The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Gorbachev and Iakovlev, as long-established party apparatchiks, well understood the power of ideology, and believed that revisions of history were an essential part of their revolution. They saw perestroika as a moral and cultural campaign to transform old ‘Stalinist’ and ‘bureaucratic’ mentalities. But this was a very risky strategy indeed. The Communist Party based its legitimacy on moral arguments: living standards might be lower than in the West, and there might be some injustice and illegitimate privilege, but fundamentally the system was just and superior to capitalism. If leaders and intellectuals were now saying that the party had led the people along the wrong path for sixty years, exploiting their self-sacrifice for nothing, how could the regime expect to retain their loyalty? A letter to the weekly magazine Argumenty i fakty from a certain N. R. Zarafshan shows how the re-examination of history could reinforce a vague sense of injustice and lead to a traumatic ideological – and emotional – crisis:

  I am a party member with a good record and everyone says that I was a conscientious worker who did social work enthusiastically. But I became older and my fire disappeared, and I have seen much injustice in my life. On learning the truth about our past I was devastated.

  … I take it all very much to heart: if I remain in the party I will be dishonest, if I leave I will be disgraced. Because I am a disciplined person I cannot miss party meetings or ignore my duties.75

  Gorbachev was inadvertently destroying the ideological foundations of the Soviet system, and opinion changed very rapidly between 1987 and 1991. More became hostile to the party and positive towards the West. This even happened in Soviet satellites, where people had had a good knowledge of the West for some time; in Hungary, the number of those believing that ‘opportunities for educational and cultural growth’ were fully realized in the West leapt from 22.8 per cent in 1985 to 51.1 per cent in 1989.76 Even so, this is not to say that a majority of Soviet bloc citizens wanted a Western-style market economy. When asked what should be done to escape from the increasingly serious economic crisis, only 18 per cent of Soviet citizens wanted more private enterprise; 50 per cent wanted more discipline and order.77 Similarly, in 1989 73 per cent of Czechoslovaks opposed the privatization of industry and 83 per cent were hostile to the end of collective farms.78

  The real beneficiary of the ideological crisis was nationalism and some of the earliest signs of political collapse came in the Baltic States, where nationalist hostility to Soviet rule had been widespread for some time. Popular Fronts in Support of Perestroika, created by the KGB to channel democracy in approved directions, soon escaped central control. Demonstrators began demanding complete independence, calling for a return to private property and the end of the Soviet system.

  Gorbachev was soon faced with chaos. By attacking the old political system and ideology, he was cutting the sinews of power before an alternative power structure had been built. Much the same was true of the economy: the power of the state was undermined, before the ground had been prepared for the market to replace it. Gorbachev was faced with two coherent alternatives. There was the Chinese model, which assumed a gradual move to the market, led by a powerful party and reliant on continuing repression of dissent; or there was a neo-liberal ‘shock therapy’, counselled by many Western economists and the IMF. Understandably, Gorbachev resolutely set his face against the former: it contradicted his plans for political democracy, and, he believed, would only entrench the power of the bureaucrats he hated so much. However, Gorbachev also rejected shock therapy – equally predictably. It would have destroyed the economic bureaucracy at a stroke, and replaced it with markets, privatization and tough anti-inflation measures. Yet the result would also have been wild price swings, deep recession and mass unemployment. Even had this been a good idea, Gorbachev would never have pursued it because he was determined to have democracy and markets at the same time, whilst retaining his own power. The introduction of the market would inevitably have hurt many people, and democracy would have given the millions of ‘losers’ a powerful weapon against the government. Gorbachev himself responded to popular pressure by cushioning living standards with borrowing from the West. The consequence was ballooning foreign debt.

  In place of neo-liberal shock therapy and Chinese-style state-led reform, Gorbachev settled on a deeply flawed compromise. The attack on the bureaucracy destroyed the old system that delivered supplies from one factory to another, whilst enterprise directors were given new autonomy: they were now free of any pressure – market or political – to produce efficiently and cheaply. Inevitably prices rose, shelves emptied and queues lengthened. Whilst the peace-maker ‘Gorby’ was being hailed in the West, his popularity at home plummeted.

