30. COMMUNIST ORDER

Communist states isolated their peoples from alien influences. Walls, landmines, barbed wire, censorship and propaganda held the people of a third of the world’s earth surface in quarantine from capitalism, representative democracy and civic freedom. Rulers in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China initially assumed that seclusion was only temporary. They thought that the superiority of communism over capitalism would soon be evident to every well-intentioned person of sound mind and that the requirement for security precautions would disappear. There was never such an outcome. The immuring of citizens within prescribed territorial – and political and mental – borders became immutable policy wherever there was a communist revolution and a one-party state. The leaders themselves huddled behind the same walls. Albania’s Enver Hoxha was unusual in being well read in the European literature classics – and Molotov thought his cosmopolitanism a reason for suspicion.1 But Hoxha was a conventional communist dictator in denying his people access to disapproved alien culture.²

Traditions in countries such as Russia and China had an influence on this. Travellers before the twentieth century recorded most Russians as deeply xenophobic, and China’s emperors, officials and people had always been inclined to regard the rest of the world with both condescension and suspicion. Yet such attitudes hardly explain by themselves why Russian and Chinese Marxists, espousing a secular ideology of Western origin, came to distrust spontaneous popular interactions with the West. Marx and Engels were proud cosmopolitans. If Lenin admired any particular people in the world, it was not the Russians but the Germans. What is more, several communist countries had a history of welcoming foreign contacts over many centuries. Czechoslovaks and Hungarians longed for admission to the community of nations after its people had been liberated from the empire of the Habsburgs in 1918–19 and subsequently from the Third Reich. Cubans were eager for better access to world trade and culture. The people of that small island flourished whenever they could make contact with friendly foreigners – it was Cuba’s openness to influences from abroad that had attracted the American author Ernest Hemingway and persuaded him to take up residence almost until he died in 1961.

So why did communist rule in so many cases carry the same basic features as it emerged from its various periods of national gestation? Doubtless deliberate imitation was at work. The USSR had elaborated the model, which was widely regarded as a highly effective one. Other countries predictably copied it to a greater or lesser extent. In eastern Europe no alternative was permitted. But objective pressures of rulership were also pushing developments in this direction. Most communist states found it difficult to consolidate their rule without introducing a quarantine regime. All had citizens who resented their political, social, cultural and religious policies, and there would inevitably be some attempt to seek support from sympathetic organisations abroad. People in general would seek to know for themselves what was going on elsewhere. Whenever they found that aspects of life were better outside the communist countries they would become frustrated with an economic order that repeatedly failed to fulfil its promises.

No wonder Marxist-Leninist rulers disliked their citizens coming into unsupervised contact with foreigners from ‘capitalist and developing countries’. Many rulers were agitated even about interaction with people from other communist states. The authorities in China were so suspicious of the USSR that they deported Russian emigrants who had fled the USSR in the 1920s. Leaders of Soviet republics in the west of the USSR regarded visitors from eastern Europe with suspicion in the months during and after the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968.3 During the long emergency caused by outbreaks of popular unrest in Poland in 1970 and again from 1980 the Kremlin often lowered the quotas of Polish holidaymakers to the USSR. The worry was that the rebellious bacillus of the Gdask shipyards or the churches of Kraków might infect the minds of Soviet citizens. The Soviet Politburo continually gauged the level of discontent among workers of the USSR while the KGB warned of the murmurings against the authorities.⁴ If the ideas of Solidarity were imported, there could be trouble on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. Such worries were not confined to the USSR or to the 1970s and 1980s. Hostility between Hungary and Romania since the 1960s had led both governments to restrict movement across their common frontier except on official business. Nicolae Ceauescu systematically persecuted the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. The last thing he wanted was a regular tourist exchange with communist Hungary.

Soviet citizens going abroad were issued with confidential instructions from the Central Committee Secretariat about their behaviour. There were fourteen Basic Rules. Travellers were to serve as bearers of the communist message. They were to travel in a designated group with its appointed leader. They had to show spirit in defending Soviet internal and external policies. They were to exercise unceasing vigilance since foreign intelligence agencies would pounce on any weakness. Relations with people in capitalist countries were to be restricted to official business. No personal documents were to be taken out of the USSR. On arrival in a foreign country, Soviet citizens were to present themselves at their nearest embassy or consulate. No paid private work should be undertaken abroad. No valuable gifts should be accepted. No debts should be run up. It was ‘not recommended’ to take an overnight train journey with a foreigner of the opposite sex. (Nothing needed to be said about homosexuals since same-sex relationships were punishable under Soviet law.) Hotel rooms were to be kept spotless. Trips around the country required the sanction of the appointed group leader. Any official taking relatives to a foreign country was to ensure that they did not pry into his or her business.5

Travellers had to write up their reports within a fortnight of returning home and to provide information of benefit to the Motherland. But what could they tell? By limiting the freedom of their citizens to mingle with foreigners, the average communist regime deprived itself of the full potential of economic, scientific and cultural intercourse. The truth is that the regimes were anyway averse to finding out what they did not want to know about the West. Ignorance for them was a complacent pleasure.

Only trusted citizens, of course, were allowed abroad – and trust was enjoyed by mere dozens of people in the extreme case of North Korea. Even in the Soviet Union it was a definite privilege for anyone to take a summer vacation in other countries, including those of eastern Europe. Frontiers were strictly patrolled, especially those abutting capitalist countries. Thousands of refugees fled the German Democratic Republic. After controls at the checkpoints between the eastern and western sectors in Berlin were tightened, people swam across the canals or hid themselves in car boots in order to leave East Berlin. Some sprinted through customs posts under a hail of bullets. Steadily the methods of illegal departure became more refined, as Hermann Borchert of the West Berlin fire service recalled: ‘It became the custom that people who wanted to escape . . . would throw little pieces of paper out of [their] windows [across the sector frontier] into Bernauer Strasse. The number of the building, the floor, the window – second or third window – was written on it, and the time, ten o’clock for example, that they wanted to jump.’ It was the duty of the firemen to position themselves so as to catch the refugees on fire-fighting blankets when they leaped down.6

Rescues remained possible because the demarcation line between the sectors ran down the middle of Bernauer Strasse. Party leader Walter Ulbricht thought Khrushchëv was showing ‘unnecessary tolerance’ of the West;⁷ he asked him to send him people from the USSR as a replacement for the German refugees. Khrushchëv gruffly replied: ‘Imagine how a Soviet worker would feel. He won the war and now he has to clean your toilets.’⁸ The constant tension led Khrushchëv to sanction Ulbricht’s request to build a wall between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin in August 1961. The Soviet ambassador reported: ‘We have a yes from Moscow.’⁹ Since the USSR barricaded itself from foreign countries, Khrushchëv had decided that Ulbricht could not be refused his request. Despite the adverse publicity, the preliminary work was accomplished late at night on 12 August 1961. Berliners awoke next day to find a six-foot-high barbed-wire fence between East and West Berlin. Soon it was turned into a brick wall. Buildings were knocked down to clear the ground near by. Watchtowers were erected at distances suitable for marksmen to shoot down refugees who dashed across the strip towards the wall. Such measures stemmed the haemorrhage of people from East to West. The exodus of doctors, teachers and scientists was halted and East Germany became a walled garden of communist development. The political price was huge. If East Germany was paradise and West Germany was hell, why did people want to flee the heavenly conditions?

Escape attempts went on happening despite the hazards. There were youths who trained at pole-vaulting and tried to get over the wall without ladders. Ingenious tunnels were dug. Over two hundred fugitives, however, were killed before the Berlin Wall was pulled down. Equal peril faced those who sought to flee Cuba after its revolution. Sometimes whole families got into inflatable rubber dinghies and paddled across the Straits of Florida to the USA. The trip was arduous because of storms, sharks and the heat of the sun. Hundreds drowned or were taken into custody by Cuban forces.

No communist state, furthermore, lasted for long without a network of prisons and labour camps for political dissenters. Backbreaking and mind-numbing work was assigned to convicts and brutal punishments were meted out. Confidential informers were used to tell the authorities about who was criticising the state order. It is reckoned, for example, that one in 120 citizens of the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s performed this function for the state. An informer had to be thought ‘an honourable, sincere and friendly person’.10 They were seldom paid for their work; but preferential treatment was often enough to get people to agree to do it. Their victims no longer automatically ended up in jail. When he was KGB chief Yuri Andropov led the way in treating young critics as misguided delinquents. His officers visited their parents and delivered a warning that their sons or daughters would be arrested if their behaviour did not change. Adults might still escape incarceration but be placed in psychiatric wards. The People’s Republic of China too adopted this technique for some prominent dissenters. Political opposition was treated as a form of madness, and victims were subjected to cocktails of dangerous anti-psychotic drugs. This was torture as bad as anything endured in the camps.¹¹

Preventive censorship anyhow restricted access to undesirable ideas. Maoist Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution burned priceless old copies of the Chinese classics. The Soviet leaders retained a vestigial respect for the importance of ‘world literature’ as well as the Russian literary canon, and after Stalin’s death they published copious translations of contemporary Western fiction – or at least those works thought to be either left-wing in orientation or apolitical and unsalacious. John Steinbeck, Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway came into the first category while Agatha Christie and Professor C. Northcote Parkinson were placed in the second. (How did Rudyard Kipling wriggle through the sieve? Perhaps his reputation as a jingoist imperialist was thought undeserved. But Christie? Were the censors fooled or were they themselves mildly subversive?) Films were selected on the same basis. Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (‘Bicycle Thieves’) and the French science-fiction hero Fantomas were favourites in the 1960s. Readers in fact interpreted these writers in ways unanticipated by the censors. Hemingway, for instance, was loved less for his exposure of capitalistic corruption than for his celebration of wine, women and song.

Albania pushed the door further ajar. This was a country justifiably notorious for having the most hermetically sealed society in Europe. Yet its leader Enver Hoxha persuaded himself that the films of British comedian Norman Wisdom offered a deep critique of capitalism. Wisdom certainly spotlighted unfairness in society in his role as the sweet-natured Mr Pitkin struggling to survive in a snobbish society. Albanian audiences loved his work for its slapstick jollity – as well as for the glimpses it gave of well-dressed, well-fed people – rather than for the supposed ideology. (Wisdom’s popularity outlasted communism and he was awarded the freedom of the city of Tirana in 1995.) Hoxha’s predilection for British comedy was nevertheless an aberration from his norms of rulership. And all across Europe east of the River Elbe there was a cultural sanctimoniousness that bored spectators and listeners rigid. The unsmiling faces of TV presenters set the tone. The endless news programmes which claimed that communism was advancing ever upwards to a glorious future were made bearable only by the latest sports results – and of course the east Europeans adored it if any of their teams or individual athletes worsted their competition from the USSR.

It was hardly surprising that Moscow and Beijing continued to regard the Western media as a pernicious influence. Soviet radio jamming was fierce and the expertise for this facility was requested by communist leaderships in eastern Europe.12 Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe could not be heard there for many years. Radio sets were redesigned so as to exclude the possibility of listening to undesirable short-wave frequencies.¹³ Under Brezhnev, though, the jamming was suspended in the years when the USSR pursued détente with the USA. Once the Soviet television industry got under way, indeed, Estonian viewers could pick up Finnish television (which carried a lot of American and British shows in English); and, despite being chided by Erich Honecker, millions of East Germans tuned into West Germany’s TV programmes. Honecker benefited economically too much from calmed relations with Bonn to disrupt the transmissions. These were breaks in the general pattern. Most citizens of communist countries were kept in ignorance about what was happening abroad except through officially approved sources.

Yet Western trends continued to seep into communist countries like a refreshing liquid. Dissenters such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia listened to smuggled records of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Mothers of Invention. Cultural rebelliousness was alive among youngsters who wanted to taste the forbidden fruit of the West. The American and European male fashion for long hair crossed frontiers in the 1970s. Albania stood out against this. The country’s few foreign tourists were inspected at the border and men were given a close trim if the length of their locks was judged improper. A close trim in Tirana was closer than anywhere in the world except for prisons. A British academic who journeyed with a tourist group that included most members of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Faroe Islands took the precaution of having a short back-and-sides in London before departure. This failed to make him welcome at Tirana airport, where he was separated from his Faroese companions and clipped again like a straying sheep. Hoxha was determined to prevent cultural contamination.14 Scissors were a weapon of choice against those who would defile Albanian Maoist propriety.¹⁴

Official distaste for rock music served only to make it more popular. Even in China the same trend was taking hold, albeit against greater obstacles. Marxist-Leninist ideology had ever fewer true believers. Mao Zedong had been able to carry through his Cultural Revolution because he could count on hundreds millions of naive peasants or poorly informed urban inhabitants to do his bidding; he had also exploited the deep feelings of social resentment. But more and more people became less gullible. The inhabitants of Chinese coastal cities knew enough about entertainment abroad to want to possess copies of its vinyl records or cassette tapes.

Unknowingly the authorities in every communist state had turned themselves into pompous, po-faced conservators of Marxist-Leninist propriety. Even in Cuba, whose popular culture was not excessively restricted, citizens had to avoid making jokes about the Castro brothers and Che Guevara. When saying something risqué about Fidel, the safe practice was to mime a beard with one’s hand instead of mentioning his name. Communism could not laugh at itself – a damning indictment of its lack of basic self-confidence. The exceptions were communists who lived outside the communist states. A British communist parody of the Gilbert and Sullivan song ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ included the memorable stanza:

I am the very model of a modern Marxist-Leninist,

I’m anti-war and anti-God, and very anti-feminist;

My thinking’s dialectical, my wisdom undebatable,

When I negate negations, they’re undoubtedly negatable.

And yet I’m no ascetic – I am always full of bonhomie

When lecturing to classes on the primitive economy;

And comrades all agree that they have never heard a smarter cuss

Explain the basic reasons for the slave revolt of Spartacus.

Chorus: Explain the basic reasons for the slave revolt of Spartacus.¹⁵

Such levity, even in an amateurishly duplicated magazine, was inconceivable in Prague, Hanoi or Pyongyang.

The authorities in some communist states – most notably China and North Korea – went on much as before. Others modified the contents of indoctrination. (The monotonous style never changed.) Marxism-Leninism in Brezhnev’s USSR ceased to claim that the Soviet order was catching up with the material standard of living attained in the advanced capitalist countries.16 Perennial shortages of agricultural and industrial goods made this no longer believable. Khrushchëv had ineptly engaged in an impromptu debate in July 1959 with Vice-President Richard Nixon at the US Trade and Cultural Fair in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, where they disputed the rival merits of the American and Soviet ways of life. The two men stopped outside an exhibit of a kitchen built in the USA, and Nixon praised a washing-machine as a labour-saving device; he had earlier cooed over a colour TV set. Khrushchëv on live radio replied: ‘Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets. We have a saying: if you have bedbugs you have to catch one and pour boiling water into its ear.’ Thus he expressed his total indifference to the drudgery of life of his Soviet female listeners. Nixon and Khrushchëv could only agree in their dislike of jazz (although Nixon confided that his daughters liked it – and of course they were free to enjoy it whereas potential fans in the USSR were not).

If Soviet leaders needed a lesson about public opinion, it was given in Novocherkassk in south Russia in June 1962 when angry crowds rioted about meat price rises. Party and police functionaries were lynched before the armed forces reimposed order. Presidium member Anastas Mikoyan, sent to the city to parley with the crowds, returned a chastened politician.¹⁷ Moscow dealt bloodily with the inciters of trouble but also increased the budget for consumer goods. Yet the supply was never enough to satisfy demand. So the authorities concentrated on saying that the collectivist principles of social order were morally superior to the decadent West.¹⁸ Soviet consumers lacked the meat, vegetables and domestic equipment they wanted; but they were asked to take pride in the spiritual benefits of their hardship. Communist collectivism was rated higher than capitalist individualism and greed. Squalor, apparently, was a virtue so long as it was communally suffered.

The leaders exempted themselves from any self-denial. The system of privileges consolidated by Stalin in the USSR was replicated in other communist countries. Central nomenklaturas enjoyed dachas, chauffeurs, nannies, tutors and a varied diet. Not content to have their snouts in the trough, they had their front trotters in there too. The only limits on the self-indulgence of each leadership were those of its taste – and this had never been a strong point among communism’s luminaries. When US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated with Leonid Brezhnev, he was surprised by the tatty décor in the General Secretary’s dacha. The Soviet dekulakisation campaign of the early 1930s had depleted the quality of available craftsmanship. Brezhnev, an ice-hockey fan, was a connoisseur more of American limousines than of the higher arts. He also had a passion for killing bears. His bodyguards were sickened by the sight of defenceless cubs being lined up for him to take pot-shots at.19 No Soviet or Chinese citizen knew anything directly about this seamy side of things. The exceptions were the leadership’s retainers – housemaids, bodyguards, chauffeurs, perhaps the gardeners – who knew better than to talk out of turn.

People engaged in double-think. Above all, they practised doublespeak: there was no possibility of making a career for oneself unless formal obeisance was made to the pieties of Marxism-Leninism. They accepted official ideas, at least to a degree, in some parts of their lives while rejecting them in others. Work was one thing, family another. This is how Václav Havel was to describe the situation: ‘All of us have become accustomed to the totalitarian system, accepted it as an unalterable fact and therefore kept it running . . . None of us is merely a victim of it, because all of us helped to create it together.’²⁰ Popular collusion was the norm in all communist societies where people had lost hope of a realistic alternative and where the barrage of punitive sanctions was maintained by the authorities. The degree of opposition varied from country to country. Where the regimes had signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 the maltreatment of anti-communist militants was somewhat lightened, and Amnesty International and International PEN as well as Western governments sometimes secured liberation for leading figures. But Asian communism remained as repressive as ever; and many European communist states continued in the old ways regardless of their international legal commitments.

Organised dissent consequently gained few adherents in most countries. The security police were not the only problem. The technical facilities for disseminating ideas were few and far between. Printing presses, which the Bolsheviks had routinely acquired before 1917, were unavailable. While photocopiers were provided as a matter of course in offices in the West in the 1970s, they remained a rare and carefully restricted piece of equipment in communist states – and the same was true of PCs and email access in the following decade. In the USSR, China and eastern Europe the groups of dissenters made do with laboriously typed copies of pamphlets using carbon paper. They also recorded speeches on re-recordable cassette tapes. They transmitted their works abroad through trusted messengers.

Yet the majority of citizens put up with communism and only rarely engaged in strikes or demonstrations against their rulers. They resigned themselves to the boring monotony of life under communism. Styles of shoes, trousers and shirts were deliberately limited in number. No communist leadership allowed its factories to produce the bright clothing widely available in the capitalist parts of the world. Jeans were a black-market item. Indeed fashion was almost a dirty word. Soviet rulers nevertheless recognised the need at least to satisfy the popular demand for modern household equipment. Washing-machines and colour televisions, derided by Khrushchëv, were manufactured abundantly under Brezhnev. But poorer countries like China and Cuba stuck to the old Marxist-Leninist norms. Not even the wealthier communist states had a strong market in private cars. Belgrade in the mid-1960s was said to be the only communist capital with a parking problem.21 Official reluctance to prioritise the manufacturing of vehicles for personal possession was influenced by ideology. Transport was meant to be a public undertaking. Castro asked an interviewer: ‘What would happen if every Indian, every Eskimo had a car to drive?’²² He clearly thought the question did not need an answer. He spoke in the long tradition of communism which put forward Spartan sufficiency and uniformity as the ideal for most people.²³

An ecological case, it cannot be denied, could be made against gas-guzzling automobiles. But Soviet and east European leaders failed to make it; they had in fact come to assume that capitalist consumerism had to be emulated to a certain extent. The problem for them was the economic framework they had inherited. Communism was everywhere tied to central planning mechanisms as well as quantitative indices of success. Its leaders persistently criminalised entrepreneurial initiative, market freedom and personal profit. Until Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China from 1976 there was no fundamental challenge to such assumptions. The conclusion is inescapable that the failure of communist countries to satisfy the material wants of their citizens was a derivative of their Soviet-style order.

