s presidential guards opened fire in an attempt to kill Amin. Two of the prime minister’s assistants died, but Amin escaped. He had enough military units loyal to him to remove Taraki from power and to have him arrested. Amin appointed himself head of the Communist party. Taraki was executed in prison on 9 October, with Amin turning a deaf ear to Soviet pleas for clemency.74
The rule of Amin, who had become a Marxist while a student in the United States, was by this time much more problematical for the Soviet leadership than the docile Afghan monarchy had been. The Afghan leader’s aggressive policies were creating enemies, including militant Islamic ones, inspired by the Iranian revolution which had taken place earlier in the same year. The deteriorating situation inside Afghanistan led to the fateful Soviet decision to intervene militarily and to replace Amin with the Communist who would have been their original first choice as leader, Babrak Karmal. The prime movers in urging military action were the Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov and KGB Chairman Andropov, but Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko also gave his approval and the head of the International Department of the Central Committee, Boris Ponomarev, acquiesced. By 1979 the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, was in poor health and he was brought into the decision-making process only at a late stage. His agreement was, nevertheless, still crucial. Brezhnev, a cautious political actor, was persuaded that the conflict would be short-lived. He went along with the advice of his senior colleagues, and the decision to invade was accordingly presented to the CPSU Politburo as a fait accompli. Kosygin had remained strongly against sending a large Soviet fighting force to Afghanistan, but he was not present at the Politburo meeting which rubber-stamped the decision, and so the usual unanimity was maintained.75
The Soviet invasion meant that a second Afghan Communist president was executed within the space of three months in late 1979–and again by fellow Communists. Taraki had perished in October and Amin was killed in December. The Soviet army moved in large numbers into Afghanistan in late December, along with more than 700 members of KGB special forces. It was the KGB troops who attacked Amin’s residence, overcame the resistance of his guards, and killed the Afghan leader, along with a number of his relatives and aides. The following day Karmal announced that he was now prime minister and also general secretary of the PDPA.76 In a five-page document laconically headed ‘On the events in Afghanistan 27–28 December 1979’, Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov and Ponomarev reported to the Soviet leadership on the change of government in Kabul they had successfully brought about. Amin, they said, had ‘deceived the party and the people’. In the period since September alone, more than 600 members of the Communist party and military personnel had been eliminated without trial. What was going on was nothing less than ‘the liquidation of the party’.77 What was now occurring was the formation of a new government and revolutionary council, whose composition would include ‘representatives of the former groups “Parcham” and “Khalk”, representatives of the military and non-party people’.78
Karmal was described by Andropov and his colleagues in that report as ‘one of the best prepared leaders of the PDPA from a theoretical point of view’, as someone who was sincerely sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and as a man who possessed ‘high authority among the party masses and in the country’.79 Nevertheless, initially Karmal was a good deal less ecumenical in his appointments policy than his Soviet mentors wished him to be. Most of the other leading members of the government came from his party group and had been in exile along with him. He followed the example of his dead rivals by arresting many Communists who had been in the wrong faction. Having been put in power by Soviet arms, he was, however, more dependent on Moscow than Taraki and Amin. Although Karmal’s predecessors had subsequently needed Soviet economic aid and weapons, they had at least seized power in April 1978 of their own accord. On Soviet insistence, Karmal had to release most of the Communists he had arrested and, for the sake of party unity, bring a number of them into the new government.80
The Afghan regime, though led by people who regarded themselves as Communists, had certainly not succeeded in creating a Communist system prior to the Soviet invasion, and it was, if anything, even less successful in doing so after it. Normally a Communist party, after coming to power, was able to increase party membership massively. In Afghanistan, as a leading specialist on the conflict has observed: ‘it would have taken a miracle to resurrect Afghan Communism’ because the latest round of factional infighting had destroyed ‘most party members’ belief in the building of a Communist Party as a viable project’.81 The regime’s survival depended heavily on the Soviet military. In the first half of the 1980s, around 100,000 Soviet troops at any one time were caught in a stalemate in Afghanistan. At least 25,000 of them were killed and over a million Afghans perished in the conflict.82 The Mujahedin opposition to the Soviet-supported leadership, based both on ethnic and religious identity, time and again retook territory which had been captured by Soviet troops. The supply of increasingly sophisticated weapons from the United States enhanced the firepower of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupying forces and raised the political costs of the operation for the Soviet leadership. The war was becoming more unpopular in the USSR, especially among parents of sons approaching military age. However, public opinion, while not totally negligible as a political factor in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, came low in the order of considerations of the pre-perestroika Politburo. Therefore, although some of the growing discontent with the war in Soviet society could be likened to the trend of opinion in the United States during the Vietnam War, public opinion did not have the same impact on high politics. Neither under Brezhnev nor under his short-lived successors Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko did the Politburo contemplate changing course. The decision to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan was taken by Mikhail Gorbachev very early in his general secretaryship in 1985 but not made public at that time. It will be discussed briefly in Chapter 24 in the context of the links between domestic reform and the ‘new thinking’ on foreign policy which characterized the Soviet perestroika.
