The Red Flag: A History of Communism (24 page)

Many of these Communist experiments caused chaos, and, under socialist pressure, were reversed. But the regime failed to restore order to the urban economy, and, most importantly, it continued to rule in the narrow interests of the proletariat. It ordered that the land be nationalized and farmed collectively. Lenin urged the Hungarians not to attempt this foolishly ambitious step, but Kun’s obstinacy was tinged with national pride: ‘Let us carry out the revolution on the agrarian field as well. We should be able to do it better than the Russians…’
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The Communists’ use of forced requisitions to feed the army, and their anti-religion campaign, merely convinced the peasantry that the regime was at war with it.

The Hungarian Soviet government soon found itself with very little support. Peasants were particularly hostile, but workers too were angered by shortages and a worthless inflated currency. But it was the regime’s ultimate failure to defend the nation from foreign aggression that really destroyed it. In the late spring of 1919 the Hungarian Red Army responded to a Czech incursion, and struck deep into Slovakia, establishing a Slovak Soviet Republic in June. Kun even planned a coup in Vienna, although this was easily foiled. However, when the French Prime Minister Clemenceau and the Allies demanded a Hungarian withdrawal, Kun complied, leading to a collapse in army morale and encouraging Hungary’s neighbours to counter-attack. In its final weeks the regime launched a ‘red terror’ against internal ‘enemies’ to consolidate their rule, leading to the deaths of 587 people. Kun desperately appealed to Lenin for military help but in vain. The Bolsheviks were too hard-pressed in Russia itself. On 1 August the Revolutionary Governing Council decided to hand over power to a trade-union government, and Kun and his allies fled to Austria. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was the victim of foreign pressure rather than popular uprising, but Kun realized that his regime had failed to gain the support of the Hungarian workers, let alone the population as a whole.

The Hungarian Communists were victims of their own dogmatism
and their inability to deliver on nationalistic promises at a time when the state was fighting for its life. In comparison, conditions looked more favourable for Communists in Italy. The radical Italian Socialist Party (PSI) had a long history of effective organization and opposition to the war; Northern Italy, like Russia a late and uneven industrializer, had a concentrated working class in the Turin–Genoa–Milan triangle, with a radical peasantry in the nearby Po Valley; and the Communists were more willing than the Hungarians to appeal to peasants. In October 1919 the PSI declared that liberal reforms were not enough and the time had come for the creation of a new type of socialist state. The radical left gained local electoral support, and strikes and boycotts were reinforced by factory occupations in the spring and autumn of 1920. These were the factory councils Gramsci believed could be the foundations of the new state.
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Yet, as was the case in Russia, the radicals found it difficult to reconcile factory democracy with effective economic coordination. Factory councils narrowly pursued their own interests, and it was difficult to ensure that they delivered supplies to each other to keep the economy going.
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Coordinating the revolutionary movement also posed difficulties. Radical socialists controlled some areas, but the army and old liberal parties were still masters of the state, and large sections of the population, especially in the countryside, were conservative. Meanwhile, there were profound divisions amongst the socialist workers themselves. The PSI’s leadership, and most of its membership, were not committed to revolution, and in September 1920 a referendum within the trade unions rejected a proposal that the factory councils become the basis of an alternative revolutionary state – albeit narrowly, by 591,245 to 409,569 votes. Gramsci, like others who had placed their faith in the factory council movement, soon became convinced that a centralized, Leninist party was needed to lead the revolution. The PSI finally split in 1921 into Socialist and Communist parties, and this divided left was no match for the paramilitary right. From early in 1920, the Fascists – a coalition of ex-socialist nationalists like Mussolini, supporters of landowners in the countryside and anti-socialist groups, often young and middle class, fought what they saw as a Red tide. Convinced that class struggle was destroying the unity and power of Italy, they unleashed formidable violence against the left, and ultimately seized power in October 1922. In 1926 Gramsci himself was arrested and imprisoned.