Communist economic policy was anyway unconstrained by considerations of ecology or morality. The USSR, followed by the People’s Republic of China, ravaged the natural environment in pursuit of industrial might. Without doubt, capitalism too has a terrible record in this respect. But, where liberal democracy, assertive newspapers and independent courts have existed, limitations on the destruction have often eventually been introduced. This was not the case in China where vast forests and lakes were devastated by the building of reservoirs and hydro-electric dams. Mining enterprises destroyed the landscape in countless regions. The Soviet Union too was afflicted. Deadly pollution was allowed to occur in Lake Baikal. The Aral Sea dried up. Large tracts of Kazakhstan were turned into a dustbowl by the virgin-lands campaign in agriculture. In Poland the air pollution in steel towns such as Katowice and Nowa Huta caused chronic bronchitis and asthma. The misuse of industrial chemicals turned the River Danube into a liquid poison flowing through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The Black Sea became a poisonous waste, dangerous to swimmers and fatal to its fish. The imperatives of the central planners extinguished every inhibition as officials at the centre and in the localities struggled to hit their output targets.

Where fundamental reform was avoided, communist rulers sometimes turned to nationalism. Originally communism had been internationalist. Marx and Engels had hated nationalism. Lenin, despite his compromises with ‘ideology’ in the face of insurmountable problems, lived and died an internationalist. Communism had long since combined internationalist and nationalist purposes under Stalin, Mao, Gomułka and Ceauescu. This certainly involved a betrayal of communism. But it did not mean a complete abandonment of communist purposes. From Stalin to Ceauescu the ruling ethos appealed to the national spirit while holding close to several basic Marxist-Leninist ideas.

Ceauescu vaunted Romania as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire’s province of Dacia, and archaeologists searched for continuities with ancient culture. He endlessly goaded the Soviet Politburo and put himself forward as the nation’s greatest ever protector. He aimed at economic autarky for Romania. This tin-pot dictator was treated as a hero in the struggle against the USSR. He received the Order of the Bath from Queen Elizabeth II on the recommendation of Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. Liberal Party leader David Steel sent him a Labrador puppy. Nicolae’s wife Elena strutted the world in her self-appointed role as a world-class chemist; and her penchant for clothes and shoes rivalled the record of Imelda Marcos in quantity and tastelessness. The Ceauescus, man and wife, planned a luxurious life in the People’s Palace which was being built in Bucharest’s old quarter after twenty-six churches and seven thousand homes had been demolished. The Pentagon in Washington is the only edifice with a larger cubic capacity. Yet while the Palace sparkled with 4,500 chandeliers, ordinary Romanians had to put up with regular cuts in electricity supply. It was modern communism with medieval appurtenances.

British ministers in 1978 were dreading the Ceauescu family’s visit to London; they were aware of the boorish behaviour to be expected. In Venezuela the Romanian President had thrown a tantrum when denied permission to hunt wild animals under a special conservation order. He had demanded a double bed even for short plane trips across country. (A Foreign Office official dryly noted that ‘he did not specify the purpose of the double bed’.) Worries were expressed about Ceauescu’s son Nicu and his demand to be provided with a woman – ‘purpose again unspecified’.24 Nicolae Ceauescu himself had tastes of spectacular vulgarity, astonishing diplomats in Bucharest by holding a reception seated on a large golden throne.

Communist rulers looked after themselves and if ever they worried about the people’s welfare it was only after their own wants had been satisfied. There was a hierarchy of material conditions in the communist world. The Yugoslavs, with the closest commercial links with the West, did best in the range and quality of goods available. Next came the East Germans, followed by the Hungarians and the Poles. Citizens of the USSR trailed in after them; and, still more galling to Russian national pride, the Georgians and Estonians in the Soviet Union enjoyed better conditions than those available to the Russians. The stereotypical Georgian, in the Russian popular imagination, was a swarthy ‘Oriental’ who smuggled oranges in large suitcases from his collective farm to the large cities of the RSFSR. That fruit could be an item of internal contraband speaks volumes about communism’s economic inefficiency. But plenty of nations were worse off than the Russians. Chinese, Albanian and Romanian societies contained millions of ordinary citizens who had to work hard for pitifully poor wages, food and social amenities. If it had not been for their instruments of control – one-party state, censorship, arbitrary police, labour camps and the comprehensive quarantining of their people – communist leaderships around the world would have fallen from power in an instant.

 

31. RETHINKING COMMUNISM

The reforms in the USSR after Stalin’s death fertilised a regrowth in sympathy for the USSR in the West. But no sooner had this occurred than trouble arose. The invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 caused an immense outcry. Not a single TV or radio station in the West endorsed Moscow’s cause and the only newspapers which condoned the Soviet invasions were those belonging to communist parties. Continuity was seen between the terror of the 1930s and the suppression of freedom in eastern Europe. Intellectuals lined up to condemn the USSR. Among them was the philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre. Refusing to tar all communist states with the same anti-Soviet brush, he found other shrines at which to worship in Castro’s Cuba and in Mao’s China.1

At times it seemed as if Castro had trouble in fending off Sartre and other visiting admirers. Mao rarely received visitors except foreign statesmen. As China’s embassies supplied bookshops with cheap copies he became the world’s bestselling – or best-donated – author. He never ventured abroad, not even to North Korea. Chinese and Cuban spokesmen composed fairy stories about their countries just as their communist forebears had done in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. Sartre in his politics pushed aside the icy scepticism of his philosophy, swallowing the propaganda like a hungry child. Such news as emerged from Cuba and China – as had been true in the USSR in the 1930s – was heavily censored. China’s propaganda was especially brazen in rejecting reports of famine, labour camps and popular discontent, and journalists who persisted with intrusive investigations were expelled. Visitors to the Soviet Union had to stay within twenty-five kilometres of their designated destinations unless special permission was granted. An innocent tourist taking a photograph of ships sailing up the River Neva in Leningrad was liable to arrest as a spy. While criticising Stalin, Khrushchëv reserved the right to set the limits for what could be said by others. Brezhnev continued the tradition.

Soviet rulers kept up the effort to disseminate a positive image of the country abroad. The Kremlin could boast of huge advances in space technology. In October 1957 the Americans were foiled in the race to be the first to put a satellite into orbit around the earth by the launch of Sputnik I. Soviet scientists went further in November by putting a stray dog named Laika into Sputnik II. (The unfortunate creature did not survive the experience and the technological achievement evoked some criticism.) In April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first man to circumnavigate the world in a space flight. Although the USA eventually overtook the Soviet programme, the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semi-official ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of deStalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR.

Khrushchëv’s record in promoting the advantages of the ‘planned economy’ was more mixed. Stupidly he restored the pseudobiologist Timofei Lysenko to respectability, and once again there was ludicrous boasting about wheat being growable on the Arctic ice. Khrushchëv promoted him avidly.2 Nevertheless Soviet statistics were often taken at their face value; this was a period when only experts in Western intelligence agencies and universities discussed their doubts about them. The USSR seemingly had an economy second only to the USA in quantity and – at least in some sectors – quality of output. The continuing reliance of Soviet civilian industry on the purchase or theft of Western technology was barely ventilated; and American, European and Japanese firms doing business with the USSR as always refrained from advertising their commercial operations. This enabled Moscow to go on asserting that the Soviet order had overcome the cyclical problems of capitalist economics. Uninterrupted progress was predicted for the USSR. American presidents assumed that the rival superpower would not collapse in their lifetime. John Kennedy was impressed by the Sputniks. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan worried that the USSR might indeed prove its superiority as a model of economic development.³

Both Khrushchëv and his successor Brezhnev asserted that communism around the world outdid the West’s advanced capitalist countries in freedom and welfare. They ignored the point that elections were pointless when a single candidate from one party alone was allowed to stand in them; they glossed over the detention of political, intellectual and religious dissenters in the Gulag. But Soviet leaders were frequently thought to score better on other matters. There was no unemployment in the USSR. Citizens were guaranteed shelter, heating, fuel, schooling, public transport and healthcare at little or no cost. Tourists to the Soviet Union reported that muggings were rare and graffiti scrawls practically unknown; and neon-light advertisements were nowhere to be seen. What is more, Soviet spokesmen castigated racism, imperialism and nationalism. The USSR was a multinational state. Its spokesmen insisted that it had eliminated the iniquities of imperialism, nationalism and racism. Although the European empires dissolved themselves in the 1950s and 1960s, the former colonies continued to face difficulties of economic dependency and under-development. Soviet Azerbaijan was compared favourably with ex-British Nigeria, ex-French Algeria and ex-Dutch Malaysia.

Commentators – at least those who were not committed anti-communists – were often confused and under-informed in what they said about the communist order. Many experienced a mixture of fear, admiration and revulsion. Moreover, the desire to avoid policies which might spark off the Third World War prompted many people to try and think the best of the USSR. The resentments of the Ukrainians and Georgians against Moscow were overlooked. The shoddiness of Soviet clothes, shoes and furniture was rarely highlighted. Politicians and journalists in any case hardly ever visited the communist countries. Impressed by space flights, they seldom asked how efficiently the USSR’s vast output of steel, diamonds, nickel, fertilisers and tractors was being integrated into the civilian economy. The shortcomings in the networks of roads, hospitals and shops were little known. Soviet spokesmen exploited this situation. Khrushchëv, brash and mouthy, sometimes made a fool of himself. He did this most notoriously when he banged a shoe on his desk in the course of a speech to the United Nations Assembly by British premier Macmillan.4 The embarrassment was ended when Macmillan courteously asked for a translation. Brezhnev was more self-restrained, and, until his health began to fail him, he cut an imposing figure when negotiating with US politicians. These Soviet leaders and their spokesmen were masters of the arts of boastful claims and rhetorical evasion.

Khrushchëv, unlike Brezhnev, was a reformer. Many of those communists who admired him felt that his reforms had not gone far enough. Among them was Roy Medvedev, who wrote Let History Judge about the iniquities of Stalin and his policies but could get it published only in the West. Medvedev argued for a return to Leninist norms. He wanted electivity to be restored to internal party life. He called for multi-candidate elections to the soviets and for wider limits in public debate. He saw Stalin’s despotism as marking a break with the desirable traditions of the October Revolution. Thus there was nothing essentially wrong with communism; it simply needed to be reformed for its own good.5 Many of these ideas were shared by the East German writer Rudolf Bahro who argued in The Alternative in Eastern Europe that the healthier elements in the communist parties were genuinely capable of ridding the Soviet Bloc of authoritarian, bureaucratic phenomena.⁶ Other dissenting analysts came to more radical conclusions. The leading nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov developed a fundamentally liberal critique of the USSR, demanding the institution of universal civil freedoms.⁷

The glass in the official picture was also being shattered by literary writers. Two Soviet accounts in particular captivated Western opinion. The poet Boris Pasternak wrote a novel, Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in Moscow but appeared abroad in translations from 1957. Its panoramic viewpoint on the civil war cast a shadow over the motives and practices of the early communists. This plunged Pasternak into political hot water and he had to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958. His role as a leading critic of the Soviet regime was picked up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose later works were published in the West from the end of the 1960s. His documentary account of the labour-camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, was a bestseller in 1974. It pulled no punches. Solzhenitsyn had talked to survivors of the camps and assembled such documentation as was available despite the censorship. The gruesome techniques of arrest, interrogation, ‘confession’ and forced labour were traced from the October Revolution. When he was deported from the USSR in 1974, Solzhenitsyn continued his campaign against the iniquities of communist repression. Every year, too, novels and poems by other writers were smuggled out of eastern Europe and China with searing messages about the behaviour of communist regimes.

Meanwhile Amnesty International and the International PEN Club exposed the abuses by the Soviet, east European and Chinese authorities. Christian and Islamic organisations maintained a well-informed critique. The Campaign for Soviet Jewry raised the matter of the difficulties facing Jews who expressed a desire to emigrate. The east European diasporas in the West intensified their struggle to convince public opinion that the Iron Curtain should somehow be pulled down. Chinese communities around the world had associations dedicated to the reintroduction of freedom to their homeland.

The popular media rarely missed a chance to depict communism as a malignant force in the world. The James Bond films, like the original novels by Ian Fleming, pitched the West against the USSR. Goodness and valour fought a duel with evil. From Russia with Love included the character Rosa Klebb, a Soviet agent with unprepossessing looks and hatred of freedom and democracy. Some authors and filmmakers offered a more measured depiction. John le Carré, who like Fleming had once worked for British intelligence, wrote thrillers suggesting that cynicism and skulduggery were more or less the same on both sides in the Cold War. Yet he also gave a clear account of the dreary oppressiveness of the German Democratic Republic in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Likewise Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr Strangelove contained American characters who were even scarier than their Soviet counterparts. A bumbling US President gets into a diplomatic crisis over a nuclear alert and frantically pleads with the USSR ambassador to calm nerves in the Kremlin. Then a rogue air force commander launches a rocket at Moscow. The implication in the film’s last scene is that the Third World War is about to begin. Although East and West were shown as being incompetent to the point of madness, there was no veiling of the dreadful oppressiveness of the USSR.

Marxists in the West increasingly agreed that something had gone seriously wrong with the October Revolution, and debate about the Soviet Union was rejoined after Khrushchëv’s Secret Speech. While Stalin was alive, few had dared move an inch away from his analysis. The exceptions had been the Trotskyists and other grouplets on the margins of the political far left which repudiated ‘Stalinism’.

Discomfort even gnawed at the mind of the Italian Communist Party’s leader Palmiro Togliatti. He had been loyal to the Soviet Union since the 1920s. Unlike his contemporary Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti found nothing basically wrong with Soviet Marxism. By denouncing Stalin out of the blue, Khrushchëv put him in an awkward position. Togliatti could hardly deny the historical facts as stated, and his party remembered how closely he had collaborated with Stalin – and the Italian non-communist press never tired of pointing this out. Somehow he had to clear his own name. He did this cunningly. Instead of rehearsing his own biography, he focused on the intellectual flimsiness of Khrushchëv’s case. Togliatti declared that the Secret Speech failed to offer a properly Marxist account. He denied that one malign individual – Stalin – and a few cronies such as Beria could have constituted the sole cause of the abuses in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s. He insisted that there must have been a wide range of reasons. Like Trotski, he pointed to a ‘bureaucratic degeneration’ which gave power to a stratum of party officials with a political and material interest in the authoritarian kind of state which had been consolidated in the 1930s. The ‘cult of the individual’ was not enough to explain this.

As his health deteriorated in summer 1964, Togliatti wrote out a political testament while on holiday in Crimea. This became known as the Yalta Memorandum. Togliatti asserted that every country had to be allowed its own strategy. He called for any polemics, especially with the Chinese Communist Party, to be couched in respectful language. He asked for Soviet spokesmen to cease pretending that no serious problems existed in the USSR. Togliatti contended that unity among the various parties was possible only if the independence of each of them was protected.8 The Italian Communist Party leadership after his death paced further in the direction he had mapped out. The Eurocommunist strategy plotted by Enrico Berlinguer went further by expressly rejecting the USSR as a model for Italian political development. The suppression of civic rights appalled him. Yet he never rejected the October Revolution⁹ – he could never go that far without undermining the basic rationale for his party’s existence. Some of his younger acolytes tried to resolve his intellectual contradictions for him by promoting the notion that Soviet history would have taken a more desirable path if Bukharin had won the factional struggle against Stalin in the late 1920s.

Communists in western Europe in any case introduced no new basic ideas to Marxism itself. Others saw this as a situation to be rectified. Among them were several who wished to resuscitate the old strand in Marxist thought in favour of people’s self-emancipation. An ageing proponent was the Hungarian György Lukács.¹⁰ Returning to Budapest from exile in Moscow after the Second World War, he became Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s government in 1956. Lukács regarded himself as a Leninist while remaining true to ideas which had been denounced as anti-Leninist in the late 1920s in the USSR. Once more he argued publicly that the working class needed to assert its untrammelled authority in the revolutionary process. His point was that capitalism produced a condition of ‘alienation’ of people from their full human potential, and Lukács believed the workers alone to be capable of surmounting the condition and then transforming society as a whole.11

Another veteran communist calling for the revision of conventional contemporary Marxism was Herbert Marcuse. After emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, he took American citizenship and wrote prolifically about the need to graft several intellectual trends of the twentieth century – especially Freudianism and German sociology – on to the tree of the Marxist tradition. Marcuse rejected Stalin’s version of communism as dogmatic, narrow and plain wrong in its interpretation of Marx.¹² He was a freer spirit than Lukács and refused to recognise Lenin as an absolute authority. He insisted that sexual drives as well as economic imperatives help to explain the mechanisms of politics and society. He scorned the Communist Party of the USA and refused to align himself with any organisation. His experiences as a young militant in Europe had eroded his faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Marcuse saw well-paid industrial workers as constituting one of the obstacles to humanity’s liberation from oppression. Based on the San Diego campus of the University of California, he counted instead upon the unemployed, the vagabond poor and the Hispanic immigrants; he also had a soft spot for college students. He regarded these groups as living in detachment from ‘bourgeois’ society and ready to overcome the ‘one-dimensional’ aspects of contemporary capitalist existence.¹³

Marcuse’s forte was as a philosopher. His preoccupation with epis-temology and dialectics was typical of a growing trend among Marxist writers seeking to challenge the Marxism that had been customary since 1917. Jean-Paul Sartre, whose early philosophical work was constructed on the basis of ideas drawn from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, published his Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1964. This was an attempt to bring together Marxism and the existentialist school in philosophy, and – unlike any previous Marxist thinker – Sartre argued for the crucial importance of the ‘autonomous’ and ‘self-conscious’ individual in explaining and justifying social activity. Lucio Colletti in Italy went back to Marx and suggested that Immanuel Kant rather than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had exercised the deepest influence on his thought.¹⁴ Colletti’s work was admired by the French communist writer Louis Althusser. But Althusser placed his emphasis elsewhere, acknowledging that some bits of Marx’s work contradicted others. This was an extraordinary admission for a Marxist to make at that time. Althusser claimed that Marxism’s claim to analytical superiority lay in the scientific method and content of Marx’s later writings; he argued that the early corpus lacked the same rigour.

Marcuse, Sartre, Colletti and Althusser were style-maestros of turgidity and never tried to rise to the flights of Marx and Engels in their inspired moments. Not one of them would choose a monosyllable if a longer word could be discovered or devised. Their Marxism, if not exactly pessimistic, was cramped and cautious. What is more, they were philosophers writing mainly for other philosophers.15 Only Marcuse became a genuine favourite of the thousands of students who rebelled in 1968 against ‘bourgeois society’ and university discipline, as well as the American war in Vietnam. He and his ideas were accorded a profile in Playboy magazine.¹⁶ (It is hard to imagine another Marxist theorist, except perhaps Marx himself, tolerating this without complaint.) Marcuse had grown popular because of the significance he attached to the students; it also did him no harm that he was willing to discuss the erotic as well as the socio-political.¹⁷

French students also produced their own theorists. The charismatic Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German citizen, led the movement in Paris. He produced Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, which was immediately translated into the other languages of the West.¹⁸ He despised the French Communist Party for failing to put its back into helping the rebelling students. He poured scorn on the USSR, a scorn that turned into hatred when the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In France, the USA, Germany and Italy there was a confluence of Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists and rebels of no sectarian persuasion. Cohn-Bendit’s attempt at revolutionary theory was embarrassingly chaotic; it was the product of a militant on the run from meeting to meeting.¹⁹ Making a virtue of being just an ordinary militant, he denied that the masses have to be guided by leaders in successful revolutions. Yet he defended Lenin against the charge of having acted with excessive predilection for centralism. At the same time he denounced the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny of 1921, attributing most of the blame to Trotski. His heroes in revolutionary Russia were the anarchists, and he picked out Makhno’s followers as exemplary rebels. He could only do this in ignorance of the antisemitism and wanton violence among the Makhnovites in Ukraine in the civil war.²⁰

In the late 1960s, if a popularity poll had been taken among the protesters, Lev Trotski, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara would probably have headed the list. They were disgusted with Soviet leaders from Stalin to Brezhnev and agreed that American Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, who had reinforced the USA’s military intervention in the conflict in Vietnam, were war criminals. The esteem for Che Guevara was enhanced by his good looks. The fact that Guevara died on campaign in Bolivia even though he could have had a comfortable career in Cuba was also counted unto him for righteousness. A similar reaction was evoked by Ho Chi Minh. Like Guevara, he was taking on the might of ‘American imperialism’. Data on Ho’s repressive regime in Hanoi were limited and would anyway have been disbelieved by his admirers if they had learned about them. The chant went up outside American embassies and on peace marches: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!’

