23. WARRING PROPAGANDA

The West’s political leaders, having decided that the USSR was their most menacing enemy, strove to convince their publics to abandon any lingering nostalgia about Uncle Joe and the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. Churchill’s rhetoric was at its most effective in a speech to students at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.1

Harry Truman matched Churchill in resolve, declaring: ‘We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.’ Popular opinion was quickly transformed. The indispensable and respected military partner of 1941–5 became the object of conventional hostility.

Not all groups in western Europe and North America welcomed the strategy of containment. The most vociferous critics were the spokespersons for émigré communities in the USA from the Baltic countries and Ukraine who called on the West to deal more toughly with Stalin. Some argued that American armed forces ought to advance into the European east. Dominant opinion, however, accepted that President Truman had no realistic alternative. The certainty that the USSR would use its nuclear bombs in a world war was terrifying to most people who thought calmly about the situation.

Western politicians were a choir singing in the same anti-communist key. All wanted to reorientate popular opinion and consign the pro-Stalinist wartime propaganda to oblivion. In West Germany this was effected by careful expositions as well as by cruder means such as, in 1956, the outlawing of the German Communist Party for calling for the overthrow of the government. Countries in Europe and North America except for the Spanish and Portuguese fascist dictatorships thought that any such ban would cause more problems than it would solve. The British government needed to do little more than eavesdrop on the communist leadership chatting at its 16 King Street headquarters in London WC2 and other venues. This did not go unsuspected by the communists. John Gollan, Assistant General Secretary after the Second World War, expostulated: ‘They interfere with me. That bloody telephone there – the fact that you phoned me, they know – what I said to you, they know – they open our letters – they go to our meetings . . . the spies are everywhere.’2 The softly-softly approach of the authorities worked effectively. After communists Willie Gallacher and Phil Pirati lost their seats in the 1950 elections, the party never won a parliamentary constituency again. Surveillance of British communists, however, was maintained. Even George Orwell, hardly a great friend of official authority, secretly supplied the intelligence services with a list of persons he deemed communists or fellow travellers. His comments were not free of a racist slant. Orwell described his suspects as ‘Jewess’, ‘Half-Caste’, ‘English Jew’ and ‘Polish Jew’.³

Not only in Britain but also in the USA the communists were as distant as ever from power and influence. But not every anti-communist was willing to do things on the quiet. Joe McCarthy, the rough-tongued Senator for Wisconsin, made his case inside and outside the Senate and avowed that communism was sucking the lifeblood of American public life. He dug up evidence – and sometimes invented it – that Moscow had secret collaborators everywhere. He appeared live on television brandishing his lists of communists and their supporters. Those whom he identified as subversives were required to ‘name names’ of communist friends or face professional ruin. McCarthy concentrated his fire on filmmaking and other sectors of the media. Often his accusations were ill founded but he succeeded in creating an atmosphere of suspicion which pervaded American public life. The playwright Arthur Miller refused to submit to the Senator for Wisconsin. Instead he drafted The Crucible, a play about the witch-hunt craze in seventeenth-century New England, which was an obvious allegory of hysteria and persecution. McCarthy’s own activities came under scrutiny after he was accused of seeking illegal favours for his protégés. The Senate held a debate on him and by a large majority ruled that he had abused his power. McCarthy died in ignominy in 1957.

Yet his impact was enormous and permanent. No longer did the left-wing American press give gentle treatment to Marxism as had been the case before the Second World War. Words like communism and socialism – and eventually even liberalism – became widely pejorative. Mainstream political discourse in the USA underwent a drastic constriction. Sympathy for communism, where it survived outside the Communist Party of the USA, was usually confined to individual writers or students’ political groups; it impinged little on popular opinion.

Academic institutes were funded in the most powerful countries of the West to establish the case against the USSR, and the study of communist politics, economics, sociology and history underwent professionalisation. The largest of them were in the USA.4 Scholars whose published works were kind to Stalin found it difficult to get jobs. A spectacular case in the United Kingdom was the removal of Andrew Rothstein, lecturer in Russian history at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Rothstein, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who had begun work in the Soviet embassy’s information department and spent years in the Comintern apparatus in Moscow, had never disguised his political allegiance. Every year he held a meeting of students to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution and deliver an emotional address.⁵ The administration refused to renew his contract on the (incontrovertible) ground that he had published nothing of scholarly merit;⁶ but the basic reason was his party affiliation and militancy. Further appointments were made with an eye to political reliability. The process did not need to be quite as crude in other countries of Europe and North America where communists were quietly barred from the seats of scholarship.

The Churches too joined the struggle against communism and its militant atheism. Christian-democratic parties were influential in Italy, Austria and Bavaria, and they relayed the anathema of the Pope in Rome on the behaviour and intentions of communists everywhere. Communist persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland and Hungary after the war was widely reported. Protestant denominations were equally active. One of their heroines was the English parlourmaid Gladys Aylward who with just two pounds and ninepence in her purse had gone off to China in 1930 to serve as a missionary near the Yellow river. She survived the Japanese occupation despite many misadventures and rescued a hundred Chinese children from the invaders of her adopted country. Her problems continued after Mao Zedong came to power. Eventually she left the mainland and set up an orphanage on Taiwan. Her bravery was exactly what the editors of Reader’s Digest were seeking.7 Each issue of the monthly worldwide magazine highlighted instances of oppression in the communist lands. The American administration, waking up to the potential of Christianity in undermining the Marxist-Leninist ‘gospel’, funded the evangelical missions led by Billy Graham to the United Kingdom.⁸

Many of Stalin’s victims, moreover, had been washed up like flotsam in the West in 1945. Not all of them drew attention to themselves, especially those who had committed war crimes. But a lot of them had a clean record and desired to alert their adopted countries to the horrors of rule by communists. Memoirs such as Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk became bestsellers. Rawicz was a Pole who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet labour camp in the Second World War. By his own account he trudged his way with astonishing endurance thousands of miles from Siberia across the Gobi desert and Tibet, where he splashed lemon juice on to the pupils of his eyes to make him look like a Tibetan, before stumbling down the slopes of the Himalayas into British India and personal freedom.

Confidence in Rawicz was not universal; doubts were quickly raised that anyone could endure so gruelling a journey – and eventually he was plausibly alleged to have made up his personal story.⁹ But no one could reasonably reject the growing literature on the practice of communism. Accurate descriptions of Stalin’s campaigns of terror appeared. No longer did they come mainly from Trotski and his supporters, who had a sectarian axe to grind and anyway were themselves communists. Many writers of Russian and east European origin piled into the debates. Grateful to have fetched up in North America or western Europe, they were frantic to avoid repatriation to communist states. Those who were Jews highlighted the iniquities of communism long before they came forward, in the 1960s, to elucidate the horrors of the Holocaust. The point they agreed on was that Marxism-Leninism in all its historical forms was characterised by dictatorship, terror, ideological intolerance and revolutionary expansionism. Most saw communism as being based on the single model already developed in the USSR. In eastern Europe and China, they asserted, the same oppressive trends were observable. Given by eyewitnesses of communisation, these accounts helped to mould popular opinion in the West.

The capture of American GIs in the Korean War heightened the alarm. Stories coming out of Korea suggested that the Chinese and Korean communists had developed techniques of indoctrination which nobody could resist. US soldiers and airmen had allegedly been turned into fervent communists. This process became known as brainwashing. Panic gripped the popular press. Perhaps such POWs, when liberated, might return home as clandestine subversives.

It was years before brainwashing was shown to be a fantasy.10 When captives, brutalised by torture and malnutrition, professed adherence to Marxism-Leninism they were usually calculating that a pretence of ideological conversion would stop their torment. At the time, however, there was widespread belief in the effectiveness of communist indoctrination and organisation. Comic magazines led the way. Characters like Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman and Captain America did not limit their energies to combating fictitious aliens from outer space but also protected the West against the malign forces of communism. Young readers learned much about the cap badges of Red Army colonels and about the appearance and capacity of MiG jet fighters. American comics were immensely popular, in English or in translation, throughout western Europe. In the United Kingdom Captain W. E. Johns, the English writer of boys’ thrillers, became a bestseller with his stories about fighter pilot Biggles and his trusty companions Algy and Ginger. Among the Biggles books was one about the hero’s dramatic rescue of his ex-Nazi antagonist von Stalheim, who had unwisely opted for life in East Germany and been locked up by the Soviet political police in the Soviet Far East.¹¹ The adult detective fiction of Agatha Christie and her rivals also evinced an abhorrence of communism.

More refined assaults on communism were mounted in the same years. Albert Camus in L’Homme revolté (‘Man in Revolt’) looked at doctrines and practices of rebellion against authority and castigated the Soviet regime. Still more influential were George Orwell’s works Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell never claimed that these two novels were fired exclusively by disgust with the USSR; indeed they contain imprecations against the totalitarianism of both right and left. But Animal Farm is a story of pigs who lead a revolution of farm livestock against the exploitative Farmer Jones under the slogan ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. By the end the pig leaders have learned to walk on two legs and have reduced the other livestock – horses, cattle and hens – to degrading submission. The tale was unmistakably based on the author’s analysis of Soviet history. Likewise Big Brother, leader of the revolutionary regime in 1984, had a distant enemy in Goldstein who was obviously based on the real Trotski; and the manipulative methods and contents of Big Brother’s propaganda were reminiscent of what was already well known about Stalin. The works of Camus and Orwell became instant twentieth-century classics.

Ex-communists too joined the intellectual and political contingent denouncing communism. These renegades were typically more pugnacious than those who had always hated communists. The most famous was Eugenio Reale. As Togliatti’s friend and political confidant, Reale had represented the Italian Communist Party at the first Cominform conference. His revelations about the Soviet domination of international communist relations invalidated Togliatti’s claim to political independence from Moscow.12 The British Labour politician Richard Crossman gathered statements by former communist intellectuals in The God that Failed.¹³ This book included Arthur Koestler’s vivid memoir of life as a German communist in the early 1930s. Koestler told about the rigorous techniques of securing internal party discipline. His portrait of oppositionists being humiliated into recanting perfectly reasonable opinions left a deep imprint on the minds of his readers. His novel Darkness at Noon, which was a fictionalised evocation of the fate of Nikolai Bukharin, was another influential account. It was Koestler’s contention that Bukharin could not imagine living outside the communist milieu and that he was willing to pour filth on his own head and go to his death in the interests of the official cause.¹⁴

Most commentators contended that the Soviet order was an extreme form of a phenomenon not confined to state systems of the political left. This was the theory of totalitarianism. Quite apart from its analytical plausibility, it was a handy polemical concept for anti-communists. Above all, it bracketed the USSR and the Third Reich as regimes of similar structures and attitudes. Thus the present enemy of the West was conceptually associated with the West’s recent Nazi foe. The global effect was electric. From being an admired partner in the Grand Alliance, the Soviet Union became the pariah power.

Several writers objected to this definition of the USSR and not all of them were communist party members. In the USA such individuals restricted themselves to quiet study and specialist monographs. (Several were volumes of pioneering analysis.)¹⁵ In France, Italy and Germany the ‘totalitarian model’ prevailed. It was in the United Kingdom that debate was polarised to the greatest extent. Prominent scholars such as Leonard Schapiro and Hugh Seton-Watson described the USSR and other communist states as totalitarian. Their standpoint was subjected to continual attack. Thus the former deputy editor of The Times newspaper E. H. Carr and the freelance Trotskyist scholar Isaac Deutscher provided a positive analysis of conditions in the USSR – and their works were also published in substantial print runs in North America. Carr and Deutscher believed the USSR to be capable of internal development. According to Carr, the USSR had already provided a universal model of social and economic development despite much nastiness. He did not explain exactly how the situation was going to change for the better. Deutscher as a Marxist felt no such confusion. Eventually, he predicted, the Soviet working class would stand up for itself against its masters and something like the original Leninist vision would be realised in the country.16

Official communism in the USSR and China did not lack supporters in the West in the arts, scholarship and even organised religion. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, went on eulogising the achievements of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet order. Communism around the world earned paeans in his What We Saw in Rumania (1948) and The Upsurge of China (which was so uncritical that the Chinese were delighted to publish it).¹⁷ Nothing had changed in the mind of the gaitered cleric since his Socialist Sixth of the World in 1939. The British deflated his influence by treating him as a figure of fun – and teachers and mothers kept the boys of the King’s College, Canterbury away from him.¹⁸

Friends of communism in literary activity included Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who wrote an ode to Stalin. In painting there was Pablo Picasso, a refugee from Spain since the end of the civil war. Joining the French Communist Party in 1944, Picasso dashed off a sketch of Stalin. The image was not his best: Stalin appeared as a gawky young man and – to the eyes of everyone but the artist – a trifle comic. People had been shot for less than this in Moscow. The French party leadership in Paris rebuked the artist for abandoning a ‘realistic’ style, as if Picasso usually painted according to such a principle. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s last work in oils was also of Stalin; it was an unprepossessing picture even though – or perhaps because – she used a more representational technique than Picasso. Another supporter of world communism was Paul Robeson. Speaking out against racial segregation in the USA, Robeson was fêted in the USSR as a fighter for human progress. He never joined the Communist Party of the USA. (Not that this saved him from investigation by Joe McCarthy.) Then there was the English novelist Graham Greene who never joined any communist party and remained a practising Catholic. Nevertheless Greene felt a strong pull towards the claim of Marxist-Leninists to know how to make the world better for oppressed people. He spoke up for the British defector Kim Philby, who in 1963 was exposed as a KGB agent.

American novelist John Steinbeck published his Russian Journal in 1949 about his Intourist trip to the USSR. Although he noted oddities in Soviet bureaucratic behaviour, he generally absolved the authorities of blame: ‘Far from being watched and shadowed and followed, we could hardly get anyone to admit that we were there at all.’19 (This was a tribute to the efficiency of the surveillance conducted on him.) Journalist Edgar Snow went on proselytising for Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists as he had done before the war. Several political and personal details in Red Star over China were uncongenial to the revolutionary regime in Beijing. Snow agreed to revise his work while pretending to have maintained his authorial independence.²⁰ Unlike Stalin, Mao was as yet in no position to organise foreign propaganda on his own behalf. But until the outbreak of the Korean War he largely escaped criticism. Snow’s account led to Mao’s being fêted as a hero on the Western political left.

Stalin sat in on the editorial meetings for the second edition of his official biography.²¹ All human progress in recent years was attributed to him. ‘Without the special care of Stalin,’ it was stated in a Bulgarian newspaper, ‘the present advanced techniques in meat-combines, preserve and sugar plants, fish and everything else done in the field of food industry would not exist.’²² Stalin statues were erected, Stalin posters displayed in all communist states. Streets, factories and even whole towns were named after him. His authority was endlessly invoked. His works appeared in hundreds of millions of copies and were translated into the world’s main languages. Purportedly he embodied a system of power that had proved its freedom-loving, democratic credentials in wartime and offered the only avenue towards global peace and a universal end to oppression and exploitation. The USA and its allies were portrayed as building a ‘camp of international reaction’. Allegedly NATO was the successor organisation to the Third Reich and Western leaders were routinely depicted wearing swastika armbands. Konstantin Simonov wrote a play, The Russian Question, about an American journalist who writes a book about the peaceful intentions of the USSR and loses his job, wife, house and eventually his life in a mysterious accident.²³ Simonov’s message was that people in the West could never get access to the truth about communism; the play was a favourite with Soviet audiences in the post-war years.

The Kremlin’s leaders could say what they liked in eastern Europe. Open dismissal of their propaganda would have been suicidal; and although most people had their doubts about Stalin, some popularity undoubtedly accrued to him. It was not unusual for individual Czechs, Poles or Hungarians to boast that they knew somebody who knew someone else who had met him. He had the magical appeal of a leader wrapped in mystery and girded with power.

Yet the ambition of the Kremlin was wider than the countries conquered in 1944–5. Its occupants wanted to win the war of propaganda throughout the world. One of their devices was to hold anti-war meetings in Europe.24 In August 1948 a World Congress for Peace was held in Wrocław in Poland. Intellectuals from western Europe were invited. Not every participant buckled under the pressure to praise the Kremlin. French philosopher Julien Benda accosted Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg: ‘One of your comrades in his speech referred to Sartre and O’Neill as jackals. Is that fair or, to put it at its lowest, wise? And why do we have to clap every time Stalin’s name is mentioned?’²⁵ Another independent spirit was the British historian A. J. P. Taylor. Speaking without notes as was his wont, he evaded being censored by the organisers and his contribution was broadcast live to the streets of the Polish city. Taylor provocatively but accurately pointed out that ‘we and the French were the only peoples which went to war against Nazi Germany without waiting to be attacked’. He further infuriated the Soviet delegation by calling for ‘freedom [for all peoples] from arbitrary arrest, freedom from a secret police, freedom to speak their opinion of their own government as well as of others’.²⁶

In America the communist party had fallen into obscurity until Senator McCarthy had gone on the hunt for communists and their fellow travellers; and when he had finished with them the party’s public influence had diminished to vanishing point. In western Europe it was a different story. Communist parties were large and vocal in France and Italy; they also operated freely in the other countries of the region except fascist Spain and Portugal. When the media turned against communism in the late 1940s, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China could still count on a measure of active support.²⁷

Even the wily Stalin, though, had missed some tricks. He paid little mind to the communist parties outside Europe, China and Korea. Nor did he bother himself with politics outside the world’s communist parties. He scarcely thought about the colonial countries. This was odd since Stalin had made his name before the First World War as an expert on Marxism and the ‘national question’; he gave speeches on the need to reach out to the national liberation movements in the European empires after the October Revolution. But by the 1930s Realpolitik had supervened. Not wanting to upset the other great powers, he stayed out of their spheres of influence. But there was more to it than that. Even when the Cold War started, he refrained from calling on the colonies of the United Kingdom, France and Holland to revolt against their rulers. These were the very years when the USA, Europe’s creditor, called for an end to European imperialism and had the economic leverage to make things awkward for empires which failed to comply. The United Kingdom in 1947 granted independence to India – and it did this without direct American pressure. National liberation movements were springing up across Asia and Africa. They had been anticipated by Lenin and the Politburo in the early 1920s but had been weak until recently. Yet Stalin, while paying lip-service to their importance to the Marxist cause, gave them next to no practical help.

He was silent about his motives. Probably he thought the USSR had its hands full in dealing with other problems such as the Cold War, eastern Europe and industrial reconstruction. Perhaps he also felt that, unless the national liberation movements could do most of the work by themselves, any assistance would just waste Soviet resources. Even so, it is hard to deny that Stalin was failing to understand a changing world. He wrote about the iniquities of imperialism and predicted its imminent demise, but he did not earmark resources to help bring this about.

Nevertheless the leaders of the national liberation movements in the colonies, even though few of them were communists, saw communism in a sympathetic light. They were attracted to pronouncements rejecting racism and imperialism. They saw the West as transcendentally hypocritical. Blacks in the American south could not use the same schools, restaurants or buses as pale-skinned citizens; and lynching of ‘uppity niggers’ continued to occur without judicial retaliation. Billie Holiday’s song ‘Strange Fruit’ drew this to public attention. In South Africa, the severities of segregation were even greater. And the Indian National Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru was already irreconcilably offended by the combination of British oppression and condescension to its members. The USSR appeared to a significant number of Asian and African radicals as sincere and effective in dealing with its own problems of race and nationality; and the fact that hardly any of the colonial radicals had been to Moscow meant that Soviet propaganda was frequently taken at face value.

