VII.

Communist Governments in Other Regions

Outside of the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe, Marxist-Leninists scored victories in a string of other countries. Successful communist movements were mostly tied to the Soviet camp, which supplied them with arms, economic aid, and advisers. The Chinese also exercised influence in some of these countries, but when relations chilled between China and the USSR in the early 1960s, Moscow generally insisted on conformity with the Soviet position.

A.

Asia

A.1.

Mongolia

Mongolia, an appendage of the Chinese empire until 1911, was the first country outside Soviet frontiers to accept a communist regime. Local, Russian, and Chinese factions fought for mastery there from 1911 until 1921, when the Mongolian People’s Party (later the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, or MPRP), a pro-Soviet group headed by Damdiny Sühbaatar, won out. A Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, in 1924, and the MPRP became the sole legal party. Under the long-lived leadership of Horlogiyn Choybalsan and then of Yumzhagiyen Tsedenbal, Mongolia was a pliant ally of the Soviet Union. It sent troops to help Soviet forces fight Japanese divisions crossing over from China in the late 1930s, and it again sent troops during the Soviet occupation of Manchuria in 1945. It also sided with Moscow during the Sino-Soviet conflict, the rift in relations between China and the USSR that developed in the early 1960s. Developments in Mongolia after 1985 paralleled those in Eastern Europe. Reforms began slowly, but by the early 1990s the country had instituted a multiparty system and embarked on market reforms. In 1993 President Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat, who had split from the MPRP and aligned himself with the opposition, was reelected president in the country’s first direct presidential elections. The MPRP regained control of parliament in 2000, and today it remains the largest political party in Mongolia.

A.2.

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

There was a longstanding communist tradition in French-governed Indochina, and the Indochinese Communist Party was founded in 1930 in Hong Kong. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the party and of the Viet Minh nationalist movement, proclaimed the independence of the Vietnamese lands from the French in 1945. After a lengthy guerrilla war and the defeat of French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, France granted the Vietnamese request (see First Indochina War). France and the Viet Minh agreed to the temporary partition of Vietnam into two zones: North Vietnam, to be ruled by Ho and the communist Lao Dong (Workers’ Party), and South Vietnam, which would be controlled by noncommunists. National elections were to be held in 1956 to bring about a reunified Vietnam. But the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold elections after it appeared likely that Ho would win.

In 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed with the goal of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government. Although controlled by the Lao Dong, the NLF was largely composed of native southerners disaffected by Diem’s repressive rule. Subsequently, a military struggle raged for control of Vietnam, with the government in South Vietnam backed after 1964 by American troops and air forces. The United States justified its support of the South Vietnamese government in the Vietnam War (1959-1975) by the “domino theory”: the belief that if all of Vietnam fell under communist rule, communism would quickly spread to other countries in Asia and beyond. In 1973, its resolve sapped by antiwar protests at home, the United States negotiated the withdrawal of its forces. In 1975 Vietnam was reunified under communist rule, and in 1976 it officially became the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. For years, communism in Vietnam by and large followed the Soviet model, and the government accepted large subsidies from Moscow.

In 1979, following several years of tension and border skirmishes with the Khmer Rouge communist regime in Cambodia, Vietnam invaded its neighbor and established a pro-Vietnamese government. This incident in turn touched off a short war between Vietnam and China, the protector of the Khmer Rouge. The subsequent loss of Chinese trade led to even closer ties between Vietnam and the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1986 the Vietnamese Communist Party put forward a package of economic reforms quite similar to those mounted in China by Deng Xiaoping. Party leaders ended collective farms, encouraged private industrial activity, and passed legislation aimed at attracting foreign investment. As in China, these reforms spurred economic growth but did not include political changes that would end single-party rule. Today, the Vietnamese Communist Party remains the only legal political party in Vietnam.

