are you not defending a new religion? I’ve followed your educational sessions. They’re not unlike courses in Buddhist doctrine: renouncing material possessions; giving up family ties, which weaken us and prevent us from devoting us entirely to the Angkar [Organization]; leaving our parents and children to serve the revolution. Submitting to discipline and confessing our faults.106
The Khmer Rouge’s peasant recruits were certainly taught its teachings without reference to Marx or Lenin, and until 1977 it even hid the fact that it was a Communist party, demanding allegiance to the ‘Revolutionary Organization’ (Angkar Padevat) instead. This was partly for nationalistic reasons: the Khmer Rouge was highly xenophobic, and did not want to acknowledge any foreign descent, especially from the hated Vietnamese. As Pol Pot declared in his victory speech: ‘We have won total, definitive, and clean victory, meaning that we have won it without any foreign connection or involvement.’107 But the Khmer Rouge was also extraordinarily secretive. Convinced that they had very little time to carry out a total revolution to prepare for a counter-attack, they continued to behave as if they were fighting a revolutionary war. The government was formed in secret, and the leaders all had code names: ‘Brother No. 1’ (Pol Pot), ‘Brother No. 2’, and so on. The first time the public heard the name ‘Pol Pot’ was during the ‘elections’ of April 1976, when this mysterious figure was identified, bizarrely, as a ‘rubber plantation worker’.108 Khmer Rouge officials told foreigners that Saloth Sâr was dead.
War and an extreme, resentful nationalism undoubtedly contributed to this secrecy and xenophobia, but so did the example of the Khmer Rouge’s erstwhile Vietnamese patron. The Viet Minh also presented itself as a broad nationalist front, and never officially referred to Marxism-Leninism.109 In other respects, the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist traditions in elevating the peasantry to the status of revolutionary class. However, the Cambodians went much further. As has been seen, Mao idealized the virtues of the peasantry, but he always remained committed to the ultimate supremacy of the proletariat. The Khmer Rouge, in contrast, saw the poor peasantry as a ‘working class’, and discriminated against all city-dwellers. One of their first decisions was to order that Phnom Penh and all other cities be evacuated and their residents – over 2 million people – be sent to the countryside to work, under coercion, in collective farms.
It is unclear what the precise motivation was.110 In large part, it exploited the resentments of the peasantry at the richer, cosmopolitan cities. This was a politics of revenge. As the party explained to its members when beginning the evacuation of the cities, ‘The city people have had an easy life, whereas the rural people have had a very hard time… The morality of the cities under Lon Nol was not pure and clean like in the liberated areas.’111 But it was also reminiscent of persecutions in other Communist states in mixing ideology and security. The urban residents were seen as potential opponents, but they were also seen as ideologically corrosive because they had grown up in the ‘filth of imperialist and colonialist culture’.112
In other respects, however, Khmer Rouge policy was an extreme version of the egalitarian Maoism of the Great Leap Forward. Money was abolished, and everybody, including the deportees, became labourers on collective farms. Urban life was destroyed, the cities emptied, schools closed. The country became one large agricultural labour camp, and the lives of all were devoted to labour and political education. The regime sought to destroy old hierarchies of all sorts. Children were expected to call their parents ‘comrade father’ and ‘comrade mother’ and the use of the term ‘sir’ was banned.113 Only marriages approved by the party were allowed. Pol Pot even declared that ‘Mothers should not get too entangled with their offspring’, and communal dining halls were introduced to stop family bonding.114 At the same time, however, society was divided in new ways, according to class and ideology: the deportees from the towns (the ‘new people’) were treated as second-class citizens, whilst the ‘base people’ were divided into two groups: the loyal poor peasants (‘full-rights members’), and the semi-reliable (the ‘candidates’). Rations and privileges depended on one’s status in the new hierarchy, although in theory one could rise through hard work and commitment.115
Pol also followed Mao, and the Radical Marxist-Leninist tradition, in his desire to engineer a ‘great leap forward’ towards agricultural plenty and, ultimately, industrialization. As the Khmer Rouge launched border raids into Vietnam and the conflict with its neighbour escalated, Pol Pot announced his ‘Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields’ in 1976, as part of his strategy to defend the nation. The ‘Plan’ was one of the most unscientific ever produced in the Communist world. Lacking detail, sloppily constructed and hugely overambitious, it revealed the Khmer Rouge leadership’s fundamental lack of interest in the discipline of economics, and depended largely on willpower. ‘When a people is awakened by political consciousness,’ one official declared, ‘it can do anything’; ‘our engineers cannot do what the people do’.116 The hubristic Pol Pot was convinced that ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ would not just catch up with its neighbours, but become a beacon for all other Communist states. It would truly be ‘Communist State No. 1’.
