The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  you can also accuse us of having been in the minority, and yes, we were. And so what?… That doesn’t mean anything! Because what does the development of mankind teach us? It teaches us first of all that it was always the minority, the avant-garde, that rescued the majority, often against the will of that majority… Let’s admit it honestly: who organized the uprisings in Poland? A handful of people. That’s simply the way history is made.114

  As Berman makes clear, many of the Stalinist leaders were true believers, convinced that the Soviet system was best for their countries. They were eager for the rapid transition to socialism. Most of the new leaders, the ‘little Stalins’ of the new order, had spent a good deal of time in the Hotel Lux and other Comintern establishments: Poland’s Bołeslaw Bierut, Czechoslovakia’s Klement Gottwald, Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi and Bulgaria’s Vulko Chervenkov – Dimitrov’s brother-in-law – had all spent long periods in exile in Moscow. Only two were ‘locals’: Romania’s Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a railway engineer who helped to lead the party from a Romanian prison cell, and the now pro-Soviet Albania’s Enver Hoxha, a teacher educated at the University of Montpellier, forced to become a tobacconist when sacked by the Italian occupying forces.

  This group of Communist leaders was joined in October 1949 by Walter Ulbricht, another Hotel Lux resident, who led the new East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Germany and Austria had been split into occupation zones after the war, and the Americans, British and French had precipitated the formal division of Germany in June 1948 by announcing plans to create a separate West German state out of their zones, introducing a new currency. Stalin had responded by cutting off Berlin – a jointly administered city within the Soviet zone – in an attempt to force the Allies to back down. Between then and the following May the Allies organized a massive airlift to keep West Berlin from starving. But Stalin was ultimately not prepared to go to war and his bullying tactics failed. Germany, the centre of the struggle between classes in the 1920s, by the 1940s had become the cockpit of the struggle between systems.

  Stalin was determined to mobilize his new empire to meet the Western threat. Central and Eastern Europe’s economies were to be rebuilt according to the Soviet model of the late 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture was to be collectivized, heavy industry built and consumption squeezed. Popular Front moderation was over. Governments drew up five-year plans in all of the Soviet satellites in 1949–50, and as in the Soviet Union, this policy was combined with ‘class struggle’ against kulaks and the bourgeoisie.

  The end of the Popular Fronts, and the creation of a Communist empire in Central and Eastern Europe, was confirmed at the founding conference of the Cominform in the Polish town of Szklarska Poręba in September 1947. Purportedly an organization for sharing information between Communist parties, it was not designed to be a successor to the Comintern, spreading international revolution. Rather it included only the East European parties and a few strategically important West European parties, and was to subject them to the dictates of Soviet foreign policy.115 Stalin had become convinced that the relatively loose supervision over European Communist parties had to end. He knew that his demands would be unpopular amongst national parties, and he kept the purpose of the meeting secret. The Polish leader Gomułka made his dissatisfaction clear, but he had little effect. Parties were to be subjected to stricter supervision, and were to mobilize against the American threat. The Popular Fronts were dead, and in their place was a new doctrine of international struggle between ‘two camps’ – the capitalist and the socialist.116

  In the East, the Marshall Plan damaged the Communists, but they could rely on force to keep them in power. In the West, Communists just had to do their best in very adverse circumstances. Even though the French and Italian parties were becoming powerful political forces in 1946 and early 1947, Cold War tensions undermined their position. In May 1947 they were expelled from the coalition governments, and the Cominform then commanded them to take a more militant line, not to foment revolution but to mobilize opinion against American influence.117 In 1947, Stalin called on them to organize strikes, and the following year they were told to take part in ‘peace’ coalitions against the United States. The Communist parties were inevitably damaged by the new line. The Italian Communist leadership, which stood to do very well in the 1948 elections, hoped that the Soviets would take a softer line on the Plan or to offer their own aid as an answer to Marshall.118 But the Soviets ignored them. As the Italians understood, the Marshall Plan and the Americans would play a central part in the Christian Democrats’ election campaign. General Marshall himself threatened that all aid would be cut off in the event of a Communist victory, and the Catholic Church mobilized Italian-Americans to write over a million letters both to family members and to total strangers, warning of the Communist threat. The Prague coup proved to be the final straw in frightening voters away from Communism, and the Christian Democrats soundly defeated the leftist bloc. The Italian Communist Party remained the largest leftist party, but, like its French sister party, it would be banished from the corridors of power for several decades. The Finnish party was the last to leave government, in 1948.

