Communism, Rising and Falling

Communism, Rising and Falling

M. Kimmage: Communism, Rising & Falling

The sharpest of these ironies is that communism could be the historical midwife of capitalism. But in a similar contortion of theoretical logic, communism—which, for Marx, was rigorously internationalist— has also served as an agent of nationalism. In its rise and fall, from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, communism was “most successful when it could enmesh itself within local nationalisms,” as David Priestland writes in his new survey, The Red Flag.

Priestland’s beautifully written book, along with Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism, are emblematic of the new scholarship on communism. A mere twenty years after the cold war, communism is now a properly historical phenomenon for these authors. In fact, Brown’s title implies that communism is to us what the Roman Empire was to Edward Gibbon—finished off and far away.

Priestland and Brown write about communism as other historians might write about monarchy or mercantilism or the religious constellations of the English Civil War. Their primary challenge is to explain communism’s ideological self-effacement. They struggle to define what communism is—or, rather, what it was—and to analyze the political alchemy by which communism metamorphosed into capitalism and nationalism. Their books are global history for connoisseurs of political irony.

IN THEIR grand narratives Priestland and Brown trace similar turning points. The first is the transition from Marxist theory to Leninist praxis, which reached its climax in the 1917 revolution; the second is the rise of Asian communism after the Second World War; the third is the death of Stalin in 1953; and the fourth is the experiment with reform, starting fitfully with Nikita Khrushchev, moving to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and then culminating in the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev. Communism’s fortunes rose from 1917 to 1953, and then they began to fall—slowly and almost invisibly at first and then visibly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Neither Priestland nor Brown devotes sustained attention to the market-oriented reforms of Deng Xiaoping, perhaps because China’s history after Mao lacks the narrative coherence of Soviet history. The “red flag” is still being waved in China, however, and China’s dynamism and persistence, as a communist state, unsettles the standard narrative of communist decline. China may have “introduced radical economic reform,” as Brown observes, but it has also “preserved many of the essential features of a Communist polity.”

If radical free-market reforms can be integrated into a genuinely communist polity, then communism is a thing that demands careful definition. Both Brown and Priestland do their best with this demand. For Brown, communism is a regime, a set of political attributes that some states possess and others do not. The Soviet Union, for example, was the communist state par excellence, “the archetypal Communist system,” and thus, its fall marked the end of communism. For Priestland, however, communism is more a spirit, born in the French Revolution and capable of flourishing wherever inequality and utopian hunger intersect. The Jacobins, he writes, had dreamt of “communal ownership, egalitarianism and redistribution to the poor, and the use of militant, revolutionary tactics to seize power.” It was this dream that inspired “Marx’s Prometheanism,” his will to remake the world with reason, technology, and revolution.

With Lenin, Brown and Priestland’s two definitions of communism merge. Lenin rooted communism in the Communist Party, a vanguard of political visionaries who would lead the way to communism with their intellect and their will. Lenin’s rejection “of institutions which would underpin accountability, individual freedoms and political pluralism became a common feature of Communist systems,” Brown writes. Lenin added one further element to communist praxis: he was a charismatic leader and, after his death in 1924, the first in a list of mythic names—Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara—who were to be Promethean gods in the communist pantheon.

BUT IT is Stalin, not Lenin, who looms over The Red Flag and The Rise and Fall of Communism. Priestland and Brown closely examine communism’s phenomenal success during the twenty-five years that Stalin led the Soviet Union, if success can be measured in purely territorial and ideological terms. After gaining power around 1928, Stalin drew upon what Priestland calls the “radical, messianic aspects of Bolshevik culture” and unleashed the Great Terror of the mid-1930s, the mass arrests and executions that left him in solitary command of the Communist Party.

At the same time, Stalin revived Russia’s nineteenth-century imperial aims and privileged Russians as the natural leaders of the Soviet enterprise. A messianic Bolshevik and a neo-tsarist reactionary, Stalin was the ferociously authoritarian leader of a movement and an empire. For movement and empire alike, the apex of glory was the Second World War. The German surrender at Stalingrad was “a massive boost for the Communist movement worldwide,” Brown writes. After his triumph in the war, Generalissimo Stalin could impose communism upon Eastern Europe, and he could tutor Mao Zedong in the art of state building, after Mao had come to power.

Although Mao made the obligatory pilgrimage to Moscow, the communism he initiated was not Stalinist in essence. From the Bolsheviks, he borrowed the idea of an all-powerful Party, and he admired Stalin’s method of collectivizing agriculture and of expanding military-industrial might by decree. But together with Ho Chi Minh, Mao created an Asian model of communism that, as Brown observes, “substituted the peasantry for the proletariat.”

Lenin and Stalin wanted to transform their peasantry into a proletariat, in order to include everyone in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Mao, himself of peasant background, focused his hopes on the peasantry itself. The peasants would raise China to the heights of communism and modernity, bestowing great-power status on China, and peasant-driven Asian communism, from Korea to Vietnam to Cambodia, had an anti-colonial élan that harmonized perfectly with postwar political realities. It offered a template for communism that revolutionaries would use in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

In the 1960s, Mao’s many deviations from Soviet precedent led to the Sino-Soviet split. Movement communism was weakened internationally, and Chinese communism was strengthened. Worldwide anti-imperial ideology “suffered a blow from which it could never fully recover,” Brown writes. China, meanwhile, retained its connection to anti-imperial ideology and gradually became more and more capitalist.

Brown quotes Mao in 1957, talking with Khrushchev: “‘See that little man there?’ Mao said of Deng Xiaoping. ‘He’s highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.’” Mao might himself have been startled by the accuracy of his judgment: Deng Xiaoping would put aside the horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and concentrate on the mechanics of Chinese prosperity. Xiaoping made China into a “newly assertive market-state,” as Priestland writes, doing what no Soviet or European communist ever managed (or wished) to do. Asian communism, with the exception of North Korea, followed suit.

After the Second World War, communism moved East and South. The revolution bypassed Western Europe, the intellectual cradle of Marxism. Outside the Soviet Union, Germany was the greatest communist center in the 1920s, until Hitler literally killed off the German Party. France had a prominent Communist Party for much of the twentieth century, but it was never a ruling party. In Western Europe and the United States, communism’s appeal was greater among intellectuals than it was among the masses. “In a majority of cases they [communist systems] have had a base of mass support,” Brown writes. This support never materialized in Western Europe or the United States.

For Brown, the absence of a communist governments in Western Europe and the United States signifies the absence of communism. In Priestland’s reading, there was a brief resurgence “of Romantic Marxism in the West” in the 1960s before “the Reagan presidency marked the beginning of a renewed Western liberal ideological ascendancy.”

The “neoliberal revolution” began on the Anglo-American Right in the 1980s, but eventually extended itself into the moderate social democracy of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton. The neoliberal revolution supplanted the Bolshevik Revolution, changing Soviet communism from the avant garde to the old guard.

THE FALL of communism, in Russia and Eastern Europe, preoccupies Priestland and Brown. They gravitate toward root causes and move away from the journalistic storyline in which 1989 and 1991 are the crucial dates. Neither Priestland nor Brown places great weight on the activism of Poles, Czechs, and East Germans in 1989. For Priestland and Brown, the crisis of the Bolshevik ancien regime lasted from 1953 until 1989; it was a crisis of the ruling Party in Moscow.

The Communist Party always had military superiority over its subject peoples, a power it could in theory have held forever. Yet it did not have the power to generate its own legitimacy, which faded year by year. Neither force nor reform could foster legitimacy; in fact, the use of force damaged the legitimacy of Communist rule in the Eastern Bloc, and the enactment of reform exposed a lack of legitimacy in the Soviet Union itself. Legitimacy was the riddle no Soviet ruler after Stalin could solve, though the Soviet system was at risk only when the party in Moscow refused to call in the Red Army. The refusal to do so was Gorbachev‘s in the end, a decision that was idiosyncratic and not inevitable.

The crisis of legitimacy started with Stalin’s death in 1953. In his chaotic manner, Khrushchev sought to preserve Stalin’s power and to banish his legacy. At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev spoke out against Stalin’s crimes, hoping for emancipation from fear and for an end to communist atrocities. To expose Stalin as a monster was also to expose his own regime to debilitating questions. Could the monster have been the product of a monstrous system? Brown reveals the causality behind Khrushchev’s speech: “The breakthrough to honesty in Khrushchev’s speech… was the beginning of the end of international Communism,” if not for the Soviet Union per se.

Khrushchev’s his answer to the 1956 Hungarian uprising, partially inspired by his speech, was the first gravestone for international communism. Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, disavowed reform without fathoming the impossibility of force. When a reformist spirit swept through Prague in the spring of 1968—“the closest precursor to perestroika,” in Brown’s words—Brezhnev opted for force, a tactic that was “the writing on the wall for the whole Soviet bloc,” as Priestland persuasively argues. After 1968, dissolution was the only real answer to a decades-long crisis of Soviet legitimacy. It came in 1989.

AS BOOKS, The Red Flag and The Rise and Fall of Communism are emphatic in their distance from the cold war. Their authors seem to enjoy the quiet and calm of the scholar’s study. There are no displays of polemical fireworks; nor do Priestland and Brown find any “policy implications” in the history of communism, though Priestland does end his book with a vague warning about inequality. Both historians want to avoid the antiquated cold war binaries—us versus them, East versus West, communist versus anti-communist. Their greatest virtue is their chronological and geographical scope. These books are erudite essays in international politics, from the French Revolution to the present, and there is good reason to flee the provincial paradigms of the cold war.

