Communism

A

Origins

Marx and Engels expected the proletarian revolution to erupt in a highly developed Western country like Germany, France, Britain, or the United States. In Marxist terms, Russia was just entering the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Its economy was primarily agrarian; serfdom in the villages had been eliminated only in 1861. Its political system was autocratic and imperial, with power concentrated in the tsar’s court, and its many minority groups were treated as inferior in status to ethnic Russians, the largest ethnic group. Russia was, therefore, an unlikely site for either a revolution or for construction of a communist system following a revolution. Nonetheless, from the 1860s onward, it was home to a sizable revolutionary movement. Marx and Engels themselves conceded that, given the speedy growth of its capitalist economy, Russia had revolutionary potential, and an uprising there might “sound the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West.”

The first organization of Russian Marxists, the League for the Emancipation of Labor, was established in 1883 by a group headed by Russian political theorist Georgy Plekhanov. Most members lived in political exile outside of the Russian Empire. They rebutted claims that Russia could bypass capitalism and pursue a direct path to socialism, asserting that the country needed to go through the step-by-step development seen in industrialized Western countries. Adherents of the league founded the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) at a meeting in Minsk in 1898. The party became a member of the Second International.

B

Under Lenin

The principal figure in the genesis of Russian communism was the radical socialist Vladimir Lenin. Like Marx, Lenin believed in the necessity of political revolution to achieve communism. In his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin lambasted Marxist revisionists, saying their fixation on bread-and-butter issues doomed the movement to a reformist “trade-union consciousness.” He urged Russia’s Marxists to build a party of professional revolutionaries, a steely vanguard (leading group) that would shape the consciousness of the masses and fight unflinchingly for the revolution. At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels, Belgium, and in London, England, in 1903, Lenin cleaved the party in two. His militant faction, the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for “majority”), had the most votes in the congress, but was soon embroiled in a drawn-out battle for superiority with the more moderate Mensheviks (from the Russian word for “minority”), whose leaders included Plekhanov, Yuly Martov, and Pavel Akselrod. Some other party members, such as the gifted orator and pamphleteer Leon Trotsky, stayed out of the conflict. The Bolsheviks convened their own congress at Prague (in the present-day Czech Republic) in 1912, marking the final rupture with the Mensheviks.

The defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was followed by the widespread disorder of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which nearly toppled the government. To curb the unrest, Tsar Nicholas II grudgingly agreed to create a national parliament. This concession led many opponents of the regime to conclude that the government would evolve peacefully from an autocracy into a constitutional monarchy. But World War I (1914-1918) intervened, massively draining the resources of Russian society and government. Facing food shortages, rapid inflation, and a breakdown of order in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), his capital city, the tsar abdicated power in February 1917. For the next eight months a weak and fractious Provisional Government shared power with a hierarchy of soviets, local and regional councils that were democratically elected by workers and peasants. The transfer of power from the monarchy to the Provisional Government became known as the February Revolution.

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In October 1917 Lenin’s Bolshevik vanguard, cloaking itself in the legitimacy of the soviets, staged a nearly bloodless armed coup against the Provisional Government. This seizure of power became known as the October Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution. The new “Soviet” government, chaired by Lenin, backed out of World War I, negotiating the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in early 1918, which meant huge territorial losses for Russia. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and transferred the seat of operations of the party and their fledgling government to Moscow. [In 1925 this name was changed to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). The name Communist Party of the Soviet Union was adopted in 1952.] In July 1918 the Congress of Soviets, led by the Bolsheviks, established the new state of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

In addition to withdrawing Russia from World War I and demobilizing the tsarist army—a policy change popular with soldiers and the masses—the infant regime quickly made a number of far-reaching decisions consistent with its socialist ideals. It validated the peasants’ seizure of landlords’ estates, which had begun in the months after the February Revolution. It proclaimed worker control of factories, the legal equality of women and men, the separation of church and state, and payment of members of the government at levels no higher than those of common skilled laborers. It encouraged ferment and experimentation in science, literature, and the arts, and committed itself to free provision of health care, education, pensions, and housing.

