Communism

Article Outline

Introduction; Early Forms of Communism; The Ideas of Marx and Engels; Communism in the Soviet Union; Communism in China; Communism in Eastern Europe; Communist Governments in Other Regions; Communist Influence in Noncommunist Countries; Features of Communist States; The Future of Communism

Origins and Growth

China, the world’s most populous nation, came under communist rule in 1949. In the preceding decades, China had been racked by political turmoil. The collapse of the imperial Manchu dynasty in 1911 instigated the rise of regional warlords and of reformist and revolutionary movements. In 1919, after the United States failed to support China, its World War I ally, at negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, a group of students gathered in Beijing to protest. These demonstrations, known as the May Fourth Movement, set off a wave of nationalism and criticism of Western imperialism. At the same time, the successful October Revolution of 1917 in Russia began to exert a growing influence among Chinese intellectuals, sweeping many idealistic youths into the mainstream of revolutionary Marxism. In 1921, largely on the initiative of two Beijing University professors, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in Shanghai. One of Li’s young disciples was Mao Zedong, the son of a prosperous peasant.

In 1923, at the urging of the Russian leaders of the Comintern, the CCP allied itself with the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party), which then controlled a small area of southern China. The rest of the country, at the time, was split up among various warlords. With the assistance of the Soviet Union, the Kuomintang organized a military force to gain control of the rest of China. Led by the young general Chiang Kai-shek and aided by Communist mobilization of peasants and workers, the Kuomintang marched northward through China and by March 1927 had won control of most of central China, including Shanghai and Nanjing (see Northern Expedition). On entering Shanghai, Chiang ordered a violent purge of Communists, fearing that they were becoming too powerful. His troops, aided by the city’s criminal gangs, massacred thousands of pro-Communist workers and students. Similar repression soon followed in Wuhan, Nanjing, and Canton. The Kuomintang established itself as the national government of China in 1928.

The Communists, including Mao, retreated to a remote mountainous area in Jiangxi province, in southeastern China. Before the relocation, Mao had called for the party to base itself on rural peasants, not urban workers as in traditional Marxism. Mao saw the poor peasant masses as likely agents of revolution, but the CCP had rejected this strategy. Now, forced from the cities, the Communists had no choice but to adopt Mao’s peasant revolt strategy. Under Mao’s leadership, the party soon proclaimed its territory independent as the Jiangxi Soviet Republic, and it recruited peasant supporters to establish a Communist military force known as the Red Army.

The CCP survived a series of annihilation campaigns by the Kuomintang, but in October 1934 the KMT army encircled the Jiangxi strongholds and the Communists had to flee. Mao now led 80,000 Communists on a harrowing 9,600-km (6,000-mi) trek to the Shaanxi province in north central China. This trek became known as the Long March. Pursued by KMT troops and plagued by disease, only 8,000 people survived the yearlong journey. In 1936 the CCP established a new base in the Shaanxi province, in the town of Yan’an.

Under Mao

Mao reigned as the supreme authority in Communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976. Once in office, Mao signed a friendship treaty with the USSR and remained loyal to the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death, accepting Soviet doctrine and numerous Soviet advisers. However, Mao soon parted company with these advisers. Upset at Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, which he branded revisionism and a capitulation to capitalism, Mao became convinced that China needed to build its unique version of communism. In the early 1960s China struck out in an independent and often anti-Soviet direction in foreign policy.

Maoism, or “Mao Zedong thought,” as it came to be titled, combined components of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, Confucianism, the practical experience of Communist revolution in rural China, and the combative and iconoclastic personality of Mao. In its suppression of dissent, disregard of individual liberties, and eagerness to bring about swift industrialization and modernization of the country, Mao’s regime closely resembled unreformed Soviet communism. Industrial development was at first directly patterned on Stalin’s economic policies. All large-scale industry and trade were taken over by the government. A five-year plan for the years 1953-1958, assisted by Soviet economic aid, led to rapid industrial growth and was followed by other five-year plans. The collectivization of Chinese agriculture similarly imitated the Soviet precedent.