The anti-imperial leaders overlooked the subjection of eastern Europe to the USSR. Poland and neighbouring countries were the Soviet outer empire just as Ukraine was part of the inner empire. The focus of such leaders, however, was on the USA. The Americans had held hegemony in Central and South America for over a century. Panama was treated as a commercial convenience for US shipping. Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was occupied by a US military base. American armed intervention occurred in Guatemala in 1954 and in Lebanon in 1958. Americans seemed to offer no genuine solution to the colonial question around the world.

What also won admirers in the various national liberation movements was the fact that the USSR had dragged itself out of ‘backwardness’ through its own efforts and against the expectations of world capitalism. (The contribution of foreign technology and expertise was not yet public knowledge.) It had done this by methods of state central ownership and planning. Russia was no longer predominantly a land of uneducated peasants but a great modern power. Its society had passed from being dishevelled and disorganised to giving the appearance of superb co-ordination. Radical anti-imperialists were willing, consciously or otherwise, to ignore the abundant evidence of terrible exploitation and oppression in the USSR. This was a sign of things to come. The colonial rebels were rarely of poor backgrounds. Many had benefited from a decent education and had acquired their political ideas when studying at the metropolitan universities of empire. They expected to change their countries with popular consent, but they would – if they got the chance – do this from above. They felt they knew what was best for their societies. They suspected that if ‘the people’ were to be asked its opinion, the likely response would only hold things up by introducing compromises with traditionalism. The rebels had more in common with Marxist-Leninists than anyone recognised.

Yet Stalin remained indifferent to them, and Mao had had no expertise in international relations except in regard to Japan, Korea and – to his chagrin – the USSR itself. Other communist leaders appreciated the importance of the anti-imperialist movements. Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchëv was one of them. But he could do nothing about his insight until Stalin had left the scene: the worldwide image and appeal of post-war communism until 1953 was in the hands of a man whose prejudices gave the edge to the West in the ideological contest of the Cold War. Stalin as propaganda overseer was his own worst enemy.

 

24. THE CHINESE REVOLUTION

Chinese communists inscribed a second great date – after 25 October 1917 – in the annals of twentieth-century communism on 1 October 1949. It was then that Mao Zedong climbed the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in Beijing to announce the victory of the Revolution. The People’s Liberation Army – as the Red Army was renamed in 1946 – had occupied the capital in January 1949. The Chinese civil war against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang was not over; but the end was near. While he was consolidating his power in Beijing, Mao directed his armed forces southwards. The People’s Liberation Army moved with remarkable speed. Crossing the Yangtze river, they took Shanghai in April. Although Tibet had yet to be overrun, Guangzhou in the south was on the point of capitulation and the outcome of the Chinese civil war was no longer in doubt. The communist leadership celebrated in pomp. Communist militants for weeks had risen early from their beds to write slogans and make paper lanterns, flowers and five-star red flags. Supporters were invited to the October ceremony; non-transferable tickets were issued to guarantee security: everything had to happen like clockwork. The neighbouring streets were cordoned off. Police and army were everywhere and Mao’s arrival was greeted with deafening applause. His nerves made him keep clearing his throat, but he had the crowd in the palms of his hands when the loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘The Chinese people have stood up!’1

Mao had not expected the Kuomintang to crumble so abruptly. Stalin, even though he had sent copious shipments of arms to the Chinese communist forces, was still more surprised; indeed he had been advising Mao to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek until a year before the communists fought their way to Beijing.² Mao had drawn the obvious conclusion. If the communists were going to come to power in China, it would be through their own independent strategy. Mao had endured a lot from Stalin in the 1930s and at last had a chance at power. He had feinted diplomatically by agreeing to talks with his enemy Chiang Kai-shek about avoiding the civil war which was inevitable in the eyes of both of them. Stalin went on advising restraint. Why, he queried, did the Chinese communists have to be so ambitious? He thought they should content themselves with ruling just the northern half of a country as vast as China. Stalin did not want to place a further load on his fraught relationship with President Truman. Mao did not argue back, preferring just to ignore the advice from Moscow. He knew that, if the Chinese communists defeated Chiang, Stalin would welcome the creation of a great communist state in Asia regardless of American concerns.

The two sides in the Chinese civil war had squared up to each other again as soon as the Japanese withdrew. Pitched battles occurred, and Mao adjusted his general strategy: instead of avoiding the big cities, he decided that the time had come to conquer them. Mao entrusted Lin Biao with the military command of the Manchurian campaign. Despite several setbacks, success followed and Manchuria was overrun. Lin was ordered to the south to encircle Tianjin and Beijing. Chiang had made operational mistakes and his commanders had made still more. American equipment and money were a lot less than he needed to put up a solid fight. The People’s Liberation Army outnumbered the Kuomintang’s forces and had its tail up. When Beijing fell in January 1949, Chiang resigned the presidency and fled some months later with three hundred million dollars and the remnants of his army to the island of Taiwan off the Chinese mainland.

By then, far too late, he understood what had gone wrong. Corruption had spread like a plague under the Kuomintang and Chiang had hardly lifted a finger to cure it. Military commanders – warlords – had supplanted the official administration in several regions. Inflation had rocketed. Pillage of private property had been rife. Rape had been common. The Kuomintang’s natural supporters felt no incentive to back it any longer. The very effective propaganda of the People’s Liberation Army gave it a reputation for being uninterested in financial gain; it also won friends by making a start on agrarian reform in the regions it seized. Repression of ‘local tyrants and evil landlords’ pleased hundreds of millions of peasants who were short of land and money. The communists had been exacting heavy taxation in territory they occupied, but there was a growing popular belief that graft and social privilege would cease when they attained power. They had a reputation for probity and dedication. They were Marxists; they were also Chinese patriots. They were ruthless and dynamic. Their ruling group included individuals of exceptional talent such as Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping. Only Mao outmatched them in forcefulness of leadership.

He was as yet little known to most Chinese. Mao was the child of well-off peasants in Hunan province – and he retained the local accent when speaking the national language.3 Like his countrymen, he grew up resenting China’s vulnerability to foreign military and economic power. He loved Chinese classical literature. As a young radical he was impressed by the October Revolution in Russia and was attracted to communism. He studied hard, largely on his own, and became a Marxist militant in Hunan. Spotted as a talented organiser, he was promoted to the Central Committee and operated in Shanghai. From 1925, under the influence of fellow communist Peng Pai, he focused his activity on the peasantry. He believed that communism in China had to concentrate its efforts on the twin problems of the village and the nation; this was to form the core of Mao Zedong Thought. In contrast with other communist leaders, he did not go to party school in the USSR. While broadly wanting to apply the Soviet model in power, he made whatever adaptations he thought necessary for the peculiarities of Chinese circumstances. He had endured adversity for decades and did not intend to surrender his independence to Moscow now that power was at last in his hands.

The communist regime set about transforming Chinese society. It was always going to be a savage process. Mass repression of ‘class enemies’ had been systematic in the areas occupied by the Red Army in the civil war.⁴ Chinese politics had often been brutal in previous decades and had not been softened by the Japanese invasion and occupation. Recurrent famines had also coarsened attitudes. Each city, town and village was a cauldron of rivalries and resentments. The termination of military campaigning was not going to bring an end to political and social conflict.

The communists did not yet intend to calm things down. In March 1949, Mao adjured the Central Committee: ‘After the enemies have been wiped out, there will still be the enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us. We must never regard these enemies lightly. If we do not now raise and understand the problem in this way, we shall commit very grave mistakes.’⁵ He urged peasants and workers to be active allies in eradicating opposition. The Soviet communists had used their security forces to carry out this task in the USSR; and from the late 1920s the Politburo in Moscow issued precise quotas for the number of victims to be arrested, deported or executed in each province. Chinese communism proceeded differently. The ‘masses’ were told the general contents of Beijing’s policy and then trusted to implement it. Mao felt confident that they would know whom to persecute; he also sensed that, if they participated in repression, they would go on associating themselves with the revolutionary regime – and since official policy also involved a popular redistribution of property, they would have an incentive to continue to favour the communists.

Mao defined his state not as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ nor as a ‘people’s democracy’ but as a ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’. This was a term absent from the political lexicon of the USSR: quietly he was shrugging off Soviet mental tutelage. Mao insisted that peasants could be the main revolutionary class. What is more, he insisted that, although he intended to ruin the landlords, he was picking no fight with the capitalist class in general. He claimed he was unifying the people – or most of its elements – behind him even if the methods he used were dictatorial.6

The party had never disguised its intention to carry ‘class struggle’ to a conclusion, and the propertied elites had been a main target of its hostile propaganda alongside the Japanese invaders. Stalin thought the Chinese communists were overestimating their potential. Yet they were in fact in a much more advantageous situation than the Bolsheviks in Russia after October 1917: they did not have to build a Red Army from scratch. Far from coming to power by being voted majorities in workers’ councils or peasant communes, they had made their political advance by means of a military victory. The Chinese civil war preceded the accession to government. This meant that the communist order was always structurally a little different from the Soviet model. For decades to come, the army was a key agency in deliberations at the highest levels of state. Its leaders were figures of greater authority than any Soviet military figure since Trotski. There was deep interpenetration of party and army in the People’s Republic of China. Party officials dressed as for a military parade. Nor was it unexpected that when the Chinese leadership drew up its budget the armed forces were constantly treated as a sector of prioritised investment.

The party worked tirelessly in the countryside while the People’s Liberation Army mopped up the often large pockets of resistance. This was yet another difference from the Soviet historical experience. Dispossessions of land in China had started before the capture of the capital, and in 1950 the policy was systematically applied to the whole country. Instructions were issued from Beijing. Perhaps two or three million people were executed and millions were dispatched to labour camps.7 Landlords were paraded with heads bowed in front of village inhabitants. They would be forced to confess to the crimes, real or imaginary, before learning their sentence. Terror was applied to the cities from spring 1951 when known or suspected enemies of the regime were given the same treatment. The camps – laogai – used forced labour, applied severe discipline (including capital punishment for offences that would not have attracted this sanction in the Soviet Gulag) and conducted regular indoctrination (which was hardly bothered with in the camps of the USSR). Labour was the designated route to personal reform. Really it was a gruesome process of intimidation and exploitation as the inmates mined coal, built roads and dams and farmed the fields on a near-starvation diet.⁸

The authorities dealt out labels to the other members of society. Good, ‘red’ categories included revolutionary veterans, their families, poor peasants and workers. The ‘black’ categories included landlords, rich peasants, bad elements, counter-revolutionaries and rightists; and all who were assigned to them were picked out for persecution. Everyone was attached to a work unit at the factory, farm or office. Each unit had a recognised leader who was held responsible for its loyalty and efficiency and who typically had been designated as belonging to one of the red categories. This system facilitated the supervision of the endless political and economic campaigns dreamed up in Beijing. Any dereliction of duty would initiate a hunt for the easily identifiable hostile elements.⁹

China’s security from foreign threat had been jeopardised by Mao’s decision to aid the communists militarily in the Korean War (although the gamble paid off inasmuch as a communist state was consolidated on the Chinese frontier as a result of the fighting).¹⁰ But the completeness of communist control in China meant that agrarian reform could proceed without the concentrated assistance of the People’s Liberation Army. By the end of 1952 only 10 per cent of rural households had been unaffected.¹¹ This was an astonishing achievement in the face of post-war exhaustion and continuing administrative weaknesses. The communists, handing out quotas for land to be redistributed, had done what they had promised by dispossessing the landlords.¹² The peasants were the beneficiaries. Landlords were not the only group to endure an assault. The Three Antis campaign was started up in the towns in late 1951. It was aimed against corrupt cadres; the party did this for its own sake and in order to boost its popularity: communism had to be cleansed of the taint of association with scoundrels. The Five Antis campaign quickly followed; this was aimed at known and suspected counter-revolutionaries. People strove to show their loyalty to the authorities – and executions and suicide occurred in the hundreds of thousands.13 Two hundred thousand letters of denunciation were received in Shanghai alone.¹⁴ Economic and political sources of organised hostility to the communist authorities were being eradicated. Soviet experts helped with the establishment of planning mechanisms to ease state regulation. Communisation was proceeding apace.

A universal literacy programme was begun. Urban sewerage and sanitation were prioritised for attention. The government energetically counteracted plagues of locusts and insects. There was a dynamism about the national effort that had not previously been seen in the twentieth century.

By 1953 the state owned up to four-fifths of heavy industry and two-fifths of light industry and handled about a half of business commerce.¹⁵ But the greater impetus was felt by agriculture. No sooner had he handed over the land to the peasantry than Mao bristled with desire to communise agriculture. Collectivisation was announced as a priority in September 1951.¹⁶ The communes, as the collective farms were called in China, allowed the peasants to retain small family plots.¹⁷ Yet Mao declined simply to ape Soviet economic and social methods; he understood that Stalin’s punitive campaign against the kulaks in the USSR had been a counter-productive overreaction to whatever threat they posed. In China the rich peasants were neither shot nor deported but allowed to stay in the new communes under surveillance; their skills and labour were valued. There was also a wish to avoid forcing the communes to act as the prime resource to be squeezed for the launching of industrialisation. Mao was not going to imitate Stalin by exacting a ‘tribute’ from the peasants to pay for foreign industrial technology. This caution helps to explain why Chinese collectivisation met much less resistance than its Soviet predecessor. It also goes some way to accounting for the reverence shown towards Mao by the hundreds of millions of rural inhabitants. At least in the early years of communist power, the authorities moved cautiously. The written decree was gaining priority over the rifle.

Mao had the instincts of a political thug and was hardly averse to using violence in pursuit of political ends – by 1955 the number of detainees of one kind and another had risen to about 9.6 million.¹⁸ But his whole communist career had centred on the need to keep the maximum number of peasants on his side, and he did not abandon this when setting up the commune system. He was using gentleness until such time as he chose to bring thuggery to bear on a situation.

Yet collectivisation was marred by serious economic disruption. This gave rise to lively discussion in the leadership as reports flowed into Beijing about the damage done to agricultural production. Mao adamantly rejected the arguments of those who wanted a deceleration – or even a partial reversal – of the changes he had sponsored. This advice came from his deputy and presumed political heir Liu Shaoqi as well as from Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Mao was unmoved. He had set his sights on territorial reunification, national security and economic modernisation; he regarded these targets as inextricably connected. In summer 1955 he identified himself with the side of the party which advocated greater audacity, and poured scorn on ‘some of our comrades who are tottering about like a woman with bound feet’ – he never failed to find a striking phrase in internal party disputes.19 Yet he did not ditch those prominent comrades. The Politburo Standing Committee consisted of Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai and Deng Xiaoping. Obviously Mao had neither ruled out a further swing to the right nor lost his confidence that he could get his subordinates to do as he bade them.²⁰

Party membership grew from 2.8 million in 1949 to 5.8 million by the end of the following year.²¹ By 1956 the total was to reach 10.7 million members.²² The rapid increase was characteristic of communist seizures of power. Once everyone knew that the communists had a firm grip, recruitment to the party’s ranks became an easy task. Volunteers appeared in abundance. But they remained a drop in the ocean of the general population, especially in the countryside.²³ Party members were usually ignorant of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. They were inexperienced in the functions of urban political and economic management. The veteran leaders were feeling their way around the corridors of power. Huge responsibilities had accrued to them. If they were indeed convinced Marxists, they had yet to show how they would adapt their doctrines to the reality they found in a country of extraordinary cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. Many communists who had served in the armed forces felt they had nothing to learn. The mental impact of years of fighting was still with them. They had trounced their enemies. Their communism was a highly militarised variant and they were in a mood to drive the nails of their policies into Chinese society without regard to civilian niceties.

The official story of the regime’s achievements was conveyed in a song taught to peasants:

Communism is heaven.

The commune is the ladder.

If we build that ladder,

We can climb the heights.24

Communists put themselves forward as the honest, tireless leaders who would ensure that such ladders covered the entire People’s Republic of China.

Yet the communists were not untainted by corruption. As an angry popular jingle put it:

First-rank folk

Have things sent to the gate.

Second-rank folk

Rely on others.

Third-rank folk

Can only fret.²⁵

Cronyism flourished. Political patrons rewarded their clients with promotion and obtained personal allegiance in return. People got what they wanted by exchanges of favours²⁶ – guanxi was the Chinese equivalent of what was known as blat in the USSR. Beijing could never be satisfied with their willingness to comply with its orders. Official policies were frequently modified when they reached provincial China by local leaders who disagreed with them.²⁷ At the bottom of the social pile were the peasants and workers; and although they could not safely criticise the regime they could withdraw their co-operation. Deliberate slowdowns in industrial production were widespread. The Chinese communists, like the party in the USSR, did not have the sanction of sacking recalcitrants.²⁸

The economy went through a dire recession. Drought had afflicted the countryside in autumn 1956. Climatic conditions were dreadful in the following spring and the summer harvest was disastrous. Textile production and food-processing were severely affected. The communes tried to get their delivery quotas lowered. Morale among the peasants fell. Artisans who had been forced into communal membership abandoned their skills. Such popularity as the communists had enjoyed in late 1949 was fading. The arguments of those in the leadership who demanded a moderation of political and economic radicalism gained momentum.²⁹

Mao understood the dangers and in April 1957 swung the leadership into a change of course through a ‘rectification campaign’. This was better known by the slogan ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom! Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.’30 Mao stated: ‘Our society cannot back down . . . criticism of the bureaucracy is pushing the government towards the better.’ He invited people to express their criticisms of state policy and make their practical proposals. Room was to be made for open debate – through the blooming of a multitude of flowers – instead of an imposed single communist line. Political, social and cultural matters came on to the agenda in a rush after Mao assured people that they would suffer no unpleasant repercussions. Often it was the trivial stuff of daily life which was exposed: too few toilets at a primary school or incompetent procedures in the local administration. But large matters also came to light. Intellectuals demanded a lifting of the ban on certain classical literary works. Former members of democratic parties objected to being banned from public activity. Many had been fobbed off with words like ‘You’re only a landlord’s son, your ideology isn’t pure, your past is complicated, you’ve never worked actively for us.’ There was much grumbling that ‘to become a boss it’s necessary to join the [communist] party’.³¹

Expressions of discontent grew as fast as bamboo shoots. China in the 1920s had enjoyed a pluralism of public thought. Traditions of civil society had been growing. The Chinese elites had studied contemporary trends in the rest of the world. Foreign companies had continued to trade in the coastal cities. Intellectuals, businessmen and students retained a memory of these past times after the establishment of the Chinese communist regime.

At Beijing University they put up posters on a ‘democracy wall’ criticising the Chinese Communist Party for its harsh treatment of enemies, severe censorship, economic incompetence, financial corruption and slavish adherence to the Soviet model. One poster stated: ‘Party members enjoy many privileges which make them a race apart.’³² Another complained: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletariat of the few.’ Yet another castigated the Mao cult. This kind of remark was not heard inside the party but internal party communist strains during the Hundred Flowers campaign broke the string of organisational unity. Some veterans – soon to be labelled as ‘rightists’ – sympathised with the general critique of the regime.³³ Among them was Politburo member Liu Shaoqi. It would fit a conspiratorial viewpoint that Mao had instigated the open discussions in order to get the ‘poisonous weeds’ to reveal themselves. This probably ascribes too much cold calculation to one of revolutionary politics’ compulsive gamblers. What is undeniable is that Mao’s reaction would become severe and repressive. Weeds had drawn sustenance from the cataclysms of political repression, administrative turmoil, social unfairness, economic mismanagement and famine.

