The Red Flag: A History of Communism (79 page)

By the end of the 1960s it was clear that Communism was no longer a radically transformative force, at least in Europe. Many Communists and even ordinary citizens in some countries were still convinced that their system was superior to capitalism, but they no longer expected it to forge radically egalitarian social relations, or to create a dynamic new economy to compete with capitalism: both radical equality and economic dynamism were simply too difficult to reconcile with party dictatorship and the command economy. Ambitions therefore became more realistic: Communism’s objective was to be a stable system of economic welfare and justice. Similar trends can be seen in China. Although China remained much more egalitarian than the Soviet bloc until Mao’s death in 1976, as early as 1968 it was becoming clear to Mao that the Radicalism of the Cultural Revolution was unsustainable. And as the leadership turned away from its earlier Radicalism, China itself moved towards its own version of socialist paternalism. In many parts of the Communist world, the system found some sort of equilibrium, as Communist regimes learnt how to live in peace with at least most of their people.

In the autumn of 1988, a pair of Hungarian sociologists, Ágnes Horváth and Árpád Szakolczai, both deeply unsympathetic towards the ruling Communists, were finally given permission to embark on a project most thought impossible: an independent academic analysis of party officials in the district organizations of Budapest – the way they worked, their values, and their psychological profile.
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But traditional Communist secrecy almost aborted the research even before it began. How, the anxious Communists asked, could non-party people be trusted to study the comrades? Eventually, however, a tiny window of opportunity opened: liberalization had reached the point where the party was willing to be scrutinized from outside – though it was in fact only a matter of months before the party’s monopoly ended. Even so, a wary Horváth and Szakolczai sent their results for safekeeping to a number of well-known Hungarian academics as soon as they had a first draft, terrified lest their work be confiscated and suppressed.

The results of their research surprised them. When a group of party ‘instructors’ – middle- to low-ranking full-time officials – was asked what made them especially well-suited to politics, the replies were remarkably similar. One answered: ‘I can make personal connections easily in all areas. I love to deal with people’s problems’; another: ‘I planned this job as a temporary
service
. I felt I could easily make contacts with people; I have empathy’ (italics added). Though, of course, these answers should not be taken at face value, they are remarkably consistent with the results of questionnaires they completed on their personalities and values. The researchers had expected the officials to be typical political leaders: decisive, independent and self-consciously rational problem-solvers. Instead, they saw themselves as particularly flexible, emotional and sympathetic. Moreover, when asked about their values, they were much more likely than other educated people to value individual responsibility, hard work, tolerance and imagination. On the other hand, they were less likely than others to see rules and constraints, whether internal (such as self-control and honesty) or external (such as obedience and politeness) as virtues.

These Hungarian instructors sound like a group of social workers or psychotherapists, rather than the leather-jacketed militants of old. However, these results are less remarkable given how radically Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc had changed since the early 1950s (and in China from the mid-1970s). The party – unlike the more technocratic state organizations – had always prized emotional skills, and the ability to connect with ‘the masses’. These were, after all, essential
qualities if one was to persuade and mobilize others. But now the heroic era was past, the party increasingly saw itself as an organization committed to looking after the welfare of its citizens, although, of course, it propounded a very particular vision of welfare – moralistic, paternalistic, economically egalitarian and socially conservative. The values endorsed by these Hungarian officials were useful in this type of organization. They wanted to help people, prized personal relationships, eschewed abstract, impersonal rules, and were happy to discriminate, seeing some as more deserving than others. Unlike previous party officials, those of the 1980s were generally highly educated, and Communist parties increasingly presented themselves as scientifically trained professionals. They were not, however, Max Weber’s rational bureaucrats; indeed, they strongly disapproved of formal or routinized methods. As one said, ‘I consider the most important thing to do… is to talk. [Information] from paper – that information smells of paper.’
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Therefore, outside the Stalinist periphery, Communist parties no longer treated their populations as guerrilla armies; citizens were not expected to be ‘labour heroes’; nor were egalitarian social and gender relations enforced. They were also no longer so concerned with transforming their citizens’ internal beliefs, though some regimes, such as the Chinese and the East German, were more concerned with ideological belief than others, such as the Hungarian and Soviet. Rather, the paternalistic party-state looked after the population and used coercion to make sure they stayed in line – they were ‘welfare dictatorships’, as one scholar has put it.
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They also gave privileges according to people’s ‘service’ to the state and society – a non-military version of the tsarist and Stalinist ‘service aristocracy’, which had now been extended from the elite to society as a whole. In some states they were also reminiscent of the ‘well-ordered police state’ imported into Russia from Central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which the ‘police’ (now the party) were not just responsible for law and order, but also for making sure that the citizenry were both moral and productive.
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But this paternalistic structure had its weaknesses. It was very difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that rewards were given in a way that was seen as just. The officials in charge of distributing goods often acted corruptly, helping friends and family. And even if they had been more altruistic (and some parties, such as the East German one, were less corrupt than others), a system founded explicitly on official decisions about
who is and who is not virtuous is bound to be vulnerable to criticism. Capitalism, paradoxically, is less vulnerable, because its inequalities can be justified as, in some way, a ‘natural’ impersonal phenomenon – the product of the iron laws of the market.

