The Red Flag: A History of Communism (59 page)

It is therefore no surprise that the death of Stalin brought not peace, but a ‘thaw’ that exposed some of the ‘frozen’ tensions within the Communist world, whilst fragmenting his vast empire. Indeed the fifteen years after Stalin’s death were some of the most turbulent in the Communist history and the most dangerous of the Cold War, when the world came closest to nuclear conflagration. The first challenge to Stalin’s orthodoxy, though, had come whilst he still lived – with the break with Tito in 1948.

In his memoirs, Milovan Djilas recalls:

He then revealed his new idea to the ideologist Edvard Kardelj and the economic chief Boris Kidrič ‘while we sat in a car parked in front of the villa where I lived’. Kidrič was sceptical, but eventually they took it to the boss:

Djilas was describing the first of many ‘returns to Marx’ of the 1950s, as Communists tried to find an alternative to Stalinism. Djilas’s account of eureka moments, fevered discussions about Marxism in the backs of cars and sudden decisions in party villas tells us a great deal about the closed nature of Tito’s leadership. Yet his story of the origins of the new Yugoslav model of Communism is not entirely convincing. Tito and the leadership had been looking for new models for some time before the break with the USSR. More importantly, the rhetoric of ‘self-management’ was highly misleading. Djilas and his friends were doubtless sincere in trying to find a democratic Marxism, and their ideas caused enormous excitement amongst Western socialists. But in practice, Yugoslav self-management had little to do with the Romantic Marx’s ideas of democratic participation in management, or even the workers’ control of Lenin’s
State and Revolution
. The reforms were the beginning of Tito’s move towards the market, and the Yugoslav model showed how difficult it was to re-radicalize Marxism in Europe after Stalin.

As in China, the roots of the Yugoslav Communism are to be found as much in the experience of partisan warfare as in Moscow and the Comintern. But in Yugoslavia, with its ethnic and economic diversity, two models of governance emerged as the War ended. The first, in the relatively peaceful and prosperous Slovenia (where most fighting had finished with Italy’s collapse in 1943), was moderate and pragmatic. Local assemblies were relatively democratic, land redistribution was limited, and the state used money to give people incentives. The second, in the poorer, war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, was more radical and egalitarian. Here shortages and inflation had destroyed the value of money. Communists resorted to rationing, ideological enthusiasm, and the mobilization of labour teams to keep the economy going.
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Tito’s objective in the first few years of Communist rule was to combine the Pragmatic Slovenian and Radical Bosnian models and apply them to the rest of Yugoslavia. Many policies of the early years echoed Lenin’s NEP. Tito, apprehensive about alienating his peasant supporters, eschewed collectivization, whilst Kidrič’s Five-Year Plan of 1947 (an enormous set of documents weighing one and a half tons) was not
modelled on Stalin’s. It was an amalgam of hundreds of local plans; the centre used financial incentives, not political commands, and budgets were expected to balance. At the same time, however, Tito wanted rapid development for his poor and vulnerable country – something moderate NEP-style policies would not achieve. So the Communists decided to rely on voluntary, unpaid ‘shock work’ to push the economy forward. The Communist Youth League was particularly active, and led 62,000 young people in building the Brčko–Banovići Youth Railway. Several idealistic Communists from around the world also joined the labour platoons, much as their predecessors had flocked to Spain in the 1930s – one of them was the future Cambodian Communist leader Pol Pot, who was studying in France at the time. For Yugoslavs, however, participation was not always voluntary, and conditions were poor. Nevertheless some enthusiasm persisted; as one worker declared, ‘although we are tired, together, and with song, it is easier’.
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This type of mobilization, though, had its disadvantages for Tito. In its enthusiasm for social transformation, the Youth League often encouraged the unauthorized persecution of ‘class aliens’, something the leadership did not want.

This schizophrenic combination of two very different approaches continued until 1947, at which stage Tito understood his real vulnerability. A wily operator, Tito had secured foreign aid from both the Americans and the Soviets after 1945. With the beginning of the Cold War, though, Western aid stopped, and following the break with Moscow in 1948 Yugoslavia was left friendless and threatened by a possible Stalinist coup. Paradoxically, Tito resisted Stalin by emulating him with a much more centralized, militaristic strategy. These years saw some of the harshest repressions of the period, including purges of ‘Cominternists’ and the foundation of the ‘Naked Island’ (Goli Otok) prison camp for political opponents. The old idealism came under severe strain. Djilas commented angrily to the security chief Aleksandar Ranković: ‘Now we are treating Stalin’s followers as we treated his enemies’, to which Ranković replied despairingly, ‘Don’t say that! Don’t talk about it!’
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Repression, though, was combined with pro-worker campaigns rather similar to Stalin’s in the early 1930s. The party encouraged workers to criticize managers and experts, at the cost of losing control of the workforce.