  Some at the time urged that Gorbachev copy the more statist Chinese model, and the debate over alternative paths continues.79 Chinese conditions were certainly very different from Russia’s. In the Soviet Union, agriculture had been more damaged by collectivization, and the old industrial apparatchiks were much more powerful and able to block economic reforms. Nevertheless, some argue that had the right incentives been put in place, some version of Deng’s Four Modernizations might have produced a better economic result.

  It is perhaps pointless to speculate about possible alternatives. Given the democratic, anti-bureaucratic worldview of Gorbachev and the reformers, and the liberal intellectual environment in the West, the Chinese model had little chance. And even had a version of the Chinese model secured an improved economic result, it would have been at the expense of political freedom, and probably world peace. The Communists would have remained in power, and an old guard would have been more likely to resist the retreats of 1989 in Eastern Europe.

  However, the course Gorbachev chose, whatever its political advantages, had a damaging economic outcome: the effective collapse of the state and the ‘theft’ of the economy by managers and officials. When, in 1989, the dithering Gorbachev eventually did appoint the liberal Nikolai Petrakov as his economic adviser, and made it clear the following year that privatization was on the cards, they began to ‘self-privatize’, selling off equipment and pocketing the proceeds. Meanwhile party bosses and state officials took advantage of Gorbachev’s attack on the central hierarchy and took the assets of the organizations they worked for. The bureaucrats were ‘stealing the state’.80 This semi-legal larceny was the source of the wealth of many of the ‘oligarchs’ of the 1990s. Gorbachev, intent on destroying the ‘bureaucrats’, had actually helped many of them to enrich themselves, and his idealism had set in train the decade of political and economic collapse that beset Russia after Communism, in turn fuelling the anti-liberal reaction that followed it under President Vladimir Putin.

  From the autumn of 1989 onwards, therefore, the effects of Gorbachev’s creeping revolution against the Communist Party were becoming clear: the various spheres of Soviet power were collapsing. And it was no surprise that the first to go was the weakest link in the chain: Eastern Europe.

  VIII

  In the days before the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 1987, the citizens of Wrocław learnt of plans for an unusual commemoration of the Soviet state’s foundation:

  Comrades!!!

  The day of the eruption of the Great Proletarian October Revolution is a day of a Great Event… Comrades, it is time to break the passivity of the popular masses!… Let us gather on November 6, Friday at 4 p.m. on S´widnicka Street under the ‘clock of history’. Comrades, dress festively, in red. Put on red shoes, a red cap or a scarf… As a last resort, with no red flag, paint your fingernails red.

  This satirical celebration of revolutionary history was just one of the events organized by Poland’s ‘Orange Alternative’, a surrealist protest group. They satirized the early Bolshevik political festivals like the Storming of the Winter Palace of 1920 – complete with a mock-up of the revolutionary battleship Aurora, a ‘cavalry’ wearing Russian civil-war (Budionnyi) caps, and banners bearing slogans such as ‘Red Borscht’. One of the orga
nizers described the scene: ‘Shouts of “RE-VOLU-TION”. The Proletariat [i.e. workers from local factories] emerged from the bus; on their shirts are signs reading “I will work more” and “Tomorrow will be better”.’ The police were ready in large numbers, but were put in the humiliating position of arresting anybody dressed in red or provocatively drinking strawberry juice.81

  The Orange Alternative, whilst unusual in many ways, captured much of the character of East European dissent in the late 1980s, at least in the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (including the Western Ukraine). A new younger generation of dissidents was emerging, who were less interested in grand protests and demonstrations against the regime than in creating an alternative, counter-cultural ‘civil society’, free of the control of the state. The new style was ‘carnivalesque’, as Padraic Kenney has called it, rather than militantly confrontational, and owed much to the Situationists and Western youth culture of the 1960s. Indeed, the spirit of 1989 was a non-violent adaptation of the spirit of 1968. As the Wrocław display showed, their approach could not have been more different from the old Communist model of mass mobilization. But the goals of many groups (in contrast with the Orange Alternative) were often very specific and ostensibly non-political – campaigning for environmental causes or peace, for example.82 This was perhaps to be expected after the suppression of the Solidarity movement. The regimes had lost even more prestige, but it was clear that open opposition would only be met by force, and outside Poland it was difficult for intellectuals to mobilize workers. A new, less confrontational style was therefore required.

