The Red Flag: A History of Communism (93 page)

Hungarian polls in 1983–4 show a similar ideological division based on education. Sociologists found that 49 per cent of degree-holders favoured a liberalizing ‘democratic socialism’, compared with only 4 per cent of those with less than a secondary education. The vast majority of the least well-educated supported a number of other ideological positions which were fundamentally anti-reform.
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This growing difference between the university-educated and ordinary citizens, and the defection of the intelligentsia, was hardly surprising given the style of socialist paternalism that had prevailed since the 1960s. Since Stalin’s death, the party had been quick to respond to worker and peasant discontent by improving their living standards, and that had tended to undermine the privileged position enjoyed by the educated under Stalin.

At the same time, paternalism had undermined the prestige of the party amongst the educated. Throughout the Soviet bloc party bosses of all ranks were still largely people with political rather than technical skills – people like the officials Horváth and Szakolczai interviewed.
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They were also generally less well-educated than economic managers. And as the economies started to experience difficulties, the educated blamed officials’ amateurism and resented having to be subservient to people less well-educated than themselves. Even so, links between the intelligentsia and the Communist parties remained, especially at the very top, and it was through these channels that liberal reformist ideas penetrated the power structure. The educated may have been disillusioned with Communism, but its end was not brought by a broad-based middle-class revolution; it was a much more elitist affair. To look for the roots of the end of Communism, we need to look within the Communist party itself.

When, in 1986, the philosopher and covert ‘White’ Aleksandr Tsipko first visited the Central Committee building in Moscow’s Old Square as a newly appointed ideological consultant, he was stunned to discover a deeply anti-Communist atmosphere at the very heart of the Communist Party:

Tsipko, who had completely abandoned Marxism, noted how much things had changed since the pre-Prague Spring years when he worked in the Komsomol’s Central Committee. Then there had been a great deal of optimism about the future, and most of his colleagues had been convinced Communist nationalists, or ‘Red Slavophiles’ as he called them.
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During the 1970s, however, the atmosphere amongst the intelligentsia had become distinctly more liberal and pro-Western, and many had moved towards Social Democracy. These ideas had also affected the intellectuals who worked in party headquarters – indeed throughout the bloc (and in China as well) ‘party intelligentsias’ were often in the vanguard of reformist thought. Party intellectuals were very much part of the broader non-party intelligentsia, and shared their more liberal values, but they also had much closer links with foreigners than most people, especially in the USSR. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they were therefore more acutely sensitive than most to the USSR’s status abroad. And one group that was to become especially vocal and influential was those party members working in the Central Committee’s departments dealing with foreign affairs – in effect the successors of the Comintern. People like Georgii Shakhnazarov and Vadim Zagladin – both future advisers of Gorbachev – realized that the USSR was losing its moral force in the world.
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They sought high international status for the USSR, but they believed it could only be achieved if it changed and became the leader of a progressive, more liberal Communist movement. By concentrating exclusively on military power, the USSR was forfeiting its prestige, even amongst Western Communist parties. These reformers, initially keen supporters of Soviet involvement in Africa, were especially disillusioned by the militarization of Soviet support for revolutionary regimes in the Third World. They saw the ageing Brezhnev much as the previous generation had viewed the ageing Stalin: a reactionary figure who had detached the USSR from the cause of ‘progress’.

A good example of this type of party intellectual was Mikhail Gorbachev’s future ideology chief, Aleksandr Iakovlev. Born in 1923 to a peasant family, he had risen through the party, studied in party academic institutions, and become acting head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee from 1965. However, in 1972 he wrote an article criticizing all kinds of nationalism – including Russian ‘great-power chauvinism’ and anti-Semitism. Brezhnev, predictably, was displeased, and Iakovlev was exiled to Ottawa as ambassador to Canada.

His apparent misfortune, though, was in fact his big break. In 1983, a new member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev, visited Canada, and Iakovlev was in charge of organizing the trip. They got on well, Gorbachev complaining about
stasis
at home, and Iakovlev explaining ‘how primitive and shaming the policy of the USSR looks from here, from the other side of the planet’.
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When Gorbachev took power two years later, Iakovlev was to become one of his main mentors. Their Canadian meeting marked the beginning of an alliance between liberal party intellectuals and Marxist party reformers that was eventually to destroy Soviet Communism.

Ultimately, then, it was this small ‘vanguard’ alliance of Communist Party politicians and intellectuals that led the revolution against Communism – just as small bands of revolutionary intellectuals had brought Communism to power. But neither group was operating in a vacuum. By the early 1980s the future of Communism in the Soviet bloc looked increasingly grim. The majority of East European countries may have been stable – and, as we have seen, there was still much support for the regimes’ socialist paternalism – but the bloc had serious weaknesses, especially in Poland and in the developing world. And when, from the
end of the 1970s, international economic conditions deteriorated and the West began its counter-attack, the bloc became extremely vulnerable. In these conditions, a fundamentally conservative leadership was willing to give the reformers a hearing.

In 1980, when the Polish Communist Party effectively collapsed before the onslaught of the Solidarity independent trade union, the film director Andrzej Wajda produced his cinematic account of the uprising and its history –
Man of Iron
. The film used documentary footage of the uprising but it was also a conventional film drama. At its core was the relationship between the old worker Birkut and his educated son, Maciek. Birkut is the conscience of the Polish working class, disillusioned with the party, but sharing little sympathy with the student rebellions of 1968 and Maciek’s involvement in them. The mistrust between workers and students is reciprocated when the students refuse to support the 1970 Baltic shipyard strikes. When his father is shot by police, Maciek realizes that he has to forge a worker–intelligentsia alliance and becomes an activist in Gdańsk. After many struggles, his goal is achieved with the Solidarity strikes of 1980. And helping to forge this unity is the Catholic Church: Maciek plants a cross where his father fell, and he marries in a church, his (film-maker) wife given away by the leader of Solidarity, the mustachioed electrician Lech Wałesa (played by himself).

Wajda’s film reflected the crucial importance of the relations between white- and blue-collar workers. Divisions between the two were one of the main sources of stability in Communist regimes: society was too divided to mount a real challenge to the status quo. Also, many Polish workers, like their Soviet-bloc confrères, broadly endorsed socialist values and benefited from improving standards of living – a theme explored by the prequel to
Man of Iron
,
Man of Marble
. In Poland alone, however, the Communists’ paternalistic strategy failed to achieve the stability it needed, largely because nationalism, together with the extraordinary power of the Catholic Church, helped to reconcile white with blue.

Poland, of course, had been the Achilles heel of the bloc for decades, and after the 1956 crisis the Polish party’s retreat – on the issues of collectivization, religion and the private sector – was more extensive
than elsewhere. Even so, after a period of relative peace, conflict between the party and sections of society resumed after 1968. In that year Gomułka’s repression of student dissent alienated the intelligentsia, and in 1970 he antagonized workers with price rises. Strikes were put down by force, but Gomułka, who had survived so many vicissitudes, was forced to stand down. He was replaced by Edvard Gierek, a worker by background, who responded to worker discontent by pursuing one of the most lavish and expensive programmes of socialist paternalism in the bloc, all financed by Western loans. The strategy worked, for a time. Living standards rose by 40 per cent, and the party leaders basked in the public’s esteem: in 1975, when asked whether they had confidence in their national leaders, 84.8 per cent replied ‘yes’ or ‘rather so’.
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Yet in the absence of economic reforms, the massive new industrial investments did not provide the expected returns, and the leadership was forced to make sudden, savage cuts in investment and food subsidies. The resulting 60 per cent rise in food prices in 1976 showed how shallow and conditional popular support for the regime was. Workers’ strikes and violent demonstrations again flared up, and were again harshly suppressed. This time, though, the use of repression was more damaging to the regime. Notwithstanding
Man of Iron
, it was 1976 rather than 1970 that precipitated the worker–intelligentsia alliance, and in that year a group of thirteen intellectuals founded the Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR) to provide legal and other support for strikers, providing a model for many other oppositional groups throughout Poland. By 1980 Poland had a large network of democratic oppositional groups.

Central to this alliance was the Catholic Church – and this is one of the main reasons why Poland was different. As in the rest of the bloc, blue-collar and white-collar groups had very different views on politics: workers favoured equality much more than the intelligentsia, and many of the intellectual dissidents, with their Marxist background, were suspicious of the Church.
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Nevertheless, the Church successfully placed itself at the head of a nationalist, anti-Communist revival. Its massive nine-year campaign to celebrate the ‘Great Novena of the millennium’, the anniversary of the coming of Christianity to Poland, saw huge crowds marching behind the Black Madonna of Częstochowa and the Polish crowned eagle. By the mid-1970s, therefore, the dissident intelligentsia was beginning to move towards the Church (with the reforms
of the Second Vatican Council). When in 1978 the election to the papacy of Karol Wojtiła, Archbishop of Krakow and a worker in his youth, gave the Catholic Church even greater nationalist credentials, the Polish Communist party confronted a broad social movement united behind a coherent alternative ideology and an effective organization with international reach.
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The dissident Adam Michnik and the journalist Jacek Żakowski remember the power of this religious nationalism amongst workers:

As was clear from Skrzynecki’s comment, the intelligentsia and workers were now united behind the Catholic Church, and the Polish regime had to face unusually strong challenges to its authority. Even so, the Polish party’s travails were merely extreme forms of the forces buffeting every Communist state in the late 1970s and 1980s. All regimes, except the USSR’s, had taken advantage of the opening to the West in the mid-1970s and had borrowed money from Western banks. And all of them found their inefficient smokestack industries unable to pay off those debts with increased exports.

Yet they were suffering, in extreme form, from conditions that affected the whole of the industrialized world. A global glut of heavy industrial goods, new computer technologies, and the oil-price hike all demanded radical changes to an economic project developed in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time organized labour had been empowered by high levels of employment and the after-shocks of the 1968 rebellions. Wage levels rose as productivity and profitability fell, and business lost faith and refused to invest. Share prices, an indication of economies’ levels of optimism, fell by two thirds between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s.
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Clearly the industrialized world needed a new economic model – one that redirected investment into more profitable, high-tech areas.