№ 2 7 / FA L L 2 0 1 7 R E A S O N I N R E VO LT J A C O B I N M A G .

C O M
It is often said that “the germ of all
Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its begin-
ning.” Well, I have no objection. Only,
Bolshevism also contained many other
germs, a mass of other germs, and those
who lived through the enthusiasm of the
first years of the first victorious socialist
revolution ought not to forget it. To
judge the living man by the death germs
which the autopsy reveals in the corpse —
and which he may have carried in him
since his birth — is that very sensible?

— Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, 1937.

 Features ISSUE 27 FALL 2017

pg. 17

THE FEW WHO WON

BHASKAR SUNKARA

pg. 65

STRAYING FROM THE

PARTY LINE
GEORGI DERLUGUIAN

pg. 82

THE SOVIETS ABROAD

DANIEL FINN

pg. 90

RED DIAPER BABIES

MEGAN ERICKSON

insert

OUR ROAD TO POWER

VIVEK CHIBBER

4
 Departments
FRONT MATTERS CULTURAL CAPITAL

7 9 11 100 104 107

party lines the soapbox friends & foes beyond a bass & red channels
boundary superstructure
Socialism Letters + The New Seventeen
Won’t Be Built The Internet Communists The Miracle The Elvis Soviet Films
in a Day Speaks on Ice of East
Germany

MEANS OF DEDUCTION THE TUMBREL

34 38 40 117 122 124

the vulgar transitions uneven and girondins thermidor versailles
empiricist combined
When Did Our Favorite Fascism’s Yacht Party
As Long It Go Wrong? Moscow Dupe Face-Lift Men
as It Catches Globetrotters
Mice

36
Workers’
Paradise Lost

READING MATERIEL LEFTOVERS

46 55 58 130 141 144

field notes dossier canon fodder popular front the dustbin means & ends
Brussels, A Red The Man From Choose Become
Dec. 12, 1975 by Any Other Who Brought Red Square to Your Own a Jacobin Comrade
Name Pizza Square One Adventure Today

5
 Contributors
cover art by
Luke Brookes

Seth Ackerman is Jacobin’s. Georgi Derluguian is the author Eileen Jones is a film critic at
managing editor. of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Jacobin and the author of Filmsuck,
Caucasus and the co-author USA. She teaches at the University
Hubert Adjei-Kontoh is a Jacobin of Does Capitalism Have a Future? of California, Berkeley.
editorial assistant. He teaches sociology at nyu
Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial
Abu Dhabi.
David Broder is a Paris-based board of Jacobin.
translator. He is currently Megan Erickson is a Jacobin
completing a phd on dissident Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin
editorial board member and
communists in the Italian staff writer.
the author of Class War: The
Resistance. Privatization of Childhood. Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding
Vivek Chibber is a professor of Daniel Finn is deputy editor editor and publisher of Jacobin.
sociology at New York University of New Left Review. Adaner Usmani is a postdoctoral
and the co-editor of Catalyst:
fellow in international and public
A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Keith Gessen teaches journalism
affairs at Brown University’s
at Columbia University and is the
Julia Damphouse is a Canadian author of the forthcoming novel Watson Institute.
activist and student living in Berlin. A Terrible Country. Jonah Walters is a researcher
at Jacobin.

6
 Citoyens
Jacobin is a leading voice
E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R E V E N T S, P U B L I C I T Y, & D E V E LO P M E N T of the American left,
Bhaskar Sunkara Jason Farbman offering socialist perspectives
on politics, economics,
C R E AT I V E D I R E C TO R C I RC U L AT I O N
and culture. The print magazine
Remeike Forbes Flynn Murray
is released quarterly.
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E D I TO R I A L AS S I STA N T S Circulation: 36,750

Hubert Adjei-Kontoh Web Visitors: 1,120,417
Branko Marcetic

7
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY
OF THE REST OF YOUR MAGAZINE.
 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES BY BHASKAR SUNKARA

Socialism Won’t Be
Built in a Day

“I am convinced that there are only a few people in this hall who will not
experience the great day.” August Bebel had plenty of swagger in 1891 — and he
wasn’t alone. As he spoke, Rosa Luxemburg recounted, “a warm, electric
stream of life, of idealism, of security in joyful action” swept through the crowd.

The Second International was just two years old and now, at the pivotal Erfurt
Congress, the German Social Democrats — the largest socialist party in the
world — were laying the groundwork for generations of working-class politics.

In the years that followed, socialists had plenty of cause for optimism.
In election after election, labor and social-democratic parties saw their vote
totals climb thanks to newly enfranchised workers. It seemed natural —
both to terrified capitalists and ambitious trade unionists — that working-
class political rights were translating into broader social emancipation.

Of course, history had other ideas. Most social democrats never lived to see
their great day. New dynamics emerged that drew the movement close to the
nation and class they once vowed to challenge. For those on its left wing,
victory came in 1917 but proved to be a Pyrrhic one.

9
 PARTY LINES

Now, a century later, the question is less whether any of us will live to see
socialist triumph than if such dreams belong entirely in the past. We know that
instead of great days, we need to think in terms of a “great epoch” of
transformation. We also know the dangers of co-optation that face any patient
political strategy. What we don’t know is whether anyone else is interested
in our dreams.

The recent success of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and the growing
ranks of young socialists, could be signs of a surprising resurgence. Or they could
just be an Indian summer.

Capitalism has proven more resilient to working-class challenge and more

amenable to reform than any of our predecessors could’ve imagined. But the
system isn’t meeting the needs of millions, and at its core, it’s still an
economic order rooted in exploitation and coercion. As long as we live in a class
society, there will be resistance to it. The unresolved question is whether
we can take the small instances of everyday struggle and — rather than just
celebrating them — aggregate them into a force capable of pushing
beyond capitalism.

The challenges of doing so in the twenty-first century are daunting, and many on
the Left are more willing to abandon than reimagine working-class politics.

But if I had to guess, I would say that our message is too simple not to find an
audience: it’s not your fault. You’re working longer hours than ever, you’re
doing whatever you can to survive, and yet you’re falling further and further behind.
We don’t have a gospel of self-improvement or nativist fairy tales, but
we have a set of villains — the small elite that benefit from your immiseration.

Class anger isn’t going out of style.

By itself, it isn’t politics either. Yet Jacobin was founded on the idea that a rich
working-class movement can reemerge and that alternatives to capitalism
can still be constructed. In 2017, just as much as in 1891 or 1917, we should have
moral confidence about this goal — a world without exploitation or
oppression. But there is something profoundly different between claiming
that socialists can unexpectedly break the tide of history and the old
assurances that socialism was the tide of history. 

10
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX

Letters

Did Kerensky Write a What Happened? Cautious Creation

Kerensky was not some windbag or weakling. He spent In “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,” Angela Nagle urges
the years 1905–17 defending the poor from the tsar’s us to set aside our “aesthetic aversion” to “Promethean
oppression in court — a difficult and dangerous task that modernity” and embrace the “ambitious technologies” and
won him the love of the nation. It was often the case “confident economic transformation” that offer the
that the people he was defending couldn’t afford to pay. “only way to save … the natural world.”
So he knew the faults of tsarism in great detail and
This admonition might be more plausible if Nagle could
knew what the people wanted instead. Given the mess
bring herself to acknowledge that “Promethean
left by Nicholas II, it is amazing that the Provisional
modernity” has been a very mixed blessing. Promethean
Government survived a month, let alone eight.
modernity has brought us suburbia, freeways,
— Stephen Kerensky, grandson of AF Kerensky agribusiness, Big Pharma, the Great Leap Forward, the
$1.5 trillion Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II
fighter-bomber program, countless mind-numbing and spirit-
debasing Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters, and
the destruction of much of Earth’s most beautiful landscapes
and ecologically irreplaceable habitats, among
many other disasters. It’s by no means certain that even
democratic and socialist governments would wield
“ambitious,” world-altering technologies with sufficient
wisdom and restraint to avoid similarly horrific
consequences. Adorno, whom Nagle quotes approvingly,
would undoubtedly have offered some grave cautions
on this score.

— George Scialabba, Cambridge, MA

11
 THE SOAPBOX

Modi Got Shooters Everywhere

Why does Jacobin hate yoga?
Oh, I do so hope we get treated to a

The
1,000 word essay on the harm
caused by white people with dreadlocks
next cuz that is going to get the

Internet sociopaths elites out of power for sure.

— Isaac Bretz, State College, PA

Speaks No, Somos Titoistas

Seguro, no serán trotskistas — social
demócratas vestidos de marxistas?

— Oskar Calvo, Madrid, Spain

This Is Why We’re Anti-Work
Have bad mood after work? — This Sounds Like a Bad Idea
Because read Jacobin magazine, cause you Under socialism all water will be
communication are pure joke cold, frothy beer.

is at the — Arsen Danylyuk, Tartu, Estonia — Kyle Bigley, New York, NY

heart of any Love in the Time of Anti-Communism You Sorely Overestimated Us
good The couple that red baits together, As bad as Steve Bannon is, I’m
relationship. stays together. disappointed Jacobin would stoop to
fat shaming anybody.
— Joe Vaccaro, Saint Paul, MN
— Sam Ginty, Kassala, Sudan
This Word Essentially Has No
We Want Answers Ja Rule May Have Meaning Anymore Richard Florida
I think these artists dropping all Jacobin is essentially a neo-liberal. So he’s the one to blame for all those
those hot new singles caused the annoying people using “creative”
— Richard Elster, Los Angeles, CA
planet to heat up if anything. as a noun.

— Steve Fleet, Toronto, Canada This Is Too Pop Front Even for Us — Tara Banks, The Internet
Let the Trotskyites heckle, their
Yes, This Actually Happened derision is not felt! They can have Standardize English!
Social media ruined socialism. their Revolution, we have Roosevelt! Nationalize? Surely you mean
nationalise?
— Ja Rule, New York, NY — Susan Carr, Chicago, IL
— Tom Barker, Liverpool, UK
He’s Talking About Donald Duck, Jacobin: “The Popular Front Didn’t
Don’t Worry Work” Finally, Someone Gets It
UPHOLD Reader: “Trotskyism however Thank you Jacobin Magazine.
ANARCHO-DONALDISM proved to be a stunning success” I would feel utterly lost in a mad
world without you <3 <3 <3.
— Conor Mullins, Essex, United — Alex Hogan, New York, NY
Kingdom — Susie Seabrook, London, UK

12
FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS AND FOES BY CONNOR KILPATRICK
ADANER USMANI

The New
Communists

It’s 2017. Time to stop worrying

about the questions of 1917.

Nothing catches the eye like gold

set against red. And in the great war
of the twentieth century, the color
scheme was on both sides of
the divide — the Soviet hammer and
sickle, McDonald’s golden arches.

At its peak, some variation of the

USSR’s flag flew over 20 percent of
the Earth’s habitable landmass.
But while McDonald’s has now spread
to over 120 countries, today only
three of the four ruling Communist
parties left fly the hammer and
sickle. Of the five nations that claim
Marxism-Leninism, the hammer
and sickle appears on the state flags of
none. Once the symbol of the
struggle for a better world, today the
hammer and sickle is a sign of
little more than single-party sclerosis.
 FRIENDS AND FOES

In effect, only two kinds of Communist Parties

are left standing: Parties of Atrophy — who
can boast large memberships but which have little
to offer their supporters — and Parties
of Marginality — who have entirely lost any
substantial connection to workers.

Yet that very icon was forged in the Today, one hundred years later, October, today the probability of such
kind of populist fires that have the world has turned. Nowhere do the a revolution is infinitesimally small.
eluded it for decades. In 1918, the political tasks today look anything And yet, the sharpest way to pillory a
Bolsheviks were looking for a new flag like those the Bolsheviks confronted lefty is still to call her a reformist.
for their young state. They knew in 1918. In the West at least, the
How has it come to this? To observe
that they had to communicate the agrarian question has been answered —
that communism is obsolete is not to
weight of their achievement — the by capitalism. The Bolsheviks
argue that it never traveled well.
first workers’ state in history. Just as inherited a Europe convulsed by
France and Italy both had thriving,
the French Revolution’s tricolor murderous interimperial war;
powerful Communist Parties with
set the standard for the republics of we live in the most peaceful period in
working-class social bases up through
the nineteenth century, Soviet recorded history.
the 1980s. Membership in the Italian
iconography, they believed, should set
The trade union movement that under- party peaked at over two million in 1947;
the standard for the coming prole-
girded both the social-democratic it received its highest share of
tarian states. So Lenin and Anatoly
and Western Communist parties has the vote (34.4 percent) in 1976. To
Lunacharsky, the commissar of
all but disappeared. Even the Europeans who lived through the
education, held a design contest to take
hammers have begun to look as anti- nightmares of fascism, the hammer
in entries from all across the republic.
quated as the sickles. Yet on the and sickle stood for organized
The winning entry borrowed the socialist left, we have hardly sundered and effective resistance. And soon after
industrial imagery (the hammer) so our ties to the Soviet example. the war, after their capitalist classes
celebrated in British, French, and Leading academics convene confer- were discredited for either explicit or
German labor and social-democratic ences to debate “The Idea of tacit support of fascism, those
parties, but made a major concession Communism,” or publish books on hammers and sickles were hoisted by
(the sickle) to the three-quarters “the resurgence of the communist mass workers’ parties who spent the
of Russians that were still peasant idea,” or end their histories of October following decades winning sweeping
farmers. After all, the Bolsheviks 1917 with a call to keep trying. reforms. In their struggles against
were European social democrats, but employers, those trade unionists saw
Lest we forget, most of us live in
their genius lay in their readiness to the same noble cause of antifascism.
advanced capitalist societies ruled by
adapt doctrine to experience — to mold
sturdy, capacious states. In 1917, Examples abound elsewhere, too.
European Marxism to tsarist Russia.
the tsarist regime had lost two million In South Africa, the hammer and sickle
In other words, in a country that didn’t men to war; the rest returned to a flew at the head of a decades-long
neatly fit their understanding of country less developed than Angola, fight against another reactionary, racist
the world, they made adjustments to Bangladesh, or postwar Iraq today. power. In Brazil, the Communist
their model. No matter how many freshmen come Party is the oldest active political party,
to your September screening of and built its legitimacy in the

14
 The New Communists

struggle against a regime that took entirely lost any substantial In fact, the problem goes far beyond
power after the US-backed connection to workers, if they ever parties that never broke with
1964 coup d’etat. In parts of India, had one. In some ways, they mirror Moscow — it’s anyone who insists
the Communist Party of India the two tendencies of the prewar US on looking at the world through
(Marxist) weakened a venal landed Communist Party. On the one hand, October’s eyes. Counterfactuals have
elite and won much-prized gains there was the extreme sectarianism become the stuff of lifelong
for workers and peasants. of the Third Period (the late 1920s to sectarian debates for the socialist left:
early 1930s), in which the Comintern “if only Germany had gone the
But today, the Italian Communist
took aim against socialist parties. On right way, if only Lenin had lived, if
Party is no more. One wing
the other, the worst accommoda- only Stalin had been isolated, if only,
has become the Tony Blair–inspired
tionism of the Popular Front and war if only….” In almost every instance of
Democratic Party; the other the
years, in which the party supported mass revolt they find the Bolshevik’s
Communist Refoundation Party,
no-strike pledges, uncritically hailed October — Germany in 1918–20,
which can boast of no more
Roosevelt’s New Deal, and even France in 1968, Egypt in 2011, and
than 17,000 members. In France,
briefly dissolved itself in 1944. cpusa everything in between — revolutions
the Communist Party (now at
went so far as to denounce A. Philip made mere “revolutionary
130,000 members) was a mere junior
Randolph for threatening the first rehearsals” by conniving bureaucrats
partner in the coalition behind
March on Washington in 1941 in an or naive cadre.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who achieved
attempt to desegregate war
the highest voting share for a radical Instead of seeing the Russian Revo-
industries — quite a reversal for a party
left candidate in France since 1969, but lution as a tragic story of impossible
that had demanded “self-
did so under his own banner — La choices in the worst possible
determination for the Black Belt” just
France Insoumise, a populist left forma- conditions, we fantasize about a time
a few years earlier. But these two
tion that had little use for Soviet in which states could be sundered
extremes — ultra-left marginalism or
iconography. By that point, the French and built from the ground up by revo-
defanged accommodation — only
Communists themselves had already lutionary will. A time in which
underline Communism’s deep malaise.
removed the hammer and sickle small groups of disciplined activists
from membership cards. and intellectuals could remake the
world: “Next time, we’ll be ready —
In South Africa, the South African
we’ll make sure we make the right
Communist Party is an appendage of
decisions!”
the ruling African National Congress —
a coalition which has done little to trans- Whether or not twentieth-century
form the realities that today make communism was fated to fail, we now
South Africa the planet’s most unequal live in a new era. The question of
nation. The Brazilian Communist socialism in the twentieth century was
Party is impotent — in the lower house unavoidably the Russian Revolution.
of the National Congress, it has Today, it is a question which interests
only 11 of 513 seats. In India, the cpi-m professional historians and the far left.
is today not much more than a regional
patronage machine.

In effect, only two kinds of Communist

Parties are left standing: Parties The far left today embraces the Soviet
of Atrophy — who can boast large
obsession like a vampire hunter wields garlic.
memberships but which have
little to offer their supporters — and The problem is that garlic repels far more than
Parties of Marginality — who have just monsters — it makes you stink.

15
 FRIENDS AND FOES

There’s nothing wrong And yet, much of the radical

left learned the opposite lesson from
with horizons — 2016. We have been staking out
we need them. But the increasingly wilder terrain, moving
basic challenge the goalposts well beyond what
of left-wing politics is most of the last century’s socialists
or communists thought possible.
to train our eyes Of course, there’s nothing wrong with
on horizons that others horizons — we need them. But the
can see. basic challenge of left-wing politics is
to train our eyes on horizons that
As Ralph Miliband pointed out at
The world’s working classes have others can see. Social democracy failed
the end of his life, Western European
moved on. And yet the far left today not because it traded utopianism
Communist Parties were also
embraces the Soviet obsession like a for reform but because it swore off
parties of reform. They differed from
vampire hunter wields garlic. The horizons entirely, and began to
social-democratic parties “in
problem is that garlic repels far more look inwards, upon its own parties and
terms of their sharper and more radical
than just monsters — it makes you stink. parliaments. In rhetoric, the radical
programmes of reform, and
left is different; but in practice, the
At its worst, in this crowd, isolation is their willingness to resort to extra-
mistake is similar: victory is defined
proof of revolutionary virtue, rather parliamentary agitation and
as whatever makes the already-initiated
than political calamity. Particularly in action.” The uncomfortable truth for
tick. Ultra-leftism and reformism are
a country like ours, the politics of both liberals and die-hard revolu-
united by their scorn for mass action.
“Yay revolution! Boo reform!” has led tionaries is that whenever and wherever
to a rhetorical arms race in which Western Communist parties were If we are to learn something from
the most virtuous, maximalist posi- strongest, it was because they were the October, let it not be from a reading
tions are the most progressive. most effective reformers, not group on Kronstadt. As Lukács
That these positions are untethered not revolutionaries. They won when they said, Lenin’s genius was to demand
only from a mass social base but bested the social democrats at “the concrete analysis of the
also any plausible political strategy their own stated aims. It was not starry- concrete situation.” Today, the relevant
becomes just more proof of eyed dreaming but everyday material Lenin is not Lenin the indefatigable
their purity: “Try and co-opt this, you victories that led 1.5 million people to revolutionary, but Lenin the discon-
Menshevik!” They are symptoms attend Italian Communist Party solate strategist —the man who
of a Left that looks inwards for vali- leader Enrico Berlinguer’s 1984 funeral. in 1920 chastised Communists “to
dation — one with a battle plan The flipside of this fact is that in the convince the backward elements,
and plenty of generals but no army. pre–World War II period, European to work among them, and not to fence
Communism was feeble and themselves off from them with
Despite what liberals might say,
ineffective — with the telling exception artificial and childishly ‘Left’ slogans.”
it’s not an inability to atone for commu-
of the French Communist Party
nism’s body count which haunts the One has to ask what such a man
during the Popular Front and the
socialist left today — it’s our inability would think of socialists’ century-
Spanish one during the Civil War.
to move on from these dreams of long obsession over the revolution
apocalyptic rupture; fantasies of new, The unprecedented success of Bernie he helped make. Four years before
unfathomable worlds that will Sanders’s run and his enduring storming the Winter Palace, Lenin
somehow spring up unencumbered popularity should have been a wake-up was grieving over the sad state of affairs
by the shells of the old one. call to much of Leftworld: the in Russia. And he chose a peculiar
country is ready for working-class example to highlight his own country’s
The lessons of social democracy’s
politics, and even for the s-word, backwardness — the New York
rightward trajectory have been
as long as we talk about it in everyday, Public Library. In it, Lenin saw a
overlearned to the point of paralysis.
tangible terms.

16
 The New Communists

tangible, achievable example of what to be read at home, the number of wealth, and leisure. These are
a modern, democratic society could children attracted to reading and horizons everyone can see — and most
deliver — not a hazy promise of a better to the use of the library.… desperately want to reach.
world on the other side of disaster.
Such is the way things are done in But whatever the answers are,
[T]hey see to it that even children New York. And in Russia? finding them is the only hope we have
can make use of the rich of winning. A radical must plant
Today, it’s time for us to stop
collections; that readers can read one foot firmly in the world as it is and
worrying about old answers to old
publicly owned books at home; the other in the world as she knows
questions and start worrying
they regard as the pride and glory of it could one day be. With the rise
about the ones working people are
a public library, not the number of Sanders and Corbyn, it’s clear that
asking. For the Bolsheviks, that
of rarities it contains, the number even in the heart of global capital,
meant “Peace, Land, and Bread!” For
of sixteenth-century editions or tens of millions of people are dead set
us, the answers will be different.
tenth-century manuscripts, but the on changing the world.
“Medicare for All!” is a good start. So
extent to which books are distri-
is “Green Jobs for All!” Each Everyone can see it. Everyone can
buted among the people, the number
of these strikes at the core of the feel it. Everyone, that is, who’s not
of new readers enrolled, the speed
socialist dream — a radically looking for October. 
with which the demand for any book
more equal distribution of work,
is met, the number of books issued

