30

What’s Left of Communism?

Very little is left of Communism in Europe where the movement began. As recently as the mid-1980s, half of Europe was controlled by Marxist-Leninist parties. Today, no state in that continent is ruled by Communists, nor are they remotely close to coming to power. In both Eastern and Western Europe, Communist parties are but a shadow of their former selves. Even in Russia, where throughout the 1990s the Communist Party of the Russian Federation provided the main opposition to the Yeltsin administration, the CPRF appears enfeebled. In the autumn of 2008 they were presented with what would have seemed at one time a political gift – a global crisis of capitalism! Russia was far from immune to it. By the end of October, the Moscow stock market had lost 70 per cent of its value at the beginning of the year.¹ Not only did the CPRF fail to exploit the economic difficulties; they were deliberately restrained, not wishing to exacerbate the financial turmoil. A secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, Oleg Kulikov, announced that they would be making no public criticism of the government, since to do so ‘would only harm the market and the anti-crisis programme’.² All very patriotic, but a far cry from the revolutionary doctrine enunciated by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Long before that, of course, there were many, and very different, deeds and statements of Communist parties, not least in Russia, that would hardly have been recognized by Marx and Engels as deriving from their doctrine. Yet the influence of the ideas of the founding fathers was huge, especially in the earlier years of the development of Communist parties. When the worldwide financial crisis came to a head in the second half of 2008, it did at least lead to an increase in sales of Das Kapital in Germany, but neither there nor anywhere else in Europe did it lead to a revival of Marxist-Leninist parties.

Outside Europe, the current which has swept away ruling Communist parties has very occasionally been reversed. By far the most notable fresh success for such a party in the twenty-first century has been in the continent where Communism has retained its most substantial presence, Asia. In Nepal, a landlocked country of just under thirty million inhabitants, situated between China and India, a party which deemed itself to be Maoist emerged victorious in genuinely competitive elections in April 2008. The Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) became the dominant partner in a coalition government. One month after the election, the Nepalese monarchy – which had lasted for some 240 years – was abolished. A non-Communist, Ram Baran Yadav, was chosen to occupy a largely ceremonial presidency, and the much more powerful position of prime minister went to the leader of the Communist Party, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who prefers to be known by his nom de guerre, Prachanda (which means ‘The Fierce One’).

This followed years of civil war (ended only in 2006), in which more than 12,000 people were killed. While the party followed the Maoist path of waging war in the countryside, it eventually came to power legally. With Nepal’s huge neighbour, China, now pursuing a policy remote from Maoism, it is far from clear that Nepal will become a fully fledged Communist state, still less one which will seek to emulate the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Economically, the country is dependent on trade with India, and Prachanda has said that Nepal will retain multi-party competition, foreign investment, and a private sector. The country is desperately poor – one of the secrets of the Maoists’ success – and although the Communist Party is the dominant partner in the government, it would be premature to conclude that Nepal has increased the number of existing Communist states from five to six. Time will tell, but so far not only Nepal’s political system but also the ruling party’s ideology appears to be in transition. It is adapting to a very different international environment from that in which Asian Communist parties came to power in the twentieth century.³

There is, after all, no longer an international Communist movement. Of the six defining characteristics of a Communist system elaborated in Chapter 6 of this book, it is the last two ideological features which have most completely disappeared. One of those was the sense of belonging to such an international Communist movement. It had its headquarters in Moscow, although Mao’s China offered an alternative pole of attraction. That transnational movement has gone, and so has the aspiration to build a communist society. In spite of lip-service to the goal of communism, no ruling Communist Party any longer places emphasis even in theory on movement towards that stateless society, the culminating and ‘inevitable’ stage of human development, as envisaged by Marx.