Cambodia and Laos gained their independence from France in 1953. Both were to be destabilized by the Vietnam War. In Cambodia, General Lon Nol deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and sent troops to fight North Vietnamese guerrilla groups that had established bases in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge movement (controlled by the Communist Party of Kâmpŭchéa, or CPK), which had waged a guerrilla war against the government since 1967, gained control of large zones of Cambodian territory. The United States postponed a Khmer Rouge victory with an intensive bombing campaign, begun in 1969, aimed at cutting off the Cambodian supply lines of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces (see Secret Bombing of Cambodia). In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and immediately began a radical transfiguration of the country, which it renamed Democratic Kâmpŭchéa. Headed by Pol Pot, the regime terrorized the population for the next four years while claiming to build what it called an authentic Cambodian socialism. It forced millions of city dwellers to move to rural areas to work as farmers and to build canals, dikes, and dams. All land was nationalized, as were other means of production, and barter took the place of money. Khmer Rouge leaders severely restricted freedom of speech, movement, and association and suppressed religious practices. The regime’s brutal policies, along with outright terrorism and political murder of real and imagined opponents, resulted in the deaths of nearly 1.7 million Cambodians. Millions of others were tortured, deprived of food, or sent into forced labor.

Vietnam’s 1979 invasion brought to power a less brutal communist government, which established the pro-Vietnamese Kâmpŭchéan People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) as the sole legal party. In 1990 the party abandoned socialism and introduced a range of free-market reforms, including the ending of collectivized agriculture. The following year the party changed its name to the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Multiparty elections were held in 1993 for the first time in decades, Sihanouk was restored to the throne, and the country was renamed the Kingdom of Cambodia. By 1999 the last Khmer Rouge troops and leaders had surrendered or been captured.

Laos, too, had a communist revolution in 1975, which replaced the Kingdom of Laos with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. It remained dependent on Vietnam until the early 1990s, when Vietnamese aid declined and the Laotians commenced some gradual economic reforms, mostly in agriculture. Today, the communist Lao People’s Revolutionary Party is the only legal political party.

A.3.

North Korea

Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, was partitioned after World War II into Soviet- and American-occupied zones. In 1948 a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, was established in the Soviet zone, and a Republic of Korea, or South Korea, was established in the American zone. In a bid to unify the country under communist rule, North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950. The United States and small contingents of troops from other nations came to the defense of South Korea, while China joined the North Korean offensive. Millions of soldiers and civilians died in the Korean War, which ended with a truce in 1953.

Kim Il Sung was party leader and head of state in North Korea from 1948 until his death in 1994. Throughout that time, North Korea was an unvarnished Stalinist dictatorship, with harsh internal repression, an extravagant cult of Kim’s personality, and a colossal military machine that positioned large numbers of troops along the demilitarized zone that separates North Korea from South Korea. All industry was nationalized and agriculture was collectivized. North Korea maintained cordial relations with both the Soviet Union and China and accepted aid from both. In the 1990s the North Korean economy deteriorated markedly, with food shortages leading to malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic disease. Kim’s son Kim Jong Il succeeded him as leader of North Korea in 1994. His main priorities have been to end the food crisis, achieve a rapprochement with South Korea, and negotiate with the United States on trimming North Korean weapons programs in exchange for economic relief. Today, North Korea remains one of the world’s most insular societies. The Korean Workers’ Party, the ruling communist party, tightly controls almost all aspects of economic, political, social, and intellectual life.

B.

Latin America

B.1.

Cuba

In 1959 a guerrilla force commanded by Fidel Castro, a leftist revolutionary, unseated Cuba’s dictatorial ruler Fulgencio Batista in the Cuban Revolution. In 1961 Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and pronounced Cuba a socialist country, the first in the Western Hemisphere. Castro allied Cuba with the Soviet Union and gave the Soviets the right to station intelligence units and dock their naval vessels in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, triggered by the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, brought Havana and Moscow into an even more enthusiastic partnership. Within several years, Cuba had acquired the trappings of a communist state. Although Castro had not been a member of Cuba’s communist party (the Socialist People’s Party, or PSP, established in 1925), in 1961 he forced a merger of the PSP and his own political group, the 26th of July Movement. In 1965 the merged party was renamed the Communist Party of Cuba.

Castro’s Cuba adopted many features of Soviet communism, including a state-owned economy, but it also experimented with features different from both the Soviet and Chinese models. The government eliminated fees and charges for sporting events, telephone calls, and funerals, and it mobilized thousands of urban dwellers to bring in the annual sugar crop. It made major improvements in public health and education and introduced policies to eliminate racial discrimination against blacks and mulattoes (people of mixed black and white ancestry). The Castro regime’s radicalism peaked from 1966 to 1970. In 1968 it shut down all surviving private businesses, and in 1970 it mounted a drive to harvest 10 million tons of sugar by mobilizing the masses. When the effort failed to achieve its target, Castro was forced to moderate his economic policies, which after 1970 were close to Soviet practice. In 1976 Castro introduced an economic management system that enlarged the autonomy of state enterprises and lifted price controls on some agricultural products.