These years were grim ones for Tito and his circle, constantly terrified of assassination, Soviet invasion and economic collapse. But in 1950
salvation arrived in the form of American aid. It was the United States, keen to have an ally in the Communist world, that decided to ‘keep Tito afloat’, and the Americans, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank all provided loans. Loans, of course, had to be repaid, and that meant that budgets had to be balanced, which in turn made more radical socialist experiment impossible. Military-style mobilization had to give way to strict accounting and efficiency. Meanwhile the regime decentralized power, and officially transferred all property from the state to so-called ‘worker councils’. The Yugoslav Communist Party was renamed, in a bow to democratic sensibilities, the ‘League of Communists of Yugoslavia’. But this was still a one-party state, and ‘worker self-management’ was not management by workers at all. In practice managers and officials were in control, and they had to keep within budgets set by the centre. This much-trumpeted democratization of the workplace was actually a reversion to the Slovenian wartime model, and far from being a return to Marx, this was rule by managers and financial controls.

After 1950, Yugoslavia was neither a command nor a market economy but something in between; the state managed the economy by regulating prices and issuing credits rather than by political diktat. In some ways, it continued to behave like a typical Communist state: the regime poured money into heavy industry, and used redistribution to soften inequalities, especially between the richer Croatia and Slovenia and the poorer Macedonia and Montenegro. But it had scrapped collectivization, and was, to all intents and purposes, part of the Western economic world. For a time, this mixture of markets, socialism and American aid was remarkably successful, and in the 1950s Yugoslavia posted the highest growth rate in Eastern Europe. The country was also the most open and liberal of all Communist states. Western tourists visited and Yugoslavs worked abroad, bringing back Western influences with them. At the same time, tensions between the republics were held in check by memories of wartime blood-letting, and by Tito himself. Tito, Serbian Orthodox and Croat, embodied ‘Yugoslavism’, and his almost monarchical style appealed to many, even as it alienated others. Djilas, a puritan and intellectual, excoriated Tito’s vanity and love of luxury – his thirty-two palaces, his lavish banquets and receptions, his perma-tan, dyed hair and dazzling false teeth.
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But he conceded it had a rationale:

Djilas was expelled from the Central Committee for his democratic scruples in 1954. But he acknowledged that Tito’s monarchical style appealed to a rural population accustomed to traditional forms of authority. Tito’s regime, caught as it was between the East and West, the urban and the rural, presented a remarkably diverse set of faces to the world. To the urban intelligentsia, party idealists and the Western left it was the home of an authentic democratic Marxism; to the United States and Western business, it had reconciled socialism with the market; and to the peasants, it was a government of ancient heroes. Folk poets celebrated the break with the Soviet bloc (and the Hungarian Communist leader Rákosi) in pseudo-epic verse:

As will be seen, beneath the prosperity and Tito’s bravura confidence, all was not as happy as it seemed. Nevertheless, by 1956 Tito could afford to be satisfied. Since the perilous and gloomy days of 1948–9, he had steered Yugoslavia towards independence and wealth. He had even gained international prestige with his own special form of Marxism. He became a major figure in the ‘Non-Aligned’ movement of states outside the Soviet and Western alliances, and by 1955 he had made peace with the USSR. The transition from the Stalinist model was to be rather more traumatic in other East European states.

On the morning of 1 March 1953, after a boisterous evening of food, drink and cinema that lasted until 4 a.m., Stalin was discovered on the floor of his bedroom. He had suffered a severe stroke. Members of the party’s inner circle – Georgii Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Red Army boss Nikolai Bulganin – were called to his bedside, but it was some time before they summoned the doctors. This may have been deliberate. They had become increasingly worried about Stalin’s unpredictability and vindictiveness in his final years. But it is more likely that they were too frightened to act.
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In the poisonous atmosphere of the Soviet leadership, overt ambition and pushiness could attract severe punishment. The extreme centralization of power Stalin had spent so much of his life perfecting may well have killed him.

Stalin’s death came as an emotional shock to friends and enemies alike. For Stalin was not just a political boss; he was the embodiment of a whole system – ideological, cultural, political and economic. Fedor Burlatskii, later one of Khrushchev’s main advisers and, privately, no admirer of Stalin’s, tried to sum up his mixed feelings:

Burlatskii’s thoughts were probably shared by many of the middle-aged lieutenants of world Communism who attended the funeral, including Togliatti, Thorez and Zhou Enlai, as well as the Soviet inner circle. All were aware that the USSR was in a poor state. Living standards were low, there was little new housing, and consumer goods were scarce. Agriculture was a disaster – harvests were poorer than before World War I – and much of the nation’s food was produced outside the collectives on the tiny proportion of land given over to individual plots. The prison system was massive, and Beria, charged with making the Gulag pay, despaired at the cost of managing the 300,000 guards and the low
productivity of the prison labour.
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Riots and protests in the camps were common: in early 1954 inmates in the Kengir prison in Kazakhstan took over the camp for forty days before being eventually subdued by tanks and aerial bombing. Relations with the West were also tense, forcing the regime to expend scarce resources on guns, not butter. The Korean War dragged on, only repression kept Eastern Europe stable, and the USSR lagged behind the United States in airpower and nuclear capability. Stalin’s successors all agreed that his security-obsessed world-view had merely caused fear and resentment abroad, and had ultimately undermined Soviet security.