  IX

  On May Day 1950 a group of men in quasi-military garb, wearing armbands decorated with red stars, seized control of a small Wisconsin mill-town, Mosinee. They set up roadblocks and arrested the town’s mayor, Ralph Kronenwetter, dragging him from his bed at gunpoint, clad in polka-dot pyjamas and dressing-gown. The mayor accepted his defeat, and urged his fellow townspeople to surrender, standing in the newly named ‘Red Square’ on a platform emblazoned with the slogan ‘The State Must Be Supreme Over The Individual’. The leader of the insurgents, the derby-hatted Commissar Kornfeder, then declared Mosinee a part of the ‘USSA’ (United Socialist States of America), and issued a decree nationalizing industry, abolishing all political parties except for the Communists, and banning all civic and church organizations.119

  This was Communism American-style – though a Communism staged by the conservative veterans’ organization, the fiercely anti-Soviet American Legion, rather than the CPUSA. The citizens of Mosinee had to suffer the torments of Communism for one day only. They were participants in one of the many political pageants of the era staged to demonstrate the dangers of the Communist threat. Out-of-town Legionnaires, dressed as Communists, deliberately ‘unfamiliar’ to locals, invaded Mosinee. After hearing a speech in which their leader declared ‘we count the hours when the poor and downtrodden workers will rise and overthrow the whole rotten regime of the United States!’, they embarked on their campaign of repression. Recalcitrants – including three nuns – were put in ‘concentration camps’; libraries were purged; the film Guilty of Treason, a drama about the show trial of the Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty running at the local cinema, banned. Other, more commonplace aspects of the American way of life were also disrupted: sports fields were ‘confiscated’, restaurants served only black bread and potato soup, and the price of suits and coffee more than quintupled. Rationing was enforced, and the Milwaukee Journal showed a six-year-old looking dolefully at a shop-sign that read ‘Candy for Communist Youth Members Only’.

  The Mosinee occupation was organized by Legion officials, but ex-Communists also played a leading role. Joseph Kornfeder was an immigrant tailor of Slovak origin, who had been a Communist between 1919 and 1934 and had been trained at the Lenin School. He was joined in the performance by Ben Gitlow, a former General Secretary of the CPUSA who had been purged during Stalin’s anti-rightist campaigns of the late 1920s. Mayor Kronenwetter, a Democrat, was initially unhappy about what he thought was a ‘Republican idea’, but he finally agreed to go along with the plan.

  The following month, a strikingly similar drama was shown – this time in the cinemas of the USSR. Mosfilm’s Conspiracy of the Doomed was set in a generic East European country ruled by a multi-party Popular Front.120 Again, a foreign-led conspiracy to stage a political revolution was at the centre of the story.
This time, though, the Americans were the villains. MacHill, the outwardly charming but cynical American ambassador, leads a sinister coalition intent on removing the Communists from government and forcing the country to join the Marshall Plan. His collaborators include the Social Democrats (as MacHill gloats: ‘I’ve overthrown so many governments with the help of the Social Democrats’); the Vatican and Cardinal Birnch (modelled on Mindszenty); the treacherous Cristina, head of the right-wing Christian Unity Party; Tito’s untrustworthy ambassador; and an American vamp, the Chicago journalist Kira Reichel. They hatch a number of dastardly plots: to assassinate the heroine of the film, the Communist Deputy Prime Minister Hanna Likhta; to bribe the population with the baubles of American culture (a ‘peace train’ arrives, complete with jazz band and advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes); and to organize a food shortage to ensure complete dependence on the West. But the Communists fight the coup, mobilizing the masses against the insidious dollar, in defence of moral virtue and national independence. They storm the parliament and drive out MacHill together with the reactionary parties, crying, ‘The Marshall Plan is our death! We don’t want to wear the American dog-collar.’

