The Red Flag: A History of Communism (26 page)

Small, embattled Communist communities emerged throughout Europe, even where national parties were tiny. Britain had its ‘little Moscows’ in Fife, Stepney in East London and the South Wales coal-fields – homogeneous working-class communities where Communists became involved in defending jobs and union rights, whilst also organizing leisure and cultural activities.
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Communist activists reported back to Moscow, explaining why miners in South Wales were so receptive to a militant, sectarian Communism:

The party where the culture of sectarian struggle and loyalty to the USSR was most fully established was the German one. Here party membership and its popular vote remained high throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The KPD was often divided over strategy, and the culture of the party also varied by region, but under Ernst Thälmann, its leader from 1925, it combined revolutionary activism with adherence to hierarchy and loyalty to the Kremlin. It soon became the Bolsheviks’ favourite little brother, and much of its intransigent hostility to any compromise with social democracy survived the revolutionary era of 1918–19. The separation between the Communists and Social Democrats was not an absolute one: they shared the same trade unions until 1928 and sometimes attended the same festivals;
⁷²
and both Communists and Social Democrats addressed their fellows as ‘comrades’, and marched beneath the red flag. Even so, the Social Democrats’ participation in suppressing Communism had left a legacy of bitterness, as did their identification with the political status quo. In some factories in the Halle-Merseburg region, the mutual hatred was so great that Social Democratic and Communist workers even went to work on different train carriages and ate in separate parts of the company cafeteria.
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Communists tended to see Social Democrats as the bosses’ lackeys, and certainly the latter were better represented amongst the ‘respectable’ working class, whilst the former did better amongst the poorer and unskilled workers. Yet the KPD soon became a gathering of the unemployed. Communists were inevitably the most likely to be sacked in the efficiency drives of the 1920s, and by 1932 only 11 per cent of German Communist Party members had jobs.
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Adversity only strengthened the KPD’s uncompromising attitudes. Its culture was militaristic and infused with machismo.
⁷⁵
Its language was often violent: one newspaper was even named
Rote Peitsche
(
Red Whip
). Propaganda was an effusion of proletarian fists, leather-coated marchers and billowing red flags. Its rallies adopted much of the style of its radical right competitors, and the uniforms and jackboots made it difficult to distinguish them from the paramilitary Stahlhelm or the Nazis. Thälmann was even described in the party press as ‘
unser Führer
’ (‘our leader’), in imitation of the authoritarianism of the right. At times, in 1923 and 1930, the Communist party used nationalist language as a way of attracting support away from the Nazis and others. Even so, the German Communists were not quasi-Nazis. The party was fundamentally one of class struggle, not national revival, and the Nazis themselves generally regarded Communists as their main enemies.
⁷⁶

The Communist party’s militarism was not limited to propaganda. It had a paramilitary wing, the Red Front Fighters’ League (
Rote Frontkämpferbund
) until it was banned in 1929, and various underground groups after then. Many Communists had guns, brought back from the war, and sometimes they made their own. In 1921 workers at the Leuna plant built their own tank, which they deployed against the police. The German Communists, largely excluded from factories, became a party of the streets and, especially towards the end of the decade, engaged in brawls and shoot-outs with police.
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Unsurprisingly, this martial party was overwhelmingly (70 per cent) male, even though it had one of the most feminist programmes of all Weimar parties. Even so, it was too small and isolated to threaten the stability of the German state in the mid-1920s, at a time when the economy as a whole was recovering and a liberal politics was still able to incorporate a majority of interests. As had become clear in the USSR in 1921, militant, sectarian Communist parties were too divisive to appeal to anything more than a minority. But this only applied in normal times. Everything was to look very different when the economic downturn came.

On 13 May 1928 the
New York Times
published an article entitled ‘America’s “New” Civilization’, which reported on a lecture given by the French academic André Siegfried in Paris. Siegfried had argued that the ‘greatest contribution of the United States to the civilized world was “the conquest of the material dignity of life”’, through mass production techniques and prosperity, and the journalist praised Siegfried’s encomium to the United States. However, the
Times
believed that America’s ‘contribution to the democratic ideal’ and its export of ‘a social system free from caste’ were of even greater importance than its economic achievements.
⁷⁸

Both Siegfried and the
New York Times
expressed a widespread belief that the newly dominant United States, and the laissez-faire democratic model it embodied, had succeeded in overcoming the social divisions of the revolutionary era of 1917–19. Within months, however, this faith proved to be misplaced. In the summer of 1928, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to restrain a share bubble fuelled by poorly regulated banks; American lending to the rest of the world collapsed. The result was a catastrophic constriction of credit in much of Europe and Latin America; heavily indebted Germany was particularly affected.
⁷⁹
The economies of the developing world (including that of the USSR) had been suffering for some time from low commodity prices, but the economic crisis worsened when the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 brought the fragile boom to an end in the United States itself.

The result was a sharpening of social and international conflict, as an atmosphere of frantic
sauve qui peut
reigned. Social tensions intensified as workers and middle classes fought over shares of a shrinking national economic cake, whilst international collaboration broke down as states tried to save themselves with protectionist and other autarkic policies. Capitalism’s power to integrate the poor and less privileged – whether workers, peasants, or developing countries – into a liberal, free-market order was ebbing. There were now fewer incentives for Communists, Western or Soviet, to cooperate with liberal capitalism, and Communism entered a new radical phase.

The crisis of 1928–9 was, however, only the culmination of tensions
between the Communist and capitalist worlds that had been brewing for some years. The 1926 General Strike in Britain led to a deterioration in relations between the Conservative government and Moscow, and in May 1927 the British broke off diplomatic links. Meanwhile, the Guomindang’s attack on the Chinese Communists that April was an embarrassing setback for the ‘united front’ policy, and a major blow to Communist hopes in Asia. German workers were becoming more radical, and in July a failed workers’ uprising in Vienna reinforced Moscow’s belief that revolution was brewing in the West. From the spring of 1927 the Comintern began to change its line as the Soviet leadership became convinced that its security would be better served by a more militant foreign policy. Moscow began to insist that Social Democrats – especially those like the Germans who had a pro-British foreign policy – be treated as bourgeois enemies, and in 1928 the Comintern declared that a new period of revolutionary politics had begun – the ‘Third Period’ (following the ‘first’ post-war revolutionary period and the ‘second’ stabilization period). Capitalism, it now argued, was tottering; clear lines had to be drawn between revolutionaries and reformists; and the Social Democrats had become ‘social fascists’. The new principle of national politics was ‘class against class’. Meanwhile the Kremlin became convinced that it could no longer build the economy by relying on trade with the West, but now had to depend largely on the USSR’s own resources. The stage was set for a new version of Communism that was both revolutionary and nationalistic. And this model was championed by a Bolshevik leader with a rather different culture and style from Lenin’s – Iosif Stalin.

Bolshevik bosses had to wait until March 1928 to see Sergei Eisenstein’s completed treatment of 1917 –
October
.
¹
Unlike his colleague and rival, the punctual Pudovkin, Eisenstein failed not only to produce his masterpiece on time (possibly because the censor intervened), but he also offered a treatment of the revolution at odds with Pudovkin’s Modernist Marxist tale. Whilst Pudovkin dealt with an ordinary ‘lad’ full of ‘spontaneous’ feeling who develops a disciplined, rational, socialist consciousness, Eisenstein’s film was infused with revolutionary romanticism. He declared that his goal was:

His film is a brilliant rendering of the Radical Marxist temper. His account of 1917 contrasted the inertia and decadence of the Provisional Government with the vibrant energies of the people. And as Eisenstein made clear, the heroism was not individual but collective. The conventional ‘leading men’ of Hollywood, and indeed of
The End of St Petersburg
, were absent; Lenin’s role was fairly minor. The famous storming of the Winter Palace scene, where the masses breached the gates and poured ecstatically into the seat of power, was based not on the revolution itself, but on the carefully choreographed mass festivals of the civil-war period, such as the 1920 ‘Storming of the Winter Palace’, which had deployed its own cast of 10,000. Eisenstein himself had some 5,000 extras at his disposal, live weaponry and the extraordinary tolerance of
the authorities. Pudovkin relates how his and Eisenstein’s rendering of the iconic storming differed:

Eisenstein’s deputy joked that more people were injured in the cinematic storming (largely the victims of mishandled bayonets) than in the Bolsheviks’ actual assault of ten years earlier. The result was a film of extraordinarily propaganda power that did much to create the myth of October 1917.
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Eisenstein’s imagery penetrated global popular culture; indeed only recently it was used in a Western advertising campaign for vodka.

But less appealing today is the real Radical Marxist theme in the film – class struggle. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, a worker flees from the troops after the break-up of the July Days demonstrations. An officer and his girlfriend in a nearby boat spot him and call on a number of well-dressed bystanders to stop the ‘Bolshevik’. In the ensuing melee the muscular proletarian is murdered by the violent and angry bourgeois ‘mob’ – the wealthy women are particularly aggressive, stabbing him viciously with their parasols. As often in Eisenstein’s films, the imagery is suffused with machismo, and even misogyny. Eisenstein also insisted on transporting the centrality of conflict to the art of cinema itself: film-making, he argued, must be Marxist and ‘dialectical’. His ‘montage’ technique juxtaposed jarring and paradoxical images to create a new ‘synthesis’ in the audience, in sharp contrast to Pudovkin’s smooth and more conventional ‘linkage’ method.
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However, Eisenstein’s film was considerably less well received in the USSR than Pudovkin’s. It was deemed to be inaccessible to ordinary people, and his decision to portray Lenin was regarded as an affront to his dignity. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s themes were much more in tune with the developing political order under Stalin than Pudovkin’s. The film, a celebration of the energy of revolution, was completed just as Stalin consolidated his power and launched his ‘second revolution’, and it was screened in the same month as the so-called Shakhty show trial of ‘bourgeois specialists’ from the Donbass mines was staged. This affair,
like
October
, was pure political theatre designed to mobilize the masses against the supposedly continuing influence of the bourgeoisie.