Alongside the fratricide, the Afghan Communists had some achievements to their credit. Even the divided Taraki – Amin leadership in 1978–79 tackled the problems of widespread illiteracy and of the gross gender inequality in educational opportunities. At that time only 5 per cent of girls attended school, as compared with 30 per cent of boys. The Communist government granted women equal legal rights and tried to ban forced marriage. They also attempted to introduce land redistribution.83 The changes in education and the measures affecting the rights of women were popular in the towns but resisted in the countryside. They led to clashes with fundamentalist clergy and the beginning of fierce resistance to the secularization intrinsic to Communist rule. It was the strength of that backlash, as well as the internecine conflict within the ranks of the PDPA, which brought about the Soviet Union’s ill-fated intervention.
Non-ruling Communist Parties in Asia
Elsewhere in Asia there have been Communist parties which have attracted more support than the PDPA in Afghanistan, but – with the exception of Nepal in the twenty-first century – they have not come close to success at national level. Nevertheless, in two of Asia’s most important democracies, the Communists have performed better in elections than their counterparts in the Americas or in most of Western Europe. The Communist Party in India, while never coming close to power nationally, has governed in two of the regions of this federal state – the second most populous country in the world. At various times the Communists have been in control in Kerala and, from the mid-1970s and up to the present, they have enjoyed overwhelming majority support in West Bengal. The party which had such success, usually in coalition with other leftist parties, emerged from a split in the old CPI in 1964 between pro-Soviet members and Maoists. The former took the name Communist Party of India (Marxist)–or CPI(M)–and it is they who have had these significant regional successes. Their electoral support has come from the peasantry. As elsewhere in Asia, land redistribution has been part of the Communists’ appeal.
Just as Communist parties in Western Europe generally lost out to socialist parties of a social democratic type, so in India, the CPI – and subsequently the CPI(M)–was unable to compete nationally with the party which had led the struggle for independence and which had a generally leftist political orientation. In the 1930s Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign against the British won overwhelming support for his Indian National Congress, and the party which emerged from this movement, the Indian Congress Party, consistently eclipsed the Communists at national level. There has been, though, wide regional variation. Of particular significance is the fact that in a democracy such as India, Communist rule locally has not been accompanied by the massive disadvantages of a Communist monopoly of power. In West Bengal, along with land redistribution, came security of tenure for the peasantry – not forced collectivization, which would be impossible in a genuine democracy. Increased spending on health and education, especially in Kerala, also enhanced Communist standing. Of the two most fundamental political attributes of a Communist system – democratic centralism and the ‘leading role’ (monopoly of power) of the party – only the first has been applicable in India, and practised by the Communist Party and its subsidiary organizations in the regions where it has governed. The CPI(M) has, indeed, generally maintained the strictly hierarchical organization and rigorous discipline characteristic of democratic centralism. In the Indian political system, this was not, and could not have been, accompanied by either a monopoly of power or a monopoly over the sources of information. Where the CPI has gained power locally, it has been in competitive elections, and even the local media – and, naturally, the national media – have been far from uncritical of their performance. Thus, there is a qualitative difference between Communist government locally, or even regionally, and a Communist system.
