The Red Flag: A History of Communism (73 page)

Apart from modernizing socialists, a host of other nationalist movements emerged, some seeking to create a supposedly ‘traditional’ Africa of chiefs and ‘tribes’, and others promoting a particular ethnic group. In Guinea-Bissau, the pragmatic Cabral succeeded in absorbing all of these resistance fighters into his inclusive and highly successful PAIGC. Similarly, in Mozambique, the modernizing nationalist Eduardo Mondlane created a broad coalition in FRELIMO. A former United Nations diplomat, Mondlane was much less influenced by Marxism and was closest to Nyerere’s socialism. FRELIMO was a coalition of three nationalist organizations, whilst Mondlane used his considerable diplomatic skills to smooth over ideological and ethnic conflicts. The MPLA, the most Marxist and pro-Soviet of all, was least successful in establishing itself as the single Angolan nationalist party, and it faced serious anti-Communist rivals: the ethnic nationalist FNLA (
Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola
– representing mainly the Bakongo ethnicity) and
then Jonas Savimbi’s breakaway UNITA (
União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
).
⁷¹

In the course of the 1960s, all three modernizing parties – the Angolan MPLA, the Guinean PAIGC and the Mozambican FRELIMO – became more radical, marginalizing the traditionalist groups, whilst launching their own versions of Maoist guerrilla war. The MPLA moved to the left in 1963, and in 1964 Cabral defeated the traditionalists in the PAIGC. Even so, Cabral’s Marxism was still relatively undogmatic, whilst FRELIMO did not fully move into the Marxist camp until the early 1970s.

In South Africa, too, Communists developed a flexible Marxism so they could collaborate with African nationalists in the struggle against apartheid. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was a long-established one, and in the 1920s it had considerable success in attracting black African members.
⁷²
However, by the 1940s it found its revolutionary proletarian ideology had little resonance amongst African workers, many of whom were rural migrants.
⁷³
The increasing militancy of the African National Congress (ANC), and the apartheid government’s banning of the Communist party in 1950, led them to rethink their doctrine. The new, underground party, the South African Communist Party (SACP), formed in 1953, declared that South Africa suffered from a ‘colonialism of a special type’: because there was no black bourgeoisie, it was possible for a ‘proletarian’ Communist party to ally itself with non-Communist nationalists.
⁷⁴
The SACP had given itself theoretical cover to enable it to forge an alliance with the ANC, and both parties had overlapping memberships. The SACP had considerable influence on the struggle against apartheid, despite its small numbers, and members of both parties – including the ANC’s Nelson Mandela – formed the guerrilla organization
Umkhonto we Sizwe
(‘Spear of the Nation’), which began its campaign of political violence in 1961.

By the mid-1960s the guerrilla Communism promoted by Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che had therefore acquired a foothold in Africa – mainly in the Portuguese-controlled South – but elsewhere it struggled to survive, and it no longer seemed like the force of the future as it had in the late
1950s. Much stronger in this era were the non-revolutionary, ‘united front’ parties, which were prepared to collaborate with left nationalists. Such parties boasted the largest memberships in the non-Communist Third World in the early 1960s: the Sudanese party was the second largest, benefiting from its good record in the struggle for independence and commanding support amongst students, some peasants, and workers (especially on the railways).
⁷⁵
The Iraqis came third. But largest of all was Dipa Aidit’s Indonesian Communist Party, which had recovered after the 1948 Javanese debacle by adopting a more moderate, inclusive set of policies. It forged an alliance with Sukarno, and by 1965 it had an extraordinary 3.5 million members, whilst another 17 million or so joined its trade unions and other mass organizations (out of a population of 110 million).
⁷⁶

On the face of it, therefore, it seemed that the great powers could be satisfied: the Soviet ‘national democratic state’ and Chinese ‘new democracy’ were paying dividends in delivering mass Communist support, whilst the United States did not have to worry about a powerful revolutionary strain of Communism. In reality, though, all three powers were deeply dissatisfied with the Third World ‘united fronts’, because their global influence was largely dependent on nationalist leaders over whom they had no direct control, and who could defect to the other side at any moment.

