37. CHINA’S CAPITALIST COMMUNISM

Mao Zedong died minutes after midnight on 9 September 1976. Competition for power, which had been gathering in intensity for months, became frantic. He had endeavoured to preserve his legacy by anointing Hua Guofeng as his successor. Learning from Soviet history, Mao acted nimbly to prevent de-Maoisation. Yet Hua remained vulnerable to attack from the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing and fellow Gang members were impatient to seize power and throw China back to the politics of 1966–8 when Mao had released and directed the Red Guards, cut down the intelligentsia and lunged at economic regeneration through the efforts of workers and peasants.

The Gang hurried to barge Hua aside. The headstrong Jiang Qing went about deriding him as a ‘nice gentleman in the Malenkov mould’.1 Stalin in 1953, it will be recalled, left Malenkov in the best position to succeed him and yet Malenkov was quickly supplanted by Khrushchëv. Having always fired her weapons from under her husband’s parasol, Jiang was poorly equipped for unchaperoned conflict. People said she suffered from an empress syndrome and she was deeply unpopular in most layers of China’s society. Few Chinese wanted to return to the era of the ‘little red book’, revolutionary operas and small bowls of rice; there was a longing for the authorities to guarantee a lengthy period of political stability and economic growth. Outsiders to the leadership anyway had no impact on what was decided. The problem for the Gang was that dislike of them was not confined to ordinary people. The political and military elites found them equally repugnant: officials in the army, party and government hated the prospect of resumed turbulence. Even the beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution could not count on keeping their jobs under the rule of Mao’s widow and her allies.

While Mao’s corpse was being embalmed for display in its mausoleum, the Gang’s members plotted a coup d’état. They did this without finesse. On 19 September 1976 they demanded a Politburo Standing Committee meeting to be held with Jiang in attendance despite her not being a member; they also called for the exclusion of Ye Jianying from the proceedings even though he held membership. Hua gave way on this but refused Jiang Qing’s sudden request to put Mao Yuanxin, who was her shield-carrier and Mao Zedong’s nephew, in charge of the late Chairman’s papers. Hua had stopped dithering and was fighting back. He knew that, once in possession of such papers, the Gang would be able to concoct whatever text they liked to legitimate their measures.2

The Gang ordered the militia in Shanghai to remain under arms and Jiang Qing and Wang Hongwen made provocative speeches in Beijing. Hua reacted by holding an impromptu Politburo conference at the People’s Liberation Army headquarters outside the capital on 5 October. The decision was made to arrest the Gang, and the task was given to Army Unit No. 8341. A servant spat on Jiang. Resistance in the rest of the country was slight and easily eliminated. Hua, though, faced a gathering economic crisis. Planning targets had not been met. Popular discontent about food and wages was on the rise. Strikes had broken out. Veterans in the leadership persuaded Hua that Deng Xiaoping’s rehabilitation would help to stabilise public life and tranquillise the unrest. Deng, despite trouble with his prostate gland, returned to the fray at the Central Committee in July 1977. He had the personal contacts to create a favourable atmosphere for measures of reform. Unlike Hua, he knew every influential agency of party and government from the inside – and he understood that Hua had restored him to public life not out of mercy but because he could not handle the situation without him. By the Eleventh Party Congress in August he was third in the ranking of the Chinese communist leadership. Rejecting doctrinaire Maoism, he coined the slogan: ‘Seek truth from facts.’3

Deng was born in 1904 to a landowning family deep in the Sichuan province. He took the path of many other young Chinese and boarded a steamer from Shanghai to France. Learning French, he made his living as a waiter, train conductor and rubber-overshoe assembler and eventually joined the Renault automobile factory as a skilled worker. He quickly became a communist agitator among the Chinese émigrés. Deng was an adaptable fellow who came to like croissants, potatoes and coffee. He watched football and played bridge – and deep into old age he was to accept appointment as honorary chairman of China’s bridge-players’ society: he had always liked holding political discussions during a game.4 As a practical man he produced the local communist newsletter. In 1926 Deng was chosen to train in Moscow at the Sun Yatsen Communist University of the Toilers of the East.5 On returning to China, he joined Mao Zedong in forming a communist armed force after the party’s disaster at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. He soon rose to the highest levels of the Red Army command and stayed with it during the gruelling Long March and through to the seizure of power in 1949.

His European experience left him with some understanding of capitalist countries. This was also true of Zhou Enlai. Both were open to fresh thinking and pragmatic in the quest for national resurgence. Deng was as hard as teak. He endured as many demotions as promotions at Mao’s hands from the 1950s. His son was crippled from the waist down after leaping from a window to escape physical maltreatment in the Cultural Revolution. Denounced as the ‘Second Biggest Capitalist Roader’, Deng might have been put on trial but instead he was sent to work as a fitter in a tractor-repair plant in Jiangxi province. The purpose was to knock the fancy ideas out of him and restore him to Maoist orthodoxy. Although it was a part-time job, this was a grim sentence: his pay barely covered his family’s basic material needs.6

Aged seventy-three at the moment of this latest comeback in 1976, he knew he had no time to waste if he wanted to make the changes he wanted. Victims of the Gang were released from the camps.7 Prominent leftists were dropped from the Central Committee at the Eleventh Party Congress. Such guarantees of good behaviour he had given before his political rehabilitation were no more than expedients. Hua’s removal was made easier by the wide recognition that the economy had been ineptly managed. His inclination was to position himself between contending political groupings and to adopt measures that avoided risk and disturbance. He went on promising that ‘whatever directives Chairman Mao issued, we shall steadfastly obey’.8 Deng was forthright about the need for change and impressed himself on the Politburo and the People’s Liberation Army as the leader in waiting. On a tour of the USA in 1978 he acted the part by wearing a cowboy hat in Texas and waving heartily at the crowds. Most Americans thought the tiny, wildly gesticulating figure faintly ridiculous; but many Chinese warmed to a politician who dispensed with the austere pomp of Mao Zedong. At the same time he refused to be pushed into undertaking comprehensive political reform, and in March 1979 he terminated the ‘democracy wall’ movement and jailed its leaders.

Deng pounced on Hua in September 1980 by getting the post of Prime Minister for his own protégé Zhao Ziyang. The Gang of Four were put on trial in the ensuing winter. The court proceedings against them were carried on national TV. Popular antagonism to Jiang Qing and her fellow accused was deep and wide. When the unrepentant Jiang claimed Mao’s mantle as her inheritance, she met with derision. The decade before his death started to be described as the ten years of chaos. While honouring the virtues of Mao Zedong Thought, Deng asserted that the Great Helmsman had made many basic mistakes from the late 1950s.9

The guilty verdict against the Gang of Four was never in doubt. Its members were sentenced to life imprisonment; and in June 1981 Hua lost his post as Party Chairman to Hu Yaobang, yet another of Deng’s protégés. Deng was by then the supreme leader. His only serious rival by then was Chen Yun, who had charge of economic policy; but Chen failed to make a direct bid for power. What is more, Deng knew what he wanted to do and when and how to do it; unlike Mao he did not bother with cycles of attack and retrenchment. He genuinely wanted to step down from office as soon as possible, but not until he had fixed his strategy in indestructible cement. He announced four cardinal principles: keeping to the socialist road, maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat, upholding the party’s leadership and adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.10 There was much obfuscation here. ‘Proletarians’ were not running their own dictatorship any more than in other communist systems of power. Deng, a communist since his French sojourn, had not changed his political allegiance. Communist rule would be maintained. He regarded the one-party state as crucial for containing the pressures of what assuredly would be an explosive transition to ‘modernity’. He was planning to tread down every trace of Mao Zedong Thought from economic policy; he aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an immense capitalist sector.

Deng, like Gorbachëv, had to convince the elites of the party, army and ministries that his reforms were desirable. How did Deng succeed in keeping power while Gorbachëv did not? Chinese elites, it would seem, were easier to persuade. Perhaps they were more nationalist than Soviet elites were. This is definitely possible. Possibly too China’s reforms were facilitated by a sense of emergency in the communist leadership after the twin cataclysms of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Deng was devising an orderly way forward and an end to chaos. Above all, he intended to leave the existing elites in post; and he offered to increase the material rewards available to them. Gorbachëv, by contrast, caused disorder in the Soviet state, undermined the elites and almost invited a coup against himself.11

Deng anyway got on with things. With Mao dead, he at last had a chance to choose his set of priorities. The rural communes were dismantled, with the land being handed back to individual peasant households. Fields could be reclaimed by those who had owned them early after the revolution of 1949. State procurement prices were increased. Permission was given for the setting up of private industrial companies. Capital was invited from overseas. Special economic zones were established in the cities along the Pacific coast (where foreign firms before the communist seizure of power had conducted trade through the ‘treaty ports’). Businessmen from China and foreign countries were assured of finding a cheap, compliant and educated workforce and a helpful administration. Technology and organisational methods were renovated to the highest standards. The Chinese Communist Party was ordered to step back from controlling the minutiae of public life. Widened debate was allowed among communists. The People’s Liberation Army was retrained and re-equipped so as to discharge its responsibility for defence and security. Veteran communist leaders began to be eased out of office without loss of respect. Deng managed the transition in such a fashion as to ensure peaceful compliance.

He was building on the minor economic reforms in process since the early 1970s. Much change was occurring at the local level. Party organisations quietly increased the scope for initiative among factory directors and managers. Red tape was cut; material incentives were increased. Rural industrial output rose in the villages of the coastal regions. Cultural relaxation was introduced, and painters who worked in a traditional style were given assignments again.12 Even Deng was astounded by the rapidity of the Chinese economy’s growth once he had raised the reforms in industry and commerce to the national level.13

He assumed that reforms would eventually need to be applied to internal politics. At least, this was what he said in public: ‘We must create the conditions for the practice of democracy, and for this it is essential to reaffirm the principle of the “three don’ts”: don’t pick on others for their faults, don’t put labels on people and don’t use a big stick.’14 Party Chairman Hu Yaobang said privately that China needed to move towards the rule of law, the separation of powers and even multiparty pluralism.15 He was even willing to relax repression in Tibet.16 Deng announced: ‘Undoubtedly when the methods of dictatorship are being used it’s necessary to be cautious, it’s necessary to arrest the minimum number of people, it’s necessary to do the very utmost to avoid bloodshed.’17 The authorities had slackened the repression somewhat earlier in the decade. Disturbances broke out in the camps as discipline was relaxed. About 1.4 million people had succeeded in escaping in the year before September 1981; demands for rehabilitation proliferated.18 Yet the Chinese leadership’s ‘liberalism’ had limits: the number of detainees in the camps remained between four and six million.19 When Deng began a campaign to ‘punish criminals without mercy’, he reverted to the communist technique of assigning numerical quotas to lower authorities. People were executed who would normally have been given sentences of confinement.20

Party Chairman Hu paid dearly for what had been only a limited enthusiasm for democratic reform. When students staged noisy protests in December 1986, the party elders successfully petitioned Deng to sack him.21 Deng was not just yielding to pressure from old comrades. Democracy was acceptable to him only insofar as it did not get in the way of the rest of his strategy. Tensions remained in the Politburo with Zhao Ziyang advocating a degree of political liberalisaion and Li Peng urging a continued clampdown. A paralysis affected public affairs until spring 1989 when the students massed daily in Tiananmen Square, calling for the introduction of democratic and civil rights. Pamphlets were produced, wall-posters pinned up. Hundreds of thousands of party members joined in the protest movement.