Little came of the industrialization projects, but plans to increase the rice harvest sent about a million workers – many of them the urban ‘new people’ – to create new agricultural land out of wilderness. Tens of thousands died of hunger and disease, and the Khmer Rouge treated these class enemies callously, declaring in the notorious phrase, ‘To keep you is no benefit and to destroy you is no loss.’117 They were seen as second-class citizens, and could be killed for minor infringements. But all peasants, whether ‘base’ or ‘new’, were subjected to high rice delivery targets, and suffered as a result.
However, there were also more Stalinist aspects to Khmer Rouge thinking, as one might expect given the influence of the French Communist party on its leaders. Close contacts were also maintained with North Korea.118 There was no Cultural Revolution-style mobilization, and the attitude towards ‘enemies’ also echoed the Stalinist one of the late 1930s: they were to be executed, not re-educated. Like Stalin, Pol Pot argued that success in war required campaigns against hidden internal ‘enemies’, and he blamed economic failures on the lack of commitment of the ‘new people’, on enemy ‘microbes’ that were ‘seeping into every corner of the party’ and had the potential to do ‘real damage’. In a striking echo of Stalin’s language, he declared: ‘Are there still treacherous, secret elements buried inside the party, or are they gone? According to our observations over the last ten years it’s clear that they’re not gone at all… Some are truly committed, others waver in their loyalties. Enemies can easily seep in.’119 A vast spectrum of people was targeted, some of them previous party loyalists. About 14,000 passed through Comrade Duch’s S-21 prison, most of them forced by torture to confess to bizarre conspiracies, and then executed. Meanwhile, the regime launched a series of persecutions of various groups, both ‘class enemies’ and ethnic minorities.
The violence varied over time, and deaths were higher in some areas than others. But in all, the death toll from murders and famine was horrific: estimates range from 1.5 to 2 million, or 26 per cent of the population.120 Of course, the regime relied on supporters to carry out the killings, and individual motivations differed. Most were young peasants who had initially been enthusiastic about land reform, and the Khmer Rouge created an atmosphere in which there were strong pressures to mete out violence against ‘enemies’. ‘Cutting off one’s feelings’ towards all ‘enemies’ of the revolution, even they were relatives, was considered a virtue, and killing them was seen as a way of achieving ‘honour’ in the new society. One ‘new person’ remembered how his boss believed that ‘if he purged enough enemies, he satisfied his conscience. He had done his duty to Angkar [the Organization]’;121 others were pressured into conforming, afraid that if they did not kill they would be suspected of being an enemy themselves.
The nightmare of ‘De
mocratic Kampuchea’ came to an end at the beginning of 1979 with a Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion. Unsurprisingly, the poorly prepared Kampuchean military was no match for its well-armed and battle-hardened neighbours. But the Khmer Rouge, backed by the Chinese, continued the guerrilla struggle throughout the 1980s, until the Soviets withdrew support and the Vietnamese left in 1989.
VII
The experience of Kampuchea and Ethiopia was seriously to damage the reputation of Third World Communism, even amongst Communists themselves. Both the Soviets and the Chinese saw how much these regimes resembled their own militant pasts – histories they were now eager to forget.