Mao Zedong’s ‘little red book’ was the only source of information on contemporary China for many on the political far left. The Cultural Revolution was widely admired; a blind eye was turned to any newspaper reports of abuses of human rights. The generation of Westerners who liked mini-skirts, long hair and hallucinogenic drugs responded positively to Mao’s portentous platitudes. They saw what they wanted to see. Mao appeared to be on the side of ‘ordinary people’ who were being allowed to carry out their own revolution. More tricky to explain is the posthumous rehabilitation of Lev Trotski. Why did so many leftists who professed libertarian forms of socialism fall for the blandishments of a man who had eulogised terror and dictatorship? There were several facets to the syndrome. One was the pathos of Trotski’s death: the hunted last years, the ice pick in the back of the head, the trained assassin. Trotski was also a brilliant writer who presented his life in the best possible light; and he acquired a useful propagandist in his follower and biographer Isaac Deutscher, who emigrated from Poland to England in 1939.

Deutscher in fact disagreed with his hero about how change would come about in the USSR: whereas Trotski had called for political insurrection, Deutscher gave Stalin his due as an industrialiser and predicted steady internal reform as the Stalinist generation died off. But Deutscher indefatigably defended the record of Trotski in his years of power and pomp. Allegedly circumstances had simply forced Trotski to engage in repression. Deutscher proposed that if only Trotski had been Lenin’s successor, the Bolshevik party leadership would have steered a passage to socialism with a human face. Another candidate was found by American academic Stephen Cohen who wrote a biography of Nikolai Bukharin. Cohen depicted his hero as a radical socialist who, building on Lenin’s last writings, formulated a strategy for the introduction of socialism to Russia by peaceful means. This book played down Bukharin’s continuing adherence to the axioms of the one-party dictatorship and the one-ideology society. It had the effect of dragging Trotski off the pedestal of esteem. Italian Eurocommunists in particular were attracted to Bukharin as standing for the kind of USSR that they wanted in the past and present. The memory of Bukharin also appealed to Mikhail Gorbachëv, who was to put it at the heart of his vision for a reformed Soviet Union.21

The young generation provided several publications that rivalled Lukács and Marcuse in arcane jargon. Among them was the New Left Review, founded in London in 1960. Its editors and contributors engaged in an earnest quest to find a Marxism appropriate to their times. Official Soviet ideology since the mid-1920s held no appeal to them. They venerated Lenin and Trotski while exploring whether Marcuse, Sartre, Colletti or Althusser had anything to contribute to a renewal of Marxism in general. The nature of the USSR past and present remained a bone of contention. New Left Review was just one among many Marxist organs in western Europe where the same questions were asked. Was the USSR a reformable workers’ state? Had the Soviet bureaucratic stratum turned itself into a ruling class? Was the USSR imperialist? When did the basic ‘deviations’ from Leninism occur in Soviet history?

More widely read and more easily readable were the newspapers put out by various communist organisations in the same years. Perhaps the most accessible was the London publication Black Dwarf. Edited by Tariq Ali, a muddled Oxford student with a talent for improvising speeches, it purveyed hatred of the American and Soviet rulers in roughly equal measure. Ali, unlike Cohn-Bendit, was an admirer of Trotski. Beatles member John Lennon wrote to Black Dwarf criticising its sanctioning of political violence. The song ‘Revolution’ encapsulated his standpoint:

You say you want a revolutio-o-on,

We-e-ell, you know,

We all wanna change the world.

The stanza ended:

But when you talk about destructio-o-on,

Don’t you know that you can count me out?

Ali remonstrated in vain with Lennon; and Lennon’s way of thinking was shared with many in the West whose chief wish was for an end to violent politics around the world. In the United Kingdom the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been founded by Bertrand Russell, A. J. P. Taylor and others in 1958; its principal belief was that the British government should set an example by abandoning its H-bombs and that the USSR would surely follow.

This was quite a turnabout even for the mercurial Russell, who in 1945 had advocated obliterating Moscow from the air. Taylor too had been stern about the Soviet Union at the end of the war.22 Neither the prince of mathematical logic nor the master-narrator of international history properly accounted for their confidence that British self-abnegation in weaponry would become a model for the Kremlin to give up its military-technological rivalry with the USA. Annual demonstrations took place and, from the late 1960s, were joined by groups from the Quakers to the latest Trotskyist groupuscule. ‘Anti-Cold War’ groups in the West were a godsend to the Soviet political and military establishment, and the Moscow-run Assistance Fund for Communist Parties and Movements of the Left did not fail to channel funds to several of them. Washington strove to reinforce any organisation working in the opposite direction. The London magazine Encounter robustly countered the intellectual argument for communism. Not all of its own editors were aware that its financial health depended on the Central Intelligence Agency. The poet Stephen Spender, ex-communist turned anti-communist, resigned because he thought his personal integrity had been compromised.²³

The Cold War remained a struggle for Western minds as much as a competition in weapons development. All academic institutes and political ‘think tanks’ in the USA were hostile to the Soviet Union. The same was true of most such bodies in western Europe (although a few of them produced work untouched by criticism of Soviet history and politics). The great dividing line was the question what to do about the Kremlin. One wing of opinion wanted a stronger position to be adopted in any agreements with the USSR. Soviet politicians were depicted as slippery ideologues bent on internal repression and territorial expansion. If they wanted to trade with the USA, then they should be constrained to respect human rights as agreed in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe signed in Helsinki in August 1975. But better still would be the introduction of a cordon sanitaire around the communist states. Eventually, it was predicted, communism would implode in the USSR and elsewhere. Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Martin Malia were prominent in making the case. They argued that the communist order was doomed and that there was nothing to be gained by prolonging its death agony. The Soviet Union was the most pernicious existing example of totalitarianism, and the extension of its type of state to China, eastern Europe and other countries was the greatest tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century.24

Not only incumbents of political office but also most academic analysts distanced themselves from this standpoint. They were worried about jeopardising the benefits of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and ‘détente’. The Cuban missiles crisis of 1962 had shown how easily the global rivalry could abruptly intensify and lead to a third world war. Prolonging peace between the superpowers and their allies was the most attractive objective.

There was an intellectual as well as a political component in the criticism of the ‘totalitarian school’. Isaac Deutscher continued to contend that reform could – and probably would – come about in the USSR through a younger communist generation acceding to power. As Soviet society became more educated and complex, the impact of its demands on the regime would increase. This was also the position taken by the American sociologist Daniel Bell, who contended that existing trends in the USSR and the USA pointed towards an eventual convergence of the communist and capitalist systems. Growing state interference in the lives of individual Americans was paralleled by the gradual diminution of oppressive rulership in the Soviet Union. E. H. Carr, once the deputy editor of The Times, was no less insistent that the USSR’s comprehensive welfare provision and state economic intervention were becoming standard features of Western governmental practice. Carr had begun as a post-Victorian liberal and ended up a quasi-Marxist.²⁵

From the late 1970s the disagreement sharpened into protracted scholarly warfare. The opening attack came from what became known as the ‘revisionist’ trend. Its writers emphasised the popular basis of Soviet power in the decades after 1917. Some claimed that the communist dictatorship merely reflected the demands of workers and peasants and even that only a few thousand people died from repression in the 1930s. Stalin’s primary responsibility for the Great Terror was denied.²⁶ Whereas the Webbs had done this by reliance on Soviet constitutional handouts, the newer version was based primarily on those impeccable sources, Pravda and the official records of party congresses. The desire to analyse the USSR and the USA in comparable terms also affected the study of contemporary communist politics. The leaderships in Moscow and Beijing, it was proposed, were decisively constrained by the frictions of bureaucratic function and by the demands of emergent interest groups. Each communist leader supposedly became a mere spokesman for the institution he headed. Revisionists had been influenced by post-war developments in the social sciences. Some of them were also alienated from the policies of their Western governments at home and abroad; a few were communists. All put the Soviet Union under a kindly gaze.

There was no consensual statement of revisionism; nobody even made an attempt at such a thing. The single unifying theme was the rejection of the totalitarian tradition of thought. Much new material was unearthed about communism in the past and present. But something was lost in the process. Writers in the 1960s – and this included Carr and Deutscher as well as Conquest and Pipes – had agreed that the Soviet state was characterised by huge central power which was frequently wielded with extreme brutality. Revisionists suffered a lapse in analytical imagination; in some cases this bordered on moral blindness.27

Yet the angry discussion directed light on to shadowy corners of communism. More was known than in any previous decade about conditions in Hungarian factories, North Vietnamese military units, small Chinese communes and Soviet housing estates. There was also a rising appreciation of the complexity of such states and their societies. Not only high politics but also rulership at lower levels were scrutinised. The supreme leaders were not ignored; in fact a legion of professionals were examining the minutiae of speeches by Ceauescu, Zhivkov and Mao. Knowledge was widening and deepening. The problem was what to do with it. Throughout the 1930s there had been multi-sided and acrimonious debates about communism. The parameters of the arguments changed in the 1960s and 1970s, but people were no nearer to agreement. Political partisanship played a part in this. So too did judgements about the present and future path of developments around the world. And although a lot more came to be known about communist states than in earlier years, an immense amount of information still lay hidden by the censorship and police regulations. The consequence was that there was no such thing as ‘Western opinion’, only a plurality of competing and shifting standpoints. The Cold War had started with a degree of Western consensus which fell away as the years passed by.

 

32. EUROPE EAST AND WEST

Eastern Europe’s condition as the informal outer empire of the USSR had been bloodily reconfirmed by the Soviet army’s suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. Refugees flooded across the Austrian frontier. Hungary suffered savage repression and its new leader János Kádár, handpicked by the Kremlin, was left in no doubt that his job was to prevent any repetition of trouble for Moscow. Imre Nagy had reached sanctuary in the Yugoslav embassy after the fall of his government. Soviet leaders, having assured Tito that they would do no physical harm to him, took him into custody in November 1956 and held him in Romania until shooting him after a secret trial in 1958. The brutal warning to all communist regimes in the region was clear: if they failed to fulfil the USSR’s requirements they would incur violent retaliation.

Moscow recognised the imperative to regularise the situation in such a fashion that the Hungarian situation would anyhow be unlikely to recur. Soviet economic subsidies to the region were increased. In particular, oil was sold to eastern Europe at prices far below the level on the world market.1 The armed forces of the USSR garrisoned in Hungary, Poland and the German Democratic Republic were a further drain on Moscow’s budget. The outer empire had not come cheap in blood: it now cost dearly in rubles. The regimes of the Soviet Bloc were still allowed to assert some national pride. They could also experiment, within limits, with economic modifications of the order in place before 1953. At the same time they were expected to communise their industry and agriculture more fully. Only Poland was permitted to exempt its countryside from collectivisation: Khrushchëv could see that too rigorous an imposition of the Soviet model might provoke yet another Polish uprising. He also sought a greater integration of eastern Europe with the USSR by increasing co-operation among the various armies of the Warsaw Pact. Co-ordinated training, equipment and planning were stepped up. All this was done subject to Soviet hegemony.²

The same was true of regional economic organisation. Comecon, established in 1949, was turned into a more active agency. At Khrushchëv’s insistence, countries were instructed to concentrate on the traditional strengths of their economies. Previously all had been expected to follow the Soviet path of industrialisation. Now several of them were confined to being the suppliers of agricultural produce or minerals for the others, while the more industrialised ones could export factory goods to them.3

This whole idea was anathema to Romanian communist leader Gheorghiu-Dej. While maintaining a tight political order, he was affronted by the call to abandon his ambitious plans for heavy industry and to prioritise investment in wheat, grapes, tomatoes and petrol. By 1964 an official statement was made: ‘There does not and cannot exist a “parent” party and a “son” party, or “superior” parties and “subordinate” parties.’⁴ In 1963 he cheekily offered himself as a mediator in the Sino– Soviet dispute. Nicolae Ceauescu, who succeeded to the Romanian leadership in 1965, pursued the same autonomous line. Bucharest was a constant irritant inside Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. Romania’s ambitious industrial plans remained in place. Ceauescu also reinforced the collective-farm system. Like Khrushchëv earlier, he bulldozed villages and brought peasants together in new rural townships. The rationale for this was the zeal to bring concrete-slab, multi-storey buildings, tractors and electric light to the countryside. National pride was asserted and the Hungarian Autonomous Region was abolished. Opposition was vigorously suppressed by the security police. Ceauescu was determined to secure his regime from internal subversion as well as external interference.

What saved Romania from being invaded by its allies in the Warsaw Pact was its retention of the one-party, one-ideology communist state. Ceauescu’s friendliness to the powers of the West was irritating but not a casus belli. Adoption of party pluralism and capitalist economics would have been an entirely different matter. There was even less chance of such Westernising trends in Albania. Its leader Enver Hoxha argued that ‘the Khrushchëv–Tito group [had concocted] new plans against the cause of socialism’. Hoxha sided with China in the Sino–Soviet split. He castigated Khrushchëv and Tito as the leaders of ‘modern revisionism’ who, like Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky at the turn of the century, had betrayed Marxism.⁵ His was eastern Europe’s only state which refused to rehabilitate the communist leaders executed in the show trials of Stalin’s last years.⁶ Most of his anger, though, was aimed at Tito. Territorial rivalry between Albania and its more powerful Yugoslav neighbour was the source of constant friction. Yet Albania was left alone. It maintained a communist regime, even announcing the total abolition of religion in the country in 1967. Its geostrategic importance for the USSR was small, and the fact that it criticised Tito was no problem for the Kremlin.

The authorities in the German Democratic Republic kept an even more rigid control over their people than was achieved by Hoxha in Albania, whose mountainous terrain and village traditions made things difficult for the central state authorities. Walter Ulbricht aimed to turn his state into a model of contemporary communism. It was his constant pestering that pushed the Soviet Presidium into sanctioning the building of the Berlin Wall.7 Competition was joined with West Germany to raise the quality of material and social life, and Ulbricht constantly claimed that the German Democratic Republic was winning. In 1963 he introduced a New Economic System which provided enterprises and their managers with somewhat wider powers outside central planning control. Output rose but never as quickly as in West Germany. Although people were better off than previously, Ulbricht’s unpopularity deepened. His ideological rigidity made even Brezhnev appear flexible. No one could forget that he bore responsibility for stopping people from meeting their relatives in the West. He was fired in May 1971, utterly convinced of the correctness of his policies to the very end. His successor Erich Honecker was only marginally less gloomy. Political presentation was made somewhat livelier but the basic policies remained the same. Far from being a workers’ paradise, the German Democratic Republic was eastern Europe’s most efficient police state.

Poland’s police hardly treated opposition gently. But Gomułka did not dare to interfere blatantly with the Catholic Church, which gave quiet support to anti-communist worker–militants and intellectual dissenters. He too loosened the economic system to a certain extent immediately after returning to power in 1956, and the living conditions of Poles improved over the 1960s. Peasants were given a guarantee that the authorities would not collectivise the land. Communism by itself had not endeared itself in the country. Bidding to rally patriotic support, Gomułka started to discriminate against the Jews.⁸ Few as they were in Poland after the Second World War, they remained the object of popular hostility. Grumblings about the regime grew more intense over the years. Jacek Kuro and Karol Modzelewski wrote an open letter to the party in 1968. They could not be accused of ambiguity. Kuro and Modzelewski were arrested and, after a brief trial, thrown into prison.⁹

János Kádár in Hungary proved more flexible than Gomułka. He too understood that improvements in the economy were badly needed, and with this in mind he cautiously began to introduce reforms rather like those mooted in Poland by communist radicals in 1956–7. Managers were granted somewhat wider powers. Enterprises were less tightly regulated by the national planning authorities. Bigger material incentives were introduced for workers. The New Economic Mechanism was formally announced in 1966 as the culmination of a series of minor reforms in previous years. Really, however, this was a very anodyne variant of an old, pre-revolutionary mechanism: the market economy. But it was bold indeed for contemporary communist economics – and Soviet reformers followed its progress with enthusiasm. The behaviour of Kádár came as a surprise to most Hungarians, who regarded him as the Quisling who had collaborated in the country’s reconquest by the USSR. Nothing good had been expected of him. The martyrs of the Hungarian Revolt lived on in the public memory. Radio stations staffed by refugees continued to broadcast their anti-communist message to audiences in Budapest. (The wavelengths were quickly jammed by the authorities.) Yet Kádár’s economic measures depleted any active opposition and the standard of living in Hungary steadily but slowly rose.

Kádár was clever in the way he cultivated his political appeal. He saw that Hungary would never recover from the catastrophe of 1956 if it was ruled as tightly as the other states in eastern Europe. He abandoned the goal of comprehensive indoctrination and mobilisation. ‘People don’t exist’, he said, ‘just so that we may test out Marxism on them.’ His slogan became famous: ‘He who is not against us is for us.’10

The press in Hungary, as in Poland, was no longer as severely constrained as in the USSR. The country did not have complete freedom of cultural expression, not by a long chalk. But Kádár allowed just enough space for discussion, especially about Hungary’s pre-communist history, to assuage the worst frustrations in society. And Hungarians knew that, compared to most other peoples in the Soviet Bloc, they lived better. If they needed persuading, Czechs and East Germans holidaying in Hungary’s campsites by Lake Balaton told them so. What the visitors liked, apart from the delights of camping and swimming, was the New Economic Mechanism’s success in increasing the variety of food in the shops. Also impressive was the permission given for people to run their own little businesses as cobblers, plumbers and stall-traders. Essentially this legalised and expanded what happened in all communist economies (where tradesmen worked on the side for private gain). The idea was to shake the economy out of its bureaucratic rigidities. Kádár also stuck his neck out in international communist relations by refusing to condemn the Eurocommunists of Italy, Spain and France. He proved more irksome to Moscow than Gomułka, and the whole package became known as goulash communism.

More troublesome for the USSR was Czechoslovakia. Frustration with Antonín Novotný’s obstruction of any moves towards political and economic reform was boiling up in 1967. Communist reformers allied themselves with the intelligentsia. The Central Committee was riven by barely disguised internal disputes in October 1967. The reformers gained the upper hand. Novotný was forced out of office in January 1968 and Alexander Dubek took over as communist party chief. In April the Central Committee adopted an Action Programme. Its basic goal was to develop ‘a new model of socialist society, deeply democratic and adapted to Czechoslovak conditions’. Dubek abolished censorship. He permitted the formation of associations without official interference. The economic reforms of Ota ik included allowing the closure of unprofitable factories and the growth of private economic activity.11 Time and time again Moscow warned Dubek that he might prove unable to stop the process running out of control. Kádár, who had the Hungarian events of 1956 burned into his soul, asked him: ‘Do you really not know the kind of people you’re dealing with?’¹² The Czechoslovak leader was a naive reform-communist. He was confident he could persuade the Kremlin that the changes would reinforce the appeal of communism in his country and suit the USSR’s geopolitical interests.

