The Red Flag: A History of Communism (44 page)

The ideological conflict between Communism and the West was therefore being reconfigured, from a social conflict within the blocs, to a geopolitical struggle between them. ‘Cold war’ between the superpowers was accompanied by a ‘cold peace’ within. Politics was stabilized, class conflicts tamed. A lake, once choppy, was frozen. The ice was thicker in the North-West of Europe, the USA and the USSR, more fragile in Central and Eastern Europe. It was also thinner in Southern Europe. Greece had shown the weaknesses of British and American power, Yugoslavia the USSR’s.

This, though, applied largely to the global ‘North’. In the ‘South’ – and especially Asia – the situation was very different. Internal conflicts there continued to be violent and inequalities stark. Nationalists confronted European empires, whilst highly unequal and divided agrarian societies generated calls for fundamental social change.

Neither the American nor Soviet blocs found it easy to absorb this turbulent part of the world, but as the War ended it seemed as if the United States might be in a better position to compete for influence. It was massively wealthier and had the power to project force anywhere. It could also appeal to nationalists, as it initially rejected the imperialism of its European allies: as the United States National Security Council explained, ‘19th-century imperialism’ was no longer acceptable because it was ‘an ideal culture for the breeding of the Communist virus’.
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The post-war Soviet Union, meanwhile, was poorly equipped to spread its influence in this newly radicalized world. The Comintern’s strategy since the revolution had largely been aimed at Europe: the Popular Front had been fashioned to appeal to European left-liberals, and the Cominform was entirely focused on Europe. Meanwhile Stalin’s approach to the developing world was founded on a mixture of
realpolitik
and scepticism about the readiness of agrarian non-European societies to achieve socialism in the near future. He did not want to encourage independent Communists in their revolutionary ambitions, partly because they might challenge Moscow’s pre-eminence, partly because they might alienate the Western powers and undermine the wartime agreements on the division of Europe. He therefore refused to help the Greek or Vietnamese Communists, and was also initially reluctant
to recognize Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communists (though in early 1948 he became more enthusiastic about the opportunities for revolution in China).
¹³²
His betrayal of indigenous Communists was most striking – and counterproductive – in Iran, where the Communist-led Popular Front Tudeh party (the largest in the country) was eager to take power. Stalin had no interest in an Iranian revolution, and insisted that it was premature: his objective was a ‘bourgeois’ Iranian state, friendly to the USSR and prepared to grant it oil concessions. He put pressure on Tehran, using the presence of Soviet troops in the North and support for the Azeri independence movement, and the Tudeh was forced to follow the Soviet line. Stalin’s policy, however, was a spectacular failure, destroying the prospects of Communist influence. The Americans put pressure on the Soviets to withdraw their troops, and by 1947 the Tudeh had been banned and the Shah was moving into the American orbit.

In East and South-East Asia, however, Stalin had less direct power, whilst the local Communists were more confident. There Communist parties had melded the Soviet tradition with indigenous ideas, stressing the anti-imperialist elements of Lenin’s and Stalin’s legacy. And it was this synthesis that was to give Communism a new lease of life. In the West, Communism had found fertile soil largely in tension between social classes. In Russia, Communists benefited from both class conflict and a powerful desire to improve the status of a ‘backward’ nation. But in Asia – the next centre of global Communism – it had emerged largely in a different context: the conflict between the empires of the West and the colonies of the South. And to understand these powerful, new versions of Communism, we need to return to the aftermath of World War I. For this catastrophic war had brought not only a crisis of Europe’s elites, but also of its overseas empires.