Mao aimed to wrench them out of the ground with the assistance of public security minister Luo Ruiqing. People who had spoken out against the party or its policies were targeted. Even the party was purged. About a million of its members – some 8 or 9 per cent of the total – were expelled for being right-wingers.34 Many were dispatched to remote rural areas for an indeterminate period of manual labour. The idea was that they would learn to abandon dissent and to assimilate themselves to the attitudes of ordinary, loyal citizens.³⁵ The party leadership did not halt at the rustication of party members. It also sought out people who belonged to other political parties, to the old administration or to the economic and cultural elites. Denunciations of individuals were assiduously collected by the security agencies. The party leadership extended the existing forced-labour camp (laogai) network by setting up centres for ‘education through work’ (laojiao); the difference between the two types of confinement was negligible.³⁶ The families of the victims quaked with fear. Wives divorced husbands. Children disowned parents. Inside the camps there was intense pressure, confirmed by psychological and physical torture, for convicts to make a confession of guilt; and when convicts reached the end of their sentence, they were often constrained to go on working in the camps as ‘free labourers’.³⁷

Repression was just the first step. Mao would not be deterred from the tasks he had set himself to build an impregnable communist order in the People’s Republic of China. He aimed to complete the changes he had started in 1949. His journey was about to be resumed as he strode the path that was soon to lead to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

 

25. ORGANISING COMMUNISM

The new communist states in eastern Europe and east Asia – from Tirana to Pyongyang and from Tallinn to Shanghai – had much in common. Usually a single party governed. Sometimes other political groups, if they were left-wing and compliant, were incorporated into the communist party or allowed a semi-autonomy. Dictatorship was imposed. The courts and the press were subordinated to political command. The state expropriated large sectors of the economy and central industrial planning was introduced. Religion was persecuted. Associations of civil society were battered into submission or simply annihilated. Marxism-Leninism in its Stalinist variant was disseminated and rival ideologies were persecuted. Administration was centralised. Control of state institutions was reinforced by means of the nomenklatura system and tight interconnections were maintained among party, government, police and army. The communist leadership elaborated grand policy and scrutinised personnel appointments. Each had a dominant single figure enjoying official devotion. The rituals of public life were similar. May Day and the October Revolution anniversary were state festivals and military parades were held in the capitals. Leaders lined up in public in strict conformity to current political authority. Communist states, with the exception of expelled Yugoslavia, professed allegiance to the world communist movement headed by the USSR.

This is not to say that the Soviet model was copied in every detail or that there were no national differences among the new communist states. Specific circumstances and traditions had brought communism to power in Russia. The situation in other countries inevitably was different. What is more, big changes had occurred in Russia after 1917. Foreign communists did not always learn from Soviet mistakes; many of them suffered from historical amnesia and blundered in the same fashion. Sometimes they saw the need for avoiding precisely what had been done in the USSR and yet imposed policies which were still highly oppressive. And although a few leaders in eastern Europe saw that some moderation was required, they were restricted by fear of the Kremlin’s reaction. Thus the communist order in the communist states had little elasticity. Once the parties of Marxism-Leninism had their hands on the levers of governance, the choice of structures, practices and policies was strikingly uniform.

One exception lay in the way that the ‘national question’ was handled. Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the Soviet case that state boundaries had to be redrawn and that national and ethnic ‘transfers’ were necessary. The Big Three had moved the frontiers without waiting for peace treaties. The USSR got the consent of the Western Allies to expand its territory at the expense of pre-war Poland. An understanding was reached that Poland should be compensated by acquiring Germany’s eastern territories. Behind the scenes a riot of territorial claims broke out. The Yugoslavs started a lot of trouble. Scarcely a country on their borders was safe from their greedy eyes: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria and Italy. Even Stalin was taken aback: ‘But do the Hungarians agree?’1 He was also disconcerted by the territorial demands of the Hungarian government on Romania. Hungary had until recently been fighting as an ally of the Third Reich and it seemed inappropriate to reward the Hungarians, even though Romania too had invaded the USSR. In any case the Soviet Union could not take the decisions by itself; it had to have the agreement of the Western Allies. Whatever the Big Three decreed was obeyed. Their sharpest dispute was over Trieste. Italy and Yugoslavia competed to have the city. Eventually it was given to Italy. Inside eastern Europe, meanwhile, the new states huffed and puffed but did not seriously challenge the frontiers determined for them.

Limits anyway existed to the achievability of communist nation-states. Without rounding up the entire population of Europe east of the River Elbe and depositing them in countries according to nationality, there would always remain national and ethnic minorities. Despite the shifting of frontiers and populations, no state in eastern Europe was inhabited exclusively by a single nation. Poland came nearest to being mononational. Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and the Roma left few of them alive in the country by 1945. German inhabitants had fled or been expelled. Ukrainians had been scooped into the USSR’s expanded Ukrainian Soviet republic. The result was that all but 2 per cent of the population of the Polish People’s Republic were ‘ethnic’ Poles.²

But Poland was exceptional. Elsewhere there were problems of managing what were still multinational states. Constitutional mechanisms had been developed in the USSR, including ‘autonomous regions’, for this situation. Yugoslavia led the way: the intertwined cohabitation of several nations made Tito eager to adopt something like the Soviet model.3 The Romanians followed in 1952.⁴ The Hungarian Autonomous Region was established to prove that the Romanian People’s Republic guaranteed rights of national self-expression in schools, the press and culture. Romania’s leader Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej was worried about his Hungarian minority. The autonomous region therefore did not include the long northern border area with Hungary and embraced only a third of Romania’s Hungarians.⁵ Gheorgiu-Dej was to be an ardent supporter of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956: he did not want ‘his’ Hungarians imitating the rebelliousness of those in Budapest. A similar constitutional arrangement could have been introduced for the Hungarians in post-war Czechoslovakia, but Klement Gottwald set his face against this. He had enough on his hands trying to keep the dual federation of Czech and Slovak territories together. He also played on nationalist sensibilities. No inter-war Czech or Slovak politicians had lost followers for hammering a Hungarian minority which had kicked around the Czechs and Slovaks under the Habsburgs.

The other state where autonomous national regions were established was the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong founded the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in 1947 even before taking power in Beijing. The Mongols were to be protected from ‘Han chauvinism’ in the newly communist China. The Han had dominated the old empire in size and influence, and communists wanted to prove their credentials as bringers of harmony among the various ethnicities. A Uigur National Region followed in 1955. Based in Xinjiang, it abutted the USSR and no doubt the rulers in Beijing thought that this concession to the Uigurs, who had co-nationals living on Soviet territory, would solidify their loyalty. Three further autonomous regions were created. The last was in Tibet. The circumstances of its foundation in 1965 demonstrated that Mao Zedong was more nationalist than he had claimed. Tibet had been independent until the Chinese Red Army’s invasion in 1950. The resistance of Tibetans was brutally crushed and the conquerors sought to extirpate religious customs. They took the Panchen Lama into custody while the Dalai Lama escaped on foot across the snows of the Himalayas. Chinese spokesmen declared that Tibet had always been a province of China and that their armed forces had been welcomed as liberators. The military and judicial repression told a different story.

The Chinese and Yugoslav constitutions, unlike that of the USSR, made no provision for secession.⁶ In other ways the similarity was unmistakable. Communist leaders believed in the urgent priority of industrialising their countries. Lenin had argued that heavy industry was the key to progress for pre-capitalist economies; Stalin had acted on this principle, wringing resources out of his people and pouring them into steel production for armaments, railways and tractors. Environmental considerations were flagrantly ignored and health and safety precautions were tossed aside. The universal assumption of communists was that the sooner they could ‘modernise’ their economies, the more quickly they would be able to distribute the goods and services on a fair basis to society.

The zeal to emulate the USSR was shared by all ruling communists. Landowners’ property was expropriated and the old estates were broken up. Collectivisation was undertaken in the newly annexed Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.7 From 1948 the process was started in the USSR’s outer empire and east European leaders who disagreed were shunted to the side. (Gomułka was the best-known example.) Scarcely had peasant families received parcels of land than it was grabbed and incorporated into estate-sized collective farms. In Hungary they slaughtered their livestock as the Soviet peasantry had done in the 1930s.⁸ Wartime exhaustion and fear of the Red Army’s firepower and preparedness discouraged resistance. The national leaderships in eastern Europe competed to out-Stalinise each other. Bulgaria under Vulko Chervenkov won by collectivising 56 per cent of its agricultural land by 1953, narrowly beating Czechoslovakia’s 54 per cent. The most sluggish was the German Democratic Republic with only 5 per cent; but this was attributable to the complexities of its international and constitutional situation; and as soon as this could be resolved the local communist leadership was keen to enter the race.⁹

The paraphernalia of Soviet-style communism were emplaced into eastern Europe’s countryside. Tractors were trundled off the factory production lines for the new collective farms. Machine-tractor stations were established. Farm chairmen were appointed; usually they were local men without managerial or technical training but with a reliable political record. Preference was also given to participants in the anti-German resistance. The most talented communist veterans, however, tended to be given crucial urban postings. The lamentable outcome was predictable. The customary skills of peasants were supplanted by the ignorance of the new bosses. The tax burden on the villages rose as heavy industry was prioritised. Communist officialdom proved expert at denuding the countryside of its resources. Post-war agricultural recovery faltered and collapsed. The official data, despite being massaged by statistical functionaries to look as encouraging as possible, told a pitiful story. The fertile soil of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1951–2 was still registering yields much lower than the average for the years before the Second World War.10

The communist economic system had caused an economic disruption which was usually the consequence of defeat in wars. Robbed of its cows, horses and equipment, the peasantry resigned itself to defeat but withheld active co-operation. The dodges of Soviet kolkhozniks were learned through bitter experience in eastern Europe (and would be adopted by Chinese peasants when the drive to push them into agricultural ‘communes’ picked up speed in 1958). Directors of collective farms, harassed by the state’s quotas for food supplies, had to turn a blind eye as the peasantry broke the rules. Household allotments tended to be bigger than was legal. More livestock was privately retained than the agrarian code of any communist state permitted. Administrative control over distant villages was weaker in mountainous Albania than in the highly industrialised and urbanised German Democratic Republic – and in the vast interior of the People’s Republic of China there were thousands of settlements which rarely saw an outsider.

Most people in countryside or town in eastern Europe had been anything but prosperous before the Second World War. Communists were determined to abolish the old class system. The former aristocrats, bankers and owners of big estates vanished from eastern Europe. King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate in 1947; he left to marry a Danish relative in Greece before settling into exile in Switzerland. Other royal dynasties too were forced out. Noble families fled. Such countries, where the Esterhazys, Zamoyskis and Radziwills had lived through centuries of upholstered splendour, were suddenly left without trace of them. This was a region which had produced a dazzling high culture. The novelists Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Haek and the composer Antonín Dvoák had attracted the admiration of the world; and even though this efflorescence faded somewhat after the First World War, the tradition of independent thought and creativity remained in the arts and sciences. The communists were remodelling the entire social structure at breakneck speed. The owners of factories, banks and mines had been expropriated even before communist parties got rid of their government coalition partners in 1947–8.¹¹ The upper bourgeoisie had taken refuge abroad, hoping to return as soon as the Reds had been removed.

Policy treated society as being divided between a majority of loyal citizens and a potentially treacherous minority. Tests of allegiance came with the regular national elections. The communist triumph in each contest was a foregone conclusion, but everyone had to vote. The Polish poet Czesław Milosz recorded: ‘They had to vote; for when one turned in one’s ballot, one’s passport was stamped. The absence of this stamp meant that the owner of the passport was an enemy of the people who had revealed his ill will by refusing to vote.’12 The point was to get the maximum participation in collective expressions of support for communisation. It did not much matter if individuals as yet lacked personal conviction. The regimes would be stabilised and secured so long as people bought Marxist works, attended communist clubs and watched and applauded the May Day parade.¹³

With bureaucratic precision the Hungarian Party Secretariat listed the class-hostile elements they had expelled from Budapest in summer 1951:

6	former dukes,
52	former counts,
41	former barons and their families,
10	former Horthy regime ministers,
12	former deputy ministers,
85	former generals,
324	former officer corps members,
67	former police and gendarme officers,
30	former factory owners,
93	former large merchants,
46	former bankers,
53	former factory directors,
195	former large landowners.14

The Secretariat noted with satisfaction that the expelled families were shunned by the local population in their new places of residence. With few exceptions the royal and aristocratic families of the region had not been characterised by opposition to right-wing political dictatorship; and the leading industrial, commercial and financial groups had typically made whatever profits were available from such regimes. Anyway, the emptying of large town-houses freed thousands of decent rooms for allocation to needy working-class families.

People were irked, however, by the campaign against urban small producers and traders. Private shops were closed. Cobblers, newsagents, bakers, grocers and pharmacists were put out of business; the best they could do was to seek state employment in their previous occupations. The landscape of the towns was radically changed. Gloomily impressive apartment blocks were thrown up. Large department stores were taken over or new ones constructed; the goods for sale were standardised: the old diversity was eliminated.

What happened in the USSR was repeated with a few modifications in every communist country. The wartime ravages in eastern Europe, China and North Korea left most people poorly clothed by pre-war standards. Communist leaders privately enjoyed better conditions while drawing up plans for the production of cheap but dour consumer goods for the ‘masses’. Newspapers and magazines no longer carried pictures of the latest high fashion. Western fads were not reported. Frumpy styles for women became the norm and sexual allure was discouraged. Men’s tailoring was no more imaginative. But east Europeans at least could save up to buy coloured frocks or two-piece suits. If they joined the nomenklatura, they could count on their share in the graduated scheme of perks and privileges – and Moscow encouraged the subordinate communist leaderships to ensure that loyal ordinary workers should have their turn in access to sanatoria and holiday resorts. The situation was still duller in the Far East. Mao Zedong’s baggy military tunic was the standard accoutrement for the Chinese millions. Women as well as men wore it. China began to look like a gigantic ant-heap whenever newsreels of Beijing were shown abroad.

Yet communism also brought improvements to the new China. In a break with pre-revolutionary culture, nearly all urban inhabitants acquired a bicycle. Once it had been mainly the rich who got about town otherwise than on foot; they had hired taxis and rickshaws for comfort. Bikes, having been made a priority of industrial production, became a vehicle of democratisation. They were used in a spirit of strict conformity; visitors to Beijing were astounded how people rode through the streets at exactly the same speed as if obeying a central command.15 The public cause took precedence over private privilege – at least in state policy. Parks were constructed for everyone’s benefit. State healthcare and education were opened to all without charge. Shelter and food was made inexpensive (although this was not much consolation in the famine of the late 1950s). Life expectancy began to rise.¹⁶ Most visible was the attack on outmoded and injurious custom. Women became eligible for jobs previously reserved for men. The damaging practice of binding the feet of young girls was at last prohibited.

Official policy in the new communist states in eastern Europe and Asia was that ordinary people should be able to buy the essentials in life cheaply and easily. Prices were indeed low but availability was dire. Agriculture had still not climbed back to the pre-war level by the early 1950s. Factories, especially in heavy industry, were given huge resources and textile production rose impressively: the problem was that 70 per cent of Hungarian output was immediately grabbed by the Soviet occupation authorities as war reparations.17 Grumbling became a way of life. The relationship between the state and its people, however, was complex in the several countries undergoing communisation. The security agencies needed co-operation with their mission to control. Many citizens were not averse to informing on their neighbours or foremen. Anonymous denunciation was encouraged by the authorities. In the German Democratic Republic the tradition of obeying governmental instructions to the letter did not die out with Hitler’s removal. Enthusiastic exposures of local malfeasance and delinquency were a regular feature of the new society. Germans proved impressively compliant in helping the communist state to consolidate itself.¹⁸

The level of co-operation varied from country to country, and probably the Germans and Chinese showed extraordinary helpfulness to the authorities – even so, this was only by international communist standards. The East German authorities, for example, were soon reporting a drastic decline in labour productivity.¹⁹ (The Chinese communists do not seem to have bothered about such comparisons.) People’s motives were anyway conditioned by individuals having an eye for the main chance in conditions of scarcity. Informing on disliked rivals or bosses was a way of improving one’s own conditions at their expense. Internal factory arrangements allowed the labour force a degree of influence over procedures – the communist authorities in eastern Europe hoped against hope to keep the workers on their side.²⁰

Communist regimes bombarded their people with promises of a glorious future life. Utopia was heralded. Problems were blamed on capitalist iniquity in the past. Official spokesmen called on every well-meaning citizen to work hard and contribute to the general betterment.²¹ Associations of civil society were closed down or put under severe control – and organised religion was treated with grave suspicion. The Catholic Church with its global base in the Vatican was deemed especially suspect in both China and eastern Europe. Communists sought to recruit informers among the ecclesiastical hierarchy and to influence new appointments.²² The Orthodox Church in Romania was craven in the extreme; its Patriarch declared: ‘Christ is a new man. The new man is the Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!’23 Intellectuals too were suborned everywhere. Pushed to produce works of ‘socialist realism’ for the regime, they widely agreed to do so even when privately they detested Marxism. Their hypocrisy was salved by the thought that everybody had to earn a crust. In Poland the authorities were eager to get well-known Catholic writers to make the case for communism.²⁴

The state publishing houses displayed their patriotic and cultural commitment by printing millions of copies of approved national classics. This was a high priority throughout eastern Europe. The difficulty for the Polish regime was that ‘the works of the greatest Polish poets are marked by a dislike of Russia and the dose of Catholic philosophy one finds in them is alarming’.²⁵ But careful selection in most countries allowed communist rulers to claim that they alone were able to carry out the tasks of popular enlightenment.

Direct mass protest was anyway exceptional. The communists were feared as ruthless masters of the techniques of suppression. The labour camps developed in the USSR were introduced across the communist world. This was especially easy in eastern Europe where they inherited the punitive structures of the Third Reich. But China too was quick in developing its camp network. This became one of the defining features of communism. It is true that other types of society used forced labour as part of their penal system. Intensive manual labour in prison farms was widely found in the USA and South Africa, where the prisoners suffered terrible conditions. Such treatment, though, followed due judicial process and conviction for criminal offences even if the decisions were often arbitrary. What was different about communist rulership was the dispatch of people to the camps for no reason other than the misfortune of belonging to a suspect social class, religious group or intellectual tendency. Communist courts, if they were bothered with, frequently condemned individuals who had broken no law. Only when Stalin died and societies in eastern Europe saw a chink in the wall of communist control did workers – and indeed prisoners in some camps in Kazakhstan – risk coming out on to the streets against the regimes.

Leading offenders, if they escaped being executed, were required to engage in self-criticism. This ritual of humiliation was already entrenched in Chinese communist practice.²⁶ People had to be shown that nothing except endorsement of current policy was acceptable in political discourse. Opposition had to be seen as reactionary and futile. Thus the whole society would be brought to feel that communism was in the natural order of historical development.

Yet the patterns of non-acquiescence were strong. Work habits were sloppy.27 The sole possible exception, perhaps, was East Germany; it has been surmised that the Germans were the only nation capable of making communism work: in fact the quality control in the country’s factories and mines was hugely inferior to the norms across the border in West Germany. Fiddles and evasions were pervasive. Misreporting was general. Pilfering from state enterprises became a way of life. Workers caught in the act retorted that directors were guilty of gross embezzlement. Polish railwaymen defiantly shouted down trade union activists in Poland: ‘We will steal!’ They called on the authorities to supply families with the coal they needed for heating.²⁸ Cynicism about the authorities was quick to grow. An anonymous letter to Poland’s Industry Minister Hilary Minc started:

Citizen Minister! Do you think your game is not transparent to us workers, who have had enough of your democracy based on demagogy and your charlatan’s road to socialism? Do you think that we, the working people, don’t see your limousines, beautifully furnished apartments and in general your private rotten life?²⁹

Communist regimes encouraged people to send in complaints about malpractice. Sometimes they learned things they did not greatly like.

The installation of communist regimes led to the formation of mass parties in eastern Europe. This was the easy bit. Veterans from Moscow exile or from the local political underground learned that the growth in membership introduced the virus of careerism. Party schools were established to induct promising young recruits into the ways of communism.³⁰ The idea was to create a cadre of reliable functionaries. The other side of the coin was to cleanse each party of undesirable newcomers. In Romania Gheorghiu-Dej was already planning a purge of ‘cowardly, opportunistic and provocational elements’ in early 1947.³¹ The Hungarian and Polish leaders did the same with a view to ending ‘corruption’ in their parties and starting a fresh recruitment of workers.³² Without a party card it was more difficult to get access to anything but the most basic goods and services. The crucial thing was to obtain a post on the nomenklatura list of jobs as the Soviet kind of order was implanted. Noteveryone succumbed to temptation. Devout Catholics in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were disgusted by the militant atheism of the Marxists. But others conquered any inhibitions they might have experienced. It was something of a risk. There was as yet no certainty that the USSR’s grip on eastern Europe would last. But short of a third world war breaking out there was a diminishing prospect of the Soviet army being expelled.

Yet the bursts of centrally planned industrialisation diverted many in eastern Europe, if not yet in China, from thinking that all was bad with the communist project. Urbanisation was rapid. In Bulgaria, for instance, the percentage of the labour force employed in agriculture fell from 73 in 1950 to 57 in 1960. This was the biggest transformation in a region moving universally in the same demographic direction.33 Workers and their families were favoured by the regimes – and in China the peasantry benefited too. Promotion in factories became easier for them. Educational and training facilities were put at their disposal. As in China, free schools and hospitals, cheap shelter and low food prices became the norm. Unemployment was eradicated. Lines of jobless men and women in search of work became a thing of the past. Wages, though, remained low by the standards of North America and most of western Europe. It also became a criminal offence to avoid being employed. ‘Shirkers’ were charged with parasitism. Communism certainly brought positive changes to the societies which it ruled after the Second World War; but most people did not want communist rule and objected to their conditions of oppression and exploitation.

If only one communist state had experienced the basic difficulties of Soviet society, it might be thought as a freak coincidence. In fact all those new states were troubled by problems which had afflicted the USSR from its inception. The structures, practices and ideas of communist rule were remarkably alike. The reaction to them by people, including even party officials themselves, was likewise similar. Czechoslovakia was an industrial, urbanised society integrated into the European economy before the Second World War, whereas Albania was overwhelmingly agrarian. Yet the pattern of responses to communism was a common one; national circumstances were important but only at a secondary level. There really was such a thing as communism. Until the creation of new communist states after the Second World War this was not easy to predict – and the fact that everyone at the time concentrated attention on the power of the state deflected attention from the ineffectual sides of communist authority. The consequences were going to take years to be fully appreciated. Lenin in 1917 had announced: ‘There is such a party!’ His supporters outside the Soviet Union could now announce: ‘There is such a system!’

 

26. AGAINST AND FOR REFORM

The spread of communism to eastern Europe, North Korea and China was an important outcome. A third of the world’s earth surface was occupied by communist states – and communists everywhere were cheered by this development. Yet this triumph disguised many deep setbacks. The onset of the Cold War brought damage to dozens of communist parties. Government after government in Latin America outlawed, suppressed or persecuted them.1 The authorities in Australia sought the same end, and only the failure of their plebiscite stopped a complete prohibition of the communist party there.² In the colonies of the European powers the communists frequently joined the national-liberation movements – they were especially prominent in the struggle for independence in Vietnam and Indonesia.³ The many anti-communist campaigns stemmed both from local pressures and from American encouragement. Soviet Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov had spoken about the growing division of the world into two rival camps led by the USSR and the USA. This description fitted global reality by the end of the 1940s.

The Soviet order in the meantime continued to petrify. This was never a spontaneous process. Nobody – alas, except for a handful of historians and political scientists in the West in a later generation⁴ – doubted that Stalin continued to exert his influence. While he remained political cook of the Kremlin there was no chance of remixing the ingredients. Some in his entourage recognised that things could not last like this. Malenkov wanted a rapprochement with the USA to reduce the tensions in the Cold War. Khrushchëv placed his hopes in agrarian reform. Beria saw peril in the treatment of the non-Russians in the USSR and agreed with Malenkov and Khrushchëv that needless emergencies were arising in external and internal affairs. They could breathe no word of this in Stalin’s presence. Whenever they offended him, however unintentionally, they had to beg forgiveness and to prove themselves his humble pupils and eager servants. They flattered him and his wisdom. They could not meet except when he brought them together. No big policy could be altered without his sanction, and he held all members of the central leadership in trepidation. His whims were law for them.5

Official statistics in 1952 proclaimed that the USSR had completed a full agricultural recovery. This was the purest fiction. The method of counting cereal output was based on average measurements of grain standing in the field before being harvested; it made no allowance for either subsequent bad weather or poor storage and transport. By concentrating his budget on military expenditure, Stalin had starved the countryside of investment. His farming policy anyway failed to provide peasants with incentives to work harder. Although there was no outright famine after 1947, conditions in the villages remained grim. The urban diet was the worst in the industrialised world. Soviet consumers who did not belong to the administrative stratum were ill fed, ill clothed and ill housed.

If they wanted to do better than subsist in Stalin’s USSR they had to glorify his name. Millions of them did this voluntarily. He had become the popular incarnation of victory over the Third Reich. Rarely appearing in public, he grew in mystery and prestige. Yet his health was deteriorating and his physician Vladimir Vinogradov advised him to retire from political activity. (Vinogradov was rewarded for his honesty by being locked up in a Lubyanka cell.) The Soviet order went on singing its own praises and lauding Stalin. The party-state bestrode the vast institutions brought into being in the inter-war years and the party itself retained crucial functions. It supervised the agencies of government and picked and scrutinised their personnel. It adjusted and propagated Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine. Tensions between party and government persisted; Stalin kept things that way to stop either of them undermining his personal power. He also wanted to prevent the party from achieving comprehensive dominance over the ministries since he aimed to promote young men and women qualified in their professions to handle the tasks of governance. Communist technocracy was on the rise.

The Ministry of State Security (MGB) mopped up all spillages of opposition to the state order. Workers and peasants could only passively obstruct the policies of the authorities. Labour discipline, like productivity, remained woeful. Directors, managers and foremen of enterprises served their personal interests at the expense of higher instructions. Localism remained the bane of central purposes. Clientelism persisted, unshaken even by the occasional arrests: the post-war purges affected particular groups and not the clientel system itself. Despite decades of indoctrination and repression, alternative ways of thinking continued to engage the minds of millions. National feelings were intensified by the punitive official campaign to eliminate them. Religious belief endured in the teeth of persecution. There was no realistic chance of a revolution from below against the ruthless power of the MGB and the Soviet army; but beneath the surface of unity there lurked stormy tendencies. It did not take a genius to work out that popular discontent would sooner or later have to be assuaged rather than suppressed. Stalin’s obduracy meant that, when reformers took power in 1953, the difficulties had festered into a dangerous condition.

He was also storing up problems to the west of the USSR. Yugoslavia’s disobedience was a dangerous example for other states in eastern Europe. Tito had let it be known that if Soviet agents continued to be sent to Belgrade to assassinate him, he would dispatch his own agent to Moscow – and Tito guaranteed that Stalin would not survive the visit.6 Stalin played on the tensions in each leadership in eastern Europe. The individuals had always been eaten up with mutual jealousies; and as the pressure from Moscow increased, they eagerly ratted on each other. High politics in Romania became extremely vicious. Vasile Luca, who himself had come under suspicion in previous years, denounced Lucreiu Ptrcanu for acting like the Romanian Bukharin. Luca himself was disliked by Ana Pauker, who passed on her criticisms to the Soviet authorities.⁷ Various channels of communication with Moscow were kept open across eastern Europe. The Polish security chief Jakub Berman tried to discredit fellow Politburo member Gomułka in a conversation with the Soviet political adviser.⁸ Rudolf Slánský, the Czechoslovak party secretary, sensing that others were ganging up against him, hung portraits of both Stalin and Gottwald in his office. Anything to prove his loyalty.⁹

If anyone took the prize as eastern Europe’s biggest rat it was Hungarian party and government leader Mátyás Rákosi. This was a man who did not confine his comments to his own country’s affairs. He complained to Moscow that Czechoslovak leaders had been tardy in exposing spies and provocateurs. ‘It’s strange’, he wheedled, ‘that comrade Gottwald doesn’t take measures.’ Rákosi also noted that an arrested American spy was carrying a letter of recommendation from Jakub Berman in Warsaw.¹⁰ Nor was he shy about criticising the weak assistance he had experienced from the ‘Soviet organs’ in Hungary.¹¹ Whether this earned him the trust of Stalin is doubtful. Stalin knew all the tricks and automatically assumed that a display of zeal could conceal suspect purposes.

His device was to get each leadership to pick on a few of its members and parade them as accomplices of Tito as well as Western intelligence agencies.12 Trials ensued against the broken victims. Poland’s leadership held out against Soviet demands to put Gomułka in court. The Polish United Workers’ Party leadership, which had a disproportionate number of Jews, may not have wished to stir up antisemitism by bringing down a native-born Pole such as Gomułka. Victims elsewhere were not so lucky. The accused were chosen in consultation with Moscow and any past softness towards Tito attracted a black mark in the record. László Rajk in Hungary and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia found themselves arrested. Koçi Xoxe fell in Albania, Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, Pauker in Romania. After gruesome torture, the defendants confessed to crimes invented for them by their prosecutors.¹³ Rajk, Slánský, Xoxe and Kostov were executed. Pauker was spared and sentenced to imprisonment. The German Democratic Republic escaped the demand for such trials. This was not for want of compliance from its leader Walter Ulbricht, who had denounced German comrades to the Soviet authorities in the 1930s.¹⁴ Perhaps the Berlin communist leadership was thought already obedient enough to the Kremlin’s wishes.

Eastern Europe’s subjugation was reinforced by trade deals which privileged the USSR. Instructions were given for countries to specialise in producing goods needed by the Soviet economy; an imperial economic system was created. Those states which had been Hitler’s allies, furthermore, continued to have to pay reparations to Moscow. Seventy per cent of Hungarian industrial output in one fashion or another ended up in the USSR in 1953.¹⁵ The situation in Bulgaria and Romania was little better.

Public life in the USSR underwent further degradation as Stalin exploited antisemitism. He had supported the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 only to find that the new socialist government had a preference for the USA over the USSR; this served to aggravate his suspicion of Soviet Jews as a possible disloyal group.¹⁶ Fears of a general pogrom grew. Jews were insulted in the street and many were beaten up. Many more were sacked from posts of influence. The rumour spread that all people of Jewish ancestry were going to be deported to Siberia. That this was really intended is unproven but prominent Jewish figures undoubtedly dreaded the possibility. He habitually applied repression against any people linked by nationality to a foreign state. In January 1953 several Kremlin doctors were accused of poisoning Soviet politicians. Almost all these medical professionals had Jewish-sounding names. The antisemitic disease was transmitted to eastern Europe. Reports were filed to Moscow claiming that the Jews in the Polish communist leadership had a ‘nationalistic’ tendency to give preference to fellow Jews in the appointment of personnel.17 This was a calumny. But it was easy to get people to believe in it. And a similar trend was beginning to plant its roots elsewhere in the region. Communists abroad followed this development with horror and amazement.

Stalin remained intensely suspicious in his old age. He told Italian communist emissary Pietro Secchia: ‘However good a party may be there will always be spies inside it. In our party too – the Bolshevik party – there were spies.’ He affirmed that not all such spies had yet been unmasked.¹⁸ He told the Central Committee after the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 that Molotov and Mikoyan were untrustworthy. Both men lived under the cloud of expected arrest. Stalin had also started the Mingrelian Affair. The Mingrelians are a people living in Georgia. Beria was a Mingrelian and had appointed many of his protégés to posts in the Georgian administration. The fact that Stalin was incarcerating hundreds of Mingrelian functionaries boded ill for Beria’s future health. Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria lost influence and status in the Presidium (as the Politburo was renamed) which was formed by the Central Committee after the Congress. Panic was growing among the supreme leaders. Stalin’s bodyguard-in-chief Vlasik and personal assistant Poskrëbyshev were taken into custody. The ailing Stalin seemed to be plotting to eliminate his most prominent subordinates and promote more malleable young substitutes.

But on 5 March 1953 he suddenly died. Out at his Kuntsevo dacha, alone with his guards, he had suffered a heart attack. Fear of infringing his routines had stopped anyone from entering the building for several hours, and when they plucked up courage to do this they found him collapsed on the floor. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was phoned. Its officials also were too frightened to act on their own initiative. Politburo members were rung up, and they hurried out to the dacha. Only then were the doctors summoned. It was too late: Stalin by then was breathing his last. A period in twentieth-century world history drew to a close. The chief figures in the hastily reorganised Soviet leadership were Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria and Nikita Khrushchëv. These three agreed that reform and renovation was essential. Not every leader concurred: Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich were convinced believers in Stalin’s policies and felt anxious about the destabilising effects of any change. But they lacked the energy and the institutional positions already held by the younger troika. Malenkov headed the governmental machine. Beria resumed control over the police and Khrushchëv increased his authority over the party apparatus. Together they edged policies away from the Stalinist legacy.

The Doctors’ Plot was exposed as a sham. The announcement was made that communist principles were opposed to any ‘cult of the individual’. Stalin was not expressly criticised, but his legacy was plainly under attack. Overtures were made to the USA, and Tito and the Yugoslav communists were no longer spoken about as pariahs. The forced-rate drive for industrialisation in eastern Europe was decelerated. Malenkov confided that thermonuclear war would bring disaster upon the human species.

Beria wanted to go faster and further than the others in reforming communism, and he sometimes acted without consulting Malenkov and Khrushchëv. He went round threatening to grind local police officials into ‘labour camp dust’. He was also the leading advocate of reform in eastern Europe, where communist leaders were put on notice to go easier in economic policy. Compliance was not universal. Leaders across the regions had come to power by proving themselves to be reliable Stalinists. None was more dedicated to the old ways than Walter Ulbricht in the German Democratic Republic. Ignoring the changes in Soviet internal and external policies, he announced a rise in work quotas in May 1953. Mátyás Rákosi came from the same mould as Ulbricht. Summoned to the Kremlin, he was told to adopt the New Course after Beria asked him if he aimed to be the first ‘Jewish king of Hungary’. Only then did Rákosi back down. The Soviet leadership punished him by insisting that he give up the post of prime minister in favour of Imre Nagy, a known supporter of reforms. Changes in personnel followed everywhere in eastern Europe. The usual procedure was to require the supreme communist ruler to drop the role of dual political leadership. Each had to choose between the party and the government. After Rákosi’s humiliation they meekly complied.

Ulbricht’s measures were the last straw for his exhausted populace. A strike by building workers spread like a summer forest-fire to the rest of the economy and to all cities of the German Democratic Republic. A demonstration in East Berlin against the authorities drew together a hundred thousand protesters who demanded the resignation of the government. Ulbricht called in the Soviet occupation forces and T-34 tanks trapped the crowd in a main square. When stones were thrown by demonstrators on 17 June, the Volkspolizei retaliated with gunfire and at least 125 demonstrators were killed. The massacre itself caused no palpitations in the Soviet Party Presidium: no Kremlin leader was troubled about the use of force. What worried Moscow was the fact that the German Democratic Republic had come so near to outright revolt. The Presidium had tried to restrain Ulbricht in May and get him to adopt a ‘New Course’. Strikes were already taking place in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. The result was that the Kremlin allowed Ulbricht to stay in power and decelerate the reforms.19

The first political casualty was Beria. Khrushchëv talked a reluctant Malenkov into agreeing to arrest Beria at the Party Presidium on 26 June. Beria was a threat to all its members with his bloody record as a police chief and his willingness to act without consulting others. His radical policies were also dangerously destabilising. The army commanders did not need to be persuaded: they hated Beria for the way he had treated the Red Army in the Second World War. Beria was taken into military custody and executed some months later. Khrushchëv was elevated to the post of Party First Secretary in September while Malenkov remained Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Malenkov emphasised the need to avoid a third world war and to prioritise the expansion of light industry. Khrushchëv had other ideas. By calling for the ploughing up of virgin lands in Siberia and Kazakhstan, he showed he understood the difficulties faced by Soviet citizens in daily life. He cleverly put together an institutional coalition. Khrushchëv promised the armed forces and the heavy-industry ministries that he would maintain their share of the budget, and he assured the Central Committee that the party was the foundation of the Soviet order. As the doors of political discussion were prised ajar, he alone had the skill to reach out beyond the Party Presidium.

He had no shame or modesty; he spoke impromptu and sprinkled his talk with coarse condiments. (His speeches had to be cleaned up before publication.) He looked like a Russian version of the Michelin man in the tyre advertisements of the period. Yet behind his jokiness there was a pugnacity lacking in the doleful Malenkov. Khrushchëv was intuitive; he knew his inadequate schooling left him with deficiencies, but he had a boundless confidence that he knew what needed to be done in the USSR. Malenkov, pudgy and uninspiring, was continually outmanoeuvred; he looked like a victim even before he was picked on.

Khrushchëv, facing down difficulties in the Presidium, steadily increased the pressure to expose the abuses that had been systematic under Stalin.²⁰ He shrugged off constraints at the Twentieth Party Congress. When his comrades advised against discussing Stalin, he retorted: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the congress we’ll be forced to tell the truth at some time in the future. Then it won’t be us making the speeches but rather we’ll be the people under investigation!’21 Insisting on his prerogative as Party First Secretary, he delivered a speech on the ‘cult of the individual’ to a closed session. This was a devastating indictment of Stalin. The deceased Leader, revered by most of his audience as the greatest communist of his generation, was exposed as a mass killer with a psychological disorder. Khrushchëv pulled up short of certain hurdles. He refrained from criticising Stalin’s forced-rate industrialisation and forcible mass collectivisation at the end of the 1920s. He also stressed that the Soviet order survived Stalin’s abuses intact and that Leninism had been preserved. He downplayed the number and range of victims and avoided mentioning that millions of ordinary people had perished; he gave the impression that only ‘several thousand’ innocent functionaries in party, army and government had been killed or sent to the labour camps in the 1930s and 1940s.

Yet the speech had the effect of a political thunderbolt; and Khrushchëv insisted that its implications should be brought to bear on foreign as well as internal policy. He earnestly wanted a changed relationship with eastern Europe. The Soviet leaders had already established a military alliance for the Soviet Bloc in the form of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation – unofficially known as the Warsaw Pact – in May 1955; they also abolished Cominform in April 1956, dropping proposals to get communist parties to form new regional agencies.²² The initiative came entirely from Moscow. No communist leadership in the USSR’s outer empire would have dared to make such a proposal. Increasingly the economics of Comecon gave less advantage to Soviet interests; indeed the USSR began to supply petroleum and gas to eastern Europe at prices lower than those on the world market. The Kremlin was paying dearly for retaining its ‘satellite states’. Political relations, though, remained strictly hierarchical and the USSR remained the dominant power. Khrushchëv had not become Party First Secretary in order to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.

Abridged versions of the speech were relayed to the lower levels of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; the contents were also passed to the leaderships of fraternal parties. Unintentionally Khrushchëv was loosening the mental fixtures of the world communist movement. Bolesław Bierut, General Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, had a heart attack. British communist leader Harry Pollitt was furious about the denunciation of Stalin. ‘He’s staying there as long as I’m alive,’ he said of the portrait of Stalin that hung in his living room – and stay there it did.23 Pollitt, however, kept his thoughts within his family. The Chinese Communist Party reacted negatively. Mao Zedong, despite his own past troubles with Stalin, refused to accept the burden of Khrushchëv’s case. He adopted the formulation that Stalin was 70 per cent right and only 30 per cent wrong. This arithmetic let Stalinism off the hook: neither Mao nor the other Chinese communists leaders spoke of the horrors of agricultural collectivisation and the violent mass purges in the USSR. They wanted freedom to make their own frantic dash for economic growth. This was the beginning of a journey down the road to the split between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.²⁴

Communist leaders in eastern Europe undertook a reluctant assimilation of the so-called Secret Speech. They appreciated the perils they faced better than Khrushchëv and his fellow reformers. Stalin’s Red Army had conquered these countries. No communist regime had come to national power through the ballot box. All were police states. If Stalin was to be denounced as a despot, every last shred of legitimacy for communist rule in Poland and Hungary vanished. Khrushchëv had no such worry and concentrated on reforming Soviet foreign policy. The USSR had already pushed the North Koreans to sign an armistice at Panmunjom in July 1953 and agree to a partitioning of the country along the thirty-eighth parallel. In April 1955, despite all manner of objections raised by Molotov as Foreign Affairs Minister, Khrushchëv had travelled to Belgrade to effect reconciliation with Yugoslavia.²⁵ In May, he withdrew the Soviet occupying forces from Austria. Unlike Stalin, he was eager to journey abroad. In 1959 he met US President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Camp David and President John F. Kennedy in Vienna in 1961. A framework of ‘peaceful coexistence’ was being set up by the great powers. Prevention of a third world war became an acknowledged priority for Soviet and American leaders.

A rip tide of popular discontent, however, was inundating eastern Europe. There was no need for anyone to be prodded to hate Stalin, the October Revolution and Marxism-Leninism: they were a triple plague imported from Russia. The communist economies functioned poorly for consumers. Even the leaders admitted that the output of staple items was on the sub-optimal side. The East Germans had recent experience of Soviet military brutality and held themselves back. The Poles, though, had not been chastened. Industrial workers in Poland went on strike in summer 1956 and, just as in Berlin three years earlier, disputes about conditions at works spiralled up into a massive political protest. Fifty thousand people turned out in the northern city of Pozna shouting ‘Free elections!’ and ‘Down with the Russkis!’26 The intelligentsia and Church were ready to support any national movement against the dictatorship. Among them were communist reformers. The repression was swift and ruthless as Pole repressed Pole. There were about fifty fatalities. Yet the unpopularity of the regime was too blatant to be ignored. Władysław Gomułka, who had languished in disgrace since 1948, was invited back to supreme office on 13 October 1956. Gomułka was famous as Stalin’s communist antagonist, and Poles were willing to give him a chance. Tito looked on approvingly from Belgrade. At last eastern Europe appeared capable of loosening the Soviet grip. Gomułka himself gave encouragement to communist reformers in Hungary.²⁷

The Hungarian people too were indignant. The Petöfi circle of intellectuals, which met in Budapest to discuss what was wrong in the country, spread rebellious ideas. Unrest broke out in factories, mines and building sites. Rákosi lost the confidence of his fellow leaders. They no longer feared him either. In July he had to step down as party leader in favour of Ernö Gerö. This did nothing to stem the national flood of demands. Students, workers and even soldiers took to the streets in October. The security police – the ÁVH – fired upon the demonstrators but then found itself besieged in its own headquarters. The Hungarian communist leadership panicked and, backed by Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov, got Moscow’s permission for Imre Nagy to assume personal authority.²⁸ Nagy identified himself with the crowds in the capital. He assured the Kremlin that he could master the situation, and maintained that Hungary would remain faithful to the communist cause. At the same time his party and government released Cardinal Mindszenty and other religious and political prisoners from custody. The press shook itself free from censorship. Open demands for national independence were made throughout the country. The armed forces were plainly on the side of the demonstrators. Nagy ended up approving the country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

Budapest in autumn 1956 became the epicentre of an entire people’s revolt against the USSR. Khrushchëv vacillated. On 30 October he persuaded the Soviet leadership to desist from invading Hungary. But then he reconsidered. Emboldened by the Anglo-French and Israeli attack on Egypt to resecure control of the Suez Canal, he sent tanks into Hungary on 4 November.²⁹ The Soviet soldiers themselves knew little or nothing about the purpose of their mission until they crossed the border. Khrushchëv remembered Hungarians as the wartime allies of the Third Reich and saw Nagy as a traitor to the communist cause. Soviet forces in the name of communism crushed the workers’ councils elected by factory labour forces. Demonstrations were broken up. The brutality was intense. When all was lost, many rebels headed for the frontier and freedom rather than stay behind and endure the military occupation. Nagy was seized and executed a couple of years later despite assurances to the contrary: Khrushchëv wanted no east European communist leader to repeat Nagy’s act of defiance. The USSR approved the establishment of a puppet government under János Kádár.

Yet the entire imbroglio emboldened Khrushchëv’s enemies in the Party Presidium to attack his policies. In June 1957 Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov plotted to demote him. Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin’s closest henchmen in the 1930s, detested the programme of reforms; Malenkov approved of it but disliked being shunted out of the central terminus of Soviet politics. They were confident of a majority in the Presidium. Khrushchëv was ready for them. Again standing up for his rights, he demanded to put his case to the larger Central Committee on which sat party, ministerial and military officials who admired him. Marshal Zhukov used the air force to ferry them from all over the USSR. They banged on the doors of the Presidium to get the Central Committee into session. The result was victory for Khrushchëv; he had turned personal disaster into the defeat of the three leaders of what he called the ‘anti-party group’.

After that there was no stopping him. His policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in no way implied that he was abandoning the competition with the USA. He had confidence that the USSR had a superior order of state and society to the entire capitalist world. By 1961 he was promising that the Soviet Union would have overtaken the USA in its standard of living by the end of the decade. He asserted that the ‘all-out construction’ of a communist society as envisaged by Lenin in The State and Revolution would have begun by 1980. He called the USSR an ‘all-people’s state’. The gauntlet was thrown down in front of the USA. Direct military conflict was to be avoided but economic, political and ideological competition was going to be intense. Khrushchëv was eager in particular to win support from the Third World. Around the globe the empires had not yet been fully dismantled even though the British and French were already intent on this end. The Soviet leadership sought to exploit the situation. The other aim was to encourage ‘non-aligned’ nations to break free of American influence and cause trouble for the USA. Khrushchëv offered financial aid and economic advisers to those states which agreed to this; he presented himself as the tireless advocate of independence for all the world’s small countries.

The communist movement around the world was convulsed by the events of 1956. An exodus from the party ranks occurred with especial intensity in western Europe and North America. Admissions about Stalin’s abuses undermined old loyalties; and the military suppression of the Hungarian Uprising convinced many veterans that the attitudes of the Kremlin leaders were insufficiently different from those of the deceased Soviet dictator. The Communist Party of Great Britain, for example, lost around nine thousand members – over a quarter of the total – in the two years after February 1956.30

Yet most communist party leaderships were willing to give the USSR the benefit of the doubt. Palmiro Togliatti in Italy had hinted that he would support an invasion even before the Soviet leadership had taken the decision.³¹ The regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania and even Yugoslavia were eager for the Hungarian experiment in self-rule to be terminated. They had Hungarian minorities of their own and did not want them to start causing similar trouble. China, despite other basic disagreements with Moscow, condoned the use of troops. Only Gomułka in Poland held out against Khrushchëv. He had been restored to power against Khrushchëv’s wishes and did not want a precedent set in Budapest which might later be applied to Warsaw.³² Nevertheless the unity of communist parties around the world was less than firm. The Chinese Communist Party had had political difficulties with Stalin before and after seizing power in 1949. But Mao endorsed most of what had been done in the USSR under Stalin; he also hesitated to lower his own claims to omniscience by recanting any cardinal features of Mao Zedong Thought. Chinese communists castigated Khrushchëv as a ‘revisionist’. Yet Mao approved of the Soviet army’s operation against the Hungarian Uprising. His attitude was that if the USSR had not undertaken deStalinisation, the problem in Budapest would never have arisen.

Washington’s political and intelligence establishment still assumed that the USSR was the hidden hand in everything done by communist states and that Soviet domination of the world communist movement was unchecked. This was an overdrawn picture.³³ When no other communist states existed, it had been easy for Stalin and the Comintern to hand out instructions and get them obeyed. Tito had shown that it was possible to stand up to Stalin; Mao and Kim Il-sung had manipulated Stalin into making choices about war and peace according to their considerations and schedule. Even eastern Europe posed constraints on his freedom. If communist states were to endure in the region, they needed assistance from Moscow. All of them would crumble without the guarantee of Soviet military intervention. Without cheap Soviet oil and other natural resources, they would fall into difficulties. Although eastern Europe had become the Soviet Union’s outer empire, the pleasures of imperialism were attenuated by the drain on the Kremlin’s treasury. DeStalinisation had not put an end to the geopolitical and internal threats to the USSR.

 

PART FIVE

MUTATION

1957–1979

 

27. DÉTENTE AND EXPANSION

As soon as Nikita Khrushchëv had consolidated his posistion as Soviet supreme leader in 1957 he pressed forward with change in all sectors of internal and external policy in the USSR. Already the Party First Secretary, he also assumed the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers a year later. He pulled up his younger supporters to high office, shunting his enemies in the ‘anti-party group’ into disgrace and retirement. He decentralised industrial organisation in the USSR by scrapping the Moscow-based ministries and establishing scores of ‘councils of the people’s economy’. He split the party into two sections, industrial and agricultural, at each local level: this bipartition was meant to energise economic advance. Khrushchëv encouraged a widening of public discussion, permitting the appearance of novels and poems about Stalin’s Gulag.1 He introduced a priority for investment in light industry. His purpose was to bring about a massive immediate rise in the Soviet standard of living. He brought the Twenty-Second Party Congress to its feet with his vision of the immediate fugure. Hard as nails in political struggle, the First Secretary was also a dreamer. He told the Presidium: ‘Thus we’ll proceed to the realisation of Lenin’s tenet that every kitchen maid must know how to administer her state.’²

In international relations he placed emphasis on ‘anti-imperialism’, making overtures to countries in the Third World. This involved support for national liberation movements in the colonies of the European empire as well as assistance to those independent states in Asia, Africa and Latin America striving to break free from Western economic dominion. Furthermore, he allowed for a variety of ways, including peaceful ones, of making the ‘transition to socialism’. Communist parties did not have to copy the Soviet historical experience.³ And all this time the USSR sought a working relationship with the USA. Agreements were made to postpone atomic-bomb tests. The underlying idea was to slow down and even halt the arms race between the two superpowers.

Competition continued between the USSR and the USA as they scrambled after global influence. Despite being the weaker superpower, Khrushchëv was willing to take a risk and see what the Americans would do. He repeatedly threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic, proclaim all Berlin its capital and end the rights of Western powers to occupy any part of the city. The Americans reacted by building up their forces in Europe to protect West Berlin. The danger of the stand-off escalating into all-out war could not be excluded until, in summer 1962, the USSR backed down. Hardly had this happened than US reconnaissance aircraft discovered a Soviet plan to construct a nuclear-missile base on Cuba, where Fidel Castro had made his revolution in 1959.4 President Kennedy declared a naval blockade of the island, issuing an ultimatum for the ships carrying the rockets across the Atlantic to be recalled to the USSR. Days of acute tension followed in October 1962. Khrushchëv recognised that he had over-played his hand and backed down, and the outbreak of a third world war was prevented.⁵ From this episode onwards Soviet and American leaders understood how easily a diplomatic fracas could explode into a planetary holocaust.

Mao Zedong and the Chinese communist leaders berated Khrushchëv for pusillanimity. They themselves were determined to deal on more equal terms with the USSR: they wanted back the territory taken by the USSR in 1945; they aimed to renegotiate the agreements on the natural resources which they were dispatching to the Soviet Union. They sought to challenge the hegemony of the USSR over the ‘world communist movement’. Like a bride regretting a shotgun wedding, Mao was suing for divorce. The decree nisi came with angry mutual consent in July 1960 after Moscow withdrew Soviet technology, finance and ten thousand advisers from China. Joint projects were abandoned at twenty-four hours’ notice. Dams, factories and science laboratories were abandoned half built. Agreements were torn up and economic assistance was halted. The Soviet promise to enable the Chinese to construct nuclear weapons was nullified. Mao denounced Soviet leaders as revisionist; he personally refused to attend the world conference of communist parties in Moscow in November 1960 and ordered Chinese representatives to castigate the USSR’s ideas and practices. Only Albania took China’s side and eventually a compromise was reached in the proceedings.

But this only papered over the cracks of a deep schism. World communism was divided. Sino–Soviet military clashes occurred across the disputed borders. When Yugoslavia had stood up against the USSR in 1948, nobody seriously thought that Tito would take to arms. Mao was different. The possibility could not be discounted that the USSR and China might go to all-out war against each other.

Mao administered a mauling to the strategy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between world capitalism and world communism. He contemplated the possibility of a third world war with a staggering insouciance:

Let’s contemplate this: how many people would die if [such a] war breaks out? There are 2.7 billion people in the world. One third could be lost; or a little more: it could be a half . . . I say that, if we take the extreme situation, half die and half live; but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.6

If this had been said merely for rhetorical effect, it would not have been quite so bad. But Mao was deadly serious. He and his comrades took the outcome of the Cuban missiles crisis as a sign that the USSR and the USA were colluding in imposing a condominium over the rest of the globe. Mao regarded this as the newest and most terrifying expression of imperialism, filling the vacuum left by the European empires. China persistently made overtures to the Non-Aligned Movement, posing as the defender of the rights of small, defenceless states against political and economic depredations.

Neither Khrushchëv nor Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded him as Soviet party chief in October 1964, had truly given up the ambition to trounce the USA in the Cold War; and while trying to build up a peaceful relationship with Washington, they sought to hold on to and legitimate all communist geopolitical gains since the Second World War. In particular, the USSR aimed at an American guarantee of military non-intervention in eastern Europe in return for the assurance that the Soviet army would never invade western Europe. Khrushchëv himself paid heavily for the failures of his leadership. There were riots in Novocherkassk and other Soviet cities when food prices were raised in July 1962. There was deep resentment among party and government officials whose job security and privileges were menaced by his frequent institutional changes. There was dissatisfaction with the humiliation he had brought on the USSR through the Cuban missiles affair. The Party Presidium, most of whose members were his promotees, removed him in a peaceful coup. Khrushchëv declared that the absence of violence in the change of leadership was among his greatest achievements, and he wept as he acknowledged his faults.⁷

Brezhnev promised to consult colleagues about policy, to maintain a ‘collective leadership’ and to gather expert opinion on all matters. He espoused the ‘stability of cadres’ as his objective: as long as officials toed the party line, they could keep their jobs for life. Brezhnev and his main colleagues Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny scrapped Khrushchëv’s bipartition of the party and restored the central ministries. They clamped down on the growing intellectual dissent and moderated any criticism of Stalin – and they were delighted that this went down well in the armed forces.8 Kosygin in 1965 introduced a process of economic reform to give a modicum of increased authority to enterprise directors at the expense of state authorities; but Brezhnev disliked such schemes and they were dropped. The Politburo – as the inner core of the party leadership called itself again after getting rid of Krushchëv – concentrated on eliminating the eccentricities of the disgraced Khrushchëv. Politics were stabilised in the USSR by the dyes and fixative spray of Brezhnev’s policies. Brezhnev’s focus was on economics and international relations. Like Khrushchëv, he prioritised an expansion of supplies of food and industrial products for Soviet consumers. And he geared the state budget to the achievement of military parity with the USA while skirting any risk of a third world war.

It remained an article of faith among communists in the USSR and elsewhere that capitalism was a rotten apple which either would soon fall to earth or else would need to be pulled down from the tree. ‘Class struggle’ continued to be advocated from Moscow and other communist capitals. When Nicolae Ceauescu of Romania was negotiating for his state visit to London in 1974, his heart stopped after being told of the industrial conflicts raging across the United Kingdom. Perhaps the final ‘crisis of capitalism’ was happening there.⁹ He did not want to be seen as supporting the British Labour Party in dissuading the workers from going on strike. Moreover, leaders of communist states usually displayed greater distrust of the West’s socialist, social-democratic and labour parties than of conservative and liberal parties. Khrushchëv angrily exclaimed in 1956: ‘They always asked for that little bit more. Russians, therefore, would always tell them to go to Hell. They were impossible people.’¹⁰ The doctrines of communism were maintained; and if capitalist states such as the USA, West Germany or Japan were economically resurgent, this could not be seen as a lasting phenomenon: Marxist-Leninists confidently predicted the end of private enterprise and its political systems.

Communist revolutions had been few in Khrushchëv’s period of rule. The anti-colonial campaign in Indochina forced the French to leave after the victory of Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese communist forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Civil war followed; the armistice of 1954 confined the communist regime to the area north of the seventeenth parallel. It was not long before fighting was resumed between the governments of the north and the south, and the prospect of an eventual communist triumph, adding to the success of Castro’s revolution in Cuba, looked distinctly possible by the early 1960s.11

The world map acquired more red expanses in the 1970s. American military intervention in the Vietnamese civil war came to a humiliating end in April 1975. Within weeks the government of the communist north established its power throughout the south of the country. This event unravelled relations among several powers. Vietnam had relied on military supplies from both the USSR and China. The supreme desire of the Chinese was to get the Americans out of their backyard in Indochina. Once this had happened, Vietnam itself became an object of Chinese concern. The two countries were old enemies. When violent clashes broke out between communist Vietnam and communist Cambodia, leaders in Beijing took the Cambodian side to prevent Vietnam from asserting itself as a regional power or being turned by the USSR into an anti-Chinese vassal state.¹² The Cambodian communists – known as the Red Khmers (or Khmers Rouges) – had come to power in the mêlée caused by recent events. Prince Norodom Sihanouk had been deposed, with American connivance, by Lon Nol and the army in 1970. Sihanouk’s cordial relations with Beijing had annoyed Washington. The US air force, moreover, had bombed Cambodian forests on the Vietnamese border so as to disrupt Vietnamese supply lines. All this brought recruits to the Khmers Rouges – and even Sihanouk went into alliance with them. Their leader Pol Pot became dictator in Phnom Penh in the same month as the Americans abandoned Saigon in the Vietnamese south. Laos also fell to a communist insurgency in 1975.¹³

Across the Pacific, Chile elected President Allende and his communist-inspired coalition to office in 1970; and although his administration was overturned with American support three years later, evidently the USA could no longer take its dominance in South America for granted.¹⁴ In Africa a communist regime was established in Ethiopia in 1974 and in Angola in 1976. In both these cases the supply of financial and military assistance from the USSR was crucial for the survival of communists in power.¹⁵ Almost to their own amazement the leaders in the Kremlin began to believe that global history had turned decisively in their favour.