Soviet Politburo members, however, were deeply worried. They were not alone. Other communist leaders in eastern Europe, especially Gomułka and Ulbricht, saw the Prague Spring as the beginning of a counter-revolution. Negotiations were intense between Moscow and Prague. Dubek repeatedly claimed to have everything under control. Brezhnev wanted to believe him or at least to avoid drastic action, but opinion in his Politburo was moving in favour of intervention. Army manoeuvres were held near Czechoslovakia’s frontiers. After much discussion it was decided in Moscow to invade with Warsaw Pact allies: Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary supplied forces. In the night of 20–21 August the tanks rolled across the frontiers. They moved on Prague unopposed. The day of the operation could not have been balmier. There was a slight haze in the Czech capital and a light southerly breeze was blowing. Students approached the tank crews and asked them why they had invaded. The politics of Czechoslovakia were no longer in local hands. It was the Soviet Politburo and its agencies which ruled as Alexander Dubek, President Ludvík Svoboda and other leading reformers were arrested, drugged and abducted to Moscow in handcuffs.

Dubek had a nightmarish ‘conversation’ with Brezhnev. Either Dubek accepted the USSR’s terms or he would be killed and the treatment of his invaded country would worsen. Forced to stay awake so that he could not think straight, Dubek succumbed. František Kriegel, medical doctor and veteran of the Spanish civil war, was the only one of the five abducted Czechoslovak leaders to reject the Moscow Protocol. Brezhnev reacted with blustering crudity: ‘What’s this Jew from Galicia doing here anyway?’

The communist reformers back in Czechoslovakia had not yet been reduced to inactivity. They could not retaliate directly against the forces of the Warsaw Pact. Instead they held a party congress at Vysoany and defiantly elected a new Central Committee consisting of communists hostile to the invasion. If they were not going to go down fighting, they were determined to make plain the illegitimacy of the Kremlin’s actions. Dubek and Svoboda were sent back to Prague and, still under Soviet intimidation, challenged the validity of the proceedings. The USSR stipulated that the Czechoslovak Communist Party should prioritise the ‘defence of socialist achievements’. Dubek carried out his tasks with visible distaste. Once he had fulfilled his function of quietening political passions and facilitating ‘normalisation’, he was sacked as Party First Secretary and shunted out of sight to an obscure job in forestry administration. His place was taken by the dour Gustáv Husák who scurried about as the USSR’s chief spaniel. All the leading reformers were removed from office. Censorship was reintroduced and repressive controls were strengthened. The experiments with economic decentralisation were abandoned. The Prague Spring had turned to winter without an intervening summer and autumn.

Events in Czechoslovakia lay at the foundations of what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. The USSR arrogated the right to enforce the communist order in eastern Europe. Only the Kremlin was empowered to judge when this order was being threatened. Brezhnev was giving notice that the territorial and political settlement after the Second World War would be kept firmly in place – and the West was warned to respect the Doctrine. The countries of eastern Europe were presented with the concept of limited sovereignty. Having been brought under Moscow’s hegemony in 1945, they were to remain loyal to the USSR in perpetuity. Svoboda believed that he and other signatories of the Moscow Protocol had saved Czechoslovakia from a still worse fate. But he also stated: ‘When our republic was occupied, it was clearly stated by the party, by the government and by myself: we invited nobody. The whole world knows that.’ The idea that Ivan’s tanks had arrived by fraternal invitation was one falsification too many for him. Yet the political resubjugation of Czechoslovakia was complete; and the Warsaw Pact invasion deadened all talk of reform in the whole of eastern Europe.

Yet this did not entirely root out criticism of the USSR in those countries; indeed the sheer brutality of Soviet external policy stiffened the feeling that enough was enough. Ceauescu, who as a member of the Romanian leadership in 1956 had avidly approved of the crushing of the Hungarian Revolt, denounced Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia. He flatly rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine. Tito stormed around the world with his criticism of the USSR. Hoxha went further and pulled Albania out of the Warsaw Pact.

Popular protest, though, amounted to little more than rowdiness at ice hockey games against the USSR. Dissenting activity, however, did not cease and Czechoslovakia was far from becoming quiescent. The troublemakers were not communists but liberals. Among them was the playwright Václav Havel, who denounced the communist authorities at every opportunity. He was frequently arrested. A group formed around him which was eventually to call itself Charter 77. (It was created in 1977.) Persecution failed to suppress them. Havel understood how to attract attention from the West and encourage American politicians to indicate that, if Husák and his counterparts in other countries of eastern Europe were to intensify repressive measures, the USSR would pay a grievous price in diplomatic and financial relations. So Havel lived a life of arrest, release and arrest. But he was never tortured, starved or compelled to sign a false confession. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was a disaster for communism. Dubek was a communist reformer who had been lucky to escape with his life. The conclusion drawn by anti-Kremlin militants was that a communist reformation of Czechoslovakia was a futile objective. They turned to ideals of liberal democracy, national sovereignty, Christianity and market economics. They differed about which ideals they espoused. But on the need to do away with communist rule they were united.

And if armed might and military occupation did not work for the USSR in Czechoslovakia, communism was bound to encounter growing resistance elsewhere in eastern Europe. In Poland the working class was restless, the intelligentsia was resentful and the Catholic Church was troublesome. Even under tough regimes such as those of Bulgaria, Romania and the German Democratic Republic there were shoots of dissent. Albania operated the harshest repressive machinery and had the weakest organisations of opposition; Enver Hoxha proudly announced that he had extirpated the religious mentality and turned the people into eager atheists. Gomułka’s economic reforms in Poland had had a positive impact until the mid-1960s. National income in Poland grew faster than investment for the first time since the war, and wages also rose. The emphasis was put on heavy industry. As previously, the peasants bore most of the load. Compulsory delivery quotas for agricultural produce were always being revised upwards.13 The pace of economic growth was unsustainable; without a freer system of information, management and innovation the Polish economy was bound to go on falling behind the advanced-capitalist West.¹⁴ Gomułka’s didactic speeches came to irritate most Poles; his heroic status was short lived among them. People imitated him with a joke: ‘Before the war the Polish economy was on the edge of a precipice. Since liberation we have made great strides!’¹⁵ As soon as price rises were imposed in December 1970 there were strikes. Trouble was worst in the Baltic cities. Workers in the shipyards formed unions, went on strike and took to the streets to protest against the government. Gomułka brought in the armed security forces and hundreds of demonstrators were killed. But the strikers refused to give way and Gomułka had to resign in the same month. This was a momentous event. It was the first time in eastern Europe after the Second World War that a ruler had been dislodged from office by working-class power.¹⁶

His place was filled by Edward Gierek, who had negotiated in a friendly fashion with the strikers. He had to make it his priority to improve living conditions, otherwise what had happened to Gomułka could happen to him too. Gierek set about contracting state loans from Western banks and attracting Soviet commercial subsidies. Poland used them to import consumer products and up-to-date industrial machinery from West Germany and elsewhere. This strategy depended on success in long-term economic regeneration. Failure would force the government to lower real wages in order to make repayments to creditors abroad. Gierek was a solid fellow with an amiable demeanour. Although he was not exactly charismatic, he gained some approval after replacing the glum Gomułka. What he lacked, though, was vision. Neither he nor his fellow leaders fully appreciated the unremitting contempt for communism among Poles. The Catholic Church stood unbowed by decades of persecution. The intelligentsia, which had once included an impressive collection of communist reformers, had turned against Marxism in all its guises. The workers in factories, mines and shipyards refused to give Gierek the benefit of the doubt.

Civil society had been battered but had not expired. Resentment of Russia was intense. The only reason why there was no revolt was the knowledge that the Warsaw Pact had the tanks. Poles feared a repetition of the bloodshed in Hungary in 1956. Older people recalled the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when patriots rose against the German occupation and were outgunned from the start. Yet all was not lost. Many workers were eager to confront the authorities about wages, living conditions and civil rights. Linked to intellectual dissenters as well as to the patriotic clergy, the militants of the labour movement had the capacity to bring the economy to its knees if they chose to call for a general strike.

External loans bought a little time for Gierek, but the Polish economic output dipped sharply in 1977.17 One east European ruler – Nicolae Ceauescu – understood the dangers of the Polish strategy. Romania contracted foreign loans like every other country in eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia (where Husák had an almost compulsive aversion to contacts with the West).¹⁸ But Ceauescu paid his debts on the nail and did not flinch at impoverishing his people in order to keep the national accounts in the black. Oil was the country’s great asset and was traded strongly on world markets. Wine too began to be exported. The Romanian government also made money from the export of people. Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel had to pay a heavy financial toll for the exit visa and the air trip. Ethnic Germans left Romania on a similar basis through an accord between Bucharest and Bonn. But there was no halt in the deterioration in economic conditions. Ceauescu tightened his grip on party and people through his security police, the Securitate.¹⁹ His wife Elena also acquired political influence and prominence. No shoots of political or economic reform were allowed in Romania. The cult of Ceauescu was exaggerated beyond even the conventions of contemporary communism outside North Korea and China. Romanians who criticised the regime were locked up.

Eastern Europe caused constant alarm in the Soviet supreme leadership. The suppression of the Hungarian Uprising had been traumatic for Khrushchëv. He had thought he was relaxing communist rule for everybody’s benefit but found that societies west of the Soviet Union hated their oppressors. The Prague Spring was less traumatic for Brezhnev, who had never promised reform in eastern Europe; his conscience, if he had one, was untroubled by his decision to send Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia in 1968. But military action dealt only with the symptoms. It offered no fundamental cure for the malaise of communism across the entire eastern half of the continent.

From Stalin to Brezhnev the sickly phenomena persisted. The ‘colonies’ in eastern Europe had turned into a multinational drain on the Soviet budget. Nuclear missile bases had to be supplied if the threat of attack by NATO was to be faced down. The Soviet army also maintained garrisons which needed equipping and financing. These disgruntled troops were locally very unpopular and Moscow took the precaution of secluding its contingents well away from regular contact with the country’s civilian inhabitants. It was a most peculiar empire which resorted to such expedients. This was not all. Communised economies in eastern Europe were constructed on the Soviet model. It is true that Poland refrained from collectivising most of its peasantry; but industry, commerce, finance and transport copied the templates invented in the pre-war USSR. The result was permanent economic inadequacy. The countries of eastern Europe lacked the USSR’s abundance of natural resources. If Moscow wished to salvage the situation, it had to reconcile itself to the unceasing subsidisation of gas and oil exports.

The costs were borne also in the declining impact of the USSR on politics in western Europe. Step by step, the Italian Communist Party broke free of the Soviet political and ideological embrace.20 Its Eurocommunism involved a new and distinctive strategy. Togliatti had operated inside the constitutional framework without openly abandoning the possibility that communists might need to use other methods, especially if the political far right staged a coup d’etat. Berlinguer wanted the party to commit itself unconditionally to a peaceful and electoral strategy. He asked for a ‘historic compromise’ with the Christian Democratic Party. His suggestion was that the fundamental tasks of reform in the country should be tackled by its two largest parties in tandem – and in Aldo Moro, until his murder by the Red Brigades in 1978, he found an ex-premier who was willing to take him at his word. Berlinguer dropped the traditional anti-Americanism of Italian communism. Europe, though, was at the core of his policies. He welcomed Italy’s adhesion to NATO and to the European Economic Community (whereas Togliatti had treated both organisations as anti-Soviet conspiracies).²¹ He also made overtures to Europe’s socialist, social-democratic and labour parties. The Italian communists did well in successive elections, but in 1979 their share of the vote fell from 34 to 30 per cent.22 Furthermore, the Christian Democrats refused Berlinguer’s offer of co-operation; and the enemies of communism always succeeded in forming coalitions without the Italian Communist Party.

Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, returned to Madrid after Franco’s death and the restoration of democracy in 1976. He agreed with the main practical tenets of Eurocommunism and hoped that his years of foreign exile and opposition to fascism would recommend him to the electorate.²³ It was not to be. The party did disappointingly in elections and Carrillo resigned six years later. A similar fate befell the Portuguese Communist Party. The revolution against the fascist regime had occurred in 1974, and communists had participated strongly in it. Its leadership disdained Eurocommunism, placing its trust in continuing friendly relations with Moscow. This made no difference. Next year it received only an eighth of the votes in national elections.

The French Communist Party under Waldeck Rochet, who succeeded Maurice Thorez, remained solidly pro-Soviet despite what Rochet had witnessed in the USSR in the 1920s.²⁴ Its candidate in the 1969 presidential elections was the gnarled old Stalinist Jacques Duclos, who gained 21 per cent of votes. Discipline in the party was strict; dissenters such as Roger Garaudy who criticised the USSR were expelled. Georges Marchais became Secretary-General in 1972 and edged towards a Eurocommunism standpoint like a man climbing out along a ledge from a skyscraper. He frequently questioned the KGB’s repression of dissenters; Marchais took no notice of the instant Soviet complaint.²⁵ He also negotiated for an electoral coalition with François Mitterrand and the Socialist Party. But the agreement collapsed in 1974. What is more, Marchais declined to go as far as Berlinguer and Carrillo in redefining communist strategy.²⁶ His party remained a perennial force of protest. Even as such it had severe limitations. In 1968 all France had been ablaze with workers’ strikes and students’ demonstration. The French Communist Party stood aloof, refusing in particular to ally with ‘bourgeois’ students and denying – with justification – that there existed a truly revolutionary situation in the country. Nevertheless it did not cover itself in glory. Really the party was satisfied with the role of permanent, influential opposition. Always the bridesmaid of the Revolution, never the bride.

Communism in western Europe – with Italy, France, Spain and Greece as notable exceptions – held next to no appeal to the imagination of the industrial working class in whose name it had been invented. A case in point was the United Kingdom, where the co-founders of Marxism had written so many of their important works. The party finally turned against the USSR only in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The rest of the British labour movement barely noticed this transformation of consciousness. In a few trade unions the communists held a certain authority. This was especially true among the Scottish miners, who were led by party militant Mick McGahey. But young radicals in general turned not to the Communist Party of Great Britain but to communist splinter organisations or to other organisations entirely.27 Official British communism was not yet dead, but it was dying on its feet. The only consolation for its active members – pro-Soviet or ant-Soviet, Stalinist or reformist, activist or intellectual, old or young – was that they did not yet sense that history was leaving them behind. The hurricane of global change which had favoured communism in Europe, west and east, in 1917 and 1945 had been dissipated into the ether.

 

33. REDUCED EXPECTATIONS

Lenin’s communism had a strategic fixation with the question of how to obtain central state authority. Communist parties planned to take over whole countries and transform the framework of their politics and economy. They aimed at permanent rule; they intended that when – there was never any ‘if’ about it – they attained power, they would keep a tight hold on it. Like Lenin in 1917 or Mao in 1949, they believed that their policies would make them popular among most people. Communist theory never produced an alternative strategy for communist parties which lacked a ‘revolutionary situation’ to exploit.

Over the decades, however, most communist parties had to recognise that the chances of a successful revolution in the near future ranged from the discouraging to the non-existent. The paradox was that the greater the prospect of communists coming to power, the likelier it was for governments to adopt ruthless preventive measures. Throughout the years after the Second World War a watchful eye was kept on communist parties. The Australian labour movement had a long tradition of far-left radicalism. Between 1941 and 1945 the Communist Party of Australia under Lance Sharkey, a devotee of Stalin, had worked indefatigably to reinforce the war effort, and the consequence was a lasting influence over post-war politics.1 The communists challenged the governing Labour cabinet by starting an industrial offensive in 1947. The army was used to break up a lengthy miners’ strike two years later. In 1951 the Conservatives under Robert Menzies out-McCarthyied Senator McCarthy in the USA by trying to ban the party outright; and although the referendum on the matter went against the government, enough was said about the subversive activities of Australian communists as well as about the iniquities of Stalin’s USSR for most Australians to conclude that communism was not for them. Sharkey, who had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in 1949, was a man without influence long before Khrushchëv attacked Stalin’s record.

Communists in Australia and south-east Asia kept warm ties. The comrades in Malaya seriously threatened the British imperial administration after the Second World War. When the country gained its independence as Malaysia in 1957, the communist party’s strength and ambition led to clashes with the government. Most party members were ethnic Chinese and it was easy for the authorities to mobilise action against them. The Malaysian Communist Party was no match for the regular army and was crushed in 1960.

The Indonesian communists were also a menace to their government after decolonisation. By the early 1960s they had acquired three million members, making it the third largest communist party in the world. Only the USSR and the People’s Republic of China had bigger memberships. The Communist Party of Indonesia had played a prominent role in fighting Dutch colonialism and had been forced into the political underground more than once. A period of turbulence ensued when Indonesia gained its independence. The communists supported President Sukarno against right-wing rebels in 1958 and he brought communist leaders Aidit and Njoto into his cabinet.2 Fears grew that a military coup d’etat was being organised in 1965. The communist party sought to frustrate this by initiating a preventive coup of its own. General Suharto in turn forestalled the communists by mobilising his troops and starting a process of bloody suppression. The American CIA was closely involved as Moslem conservative groups were let loose on known communist organisations and individuals. About a million suspected communists were massacred. Where the mobs lacked rifles they used knives. The heads of the dead were displayed on poles and corpses clogged the water courses. Aidit and Njoto were murdered. Indonesian communism was liquidated in the most comprehensive attack on communists since Stalin had assaulted his own party in 1937–8. From sharing power and aiming to monopolise it, the communist party had been cast into oblivion.³

The Communist Party of South Africa had been languishing under persecution long before being banned outright in 1950. Strategy was reconsidered and the leadership opted to devote itself to long-term collaboration with the Black-led African National Congress to bring down the apartheid regime established a couple of years earlier. The thinking was that this would enable the communist party to increase its impact on political events and leading communists to take a prominent position. The African National Congress was more social-democratic than Marxist in outlook. But it brought together many strands of opinion and was committed to overthrowing a violently racist government; and its resolve to conduct economic sabotage and armed resistance convinced the Communist Party of South Africa of the benefits of such a coalition. Joe Slovo and other communists were prominent contributors to the African National Congress’s operations. They had an influence out of proportion to the size of their membership and following. Essentially they had reconciled themselves to never holding supreme national power even after the desired overthrow of the Afrikaner-led apartheid regime.

Communists in several other countries came to the same conclusion and decided to concentrate on political activity below the national level. The most remarkable cases occurred in India. Led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the communist organisation in the state of Kerala on the southwestern coast won 38 per cent of the votes in the 1957 elections. This result horrified Jawaharlal Nehru’s government in Delhi. E. M. S. – as he was popularly known – quickly made a name for himself. The key to his success was his set of promises to rural voters. Agrarian reform was implemented fast. At its heart were restrictions on the rights of owners of the large estates. There was also a redistribution of land to their tenants. A minimum-wage law was passed to pull support from civil servants and urban workers – this was of particular benefit to the labour force in the coir industry. Nehru sent his daughter Indira Gandhi down to Kerala to encourage opposition to the communists even though the reforms had been introduced with constitutional and legal propriety. Her heavily publicised tour made no difference. Communists snubbed and denounced her. Exasperated, Nehru issued a peremptory decree to close down the Kerala administration in 1959. His legal grounds were largely spurious. Thus the state’s communists became the victims of what elsewhere in the world they had often done to others.4

Rule by central fiat did not eliminate Delhi’s problem with communism. Kerala quickly acquired a communist administration again and the communists have won most of the elections through to the present day. They remained popular by committing themselves to alleviating the plight of the peasantry and the rural poor. Local militants even renamed a whole town in honour of communism. They called it Moscow. The communist authorities encouraged parents to name their children after the Soviet pantheon. The result by 2005 was that India’s Moscow had six residents called Mr Lenin. Stalins, Khrushchëvs and Brezhnevs have gone out of fashion in recent years. There is also a tendency for parents to pick almost any name that sounds attractively Russian. Anastasya was the daughter of Emperor Nicholas II murdered by communists in Yekaterinburg in July 1918; yet her name has been given to a present-day woman by her communist father.⁵

Kerala’s communists had shown their independent streak since flirting with Maoism for a while in the late 1940s:6 their Russophilia was a later development. In other parts of India, though, the attraction of the Chinese variant of communist exercised a permanent appeal. This was hardly surprising. Many members of the Communist Party of India were made to feel uneasy by the Kremlin’s support for Nehru, who pursued a policy of ‘non-alignment’ with either of the world’s superpowers. This reaction was natural enough. Indian communists were trying to gain in electoral strength by exposing the central government for its corruption and lack of resolve in improving the conditions of most Indians.⁷ The warmth of Indo–Soviet relations at the governmental level undermined this activity. When the Sino–Soviet split forced communists to choose between China and the USSR, debate was intense on two great matters. One was the choice between the turbulent mobilisation demanded by Mao Zedong and the staid organisation preferred by Soviet leaders to be sanctioned. The second touched on the USSR’s role in world politics. Those who sided with Mao’s denunciation of ‘Soviet hegemonism’ broke away to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) – or the CPI(ML).⁸

The split was extremely violent in some places. In central Bihar the Maoists killed hundreds of members of the rival communist organisation.⁹ At first they held the upper hand over the older party despite having fewer members.¹⁰ Slowly the intra-communist enmities declined into peaceful political competition. And the Kerala precedent was followed by other Indian states. The West Bengal communist-led administration in particular achieved something remarkable. Coming to power in 1977, it succeeded in sustaining its electoral popularity into the twenty-first century. This has been the longest period of rule by communists who were elected to office anywhere in the world.

