The Red Flag: A History of Communism Read online

  DAVID PRIESTLAND

  The Red Flag

  Communism and the Making

  of the Modern World

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2009

  Copyright © David Priestland, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-141-95738-8

  In memory of my mother

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: 1789–1889–1989

  Prologue: Classical Crucible

  1. A German Prometheus

  2. Bronze Horsemen

  3. Under Western Eyes

  4. Men of Steel

  5. Popular Fronts

  6. The East is Red

  7. Empire

  8. Parricide

  9. Guerrillas

  10. Stasis

  11. High Tide

  12. Twin Revolutions

  Epilogue: Red, Orange, Green… and Red?

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.

  1. Eugene Delacroix, July 28: Liberty Leading the People, 1830, Musée du Louvre, Paris (copyright © akg-images/Erich Lessing)

  2. Cartoon from the 1898 German elections, from Der Wahre Jacob, 7 June 1898 (copyright © akg-images/Coll. Archiv f. Kunst & Geschichte)

  3. Vladimir Lenin speaks at the opening of a monument to Marx and Engels, 7 November 1918 (copyright © RIA Novosti/ TopFoto)

  4. A still from Sergei Eisenstein’s October (Ronald Grant Archive, London)

  5. Russian civil war poster, 1919 (Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine, Paris)

  6. Starvation in the Ukraine, 1921 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  7. ‘A Spectre Haunts Europe, the Spectre of Communism’; lithograph published by Mospoligraf, 1917–24 (The Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University RU/SU 524)

  8. D. S. Moor, Death to World Imperialism, 1919 (private collection)

  9. Vladimir Tatlin, model of the Monument to the Third International, 1920, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (PA76. Digital image copyright © 2009 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Florence)

  10. Ho Chi Minh speaking at the opening session of the Socialist Congress in France, 25 December 1920 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  11. Poster of the International Red Aid, 1930s (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  12. The young Mao Zedong, late 1920s (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  13. Stalin in a poster by Gustav Klutsis, The Reality of Our Program, 1931 (copyright © Posters Please, New York)

  14. Stalin in a poster Gustav Klutsis, Cadres Decide Everything, 1935 (copyright © Plakat)

  15. Stalin in a poster by K. Ivanov and N. Petrov, Glory to the Great Stalin, Architect of Communism (copyright © Plakat)

  16. A cartoon by V. Koslinszky, 1931 (private collection)

  17. Soviet prisoners constructing the White Sea–Baltic canal, 1931–3 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  18. Soviet peasants taking possession of land allocated in the collective farms, 1935 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  19. Red Army soldier and proletarian shaking hands, poster, 1928 (copyright © akg-images)

  20. Members of the English Tom Mann Brigade, Barcelona, 1936 (copyright © AP/Press Association Images)

  21. The pavilions of Germany and USSR at the Paris exposition of 1937 (copyright © LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

  22. A French Communist Party poster from 1946 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  23. Communist sympathizers at the Fiat auto plant in Turin, 14 June 1948 (copyright © David Seymour/Magnum Photos)

  24. A Russian policewoman directing traffic in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 5 July 1945 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/ Rue des Archives)

  25. Chinese poster showing a Soviet engineer instructing his Chinese colleague (International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands)

  26. V. Ivanov, Vigilance is Our Weapon (poster), 1953 (copyright © Plakat)

  27. Wojciech Fangor, Figures, 1950, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (photograph: Piotr Tomczyk)

  28. Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon at the United States exhibit at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, 24 July 1959 (copyright © AP/Press Association Images)

  29. Chinese peasants operating blast furnaces during the Great Leap Forward, 14 June 1958 (copyright © Henri-Cartier Bresson/Magnum Photos)

  30. Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, 1966 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  31. Execution during the Cultural Revolution, 1966–8 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  32. Alfredo Rostgaard, Che, 1967 (ICAIC)

  33. Alfredo Rostgaard, Christ Guerrilla, 1969 (International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands)

  34. A young soldier of the MPLA in Huambo, Angola, 23 February 1976 (copyright © AFP/ Getty Images)

  35. Demonstration outside a Soviet cultural shop, Budapest, 14 June 1956 (copyright © Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos)

  36. East Germans strengthening the Berlin wall (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives)

  37. (a) A Communist demonstration in Paris, May 1968 (copyright © Mary Evans Picture Library/Rue des Archives); (b) invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, Prague, August 1968 (copyright © Joseph Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