  Both the Mosinee occupation and Conspiracy of the Doomed show the themes, and the flavour, of the new Cold War politics – both East and West. The era of the Popular Front is clearly over, and former allies are now deadly enemies: in the United States Communism is equated with fascism, whilst in the USSR social democracy has again become ‘social fascism’. In its place, the state enforces unity founded on a mixture of nationalism and universal ideological principles: ‘Americanism’ and ‘Soviet values’. Any threats to this order are highly dangerous. Sympathy with a radical left in the West, or with liberalism in the East, had to be rooted out, as it might be connected with sinister conspiracies hatched by the rival superpower. Political elites used the ideological war for their own purposes, but no one person created it. The new obsession with ideological security explains the bizarre obsession with spies and conspiracies. And the outcome of that obsession was a lengthy interlude in the European ‘civil war’. Internal struggles between classes had been recast as conflicts between geopolitical blocs.

  Both sides, then, tried to discipline society and mobilize it for the new ideological war.121 But the effect of that mobilization was much greater in the Soviet bloc than in the West, and the balance between repression and persuasion varied. Repression was by far the most intense in the Soviet bloc, as will be seen in Chapter Seven. In the Western sphere, it involved most violence in Southern Europe. The American-backed monarchists in Greece and the authoritarian Spanish regime used force to suppress Communists, whilst Italy in the late 1940s saw harsh police repression of the left.122

  In America itself, Communists were discriminated against, not repressed, and some 10,000–12,000 Communists, real or alleged, lost their jobs.123 Three months before the Mosinee invasion, Wisconsin’s own senator, the Catholic Irish-American Joe McCarthy, had delivered his first famous speech claiming he knew of fifty-seven Communists within the State Department. He soon became the symbol of the ‘Red Scare’ that swept American politics, but he was one of a number of powerful individuals and organizations who launched purges of Communists.124 Truman himself instituted loyalty tests for his administration in 1947, though he disapproved of McCarthy; employers and trade-union anti-Communists removed activists connected with Communism; J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation employed an extra 3,500 people to investigate 2 million federal employees; and Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee launched 135 investigations between 1945 and 1955, including, most famously, into Hollywood.

  Moscow did have a network of spies operating in America, some at high levels, and it used the (tiny) CPUSA, whose activities it broadly controlled. However, the extravagant fears of Communism in the period had more to do with fears about ideological security, and their use by various political forces, than the damage caused by spying. McCarthyism had precedents in the Red Scare of 1919–20, but the Cold War placed the issue of Communism near the centre of American politics.125 So, although the onset of the Cold War brought with it the entrenchment of a New Deal-style economy, it weakened the American left. In 1942 polls showed that 25 per cent of Americans favoured socialism and 35 per cent were open-minded; in 1949 only 15 per cent supported it, whilst 61 per cent were hostile.126

  In Western Europe, the anti-Communist crusade was more muted. Western Europe did not see the extremes of anti-Communist witch-hunting, and McCarthyism in the United States only dented America’s image in Europe. The 1953 tour of European capitals by McCarthy’s minions Roy Cohn and David Schine, purging libraries in American embassies and other government institutions of ‘dangerous’ leftist works like Henry Thoreau’s classic Walden, went down especially badly.127 Yet politics was profoundly affected by the Cold War. Communists were marginalized, and Social Democracy returned to the strong anti-Communism of the immediate post-World War I period. Some West European socialist parties still included Marxist talk of class struggle in their programmes, but in reality they were becoming profoundly reformist forces.

