The Red Flag: A History of Communism (38 page)

But for some visiting fellow travellers it was not manipulation or credulity that led them to overlook political repression and violence. They simply saw it as necessary and inevitable. The African-American singer Paul Robeson declared in 1937: ‘From what I have seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot.’ Similarly, the
New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty, who notoriously denied the existence of famine in 1932–3, believed that violence was inevitable in a backward country like the USSR, though he was also interested in ingratiating himself with his hosts to further his career.
³⁷
Others deliberately hid the negative sides of the Soviet experience because they did not want to undermine the anti-fascist cause. The French writer André Malraux was a revolutionary romantic, and had little sympathy with the disciplinarian Communist culture of the Comintern. In private he was scathingly critical of the USSR, but he remained a firm supporter in public.
³⁸
The English historian Richard Cobb, who lived in Paris at the time, explained the political choices as they then appeared to the liberal left:

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda used a similar language of unavoidable, difficult choices, although he, unlike Cobb, became more committed to the Communist cause. In his memoirs he recalled how his time in Spain convinced him to support the Communists:

Neruda was not alone, and the Spanish Civil War was central to the revival of Communism’s popularity in Latin America. There were, of course, close cultural links with Spain, and many went to fight in the civil war; Spanish exiles also played a large part in improving Communism’s fortunes there after years of failure.

Communist parties had been founded after 1917 throughout Latin America, and attracted many intellectuals, but as in many countries outside the developed world they did not flourish in the 1920s. Extreme repression by authoritarian states, backed by the influential Catholic Church, explains much of their weakness, but so does the Comintern’s narrow obsession with the proletariat – a tiny class in most Latin American states. They therefore found it difficult to compete with broader populist parties, and to harness the radicalism of the peasantry. Some Marxists, like the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, formed a socialist party that sought to unite a broad front of workers, intellectuals and indigenous peasants, but he was strongly condemned by the Comintern for his populism. The Comintern did support two uprisings in El Salvador in 1932 and in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s – both of which had strong peasant participation. Neither succeeded, and the Comintern played very little role in the rebellion of the Nicaraguan Communist leader, Augusto Sandino.

Prospects for Communist parties improved after the beginning of the
Comintern’s Popular Front policy, especially where there was significant industry and a powerful labour movement. In Mexico, a relatively weak Communist party forged an informal alliance with the reforming socialist President Cárdenas, and in Chile Communists actually won elections in 1938 as part of a Popular Front government under the left-liberal Pedro Cerda. In Chile, as in Mexico, Communists benefited enormously from their role in the Spanish war.
⁴¹

Not everybody on the left, however, saw Spain as a vindication of Comintern strategy, and it exacerbated what was to become a major split in international Communism – that between Stalinists and Trotskyists. Active in exile in Turkey, then France, Norway and Mexico, Trotsky became one of the main Marxist critics of Stalin. He despaired of the popularity of the USSR amongst the Western intelligentsia: ‘Under the pretence of a belated recognition of the October revolution, the “left” intelligentsia of the West has gone down on its knees before the Soviet bureaucracy.’
⁴²
Yet by the time he wrote this, in 1938, the love affair between Soviet Communism and Western leftist intellectuals was already beginning to sour. The Moscow show trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938 and the purges of the Comintern bureaucracy had an ever-greater cumulative effect and deeply disturbed many Communists and fellow travellers. Paul Nizan refused to discuss them, even with his friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
⁴³

However the crisis of the Popular Front policy, and particularly events in Spain, were the main causes of disillusionment. The Popular Front was a shaky compromise. Communists were dropping their old revolutionary goals, temporarily, to appeal to reformist socialists. But at the same time they remained an anti-liberal, disciplinarian party that sought to retain working-class support. This was the essence of Soviet Communism, and for Stalinists the iron discipline of the party was what gave the party its advantage in the fight against fascism. It was a tricky, and ultimately impossible, balance to maintain.