Deng told US Secretary of State George Shultz that his own reforms would succeed. He scoffed at the Soviet strategy for reform.22 China was economically on the rise whereas the USSR was entering a crisis in production and supplies. Deng, unlike Zhao Ziyang, refused to compromise with protesters. He resharpened political authoritarianism and held the unity and power of the party as sacrosanct. He felt sure that this was the only way for the Chinese to extricate themselves from the communist cul-de-sac. Deng declared martial law on 20 May and sent Premier Li Peng to negotiate with the students. Li, an implacable supporter of order and authority, told them: ‘Today we will discuss one matter: how to relieve the hunger strikers of their present plight.’ Student leader Wuer Kaixi, jabbing his finger at Li Peng, retorted: ‘Excuse me for interrupting you, Premier Li, but time is running short. Here we are sitting in comfort while students outside are suffering from hunger. You just said that we should discuss only one matter. But the truth is, it was not you who invited us to talk but we – all of us in Tiananmen Square – who invited you to talk. So we should be the ones to name the matters to be discussed.’ When Li Peng offered his hand to the students, the gesture was rejected. The Premier grunted: ‘You’ve gone too far!’23 The People’s Liberation Army was rushed to the central precincts with orders to clear the area of protesters.

A massacre began late on 3 June as tanks rolled across the cobbled square and crushed several students under their caterpillar tracks.24 Leaders of the protest were sentenced to long terms in labour camps. Zhao Ziyang, the Politburo member who had shown sympathy with the students, tumbled into official disgrace and was put under virtual house arrest. Censorship was reinforced. Army and police were put out on the streets and told to nip any resistance in the bud.

Deng ignored all the international criticism. He stressed that it was for China to determine how to organise itself and that foreigners were welcome to do business with the Chinese so long as they kept their noses out of politics. The ruling group reimposed its authority. Potential trouble in the ministries and the armed forces was defused. Ministers and their families could make profits out of the expanding market sector. Commanders were promised advanced weaponry and sustained prestige and influence. Order was restored. The elderly Deng was confident that no jeopardy existed for his strategy, and he stepped down from his burdensome offices in November 1989 while retaining the unofficial power of general political oversight. His protégé Jiang Zemin became leader. The process of economic reform slowed for a while. But Deng’s tour of southern provinces in 1992 revived it, and China’s transformation quickened again. Private companies sprang up in all cities and many villages. The most dynamic zones lay along the Pacific coast. Investment poured in from abroad. Multinational companies long excluded from Chinese industry and commerce set up in Beijing, Shanghai and Guanzhou. Gross domestic product rose exponentially as private enterprise from home and abroad injected the most up-to-date technology into an industrial sector which offered a cheap, educated, co-operative and disciplined labour force. By 2003 China share of the world’s gross production had risen to 12 per cent.

Conditions in factories were usually unhygienic and always the work was hard and the hours long. The gap between rich and poor became a chasm. Young, ambitious people had opportunities denied to the old. The urban coastland belt prospered while peasants who stayed in the villages paid with their taxes for their over-mighty state. The old patterns of communal assistance – the moral economy – broke down.25 Welfare provision fell away. Chinese capitalism was red in tooth and claw. Not a word of objection to the abandonment of communist economics appeared in the party’s central newspaper Renmin Ribao. Financial fraud and judicial malfeasance became deeply rooted. Criminal gangs spread their tentacles into every corner of business. Police were used to enforce the needs of the big entrepreneurs. Strikes were no longer treated gently.26 Officials in party and government lined their pockets by taking bribes and overlooking scams. The licensing of new enterprises and the enforcement of contracts spawned corruption. Communist authorities talked about the commonweal while ignoring it in reality. The wealthy, protected by their bodyguards and living inside the walls of their new palatial cantonments, enjoyed their expensive clothes, jewellery and trips abroad. Car ownership increased exponentially and the sprawling cities no longer reserved their avenues for cyclists.

Capitalism had liberating effects. Villagers sometimes welcomed the improvements in healthcare and education even though they had to pay for them. ‘Under the new system,’ said veteran rural leader Wang Fucheng in Henan province, ‘the people work harder and they get more.’27 There were plenty of jobs for those who could move to the growing zones of employment; and people arriving from the countryside, however meagre their pay, improved their situation and remitted their saving to their rural relatives. Entrepreneurial initiative, furthermore, brought rewards for the businessmen who set up thriving stalls, shops and companies. But this broad process of liberation provided most people with less time and energy for private obligations and pleasures. China acquired the world’s highest suicide rate.

A few glimpses of a brighter future for civil society were detectable. No capitalist society could function without the Internet, and although the parameters of usage were politically restricted there was plenty of access to news and ideas that were banned from the media. Foreign books were readily translated. Sporting links were strengthened and Manchester United and other soccer teams played exhibition matches. Rock music concerts were put on with leading bands from abroad. Even the factories and sweatshops of Shanghai had the positive feature of upgrading the skills and technical knowledge of their workforces. Advanced machinery was shipped in abundance to the People’s Republic of China. The country became the workshop of the world. Yet, although people did not dare to come out on to the streets to protest against the authorities, the grumbling about official policies became louder. The regime understood that it needed to take popular opinion into account. When the SARS virus afflicted the southern provinces in summer 2004 the government at first tried to clamp down on public discussion. A combination of international and internal criticism made this unsustainable. China’s rulers could no longer talk nonsense and get their subjects to parrot it automatically.

Hong Kong was reincorporated in the People’s Republic in 1997 when the British ceded their colony to Beijing. The immediate effect was a restriction on liberties on the island. But the Chinese regime needed to reassure global entrepreneurs of its commitment to some degree of social freedom, and a political witch-hunt in Hong Kong would have damaged this objective. Expatriate Chinese colonies in North America and Europe also required reassurance since they acted as important intermediaries for China’s entry into the world economy. Ties of commerce between the People’s Republic and the USA were strengthened and the global markets teemed with Chinese exports. Chinese rulers huffed and puffed about desiring to reincorporate Taiwan but military action was avoided. Trade was preferred to conquest.

Yet China remained a one-party dictatorship and its labour camps – the infamous laogai – continued to hold between four and six million inmates in shocking conditions.28 Mao’s gigantic image was still displayed in Tiananmen Square. There was no true pluralism of intellectual and political discourse at the highest official levels. Interest groups of employers were not allowed to function. Trade unions were emasculated. The importance of military power went on being promoted. Tibet languished under China’s despotism and its levels of literacy and material provision remained low;29 and the construction of a railway across its territory, much vaunted in Beijing as showing its wish to share the benefits of modernisation, was seen by Tibetans as a means of reinforcing central control. Great regions such as Xinjiang in the north-west of the People’s Republic were held in a suffocating grip. There the Chinese authorities feared that Islam and Uigur nationalism might breed a separatist movement. Freedom of religious expression was only patchily respected across China. Falun Gong, an indigenous faith of massive popularity, was systematically persecuted. Communist doctrines remained an obligatory ingredient in the school curriculum and a qualification for a serious public career.

Marxism-Leninism was otherwise honoured only in the breach. The discussion of Mao Zedong Thought sank to mere ritual, and the young in particular had no regrets about its reduced influence. Peasants in some districts refused to abandon their devotion to him and erected traditional religious shrines in his memory. Countless further millions of Chinese continued to think well of him as a patriot and state-builder while shuddering at the memory of his Cultural Revolution. They tended to idealise the practices of the Maoist period and contrasted them with the economic and administrative corruption after his death.

A firm line was held from 1989, and hopes for political reform were regularly dashed. From Deng Xiaoping through Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao (who came to power in 2003) there was no vacillation. When Zhao Ziyang died in January 2005, his quiet funeral evoked memories of what might have been. He had never expressed a principled commitment to democracy and the rule of law, but he had gone further in that direction than any other leader. Young militants trying to preach the need for ‘democratisation’ were meanwhile regularly rounded up; they were kept strictly apart from foreign journalists and politicians. The government also patrolled the use of the Internet and secured the consent of Google and other global search-engine companies to excise politically sensitive matters from their China-based coverage. Official worries were not confined to the cities. Discontented peasants constituted by far the greatest proportion of the population, and the government became concerned that they might become infected by the propaganda of urban dissenters. Troops and local thugs were dispatched to beat up troublemakers. In 2004, according even to the Ministry of Public Security, there were 74,000 riots and other ‘mass incidents’ involving 3.5 million people.30 The Ministry of Labour and Social Security suggested that instability in society had risen to the ‘yellow alert’ level. This was only one level below a ‘red alert’, the very highest level.31

Rural discontent was spreading. Peasants had benefited from the dissolution of the land communes under Deng Xiaoping and traded their growing harvests for profit. But they were taxed ever more heavily. Regional and local administrators illegally dispossessed them of their fields on the edges of cities. The cranes and bulldozers were kept working twenty-four hours a day in the great cities as the massive economic boom continued. Where was it going to end? There was no equivalent in the history of world communism. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created. China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism.

By the beginning of the third millennium the country was already pointed in the direction of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It was its social cohesion and political durability that remained questionable. Deng was the last supreme ruler to have taken part in the Long March; his successors lacked the aureole of legitimacy as revolutionary veterans. Measures to deal with popular discontent were either crudely punitive or merely palliative. Party officials, faced with a choice between Maoist ideology and self-enrichment, invested in apartment blocks, coal mines and computer technology. No one was able to tell how long this situation could last. No one today can tell any better.

 

38. PERESTROIKA

The challenges to the communist order in eastern Europe had always annoyed the old men in the Kremlin. Most Soviet leaders had come to high office under Stalin; they had gone along with Khrushchëv’s reforms because they wanted freedom from fear of arrest and recognised that greater flexibility was needed in policy. Yet they saw everything through the cobwebs of past glory and disliked the denigration of Stalin and of the industrial and military achievements that took place under his command. Khrushchëv’s denunciation of their idol rankled with them for damaging the core of purpose in their lives. While stumbling towards the time of their own funerals, they felt an instinctual need to correct what they regarded as the wrong done to Stalin. Their anger spurted out at a Politburo meeting in July 1984. Minister of Defence Ustinov said Khrushchëv ‘did us great harm’. Minister of Foreign Affairs Gromyko agreed, maintaining that the positive image of the USSR had been destroyed after 1953. Tikhonov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, recalled his own humiliation in being transferred from Moscow to a provincial post in one of Khrushchëv’s reorganisations. On and on they went. Inevitably they got round to their memories of glory in the Great Patriotic War. Khrushchëv had changed the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd. Ustinov proposed changing it back: ‘Millions of people would receive this very well.’1

Some of those present must have sensed that things were getting out of hand. While millions of people from the wartime generation might have welcomed the name change, the rehabilitation of Stalin would have caused untold damage to the country’s reputation. The proposal was dropped. The old men had had their rant and their anger was spent, at least until the next time one of them got worked up about the USSR’s ‘glorious past’.

