The Red Flag: A History of Communism (102 page)

The resulting ideological vacuum has been filled with a potent nationalism and by the strange reappearance of official Confucianism. After spending decades trying to root out this ancient ideology of patriarchy, obedience and order, the party is now assiduously embedding it. In 2004 the Chinese government set up the first of a planned hundred or so Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture abroad – a far cry indeed from Mao’s propagation of international Marxism in the 1960s.
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Even so, the Chinese Communists are apprehensive. That a Communist party presides over rampant and red-blooded capitalism is, of course,
rather difficult to justify. Levels of inequality in China (largely between urban and rural households, and between different regions) exceed that of the United States. The choice made in the 1970s – to embrace market reforms with the support of the bureaucrats – avoided a Soviet-style collapse, but it left local officials with enormous economic power. Bosses and their children – the new Communist ‘princelings’ – have leveraged their political clout into extreme privilege. Predictably, many ordinary people are disillusioned, especially in the poorer rural areas, and most peasants have a very negative view of their local rulers.
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Political interference can also have a damaging impact on the economy. Local party pressure on banks to help friendly businesses means that investment decisions are often made on political, not economic grounds. The Chinese Communists’ dilemma is a common one: how can a political elite, however expert, control and direct an economy when there is no independent non-party authority – democratic or legal – to curtail officials? Campaigns against corruption may work for a while, but soon run out of steam.

In the rest of the former Soviet bloc, Communist parties refused to adapt to the neo-liberal revolution, and their response combined resentment and nostalgia. East Germany’s successor Communists, who attracted a great deal of support in the eastern regions of the newly reunited Germany, were highly ambivalent about the market. In much of the former USSR, a strong hostility to capitalism has also become the norm. Gennadii Ziuganov’s Russian Communist Party adopted a highly nationalistic version of High Stalinism; his mixture of a yearning for the USSR as a Russian empire, social egalitarianism, and hatred of the West and resentment of the plundering oligarchs, was a heady brew. By the mid-1990s disillusionment with the West and economic collapse fuelled popular support, and in the parliamentary elections in 1995 the Communist Party won the largest number of votes. This, however, was to be the high point of Communist support. In the presidential election of 1996 Yeltsin narrowly defeated Ziuganov, though in somewhat dubious circumstances. In effect, old-style Communists had been trounced by an ex-Communist, presiding over a highly corrupt semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian regime, bankrolled by friendly businessmen.

This became the pattern throughout the former USSR, as former Communist bosses tried to rebuild their power without the old Communist parties. Many embraced a mixture of crony capitalism, nationalism and authoritarianism. But from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, a second wave of democratization swept the region. In Bulgaria and Romania, then in Slovakia, Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro, mass protests at electoral fraud and corruption forced elections and removed ex-Communist bosses.
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These democratic revolutions became an exportable package. Serbia’s ‘
Otpor
’ (‘Resistance’) pioneered a model of revolution for a post-modern, ironic and media-driven age. Using a combination of rock music, 1980s ‘Orange Alternative’-style stunts and irreverent catchy slogans, such as ‘
Gotov je
’ (‘He’s finished’) (applied successfully to Milošević in 2000), they brought their model of revolution to the former USSR, spawning the ‘
Kmara
’ (‘Enough’) movement in Georgia and ‘
Pora
’ (‘It’s time’) in Ukraine. Although they had a great deal of domestic support, they were also helped by a United States anxious to reduce Russian influence over the region, which funnelled funding to the protestors through various non-governmental organizations. The ‘colour revolutions’ – ‘Rose’ in Georgia in 2003, ‘Orange’ in Ukraine in 2004 and ‘Tulip’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 – all succeeded in toppling old orders dominated by former Communists. But they found it far less easy to replace the nexus of crony capitalists and bosses with genuinely liberal democracies; new rulers soon found themselves dependent on the power structures that had existed before.

Ex-Communists have been noticeably more resilient in former Soviet Central Asia. But in the absence of the old Communist parties, political leaders found themselves increasingly dependent on traditional clans.
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Only Askar Akayev, the ex-Communist leader of Kyrgyzstan, seriously tried to liberalize politics in the early 1990s, but even so local notables eventually returned to power. Nursultan Nazarbayev of energy-rich Kazakhstan established an authoritarian, clan-based regime more rapidly, as did the eccentric former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niiazov. Niiazov had initially supported the Russian coup leaders of 1991, but when they failed, the newly fashioned ‘Turkmenbashi’ (leader of the Turkmen) compensated for the weakness of his support amongst the clans by creating an extreme leadership cult. His
Ruhnama
, or the ‘Book of the Soul’ – a mixture of moral principles, dubious nationalist history and sufism – became compulsory reading in all schools. A giant mechanical model of the
Ruhnama
graces the capital, Ashgabat. The book opens at 8 p.m. every day and recorded readings are broadcast, rather like the Muslim call to prayer. Niiazov, in
true Jacobin style, also renamed the days and months, although the new nomenclature was more narcissistic than rationalistic: September became ‘Ruhnama’, whilst April became ‘Gurbansoltan’ – his mother’s name. Since Niiazov’s death in 2006 his successor, formerly his personal dentist, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, has continued the old regime, though he has moderated some of the more idiosyncratic manifestations of the personality cult. These ex-Communists still found the old Stalinist tools essential if they were to shore up their regimes, even though they had long abandoned Stalinist ideology.

Two particularly vulnerable former Soviet allies have retained not only the tools but also much of the substance of Marxist-Leninist ideology: North Korea and Cuba. Both were severely hit by the collapse of the USSR. They not only lost crucial economic assistance, but were now also internationally and ideologically isolated. Even so, they have shown the willpower to survive, as both see themselves as Davids in confrontations with neighbouring Goliaths. Both have also used a mixture of repression and nationalism to stave off collapse.

In the case of North Korea, Kim Il Sung bequeathed the old guerrilla mentality to his son and successor from 1994, Kim Jong Il, and the economic crisis that came with the end of Soviet support, together with the success of South Korea, only convinced the Kims that they should make no serious concessions. In the mid-1990s bad weather and rigid agrarian policies led to famine, causing an estimated 2–3 million deaths.
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Nevertheless, North Korea has been able to attract aid – partly through blackmail. Fear of Korea’s nuclear weapons, and of the chaos caused by its economic collapse, has persuaded foreigners to open their chequebooks. The economy remains depressed, but there have been no signs that the regime is losing control.

The fall of the USSR was an even greater blow for Cuba, because it depended so much on trade with the Eastern bloc. Since 1991 the regime has been beleaguered, but it has remained resilient. Continuing American hostility and the economic embargo, extended under President Clinton in 1999, have helped the regime exploit nationalist resentment at their big neighbour’s bullying tactics. Cuba’s economic strategy, though, has been very different to North Korea’s. By allowing private citizens to participate in the international economy – receiving money from relatives abroad or tourists at home – the Cuban regime has acquired valuable dollar earnings. It has thus stayed afloat, though at the
cost of losing control over a substantial part of the economy. Inequalities, especially between blacks and whites, have increased; the state sector is losing talented people to a private, black-market sector; and cynicism has grown, as the gap between ideals and reality widens.
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In February 2008 Castro handed over power to his brother Raúl and economic liberalization has continued, though the economic downturn has also forced Raúl to impose new austerity measures. As Cuba celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Castro’s entry into Havana, the mood is pessimistic. But regime change in Washington may have the greatest effect on the state: if President Obama restores relations with Cuba he may well hasten the regime’s collapse.

Communists and ex-Communists therefore preside over some of the world’s most and least successful economies. But in both cases, the old Radical Marxism has disappeared. Only in poor, peasant societies, where economic inequalities were reinforced with the sharper inequalities of status and race, could revolutionary Marxism still appeal.

In April 1980, Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor teaching in the poor, remote Peruvian town of Huamanga, made a rousing appeal:

With this, Guzmán – nicknamed ‘President Gonzalo’ – launched the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path (
Sendero Luminoso
). His intense, apocalyptic language was highly idiosyncratic, far from both orthodox Soviet and Maoist rhetoric, and he did indeed claim to be creating a new Marxism designed to appeal to his Peruvian Indian supporters. As the party’s slogan went: ‘Uphold, defend and apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo Thought, Mainly Gonzalo Thought!’ However, in practice, Gonzalo Thought was pretty close to Maoism, and Guzmán had visited China at least three times during the Cultural Revolution. His one notable departure from Maoism was his attitude towards violence, which was glorified as an almost redemptive force.
One
Sendero
anthem contained the gruesome line: ‘the people’s blood has a rich perfume, like jasmine, daisies, geraniums and violets’.
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Shining Path’s violence made sense to its supporters amongst the poverty-stricken indigenous peasantry of Peru’s Southern Highlands, the urban poor and middle-class students. Racial discrimination against Indians had a long history, and a brutal military regime had used violence itself to defend a highly unequal agrarian system. Crude military repression in the mid-1980s, followed by a serious debt crisis, primed the pump of rebellion, and at its height in 1991 Shining Path had some 23,000 armed members and its campaign of urban and rural violence threatened to topple the government.
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However, the guerrillas, obsessed with building up a wholly unified body of peasant militants, spent as much time terrorizing the peasants as they did attacking their enemies. Traditional peasant markets were outlawed and complete subordination to the organization was enforced. Shining Path’s white, urban leadership had a very alien culture to that of their peasant supporters. Guerrillas would paint slogans such as ‘Death to the Traitor Deng Xiaoping’ on the walls of remote Andean villages, even though they meant nothing to the locals.
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The Peruvian government made much of this culture gap when it released a captured video of Guzmán and his associates drunkenly dancing to Zorba the Greek at a party in a Lima hideaway.
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When Guzmán and much of the leadership were arrested in 1992, the insurgency collapsed, though remnants survive to this day. The story of
Sendero Luminoso
became a cautionary one for Maoists, and did much to discredit the use of such extreme violence.

One group to learn the lessons of Peru were Maoists on the other side of the world – in Nepal.
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Nepal, like Peru, was a highly stratified society – this time along lines of both ethnicity and caste. The Maoists, under Prachandra (‘the Fierce One’), launched a ‘people’s war’ in 1996, which intensified as the monarchy, encouraged by a Hindu Nationalist India and a neo-conservative United States, cracked down in 2002. By 2005 the Maoists could have made an attempt to take the country by force, but they decided not to. They perhaps felt they were not strong enough, but they had also learnt from Guzmán’s failure. Having forced the King to give in, they decided that elections would give them more legitimacy than a guerrilla takeover. In 2008 they won elections and formed a government. A crucial question today is how local guerrilla leaders will adapt to the new democratic politics.

The Maoist victory in Nepal has encouraged Naxalites in neighbouring India, whose insurgency has spread in Bihar and Central India. Again, unrest arises from the discontent of poor peasants as the wealthier benefit from economic change, intensifying economic inequality and poverty. They are generally local movements, engaged in violent conflicts with the police and landlords’ private armies, and their attitudes to violence differ.
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One, reasonably sympathetic, Indian journalist who spent some time with Naxalite guerrillas in the state of Maharashtra in 1998 described one of their leaders thus: