The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  There were, of course, tensions. The market produced losers as well as winners, and Beijing found it difficult to keep control of the local bosses-turned-businessmen, whilst corruption flourished. Conservatives were naturally unhappy, and the ‘zigs’ of liberalization were interrupted by occasional ‘zags’ – old-style campaigns against ‘spiritual pollution’ and ‘bourgeois liberalism’. Workers, in particular, faced lower living standards with the ‘smashing of the iron rice-bowl’, or the end of the old welfare state. But the party leadership, fearful of disorder, moved very cautiously, and it was only by the end of the 1980s that welfare benefits actually began to be withdrawn. Worker unrest played a major part in the rebellions of 1989, and it almost helped to derail reform. But by then, a reform coalition had been built that included party bosses. Ten years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, China had decisively changed course. A visitor in 1968 would have found the China of 1988 virtually unrecognizable.

  Western commentators were surprised by the changes, but in hindsight they should not have been. Despite significant opposition to market reforms, the experience of the Cultural Revolution had been so traumatic that the technocratic and liberalizing ‘right’ was in a good position to win political battles. In the Soviet bloc, in contrast, the regimes were following a very different course, because they had learnt different lessons from the late 1960s. They had already tried market reform, and it had ended in the Prague Spring. Therefore unlike the Chinese, who gave party bosses incentives to support market reform, they encouraged them to become paternalists, buying off workers and peasants with welfare and consumer goods. This strategy was to prove destabilizing, for it alienated educated, white-collar groups. And it was these groups who had the confidence and the power to challenge the system. The regimes therefore laid the foundations for a revolution within the party against Communism itself.

  III

  In the early 1980s, a Komsomol organization in a Soviet library convened a meeting to decide whether one of its librarians, who had been moonlighting as a Latin teacher at a religious seminary, should be expelled. Though religious observance was not illegal, and ordinary citizens could attend church, it was a big problem for party or Komsomol members – supposedly still the ideological vanguard. It was, indeed, grounds for expulsion. But these were pragmatic times, and the Komsomol committee was ambivalent. As one of the participants told Alexei Yurchak:

  At first our committee was against expelling that guy… Considering his degree, it was obvious that teaching Latin was much more appropriate and interesting for him than doing tedious library work. However, the problem was that… he was arrogant and disrespectful and just tried to show that he couldn’t care less what we had to say. And unexpectedly, several people in our committee began attacking him for being a ‘traitor of the motherland’. One committee member even said, ‘And what would you do if you were offered a job by the CIA?’ That was a ridiculous thing to say, of course, but at that point all of us started attacking the poor guy. We were not too kind to him.12

  The episode is highly revealing. Here was a group of educated people, with a liberal, even sceptical attitude towards the ideology; they placed a high value on individual fulfilment in work, and were less driven by puritanical social duty than earlier generations. Even so, the system’s collectivism broadly fitted in with their own morality, and they saw it as ‘theirs’. Angered by a colleague who seemed so arrogantly to flout the rules of their own little kollektiv, they found themselves, much to their own surprise, invoking the harsh dogmas of earlier generations of Communists.

  Despite the ebbing of ideological dynamism, many Soviet citizens still saw socialism, fundamentally, as just. Though party and Komsomol members might find party culture boring and pointless, it did not follow that they were cynical about Communism itself. Indeed, amongst many a residual idealism lingered. One Komsomol organizer from the town of Sovetsk, born in 1960, described the tedious routine of the meetings:

  I understood perfectly well, and I think everybody did, that the decisions had been made in advance. The meeting had to be sat through… You could not talk much, so reading was optimal. Everyone read books. Everyone. And what’s interesting, as soon as the meeting began, all heads bowed down and everyone started to read. Some fell asleep. But when a vote had to be taken, everyone roused – a certain sensor clicked in the head; ‘Who’s in favour?’ – and you raised your hand automatically.13

  But at the same time, though, he believed in Communism and the Komsomol: ‘I wanted to be in the Komsomol because I wanted to be among the young avant-garde who would work to improve life… I felt that if you lived according to the right scheme – school, institute, work – everything in your life would be fine.’14

  Many citizens of the USSR in the early 1980s continued to regard the Soviet system as superior in many ways to the one existing in the West. From their limited knowledge of the West, heavily influenced by official propaganda, many concluded that although the USSR might have lower living standards, it was superior in social justice, welfare, stability, morality and education.