Mikhail Gorbachëv, the youngest Politburo member, had held back from bad-mouthing Khrushchëv in the discussion. This was a small, early example of his independence of thought. Born in 1931, he had driven tractors in his village in Stavropol region, deep in the Russian south, before gaining a scholarship in jurisprudence at Moscow State University. On graduating he went back to Stavropol and climbed the high pole of local party politics. By 1970 he had been appointed party chief for the region. He caught the eye of KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, who took his holidays down there. In 1978 Gorbachëv joined the Central Committee Secretariat. Andropov appreciated his intelligence and affability and in 1982, as Party General Secretary, recruited him to the confidential group examining the defects of the Soviet economy. Gorbachëv was being groomed by Andropov as his successor. But Andropov died too soon, in 1984, and the wheezing Konstantin Chernenko became party leader and reinstated the policies of Brezhnev. Chernenko himself expired in March 1985. At last it was Gorbachëv’s turn, and he did not let the grass grow beneath his feet. From his first day as Party General Secretary he caused tremors in the Kremlin.

He had disguised the scale of his purposes until that moment. On the very eve of being appointed to the highest party office he strolled with his wife Raisa in their dacha garden. Out of range of KGB bugging devices, he confided: ‘We can’t go on living like this.’2 He was referring not to themselves as a couple but to general conditions in the country. The Gorbachëvs believed that Khrushchëv had erred on the side of caution. They quietly adhered to the version of communism advocated by the dissenter Roy Medvedev. They wanted electivity as a principle of internal party organisation. They wished for broader public discussion and for a lessening of the state’s reliance on force. Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachëv believed that if the ideas and practices of Lenin were reinstated, the USSR would become the most dynamic society and economy in the world. Then Soviet people would show undying enthusiasm for communist rule.

Gorbachëv’s affable public manner marked him off from his predecessors. Adopting the slogan of ‘acceleration’, he pensioned off the gerontocrats and rapidly gathered like-minded reformers into the Politburo. Chief among these were Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev. Drastic changes were made in policy. Gorbachëv brandished the Russian word glasnost like a sword. Glasnost, a difficult word to translate, basically referred to the ventilation of historical and current political ‘questions’ through the official media. This was to be done under close official supervision: Gorbachëv was aiming not to terminate the one-party state but to enhance its effectiveness. He also introduced a modicum of economic reform. Stressing the importance of the ‘human factor’, he hoped to involve the ‘people’ in the process. He renounced what had happened to the USSR after Stalin’s attainment of dominance. Supremely optimistic, he genuinely believed that reforms in Moscow would create an order superior, in economic dynamism as well as in political and moral stature, to the best on offer from advanced capitalism. A dreamer had entered the portals of the Kremlin. But the transparent fact that he was committed to the enhancement of the Soviet order saved him from being removed from the throne.

He and the reformers had no agreed plan. Some like Ligachëv wanted to go a shorter distance and at a slower pace. But Ligachëv supported Gorbachëv’s eagerness to restore friendly relations with the USA, and everyone in the Politburo accepted that Gorbachëv was their most impressive international negotiator. (Most Americans thought the same about Reagan.) If Soviet leaders could attenuate tension in the Cold War they would have an opportunity to re-aerate the USSR’s crumpled budget into shape and boost the output of consumer goods.

Andropov’s agenda was meanwhile being zealously extended. Discipline was insisted on. The replacement of ageing communist officials began in earnest. Ligachëv sponsored a militant temperance campaign; whole vineyards were cut down in Moldavia and Ukraine. The unifying intention was to ‘perfect’ the mechanisms of the Soviet order. The Politburo was divided about what to do next, and it became clear that Gorbachëv was not going to be satisfied with Andropov’s limited projects. Instead he demanded comprehensive reform. With his policy of glasnost he encouraged the exposure of the horrors of the Stalin years; he also directed a spotlight at the ‘period of stagnation’ under Brezhnev. If reform was to succeed, Soviet people had to be convinced of its desirability. The changes would have to involve more than tinkering with the institutional architecture. Gorbachëv called for a process of ‘restructuring’ (perestroika). He aimed at a drastic shift in the organisation and methods of party, government and other institutions of the Soviet state. He wanted to introduce the elective principle to public posts. Even communist party secretaries were to be subject to democratic control ‘from below’.3

Bad luck intervened. In 1986 the OPEC countries reduced their prices for oil and threw the Soviet economy into lasting imbalance. It was a grim year. In April 1986 the nuclear power-station at Chernobyl in Ukraine exploded. Local politicians and scientists, being stuck in the old ways of doing things, covered up the disaster rather than come clean and ask for assistance. The effect on Gorbachëv was to galvanise his commitment to making changes. He met immense passive resistance. Party officials, including those appointed under Gorbachëv, hated the thought of losing any authority. Governmental ministers were annoyed by demands for them to alter their ways. While holding Gorbachëv in high esteem, citizens felt uneasy about the consequences of basic political and economic reforms. Gorbachëv turned to the intelligentsia for help. To demonstrate his sincerity he liberated the liberal dissenter Andrei Sakharov from administrative exile in December 1986. Such was his charisma and confidence that he was given the benefit of the doubt. The struggle was joined to persuade society that the old ways of the Soviet order had to be abandoned and a fresh prototype of communism developed. Writers and thinkers would be crucial allies.

Gorbachëv no longer defined the USSR as having attained ‘developed socialism’; instead he called it ‘socialism in the process of self-development’.4 This terminological mouthful implicitly abandoned the conventional claims of the USSR’s ideologues. His own aims remained undefined. By 1987 he was beginning to understand the immensity of his problems. The Soviet institutional colossus tended to preserve its habits even after he had sacked the old incumbents of offices. Functionaries were not used to submitting themselves to elections and conspired to undermine him. In 1988 he encountered trouble over economic policy. His legislation on state enterprises gave a modicum of autonomy to their directors. They were permitted in particular to put some of their products on sale at prices they could fix without consulting Moscow. Directors reacted by charging more for their output rather than by expanding it. Gorbachëv also granted much power to the regions. This had an effect he had not foreseen as several Soviet republics followed their own national agendas in opposition to the wishes of the ‘centre’. Likewise many members of the Russian intelligentsia, freed from fear of retribution, advocated ideas for the future different from his own. The genie had escaped the lamp of the Soviet order.

If he had wanted, Gorbachëv could have caught and returned it to the lamp. The party, army and KGB were under his aegis. Gorbachëv, though, shrank from ripping up his reform agenda; he genuinely wanted a more democratic USSR. Another possibility would have been for him to start with small-scale changes in the direction of the market economy while maintaining a severe regime in politics. This was what the Chinese had been doing under Deng Xiaoping for over a decade. Why did Gorbachëv not do the same by fostering private agriculture and manufacturing? He might thereby have been able to attract foreign capital into the Soviet economy and boost gross domestic production as well as raise the standard of living of millions of citizens. Perhaps then he might have started a cautious process of ‘democratisation’.

The General Secretary had different ideas. His political attitudes were formed in the Khrushchëv years and he truly believed that the country suffered from a deficit of democratic procedures. He detested the Stalinist legacy and felt disgust at what his country had done to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was comfortable in the company of those of his generation who thought as he did, and he welcomed such politicians and intellectuals to his entourage. His conversations with Western leaders encouraged him to go on thinking that his strategy had credible chances of success. What is more, Reagan constantly nagged him about the USSR’s disrespect for human rights. If Gorbachëv wanted to conserve friendly relations with President Reagan and NATO, it was certainly going to help if he started to empty the Gulag and reduce the authority of the KGB. Failure to put words into action would shatter Gorbachëv’s clean image as a reformer. In fact there is no evidence that Reagan would have refused to negotiate seriously if the USSR had taken the ‘Chinese road’ to reform. Reagan’s supreme priority was to move beyond arms limitation talks to a process of actual reduction in armaments. He would probably have gone easy on Gorbachëv, as he did on Deng Xiaoping, if he could have enhanced American geopolitical security.5

The truth is that Gorbachëv gave no thought to emulating Deng Xiaoping. Several Soviet politicians later claimed that this was a strategic blunder and that the ‘Chinese road’ should have been followed. But few of them said or even hinted this before the fall of the USSR. The general assumption of reformers, from Gorbachëv to Ligachëv, was that reform required some attenuation of central political authority. Whether the ‘Chinese road’ was a realistic alternative is a separate question. If he had started down it, Gorbachëv would doubtless have come up against perils greater than those which confronted Deng. The Soviet countryside had been denuded of its young, industrious males, who had gone off to the towns to improve their conditions. Much of the work on collective farms was carried out by old women who offered little potential for an agricultural resurgence. Gorbachëv, moreover, needed allies. Unlike China, the USSR had a party apparatus which gave lip-service to perestroika while seeking to restrict its effects. Gorbachëv had had little alternative to seeking support among intellectuals. Most of them saw the liberalisation of the media as a priority. Without their help in shifting public opinion to his side he knew he would be in difficulties.

Yet a slower pace of political and cultural reform might have been beneficial; and a faster granting of freedom for small-scale manufacturing and commerce could also have brought advantage. Such a scenario perhaps would have facilitated a more orderly and – quite possibly – more successful process. Gorbachëv went at his tasks like a bull at a gate. He was a brilliant and brave leader of his vanguard but he and his society paid dearly for his recklessness.

It needs saying in his favour that his enemies were growing in number. Moscow city party chief Boris Yeltsin, noisy and contumacious, disturbed the Politburo by advocating policies still more radical than those of Gorbachëv. He repeatedly threatened to resign. He engaged in personal criticism of Gorbachëv, accusing him of listening too much to Raisa and flagrantly exploiting his political post for his own material gain. In November 1987 Gorbachëv had had enough and pushed Yeltsin into retirement. This had the unfortunate side-effect of boosting the standing of Yeltsin’s strident critic Yegor Ligachëv. Ligachëv was Gorbachëv’s deputy in the party leadership and connived at reverting perestroika to the more restricted agenda being elaborated under Andropov; and whenever Gorbachëv left on a foreign trip, Ligachëv got up to mischief. Whereas Gorbachëv succeeded in mastering Ligachëv, he found it harder to suppress the tendency he represented. There was an increasing number of politicians at the centre and in the localities who spoke out in favour of a greater emphasis on statehood, Russian pride, reverence for Soviet historical achievements. From their vantage points in party, army, KGB and economic ministries they urged the need for reforms to be decelerated and even reversed. Gorbachëv knew he would ignore them at his peril.

