The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Military force therefore severely damaged Communism in the South, but the neo-conservative hope that it would undermine the USSR itself was misplaced. Indeed, the West’s new hawkishness may have been counterproductive, as it hardened Soviet attitudes and strengthened the hard-liners. Superpower relations were at their worst for years, and in November 1983 the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviets misinterpreted a NATO exercise as an attack, and retaliation was only just avoided.59 In Moscow, nostalgia for Stalinism was rife: the ancient Viacheslav Molotov was readmitted to the party (it was commonly joked that he was being groomed to be the next leader), and there was even talk of a return to the old-style Stalinist tactics of labour mobilization. When Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, it was the hard-line Iurii Andropov who took the helm. In the event, he did not return to the 1940s, but his ideas still contained echoes of the past. The economy was to be revived not through market reforms and liberalization, but through renewed worker discipline and purges of corrupt officials.

  When Andropov died in 1984, the poor international atmosphere boosted hard-line opinion in the Kremlin. The aged and ill conservative Konstantin Chernenko took over, and even though Gorbachev, well-known to be a reformer, became his number two, there was some opposition to him. When Chernenko himself died the following year, anxieties about Gorbachev continued, but it was clear that the Politburo could not continue electing aged, ill men, unlikely to survive for long. The worst of the East European debt crisis was over (though it was still serious in Poland), but the satellite states were stagnating, unable to attract new capital for investment. It was clear that a new generation had to take over, and Gorbachev, the youngest Politburo member, was the only remotely plausible candidate.

  Within four years of Gorbachev’s accession, the Berlin Wall had fallen; within six, the USSR was no more. Virtually nobody in 1985 predicted these momentous events. They are still puzzling, and historians argue fiercely over them. Some suggest that Reagan’s rearmament, and especially the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), destroyed Communism. Reagan’s policies undoubtedly put economic and psychological pressure on the USSR, and SDI was a worrying sign that the USSR was not keeping up (though several officials did not take it seriously).60 But the military burden, whilst very heavy, was not causing economic crisis or social unrest. As one well-connected senior academic mused when interviewed in the late 1990s:

  Imagine that Brezhnev is still alive. We would still be living with the old regime; nothing would have changed. Perhaps things would have been a little worse, but the country would be under control. We would still have the same totalitarian system; we would still be going to Party meetings and demonstrations with the same red flags.61

  The man who destroyed the Soviet Communist Party was to be found not in the White House but in the Kremlin. Gorbachev himself was motivated less by a fear of American military power than by a desire to reinvigorate the system, whilst rendering it more inclusive. Initially, like his predecessors, he had hoped that he could achieve this by transforming the Communist Party, but when that failed, he found himself trying to emasculate it. Communist rule therefore imploded, not from pressure from without but as a result of an internal non-violent revolution, staged by the elite of the Communist party itself.

  VII

  Repentance by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze must be one of the most complex and high-brow films ever to become a box-office hit. Made in the early 1980s but only released in 1986 under Gorbachev’s new policy of ‘openness’ (glasnost’), it is a surrealist zombie movie. It begins with the burial of Varlam, a Stalinesque local mayor, whose corpse keeps reappearing, mysteriously disinterred, however many times it is reburied. The culprit is discovered – Keti – a driven woman determined to remind the world of Varlam’s rule of terror. Keti has been traumatized by the death of her mother, who was murdered by Varlam whilst trying to prevent the destruction of a historic church. She finally succeeds in exposing the horrors of the past, despite the town’s attempts to keep it hidden, and Varlam’s son, stricken with remorse, finally disinters the body and throws it off a cliff. Even so, the film ends on a pessimistic note. Keti is shown at home, still living on ‘Varlam Street’ – a neighbourhood devoid of spiritual values.

