The Red Flag: A History of Communism (75 page)

Kim was worried about threats from his Communist neighbours to the North – the USSR and China – as much as from the capitalist South; he was therefore determined to build up his defences during the turbulent years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin left him dangerously exposed. Setting out to free himself from the vagaries of Communist-bloc politics, in 1955 Kim began to marginalize Marxism-Leninism, and his philosophy of
Juche
(usually translated as ‘self-reliance’), became the new ideology of the regime.
Juche
, in effect, meant national spirit. The main evil in the
Juche
universe was ‘flunkeyism’ (literally ‘serving the great-ism’ (
sadae ju
i
)) – sycophancy towards foreigners and their culture. This echoed the High Stalinist crime of ‘servility to the West’, but this time the targets were the Russians themselves. Kim decried ‘poets who worshipped Pushkin and musicians who adored Tchaikovsky’; ‘flunkeyism was so rampant that some artists drew foreign landscapes instead of our beautiful mountains and rivers’ – he was particularly outraged to find a painting of a Siberian bear in a local hospital.
¹³
His old connections with the Soviets and the Red Army were downplayed, and Kim Jong Il’s official biography was doctored – now he had been born in Korea itself, not the USSR. Iurii Irsenovich Kim had never existed.

Kim initially deployed
Juche
during the tensions with the USSR in the early 1960s. But later, during the Cultural Revolution, it was China that became more of a threat. In 1967 radical red guards, seeing in North Korea the ‘feudal’ Communism they were so eager to extirpate, and criticizing Kim for failing to be anti-Soviet enough, began to condemn the regime as ‘revisionist’ and corrupt, and a dispute simmered over the Sino-Korean border.

Kim responded by emulating aspects of Mao’s leadership cult. North Koreans were now expected to demonstrate the passionately intense emotional attachment to the ‘Great Leader’ that the red guards showed to Mao. However, Kim never copied the chaotic populist mobilizations of Maoist China. Indeed the country has retained his hierarchical order: according to a grim Korean quip, the population was divided into ‘tomatoes’ – those who are red to the core; ‘apples’ – red on the surface but susceptible to ideological improvement; and ‘grapes’, who have no chance of redemption. Heredity and class background (
songbun
) still play a role in Korean society: the top ‘core class’ are largely the descendants of the workers, peasants and Communists of the 1940s and 1950s,
and occupy good jobs; the ‘wavering class’ have opportunities to secure promotion, possibly through the military; whilst the ‘hostile class’ are seen as outcastes, and have lowly jobs. However, observers disagree over the strength of
songbun
and people’s ability to circumvent it – as over so many other aspects of this mysterious and isolated society.
¹⁴

Social hierarchy has been reinforced by ideological controls, and the population continues to be treated as a labour army. Life was, and is, hard. North Koreans generally have to leave for work at 7 a.m., attend political study sessions and meetings between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., work for eight hours with a rest period of three hours at lunchtime, and then attend more study sessions and self-criticism meetings until 10 p.m. (except for mothers with young children who are excused), returning home between 10.30 and 11 p.m. The military model extends to all aspects of everyday life. Everybody is allocated a set of clothes, suited for their work and position, once a year on Kim Il Sung’s birthday, and whilst there are subtle differences in quality according to rank, the styles are all very similar, creating an extraordinary uniformity. They are also of mediocre quality, many of them made of ‘vynalon’, a locally invented synthetic textile derived partly from limestone. Food has been rationed, and droughts, combined with agricultural mismanagement and exports of grain to earn foreign currency, have caused serious shortages and even famines.
¹⁵

Despite these crises, however, the regime has survived. After the Cultural Revolution, relations with China improved, and North Korea became more secure internationally. Domestically, too, the regime has been remarkably stable. Defectors report dissatisfaction, especially amongst those social groups that are not favoured by the
songbun
system, but there is a significant privileged group that benefits from the regime. The regime’s nationalist credentials, its determination to preserve its isolation from the rest of the world, the state’s intrusiveness, and the power of the leadership cult – now under the auspices of Kim Jong Il – have all contributed to its survival, despite a severe deterioration in living standards.

All three regimes on the periphery of the Eurasian landmass found they could use their own versions of High Stalinism in pursuit of nationalist ambitions. But the Central and East European core was travelling in precisely the opposite direction. As relations between East and West gradually improved from the 1960s, the failures of Khrushchev’s
Romantic Communism left them open to the influence of the market and the capitalist world.

The second part of Kundera’s
The Joke
is set in the 1960s. Ludvik has long been released from his mining labour battalion and has become a successful academic in a research institute. A journalist comes to interview him about his work, and it transpires that she is Helena, the wife of Zemanek – the party boss who presided over his youthful expulsion from the Communist Eden. Still bitter, Ludvik decides to take his revenge by seducing Helena and breaking up her marriage. But though he succeeds in winning Helena, he fails to wound Zemanek, who is involved in an affair himself and is delighted at Helena’s departure. He also discovers that Zemanek has become a popular reform Communist. His cruel joke aimed at his old enemy has backfired on him. A last encounter with his old friend, the folklore enthusiast Jaroslav at an ersatz folk festival – the ‘Ride of the King’ – reveals that the Slavic folk tradition, now commandeered by the Communist regime, has been emptied of all meaning; it has become a hopelessly vulgar, kitschy entertainment gawped at by uncomprehending teenagers. Though temporarily transported by their love of music, Ludvik’s and Jaroslav’s brief idyll ends when Jaroslav has a heart attack.

