IX.

Features of Communist States

Communist regimes have ruled many countries, so it is not surprising that the practice of communism has varied widely among them. The societies in which communists have exercised control have themselves been diverse, although none has been among the advanced industrial countries where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the workers’ revolution would catch fire. Some communist officials have been revolutionaries, others reformers, and yet others dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. Some leaders, such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot, have been mass murderers; others, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, have eschewed force. Their differences notwithstanding, communist states have shared certain features: a Marxist-Leninist ideology, a centrally planned economy, single-party rule, and restrictions on individual freedom.

A.

Marxist-Leninist Ideology

A root feature of communist states has been their subscription to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. As fashioned by Lenin, building on the earlier works of Marx and Engels, it is the belief that history advances by means of class struggle, always nudged in a benign direction by the leadership of a communist party. The theory foresaw that in capitalist societies, a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries was necessary to infuse the working masses with revolutionary fervor and overthrow capitalism. This would be followed by a brief period of proletarian dictatorship—in Lenin’s view, the communist party ruling on behalf of the working class—which would establish a socialist state and put in place the foundations of a communist society. Eventually class differences would vanish, the state would be abolished, and people would live in affluence and harmony.

The reality of communist regimes, however, was that of a dictatorial government of indefinite duration, and one that was as indifferent to the wishes of the working class as to every other social group. For several generations of communists, the contradiction between theory and reality could be rationalized as the unfortunate result of the poverty of their societies, of the mistakes of individual leaders, or of the malevolence of the capitalist world. Eventually, communist elites began to have doubts about the costs and benefits of a communist regime, especially as compared to liberal Western democracies. Ordinary people also questioned parts of communist ideology and offered passive and, more rarely, active defiance of the entrenched authorities. Surveys of Soviet refugees after World War II showed that younger people, who were born under communist rule, were more accepting of the values of the system than their elders, who had memories of life before communism. When similar surveys were done in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the pattern was exactly the opposite. People in all age groups supported many fundamentals of the communist system, but younger people were cooler toward the Soviet government and more receptive to alternative institutions and policies.

B.

Centrally Planned Economy

Marx and Engels conceived of communism as a society of abundance, equality, and free choice. They said little about how economic decisions would be made, other than that property would belong to society as a whole. Beginning with Soviet Russia after 1917, the rulers of real-life communist regimes were engrossed in setting up and working through bureaucratic agencies designed to mobilize economic resources for the industrial transformation of their countries. Industrialization became an end in itself, and the fantasy of the communist paradise receded into a cloudy future.

Communist systems relied on a centrally planned economy, also called a command economy. The centrally planned economy had four cornerstones. The first was government ownership of virtually all the means of production—farms, factories, scientific laboratories, shops, and so forth—and organization of those assets into firms managed by employees of the state. The second was control of those managers by party-appointed economic planners, who fixed output targets and prices and meddled in countless of the firm’s decisions, such as product mix and production scheduling. The third was a policy of giving the highest priority to industrial investment and—in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and several other countries—to military spending, at the expense of production of consumer goods and food products. The fourth central feature of communist economies was national self-reliance. Foreign trade occupied an inconsequential place in the economy, and trade that did occur was usually with other planned economies. Foreign investment was discouraged, and the communist countries, until late in their history, kept out of international financial institutions.

Communist economies did achieve some success. Studies of growth trends from the 1950s to the early 1970s showed the centrally planned economies equaling and in some cases exceeding the growth rates of the capitalist economies. They also attained high literacy rates, made basic health care available to the population, eliminated extreme poverty, and avoided unemployment. From the mid-1970s onward, however, the communist countries lost ground, and their leaders began to contemplate unpalatable economic reforms in the interests of achieving technological prowess and a higher standard of living. In all of the Asian communist countries except North Korea, ambitious reforms did unfold. In the Soviet bloc, there were scattered attempts at reform (in Hungary and Poland, for example), but they were limited by the unwillingness of the USSR, until several years into Gorbachev’s administration, to give change the green light.

C.

Single-Party Rule

In communist states, the communist party held complete and unchallenged political power. All other political parties were banned, except for minor procommunist parties in several Eastern European countries. The name of the governing party differed from country to country. Rather than calling themselves the “communist party,” some parties adopted variations like the “socialist unity party” (as in East Germany), the “people’s democratic party” (Afghanistan), or the “party of labor” (Albania).

Ultimate authority—subject to external audit from Moscow, in the heyday of Soviet power—was vested in a self-perpetuating leadership of perhaps 15 to 25 high officials in the party. The senior person in the ruling group wielded disproportionate influence over policy and personnel decisions. A single-minded leader—such as Stalin, Mao, Tito, or Castro—could wield supreme power over the entire political scene for decades on end. Organized factions within the top leadership were strictly forbidden. Stretching downward from the apex of the hierarchy was a sprawling and multilayered state bureaucracy. Owing to governmental stewardship of economic activity, public employees did almost all jobs, including those, such as selling newspapers and designing jet aircraft, that in Western societies would be the preserve of private business.

Communist parties often shared a similar organizational structure. The highest decision-making body, usually called the Politburo, consisted of a small group of senior party officials. Typically, the Politburo met weekly under the chairmanship of a top party leader to discuss high-level policy. A larger committee, usually called the Central Committee, included top executives of the government ministries, the military and police, and the party itself. Reporting to these high-ranking bodies was a separate administrative hierarchy composed of full-time officials of the party, grouped into departments in the capital city and at local and intermediate levels. Individual members of the party paid their dues and were subject to party directives in party cells (local organizations) nested in factories and other workplaces. Communist parties invariably judged control of personnel to be the crux of their control over society. In the Soviet Union, people appointed to important government positions were required to be vetted by party officials, a procedure known as nomenklatura. This system was copied throughout the communist world.

Communist states possessed elaborate pseudo-democratic processes for formalizing and publicizing political decisions. In the national capital, a parliament met once or twice a year to rubber-stamp laws and ratify selection of the members of the government. The legislators were chosen in elections in which the outcome was usually predetermined; with rare exceptions, the nominee of the communist party was the only name on the ballot. Similar rituals were replicated at the regional and local level. Three communist countries had federal systems in which the constitution divided formal powers between a central government and the governments of constituent republics: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and, after 1968, Czechoslovakia. The federal republics were designated as the homelands of ethnic groups and were named after them. For example, Czechoslovakia consisted of the Czech and Slovak republics.

D.

Restrictions on Individual Freedom

Another hallmark of communist states was the mandatory involvement of the mass of the population in political life. Most young people enrolled in party-controlled youth organizations, the entire labor force had to sign up in official trade unions, and the professionally ambitious were obliged to join the communist party and to submit to its discipline. Participation in state elections was all but impossible to escape, with turnout approaching 100 percent. Political education was also omnipresent. Political classes were organized in all schools (and textbooks in most subjects contained ideological content), and the program was continued in the universities and the armed services.

Complementing this compulsory participation was an extensive web of negative controls on personal liberties. For communist leaders, it was an article of faith that collective needs, as interpreted by the state, ought to override individual rights. Not without justification, they were wary that relaxation of controls might encourage individuals to seek wider freedoms and thereby to challenge the single-party system. Public assembly and voluntary association were prohibited; only meetings and organizations authorized by the state were tolerated. Communist states also limited, to one extent or another, individuals’ ability to worship, work, and travel as they pleased. The most intense restrictions were those clamped on the mass media, intellectuals, and artists, all of whom had to comply with party directives. Books, magazines, and newspapers were subject to pre-publication censorship in all communist countries before the Gorbachev reforms, and radio and television stations were owned outright by the state.