It was Communism’s ‘realism’ and moderation that initially caused problems for the Comintern, as it found itself having to deal with an eruption of popular radicalism. In France, Blum’s government came to
power amidst massive strikes and factory occupations; Trotskyist groups within the Socialist Party were even arguing that the time was ripe for revolution. The Popular Front granted significant concessions to workers in the Matignon agreements, including the 40-hour week, but the strikes continued. Maurice Thorez supported Blum: now the workers had gained so much, they should ‘know how to end a strike’. But afraid of being outflanked from the left, the Communists soon began to go along with worker demands and relations with the liberals and Socialists became tense. Meanwhile, Blum’s decision not to intervene on the Spanish Republicans’ side for fear of triggering a European war led to further conflict. The Socialists began to fear Communist strength (as also happened in Chile, where socialists began to worry that Communists were exploiting popular radicalism, to their disadvantage).
⁴⁴
However, it was the centrist Radicals, believing workers had won too much at Matignon, who ultimately destroyed the Popular Front, and in 1938 Blum was forced out of power.

In Spain, the Communists were less willing to make compromises with the more radical left, for here Soviet security was at stake. The victory of the left in the 1936 elections was, in some areas, accompanied by a social revolution: anarcho-syndicalist-inspired workers took over factories and expelled their owners; peasants seized land, and set up collectives and cooperatives. Just as Lenin had rejected factory councils in 1918, the Communists were convinced that egalitarian experiments merely undermined the war effort. Victory demanded centralization and economic efficiency. They argued that the time was only ripe for a market socialist (or ‘NEP’) type of regime, ruled by a coalition of ‘progressive forces’, including elements of the bourgeoisie, with private ownership permitted. At the same time, they were virulently hostile to the leftist-Communist POUM, led by Trotsky’s old associate Andreu Nin. Therefore they and their ally, the technocratic Republican Prime Minister Juan Négrin, attracted a great deal of support from middle-class groups anxious about the power of workers and anarchists.
⁴⁵
In May 1937 the Republican government, with Communist support, moved against the anarchists and POUM in Barcelona. Resistance was crushed, and the Soviet secret service, which had a significant contingent in Spain, sent its assassins to murder Nin and arrested other remaining POUM activists.
⁴⁶

George Orwell, like many of his generation, was eager to help the Spanish Republic. But unlike most, he ended up with the Trotskyist
POUM, by chance rather than ideological conviction. Orwell was in Barcelona during the May days, and his account of his experiences published in 1938,
Homage to Catalonia
, proved one of the most powerful and influential denunciations of Soviet-style Communism of the era. Initially he had disagreed with his POUM comrades’ hostility to the Communists. As he observed, the Communists ‘were getting on with the war while we [POUM] and the Anarchists were standing still’. But after experiencing Communist and Republican oppression in Barcelona, he changed his mind. He now declared that the Communists were at fault for stifling popular radicalism: ‘Perhaps the POUM and Anarchist slogan: “The war and the revolution are inseparable”, was less visionary than it sounds.’
⁴⁷
He reasoned that the Communists’ social conservatism alienated the Western working class, which might otherwise have put pressure on governments to support the Spanish Republic, whilst undermining a potential revolution in the territory occupied by Franco.

The debate over ‘who lost Spain?’ continues.
⁴⁸
The Soviet secret police’s obsession with purging enemies on the left doubtless undermined support for the Republic. But probably more significant in democracy’s defeat were the paucity of help from abroad and the strength of Franco’s German and Italian allies. Stalin, it seems, remained committed to Spain to the end, but he had to husband his resources for the defence of the USSR against Germany, and against Japan, which had invaded China in July 1937.
⁴⁹

Trotsky was one of the unexpected beneficiaries of the Spanish Popular Front’s failure. Soviet behaviour in Spain, together with the show trials, fuelled disillusionment on the left, and Trotsky attracted Communist dissidents to his cause. The murders of Nin and other supporters gave the movement its martyrs, though its greatest martyr was to be Trotsky himself, killed with an ice-pick by one of Stalin’s assassins in August 1940. In 1938 Trotsky founded the Fourth International, a new force on the left to rival the second, social democratic, and the third, Communist, internationals.

