The Red Flag: A History of Communism (51 page)

The subsequent restoration of European colonial rule after the defeat of the Japanese enraged and emboldened Communists throughout Asia. In many places they were able to exploit the economic disruption in the countryside caused by the war and harsh Japanese exploitation. But outside
China, Vietnam and Korea, they were generally unable to fuse Communism with an attractive nationalism. The Indonesian Communist Party took part in fighting against the Dutch, but it had little success. The indigenous socialist leader Sukarno, who sought to combine a non-Marxist socialism with Islam, was much more able to forge such a diverse archipelago together than the Communists. The Communist Party was finally crushed after a failed rebellion in eastern Java in 1948. It was only when it adopted a less revolutionary approach in the 1950s that its fortunes revived.

More serious were Communist insurgencies in American and British colonies, though, confined as they were to particular groups of the population, they also ultimately failed. The Americans granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, handing over power to a wealthy collaborator landed elite. Its attempts to disband the Communist-led People’s Anti-Japanese Army (‘Huk’ for short) precipitated a peasant rebellion in central Luzon. The Huks, though, were relatively few. The Americans also decided that Communism was best fought by addressing social problems, and persuaded the Manila government that land reform could blunt the Communists’ appeal. The revolution was soon tamed by a judicious mix of repression and reform.
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The Malayan Communist uprising failed for similar reasons. The appeal of Maoism and guerrilla warfare took hold amongst the Chinese in Malaya – like the Malays, about 40 per cent of the population – after the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937; it was then, at the age of fifteen, that their future leader Chin Peng first became interested in Communism.
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During World War II, the Malayan Communist Party, like the Vietnamese Communists, formed a guerrilla force to fight the Japanese and even received British support. But the British were soon to alienate the Chinese community, first promising them full political rights and then, when the War was over, reneging on that promise under pressure from the Malays. The Communists took up the Chinese ethnic cause, and fought a guerrilla insurgency against the British from 1948.
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They were, however, at a disadvantage compared with the Vietminh. Their support was largely limited to the Chinese, especially the poor, excluded rural population without secure land rights, and the British, like the Americans in the Philippines, generally took a more conciliatory line than the French and the Dutch. They sought to win ‘hearts and minds’ of potentially Communist villagers.
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And as well as declaring their intention of giving Malaya independence, they embarked on the costly resettlement of half a million Chinese squatter peasants into highly defended ‘new villages’, which gave them higher living standards and starved the guerrillas of support.

Despite these setbacks, Communists had established a powerful position in East and South-East Asia by 1950. On the face of it, they had benefited from the very forces that had helped Communists in Europe in the 1940s: they were at the forefront of a struggle against imperialist occupiers and their collaborators amongst local elites. They had also used similar guerrilla or partisan strategies, retreating from the cities into the countryside and harrying their more powerful enemies. But the outcomes were very different, much depending on the role of the Red Army. In the West, Communist parties were defeated electorally and returned to political isolation; the Central, Soviet zone embarked on projects to build Soviet-style socialism; and in South-Eastern Europe and Asia, more independent, radical Communisms emerged.

The Communist ‘bloc’ was therefore highly diverse – much more so than many in the West appreciated at the time. Even so, for a few years from 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the earth’s population. Few would have predicted such an extraordinary outcome only eight years before, when the Nazis were at the gates of Moscow and Communism was on the verge of collapse.

Like Shelley’s Ozymandias, all great imperial rulers have built monuments to celebrate their power, from the Roman emperors’ aqueducts and triumphal arches to the grand memorials and gothic railway stations of the British Empire. The Soviet empire was no exception. Despite the removal of most of the Marx and Lenin statues that adorned (or blighted) the former Communist world, remarkably prominent monuments are still scattered throughout the former Soviet sphere of influence. The most recognizable of all are the Stalinist ‘tall buildings’. These colossi of Stalinist gothic were planned between 1948 and 1953, and had Stalin lived longer there would have been many more. Eight were planned for Moscow, though only seven were actually built (a nostalgic pastiche of the eighth, the luxurious ‘Triumph Palace’ apartment building, was built in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow in 2003). The most monumental is the massive 5,000-roomed Moscow State University building on the Lenin Hills.

Similar enormous buildings, ‘gifts from Comrade Stalin’, were planned for the satellite states. Only one, the Stalin Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, was completed (built to accommodate 12,000 people, it now houses, amongst other things, a bowling alley). But the ex-Communist world contains a number of smaller versions, from the Hotel International in Prague to the Soviet Friendship buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. Scores of other grand buildings were also built in a similar style; amongst the most striking were the Casa Scînteii in Bucharest and the Stalinallee (today Karl-Marx-Allee) in East Berlin.
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These symbols of Communist power were the
pointes d’appui
of the Soviet sphere of influence at its most extensive, when it encompassed much of the Eurasian
landmass, from the Baltic to the South China Sea in the period between Mao’s victory in 1949 and the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s.

Moscow’s tall buildings also tell us much about post-war Stalinism. Gargantuan hybrids of Manhattan-skyscraper gothic and neo-classical bombast, studded with ornamentation from the medieval Muscovite past, they combined modernity, empire and nationalism.
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But they also indicated a politics that was increasingly emphasizing local, mostly Slavic cultures over internationalism and universalism.
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Stalinist buildings in every state tried to incorporate, in a minor way, ‘national forms’ – whether Byzantine features in Romania or Renaissance motifs in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They were also designed to boost the prestige and power of elites; these offices and apartment blocks were clearly not designed to provide housing for the cramped masses after the destruction of war.

All of these massive structures were stone embodiments of a post-war ‘High Stalinism’, an exaggerated version of the order first seen in the mid-1930s, both paternalistic and technocratic. The remnants of Radical, anti-bureaucratic Marxism, still evident even during the Terror, had now largely disappeared. This hierarchical model was also applied to the whole of the Soviet bloc. Indeed there was something distinctly imperial about it. Of course, the USSR never called itself an empire, and it was deeply hostile to ‘imperialism’, which, following Lenin, was still seen as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. Unlike many empires, it did not justify hierarchy on the grounds of ethnicity but as a reflection of different levels of socialist attainment. Russians were at the top of the tree because they were the most progressive people, not because they were racially or culturally superior. In practice, however, the USSR’s relationship with its satellites in Eastern Europe was typically imperial, and its politics and culture were increasingly those of an imperial state. A hierarchy of power, centred in Moscow, extended to all Soviet-bloc states; Russians had higher status than other nationalities; and socialist societies were becoming highly stratified, with the most loyal (or at least politically reliable) party members at the top. In some parts of the bloc, such a system required high levels of coercion and intimidation to keep it in place.

Anxiety about maintaining control over a USSR and Eastern Europe devastated by war and lessons learnt from the Terror all fed the Soviet leadership’s appetite for a fixed and ordered culture. At the same time, fears of foreign invasion and the desperate desire to raise international
status reinforced inequalities at home. Khrushchev remembered, with some contempt, Stalin’s anxieties that Westerners would look down on the Soviet Union: ‘What will happen if they [foreign visitors] walk around Moscow and find no skyscrapers? They will make unfavourable comparisons with capitalist cities.’
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According to the Stalinist post-war vision, then, top officials were to live and work high above the ordinary people – a service aristocracy of technical experts and ideological visionaries, guiding the state machine towards a glorious future. At the same time, however, the Soviet leadership hoped to combine discipline with dynamism. Alongside the tall buildings, the Communist-bloc regimes built vast squares to accommodate huge parades of supposedly enthusiastic people. Assembling the people, or as many of the people as possible, in elaborate state festivals and marches was, of course, reminiscent of Jacobin France. But the ceremonies of the late Stalin era acquired a particularly Soviet colouring. The original model was the Lenin Mausoleum – repository of the great man’s mummified corpse – which served as a tribune on which leaders stood to welcome the masses processing though Red Square. Bulgaria followed the Soviet example most closely, with the construction of Dimitrov’s Mausoleum in 1949 and the ceremonial September 9th Square in front of it. Tribunes and squares were also built in Budapest, Bucharest and East Berlin. Only Prague, relatively undamaged by war, escaped Comrade Stalin’s generosity.
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Meanwhile the Chinese built their own Stalinist spaces on their own initiative, with Soviet assistance. During the 1950s the vast space in front of the Tian’anmen gate podium – what is now Tian’anmen Square – was built, destroying countless ancient buildings and walls.

