The Red Flag: A History of Communism (37 page)

Eventually Dimitrov and others, including the Italian party leader Palmiro Togliatti, won Stalin over, and they were helped by a change in Soviet foreign policy, which now favoured an alliance with France and Britain against Germany. At the end of the year, Stalin acceded to the new policy, which was finally endorsed by the Comintern in the summer of 1935.
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According to the Comintern decisions of 1935, Western Communist parties were only allowed to ally themselves with parties committed to a radical, anti-capitalist programme, as a prelude to revolution.
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But in practice the Popular Front policy allowed Communist parties to join moderate socialist governments and defend liberal democracy against fascism. They desisted from agitation for a proletarian, Communist revolution, at least in the foreseeable future, and they were also allowed to appeal to local nationalisms in their efforts to win support.

Communist parties throughout the West adopted the mantle of national unity and reconciliation, in line with the new emphasis on patriotism within the Soviet party. Even in the United States, Communism became remarkably respectable. Although the party was closely controlled by the Comintern, it claimed to have inherited ‘the traditions of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Lincoln’, and worked with a broad range of organizations from trade unions to churches and civil rights groups.
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The Popular Fronts’ inclusive attitude to ethnicity appealed to many second-generation immigrant workers who had suffered from the Depression and identified themselves as a ‘working class’.

The party that followed the Popular Front line most enthusiastically and successfully was the French one, under the leadership of Maurice Thorez. Thorez was born in 1900 and brought up by a family of Jacobin Socialist miners in the department of Nord. A studious child, he did not work in the mines for long, and had a number of short-term jobs.
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But his real life was the Communist Party, and he worked his way up the hierarchy, carefully observing and obeying the demands of Moscow. His Communist critics saw him as bland, submissive and docile, and he certainly lacked charisma. But his calm manner and beatific smile proved ideal for winning over sceptical socialists and liberals. This was not the rabid class warrior of conservative nightmares. His image did not provoke the bourgeois anxiety aroused by the Jewish and seemingly more threatening Socialist leader, Léon Blum.

Thorez also always made sure he attended public gatherings wearing
a
tricolore
sash underneath his suit jacket: the Communists now stressed their French roots. They presented themselves as the successors to the patriotic Jacobins, whilst the fascists were the equivalents of the old aristocratic émigrés, linked to foreign reactionaries. In June 1939 they even celebrated the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution with a grand Robespierrian festival, in which 600 liberty trees were planted by Phrygian-capped children.
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The Communists also used populist Jacobin language. They spoke of the ‘struggle of the little people against the big’, and their enemies were the ‘two hundred families’ – a small quasi-aristocracy rather than the whole bourgeoisie.
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The Communists’ new image allowed them to play an important role in French politics for some time, as a non-revolutionary leftist party.
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However, the nature of the party itself did not change. Like other Communist parties, it aspired to be a ‘total’ institution for its members, in some ways like a religious sect.
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Like the Soviets, the French learnt party doctrine, wrote autobiographies describing their political and personal histories, and subjected themselves to ideological self-criticism.
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They were expected to keep the party’s secrets and treat the outside world with ‘vigilance’ and suspicion, a potential source of contamination. Their social and family lives were often entirely bound up with the party. They were to remain a vanguard, ready to bring the revolution when the time came – though levels of participation varied, depending on one’s position within the party.

Whilst maintaining their purity, the French Communists were now expected to cooperate with the outside world, and they did so just as workers were being radicalized by the Depression. The result was thousands of new members. A party of 40,000 in 1934 swelled to one of 328,647 in 1937. The French Communist Party had taken over from the German as the leading party outside the USSR. In May 1936, the Popular Front of Socialists, Communists and liberal Radicals gained a majority in the elections, and Léon Blum became Prime Minister, supported by the Communists from outside the cabinet.

However, it was the Popular Front in Spain that, at least temporarily, contributed most to the increasing prestige of international Communism. Here, politics was even more polarized than in France; indeed, some areas of Spain had much in common with the old agrarian states where Communism had been so successful in the years after World War I. In particular, the question of land redistribution was still unresolved.
Landless peasants, especially in the South, were attracted to a decentralizing radical socialism, whilst other radicals, in the Socialist Party, the anarcho-syndicalist parties and the quasi-Trotskyist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity (POUM) also had a good deal of support. But so too did the Right, with its heartland amongst the small-holding peasants of the North and the centre. When the left, a shaky alliance of left-liberals, socialists, anarcho-syndicalists and the small Communist party, won elections in February 1936, a social revolution was sparked in many rural and urban areas. The left’s victory, in turn, provoked a military coup, led by the authoritarian conservative General Francisco Franco. The sharp social divisions within Spain had precipitated a civil war; and within a week a domestic conflict had become an international one, when Mussolini and Hitler sent military aid to Franco’s rebels.

