The Red Flag: A History of Communism (58 page)

More revolutionary, perhaps, than even its economic consequences was the political impact of collectivization. The power of Geng and people like him over peasants’ lives (already considerable) now became vast. Village leaders exercised exclusive control over all of the land; they allocated jobs to peasants; and they gained privileged access to all state resources. One popular verse tersely captured the new relationship between rank and resources:

Geng was one of the more honest and altruistic officials, and put much effort not only into persuading peasants of the advantages of the collective farm but into making the system work. Education was expanded, and unlike many villages, Wugong acquired, for the first time, a rudimentary welfare system. However, even the virtuous Geng was soon wrapped in all the trappings of local bossdom, for alongside schools and welfare, Wugong could also now boast its own village security apparatus. The new police force was led by the feared ‘Fierce Zhang’, a former poor peasant, who recruited a rough and ready cadre of local toughs to keep order. When, for example, a group of villagers uprooted 1,500 cotton plants in protest at the low price for cotton being offered, this security force used torture to flush out the culprits. In other Chinese villages abuses by officials could be even worse. Now village leaders’ powers fused with traditional patriarchal attitudes into a new quasi-feudal code, which could include an informal
droit de seigneur
over mainly poor women. Rapes were widespread: two of Mao’s former bodyguards, for instance, rewarded with high office in Tianjin, used their power to terrorize local women. They were ultimately executed for their crimes, but many others escaped justice.
⁸⁸

The story of Geng Changsuo and Wugong village encapsulates many of the hopes and disappointments of what was called the ‘Soviet model’ in China. Some aspects of collectivization could appeal to some peasants: the tractors and the large-scale agriculture all promised the riches small-scale agriculture could not deliver, whilst education and welfare promised integration and opportunities in the broader national community. But collectivization soon created a new hierarchy: a powerful privileged stratum which often behaved arbitrarily and exploitatively. The peasantry, as a whole, remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy, isolated from the rest of China and tied to the land, over which they exercised much less control than they had before. Meanwhile, rural resources were sucked out of agriculture and pumped into heavy industry, whilst the incentive system damaged productivity, laying the ground for food crises in the longer term.

Soviet Eastern Europe had experienced collectivization in a similar, though even more traumatic way. China escaped violent ‘dekulakization’; the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in persuading (or pressuring) peasants into joining collectives without a full-blown class-struggle campaign. (In all probability this was because peasant resistance
had been broken earlier during the violent land reform campaigns.) Eastern Europe, however, following the Soviet 1930s blueprint more closely, launched collectivization and dekulakization simultaneously.

Pressure to join the collective was often intense, and in some areas, coercion was explicit. In others, it was less direct: peasants would find that they could only buy non-agricultural goods in state shops if they were collective-farm members. As one Bulgarian peasant put it, ‘Of course, you did not
have
to join the cooperative, unless you wanted shoes on your feet and a shirt on your back.’
⁸⁹
Even so, as in the USSR of the 1930s, there was a good deal of resistance. Peasants mistrusted the detachments of officials sent from the towns to impose the collectives, and refused to give inspectors information about who owned what. It was not, moreover, easy to persuade peasants to denounce their influential wealthy neighbours: in the Romanian village of Hîrseni in the Olt Land region of south-eastern Transylvania, for instance, party officials tried to persuade the poor peasant Nicolae R. to denounce his allegedly kulak (
chiabur
) neighbour Iosif Oltean, who had promised him 20 kilograms of wool and 10 of cheese in return for work, but had only delivered a nugatory quantity of poor-quality wool. Nevertheless, Nicolae defended his neighbour: ‘Oltean was a good man who helps us poor people, even if he was greedy.’
⁹⁰

Peasants were profoundly alienated by the loss of their land. The new Marxist-Leninist ideology, which regarded labour as the prime virtue, was diametrically opposed to the moral economy of many peasants, which saw landowning and economic independence as a mark of status. But the high food-delivery quotas demanded by the state to feed workers and finance industrialization were, if anything, even more unpopular than dekulakization or collectivization. One woman peasant from the Hungarian village of Sárosd, south of Budapest, remembered her misplaced hopes that she could deliver enough tax to the state by growing 1.7 hectares of sunflower seeds: ‘One came home without a penny. Everything went to taxes, not enough was left even to buy an apron.’
⁹¹
On the collective farm itself, pay was low and conditions were poor. One peasant from the Bulgarian village of Zamfirovo remembered:

As in China, the weakly constrained power of the new village political elite inflamed peasant anger further. Quotas depended on the whims of collective farm officials. Meanwhile peasants found that people higher up in the political hierarchy were given more credit for their collective-farm work than others. Life became intensely political, as villagers’ future became dependent on relationships with the new bosses.

Some resisted the harsh policies, and rebellions and demonstrations broke out in several areas. One of the most violent and disruptive was in the Bosnian Bihač region in May 1950, though elsewhere they rarely posed any real threat to the authorities. A more common way of resisting collectivization was simply to leave agriculture altogether – something that some East European governments, desperate for industrial labour, encouraged.

Resistance and resentment slowed the pace of collectivization, and by the time of Stalin’s death it had made surprisingly little headway in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, only 43 per cent of the agricultural population were employed on collective farms of some sort, whilst in Poland the figure was a mere 17 per cent. Indeed, it was only in the early 1960s that collectivization was completed, and then only after serious concessions had been made to the peasantry – allowing private plots and giving peasant households the right to organize the use of labour, for example. In Poland and Yugoslavia, collectivization was simply scrapped, and the countryside reverted to small private farms.