These political and social changes, though, were overshadowed by the desperate struggle for survival in which the Communist regime soon found itself, and which in the process transformed it. Lenin believed, like Marx and Engels before him, that a communist government could survive in Russia only if it sparked socialist revolutions in the advanced capitalist societies of Western and central Europe. In the afterglow of 1917, this seemed attainable, as left-wing insurrections flared in Finland, Germany, Hungary, and several other countries. Lenin did what he could to help. In 1919 the Soviet government sponsored the formation of the Communist International, or Comintern, which promoted world revolution (International: The Third International). The Comintern instructed its members to split away from reformist socialist parties in their host countries and set up revolutionary parties modeled on the Communist Party and faithful to Moscow. But working-class uprisings outside of Russia were short-lived and ultimately failed. No country, with the exception of landlocked Mongolia, emulated Russia’s example, confirming its isolation among hostile capitalist societies.

The Communists also faced threats from within. They at first governed in coalition with other left-wing parties, but expelled representatives of those parties from the government in July 1918. From then until the spring of 1921, Russia was engulfed by a savage civil war. Trotsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, commanded a fighting force known as the Red Army to defend the new Communist state against counterrevolutionary forces known as White Russians, or simply, Whites. The Cheka, the Communist regime’s secret police, launched the Red Terror, arresting and executing tens of thousands of suspected political opponents. During the war, the Communist government rapidly implemented a series of socialist economic policies known collectively as War Communism. The government nationalized banks, insurance companies, railroads, and large factories, forbade most private commerce, and seized grain from the rural population, undermining peasant support for the regime. Under the rigors of War Communism, inflation soared, production plummeted, and millions of urban dwellers trekked to the countryside to feed themselves by working the land. Fearful of the spread of communism, Britain, the United States, Italy, and Germany came to the aid of the counterrevolutionary forces, supplying troops and imposing an economic blockade on Russia. This caused the further disintegration of Russian industry and hardship to the working class. Famine, disease, and deprivation became rampant, and much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed. In total, an estimated 7 million to 8 million people died during the Russian Civil War, more than 5 million of whom were civilians.

The Communist Party emerged victorious from the civil war, but it was no longer the mass workers’ organization of 1917. The war promoted the centralization of Communist power and a preference for force over persuasion. The party had become increasingly coercive and authoritarian, and was now a bureaucratic apparatus beginning to be dominated by a ruling elite of senior officials. In addition, the economic situation in Russia was catastrophic. As hostilities came to an end in 1921, Lenin touted his New Economic Policy (NEP) as a compromise recipe for postwar recovery. It kept the so-called “commanding heights” of the economy—finance, transportation, heavy industry, and foreign trade—in state hands but allowed entrepreneurs and private firms to engage in domestic trade, small-scale manufacturing, and farming. There was no corresponding slackening of restrictions in the political sphere. Non-Communist parties were not allowed to resume activity. The NEP was largely successful in restoring Russian production, and within a few years the worst of the economic chaos was over.

In May 1922 Lenin was forced into virtual inactivity by a stroke. Joseph Stalin, who had labored loyally in a series of government posts, emerged as the most influential Soviet leader after the stricken Lenin. His power, though not unchallenged, had been strengthened in April 1922, when he was appointed to the newly created post of general secretary of the Communist Party. In December 1922 Communist Party leaders decided to unite the RSFSR with several neighboring areas of the old Russian Empire that the party directly or indirectly controlled. They established a new federation, known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which initially consisted of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian republics; eventually it grew to encompass 15 republics.

C

Under Stalin

The death of Lenin in January 1924 triggered an impassioned struggle over political power and policy within the Central Committee and the Politburo, the top leadership body of the Communist Party. Stalin, Lenin’s deputy for organizational matters, was victorious in the power struggle, demoting rivals like Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev (the head of the Comintern), and Nikolay Bukharin to secondary positions. Whereas Lenin had ruled mostly from his post as head of government, Stalin, as the party’s general secretary, relied for political and administrative support mostly on the swelling bureaucracy of the party itself, becoming chairman of the Soviet government only during World War II (1939-1945). He deftly utilized the party apparatus to place his supporters in key party positions, ostracize his foes, and meddle in a multitude of decisions.