The United States was the most discontented – understandably given many Third World nationalist leaders’ overt sympathy for the Communist bloc. And Washington became particularly determined to change the status quo from late 1963, under Lyndon Johnson. Several in the administration had concluded that Kennedy’s encouragement of ‘modernization’ and liberal democracy had been counterproductive and had only helped the left, especially in Latin America.
⁷⁷
It seemed as if Communism was advancing in the Third World, and Washington could not risk a liberal policy. But Johnson’s personality probably led him to favour military solutions even more than Kennedy. Though undoubtedly committed to improving relations with the Soviets, he suffered deep anxiety about the humiliation of the United States, and his own personal humiliation. One of his greatest fears was that he would lose face after the ‘loss’ of another China or Cuba to Communism,
⁷⁸
and so he responded very harshly to any sign of left-wing nationalist advance.

Whatever the reasons for the change in policy, Johnson presided over
a sustained American offensive against radical nationalist governments throughout the global South. The United States encouraged coups in Brazil (1964) and Ghana (1966), and in 1965 invaded the Dominican Republic, helped its client Mobutu Sese Seko to defeat the Lumumbist insurgency in Congo-Léopoldville, and welcomed the toppling of Algeria’s Ben Bella. In the same year, most fatefully, Johnson responded to Ngo Dinh Diem’s deteriorating position in South Vietnam by sending in ground forces and escalating the bombing campaign.

The clearest – and most violent – attack on the Communist ‘united fronts’, however, occurred in Indonesia. In 1963 Sukarno moved sharply to the left in response to popular unrest at famine and economic collapse, and angered that the Americans had accepted the foundation of Malaysia as an independent state. He strengthened his alliance with the Chinese without, and Dipa Aidit’s pro-Beijing Communists within. The Communists took advantage of their new power by launching a campaign of rent reduction for peasants, which in turn sparked off a violent reaction by landlords and anti-Communist Muslim organizations.
⁷⁹
The Communists, who had no military force of their own, were forced to moderate the campaign, and they became increasingly anxious about the possibility of a military coup against Sukarno. Therefore, when a group of junior army officers mounted their own coup against the generals, the Communists probably supported them, though the facts are unclear.
⁸⁰
The rebel officers failed; the commander of the army’s strategic reserve, General Suharto, took control, and proceeded to launch a violent campaign against the Communists. Commandos were sent to kill suspected party members and sympathizers, and Suharto also exploited social tensions generated by the Communists’ rent reduction campaign. Whole villages were destroyed in the resulting massacres, and scholarly estimates of the numbers killed range from 200,000 to 1 million.
⁸¹

The United States was pleased to see the end of Sukarno, and it supported General Suharto in his violent campaigns against the Communists. Meanwhile for the Communist bloc – and especially the Chinese – the destruction of the powerful Indonesian party was a disaster. The events had distinct echoes of the Guomindang’s massacre of the Chinese Communists in Shanghai in 1927. And just as that catastrophe had led Stalin to reconsider the ‘united front’ strategy of forging alliances with ‘bourgeois’ nationalists, so the Indonesian events cast doubt
on the collaborations which Zhou Enlai and Khrushchev had championed from the mid-1950s. The Soviets had been disappointed with the strategy for some time. Khrushchev’s optimistic view that support for left-wing nationalist leaders would help the transition to Soviet-style socialism was clearly false; the Soviets had spent time and precious resources nursing leaders like Nasser, only for them to turn against their benefactors. Even the relationship with Castro had turned sour, and the series of defeats in Indonesia, Ghana and Algeria only reinforced the conviction that the Soviet approach had to change. The Chinese, who had particularly close relations with the Algerians and Indonesian Communists, were similarly dismayed.

The response of the two Communist powers was to withdraw from the Third World – for a while – but for rather different reasons. The Chinese became increasingly absorbed in the domestic politics of their own Cultural Revolution, and as a result of that upheaval their foreign policy became strident, uncompromising and ineffective. In the USSR, meanwhile, the fall of Khrushchev had discredited Third World adventures, and Leonid Brezhnev had little interest in them. And when, in the late 1960s, the Soviets renewed their assault on the global ‘bourgeoisie’, they were to abandon Khrushchev’s faith in united front-style alliances in favour of orthodox Marxist-Leninists.