Stalin was faced with a dilemma. The Spanish Republicans were without foreign friends: Blum in France was too afraid of antagonizing the Germans, and a Conservative British government would not expend any effort defending such a leftist government. Only the USSR could halt Franco in Spain, and therefore prevent the balance of power shifting in favour of the fascists. However, Soviet support for revolutionary Spaniards might worry the French and British establishments, and scupper any chance for a collective security treaty against Hitler.
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Stalin dithered for some time, but eventually decided to send arms and commissars, whilst insisting that the Popular Front should not aim for socialism. Stalin wrote to the Socialist Prime Minister, Largo Caballero, advising him that the ‘parliamentary road’ was more suited to Spanish conditions than the Bolshevik model; he urged him to take account of the interests of rural and urban middle classes, and to forge links with liberals. For the Soviets, winning the war and keeping bourgeois allies had to take priority over socialist revolution.

This led the Spanish Communist Party to adopt a more pragmatic, gradualist policy than many in the Popular Front, including, at times, Caballero himself. But by the end of 1936, it seemed that the Communist strategy had been triumphantly vindicated. The Communists acquired a large, cross-class membership;
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and their centralized, militarized approach to politics seemed to be more effective than the more democratic, divided and chaotic Socialist and radical forces. The Comintern also organized over 30,000 volunteers from over fifty nationalities, to fight for the Republic – the International Brigades. Many of
these volunteers were Communists and workers. In November 1936, as Franco’s Nationalists advanced on Madrid, Caballero despaired of victory and abandoned the capital. But General Miaja remained, and he, together with the International Brigades and the Communist Party, were vital in helping the population to defend the city. Soviet arms (however small in number) and Communist organization and discipline, it seemed, had saved democracy against fascism.

Nineteen thirty-six was perhaps the high point of Communist prestige in the West. The Communists, unlike the French socialists and the British Labour Party, seemed to be the only force willing to act decisively against the forces of extreme reaction. Moreover, since the mid-1930s Western intellectuals had fallen in love with the Plan. Communists now had a disciplined and rational image, the heirs of the Enlightenment. They were no longer the revolutionaries of the post-World War I period, or the militant sectarians of the 1920s. Their Marxism was much more Modernist and rationalistic.

Eric Hobsbawm, the Austrian émigré historian and one of the most incisive Communist memoirists of the period, captured this atmosphere of seriousness. He had taken part in the German Communist Party’s militant street marches in Berlin in 1932–3 as a youth, but the Communism of the British party, which he joined in 1936 when he went to study at Cambridge, was very different:

Many non-Communists were also attracted by this ethos of disciplined and clear-headed statism that could counter fascist irrationalism and pull the world out of Depression. Leftist intellectuals flocked to the USSR to see the ‘Great Experiment’. In 1932 Kingsley Martin, the editor of the British leftist magazine the
New Statesman
, declared that ‘The entire British intelligentsia has been to Moscow this summer.’
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Soviet eagerness to welcome and impress visitors with well-crafted propaganda trips only fuelled the enthusiasm. Hundreds of travel books appeared; over 200 French intellectuals visited in 1935, and the Communist philosopher Paul Nizan gave a lecture tour of France, describing the marvels he had witnessed.
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The ‘Soviet Union’ the visitors saw was a blend of their own utopian preconceptions and the Potemkin-village socialism presented by their guides. They admired the welfare state, the mass education, and the rational organization of leisure. They envied the high status that intellectuals (at least the obedient ones) enjoyed in the USSR. But most of all they loved the Plan. The Soviet regime was, in their eyes, a Saint-Simonian paradise, where hard science and efficiency informed a moral vision of social transformation.

The British socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb are the most notorious examples of this type of enthusiast. Technocrats and elitists, they were champions of a rational, modernizing socialism, but enemies of revolutions, which they saw as violent, anarchic and irrational. In the 1920s they had been opponents of the USSR, but Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan delighted them, and in 1932, in their seventies, they went on a tour of the Soviet Union. The result of their researches was a massive, detailed work of over a thousand pages,
The Soviet Union – A New Civilization?
, published in 1935.

By the time of the second edition in 1937 the publishers had removed the question-mark. The Webbs’ ‘new civilization’ was a land of committees, conferences and consultations. They could have been writing about the London County Council, to which Sidney had devoted so much of his career. They read reams of official documents, including the Stalinist Constitution of 1936, and assured their readers that full provision was made for elections, democracy and accountability; it would be entirely wrong to call the Soviet Union a ‘dictatorship’, they declared.
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Writers like the Webbs were eager to accept the reassurances of the Soviet authorities for political reasons. Others succumbed to cruder
manipulation. The minor French landscape-painter Albert Marquet proved a much more awkward case for the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), the body that hosted foreign visitors. He was not interested in politics, and was certainly not a Communist; his guides reported that he was irritable and unimpressed. But things changed when he visited the Museum of Contemporary Western Art in Leningrad. He was gratified, and surprised, to see that his own paintings were prominently displayed as part of the permanent exhibition, alongside works by Matisse and Cézanne. What he was not told was that VOKS had arranged for them to be taken out of storage especially for his visit. Marquet went on to attend various stage-managed meetings with young artists who claimed to value him as a mentor, and he was favoured with wide press-coverage. On returning to France, his attitude had been transformed: ‘I did like it in the USSR… Just imagine, a large state where money does not determine people’s lives’, he gushed. In a terse report, VOKS congratulated itself on the success of its elaborate efforts: ‘The Soviet artistic community was widely involved with this work [the Marquet visit]. The work went according to plan.’
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