Ludvik is again a victim of his incomprehension of the world around him and, more generally, mankind’s inability to control events. His first joke backfired because he did not understand the puritanism of the late 1940s, whilst his second ‘joke’ fails because he does not realize how far those ideals have decayed by the 1960s. The marriage of Helena and Zemanek, which began as an idealistic Communist union, is a sham. The folk tradition has been deeply corrupted by the state. Ludvik discovers that a world without values is as abhorrent as one of intolerant mass joy.

Kundera, writing in 1965, captured the changes in Eastern Europe since the end of High Stalinism. In most states, the terrifyingly idealistic enthusiasms of the late 1940s had yielded to a less repressive but more cynical era. The rebellions of the mid-1950s had forced many of the socialist regimes to retreat from High Stalinism, and they had achieved
some stability. However, now they had jettisoned their old ambitions, there was a danger they would merely become repressive and infinitely less successful versions of their Western counterparts.

Immediately after the shock of 1956, it looked as if the Eastern bloc might be subject to new campaigns of revolutionary purity. Khrushchev was sensitive to Chinese criticisms, and the Moscow conference of Communist parties in 1957 launched a new push for collectivization after the brief post-Stalin pause. Except in Poland, where Gomułka managed to ditch collective farms completely, most East European countries completed collectivization by the early 1960s. Yet this was to be the last gasp of ideological optimism in the region. Never again would there be such a concerted advance along the road to Communism.

The loosening of the imperial reins brought much greater diversity to Eastern Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s. Whilst Yugoslavia, Romania and Albania had escaped Soviet control, even within the Soviet sphere variations were large – from a liberal Hungary at one end of the spectrum to an immobile Bulgaria at the other. But beneath the surface they all resembled each other in one respect: Communist parties throughout the region were retreating, and in doing so they were forced to become a different type of animal. The more egalitarian militias or guerrillas of the Soviet First Five-Year Plan and of the Chinese 1950s and 1960s had never been much of a model in Eastern Europe, but even the more orderly armies of High Stalinism no longer seemed to be suitable. One Hungarian low-level party official, interviewed in 1988, put the problem starkly:

The remaining Radical elements of High Stalinism were dropped in favour of technocracy and creeping markets. Communists were now much more likely to be professionals and managers than workers. In 1946, only 10.3 per cent of Yugoslavia’s Communists were white-collar
workers; by 1968 the proportion had more than quadrupled to 43.8 per cent.
¹⁷
Secret policemen remained but they were less visible.

The Communist authorities also made fewer efforts to remould their populations and create the new socialist man. They sought, rather, to establish a workable
modus vivendi
with the rest of society. The first renegotiation was with the industrial working class, the most rebellious and threatening force. Stalinist efforts to bully workers into increasing productivity were abandoned, and the influential grouping of male skilled workers in heavy industry was bought off with incomes approaching those of educated white-collar employees. Rapidly, therefore, the regimes’ pro-worker rhetoric, so evidently hypocritical in the Stalinist period, began to mean something. But as will be seen, these concessions had their drawbacks. Factories became even less productive, and opposition to market-style reforms became more entrenched. The concessions also fuelled resentment amongst professionals, who felt that their educational achievements were not being recognized.

Communist parties also retreated before entrenched peasant cultures. In Yugoslavia and Poland collectivization was permanently abandoned, but even where collectivization was the norm, efforts were made to accommodate the traditional peasant household. Private plots expanded, and soon made a major contribution to food supplies.

Religion also flourished after the new retreat. No longer were the churches and (in Bosnia) mosques treated as inherently anti-Communist. The Polish Catholic Church did particularly well out of the 1956 crisis and became a major force, seizing a great deal of autonomy. In Hungary Kádár reached agreement with the Vatican in 1964, whilst in 1958 the East German leadership tried to come to some understanding with the influential Protestant churches. Yet the Communists never fully made their peace with God. Relations with the churches were always tense, and churches were riddled with spies and informers. Only in Orthodox Romania did Gheorgiu-Dej follow Stalin’s wartime strategy and co-opt the Church. By 1971, his successor Ceauşescu had put medieval images of St Stephen on Romanian postage stamps.
¹⁸

But perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the retreats – at least for a time – were the urban middle classes; the early 1960s was one of the freest periods of the Communist era. Khrushchev’s second and even more forthright denunciation of Stalin at the twenty-second party congress in 1961 reverberated throughout the Soviet sphere of influence. Solzhenitsyn
and Kafka could even be read in conformist Sofia – for a time. Only Poland bucked the trend. After a liberal period in 1956–7, when Gomułka even allowed competition between candidates in parliamentary elections, the party cracked down, seeking refuge in anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism.

But if the comrades were retreating, and no longer serious about creating full Communism, what on earth were they for? How could they justify their monopoly of power to the population, or to themselves? Nationalism, of course, had long been part of the Communist repertoire, and the Polish regime embraced it more fully after 1956. But nationalism itself could be hazardous. Polish nationalism, for example, was strongly entwined with an anti-Communist Catholicism and anti-Russian sentiment; Hungarian nationalism was difficult to disentangle from old revanchist demands for pre-World War I territories – demands that were naturally unacceptable to its now socialist neighbours; and nationalism in the GDR was now irredeemably besmirched by Nazism. In multi-ethnic states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (and the USSR), nationalism, far from fostering cohesion, could be dangerously corrosive. Slovenes and Croats increasingly saw Yugoslavia as a Serb project and became vocal liberalizers in the 1960s, whilst Slovak discontent at Czech domination helped to bring about the Prague Spring in 1968.