With Moscow’s backing, Cuba promoted communist and revolutionary movements across Latin America, training and arming their fighters. The main agent of this policy, Che Guevara, was killed in fighting in Bolivia in 1967. In the 1970s Cuba dispatched troops and specialists to aid the pro-Soviet regimes in Ethiopia and Angola. About two-thirds of Cuba’s foreign trade was with the USSR, which exchanged Cuban sugar for petroleum and machinery. Castro’s regime was hence badly hurt by Soviet economic stagnation in the 1980s and especially by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Soviet subsidies and most trade with Russia vanished, Cuba’s economy dwindled by one-third between 1991 and 1993. Castro buffered the national crisis by conducting some cautious economic reforms, such as promotion of foreign investment, tourism, and self-employment in certain occupations. Beyond that, he proudly reaffirmed his belief in Marxism-Leninism and faulted other communists for selling out to the capitalists.

B.2.

Nicaragua

The only other Latin American country to be governed along communist lines was Nicaragua. An uprising led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1979 deposed the dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and made Nicaragua the second Soviet client state in the hemisphere. Nicaragua was governed first by a Sandinista junta (council), and after 1984 elections by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra and a Sandinista-controlled legislature. The new government established friendly ties with the USSR and Cuba, nationalized the banks and many large firms, and expanded public spending on health care and education. Although the Sandinistas allowed opposition parties to operate, they restricted the media and manipulated the political process; most opposition parties, therefore, boycotted the 1984 election. Throughout the 1980s an opposition guerrilla force known as the contras (short for “counterrevolutionaries” in Spanish), supported financially and militarily by the United States, sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. In 1990, facing a deteriorating Nicaraguan economy and pressure from the contras and the United States, the Sandinistas eased restrictions on political opponents and allowed a presidential election. The opposition candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, defeated Ortega, and the Sandinistas became the major opposition political party. By the end of the 1990s more competitive elections had been held and civil liberties were better defended than before the 1979 revolution.

C.

Middle East

C.1.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan, one of the world’s most impoverished countries, was ruled into the 1970s by a conservative monarchy. The communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, founded in 1965, carried out a coup in 1978 and set about revolutionizing Afghan society, in the process alienating its middle class and Muslim clerics. The party was bitterly divided between a radical Khalq wing and the more restrained pro-Soviet Parcham faction. The 1978 government, chaired by Noor Muhammad Taraki, was under Khalq control. In late 1979 Hafizullah Amin, an extremist member of Khalq, deposed and killed Taraki in a palace coup. Fearing further tumult, the Soviet Union in December 1979 landed paratroops in Kābul, killing Amin and installing a member of the Parcham faction, Babrak Karmal, as president. The Soviets then sent in an occupation force of more than 100,000 troops, who incurred massive resistance and were unable to stabilize the situation. The fighting with the anticommunist mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters), who were aided by Pakistan and the United States, devastated the countryside and forced more than 4 million refugees into surrounding countries. In 1986 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev engineered Karmal’s replacement by Mohammed Najibullah, the head of the Afghan secret police, and in 1988 the USSR began pulling out its troops. The Soviet exodus was complete by February 1989. Najibullah remained in office until April 1992. He was tortured and executed by soldiers of the Taliban Islamic movement when they occupied Kābul in 1996.

C.2.

South Yemen

The southern section of the present-day Republic of Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, was from 1967 to 1990 a Soviet-aligned country. Great Britain had administered the area as a colony (known as the Aden Protectorates and later the Federation of South Arabia), but British troops withdrew in 1967 after challenges from guerrilla groups. The National Liberation Front (NLF), which endorsed a Marxist ideology, took control of the government and proclaimed the People’s Republic of South Yemen, known commonly as South Yemen. The country was renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in 1970. The NLF instituted a socialist regime, drawing economic aid from the USSR. In the 1970s violence flared between South Yemen and North Yemen, known officially as the Yemen Arab Republic. But the two Yemeni governments cooperated during the 1980s and in 1990 reunited as the Republic of Yemen. In 1993 multiparty elections were held.