Trotskyism was a leftist, Radical branch of Bolshevism, and its ideas were typical of the various left oppositions that had existed within the Soviet party since 1917. It championed a revival of ‘socialist democracy’, and denounced Stalinism for its authoritarianism. But it did not advocate pluralist, liberal democracy. It adhered to the Marxist-Leninist commitment to the single, vanguard party, though politics and the
economy were to be run in a participatory way. Trotsky was also reluctant to be too harsh on the Stalinist system itself. He argued that a ‘bureaucratic caste’ had emerged under Stalin, but he insisted that this was not a ‘new class’; the USSR had not become a ‘state capitalist’ system, but was still a ‘workers’ state’, even if a ‘degenerated’ one. In the international sphere, Trotskyism was more optimistic and revolutionary than Stalinism, and it was deeply hostile to the nationalism underlying Popular Front politics. His theories of ‘permanent revolution’ and ‘combined and uneven development’ both justified a revolutionary politics in the developing world. Unlike Stalinists, who stuck more rigidly to Marxist phases of development, Trotskyists believed that underdeveloped, agrarian societies could skip phases and make rapid revolutionary leaps to socialism. They always, however, insisted that only the proletariat could be in the vanguard, even when leading the bourgeoisie and the peasants in their ‘permanent revolution’.
⁵⁰

The membership of the Fourth International was tiny – optimistic official figures put it at 5,395 – and almost half of its members were members of the Socialist Workers’ Party of the United States (SWP). Trotsky’s Radical Marxism, and his defence of workers-council democracy, was predictably appealing in the more libertarian culture of America, where the discipline-obsessed Second and Third Internationals had been weakest. And Trotskyism was to be highly influential amongst American intellectuals, especially the ‘New York’ group. Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson all at one time had connections or sympathies with Trotskyism.
⁵¹

Yet many American Trotskyists found even Trotsky too indulgent towards Stalinism, and in 1939–40 the Socialist Workers’ Party was shaken by an acrimonious debate on the nature of the USSR. The party split, and Max Schachtman created a new ‘Workers’ Party’, more hostile to Stalinism than the orthodox Trotskyists. He, like several other American Trotskyists, were to become Cold Warriors, and by the 1960s were to constitute the core of an influential group of militant liberals – the ‘neo-conservatives’. Elsewhere, Trotskyism was to come into its own as a powerful force during the 1960s and 1970s, as the USSR became less attractive. Even so, the movement retained a deserved reputation for endless disputes and splits.

The Trotskyists were the first serious champions of the idea that Nazism and Stalinist Communism had to be compared, and were both
‘totalitarian’ regimes; and their analysis appeared prescient when, on 23 August 1939, Berlin and Moscow concluded a pact. In fact, the treaty was not the product of a real friendship, but of Stalin’s belief that he had no alternative.
⁵²
The British had little real interest in a formal anti-Hitler military alliance, whilst Stalin could not risk war with Germany. But Stalin also had no qualms about the alliance, and, as in the past, hoped that socialism would benefit from a war within the ‘imperialist’ camp. Speaking to Dimitrov, he exulted that Hitler was ‘throwing the capitalist system into chaos’; ‘the pact of non-aggression helps Germany to a certain extent. In the next moment we will incite the other side.’
⁵³
At the same time, the Comintern declared the end of the Popular Front. Stalin was not planning imminent revolutions, but he did believe that war might lead to future revolutions, and the Comintern line became strongly anti-bourgeois.
⁵⁴
Meanwhile, the Red Army was in a position to spread socialism by force into the Baltic, Polish and other lands taken by the Soviets as a result of the pact. The Popular Front line, the Comintern now declared, was heresy; the evils of Anglo-French imperialism were denounced; and anti-fascist propaganda was banned.