A turning point in Mao’s approach to governing, not fully understood at the time, came in 1956 and 1957, when Mao invited China’s intellectuals to participate in a campaign to “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” By encouraging them to freely air their grievances and opinions, Mao hoped to enlist their more active support in the next stage of China’s development. Mao saluted the value of struggle between opposing ideas and social forces, emphasizing that even in a socialist society numerous “contradictions” exist and that “What is correct always develops in the course of struggle with what is wrong.” When the intellectuals responded to his invitation with increasingly bitter and hostile criticisms of the party, of socialism, and of Mao himself, Mao clamped down on what he termed the “bourgeois rightists” and silenced his critics. Thousands who had spoken out were imprisoned, fired from their job, or exiled.

Although the intellectual thaw had been short-lived, the party leadership, prodded by an ever more restless Mao, dabbled in novel and often risky policies for advancing toward utopian communism. In 1958 it unveiled a radical program known as the Great Leap Forward to dramatically increase agricultural and industrial production. Mao claimed this plan would boost Chinese economic output to British levels within 15 years. The Great Leap called for decentralization of administration of the economy to local firms and CCP units. At the same time, Mao ordered the consolidation of the country’s newly formed farm collectives into thousands of huge communes where peasants would work together to increase China’s agricultural production and self-sufficiency. The party called upon all Chinese to engage in physical labor digging irrigation ditches, planting grain, and setting up local factories and backyard furnaces for the production of steel. Although the government initially reported great increases in production, within a year the Great Leap was leading to general exhaustion and economic collapse. The program was aborted in 1960, but steep declines in agricultural production had already begun. Gross exaggeration of grain production figures by communes led the government to seize large amounts of grain as taxes. Combined with extremely poor weather, this led to a massive famine that killed millions of people.

In the mid-1960s Mao sensed that the Chinese Communist Party was becoming increasingly elitist and bureaucratic. In addition, he began to suspect that other CCP leaders were deliberately trying to sabotage socialism by advocating more moderate approaches to economic development, which he deemed revisionist. Roused to action, in 1966 Mao launched his most aggressive and most tragic act of leadership: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution began as an attempt to reprimand moderate artists and intellectuals in Beijing, but spiraled into a frantic attack on dissent and, soon, on established structures of authority all over China. All schools were closed, and huge bands of students, calling themselves Red Guards, began an ill-defined battle to crush overt and covert enemies of communism. Scientists and other intellectuals were singled out for special victimization; hundreds of thousands were beaten, robbed, publicly humiliated, and condemned to menial labor on farms far from their home. Large numbers of party officials and senior party leaders were dismissed from office, accused of plotting to restore capitalism. Party general secretary Deng Xiaoping was imprisoned in a remote village, and head of state Liu Shaoqi was jailed under conditions that quickly killed him. In addition to wrecking China’s cultural and intellectual life, the Cultural Revolution gravely disrupted the economy, especially industry and transportation. By 1967 the turmoil was so great that the army was called in to restore order. By mid-1969 the military and the party apparatus had restored some calm and the Red Guards had been decommissioned.

Mao now consented to a more sober approach to governing the country. Defense minister Lin Biao, purged from the party in 1971, and accused posthumously in 1972 of plotting to assassinate Mao, served as a convenient scapegoat for the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The cult of personality around Mao, who had been revered as the “Great Helmsman,” cooled somewhat. China’s seasoned premier, Zhou Enlai, who had been under a cloud of suspicion during the Cultural Revolution, had his role restored. He restored to office many disgraced pragmatists, including Deng Xiaoping, who returned to the Politburo in 1973. Moderation also prevailed in foreign policy. In 1971 the People’s Republic of China was given the China seat in the United Nations, replacing the Taiwanese government. In 1972 U.S. president Richard Nixon visited China and signed the Shanghai Communiqué, normalizing relations and pledging China to resolve its conflict with Taiwan without war. In a last burst of Maoist leftism, Deng and several colleagues were publicly criticized in 1975 as “counterrevolutionaries.” Before the campaign could gain steam, Mao died in September 1976, at the age of 82.