How, though, could mass enthusiasm be generated within such a rigid political hierarchy? The contradiction was most visible in Warsaw, where the base of the enormous Palace of Culture served as the tribune for the mass parades. This highly unpopular building, symbolizing, as it did, not only Russian domination but also party and bureaucratic privilege, was hardly going to generate feelings of commitment amongst the ordinary workers marching past every May Day. Stalin had, of course, wrestled throughout the 1930s with the problem of how to mobilize the masses whilst subjecting them to discipline, and he had sought to do so through appeals to inclusive patriotism rather than class. The Stalinist regimes therefore sought to merge local nationalisms with Soviet Communism, but inevitably the task was a difficult one.

The Stalinists were therefore left with a problem: the economic system demanded high levels of heroism and self-sacrifice from workers and peasants, but it depended on repression and harsh discipline, wielded by white-collar workers and officials. Even more than in the USSR of the 1930s, the post-war Soviet system seemed to operate in the interests of the ‘socialist intelligentsia’ rather than the workers and peasants. This had its advantages, as it attracted young, ambitious people eager to advance themselves and develop their countries. At the same time, however, many ordinary people were deeply alienated, as were the non-Communist middle classes. The socialism Stalin exported throughout his empire therefore, like his buildings, looked monumental, but had serious cracks behind the façade.

The balance between repression and mobilization, and levels of support, differed in the various parts of the Communist bloc, however. It was at its most rigidly disciplinarian in the USSR itself. In Eastern Europe, in contrast, Communist parties were more dynamic, for they were transforming their societies and ‘building socialism’ from scratch. But the violence inevitably alienated many, and the be-medalled patriarchs found it increasingly difficult to inspire ordinary people. And as the hoped-for dynamism turned to
stasis
, Soviet socialism looked less like universal progress and more like Russian imperialism. The late-Stalinist model was most appealing in China – part of the USSR’s ‘informal’ empire – for it was seen as more effective in building a modern state than the more egalitarian ‘guerrilla’ socialism of the civil-war period. But here also the drawbacks soon became abundantly clear, and the way was soon prepared for a sharp rejection of the Stalinist vision.

In 1951 a certain Mishchenko, of the Molotov military academy in the city of Kalinin (formerly, and now, Tver), reported on the visible poverty in its centre:

Mishchenko’s priorities were typical of the late-Stalinist elite. Poverty and inequality within the USSR were less important than international status, and after World War II Stalin sacrificed the living standards of Soviet citizens to the needs of the crippling Cold War arms race. The Soviet Union was, of course, a victorious power, but its triumph had been a Pyrrhic one. At the end of the conflict it was at a huge disadvantage in its competition with the enormously wealthier United States: with a massive 23 per cent of its assets destroyed and 27 million lives lost, it was faced with the task of rebuilding with a devastated population.
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Labour shortages were especially bad in the countryside, and contributed – together with drought and harsh state grain requisitions – to the famine of 1946–7 in which between 1 and 1.5 million died. The Soviet state was barely able to cope with the chaos, disorder, poverty and criminality in the aftermath of war. And at the same time it was faced with the task not only of rebuilding but also of creating a virtually new, technologically advanced military complex. By the end of the 1930s, the USSR had more or less eliminated the technological gap with Germany, but the challenge was far greater in the mid-1940s now that American weaponry had become atomic.