Yet he pressed onward. By 1989, he was no longer seeking to adjust and revitalise the Soviet order: he wanted to transform it.6 It is true that in his own head he was a Leninist – and he was to remain so. But the objective work of his hands told of a different goal. He was turning many basic features of the USSR into their diametrical opposites. He did this with ingenuity and audacity. If his Politburo rivals had suspected what he was up to, they could easily have removed him from power. But Gorbachëv could also trade on his enormous popularity in the country and his mastery of the central policymaking bodies. The first great step in constitutional change was to scrap the pyramid of appointed soviets in favour of elected ones. Contested hustings would underpin the entire political system. The topmost stones would be a Congress of People’s Deputies whose sessions would be chaired by Gorbachëv and broadcast on television. Not all of its members would need to be communists or even declared sympathisers of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachëv privately discussed whether to split the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into two and lead off the radical reformers into a new social-democratic party. But he refrained from this, fearing that the anti-reformers would exploit such a situation to the lasting detriment of fundamental change.

In 1990 he gave scope for the formation of rival political parties by repealing article six of the USSR Constitution which guaranteed the leading role for the communists. There had been nothing like it since the early years of the Soviet state. Cultural pluralism crossed beyond previous bounds. Gorbachëv had already reviled Stalin and ridiculed Brezhnev; he now sat back as his own hero Lenin was criticised by others. As a counterweight to his communist-conservative adversaries, he brought back Boris Yeltsin from disgrace. All the gratitude he received was Yeltsin’s resumed castigation of his policies. The attacks on Gorbachëv came from several sides as political pluralism spread. And Gorbachëv’s willingness to sit through the interminable proceedings of the Congress of People’s Deputies did him no favours. He lost the supreme ruler’s aura of mystery. The Soviet man of destiny was turning into a figure of contempt and distrust.

His unpopularity came upon him in a rush. He had collaborated with Ronald Reagan in bringing the Cold War virtually to an end. The rest of the world wished the USSR well; this had not happened since 1945. He had introduced political and cultural liberalisation even though he had not yet completed the process. But fellow citizens did not forgive him his responsibility for economic collapse. His ideas for the country’s transformation included the introduction of a market sector to the economy. The trouble was that his measures were too modest and ill-formulated to bring about an expanded provision of industrial and agricultural products. The standard of living of consumers collapsed. Shops ran out of things to sell. Meat, sugar, butter and vegetables were rarely available. As the black market grew bigger, people’s discontent increased. Although Gorbachëv meant well, this was not enough to turn the ship quickly in the desired direction. Disputes intensified among the reformers as they planned how to reduce the state-owned, planned share of the economy. Soviet economists lacked experience of markets; they also represented large institutional interests in the USSR. Gorbachëv tried to get the country’s political leaders to agree on a compromise which became known as the 500-day programme. But this only meant that radical change was yet again postponed. The economic crisis deepened.

Moscow had always been better supplied than the Russian provinces, but in the winter of 1990–1 a visitor might have been forgiven for thinking that a horde of robbers had passed through the capital. A dairy supermarket near the prestigious metropolitan university was staffed as usual with dozens of counter-assistants in white jackets. Yet they had no milk, yoghurt or butter for sale. The only products on offer were a few small tins of sardines. It was not yet famine. But there was deep popular discontent.

Gorbachëv alluded to the deteriorating situation only in abstract terms. As opinion turned against him, he was not helped by the growing sense that the USSR was on the point of disintegration. One of his blind spots was the ‘national question’. This was in some ways surprising. He came from Stavropol region on the edge of the multi-ethnic north Caucasus where tensions among nations were bitter. Both he and his wife came from a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian ancestries. Perhaps, though, this contributed to his blindness. Gorbachëv was a typical ‘Soviet person’ who thought that sensible citizens should assimilate to the USSR’s values regardless of national background; he also unthinkingly assumed that Russian culture should lie at the core of Soviet identity. When in Kiev, he talked as if he was in Russia rather than Ukraine. Early in his time as General Secretary he had concentrated on rooting out corruption and disobedience in the various Soviet republics. He did not allow for the capacity of communist elites in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere to stir up nationalist trouble. Indeed he continued to include the Soviet republics in his policy of political decentralisation. The intention was to resolve tensions by giving autonomy to the national communist leaderships: he showered them with freedoms.

It was a gamble that only a believer in the ‘Leninist harmony of peoples’ could have taken. For a while Gorbachëv appeared to be the winner. In March 1991 he held a referendum across the USSR. The question was: ‘Do you believe it essential to preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?’ The turnout was high and 76 per cent of the ballot papers had a cross in favour of Gorbachëv’s objective. The federal union seemed to have been saved.

No plebiscite, however, could alter the basic trend towards break-up. As the political and economic disarray increased, the republics had to fend for themselves. The communist leaderships could no longer rule exclusively by command and intimidation. They turned to nationalism to drum up support for their continued leadership. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the communists sought to identify themselves as national leaders first and communists only second. The communist leaders in the Caucasus and central Asia were more discreet but no less keen to take advantage of the rising tides of nationalism. Ukraine and Belorussia stayed firm in their allegiance to Moscow; but even their loyalist pronouncements were problematic for Gorbachev since neither Kiev nor Minsk was led by communists who favoured his reforms. As the other Soviet republics asserted their rights to self-rule, Yeltsin claimed that the RSFSR (or just ‘Russia’, as he called it) was being left behind. The RSFSR was larger than all the other republics put together. Yeltsin, who had risen from his political grave, demanded that it should have its own political institutions and leadership; he obtained an overwhelming victory in the Russian presidential election of June 1991. Gorbachev as President of the USSR had facilitated the holding of the election, and he was counting on Yeltsin as a strong ally in the campaign to save the federal union against dissolution. But Yeltsin was already signalling that a price would have to be paid for his co-operation.

What made things worse was that the men lately appointed by Gorbachev to high office had deep misgivings about the loose constitutional structure projected in the draft Union Treaty. They were also appalled by the gathering pace of economic decline. Some now thought Gorbachev a traitor. Meanwhile Gorbachev had lost his magical touch with Western leaders, who began to refuse his requests for emergency financial assistance; he was no longer an asset for the USSR in international relations. His rapprochement with Yeltsin convinced several members at the core of the Soviet establishment that drastic action was called for. They plotted a coup d’état. They would appeal to Russian patriotism and Soviet pride, and they hoped that Gorbachev would see the light and come over to their side, but they were determined to act regardless of his attitude. He was not to be told until they had declared a state of emergency.

The conspirators made the correct assumption that most people were fed up with Gorbachëv and his unfulfilled promises and wooden jargon. The old economic order had disintegrated as industrial output was dislocated by local administrative chaos and blunders in central policy. The legal retail trade all but vanished. Crime on the streets was growing. Pride in the USSR’s history had been ridiculed; the media turned out a ceaseless stream of exposés of abuses of power from Lenin onwards. The Congress of People’s Deputies frequently descended into a verbal bear-pit. Pornography was sold in kiosks. As the small steps were taken towards a market economy, already a few entrepreneurs were becoming conspicuously rich. Beggars appeared in the main cities. The maltreatment of army conscripts became a public scandal. Republican and local political elites ran their areas as fiefdoms. Strikes broke out in the mines of the Kuzbass. It was unlikely that people would come out in large numbers to defend Gorbachëv. He had lost his towering popularity; he was also dreadfully tired. The organisers of the coup made a few amateurish arrangements; they were betting on being able to deploy the traditional instruments of party, police and army without need to plan for any contingency other than total success. If the worst came to the worst, the residual fear of the punitive sanctions would surely deter resistance.

They made their move on 19 August, setting up a State Emergency Situation Committee under the nominal leadership of Vice-President Gennadi Yanaev while Gorbachëv holidayed at Foros in the south. Moscow was brought under martial law; an appeal was made to the patriotism of citizens while order and welfare were being restored to the USSR. The conspiracy was ridiculously amateurish. The State Emergency Situation Committee included experienced figures such as KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Interior Minister Boris Pugo and Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov. Yet they complacently omitted to arrange properly for the arrest of Yeltsin, who was just outside Moscow at his dacha. On TV they made a pathetic line-up. Their nerves jangled when Yeltsin, arriving at the RSFSR Supreme Soviet building, announced his defiance from the top of a tank put at his disposal by a friendly army officer. A delegation of the committee sent to negotiate with Gorbachëv met with the President’s angry contempt. The conspiracy collapsed as Yeltsin took control of Moscow. Gorbachëv, who had been reported as having been incommoded by illness, returned to resume authority. Yet the real victor was not Gorbachëv but Yeltsin. From that time onwards Yeltsin oversaw everything done in the name of the USSR.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared their independence. The other Soviet republics raised the stakes for continued collaboration with Moscow. The exasperated Gorbachëv offered to step down in Yeltsin’s favour. But Yeltsin chose a different tack. On 1 December the Ukrainians voted in favour of independence. Without Ukraine, the Union could not endure. Yeltsin cut the Gordian knot by stating that the RSFSR would also become independent. Gorbachëv implored him to avoid so drastic a course, to no effect. With deep regret he announced that the USSR would cease to exist on the stroke of midnight on the last day of 1991. Although a Commonwealth of Independent States was formally established, the reality was that Russia went its own separate way. The communist order was brusquely torn down. The communist party itself had already been outlawed. The October Revolution and Marxism-Leninism were disowned; the course of Soviet history was described as a totalitarian nightmare. Yeltsin’s ministers initiated radical economic reform, starting with the liberalisation of prices for goods in the shops. A multi-party system was welcomed without the previous limitations. Citizens were promised permanent relief from state interference. The era of social mobilisation was said to be over; everyone was to have the right to a private life and to a free choice about beliefs and recreations. Communism as Russians had known it since 1917 was at an end.

Few Soviet citizens lamented Gorbachëv’s going. His policies had ruined the economy and smashed the state into fragments. His critics showed him no mercy. This was ungenerous of them since without his introduction of glasnost and perestroika they could never have had the opportunity to calumniate him. Abroad, he was better respected. His disinclination to halt the decommunisation of eastern Europe by force was widely admired. His primary role in the ending of the Cold War was rightly esteemed. There had been many times when a different General Secretary would have called upon the armed forces and the KGB and reversed the reform programme. Yet the verdict on him has to take account of his inability to understand the nature of the Soviet order. He had genuinely believed that the USSR could be reformed and still remain communist. He had a passion for a democratic, humanitarian Lenin who had never existed in history.

 

39. THE COMRADES DEPART

Dozens of communist states vanished in the two years after mid-1989. This phenomenon was not confined to eastern Europe and the USSR: the Marxist dictatorship in Ethiopia was overturned in May 1991 and Mengistu took himself off to political sanctuary in Zimbabwe.1 Viewed in the perspective of centuries of recorded history, it had happened in a flash of time. A state order which covered a quarter of the world’s land surface underwent convulsive shrinkage, and people brought up with the pages of their atlases coloured in red could hardly recognise the new political maps of the globe. Only a handful of regimes continued to profess a commitment to the objectives of Marxism-Leninism in any of its variants.

