The Red Flag: A History of Communism (53 page)

Many were caught up in the witch-hunt. The Anti-Fascist Committee was closed down, and Mikhoels murdered by the secret police. The film
Circus
was re-edited and Mikhoels’ performance of the Yiddish lullaby verse excised. Jews who embraced Yiddish culture were now ‘bourgeois nationalists’, those who were more assimilated were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. Various ‘conspiracies’ were discovered; some leading figures were arrested, including Molotov’s Jewish wife; many more lost jobs or were unable to continue their studies. Most worrying for Soviet Jews was the ‘discovery’ of a supposed plot by a ‘spy group of doctor-murderers’. These ‘monsters in human form’ – all of them Jews – had allegedly assassinated Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov (who had died of a heart attack in 1948). The so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was made public at the beginning of 1953, months before Stalin’s death; fortunately for Soviet Jews, the anti-Semitic campaigns did not survive him.

Some have seen these events as a fresh outbreak of the purges of the 1930s. They did have some similarities with the ethnic cleansings of the earlier period, but they were very different from many of the repressions, which had at their core the revival of ‘class struggle’. They were much more targeted and there were many fewer victims. Also the new message now being broadcast was of patriotic unity, not class division. These purges then were not a threat to the vast majority of party bosses, technical experts and other previously suspect elites. Stalin had learnt the lessons of the 1930s Terror. Never again would he allow mass ‘criticism from below’, nor would he try to mobilize the population with campaigns for ideological purity. The carrot of unequal wages and the managers’ stick was replacing appeals to worker heroism.

The new balance of power between elites and masses was reflected in the continuing embourgeoisement of culture. Paintings dwelt lovingly
on elaborate lampshades and curtains, and soft pink replaced red as the dominant colour. Novelistic heroes were no longer puritanical scourges of bureaucracy, but bluff and easy-going pragmatists. Whilst the appearance of a piano in a 1920s novel was always a sure sign that its owner was a bourgeois enemy, in the 1940s and 1950s pianos were approved of as markers of culture and education. Even Pasha Angelina, the famous Stakhanovite woman tractor-driver of the 1930s, had transferred her enthusiasms from the cultivation of wheat to cultivating her daughters’ pianistic virtuosity. In 1948 she wrote a magazine article in which she related that her youngest daughter, the delightfully named Stalinka, wanted to follow in her sister’s footsteps:

It would be misleading to see late Stalinism as a restoration of the tsarist
ancien régime
, populated with a new elite; this was a much more modern society – integrated, socially fluid and welfarist – than tsarist Russia. But after the War, Stalin went further than many other Communist leaders in jettisoning the remnants of radical socialism and embracing hierarchy, bolstered by
ancien régime
trappings and symbols. It was this model that was, at least in principle, exported to the USSR’s empire and its spheres of influence. However, the circumstances in Eastern Europe were rather different. East European Communists were introducing a wholly new social and political system, and inevitably pursued a more revolutionary politics, eliciting much opposition, but also some enthusiasm for the new order, at least for a time.

The Joke
, the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel, is the story of Ludvik, a bright and popular student during the Stalinist period of Czechoslovak history, whose life is ruined by a minor mistake. He is a keen party member, and a true believer, though his motives are mixed:

Yet far from being history’s master, he becomes its victim. For a ‘tiny crack’ opened up ‘between the person I had been and the person I should (according to the spirit of the times) and tried to be’.
²⁴
Whilst he can be earnest and committed at party meetings, he adopts a teasing, cynical persona when flirting with his fellow student Marketa. Marketa is a very different type of true believer, a straightforward, unsophisticated and humourless enthusiast. Much to Ludvik’s chagrin, she sends him a postcard praising the ‘healthy atmosphere’ of callisthenics, discussions and songs. Upset that she prefers party propagandizing to him, he sends a jokey riposte: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.’ But for the party this is no joke, and he is denounced as a Trotskyist and a cynic, whose nihilistic attitudes are sabotaging socialism. Stripped of party membership and with it his university place, he is forced to work in a labour brigade in the mines. Initially he attempts to rehabilitate himself – but he ultimately lapses into angry contempt for the shallow, folksy nationalism now being propagated by the party. The bitterness stays with him, and lays the ground for another series of disastrous jokes.

Kundera’s novel was loosely based on his own experience. The son of a famous pianist, he joined the party in 1948, a true believer, and has even been accused of informing on a Western spy; he was then expelled in 1950 for making a politically incorrect comment. He was therefore ideally placed to capture the atmosphere amongst educated youth during the revolutionary years of the early 1950s. For whilst the old Popular Front generation of Communist leaders was either assiduously conforming to the Moscow line or enduring purges and show trials, a younger group of enthusiastic Communists was coming to the fore. In part this was typical of the swing to the left in many countries amongst an anti-Nazi post-war youth, East and West. But their place on the periphery of a more successful Western Europe also explains their
choices. The Stalinist model could appeal to young and educated people in developing countries, for whatever its failings it seemed to provide a recipe for catching up. The conservative counts and generals and liberal professionals who had ruled most of Eastern Europe between the wars had been strikingly unsuccessful in improving their economies. After the disasters of the inter-war period, when the poor, weak and divided countries of the region had been at the mercy of an aggressive Nazi Germany, loss of liberty seemed to some to be a price worth paying for development and Soviet protection.

