Twentieth Century Communism

Writing the history of twentieth century communism

Peter Beilharz

Horrors, hopes and utopias

Everybody knows these things are gone, over, kaput. Communism and the twentieth century: who cares?

We do, as radicals of any kind of historical sensibility at all; because we know that we still inhabit the twentieth century, in many ways, and that communism was indeed one of its major problems, traditions and legacies.

Henry Luce, the editor of Fortune Magazine, is usually credited with the idea that the last century was the American century. This meant that it was the future, and again, in many ways it still is. Expanding Chinese and Indian economic hegemony will not translate readily into its cultural forms; Rock and Roll and Hollywood still rule, and Fordism is still a cultural universal, not least in those economies where mass production rules. But there were other candidates for the title of the spirit of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, it could tentatively have become the Japanese century. As the century of the American Dream, it was also the century of the Lucky Country announced in Australia in the 1970s, and everywhere else where the post-war boom indicated local and regional economic miracles and promises of more modernity and modernisation to come. In all its tragedies and triumphs, the twentieth century could have also been the German century. And it was, indeed, decisively the Soviet century, its beginnings and endings neatly marked, as Eric Hobsbawm and others have noted, by 1914 or 1917 or 1918 and 1989. Soviets and Germans were connected by other bonds. Then there were the controversies, not least in Germany, as to whether, or the extent to which, Nazism was a necessary or contingent response to the October Revolution. 1917, 1933, 1945: the defeat of fascism and the consolidation of global Stalinism; the dates might not be dominoes, but there seems in retrospect to be some kind of logic in their sequence. No Soviets, no twentieth century. No Soviets, no Nazis.

These last themes are also necessarily interconnected through the interwar years. The German and Soviet experiences were deeply impacted upon by Fordism, so much so that the idea of non-American Fordisms becomes necessary to think them. In the Soviet case, this became the Fordism of the tractor, in the German, the Fordism of the tank and Zyklon B. Perhaps, then, the twentieth century was really the century of Fordisms, benign and suburban in the American case, rural and developmental in the Soviet, systematically murderous in the German, Nazi case. Fordism begins to spread across the world from Detroit to the Dnieper, to Auschwitz, back to Levittown.

At some point in the conversation, the question then arises, was this not rather the century of totalitarianism? Historians have always taken issue with the category, observing the conceptual violence or homogenisation it does to stories that run from Italy to Germany to Russia and wider afar. There are simply too many different and divergent cases to be accommodated under the one totalising category. Yet sociologists have always paused to wonder about the incredible crossovers between mass movements initially claiming some filiation or other with socialism - national or romantic, backward-looking or nostalgic; and various social scientists have puzzled over the only apparently bizarre crossovers between personalities and personnel, as Marxists became Nazis, anarchists or futurists followers of Mussolini, Bolsheviks or Nazis national Bolsheviks, or pan-German/Russian enthusiasts. These conversations have in some regards only just begun; perhaps they can gain more exercise within these pages.

If not the century of totalitarianism, perhaps then, as Zygmunt Bauman has intimated, ours - the century into which we were born - instead became the century of camps. Camps, now, are everywhere, even if less so in the centres of the world system, more so in their borderlands or in wilder places, where displaced peoples suffer endlessly for having no sufficient fatherland or motherland. But alongside this, as Bauman has also been wont to argue, the twentieth century was also the age of utopia, or of utopias and dystopias. Yet this, too, is where the enormity of the crimes committed under the banner of communism belong. The horrors of European and East European Stalinism cannot be blamed on Asiatic despotism, for each of these was modern and progressivist as well. Yet when the metanarrative wheels in via China in 1949 everything gets worse, even after the Gulags and death experiments in hyperdevelopment that were specialised in by the Soviets.