The People’s Republic of China was the sole remaining communist power of global importance, but its frenzied adoption of market economics had turned the country into a hybrid of communism and capitalism.2 This had the effect of deflecting the criticism of the Chinese labour-camp system or the terrible working conditions of the free employees. World business was doing well out of China and, as had been true of many industrial enterprises which had contracts with the USSR in the 1930s, did not pry into the gruesome corners of the national penal system. Although Vietnam remained under communist rule, its rulers too adopted capitalism: they saw China as a model for their own development.3 Cuba shuffled unsteadily towards a few reforms; it increased religious tolerance, welcomed foreign tourism and attracted direct investment from abroad despite the American economic blockade.4 The communist government in Laos had little alternative. The only financial aid available to it since the seizure of power in 1975 had come from Moscow, and the authorities had built holiday hotels for Soviet tourists to earn extra revenue.5 The USSR’s collapse was a disaster for Laotian communism and change was unavoidable. By the mid-1990s the authorities even embarked on closing down its labour camps.

No longer was communism in any country interested in fomenting communist insurrections abroad. Beijing’s financial aid was concentrated in countries able to supply the oil needed for Chinese economic development or territorial security. Maoist insurrectionaries in Nepal and other places received neither help nor encouragement. Communist parties of all types everywhere learned to look after themselves. They had no alternative. The world communist movement was no longer just fragmented but had been blasted to smithereens.

North Korea was an exception to the global pattern. Its rulers adhered rigidly to an unreformed communist order despite its difficulty in feeding its people. Its possession of nuclear weapons made it a danger to the regional security of the north-west Pacific. Under Kim Jong-il, son of the state’s founder, it had to accept donations of food supplies for more than a fifth of its people. Two-thirds of its medicines were gifts sent from abroad. A degree of economic reform was introduced in 2002 with the purpose of shaking off the reliance on foreign aid. But Kim abandoned this policy in summer 2005. Soldiers were posted in paddy-fields to ensure that every grain of rice would be delivered to the state procurement agency. There was a ban on selling the produce from kitchen gardens to private buyers. The government in Pyongyang intimidated neighbouring countries by advertising its research and development in the field of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles – and in October 2006 it taunted the world with a claim to have carried out an underground nuclear explosion. The claws of the political police were sharpened. Only three hundred foreigners, including diplomats, were licensed to be resident in North Korea. The insulation of popular opinion was nearer to completeness than in any long-lasting communist state. Kim Jong-il, dumpy and smiling, forwent rice and grain from the world’s humanitarian agencies rather than submit to demands for visits by their inspectors.6

Yet the Cold War was over and the West had won it. There was no particular date when victory occurred. There was no single event such as a military surrender. The process was completed almost without being noticed. But there was no denying that communism had suffered global defeat. President George H. Bush, not a politician given to coining memorable phrases, heralded ‘a new world order’.

More and more governments were being formed by popular election. Economies were being turned over to and expanded by capitalism. Political aspirations were liberated. It was widely believed that liberal democracies and market economies would become the universal way to organise societies around the globe. This thought was endorsed by Bush’s successor Bill Clinton and entered common currency. The ‘end of history’ was proclaimed.7 Dictatorships of the political right and left were diminishing in number. Latin America had followed a democratising trend in the 1980s and cast down several right-wing authoritarian regimes; eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had toppled communism in 1989–91. The assumption was that the successor states would cooperate to make the world safe for democracy, civic freedom, legal guarantees and material prosperity. The atmosphere of global politics exuded triumphalism. The USA became the world’s unique superpower. Successive presidents promised to use American military, diplomatic and economic might in the service of universal humanitarianism and were willing to crush resistance to this progress by the use of America’s unmatchable force.

The rulers of the universe forgot that all countries, collectively or individually, had enduring features which could bend the straight line of future development. Their hopes were quickly disappointed. Ethnic, cultural and inter-state conflicts arose in Yugoslavia, Chechnya and Rwanda. Religious animosities were intertwined with them. The growth in fanatical variants of Islam continued. The Al-Qaida group led by Osama bin Laden obtained a haven for its training bases in Afghanistan under the strict Moslem rule of the Taliban government. Bin Laden organised terror campaigns worldwide; and his example was followed by organisations which sprang up independently. The new world order turned out to be neither new nor worldwide nor even orderly. When American power overturned oppressive regimes the consequences were seldom what Washington had expected. The Taliban and Al-Qaida were militarily defeated in Afghanistan in 2002 but they were not eliminated, and the succeeding Afghan administration was hardly a model for the rule of law or for popular consent. Iraq was invaded in 2003 and the Baathist dictator Saddam Hussein was overthrown. The outcome was a widening insurgency and incipient civil war despite the introduction of electoral freedom. History had not finished its course.

But George H. Bush and Bill Clinton were right about one great thing in the last decade of the twentieth century: communism in most places had ended as a state order. The incoming administrations, after the comrades had departed, tried diverse ways to prevent any restoration of communist rule. The Bulgarian authorities hauled Todor Zhivkov into custody in 1990 and convicted him of embezzlement two years later. This was a bit like Al Capone being found guilty of tax evasion. Zhivkov pleaded ill-health and was let off with house arrest. The Germans pressed charges against Erich Honecker in 1993, but he was already stricken with liver cancer and the trial was suspended. He died a year later in Chile. His successor Egon Krenz enjoyed better health and was treated less leniently. In 1997 he was arrested for complicity in the shooting of individuals who had tried to clamber over the Berlin Wall. Krenz was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. (In fact he served only three of them.) Gustáv Husák and Wojciech Jaruzelski suffered little harassment. President Havel in Prague wanted no vengeance upon his tormentor Husák, who was mortally ill and died in 1991. Successive governments in Poland recognised that Jaruzelski, despite his faults, had helped his country avoid invasion by the Warsaw Pact in the 1980s.

In the Czech Republic a law was introduced prohibiting communist leaders from holding office; in reunited Germany the public was given access to the files on them gathered by the security police. Archives were opened and the horrors of communist rule were exposed. The consensus in the media was that the ‘totalitarian nightmare’ was over. From Siberia’s Pacific coast across to Hungary, the Balkans and the former East Germany the same development took place. National pride was asserted. Religious and cultural tradition was reinstalled. Flags were redesigned and towns and streets were renamed. Statues of Marxist-Leninist heroes were pulled down. The history books were rewritten. The offices, dachas and bank accounts of the old communist parties were seized.

But then a strange thing happened: the communists began to make a political comeback. Boris Yeltsin had striven to make this impossible in Russia. Immediately after the August 1991 coup he outlawed the communist party. He sealed the party’s offices, expropriated its property and locked up the coup leaders. He spoke of all the years since 1917 as a totalitarian nightmare. Whereas Gorbachëv had zigzagged his route towards market reforms, Yeltsin drove directly into capitalism. Prices were liberalised in January 1992. Preparations were made to sell off Russia’s industrial assets by means of a system providing all citizens with vouchers entitling them to shares in their privatised enterprises. Consumer goods were imported to satisfy the demands of consumers. Yet the coalition which had brought Yeltsin to power peeled away from him. Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi objected to the social hardship caused by the economic transformation. Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, criticised Yeltsin’s eagerness to rule by decree. Constitutional stalemate resulted. Yeltsin was spoiling for a fight; he and his advisers wanted to accelerate the movement towards capitalism. Restless and imperious, he suspended the Supreme Soviet and announced the holding of a referendum on a new constitution. He sought a popular endorsement of his dismantlement of his intended programme.

Many supporters of Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were nostalgic for communism. The emergency brought even outright Stalinists to their side. Picking up Yeltsin’s challenge, they formed an armed group and attacked the main TV station in Moscow. The rest holed up in the Supreme Soviet building, calling on fellow citizens to help in overthrowing the government. Yeltsin obtained the pretext he wanted for the use of force. The Russian army shelled the Supreme Soviet into surrender and, after a brief exchange of fire, Yeltsin achieved total victory.

Yet the death of communism in Russia had been much exaggerated. The December 1993 referendum endorsed Yeltsin’s constitutional project but only because his officials fiddled the results. Yeltsin also suffered disappointment in the simultaneous election to the State Duma. Instead of a thumping win for his supporters there was much success for the neo-fascist party of Vladimir Zhirinovski. What is more, the Constitutional Court in November 1993 had ruled the ban on the communist party invalid. Back into the legal political arena marched the communists under Gennadi Zyuganov, and they became the most influential party of opposition by the mid-1990s. Zyuganov understood that he would win over few voters if he called for the restoration of a one-party state. He repositioned the Communist Party of the Russian Federation by asserting its sympathy with that bastion of the Russian Imperial tradition, the Orthodox Church, whereas the party of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchëv had persecuted religion as the opium of the people. Zyuganov anyway cared little for Lenin. The communist he most admired was Stalin, who had led the USSR to victory in the Second World War. Zyuganov denounced the breaking up of the Soviet Union. He and his party hymned the welfare provision available under Brezhnev. They vilified Gorbachëv and snidely fostered antisemitism.

Zyuganov stood against Yeltsin in the presidential election of 1996. He was in the lead as the campaign opened but lacked the resources available to Yeltsin, who enlisted the wealthiest businessmen on his side. The communist campaign was anyway a jaded one and Zyuganov proved a distinctly uncharismatic candidate. Despite serious cardiac ill-health, Yeltsin pulled himself together for the electoral contest. He toured the country. He spent freely on political broadcasts. He disbursed budgetary largesse to local administrations. TV and print journalists focused attention on the past iniquities of communism. The result was a second presidential term for Yeltsin and the definitive trouncing of communism in Russia.

Yeltsin consolidated his power in the role of an anti-communist ex-communist; Algirdas Brazauskas did the same in Lithuania but in a more circumspect and less corrupt and violent fashion. Brazauskas had broken with Moscow before the collapse of the USSR. He then declared himself a social-democrat and gained such popularity that he won the presidential election in 1993 and went on to become Prime Minister in 2001. The old communist leaders in Latvia and Estonia did less well. Lacking Brazauskas’s political versatility, they suffered ignominious electoral defeats. Patriotic revenge was being exacted after years of national subjugation. Latvians, Estonians and indeed Lithuanians celebrated their freedom in parades, religious services and literary and historical writings. Glad to see the back of the Soviet army, they hoped that Russian civilians would also depart. Rules on citizenship stipulated that everyone should speak the national language and know the national history. Wanting to acquire membership of the European Union, however, the three states moderated their treatment of resident Russians. Slowly but surely the democratic system and the market economy in these three Baltic states were strengthened by integration in the European Union.

The other former Soviet republics, except Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, were headed by communist party chiefs who restyled themselves as patriots and used their political patronage to secure themselves in power. Nursultan Nazarbaev in Kazakhstan was typical. He put his long-established group of clients in the main offices of state and gave outrageous benefit to his family as privatisation proceeded. He overrode constitutional and legal obstacles; his police used torture against dissenters. His policies blatantly discriminated in favour of individuals and groups of Kazakh nationality. In central Asia and the south Caucasus it was the same story. The new leaderships had familiar faces. The post-communist presidents and their regimes were more brutal than anything witnessed in the region since the death of Stalin. The cult of Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan was extravagant by any known standard. He proclaimed himself Turkmenbashi (Leader of all the Turkmens). His books were made compulsory in schools. A golden statue of him was erected, fifty feet high, on a pedestal which is rotated so as to stand constantly facing the sun. He renamed one of the months of the year after himself, another after his mother. Words in the state hymn threatened that anyone defaming him should have his arms chopped off. Until 1991 this same Niyazov had been First Secretary of the Turkmenistan Communist Party. Only his death in December 2006 ended his savage tyranny.