After his failure in Congo, Che Guevara abandoned Africa, seeking new revolutionary opportunities in Latin America. He returned to Bolivia, where he had travelled as a youth, and tried to apply his
foco
theory of guerrilla warfare there. It was, predictably, a failure, and in October 1967 he was tracked down, caught and executed by the Bolivian army with the help of the CIA. His emaciated corpse was preserved and displayed to journalists in an ultimately misguided PR exercise to prove that he, and the guerrilla Communism the Americans so feared, was truly dead. Walt Rostow wrote a triumphant letter to Johnson, asserting that the death of Che ‘marks the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Ben Bella… It shows the soundness of our “preventive medicine” assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency.’
⁸²

But the dead Che proved to be just as, if not more, potent than the live one. With his matted hair and beard, wan features and drawn face, many pointed to the resemblance between Freddy Alborta’s photograph and Mantegna’s
Lamentation over the Dead Christ
. And in a strange reprise of his youthful trade in Catholic trinkets, he too became a source of relics, as local women cut off locks of his hair and kept them as charms. The Cuban regime exploited the cult of the new revolutionary martyr, and Che’s image – especially Alberto Korda’s famous 1960 photograph of a determined Che looking into the distance – became a powerful symbol during the student revolts of the late 1960s and 1970s. The 1965 song to mark Che’s departure from Cuba, ‘
Hasta siempre, Comandante
’ (‘Farewell, Comandante’), also became a popular anthem on the radical left, sung by, amongst others, the American folk-singer Joan Baez.

The idealism of the late 1950s and early 1960s, represented by Che, was therefore to remain a powerful force during the rebellions of the late 1960s, as will be seen in Chapter Eleven. But in some ways Rostow was right: the death of Che was a sign that the romantic era was coming to an end, at least in the capitals of the superpowers. Different as their politics were, Khrushchev, Mao, Tito, Che and even Kennedy believed that they were fighting an ideological struggle for hearts and minds. From the mid-1960s, however, statesmen in Moscow and Washington were concluding that the times were much more dangerous; the new era demanded not a Peace Corps or guerrilla bands, but traditional armies and vanguard parties. And in Moscow, this conservative thinking was only reinforced by a revolutionary challenge within the Communist bloc itself – the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968.

On 21 August 1968, as Soviet and other Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu addressed a crowd of 100,000 from the balcony of the Central Committee building in Bucharest. The USSR, he declared, was guilty of aggression and Romania would not be sending troops to join her Communist allies, even though she was a member of the Warsaw Pact. His announcement was met with roars of approval, and his stand seemed like a truly courageous one, for Romania might have been at risk from a Soviet invasion. Ceauşescu, together with Alexander Dubček, now led the most popular Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, his alliance with the Czechoslovak reformers was a strange one in ideological terms. Whilst the Communists of the ‘Prague Spring’ were moving towards a more liberal form of Communism, only one year earlier Ceauşescu had abandoned a much less liberal reform package, and within a few years would preside over one of the most authoritarian of Eastern Europe’s regimes. The plaudits and praise he enjoyed were not rewards for any great liberalization but were bestowed in recognition of his patriotic valour in standing up for little Romania against an over-bearing Soviet neighbour.

The drama of August 1968 revealed the crisis the Communist bloc found itself in following the failures of Tito, Khrushchev and Mao to revive Communism by looking to various Marxist forms of ‘democracy’, with doses of militant radicalism and party-led mobilization. What was the way forward? The bloc fragmented. One group, including Romania, clung to a version of High Stalinism, complete with mobilization and harsh austerity, though they draped it in their own national
colours. At the other extreme, Communists like Dubček looked to a more pragmatic, even liberal Marxism which even allowed markets and pluralism. In the mid-1960s Moscow also tried to liberalize its economy to a limited degree. But the experiment was short-lived, and the Prague Spring discredited such experiments. By the end of the 1960s the nature of the Soviet bloc was best seen in the image of the tanks rumbling into Prague. It had lost any dynamism the system once had, and now devoted its energies to stability at any cost.