Insofar as it is still meaningful to describe as Communist the largest and most important of the states still governed by a Communist party, it is because China fully retains the monopoly of power of the party and the strictly hierarchical organization and discipline associated with democratic centralism. In many ways, however, China today is a hybrid system. So far removed from Communist orthodoxy has its economy become that it has even been described as an example of ‘party-state capitalism’.⁴ Yet the party’s ‘leading role’ and democratic centralism not only define it politically, they also remain pillars of the country’s still highly authoritarian (but less than totalitarian) system. There has, though, been significant ideological adaptation to a changing world, as well as bold innovation in economic policy. Reflecting as well as promoting an increasing pragmatism, Deng Xiaoping said that many generations would be required to build the first stage of socialism. This implied several hundred years, and raises the further hypothetical question for students of Communism: how long, then, after that would it take to construct the second stage – communism? In fact, the aspiration to build communism has been put so far ahead into the unknowable future that it is perfectly obvious that this task is not even on the long-term agenda of the CCP leadership. Indeed, in China there is very little contemporary interest in building socialism, never mind communism. Or, as Chris Patten – Britain’s last governor of Hong Kong and an astute observer of China – put it, exaggerating only slightly: ‘There is no Marxism left in China, though there are bits of Leninism.’⁵

Of the six defining features of a Communist system, China, then, meets only the two important political aspects. Since Mao’s death it has moved substantially away from the economic criteria. Its concessions to the market have been on such a scale that it cannot now be considered a command economy. So far as ownership is concerned, there is still a large state sector, but by 2006 private enterprise in China accounted for almost half of the country’s GDP and more than two-thirds of its industrial output.⁶ In a related development, inequality has greatly increased, especially the urban – rural divide. That inequality is substantially higher than the European average and marginally higher than in the United States.⁷ There is, in fact, increasing concern in China about the size of the gap between rich and poor. If China has become the workshop of the world, it is a workshop in which many are paying a high price. Accidents at work killed 101,480 people in China in 2007. In the same year there were 229 people killed at work in Great Britain.⁸ The difference in the size of the two country’s populations – China’s is approximately twenty-two times higher than that of Britain – does not come even remotely close to explaining such a remarkable disparity. It has a lot to do with the nature of the work in which most people are employed in the two countries, but is related still more to the absence of democratic and legal accountability in China. Unsafe practices as well as corruption (a major problem in the Asian Communist states, not least in China) flourish in the absence of democratically elected politicians and an independent judiciary who can hold both economic and political executives to account.

While China’s Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of ‘communism’ in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name ‘Communist’. In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given by the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word ‘Communist’ because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition – fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party’s name remained the same.⁹ The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow ‘the path of European democratic socialism’ would be a step down ‘the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP’.¹⁰

In all the established Communist states left standing – China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam – the leading role of the party and democratic centralism remain intact. Indeed, that is the chief justification for calling them Communist. However, they differ greatly in the extent to which they still possess the defining features of a Communist system economically – state ownership of the means of production and a command, rather than market, economy. As we have seen, China, so far as ownership is concerned, is already a mixed economy, and it has become in the main a market economy. Vietnam has followed in China’s post-Mao footsteps. From 1986 onwards it, too, embraced marketizing reform. Indeed, there are analysts who, while acknowledging the strength of the party-state institutions in both countries, have classified both China and Vietnam as ‘post-communist’.¹¹ Clearly, which category one puts these countries into depends on how much weight is accorded to the political as distinct from the economic criteria of Communism. Their political institutions are Communist, and they are still paying homage, however unconvincingly, to the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin (and in China to both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, very different though these former leaders were). In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh is added to the ideological pantheon, though within two decades of Saigon being renamed Ho Chi Minh City, its inhabitants were calling it once again Saigon.¹²

In Laos and in Cuba there has been modest movement away from the classical command economy, which, in Stalinist form, is now to be found only in North Korea. Yet neither Laos nor Cuba has gone anything like as far down the road to the market as have China and Vietnam. The population of Laos is only eight million, and a majority of the people are subsistence rice farmers. Reporting from Laos in the year 2000, a BBC correspondent noted that the traffic was so light in the capital city, Vientiane, that hens lived around one of the main roundabouts. Politically and economically, the regime is a severe one, but Buddhism is now tolerated, as, advertently or inadvertently, are drugs. Indeed, as Owen Bennett-Jones observed, whereas for Marx religion was the opium of the people, in Laos, ‘opium is the opium of the people’.¹³ Cuba, with its population of eleven million, was under Fidel Castro one of the most egalitarian of Communist states and the most resistant to any kind of ‘market socialism’. It remains relatively egalitarian, but since Castro, as a result of severe illness, was officially succeeded as leader by his brother Raúl in February 2008 (the younger Castro having been in charge de facto since August 2006), some modest steps towards widening pay differentials have been taken. The party newspaper Granma justified these in June 2008 by saying, ‘If it’s harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it’s also harmful to give him what he doesn’t deserve.’¹⁴ While Cuba remains a poor country, and preserves the essentials both of a Communist political and economic system, it has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main economic benefactor, and more than forty years of sanctions imposed by the United States with the purpose of toppling the regime.