American Presidents took account of the USSR’s growing confidence and ambition. Richard Nixon, who entered office in January 1969, sought an accommodation with the rival superpower and together with Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, designed measures to bring about a relaxation of tensions. This became known as the policy of détente. Nixon and Kissinger maintained a strategy of containment; they supported anti-communist governments where they could and were largely oblivious to considerations of democracy, the rule of law and human rights. But negotiations were also initiated for a Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe (CSCE). This initiative came from west European governments but Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford supported it. The result was the Helsinki Final Act, signed in August 1975, which guaranteed fundamental freedom to all people throughout the continent. President Carter, entering office in January 1976, used the Act’s clauses to press for a slackening of the persecution of citizens in the communist states. The main advantage to the USSR was its formal acceptance by the rival superpower as a legitimate participant in the contests of global politics. The world seemed divided for decades ahead between the two contending ‘camps’ led by America and the Soviet Union. A commitment to avoid a third world war appeared to have been guaranteed.

This settlement implied a weakening of the walls of Truman’s containment – and certainly this was how the Kremlin understood the situation. Yet the USA’s moderation was undercut by the rapprochement engineered by Nixon and Kissinger with the People’s Republic of China in February 1972. The USSR was not the only possible main partner for Washington. Bets were being hedged in Washington. Equally clearly, Mao the anti-revisionist was willing to do deals with the foreign enemies of communism.

The USSR’s leaders remained buoyant. The Soviet standard of living rose in the 1970s. The Politburo under Brezhnev was pleased that it avoided any serious repetition of the Novocherkassk troubles. The ‘stability of cadres’ policy allayed the concerns of officialdom. In 1973, moreover, the Kremlin benefited from the sharp increase in oil prices on global markets. Research and development in military technology strengthened the armed forces. A rough parity was attained with the USA, and the USSR at last became a worldwide naval power as well as the possessor of nuclear missiles with the capacity to strike at American cities from long range. Yet there was no room for complacency. The bottlenecks in economic production remained. Grain had to be imported for livestock feed and the subsidy to agricultural production was the highest in the world. Light industry was chronically under-funded. Disgruntlement with the authorities spread wide and deep in society and Marxism-Leninism was popularly discredited. Intellectuals and labour militants defied the efforts of the KGB – the new and final name for the Soviet political police – to suppress them. Party and governmental officials served their own interests at the expense of central directives. Corruption was on the increase. Non-compliance and misinformation pervaded the state order. The Politburo’s grip on the rest of the country was weakening in matters of day-to-day governance.

Yet the Soviet leadership stuck to its policies: it had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. In eastern Europe it felt safe in the knowledge that the Americans would not interfere in its dispositions. When the Czechoslovak communists under Alexander Dubek embarked on a course of radical political and economic reform which came to be known as the Prague Spring, Brezhnev ordered an invasion in August 1968. The Kremlin also approved the vigorous suppression of the independent labour movement in Poland in December 1970. The USSR’s reputation around the world sank ever deeper. And the cost of holding on to the ‘outer empire’ placed additional strain on the Soviet budget as oil and gas were transferred to eastern Europe and Cuba at artificially low prices.16

The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks got under way towards the end of 1969 and an agreement – known as SALT I – was signed in May 1972. Further development in military technology was not precluded and the two sides came together again and, in June 1979, agreed on SALT II. Also of importance was the initiative taken by Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany, for a modus vivendi with the East Germans through his Ostpolitik. The two German states officially recognised each other in December 1972. The fact that American armed forces in the same period were embroiled in the war in Vietnam and proving incapable of winning it added to the feeling in the Politburo that progress for the cause of communism was steady and inevitable. The protest movement against American foreign policy mounted in the USA and western Europe. Student unrest in France in May 1968 also involved basic revulsion against the capitalist economy. Paris was convulsed by street disorders and President Charles de Gaulle and his government came close to falling. The Kremlin as well as the French Communist Party doubted that a ‘revolutionary situation’ was at hand. But it relished the difficulties that the West was experiencing. Anything bad for capitalist countries was considered good for the USSR.

Moscow continued to offer guidance and money to loyal and semi-loyal communist parties around the world. The People’s Friendship University – later named after the murdered Congolese radical Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba – had been established in Moscow in 1960 to offer an education to young communist militants and sympathisers from the Third World. This was all done above board and in the open. Behind the scenes, though, the Soviet leadership continued to provide explosives and sabotage-training courses. The Central Committee Secretariat in 1980 approved a request from the Communist Party of Chile for such provision.17

Meanwhile Boris Ponomarëv, head of the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat, went on dishing out dollars through the Assistance Fund for Communist Parties and Movements of the Left, supplemented by contributions from eastern Europe.¹⁸ The distribution list conformed to the current objectives of Soviet foreign policy. In 1980 by far the largest grant was 2,500,000 dollars. This went into the account of the Communist Party of the USA, which stood no chance of national or even local power but was thought to perform a useful service in propaganda. Next in line were the French communists with 2,000,000 dollars; their position as a spokesman for the ‘peace-loving’ intentions of the USSR in western Europe was pre-eminent. The Finnish communists received 1,350,000 dollars.¹⁹ The common border with the USSR made Finland a crucial zone for the Soviet geopolitical interest. Then, lagging behind, came Portugal (800,000 dollars), Greece (700,000 dollars) and Chile (500,000 dollars). The South African Communist Party received a paltry 100,000 dollars.²⁰ The Soviet leadership had no high opinion of Joe Slovo and fellow communists and instead concentrated its assistance on the African National Congress.²¹

China competed by paying out subsidies to Albania and Cambodia. Mao found that Albanian leader Enver Hoxha’s reputation for wiliness was well earned when Hoxha demanded ever greater subsidies in return for his public loyalty.²² Chinese funds were also channelled to African countries unconnected with communism. The People’s Republic of China under Mao wanted to be identified as a philanthropic world power.

It was political rather than financial difficulties that limited the USSR’s influence on communism around the world. Attempts by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to impose its doctrines on other parties, at least those outside eastern Europe, met with growing opposition at the conferences of the world’s communist parties held in Moscow in 1957 and 1960.²³ The Italian, French and Spanish communists since the mid-1960s had objected to the oppressive nature of the Soviet internal order. Their critique came to be known as Eurocommunism.24 When communist parties gathered again in the Soviet capital in June 1969, the Italians robustly rejected the Kremlin’s policies and angry exchanges occurred about the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the previous year. The British, who had endorsed the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, took the Italian side. So too did the Australians, Belgians, Spanish, Swedes and Swiss. Discussions on the ‘Document about the Tasks of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle’ were acrimonious and several parties refused to sign it. The number would have been higher if the Chinese, Albanians, Thais and Burmese had bothered to attend; and, as Brezhnev noted in his confidential report to his Central Committee, the Koreans and Vietnamese had declined an invitation for fear of annoying Beijing.²⁵

There remained many communist parties which ingested Soviet doctrine like their mothers’ milk. The South African Communist Party was one of them.²⁶ But it was Gus Hall of the Communist Party of the USA who earned the warmest praise for saying: ‘We don’t regard internationalism as a burden, as a concession or as a cross to bear.’²⁷ Even so, Brezhnev felt obliged to acknowledge that any increase in the USSR’s influence over a multitude of communist parties around the world was going to involve painstaking steady work. The Soviet leadership would have to operate ‘in a differentiated fashion’. He thought that the Japanese communists with their current ‘right-nationalistic’ tendency could be brought to co-operate in the ‘anti-imperialist’ campaign. He discerned a chance for ‘the normal development of relations’ with the Yugoslav leadership. He affirmed that ‘unremitting work’ was needed to alter attitudes among Italian and British comrades. Only with Mao Zedong and China did he see no realistic chance of rapprochement.²⁸

He was overestimating what he could do about the Italians. Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist Party, decided in 1977 to break an important remaining tie with the Soviet leadership. The Italians had secretly received four to five million dollars annually. Inside a total budget of nearly thirty million dollars this made the difference between bankruptcy and balancing the books. Boris Ponomarëv usually handed over the cheque in person.²⁹ Berlinguer had made up his mind to refuse Soviet largesse. The reasoning for this action was simple. Eventually the story of ‘Moscow gold’ was bound to reach the press in Italy; it was only surprising that this had not happened already. Berlinguer wanted to avoid a political scandal.³⁰ He also had positive motives. The Italian communists were beginning to believe that the ‘historical compromise’ was actually working. At the June 1976 elections the party had raised its proportion of the vote from 27 to 34 per cent. Gianni Cervetti delivered this message in Moscow in January 1978.31 But Berlinguer did not stick to his decision and cheques continued to arrive in Rome from the USSR.³²

The financial rupture between Moscow and the Italian Communist Party was finally accomplished in 1981, and the reason was not merely Berlinguer’s revulsion at Soviet policy but also the Politburo’s conclusion that he was no longer worth subsidising. The USSR had counted on Berlinguer’s help in the Soviet propaganda campaign against American policy in Europe. Even when Italian communists were criticising their comrades in Moscow, they had been useful in attacking the USA’s activities.³³ But when Berlinguer started to criticise the USSR as much as the USA, it ceased to make sense to provide him with funds. The Soviet leadership instead made payments to the pro-Soviet elements in the Italian Communist Party.³⁴

The Soviet leadership kept up a barrage of abusive notes to Eurocommunist leaders in Italy and Spain.³⁵ But it made no difference. The die was cast: a strategic decision had been taken in Rome and Madrid that any close political association with Moscow would ruin the chances of communist electoral success. By 1979 the Italian communists were telling Moscow that they intended having direct relations with the People’s Republic of China.³⁶ Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, published fiery assaults on the reputation of the USSR. From Madrid and Rome went messages of disapproval of Soviet internal and external policy. The French Communist Party at first showed Latin solidarity. Even crusty Georges Marchais, Secretary-General from 1972, criticised Soviet abuse of human rights. He was roundly condemned by the USSR in confidential messages.³⁷ What is more, the party’s militants and mass membership were frequently unhappy about denunciations of the Soviet order. The French Communist Party was not ready for Eurocommunism. Marchais relapsed into a display of loyalty to the USSR without entirely abandoning his objections to the Kremlin’s attitudes and practices; he resisted any lingering temptation to form a west European front against Moscow.

About the desirability of détente, however, there was consensus among Berlinguer, Carrillo and Marchais. The American political establishment did not speak with one voice. In 1975, the year of the Helsinki Final Act, the US Congress passed a Trade Reform Law amendment devised by Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson and Charles Vanick. Its main clause denied the status of ‘most favoured nation’ to any state that restricted free emigration. Brezhnev was put on notice that, if he continued to prevent Soviet Jews from leaving for Israel, the USSR’s access to the Western capitalist economy would be terminated. He was also made edgy by the USA’s awarding of the status of ‘most favoured nation’ to Romania, Hungary and Poland. This was a deliberate attempt to loosen the cement of the Soviet Bloc in eastern Europe. The three countries in various ways had shown a willingness to stand up for themselves against Moscow, and the granting of this status was a reward for their endeavours.

Despite the Jackson–Vanick amendment, business had continued to be brisk with the USSR. This did not happen without objections from the US Department of Defense that exported machinery could easily be transferred to military programmes.38 But Presidents Ford and Carter sanctioned many projects in the interests of boosting American trade and industry as well as inducing Soviet co-operation in superpower arms limitation. The USSR’s computer technology was almost entirely imported from the USA and Japan.³⁹ Economic ties were especially close with West Germany and Italy. Germans imported most of their gas from the USSR. Italian companies increasingly traded with Soviet ministries. The city of Tolyatti – or Togliatti – was founded on the River Volga. Fiat patents were bought to produce ‘Zhiguli’ automobiles.⁴⁰ Yet the Kremlin was constantly playing economic catch-up. Inventions bought on licence from foreign countries – as well as those stolen by Soviet intelligence operations – were rarely implemented with speed, and the technology gap between East and West remained large in general and in certain key sectors grew decisively wider.⁴¹ Moscow’s official boasts about the USSR’s programme of research and development were insubstantial.⁴² The gains in nuclear missile capacity or in space rocketry disguised the simple fact that the Soviet civilian economy was woefully backward by world standards.

The end to détente came suddenly in December 1979, towards the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when the USSR sent its forces over the Soviet–Afghan border. Communists in Afghanistan had for months begged Moscow to help them militarily against their many religious and political enemies. The Politburo gave permission for KGB special forces and paratroops to give them secret assistance,⁴³ but, under Kosygin’s influence, stood out against all-out intervention by the Soviet army. But the pleas from Kabul grew more insistent. Brezhnev gathered his leading confidants to a state dacha; these were Dmitri Ustinov, Andrei Gromyko and Konstantin Chernenko. Fatefully they resolved to dispatch a military contingent. For conspiratorial reasons the decision was phrased in opaque terminology and Afghanistan was referred to only as ‘A’. The rest of the Politburo gave subsequent approval.44

This decision was motivated by the wish to prevent power being seized in Kabul by anti-communists supported by the USA, and the USSR put its troops over the border with reluctance. But a blunder is a blunder. Afghan patriots with antique weaponry had sent the British army packing in the late nineteenth century without external assistance. The situation was different in 1979. The Americans were eager to supply all the material aid requested by the insurgents. The fact that the revolt was led by Moslem fanatics – the mujehaddin – did not bother the Americans at the time. Carter, hardly a bruiser in the bargains he struck with Brezhnev, felt betrayed and pronounced the death of détente. The Americans suspended talks on arms limitation for the signature of SALT II. Civilian trade agreements were obstructed. A more vigorous strategy of anti-communist geopolitics was pursued in Africa and Latin America. Eurocommunists were furious with Moscow.⁴⁵ In order to sustain its position in the world the Kremlin had to go on squeezing the non-military sections of the USSR’s state budget. Brezhnev had thought he was throwing a lasso around the neck of an adjacent country, Afghanistan. Instead he had tied a cord round the neck of the Soviet order and pulled it tight.

 

28. CHINA CONVULSED

The Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956–7 hurled the People’s Republic of China into turmoil. People bombarded the communist party with criticism, and Mao Zedong was not exempted from their blame. Open disagreement had occurred in the communist leadership. Weary and apologetic, Mao expressed the wish to retire from daily political management and to focus his energies on strategic supervision.1

The Great Helmsman, as he liked to be called, was talking with monumental insincerity. In reality he was intensely anxious about opposition and determined to root it out. In summer 1957 he ordered criticism of the ‘rightists’ in the party as well as more widely in society. Those who had rebuked Mao or the regime were the principal targets. Although there were few arrests and executions, the psychological pressure resulted in over half a million suicides.² Quotas for denunciation of ‘rightists’ were assigned to administrative tiers right down to particular work groups.³ Mao simultaneously readied the leadership for an intensive campaign of economic transformation. This became known as the Great Leap Forward. Aiming to eliminate the differences between town and countryside, he called for the rapid growth of rural industry. As the campaign got under way, about a tenth of the population volunteered – or, most frequently, found themselves directed – to work in makeshift iron foundries. A million of them were built. Planned output of steel was raised from six million tons in January 1958 to thirty million by the end of the following year. These were the years when Chinese communists repudiated the Soviet denunciation of Stalin and claimed that only China could supply an authentic model for communism around the world.

Mao’s dominance over the Politburo was at a peak and he was as peremptory as Stalin in his ideas and methods. Among his obsessions was a campaign to exterminate the sparrow, which he thought the scourge of China’s agriculture. People were told to shoot them. Mao, like Stalin in plant genetics, was balefully ignorant of zoological ecology. Sparrows performed the useful function of feeding off insects harmful to crops; their annihilation inevitably reduced the size of harvests. Yet Mao blundered forward. All Chinese were to accept his policies as unquestionable wisdom.

The targets for transforming the economy were to be met by fair means or foul. Mothers handed over the family woks and children’s brooches to be melted down for industrial use. Youths went out searching for scrap metal. Doorknobs, scissors and buckles were tossed into the furnaces. The activity was hysterical, the environment intimidating. People in the urban foundries who tried to visit their families in the villages were beaten up.4 A vast famine afflicted the country. Drought affected some regions in 1958, but the industrialising campaign and its consequences were the main reason for the hardship. Survivor Bian Shaofeng described the result: ‘When you were hungry you would eat anything. We ate all kinds of wild grass, wild roots, pumpkin leaves and peanut shells; we ate worms, baby frogs, toads. It was disgusting to eat toads as they made you sick. We ate rats if we could catch any, but often we were too weak.’⁵ Her relatives died off like flies. People kept the deaths a secret so that they could go on receiving the rations of the deceased. Parents lived with the rotting corpses of their children. Cannibalism was widespread. On a trip into town, Bian Shaofeng noticed a man’s head and chest by the roadside. On questioning a local woman, she was told unashamedly that he had been chopped up for his plump flesh.⁶

The exact incidence of mortality through starvation may never be known; the most plausible estimate is that at least thirty million people perished. It was the worst man-induced famine in history. Chinese state officials hid this efficiently from the world’s attention and no latter-day Malcolm Muggeridge got outside the capital to investigate.⁷ The disaster was a sensitive topic inside the communist leadership. Defence Minister Peng Dehuai broke the taboo at the Central Committee plenum in Lushan in June 1959 and talked about the human losses. Peng’s reward for his honesty was to be branded the leader of a rightist opportunist clique and sacked. (He was to die after torture by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution.) Lin Biao, a veteran of the civil war and an ambitious radical, replaced him at the Defence Ministry.

Supposedly this was Mao’s reaction to all the suffering: ‘You have only tree leaves to eat? So be it.’⁸ What is undeniable is that he took no serious steps to change policy until it was too late. He continued to take satisfaction from communist successes in the decade since 1949. Land had been collectivised, industry nationalised. Rival parties had been eliminated. The non-Chinese groups in the population had been cowed. The ruling group enjoyed unchallenged supremacy; its members had the prestige and authority of men who had fought in the civil war against the Kuomintang. Yet the Great Leap Forward had not worked out as Mao had intended. The tens of millions of deaths were not the only reason why the central leaders of party and army were alarmed – and many leaders in fact were just as unconcerned about the hardship as Mao himself. What worried them to a greater extent were the consequences for state authority if the disruption was not ended. Mao had to give way: his leading position was not unconditional. After much discussion it was agreed that he should step down from the Chairmanship of the People’s Republic in favour of Liu Shaoqi. Although Mao remained Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Liu acquired an ally in Deng Xiaoping, who held the post of its General Secretary. Mao referred to himself as a ‘dead ancestor’, meaning that nobody any longer had to consult him about current policy.

Yet Mao’s official image remained unsullied as the media went on depicting him as a wise, altruistic supreme leader who lived the simple life. Photographs and paintings showed him in a baggy plain tunic and with a face uncreased by age. He looked more like an inflatable rubber doll than a human being. When a Danish socialist newspaper published a cartoon of him being eaten by a Chinese dragon, the Beijing authorities issued a furious protest. Disrespect to Mao was treated as an act of enmity towards the entire people of China. Implicit threats were made to Danish businessmen about to visit the country.9 Evidently Beijing wanted a monopoly of representations of Mao: a joke was always a serious thing for communists.

Mao had no genuine leaning towards altruism and self-denial and was a serial philanderer with a penchant for ingenuous young women. In later years he infected his conquests with a sexually transmitted disease.¹⁰ Worried about becoming impotent, he swallowed a solution of ground deer-antlers to improve his performance in bed. He believed that the Daoist love-making technique would also help – this involved physical penetration short of ejaculation, the idea being that it enhanced his virility. He kept fit by swimming every day. With characteristic one-upmanship he held poolside talks with Khrushchëv in Beijing in 1958 because the Soviet leader could not swim and had to wear a rubber ring.¹¹ In 1965 a doctored photo appeared in the press with Mao at the age of seventy-two swimming nine miles in sixty-five minutes in the Yangtze river. In fact his physical prowess was already in decline. When doing a bit of digging in his campaign to get everyone to engage in manual labour, he had to give up with the sweat dripping off him. He spent most days lounging about in a bathrobe and wore the famous Mao tunic only for public appearances. He frequently relapsed into mental passivity and by the early 1970s was to suffer from a form of motor neurone disease.12

Since the Long March, however, Mao had outmatched every party leader in authority. His fickleness in the matter of promotions and demotions put a strain on everybody’s nerves. On policy he was no less flighty. Radicalism and anti-radicalism succeeded each other with confusing rapidity. The other leaders were so buffeted that they had no time to think about trying to replace Mao. If they pondered on his career, they would have known that his instincts lay with radical politics. He wanted results and wanted them fast. Yet it was always hard to know what he was up to. Mao was master of the opaque phrase. If a policy went wrong, he distanced himself from responsibility. Whenever he changed strategy or tactics, the book could always provide an aphorism in support.

In 1961, however, Liu Shaoqi resumed the criticism of the Great Leap Forward. It was no longer possible to ignore the social and material damage. Although Mao himself was spared any rebuke, everyone in the Politburo knew who was in Liu’s mind when he exposed the inanities of the campaign. Other leaders too were willing to urge a change of policy. Among them was Deng Xiaoping, who sought to restrain Mao’s fanaticism. Zhou Enlai, a more sinewy figure at the court of Mao, was also reputed to have had doubts about the Great Leap Forward. Mao anyway retreated. Publicly the Great Leap Forward continued to be celebrated and the Mao cult was undiminished. And although Liu had offered a challenge behind closed doors, Mao marked him down for elimination along with all his known supporters.¹³ The intention was to shake up the entire ruling group at the central and local levels. Mao had resolved upon a purge of political and cultural elites. The lesson he had learned from the Great Leap Forward was not that he needed to moderate his revolutionary zeal but that he had to rid himself and the state of those who resisted his call for greater audacity. At the same time he would reassert his personal supremacy.

Mao laid the basis in 1963 by entrusting Lin Biao with editing Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong – the ‘little red book’ of his sayings – which was published in hundreds of millions of copies. Then, in summer 1964, Mao formed a Cultural Revolution Group under Peng Zhen to lead the campaign against those writers, lecturers and teachers who failed to accept the party’s doctrines. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping ignored the warning signs. Worse than that, they behaved brusquely towards Mao. At a Central Committee conference Liu interrupted Mao’s speech with comments of his own. This was an act of lèse-majesté. It came after Deng had said there was no need for Mao to attend the conference unless he really wanted. Liu and Deng also advocated the re-introduction of material incentives in workplaces. This put the country’s economic strategy on the agenda. Mao was cornered. ‘Do I’, he asked mock-plaintively, ‘have any rights at all?’14 The result was victory for Mao and the defeat of his rivals.

For the next two years he oiled the machinery of radicalism, assembling the leaders to operate it. One of them was his wife Jiang Qing. Others were Lin Biao – the Minister of Defence – and Chen Boda. Mao aimed to bring the intelligentsia to heel, reactivate mass revolutionary participation and humble the ‘capitalist roaders’ in the leadership. Liu and Deng were compelled to conduct self-criticism. On 31 May 1966 he instructed his follower Chen Boda to take over the Renmin Ribao (‘People’s Daily’) newspaper without giving due notice to Liu. The next day’s editorial was headed: ‘Sweep Away All the Monsters and Ghosts’.¹⁵ Workers could go on strike and be praised for it.¹⁶ Students were encouraged to form groups known as Red Guards and the usual work-team tutelage over them was withdrawn. This meant that, for the first time since 1949, independent bodies were allowed to function in the Chinese public arena. The call was made in August to eradicate the so-called Four Olds. These were old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The Red Guards were cheered on by Jiang Qing and Chen Boda. Mao then went further by legalising the free formation of workers’ organisations. The combined élan of students and labourers, he believed, would enable him to crush any obstruction by communist party veterans, the professional elites and surviving supporters of the pre-communist order.

Mao even encouraged spontaneous activity against party and government cadres. On 1 August 1966 he wrote to the Red Guards at a Beijing school:

Your activities show resentment to and condemnation of the landlord class, the bourgeoisie, the imperialists, the revisionists and their running dogs, who exploited and suppressed the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and other revolutionary groups. They also reflect justification for rebellion against the reactionaries. I express my warmest support to you.17

The communist order which he had established was about to come under attack with his full approval and at his connivance. But he himself was to remain sacrosanct¹⁸ – and the memory of the retaliation after the Hundred Flowers Campaign left no one in any doubt that it would be dangerous to offer the mildest criticism of him.

The purpose was to shake up institutions and attitudes throughout the country. Mao and his underlings wanted a complete break with the recent and distant past. Long experience had taught them that Chinese popular beliefs were very tenacious. China’s culture and its impregnation with Confucian philosophy had lasted many centuries, and Maoists were determined to dig it out of the minds of their contemporaries. Poetry, history books and works of art from the Imperial dynasties were to be destroyed. Just as important to Mao was his campaign to sever the enduring allegiances of people to their extended family, their networks of social deference and their village mentality. The informal linkages between patron and client were also to be smashed. While expressing a willingness for Red Guards to act on their own initiative, the ruling group around Mao were pushing activity in this planned direction. Students were encouraged to denounce their bosses, professors and even parents. Like every communist leadership elsewhere, Mao and his close supporters had discovered that their instant success in establishing a regime was not matched by a rapid transformation in attitudes. They had not been able to make institutions work entirely to instructions. The party had been infiltrated with careerists, and many older communist officials were failing to display the desired co-operation.

Mao wanted to replace – or at least to examine the activity of – post-holders at every level. This involved action at the top as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were pushed aside and Lin Biao gained preference. The ‘masses’ were to take hold of their own revolution. There was a menacing comicality to events. Nien Cheng was a former employee of the Shell Oil Company (whose offices had been closed after the communist seizure of power). As such she had every reason to fear developments. Students marched up and down the streets of Shanghai with drums and gongs and shouting slogans.¹⁹ Sofas were condemned as bourgeois. Red Guards in the city even debated whether to change the traffic lights so that red would be the signal for go instead of green. The city’s traffic lights were put out of action until, to general relief, the proposal was dropped. Nevertheless there was plenty of dottiness still about. Cyclists were bullied into taping pages of Mao’s ‘little red book’ on to their handlebars. So many shops were renamed ‘The East is Red’ and filled with the same pictures of Mao that, together with the renaming of streets, urban inhabitants became disoriented.

Nien Cheng herself was shocked, on her way home, to see a poster denouncing her neighbour as a ‘running dog of Swiss imperialism’. His crime was to have been employed as a manager at a defunct aluminium factory owned by a company based in Switzerland.20

When the Red Guards came for her, she was drinking coffee. A pretty student asked with obvious revulsion: ‘What is this?’ Nien Cheng replied that it was coffee. But this only provoked the question: ‘What is coffee?’ Nothing would stop the Red Guards in their campaign against every sign of middle-class and foreign influences. In the end one of them railed at her:

Why do you have to drink a foreign beverage? Why do you have to drink foreign food? Why do you have so many foreign books? Why are you so foreign altogether? In every room of this house there are imported things, but there’s not a single portrait of our beloved Great Leader. We have been to many homes of the capitalist class. Your house is the worst of all, the most reactionary of all.²¹

Nien Cheng remembered smiling at this outburst. This was a perilous reaction when at that very moment the Red Guards were ransacking the house. Worse was to follow. She was put under house arrest while her daughter, an aspiring film actress, was confined to a shed at her studios while she wrote endless ‘confessions’ and promised to learn Mao Zedong Thought inside out. After a brief public denunciation Nien Cheng was transferred to the No.1 Detention House. Months of interrogation followed, but this was an extraordinary woman who refused to confess to imaginary crimes. Nothing broke her in six and a half years of solitary confinement. She was released only in March 1973.²²

The apparatus of control was highly intrusive. Detainees had to study Mao Zedong Thought; other inmates were intimidated into persuading any of their fellows who might be holding out to do the same. It was not enough to work and serve out their sentence. Recalcitrance could be met with beatings, even execution. (Nien Cheng was lucky at least in this respect.) The assumption was that if you had been arrested, you must be guilty and must therefore confess to your crime and reform your thought.23 To protest your innocence only confirmed your depravity and earned more severe punishment. Not even Kafka was tormented by such a nightmarish cycle of ‘logic’.

The state reverted to capital punishment in the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards sometimes put victims on trial in the street after leading them in chains through the city. In extreme cases a defendant would be forced to confess before kneeling down and receiving a bullet in the back of the head. It was widespread practice for the families of the deceased to be sent a bill for the price of the bullet.²⁴ Perhaps a million people died by execution or by their own hand.²⁵ These gruesome rituals had a purpose. They were designed to make the maximum number of people complicit in the butchery and compliant with the policies of the authorities. Mao had no intention of doing things on the sly as Stalin had usually done. He wanted a society of active participants in the terror. According to one estimate, up to a million of the victims of the Red Guards were thrown into the prisons, the laogai or the reform-by-labour centres;²⁶ but the true number may have been much higher. Moreover, the families of victims were discriminated against. Even people who were neither killed nor arrested could suffer in various ways. Some were dispatched for re-education by means of menial labour. Others were simply demoted. Psychological trauma was a pervasive phenomenon across the country.

The five ‘black’ categories – landlords, rich peasants, bad elements, counter-revolutionaries and rightists – were again applied to people. Having been labelled, they were stuck with the designation. And if those doing the labelling were wondering how to discredit somebody they could also brandish the vague and menacing ‘bad element’. Not that they were concerned about words. They accused people of being counter-revolutionaries and rightists who had nothing to do with either Chiang Kai-shek or Liu Shaoqi. Mao had sowed the seeds of destruction; the country reaped the whirlwind. There were plenty of volunteers to do Mao’s dirty business. Some were naive youngsters who were taken in by the Mao cult and the ‘little red book’. But, as the Cultural Revolution became wilder, many students who carried the burden of ‘bad’ personal labels had an interest in proving their radicalism. So did delinquents. Thus the Workers’ Headquarters in Wuhan seemingly was staffed exclusively by individuals who had recently fallen foul of the authorities. Youths with ‘good’ labels and parents in official posts tended to oppose the new radicals. The result was that the Red Guards split into two factions, and cities became the ground for often physical conflict between them.27

At the centre, Mao totally regained control over his leading comrades. Liu Shaoqi was declared the ‘First Biggest Capitalist Roader’, Deng the ‘Second’. Liu suffered a savage beating by Red Guards and died exhausted and demoralised in the following year.²⁸ Deng was sent off into provincial obscurity. Zhou Enlai escaped punishment by backing the Cultural Revolution. About 20,000 alleged supporters of Liu were purged between 1966 and 1968. Further millions of officials in party and government suffered likewise.²⁹ Arbitrariness pervaded the entire process. As in the Great Terror in the USSR, the purgers made decisions out of self-interest. Mao, having started the process, could not regulate how it affected most individuals.

It became clear to Mao that a continuation of the Cultural Revolution threatened to undermine the communists’ grip on power in the country, and he called a halt to the hysteria before the start of 1969. Things calmed down and Mao and the leading group he had assembled were unchallenged in authority. The group itself, however, had internal tensions. The troops of the People’s Liberation Army under Lin Biao had loyally backed the Red Guards in 1966–8 and just as reliably restrained the Red Guards when Mao ordered the change of policy. Mao recognised Lin Biao as his desired successor by a formal amendment to the constitution. But mutual suspicion grew. Lin wanted greater power and Mao refused to give it to him. Perhaps Lin also wanted a greater share of the budget for the armed forces. Possibly he disliked the early moves in foreign policy towards a rapprochement with the USA. By 1971 there was a growing breakdown in the relationship of the two leaders. Lin fumbled his way towards a coup d’état. In September he tried to strike, but Mao was too nimble for him and Lin anyway had failed to organise his military sympathisers properly. Lin fled by plane to the USSR but his plane crashed before he crossed the frontier.

Political radicalism was slackened, especially after the Sino-American rapprochement. A visible political calm was necessary. Mao turned back to Zhou Enlai and the other moderate figures in the leadership. Deng was rehabilitated in stages from April 1973. Younger newcomers, including Hua Guofeng from Hunan, were also introduced to the leadership; these had risen to prominence in the Cultural Revolution but were not devoted to its resumption.³⁰ Zhou, however, had advanced cancer; and while he declined in hospital, it was Deng who took the attack to Jiang Qing in the Politburo. Sessions were ill tempered. Using her last resource – her marriage – she turned to Mao for support after Deng had stormed out of a Politburo meeting in October 1974. Deng had been unwise. Jiang had three notable allies in the leadership – Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen – and together they formed what became known as the Gang of Four. Wang sped to tell Mao about Deng’s exodus and to denounce his policies and personal ambition.31 Deng, though, did not let up. In September 1975 he gave a ‘Report on Several Problems about Scientific and Technological Work’ urging the need to prioritise a professional approach to economic construction and to confront the dogmatic leaders who had ‘inherited Lin Biao’s mantle’.³²

This was a counter-attack against the Gang of Four and their allies. If popular opinion had been decisive, Deng would have had no worries. Most Chinese hated what had happened during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. A gauge of feelings was provided when Zhou Enlai died in January 1976 after his long illness. The leadership sought to downplay the funeral ceremony; but Zhou was widely cherished as someone who had tried to moderate the excesses of policy. He had never openly opposed the official line and had always yielded to Mao in private; but people sensed where his true preferences lay and appreciated him for doing whatever he could to improve conditions for ordinary Chinese. Troops broke up the impromptu mourning by two million people on Tiananmen Square in the weeks after the funeral. Riots took place. Jiang Qing and leading radicals told Mao that Deng’s ‘rightists’ were responsible. Mao yet again purged Deng, who had been in trouble for some months.³³ But he refrained from appointing a Gang of Four member to replace him. Instead he selected Hua Guofeng, who was not eager for the responsibility. But Mao insisted: ‘With you in charge I am at ease.’ He was recognising that his time was nearly up. Hua was his chosen heir.

While moving against Deng, Mao hedged his bets by restraining the Gang of Four as well as by keeping Deng alive. He sent letters to his wife upbraiding her for speaking intemperately and acting so ambitiously. Jiang Qing was unrepentant: ‘Seventy-five per cent of the old cadres inevitably follow the capitalist road!’ Zhou was accused of leading this renegade tendency. Deng too was subjected to continuous criticism; Jiang obviously feared that his removal from power might prove only temporary. Her supporters outside Beijing were not afraid even to take side-swipes at Hua Guofeng.³⁴

Mao himself no longer attended meetings but let his opinions be known in conversations and memoranda. He had stopped intervening in the making of policy. He ruled by controlling, right to the end, the decisions on the appointment of leading personnel. Mao had been like a great pendulum of the Chinese Revolution since the 1950s. By swinging from side to side in strategy, he showed that he knew how to hold on to power and pull up short of destroying the state order. But he had run out of ideas about how to advance the revolutionary cause in China. Maoism was a helpful way to win peasant support and make a revolutionary war. It could unify and energise a whole people by fundamental social and economic reforms. But it was a poor way to industrialise a country. It involved horrendous suffering even in its quieter periods. Its ruptures with the Soviet historical experience included both advantages and disadvantages for citizens of the People’s Republic of China. But it shared many basic concepts, practices and structures with the USSR. Maoism was a variant of Marxism-Leninism. Its bankruptcy was evident to most Chinese long before Mao died.

 

29. REVOLUTIONARY CUBA

The revolution by Cuban guerrillas in January 1959 took communism to power in Latin America for the first time. They had started two years beforehand as a scratch force with nothing like the battlefield experience of Mao’s People’s Liberation Army a decade earlier. Their leader was thirty-two-year-old Fidel Castro Ruz. He was bearded and athletic and his military success took the world by surprise. Castro had been a superlative sportsman at school and a brilliant law student at the University of Havana, and had given no hint of a communist allegiance. Born to comfort and privilege, he was marked down by his Catholic teachers as a person of exceptional promise and piety. By late adolescence, however, he had lost his religious faith, and his disgust with conditions in his country turned his thoughts towards rebellion.

A military coup had brought back Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant, to the presidency in March 1952. Corruption was systemic and Batista its greatest beneficiary. In the Second World War he had formed a coalition which implemented some social-democratic policies; he had even brought communists into his cabinet. But power and money were his priority. By the 1950s, he was an American puppet, stashing away all the dollars he could grab while deftly suppressing the successive conspiracies against him. The Americans already had a military base at Guantánamo on the south-east coast of the island; they had established it after intervening in the Cuban war of independence against the Spanish in 1903, agreeing two thousand dollars annually for the privilege of the lease. Cuba was a source of imported sugar, rum, cigars and professional sportsmen for the USA. Rich businessmen and richer gangsters could come to Havana for casinos, whores and offshore banking facilities. The Cubans, especially the descendants of the African slaves who cultivated the sugar cane, paid a heavy price. Poverty was rife. The Catholic hierarchy had little concern for social justice. Gun crime was rampant. Educational attainment, except among the wealthy minority, was pitiful.

Batista was almost asking to be toppled. Among those plotting against him were radicals who belonged to the Orthodox Party. Castro, who was close to them, believed that a violent coup by small armed band was all that was required. In July 1953 he had led an attack on the Moncada barracks near Santiago de Cuba. It was a bungled mission of amateurs. Batista’s troops shot down dozens of them, but Castro was fortunate in only being thrown into jail; in the ensuing court case he gave an exuberant speech of defiance: ‘History will absolve me!’1 Released in one of Batista’s amnesties, he fled abroad seeking funds for another attempt.

In December 1956 he led his band of eighty-one insurgents on the perilous voyage back from Tuxpan in Mexico. They travelled in a dangerously over-laden cabin-cruiser, the quaintly named Granma, and landed at Playa de los Colorados. Batista’s troops killed most of them in the first few days. Castro and leading supporters such as Che Guevara escaped to the Sierra Maestra in the south of the island while sympathisers such as Frank País fomented rebellion in the cities. Castro attracted recruits and acquired equipment and then advanced down the mountains. Support for Batista slipped away as the guerrilla forces, insisting on treating the rural inhabitants decently, gained popularity. The insurgents were a motley body of men. A few were communist sympathisers, including Castro’s brother Raúl, but Fidel himself denied having any such allegiance.² His programme was distinctly vague: a cleansed system of justice, land reform, educational advance, democracy and an end to corruption. American officials thought they could live with this. Reformers had appeared in the past. They always came to an accommodation with existing national and foreign interest groups. Washington quietly cut the cord of assistance to Batista, who flew from the island on New Year’s Day 1959.