The Chinese continued to support the Khmer Rouge militarily, even though on Mao’s death they moved away from the radicalism they had once espoused, for they wanted the Cambodians’ support against the Vietnamese. Similarly, Soviet policy-makers became increasingly disillusioned with some of their clients. Initial enthusiasts within the party for the African adventures, such as Brutents, Shakhnazarov and Zagladin, found that protégés such as Mengistu refused to take their advice and moderate their ambitions. As they witnessed the purges and the bloodshed, they wondered whether some of these supposedly Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties might actually be self-interested elites, who were not promoting real socialism in the interests of society as a whole, and who had excessively ambitious goals given the level of economic development.
Events in the USSR’s southern neighbour, Afghanistan, seemed to confirm this gloomy prognosis. The authoritarian modernizer Mohammed Daoud was alienating both an urban-based left and a tribal and Islamic right. As a consequence, in April 1978, without Soviet involvement, the leftist ‘Khalq’ (‘Masses’) faction of the Communist party took power in a coup under Nur Taraki and Hajfizullah Amin. Calling themselves ‘the children of history’, these urban missionaries of modernity, many of them schoolteachers, tried to bring literacy and progress to the countryside, but their style was insensitive, and they increasingly resorted to force.122 The Soviets, for whom Afghanistan was of high strategic importance, supported the new regime, but tried and failed to moderate its behaviour. When a rebellion broke out in Herat, spear-headed by Islamist guerrillas, Moscow decided it had to act, and tried to remove Amin. The plot backfired, and Amin killed Taraki, thus leaving the Soviets with a hostile government to deal with. In December 1979, Leonid Brezhnev made the fateful decision to send in the tanks.123
The Soviet invasion, then, was a sign of weakness, not strength, as many in the West believed at the time. The optimism of the mid-1970s, when the Kremlin embraced ideological ambition in the Third World, was over. Amongst the Western Communists, meanwhile, the military confrontation between the blocs had been causing deep anxieties for some time, and especially within the Italian party, headed from 1972 by the reserved Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer. Italy, like much of Western Europe, was suffering from an economic crisis and social tensions, but its labour unrest was especially serious and the country had the most active terrorists in Europe, mainly of the far left, but also of the far right: between 1969 and 1980, 7,622 violent attacks caused 362 deaths and 172 casualties. Berlinguer was worried about both extremes. The toppling of Chile’s President Allende in 1973 convinced him that as the Communists became electorally stronger they would face the threat of a coup. The Spanish Communist party, led by Santiago Carillo, took a similar view following the revolutionary chaos they had seen in Portugal.
Berlinguer was convinced that Communism would only succeed if the conflict between the blocs, and within states, was moderated. His solution was the formation of a third way between Social Democracy and Soviet Communism – a movement that came to be known as ‘Eurocommunism’. It would embrace détente fully, including the Helsinki agreements on human rights which the Soviets had signed in 1975 but not adhered to; it would set its face against the militarized Cold War, including Soviet interventions; and it would formally accept multi-party systems and ‘socialist pluralism’. The Italians had most support from the Spanish, but they also succeeded in securing French approval. And in June 1976 at the pan-European Communist conference in East Berlin, all three parties claimed political independence from Moscow, and criticized the Soviets’ use of military force to spread Communism. In the compromise document, signed by all participants, all mention of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had gone, and the term ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was replaced with ‘the great ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin’. Criticism of NATO was also absent, in deference to the Italians, who now supported membership of the Western military alliance. And in April 1978 the Spanish party became the first Communist party formally to drop the description ‘Marxist-Leninist’ in favour of ‘Marxist, democratic and revolutionary’.
Both the Italian and French parties also forged alliances with rivals at home. Berlinguer launched his ‘historic compromise’ (compromesso storico), designed to unite with the Christian Democrats against the threat of fascism and pull Italy out of crisis. In France, too, the Communists collaborated with François Mitterand’s Socialists in 1972, agreeing on a left-wing, but far from orthodox Communist programme. For the first time since the 1940s they were a potential party of government.