17
 The

Few
Who
Won by Bhaskar
Sunkara

HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
AND ITS TRAGIC AFTERMATH?
 A
devout Polish Catholic, Felix Dzerzhinsky was once asked why
he was sure there was a God. “God is in the heart,” the teenager
replied. “If I ever come to the conclusion that there is no God, I
would put a bullet in my head.”
A few years later, he realized just how alone humanity was.
But instead of a bullet, he found a new faith, vowing “to fight against evil to the
last breath” as a revolutionary socialist. By age forty, he was clad in black leather,
designing a bloody terror as head of the young Soviet Union’s secret police.
This story of zealotry fits with the popular image of Bolshevism — a con-
spiratorial sect, singular in purpose. By virtue of their ruthlessness, they would
take advantage of 1917’s democratic upheavals, perverting the noble February
Revolution into the bloody excesses of October. That Stalinism emerged from
its womb is no surprise — the extremism of men like Dzerzhinsky, confident the
utopia they were building was worth any cost, made it all but certain.
The narrative is neat, and seemingly vindicated by history. The system that
emerged out of the October Revolution was a moral catastrophe. But more than
that, it was a tragedy — and tragedies don’t need villains.
Take Dzerzhinsky’s socialism. It was rooted in the humanist idea that the
“present hellish life with its wolfish exploitation, oppression, and violence” could
give way to an order “based on harmony, a full life embracing society as a whole.”
The future executioner suffered for his beliefs — eleven out of twenty years
underground spent in prison or exile — “in the torments of loneliness, longing
for the world and for life.”
Poor, tortured, imprisoned, and martyred, the revolutionaries of Russia
seemed destined to meet the same fate as radicals elsewhere in Europe. Only
they didn’t. After half decade in solitary confinement, enduring beatings that
permanently disfigured his jaw, Dzerzhinsky’s last letter from prison was reso-
lute: “At the moment I am dozing, like a bear in his winter den; all that remains
is the thought that spring will come and I will cease to suck my paw and all the
strength that still remains in my body and soul will manifest itself. Live I will.”
Here’s what happens when noble, determined people win — and find them-
selves in an unwinnable situation.

20
 THE BOLSHEVIKS
BEFORE BOLSHEVISM

in the cold war, both sides painted Vladimir Lenin and

his party as special — unique in their brutality or their model
for revolution. But despite being an underground move-
ment, it’s striking just how ordinary they were. Lenin saw
himself as an orthodox Marxist, trying to adapt the German
Social Democratic Party’s (spd) plan to a largely rural and
peasant country with a weak civil society and mass illiteracy.
The supposed proto-totalitarian smoking gun, Lenin’s
1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, does have unusual
elements. Lenin calls for professional organizers capable
of eluding police and places special emphasis on the role
of print propaganda, for instance. But it wasn’t a blueprint
for a radically different party; rather, these were tactics
needed for a movement barred from the legal organizing
and parliamentary work pursued by its counterparts else-
where. Once tsarism was overthrown, backward Russia and
its small working class could develop along Western lines
and push the struggle further.
Siding with Karl Kautsky, Lenin took aim at Eduard
Bernstein and others on the spd’s right wing for trying to
change “a party of social revolution into a democratic party
of social reforms.” To be a revolutionary, for Lenin, meant
smashing the capitalist state — it was a politics of rupture.

21
 THE FEW WHO WON

GOODBYE, SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

But his project, unlike the “Blanquists” he also denounced,

was about cohering a workers’ movement and placing it at
the center of political struggle, not creating a hardened core
of putschists. For Lenin the problem wasn’t that workers
weren’t flocking to the vanguard party, but that socialists
were underestimating workers. His goal, following the
German example, was a merger of the two currents — a
militant socialist workers’ movement.
Then perhaps if not by design, the Bolsheviks were
forced by repression to adopt a military-like structure that lenin didn’t leave social democracy, it left him. When
they would take into power. This claim, too, is doubtful. he first got news that the spd had voted for war credits on
Bolshevik organs even functioned with transparency and August 4, 1914, he thought it was capitalist propaganda.
pluralism few organizations in much rosier conditions today His faith was misplaced. Only fourteen of ninety-two
can match. German socialist deputies opposed the decision. Following
Take the “economists,” the grouping Lenin criticized parliamentary norms, they voted with the majority as a bloc.
so thoroughly in What Is to Be Done? He thought that they, An antiwar politician, Hugo Haase, was made to read the
like every other faction, deserved “to demand the oppor- party’s pro-war statement in the Reichstag. Socialists in the
tunity to express and advocate views.” Lenin was hardly a French Chamber of Deputies followed suit the same day.
genial interlocutor — like Marx, he was a fan of personal Kautsky wasn’t a parliamentarian, but he was present
invective. Still, the leader had to deal with not getting his at the debate. He suggested abstaining, but agreed that
way. Between 1912 and 1914, forty-seven of his articles were Germany was waging a defensive struggle against an
refused by Pravda, the “party paper.” eastern threat. Within a year, he changed his tune and vig-
Dissent cut through Russian social democracy; no one’s orously denounced the spd’s pro-war leadership and the
marching orders were followed without debate. It wasn’t German state, but the damage was done. The longstanding
just Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Socialist Revolutionary social-democratic idea, affirmed by the Second International
(sr), but dozens of shades of opinions among the Bolshe- in congress after congress, was that the growing power
viks themselves. of the working class would maintain peace “by resolute
On important political issues, however, the main wings intervention.” If war did come to pass, the parties would
of Russian social democracy were close. When the Menshe- not only oppose it, they would use the “crisis created by the
viks and Bolsheviks split in 1903, it was over small points war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall
of emphasis, not because of Lenin’s supposed call for a of capitalist class rule.”
professional vanguard party. When the 1905 Revolution That was the theory — in reality, social democracy’s
arrived, all parts of the movement fought side by side. Most flagship not only voted for war, but promoted Burgfrie-
Mensheviks, like most Bolsheviks, opposed the Great War, denspolitik, a policy of class peace to help it along. Sixteen
a clarity matched by few socialists elsewhere in Europe. In million people died in the conflict.
the lead-up to February 1917, they differed on how to view For more than a century, the Leninist narrative was that
the liberal bourgeoisie, but agreed that the immediate task Kautsky had been an ideal Marxist until almost the outbreak
of Russian social democracy was overthrowing autocracy, of World War I. It was his stance on war in 1914 and his oppo-
not socialist revolution. Only in this period did it become sition to the October Revolution in 1917 that transformed
obvious what set the Bolsheviks apart. him from revered “Pope of Marxism” to a “great renegade.”

22
 Bhaskar Sunkara

In his 1939 obituary for the German socialist, Trotsky sounds

like a scorned lover: “We remember Kautsky as our former
teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who sep-
arated himself from the proletarian revolution and from
whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.”
Kautsky’s position on the war was indeed shocking.
Within social democracy, a right-wing tendency had been
growing among trade union leaders and parliamentarians
who saw not just their own power, but that of the class they
represented, as bound up more with the stability and pros-
perity of their respective nations than with vague notions
of proletarian internationalism. But those were foes against In his 1939 obituary
whom Kautsky had waged intellectual and political battle
for years.
for Karl Kautsky,
“Modern society is ripe for revolution; and the bour- Trotsky sounds like
geoisie is not in a position to survive any insurrection.” Such a scorned lover.
a revolution would be won by “a well-disciplined minority,
energetic and conscious of the goal.” Sounds like Lenin, but
that was actually Kautsky.
There was, however, a growing gap between Kautsky’s
ideas and those of his Russian admirers. He had developed
a conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that
differed from Lenin and Trotsky’s. Kautsky might have
used language similar to theirs in the 1880s, just a decade
removed from the Paris Commune and with the spd still
underground. But his thought subsequently evolved. He
believed workers would win power through free elections,
extend political and civil liberties, and radically reform, not
smash, the existing state.
Kautsky was skeptical that direct democracy could
operate at scale. Though never equating nationalization
with socialism, neither did he advocate a council-based
“soviet democracy.” He saw overcoming capitalism as a
struggle that required political democracy and a long battle
for popular support. Well before publishing The Road to
Power and other late works praised by the Bolsheviks, he
had developed ideas distinct from both social democracy’s
reformist right and its revolutionary left.
But Lenin still looked to the Paris Commune of 1871
and the great revolutions of 1848 and 1789. This was the
spirit that spawned the communist movement.

23
 THE FEW WHO WON

TO THE FINLAND
STATION

the 1905 revolution showed lenin to be in step with

his era. The “great dress rehearsal” came close to toppling
tsarism and gave birth to the soviet.
Russia at that time was already pulsing with change.
Rapid economic growth and social advance had taken place
in the empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Industrial production doubled in the 1890s alone. Horses
and carts and dusty tracks began to give way to vast railroads
and, for a time, Russia even led the world in oil production.
1917 saw Trotsky’s But development was highly uneven. St. Petersburg’s
modern factories told little of life in an empire where, even
vision vindicated — but
in its European regions, only one in nine people lived in
with one key exception: cities. Whatever Russia’s progress in absolute terms, it was
the international falling ever further behind Western Europe.
revolution didn’t come. In the countryside, agricultural development advanced
at an even more glacial pace, failing to keep up with huge
population growth. Land-hungry peasants pushed westward
from their traditional communes into the steppes. Rural
poverty was still endemic. With economic stagnation in
the countryside and growing but patchy capitalist industry
in a few cities, generalized scarcity went along with a small
but highly politicized working class.
January 1905 caught the Bolsheviks by surprise. The
timing and shape of the revolt was not what they expected.
In October, St. Petersburg workers established an organ
to coordinate their actions. Factory delegates formed a
soviet (council) in the city. The body soon became a kind
of workers’ parliament, with representation from a range
of trade unions and committees. It was essentially a func-
tioning local government.

24
 Bhaskar Sunkara

Trotsky, not Lenin, shined brightest in 1905. Neither patiently organize for a second, socialist revolution. The Bol-
Menshevik nor Bolshevik, but respected in both camps, he sheviks and Mensheviks agreed on this — they just argued
immediately grasped the revolution’s significance. Within over the role liberal capitalists would play. Mensheviks
the St. Petersburg Soviet’s brief life, the twenty-six year old thought they would be at the heart of a bourgeois-dem-
delegate emerged as an unparalleled orator and thinker. By ocratic revolution, while Lenin thought workers could
the end of November, he was even elected its chair. reconcile their interests with those of peasants and drive
The situation by that point was untenable. As feared, the process themselves.
Nicholas soon crushed the revolution and reneged on Trotsky foresaw a different scenario. Instead of a bour-
concessions promised to liberal forces. By April 1906, geois democratic revolution, the peasants would defeat the
14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned. gentry in the countryside and the workers would conquer
But the revolutionaries now had a taste of real power. capitalists in the city. This “proletarian-socialist” revolu-
The transformation of Russian social democracy was tion would merge democratic and socialist tasks into one.
stunning. Immediately before the 1905 Revolution, the In underdeveloped Russia, however, this would create a
Bolsheviks had just 8,400 members. By the following spring, situation of flux, with exploiting classes defeated but no
they could count 34,000 among them. The Mensheviks also material basis for large-scale socialist construction. As a
drew thousands to their ranks. result, the sequence would have to be “furthered by an
The revolutionary movement finally had something international revolutionary process.”
Lenin had been aspiring to for years — a mass base of Nineteen seventeen saw Trotsky’s vision vindicated —
workers. Attempts to mend the divide between Bolsheviks but with one key exception: the international revolution
and Mensheviks would fail, but all had a sense that they were didn’t come.
in a new era and that the tsar would soon fall.
But none came as close as Trotsky to guessing what
would happen next. Grasping 1905’s implications, Trotsky
refined a novel theory of “permanent revolution.” Marxists
had traditionally thought that revolution would happen in
stages. The first of these would be “bourgeois-democratic”:
economically, this stage would pave the way for peasant land
reform and further urban industrialization; politically, it
would create a capitalist republic with freedom of speech
and assembly. That would then allow social democrats to

25
 THE FEW WHO WON

THE TWO REVOLUTIONS

two years into the great war, three million Russians going to wait patiently for Marxist schema to mature. Freed
were dead, the empire’s economy was in ruins, yet the army from generations of oppression, workers seized factories and
pushed ahead with futile new offensives. In February 1917, peasants divided up estates. Popular committees sprang up
the stalemate was broken from within. across the country: rank-and-file soldier committees resisted
As in 1905, St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) and its their officers and peasant organizations oversaw unsanc-
working class led the upsurge. On International Women’s tioned land expropriations. Authority in all its forms was
Day, February 23, women textile workers began a strike questioned: the aristocracy was gone, but for a supposed
which spread across the city. By day’s end, 90,000 workers “bourgeois revolution,” the bourgeoisie was reeling.
were involved; by the next day, 200,000. A similar situation Radicals didn’t drive the change, though they benefited
developed in Moscow, where workers protested against sky- from it. In February, there were 24,000 Bolsheviks; within
rocketing inflation and bread shortages. Nicholas II refused months they became a mass organization ten times that size.
concessions until he was forced to abdicate on March 1. The For now, however, the democratically elected soviets
Romanov dynasty that had endured for three centuries was were still dominated by Menshevik and sr forces. And
swept away in a week. meanwhile, the dynamic between those bodies and the
Its fall was almost universally celebrated. What to do Provisional Government was frustrated by the latter’s lack
next was less clear. The Bolsheviks’ doctrinal dispute with of legitimacy. It’s not hard to understand why — Prince
the Mensheviks over how to relate to the liberal bourgeoisie Georgy Lvov, a link to the old regime, was the nominal
would prove important here. Though the Bolsheviks agreed head of state and the Kadets and Octobrists that ran the
that the time wasn’t ripe for socialism, they wanted workers government were terrified by the revolution that brought
and peasants to take power and carry out the revolution’s them to power. Liberals could pass decrees and try to restore
democratic tasks. But most workers were instead drawn to order and continue the war effort, but their wishes simply
the Menshevik call to simply revive the soviets; these would weren’t carried out.
assert the interests of the oppressed, but not capture state On March 1, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and
power themselves. Soldiers’ Deputies published its famous Order Number
Liberals established a Provisional Committee to fill the One. It declared that military orders from the Provisional
void, but it had little social base. On March 1, the day of the Government were to be carried out “except those which
tsar’s flight, soviet and liberal leaders came to an agreement: run counter to the orders and decrees issued by the Soviet
a new Provisional Government would form and agree to a of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.” With Order Number
wide range of reforms. Russia would have full civil liberties, One, the soviet demanded a key component of sovereignty,
with political prisoners released and the police and state yet refused to actually make itself the functioning authority
apparatus transformed. in the country.
Important questions about the war, land reform, and Moderate socialists still looked to the Provisional Gov-
elections remained unresolved, but the February Revolution ernment, which had been reconstituted to include more
was among the most sweeping the world had ever seen. left-wing forces, including Alexander Kerensky, himself an
But a tense situation of “dual power” quickly emerged. sr. The hope was that this alliance would calm the country
Sovereign authority could now be claimed by the worker and and create an environment in which socialists could press
soldier soviets and by the Provisional Government. Moderate democratic demands and find a route to end the war. For
socialists struggled to bridge the gap, believing they had to keep now the fighting would continue, but was to be strictly
the “progressive bourgeoisie” within the February consensus. “defensive and without annexations.”
They were right. Materially, Russia wasn’t ripe for The Bolsheviks themselves were split on how to relate
socialism. But those finally released from tyranny weren’t to the government. Returning from Siberian exile in March,

