The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The Hungarian Communists were victims of their own dogmatism and their inability to deliver on nationalistic promises at a time when the state was fighting for its life. In comparison, conditions looked more favourable for Communists in Italy. The radical Italian Socialist Party (PSI) had a long history of effective organization and opposition to the war; Northern Italy, like Russia a late and uneven industrializer, had a concentrated working class in the Turin–Genoa–Milan triangle, with a radical peasantry in the nearby Po Valley; and the Communists were more willing than the Hungarians to appeal to peasants. In October 1919 the PSI declared that liberal reforms were not enough and the time had come for the creation of a new type of socialist state. The radical left gained local electoral support, and strikes and boycotts were reinforced by factory occupations in the spring and autumn of 1920. These were the factory councils Gramsci believed could be the foundations of the new state.39

  Yet, as was the case in Russia, the radicals found it difficult to reconcile factory democracy with effective economic coordination. Factory councils narrowly pursued their own interests, and it was difficult to ensure that they delivered supplies to each other to keep the economy going.40 Coordinating the revolutionary movement also posed difficulties. Radical socialists controlled some areas, but the army and old liberal parties were still masters of the state, and large sections of the population, especially in the countryside, were conservative. Meanwhile, there were profound divisions amongst the socialist workers themselves. The PSI’s leadership, and most of its membership, were not committed to revolution, and in September 1920 a referendum within the trade unions rejected a proposal that the factory councils become the basis of an alternative revolutionary state – albeit narrowly, by 591,245 to 409,569 votes. Gramsci, like others who had placed their faith in the factory council movement, soon became convinced that a centralized, Leninist party was needed to lead the revolution. The PSI finally split in 1921 into Socialist and Communist parties, and this divided left was no match for the paramilitary right. From early in 1920, the Fascists – a coalition of ex-socialist nationalists like Mussolini, supporters of landowners in the countryside and anti-socialist groups, often young and middle class, fought what they saw as a Red tide. Convinced that class struggle was destroying the unity and power of Italy, they unleashed formidable violence against the left, and ultimately seized power in October 1922. In 1926 Gramsci himself was arrested and imprisoned.

  Moscow had harboured great hopes for revolution in Italy, but its main ambitions were concentrated on Germany. The Communists’ first attempt to seize power, however, was a failure. In January 1919 Ebert’s new government began to root out enclaves of radical influence, and on 4 January 1919 dismissed the leftist president of the Berlin police authorities, Eichhorn. Unexpectedly large demonstrations erupted in his defence, and although Rosa Luxemburg was sceptical of the wisdom of challenging the government, she and the newly formed Communists (KPD) ultimately decided to support the mass uprising, in alliance with the leftist Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The Ebert government responded by sending in members of the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitary squads set up to oppose the revolution, and on 11 January they stormed the headquarters of the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, which had been occupied by the revolutionaries. By 15 January the uprising was over and the Communist leaders went into hiding. The Freikorps discovered and subsequently killed them with the tacit support of the Social Democratic government.

  The murders caused profound shock, and the ‘martyrdom’ of Luxemburg and Liebknecht transformed them into potent icons for the young Communist party. ‘LLL’ (Lenin–Luxemburg–Liebknecht) festivals became central to Communist culture throughout the Weimar period.41 But the repression worked, at least for a time. As Brecht had shown in Spartakus, a majority favoured peace and order over revolution, and in the elections that followed, the Social Democrats won 37.9 per cent of the vote, compared with 7.6 per cent won by the USPD – the only far-left party standing.

  This, however, was not the end of the revolutionary era. The repressiveness of the Social Democrat-led government and its military allies was counterproductive, and Wolfgang Kapp’s failed right-wing coup convinced many workers that the Social Democrats could not be trusted to resist the return of the old elites. The factory council movement was revived, several areas were cleared of the army and the Freikorps, and in the June 1920 elections the radical left achieved its highest ever vote – 20 per cent for the USPD and Communists against the Social Democrats’ 21.6 per cent. Strikes and unrest continued in the industrial regions of Germany, and the newly merged USPD and Communists continued to do well.

  In July 1920 the Second Congress of the Comintern met amidst enormous optimism. The factory council movement in Italy seemed on the verge of success, and the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, bringing Communism to the West, or so the Bolsheviks supposed. But by the autumn, the Communists were in retreat on all fronts. The persecution of the Wobblies and other American radicals that began during the war reached a high point during the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919–20. Thousands were arrested, and many deported.42 In Europe, the failure of the Italian factory council movement in late 1920 and the retreat of the Red Army from Warsaw after August, following its defeat by the new Polish army, marked the beginning of the end. It became clear, however, that the revolutionary era was over with the catastrophic failure of the German Communists’ so-called ‘March Action’ of 1921. The police and army had been deployed to crush strikes in Saxony, and Béla Kun, who materialized in Berlin as a Comintern leader, encouraged the Communist party to organize a proletarian revolution in response. The rebels were in a minority, and strikes were broken with the help of Social Democrat workers. They were inevitably defeated; thousands were imprisoned and 145 individuals killed.

