Read The Red Flag: A History of Communism Online
Authors: David Priestland
The Red Flag: A History of Communism (100 page)
Their worldview was captured in a poetic but highly polemical TV documentary series of 1988,
River Elegy
. The films – a carefully selected set of powerful images with didactic voiceover – were a head-on assault on three enemies, each represented by a well-known emblem of Chinese identity: Chinese traditional culture, symbolized by the Yellow River; political authoritarianism, symbolized by the Chinese dragon; and isolation from the West, symbolized by the Great Wall. As the voiceover solemnly intoned at the end of the first film:
Oh, you heirs of the dragon… The Yellow River cannot bring forth again the civilization that our ancestors once created. What we need to create is a brand new civilization. It cannot emerge from the Yellow River again. The dregs of the old civilization are like the sand and mud accumulated in the Yellow River; they have built up in the blood vessels of our people. We need a great tidal wave to flush them away. This great tidal wave has already arrived. It is industrial civilization. It is summoning us!
The tidal wave, it was made clear, was coming from the West. Unlike China, the West was a wide blue ocean – a Romantic place of grand emotions, open thinking and dynamism. In the final episode, the voiceover predicted the ultimate merging of China and the West: ‘The Yellow River is fated to traverse the yellow soil plateau. The Yellow River will ultimately empty into the blue sea.’
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The documentary series was screened twice on Chinese TV before it was banned, and was one of the most watched documentaries in the history of world television. The climax of this pro-Western idealism came in Tian’anmen Square on 30 May 1989, when the students constructed a thirty-foot-high polystyrene statue, the ‘Goddess of Democracy’, resembling the the American Statue of Liberty – challenging the giant portrait of Mao.
During the previous few days, it looked as if the demonstrations might lose momentum and violence could be avoided. But the statue was a sign of the students’ determination to continue. Now with workers protesting, too, and party members defecting to the rebels, Deng and the leadership began to fear a repeat of the Polish collapse of 1980. The apparent success of Jaruzelski’s military crack-down emboldened them, and they decided to act. On 3 June, troops were sent in to clear the square. Confronting the protesters blocking their way, they fired into the crowds. By early on 4 June, the tanks had reached Tian’anmen and crushed the Goddess of Democracy. Between 600 and 1,200 were killed and 6,000–10,000 injured.
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The Tian’anmen Square massacre was a serious humiliation for Deng, and its shockwaves resonate to this day. In the immediate aftermath, the violence damaged Deng’s reforms. The lesson seemed to be obvious: only conservatism could save the state. It seemed that China was on the path to Brezhnevite retrenchment and stagnation. But perceptions were to change again with the failure of the putschists’ coup and the collapse of the USSR in 1991; the tide of history now seemed to favour capitalism. For the residents of Zhongnanhai – the centre of party power – the lessons of 1989–1991 pointed in one direction: China had to reject the two revolutions of the 1980s – the liberal democratic one and
perestroika
. She would resist the attractions of the West and follow her own non-revolutionary path, one that married muscle and markets.
1. Revolution in Paris. Eugène Delacroix,
July 28: Liberty Leading the People
(1830) – the classic representation of the French revolution of July 1830, and of the French revolutionary tradition as a whole. The term ‘socialism’ was first used in the aftermath of the revolution.
2. Marxism in Berlin. A cartoon commenting on the emergence of the Social Democratic Party as the second largest party in parliament during the elections of 16 June 1898. The horsemen of the apocalypse drown the traditional parties in a flood of Social Democratic votes.
3. Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. Lenin speaks at the unveiling of a memorial to Marx and Engels in Voskresenkaia Square, Moscow, November 1918.
4. Ten Days that Shook the World. Sergei Eisenstein’s mythic ‘reconstruction’ of the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, in his film
October
, 1928.
5. Red Cavalry. ‘On Your Horse, Proletarian!’ Russian civil war poster, 1919.
6. Communist famine. Starvation in 1921, partly caused by Bolshevik grain requisitions.
7. The revolution spreads westwards. Lenin points to the West, above the slogan, ‘A Spectre Haunts Europe, the Spectre of Communism’.
8.
Death to World Imperialism
, by Dimitry Moor, 1919. Workers and soldiers struggle for power while the monster of imperialism stifles the world economy.
9. A modern utopia. Model of the monument to the Third International, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1920. Never built, and probably unbuildable, it was designed as a headquarters for the Comintern and became an icon of constructivist architecture.
10. The French example. Ho Chi Minh speaking at the Congress of Tours, 25 December 1920, where the French Communist Party was founded. Ho was one of many Communists of the developing world who joined the French party.
11. ‘International Red Aid’ poster, condemning ‘imperialist terror’ in French Indochina and calling for a ‘workers’ enquiry’.
12. Guerrillas in Asia. A young Mao speaking before his fighters.
13. The changing image of Stalin. In this poster of 1931 Stalin is the same size as the workers he is marching with. The slogan reads: ‘The reality of our programme is living people, it’s you and us together’.
14. In 1935, Stalin is much larger than anybody else, and the message is more elitist. The slogan reads: ‘Cadres decide everything’ – it is now officials and particular heroic workers who are being glorified.
15. In 1952, Stalin is alone in the poster, in front of one of his ‘wedding-cake’ buildings. It reads: ‘Glory to the Great Stalin, Architect of Communism’.
16. ‘Criticism and self-criticism’. A Soviet cartoon of 1931 encouraging workers to denounce their bosses. It tells the story of a worker whose tools are broken and who finds there are no spare parts. The shortages are blamed on a Soviet bureaucrat, who is advised by a sinister bourgeois specialist with a moustache.
17. The Gulag. Prisoners work on the White Sea–Baltic canal, the first major project built by forced labour, between 1931 and 1933. Tens of thousands died in its construction.