Explaining Communist Longevity

This raises the question of why four Communist states in Asia and one in the Caribbean have survived for so long. It goes without saying that they have had the same supports which worked effectively for seven decades in the Soviet Union – powerful institutions, starting with a disciplined ruling party, an omnipresent secret police, and a rigorous censorship. Moreover, although two of the five states (China and Vietnam) have undertaken radical economic reform, they have not taken the risk of embarking on fundamental political reform, even though a modest liberalization of the two regimes has taken place gradually since the 1980s. What all five states have succeeded in doing, however, is linking Communism and nationalism, making the development of a strong state part of their appeal to national pride. In this they have been blessed by having enemies to be invoked, whenever needed, as a potent external threat. That has aided the effort to rally patriotic support behind the system.

Cuba is an especially interesting case from this point of view. Its survival, after the collapse of Soviet and East European Communism, was regarded by many observers as improbable. However, United States policy towards Cuba, from the time of Castro’s takeover up to the time of writing (late 2008), has played an enormous part in preserving the Cuban Communist system in aspic. Uncle Sam was already a bogeyman in Cuba before the island became Communist. Since then, the American economic embargo, including a ban on US passport-holders from visiting the island, has achieved precisely the opposite effect from that intended. It has increased anti-Americanism, strengthened the standing of the Castro leadership, bolstered the Communist system, and kept the great majority of the Cuban people poorer than they otherwise would have been. American engagement with Cuba, if it had begun several decades ago, would undoubtedly have led to liberalization – and, in all probability, substantial democratization – of the regime. A policy of ‘doing nothing to help Castro’ has had the wholly unintended consequence of sustaining him and the regime as the David who successfully defied Goliath.

All the Asian Communist states have, to varying degrees, likewise viewed the United States as a major enemy. Three of the four – North Korea, Vietnam and Laos – were at various times subjected to American military attack. Almost 60,000 American servicemen lost their lives in the Vietnam War, but by the time that war ended in 1975, some three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had been killed. Vietnam’s economy was destroyed in the course of the conflict, and untold ecological damage was inflicted. The toxic substances, including Agent Orange, used to defoliate the forests (and thereby reveal the hiding places of enemy soldiers) were still causing unusually large numbers of cancers and birth defects in Vietnam years after the war ended.¹⁵ Thus, in spite of the harshness of the regime imposed by the Communists, it has not been difficult to project the enemy image of the United States or to evoke terrible memories of the war and a measure of gratitude to Vietnam’s peacetime rulers for rebuilding the country.

The Indochina War left Communists in charge of Laos also, and gave them the possibility of making anti-Americanism a rallying cry. When the Pathet Lao seized control of the whole of Laos in the mid-1970s, they took revenge on the minority ethnic group the Hmong, who, equipped by the United States, had attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos to Vietnam. About 100,000 of the Hmong were killed by the Communists and another 100,000 succeeded in making their way gradually to the United States.¹⁶ The reputation of the United States in Laos was damaged not only by its bombing of the infiltration trails in Laos but by its apparent abandonment of the anti-Communist insurgents once a peace settlement of the Indochina War had been reached.

North Korea is a case apart. It remains the most totalitarian of Communist states. It, too, has the United States as a past and prospective enemy. But it has a deadly rival much closer to home than the USA – South Korea. To have on its borders a Korean state which is much more prosperous and incomparably more democratic is a clear threat to the future existence of North Korea. Moreover, there are still almost 30,000 American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula as of 2008, a number which has been gradually reduced. Thus, the Kims, father and son, have had no difficulty in maintaining a siege mentality in their highly militarized state. Because of the manifest failure of the hard-line regime in North Korea to provide a decent standard of living for its citizens, control over information about the outside world is tighter than in any other Communist country. Although it would appear, on the face of it, to be more difficult for the North Korean leadership than for Communist leaders elsewhere to play the patriotic card, since (like their old East German counterparts) they are part of a divided nation, they have, nevertheless, had some success in this endeavour. Kim Il-sung has been portrayed as the person who liberated Korea from Japanese rule and who then successfully defied the United States. The leadership also nails its nationalist colours to the mast of an eventually united Korea under Communist rule. (Korea will surely be united at some future date, but, no less surely, as a non-Communist state.)

Even though the establishment of a Communist system in the northern part of the Korean peninsula was mainly the work of the Soviet Union, North Korea went on to establish a foreign policy independent of both the USSR and China. In this respect, as in others, it can be compared with Romania, where for several decades the nationalist card was played with a measure of success. Without the Soviet Union, there would have been no Communist regime, but under Ceauescu, a somewhat independent line on foreign policy was taken – against, for example, military intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and (again, in contradistinction to Soviet policy) for intervention in Poland in 1989.¹⁷ Both North Korea and Romania also went further than any other Communist regime in a personalist politics that had sultanistic and dynastic elements. In North Korea, Kim Jong-il did, indeed, succeed his father as the supreme ruler of the country, and in Romania, Nicolae Ceauescu was grooming his son, Nicu, for the succession.¹⁸

Broad comparative studies of authoritarian regimes (embracing not only Communist systems) have shown that personalistic rule tends to last longer when it is linked to a ruling party. The party organization can help keep in line potential rivals to the supreme leader and prevent them from endangering his power.¹⁹ In a party as disciplined as that of the Communists, this works especially effectively. Nevertheless, in Communist states which have moved beyond both totalitarianism and the extreme ‘personality cult’ characteristic of North Korea, institutions are both enabling and constraining. They enable the party leader and the Politburo to get decisions implemented throughout the country. The hierarchical nature of the party does, indeed, make it difficult for anyone to challenge the top leader, and it gives him an undoubted advantage in the determination of policy. However, the high degree of institutionalization also means that if the leader wishes to break with the past, and embark on a radically new course, political subtlety is required. The leader has to use his powers of persuasion as well as power of appointment to get radical reform accepted by the highest party organs. That clearly applied to Gorbachev and the Soviet perestroika. It was scarcely less true of Deng Xiaoping and the move to marketization and a substantial private sector in the Chinese economy.

Apart from the appeal of nationalism and the utility of having an enemy to denounce and hold responsible for current difficulties, it is clearly to the advantage of Communist systems if they can deliver adequate social services and fast economic growth. Cuban success in training doctors and providing a reasonable standard of health care, in spite of the country’s economic backwardness, has already been noted (in Chapter 16) as one of the supports of the regime. Moreover, a Communist leadership may find that concessions can be made to some sections of society which help to dampen down dissent without involving potentially dangerous political reform. Thus, Cuba and even Laos have over the years become more tolerant of religious believers, with Cuba going so far as to make religious observance compatible with membership of the Communist Party. In Vietnam, too, many of the restrictions on religious groups have been lifted.²⁰ Religious observance has also increased in China, with some revival of Buddhism. There is, though, extreme suspicion of religious and quasi-religious organizations which are not under the control of the state. When a Buddhist group known as Falun Gong began to attract many adherents in China in the late 1990s, mass arrests accompanied its denunciation as a dangerous cult.²¹

China and Vietnam have the advantage over the other remaining Communist states of relative economic success. With China leading the way, both countries have become important participants in the global marketplace. With a population of more than eighty-two million people, Vietnam is by a wide margin the second most populous remaining Communist state (albeit a long way behind China’s over 1.3 billion). As noted in an earlier chapter, capitalists have been allowed to become Communists in China – i.e. to join the CCP. In Vietnam, Communist Party members were given full permission from 2006 onwards to engage in commercial activities.²² As a result of Vietnam’s economic reform, which has earned it membership of the World Trade Organization, the country’s relations even with the United States have improved. If it has thus lost some of the political ‘advantage’ of a potential external threat, its relative economic success has helped to compensate. The same thing has happened in China, which for years was seen as a dangerous potential enemy by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Now China has a mutually beneficial, and highly interdependent, economic relationship with the USA. And it is on far better terms politically with non-Communist Russia than it was with the Soviet leadership throughout most of the post-Stalin era.