  Brecht had been proved prescient, and it may be that his analysis was right too: people were tired of struggle. Whilst many might have been profoundly disillusioned with the old regimes and their stubborn bellicosity, most did not want a horrific international conflagration to be followed by class war. But there were other reasons for the failures of the revolutions. Some Communists were too sectarian and ambitious, as in Hungary. Others were discredited by their lack of realism, unable to explain how decentralized factory councils could run a modern industrial economy. Repression from moderate left and far right was also effective. But crucial in undermining the revolutionary impulse was the power of democratic and welfare reforms. Throughout Western Europe, states extended the franchise and increased welfare benefits for workers – especially in Weimar Germany, where the Social Democrats retained considerable influence. The hope of peaceful improvement, combined with the end of the post-war booms that had given workers economic power, soon vanquished Communist insurgencies.

  Even so, the social conflicts of the past had not been resolved. Governments and the middle classes wanted a return to the pre-1914 laissez-faire economic system and the gold standard, which inevitably restricted growth. But this was hard to reconcile with promises made after the war for improved welfare, and living standards were regularly sacrificed, nailed to the ‘cross of gold’ – the need to keep the currency stable. Workers protested against the resulting low wages and high unemployment, most famously when Winston Churchill returned sterling to the gold standard and the 1926 British General Strike was called against the resulting wage cuts. There was a boom of sorts at the end of the 1920s, but it proved to be fragile. Wages remained low as profits soared, and in the United States capital flooded into share and property speculation rather than production for an expanding market; in Central Europe the temporary prosperity was dependent on high levels of short-term loans from American banks. The developed world had failed to forge a sustainable capitalism that secured both prosperity and social harmony – as was soon to become clear.

  For a time, then, the capitalist system had ‘stabilized’ itself, as Communists admitted. But the revolutionary tide left rock pools of radicali
sm as it retreated, and Communism found a home in many communities of workers and the unemployed throughout Europe. However, its real stronghold was in Germany, where the Communists continued to attract over 10 per cent of the vote. The old home of Marx and Engels remained the centre of Communism outside the USSR.

  IV

  In December 1930, Brecht, by now a serious Marxist and supporter of the KPD, produced what was probably his most controversial play: The Measures Taken. Staged with a ‘control chorus’ (adapted from the Greek chorus) made up of large numbers of workers, it told the story of three Communist activists on a secret mission to foment revolution in China. They find a young guide, and tell him that they must all keep their identities secret. If the authorities discover them, not only will they be killed, but the whole Communist movement will be in jeopardy. All four put on masks. Yet the guide, emotional and undisciplined, is so outraged by the sufferings of the Chinese people that he tries to help them, removing his mask and revealing his identity. The authorities pursue the young guide, and the three Communists realize that he is a liability. They cannot leave him and they cannot take him. So they decide they must kill him, and he himself agrees that this is the only solution. He is shot and his body is left in a lime pit to remove all traces of his identity. The chorus then chillingly declares that the comrades have made the right decision; the necessary ‘measures have been taken’ for the salvation of the revolution.43

  The play caused a storm of controversy within the left. Ruth Fischer, a Communist and sister of Brecht’s collaborator Hanns Eisler, later accused him of justifying Soviet brutality, as ‘the minstrel of the GPU [the Soviet secret police]’.44 Brecht protested that he was merely encouraging his audience to explore the problem of revolutionary tactics and the need for self-sacrifice at a time when Communists were under attack from fascism. Even so, the play was to damage him. During the McCarthyite campaign against Communists, the House Un-American Activities Committee saw The Measures Taken as evidence that Brecht was wedded to revolutionary violence, and their judgement precipitated his move from America to Communist East Germany in 1949.

  However controversial and ambiguous Brecht’s message on violence, the play does capture the austere character of European Communism outside the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Brecht’s scepticism of revolutionary radicalism, already evident in 1919, was now widespread; the emotionalism of expressionist art and literature had given way to a sober ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit). The failure of the post-war revolutions and the growth of an anti-Communist radical right both fed the sectarian and unsentimental culture that Brecht espoused in The Measures Taken. Revolution was still the goal, but emotionalism had to be replaced by discipline. European Communists became increasingly reliant on the Soviet Union, and subject to a new authoritarian ethos, worlds away from the council democracy of 1919. They also became more isolated, members of a persecuted sect.