Stalin adopted the catch phrase “socialism in one country” as the basis for his regime. Contradicting earlier Marxist doctrine, Stalin maintained that the complete victory of socialism within the Soviet Union was not contingent upon the success of other proletarian revolutions in the West. To achieve state socialism and, eventually, classless communism, no sacrifice was too great. At the end of the 1920s Stalin revoked the New Economic Policy and inaugurated the first of a series of Five-Year Plans, committing the regime to a program of breakneck industrial development and forced collectivization of agriculture. The result was a radical transformation of Soviet society. The government built hundreds of factories to produce machine tools, automobiles, agricultural machinery, motors, aircraft, generators, chemicals, iron and steel, coal, oil, and armaments. Construction—in which forced labor played an ever-increasing role—was begun on a vast network of new railroads and canals. The police chased small traders out of urban marketplaces. In the countryside, the policy of collectivization terminated private ownership of land and farm machinery and forced the Soviet Union’s vast peasantry into large collective farms under state and party control. State planners, subordinated to party leadership, henceforth assigned binding production quotas, targets for raw materials and labor utilization, and other directives to all economic units.

Lenin’s personal modesty and inhibitions about the unbridled use of force had tempered the dictatorial ways of the Communist regime until 1924. Stalin soon revealed himself to be immodest, ruthless, and a despot of grotesque proportions. Beginning with his fiftieth birthday in 1929, he was celebrated by an ever more extravagant personality cult. Nearly all his adversaries of the 1920s met a violent end during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. A handful were convicted in public show trials and shot; many more were seized by the Soviet political police, the NKVD (the Russian acronym for People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), and put to death without trial or dispatched to labor camps in Siberia or other remote areas. Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 while in exile in Mexico. Stalin’s campaign of terror was not confined to the Soviet elite; it penetrated all corners of society. Untold numbers of innocent peasants, workers, party members, government officials, army officers—essentially anyone alleged to have reservations about his policies—met immediate death by shooting or suffered slow death in labor camps. By some estimates, 10 million or more people were arrested for political offenses during the Stalin period. Roughly 1 million were executed. Several million at a time populated the Gulag—the far-flung network of concentration camps, forced labor camps, and exile sites. Millions of informers passed on tips about their fellow citizens to the police. The Stalinist regime also exerted totalitarian controls over artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and other intellectuals, squelching all dissent and subjecting them to recurrent campaigns to enforce conformity. Thousands of intellectuals perished in the terror wave of the 1930s, and smaller numbers died in persecutions after World War II.

Stalin’s foreign policy centered on securing the borders of the Soviet state and, when an opportunity presented itself, expanding the state’s influence. He converted the Comintern into a pliant tool of Soviet policy. Like the domestic bureaucracy, it was mercilessly purged in the 1930s of anyone not fully obedient to Stalin’s will. One of the Comintern’s most difficult assignments was to propagandize the twists and turns of the Soviet party line. For most of the 1920s, the Comintern pressured foreign communists to go it alone politically. Then, in the mid-1930s, it encouraged “popular front” alliances with social democrats and liberals against right-wing and fascistic parties. In 1939, upon conclusion of an alliance with Nazi Germany (see German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact), this edict was reversed—only to be reinstated in 1941 when the Nazis’ invasion brought the Soviet Union into World War II as an ally of the Western powers. In 1943 Stalin ordered the Comintern disbanded, concerned that it would inhibit wartime collaboration with the Allies. In 1947 he instituted the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), consisting only of the ruling communist parties of Eastern Europe and the French and Italian parties (International: The Communist Information Bureau). Of limited payoff to Soviet policy, it was terminated in 1956.

An important tendency within Soviet communism from the mid-1930s onward was glorification of certain aspects of Russia’s national heritage. The terrible losses suffered during World War II—estimated to be up to 30 million people—impressed upon Stalin the imperative of multiplying the regime’s sources of authority. For the Russian majority of the population, Russian nationalism was the most obvious such source. Stalin reinstated the reputations of past military heroes and of state-building tsars such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He toned down the crusade against the Russian Orthodox Church, which had endured government persecution since 1917, and enlisted it in the war effort. And, after the ouster of the Nazi forces, his government spent immense sums on the reconstruction of palaces, churches, and other landmarks despoiled during the occupation.