In June 1919 a 29-year-old native of French Indochina, Nguyen Tat Thanh, entered the Palace of Versailles. According to some reminiscences, he wore a morning suit, but if he did it was a hired one. He was a far from eminent figure, working as a retoucher of photographs and fake Chinese antiques. In his hands he held a petition, which he hoped to deliver to President Wilson and his fellow peace-makers. Entitled ‘The Demands of the Annamite [i.e. Vietnamese] People’, it was a relatively moderate document, demanding political autonomy (rather than independence) for the Vietnamese and equal rights with their French imperial masters.
¹
It was signed with a pseudonym, Nguyen Ai Quoc – ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Nguyen had hoped that it would be included on the conference agenda, and he had some reasons for optimism. Towards the end of the war, Wilson had championed the principle of self-determination of oppressed peoples, and although he did not explicitly mention non-Europeans, colonial nationalists were optimistic it would be applied to them. But Nguyen merely received a polite letter from Wilson’s senior adviser promising to draw it to his attention. Wilson probably never saw it, but even if he had it would have had little effect. Versailles endorsed self-determination for the European subjects of the old empires, but not for their colonial subjects.
²

Nguyen’s response to this rebuff was to transfer his hopes from Wilson to Lenin. He soon joined the French Socialist Party and in December 1920 became a founder member of the French Communist Party. He then left Paris for Moscow in 1923, where he may have studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) or ‘Stalin School’ – the Comintern school for Asian Communists and the sister
institution to the Europeans’ Lenin School.
³
Within a few years he had become an important Comintern figure (a regular resident of the Hotel Lux), and had accepted a new revolutionary
nom de guerre
– ‘He Who Enlightens’, or ‘Ho Chi Minh’.

Ho Chi Minh was not the only Asian intellectual disappointed in Wilson. The Chinese Chen Duxiu hailed him in 1919 as ‘number one good man in the world’, but went on to co-found and lead the Chinese Communist Party.
⁴
The young Mao Zedong, a political activist in provincial Hunan, found the betrayal at Versailles shattering, and set up a journal, the
Xiang River Review
, in which he published his thoughts on the tragedy. Mao urged his readers to study the ‘Russian extremist party’ which, he believed, was spreading revolution throughout South Asia and Korea – his first reference to Bolshevism.
⁵

Yet in truth, any alliance between Wilson and Ho Chi Minh was doomed to failure. Wilson was undoubtedly eager to keep European imperialism in check, but had little real interest in colonial peoples and their rights. He regarded them as ‘underdeveloped peoples’, who would very slowly move towards independence, presided over by benign Westerners; he particularly admired British imperialist methods and, more generally, was a cultural Anglophile. He would not have regarded tumultuous nationalist revolutions as the way forward. Moreover, as an American Southerner, he shared many of the racist assumptions of his background. It is therefore no surprise that he acquiesced in the demands of his European and Japanese allies; he accepted that their empires should survive, and, albeit reluctantly, agreed to the transfer of the eastern Chinese enclave of Shandong in China from the defeated Germans to the victorious Japanese.
⁶

Moreover, if Wilson was no radical, Ho Chi Minh was certainly no liberal. The son of a disgraced government official, he left Vietnam in 1911 and travelled the world, working as a ship’s kitchen hand. Embarked on what was effectively a ‘grand tour’, he visited the colonial world and then spent extensive periods living in the United States, London and Paris. Already resentful of the French imperial presence in Vietnam, his experiences allowed him to generalize his critique of imperialism, and witnessing the humiliations of African-Americans in the United States and of Africans and Asians in the European empires sharpened his consciousness of white racism. By the time he reached London he was already seen as a radical. The great French chef Auguste Escoffier spotted
him in the kitchens of the Carlton Hotel, and offered to teach him how to cook if he abandoned his revolutionary ideas. Ho agreed to learn the art of patisserie, but spurned Escoffier’s political advice. He became involved in an organization to improve the conditions of Chinese labourers, and protested in favour of Irish independence.
⁷
On arriving in Paris in 1917 Ho became active in labour and socialist circles. He was a reserved figure, amongst the French at least. The French socialist Léo Poldès rather patronizingly described his ‘Chaplinesque aura’, ‘simultaneously sad and comic’. ‘He was
très sympathique
– reserved but not shy, intense but not fanatical, and extremely clever.’
⁸
But one of his fellow nationalists described Ho Chi Minh as a ‘fiery stallion’.
⁹
And by 1921 he had concluded, partly (he claimed) as a result of reading Lenin’s
Theses on National and Colonial Questions
, that only violence and socialism would free his people.
¹⁰