26
 Bhaskar Sunkara

Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin saw the new republic as one the blessing of the Menshevik-sr majority, Kerensky’s Provi-
that would stand for years, if not decades, and oriented the sional Government claimed more power for itself.
Bolsheviks along that time horizon. During his two months hiding in Finland, Lenin finished
Lenin, still in exile, was shocked by his party’s com- The State and Revolution. His argument with reformists
placency. The day after his arrival at Finland Station he was premised on a simple point: “the working class cannot
presented his April Theses, where he reaffirmed an uncom- simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its
promising antiwar posture and essentially embraced own purposes.” Like Marx and Engels, he saw the state as a
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Like Trotsky, tool of class oppression. A tiny minority used it to rule over
Lenin thought that rather than let the revolution con- a great majority. The state was, unsurprisingly, bloody and
solidate into a parliamentary republic, socialists should repressive. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat and its
instead push it forward and build “a republic of Soviets of allies, by contrast, it would be the great majority repressing
Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.” a tiny minority. There would be some violence, then, but
This wasn’t empty rhetoric: the soviets already had more by comparison it would be minimal.
popular legitimacy than the Provisional Government. “We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes, “we do not ‘dream’
Against the tamer position of Kamenev and Stalin, of dispensing at once with all administration, with all sub-
Lenin said “No support for the Provisional Government; the ordination.” But as socialism triumphed, the need for a
utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear.” The repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would
die was cast — there would be another revolution in 1917. wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution
Trotsky was also in exile when the February Revolution as a false flag — a libertarian socialist document from the
broke out, rousing the “workers and peasants of the Bronx” father of socialist authoritarianism. But it seems to have
an ocean away. After a perilous return home, conditions been a genuine indicator of his political worldview. It was
were set for him and his followers to eventually join the the simplicity with which Lenin made his case that prefig-
Bolsheviks and play a pivotal role in the events to come. ured the problems Bolshevism would face once in power.
The reception to Lenin’s April Theses among many In August, it was the Right’s turn at revolt. General
Bolsheviks was frosty at first, but it found some popular sup- Kornilov, sensing the instability of the Provisional Govern-
port. Lenin also had an ally in the young Nikolai Bukharin, ment, tried to restore order by way of a coup. With no one
then on the left of the party. Lenin’s return and radical line else to call on for help, Kerensky appealed to the Petrograd
elevated his stature. Soviet. It easily beat back Kornilov, with the Bolsheviks
The party was still split in this period: there were those playing a decisive role. The party’s prestige was at a high
like Lenin and Bukharin who looked to insurrection and and Kerensky was forced to release its captured leaders.
those with a more moderate perspective — like Kamenev, In late September, Trotsky once again became chairman
Alexei Rykov, Viktor Nogin (who had long wanted to reunite of the Petrograd Soviet, now under the control of a Bol-
with the Mensheviks), and Gregory Zinoviev. The latter shevik majority. What was recently a small, radical party
wanted to replace the Provisional Government, but only could now claim popular legitimacy. The stage was set for
with a broad coalition of socialist parties. the October Revolution.
Lenin also didn’t want a premature uprising that would Yet before it could transpire, the Mensheviks and srs
leave the Bolsheviks isolated and unable to last in power like had one last chance. The mood in the country had swung
the Communards of Paris. As late as June, he would stress even further left. It was clear the Provisional Government
that: “Even in the soviets of both capitals, not to speak had no independent means of defense in a country that now
now of the others, we are an insignificant minority ... the had six hundred radicalized soviets. Among the Menshe-
majority of the masses are wavering but still believe the viks, steadily hemorrhaging support to the Bolsheviks, a left
srs and Mensheviks.” wing under Julius Martov was gaining strength. Martov was
But the party’s radical appeals were taking hold — tens of resolutely antiwar and in favor of more sweeping reforms
thousands of workers and soldiers joined. Some, inspired by than the Provisional Government could offer. His position
slogans like “All Power to the Soviets,” launched spontaneous was nearly indistinguishable from that of the moderate
armed demonstrations in Petrograd against the Provisional Bolsheviks.
Government in July. A crackdown followed — Trotsky was The Mensheviks and srs could have stepped in and
imprisoned for a time, Lenin fled, publications were banned, taken power as part of a broad front of socialist parties to
and the death penalty was reintroduced for soldiers. With create a constituent assembly and a framework for reforms.

27
 THE FEW WHO WON

The Bolsheviks could have formed a loyal opposition to such Socialist Revolutionaries who supported the October rising).
a government, or even directly joined it, as Kamenev and Now transformed into a small minority, the Right srs
Zinoviev wanted. It was a moot point — the Mensheviks and Mensheviks attacked the Bolshevik action. Even Martov
and srs clung to the sinking Provisional Government, and denounced the “coup d’état,” but also put forth a resolution
even if they hadn’t, the parties were divided on the war. calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for
Lenin and Trotsky’s insurrection seemed like the only way. a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the
With the Petrograd Soviet now under their control, motion and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would
Lenin finally convinced the Bolshevik Central Committee have created the broad socialist government that many had
of that course. The “single greatest event in human history,” sought in September — only now, in a more radical context,
as socialists called it for decades, was anticlimactic. On it would be pressured into taking principled positions on
October 24, Bolshevik units quickly occupied rail stations, the war and land reform.
telephone exchanges, and the state bank. The following day But as in September, the Right srs and the Menshevik
Red Guards surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested majority refused to go along. They walked out of the Con-
the cabinet ministers. One-sixth of the world had been gress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks.
conquered in the name of the proletariat with barely a drop Martov still wanted a compromise — negotiations for the
of blood spilled. creation of a coalition socialist government. But now, just
Did Lenin lead a coup? Though certainly not as spon- two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall,
taneous as the February Revolution, October represented a the Bolshevik mood hardened. “The rising of the masses of
genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers, allied the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his
with elements of the peasantry. After the Kornilov coup, the former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no com-
Bolsheviks could claim a mandate for such an action. Their promise is possible. To those who have left and to those who
support was bolstered by a straightforward call for “peace, tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts,
land, and bread.” The Mensheviks demanded patience from your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the
the long-suffering masses; the Bolsheviks made concrete dustbin of history!”
promises. Making those desires a reality would be another Here is Trotsky epitomized — grand, rhetorically mas-
matter, but the Bolsheviks were the force most militantly terful, but tragically overconfident in the ordination of
trying to fulfill the February Revolution’s frustrated goals. history. The delegates didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.
In the first months after October, the character of the They erupted into applause. Martov began to leave with the
regime was not yet clear. The Bolsheviks didn’t initially seek other left-Mensheviks. A young Bolshevik confronted him
a one-party state — circumstances, as well as their decisions, on the way out, upset that a great champion of the working
conspired to create one. Immediately after the revolution, it fell class would abandon its revolution. Martov stopped before
to the Second Congress of Soviets to ratify the transfer of power the exit and turned to him: “One day you will understand
from the Provisional Government. From 318 soviets, 649 del- the crime in which you are taking part.”
egates were elected to the body. Reflecting a dramatic shift in Almost exactly twenty years to the day, that worker,
mood, 390 of them were Bolshevik and 100 Left srs (those Ivan Akulov, was killed in a Stalinist purge.