  38. Pol Pot leads a column of his men (copyright © AP Photo/Kyodo News)

  39. Killing field south of Phnom Penh, 1996 (copyright © Bruno Barbey/ Magnum Photos)

  40. Propaganda billboard of Colonel Mengistu, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1984 (copyright © Rex Features)

  41. Istvan Orosz, Comrades, It’s Over! (poster), Hungary, 1990 (copyright © Istvan Orosz)

  42. The fall of the Berlin Wall, 11 November 1989 (copyright © Raymond Depardon/Magn
um Photos)

  43. Ceremony to mark the arrival of the Olympic Torch on Tian’anmen Square in Beijing, 31 March 2008 (copyright © Diego Azubel/epa/Corbis)

  44. A Cuban boy holding a picture of Che Guevara during a political rally in Santa Clara, Cuba, 14 June 2003 (copyright © Reuters/Corbis)

  45. Maoist rebel chief Prachanda addressing a rally in Chapagaun village, Nepal, 3 September 2006 (copyright © Narendra Shrestha/epa/Corbis)

  Acknowledgements

  Writing global history is a challenge, but I have benefited from the enormous amount of exciting new scholarship published in the last twenty years, much of it based on newly available archival sources. I am also extemely grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have given me advice and helped me avoid errors. Tom Buchanan, Martin Conway, Mary McAuley, Rory Macleod, Rana Mitter, Mark Pittaway and Stephen Whitefield all read substantial parts of the manuscript; Steve Smith was especially generous with his time and read nearly all of it. Ron Suny has shown me unpublished work on Stalin, Steve Heder shared material on the Khmer Rouge and Laurence Whitehead gave me advice on Cuba. The Cambridge History of the Cold War project, led by Mel Leffler and Arne Westad, was an ideal group in which to discuss the international role of Communism.

  The fellows of St Edmund Hall and the History Faculty of Oxford University have provided me with a stimulating and congenial working environment and granted me periods of study leave to work on the book. I am also grateful to the British Academy and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (both in Shanghai and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought in Beijing) for arranging a fruitful study trip to China; to Shio Yun Kan for his brilliant Chinese-language teaching; and to the archivists and librarians at the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History in Moscow, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library, and the Russian State Library in Moscow.

  Gill Coleridge was an ideal agent, and played a major role in the project from the very beginning; I am very grateful to her for her encouragement and advice. I have also been very fortunate in my publishers. Simon Winder at Penguin was an extremely incisive and impressively knowledgeable editor. Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic was also very supportive, as was Stuart Proffitt at Penguin, and both gave me invaluable comments on the text. I would also like to thank Jofie Ferrari-Adler and Amy Hundley at Grove Atlantic. Thomass Rathnow at Siedler, and Alice Dawson, Richard Duguid and Mari Yamazaki at Penguin. Charlotte Ridings was an extremely effective and patient copy-editor and Amanda Russell’s extensive knowledge of the visual sources was a great help with the illustrations.

  My greatest thanks go to Maria Misra, who made an enormous contribution to the book. Her knowledge of Asian and African history helped me to range far more widely than I otherwise would have done, and she read the whole manuscript, saving the reader from a good deal of clumsy prose.

  NOTE ON TRANSLATION

  Russian transliteration accords with the Library of Congress system (while suppressing soft and hard signs) except for a few well-known proper names (such as ‘Trotsky’ and ‘Yeltsin’); similarly, Chinese transliteration generally follows the pinyin system, except for a few well-known names (such as ‘Chiang Kaishek’).

  Introduction

  1789–1889–1989

  I

  In November 1989 the Berlin Wall – the concrete and graffiti-daubed symbol of division between the Communist East and the capitalist West – was breached; joyful demonstrators from both sides danced and clambered on the wreckage of Europe’s ideological wars. Earlier that year Communism had been dealt another blow by popular protests (though on that occasion brutally suppressed) in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. And so, exactly a century after the ascendancy of organized international Communism was marked by the foundation of the ‘Second International’ of Communist parties, and two hundred years after the Parisian populace had stormed another symbol of authoritarian order – the Bastille – revolution had again erupted in the world’s capitals. These new revolutions, however, were aimed not at toppling the bastions of traditional wealth and aristocratic privilege, but at destroying states supposedly dedicated to the cause of the poor and oppressed. The dramatic, and largely unpredicted, fall of Communism in 1989 was, then, much more than the collapse of an empire: it was the end of a two-century-long epoch, in which first European and then world politics was powerfully affected by a visionary conception of modern society, in which the wretched of the earth would create a society founded on harmony and equality.