After Mao

Mao had anointed a party functionary, Hua Guofeng, to succeed him as chairman of the CCP. A month after Mao’s death Hua, in a swift coup, arrested the Gang of Four, a quartet of leftist leaders headed by Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, who were accused of implementing the most extreme policies of the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s followers were effectively eliminated from national leadership. Without Mao’s patronage, however, Hua lost influence.

The real winner in post-Mao politics, as was clear by 1978, was the unassuming but wily Deng Xiaoping. Formally, Deng held but one top-level position: chairman of the party’s military commission. Informally, however, he was the kingpin of the leadership and had the final say on all pressing issues. With the ouster of the Gang of Four and their sympathizers, he wasted no time in advancing significant reforms. At the outset, he seemed to hold the door open to political change. In the so-called Democracy Wall movement of 1978 and 1979, hundreds of activists were allowed to paste up posters in downtown Beijing in protest against government policies. But this permission was rescinded, several activists were imprisoned in 1979, and the movement soon disappeared. Making it clear that he had no intention of dislodging the CCP, Deng rebuilt its organization and finances and fortified its hold on the army, security services, and courts. He sought to revive the prestige of the CCP, which had been badly damaged by the Cultural Revolution, by overseeing a reassessment of Mao and his reputation. The CCP gave Mao credit for reunifying China, but blamed him for arbitrary decisions and the “leftist errors” of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Reluctant as he was to effect political reform, Deng turned out to be an astonishingly ambitious and effective reformer in the economic domain. Winning over party elders and bringing more youthful advocates of change into high positions, he committed the party to “building socialism with Chinese characteristics” and revamped Chinese policy on several fronts. After some delicate first steps, the government in the early 1980s revived private trade and services in urban areas. In the countryside, the agricultural communes were reduced to empty shells and most of their administrative duties, such as setting production quotas, were transferred to village governments. Farmers were allowed to lease plots of land and sell their surplus produce on the free market. Rural industrial enterprises, operated in tandem by local governments and private entrepreneurs, became the fastest growing sector of the economy. In 1984 state-run factories in the cities also began to undergo restructuring, with managers given the right to shed surplus workers and to reinvest profits instead of giving them to the state. Whereas Mao had pursued a policy of national self-sufficiency, Deng endorsed an “open door” policy to start integrating the country into the international economy. Foreign trade boomed, China petitioned for entry into international financial institutions, and it carved out “special economic zones” along its southern coast to offer incentives to foreign investors. China’s exposure to the world economy deepened further in 1997 with the return to Chinese sovereignty of Hong Kong, a vital international trading center.

Deng’s daring market reforms were spectacularly successful in stimulating economic growth. Deng defended these reforms as consistent with the regime’s long-term ideological goals. He cited them as a logical part of a “primary stage of socialism” that would prepare China for its final task of constructing mature communism. That rationale, however, became threadbare as awareness grew that Communist China, whatever the words of the leadership, was in deeds acquiring the rudiments of a capitalist economy in which private control and profits would be paramount and the state would retrench to a largely regulatory role. Deng retired from active formulation of economic policy in the several years before his death in 1997, but reforms continued and even accelerated under his successor, President Jiang Zemin. Jiang favored the partial privatization of failing or inefficient state-owned enterprises, a move Deng had avoided.

Neither Deng nor his heirs relented on the decision to go slow with political reform. From 1986 to 1989 more flexible senior officials such as Hu Yaobang, CCP general secretary from 1981 to 1987, and Zhao Ziyang, who replaced Hu as general secretary in 1987, attempted to do more to open up the political system, with mild encouragement from Deng. Student unrest with the slow pace of change blew up in 1989 into mass protests and in the occupation of Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, by demonstrators. Following a searching debate in the Politburo, martial law was decreed in Beijing and in June the army marched into the square, dispersing or arresting participants in the demonstration. Hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed in the ensuing battles, and many more were jailed (see Tiananmen Square Protest). Memories of the democracy movement of 1989 linger, but the post-Deng leadership is determined to prevent any revival of it and to stave off searching reforms of political structures. For the time being, the Chinese Communist Party rules.