Although there was peaceful abandonment of communism in most states of the former Soviet Union, some terrible exceptions occurred. Russian and Moldovan elites fought for supremacy in Moldova (which had dropped its Soviet name of Moldavia). Tribal and religious rivalries produced a vicious civil war in Tajikistan on the Afghan border. Chechnya rose in revolt against the Russian Federation. A bloody war sputtered on between Armenia and Azerbaijan about the Armenian-inhabited enclave in Karabagh.

But it could have been so much worse and most of the countries of the former USSR at least achieved independence without bloodshed. The same was true across the Kremlin’s ‘outer empire’. Eastern Europe’s peoples coped calmly with life after communism without ‘Russian’ interference. There was a political emergency in Czechoslovakia when the Slovaks, after years of resenting the Czechs, demanded the right to secede. But the dispute was resolved. Not a shot was fired as the Czech Republic and Slovakia went their separate ways in January 1993. The great exception was Yugoslavia (which had anyway never submitted to Soviet Imperial control). Conflicts broke out across the borders of many republics after Miloevi’s rise to power in Serbia. Ethnic strife convulsed the internal affairs of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Suddenly in mid-1991 Yugoslavia broke apart when Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared their independence. Macedonia followed in September 1991, Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992. Inflamed by Miloevi’s speeches, Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina demanded broad self-rule. This was reasonably interpreted by resident Moslems and Croats as the first steps towards annexation by Serbia. The Croatian government under Franjo Tudjman poured finance and arms into Bosnia-Herzegovina in support of its co-nationals. The whole federal state collapsed in concurrent processes of secessions, civil wars, inter-republican invasions and ethnic expulsions.

The barbarous violence was brought to an end in 1995 by an agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio; and Miloevi was momentarily hailed around the world as a peacemaker. But he had suspended action in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only because he currently lacked the necessary military power. Kosovo, morever, was another matter and in 1998 he carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing which forced Albanians to flee for their lives over the border into Albania. President Clinton convinced the UN to sanction armed intervention. In March 1999, after Miloevi refused to give way, Belgrade suffered relentless NATO bombing from the air. By June he had no alternative but to pull out of Kosovo. Political demonstrations began against him in Belgrade. In the following year he went down to defeat in Serbia’s elections and was ousted from office. In 2001 the Serbian authorities surrendered him for trial as a war criminal at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague; he died in March 2006 before any verdict was reached. Yugoslavia had long since been dismembered and its communism consigned to the dustbin of history. Nationalism, casting off the light disguise of constitutional federalism, had triumphed – and only to a partial degree did it lead to liberal democracy.

The system of political patronage and financial corruption outlived the communist order in the states carved out of Yugoslavia. Ex-communists frequently did well out of the ‘transition to the market’. This was a phenomenon common to several states in the region but not in Poland, the Czech Republic or the abolished German Democratic Republic, where communists were flung out of positions of influence. Nearly everywhere the communist parties adopted fresh names, new leaders and a programme of ideas close to social-democracy rather than communism. This was usually not enough to earn them popular trust. But they were not disgraced in elections and in 1995 the ex-communist Alexander Kwasniewski won the Polish presidency and served two full terms. This had been barely imaginable in the heady years of Solidarity’s supremacy. Yet capitalism had not been kind to many people in Poland and elsewhere in the 1990s. Mass unemployment, shoddy welfare facilities and a widening of the gap between rich and poor gave communists a second chance in politics. They had to adjust their appeal by wrapping themselves in the national flag, throwing Marxism to the winds and identifying themselves with the needs of downtrodden electors.

Electoral victory did not come easily or often. Kwasniewski had done better than the candidates put up by communist parties in western Europe. The leadership in Paris was demoralised. Georges Marchais, Secretary-General from 1972 to 1994, was an ageing poodle who had usually trotted obediently down the line prescribed by Moscow.8 His successors were befuddled about how to recast the party’s programme. They could no longer praise the defunct USSR. They concentrated increasingly on policies of state welfare and hostility to ‘American imperialism’. The old linkage between the Kremlin and French communism was not so much regretted or disowned as overlooked. This situation was neither fish nor fowl to militant veterans, who left the party in droves.

In 2002 the post of Secretary-General was taken by Marie-Georges Buffet. This was a sign of the times. Previously the French Communist Party had seldom allowed women to get within a sniff of genuine authority. The veteran male champions of class struggle had lost their nerve. This was also what happened across the English Channel where Nina Temple became the Communist Party of Great Britain’s last leader in 1990. As soon as she had risen to the top she dissolved the organisation into a new Party of the Democratic Left in November 1991, while various factions cursed her renegacy and went off to form parties of their own. Mme Buffet did not restore communist fortunes: in the parliamentary elections of 2002 the French Communist Party received less than 5 per cent of the popular vote. Its period of street demonstrations, ideological ambition and cultural influence was at an end. Ms Temple’s pragmatic decision to distance her party from communism by name and ideology attracted scarcely any new followers and won not a single election even at the local level; and if the party had not inherited funds available from the USSR’s earlier subventions to the Communist Party of Great Britain it would have fallen into instant oblivion.

The Italian Communist Party, redesignated as the Democratic Party of the Left, did much better. It had long ago cut its connections to Moscow. To demonstrate its rupture with old ideas it joined the Socialist International (which had been the object of hostility for all communists since the end of the First World War). The Democratic Party of the Left helped to establish a left-of-centre electoral coalition called the Olive Tree which succeeded in forming governments in 1996, 1998 and 2006. The new party retained its position as Italy’s main leftist organisation. Its older members were sometimes nostalgic for Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party. But the deed had been done. Communists in Italy were the gravediggers of communism. Thousands of irreconcilables streamed out of the Democratic Party of the Left and formed new communist organisations. The Communist Refoundation party was among them; its leaders called upon all genuine communists to stand up and be counted. But this summons was largely ignored – and the leaders of Communist Refoundation were anyway scarcely sea-green incorruptibles: they fought elections from 1996 onwards as part of the Olive Tree coalition alongside both the Democratic Party of the Left and several liberal parties.

Elsewhere, in countries which had not effected reforms to assist the poorer social classes, it was a different story. Communism as ever fed off popular misery. The example of Guevara continued to exercise a strong appeal in Latin America. Nearly everywhere the indigenous peoples – the Indians who had inhabited those countries before their conquest by the Spanish and the Portuguese – suffered oppression and exploitation. Urban workers were treated abominably. Legal political parties offered little realistic hope of alleviating their conditions. The USA exercised an economic influence which benefited the commercial and landed elites in the region but prevented fundamental reform. Some countries had working parliaments, others were ruled by military dictatorships. Washington since 1945 had judged regimes by their willingness to accept American hegemony and to suppress communism. The end of the Cold War made little difference. Presidents Bush and Clinton did little to foster social fairness in Latin America even though at least Clinton backed the movement towards political democracy. The grinding poverty of Guatemalan villages or the shanty settlements on the edge of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil remained grim. In such circumstances there was a guaranteed residuum of support for clandestine communist parties which promised to liberate the downtrodden ‘masses’.

Many small organisations and groupings ignored the vast changes in Moscow and Beijing. Not having been dependent on foreign assistance, they went on pursuing their own strategy with ideas. The Shining Path in Peru took up the peasantry’s cause by selective assassinations of political and economic leaders, including foreigners, and indiscriminate bombings of institutions and companies. Ex-academic Abimael Guzmán and other leaders thought of themselves as Maoists even though Mao Zedong’s revolutionary strategy had little to say about terrorism. (Guzmán’s long and violent campaign was brought to an end after he was arrested and, in October 2006, sentenced to imprisonment.) The same story continued in Colombia where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – the FARC – used drug-smuggling, kidnappings and assassinations as well as the operational expertise of the Provisional IRA from Northern Ireland. Maoists in Nepal constituted the only serious opposition to the ruling monarchy. Popular discontent as well as Maoist terror against those who collaborated with army and police allowed the communists to sustain their insurgency. The Beijing government disapproved. China’s interests of state lay with the maintenance of orderly government in Nepal, and the Nepalese Maoists were cold-shouldered by Chinese leaders who maintained the colossal image of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square.

Wherever most people had a sense of economic and social despair there remained an opening for communist organisations. But, if the state was powerful, the communists had to take to the mountains and forests in order to survive. They tended to be more effective at sabotage, disruption and intimidation than at building a political movement with a realistic chance of forming a government. Not all governments attempted the systematic eradication of operations by communists. In Asia, Africa and Latin America there remained a profusion of parties. The media exposure of past abuses under Lenin, Stalin and Mao failed to stop grouplets from revering their memory. What counted for communist recruits was the lingering historical image of Marxists taking up the struggle against capitalism, imperialism and cultural backwardness. They wanted a different political, social and economic reality for their countries and were uninterested in discussions of what had gone wrong in earlier decades. If the Shining Path or the FARC were ever to hold power, their lack of curiosity about communist history – as well as their own penchant for dictatorship, terror, civil war, amoralism and societal mobilisation – would doom them to repeat the blunders of their heroes.

Much more eclectic in their handling of communism were the revolutionaries who were led to power in Nicaragua by the charismatic Daniel Ortega in 1979. They called themselves the Sandinistas after Augusto Sandino, a revolutionary from an earlier generation who had been executed by Somoza’s army in 1934. The Sandinistas were communists. Their propaganda emphasised a populist set of aspirations. Their aims included agrarian reform, universal education and the involvement of all layers of society in their revolutionary project; they also intended to pull Nicaragua out of the political and economic orbit of the USA. Apart from Soviet Marxism, they drew upon Sandino, Castro, Mao, Catholic liberation theology, European social-democracy and a touch of anarcho-syndicalism.9 They emphasised that no prior model would constrain them: ‘Neither communism nor capitalism, just Nicaraguan Sandinismo!’ More vaguely they proclaimed: ‘The Revolution is young, fresh, creative!’10 Defeated in the national elections of February 1990, they stood down without violence.11 The Sadinistas revised their policies; and Ortega, having softened his economic and anti-clerical radicalism, won back the presidency at the ballot box in November 2006.