Moreover, Communism promised free education and an expanded state with large numbers of professional jobs – precisely what the ambitious, self-improving middle classes were seeking after the deprivations of Depression and war. Some groups with a middle-class background did suffer under late Stalinism. Class quotas were applied to education – the playwright and future dissident (and President of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel was one of the victims. Others suffered more directly in deportations and other persecutions. In 1951, for instance, many thousands of bourgeois were deported from Budapest to make way for workers in the new industrial plants.
²⁵
But High Stalinism never permitted class struggle to threaten economic productivity. The educated generally retained high status as long as they were loyal. And except in Poland (where over 70 per cent of the professional and business class had been killed during the War) and East Germany (where many fled to the West), the old middle classes were remarkably successful in clinging on to their dominant positions. In Czechoslovakia there was relatively little anti-bourgeois discrimination. In Hungary there was some, but in 1956 60–70 per cent of professionals still came from the old middle and upper classes. The regime, desperate to fill technical jobs, was often happy to turn a blind eye to the air-brushing of biographies. One girl, expelled from grammar school because she was labelled a member of the dangerous element of the bourgeoisie – the ‘x-class’ as it was informally called – was told that if she worked as a labourer for a time she could shed her bad background and return to school.
²⁶

The Captive Mind
– an analysis of the thinking of the Polish intelligentsia by the dissident Czesław Miłosz – explored these mixed motives: a sense that history was on Communism’s side, a moral commitment to national development, and self-advancement. He described the attitude of ‘Alpha’, a well-known writer:

For people like Alpha and Marketa, therefore, the regime seemed to be the harbinger not only of modernity, but also of morality. The Stalinist social model elevated self-sacrificing labour over all else. Production, not selfish consumption, was to lie at the centre of life. As if to prove the point, the numbers of shops fell and advertising entirely disappeared. And what shops there were became bill-boards for the regime of labour. The façades of the shops in Warsaw’s 1952 Marszałowska Residential District bore a huge narrative sculpture, depicting the heroic workers who had built the complex; there was no representation of the products sold inside.
²⁸
Production also lay at the centre of the massive new socialist cities of the period, like Nowa Huta outside Krakow in Poland, and Sztálinváros in Hungary, both built around huge steelworks.
²⁹
In the latter, the whole city plan was arranged around the twin poles of political and productive power: at one end of the main street lay the party headquarters and city hall and at the other the steel plant. The ideal of the large, collectivist factory was also brought to the countryside, through collectivization. As in the USSR, these campaigns were accompanied by repression of ‘kulaks’, and were also highly unpopular amongst the small-holding peasantry, now corralled into collectives and forced to give more food to the state for lower prices.

Indeed, despite valorization as the ‘owners’ of the state, workers and peasants tended to be the groups most disillusioned with Communism, for it was they who bore the brunt of Eastern Europe’s ‘revolution from above’ after 1949 – a revolution even more rapid and radical than the USSR’s in the 1930s. This economic revolution probably damaged
living standards even more than in the 1930s USSR (although the income per capita was higher). Except in the more developed Czechoslovakia, investment in the industrial Plan was set at between 20 and 27 per cent of national income, compared with 9–10 per cent before.
³⁰
Consumer goods were no longer a priority, and collectivization contributed to dire food shortages.

For Communist leaders such suffering was the inevitable price of development; without foreign help there was no alternative to reducing consumption to fund investment. The Polish secret police chief, Jakub Berman, explained:

Others, though, were sceptical of Berman’s reasoning. For critics, the Five-Year Plans were imperialist projects pure and simple, designed to extract resources for the Soviet military effort. The huge sums taken by the USSR in reparations reinforced these views: between $14 billion and $20 billion (thus more, possibly, than the $16 billion given by the United States to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan).
³²
Most of these reparations came from East Germany, but all the satellites’ economies were affected. The euphemistically named Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), founded in January 1949, was also designed in such a way that economic cooperation furthered Soviet interests.

The perception that the USSR was an imperial power, squeezing the economic lifeblood from its East European colonies, was deeply damaging to the Communist regimes in those countries. Communism had always been most successful when it could enmesh itself within local nationalisms, and the Stalinist regimes did try to present themselves as indigenous. However, their attempts to drape themselves in national colours were often unconvincing, and soon, as Kundera demonstrated, even loyal Communists developed a bitter contempt for the Russians. As Czesław Miłosz wrote, many Polish intellectuals privately harboured ‘an unbounded contempt for Russia as a barbaric country’. Their position was ‘Socialism – yes, Russia – no’.
³³
Rather like Béla Kun in 1919, they came to believe that East Europeans were actually far better able to realize socialism than Russians because they were more civilized,
intelligent and organized. But unable to say so openly, they hypocritically praised Russian literature, songs and actors at every turn.