  Soviet citizens, of course, had the advantage of living in the imperial power. Communism was ‘their’ system and gave them international standing (with the exception of some disaffected nationalities, like the Baltic peoples). But throughout the bloc (bar Poland), support for broadly market socialist values, if not revolutionary ones, remained strong until the late 1980s. In Hungary in 1983, schoolchildren aged between ten and fourteen were given a list of words, and asked whether they ‘liked’ or ‘did not like’ them. Amongst the most popular were ‘national flag’ (liked by 98 per cent), ‘red flag’ (81 per cent), and ‘money’ (70 per cent); amongst the least popular were ‘party secretary’ (40 per cent), ‘revolution’ (38 per cent), and ‘capitalism’ (11 per cent).15

  Children may, of course, be particularly susceptible to school propaganda, but some of the polls showed that adults were also broadly sympathetic: Hungarians were overwhelmingly in favour of socialist equality; the delivery of welfare by the state; collective farms; and the principle that ‘everyone should subordinate his interests to those of the society’. On the other hand, there were also majorities in favour of greater political liberties (‘people should be free to say what is on their minds’) and greater market reforms.16 Surveys of émigrés in the 1970s showed that support for this mixture of welfarist socialism and market reforms also applied to the USSR.17

  Hungary had its own idiosyncrasies. János Kádár was widely popular (87.7 per cent were fully or partly satisfied) as a figure who had defended the interests of Hungarians against the USSR, and this may have distorted poll responses. The position of the parties in the other Communist states varied. Husák’s Czechoslovak regime did promote higher living standards and consumerism, but unpublished official polls taken in 1986 show serious dissatisfaction with the regime’s ideology and policies. Opinion in the GDR was also much less supportive of the socialist system than in Hungary and the USSR. But Polish opinion seems to have been in a class of its own. Independent polls taken between 1981 and 1986 showed that support for the leadership was a mere 25 per cent, and 50 per cent were unhappy with the system but were unwilling to challenge it. But even in anti-Communist Poland, opinion polls showed strong overall support for broadly socialist values. In a 1980 survey, taken during the Solidarity period, ‘equality’ was regarded as the second most important value, after ‘family’, and there was a great deal of support for ensuring more or less equal incomes for every citizen. Democracy was seen as valuable, but it was less important than equality.18 The Communist regimes may not have created ‘new socialist people’, but they did create men and women with many socialist ideals which could be used to criticize Communism.

  There were, of course, many dissidents throughout the bloc who criticized the regimes from a number of perspectives – populist-nationalist, liberal-democratic and radical socialist. The Soviet bloc countries’ signing of the Helsinki accords (which included pr
otection of human rights) in 1975 particularly strengthened liberal groups, whilst the growing environmental movement became the focus of other dissident groups.

  Official response to dissidence varied. Repression was greatest in Albania and Romania; Poland and especially Hungary were much more liberal, as was Yugoslavia. Secret policemen were extremely active in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and Brezhnev’s KGB expended much energy persecuting a tiny, but increasingly vocal dissident movement. The show trial of the writers Siniavskii and Daniel in 1966 marked the end of the Khrushchev thaw, and several intellectuals were arrested or exiled. But few sought a return to the days of Stalin. In part this was a pragmatic choice: terror could get out of hand, threaten officials themselves and possibly upset relations with the West. The KGB, therefore, tried to stay within ‘socialist legality’ and go through some form of due process. That, though, could be embarrassing and unpredictable, so normally the KGB first tried ‘advice’ – or ‘explanatory work’ as the jargon described it. If the ‘advice’ was ignored, the dissident could be expelled from the USSR, as was the case with the conservative nationalist writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or, as happened to the liberal physicist Andrei Sakharov, sent into internal exile. Alternatively a pliant psychiatrist might be persuaded to furnish a diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ – a syndrome known only in the Soviet bloc, the symptoms of which included ‘reformist delusions’. The dissident would then be sent to a ‘special psychiatric hospital’ and subjected to painful punitive ‘treatments’.19

  East Germany had one of the best-organized and largest secret police services in the entire bloc – the feared Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service), or ‘Stasi’. This was a much more extensive organization than the KGB. The Stasi had 91,000 staff to monitor a population of 16.4 million (compared with the 7,000 Gestapo in the pan-German population of 66 million). Moreover, the Stasi was assiduous in building a network of informants, especially within dissident groups; in the eighteen years of the Honecker era, some 500,000 people informed on their neighbours, colleagues and relatives at some point in their lives.20 Motives for informing varied. Some were coerced (though, according to Stasi figures, only a small minority (7.7 per cent)); others were given rewards; many merely wanted to please the authorities, or hoped that working for the Stasi might advance their careers. But Stasi officers were instructed to use ideologically principled arguments to elicit cooperation from informants as much as was possible, and on many occasions this clearly worked.21 One informant, ‘Rolf’ – an idealist who supported the GDR but was unhappy with official policies towards the environment – was told by the Stasi that if he helped them he would be contributing to world peace by preventing espionage. They also promised him that they would look into any environmental complaints he might have. As he remembers:

  I used to read the Weltbühne [World Stage] newspaper at that time and once there was an article in it and yes, it sounds mad, but it said that it was important at that time to do more than just get on with your daily life, that you should do more than just get up and go to work if you wanted to ensure peace…

  In a word they made use of my, yeah what should I say, my love of peace, maybe that sounds a bit mushy, my concerns for the world, and they said: ‘You can help us fight this together.’ Yes, and then I said: ‘I’ve got nothing against that.’22

  Once ‘Rolf’ realized that the Stasi was manipulating him, he broke off all contact – though that was unusual. It was more common for the Stasi to abandon the informant because they were not providing useful information.

  The impact of such information was often devastating. The lives and careers of many were ruined; more rarely persecution resulted in death. The greatest victim, though, was trust. As one who had been part of dissident circles explained: ‘These informers determined my life, changed my life over those ten years. In one way or another – because they poisoned us with mistrust. They caused damage simply because I suspected that there could have been informers in my vicinity.’23 When the files were opened in the 1990s, many discovered that friends or even spouses had been spying on them for years.

  With the exception of Poland, the enormous expense and effort devoted to secret intelligence in the GDR and also in the Soviet Union seems bizarre as the number of dissidents was small, as was their influence on broader society.24 Yet whilst Soviet bloc populations, in most countries, were unwilling to challenge the system, and even supported aspects of it, sharp differences were emerging within society – not between White and Red partisanship, but between white and blue collar. A comparison between Soviet émigrés’ views from the Stalin era and those of the 1970s and 1980s shows that whilst a majority in both eras favoured industrialization, a mixed, NEP-style economy, extensive state welfare, and fewer political controls and repression, there were also striking differences. In the Stalin era, the young and the educated were more likely to favour state control and welfare than workers and peasants; in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the exact opposite. Moreover, the divisions between those with and those without higher education hardened into coherent, ideological divisions between the more liberal and less liberal. In the Stalin era workers and peasants were more economically liberal than the educated, but people of all social groups were split more or less evenly over whether controls on the press should be kept and freedom of speech restricted. In the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras, in contrast, the young and the educated were not only more economically liberal than the less educated, but more politically liberal as well. So, in the Stalin era, 55.1 per cent of those with a higher education supported the existing strict controls on the press, compared with 47 per cent of those with a secondary education; in the Gorbachev era, in contrast, 55.7 per cent of university-educated people thought it right to ban certain books, compared with an overwhelming 86.8 per cent of those with less than a secondary education.25