18. The collective farm. A propaganda photograph of happy peasants marching, shoeless, to the collective farm.
19. Moscow’s favourite little brother. A Red Army soldier shakes hands with a German worker in this German Communist poster. The slogan reads: ‘The Soviet Union, Ten Years’ (1928).
20. Civil war. Members of the English ‘Tom Mann’ International Brigade, fighting in Spain, pose before their red flag. Barcelona, 1936.
21. The war of ideologies. The German and the Soviet pavilions face each other at the Paris exposition of 1937, either side of the Eiffel Tower.
22. Communist anti-fascism. A French Communist poster of 1946 presents businessmen as Nazi collaborators and calls for the nationalization of their firms. The text reads: ‘The cartel businessmen sold France to Hitler’.
23. Communism in Italy. Communist sympathizers in a Turin factory during the 1948 election campaign, which the Communists lost.
24. Communist occupation. A Russian woman policeman directs traffic at the Brandenburg Gate, shortly after the Red Army entered Berlin in 1945.
25. Learning from big brother. A Soviet engineer instructs his Chinese colleague (1953). The slogan reads: ‘Learn the advanced production experience of the Soviet Union, struggle for the industrialization of our country’.
26. Enemies. A Soviet worker catches a saboteur, bribed by American money. The poster (1953) reads: ‘Vigilance is our weapon’, and was produced at the height of Stalin’s xenophobic campaigns.
27. Communist puritans. Virtuous workers, rebuilding Poland after the war, reproach a woman personifying Western consumerism, in Wojciech Fangor’s painting
Postaci
(
Figures
), of 1950. Her dress is covered with Western words such as ‘Coca Cola’ and ‘Wall Street’.
28. The power of consumerism. Richard Nixon shows an unhappy-looking Nikita Khrushchev the benefits of the American way of life during their ‘kitchen debate’ at the American exhibit in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, 24 July 1959.
29. Great Leap Forward. Chinese Peasants operate newly built blast furnaces in the countryside, June 1958.
30. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Chinese soldiers in a political study group, 1966. The slogan behind reads: ‘Open fire on the black anti-party and anti-socialist line!’
31. Execution of an ‘enemy’ during the Cultural Revolution.
32. Icon of revolution. Pop art version of Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara, 1967. The slogan ‘Forever, until victory’ were the last words Che wrote to Fidel Castro.
33. ‘Christ Guerrilla’. Alfredo Rostgaard’s poster of 1969 blends Christianity and Marxism into a ‘Liberation Theology’.
34. Children of the revolution. A very young soldier of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) sits beneath a portrait of its leader, Agostinho Neto. Huambo, Angola, February 1976.
35. Rebellion. Protestors burn portraits of Stalin in Budapest, 1956.
36. Incarceration. Strengthening the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, 1961.
37. 1968: two faces of Communism. Parisian student protesters carry portraits of Mao (May).
Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring (August).
38. Brother No. 1. Pol Pot leads a group of guerrillas after his fall from power, 1979.
39. Killing fields. A boy stands beside the remains of some of the Khmer Rouge’s victims, collected together in a disused school south of Phnom Penh, 1996.
40. Afrostalinism. A poster of the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu dominates this Soviet-style Addis Ababa square.
41. ‘Comrades, it’s over’. Poster of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, 1989, hailing the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe.
42. The Fall. The Berlin Wall is breached, November 1989.
43. Communist survivals. A portrait of Mao in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing, during the ceremony celebrating the arrival of the Olympic torch, 31 March 2008.
44. Enduring icon. A Cuban boy holds a picture of Che Guevara during a rally marking the 75th anniversary of his birth, 14 June 2003.
45. ‘The Fierce One’. Prachandra, the leader of Nepal’s Maoists, addresses a rally in September 2006.
In 2002, Chinese pollsters asked Beijing students to name their greatest hero, but the choice offered was oddly circumscribed: the American IT entrepreneur Bill Gates or the Bolshevik civil-war fighter Pavel Korchagin. It was a dead heat: both received 45 per cent support. But when asked whose example they would follow, 44 per cent chose Gates, 27 per cent said both and only 13 per cent mentioned Korchagin alone.
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And even that result rather exaggerated support for the values of socialist self-sacrifice in twenty-first-century China, for the ‘Korchagin’ being discussed was far from the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovskii’s creation. The Korchagin at the forefront of Chinese minds had recently been the subject of a phenomenally popular twenty-part TV adaptation of
How the Steel was Tempered
made in 2000. The TV series was the product of a typically post-modern fusion of cultures: a Soviet socialist realist classic, made in post-Communist Ukraine with Ukrainian actors, financed by a private Shenzhen property developer, and screened by a nominally Communist Chinese TV station. Its Korchagin was rather different from the figure of the novel of the 1930s, or of previous Soviet cinematic treatments of the 1940s and 1950s: he disapproves of the Red Army’s violence, and is seen to marry his beloved Tonia, even though in the novel her bourgeois class origins lead him to break off the relationship. As the series director explained, ‘We’ve watered down the class-consciousness and made him more of a human-rights figure that everyone can relate to.’
The neo-liberal revolutionaries, so marginal in the early 1970s, were now triumphant – ideologically, culturally and politically. When the Chinese had seen
How the Steel was Tempered
at the height of the Russophilia of the 1950s, they were in no doubt that Korchagin’s self-sacrifice was superior to money-grubbing capitalism. Fifty years later, Bill Gates,
the epitome of billionaire corporate values, was the figure of heroic aspiration. In internet discussions about the book there was a nostalgia for Pavel’s values amongst the older generation, but amongst the middle-aged there was often a resentment that they had followed Pavel’s example in vain, and amongst the young a general lack of interest.