28
 Bhaskar Sunkara

THE WORKERS’ STATE

“we will now build the socialist order.” Lenin’s words Within months the Bolsheviks would have to clamp
just after the revolution suggested a radical course, but down on such actions — the immediate task was restoring
the Bolsheviks moved cautiously. Though they had pop- basic productivity and order. It’s clear that the government
ular support in a few major cities, they knew it would be a intended to maintain a mixed economy at least until its
struggle to assert authority in a massive, mostly rural and rescue by revolutions elsewhere in Europe.
peasant country. But the confusion of these months was helped along by
They tried to make good on their program, however. the fact that Bolsheviks never clearly delineated between the
Against the old elites’ resistance, worker control over pro- overlapping jurisdictions of factory committees and trade
duction was expanded. Homosexuality was decriminalized, unions and a sprawling complex of soviets, not to mention
women won divorce and reproductive rights. Land rights the central state. They had vacillated on these questions
were expanded to peasants, antisemitism was combatted, for tactical reasons in the pursuit of power. Centralization
and steps were made toward self-determination in the and the blurring of party and state were simple, pragmatic
former empire Lenin called “a prison house of nations.” ways to resolve the dilemmas.
In industry, Lenin’s vision of worker control wasn’t On the question of the war, the Bolsheviks also saw
syndicalist (“the ridiculous transfer of the railways to the their hopes complicated. The situation was urgent. Though
railwaymen, or the tanneries to the tanners”); in the long fighting was subsiding, between the February and October
run, he looked to more coordinated class-wide methods of Revolutions one hundred thousand died on the Eastern
ownership. In the short term, he said, “the immediate intro- Front. The Bolsheviks made a call to all governments for a
duction of socialism in Russia is impossible,” and argued “just and democratic peace.” If they refused, Lenin was con-
instead for worker oversight of management, alongside the fident that “the workers of these countries will understand
nationalization of key sectors. That wasn’t the limit of his the duty which now rests upon them of saving mankind
horizons, of course. Lenin was impressed with the wartime from the horrors of war.”
economy in capitalist states. If planning in the service of The decree was ignored by the Entente powers and, for
chaos was already a reality, why shouldn’t planning in the the moment, so was the call for revolution. Negotiations
service of human need — under the watch of democratic with the Central Powers began. Against Lenin’s advice, the
soviets — be possible? Bolshevik Central Committee turned down an initial peace
The push for more extensive nationalizations came offer. “Left Communists” led by Bukharin wanted to con-
from the grassroots. A contradictory late November order tinue the war and fan the flames of revolt in their enemies’
gave factory committees a legal mandate to interfere in homes. It was a grave miscalculation. Taking advantage
production and distribution, while still asserting manage- of strife within the young socialist state, the Germans and
ment’s right to manage. Not surprisingly, it fueled disorder Austrians advanced, seizing a huge swathe of land from
and further hampered production. Many workers took to the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s
taking over factories on their own accord. Often, these were painful concessions followed, cutting the Soviet state from
honest attempts to restore production after capitalist sab- key agricultural and industrial heartlands and putting it in
otage or flight; at other times, workers responded to chaos a weaker position to deal with growing civil unrest.
by hoarding supplies and protecting their own interests.

29
 THE FEW WHO WON

“Having mounted
the saddle, the rider is
obliged to guide the
horse — at the risk of
breaking his neck.”

Attempts to undermine the Bolshevik government As Trotsky, that great army’s organizer, put it, “Having
started from the day it took power in Petrograd. The White mounted the saddle, the rider is obliged to guide the horse —
movement was an unholy alliance spanning the political at the risk of breaking his neck.” The Bolshevik government
spectrum — from right-Mensheviks and srs to the lib- rode on. Their argument for doing so was at first less about
eral Kadet party to extreme nationalists and monarchists. the immediate prospects for socialism within Russia and
Thirteen thousand American troops along with British, more in terms of a “holding action.” The survival of the first
Canadian, French, Greek, Italian, and Japanese forces joined workers’ state would be a boon to the revolutionary move-
to aid a brutal domestic opposition. Against remarkable ments that would take power in more advanced countries.
odds, the Bolsheviks oversaw the creation of a Red Army These states would then come to the Bolsheviks’ rescue and
and triumphed in a five-year conflict that claimed nine help rebuild the country as part of a broader proletarian
million lives. confederation.
It wasn’t as fantastical as it sounds today: this was an
era of upheaval. Not long after October, German com-
munists launched an ill-fated series of revolts trying to
follow the Russian example. Newly liberated Finland saw
its democratically elected socialist government dislodged
in a bloody civil war. In 1919, a Hungarian Soviet Republic
briefly took power. Two red years of factory occupations
and mass strikes shook Italy. Even Ireland boasted soviets
for a time.
Though the Bolsheviks still hoped for a breakthrough
through the newly formed Communist International, it was
becoming clear that no salvation from abroad was on its way.
Lenin’s party had made a justified gamble to protect and
extend the February Revolution’s gains and help end not
just one grisly war, but all future ones as well. That gamble
failed. And now with the only apparent alternatives to their
leadership being a right-wing military dictatorship or even
a form of Judeocidal fascism, they pressed on. Faced with
an impossible dilemma, what the Bolsheviks had to do to
survive would only exacerbate the party’s worst tendencies.

30
 Bhaskar Sunkara

TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM

the moment called for hardened men like Dzerzhinsky.

His newly formed Cheka would collect information from
across the empire and act on it immediately. Interrogations
were quick, and those who failed to dispel suspicion were
stood up against a wall and shot. With Lenin’s blessing, the
Cheka grew two hundred thousand strong and led a Red
Terror in which as many were killed.
Were such terrible acts necessary to win history’s most
destructive civil war? Maybe, but the methods in which
they were conducted certainly were not. There were no
external controls on the Cheka’s arrests and executions —
the example of Dzerzhinsky’s disciplined leadership would
never be enough to curb excesses. Collective punishment,
state terror, and intimidation — all these were initially
exceptional measures that became norms when social con-
flict reemerged during Stalin’s reign.
Though one can overstate the comparison, Abraham
Lincoln’s US Civil War government declared martial law,
suspended habeas corpus, detained thousands, and used
military tribunals, among other extra-Constitutional mea-
sures. But these were recognized as temporary deviations
necessary for the restoration of normal republican govern-
ment, which was restored before long.
The Bolsheviks didn’t delineate their state of exception
clearly enough, blurring together actions taken out of neces-
sity and those performed out of virtue. There was no clear
bedrock of rights and protections that Soviet citizens could
claim once the emergency of war subsided. Open debate
within the newly formed Communist Party would continue
for some time, including factions pushing for democracy and With the exploiting
worker power. But the broader political culture of engage-
ment and contestation — sustained by a network of parties
classes gone,
and newspapers — that had survived underground for long wouldn’t the proletariat
decades under tsarism would never reemerge. need a socialist
A central problem was the lack of clear agreement theory of jurisprudence
on what the dictatorship of the proletariat should look or institutional
like. Like other wings of social democracy, the Bolsheviks
focused on seizing power, not exercising it. Aside from
checks on power?
vague sketches, they hadn’t thought much about politics
after revolution. With the exploiting classes gone, would
the proletariat need a socialist theory of jurisprudence or
institutional checks on power? Caught in an unprecedented
situation, they made it up as they went along.