  Repentance was only shown after a political struggle. Aleksandr Iakovlev was its main champion, but he ran into resistance from his colleagues, and he only won them over by convincing them that it was too obscure for ordinary people, and promising that it would only be shown in a few cities. When he arranged for its broader distribution, several local party bosses were furious and banned it.62 Even so, Repentance was a sensation, and captures much of the atmosphere at the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika (‘restructuring’). As in the Khrushchev era, the Stalinist is depicted as a bureaucratic, reason-driven figure who views the moral and spiritual realms with contempt, whilst the heroes are people with ideals and values. Yet the film is also concerned with the Brezhnev era, its attempts to ‘re-inter’ Stalin, and the ensuing struggle between reformers, who want to challenge Stalinist bureaucracy and Brezhnevite conservatives, who are determined to keep the old system in place.

  The film offers a powerful insight into the thinking of many of the glasnost period, not least Mikhail Gorbachev, who himself saw and liked the film.63 Assessments of the attractive and intelligent Gorbachev are still not settled. Why did he behave so apparently irrationally, and end up destroying the system he had hoped to strengthen? Repentance provides some clues. Gorbachev certainly did not have Abuladze’s religious sensibility, but, like many of the generation who came to maturity in the period of de-Stalinization, he did share his anger at the ‘bureaucrats’ in the party – a feeling captured by Iakovlev’s reaction to the film: ‘The film stunned me and all my family. Intelligent, honest, with an unusual style. Merciless and convincing. It used a sledge hammer to smash the system of lies, hypocrisy and violence with all its might.’64

  Gorbachev was the last in the long tradition of those Communists who believed that socialism could be reinvigorated by attacking conservative, status-obsessed ‘bureaucrats’ – a tradition running from Stalinists in the 1920s, to Khrushchev in the early 1960s, to Mao in the Cultural Revolution. His strategy was closest to Khrushchev’s, in that he hoped to render the system less bureaucratic by opening the party up to influences from society as a whole. But unlike all of his Soviet predecessors, he came to the conclusion that the powers of the party as an institution had to be curtailed. He had also learnt lessons from Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 and the end of the Prague Spring. Like Keti, he was determined not to let the bureaucrats rise again, zombie-like, from the dead. He ultimately decided to destroy their power, even though it would eventually lead to the destruction of the system itself.

  Moreover, Gorbachev’s animus against the bureaucrats within was ultimately greater than his mistrust of the West. In addition, just as the post-war era of class compromise in the West was entering a period of crisis, Soviet Communists were beginning to appreciate its virtues. Gorbachev became increasingly eager for the USSR to be integrated into the Western sphere as a Social Democratic state, and began to favour Western-style democratic elections and market reforms. He was encouraged in his ‘revolution’ by the ‘counter-revolutionary’ intellectuals Tsipko had found in the Central Committee in the 1980s, by the neo-liberal IMF, and by much Western opinion.

  When Western leaders met Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time, they were as surprised as they were disarmed. How could such a friendly, open and charming figure be a Communist? Even the militant anti-Communist Margaret Thatcher warmed to him. But they were judging him by the standards of the dour and defensive apparatchiks of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact Gorbachev was merely a high-calibre version of a common party type. He was born in southern Russia in 1931 to peasant parents; his maternal grandfather had been a party member and collective-farm chairman who had been arrested in 1937 (as had his paternal gr
andfather). He became an ambitious and hard-working Komsomol member, and his academic ability, together with his party activities (he was awarded the prestigious Order of the Red Banner for his heroic work in bringing in the 1948 harvest), enabled him make the huge leap from the provinces to the law department of Moscow University. He soon discovered that he had the ideal personality to become a party official: he liked the broad brush and grand principle; indeed, he seems to have been a genuine idealist. Unlike Brezhnev, he did not have the technical, nuts-and-bolts approach of the ministerial economic administrator. In fact he had a particularly poor understanding of economics, which frustrated some of his advisers.65 He was a people person, with energy and enthusiasm, and an unshakeable belief in his own persuasive abilities. Anatolii Cherniaev, later to become one of his chief advisers, recalled how when travelling with him in Western Europe in the 1970s, ‘he grabbed me by the elbows and “proved”, “proved”, “proved” how important it was to do this or that in Stavropol’.66 This was very Khrushchevian behaviour, and he shared his ebullient predecessor’s enthusiasm and optimism. He was, however, better educated, more politically astute and, as a consequence, much more confident – justifiably so, for he was an expert politician skilled at getting people to do things for him. It is no surprise that ‘Gorbymania’ swept the West and Soviet Eastern Europe.