D

After Stalin: Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Stalin’s death in March 1953 set off another high-level contest over political supremacy. The winner was Nikita Khrushchev, who had become a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1949. Earlier in his career, Khrushchev had headed the party’s branches in Moscow and Ukraine. A master of political infighting, Khrushchev ascended to the position of first secretary of the party in late 1953. He defeated more senior leaders such as Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov and consolidated his authority by 1957. In 1958 he also became Soviet prime minister.

Though long a lieutenant of Stalin, Khrushchev found it morally necessary and politically expedient to expose his predecessor’s paranoia and renounce the cruelest of Stalin’s acts. His revelations were initially made in a secret speech at the 1956 congress of the party, the nature of which was gradually revealed to the general population. This speech led to a campaign of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. With Khrushchev’s backing, the Gulag camp system was largely dismantled, millions of political prisoners returned to their homes, many victims of the Stalinist terror were posthumously “rehabilitated,” and penalties for ordinary crimes were lightened. A thaw in restrictions on the press and cultural community facilitated some airing of Stalin’s crimes and discussion of Soviet economic and social problems. Khrushchev embarked upon halting reforms of agriculture, industrial administration, science and education, and the armed forces. Pronouncing the USSR an “all-people’s state” and no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership also widened popular participation in Soviet institutions.

Khrushchev’s reforms stopped short of the heart of the Soviet system. Although criticism of Stalin’s excesses was tolerated, discussion of more fundamental issues—such as the merits of Marxism-Leninism and single-party rule—was off-limits. Even in assessing Stalin’s rule, the party line fluctuated, while praise of Lenin, the founder of the regime, increased markedly. Far from spurning the cardinal values of Soviet communism, Khrushchev was viscerally committed to them and optimistic about progress toward their fulfillment. The 1961 party congress promised that the Soviet people would arrive at full-blown communism within a generation and would achieve American living standards by 1980. Industrial growth, the USSR’s military might, and its feats in space exploration, beginning with Sputnik I in 1957, reinforced this optimism. Khrushchev and the party carried out domestic reforms with caution, concerned that any ill-considered reforms could spill over uncontrolled into Eastern Europe and jeopardize their dominion there. De-Stalinization, in short, did not blossom into a more comprehensive de-communization of the USSR.

Khrushchev’s rule was curtailed by widespread animosity in the political establishment toward his erratic style of decision-making. Especially resented were his inconsistent personnel shake-ups, zigzagging policies, and reshuffling of the bureaucracy. In October 1964 Khrushchev became the only Soviet leader to be unseated by his fellow party chieftains. A conspiracy spearheaded by Leonid Brezhnev, a veteran of the provincial and central party apparatus, persuaded the Communist Party’s high command to topple him and denounce his “harebrained schemes” and hasty decisions “divorced from reality.” Khrushchev was sent into retirement and died in 1971. In his stead, Brezhnev became general secretary of the party and Aleksey KosyginAlekseyAleksey, a skilled economic administrator, was chosen head of the Soviet government.

Brezhnev’s 18 years in the Kremlin were the most tranquil period of Soviet history. Taking a conservative approach to governance, he abstained from drastic changes in personnel, procedures, and policy. Public criticism of Stalin was greatly trimmed and the cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years came to a halt. When a Soviet dissident movement materialized in the late 1960s, it was crushed and most of its leaders either were imprisoned by the KGB (as the political police were now titled) or left the country. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and chronicler of the Gulag, was forced to emigrate in 1974; the KGB sent the physicist Andrey Sakharov, the best-known Soviet dissident, to internal exile in the city of Gorky in 1980. Although Brezhnev was willing to tolerate some pragmatic revisions of the party line and to try to boost popular welfare, he opposed any serious loosening of political controls over society. The Cold War rivalry with the United States made the Soviet military-industrial complex the main beneficiary of budgetary allocations.

The Soviet economy labored in the 1970s as its reserves of raw materials, fuels, and labor began to deplete and its technological development began to decelerate. One consequence was that the country found it harder and harder to shoulder the burden of the arms race with the United States. Economic growth virtually halted by the beginning of the 1980s, while environmental and social problems accumulated and tensions among the USSR’s nationality groups worsened. More and more, the public mood was one of cynicism and withdrawal. The graying leadership of the Communist Party turned a deaf ear to these difficulties. Moreover, the party tried to fabricate a personality cult around Brezhnev at the very time that his health and competence were visibly failing. The infirmity of the party chief and his entourage was matched by increasingly apparent stagnation in institutions, policies, and ideas.