The other Communist party which has performed respectably in elections in Asia is the Communist Party of Japan (JCP). As early as 1949, after it became a legal party in the post-war period, it secured just under 10 per cent of the vote and thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives, the lower and more powerful parliamentary chamber. That support dropped to much less than 5 per cent throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s – the coldest years of the Cold War. However, between 1972 and 1980 the party’s vote exceeded 10 per cent in three successive elections to the House of Representatives. This was a period in which the JCP had distanced itself from Soviet policy. In outlook it had become close to the ‘Eurocommunist’ parties (discussed in Chapter 23). Together they examined ways of making a democratic transition from capitalism to socialism.84 Compared with the Asian Communist parties which came to power, the Japanese Communists were not only more like their European counterparts (by the late 1960s, at least) but also more in line with what Marx would have expected. They were operating in an advanced industrial society and their greatest strength has been in the towns. Unlike the Asian Communist parties which took power, the JCP has had little appeal or success in agricultural areas. (Its support in the early twenty-first century is much diminished. The JCP won only nine seats in the elections to the lower house in 2005.)85 In other flourishing democracies in Asia, such as Australia and New Zealand, the Communist parties have been a negligible electoral force, although in Australia for a time Communists held leading positions in a number of trade unions. Their hard work and organizational skills made them effective challengers to weak or corrupt non-Communist union leaders in the 1930s and in the earlier post-war years.
The largest Communist party in the world outside Communist-ruled countries was in Indonesia. It had been gaining in influence in the first half of the 1960s under the rule of President Ahmed Sukarno, a leading figure in the non-aligned group of nations, alongside Tito, Nasser and the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Sukarno was, however, more indulgent to the Communist Party than Nehru and much more so than Nasser. Although Nasser had good relations with the Soviet Union, he took a tough line against Egypt’s own Communists. Sukarno, however, not only leaned more towards the Soviet Union than the West in his ‘non-alignment’, but was protective of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Rhetorically, his policy came close to that of the Communists when on Indonesian Independence Day in August 1965 he said that Indonesia was only ‘at the national-democratic stage’ of development, but the time would come when it would ‘build socialism’. Land in the ownership of landlords would be ‘redistributed among the people’.86 Earlier that year, Sukarno endorsed the claim of the PKI that they had three million party members. He added that the youth organization had another three million and that there were an additional twenty million Communist sympathisers.87 Since the total Indonesian population was around 105 million at the time, this suggested that at least a quarter of adults were either affiliated to or supported the Communists.
The main stumbling block to further advance on the part of the PKI was the Indonesian army. Sukarno wielded extensive power within a system which he called ‘guided democracy’. It rested, however, on an uneasy coalition – or rather ‘peaceful co-existence’, which was not to last – between the Communists and the armed forces. The military elite controlled not only a large fighting force but also the country’s economic spoils. Either personally or through their family ties, they reaped the profits from the country’s state industries. Accordingly, their nationalism, anti-Communism and economic self-interest were in perfect harmony.88 To overcome the obstacle which the higher ranks of the military presented, the Communists urged Sukarno to introduce a system of political commissars in the armed forces and also to form a force of volunteers.89 The latter would have been the equivalent of the ‘workers’ militias’ the Communists created during the power seizures in Eastern Europe. Sukarno hesitated, and while he did so, Communist sympathisers in the armed forces in September 1965 abducted and killed six of the most senior army generals. The army, with General Hadji Suharto leading the way, retaliated ruthlessly, and they were supported by millions of previously suppressed Muslims. There was a massacre of Communists and those deemed to be sympathetic to them. According to Amnesty International, half a million people were killed. Other estimates put the figure at a million.90 One of the world’s largest Communist parties virtually ceased to exist. Sukarno was not deposed at once, but his position was greatly weakened. By 1967 he was replaced by General Suharto as national leader. In the following year Suharto became president. For the next thirty years he ruled Indonesia as a corrupt and nepotistic dictatorship, ameliorated only by the achievement of substantial economic growth.
