Communism

X

Break Up of International Communism

The Communist monolith started to break up almost as soon as it was established. In 1948 the Yugoslav Communist party was accused of pursuing a foreign policy hostile to that of the USSR. In reality what particularly irked Moscow was the decision of the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito and his followers to follow an independent course in both domestic and foreign affairs. The USSR feared that similarly national deviations would take place in the other countries of Eastern Europe. “National” Communists in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were subjected to show trials leading to executions or long terms in prison. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform and followed a more open course than Communist states elsewhere: it permitted emigration, refrained from collectivization, introduced industrial self management and federal decentralization. Changes, however, were also taking place in the USSR. In 1956 at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, the party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin, accepted the principle of different “national roads” to socialism and revealed the extent of Stalinist repression in the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless, attempts in the same year to secede from the Soviet sphere of influence were violently repressed. A workers' rising in Poznan, Poland, was put down by the Polish army. A cautious reform-minded leadership later emerged, but Poland remained the most rebellious of the USSR's European socialist neighbours. In Hungary the Soviet army intervened directly to repress a revolution which threatened to overthrow Communism (1956). Thereafter reforms proceeded in Hungary at a snail's pace. By the time Communism collapsed (1989), the Hungarian economy had become the most market oriented in the Soviet bloc. Romania was allowed to develop a relatively independent foreign policy, but internally its regime was harsher than that of the USSR.

In 1968 a new reformist leadership under Alexander Dubcek took over the Czechoslovak Communist party and inaugurated a brief period of liberalization, the so called Prague Spring. The new government promised a “socialism with a human face”, and liberalized the press and censorship. The USSR feared that this would lead to a return to capitalism, which would spread to the entire Soviet bloc. Proclaiming the principle of “limited sovereignty” Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev's successor, effectively blocked any further reform of Communism for the following 20 years.

XI

The Sino-Soviet Schism

The most important dispute within the Communist movement was that between China and the USSR. It has already been noted that Chinese Communism was quite distinct from that of Russia almost from its inception. It came to power without Soviet help, and was largely peasant based. At first the Chinese Communist party appeared to accept Soviet leadership. After 1956 relations began to deteriorate. In 1960 the USSR withdrew its technical and material aid. Afterwards the enmity between the two Communist regimes escalated. Moscow tried to isolate China diplomatically and militarily. The Chinese attempted to rally the entire developing world against the “cities of the world”, a category in which they lumped the USSR and its allies along with the capitalist countries. The voluntarist brand of Communism they developed under the leadership of Mao Zedong relied far more on participation from below (though sternly controlled from above) and a sometimes exaggerated faith in the capacity of the human will than that of Russia. The culmination of this process was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a vast semi-anarchic movement—now utterly discredited—against Mao's opponents in the leadership.

XII

Latin America

Communism in the Latin American continent remained of little significance until some time after the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro (1959). The Cuban Communist party had played a minor role in the revolution itself. At first Castro appeared to be another modernizing nationalist and non-aligned leader. Over the next few years, he became internally dependent on the Communist party machine and externally reliant on Soviet help. Subsequent confrontation with the United States led to the nationalization of US property (1960), attempts by the United States to overthrow the regime (the Bay of Pigs in April 1961), Castro's declaration that he had become a “Marxist-Leninist” (December 1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962). During the 1960s Cuba tried to distance itself from the USSR and to develop a Latin American brand of Communism. Much as Lenin had hoped that the Russian Revolution would be followed by others in Europe, Castro hoped that there would be “one, two, and many Vietnams” in Latin America. By the end of the 1960s, Cuban-supported guerrilla activities in the rest of the continent had been contained or defeated and Cuba returned to the Moscow fold. The only other Communist party of some importance in Latin America was that of Chile. This had much in common with European Communist parties: its support was in the working class; its strategy was parliamentary and electoral. In 1970 Salvator Allende, a socialist, was elected President with Communist support. The Popular Unity government which followed was overthrown by a military coup in September 1973.

XIII

Eurocommunism

In much of Western Europe Communism was a marginal force. There were important exceptions. In countries under authoritarian rule (Spain, Portugal, and Greece between 1967 and 1974) the Communists were the main opposition party; their discipline and organization stood them in good stead in conditions of clandestine operation. As these countries turned to democracy in the mid-1970s the socialist parties quickly established themselves as the leading parties of the left, supplanting the Communists. In the rest of Western Europe the only substantial Communist parties were those of Italy (PCI) and France (PCF). These were both genuine mass organizations, enjoying considerable trade union support, and each larger than their socialist counterparts. After 1956 the PCI, in effect the largest Communist party in the capitalist world, became increasingly independent of the USSR. Strengthened by its own national brand of Communism developed by Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, it condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the abuse of civil rights in the Soviet camp. By the mid-1970s, under Enrico Berlinguer, the PCI had become in all but name a radical socialist party and the rallying point for “Eurocommunism”. The term designated those West European Communists, including the Spanish and French, who, having accepted all the principles of Western parliamentary democracy, abandoned Leninism, rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and were critical of Soviet Communism. The most significant exceptions were the Greek and Portuguese parties, which remained pro-Soviet. The season of Eurocommunism was brief. In Spain the Communists were quickly marginalized by the much stronger socialists. The French soon returned to the embrace of Moscow. The Italians remained excluded from power in spite of their endorsement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

XIV

Conclusion

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Communism entered a period of long-overdue reforms. The planned economy had been successful in lifting the USSR from industrial backwardness. It had failed utterly to develop a consumer society. The country had remained secretive and repressive. Gorbachev assumed that Communism could be saved by introducing more openness (glasnost) and economic restructuring (perestroika). As these reforms failed to halt economic decline, the country began to implode with the rise of separatist tendencies, particularly in the Baltic republics which had been annexed in 1939. The Soviet bloc too was breaking apart. In Poland, where a military coup had halted the growth of the independent trade union movement Solidarity, relatively free elections in 1989 had returned an anti-Communist majority. Gorbachev's manifest intention to refrain from intervening in Eastern Europe led in 1989-1990 to the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the collapse of Communist rule in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. The Yugoslav Federal Republic splintered into five separate states, three of which sank into a prolonged armed conflict. In Moscow in August 1991 a failed takeover by nostalgic Communists paved the way for the replacement of the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev by Boris Yeltsin. By the end of 1991 the Communist party of the Soviet Union was banned, the USSR abolished, and the former Soviet Republics independent states. The Communist experiment which made such an import on the history of the 20th century was over. Former Communist parties reconstructed themselves as socialist ones committed to a mixed economy and market reforms. Some of them regained enough popularity to return to power (for instance in Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland) or remained in government under a different name and with different programmes (Romania, Bulgaria). In Italy the PCI turned itself into the Democratic Party of the Left and was accepted as a member of the Socialist International. At the time of writing, ruling Communist parties survive only in Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, and China. Even there, notably in China, while the Communists retain the monopoly of power, the rapid introduction of market reforms signals the definitive abandonment of the original idea of Communism, the creation of a society where all property is held in common. (See Communism, Collapse of)