Castro arranged a stately progress by limousine to the capital. He took obvious pleasure in the acclaim of the roadside crowds over the next few days.³ He seemed to epitomise the carefree Latin American. He dressed casually; he washed infrequently and not very efficiently. He chased beautiful women. He turned up late to meetings, including those of his own cabinet. Whenever he was at the wheel of his Plymouth limousine, he scared the daylights out of his passengers.⁴

In fact he was calculating and inscrutable. At the beginning he seemed intent on getting rid of all communists. He said to his Finance Minister that he intended to ‘do away with them with a sweep of my hat’; he told others that he was against class struggle and dictatorship.⁵ His programme was disclosed gradually as he tested out his ideas against reality. He wanted to change the tax laws and root out corruption. He aimed at an agrarian reform which would give twenty-seven hectares to each peasant household while retaining the large sugar plantations. He wanted to modernise the economy. His ‘maestro’, he stated, was the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist rebel José Martí; he said nothing about Marx, Engels or Lenin.6 He avoided anti-imperialist discourse, and when he travelled to Washington in March 1959 he had expectations of economic aid.⁷ He assumed that his refusal to call himself a communist would see him through. He failed to take into account the impact he made. He was calling his revolution the first in the countries of ‘our America’. This was scant reassurance to President Eisenhower, who shared the conventional Yankee idea that the USA should dominate the politics of the Americas. American financial assistance was not forthcoming.

An angry Castro adopted an anti-American posture. His mood had not been lightened by the sporadic attempts at counter-revolutionary risings supported from abroad.⁸ He was determined that his radical regime would not be blown away by military action conducted or sponsored by Washington. Thus it came about that a failure of mutual accommodation produced the first communist state in the history of the Americas. Washington was flabbergasted. Previously it had seen many communists where few had existed. Suddenly and without warning a real and growing communist challenge existed a few score miles from Florida. When Castro returned to the USA to address the United Nations General Assembly in 1960, he was fêted by crowds chanting: ‘Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!’ He declined to stay in a sumptuous Manhattan hotel and decamped to Harlem. At a time when Blacks still suffered legal discrimination this was a snub and a challenge to the White House. Castro went on the offensive at the United Nations General Assembly, calling President Kennedy ‘an illiterate and ignorant millionaire’. He criticised the USA’s past actions in Puerto Rico, Panama and Honduras. He castigated the Americans for holding on to their military base at Guantánamo Bay despite its having been acquired through duress. Castro compared the USSR favourably with the USA for not having colonies.⁹

Back in Havana he toughened his regime. Already the Prime Minister, he encouraged the informal title of el Máximo Líder while disclaiming any ambition to be a dictator.¹⁰ He also took over the communist party and replaced its leading veterans. A Soviet delegation flew to Havana to investigate the situation. Castro, by then being avid for the USSR’s support to countervail against the Americans, impressed on his visitors that he was a convinced Marxist-Leninist. He wined and dined them splendidly and some ‘meetings’ lasted nine hours.11 Castro told Komsomol leader Sergei Pavlov that he was reading John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and noticing the similarity between the beleaguered Soviet republic in 1917–18 and the current condition of Cuba’s revolutionary regime. Being a novice in international communism, he did not know that Reed’s book was banned in the USSR for its favourable references to Trotski. Castro gushed: ‘You know, the Cuban revolution didn’t begin two years back: it began in 1917. If it hadn’t been for your revolution, our revolution wouldn’t have happened. So the Cuban revolution is forty-three years old!’¹² He pleaded for an invitation to the Soviet Union. He expressed a desire to go hunting with friends in Russian woods instead of addressing official gatherings. This last claim fooled no one who had heard his interminable speeches.

Castro hoped to sell Cuban sugar to the USSR at higher than the world market price. He wanted teachers and other experts to be sent to the island. He projected a steady advance after economic nationalisation and held the entrepreneurs in his sights for eventual expropriation: ‘They’re all parasites who live off others. But there are a lot of them, and for this reason we’re not doing anything about them (and they’re not touching anyone either) but we’re thinking about it.’¹³

The Cuban authorities paid dearly for cocking a snook at the USA. On 16 April 1961 an armed contingent of anti-communist exiles left its CIA training camp in Guatemala and sailed for the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s northern coast. Kennedy had given his approval almost casually; he took it for granted that a modest deployment could easily suppress the revolution. Castro was surely just an irritating gnat to be swatted into oblivion. But the planning of the enterprise was sloppy and the prognosis of a spontaneous popular uprising against Castro proved wildly optimistic. Peasants living near the landing site had been well treated by the revolutionary government and were ill disposed to help the invaders. Castro’s experience as an insurgent told him what to expect and how to organise an effective defence. The anti-communist fighters were defeated, captured and put on show on television. Castro made brilliant use of the media. Instead of delivering a long verbal tirade, he relied on the pitiful confessions of the detainees to make his case for him on radio and television. Although Kennedy made light of his government’s involvement the world knew otherwise. The USA had been humiliated in Latin America for the first time in its history.

Castro concluded that invaders would keep on coming in strength until they toppled him. Sceptical about Soviet talk of technological superiority over the USA, he laughed in Mikoyan’s face when told about the USSR’s industrial sophistication.14 This was the common judgement in Cuba. When the Soviet leadership sent ‘economic specialists’ to advise them, Cubans welcomed them politely and left them to their own devices. (This was no problem for the specialists, who treated a stay in sunny, musical Cuba as a work-free privilege.) The Cubans knew better than any Russian agronomist how to cultivate sugar cane.¹⁵ They were also aware of the lasting damage done to agriculture in the USSR by the system put in place by Stalin. What is more, Castro had his own priorities in social welfare. He went further than the Kremlin in establishing decent medical facilities. Doctors were trained in abundance. Cuba’s difficulties with its balance of foreign trade ruled out the import of modern medicines; instead the emphasis was placed on preventive healthcare. Cuba was renowned in Latin America for its success in lengthening the life-span of its citizens.

But the Cuban Revolution needed a geopolitical ally of substance and the only one available was the USSR. Raúl stiffened his brother’s resolve. Fidel came to understand that the price he would have to pay for Moscow’s military and economic support was the assimilation of his revolution to the structures and practices of the Soviet comrades. Cuba, if it was going to survive the hostility of the USA, would have to go right down the line of communisation.

Castro swaggered his way into the Kremlin’s embrace. Although he claimed that he had always been a Marxist, he did this with a smile and admitted to never having got further than page 370 of Marx’s Capital – and there must be a doubt that he even got that far.¹⁶ Probably, though, he had genuinely come to believe in the need to assimilate basic aspects of the Soviet historical experience. Internal dissent would inevitably proliferate and subversion was bound to be organised from abroad. A system of political control was needed and the one-party edifice built in the USSR offered a useful model which had stood the test of time. If the dictatorship was to secure itself there also needed to be strict regulation of the economy. The private sectors of industry and commerce contained potential supporters of counter-revolution. There would simultaneously need to be strict supervision over the media. The people of Cuba had to be convinced that the government was doing good on their behalf. The situation was prodding Castro into adopting structures, methods and ideas developed by Marxism-Leninism since 1917. This was the first case of communisation of a country by a leader who adopted communism after seizing power.

The regime for a while held back from the complete nationalisation of the economy; but in international relations Castro identified himself entirely with the USSR. He and Khrushchëv were as close as two coats of paint after their first talks. The missiles crisis in October 1962 had stemmed from this. After the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro had begged Moscow for military assistance. Khrushchëv had surprised him by offering to install long-range nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter an American attack. Castro readily agreed. He allowed Soviet military experts to take charge of the building arrangements, and inadequate precautions were taken against everything being filmed by the U-2 spy planes which flew over the island daily. Castro later argued that the experts should have pretended to construct a vast poultry shed.17 Alerted by his intelligence officials, President Kennedy broadcast the news on television on 22 October 1962. For him, the installation marked a dangerous and unacceptable extension of Soviet military power; he would not allow the cities of the south-east of the USA to fall within the range of the USSR’s missiles. Khrushchëv countered that American missile bases existed in Turkey on the Soviet border. The globe was suddenly poised at the edge of an abyss: there was a serious possibility of the Third World War.

Castro got carried away at this point and urged Khrushchëv not to back down.¹⁸ American bluster, he argued, should be met by launching nuclear missiles aimed at the USA. Khrushchëv, by now regretting his own impetuosity, turned to his Party Presidium for permission to make concessions. The Presidium agreed. Khrushchëv told Kennedy that a missile-carrying flotilla presently approaching Cuba would be turned around. The best he could achieve was a promise from Kennedy to close down American nuclear facilities in northern Turkey; but this was qualified by the caveat that the promise should be kept secret.¹⁹ Kennedy also guaranteed to desist from military action against Cuba. In public, though, there was only one winner: the USA. Communism, the USSR and Khrushchëv had been humiliated. Khrushchëv concluded that the Cubans might have only a breathing space of two or three years, and he felt the lash of Castro’s tongue for the imbroglio.²⁰

Fidel and his brother Raúl, who was his deputy in the Cuban leadership and oversaw the army and security forces, deepened the process of communisation in subsequent years. The state expropriated and collectivised the sugar plantations. The small plots belonging to peasants were transferred into the patrimony of government. The country’s mines were nationalised. Shops and cafés – including those beloved by Ernest Hemingway – were taken out of private hands. Casinos were closed down. Prostitutes were driven off the streets. The revolutionaries, whose leaders were conscious of being white men of educated and comfortable backgrounds, worked to end discrimination against Cuba’s black population. The property of the American rich was seized. With a US economic blockade in place around the island the Cubans had nothing to lose. Conditions under Batista, bad as they had been, had been better than almost everywhere else in Latin America. It was therefore essential for Castro to demonstrate a capacity to bring about further improvement, especially for the poor. This was where the alliance with the USSR was vital. Although Ukraine’s beet production could supply all the sugar needed by the Soviet consumers, Khrushchëv and Brezhnev bought up Cuban cane sugar at above world prices; they also shipped cheap Soviet oil to Cuba as to member countries of Comecom, which Cuba itself joined in 1972 to become eastern Europe’s outpost across the Atlantic. Financial credits continued to be granted on generous terms.21

The regime’s welfare policies and patriotic assertiveness gave it great initial popularity. Castro, keeping quiet about his geostrategic dependence on the Kremlin, seemed the first ruler of a truly independent Cuba. He frequently mocked the old elites. Businessmen and politicians from the Batista decades either retired into obscurity or fled into exile in Miami. The great landowning families joined them. Not even the Catholic Church put up an effective resistance to the regime. Catholicism was a peculiarly suspect denomination for being directed from the Vatican. Although Pope John XXIII had softened policy towards the world communist movement from 1958, his reforms had little impact in Cuba. The Cuban clergy naturally felt hostile to the policies of militant atheism. Castro for his part arrested priests who refused to hold their tongues about his regime. He was less hard on the indigenous religious traditions unassociated in their origins with Christianity. Chief among these was Santería, a set of beliefs and rituals brought over from Africa with the Negro slaves and developed in interaction with the indigenous peoples of the island. It was reliably reported that Castro’s long-term lover Celia Sánchez influenced him to indulge these local sources of popular consolation. Otherwise, though, he completed a communist revolution.

Cuba’s attractiveness on the global political left as a communist alternative to the Soviet order went into steep decline. He was Brezhnev’s cheerleader in the Third World. Far from condemning the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Castro supported it. He performed this role in an idiosyncratic fashion by stressing that Dubek and the Prague Spring brought about geopolitical difficulties for world communism. He did not spell out the nature of these difficulties. Most remarkably he ignored the rights of small communist countries to decide their own path of development – and Cuba was one of those countries.22 Castro faded from world attention until, in the 1975, he found an outlet for revolutionary commitment by aiding the efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). A quarter of a million Cuban troops under the command of Arnaldo Ochoa were sent across the Atlantic – and the USSR supplied arms and finance. Cuban propaganda was directed at Latin America. There was no serious attempt by Cuba to organise insurrection after the capture and killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. Salvador Allende’s communist-led government in Chile was welcomed in 1970 and Castro himself urged Chilean communists to adopt more radical policies than Allende thought prudent.

Little changed at home. The police arrested anyone who criticised Castro and the usual punishment was several years in custody. The Ministry of the Interior’s three thousand officers penetrated society by means of informers. Treatment of prisoners was harsh; not for nothing did Castro refer to the machete as the symbol of the Revolution.²³ Yet practices usually stopped short of physical torture and Castro’s personal sanction was required for the imposition of the death penalty.²⁴ Prisoners of conscience were few by the standards of many authoritarian states. There were 316 of them in mid-2006.²⁵ There would undoubtedly have been many more if thousands of people who detested the regime had not found refuge in Florida.

Revolutionary initiatives ceased as the regime consolidated the political and economic measures introduced since the early 1960s. Cuban families made the best of things. If they had a car, they kept it on the road long past the time when it would have been scrapped in most other countries. Food, though it was hardly plentiful, was adequate. Fruit, maize, rum and fish were available to all. Castro’s housing programme was well intentioned. Shortage of funds and faulty planning, however, resulted in apartment blocks which lacked running water. The poor of the island benefited most from the revolution. Blacks in particular were helped by governmental efforts to improve conditions. Illiteracy was wiped out. Furthermore, Cuba had more doctors per capita than any other country in the Americas. Life expectancy for Cubans rose. Jobs in education, healthcare and administration were accessible to the newly trained youth. Cuban music retained its vigour; and Castro, far from suppressing it, enjoyed it being performed in bars and restaurants. Sports facilities were expanded. Cuba’s runners, jumpers, boxers and basketball players won Olympic gold medals. (Some of them, though, defected when they had the chance.) The Revolution could not manage without its police and its prisons. But most members of its society were not itching for Castro’s overthrow.

A sharp shock to revolutionary Cuba was to come in the 1980s. It was not to be the American bombs or the American economic blockade but reforms in the USSR which turned everything upside down. In 1983 Yuri Andropov, Soviet General Secretary, withdrew the military guarantee of the island’s security. Cuba was told it had to defend itself. Gorbachëv later went a step further and warned the Cubans to prepare themselves for life without economic subsidy. As he and the Americans brought the Cold War to a close, he told the Cubans that intervention in civil wars in Africa no longer suited the USSR’s purposes. Gorbachëv had also secured Castro’s promise not to stir up a commotion in Latin America; he was insistent on the Cubans agreeing to keep out of El Salvador and Nicaragua: the last thing he needed was to have President Bush on the phone asking why the world communist movement was still kicking up dirt in the USA’s ‘backyard’.26 At the same time, Soviet leaders gave oral assurances that the protection of Cuba was a ‘sacred cause’ for the USSR.²⁷ Castro continued to offer what he could to Moscow. If sugar was not enough, he was eager to provide medical supplies to the USSR and to welcome Chernobyl victims to Cuba. The fact that impoverished, unindustrialised Cuba could plug gaping holes in Soviet healthcare provision was an indictment of the general bankruptcy of communism in Russia.²⁸

When the USSR collapsed at the end of 1991 and Boris Yeltsin took power in Russia, he ended the subsidy for Cuban sugar and stopped the shipments of cheap oil. Cuba was left on its own. Castro’s first reaction was to expand central state control over the economy. This counter-reform, which led to the closure of the farmers’ markets, at once lowered the popular standard of living. If he had known any foreign communist history, he might have anticipated such an outcome. Soon he recognised the error and opted for a very limited return to private enterprise. Whereas Gorbachëv did this half eagerly, Castro did it in a sulk. But at least he brought back markets for farmers and allowed private handicrafts to be sold from stalls at the roadside. Ever more types of small-business activity were made legal. Private restaurants returned. Agricultural co-operatives supplanted the state farms and diversified cultivation away from sugar cane. Castro filled gaps in the state budget through deals with tourist firms from abroad. He signed a deal with a Canadian company to redevelop the nickel-mining industry at Moa Bay. Withdrawal of troops from Africa reduced a drain on revenues. Still blockaded by the Americans, the Cuban leaders made the minimum of alterations to the economics of communism in order to survive the effects of the transformation in the USSR.

What they refused to permit was any basic political reform. The one-party system with its censorship and security police was maintained in efficient fettle. Castro kept a tight grip on the situation. In 1989 his chief commander in Angola, Arnaldo Ochoa, was shot for having engaged in illicit commercial schemes. The rumour was that Ochoa desired a political overhaul like Gorbachëv’s reforms and that his execution was really Castro’s judicial murder of a potential rival. Castro maintained a posture of revolutionary defiance. He responded to the collapse of the Soviet Union with a dismissive joke:

There are those who believed that when the others dissolved like a meringue, Cuba would do also. Perhaps it didn’t occur to them that we are made from different egg-whites, from different eggs (Laughter and applause). And don’t misinterpret my symbolism [eggs in Spanish idiom can refer to testicles] (Laughter): I’m referring to the egg-whites used in a meringue; but perhaps we [here in Cuba] are dealing with dragons’ eggs.29

Cuba’s revolution was not going to fall apart if Castro had anything to do with it. Gorbachëv was tossed into the mockery-box occupied in Castro’s speeches by American presidents from John Kennedy to George H. Bush.

He did not flinch at explaining to his people why difficulties were growing. Castro explained to a young audience in November 1991:

at the time when the Revolution triumphed we were using four million tons of petroleum, and a ton of sugar bought seven tons of petroleum, seven! . . . The point is that now, with the monopoly prices of petroleum and with the depressed prices of sugar on what we call the world’s dump market, to buy a ton of petroleum you need almost a ton of sugar: you can buy 1.3 or 1.4 tons of petroleum with a ton of sugar.30

However tough things were, Castro urged determination and pride. It was not in Cuba that people lacked food, shelter, education and healthcare. Its example was a beacon to the rest of Latin America. Cubans could still snub their noses at ‘Yankee imperialism’.

Not all foreign leaders attracted disrespect. Castro discreetly sought a softening of relations with the Americans after Bill Clinton won the US presidential election of 1993. This had a slighter effect than the attempt at conciliation with the Catholic Church. Cuba hosted a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Four years later Castro welcomed ex-President Jimmy Carter. But simultaneously he screwed down the clamps on incipient protest. Voluntary emigration remained illegal and captured escapers were treated as enemies of the people. (This was the official line even though remittances from exiles in the USA provided a lifeline to the Cuban economy.) Castro in his seventies had grey hair and when he greeted the ailing Pope John Paul II he looked more like a sprightly but elderly aristocrat – he had changed his military fatigues for a smart dark suit – than the athletic rebel of years gone by. Yet he refused to give his enemies the pleasure of witnessing his disappointment. Repeatedly and at length he expressed pride in his Revolution’s achievements in education, employment, sport and healthcare. The goal of an orderly communist society and a smoothly functioning communist economy had long since become unrealistic. But Cuba, as it re-entered the force-field of world capitalism, had much to show for its decades of standing up to the powers of the West.

Castro saw his Revolution as fitting the Marxist-Leninist perspective. The USSR had laid the foundations and built the walls but its edifice had collapsed, while Cuba, small, defenceless yet resolute Cuba, had survived. He also regarded Cuban achievement as a model in its own right for Latin America, for sub-Saharan Africa and for any other country that might care to follow it.

But, much as he had done for the island, he had not succeeded in building a vibrant economy and a settled social consensus. He could not do without his brother’s large security agencies and their prisons for political dissenters. Communists could blame a lot on the long blockade of their country by the USA, and their case was more robust than when Soviet leaders had said the same about themselves in the 1920s. But, once the Cuban Revolution had been directed towards a one-party, one-ideology state, an arbitrary police dictatorship and a state-owned economy – not to mention the caudillo-style despotism of el Máximo Líder – they were bound to come up against difficulties already experienced in other communist states. Castro could lock up the opposition but could not halt the popular grumbling, the political evasions and the economic rundown. His rhetoric soared above the speeches of his communist contemporaries. But the inherent logic of communism was irrefutable. Castro in old age knew he had long since lost the fundamental struggle even though he gave no sign of understanding why. His health suddenly deteriorated in summer 2006. Without him, public life in Cuba was thrown into confusion. Speculation about Cuban politics after Castro began in earnest.