Yet the most remarkable example of communism’s adaptation to changing conditions happened in Mexico. Revolutionary spurts had occurred there since the beginning of the twentieth century. Among the leaders of peasant rebellion had been the wild guerrilla Emiliano Zapata, who died in an ambush in 1919. Zapata had been committed to social justice. His memory was revived in the mid-1990s by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de la Liberación Nacional or EZLN). It was led by the mysterious Sub-Comandante Marcos. His very pseudonym was a propaganda device. Instead of claiming leadership of the Zapatistas, he affected to have a subordinate position. Marcos’s real name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente. He and his followers set themselves up in the mountain villages and forests of Chiapas in the Mexican south-east. Governments refused to negotiate with him and the armed forces tried to hunt him down. He was to be stopped from becoming the second Che Guevara. But Sub-Comandante Marcos proved an elusive quarry and, among the Indians of the mountains, his reputation as their protector grew. He got whole villages to adopt the habit of self-rule. He drove out the propertied elite. He also appealed to the rest of the country by organising a peaceful march – or ‘caravan’ – from the south on to Mexico City in 2000–1 (which was made possible by the more accommodating policy towards the EZLN introduced by President Vicente Fox from December 2000).

Marcos was resourceful in his propaganda. Like the Bolsheviks of old, he would not let his face be photographed. But his image in Zapatista uniform was on open sale in the shops of San Cristóbal de las Casas: trim figure, sparkling eyes, the irremovable pipe protruding from the woollen black balaclava which hid most of his face. Cassette tapes of Mexican revolutionary songs were offered for sale on stalls in the main square as well as little knitted dolls sporting balaclavas and AK-47s. Booklets and news sheets retailed stories of peasant heroism and police brutality. Marcos’s articles avoided the dourness of earlier communist outpourings; he welcomed cartoons and even children’s sketches to illustrate his journal. He and the Zapatistas were practising the idea that revolution was not just an end-goal. It was also a process designed to broaden and enliven the minds of the revolutionary militants and the peasants themselves.

Like Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua,12 the Zapatistas attached themselves only eclectically to communist traditions. Although they treated Marxism positively, they lacked the inhibitions of most communists in previous decades. Lenin was no idol for them. Refreshingly Trotski was remembered as much for his suppression of the Kronstadt sailors as for his leadership of the Red Army. Marcos talked affectionately about Rosa Luxemburg, warming to her distaste for political authoritarianism and her strategic and tactical flexibility. (He obviously did not know of her disdain for the peasant life.) Marcos’s frame of reference was contemporary as well as historical. He identified himself with the anti-globalisation protests at the Cancún summit of the World Trade Organisation in September 2003. He fulminated against President George W. Bush for invading Iraq. At the same time he quoted from rock songs. He cited the wisdom of Homer Simpson. At no point did he trouble himself with sketching a vista of the future perfect society. He had objectives rather than plans or policies. He and his Zapatistas aimed at helping the indigenous people of Mexico to help themselves – and they were willing to sacrifice their own comfort in this struggle. They educated villagers. They assisted in getting an administration in place. They promoted co-operatives. They spread ideas about agricultural development while always insisting on respect for the traditional practices of the peasantry.

Yet the Zapatistas were caught in the aspic of local preoccupations. They stood aside from conventional national politics and formed no alliance with other parties. Their internationalist agenda was little different from those of countless groups abroad. Indeed there was nothing uniquely left-wing about opposing economic globalisation and American world power. The EZNL had foreign admirers but no organisational network outside Mexico. Their routine activities were seldom reported even in the Mexican media, far less in North America and Europe. Their prospects of supplanting the government in Mexico City were negligible.

Communism in the early-twenty-first century had exhausted most of its potential to transform societies. Like the mysterious monoliths on Easter Island, the great mausoleums of Lenin, Mao, Ho and Kim continued to attract visitors. But fewer and fewer people even in supposedly communist states bothered much with their writings. Leninism in nearly all its variants was more frequently hated or ridiculed than espoused. Communist parties lost members, morale and rationale. They declined in global ambition and focused their efforts on attracting patriotic support. Wherever it was convenient, they changed leaders, names and basic ideology. Communism as it really existed became bewilderingly diverse. The world got to know Russian comrades who owned casinos and Chinese comrades who did deals with Google and Dell Computers. At the same time Cuban comrades protected what they could from their revolutionary heritage; and Korean comrades went on strengthening a regime more penetratively repressive even that Stalin’s USSR. Guerrilla bands of comrades in Asia and Latin America kept up their war against national capitalism and Yankee imperialism. Most European comrades stressed that they completely dissociated themselves from the totalitarian perspective of Marxism-Leninism – and they stopped calling each other comrade.

 

40. ACCOUNTING FOR COMMUNISM

Communism caused astonishment around the world both when it came to power in Russia in 1917 and when it lost its political supremacy there and in many other countries towards the end of the century. Until the First World War the Marxists had everywhere talked a good revolution without doing much to achieve one. A confluence of many factors produced the Soviet order. There is little reason to believe that, if Lenin and Trotski had died while directing the October Revolution in the Smolny Institute, a permanent one-party, one-ideology dictatorship would have been established. Also crucial was the long tradition of revolutionary ideas peculiar to Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Terror, dictatorship, centralism and doctrinairism attracted an intense following. Deep feelings of resentment existed widely in Imperial society, and the chasm of sentiment separating workers and peasants on one side and the rich, powerful elites on the other was no figment of the revolutionaries’ imagination. The waging of war against the Central Powers from 1914 caused acute strains in the Russian Empire. When the monarchy collapsed, the Provisional Government experienced a deeper emergency in society and the economy – not to mention the growing disarray on the military front – than occurred in any other belligerent country. Communists were given their best ever chance to make a revolution, and they took it.

Before establishing their dictatorship, they had few clear policies but many basic assumptions – and it was these assumptions which guided them as resistance grew to communism in Russia and Europe. Their early fumblings towards a communist order left the USSR internationally vulnerable in its economy and its defence, and there was a rising tide of discontent, alienation and potential opposition at home. Stalin’s policies from the late 1920s industrialised the Soviet Union and turned it into a great power. He built on Lenin’s legacy while ditching much that Lenin had held dear. But the foundation stones of the Leninist order remained intact: the one-party state, the one-ideology culture, the hyper-centralism, the state-penetrated economy and the mobilised society.

The Soviet Union succeeded in shining its lamp to the world whereas the lights of a Soviet Belgium would have been snuffed out by foreign powers. Perhaps if the first communist experiment had taken place on Christmas Island it would have been left alone; but any other country would inevitably have stirred up a crusade against it. Communism in Russia came near to being overrun by the great powers but by late 1919 the Western Allies, as a result of internal pressures as well as out of geopolitical considerations, had dropped any immediate ambition to overturn Lenin. As the power of the Red Army rose in the 1930s, democratic states were yet more reluctant to take up arms against Moscow – and their businessmen were making solid profits out of exports to the USSR. The Great Depression in the world economy could hardly have happened at a better time for the USSR. Another stroke of luck was the fact that Russia and its borderlands were rich in natural resources. Scarcely a mineral existed which could not be found there in abundance. Oil, gas, gold and nickel were plentiful, and vast forests could be felled for their timber. Without such advantages the communists would hardly have achieved what they did before the Second World War. Geography worked greatly to the advantage of the USSR.

Soviet communism’s survival also resulted from the country’s political and cultural insulation from the capitalist world even while trading with it. Stalin eliminated the space where alternative organisations, individuals and ideas might operate. Private entrepreneurship, national assertiveness, spiritual exploration and religious celebration were more or less eradicated. There was an internal state of siege. Khrushchëv’s reforms loosened things up; and Brezhnev, despite reversing some of his reforms, refrained from reintroducing the old severe tautness. Gorbachëv went further than Khrushchëv. He lifted the siege and inadvertently brought the order tumbling down.

Yet Stalin’s regime surely could not have lasted without modification even if Stalin by some freak of nature had lived out the twentieth century. (Georgians, of course, are noted for their centenarians.) He had had to reconcile himself to a state order with inefficiencies and obstructions he was powerless to eliminate. Clientelism persisted. Local ‘nests’ were ineradicable. Bureaucrats behaved sloppily and ignored higher instructions and popular needs. The quality of goods and services, except at the highest reaches of the hierarchy, languished far below world standards. The economy operated according to criteria of quantitative output and fulfilled the five-year plans without proportionately improving the living conditions of most people. Military objectives skewed the budget and conditioned the whole organisation and official culture of society. Stalin was an eager militarist. But he also aimed to create an affluent society, and neither he nor his successors came near to satisfying popular desires. Problems mounted as Soviet rulers came to appreciate that they were more effective in suppressing than in liquidating anti-communist tendencies. Under the surface of Stalinist totalitarianism, different kinds of order remained capable of re-germinating. The pre-revolutionary roots of society had clung to life.

This was not the only reason why the USSR was vulnerable when its rulers softened its terror-regime. Soviet people in their vast majority were more educated and better informed in the 1980s than at the beginning of the twentieth century; they knew more than was good for the communist party leadership. Acquaintance with foreign developments was growing. The communist rulers encountered tasks of increasing complexity as the economy left the first stage of industrialisation behind. Questions arose needing the expertise of scientific, academic and managerial professionals. The regime’s advisers acquired a greater influence over the shaping of policy. Yet the leadership had made extravagant claims for its ability to satisfy material demands. Its repeated failure aggravated the popular resentment. The communist order, unfortunately for itself, contained components which inhibited the development of initiative outside the range of current policies. The dynamism of the armaments sector could not be reproduced throughout the entire economy. No amount of tinkering with institutions and cajoling citizens worked. Soviet-style communism spent decades engineering its institutional machinery; but although the engine made a lot of noise and moved well through the lower gears, the direction of movement was always down a cul-de-sac.

Such was the order which, with a few national adjustments, was introduced to most countries of eastern Europe after 1945. The same difficulties mounted as soon as the communists took power. There was political oppression, economic rigidification and social alienation. Apathy and disillusionment spread. Although the party in each communist state attracted a mass membership, idealism was quickly outweighed by cynicism among the recruits. Communists in government needed the assistance of technical specialists – and such specialists, including ones trained up under communism, obfuscated official policy when it conflicted with their interests. Everywhere there were the same old dodges. Functionaries huddled together as ‘clients’ protected by a patron. Information delivered upwards was distorted to benefit the senders and frustrate the awkward intentions of the recipients. Misleading the ‘centre’ became a mode of existence. Communism, even more than other types of political order, relied on administrators to transmit accurate data to the supreme leadership. It never attained this end.

Communists had abolished multi-party elections and public criticism of their policies. They had crushed independent organs in the media and turned their central party newspapers and state radio and TV stations into the sole purveyors of public information. They had eliminated due legal process. They outlawed any political parties which offered effective opposition. They thought they were being clever; their ideology told them that the separation of powers was a bourgeois sham, and they thought that unifying agencies of state would make for a more accountable order. Marx, following Rousseau, developed this way of thinking and Lenin had enthusiastically grafted it on to his own. This was disastrous in theory and practice. Communist rulers deprived themselves of crucial instruments for checking the veracity of information reaching them. Without an unofficial network of media they had no access to open-ended discussion. The absence of constitutional and judicial propriety forestalled the preventability of administrative abuse. Communism in eastern Europe had no choice but to follow the Soviet road. Elsewhere, in China and Cuba, the rulers were not constrained by the requirements of obedience. Doubtless they were adhering to a common ideology; but they also adopted the Soviet model because they recognised that they would otherwise collapse under the onslaught of popular discontent and resistance.