Thus the communists in many democracies tried to make the best of things by working hard at the local level. Communist militants contested elections in cities and provinces, putting themselves up as local champions in the struggle against the national government for social justice. They campaigned to improve living and working conditions. They listened to the grievances in their constituencies and did what they could for their voters – and they trusted that this activity, along with propaganda about the party’s larger purposes, would benefit communism throughout the country. They led protests against the treatment of the poorer groups in society. They railed against capitalism and stressed that the landlords, industrialists and bankers were linked to a world system of exploitation and oppression. The old communist case was therefore not abandoned, and people were becoming communists for the traditional reasons: they wanted to fight and defeat the capitalist order at national and global levels. They coveted a reputation for resisting the temptation of corruption and castigated the privileges of political office and wealth. (This, of course, was the opposite of what happened in communist states, where communism enabled the emergence of a ruthless and self-indulgent political elite.)

The Japanese communists, disenchanted with Moscow yet reluctant to identify themselves with Beijing and its fanaticism, went their own way. They declared that the USSR and the People’s Republic of China were equally guilty of ‘hegemonism’, which was the charge laid by Mao at the Kremlin’s door; they also supported Japan’s nationalist case for the restoration of the northern islands seized by Stalin’s Red Army in 1945. They were turning into something like Western social-democrats as they embraced principles of elective, representative democracy.11 By playing up the anti-American theme in their propaganda, they exploited popular resentment at Japan’s post-war subjection to the geopolitical strategy required by the USA. The Japanese Communist Party never came near to obtaining national office. But in 1983 it achieved a measure of power in Osaka as part of a broadly based governing coalition. This was an impressive comeback after the brutal suppression of the communists – arrests, execution, prison maltreatment and forced exile – during the Korean War.¹² Few voters wanted to give up consumer capitalism. The country’s economy depended on its continuing capacity to export cars, radios and other electronic products, and everyone knew this. But there was enough discontent among urban workers and low-level employees for the communists to maintain an influence.

The Italian Communist Party too fought hard local campaigns in successive elections after the Second World War. The need was recognised to compete with the attractions of radio, TV, the cinema and sport. Its newspaper L’Unità had been pretty dour in 1945. Posted on walls at the side of streets, it testified to the party’s zeal to inculcate its message. Yet gradually it began to report on football matches. Similarly the Communist Party of Great Britain took to covering horse racing, a favourite pastime of the British working class – and indeed the party’s London tipster had the edge over his rivals on newspapers of other political orientations. The Italian Communist Party went further and organised an annual Festa dell’Unità. These were celebrations with pasta, folksongs and carousing. Communists shrugged off their stolid image. One party member, interviewed in the 1950s, explained the rationale: ‘The [communist party] is very active in the organisation of pastimes for the members so as not to give them the opportunity to wander off and have their minds diverted from the spirit of the party even during their recreation.’13 Political duties were simultaneously discharged. There were always bookstalls and public speeches at the Festa; and militants gave handouts about the domestic and international campaigns being waged by the party; badges and posters about foreign liberation movements were promoted. The Italian Communist Party for decades survived with bread, circuses and sermons.

While facing insurmountable obstacles in national politics, the communists of Italy did well in many local elections. Siena in Tuscany was an early success after the Second World War – indeed the party won an absolute majority of votes in the province (as distinct from the provincial capital). Their popularity faded only a little in subsequent years.¹⁴ Communists of Siena had adjusted their policies to demography. Outside the city they obtained support from the agricultural poor by promising higher wages, more schools and better social welfare. Owners of large estates were put under direct pressure.¹⁵

Perhaps the greatest post-war achievement for Italian communists came when they took over the administration in Bologna. As the capital of Emilia-Romagna the city acted as a magnet attracting recruits to the party. Mayor Giuseppe Dozza held power for two decades. His rule was characterised by a reputation for honesty and dedication to popular welfare. Bolognese communists knew they needed to prove themselves as practical politicians. Buses, housing, parks, schools and litter collection had to be organised more efficiently – and, whenever possible, at a cheaper rate to the public – than under the Christian Democrats. Whereas the party at the national level under Togliatti, Longo and Berlinguer went on denouncing capitalism, Dozza did deals with the city’s businessmen. The last thing that Dozza could afford was a decline in the local industrial and commercial dynamism.¹⁶ His co-operation with capitalists became the model for how the communists came to power, often in coalition with the Italian Socialist Party, in other big Italian cities in subsequent years. Rome, Turin, Genoa and Naples at various times acquired local governments with communist representatives in leading positions. The hope – a vain one, as it turned out – was that a series of exemplary municipal records would pave the way for the party’s eventual election to national government.

There was a similar attentiveness to local elections in other European countries. In France the communists had gained over fifty councils in towns with a population of over thirty thousand by the mid-1980s. Over the previous decades they had seldom lost a council once they had gained it. Le Havre and Calais were bastions of communist power. Rheims was another, at least until 1983.17 The success in the big ferry ports was not an accident. French communists easily came to an understanding with state-owned companies in the docks, railways and shipping companies. They also frequently won power in councils in the Paris suburbs, where the party’s efficient provision of social welfare and services enhanced its popularity. Communists in Spain and Portugal hoped to do the same after their liberation from fascism in the 1970s. The Spanish were more successful than the Portuguese. Córdoba, a large city in the south, fell into communist hands in 1983.¹⁸

The regional and urban communist administrations in India, Japan, Italy, France and Spain never succeeded in achieving national power. They accepted the existing electoral framework and expressed respect for the law. This was a trifle hypocritical in the Italian case since they had secret arrangements for bringing out armed units on to the streets in the event of a right-wing seizure of power.¹⁹ But by and large they adhered to constitutional procedures. This meant that they continued to need to make themselves congenial to the electors. They were constantly criticised by the rival parties and remained under close scrutiny by a hostile press. They knew that if they put a foot wrong they would shatter the solid political groundwork they had laid under Togliatti and his successors. The result by the 1970s was that the Italian Communist Party in local government behaved like a social-democratic or socialist administration. It concentrated on getting the buses running and the streets swept. It offered welfare assistance to the poor. It aspired to what the Anglo-Saxons call respectability. When necessary, it shared power amicably with other parties of the left.

Usually it was parties affiliated to Moscow or Beijing which achieved most success at the local level. But once Deng had turned the People’s Republic of China away from Mao’s economic policies and towards capitalism, Beijing ceased to supplement the incomes of Maoist parties. This gravely weakened the Maoist cause in several countries. The Albanian communist regime, whose fondness for Mao persisted, was too poor to do more than fund a few propaganda outlets. (The little Albanian bookshop in London’s Finsbury Park became the only place in the British capital where Stalin’s multi-volume collected works could be bought.) The USSR was left as the only serious subsidiser of the scores of communist parties around the world.

Yet discontent in the same parties grew strongly after 1956. The result was the exodus of malcontents into little groups which claimed to be resuscitating the original Marxist-Leninist world-view. Some were Trotskyist, others Maoist; a few were Luxemburgist. Still others formed local groupuscules. Such recruits to communism had been drawn either by doctrinal study and conviction or by a general hostility to capitalism as well as by the attractions of internal-group solidarity. This was not very different from the situation on the political far left in the middle of the nineteenth century. Sectarian communism appealed to some among the disadvantaged, alienated and rootless young. Few of such groups could be bothered to scrabble for election to local councils in western Europe or anywhere else. They had been born out of despair at the behaviour of the large communist parties. They upheld revolutionary purity in doctrine and practice. Typically the groups gathered around a charismatic leader who offered his personal analysis of contemporary global capitalism and official world communism. They refused to despair. Although the immediate prospect of taking power was close to zero, they comforted themselves with the thought that the Bolsheviks had had only a handful of thousands of members before 1917.

Italy was a hotbed of Marxist sectarianism. Lotta Comunista in Genoa and Lotta Continua in Turin and other large cities argued that the defects of the Italian Communist Party had been evident for several decades. Togliatti was a figure of contempt among them because of his obedience to Stalin and Comintern. Whereas the Italian Communist Party steered away from direct confrontation with the state authorities, Lotta Comunista and Lotta Continua relished every opportunity to throw down a challenge to the political status quo. Togliatti’s parliamentary strategy after the Second World War had been bad enough, but the Eurocommunism of Berlinguer was denounced as the complete betrayal of communist objectives.

The tendency was for grouplets to turn in on themselves and argue the niceties of Marxist theory without cracking the mould of European politics. Bookish disputes about the arcana of texts by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao proliferated. Pamphlets were sold at meetings and on stalls. The tiniest differences of interpretation caused organisational schism and intense polemic. Frustration with this situation led some young militants to turn to the theory and practice of terrorism. Italy had its Red Brigades, West Germany its Red Army Faction; the United Kingdom gave rise to the Angry Brigade. The Red Brigades captured and murdered the prominent Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in 1978. Moro had been Prime Minister in the 1960s and had advocated some kind of co-operation between the Italian Communist Party and Christian Democracy. There was much suspicion that the assassination had been facilitated by enemies in his own party and in the intelligence services who wanted to prevent any political deal with communism. In West Germany the Red Army Faction kidnapped and killed businessmen. Most of the terrorist groups in the United Kingdom were ineffectual. The Angry Brigade let off bombs but failed to hurt their targets.

If any terrorists succeeded in shaking the foundations of the British state it was the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Guided by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, they left the old Irish Republican Army whose leaders claimed to be Marxists fighting for the liberation of Northern Ireland from London’s oppressive rule. The Provisionals abandoned Marxism while the Official IRA continued to advocate it and, as a reward, was given material assistance by the Kremlin.20 It was the bombing campaign of Adams and McGuinness, however, which brought the British government to the negotiating table.

The communist splinter parties in the United Kingdom argued with each other more eagerly than they took part in public affairs. They had ‘theorists’ – typically their own founders – who offered idiosyncratic analyses of Soviet history. Their ambition was to shoulder aside the Communist Party of Great Britain as the chief organisation of the political far left and to win the working class to their side. Their acronyms made up an alphabet soup of British communism:

CPB-ML	Communist Party of Britain – Marxist-Leninist
CPE-ML	Communist Party of England – Marxist-Leninist
MT	Militant Tendency
NCP	New Communist Party
RCG	Revolutionary Communist Group
RCLB	Revolutionary Communist League of Britain
RCP	Revolutionary Communist Party
RCPBM-L	Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain, Marxist-Leninist
RWP	Revolutionary Workers’ Party
SF	Socialist Federation
Socialist League	Socialist League
SOA	Socialist Organiser Alliance
SPGB	Socialist Party of Great Britain
SWP	Socialist Workers’ Party
Spartacist League	Spartacist League
WP	Workers’ Power
WRP	Workers’ Revolutionary Party

Some were Maoist (the CPE-ML and the RCLB) or, after Mao’s death, pro-Albania (the CPB-ML and the RCPBM-L). The Militant Tendency’s warmth for Trotski was shared by many Trotskyist organisations: the RCP, the RWP, the SF, the Socialist League, the SOA, the SWP, the Spartacist League, the WP and the WRP.

Most people found each ingredient in this mélange baffling and, if not amusing, unappealing; and the parties themselves were permanently ineffectual. The Militant Tendency was different. Recognising that it would never win political authority by straightforward means, it sought to infiltrate its members into the British Labour Party in targeted localities. This had been a Comintern tactic in the 1920s, and the Trotskyist international organisations had picked it up in the 1930s. The Militant Tendency took over Liverpool City Council by this method in the 1980s. The key to its effectiveness was clandestine parasitism. It subsisted by pretending not to exist as a separate entity and its leader Peter Taafe pretended to be a dutiful activist for the Labour Party. The Militant Tendency was a gift to Margaret Thatcher and the British Conservatives, who in the 1979 parliamentary election highlighted the Labour Party’s connection with hidden organisations of the extreme left. Liverpool councillors mismanaged the city budget with stupendous incompetence. When the banks would no longer bail out the deficit, taxis were hired to deliver redundancy notices to employees of the administration and its services throughout the city. The Labour Party National Executive, fired up by a passionate speech by its leader Neil Kinnock at the Party Conference, expelled the Militant Tendency. And without its host, the parasite shrivelled into insignificance.

 

34. LAST OF THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONS

A decade and a half elapsed between the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the next communist seizure of power. This had not been for want of trying by communists. Castro’s friend and associate Che Guevara, frustrated by what he saw as the lack of independent radicalism in a Cuba under Soviet tutelage, went off to the Congo to foment and organise a revolution in the way he wanted. When this failed, he tried to do the same in the mountains of Bolivia. He raised a guerrilla contingent as he and Castro had done in Cuba, calling on workers and peasants for support. He denounced the Bolivian government as a puppet of Yankee imperialism. But his fame undid his chances of surprise. The forces of order, aided by American money and expertise, were ready for him. Guevara was cornered in Bolivia in October 1967 in the presence of a CIA agent. No one wanted to put him on open trial; there was concern about his charisma in a country where plenty of people were discontented with the government. He was shot at the site of his capture.1

The great powers – the USA, the USSR and the People’s Republic of China – continued to exert an impact on communism around the world. Nowhere was this more obvious than in east Asia. North Korea survived as an independent state because Washington knew that Moscow and Beijing would intervene militarily if ever an American attack took place. Until the early 1970s Korean communism had an economy which performed as well as most Marxist-Leninist countries. Gross national product was roughly the same in the two halves of Korea, communist and capitalist, in the previous period. North Korea had an impressive export trade, especially in equipment for foreign armed forces. This was a highly militarised society. Conscription kept well over a million men under arms at any given time.² Party leader Kim Il-sung was accorded almost divine status. Mass rallies of joyful citizens praising his achievements and expressing gratitude for his wise rule were frequent. The ‘Great Leader’, the party and the masses were said to be in unison. Yet North Korea suffered economic atrophy as the military share of the budget got fatter. (Meanwhile South Korea experienced a boom as its imports of advanced technology and finance from Japan and the USA paid off.) Civilians went hungry throughout the north; even rice began to fail to match the state’s requirements for consumption.

Kim would not be deflected. He calculated that the best way of getting co-operation from neighbouring countries was to make his armed forces feared in the region. Research and development were initiated for the acquisition of independent nuclear weapons. Labour camps were expanded in population. Millions of Koreans, in the north as in the south, had been cut off from their families since the Panmunjom agreement of July 1953. The Koreans of the north might as well have been living on a different planet, so little did they know about the situation in the south.

A more effective effort was made by the communist state in North Vietnam to reunite its country. The country had been divided after the French withdrew from Indochina after their military defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954. Communist leader Ho Chi Minh had been fighting for the independence of the ‘Democratic Republic of Vietnam’ since the Second World War and did not intend to be bound by the agreement signed in Geneva. He had travelled widely in Europe and the USA. The Soviet and Chinese leaderships were cool towards a resumption of hostilities, but Ho went his own way just as Mao had done in the late 1940s.3 By 1958 he was ready to strike at the south. The army of North Vietnam, the Vietcong, took up the struggle in 1958. Its advances were rapid and deep, and the Eisenhower administration had to fill the gap left by the French by financing South Vietnam’s defence against communism. President Kennedy dispatched troops. This failed to eliminate the Vietcong. Massive additional assistance by the USA proved necessary. Kennedy’s successor President Johnson raised the number of American troops to over half a million by 1968. The American official standpoint was that, if South Vietnam were to be communised, it would be the first fallen domino in a line of countries in south-east Asia.

The Vietcong used a guerrilla strategy and avoided open pitched battle. It infiltrated villages in the south. It picked off units in the American encampments. The Pentagon sanctioned measures including the chemical defoliation of forests where the enemy was thought to be lurking. The US strategy suffered from several defects. The Americans failed to sanitise a South Vietnam government which was corrupt from top to bottom. Their own armed operations made the Vietcong appear as dedicated patriots; and although they regularly bombed Hanoi – the northern capital – and strafed the supply lines, they refrained from using the nuclear weapons which would have brought Ho to negotiations. Washington’s morale was sapped by demonstrations in American cities against the waging of the war. Television news clips from South Vietnam about atrocities – as well as growing resentment of conscription – poured petrol on the flames of public protest. President Richard Nixon, despite having come to office in 1969 as a vociferous anti-communist, offered peace terms to the Vietnamese forces as they advanced relentlessly towards the southern capital Saigon. For the first time since the Second World War one of the world’s two superpowers faced military defeat. Washington abruptly withdrew its forces in April 1975. American diplomats fled by helicopter at the very last moment from the roof of their embassy in Saigon.

Ho Chi Minh had not lived to witness his triumph; he died in 1969. As the northern authorities tightened their grip on Saigon, they did not forget him and the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honour. Vietnam was a single country again. Ho had organised the communist order on political and economic principles which drew on the Soviet and Chinese experiences. Agriculture was collectivised. A network of labour camps was spread across the country and hostile ‘class’ elements were rounded up and forced to abandon their capitalistic sympathies. A strict one-party dictatorship was imposed. A blend of patriotism and Marxism-Leninism was propagated. The party and the army were reinforced as the combined bastion of the regime. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam had been born in a colonial war and had known nothing but war since obtaining its independence. It was an even more militarised society than the People’s Republic of China. Yet its industry made hardly any armaments. It had little industry at all and the Americans bombed its few factories into rubble. Financial support and military supplies from the USSR and China had been crucial for survival.

The northerners communised the south after the American withdrawal. Expropriations and arrests accompanied the expansion of the party and army presence across the newly occupied provinces. Within a year or two the southern economy had been pressed into a northern mould. Yet the wartime devastation was everywhere. Vietnam was a land of orphans, invalids, ruined houses, disrupted rice paddies and poisoned forests. Hanoi expressed the wish for a rapprochement, but the departed Americans cut the Vietnamese off from the world economy. Peace was meant to turn the country into a desert. Although the USSR continued to proffer aid, it was never on a scale adequate for substantial reconstruction.

Hanoi was undeterred. The communist leadership under Le Duan pursued an agenda of expanding its regional influence. Vietnam refused to be managed by the USSR or the People’s Republic of China. It had the forces. It had the chutzpah and experience as well as a national tradition of aggression against its neighbours. Victimised Vietnam was turning into south-east Asia’s bully boy. Things in reality were more complicated. The long history of Indochina had an increasing impact. Boundaries were contentious. Every country had large national minorities. Vietnam and Cambodia were extremely ill disposed towards each other; communist internationalism was little in evidence. China was no disinterested spectator. It had helped Ho Chi Minh because he deflected the USA from any possible crusade against China. Now that Vietnam had been reunified, there was concern about a Vietnamese military assertiveness across frontiers. The Chinese withdrew assistance to Hanoi, and in February 1979, months after Vietnam had joined Comecon and allied itself firmly with the USSR, a brief war broke out between Vietnam and China. Indochina was a region of intersecting conflicts which led to the oddest of initiatives. Western leaders since the Second World War had opposed communism wherever it sprouted. But this policy was dropped in the 1970s when the USA effected a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China and even supported the communist terror-regime of Pol Pot. Geopolitics, national enmities and communist ideology were amalgamated in a witches’ brew.

Or rather in an evil wizard’s. The person in question was Pol Pot, leader of the Khmers Rouges, whose communist forces seized power in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in April 1975; he went by the soubriquet First Brother – shades of George Orwell’s 1984 – and was a Maoist fanatic: he had absorbed Mao’s ideas for revolutionary transformation like blotting paper.4

As parts of the country fell to the Khmers Rouges, they instituted instant communisation. Farming was collectivised. Even Mao had taken years to get this far; Pol Pot showed no such patience. Private property as such was abolished. Neither Stalin not Mao had attempted so extreme a measure, but Pol Pot pressed onwards. Markets and shops were prohibited. Money was abolished. The Gothic cathedral at the heart of Phnom Penh, pride of the French colonialists, was demolished.⁵ The Khmers Rouges identified two principal internal enemies. The large Vietnamese minority in Cambodia was one of them. Pol Pot ordered the razing of their villages and the butchering of the inhabitants, and there was savage ethnic cleansing. Equally miserable was the plight of urban residents of any nationality: the Khmers Rouges feared them as a fount of hostility. They wanted to work on Cambodian society with nobody around who would know more about the world than they themselves did. (Not that they knew much.) Their solution was to empty the towns of their entire population. Residents had to leave at a moment’s notice for the countryside, taking only a mat, a tin bowl and the clothes they stood up in. They fended for themselves in unfriendly villages. Pol Pot was glacially indifferent: ‘To have them is no gain, to lose them is no loss.’6

No ruler in history had engaged in such lunacy. There had been mass deportations. There had been massacres and depredations. The Chinese communists, furthermore, had engaged in brutal campaigns to push people into the countryside. But even Mao did not close down his cities. Pol Pot was unique in the Marxist tradition for treating urban life not as a prerequisite of communist progress but as an iniquity to be eliminated. It is true that he expected to revert eventually to an agenda congruent with communism elsewhere. Pol projected the total mechanisation of agriculture within ten years and the construction of an industrial base for the Cambodian economy within twenty. He aimed to double or triple the population.⁷ But all this was reserved for the future: his immediate priority was to yoke Cambodians to the party’s rule.

He took power in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh just days after the Americans scuttled from Vietnam in spring 1975. An early measure was to purge his own forces. Every follower suspected of pro-Vietnamese leanings was hauled off to an ex-secondary school redesignated as Interrogation Centre S-21. Fiendish tortures were applied to extract confessions to imaginary plots. The ‘evil microbes inside the party’ were liquidated. Communists were forced to attend courses of indoctrination and self-criticism. They had to go to evening ‘lifestyle meetings’ where they admitted to faults in their work during the day. A working cycle of nine days with the tenth off was proclaimed, but the tenth day was in fact reserved for political education.⁸ Food was used as a disciplinary instrument and the former inhabitants of the towns were given only enough rice to keep them from starvation. Everyone except the party leadership was obliged to carry out hard physical labour. Collective farming was imposed and villages had to deliver centrally determined quotas of produce to the authorities. Frugality became an official virtue. People were ordered to be satisfied with whatever food they were given. Many took to foraging for snails, mice and insects; but when Pol Pot heard about this, he made it a capital offence to pick up a fallen coconut.9

Few local functionaries in Cambodia had administrative or economic expertise. This was as Pol wanted it. He had no use for comrades who might relapse into ideas and practices which they had learned independently of him. Cambodian communism sealed itself off from ideological erosion. Violent, arbitrary rule was pervasive. Leaders in the country’s various zones appointed their own ‘strings’ to jobs – strings were the equivalent of Soviet cliental ‘tails’. Misreporting to higher officialdom became the norm.¹⁰ Although repression was ordered from Phnom Penh, a lot happened in consequence of lower-level initiatives – and the scale of repression differed from area to area.¹¹ Ill-educated, bloodthirsty ex-guerrilla fighters became a law unto themselves. Cambodia had experienced almost continuous civil war in previous decades, and brutality had regularly been practised by all sides. The terror under Pol Pot took this to the nadir of human degradation. About a fifth of the Cambodian population died; some estimates put the losses even higher: it was demographically the most devastating of all communist revolutions in the twentieth century.¹²

The madness was brought to an end not by the resistance of the Cambodians but by Vietnamese intervention. War between Vietnam and Cambodia had broken out sporadically from the start of Pol’s rule. Pol terrorised his own Vietnamese minority and idiotically made military incursions into Vietnam. The Hanoi authorities helped to establish an exile force which, with an active Vietnamese component, attacked the Khmers Rouges and overthrew Pol in January 1979. The Khmers Rouges were beaten but not eliminated, and they returned to prominence in later years; but they never again dominated the country and the nightmare of their rule had been definitively removed.

By that time the Chilean Revolution too had been suppressed. Salvador Allende won the presidential election of September 1970 against his two rival contenders, ex-President Jorge Alessandri and Radomiro Tomic, with 36 per cent of the votes cast.¹³ He was sixty-two years old, tubby and bespectacled, but still a handsome figure. He radiated a reassuring avuncularity which at last won over many doubters in the electorate. It was his first successful campaign in four attempts. Allende was a Marxist heading the Socialist Party; he was the leading figure in an electoral coalition involving the Communist Party of Chile. His Popular Unity government had radical intentions. In his victory speech he declared: ‘I won’t be just another president; I’ll be the first president of the first truly democratic, popular, national and revolutionary government in Chile’s history.’14 Allende spoke of ‘the Chilean road to socialism’. He had never believed in the violent transformation. (Che had affectionately written of him ‘striving after the same goal by different means’.)¹⁵ The government planned to introduce fiscal reform to benefit the poor, end the power of the latifundia owners, establish a unicameral legislature and enable popular participation in economic management, in political decision-making and in the administration of justice. Allende boasted that he would pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy.¹⁶

The whole history of Latin America in the twentieth century told him that US political and economic power would be directed against him. The economic legacy of the Eduardo Frei government was grievous: there was wild inflation and wage and salary demands were strong. The price of copper, Chile’s main earner of foreign currency, on the world market was falling. When Washington heard of the Chilean president’s bid for independence, it withdrew financial assistance from the country and ensured that neither the International Monetary Fund nor the World Bank would help either.¹⁷ The Popular Unity government, moreover, was a coalition of six parties including social-democrats to the right of the Communist Party of Chile and socialists to its left. Many leading figures in Allende’s Socialist Party were committed to forms of revolutionary violence, and it was sometimes hard for him to restrain them from embroiling him in trouble. The opposition whipped up anti-government sentiment. The elections to the Congress and to the Chamber of Deputies in the year before Allende’s presidential triumph had failed to provide Popular Unity with a majority of seats. The opportunities for destabilising the new government were ample.¹⁸

The huge debit in Chile’s balance of payments in international trade forced Allende to seek help from friendly powers. Cuba could give little financial assistance since its own economy was reliant on subsidies from the USSR. Fidel Castro came to Santiago in 1971 to express political solidarity and to boost morale. His lengthy speeches, though, were not to Chilean popular taste – indeed they had never been wildly liked in Havana but had had to be tolerated – and his highly publicised trip, which lasted three weeks, damaged Allende’s effort to allay disquiet in business, professional and military circles. Anti-communists in Chile knew that Castro had begun his own revolution by preaching moderation. Although Allende frequently talked about his ‘peaceful road’ to socialism, there was no guarantee that he would stick to his word. With some difficulty the government succeeded in getting financial relief from abroad. Other countries in Central and South America were better placed than Cuba to grant the loans. The USSR and eastern Europe also supplied credits to the value of 500 million dollars.19 The Soviet leaders felt they could not simply stand by and let Allende’s Popular Unity collapse even though the communists were a minority inside it.

The Chilean government fulfilled its promise to raise the salaries of state employees. Allende nationalised many industrial companies, increasing the number of them by five times. Price controls were introduced for the benefit of the poor who had brought Popular Unity to power. Among the effects, however, was a growing disruption of the commercial process. Small business proprietors in particular felt the pinch. The economic crisis deepened. The USSR had never been confident about Allende’s policies and refused to go on showing Chile the generosity it displayed to Cuba.²⁰ Allende suspended payments on his country’s external debts.²¹

Allende and his ministers held their nerve. The copper mines were taken into state ownership in July 1971. (The feeling that national assets had been plundered by the mining companies, including foreign ones, was so widely held in Chile that the political opposition supported the government’s measure.)²² Agrarian reform was more controversial. For centuries the indigenous people had been robbed of their traditional lands as Spanish-speaking landlords seized territory for their latifundia. An agricultural oligarchy ruled the rural areas. Allende took the initiative in 1972 and announced his intention to take over 60 per cent of cultivable landed property for redistribution to the rural poor.²³ The consequence was a decreasing level of agricultural production. Many new peasant owners worked their land only for subsistence. The government also picked up the pace of industrial nationalisation. Only thirty-one enterprises were state owned in November 1970. By May 1973 the number had risen to 165 and was projected to climb higher.²⁴ In most cases the government took the lead. But Allende’s drive for popular participation induced some workforces to seize control of their enterprises and eject their employers. If anything, there was greater commotion in the cities than in the countryside.

Discontent grew across in society. It is true that communists won 38 per cent of workers’ votes in the 1972 election to the trade union movement – and socialists came second with 32 per cent. But among technical staff the Christian Democrats were out in front with 41 per cent. Across the professions there was a rising concern that Popular Unity was incapable of sound governance. Nor were even the workers solidly behind Allende. Those who remained outside the trade unions constituted a majority, and many of them were hostile to Popular Unity.25

The government was hit by a tidal wave of protest. Unlike Castro, Allende had no monopoly in the press and probably did not want one. His enemies relied heavily on Washington’s financial and diplomatic assistance; they also made use of advice from the Central Intelligence Agency. Short of arresting the leaders of Chile’s traditional elites, Allende ran a continuous risk of being overthrown in a coup d’etat. It was not as if his handling of the economy was bringing prosperity to most people. Industry and commerce were in chaos. The government’s popularity was in decline among many of its supporters. Even so, Allende retained a core of left-wing parties, trade unions, workers and peasants on his side. If he was going to be removed, the easiest option would be military action. Allende thought he had covered his back by appointing an apolitical officer, Augusto Pinochet, to head the armed forces. This was a catastrophic misjudgement. Pinochet, like many in the high command, hated communism and disorder and wanted a return to capitalist economics. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger knew the general’s inclinations better than Allende. With his sanction the CIA channelled the assistance needed for a successful attempt on power.²⁶

Pinochet struck on 11 September 1973. Allende only discovered what was happening when tanks rumbled on to the lawn outside the presidential palace in Santiago. Resistance was futile. The armed forces quickly imposed their authority, but Allende refused to surrender. Recognising that his coalition government was no more, he killed himself with the rifle given him by Fidel Castro. All the parties of the left were scattered into exile or the political underground. The military junta spared no one. Communist party chief Luis Corvalán was thrown into prison. In 1976 he was included in an international prisoner-exchange. Soviet dissenter Vladimir Bukovski was allowed out to English exile while Corvalán took up residence in Moscow. Chilean communism, which had developed a strategy of radical economic and social change without violence or illegality, was crushed. Its party was outlawed. Its militants were rounded up and held in appalling conditions in the National Stadium in Santiago until they joined the ranks of the ‘disappeared’ after being shot.

Yet while life remained harsh for most people in Latin America there was still fertile ground for the growth of communism. Middle-class students invariably had some in their midst who resented ‘Yankee imperialism’ and identified their governments as repressive collaborators with the USA. Peasants and workers demanded better conditions. Castro’s Cuba was widely praised for its social and economic reforms. Allende’s miserable end was taken as yet another example of American selfish and ruthless interference in the politics of the hemisphere.

Communists elsewhere in the world, especially Africa, were undeterred. Angola was a focalpoint of struggle. The Cubans had encouraged the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) since the mid-1960s, and the USSR had begun to supply weapons.27 The collapse of the Portuguese Empire in 1974–5 was followed by a civil war. Consultations between Moscow and Havana led to a division of labour: Moscow would supply money, transport and military equipment, Havana would dispatch a large expeditionary force to bolster the MPLA.²⁸ By spring 1976 this had resulted in victory over US-backed forces and Aghostinho Neto established a government committed to Marxism-Leninism and allied with the USSR. The fighting, however, was resumed by the anti-communist army of Jonas Savimbi; and although economic planning institutions were introduced in the Soviet style, the war against Savimbi devoured all the energies of the MPLA. South Africa and the USA supplied Savimbi with ample funds and equipment. Not until Savimbi died in 2002 did the conflict come to an end. It would be overstretching the word’s meaning to say that communism was installed in Angola, despite the longevity of the regime of Neto and his successors.

Ethiopian communists were hardly more effective in setting up a stable regime. Stirrings in the armed forces against Emperor Haile Selassie led in 1974 to the formation of the Co-ordinating Committee (Derg). This body steadily stripped the Emperor of his powers. Its own members were deeply divided and its first leader Lieutenant General Aman Andom was killed in factional strife. The radical wing of the Derg, headed by Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, took dictatorial control. Mengistu declared rural land to be ‘the property of the Ethiopian people’ and distributed it to peasant co-operatives. He quickly moved to a communist ideological commitment. Supporters of the Imperial regime resisted him even after the murder of the Emperor in August 1975. Ethnic groups, especially the Eritreans and the Somalis, fought to secede from the Ethiopian state. Mengistu also confronted opposition in the Derg. His response was to conduct a Red Terror.²⁹ This finally lost him financial aid from the USA, which supported him against the Soviet-backed Eritrean rebels; but by then he could count on support from the USSR, which had ceased to favour the Eritrean rebels. In February 1977 Mengistu killed his surviving rivals and critics in the Derg. Finance, arms and military advisers in large quantities were transported to Ethiopia from Moscow. Cubans too were dispatched. Ethiopia had become a geostrategic outpost of world communism in the Horn of Africa.

Although the Derg’s fighting capacity increased, the basic difficulties of communist rule got worse. Eritreans and Somalis kept up the struggle against a government which used brutal methods of suppression. Economic mismanagement was severe. Whole regions of the country experienced famine. The assault on religion and social customs caused enormous resentment. Mengistu even annoyed his Soviet advisers. They thought his propensity for political violence counter-productive; they were also disappointed by his failure to construct a communist party, mobilise the ‘masses’ and resolve inter-ethnic enmities. The continual executions were regarded as undesirable.30

Mengistu had built a confinement ward almost to rival Pol Pot’s in the lunatic asylum of communist politics. Far from being controllable, he had used Soviet and Cuban assistance more or less as he liked. The same was true in Afghanistan. Two communist groups, Khalq and Parcham, had existed since the mid-1960s. These were bitter rivals but formed themselves into a united People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and campaigned against President Mohammed Daoud and his slow pace of reform. Modernity seemed to be postponed for decades. In April 1978 the Khalq carried out a successful coup against the Daoud government and Khalq leaders Hafizullah Amin and Nur Mohammed Taraki seized power. This came as a surprise to the Kremlin, which had been supporting Daoud. Parcham warned Moscow of the dangers of Khalq extremism. Amin pressed on with executions of the regime’s open enemies. Civil war broke out. Islamist rebellions of the various ethnic groups sprang up everywhere. Amin sought to win support by announcing a campaign for universal literacy and land reform. But little was achievable in an environment of unending violence and social insecurity. Amin had Taraki murdered in October 1979; he was also showing signs of wanting a rapprochement with Washington. It was in this situation of political disintegration and intensifying carnage that the Soviet leadership took its fateful decision to intervene militarily in December.³¹

The Khalq’s seizure of power in Kabul was the last of the twentieth-century communist revolutions and demonstrated beyond peradventure that communism had no chance of surviving in power without resorting to massive repression. The Soviet comrades were frequently appalled by what they witnessed. They belonged to a generation which remembered the horrors of Stalin’s rule, and they could hardly believe the recklessness of Pol Pot, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Hafizullah Amin. These were revolutions led by men wilder than the early Bolsheviks, wilder even than Stalin and Mao. They attempted to solve problems of economics, administration, ethnicity and religion by surgical force. Their mayhem kicked up a storm of hatred for communism. Yet the gradualist approach of Salvador Allende was hardly more successful; his regime was hurtling towards economic disaster and political disintegration even before Pinochet struck. Communist revolutionary rule proved to be a passage down a cul-de-sac.

 

PART SIX

ENDINGS

FROM 1980

 

35. ROADS FROM COMMUNISM

American presidents from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter had acted as though the USSR was a durable fixture in world politics. It was as late as 1988 that Richard Nixon published his book 1999: Victory without War, making the case that only a policy of renewed détente could safely wear down communism into defeat.1 The USSR was a global power. It financed and directed dozens of communist parties and their ‘front’ organisations. It projected its military might and prestige across the oceans. Its missiles had the capacity to obliterate European, Japanese and American cities within minutes; its submarines docked in Vietnam. Although fewer and fewer communists thought the Soviet Union infallible or gave it automatic allegiance, its influence remained extensive. No other communist state, not even the People’s Republic of China, was a close rival. Although communism had deep internal divisions around the world, communist states covered a third of the terrestrial surface of the planet. Most people assumed that things could go on like that for many years. It was widely known, of course, that communism was experiencing bottlenecks of economic development and encountering a growing tide of resentment from the societies where it had been imposed. But nobody suggested that the time was very near when most communist states would disappear.²

Global politics were transformed by the American presidential elections of November 1980. Carter had faced criticism for failing to secure the rescue of US diplomats held hostage in Tehran by the Iranian government under Ayatollah Khomeini. He also incurred blame for weakness in standing up to the USSR. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was taken as proof that the Kremlin was bent on unlimited expansion. There was a growing feeling among Americans that their country had lost its sense of purpose in the world; national pride had not yet recovered from the defeat in the Vietnam War in 1975.

Ronald Reagan easily won the election, gaining a mandate to rectify the situation on entering office in January 1981. The Soviet leadership, already discountenanced by Carter’s rejection of détente, was seriously worried. Pravda routinely described Reagan as a war-mongering ignoramus who spurned negotiations in favour of nuclear brinkmanship. Until his election as Governor of California in 1967, he was famous as a Hollywood actor and chairman of the actors’ union. His insistence on taking plenty of rest and on delegating authority to his subordinates fostered the idea that he was a figure of small substance, and he did little to counteract the image. With his dyed hair and genial demeanour, he was thought a plaything of manipulators who ratcheted up the tension in US–Soviet relations. Reagan leavened his speeches with anecdotes and avoided the complexities of affairs. He even joked, when he thought he was not being recorded, about launching missiles against Moscow. Seemingly an inmate had taken over the psychiatric ward.

His basic idea was that communism had been over-indulged. He declared the USSR an ‘evil empire’, asserting that totalitarian states were ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’.3 Truman, when introducing the policy of containment in 1947, had expected it to expire from its internal difficulties. Reagan was more militant: ‘The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to . . . denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’⁴ He refused to accept that the Cold War was a permanent condition. Reagan increased pressures on the Soviet budget by raising American military expenditure. By 1985 it had doubled in half a decade.⁵

Reagan in 1981 was as militant as Churchill in 1918 without being a warmonger. Wherever in the world a Soviet threat existed, he armed its local enemies. He licensed a gargantuan budgetary deficit. The mujehaddin resistance to the USSR’s puppet regime in Afghanistan was given Stinger ground-to-air missiles.⁶ Reagan funnelled cash and arms to the Contra rebels against Nicaragua’s radical reformers – the Sandinistas – under Daniel Ortega, who had come to power in July 1979.⁷ Washington also supported the governmental and paramilitary forces in El Salvador trying to suppress the Marxist guerrilla movement known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. In October 1983 he ordered the US Marines to suppress the Marxist-led New Jewel government on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. He commended Guatemala’s corrupt military dictator Efrain Rios Montt as being ‘totally dedicated to democracy’.⁸ This was not his most convincing remark but showed his determination to inoculate world politics against the communist infection. Reagan also started tilting policy against the compromises with the People’s Republic of China negotiated by Nixon and Carter. Taiwan was no longer to be quietly abandoned. Reagan risked confrontation with Deng Xiaoping rather than drop his anti-communist commitment.