South Africa
The most serious Communist Party on the African continent has been that of South Africa (the CPSA). Like the party in Japan, it recruited its members primarily in the urban areas. Unlike the Japanese party, it was illegal for the greater part of the second half of the twentieth century. In contradistinction from Japan, the South African Communist Party also had the ‘advantage’, as well as the disadvantage, of being opposed to a racist and manifestly unjust regime. The positive side of that for the party was that it was able to attract recruits who saw in the Communist Party the most viable radical alternative to the apartheid regime. The party remained small, but it attracted talented people who were to have an influence within the main opposition movement, the African National Congress (ANC), out of all proportion to their numbers. The party’s strength as an organization lay also in the fact that it brought together people of different ethnic and social backgrounds in a common struggle. The Communist Party contained members not only of the black African majority, but also Indians, ‘coloureds’ of mixed heritage, and whites. The last category included a disproportionately large number of Jews.91 The most prominent, and highly respected, party member of Jewish origin was Joe Slovo. Like many of the Jewish Communists, he was of East European background, in Slovo’s case Lithuanian. Whereas for the African National Congress the basic task was to replace white minority rule by majority rule, the Communists saw this as being only part of a more fundamental class struggle.
Members of the Communist Party of South Africa had, since 1950, acquired plenty of experience of working underground. When there was a warrant for the arrest of Nelson Mandela at the beginning of the 1960s, CPSA members helped him to move from town to town, holding clandestine meetings over many months. This was done so effectively that some of the mass media took to calling Mandela the Black Pimpernel, a reference to the fictional character, the Scarlet Pimpernel, who evaded arrest during the French Revolution.92 Communists were able to work within the ANC, for they were equally dedicated to ending apartheid, and their experience of operating in secret, together with their organizational skills, were valuable for the broader movement. It was partly thanks to South Africa’s white Communists – though also, of course, to strong support from social democrats and liberals (as well as Communists) abroad – that the ANC were not tempted to think of all whites as the enemy.
In spite of that, in the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was more comfortable with the ANC than with the CPSA. With Nelson Mandela in prison by then, Oliver Tambo led the ANC which had its headquarters in exile in Zambia. Through the Soviet embassy, there was close Soviet contact with Tambo and with other leading figures in the ANC.93 In the 1970s the Africa specialists within the International Department of the CPSU suspected Joe Slovo of having Eurocommunist sympathies. They also saw as a disadvantage, rather than an advantage, the fact that some whites were prominent within the party leadership (as well as, to a lesser extent, within the ANC).94 The view from Moscow was that the successful overthrow of the apartheid regime depended on Africans very clearly playing the leading role in the movement for change. The strong Communist influence within the African National Congress did not necessarily make for greater radicalism within the ANC. While committed to ending apartheid as early as possible, the Communist members were often quite cautious political actors. When Nelson Mandela in June 1961 decided that the time had come to move from a policy of non-violence to armed struggle against the South African regime, there was a mixed reaction from the Communists. He had difficulty persuading Moses Kotane, a secretary of the Communist Party and a member of the ANC executive, of the need for this. He told Kotane that his ‘opposition was like the Communist Party in Cuba under Batista. The party had insisted that the appropriate conditions had not yet arrived…Castro did not wait, he acted – and he triumphed.’95 Nevertheless, Communists became integral members of the organization Spear of the Nation, which Mandela chaired and which set out to commit acts of sabotage to discourage foreign investment in the apartheid regime. Mandela, Joe Slovo and Walter Sisulu, the leading figures in Spear of the Nation, argued that the South African state was illegitimate and rested on violence and that they had exhausted purely non-violent attempts to overthrow it.96