  Cold War liberalism was remarkably successful in achieving its main goals: destroying the Popular Front, presenting Communism as the enemy, and providing an alternative that attracted much of the population. It proved to be a powerful engine of social integration. In Western Europe and the United States, workers were finally absorbed into the political and economic community. In the United States, excluded ethnic groups, especially African-Americans, Catholics and Jews, found the anti-Communist crusade helped them gain acceptance in a Protestant-dominated polity.128 Both Catholics and Jews had strongly sympathized with the victims of late-Stalinist Communism: Jews, once the most pro-Communist of all ethnic groups, understandably became the most hostile when their confrères became targets of Stalin’s post-war ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’.129 The Vatican, of course, had long been strongly anti-Communist, but Catholics also responded to the sufferings of their brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe.

  American Cold War liberalism also managed to retain its ideological attractiveness in Western, and increasingly Eastern, Europe. The United States did establish an informal empire, but American wealth and its liberal ideology allowed it to avoid the exploitative excesses of the nineteenth-century European empires. This was an ‘empire by invitation’, the embossed card issued by both elites and organized labour.130 In much of Europe and Japan, it could present itself as a genuine purveyor of universalist values, selflessly seeking to help those under its protection achieve modernity. East of the ‘iron curtain’, Stalin’s approach was very different. As will be seen, the relative liberalization of the wartime period was soon replaced by a new form of Communism that exaggerated the paternalistic, statist and xenophobic elements of the Stalinism of the 1930s.

  The ideological conflict between Communism and the West was therefore being reconfigured, from a social conflict within the blocs, to a geopolitical struggle between them. ‘Cold war’ between the superpowers was accompanied by a ‘cold peace’ within. Politics was stabilized, class conflicts tamed. A lake, once choppy, was frozen. The ice was thicker in the North-West of Europe, the USA and the USSR, more fragile in Central and Eastern Europe. It was also thinner in Southern Europe. Greece had shown the weaknesses of British and American power, Yugoslavia the USSR’s.

  This, though, applied largely to the global ‘North’. In the ‘South’ – and especially Asia – the situation was very different. Internal conflicts there continued to be violent and inequalities stark. Nationalists confronted European empires, whilst highly unequal and divided agrarian societies generated calls for fundamental social change.

  Neither the American nor Soviet blocs found it easy to absorb this turbulent part of the world, but as the War ended it seemed as if the United States might be in a better position to compete for influence. It was massively wealthier and had the power to project force anywhere. It could also appeal to nat
ionalists, as it initially rejected the imperialism of its European allies: as the United States National Security Council explained, ‘19th-century imperialism’ was no longer acceptable because it was ‘an ideal culture for the breeding of the Communist virus’.131

  The post-war Soviet Union, meanwhile, was poorly equipped to spread its influence in this newly radicalized world. The Comintern’s strategy since the revolution had largely been aimed at Europe: the Popular Front had been fashioned to appeal to European left-liberals, and the Cominform was entirely focused on Europe. Meanwhile Stalin’s approach to the developing world was founded on a mixture of realpolitik and scepticism about the readiness of agrarian non-European societies to achieve socialism in the near future. He did not want to encourage independent Communists in their revolutionary ambitions, partly because they might challenge Moscow’s pre-eminence, partly because they might alienate the Western powers and undermine the wartime agreements on the division of Europe. He therefore refused to help the Greek or Vietnamese Communists, and was also initially reluctant to recognize Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communists (though in early 1948 he became more enthusiastic about the opportunities for revolution in China).132 His betrayal of indigenous Communists was most striking – and counterproductive – in Iran, where the Communist-led Popular Front Tudeh party (the largest in the country) was eager to take power. Stalin had no interest in an Iranian revolution, and insisted that it was premature: his objective was a ‘bourgeois’ Iranian state, friendly to the USSR and prepared to grant it oil concessions. He put pressure on Tehran, using the presence of Soviet troops in the North and support for the Azeri independence movement, and the Tudeh was forced to follow the Soviet line. Stalin’s policy, however, was a spectacular failure, destroying the prospects of Communist influence. The Americans put pressure on the Soviets to withdraw their troops, and by 1947 the Tudeh had been banned and the Shah was moving into the American orbit.