  Hungarian polls in 1983–4 show a similar ideological division based on education. Sociologists found that 49 per cent of degree-holders favoured a liberalizing ‘democratic socialism’, compared with only 4 per cent of those with less than a secondary education. The vast majority of the least well-educated supported a number of other ideological positions which were fundamentally anti-reform.26

  This growing difference between the university-educated and ordinary citizens, and the defection of the intelligentsia, was hardly surprising given the style of socialist paternalism that had prevailed since the 1960s. Since Stalin’s death, the party had been quick to respond to worker and peasant discontent by improving their living standards, and that had tended to undermine the privileged position enjoyed by the educated under Stalin.

  At the same time, paternalism had undermined the prestige of the party amongst the educated. Throughout the Soviet bloc party bosses of all ranks were still largely people with political rather than technical skills – people like the officials Horváth and Szakolczai interviewed.27 They were also generally less well-educated than economic managers. And as the economies started to experience difficulties, the educated blamed officials’ amateurism and resented having to be subservient to people less well-educated than themselves. Even so, links between the intelligentsia and the Communist parties remained, especially at the very top, and it was through these channels that liberal reformist ideas penetrated the power structure. The educated may have been disillusioned with Communism, but its end was not brought by a broad-based middle-class revolution; it was a much more elitist affair. To look for the roots of the end of Communism, we need to look within the Communist party itself.

  IV

  When, in 1986, the philosopher and covert ‘White’ Aleksandr Tsipko first visited the Central Committee building in Moscow’s Old Square as a newly appointed ideological consultant, he was stunned to discover a deeply anti-Communist atmosphere at the very heart of the Communist Party:

  French journalists who wrote at the start of perestroika that the breeding ground of counter-revolution in the USSR was the headquarters of Comm
unism, the CPSU Central Committee, were right. Working at the time as a consultant to the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, I discovered to my surprise that the mood among the highest hierarchy of that organisation did not differ at all from the mood in the Academy of Sciences or in the humanities institutes… It was clear that only a complete hypocrite could believe in the supremacy of socialism over capitalism. It was also clear that the socialist experiment had suffered defeat.28

  Tsipko, who had completely abandoned Marxism, noted how much things had changed since the pre-Prague Spring years when he worked in the Komsomol’s Central Committee. Then there had been a great deal of optimism about the future, and most of his colleagues had been convinced Communist nationalists, or ‘Red Slavophiles’ as he called them.29 During the 1970s, however, the atmosphere amongst the intelligentsia had become distinctly more liberal and pro-Western, and many had moved towards Social Democracy. These ideas had also affected the intellectuals who worked in party headquarters – indeed throughout the bloc (and in China as well) ‘party intelligentsias’ were often in the vanguard of reformist thought. Party intellectuals were very much part of the broader non-party intelligentsia, and shared their more liberal values, but they also had much closer links with foreigners than most people, especially in the USSR. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they were therefore more acutely sensitive than most to the USSR’s status abroad. And one group that was to become especially vocal and influential was those party members working in the Central Committee’s departments dealing with foreign affairs – in effect the successors of the Comintern. People like Georgii Shakhnazarov and Vadim Zagladin – both future advisers of Gorbachev – realized that the USSR was losing its moral force in the world.30 They sought high international status for the USSR, but they believed it could only be achieved if it changed and became the leader of a progressive, more liberal Communist movement. By concentrating exclusively on military power, the USSR was forfeiting its prestige, even amongst Western Communist parties. These reformers, initially keen supporters of Soviet involvement in Africa, were especially disillusioned by the militarization of Soviet support for revolutionary regimes in the Third World. They saw the ageing Brezhnev much as the previous generation had viewed the ageing Stalin: a reactionary figure who had detached the USSR from the cause of ‘progress’.