Ho was in Paris at a time when the old order was under attack in the colonial periphery, as well as in Europe. In parts of the British Empire, the Great War had a similar effect to the one it had in Europe. Almost a million Indian soldiers had fought in British armies, whilst tens of thousands of Chinese went to Europe to work on the home front. Indians and Chinese, like the European working classes, felt that they should have some compensation for their sacrifices. At the same time, it was clear to many Asian nationalists that Europe had been hugely enfeebled by war, and the international balance of power was changing. As Ho wrote presciently in 1914, ‘I think that in the next three or four months the destiny of Asia will change dramatically. Too bad for those who are fighting and struggling. We just have to remain calm.’
¹¹

As Ho realized, war was weakening old hierarchies throughout the world. In Europe, this took the form of social revolutions; outside it, anti-colonial revolts: 1919 saw rebellions against the British in Egypt, Afghanistan and Waziristan (in today’s Pakistan), Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign in India, and the declaration of an Irish republic. Further East, the Korean March 1st movement and the May 4th movement in China protested against resurgent Japanese imperialism.

Communism was in some ways a useful vehicle for frustrated anti-colonial movements. European empires generally operated through local collaborating elites, and the Communist claim that domestic inequalities were closely connected with international injustice was a powerful one. Working classes were tiny, of course, but Lenin had justified revolution
in backward Russia on the grounds that it was a semi-colony of Europe. Stalin was also a man of the colonial periphery, and was keenly aware of the importance of imperialism in the Bolshevik rise to power. The Comintern therefore soon threw its support behind anti-imperial movements.

However, from the beginning, Asian Communists encountered difficulties competing with nationalist movements that could deploy patriotic messages and fused local political cultures with modern state-building more effectively. Nor were they helped by the Comintern’s sectarianism and exclusivity. Moscow was convinced that revolutionary prospects were best in Europe amongst the industrialized working class. The colonial world, they believed, could not achieve socialism for some time to come and had to concentrate on the anti-imperialist struggle, in alliance with bourgeois nationalists if necessary, with the aim of establishing independent ‘democratic republics’.

The first congress of the Comintern in March 1919 had little to say about colonial upheavals. Hopes for revolution in Western Europe were still high. By the following year, however, it was becoming clear that Western Europe would not fulfil its revolutionary promise. However, the Bolsheviks hoped that nationalist movements, especially in Soviet-ruled Central Asia, might provide vital allies at a time when their own regime was so weak. The second Comintern congress in the summer of 1920 therefore devoted a great deal of time to the colonial question, and many more non-European delegates were invited. Its conclusions were reinforced by another Comintern congress – this time specifically devoted to the colonial question – held in the Caucasian town of Baku, the First Congress of Peoples of the East. It was attended by a diverse band of Communists, radicals and nationalists representing thirty-seven nationalities, most of them from the former Russian and Ottoman empires.
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It was in Baku that sharp divisions emerged between the Eurocentric Soviets and more radical Asians. Lenin, who opposed Popular Fronts so strongly in Europe, thought them the ideal recipe for ‘backward’ Asia. Communists, he urged, should forge alliances with bourgeois nationalists and radical peasants to fight for freedom; socialism proper had to be put off to the distant future. His analysis, however, was vigorously opposed by the more radical Indian Narendra Nath Bhattacharya (a.k.a. M. N. Roy). Before World War I Roy had been a member of a Bengali anti-British terrorist organization. He had then fled to the United States
and Mexico, where, during its revolution in 1917, he became a socialist – converted by the Russian Communist Mikhail Borodin – and founded the first Communist party outside the USSR. In 1919 he decided to go east, as he put it, to ‘witness capitalist Europe collapsing, and, like Prometheus unbound, the revolutionary proletariat rising to build a new world out of the ruins’.
¹³
What he saw, though, was the failure of the Western revolutions. Whilst in Berlin in 1919–20, he realized the future for Communism lay in the colonial world, and not in Europe. As he reminisced: