The Red Flag: A History of Communism (95 page)

The military now took power following Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law, killing about a hundred people. Solidarity activists were arrested, and stability was restored. As Jaruzelski had predicted, the measure removed any remaining legitimacy the party still possessed. This was barely a Communist state any more. The military man Jaruzelski, with his signature dark glasses, looked more like an austere version of a Latin American dictator than a Communist party leader; the state and the army now ruled, not the party.
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Most importantly, the events of 1981 made clear that the limits of Soviet support for Eastern Europe were being reached. The Soviets made it clear to Communist elites (though not to the rest of the world) that the Brezhnev doctrine and the promise of military support for Soviet-bloc regimes were now dead.
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And although the USSR was forced to give huge credits to Poland in 1981–2, Soviet patience with its unstable East European clients was running out, partly because it was itself feeling poorer; whilst the oil price was still high, it had been falling since 1981. In response to threats
that the East Germans would have to borrow more money from the West unless it received greater infusions from the USSR, Nikolai Baibakov, the head of the Soviet planning organization, told them that they had to cut investment:

Communists in Eastern Europe were not the only ones to suffer in the new international economic order. Many Third World states, of all ideologies, were hit by the rises in interest rates and the world recession, as raw material prices fell and debt became expensive. Some Communist regimes in the Third World, though, were especially vulnerable because they were more likely to pursue ambitious policies of economic development and welfare. The debt problem, therefore, especially affected them.

Exacerbating the economic and debt crises was the fact that Communist regimes were forced to deal with a newly assertive IMF and World Bank. In contrast to the 1970s, when these international institutions counselled state-led development, the United States now used them to impose its neo-liberal vision on the world. In February 1980, Robert McNamara, head of the World Bank, introduced the long-term ‘Structural Adjustment Loan’ programme for countries in economic trouble. This programme, together with those of the IMF, became one of the most effective weapons of neo-liberalism in the Second and Third Worlds. Under the slogan ‘stabilize, privatize and liberalize’, money was given only if the state was cut back, the economy was privatized and markets were unleashed.

There were now strong incentives for Communists in the Third World to abandon their economic model. But forces from within the Communist world also influenced them, notably the Chinese embrace of the market in 1978. The defection of the regime which had previously espoused hard-line Communist purism in the Third World, influenced by the success of the East Asian tigers, was a major blow to Marxist-Leninists. The failures of socialist planning also played their part. By the mid-1980s, several pro-Soviet
states were introducing market reforms. In 1984 Guinea-Bissau began cooperating with the IMF, as did Mozambique in 1987, the year after the death of Samora Machel in a plane crash. Even Angola, still involved in civil war with American allies and therefore excluded from IMF aid, introduced market reforms in 1985.

By the mid-1980s, debt and financial crisis had weakened Communism, and had a devastating effect on regimes in the South. But they did not destroy it in its Soviet and East European heartland. Indeed, conservative Communists in the USSR, hostile to economic reform, pointed to debt as evidence of the dangers of capitalism and collaboration with the West. The results of Ronald Reagan’s neo-conservative revolution in American foreign policy were similar: they had a major impact in the South, but a much more ambiguous one on the USSR and Eastern Europe.

The mid-1980s was an era of war-scares, on both sides of the iron curtain, and in the United States several popular films and TV series were screened on the theme of Soviet attacks and invasions. One of the most implausible – and violent – was
Red Dawn
(1984).
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The plot is far-fetched: the perfidious Europeans – with the exception of loyal Albion – have abandoned Washington; a revolutionary regime controls Mexico; and the Soviets and their allies (the Cubans and Nicaraguans) occupy vast swathes of the central United States. Rather like the inhabitants of 1950s Mosinee, Americans are subjected to the grim propagandizing of Soviet culture, and cinema-goers have to put up with screenings of
Aleksandr Nevskii
. Nevertheless, many Americans collaborate, and the Soviets become entrenched. But there is one thing the Reds did not foresee: ‘the invading armies planned for everything – except for eight kids called “The Wolverines”’. The Wolverines, most of whom are members of a small-town high-school football team in Calumet, Colorado, wage a guerrilla war against the occupying forces in the name of freedom, and become a serious threat to the Soviets. They are eventually defeated, but when America is finally liberated their names are remembered, inscribed on the ‘Partisan Rock’.

The film was financed by Hollywood, not sponsored by government. But it did capture a new American self-image that became increasingly influential during the second Cold War. No longer was the United States Nixon’s global policeman, maintaining order against Communist revolutionaries through a network of regional gendarmes.
It was the underdog, the partisan and the freedom fighter, struggling against the totalitarian monolith. And whilst the elderly Reagan was hardly a capitalist Che Guevara, he was determined to bring an idealism and militancy to the American cause that had hitherto been the preserve of the Communist guerrillas.

Reagan, the son of a poor shoe salesman from Illinois, was not a conventional neo-conservative. His contemporaries found him unfathomable, and he remains something of an enigma to this day. He possessed an idealistic and optimistic disposition, inherited from his Evangelical Christian mother, which was very popular amongst American voters. And yet he was also a liberal militant, determined to resist the dangers to the ‘free world’ posed by the Communist ‘evil empire’. In his fundamental optimism he was closer to the neo-liberals. He was convinced that Communism would ultimately fall because it was economically irrational, and he had a genuine commitment to nuclear disarmament. Nevertheless, he shared much of the belligerence of the neo-conservatives, especially in the early years of his presidency. He was a passionate anti-Communist ideologue, and he presided over the largest peacetime rearmament in American history, with defence spending absorbing 30 per cent of the federal budget between 1981 and 1985. He also appointed neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to junior positions (though ‘doves’ were also powerful in his administration), and his Marxist-inflected language echoed theirs. As he told the British parliament in 1982:

In the Third World, there were strong practical reasons for Reagan to adopt a revolutionary idealism. Nixon’s gendarmes had failed to stem the tide of Communist success, as had Jimmy Carter’s efforts to force them to respect human rights. Reagan was determined to use military force to roll back Communism – especially in Central America. He refused to accept that Communism was a response to local injustices; guerrillas were ‘military personnel’, trained by the USSR.
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However, he was still constrained by Vietnam, and there was little public support for
a return to sustained all-out warfare in the Third World. Reagan could fight conventional wars where victory was easy – as in the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 – but such cases were few. The use of guerrilla strategies, developed by Communists, was therefore an excellent solution. They allowed pro-American movements to appear indigenous; they were cheap; and they could be carried out in secret, without congressional oversight. The new policy, pursued in Nicaragua, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia and El Salvador, was blandly dubbed ‘Low Intensity Conflict’, but it owed a great deal to the tactics of Maoism and the guerrilla tradition.
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Rather than supporting military dictators, the United States would support local insurgent groups. Warfare was to be ‘civilianized’ – the Maoist ‘people’s war’ – whilst ‘psyops’ (‘agitprop’ in Communist language) was central to the new strategy. Leftist and Communist regimes were to be undermined using sabotage and assassinations. But efforts were also made to win the political argument and build up ‘third forces’, against the Communists and the old dictators. Anti-Communists amongst the urban middle classes and conservative churches were mobilized, and sometimes old authoritarian allies, like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, were abandoned. By 1985 the strategy was being justified ideologically, as the ‘Reagan Doctrine’, a policy of ‘anti-Communist revolution’ designed to bring democracy to the world.
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Reagan began his military counter-offensive against Communism in Central America, and Low Intensity Conflict was pursued most consistently in Nicaragua. The Americans supported a number of opposition groups, including a ‘third force’ of liberals and conservatives and the insurgent ‘Contras’. Many of the Contras were linked with the old ruler, Somoza, but covert American trainers and advisers refashioned them into a modern guerrilla force. Some CIA officials secretly issued them a manual in 1983,
Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare
, whole passages of which could have been written by Mao or Che Guevara. The pamphlet began with the sentence ‘Guerrilla war is essentially a political war’, and went on to explain how the Contras were to politicize their own forces, so they could wage a campaign of subversion against the regime. ‘Political cadres’ would organize the rank and file, making sure that they became motivated through ‘self-criticism’ and ‘group discussions’ which would ‘raise the spirit and improve the unity of thought’. The guerrillas would then carry out ‘armed propaganda’,
kidnapping and assassinating government officials as ‘enemies of the people’. At the same time, they would give the peasant population ‘ideological training’ mixed with ‘folkloric songs’, impressing on them the Russo-Cuban imperialist nature of the Sandinista regime.
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In practice, the Contras relied much more on violence, intimidation and economic sabotage than winning hearts and minds. By 1988 the Sandinistas were defeating the Contras militarily, but the war and an American embargo had wrecked the economy, and the Sandinistas themselves alienated some. When elections were held in 1990, a majority, some sick of war and believing that it would only end when the regime fell, others antagonized by the Sandinistas’ overly ambitious programmes of reform and hostility to criticism, voted for the pro-American, neo-liberal candidate, Violetta Barrios de Chamorro. Extreme violence was used elsewhere in Central America to suppress Marxist insurgencies, this time unleashed by local dictators’ paramilitaries and aided by Washington. In Guatemala, death squads with names like
Ojo por Ojo
(‘Eye for Eye’) massacred tens of thousands, mainly indigenous Indians, whilst the El Salvadorean civil war was particularly brutal.
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By the end of the 1980s, the death toll in the Central American wars was enormous: almost 1 per cent of the Nicaraguan population died in the Contra wars.
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The prospects for anti-Communist guerrilla war were even rosier in other regions of 1970s Communist expansion. The United States, working closely with South Africa, continued to promote UNITA’s war of attrition in Angola, in which some 800,000 died and almost a third of the population of 10 million were displaced.
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The Mozambican regime, meanwhile, was brought to its knees by the South Africans and RENAMO, and it made peace in 1984. But the centre of the guerrilla strategy lay in the struggle against the USSR in Afghanistan. Even before the Soviet invasion, the Afghan Communists were faced with powerful, Islamist insurgents – the Mujahedin. The Carter administration had given the insurgents limited military help, supplementing Saudi and Pakistani support, but aid was substantially increased in 1983. Young men from throughout the Muslim world flocked to join the
jihad
or holy war, including the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden; this was their Spanish Civil War. For Reagan, on the other hand, supporting the Mujahedin fitted perfectly into the strategy of anti-Communist guerrilla war. Unlike the Iranian brand of Islamism, which had a strongly socialist colouring, the Mujahedin were socially conservative. They were also an anti-imperialist movement, with genuine popular support. As CIA Director William Casey enthused, ‘Here is the beauty of the Afghan operation. Usually it looks as if the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys.’
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The Americans, of course, were deeply to regret their support for the Mujahedin in the 1990s when they turned on their erstwhile patron. But according to the Kirkpatrick doctrine it mattered little that they were not liberals, so long as they opposed Communist totalitarianism.