Talk of utopia these days is about as popular as talk of socialism, let alone communism. Yet the idea of utopia remains ubiquitous, even if these days capitalist or vaguer regulatory capitalist utopias silently rule. Around the poorer parts of the world dreams of justice and social justice still survive. What has gone, in this account as, say, via Bauman, is the idea that utopia or socialism is realisable. Better it should be a goal or an ethics of care that we, or some of us, aspire to. In this story, as it came unstuck it was indeed communism, and bolshevism in particular, that played a key part: for the Bolsheviks set out to enact utopia, against hope, in a setting where everyone knew - though few (from Kautsky to Weber) actively warned loudly enough - that this could never work. Even amidst abundance, we know now that it could not have worked. To set out to revolutionise the world in poverty was madness, yet it was also the kind of madness (or will, at least) that inspired generations of fools who were sick of saying no, or at least of hearing their leaders insist on it. No! No! No!

And alongside the dreamers of the absolute, in any case, there were always harder heads, for example that of Antonio Gramsci, who understood that to struggle often means to lose, or just that: to struggle. For alongside these world dramas of massive consequence and tragedy there were millions of little stories, of groups and individuals fighting daily for what they believed in, for bread, for justice, for freedom and dignity. As Gramsci said famously, to write the history of a communist party was also to write the history of its people. These stories were more eventful or consequential in Italy and France than they were in Britain, Australia or New Zealand, but in all these places and many, many others ordinary men and women gave life, love and labour to the left in factory, field, workshop and kitchen. All around the world, the twentieth century combined its horrors with hopes; these latter are still yet to be extinguished, and offer one of the finest legacies of the twentieth century, as the century not of communism, but of socialism. It is never too late to begin to learn.

Bernhard H. Bayerlein

Collisions of cultures and nationalism as patters of the 'Soviet Century'

With these provisional thoughts I would like to reinforce two principal ideas shaping the history of communism: first, the decisive collision of two contrasting cultures; and secondly, Russian nationalism as the key concept of stalinism. Both - the collision of cultures and nationalism - emerge as central transnational patterns of the 'Soviet Twentieth Century'.

(i) 'Kultura 1' against 'Kultura 2' (Vladmir Paperny)

Probably no revolution of the modern era other than the Russian revolution has undertaken, in addition to its already strong and worldwide radiation, such huge efforts to foment transnational initiatives and international networks to propagate and extend its influence. The Comintern, obviously, was its most impressive tool. Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes turns nolens volens into Moshe Lewin's 'Soviet Century'.

However, the ascension and fall of communist movements and state foundations remain an 'intrinsic, unresolved enigma of these times' (Gerd Koenen). It seems that the more extensive the literature and the greater the profusion of archival documents filling the wastepaper basket of world revolution, the more diffuse are the research results. I am convinced that the answers will not be found if centred only on the Soviet Union - this would be like narrating colonial history from a eurocentric viewpoint. Assistance may also come from new perceptions of the relationship between history and revolution beyond the (anti-)totalitarian consensus, and also beyond a sterile 'workers' movement marxism', including evolutionary doctrines of the social-democratic type but also the stalinist school of treachery (as practised and later exposed by Willi Münzenberg), which ended in the apocalypse.

Concerning international communism as a global phenomenon, the different segments, channels and networks mostly influenced by the Soviet Union, and its 'domestic' aspect - policy concerning different peoples and national minorities, the Comintern as virtual world party and the communist parties as its sections, Soviet foreign, military or even cultural policy - have yet not been evaluated as a whole. Due to the fragmentation of this landscape, the comparative perspective is generally missing. The Comintern's dissolution and collapse of the Cominform, as well as the communist parties' tendential transformation into governors or propagandist outposts of the Soviet Union, offer exciting new prospects for research about the Soviet twentieth century.