Its qualitatively new economic intertwining with the United States means that China, even more than Vietnam, is substantially deprived of the convenient enemy which could bolster support for the system. (NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 was, however, almost too effective in resuscitating the enemy image. It led to nationalist demonstrations in China which came close to getting out of the control of the authorities.) China’s extraordinarily fast rate of economic growth in recent decades is also a double-edged sword for the Communist system. If the growth continues unabated, there will be a very large class of relatively prosperous people, increasingly well informed about the outside world. China may then join the ranks of the Communist systems whose successes, and not only their failures, have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Already in the year 2005, over 250 million Chinese had mobile phones, and more than seventy million of them had regular access to the internet, albeit with increasingly rigorous censorship of information deemed dangerous for the regime.²³ As Chris Patten has observed: ‘Even blocking some of the most politically sensitive websites cannot give the government the total control over access to information that it once enjoyed. The handling of the SARS virus epidemic was one indicator of the incapacity of even an authoritarian state to write its own story and to cope with modern menaces without greater transparency.’²⁴

China, however, has some way to go before it reaches the levels of education – with the threat they pose to authoritarian rule – of east-central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the year 2000, the average number of years of schooling of those aged twenty-five and over in China was only 5.74, four years less than the average in countries classified by economists as ‘advanced’ and, indeed, than the average in ‘transitional economies’. It is estimated, though, that by 2020 there will be a hundred million people in China who have completed higher education, and that by 2025 the average person over twenty-five will have had eight years of schooling.²⁵ Studies of values in China have shown that the higher the education of respondents, the more likely they are to support political reform.²⁶ Nevertheless, those who belong to the educated elite, as well as the political leadership, value China’s social stability and recoil with horror at the memory of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. To the extent that democratization is seen as a development which could get out of control and give rise to instability, it is by no means automatic that a majority of those with higher education will take the risk of pressing for political democracy. If, however, there is no social upheaval over the next decade, the Cultural Revolution will become a less salient factor in their consciousness and the prospects for democratic reform may correspondingly improve.²⁷

One of the weaker reasons sometimes given for the persistence of Communist and other authoritarian regimes in Asia is that ‘culture is destiny’.²⁸ That is not to say that political culture does not matter, but rather to emphasize that political cultures change, although this rarely happens overnight. The argument that countries of Confucian tradition are ill suited to the development of democracy was effectively rebutted by Kim Dae Jung four years before he became president of South Korea.²⁹ Kim played a major role in the democratization of South Korea, first as an opposition leader who was imprisoned (and at one point sentenced to death), and ultimately, from 1998 to 2003, as South Korean president. The example of his own country – as well as that of Japan and Taiwan – has illustrated the point that neither Confucianism nor what are sometimes called ‘Asian values’ impose an insuperable barrier to democracy. More generally, it can be said that a state’s political culture inheritance makes democratization a much more uphill task in some countries than others. It was, indeed, readily predictable that the Baltic states would make a rapid transition from Communist government to democracy, and no surprise that the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union have exchanged one form of authoritarian rule for another (and with considerable continuity of practices as well as of leading personnel). However, cultures are not immutable. Every country in the world today which is regarded as democratic was at one time authoritarian, whether under the rule of a local monarch or chieftain or that of a foreign imperial power.³⁰

China is an exceptionally significant case, not only because of its own size and economic importance, but for the future – or non-future – of a form of Communism in Asia. Should China lose the two most salient characteristics of a Communist system it still retains, the collapse of Communist regimes elsewhere is likely to follow. It will be less automatic than was the case in Eastern Europe after the pillars of a Communist system were dismantled in the Soviet Union. China is not the regional hegemon in the sense in which the USSR was. However, if it continues to combine fast economic development with relative social stability, while avoiding democratization of its political system, the chances are that Communism will survive longer also in other Asian countries – longer certainly than if China were to match its abandonment of the economic characteristics of Communism with a similar departure from its political norms.³¹ In the absence of social crisis, it is likely that the direction China takes will be determined by the political elite or a reformist section of it, as was the case with the Soviet perestroika with its profound consequences.