Moscow had harboured great hopes for revolution in Italy, but its main ambitions were concentrated on Germany. The Communists’ first attempt to seize power, however, was a failure. In January 1919 Ebert’s new government began to root out enclaves of radical influence, and on 4 January 1919 dismissed the leftist president of the Berlin police authorities, Eichhorn. Unexpectedly large demonstrations erupted in his defence, and although Rosa Luxemburg was sceptical of the wisdom of challenging the government, she and the newly formed Communists (KPD) ultimately decided to support the mass uprising, in alliance with the leftist Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The Ebert government responded by sending in members of the Freikorps, right-wing paramilitary squads set up to oppose the revolution, and on 11 January they stormed the headquarters of the Social Democratic newspaper
Vorwärts
, which had been occupied by the revolutionaries. By 15 January the uprising was over and the Communist leaders went into hiding. The Freikorps discovered and subsequently killed them with the tacit support of the Social Democratic government.

The murders caused profound shock, and the ‘martyrdom’ of Luxemburg and Liebknecht transformed them into potent icons for the young Communist party. ‘LLL’ (Lenin–Luxemburg–Liebknecht) festivals became central to Communist culture throughout the Weimar period.
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But the repression worked, at least for a time. As Brecht had shown in
Spartakus
, a majority favoured peace and order over revolution, and in the elections that followed, the Social Democrats won 37.9 per cent of the vote, compared with 7.6 per cent won by the USPD – the only far-left party standing.

This, however, was not the end of the revolutionary era. The repressiveness of the Social Democrat-led government and its military allies was counterproductive, and Wolfgang Kapp’s failed right-wing coup convinced many workers that the Social Democrats could not be trusted to resist the return of the old elites. The factory council movement was revived, several areas were cleared of the army and the Freikorps, and in the June 1920 elections the radical left achieved its highest ever vote – 20 per cent for the USPD and Communists against the Social Democrats’ 21.6 per cent. Strikes and unrest continued in the industrial regions of Germany, and the newly merged USPD and Communists continued to do well.

In July 1920 the Second Congress of the Comintern met amidst enormous optimism. The factory council movement in Italy seemed on the verge of success, and the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, bringing Communism to the West, or so the Bolsheviks supposed. But by the autumn, the Communists were in retreat on all fronts. The persecution of the Wobblies and other American radicals that began during the war reached a high point during the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919–20. Thousands were arrested, and many deported.
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In Europe, the failure of the Italian factory council movement in late 1920 and the retreat of the Red Army from Warsaw after August, following its defeat by the new Polish army, marked the beginning of the end. It became clear, however, that the revolutionary era was over with the catastrophic failure of the German Communists’ so-called ‘March Action’ of 1921. The police and army had been deployed to crush strikes in Saxony, and Béla Kun, who materialized in Berlin as a Comintern leader, encouraged the Communist party to organize a proletarian revolution in response. The rebels were in a minority, and strikes were broken with the help of Social Democrat workers. They were inevitably defeated; thousands were imprisoned and 145 individuals killed.

Brecht had been proved prescient, and it may be that his analysis was right too: people were tired of struggle. Whilst many might have been profoundly disillusioned with the old regimes and their stubborn bellicosity, most did not want a horrific international conflagration to be followed by class war. But there were other reasons for the failures of the revolutions. Some Communists were too sectarian and ambitious, as in Hungary. Others were discredited by their lack of realism, unable to explain how decentralized factory councils could run a modern industrial economy. Repression from moderate left and far right was also effective. But crucial in undermining the revolutionary impulse was the power of democratic and welfare reforms. Throughout Western Europe, states extended the franchise and increased welfare benefits for workers – especially in Weimar Germany, where the Social Democrats retained considerable influence. The hope of peaceful improvement, combined with the end of the post-war booms that had given workers economic power, soon vanquished Communist insurgencies.