As Walter Benjamin put it, the historical essence of an era opens up only to a future generation and, what's more, only when this generation possesses the special developer needed to fix the emerging image on the photo plate of history. Among the subjects mainly explored after the opening of the archives have been the stalinist repression and mechanisms of dependency upon the USSR. Nevertheless, the overall dynamics of communist history are not to be revealed in a self-acting process by ex-Soviet archives ranged and classified under conditions of ultra-stalinism. Despite the spectacular opening of the archives, which in no case was foreseen, the main contradiction putting its stamp on the soviet century is not translucid and empirically manifest. This is the struggle between two distinct and highly contrasting cultures. Tendentially, this type of struggle is a feature of every revolutionary process. In Russia, it had been decided in the international field between the Bolsheviks' more revolutionary and internationalist culture in the Lenin period and a fundamentally nationalistic and organicist culture based on a strong central state. Stalinism has thus been depicted as the culmination of a quasi-naturalistic historical process. In the meantime, the victorious prophets of the Soviet apocalypse were to be consecrated throughout the world. In particular, the Comintern and communist parties were charged with this task, even if some of the parties also found a modus vivendi of their own.

There is, however, a danger in writing the history of the Soviet Union or of Stalinism - that the central convex of revolution and history might become dissolved in a narrative centred on violence and repression, on the introspection in the 'Stalinist subject', or on other patterns. In my view, it is both crucial and fascinating to observe the mechanisms by which a multicultural and somewhat 'Babylonian' revolutionary culture was replaced on a transnational level, as Michail Ryklin points out, by a national and nationalistic counterculture. This means describing a work of political, ideological and cultural engineering, and its social and psychological consequences, within a worldwide process of stalinisation that included repression but was not confined to it.

Originally, bolshevism and the national state were quite a bad match. However within the 'Kultura 2' of stalinism the new Russian-dominated statehood (Gosudarstvennost) was even made something of a fetish. The Comintern, which was originally meant to promote European and international revolution, was tendentially converted into a self-legitimatory sounding board of this new great-Russian statehood. After its dissolution in 1943 it was consequently replaced by exclusively Russian or Soviet types of body.

(ii) Communism, stalinism and nationalism

It is often implied that communism and nationalism have little to do with each other. Nationalism as an artificial creation of the nineteenth century was fundamentally directed against the concept of European unity, and subsequently against workers' internationalism, particularly bolshevism. From the mid-1920s, and as a consequence of its 'stalinisation', communism became merged with nationalism, while internationalism remained as a concept that was fluid and constantly being redefined. A major step towards state patriotism was taken with the grotesque doctrine of 'socialism in one country'. Reflecting the ideology and practice of a centralised power state, this was a conservative concept relying on past political models to affirm the possibility of an autonomous socialist construction in Soviet Russia. As this ran contrary to the revolution's founding bolshevik principles, Stalin in 1930 redefined internationalism as a common appreciation of 'the general features of capitalism, which are the same for all countries, and not its specific features in any given country'. The importance of this nationalistic shift is generally accepted and was already conceptualised by the end of the 1930s by avant-gardistic thinkers or insiders like Benjamin, Münzenberg and Trotsky. Even so, writers on national communist parties or Soviet politics who emphasise national minorities or national liberation often fail to consider the spreading of nationalist propaganda by communist movements and states, hence overlooking the communist movement's international dimension and the specific and crucial constraint of centre-periphery relationships.

Re-examining the more spectacular shifts to 'nationalisation' of communist parties consequent on the USSR's transformation into an imagined 'Workers' Fatherland' raises a host of interesting questions. Whose initiative was the nationalistic course taken by German communism at the beginning of the 1930s? What were the motivations and consequences of Stalin's recognition of the national dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler? Was it Dimitrov or Stalin who took the initiative for the appeal to patriotism at the Seventh World Congress in 1935, and what was the role of the successful initiatives taken by the PCF the previous year? How far did the creation of a Soviet scenario of foreign threat and imminence of war prepare the ground for the Great Terror, and how far were national-chauvinism and xenophobia its preconditions? What did the nationalistic alignment of Stalin and Hitler in 1939 mean for the 'national' symbolics of the communist parties? And was the 'Great Patriotic War' then followed by a certain 'nationalisation' of the parties? In what sense can the Comintern's dissolution in 1943 be ascribed to national or international considerations?

