‘Have you ever met a Communist?’ The question was put to me by the editor of my home-town Scottish newspaper where I worked as a teenage reporter in the mid-1950s. This was prior to National Service in the army and before I went to university, which led to a career switch to academia. The answer to the question was, ‘No, I can’t say I have.’ The implication behind the question, soon to become clear, was: do you realize how different from us these people are – and how dangerous?
In fact, I probably had met a Communist by that time. The teacher of my French class at school in 1952–53 was widely rumoured (I think correctly) to be a Communist – one consequence, no doubt, of his studies in France where Communist ideas in the early post-war years were much more popular than in Britain. Except in his presence, he was invariably known to his pupils as ‘Wee Joe’. And though he was indeed small, his first name was not Joseph. The ‘Joe’ referred to Josif Stalin, so closely was Communism associated in those years with the Soviet dictator.
In the years since then I have met and talked with hundreds of Communists – especially in the former Soviet Union, but also throughout Eastern Europe and in China. They included some of the small British contingent. Oddly, the first Communist I got to know to any extent was in the army – a soldier who later went AWOL. He told me that not even a small corner shop could be left in private ownership, for it would be like a cancerous cell that would spread throughout the body politic. (This was in 1957. For all I know, that youthful Communist may now be a retired businessman.)
What became clear, however, when I began the serious study of Communist systems some years later, was how little it revealed about a particular person to be told that the individual was a Communist. Joining a Communist party when it was an underground organization within a conservative authoritarian or a fascist state was different from joining a Communist party in a democracy. It was very different again from joining the party within an established Communist state where that organization had a monopoly of political power. Membership then aided career advancement and was a precondition for holding almost all of the higher positions within the society, even when these were not overtly political.
Ruling Communist parties did not try to enrol the entire population as members. The ranks of the obedient followers always had to be much larger than those of the party faithful. These were mass parties but also selective ones. As a general rule, in Communist countries, about one in ten of the adult working population was a member. They belonged to a ‘vanguard party’, exercising what became known as the ‘leading role’ (a euphemism for monopoly of power) within a Communist state. People’s motives for joining varied according to time, place, and personality. In countries in which Communists ruled, the ranks of the party were dramatically increased immediately after the successful seizure of power. Revolutionaries by firm, often fanatical, conviction were soon outnumbered by those who leapt on the Communist bandwagon once it had rolled into governmental office. These members’ reasons for joining the now ruling party were generally quite different from those which led people into a persecuted and illegal party with its risks of exile, imprisonment or death.
In the Soviet Union during the Second World War, joining the party was for many recruits just another aspect of patriotism at a time when loyalty to the regime went hand in hand with loyalty to a motherland under mortal threat. In the relatively tranquil years, by Soviet standards, when Leonid Brezhnev headed the Soviet Communist Party – between 1964 and 1982 – acquiring a party membership card was much more commonly related to career advancement. It was a fact of life that in all Communist countries ambitious people tended to join the ruling party. It is one reason why in the first two decades since 1989, former Communists have continued to be quite disproportionately well represented in high positions, including the top political offices, in many of the post-Communist states.
My professional interest in Communist systems began in the early 1960s when I was an undergraduate and graduate student at the London School of Economics. By 1964 I was lecturing on Soviet politics at Glasgow University, and before the end of the sixties I had launched a course there called ‘The Comparative Study of Communist States’. (Throughout the 1970s and 1980s I taught a similar course with a different title at Oxford.) The subject of ‘Comparative Communism’ which emerged in the late 1960s within the study of politics was both a recognition that Communist states had enough in common to be grouped together as a quite distinctive type among the world’s political and economic systems and an acknowledgement that there were differences among them sufficiently great to require analysis and explanation.
Over a period of forty years I visited many of the Communist states while they still were (or are) under Communist rule, and the people I met there ranged from dissidents to members of the party’s Central Committee. The majority of those with whom I spoke fell into neither of those two categories. Many were party members, many were not. It is helpful, when coming to write a book like this, to have had a variety of experiences – from warm friendships and cultural enrichment to secret police surveillance and time-wasting bureaucracy – in these countries while they still had Communist systems. It is no less of an advantage, however, to be writing now that most of these states are no longer under Communist rule. Many archival materials have become available – including minutes of Politburo sessions and transcripts of meetings between Communist leaders from different countries – which were beyond the dreams of scholars a few decades ago. People who were leading political figures in Communist states can be interviewed and numerous revealing memoirs have been published.
Communist systems had a number of essential things in common, in spite of the many peculiarities which distinguished one country from another. There remain at least some common features among the five remaining Communist states – China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam – although the differences between, for example, China and North Korea are enormous. It is important to examine those features that make it meaningful to call a system Communist, although that is not my starting point in this book, since history should preferably be written forwards, not backwards. First of all, in Part 1, I look at the origins and development of the idea of Communism and then what it meant in practice up to the outbreak of the Second World War. That occupies the first five chapters. I turn to the question of what we mean by a Communist system only in Chapter 6.