  For many, Communism could now be consigned to Trotsky’s ‘rubbish-heap of history’ – a hopeless detour into a cul-de-sac, an awful mistake. The American academic Francis Fukuyama’s claim that ‘history’, or the struggle between ideological systems, had ‘ended’ with the victory of liberal capitalism was greeted with much scepticism, but deep down, many believed it.1 Liberalism, not class struggle, was the only way to resolve social conflict, and capitalism was the only economic system that worked. And for some time, the world seemed to lose interest in Communism. It seemed to be a fading set of sadly fossilized attitudes surviving amongst a generation that would soon be crushed by the forces of ‘reform’. It was a phenomenon best left to dry scholarship, an ancient civilization akin perhaps to the Ancient Persians, with its own Ozymandian wreckage reminding us of past delusions. In the mid-1980s, when I began to research Communism, at the height of Cold War tensions, it seemed an exciting subject, but within a decade it seemed irrelevant in a new world of triumphant liberal capitalism.

  However, two events in this decade have brought Communism back to the foreground of public attention. The first – the destruction of New York’s twin towers on 11 September 2001 – had no direct connection with Communism at all. Indeed, the Islamist terrorists responsible were militantly anti-Marxist. Nevertheless, the Islamists, like the Communists, were a group of angry radicals who believed they were fighting against ‘Western imperialism’, and parallels were soon being drawn, by politicians, journalists and historians. Though the term ‘Islamofascism’ was more commonly used than ‘Islamocommunism’, Islamism has been widely depicted as the latest manifestation of ‘totalitarianism’ – a violent, anti-liberal and fanatical family of ideologies that includes both fascism and Communism. For American neo-conservatives, these threats demanded an ideological and military struggle every bit as determined as the one Ronald Reagan waged against Communism in the Third World.2 In 2004 the European Parliament’s centre-right parties sought to condemn Communism as a movement on a par with fascism, whilst in June 2007 President George W. Bush dedicated a memorial to the victims of Communism in Washington DC.

  If the 11 September attacks showed that the post-1989 political order had not resolved serious conflicts in the Middle East, the fall of the American bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 and the financial crisis it triggered demonstrated that the post-1989 economic order had failed to create stable, sustainable and enduring prosperity. The lessons drawn from these latter events, however, have differed from those learnt after 2001. Whilst nobody is calling for the return of the rigid Soviet economic model, Marx’s critique of the inequality and instability brought by unfettered global capital has seemed prescient; sales of Capital, his masterwork, have soared in his German homeland.

  The history of Communism therefore seems to be more relevant to today’s concerns than it was in the early 1990s. However, we have found it difficult to grasp the nature of Communism – much more so than other aspects of our recent history; whilst many warned of the Nazis’ aggression and their persecution of the Jews, very few predicted the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin’s Terror, Khrushchev’s ‘de-Stalinization’, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s ‘killing fields’, or the collapse of the USSR. In part, the obsessive secrecy of Communist regimes accounts for this, but more important has been the enormous gap between the outlook of historians and commentators today, and Communist views of the world at the time. Explaining Communism demands that we enter a very different mental world – t
hat of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Gorbachev, as well as those who supported or tolerated them.

  II

  This book is the product of many years of thinking about Communism. I had my first glimpse of the Communist world in the summer of that Orwellian year, 1984. I was then a nineteen-year-old student and had taken the cheapest route to Russia – a Russian-language course run by sovietophile ‘friendship societies’ throughout Europe, in a dingy Moscow institute for civil engineers. I knew little about either Russia or Communism, but they seemed to me, as to many people in that era, to be the most important issue of the time. That year was, in retrospect, an unusually turbulent one. I was visiting the capital of Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ at the height of what is now known as the ‘second Cold War’, as relations between East and West deteriorated after the brief détente of the 1970s. Debate was raging over NATO’s decision to deploy cruise missiles in Western Europe, and the previous autumn West Germany experienced its largest demonstrations of the post-World War II era. I went to Russia, at least in part, so that I could answer for myself some of the questions that obsessed Western opinion at the time: what was Communism, and what was the Soviet leadership trying to do? Was the USSR really an evil empire run by Leninist fanatics who, having broken their own people, were now intent on imposing their repressive system on the West? Or was it a regime which, regardless of its many shortcomings, enjoyed genuine popular support?