Nevertheless, the greatest debit in these cool, panoramic books stems from the authors’ refusal to moralize. Though Brown and Priestland never glorify the communist endeavor or minimize the crimes committed in its name, they also are strangely reluctant to analyze these crimes or to think comprehensively about the gulag and other such factories of killing and repression that proliferate in the history of communism.

As historians, they also neglect the question of daily life under communism. Here Priestland and Brown have not fled far enough from the cold war paradigms. During the cold war, Western analysts of communism concentrated almost exclusively on the question of power, and, in this tradition, neither Priestland nor Brown provides a sense of life for the billions of people who have lived under communist systems.

Communist civilization may have shown itself, ultimately, to be a failure; but for as long as a communist civilization existed in the Soviet Union (and continues to exist in China), it lent its imprint to architecture, music, television, marriage and funeral customs, education, dress, gender, sexuality, etc. This civilization encouraged a communist mentality, which has outlasted the fall of communism. The post-Soviet world, from Central Asia to Eastern Europe, did not suddenly cease being communist in 1991, and its “mentality” is best understood as a hybrid mentality, composed of communist and post-communist elements.

The political style of Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Byelorussia—their concentration of power and manipulation of public opinion—belies the linear fall of communism. The post-communist world continues to reflect the communist culture that Gorbachev failed to salvage. The ironies of communism’s existence are mirrored in the ironies of its absence. Officially absent, communism still haunts former Soviet dominions, while capitalist China has never broken with its generations of communist heritage.

THIS MISSING piece—the sensation of life lived outside inner party circles—can be found in a third book on communism: Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Zubok echoes Brown and Priestland in the magnitude he assigns to Stalin’s death, after which “the Iron Curtain around Soviet society was irrevocably breached.” Zubok’s title refers to Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and, more specifically, to one of its characters, Tania Zhivago, who was born after the Russian Revolution to parents mired in its traumas. In the novel, she represents the possibility of a new beginning. With the phrase “Zhivago’s Children,” Zubok means the generation of Muscovite intellectuals facing a new Soviet beginning after decades of Stalinism.

In this magnificent book, Zubok eviscerates the reductive opposition of communist and anti-communist, of hard-liner and dissident, of being for or against the regime, categories that are far too crude to capture the nuances of Soviet life. Zhivago’s Children were never entirely communist or anti-communist, and they were simultaneously Soviet and anti-Soviet. They had no first-hand knowledge of pre-revolutionary Russia, yet they were diligent students of Russia’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia, identifying “not only with the Soviet collectivity,” Zubok writes, “but also with humanist individualism.”

Zubok criticizes Western observers for missing the “Marxist-Leninist idealism among the postwar generation and even younger people, students in the early 1960s.” These were intellectuals for whom communism was more than aging doctrine; their “social optimism” was sincere, and they endorsed the “social cult of science,” sharing in a state-sponsored atheism. In short, they were communists who were desperate for greater freedom, most of all the freedom to remake the Soviet Union, to clear away the detritus of Stalinism and to return to a pure Leninism.

It was precisely this “revolutionary-romantic identity [that] … made the postwar students malleable clay in the hands of the totalitarian regime.” As much as the regime wanted to enlist their many talents, it feared the “liberalism” of Zhivago’s Children. After some vacillation, Khruschev turned on this precarious constituency, and Brezhnev exerted an even harsher pressure, arresting writers and pushing Moscow’s many Jewish intellectuals into emigration.

The irony was that Khrushchev and Brezhnev were persecuting the most gifted supporters of their ailing system. What the General Secretaries mistook for rebellion was in fact Marxism-Leninism: “even the rudiments of liberal-democratic thinking [among Zhivago’s Children],” Zubok writes, “were encased in the logic of Marxist and Leninist ideas sharply differentiating between bourgeois and socialist democracy.” Under Brezhnev, those who did not emigrate lost their idealism and their civic consciousness, reveling in cynical jokes about the futility of reform. Their bitterness, and their tendency toward factional strife, left Russia without an intelligentsia when the Soviet Union eventually vanished.

An additional irony is embedded in Zubok’s history of communism. Among Zhivago’s Children were two Moscow students, eager to see the Soviet Union better itself and to continue on its march to communism, a man and a woman who met at Moscow University in the 1950s and who never succumbed to political despair. They were Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. Surrounded by cynics and opportunists in the Brezhnevite party, whose only aim was to maintain their grip on power and privilege, to keep the game going, the Marxist-Leninist Gorbachev was responsible for the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The last of the true believers turned out to be communism’s reluctant gravedigger, though the metaphor of death or fall deserves qualification: The Red Flag, The Rise and Fall of Communism, and Zhivago’s Children do not prove that communism has fallen. They merely prove the changeability of communism, at a time when the final chapters on Chinese communism have yet to be written.

Michael Kimmage is an associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America. His first book, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, appeared with Harvard University Press in the spring of 2009. Photo: Hungarians gathering around a toppled Stalin statue in 1956 (The American Hungarian Federation / Wikimedia Commons).