  Whilst social activism – and ridicule – played its part in the end of Communism, more important was Moscow and the signals it was sending to the East European Communist parties. Gorbachev had told the leaders in private as early as 1985 that they could not depend on the Red Army for help, though he expected them to remain in the Soviet bloc. Ever the optimist, he believed that more popular leaders would restore Communist legitimacy. But just as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956 had undermined the ‘little Stalins’ by encouraging reformers and splitting the parties, so perestroika in the USSR shook the foundations of the East European regimes. The supporters of liberal reform within the parties were strengthened, and in some cases leaders now realized they could no longer rely on repression but would have to expand the base of their social support. Opponents of the regimes also realized that they now had less to fear; when, in the winter of 1987–8, the Polish historian Wacław Felczak went to lecture in Budapest, his audience asked him what the lessons of Solidarity were for them. ‘Found a party,’ he replied. ‘They will probably lock you up for it, but all the signs suggest that you won’t be in jail for long.’83

  Hungary was the first to respond to the signals from Moscow. Having subjected itself to multi-candidate elections where the old guard performed less well than expected, a younger, reformist group of Communist leaders, including the effectively Social Democratic Imre Pozsgay, succeeded in March 1988 in forcing the ageing János Kádár to retire. The party split; a democratic opposition now formed outside the party, and by February 1989 reformers within the regime had accepted multi-party elections. Moscow’s willingness to accept this fundamental change made it crystal-clear to all that the Soviet Union would no longer underwrite the old order in Eastern Europe.

  In Poland, as in Hungary, the signals from Moscow were heeded from an early stage. General Jaruzelski, one of the leaders closest to Gorbachev, began liberal reforms in September 1986, but in August 1988 worker unrest against austerity measures again shook Communist rule. By February 1989 the government, under pressure from Gorbachev, had accepted round-table discussions with the opposition, and elections were held in June 1989, in which Solidarity swept the board. In August 1989 Tadeuz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist head of a coalition government for over forty years.

  The more hard-line regimes showed a greater determination to hold on, but soon they too were forced to heed the writing on the Wall – in East Germany. The beginning of the end was in May 1989, when the Hungarian authorities reduced controls for Hungarians at the Austrian border. East Germans then began to organize ‘holidays’ to Hungary to take advantage of the breach in the iron curtain, even though the border was supposed to be open for Hungarians only. On 19 August at the border town of Sopron, the Hungarian opposition, with the support of an odd duo – Imre Poszgay and Otto von Habsburg, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire – organized a ‘Pan-European picnic’ during which they planned to open a disused border crossing and allow the East Germans to cross. The Germans forced their way through the border, and three weeks later the Hungarians removed all restrictions. The GDR responded by closing its border with Hungary, and this renewed repression invigorated the opposition in East Germany. Demonstrations erupted throughout the GDR, and the party began to lose control. Honecker’s rigid regime was further dented when Gorbachev visited to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR. Welcomed by enthusiastic crowds, he distinctly failed to support its leader. ‘Life itself punishes those who delay’, he is reported to have declared.84 Shortly afterwards (in a palace coup on 17–18 October) Honecker was replaced by Egon Krenz.

  Krenz soon realized he needed to make some concessions to retain control. Following a demonstration of half a million people in East Berlin on 4 November, he decided on a limited lifting of travel restrictions, but the order was garbled at the press conference, and confused guards simply opened the gate to the west of the city and allowed the crowds through.85 This was to prove to be one of the most momentous ‘misspeaks’ in history. That night some 50,000 Germans flooded out of the East and in to West Berlin, crying ‘we are one people’. This was a massive party as much as a revolution, the culmination of the ‘carnivalesque’, non-violent demonstrations and ‘picnics’ pursued by the East European oppositions in the 1980s. The breaching of the Berlin Wall justifiably became the symbol of 1989. The opposition’s vision of revolution – non-violent, joyful, even hedonistic – seemed so much more attractive and modern than the Communists’ antiquated ideal of the mobilized worker, struggling against enemies. As the Wall crumbled, so did the East German Communist Party’s will to govern.