However, economic recession in the wake of the global financial crisis which began in 2008 raises other possibilities. Falling demand for Chinese products has invoked the spectre of scores of millions of Chinese workers becoming newly unemployed. None other than China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has warned that unless a fast pace of economic development can be sustained, ‘factors damaging social stability will grow’.³² Democracies have the great advantage that when things go wrong, the incumbent government can be blamed and voted out. The political system itself is preserved as a result of the exercise of democratic accountability. An authoritarian regime which is driven to relying on economic performance for legitimacy faces special difficulties when that performance weakens. As we have seen elsewhere, that does not automatically lead to systemic change, but in conditions in which Communist ideology has lost whatever attraction it once had – and in the absence of the mobilizing possibilities engendered by Cold (or hot) War – social unrest becomes dangerous. In China’s case it could present political leaders with a stark choice – either a return to still more severe repression or accepting the risks involved in serious democratization of the political system.

Epitaph for an Illusion

The idea of building communism, a society in which the state would have withered away, turned out to be a dangerous illusion. What was built instead was Communism, an oppressive party-state which was authoritarian at best and ruthlessly totalitarian at worst. Although it had some common features, it changed over time and differed hugely from one part of the world to another. The Soviet Union was a far less fearful place to inhabit in the Brezhnev era than it was in the late 1930s. Poland and Hungary throughout the Communist period were manifestly undemocratic, but life there was qualitatively less oppressive and thuggish than it was in China during the years in which the Cultural Revolution was wreaking havoc. Communism in east-central Europe, more generally, was bad enough, especially during the years when Stalin was still alive, but it never came close to being as murderous as Pol Pot’s Cambodia/Kampuchea.

Yet even more diverse than these regimes were the people who joined Communist parties. In non-Communist states – especially fascist, right-wing authoritarian, or racist regimes – those who joined the party often did so for the best of motives. The American writer Howard Fast, who joined the Communist Party in 1943, did so believing that the destination was ‘the total brotherhood of man, a world-wide unity of love and creativity in which life is neither wasted nor despised’.³³ The last straw for Fast, who left the CPUSA in 1956, was what Eastern European Communist diplomats told him about the persecution, including anti-semitic purges, which had been conducted under Communist rule in their homelands.³⁴ He argued, in the book he wrote to explain his break with the party, that if anything could save Communism, it would be Western bellicosity. What would defeat it was the power of ideas. Communism was an idea, and an idea could not be dealt with by force. ‘It must’, he wrote in 1958, ‘be bent over the anvil of truth to test its strength. I do not believe that this particular idea if put to the test can survive.’³⁵

In Western countries, the obvious course for people who had joined the Communist Party for idealistic reasons was to leave it once they had found how wide was the gap between their ideals and the practice of power within even their own non-ruling party, not to speak of the crimes authorized by ruling parties and committed by the secret police in Communist states. This was easier said than done, for those who left the party were made to feel the stigma of betrayers of a sacred cause. Since the Communist movement tended to envelop the whole of their lives, to break with the party was also to break with almost all their friends. It was, therefore, easier to renounce their membership at a time when others were doing so, as many did following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, with still more following after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution later in the same year.

Within Communist states themselves, a different logic operated from that which made sense under conditions of political pluralism. Deng Xiaoping (who should not be idealized, for he was ruthless in suppressing the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989) played a decisively important part in putting the madness of the Cultural Revolution into reverse and in introducing radical economic reform which led to rapidly improving living standards in China. It goes without saying that Deng could achieve this only as a result of his standing within the highest echelons of the Communist Party. In the Soviet Union, it was people who had been born some years after the Bolshevik revolution, who had taken the Soviet system as a given and had in their youth joined the CPSU, who played far and away the most decisive role in transforming the Communist system into something different in kind. Mikhail Gorbachev was first and foremost among them. Others, whose importance has been discussed in earlier chapters, included Alexander Yakovlev and, in an advisory capacity, Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov.

In Eastern Europe, as distinct from the Soviet Union, most of those who worked to change the system from the inside had already joined the party before the Communists came to power. Once a Communist party did seize power, people of the most diverse views and personalities joined for a wide variety of reasons, but most commonly to further (or, at least, not retard) their careers. But in Czechoslovakia, for example, it was not those who shifted their allegiance from democratic parties and joined the victorious Communist Party in furtherance of their careers who subsequently bent their efforts radically to reform the system. The most active participants in the Czechoslovak reform movement, and in the Prague Spring of 1968 which was its culmination (and a forerunner of the Soviet perestroika), were party members who as young men and women in the immediate post-war years had joined the Communist Party full of revolutionary zeal for ‘building socialism’. In Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas had been a dedicated revolutionary and one of Tito’s closest comrades-in-arms during the Partisan war against Nazi occupation during World War Two. He became a bold critic of the system that had been established (and was imprisoned by Tito for his pains), arguing that idealization of the revolution had become a cover for ‘the egotism and love of power of the new revolutionary masters’.³⁶ Having evolved into a democratic socialist (his 1962 book, Conversations with Stalin, was dedicated to the memory of the British Labour Party hero, Aneurin Bevan), Djilas ended up hoping that ‘monolithic ideological revolutions will cease, even though they have roots in idealism and idealists’.³⁷

If those whose names are associated with amelioration or reform of the Communist system (in a few decisive cases amounting to transformative change) were, more often than not, leading members of the party, that was because the system was such that in normal times change could come from nowhere else. Poland was the great exception, although even there, as we have seen, Solidarity was effectively crushed as a mass movement at the end of 1981 and re-emerged as a force in political life only after change had been instituted at the top of the Soviet political hierarchy. It was the liberalization and subsequent partial democratization of the Soviet political system, together with the transformation of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev, which changed the whole political climate in Eastern Europe.

The part played by Western democracies in producing change in the Communist world did not lie primarily in their military alliance. Important though that was for discouraging further Communist expansion, it also helped Communist leaders to maintain their power and, in some countries, to win quite broad popular acceptance. Great stress was placed on the threat posed by external enemies, and the regime’s domestic critics were portrayed as being in thrall to the malign West. It was through simply being there as a better alternative to Communist rule that democracies prevailed in the battle of ideas. The example of greater tolerance, of free elections, accountable government, and respect for human rights, plus substantially higher living standards, had a profound effect not only on the minority of citizens from Communist states who had the opportunity to visit Western countries but on the more open-minded Communist officials themselves. Change in the ideas of leaders who already occupied positions of institutional power was of exceptional importance. Thus, Gorbachev came to believe that the kind of order which existed in the democracies of Western Europe was order of a qualitatively higher kind than that imposed by the KGB in the Soviet Union, and that what had been called ‘socialism’ in the Soviet Union was a perversion of socialist ideals.³⁸

As an alternative way of organizing human society, Communism turned out to be a ghastly failure. Partly because, however, its ideology included some genuinely humanistic aspirations, trampled on though they were by the party-state authorities, reformers were able to begin to make changes by arguing from within the ideology, choosing their quotations carefully. If, though, the change was to be as thoroughgoing as that of the Soviet perestroika, the ideational innovation had to move well beyond the boundaries of the thought of Marx and Lenin. Although many of the ideas which were influential – as Communist systems ceased to exist in Europe and parts of Asia, including former Soviet Central Asia – were of universal validity, it is not surprising that they have been reflected convincingly in the political life of only a minority of post-Communist states. As Robert Dahl has pointed out, although democracy has been debated off and on for some 2,500 years, its practice has been rare in human experience.³⁹ There can be many false starts. Former Communist states are not alone in retreating, in many cases, from democratization before they have advanced very far along the road to democracy. That form of government comes, of course, in different institutional forms, but in essence must include the real, and not merely nominal, possibility for a people to hold their rulers accountable and to turn them out of office in free and fair elections. The good news, as Dahl also emphasizes, is that democracies, once firmly established, are remarkably resilient.⁴⁰ Consolidated democracies are hardly ever exchanged for a form of authoritarian rule, and however imperfectly they function, they have shown themselves more capable of delivering justice as well as freedom than any state built on the foundations laid by Marx and Lenin.