He refrained, however, from withdrawing ‘most favoured nation’ status from Romania, Hungary and Poland. Like Carter, he wanted to help the communist leaderships of those countries to make trouble for the USSR in Eastern Europe. Only in 1982, after Poland’s armed forces had crushed the Solidarity trade union, did he withdraw the concessions being made to the Polish regime.9 The rise in global interest rates, moreover, provided Washington with increased leverage in diplomatic relations as most states in eastern Europe fell into hopeless debt to the Western banking system.¹⁰ The USSR, whose economy had its own problems, was constrained to bail out the Soviet Bloc or else confront increased political problems in the region.

Reagan in the same period proposed a deal to end the possibility of a third world war. He had boundless optimism. In 1981 he sent a handwritten letter to Brezhnev pleading for the ‘normalisation’ of relations between their two countries. (The Politburo treated this as demagogy.)¹¹ Tossing SALT II into the dustbin, he asked for START to be got under way. START would be the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. Any idea of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), in Reagan’s eyes, was madness because it remained entirely possible that a lone missile might penetrate the enemy airspace.¹² The only possible outcome would be reciprocal devastation and an uninhabitable planet. American security precautions would count for nothing. In March 1983 Reagan committed himself to financing a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). This instantly became known as the Star Wars Initiative – a reference to the popular sci-fi films of George Lucas. Reagan hoped that American scientists and technologists would enable his armed forces to intercept and eliminate any ballistic missile fired against the USA, and he insisted that he was willing to share such technology with the world’s other powers. Soviet leaders were told that they too could receive the technology. Reagan announced his ultimate aim to be the abolition of all nuclear bombs.

The Soviet Politburo had cause to distrust him and to face him down.¹³ When an international communist conference was held in Moscow in 1981, Brezhnev was in poor health; but the political line remained straight and conventional. Supposedly capitalism was decaying and communism was on the rise. Doubts existed whether the Strategic Defence Initiative was truly feasible (even though the Politburo took the precaution of ordering its scientists to work on their own rival project).¹⁴ Sceptics about the SDI were not uncommon in Reagan’s own administration, as well as among the NATO governments. At the very least, the American President had aroused perplexity. If he thought the USSR so evil, why would he aim to eliminate nuclear weaponry and to share anti-ballistic technology? Could an SDI system really be developed? Was it sensible, if the system really could be built, to hand it over to the USSR? Could nuclear bombs, once produced, be annihilated by politicians? And if Reagan was going to annoy the People’s Republic of China, how was the USA going to cope with a deteriorating relationship with both of the great communist powers at the same time?

Brezhnev died in November 1982 and the USSR acquired Yuri Andropov as its new Party General Secretary. Andropov recognised the need for political and economic changes if the USSR was to remain at all competitive with the USA. He called for a renewed emphasis on discipline and a rooting out of corruption. Dozens of central and local party functionaries were shunted into retirement. Punctuality and conscientiousness at work was demanded. Andropov stated that the leadership had failed to understand conditions in society; by implication he was conceding that a gap had opened between the party and most citizens. Behind the scenes he set up a group of younger politicians including Mikhail Gorbachëv and Nikolai Ryzhkov to explore what kind of reforms were needed in the Soviet economy. He also put in train a revision of the country’s foreign policy. Andropov quietly proposed that both the USA and the USSR should formally guarantee not to intervene militarily in the countries under their control. Thus he signalled disapproval of what had happened to Hungary in 1956 and to Czechoslovakia in 1968. Confidential indications were given to Cuba that the USSR was withdrawing its military guarantee for the island’s defence. He called not just for limitations on the superpowers’ stockpiles of nuclear weaponry but for their drastic reduction.

Andropov, ex-Chairman of the KGB, understood that he would have a weak bargaining hand unless the USSR could show a sustained capacity to develop its military technology. The Politburo approved. Investment was sanctioned for upgrading the Soviet armed forces. The military-technological parity with the USA won by Brezhnev was to be reattained even at the expense of the popular standard of living. Andropov wanted to ‘perfect’ the communist order; he had hoped for plenty of time to do this. But Reagan’s geopolitical challenge would be met. The Cold War was going to get hotter.

Moscow and Washington in this situation were unlikely to patch up their diplomatic relationship. Mutual distrust remained acute and events seemed to confirm the justification for it. In August 1983 a South Korean civilian plane, KAL-007, was shot down after straying into Soviet airspace in the Far East. All 269 passengers perished. Military personnel in the USSR had feared that a nuclear strike was being undertaken by subterfuge. As the innocence of the over-flight became evident, Reagan denounced the incident as a crime against humanity. Then just a few weeks later, in November, the KGB reported to Andropov that intelligences sources were indicating the possibility that the USA was planning a sudden nuclear attack on the USSR.15 Supposedly this was going to happen under the cover of an American military exercise called Able Archer. Soviet armed forces were put on the highest state of alert. The slightest misunderstanding by one or other superpower could have triggered the Third World War and a global holocaust. In fact Andropov held his nerve, declining to take pre-emptive action. The secret emergency ended and no Soviet or American politician wanted to comment on what had been happening. This was a crisis close to the scale of the Cuban missiles crisis of October 1962; but its principal players thought it sensible to conceal it from their citizens.

Reagan recognised that his message about wishing to eliminate tensions between his country and the USSR was failing to get through:

During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.¹⁶

Re-elected in 1984, he sought to assure the Soviet leadership that he wanted peace; he also signalled that he sought a resumption of negotiations.¹⁷ This was not going to be easy. Andropov had been in poor health at his accession to the General Secretaryship, and he died in February 1984. His successor Konstantin Chernenko had been Brezhnev’s personal assistant. Mental agility beyond the routine tasks of administration had never been one of his strong features and he was already badly ill with emphysema. Reagan was trying to parley at a table at which he was the solitary sitter.

Yet fortune smiled on the American strategy when, in March 1985, Chernenko died and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachëv. There was already a readiness in the West to treat the new leader differently from previous General Secretaries. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had said: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’ Gorbachëv talked with an amiable flexibility unknown in any previous party general secretary. Thatcher’s opinion of him was quickly shared by other Western leaders. Soviet internal reforms were put in motion in politics and economics,18 and communist rulers in eastern Europe were told that they should no longer count on the armed support of the USSR to sustain their regimes.¹⁹ President Reagan joined the crowd of Gorbachëv’s admirers when, in November, they met in Geneva for the first time. They got on famously. Both men were eager to reduce the number of nuclear missiles pointed at each other’s country; and they aimed, if at all possible, to eliminate such missiles from every arsenal and to end the Cold War. Only Reagan’s refusal to halt support for the Strategic Defence Initiative caused the talks to founder. The two men emerged from their session knowing that a chance had been missed for a fundamental settlement of hostilities between the two countries.

The sharpening difficulties of the USSR helped to strengthen Gorbachëv’s commitment to internal and external reform. Poland was a constant worry as strikes and demonstrations continued under the impetus of the Solidarity trade union. Communist-ruled eastern Europe depended on cheap oil and gas from the Soviet Union – about seventy-five billion dollars’ worth of implicit commercial subsidies are thought to have passed from Moscow in the 1970s.²⁰ Western banks assisted in bailing out communism by continuing to lend money to communist states.²¹ The strains on the Soviet budget had been increased by the invasion of Afghanistan – and they were to grow again in 1986 when the world’s main countries which exported oil agreed to reduce their prices. Cuban intervention in Angola continued to cost more than the USSR could afford.

If the USSR was ever to compete with the USA in economic development, it badly needed to reduce its military expenditure. Personal computers and later the Internet were pulling things forward at breakneck speed. American firms were in the lead and there was a rapid expansion of the world market in consumer goods. The USSR had always lagged behind; now it suddenly saw its main competitors disappearing out of sight. It was no longer credible that capitalism was in its terminal global crisis. Greece and Spain joined the European Union and ceased being the backward enclaves of the continent. Ireland’s commercial growth was remarkable. Elsewhere in the world there was similar progress. The People’s Republic of China had learned from Taiwan and Hong Kong – territories it claimed as Chinese – that capitalism had an economic and social energy that communism lacked. South Korea was offering the same lesson (although the lesson was ignored by North Korea). So too were countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. The ‘Third World’ was overtaking the USSR in industrial capacity and technological dynamism. The desirability of an improved relationship with the USA was uncontroversial among Politburo members who saw the necessity of moving their budgetary expenditure away from its preponderant emphasis on the armaments sector.

Four summit meetings followed. Gorbachëv and Reagan at Reykjavik in October 1986 nearly came to an agreement on the abolition of their nuclear weaponry but the SDI again proved an insurmountable obstacle. By December 1987, in Washington, Gorbachëv recognised that Reagan’s attachment to the SDI was indissoluble and an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed. This was a landmark on the road towards ending the Cold War. For the first time the USA and the USSR had agreed to destroy a large part of their stock of nuclear weapons. In April 1988 Gorbachëv announced his decision to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan; and when visiting the United Nations Organisation in New York in December 1988, he renounced ideological principles such as ‘class struggle’ in international relations.22 Afghanistan was the symbol of something bigger. Gorbachëv made clear to both his Politburo and Reagan that the Soviet Union no longer intended to make trouble for the USA in the Third World. He refused any longer to support the Nicaraguan Revolution. He forced the Cubans to get out of Africa. He questioned why the USSR should go on subsidising a regime in South Yemen of dubiously Marxist authenticity.²³ (Not that the USSR was lacking in problems on this topic.) Gorbachëv was rejecting the theory of Lenin and Stalin as well as the foreign-policy practice of Khrushchëv and Brezhnev.

While welcoming all this, Reagan sustained the diplomatic pressure. For pragmatic reasons he abandoned his anti-Beijing rhetoric and concentrated his fire on communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe – this change of stance was made easier for him by the perception that the Chinese under Deng Xiaoping were undertaking basic economic reform and introducing capitalism. The President did not repeat his claim that the USSR was an evil empire; he even decoupled discussions on human rights in the USSR from discussions on arms control.²⁴ Yet in two speeches – one at the Berlin Wall in June 1987, the other at Moscow State University in May 1988 – he said things that went far beyond what Gorbachëv currently wanted to hear. In West Berlin he demanded of the absent Soviet leader: ‘Mr Gorbachëv, tear down this wall!’ In Moscow in May 1988, standing incongruously beneath a huge Lenin bust, he stated: ‘Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth . . .’25 He overruled expert diplomatic and political advice to speak like this. He understood better than his expert advisers that his words would stoke up the flames of opposition to the east European status quo without endangering his relationship with Gorbachëv.

The American intelligence agencies strengthened contact with political dissenters in eastern Europe. Agents brought messages of support and helped to publicise cases of official abuse. They also brought money. Ronald Reagan, President from 1980 to 1988, wanted to do what he could to pull down the Iron Curtain shrouding eastern Europe. He had an ally in Pope John Paul II, who as Karol Wojtyła had been Archbishop of Kraków until 1978. In the past it had been difficult for rebels against communism to subsist without gainful employment because the authorities might bring charges of ‘parasitism’. The CIA and the Vatican got to work at offering discreet assistance. Informal bodies, some of them being tiny in membership and short of funds, were doing the same.²⁶ This was exactly what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was doing to help the world communist movement. Thus, as dollars arrived in Rome from Moscow, dollars departed Rome and Washington for Warsaw. The finance helped, but it was not the crucial factor in weakening communism in eastern Europe. If money had been the key to political change, Italy would long ago have acquired a communist government (and the Pope would have been ejected from the Vatican). Financial subventions could only accelerate an existing motion. The same had been true in 1917: ‘German gold’ had been an aid to the Bolsheviks in preparing to seize power but nothing like the main resource at their disposal.

Opposition to Gorbachëv in the central party leadership was confined to home affairs. In foreign policy he had a free hand. No one in the Politburo objected to his campaign to end disputes with the USA and reduce the USSR’s expenditure on nuclear weaponry. Gorbachëv was their stellar negotiator. No contemporary politician rivalled his worldwide popularity, and Reagan made things easier for him by refusing to crow about all the concessions being made from the Soviet side.

George H. Bush, before winning the presidential election of November 1988, had assured Gorbachëv that there would be no turning back on the course already pursued. Once a sceptic about the genuineness of the Soviet commitment to reform, he had become a believer – and he was not going to be browbeaten by ‘the marginal intellectual thugs’ to the right of Ronald Reagan.27 Even so, he showed a coolness to Gorbachëv for some months and there was a pause in the warming of American–Soviet relations.²⁸ Gorbachëv’s reaction to events in eastern Europe changed Bush’s mind. When Henry Kissinger came to Moscow in January 1989 and proposed setting up a condominium of the USA and the USSR over Europe, Gorbachëv rejected the proposal out of hand.²⁹ Quite what Kissinger meant is not a topic clarified in his memoirs: was he really suggesting a mere modification of the status quo? It would seem so. Kissinger, like his former master Nixon, could not imagine a world where European countries escaped from under the umbrella of the two superpowers. At least Gorbachëv understood that the old Soviet and American understanding of geopolitics was obsolete, and he could ill afford to annoy President Bush, who had no intention of reverting to détente.

Gorbachëv seemed to be doing the work of American anti-communism better than President Bush. Conditions in China were moving towards the point of political explosion as students openly criticised the authorities. Bush set off for Beijing in February 1989 determined to ring bells for the democratic cause. At his official banquet he insisted on inviting the intellectual dissenter Fang Lizhi as his guest. The Chinese security agencies, though, made excuses to Bush and quietly detained Fang. Gorbachëv was not as easily thwarted. The Soviet leader visited Beijing in mid-May, when Tiananmen Square was being occupied by a peaceful protest by students for a month. Gorbachëv made his usual call for democracy and peaceful political methods. The Chinese media did what they could to pretend that nothing unusual was happening, but hundreds of the world’s journalists had come to China to cover the visit and stayed on after his departure. The pressure of instant global media coverage was applied to the People’s Republic of China for the first time. As it turned out, it made no positive difference to the line taken by the Chinese communist leadership. In the night of 3–4 June the People’s Liberation Army moved tank units on to Tiananmen Square and hundreds were killed in the ensuing carnage. External intervention had ultimately failed to bend Deng Xiaoping to adopt, in Gorbachëv’s repeated phrase, ‘new thinking’.

Returning to Moscow, Gorbachëv had to take fundamental decisions about eastern Europe. The Polish political emergency came to a head in summer 1989. Elections were held. The communists went down to a heavy defeat and gave way to Solidarity in government. The precedent had been set. The German Democratic Republic collapsed under pressure of popular protests. Romania’s Ceauescu was overthrown. All eastern Europe was aflame with the fire of anti-communism. By the end of the year the end was in sight. Communism had already been overturned or was on the retreat in all the states of the region where it had until recently held dictatorial power. And Gorbachëv refused to lift a finger to assist his comrades in the Warsaw Pact.30

Bush was astounded: ‘If the Soviets are going to let the communists fall in East Germany, they’ve got to be really serious – more serious than I thought.’³¹ Country after country secured political liberation. Gorbachëv took care to obtain the Politburo’s approval for military withdrawal.³² No party, police or army leader objected to the inevitability of the strategy. Minister of Defence Dmitri Yazov was to recall: ‘We had to return home some day.’³³ At the summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachëv off the coast of Malta in December 1989 Gorbachëv mooted the possibility of German reunification. By January 1990 his inner circle had made a decision along those lines.³⁴ Communism was dead in eastern Europe. Gorbachëv stopped bothering about communists in the old ‘outer empire’. His Politburo was more eager to contact Václav Havel and former dissidents of Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia than to maintain ties with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.³⁵ Cuba was all but abandoned to its own devices, and Fidel Castro was asked to moderate his anti-American rhetoric and to avoid foreign military operations.³⁶ Jaime Pérez, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Uruguay, came to Moscow to plead Castro’s case; but it was Gorbachëv’s deputy Vladimir Ivashko, not Gorbachëv, who saw him.³⁷ When Bush assembled a vast force to eject Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in December 1990, Gorbachëv complained about the use of force to solve international problems but otherwise made no trouble for the Americans.

Yet Bush declined the $1.5 billion loan requested by Gorbachëv in spring 1991. Gorbachëv was judged incapable of undertaking comprehensive economic reform while manoeuvring to keep his more cautious comrades on his side.³⁸ As Soviet economic conditions became dire, Gorbachëv set out for London in June to negotiate with the leaders of the world’s seven economically most powerful countries at the so-called G7 meeting. He went cap in hand. There was nothing he could offer in return that he had not already conceded. His argument was that the world had an interest in preventing the USSR’s collapse, and he played on his general popularity in the West. He ran into a brick wall and returned to Moscow empty-handed.

For many reasons, both internal and external, his leading subordinates decided that Gorbachëv was driving the USSR towards disaster. A coup was organised against him on 18 August. The putschists, as they were known, had overplayed their hand and Boris Yeltsin, the Russian President, successfully defied them. Gorbachëv returned to the Kremlin but the real power moved to Yeltsin. Bush, however, showed less than total respect to Yeltsin and continued to favour Gorbachëv. The USA did not want the USSR to fall apart. Visiting Kiev, Bush advised against secession. The downfall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was one thing, the disintegration of a multinational power into separate and volatile units was entirely another. Yet on 8 December the decision had been taken by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to break up the USSR. Bush still went around speaking up for Gorbachëv. He had little historical imagination. Like Gorbachëv, he seems to have clung to the surmise that even if the ‘Baltic states’ – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – successfully seceded from the Union, no other Soviet republic would necessarily follow. Bush was backing a losing horse after the race had finished.

Gorbachëv bowed to the inevitable and accepted Yeltsin’s demand for Russian independence. The USSR came to an end at the stroke of midnight on the last day of the year 1991.39 Joy in the West was unconfined. Totalitarianism had been beaten first in eastern Europe and then in the USSR. The Cold War was over. The West had won and Soviet communism lay prostrate. Within a few years what had once seemed a distant prospect had been turned into reality. The October Revolution, Marxism-Leninism and the USSR had been tossed on to the refuse-heap of history – and this had happened with nothing like the amount of violence that might have been expected. It had taken place with fewer bangs than whimpers.

 

36. ANTI-COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE

Europe to the east of the River Elbe seethed with hostility towards the USSR and communism. Every country in the region had people who could recall a different time when their nationhood, culture and religion had been respected. They resented being herded into a guarded enclave of the continent. They pointed out that countries such as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were the geographical centre of Europe. They looked on ‘eastern Europe’ as a degrading designation imposed on them by the way the Second World War ended.

Communist rule was at its harshest in Romania, Albania and Bulgaria, where the regimes pulled up the shoots of any opposition before they could grow. Poland was taken as a terrible example of what would happen unless repression was maintained. The rulers of Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic would have liked to act with the same severity. But they were aware of their intense unpopularity, and some degree of national consent was important to them. Dissenting intellectuals were regularly thrown into prison, but they were seldom subjected to a physical battering. Václav Havel and his Charter 77 group in Czechoslovakia were a mixed group of intellectuals, Christian activists and lapsed reform-communists. Even after the end of détente they continued to operate and their confidence was growing. The German Democratic Republic had no prominent figure such as Havel; but the same sprouting of opposition was noticeable. Although the Stasi – the security police – penetrated this nascent organisation, it failed to extirpate it. It is hardly surprising that the Kremlin made little effort to exploit the opportunity offered by Tito’s death in 1980. The Soviet Politburo had its hands full trying to hold on to what authority it already had. Expansion of the USSR’s influence in eastern Europe was no longer a realistic possibility.