  The house of cards continued to fold and events in East Germany inspired resistance to other hard-line regimes. Demonstrations in early November helped party reformers to force Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov from power, and precipitated a challenge to the party itself from a group of opposition forces. In Czechoslovakia the regime, under Husák’s conservative successor Miloš Jakeš, had been facing unrest and demonstrations since the previous year, but had resolutely set its face against reform; it even put the portrait of the old Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald on the new hundred-crown banknote, an enormously provocative act. However events in the GDR – the regime ideologically closest to the Czechoslovak – emboldened the opposition. The anniversary of the student opposition to the Nazi takeover in 1939 fell on 17 November, and demonstrations were normal. This time, though, the numbers were enormous, and the police panicked. Police brutality in turn sparked off mass strikes and demonstrations and forced the party to begin negotiations with the opposition.

  Despite some violence (in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere) the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe were remarkably swift and peaceful. In part, this was because the new opposition movements embraced non-violence, but it also reflected the weaknesses of the regimes once the USSR changed its attitude towards repression. Communist parties were divided, to varying degrees, and there were normally reformists waiting in the wings, prepared to negotiate with the opposition. These were relatively peaceful, ‘velvet’ revolutions, as the Czechoslovak transition was described.

  As might be expected, given their autonomy from the USSR and their repressiveness, the Romanian and Albanian regimes were the last to collapse. The extraordinarily harsh austerity imposed by the Romanian leader in the 1980s put Nicolae Ceauşescu under pressure; serious industrial unrest bro
ke out in Braşov in 1987, and Ion Iliescu, a former Central Committee member sacked in 1984, levelled veiled criticism. But Romania could not insulate itself from the events in the Soviet bloc proper. In December 1989 unrest amongst the Hungarian minority in Timişoara led to police repression, and this in turn promoted further unrest in Bucharest. Ceauşescu organized a demonstration in support of the regime and spoke from the Central Committee building balcony, hoping for a repeat of the adulation he had received in 1968. He had, however, catastrophically misjudged the mood of the truculent crowd: rather than cheering, people began to jeer the dictator in a shocking display of lèse majesté. The disorder was broadcast on TV, after which the army joined the opposition and the regime soon lost control. The Ceauşescus fled from Bucharest but were later captured and executed. Power was then seized by Iliescu, in charge of a new ‘National Salvation Front’.

  Albania was the last of the East European dominoes to fall. Ramez Alia, Hoxha’s successor in 1985, had begun to make piecemeal liberal reforms, but by 1990 student demonstrations had forced him into holding multi-party elections, and although the Communists took the largest number of votes they were now part of a coalition government. The following year the coalition collapsed, and the Communists were voted out of power.

  The year 1989 clearly ranks with the revolutionary years of 1848, 1917–19 and 1968, but how similar was it to those earlier upheavals? Some of the transitions from Communism were clearly more revolutionary than others. Throughout Europe, Gorbachev’s willingness to abandon the Soviet empire was crucial, but the different nature of the regimes led to wide divergences. In Hungary and Poland, well-established reformist traditions within the Communist parties led to peaceful, negotiated transitions, whilst in Czechoslovakia and the GDR more unified conservative leaderships only fell after short periods of mass popular mobilization. Events in Romania were the most violent and ‘revolutionary’, although the effects of the regime change – the victory of the semi-authoritarian apparatchik Iliescu – was one of the least radical. If we look at popular participation in the revolutions, we see a slightly different pattern. Poland and Czechoslovakia, both unified against past Soviet oppression, and to some extent Romania, were closer to the 1917 pattern, in that they involved all classes, including workers. In Hungary and the GDR, where Communists had bought off working-class discontent more effectively, the transitions were much more intelligentsia and white-collar affairs.86