The nature of the regime in South Africa made it possible to attract into the Communist Party people who would have been highly unlikely to join the party in a democracy. If that was an advantage for the CPSA, it does not alter the fact that being a Communist in South Africa also had some serious disadvantages. They included the threat of imprisonment or assassination. The Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 made the party illegal, and went much further. As Nelson Mandela wrote:
The act outlawed the Communist Party of South Africa and made it a crime, punishable by a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment, to be a member of the party or to further the aims of communism. But the bill was drafted in such a broad way that it outlawed all but the mildest protest against the state, deeming it a crime to advocate any doctrine that promoted ‘political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder’.97
In his speech to the South African court in 1964 at the trial which saw Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment – he served twenty-seven years of that sentence, for more than eighteen of them on Robben Island – he had the opportunity to define his relationship to the Communist Party. Mandela told the court that he was not a Communist and had always regarded himself as an African patriot. Furthermore, whereas the Communist Party sought to emphasize class differences, the ANC sought harmony. He disagreed with the Communists’ dismissal of parliamentary institutions. He told the court that he regarded the British parliament as ‘the most democratic institution in the world’ and that he admired the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary which were prominent features of the political system of the United States.98 He explained to a court which was very unreceptive to such an explanation why, nevertheless, he and other African politicians co-operated with and had friendly relations with Communists:
Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression are a luxury we cannot afford at this stage. What is more, for many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with and work with us. Because of this, there are many Africans who, today, tend to equate freedom with communism.99
Communists were a significant element in the ANC coalition which ultimately came to power in South Africa under Mandela’s leadership. Their presence as an integral part of the African National Congress had made it easier for successive South African white minority governments to play the anti-Communist card against the African majority. It had also made a number of Western governments hesitate to support the ANC both because of their tacit acquiescence in armed struggle and because, in the context of the Cold War, they feared that they might thereby be embracing a future Communist South Africa. The National Party government in South Africa increasingly fell back on emphasizing the Communist threat as governments and public opinion elsewhere became unwilling to accept a racist justification of minority rule.100
Although it is moving beyond the period with which this chapter is mainly concerned, the changed international context by the end of the 1980s is crucial to an understanding of change in South Africa itself. What happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s had a profound effect on both the ANC and the more pragmatic members of the South African government. The Soviet leadership by this time was not interested in supporting armed struggle anywhere in Africa, and this had its effect on ANC thinking. Equally, the pluralization of the Soviet political system, the vastly improved East – West relations, and the peaceful transition of the countries of Eastern Europe away from Communism made invocation of the ‘Communist threat’ an anachronism. On 2 February 1990, the South African president, F.W. de Klerk, announced to the South African parliament the lifting of the bans on the ANC and the Communist Party and the freeing of political prisoners. By the time South Africa had its first democratic elections in 1994, which brought the ANC into government, the world had moved on still further. There was no longer a Soviet Union or a single Communist regime in Europe. Thus, the issue of whether South Africa might become Communist was also confined to the past. In the ANC government which was formed in the 1990s, Communists of long standing – including Joe Slovo, as well as Mandela’s deputy and eventual successor as President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki – played an important role. However, neither the system nor the policies the government pursued were remotely Communist. Whereas one of the ANC’s staunch foreign allies, Fidel Castro, continued to swim against the tide of events elsewhere in the Communist world, especially in Europe, South Africa’s most prominent Communists had swum with them.