  The first sign of these changes in the international Communist movement came in the summer of 1919, and was precipitated by defeats. If the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 was the trigger for the end of ‘proletarian democracy’ within Russia, the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919 convinced Lenin that the Bolsheviks must radically revise their approach to world revolution. He now believed that his earlier hope that the Western revolutions could be more democratic than their Russian counterpart was misplaced. Lenin held Béla Kun responsible for the failure of the Budapest republic. He had mistakenly merged the Communist party with the socialists, had placed too little faith in the vanguard party, and needlessly alienated the peasantry.45 As Lenin explained in his highly influential Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder of April 1920, Russian lessons showed that ‘absolute centralization and rigorous discipline in the proletariat’ were essential in a ‘long, stubborn and desperate life-and-death struggle’ against the bourgeoisie.46

  At the Second Comintern Congress of 1920, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seriously began the task of centralizing international Communism under tight Bolshevik control. The Congress decided that all parties had to fulfil ‘Twenty-one Conditions’, the most important being Communists’ complete separation from the unified ‘Social Democratic’ parties. Furthermore, only ‘tested Communists’ could remain members; ‘reformists’ and ‘opportunists’ were to be expelled. The principles of the conspiratorial Bolshevik vanguard party were now being applied to the international movement. There was some opposition to this Communist purism, especially from the German Independent Social Democrats, but Grigorii Zinoviev, the Comintern boss, was adamant. Those who opposed the creation of separate Communist parties, he sneered, ‘think of the Communist International as a good tavern, where representatives of various countries sing the “Internationale” and pay each other compliments, then go their separate ways and continue the same old practices. That is the damnable custom of the Second International and we will never tolerate it.’47 All member parties had to be reconstituted as ‘Communist parties’, and were to be subordinate to an executive committee dominated by the Bolshevik party.

  The result was the emergence of pure Communist parties, disentangled from the mixed-left parties of pre-war Europe. The division in the Russian party of 1903, between revolutionary Bolsheviks and gradualist Mensheviks, was being replicated in the international Communist movement. In some countries, the Communists benefited from the resulting splits. In Germany, the tiny Communist Party succeeded in attracting the majority of the Independent Social Democrats into the fold, and emerged as a mass party with 350,000 members. Meanwhile in France, the French Communist Party (PCF) took the majority of the members of the old Second International socialist party, the SFIO. But in Italy, the splitting of the old Socialist Party (PSI) left a smaller Italian Communist Party with a mere 4.6 per cent of the vote. Significant parties also emerged in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Finland. But elsewhere, in Iberia, the Low Countries, Britain, Ireland, the USA, Denmark and Sweden, Switzerland and much of Eastern Europe, Communist parties were minuscule. Apart from in Germany and Finland, they rarely secured more than 5 per cent of the popular vote, and the Communist Party of Great Britain won a mere 0.1–0.4 per cent of the vote (although it did win a single seat in Parliament in 1922).48 Germany had by far the largest and most powerful Communist party outside the USSR.

  It was clear that the revolutionary tide was ebbing, and in March 1921, the new situation faced the Bolshevik leaders starkly. The March Action in Germany had failed; economic collapse had forced Russia to introduce the New Economic Policy; and it was now glaringly obvious that the Soviet economy could only be built by exporting raw materials (especially grain) to the outside world. In the same month, the Soviets concluded their first trade agreement with a capitalist country – Great Britain. It was clear that full socialism lay over a very distant horizon; as Trotsky explained in June 1921, ‘Only now do we see and feel that we are not immediately close to our final aim, to the conquest of power on a world scale… We told ourselves back in 1919 that it was a question of months, but now we say that it is perhaps a question of several years.’49 The result was a new policy. Communist parties were to cease to agitate for immediate revolution, though they were still to prepare for it in the longer term; instead ‘united fronts’ had to be forged with the members – but not the leaders – of reformist socialist parties. As the icy relations between the USSR and the West thawed slightly (the Treaty of Rapallo was concluded with Germany in 1922, and the British Labour government extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1924), the new policy seemed to be justified.

  In some parts of the world the new line had some real effects, most strikingly in China in the collaboration between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalist Guomindang, and in Britain, where the Communist Party established links with the trade unions through the Anglo-Russian Committee. Many Communists, especially in the smaller, more marginal parties, welcomed the opportunity to play a role in the broader left. But in most p
laces the isolation of Communists continued. The ‘united front’ policy was bafflingly contradictory, banning contacts with Social Democratic parties, but calling for collaboration with reformist trade unions. Many Communists also resisted collaboration, especially in Germany, where they retained their hatred for the Social Democrats; their hostility was fully reciprocated.

  The frequent zigzags in Moscow’s policy compounded the difficulty of forging links with the moderate left, and isolated the Communists even further. A major turning point came with the humiliating failure of yet another attempt at a German revolution – the ‘German October’ of 1923. Following the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, the left of the German Communist Party, with their allies in Moscow, Trotsky and Zinoviev, insisted that the Communists could create an alliance with nationalists, forging them into a revolutionary force. Moscow provided substantial funding for the insurrection, but the Communists had massively exaggerated working-class support, and the revolution had to be called off.50