The style and degree of paternalism varied from place to place, depending on local political cultures and social conditions. Some of the most intrusive examples were to be found in China. The enormous reservoir of rural Chinese labour gave the regime much more power over the workforce than in the Soviet bloc, where managers found it difficult to stop workers leaving for other jobs. Old Guomindang practices and a Confucian paternalistic culture also had an influence. Neighbourhood committees played a much greater role in all aspects of people’s lives than municipal bodies did in the Soviet bloc, and more closely resembled the Japanese neighbourhood police (with its acute personal knowledge of local inhabitants) than Soviet local councils. The lowest rung on the political hierarchy was the residents’ small group unit, which looked after between fifteen and forty families, and communicated orders from on high whilst organizing welfare and policing citizens. In the workplace, the
danwei
(‘work unit’), like the Soviet
kollektiv
, provided housing, clinics, childcare and canteens for workers, but it had even greater sway, and even relatively low-level factory officials had powers to allocate apartments, bicycle coupons and other rations.
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To receive these ‘favours’, workers had to behave in an approved way. Even their private lives were carefully scrutinized. As one worker, interviewed by the political scientist Andrew Walder, explained:

Interestingly, poor performance in the job attracted less strict punishment, although much depended on the attitude and class origin of the worker. As one explained, ‘if the person admits guilt and makes a self-criticism, usually the group will recommend leniency, and give the person “help” or education. Usually this is enough, because this is embarrassing for a person.’
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In the Soviet bloc, by contrast, such an intrusive approach to private life only extended to party members. Local councils were too remote to
have very close contact with their inhabitants, and factories had less control over their workforces. Even so, the post-1964 Soviet system was strongly paternalistic, though socialist paternalism was not the same as the eighteenth-century paternalism of the well-ordered police state. In principle, citizens were not merely expected to be loyal to the party boss, factory manager or collective farm chairman, but had also to behave in a socialist way, that is, to work hard, be virtuous, and participate in collective activities or ‘social work’ as it was called. For workers, this would involve doing an unpaid shift for some worthy cause or serving on a trade union committee. For academics and professionals, it might include giving evening lectures to workers: the ‘social work’ given to Alexander Zinoviev, an academic philosopher and dissident commentator on Soviet society in the 1970s, involved drawing cartoons for public ‘wall-newspapers’ and travelling with an agitprop brigade around the countryside giving lectures.
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This kind of ‘social work’, though, was not done by everybody. Like party culture more generally, it penetrated the upper echelons of society to a much greater extent than society as a whole: in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s, it was compulsory for party members, whatever job they did, whilst 60–80 per cent of educated people participated, compared with 40–50 per cent of industrial workers and 30–40 per cent of farm workers.
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Motives were mixed. Many believed social work – especially committee meetings – were pointless and only participated because they were pressured to do so, or because they hoped for benefits. As Zinoviev explained: ‘If someone avoids social work, then that fact is noted and measures are taken. And there are several measures, ranging from pay rises and promotion to the solution of accommodation problems, the possibility of trips abroad or the chance of having one’s work published.’
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Even so, Zinoviev denied that ‘social work’ was always an empty formality that people were forced or bribed to perform. He insisted that it was often taken seriously: many people did it because it was good in itself, and it raised the reputation of the whole collective. It could also be a displacement activity. Surveys of academics found that older academics who had lost interest in their own research tended to be keener on social work than their younger colleagues.
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Like the ‘service aristocrats’ of old, therefore, some people laboured both for reward and for an ideal of service. For some, this was the
essence of mature socialism. One young Komsomol organizer in the early 1980s, interviewed by the ethnologist Alexei Yurchak, though critical of the boring and pointless meetings, insisted:

But not everybody was as convinced of the fairness of the system. Frau Hildegard B. from Magdeburg in the GDR was one. In 1975 after a very long wait, she finally received an allotment she had applied for, but at a far higher price than she was expecting. Furious, she protested to the authorities that she deserved better because she had loyally served the state as Chair of the Factory Trade Union Executive Committee. The Chair of the District section of the Association of Small Gardeners, Settlers and Small Animal Breeders wrote back to deny that she had been unfairly treated: all of those ahead of her had been virtuous ‘activists’ and deserved their privileges. Even so, ultimately he came to a compromise, and gave her a cheaper allotment elsewhere.
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The lengthy official response demonstrates the regime’s concern to be seen to be acting justly. Any suspicion that privilege was not closely attached to good citizenship was bound to erode general placidity and willingness to play by the rules. However, the more the state abandoned its ambitions to transform society, the more difficult it was to ensure a direct link between reward and service. This was increasingly the paternalism of the acquisitive boss and his clients, not of the loving father and his children. Meanwhile, subordinates realized that they were rewarded more for unswerving loyalty and sycophancy to their superiors rather than more abstract socialist virtue. For even though they no longer aspired to mobilize their workers to build the socialist utopia, bosses still exercised power over the details of everyday life.

When in 1983 the sociologist Michael Burawoy went to work in Hungary’s Bánki heavy-vehicle plant, he was struck by the contrasts between it and the Allied plant in Chicago where he had worked a decade earlier. Relations between managers and workers were very different. In the United States, jobs were not secure, but pay was; in Hungary, the reverse
was true. It was very difficult to sack people, but workers were paid strictly according to piece rates: if they only produced 50 per cent of their ‘norm’, they were paid 50 per cent of their wage; in the United States, independent trade unions ensured that workers were guaranteed a minimum of 100 per cent of their wage, whatever they produced. The Hungarian system gave managers and foremen a great deal of power, for they could set the work norms, and therefore pay, and they could allocate the best machines and the easiest work to their friends. So Burawoy, who, as a foreign interloper was given an old machine and a difficult job, only ever achieved 82 per cent of his norm, and earned 3,600 forints, unlike his favoured fellow worker who earned 8,480 forints.
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The Hungarian poet and leftist dissident-turned-Margaret-Thatcher-admirer Miklós Haraszti, who spent some time in the Red Star Tractor Factory in the early 1970s, described the role of the foreman: