The Red Flag: A History of Communism (74 page)

In 1974 Edgar Papu, a Romanian literary critic, wrote an article in the Bucharest journal
Twentieth Century
that elaborated a rather farfetched theory. He called his idea ‘Romanian Protochronism’. Papu argued that, throughout history, literary movements and styles commonly believed to be West European in origin – the baroque, Romanticism, the ideas and styles of Flaubert and Ibsen – could actually be found in Romanian literature first. Protochronism became an enormously popular idea in Romanian culture in the 1970s and 1980s, and was endorsed by Ceauşescu himself.
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Protochronism, of course, had been seen before, in the Soviet claims of the late 1940s that Russians had invented the telephone and the light-bulb. This was no accident. Romania was essentially importing a version of High Stalinism: a politics of hierarchy and discipline was wedded to an economics of industrialization and an ideology of nationalism. It was joined in this strategy by Albania, on the other side of the Balkans. Both Romania and Albania were non-Slavic agrarian societies; both were far away from the flashpoints of Central Europe and the impracticality of Soviet invasion gave them room for manoeuvre; and both parties saw Khrushchev’s Soviet Union as the new imperialist power – a threat to their national autonomy.

Why did they have such a strange, counter-intuitive view? Surely Stalin, not Khrushchev, was the imperialist? Khrushchev had indeed made real efforts to extend a new spirit of fraternity to Stalin’s empire. The old diktats gave way to greater freedom for local Communists. Stalin had treated East European party bosses as if they were vassals in a patrimonial court, and their visits to Moscow were almost private
affairs, rarely publicized. Now the relationship was much more equal. Visiting party leaders were treated as heads of state on official visits, and were spared the humiliations and post-prandial dancing sessions of the late-Stalinist court. Khrushchev also abolished Stalin’s old nocturnal timetable. Certainly, the Soviets continued to exert direct influence in their satellites’ security services and military, and they made it clear that there were boundaries to the freedom: capitalism and a multi-party system were out of the question. But Khrushchev’s reconciliation with Tito in 1956 marked a major change. The Soviets now accepted that Stalinist ambitions for a monolithic bloc were over; as they now declared, the ‘paths of socialist development vary according to the country and the conditions that prevail there’.
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The economic logic of the bloc had also altered under Khrushchev to a less imperialistic direction. The old exploitation gave way to subsidies.
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By the late 1950s it was the USSR that was transferring wealth to its satellites, not vice versa – most notably when Khrushchev gave János Kádár 860 million roubles’ worth of aid to prevent the Hungarian regime from collapsing during the anti-Communist strike wave of 1956–7. The subsidies increased with time and by the 1970s and 1980s had become a serious drain on the Soviet economy.

At the same time, however, Khrushchev began to take the economics of the Soviet bloc more seriously. He was not satisfied with Stalin’s loosely articulated congeries of militarized buffer states. Inspired by the example of the European Economic Community founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, Khrushchev sought to create something more ambitious. In the early 1960s he tried to introduce a ‘socialist division of labour’ into Comecon – encouraging the national economies to concentrate on areas where they enjoyed a comparative advantage. But to the poorer nations this policy really did look like imperialism. Stalin may have seemed like a pillaging imperialist to the developed states of northeastern and central Europe. But to the agrarian states of south-eastern Europe, he had offered a route to wealth and independence: the command economy. Khrushchev, in contrast, threatened to condemn them for ever to impoverished agrarian dependence, supplying food to the richer North. From the perspective of non-industrialized countries, Khrushchev’s demand that they confine themselves to producing food and primary products for the needs of the Soviet economy would imprison them in permanent inferiority.