The major contradiction concerned the communist parties and their members, who continued to consider the Soviet Union as the multinational and multicultural centre of international socialism and stronghold of world revolution. Soviet foreign policy from the end of the 1920s, instead of aiming at European revolutions, adopted the nationally international 'order of states', privileging relations with mostly conservative Germany. Particularly after Stalin's redefinition and reaffirmation of 'Socialism in one country' in 1929-30, the Comintern, together with organisations like the 'Friends of the Soviet Union', had to play the role of the 'frontier patrols' of the national and socialist society in the USSR. Despite an extensive literature on the relationship between communism and nationalism, comparative analysis is scarce on the effect which the national element in Soviet politics had on communist ideology at a transnational level. Discussions of 'national communism' and 'national bolshevism', especially in the German case, are the exception. The Soviet Union's nationalistic turn happened in parallel with a shift at once in Soviet foreign policy and in the strategic guidelines of the Comintern. Its central impetus was the recognition of the national principle as the guiding principle in world politics, and implicitly therefore of the national policy of the 'bourgeois' states as a whole, concerning defence, national frontiers and even national public order. Important studies by David Brandenberger and others have described this as an 'ideological volte-face', supplanting the emphasis on 'proletarian internationalism' with the Russocentric etatism sometimes called 'national bolshevism'. Focusing on the interactions in the field of international politics, Trotsky in 1930 characterised the 'fatal flaw' of the increasingly artificial models of both national politics and internationalism under Stalin as the basis for an 'exceptional, messianic' and 'purely Russian' national socialism and 'not as a type common to all countries'. For Trotsky, messianic nationalism was supplemented by 'bureaucratically abstract internationalism'.

Four major shifts or transitions discernible between 1930 and 1943 serve to periodise different processes of 'nationalisation' and the emergence of nationalistic or even chauvinist patterns. The first dates from 1930-1 and the struggle against social democracy as the main enemy. The second occurred under the auspices of the popular front in 1934-5. The third shift occurred with the Stalin-Hitler pact and the definite liquidation of anti-fascism in 1939-40. The fourth followed the German attack on USSR in 1941, guided by the new concepts of the so-called 'Great Patriotic War'. One way or another, each shift was linked to the implementation of new approaches within Soviet domestic and foreign policy. It has often been overlooked that these changes were connected to the specific attraction that nationalism exercised on Stalin himself. In May 1934, in conversation with Dimitrov, he resumed his logic in the following equation: 'Prolet[arian] internationalism and nationalism - Through social liberation - national independence'. Until the German Überfall in 1941, even in the 1930s, anti-fascist discourse was largely missing in Stalin. Most of the nationalistic or neo-colonial enterprises of Hitler and Mussolini were designated as residing in the 'national interest': in Stalin's parlance, the Nazis were nationalists - and not necessarily in a negative sense. In 1935, he even expressed some comprehension of Hitler's and Rosenberg's particularly virulent verbal attacks against the Soviet Union and their claim for Lebensraum, ascribing this to the sharp and continuous anti-fascist criticisms issued by the Comintern! A misunderstanding of the 'Soviet century' seem to be the misconception of stalinism as relying on a more or less coherent system of theoretical and political concepts. But Stalin's use of the national paradigm, as in his famous dictum 'national in its form, proletarian in its content', demonstrates his penchant for bizarre reasoning, based mostly on analogies or stereotypes (Sergej Slutch) or on political-ideological allegations (Dittmar Schorkowitz) and lacking any purchase on the reality of political, social or economical conditions. It relied, according to Trotsky, more or less exclusively on 'formal arguments and old citations … related to different situations of the past'.

The balance sheet of twentieth-century communism is thus a paradoxical one, for until its collapse it contributed to the reinvention of the nation states on a transnational scale and hence the reinforcing of what Benedict Anderson referred to as 'imagined communities'.

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