The greater part of the book is naturally concerned with the post-Second World War period, for until then there was only one major Communist state – the USSR (and one minor one, in terms of population and influence, Mongolia). The very fact that the Soviet Union, the revolutionary successor to Imperial Russia, was the first country to establish a Communist political and economic system meant that it profoundly influenced the organization of subsequent Communist states, even in cases where the regime had not been placed in power by Soviet force of arms. Although I pay attention to non-ruling Communist parties and to the reasons why some people were drawn to these parties even within democracies, my main concern is with countries which were under Communist rule. By the late 1970s there were sixteen of them. Although there were never more than that number of fully fledged Communist states, there are thirty-six states which have at one time been under Communist rule. That seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that three Communist countries which had federal constitutions – the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia – split into their component parts after the Communist system, which had held them together, ceased to exist. In the Soviet case alone, one state became fifteen.
The sixteen countries which by my criteria count as having been Communist for a significant period of time are the same sixteen which were regarded as ‘socialist’ – as the only ruling parties to belong to the international Communist movement – by the Soviet leadership as the 1980s drew to an end.1 (By the end of 1989, or early 1990, half of these countries had ceased to have Communist systems.) In alphabetical order the sixteen are: Albania, Bulgaria, Cambodia (Kampuchea), China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, North Korea, Laos, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia.
A major task of this volume is to provide a reliable account of, and fresh information on, the rise and fall of Communism and on the individuals who played the most crucial roles in these tumultuous events. The book, though, sets out to be more than a narrative history of Communism. While addressing also a number of other big issues, it aims especially to provide an interpretation of (1) how and why Communists came to power; (2) how they were able, in a variety of countries on different continents, to hold on to power for so long; and (3) what brought about the dismantling or collapse of Communist systems. To answer those questions involves paying attention both to the internal workings of Communist party-states and to the different societies in which they operated. Communism was a far more successful and longer-lived movement than any of its totalitarian or authoritarian rivals. Its appeal to many intelligent, highly educated, and comfortably-off people as well as to the socially and economically deprived calls for explanation. So does its structure of power, which contributed so greatly to its longevity. Communist rule in Russia survived for over seventy years. Even today, the most populous country in the world, China, is regarded as a Communist state, and in some (though not all) respects it still is.
The book is divided into five parts. As already noted, the origins and development of Communism are discussed in Part 1. This section takes the story of Communism from its founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (with a brief look at pre-Marxian ‘communists’), to the outbreak of the Second World War. That war had a different starting year in different countries – as late as June 1941 in the case of the Soviet Union. This opening section sees the Bolsheviks coming to power, the formation of the Communist International, and the evolution of the Soviet system under Lenin and Stalin. It also examines the scope and limitations of Communism outside the Soviet Union and the tensions in Europe between Communists and social democrats. Part 2 is concerned with the years between the Second World War and the death of Stalin – a period in which Communism took off beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. In particular, it looks at the establishment of Communist systems throughout Eastern Europe and in China. It is in this section that particular attention is paid to the broader issue of the appeals of Communism. The third part deals with Communism in the quarter of a century, broadly speaking, after the death of Stalin, a time of highly contradictory trends. The system was still expanding, and gaining adherents in the ‘Third World’, although few countries in Asia (as compared with the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe) and none in Africa acquired Communist systems. Yet, at the same time ‘revisionism’, reformism and even revolution (in Hungary)–not to mention the Sino-Soviet split – were posing a greater challenge to Soviet orthodoxy than had existed hitherto.
The fourth section, entitled ‘Pluralizing Pressures’, is concerned mainly with the period from the mid-and late-1970s to the mid-1980s when the problems facing the international Communist movement intensified, ranging from the aftermath of the ‘Eurocommunism’ of major non-ruling parties to, more significantly, the rise of Solidarity in Poland and the adoption of radical economic reform in China. It is a time to which many commentators trace the downfall of Communism, drawing attention to such disparate factors as the decline in the rate of economic growth, Soviet failure to keep pace with the technological revolution, the election of a Polish pope, and the policies of President Ronald Reagan. How important these factors were, and whether any of them was in reality more fundamental than other less noticed factors, is a major theme of Part 5.
In that final section, I address a number of big questions. Karl Marx argued that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Did this turn out to be truer of Communist systems, with, paradoxically, the positive achievements, no less than the failures and injustices of Communism, contributing to the growth of disillusionment with the system? Given the interlinkage between the political systems of east-central Europe and that of the Soviet Union, from where did the decisive influence flow at different times during the period of the fall of Communism? How important was influence from the West and how much did the spread of ideas from one Communist state to another matter? How much did differences and divisions behind the monolithic façades which Communist parties presented to their own peoples and the outside world have to do with the dramatic end of Communism in Europe and its modification in China? And, given that – due especially to the huge population of China – more than a fifth of the world’s population still live under Communist rule, how do we explain the resilience of those Communist states which still exist? These are but some of the big issues tackled in the chapters which follow.