The Romanian Communists were always likely to find nationalism alluring because they had unusually shallow political roots.
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Most Communist leaders in the inter-war period were from Romania’s ethnic minorities (many were Jews) and when they came to power they were under intense pressure to establish some appeal to the majority population. The ethnic Romanian ‘local’ Communist Georghiu-Dej – a former railwayman (and accomplished Machiavellian) – eventually seized the leadership, successfully outmanoeuvring the Jewish ‘Moscow’ Communist Ana Pauker. While Stalin lived Georghiu-Dej followed a slavishly pro-Soviet line. But weakened by the denunciation of Stalin in 1956, he increasingly looked to nationalism to bolster his regime. Lacking a committed group of Communists in its middle ranks, the Romanian party found itself increasingly reliant on officials with strongly nationalistic views. This was a nation with a traumatic recent history: it had been heavily bombed, many of its Jewish citizens had been massacred, it had lost hundreds of thousands of men fighting alongside the Germans, and it had permanently lost substantial territories – including Bessarabia to the USSR – resulting in substantial population transfers. It is no surprise that questions of national integrity and status should have been central, even to Communist politics.

Georghiu-Dej gradually began to distance Romania from the Soviet Union, negotiating the withdrawal of Red Army troops in 1958 and refusing to take sides on the Sino-Soviet split. The final break came in 1962 when Khrushchev tried to launch his new division of labour within Comecon. The Romanians responded by issuing a ‘declaration of autonomy’ in 1964 and began to pursue an independent foreign policy (though within the Warsaw Pact), forging links with Yugoslavia, France and even the United States. On the death of Gheorghiu-Dej the following year, his successor Ceauşescu continued the new nationalist line, which he justified with an intensely chauvinistic ideology.

Ceauşescu, born in 1918, the son of poor, ethnically Romanian peasants and apprenticed to a cobbler at the age of eleven, had little education. By the age of fifteen, however, he had been elected to the Communist-led Anti-Fascist Committee. From then on he was in and out of prison, where he received an education in Marxism and became part of the Dej faction. On becoming premier in 1965 it seemed that Ceauşescu would probably combine a new nationalist ethos with some form of cultural and economic liberalization, and he tried to gain the
support of intellectuals through a limited cultural relaxation. But this was always likely to be temporary. Ceauşescu had been committed to heavy industrial development, quoting the nineteenth-century historian A. D. Xenopol – ‘to remain only agricultural is… to make ourselves for all time the slaves of foreigners’ – and many agreed with him.
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Meanwhile, the Prague Spring convinced Ceauşescu of the dangers of liberal political reforms, and the popularity of his opposition to the Soviet invasion demonstrated the power of Romanian nationalism.

The tenth party congress of 1969, at which Ceauşescu delivered a marathon speech lasting five and a half hours (punctuated every half an hour by a waiter in a white jacket bringing a glass of water), marked the beginning of his complete control of the party, and the launch of an exceptionally extravagant leadership cult.
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By 1974 he was being compared to Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Pericles, Cromwell, Peter the Great and Napoleon.
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In many ways this was just a more extreme version of Tito’s multifaceted cult, in which the leader posed both as ascetic revolutionary for the party members, and as new king for the peasantry. The principal difference was the elevation of various relatives to high positions, and of his wife, Elena, to cultic status. This was, of course, typically monarchical; as the joke went, if Stalin had created Socialism in One Country, Ceauşescu had established Socialism in One Family. Yet Elena’s virtues were not merely uxorious, but, importantly, scientific. She pursued a career as a research chemist, and from the 1970s was described as ‘eminent personage of Romanian and international science’, ‘Academician Doctor Engineer [
Ingener
] Elena Ceauşescu’ (hence commonly called ‘Adie’ by the impertinent).
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She was also credited with the invention of a major new polymer, though when asked to discuss her researches in public she became mysteriously tongue-tied.

Like other Communist leaders in Balkan societies, then, Ceauşescu projected an eclectic mixture of political messages: monarchical, scientific and Communist. He even briefly flirted with Maoism, visiting China in 1971, though he did this largely to establish his independence from Moscow. But trumping all these conflicting attributes of Romanian Communist ideology was ethnic nationalism. In the 1970s, Ceauşescu set about creating an ethnically homogeneous state. Jews were allowed to emigrate, as were Germans (for a price, paid by the West German government), whilst efforts were made to assimilate the resentful Hungarians. Ceauşescu’s chauvinism was clearly difficult to marry with
Marxism, though the Romanians did their best, dredging up some obscure jottings by Marx which seemed to condone Romanian claims to Bessarabia.
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But it seems to have been very popular, and the Romanian regime was remarkably successful in attracting intellectuals to its cause.

On the other side of the Balkans, the Albanian Communists did not espouse such a crudely ethnic nationalism. They had little interest, for instance, in the rights of the Kosovar Albanian minority in Yugoslavia. But like the Romanians, they welcomed the Stalinist model as a way of building national strength.

Born ten years before Ceauşescu in 1908, Enver Hoxha was a small landowner’s son from southern Albania, and he always claimed that his uncle, an old Albanian patriot, had imbued him with an ardent belief in ‘Albanianism’. Hoxha won a government scholarship to study sciences at Montpellier University, and from there he went to the Sorbonne to study philosophy. He was one of the many Communist leaders of the developing world – including Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai and Pol Pot – who were inducted into Communist culture by the French Communist Party, and it was there that he began to see Stalinism as a solution to Albania’s backwardness. When he returned to Albania, he briefly taught French. But when he refused to join the Fascist Party during the Italian occupation he was sacked. He then set up a tobacconist’s shop which became a centre of undercover Communist activism.

He was a confident, articulate figure, who, like Tito, liked to dress well. Indeed, sartorial issues lay behind his conflict with the equally vain Tito: when he visited Tito in June 1946, Hoxha was appalled at his arrogance and jealous of his extravagance – his palatial surroundings, white and gold uniform and ‘haughty’ manner. He and his fellow Albanians felt humiliated and patronized. So whilst Tito complained about Soviet imperialistic arrogance, Hoxha saw Tito as the real imperialist. Yugoslav attempts to dominate the region soured the relationship further, and Albania was delighted when Tito broke from the USSR in 1948. Inevitably, therefore, the Soviet–Yugoslav rapprochement of 1955 spoiled Soviet relations with Albania, and Hoxha was further angered at Khrushchev’s attempt, as he saw it, to consign Albania to the status of a permanent agricultural ghetto within Comecon. From 1960 relations between Albania and the USSR deteriorated. The formal break came in 1961, with Hoxha denouncing Khrushchev in typically vituperative
language as ‘the greatest counter-revolutionary charlatan and clown the world has ever known’.
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In that year the Third Five-Year Plan launched an intensive programme of Albanian industrialization, and industrial output rose from 18.2 per cent of national income in 1960 to a massive 43.3 per cent in 1985.

To his orthodox Stalinism Hoxha added a number of other elements. The first was the ethnic and clan politics of Albania. The party systematically favoured the southern Tosks, of whom Hoxha was one – a group that had resented the suzerainty of the northern Ghegs for some time. And within the Tosks, Hoxha depended on a close-knit group of clans. Of sixty-one members of the Central Committee in 1961, there were five married couples (including Hoxha and his wife), and twenty were related as sons-in-law or cousins.
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In glaring contrast to this traditional ‘tribal’ politics was an adherence to Maoism, a tendency that emerged in the 1960s as Albania forged links with China in one of the more curious alliances of the era. Hoxha’s ‘Maoism’, however, was rather closer in spirit to late Stalinism than Chinese Communism. The works of Mao were used to justify his purges, and he also shared Mao’s love of and talent for vitriolic invective. His campaigns, however, were highly controlled, and bore few signs of Mao’s populism.

The most controlled of the High Stalinist states, however, was undoubtedly North Korea. After the end of the Korean War, and Stalin’s death, direct Soviet influence declined, but Kim continued to use High Stalinist policies, combined with Japanese and indigenous traditions for nationalist objectives. The Korean War had left a deep, unhealed wound in the form of the border dividing North and South; Kim Il Sung faced a threat from the American-backed South, and he himself continued to dream of reunification under his control. After the end of the war a technocratic ‘right’ emerged within the leadership, which argued for a more balanced, consumer-oriented economy, but they were soon defeated and purged. Kim insisted on an industrial and military buildup under the slogan, ‘Arms in the one hand and a hammer and sickle in the other!’
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It was unclear how one hand could manipulate both a hammer and a sickle but in 1958 – the year of China’s Great Leap Forward – Kim believed ‘Great Break’-style storming could overcome any obstacles. He called this the ‘Chollima’ campaign, after the magical winged horse from Korean mythology that could cover extraordinary distances at great speed.