D.

Africa

Although there were experiments here and there with facets of communism in postcolonial Africa, only four African countries made concerted endeavors to build a Soviet-style regime: Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique.

D.1.

Republic of the Congo

The first was in the Republic of the Congo, a tiny country that gained its independence from France in 1960. In 1964 President Alphonse Massamba-Débat formed the National Movement for the Revolution along Marxist-Leninist lines and made it the country’s only legal political party. The government obtained foreign aid from the Soviet Union and China. A coup organized by more militant leftists and the army installed Marien Ngouabi as head of state in 1968. Two years later, Ngouabi established the People’s Republic of the Congo, an avowedly socialist state. Ngouabi abolished the national assembly and made a new Marxist-Leninist party, the Congolese Labor Party, the sole legal political party. He also nationalized the railroads and some other sectors of the economy. After Ngouabi’s assassination in 1977, his successors kept the country’s pro-Soviet orientation and brought in Cuban troops as palace guards, but had more and more difficulty handling Congo’s economic difficulties. President Denis Sassou-Nguesso permitted multiparty elections in 1992 and stepped down after losing to an opposition candidate. He ousted the elected president and returned to power in 1997, but by this time he had relinquished his communist convictions.

D.2.

Ethiopia

In 1974 the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, was overthrown in a military coup. The military leadership set up the Provisional Military Administrative Council, known as the Derg, to govern the country. Led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg declared Ethiopia a socialist state with a one-party system and set about nationalizing all agricultural land and most industry. It closed all schools for a year in order to send students and teachers into rural areas to explain the government’s aims to the peasants and to teach them basic health care and improved farming methods.

For several years after the revolution Ethiopia was racked by war, insurrections, and a major famine. The Derg, while violently putting down opposition from labor unions and Marxist urban guerrillas, was itself divided by internal dissension. Only in 1977 did Mengistu gain full control of the government. Military aid from the USSR and Cuba enabled Ethiopian forces to regain control over the Ogadēn region of southeastern Ethiopia, which Somali separatists had captured. Meanwhile, peasant protest against land reform and severe droughts condemned millions of Ethiopians to hunger and starvation in the 1980s.

In 1984 Mengistu created the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia as the country’s official Marxist-Leninist party, and in 1987 he renamed the country the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Although a new constitution provided for a civilian government, Mengistu kept power, spending much of his time battling internal and external enemies and coping with the consequences of misconceived economic policies. Mengistu was forced from power in 1991, soon after the USSR ended its support for the government. A coalition of rebel groups formed a transitional government. The province of Eritrea declared independence in 1993 with the new government’s blessing, but border disputes led to a savage war, which officially ended in a peace agreement signed in 2000.

D.3.

Angola

In 1975 Portugal, having undergone a democratic revolution, granted independence to its overseas colonies. The two largest of them, Angola and Mozambique, opted for communist-type governments. In Angola, a Marxist group called the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was predominant in the post-independence government, instituting a one-party regime and a state-centered economy with the assistance of the USSR and Cuba. However, civil war immediately broke out with another Angolan nationalist group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which received military backing from South Africa and the United States. Cuba came to the MPLA’s rescue, deploying 50,000 troops as well as large numbers of construction workers, doctors, and teachers in Angola. Cuban troops began to withdraw in 1989. In 1991 the MPLA and UNITA signed a peace accord, brokered by both the USSR and the United States, which provided for multiparty elections in 1992. The MPLA and UNITA could not agree on the results of the elections, and consequently MPLA leader José Eduardo dos Santos continued to serve as president. Sporadic fighting continued after the elections.

D.4.

Mozambique

Like Angola, Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975. A Marxist-Leninist group, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) assumed power, led by Samora Moises Machel. Frelimo immediately set out to collectivize agriculture, eradicate nomadic practices, and abridge the power of village elites and of the Catholic Church. It was soon embroiled in a vicious civil war with the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), a rural guerrilla movement financed initially by Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) but later by South Africa. Machel negotiated with South Africa and the Western powers to cut off foreign support for Renamo. By the late 1980s Frelimo had disavowed most of its Marxist economic policies and begun to woo foreign investment. A multiparty constitution and other political reforms were adopted in the early 1990s, and Frelimo and Renamo signed a peace accord in 1992.