Communism in Eastern Europe

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Origins

Apart from China, the main world region in which communist movements made huge inroads after World War II was Eastern Europe. The states of the area were relatively young; all had been carved out of the former Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires by post-World War I treaties. Many had begun their independent existence as fragile democracies, but by the mid-1930s all except for Czechoslovakia had succumbed to authoritarian tendencies.

During World War II, the Eastern European countries either fell under the subjugation of Nazi Germany or allied themselves with the Nazi regime. Near the end of the war, Soviet troops invaded and occupied all but Yugoslavia and Albania, freeing them from German control. Wartime negotiations among the Allied Powers consigned Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviets took advantage of this agreement, and of Western war-weariness and reluctance to confront Soviet power, by installing communist governments in the Soviet-occupied countries of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. In 1946 British prime minister Winston Churchill, criticizing the Soviet expansion, proclaimed that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” separating Eastern and Western Europe. The term iron curtain came to describe a policy of isolation that prevented travel and communication between the two regions.

Special circumstances prevailed in Yugoslavia and Albania, where communist regimes came to power of their own accord. As in China, the Yugoslav and Albanian communists acquired much of their popular support from their prominence in the struggle against foreign occupation, in this case by Nazi Germany. Another special case was the zone of Soviet occupation in eastern Germany. Soviet aims here focused initially on German demilitarization and on obtaining postwar reparations. Only after the three U.S., British, and French zones banded together into a democratic German Federal Republic (West Germany) did Stalin, in October 1949, sanction a separate East German state, officially titled the German Democratic Republic, to be governed by German communists (see East Germany).

Communist Rule

The transition to communism in Eastern Europe took several years to complete. At first, local communist parties governed as part of multiparty coalition governments. But in 1947 and 1948 Soviet tolerance of political diversity waned, and these Eastern European countries essentially became Soviet satellites under Stalinist command. Non-Communist parties were eliminated, most industries and farms came under state control, and foreign policy was dictated by the USSR.

The governments of the so-called Soviet bloc had some latitude in the 1950s and 1960s to adapt the Soviet model to their circumstances. Each chose a somewhat different variation on the master theme. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany stayed closest to Moscow, departing only slightly from Soviet practice. The Romanian regime retained Stalinism domestically but cultivated anti-Russian nationalism in foreign policy. Hungarian leaders made unthreatening economic reforms, while at the same time maintaining the party’s political control. Poland’s government was the only one in the Soviet bloc not to compel the collectivization of agriculture.

The one country that balked at satellite status was Yugoslavia, led by the strong-willed Josip Broz Tito. Tito copied most of the USSR’s domestic institutions and policies, yet held out for independence in foreign relations and for pursuing his own geopolitical aims in the Balkans. Stalin attempted to crack down on Yugoslavia by establishing the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in 1947. Stalin hoped that the Cominform, by acting as a coordinating agency for communist parties, would pressure Tito to conform to the Soviet agenda. When this failed, Stalin branded him a heretic. The USSR, though, was unwilling to use military force to depose Tito, and he remained in power.

Demonstrating its independent course, Yugoslavia experimented with transferring control of factories to workers’ councils in factories, and it abandoned an effort to collectivize farms. It also decentralized the government to give more autonomy to Yugoslavia’s six constituent republics. Yugoslavia’s neighbor, Albania, broke with the USSR in 1961, siding with China in its feud with Moscow. Enver Hoxha, the founding leader of socialist Albania, practiced an austere version of communism, eliminating any sign of political dissent and eventually banning all religious bodies.

The Cominform was dissolved in 1956, but more sophisticated instruments for coordinating policy in the Soviet bloc took its place. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or COMECON), founded in 1949, included the USSR, its satellites, and eventually communist Mongolia, Cuba, and Vietnam. The Warsaw Pact military alliance, an Eastern European counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was formed in 1955. Yugoslavia kept aloof from these arrangements, and, along with Albania, was one of only two Eastern European countries to prohibit the stationing of Soviet troops on its soil.

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Origins and Growth

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After Mao

Communism in Eastern Europe

Origins

Communist Rule