There have been communist leaders – and not just ones whose parties failed to come to power – who moderated their zeal for full communisation. They have included individuals who in their private lives would not deliberately hurt a fly. One such was Bukharin, animal lover, mountain walker and painter. But kindly Bukharin did not abjure dictatorship and terror in principle, and he condoned most of the violence perpetrated by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Soviet state.

Multi-party elections and civil rights do not produce rule by the people. There is overwhelming evidence that they benefit the rich and powerful more than the poor and weak. Elites rule. Influential interest groups barge their way to the front of the queue of state priorities. Communists concluded that political, social and national oppression was inevitable even under liberal democracy. They also believed capitalism to be inherently unstable and unfair; they thought its end was nigh. Communism would prove itself superior in technological inventiveness. This analysis was a pernicious mixture of exaggeration and downright incorrectness. Countries with civil rights and political democracy have been widely more effective at eliminating abuses of power. Capitalism, moreover, has shown resilience in developing new and useful products for the mass consumer market. More and more countries have expanded their economies to the advantage of an ever larger proportion of their citizens in recent decades. The prediction of Marx and Engels about general impoverishment has not been realised. They contended that the market economy as it expanded would reduce nearly everyone to destitution. The Leninists added the prophecy that world wars were unavoidable under capitalism and they too have as yet proved unreliable soothsayers.

Sensing that communism was thwarting the achievement of their objectives, some communist leaders darted down the nationalist foxhole. This was scarcely an option for most regimes in eastern Europe where Soviet power held them in thrall. Tito and Ceauescu were the exceptions. But they too had problems. Tito ruled not a nation-state but a federal assemblage of nations and gained only limited favour for his concept of Yugoslavism; Ceauescu paraded as the paladin of the Romanian nation while in reality crushing the country’s religion and culture – and most Romanians hated him and his henchmen. China, North Vietnam and Cuba were better positioned to burrow down into nationalism. The Chinese asserted their independence by falling out with the USSR and introducing specific policies of their own; North Vietnam and Cuba went on receiving assistance from Moscow but geographical distance gave opportunity to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro to run their states more or less as they pleased. Mao, Ho and Fidel acquired a cachet as champions of the nation even among many citizens who reviled their communising purposes. This was not a new phenomenon. Lenin and Stalin had had an appeal as leaders who stood up for Russia more effectively than the last tsars.

The elements of nationalism alleviated but never solved the difficulties of rulership, and some reformers believed that the Soviet model and its many foreign variants required another kind of adaptation. This trend became known as reform communism. Ever since communists themselves started to object to the form taken by a particular communist state – to its policies, institutions, leaders or social structures – the temptation for them was to say that it was not communism itself that was in the wrong but the way the state was implementing it. This happened soon after the October Revolution. Oh, if only Lenin had not died prematurely. If only Bukharin had been a better politician and prevented Stalin’s rise to power. If only Russia had not been so backward as an economy and culture and had not been confronted by so many powerful capitalist states. Such reactions missed the point. A perfect society cannot be built on the premise that its construction requires perfect conditions. Communism by its nature offers a challenge to the advanced capitalist world. Capitalists inevitably pick up the gauntlet. Indeed Marxists had always predicted that they would behave like this. It follows that no communist project anywhere can endure without surmounting internal and external difficulties. If mass repression is not used, such difficulties will eventually produce political, social and economic emergencies.

After Hungarian communism embarked on reforms in 1956, it was engulfed by a popular revolt that would have swept away the communist order but for the Soviet invasion. The Prague Spring in 1968 introduced economic decentralisation and open political discussion. Dubek was already losing his grip on the political levers when the tanks rolled into his capital. The evidence suggests that any process of reforming communism is likely to turn into a movement to transform it into something radically different. Brezhnev understood this and turned his back on reform; and his predecessor Khrushchëv, despite being a reformer, had never tampered with the load-bearing walls of the Soviet political and economic edifice. There were limits beyond which it was perilous for a communist leadership to tread if it wished to avoid being replaced by an entirely different kind of state.

The danger is easily understood. The wish to enjoy a private life, free from state interference, was never expunged. The history of communist interference with the individual and the family intensified this aspiration. What is more, the notion of making a profit on deals had never disappeared. Although the open market was drastically curtailed under communism, bartering for personal gain was not eradicated – indeed it was often more prevalent in communist countries than in the advanced capitalist economies. Nor did people stop thinking for themselves politically. Distrust of government was endemic and got deeper as communisation proceeded. Resentment of the privileges of the nomenklatura was commonplace. Religious faith was not eliminated; in some countries – the most remarkable case is Poland – organised Christianity became a formidable instrument of anti-communism. The zest for free choice in hobbies, sport and recreation remained a powerful inclination. The longing persisted for society to be treated as something other than a resource to be mobilised. Knowledge also spread about the West, and the crudities of communist propaganda were rejected by a rising number of citizens. The aspiration intensified to pull down the barriers to sharing in the material and social advantages enjoyed by societies abroad.

There was consequently a sound reason why the communist leaderships refused to put their position to the test of a fair election: they knew they would lose. It was the same in the USSR even during perestroika. Although Gorbachëv was immensely strong in the opinion polls, he had cause for being wary in introducing political pluralism. When in 1990 he repealed the one-party system he was taking a huge gamble – and the resultant competition did much to undermine the Soviet order. The conclusion must be that communist governments grew stronger in direct proportion to their implementation of the Soviet model developed by Lenin and Stalin. Those states which could not or would not copy its fundamental features were vulnerable to internal dissolution or external intervention. Not only Nagy and Dubek in eastern Europe but also Allende in Latin America learned this lesson the hard way.

Yet many of those communist states in eastern Europe that rejected reform – or implemented it in only a diluted fashion – were themselves briskly overturned in 1989–91. A state order crumbled which had generated awe at home and abroad. Communism had been held together by force, and an adventitious combination of factors – in geopolitics, economic failure, social assertiveness, generational change, ideological bankruptcy and political choice – pulled it down. A vista of rapid decommunisation was opened up. The strange thing is that many features of life under communism have survived its dismantlement. The situation varies from country to country but several states of the former USSR and eastern Europe continue to be characterised by political oppression, economic corruption and social privilege. Clientelism, electoral fraud and police-state methods did not disappear everywhere. Communist rulers and administrators, as they discerned that communism was doomed, cast away their formal communist commitment while retaining many institutional and operational techniques. People throughout their societies were accustomed to this situation. Those techniques had in any case not been the patent of earlier communists. Communism had picked them up, either all or some of them, from the pre-revolutionary past and then dynamically reinforced them.

It accordingly took unusually good fortune for states to make a benign transition from their Soviet-style state order. A patriotic consensus helped in Poland and other countries. So did the preservation of traditions of civil, religious and individual freedom. A national commitment to elections, legality and constitutionality was crucial. And the new rulers needed to fix rules of the political game which firmly bound all its players to fair behaviour.

Fascism was much easier to eradicate than communism. The German Federal Republic and the Italian Republic after the Second World War quickly introduced representative democracy, the rule of law and pluralist media. The Western Allies had won the military conflict and imposed the kind of peacetime settlement they wanted, and Germans and Italians by and large consented to it. This success was facilitated by the limited nature of the changes in society made by Hitler and Mussolini. Private enterprise had flourished under them. Religion had not been subject to a campaign of extirpation. Foreign travel had not been outlawed. Hitler in the longer term intended to complete the Nazification of Germany but was defeated in war before he could bring his ambitions to completion. As things stood in 1945, it was not difficult for the USA and its allies to resuscitate the tissues of German society which were necessary for liberal democracy. This was not widely the case in communist states. Communism had penetrated every sector of life: politics, economy, society and belief-systems. In the USSR it had lasted seven decades. Even where it covered a shorter time-span it was implemented across more or less the same range of sectors. No wonder it is taking many years and much effort for a radically different order to be developed in several countries.

It cannot be stressed too heavily that not every inhuman action in the twentieth century was perpetrated by communists. Adolf Hitler carried out the extermination of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and mental-hospital patients in their millions in the Third Reich. No communist was involved in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The napalm poisoning of Vietnamese and Cambodian forests was carried out by the USAF. Capitalism’s social and ecological record, moreover, has scarcely been wholly positive. Bolivian miners have suffered terrible conditions. The Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984 was the result of an American company’s gross negligence. The depletion of the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia was driven by private commercial greed. Nor has capitalism always been on the side of democracy, popular welfare and education. Most countries in Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa were run by dictators, corrupt elites and brutal security forces for most of the twentieth century without any of the great liberal democracies seeking to change the situation.

What is more, the impulses which led to communism are not dormant. Political and economic oppression is still widespread. National, social and religious persecution endures. Although the old empires have passed away, the self-interested domination of the world by a handful of great powers persists. Personal security, educational opportunity and guaranteed access to food, shelter and employment have yet to be provided for billions of people. There is much scope for radical movements to arise and challenge this situation. The strongest and most dangerous phenomenon at the time of writing is Islamist terrorism. Its fanatical exponents, despite the paucity of their active following, have already succeeded in shaking the balance of political forces in the world. They owe much of their impact to a popular feeling among Moslems that advanced capitalism is wrecking the material and spiritual basis of their communities. Just as Marxist intellectuals before the First World War took up the cause of the industrial proletariat, now Islam has produced intransigent revolutionaries dedicated to realising their fundamental values. In the years ahead there may well emerge other as yet unknown movements in conflict with liberal democracy, capitalist economics and pluralist society. It cannot be discounted that such movements, like Marxism from 1917, might seize control of whole states.

Communism itself looks unlikely to return in the form it had in the USSR or in Maoist China. Indeed its restoration in any comprehensive fashion is surely inconceivable. It has been thoroughly discredited among intelligentsias and general publics even though grouplets of true believers will probably survive in liberal democracies or in many clandestine movements.

Yet ideologies and politics can mutate and spread like a virus which counteracts every medical effort to pinpoint and eradicate it. So it has been with communism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks groped their way to the creation of their new kind of state. This became the stereotype for communist systems elsewhere; and the USSR itself underwent internal variation in subsequent decades. Communism also infected other movements for the transformation of society. The totalising ideas, institutions and practices of Marxism-Leninism had a profound impact on the political far right. The one-party, one-ideology state with its disregard for law, constitution and popular consent was implanted in inter-war Italy and Germany. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler acted only in response to communism; and the forced submission of society to comprehensive control took different forms in the USSR, Italy and Germany. But the importance of precedent is scarcely deniable. The objective of an unrestrained state power penetrating all aspects of life – political, economic, social, cultural and spiritual – was a characteristic they shared. The same phenomenon emerged in the secularist Baathist regime in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and appeared in the Islamist plans of Osama bin Laden as well as in the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

All such leaders from Mussolini and Hitler down to bin Laden have detested communism. They dedicated themselves to its annihilation. Yet they were influenced by communist precedents even while regarding it as a plague bacillus. Communism has proved to have metastasising features. It will have a long afterlife even when the last communist state has disappeared.