E

Gorbachev’s Reforms and the Soviet Collapse

Brezhnev died in November 1982. Two elderly members of the Politburo, Yuri Andropov, a former head of the KGB, and Konstantin Chernenko, a crony of Brezhnev’s, filled his shoes for the next several years, before they, too, expired in office. In March 1985, upon the death of Chernenko, the Communist Party’s Central Committee elected Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the party. Trained as a lawyer, the 54-year-old Gorbachev had made his career in party administration, moving from his home region in southwestern Russia to the central apparatus in Moscow in 1978. His relative youth, physical vigor, and frankness gave him the edge over other candidates in 1985. After a slow start, Gorbachev proved to be the most resolute reformer ever seen in the Soviet system and, contrary to intent, the architect of its destruction.

Gorbachev launched his program of perestroika (restructuring) of Soviet society and economy to enhance and modernize the system, not to bring it down. His initial approach was to tighten discipline within party ranks and in workplaces and to stage a campaign against alcohol consumption. Within a year, Gorbachev assumed more radical positions and recruited advisers who favored a far-reaching overhaul of Soviet practices and institutions. In the economic realm, Gorbachev resurrected some pieces of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s, authorizing the formation of cooperatives and family businesses and permitting collective farms to sell some of their produce on the market at the going price. The government also relaxed restrictions on foreign trade and investment and reduced central control over the managers of state-owned firms.

In addition to pursuing economic reforms, Gorbachev soon launched ambitious political and social reforms. The most dramatic change was adopting glasnost (candor or openness) about public affairs. In quick succession, the Soviet authorities released Sakharov and other dissidents from prisons and exile, relaxed censorship in the mass media, kindled debate over the sins of the Soviet past, and lifted a ban on independent associations and organizations. Gorbachev accompanied these measures with a shift in foreign policy, pledging to curb Soviet military spending and negotiate an end to the Cold War with Western nations. His most fateful decision was the electoral reform ratified in 1988, providing for competitive, multicandidate elections for the central government and for local and republican governments. For the first time since the early 1920s, candidates not proposed by the Communist Party were allowed to run. Gorbachev in 1989 became chairman of the Congress of People’s Deputies, an elected body that had replaced the Supreme Soviet that spring. In 1990 the congress amended the Soviet constitution to allow non-Communist political parties to organize and put candidates forward in elections.

Gorbachev’s brand of reform communism opened a floodgate of spontaneous changes in all corners of Soviet society. He was quickly upstaged by public figures who demanded an immediate embrace of Western-style democracy and a transfer of power from the central government to the 15 constituent republics of the USSR. In 1990 newly elected republican governments passed resolutions affirming their sovereignty and rights in relation to the central government. Nationalist sentiments also sprang up in the republic-level branches of the Communist Party. In response to the erosion of his power, Gorbachev had the Congress of People’s Deputies elect him the first-ever president of the Soviet Union. Most of the republics matched this move by electing presidents of their own. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s economic policies did not improve living conditions and in some respects made them worse. Frustration over economic shortages fed anticommunist feeling, especially in the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Gorbachev steadfastly refused to use military force to quell the discontent.

The crisis hit fever pitch when a group of hardliners from the Communist Party, the Soviet military, and the KGB attempted in August 1991 to institute a state of emergency and turn Gorbachev into a figurehead leader. However, the coup collapsed within two days, largely because of opposition by the popularly elected president of the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, who rallied crowds of demonstrators on the streets of Moscow. The leaders of the plot soon surrendered, but Gorbachev’s authority had been irreparably damaged, and he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party. Within days all Communist Party activity was suspended. Most of the Soviet republics hurriedly announced their independence from the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party was banned in Russia and many other republics. On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus announced the dissolution of the USSR and its replacement by a loose-knit, voluntary alliance called the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as president and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

For information on the recent history of communism in the countries of the former Soviet Union, see the Communist Influence in Noncommunist Countries section of this article.

V

Communism in China

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