The comparative strength, albeit for most of the time as an underground movement, of the Communist Party in South Africa was very much a product of the racist social order. In a country as industrialized as South Africa, a social democratic party on the European model might have been expected to develop and flourish. However, the reactionary and repressive nature of the South African regime made such moderate leftist opposition impossible. People who might have belonged to a democratic socialist party elsewhere joined the Communist Party and exerted real influence within the ANC. Although the South African Communists went through many of the intellectual contortions required of Communists who were basically loyal to the political line emanating from Moscow, their primary focus was on the problems of South Africa. While Communists elsewhere in the world had usually done far more to extinguish than promote democracy, in South Africa they played a significant part in the acquisition of democratic rights by the majority of the population. Along the way, some of them paid a heavy price for that endeavour.*
States of ‘Socialist Orientation’ in Africa
For a variety of reasons, including the way the African continent was originally carved up by the imperial powers, with little regard for ethnic boundaries and cultural communities, to say that pluralist democracy did not flourish in Africa during the twentieth century would be a gross understatement. In the first half of the century most of the continent was under colonial rule. But after decades of independence (varying between one and four), in 1989 only three out of fifty African states had sustained competitive elections among different parties over a lengthy period: Senegal, Botswana and Gambia. The great majority of countries were either one-party states or military dictatorships.101 The regimes whose leaders had aspirations to build a Soviet-style ‘socialism’ – most notably Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia – but who did not succeed in creating a Communist system, turned out to be both oppressive and inefficient. They were hardly more so, however, than a number of other clearly non-Marxist African dictatorships whose leaders were embraced in European capitals and in Washington as stalwarts of the ‘free world’. The fighting of the Cold War by proxy in Africa, especially in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, added greatly to the sufferings of the people who lived in the countries concerned. Yet it achieved neither the ideological aims of the Soviet Union nor those of the United States if the goal of the former was taken to be the establishment of Communist systems and the goal of the latter the creation of democracies. In fact, for each of the ‘superpowers’, loyalty to their side in the Cold War counted, in the final analysis, for more than ideology or the form of government. Thus, the Soviet Union had good relations with Nasser’s Egypt and the far more repressive regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, although in both countries Communists were either imprisoned or, in the case of Iraq, more often executed.
Nevertheless, when leaders in a few African countries appeared to have been seriously influenced by Marxism-Leninism, some of the aged members of the Soviet leadership in Moscow of the 1970s and early 1980s took encouragement from this. Not only had the Soviet Union attracted allies, but even the ideas were apparently winning some support. ‘You see’, said the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, speaking within a narrow party circle, ‘even in the jungles they want to live in Lenin’s way!’102 Within the Soviet establishment there was, however, debate about what significance should be attached to countries such as Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia apparently being eager to follow the Soviet ideological example. At no time were these countries counted as ‘socialist’ even by the Soviet leadership, within which the International Department of the Central Committee had primary responsibility for maintaining links with them. The term that was invented for these countries – and for South Yemen, in the Middle East, which for a time received a large quantity of Soviet aid on the strength of purporting to be Marxist-Leninist – was that of ‘states of socialist orientation’.
But within Soviet think-tanks there were sceptics who thought that even the term ‘socialist orientation’ was going too far. While most officials were ready to welcome support for the Soviet Union wherever it might arise, there were specialists who argued that some of the Third World countries in which leaders were talking about ‘building socialism’ were wildly premature in such aspirations. No good, they believed, would come of it; these countries should be applying themselves to building capitalism as a necessary prelude to socialism. While not directly attacking the party leadership, such nonconformists within the Soviet establishment were arguing against taking at face value self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists and ‘builders of socialism’ in backward Third World countries. The basis of their critique was that Marx was right! The countries in question, whose very statehood was in several cases under threat, were not ready to ‘build socialism’.103
No Communist system was ever established in Africa, but it is undoubtedly true that a number of African leaders were influenced by Marxism and some also by Leninism. Even a number of entirely non-Marxist African leaders, running authoritarian regimes, picked up some tips from Soviet methods of maintaining political control. There had been earlier attempts to create what was called ‘African socialism’ – by, for example, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – but though they took on board just enough ideas from the Communist world to suffer from some of the defects of Soviet-type systems, they did not aspire to recreate such systems on the African continent. In Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia, in contrast, leaders laid claim to such an aspiration, and received Soviet aid on the strength of it. In Mozambique the guerrilla movement Frelimo, led by Samora Machel, which had fought for independence from Portugal, in the 1970s espoused Marxist-Leninist ideas, nationalized plantations and businesses, and sought to introduce central economic planning. They also denounced religion and the traditional authority of chiefs. The result was a disastrous civil war. Three years after Machel’s death in an air crash, with Soviet support drying up, Frelimo in 1989 renounced its Marxist-Leninist ideology.104
economic aid and military equipment the Soviet UnionIn the civil war in Angola, the Soviet Union and, still more enthusiastically, Cuba backed the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Aghostino Neto, the MPLA leader, was impressed by the amount of economic aid and military equipment the Soviet Union was willing to provide – to the extent that the MPLA became the second most important Soviet ally in the region after the ANC.105 The performance of Cuban troops was to be more impressive still. The United States, from the mid-1970s, stepped up its funding for the MPLA’s main opponents, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and also for a third group, UNITA, which had a following in the largest tribe in Angola. Both of these anti-MPLA and, by extension, anti-Soviet movements were supported with aid also from the Chinese.106 The South African apartheid government joined in the struggle (on the same side as the USA and China), and it was an important boost for the morale of the ANC in South Africa when Cuban soldiers, mainly of African descent, helped the MPLA defeat the better-armed South African forces.107 The MPLA emerged as the dominant grouping, and in late 1975 Cuban troops stopped several thousand South African regular soldiers in their tracks. The Organization of African Unity gave their official recognition to Neto’s government in 1976, and a year later the MPLA declared themselves to be a Marxist-Leninist party. They needed the presence of Cuban troops and Soviet aid, however, to maintain even the semblance of power through a period of further turmoil which lasted until peace accords for south-western Africa were signed at the United Nations in 1988 by South Africa, Angola and Cuba.
The United States, which was also a party to the discussions, had reluctantly to agree to the participation of Cuba because the South African government by this time wanted a settlement. The Cubans had repulsed another major South African military offensive into Angola in 1987. There were as many as 55,000 Cuban soldiers at a time in Angola, and over a period of fifteen years some 300,000 Cuban combatants served there, in addition to almost 50,000 Cuban civilians, including doctors.108 As Fidel Castro was to claim, this was a unique case of a Third World country, on its own initiative, playing a decisive role in another country outside its own geographic region.109 By 1988, however, the Soviet Union was no longer willing to underwrite economically either Cuban revolutionary zeal in Africa or the cost of civil war in African countries. Gorbachev had replaced the veteran head of the International Department of the CPSU, Boris Ponomarev, in 1986 with Anatoly Dobrynin, who had for a quarter of a century been Soviet ambassador to Washington. Well aware of how Soviet intervention in Africa had complicated the task of improving relations with the United States, Dobrynin, while critical of some aspects of Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ on foreign policy, was fully supportive of his new Third World policy.
Soon after the overthrow and murder of the Emperor Haile Selassie, in the Ethiopian revolution of 1974, the leader who came to the fore was an army officer who proclaimed himself to be a Marxist-Leninist, Mengistu Haile Mariam. He first achieved prominence at the time of the revolution when he demonstrated his ruthlessness by ordering the execution of around sixty senior officials from Haile Selassie’s regime. He also showed no compunction about killing intellectuals who had supported the revolution and members of rival factions. When Ethiopia came under attack by Somalia, Mengistu was saved from defeat by Soviet military hardware and the efforts of some 17,000 Cuban troops. The egalitarianism of the Cuban revolution was, however, being put to strange use, for Mengistu by 1978 was presiding from the same ornate chair in which Haile Selassie had sat and had come to be regarded even by former revolutionary allies as the ‘new Emperor’.110 Not only did the Communist party not play the leading role in Ethiopia. There was no attempt even to found such a party until ten years after the revolution – in 1984. And by that time Mengistu had killed most of the Marxists in the country. In the same year Ethiopia suffered a calamitous famine for which Mengistu’s policies were at least as responsible as the drought. Requisitioning grain to feed his army, who were fighting rebels, favouring inefficient state farms over peasant farming, and employing scorched-earth tactics against rebel fighters contributed massively to the catastrophe.111 From the late 1970s there were serious reservations even within the ranks of Soviet officialdom about continued involvement with regimes such as Ethiopia’s, but a Politburo majority continued to support this element of Cold War struggle until the second half of the 1980s. Then, with Gorbachev the most decisive voice on foreign policy, the aid dried up. When Mengistu made a desperate appeal for more military assistance, he was given very little. Having been briefed on Mengistu’s human rights record, Gorbachev rapidly developed a distaste for him. Africa did not bulk large in Gorbachev’s foreign policy, but, to the extent it did, he advocated, whether in Afghanistan, Ethiopia or South Africa, a policy of national reconciliation.112