In 1949, the Communist Party organization in the East German town of Plauen drew up one of its regular reports on popular opinion. It concluded that whilst the highly qualified workers and technical intelligentsia were reasonably content, the ‘broad masses’ of the population – workers and peasants – were not.
⁹³
And by 1953 there is a great deal of evidence that this distribution of happiness held for much of Soviet Eastern Europe. Efforts to break peasant cultures were inevitably unpopular. Meanwhile the High Stalinist system, in which a ‘new class’ of bureaucrats was set above the labouring classes as official resource-extractors for the ever-ravenous state, could not be sustained for long, especially in societies with indigenous socialist traditions of a pre-Soviet provenance.

In the closing years of the High Stalinist era, the Soviet satellite regimes became increasingly reliant on naked coercion to force through unpopular economic policies. In 1950 in Poland, and 1952–3 in Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, currency reforms effectively confiscated people’s savings, and in Czechoslovakia they led to a wave of protests.
⁹⁴
By 1953, it has been estimated that between 6 and 8 per cent of all adult males in Soviet Eastern Europe were in prison. It was no surprise that the High Stalinist system did not long survive its architect’s demise.

On a bright summer’s day in June 1962, beneath the shadow of the monumental Moscow University building, a good-humoured and avuncular Nikita Khrushchev released a goldfish into a newly constructed pond. Shortly afterwards, a young child was given a giant key on behalf of all Pioneers – the ‘Key to the Land of the Romantics’, as the press put it. Both were part of the opening ceremonies for the new Pioneer Palace – a centre for the party’s children’s organization on the Lenin Hills. The massive 56-hectare park and large, airy building were to be a children’s wonderland – a ‘children’s republic’, where the ‘children are masters’ and adult discipline was to be as light as possible. The project’s creators claimed that children would teach each other, using peer pressure to maintain discipline.
¹

This was all a long way from late Stalinism. Stalin loved to be shown patting children’s heads but handling goldfish in public would have been beneath his dignity. The building itself was also a sharp contrast to its forbidding Stalinist neighbour. In the modernist ‘International style’ created in the 1920s, it was decorated with modern sculptures and reliefs, some in a primitivist, child-like style, not with the old neoclassical figures of muscle-bound workers. It was low-rise and deliberately ‘democratic’, with large glass windows and doors on all sides – open to the joyful children running in from the surrounding park.

The Pioneer Palace was ideology in concrete. It showed the form of Communism Khrushchev wanted to take the place of High Stalinism: modern and internationalist; free of the archaic nationalism of the early 1950s;
²
and yet also Romantic, full of the possibilities of human creativity. According to the journalists of
Komsomolskaia Pravda
, it was built
‘by people who are Romantics, and this Romantic Pioneer style of life must splash over the walls of the palace’.
³
It was centred round the welfare of its people, rather than the power of the state. Most importantly, though, it was to be a building for children free of parental restraint. It embodied the values of equality and fraternity and was to be inhabited by children who disciplined themselves. Khrushchev loathed the old ‘aristocratic’, status-obsessed Stalinist style. He thought the Moscow University building was church-like, ‘an ugly, formless mass’.
⁴

Khrushchev was only one of the Communist leaders to seek an alternative to the harshness and hierarchy of Stalinism. Once the old patriarch of Communism was dead, the heirs realized that the old system must change. Coercion was no longer working and growing privileges and inequality were causing anger. At the same time, the legacy of mass violence and the Stalinist party’s continuing commitment to ‘struggle’ against ‘enemies’ were narrowing the regime’s base of support. The system had to become more inclusive. More generally, many reacted powerfully against the Stalinist economic determinism – the view that everything, including values, morality and human lives, had to be sacrificed to building a modern, industrial society. The old cruel dogmatism, they argued, had to be replaced by a more ‘humane’ socialism.

What, though, was this to mean in practice? Some called for a more Pragmatic Communism of limited markets and individual rights. This was especially appealing in Soviet Eastern Europe but most party leaders were not ready for this compromise. For it would undermine the ruling party and threaten its ‘leading role’ in politics, whilst challenging the old command economies. Others sought a more technocratic, Modernist model. Another answer, more appealing to Communist leaders, was to seek to broaden the regime, whilst restoring its revolutionary dynamism. The band of brothers had to be reassembled and the spirit of collective will revived. The great ideological innovators of the 1950s – Tito, Khrushchev and Mao – all embarked on a ‘great leap backwards’ to the Radical Lenin of 1917 or even the Romantic Marx of the 1840s.

Yet the photographs of the Pioneer Palace’s opening ceremony present a rather different picture to the image of relaxed self-discipline depicted in
Komsomolskaia Pravda
. To the modern eye the atmosphere looks distinctly militaristic: uniformed children stand in ordered ranks, bearing flags and drums. And here lay the difficulty facing Stalin’s ‘sons’. Whilst their ideal might have been a people working creatively and
cooperating in an easy spirit of peace and harmony, they hoped to achieve this whilst constructing powerful states and efficient economies. In the absence of market incentives, a resort to semi-military mobilization therefore remained attractive. This was Mao’s solution, and a military, guerrilla Communism, complete with accompanying ‘class struggle’, became the foundation of his strategy. Khrushchev was determined to avoid violence, but even he found it impossible to pursue a Radical Communism whilst escaping the bullying, military party culture of his youth; only Tito really broke from it, but at the cost of drifting towards the market and into the Western sphere of influence.