Meanwhile the protests against Polish communism grew in intensity. Workers, intellectuals and clergy found common cause when, in July 1980, Gierek raised retail prices to correct his government’s budgetary imbalance. In August the shipyard workers in Gdask came out on strike under Lech Wałsa’s leadership. With his ready smile and luxuriant moustache, Wałsa immediately became the symbol of Poland’s will for independence and for an end to communism. Truly he was a born orator, projecting his voice and cheekiness with or without a microphone. He was a talented negotiator. He knew what he wanted from each meeting; he never got flustered and always bargained with polite determination. Wałsa regularly took advice from the intellectuals in the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR). He also consulted the Catholic Church. But he had a mind of his own, and it did no harm to his popularity that he was a working man of the Polish people. His project was to establish a trade union free from communist control; it was to be called Solidarity (Solidarno). A founding conference was held in Gdask in September 1980, and by early 1981 the union had astonishingly acquired about ten million members. Practically the entire Polish workforce, apart from communist party members (and even many of these also joined), enrolled in Solidarity.

Gierek arrested Wałsa and other Solidarity leaders but discovered that this only stiffened the popular defiance. The failure of economic strategy and management was undeniable and the Polish United Workers’ Party was in a quandary about what to do about it. The working class of Poland had organised itself into permanent confrontation with the communist state. Nothing more sharply signalled that communism oppressed the ‘labouring masses’. The Soviet Politburo made no secret of its anxiety, and pressure on the USSR itself to deal firmly with Poland came from Erich Honecker in the German Democratic Republic. Honecker feared that the Polish disturbances might spill over his border; he pushed Brezhnev for sterner measures whenever they met.1 The Kremlin’s confidence in Gierek evaporated as Solidarity kept up its activity. Brezhnev and the Politburo demanded a change in personnel in the Polish United Workers’ Party and the stabilisation of the communist order. They turned to a military man, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who became Prime Minister in February 1981 and then Party First Secretary in October.

Jaruzelski introduced martial law in December 1981. He did this as much to pre-empt a Warsaw Pact invasion as to reimpose order in Poland. In fact the Soviet Politburo had decided not to intervene militarily even if Solidarity were to edge its way to power; but Jaruzelski was not privy to this information.2 Solidarity was outlawed and more of its militants were taken into custody. Yet the strikes and demonstrations were not abated. The network of Solidarity groups and agencies survived the police onslaught; its presses produced pamphlets, postcards and audiocassettes. Graffiti-artists sprayed slogans on walls such as ‘The winter is yours but the spring will be ours’.³ The Catholic priesthood gave uncompromising sermons on the need for religious faith and patriotism. Jaruzelski himself was reluctant to use any more force than was absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the state order. He had an impossible task. The communist party and the institutions it sponsored – trade unions, youth associations and cultural clubs – attracted popular contempt. The result was chronic stalemate: although Jaruzelski succeeded in restoring a degree of calm, he could not liquidate Solidarity and Solidarity could not supplant his military administration. Poland was like an insect trapped in amber. No fundamental political and economic development was possible for the country. No end to martial law appeared in sight.

The attempt at ‘normalisation’ included measures to increase the autonomy of enterprises and expand market mechanisms. This was not wholly ineffectual. Gross industrial output rose by 20 per cent between 1982 and 1986. Agriculture grew by 12 per cent in the same period. But investment had drastically diminished. Shortages of factory goods and farm produce persisted. Meat had to be rationed. Although the government managed to reschedule the servicing of its debts to western banks, it was trapped in a budgetary cul-de-sac. Poland tumbled into dependence on the indulgence of the USSR and the rest of eastern Europe as its trade deficit with fellow communist countries worsened.⁴ From Brezhnev through Andropov to Chernenko, the Soviet leadership did not know what to do. This was the only card in Jaruzelski’s hand to keep up his morale: he understood that he was the Kremlin’s last chance short of a military invasion.

Coming to power in Moscow in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachëv changed the principles of international relations in eastern Europe. The world’s attention was directed at his internal reforms as he reconstructed his party, decentralised the economy and encouraged much freedom in public debate. Quietly, though, he was setting about reforging the Kremlin’s linkage to its ‘outer empire’. When the communist leaders of eastern Europe arrived for Chernenko’s funeral, Gorbachëv confidentially indicated that the USSR would never again interfere in their political decisions.⁵ Not everyone in the room believed his ears. Perhaps it was just rhetoric. Surely the Soviet leadership, which had invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, would not leave the region to its own devices? Only Poland was gripped by political emergency at the time. Possibly, therefore, Gorbachev was talking about an entirely hypothetical future contingency when a member country of the Warsaw Pact might stir up unnecessary discontent with its rule. Honecker, Husak, Kádár and Zhivkov tried to persuade themselves that all would be well. Once young ‘Misha’ had got to grips with the realities of power east of the Elbe, they trusted he would cease his disturbing prattle. Another possibility was that he would not last long in office.

There was a patchwork of national responses to the call for fundamental reform in eastern Europe. Jaruzelski and Kádár were not in the same league as Ceausescu in their willingness to employ force against dissent. Even Husak, Honecker and Zhivkov preferred to treat their troublemakers with a restraint which would have amazed east European communist leaders in the 1960s – and those leaders in turn were gentler with their political enemies than had been normal in Stalin’s lifetime. It is true that the prominent dissenters experienced more bearable conditions than some of their more obscure supporters. But there was a tendency to avoid the harshest measures. In Hungary there was an attempt to go the other way and deepen the concessions to the dissenters. Indeed Károly Grósz, who succeeded Kádár in May 1988, emulated Gorbachev. Most of the veteran communist leaders hated Gorbachev, but ‘ordinary’ people in the region adored him. The dissenters, whether they were communist reformers or outright anti-communists, drew comfort from his policies. Emboldened by what they knew about Moscow, they increasingly adopted the Polish tactics and agitated against their regimes with whatever instruments they could obtain.

Meanwhile Misha Gorbachev secured his political supremacy in Moscow and showed that he had meant what he said to the east European party bosses in March 1985. He wanted reforms in eastern Europe as fast and as deep as those in the USSR; and if the crusty old stagers failed to comply, he expected younger reformers to edge them out. He wanted to observe the fraternal niceties. Unlike his predecessors, he did not play the kingmaker: each country had to select its own communist leadership. He avoided the temptation to advise Kádár or even Husak to step down.6 He rejected the request of General Militaru in Romania to back a coup d’etat against Ceauescu.⁷ He told the communist leaders what he thought needed to be done and usually they affected to agree with him – Zhivkov was a master of this tactic.⁸ Meanwhile Gorbachëv discreetly undermined the status quo across the region. Pravda as well as the various Soviet weeklies disseminated the case for fundamental reform; copies of these were readily available in the newspaper kiosks of the outer empire. Gorbachëv himself eagerly toured eastern Europe. When visiting Prague in March 1988 and East Berlin in October 1989 he declared a passionate commitment to fundamental changes in the Soviet communist order. Crowds cheered him on his walkabouts. The affectionate cry went up: ‘Gorby! Gorby!’ They were using him as their standard bearer in the march against communism’s abuses in eastern Europe since 1953.

Poland registered the impact of Gorbachëv’s campaign as Jaruzelski and his ministers made conciliatory gestures to Solidarity. In September 1986 General Kiszczak released all political prisoners, and Wałsa, without compromising his anti-communism, declared that ‘dialogue must be institutionalised’.9 Pope John Paul II made a further visit to his native country in June 1987. The crowds who swarmed to greet him carried banners of Solidarity and the Christian faith. It was only a matter of time before the national explosion occurred. Miners and shipyard workers went on strike in 1988. The government called for talks and Jaruzelski appointed Mieczysław Rakowski, a communist reformer, as Prime Minister, but his powers of persuasion were insufficient to get non-communists to agree to join the cabinet. The Party Central Committee suffered from widening divisions. Round-table negotiations with Solidarity began in February 1989. A complicated deal was done to hold elections while reserving many seats for the communist party and its allies.¹⁰ The anti-communist forces displayed their bravado. A poster was issued depicting Gary Cooper in a scene from High Noon wearing a Solidarity lapel badge instead of a sheriff’s star. The government was trounced in the election of 4 June 1989 as Solidarity won 160 out of the 161 available seats in the Senate. Under any other political system Jaruzelski would have resigned. But he hung on with support from none other than President George H. Bush, who visited Poland in July. Jaruzelski became President with Solidarity’s consent. But it was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a leading Catholic activist, who became Prime Minister and appointed Solidarity colleagues to a majority of cabinet posts.¹¹

A quiet revolution had taken place. It occurred on the very day that in faraway China, in Tiananmen Square, the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army crushed a protest movement of unarmed students. (Honecker’s regime was notable for congratulating the Chinese communist authorities on their repressive action.)¹² If Poland was a lucky country, it had worked for its luck over many years. It had undermined and brought down communism without uprising or civil war. The Mazowiecki cabinet brought in a radical free-market economist Leszek Balcerowicz to introduce capitalism. The state economy was about to be dismantled. As yet the outcome was confined to a single country. But the loosened media of eastern Europe reported on the Polish events fully enough for everyone to know what had happened. The dam had been burst. Communism had consented to its own removal in a country of huge geostrategic importance to the USSR – and the Soviet army did not interfere.

The fall of communist power in Warsaw broke the spell that held many minds in thrall. If the Poles could free themselves, other nations might be able to do the same. Communist leaders became decidedly edgy. Tensions increased and there was a growing feeling that a definitive clash was imminent in several countries. In Romania and Albania the police went on dealing brutally with opposition. Ceauescu was no longer the darling of the Western political establishments now that Gorbachëv was doing the job of attacking the old principles of Soviet policy. Appeals to Ceauescu to make reforms fell on stony ground. In Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic and Bulgaria the tide of opposition was rising but as yet did not breach the walls of the communist order. In Hungary, Grósz aligned himself with the drive for deepened reform and had to confront the consequent public unrest. Everywhere, though, there was an atmosphere of expectation. It was difficult to see how the situation could be contained much longer. The Warsaw Pact, even if Gorbachëv had fallen from power in summer 1989, would have been difficult to mobilise against rebellious countries in eastern Europe. Popular demands were bobbing on the surface of politics where previously they had been held under water.

Hungarian politics had been tense and fluid since Kádár’s departure, and it was there that the next great changes happened. On 16 June, less than a fortnight after the momentous election in Poland, the body of Imre Nagy was disinterred from its miserable grave on plot no. 301 and given a decent funeral attended by 200,000 patriots. The communist leadership tried to identify itself with Nagy, but events were running out of its control. In September it came to terms with the Opposition Round Table of oppositionist political groups. Free elections were to be called. The communists – the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party – split into two parties. The strain of self-reform was too much. The communist government threw concessions at the people like confetti. The state was renamed, the constitution amended. The end was not long in coming. The communists fell from power in mid-October as their fingers lost their grip on institutions, policies and day-to-day decisions. The odd thing was that few of their leaders seemed to regret what was happening. The Hungarian People’s Republic became simply the Hungarian Republic. The removal of the people from the name of the state was paradoxically a sign that the popular will was at last being respected. It was yet another noisy but bloodless revolution.

The troubles had meanwhile been gathering for months in the German Democratic Republic. Gorbachëv in person added to them on 7 October at the Berlin celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the state. ‘Life itself’, he declared in that ponderous style of his, ‘punishes those who delay.’ Honecker took no notice; immobility was really the way of life for his Germans. He just could not understand a crowd chanting: ‘We are the people.’ His brighter and younger comrades felt differently. They understood that only massive repression could prevent radical changes, and they knew the result would be isolation from any foreign assistance. Even the USSR was goading the anti-communist opposition into action. Honecker’s comrades therefore refused to allow the police to fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Leipzig. They proceeded to sack Honecker, and Egon Krenz took up the reins of power. Citizens streamed across the border to Hungary which by then had an open frontier with Austria. The German Democratic Republic’s leadership fell into confusion and despair. To general surprise they opened the checkpoints of the Berlin Wall itself on 9 November. Celebrations were immediate and joyous. Next day there was a swirl of delighted, dancing Germans of east and west travelling in both directions. Youngsters on both sides pulled out bricks from the infamous wall. Although the communist government remained in power, it no longer had the authority or will to use it.

Next it was the turn of Bulgaria’s ruler Todor Zhivkov, who had dominated the country since 1954. No one in Europe, east or west, had been in power for longer. On 10 November he was abruptly removed by reformers in the Politburo led by Petar Mladenov. All were Zhivkov’s appointees. They had been slow to identify themselves openly with the kind of politics approved by Gorbachëv. But the rise in anti-communist activities on the streets of Sofia disconcerted them. Mladenov took power, as Krenz had done in the German Democratic Republic, when the situation was already running out of control. Public demonstrations against the authorities had started with ecological protests and moved towards concerns with the absence of civil rights. Mladenov promised to reform the communist party and its government; he also gave a guarantee that political, social and economic reforms would follow. Thus he avoided his own instant overthrow. But the protesters could smell the sweat of reform-communists who lacked confidence. By February 1990 the party had to give up its permanent claim on power. The reformists split off from the communist party and formed a Bulgarian Socialist Party, which won the first free elections since before the Second World War. It was a popular revolution against communism carried through by ex-communist leaders. Lenin would have called it opportunistic.

What more could happen before the year 1989 came to an end? The prospects for communism in Yugoslavia were already bleak and, unusually for eastern Europe, were barely connected with events in the other countries of the region. People in Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana gave hardly a thought to the latest sayings of Gorbachëv or to rumours of the recent exercises of the Soviet army. Yugoslavia’s uneasy stability since the Second World War was disturbed by Tito’s death in 1980 and the descent began into conflicts among its republics and its nations in subsequent years.

Trouble was acute in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Serbs and Croats lived cheek by jowl – and Moslems had their grievances against both. The Albanians in Kosovo persecuted the Serbs. The result was an intensification of conflict at the local level. The loosening of federal ties allowed republican leaderships to assert themselves in their own national cause. Serbia was to the fore in this. Although the Serbian authorities had prospered under Tito, resentments had never disappeared. Communism, what is more, was coming to count for little in Belgrade. Nationalist literature was permitted. Private economic entrepreneurship was on the rise. The Orthodox Church was strengthening its case for an increased role in Serbian affairs. The whole republic was a tinderbox. The match to set off a blaze occurred in 1987 when Serbian president Ivan Stamboli supported the candidature of his protégé Slobodan Miloševi as party leader. Miloševi cultivated an image as protector of Serbs everywhere. In Kosovo he declared to them: ‘No one must beat you!’ He ruthlessly replaced Stamboli in the presidency in 1989. He stirred up Serbs in the other republics. He bullied the non-Serbs in Kosovo and Vojvodina and abolished their status as autonomous provinces. Miloševi was Yugoslavia’s internal imperialist; he was gambling that Serbia’s strength would intimidate the other republics into submission.

The reaction to the changes in Serbia was not long in coming in Croatia and Slovenia. As nationalist rhetoric sharpened, politics in Yugoslavia traced a vicious circle of embitterment. Outbreaks of violence between hostile national groups became common. The republican presidents found it difficult to deal with each other, and indeed Miloševi showed no interest in negotiation: he wanted power for himself and for Serbia. While suppressing Croat and Albanian political organisations in Serbia, he allowed new Serbian ones – including nationalist parties – to be created; he also fostered a growing market economy and turned a blind eye to corruption, criminal gangs and paramilitary violence. Serbia was no longer a one-party republic – and in July 1990 he was to change the name of his own organisation to the Socialist Party of Serbia.13 The communist order was dead long before Yugoslavia was cremated in the fires of its wars and ethnic cleansings in the rest of the decade.¹⁴ This did not happen with an open denunciation of communism and the removal of its old leaders. Posters of Tito still hung in public buildings. Miloševi went about the transformation with cunning, unobtrusively replacing Marxist doctrine with nationalism. The disturbances witnessed in Warsaw, Berlin and Bucharest were not repeated in Belgrade.¹⁵

Back in the last days of 1989 two countries alone, Albania and Romania, appeared to have rulers who might hold on to their communism. Albanian ruler Enver Hoxha had died in 1985 and was succeeded by Ramiz Alia. For a while it had been Alia’s intention to make the minimum of reforms. His regime, no longer supported by the People’s Republic of China, was friendless in the world. Its main asset was that its Soviet and Western critics showed little interest in active intervention. Alia made nods in the direction of changing economic policies but generally sat tight and hoped against hope that the tide of history would soon reverse itself.

Like Alia, Nicolae Ceauescu spat on all talk of reform in Romania. He took one of his regular opportunities to strut before an adoring multitude on 21 December when he appeared on the balcony of his grandiose Central Committee premises in Bucharest. The crowd had been filtered through the usual mechanisms. The police were on guard as was customary. Ceauescu, flanked by wife and close aides, strode forward to address the usually subservient ‘masses’. Barely had he begun to speak than grumbling voices were heard. The Conductor, as he styled himself in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of fascist dictators, was unaccustomed to this. On instinct he harangued his critics. The crowd turned surly. It was like a scene from a clichéd film ‘epic’ about ancient Rome. (This was fitting since Ceauescu had always tried to identify himself with the greatness of the Roman Empire.) People muttered, advanced, shouted and raised their fists. The security forces refrained from trying to restore order. Ceauescu suddenly understood the danger he was in. He scuffled in panic from the scene, took a helicopter to the countryside and briefly attempted to rally support. No one came to his aid. Leading communists were among those who stepped forward to announce the collapse – the most sudden and glorious collapse in a half-year of such collapses – of communist power. There was no mercy for the Ceauescu couple. The new authorities did not want them alive and able to tell the story of the part played by their successors in the maintenance of communism before 1989. They were shot on 25 December.

If ever the American dominoes theory was put successfully to the proof, it was in eastern Europe in the closing months of 1989. But it was validated in the opposite fashion to the predicted one. The collapsing dominoes in that half of the continent led not to an increased number of communist states but to the extirpation of communism. Violence occurred fitfully over that brief period, but rulers were wary of going over to the full available modalities of repression; they observed how their counterparts in adjacent states were getting into difficulties: none wanted the obloquy of being identified as ruling without popular consent.

The year had been a disaster for the reform-communists. Ramiz Alia went on contending that Albania could hold out against the trend; it was his opinion that a reformed communism could survive and flourish. But by March 1991, under threat from street demonstrations, even he had to concede multi-party elections.16 His Albanian Party of Labour won most votes but the end was in sight. In 1992 the communists were defeated by the Democratic Party and removed from government: the last domino had fallen. Alia had announced himself as a reformer late in his career. Others in eastern Europe had hoped for decades to edge aside their communist-conservatives and institute the communist order of their dreams. Hungarian reformers had tried in 1956 and the Czechoslovaks in 1968 and suffered military invasion. The constant hope had been that, if such a variant of communism were tried, it would attract national support. By the time the reformers had their chance these were unrealistic ideas. Probably they had never stood much chance. The agenda of reform-communism had quickly been left behind by a Hungarian popular revolt in 1956. In western Europe, moreover, the Eurocommunists had come to appreciate that people would be satisfied only by the maintenance of a multi-party system and a pluralist society and culture. Nowhere in eastern Europe had communists come to office in the late 1940s with a majority of electoral votes.

It is true that communists were to succeed in winning elections in certain countries in the region in the 1990s;17 but in order to do this they had to switch their policies abruptly away from communist reformism. They had to become – or to appear to become – socialists or social-democrats. Communism collapsed east of the Elbe in 1989 because Moscow released its grip and countries in one way or another stood up to their communist rulers. The situation of impatience, frustration and anger had been mounting for years. The year 1989 produced a unique conjuncture of conditions. But it is doubtful that the communist reformers would have done much better for themselves if they had enjoyed a more congenial environment.