Even so, the social conflicts of the past had not been resolved. Governments and the middle classes wanted a return to the pre-1914
laissez-faire economic system and the gold standard, which inevitably restricted growth. But this was hard to reconcile with promises made after the war for improved welfare, and living standards were regularly sacrificed, nailed to the ‘cross of gold’ – the need to keep the currency stable. Workers protested against the resulting low wages and high unemployment, most famously when Winston Churchill returned sterling to the gold standard and the 1926 British General Strike was called against the resulting wage cuts. There was a boom of sorts at the end of the 1920s, but it proved to be fragile. Wages remained low as profits soared, and in the United States capital flooded into share and property speculation rather than production for an expanding market; in Central Europe the temporary prosperity was dependent on high levels of short-term loans from American banks. The developed world had failed to forge a sustainable capitalism that secured both prosperity and social harmony – as was soon to become clear.

For a time, then, the capitalist system had ‘stabilized’ itself, as Communists admitted. But the revolutionary tide left rock pools of radicalism as it retreated, and Communism found a home in many communities of workers and the unemployed throughout Europe. However, its real stronghold was in Germany, where the Communists continued to attract over 10 per cent of the vote. The old home of Marx and Engels remained the centre of Communism outside the USSR.

In December 1930, Brecht, by now a serious Marxist and supporter of the KPD, produced what was probably his most controversial play:
The Measures Taken
. Staged with a ‘control chorus’ (adapted from the Greek chorus) made up of large numbers of workers, it told the story of three Communist activists on a secret mission to foment revolution in China. They find a young guide, and tell him that they must all keep their identities secret. If the authorities discover them, not only will they be killed, but the whole Communist movement will be in jeopardy. All four put on masks. Yet the guide, emotional and undisciplined, is so outraged by the sufferings of the Chinese people that he tries to help them, removing his mask and revealing his identity. The authorities pursue the young guide, and the three Communists realize that he is a liability. They
cannot leave him and they cannot take him. So they decide they must kill him, and he himself agrees that this is the only solution. He is shot and his body is left in a lime pit to remove all traces of his identity. The chorus then chillingly declares that the comrades have made the right decision; the necessary ‘measures have been taken’ for the salvation of the revolution.
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The play caused a storm of controversy within the left. Ruth Fischer, a Communist and sister of Brecht’s collaborator Hanns Eisler, later accused him of justifying Soviet brutality, as ‘the minstrel of the GPU [the Soviet secret police]’.
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Brecht protested that he was merely encouraging his audience to explore the problem of revolutionary tactics and the need for self-sacrifice at a time when Communists were under attack from fascism. Even so, the play was to damage him. During the McCarthyite campaign against Communists, the House Un-American Activities Committee saw
The Measures Taken
as evidence that Brecht was wedded to revolutionary violence, and their judgement precipitated his move from America to Communist East Germany in 1949.

However controversial and ambiguous Brecht’s message on violence, the play does capture the austere character of European Communism outside the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Brecht’s scepticism of revolutionary radicalism, already evident in 1919, was now widespread; the emotionalism of expressionist art and literature had given way to a sober ‘new objectivity’ (
Neue Sachlichkeit
). The failure of the post-war revolutions and the growth of an anti-Communist radical right both fed the sectarian and unsentimental culture that Brecht espoused in
The Measures Taken
. Revolution was still the goal, but emotionalism had to be replaced by discipline. European Communists became increasingly reliant on the Soviet Union, and subject to a new authoritarian ethos, worlds away from the council democracy of 1919. They also became more isolated, members of a persecuted sect.

The first sign of these changes in the international Communist movement came in the summer of 1919, and was precipitated by defeats. If the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 was the trigger for the end of ‘proletarian democracy’ within Russia, the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919 convinced Lenin that the Bolsheviks must radically revise their approach to world revolution. He now believed that his earlier hope that the Western revolutions could be more democratic than their Russian counterpart was misplaced. Lenin
held Béla Kun responsible for the failure of the Budapest republic. He had mistakenly merged the Communist party with the socialists, had placed too little faith in the vanguard party, and needlessly alienated the peasantry.
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As Lenin explained in his highly influential
Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
of April 1920, Russian lessons showed that ‘absolute centralization and rigorous discipline in the proletariat’ were essential in a ‘long, stubborn and desperate life-and-death struggle’ against the bourgeoisie.
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