  However, those undoubtedly positive characteristics had their drawbacks. He was supremely confident, but was not always aware of the difficulties associated with his plans. And it was this, combined with an ability to convince and/or outmanoeuvre opponents, that explains how he was able to push through his ambitious but incoherent programme.

  In 1985, few, if anybody, in the elite believed that the Communist system was in crisis and needed radical change. As Gorbachev himself remembered, ‘neither I, nor my colleagues, evaluated the general situation at that time as one of a crisis of the system,’67 and when Aleksandr Iakovlev presented him with an extremely radical paper, proposing that the Communist Party be split in two and each part compete against the other, he decided it was ‘premature’.68 In the first two years of his General Secretaryship Gorbachev did not depart far from the disciplinarian economic policies followed by Andropov. But abroad things were different. His main objective was to reduce tensions with the West so that he could save precious resources for domestic economic reforms. As the international oil price collapsed from August 1985 onwards, this became even more necessary. Yet he and his liberal advisers – especially Iakovlev – were also convinced that the old stand-off between the blocs both could and should end. This conflict, they argued, was in essence a continuation of the old Stalinist doctrine of international class struggle, and was now outmoded.

  Gorbachev therefore badgered the Americans with arms-control proposals, but initially Reagan and the neo-conservative hawks were predictably suspicious. On their first meeting in Geneva, Gorbachev could not believe what a primitive Cold War ‘caveman’ Reagan was. The Third World was a particular area of disagreement. For Reagan, Communism was always the result of Soviet conspiracy and interference; for Gorbachev, it was fuelled by anti-imperialism and reactionary elites, and he was determined to win the war in Afghanistan and defend other Soviet allies.

  Despite these differences, the Reagan administration’s approach to the USSR had changed since 1984. The war scare of November 1983 seems to have seriously shaken the President, and it was becoming clear that hawkishness had achieved little but risk Armageddon. European unease, together with electoral considerations, also contributed to a fundamental change in Washington’s position, culminating in Reagan’s suggestion at Reykjavik in 1986 that all nuclear weapons be decommissioned.69 Ultimately the idea of total denuclearization came to nothing because the two sides could not agree on the future of ‘Star Wars’, but from then on Gorbachev realized that disarmament was a real possibility. He now had the confidence to press ahead with domestic reform. Reagan’s rearmament had certainly put pressure on the Soviet leadership; however, it was his willingness to do deals with the USSR (often in the teeth of neo-conservative opposition) that contributed most to Gorbachev’s reform programme – and thus to Soviet Communism’s ultimate collapse.

  In the course of 1986 Gorbachev’s views had become more radical, as he brainstormed with Iakovlev and other his liberal Central Committee advisers. Meetings with Western leaders – including Mrs Thatcher, who lectured him on democracy in 1987 – also had their effect.70 Gorbachev eventually came to think of himself as a Western Social Democrat, and he and his advisers became admirers of West European welfare states. But the West European Social Democratic order had been founded in the 1940s on a compromise between free markets and interventionist states. The problem was how to reach that goal. For the party lay at the heart of the Soviet state, and any attempt to undermine its power risked destroying Moscow’s ability to control the country.

  Gorbachev’s worldview for the first few years of his rule was not, at root, a liberal one. The Soviet people, he believed, had made a ‘socialist choice’ in 1917 and was fundamentally unified, collectivist, and committed to socialism. So why, then, was the system not working? Gorbachev concluded that the problem lay in the fact that the masses’ innate creativity was being stifled. Deploying rhetoric that was one part young Marx and one part almost liberal idealism, he explained that bureaucrats and the ‘authoritarian-bureaucratic system’ ‘suppress the initiative of the people, alienate them in all spheres of vital activity and belittle the dignity of the individual’. The solution to this problem lay in a new form of ‘democracy’ that involved open discussion but not Western-style pluralism. This ‘democracy’ would change people’s psychology, motivating them to become enthusiastic workers and citizens, or ‘activating the human factor’ in the jargon of the time; it would also undermine (and hopefully topple) the ‘bureaucrats’ who were suppressing popular energies.71 Such a Romantic vision may seem like a inadequate basis for a practical programme of reform, but it made sense within the Marxist tradition, much as it had to Khrushchev. Indeed, the reformers saw their policies in that context. As Iakovlev explained to a sceptical Western interviewer, ‘On the theoretical plane, we have never asserted that the revolution in our country, which began in 1917, has ended… Perestroika is the continuation of the revolution.’72

  However, from the beginning of 1987 it had become clear that discipline and tinkering with the economy had achieved little, and Gorbachev embarked on a more radical programme of economic liberalization and political democratization. Imitating the liberalizing reforms that had taken place in Hungary and Yugoslavia, he gave factory directors more independence from the centre. Inevitably, the planners dragged their feet, and Gorbachev’s response was to launch an attack on the ‘bureaucrats’, who, he declared, were a fundamentally conservative force, a ‘braking mechanism’ on change.

  Initially – like Khrushchev before him – Gorbachev had hoped that the party would lead society towards reform, but he rapidly lost faith in it, as party officials resisted his measures. Instead he looked for new alliances among the disenchanted middle classes, relaxing censorship to some degree and permitting the organization of ‘informal’ discussion groups outside the party. More serious, though, was the abolition of the powerful party secretariat in 1988, and the decision to create a new, popularly elected Congress of People’s Deputies. Elections were held in 1989, and whilst many Communist bosses did win seats, several high-profile leaders were defeated. The party had been humiliated. Gorbachev was essentially shifting the centre of power from the party to a popularly elected state authority.

  There were limits to Gorbachev’s liberalism, and he always insisted that democracy had to be controlled. The Communist Party was given a guaranteed 100 seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies of 1989; ‘pluralism of opinions’ was fine, but the opinions all had to be ‘socialist’; and criticism had to be ‘principled’, not ‘irresponsible’. However, Gorbachev found it very difficult to preserve these red lines, especially a
s the party was subjected to an unprecedented ideological assault, encouraged by the Kremlin itself. Gorbachev reopened the Stalin question, appointing a commission to investigate Stalinist repressions in September 1987, and the ‘blank pages’ of Soviet history were discussed much more freely than in the 1950s. If for Khrushchev, socialism had started to decay in 1934, after industrialization and collectivization, Gorbachev argued that the rot had set in with Stalin’s victory over Bukharin in 1928, whilst the supposedly liberal Marxist Lenin of the NEP was held up as the authentic voice of socialism. As early as 1986 Gorbachev’s ideology adviser, Georgii Smirnov, explained his views in a conversation with Tsipko:

  Don’t think that Gorbachev doesn’t recognize the gravity of the situation. Sixty years have gone down the drain. Turning away from NEP, the Party lost its only chance. People suffered in vain. The country was sacrificed in the name of scholastic conceptions of Communism that had nothing to do with real life.73

  Gorbachev hoped he could preserve the reputation of 1917 and relaunch the Soviet project in the name of ‘Leninism’. But it was inevitably difficult to draw a clear line between Lenin and Stalin, and the party intellectuals themselves began to lose faith in the whole Marxist project. Tsipko recalls that as early as 1986, Iakovlev commissioned a ‘probe into the fundamental flaws of Soviet socialism’ which included Marxism itself, and at the end of 1988 Tsipko published the first major article to argue that the roots of Stalinist ‘barracks-type socialism’ lay in Marxism-Leninism.74 The following year, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which denounced Lenin as a founder of the prison system, was published legally in the Soviet Union for the first time. By then the liberal sections of the Soviet press had become remarkably anti-Soviet and pro-Western, full of criticisms of the past and the murderous system the Bolsheviks had created.