However, Berlinguer failed to create a new, successful form of Communism. The Soviets became extremely hostile to it, fearing that the Italians would create a rival Communist centre that might threaten their interests in Eastern as well as Western Europe. ‘It is unthinkable to fight Leninism in the name of Marxism’, Pravda declared. ‘Nothing could be more absurd.’ The Americans were also suspicious, and continued to see the Eurocommunists as a threat to the West. Meanwhile the Italians were always much more committed to Eurocommunism than the French, whose attitudes and political culture remained more sectarian and pro-Soviet.
The parties’ ‘Popular Front’-type strategy at home also ran into difficulties. In France, the Socialists were the principal beneficiaries of the deal, as the Communists’ old workerist politics looked increasingly stale. In 1978 the Communists, now lagging seriously behind their socialist allies, began to move away from their earlier endorsement of Eurocommunist principles. They took a small role in the Socialist government of 1981, but the decline became inexorable.
The Italian Communists were initially more successful. With 34.4 per cent of the vote in the 1976 election they were not the largest parliamentary bloc, but had succeeded in depriving the Christian Democrats’ coalition of a majority for the first time since the War. And though the Communists did not take ministerial positions in the Christian Democrat-dominated government until 1978, they supported it from outside and had considerable influence. But these were difficult times economically. The party behaved much like Social Democratic governments in other countries of Western Europe at the time: it sought to improve productivity through class compromise. Unions were asked to restrain wages, whilst the state in return promised to introduce fair taxes and reorient the economy into more productive areas. At first the unions cooperated and inflation fell. But overall the economic reforms were ineffective, partly because trust between social groups was poor, and partly because the Christian Democrats were not really committed to the alliance.
The Italian Communists’ short period of responsibility without power disappointed their supporters. Radical youth were especially hostile to the Communists’ support for harsh anti-terrorism legislation: the Communists, much to their disappointment, had become the staunchest defenders of the Italian state. Student demonstrations and terrorism flourished, and, dispirited and divided, the Italian Communist Party ended the ‘historic compromise’ in early 1979. The Communists’ vote fell, and whilst support was to remain relatively high, it was to remain enfeebled until the iron curtain was parted.
However, Eurocommunism was perhaps most damaged by the deterioration in East–West relations towards the end of the 1970s. Revolutions in the Third World and Soviet interventions convinced American political elites that the USSR was taking advantage of détente to spread C
ommunism. Even President Jimmy Carter, committed to improving relations with the USSR and with a Third World policy oriented towards human rights rather than pure security, was anxious about Soviet behaviour. His hard-line National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was particularly suspicious of Moscow’s intentions, and the invasion of Afghanistan strengthened his position against the ‘doves’. In Moscow, meanwhile, there was little understanding of how much damage Soviet policies in the Third World were doing to détente. Rigid and unyielding, they continued to pursue a policy of zero-sum competition.
As superpower tensions increased, ‘third ways’ such as Eurocommunism became very difficult to sustain. Relations between Berlinguer and the Soviets deteriorated, and the final blow came with the invasion of Afghanistan;124 the French party returned to the Soviet fold, whilst the Italians condemned the invasion. Following the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Berlinguer made a final, devastating critique of Soviet Communism: the phase of socialism initiated by the October revolution, he declared, had ‘exhausted its progressive force’.
The worsening international atmosphere was ultimately to destroy another ‘third way’ Communist regime – the Sandinista regime brought to power by the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979. The Sandinistas (the FSLN – Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) were a coalition named after the anti-American guerrilla leader of the 1920s, Augusto Sandino. Benefiting from the wide unpopularity of the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, they came to power calling for independence from the United States and a government in favour of the poor. They were made up of three groups, one peasant-based, one urban-based, and the ‘Terceristas’ – or the ‘third alternative’, amongst whom were the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto. The Ortega brothers were Marxists, though not of a particularly doctrinaire variety, but most Sandinistas were more populist. In some respects the Sandinistas were following the Cuban path, calling for nationalization, land reform and improved welfare and education; unlike the Cubans, however, they favoured political pluralism and a mixed economy.
The Red Flag: A History of Communism Page 66