31
 THE FEW WHO WON

FROM WAR COMMUNISM TO THE NEP

moves toward “war communism” were spurred more of the economy — large industries, banking, and foreign
by practical necessity than ideological zeal. Years of rev- trade — but markets were legalized elsewhere. A tax on
olution and unrelenting war had disrupted agricultural food producers replaced counterproductive forced requi-
production. Peasants had little incentive to direct what sitions, with peasants free to dispose of their goods how
was still produced to the cities — there was a shortage of they wished once the tax was paid. Though the partnership
consumer goods and grain prices continued to decline in would have to be skewed — peasant surplus was needed
relation to those goods. A black market naturally developed, to restore and expand industry — the hope was to replace
a market the tsarist state and Provisional Government both the direct coercion of war communism with accumulation
sought to combat. through gradual, unequal exchange. Rather than forced
The Bolsheviks continued that course, but even more collectivization, many nep supporters looked to the vol-
ruthlessly — applying their class analysis to the countryside, untary creation of agricultural cooperatives that, in time,
which they saw as divided between poor peasants, middle would outcompete what they saw as needlessly inefficient
peasants, and wealthy kulaks. They hoped to maintain sup- traditional peasant production.
port by focusing their actions on the latter, but divisions Politically, the nep was a period of hardening, not
on the ground were less clear, and the presence of armed liberalization. Party leaders feared that the peasantry’s
requisition squads searching for hoarders only served as a newfound economic power might morph into a political
further disincentive to production. Despite the banning opposition. Not only opposition parties, but even internal
of private trade and energetic repression, it was largely Bolshevik factions were banned in 1921. There would still
thanks to the black market that Russian cities survived be debate within the party, but the Bolsheviks made clear
the Civil War. that they would not step away from power. For the moment,
The Bolshevik industrial policy also shifted in this the arts and intellectual life flowered undisturbed. But the
period. The government nationalized the entire economy, one-party state was an easy trap to fall into: with the civil
instituted rationing, and imposed strict labor discipline. war, foreign intervention, blockade, and plots against the
Not even the moderate visions of worker control survived leadership, who could deny that Russia was under siege?
the return to one-man management. No capitalist sabo- Then, with the war over, the task of reconstruction required
tage was necessary — shortages of parts and raw materials reliable men of action. One such man, Stalin, rose to general
slowed production to a crawl. Highly ideological initiatives, secretary in 1922.
like the attempt to construct moneyless budgets, coexisted Lenin was wary of what he saw. But though he decried
with the reality of wholesale economic regression. By 1921, the party-state elite’s abuses and excesses, he failed to see
Russian industry was less than one-third its prewar size. that democratic reform, however risky, was the only pos-
The Soviet state’s political base was decimated, too. sible counterbalance to that power. Approaching death,
Some industrial workers died in the Civil War, while others he warned specifically about Stalin, encouraging the party
left starving cities and tried their chances in the countryside. congress to remove him, but his wishes went unfulfilled.
With the dream of German revolution buried for now, Once Lenin was gone, Stalin used his post to scatter the
the issues were now practical ones: how to restore and supporters of his rival Trotsky within the party. Still, Stalin
expand Russian industry, and how to revive the worker- was not yet in control.
peasant alliance that sparked the revolution. Debate within the party soon crystalized between
The New Economic Policy (nep) was a step in this dire- three main camps: the left opposition of Trotsky, Stalin’s
ction. The state still controlled the commanding heights current, and those around Bukharin, who now found himself
on the party’s right.

32
 Bhaskar Sunkara

STALIN AND HIS CHILDREN

Trotsky pushed for party democracy and other despite the political turmoil in russia, the nep was
anti-bureaucratic measures, faster industrialization and working. By 1926, Soviet industry had surpassed prewar
collectivization at home, and aggressive revolutionary levels — a remarkable turnaround from just five years
exhortations abroad. Bukharin was more cautious, seeking prior. What to do with this new wealth was hotly debated:
to continue slowly “riding into socialism on a peasant nag,” agricultural improvements and light industry or heavy
with some adjustments. Stalin vacillated between the two industry? These choices weren’t just technical. For a party
positions, displaying a political savvy few knew the Geor- that grounded its legitimacy in an industrial proletariat,
gian possessed. continuing along the nep route had profound political
Trotsky saw the real danger not in Stalin’s bureau- implications.
cratic centrism, but in the risk that Bukharin’s program
would accidently bring about the restoration of capitalism.
Bukharin, too, took far too long to see Stalin as a threat. Yet
even had they united, Stalin might have been destined to
win: he applauded the party men Trotsky criticized.
Meanwhile, Trotsky’s call for industrial rejuvenation
hardly won him goodwill among the peasant majority out-
side the party. And without the support of the bureaucracy
or the peasantry — and with the old Bolshevik workers dead
or exhausted — on what social basis could Trotsky hope to
win? Confidence in the dialectic of history wasn’t enough.
Trotsky was removed from power in late 1927 and sent
into exile shortly after. Until his murder thirteen years later,
he remained Stalinism’s greatest critic. Yet he couldn’t admit
that any part of the system he so despised had its genesis in
the early repression that he himself had helped engineer.

33
 With the left opposition eliminated and his erstwhile Stalin had used a food shortage to transform the Soviet
ally Bukharin marginalized, Stalin was free to answer these Union from a slowly rebounding authoritarian state to a hor-
questions as he saw fit. He was growing frustrated with the rific totalitarian regime unlike any the world had ever seen.
nep. Industrial investment increased, yet grain prices were Dzerzhinsky, who died of a heart attack in 1926, sup-
kept low. Peasants, naturally, clung to their stock. Periodic posedly anguished over every execution order he signed.
crises of this kind occurred throughout the 1920s, as indus- He was replaced by men with no such compulsion.
trial and agricultural prices fell out of sync. Stalin’s Soviet Union did win a great war against a far
In the past, these problems had been alleviated through greater evil. Yet for every action the leader took to defeat
price adjustments and other policy changes. fascism, he took another to undermine the antifascist
This time, however, Stalin made no such adjustment. struggle —supporting the disastrous Third Period policy,
Instead he sent police to commandeer legally produced and purging the Red Army of capable officers, ignoring news of
traded grain. Local officials who followed existing laws were imminent Nazi invasion. The victorious regime was deeply
dismissed. A new period of coercion against every layer of conservative, pursuing great power policies on a scale even
the peasantry was born. Stalin wanted a “revolution from the tsars couldn’t have imagined, along with episodes of
above.” The first show trials took place, the first five-year mass ethnic cleansing and even its share of antisemitism.
plan was introduced, which called for the tripling of indus- Under Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement, too,
trial output and investment. became a tool of Russian national interests rather than one
And then, without warning, millions were forcefully of working-class emancipation.
collectivized into farms. Planners thought this would per- Once Stalin was gone, the Soviet system morphed into
manently solve food supply issues. It had the opposite something profoundly different. His command economy
effect — production fell dramatically and scapegoats had to remained, but the bureaucrats who now ruled remained
be found. Collective punishment returned, not just against haunted by the totalitarian terror that had cut through
supposedly wealthy kulaks, but now also against “ideolog- their own ranks. The new order was grey and repressive,
ical kulaks,” that is, those who opposed the policy. At least but capable for a while of delivering peace and stability.
six million perished in famine, and millions more would Yet the ruling elite had no interest in building a free civil
spend their lives in a vast network of forced-labor camps. society from which socialist democracy might have sprung.
Many, of course, resisted the new serfdom. Stalin’s own Attempts to renovate the system only undermined the
wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932 to coercion that held it together. Its collapse gave way to an
protest the new course. But there was no serious challenge even more predatory order.
to the dictator. Within a decade, a once-vibrant, fractious For a century, socialists have looked back at the October
party became a monolithic sect. Revolution — sometimes with rose-colored glasses, some-
Yet if we can close our eyes to the cost, the five-year times to play at simplistic counterfactuals. But sometimes
plan was a success. The Soviet Union made an incredible for good reason. Exploitation and inequality are still alive and
advance — largely in spite of forced collectivization, rather well amid plenty. Even knowing how their story ended, we
than because of it. State planning led to a rapid rise in gdp, can learn from those who dared to fight for something better.
capital accumulation, and consumption. Foreign observers Yet both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were
downplayed reports of mass famine and celebrated the wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals
achievement. (Not just the Daily Worker, but also liberal was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world
outlets like the New York Times and the Nation.) As the revolution and an easy leap from the kingdom of necessity
fascist threat grew, so did Communist prestige. But this to the kingdom of freedom. The Bolsheviks, having seen
economic breakthrough was accompanied by new political over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an
terror. A campaign of mass murder began in 1936, with era of upheaval, can be forgiven. We can also forgive them
thousands purged from the Communist Party, including because they were first.
lifelong Bolsheviks. Many of them were imprisoned as What is less forgivable is that a model built from errors
counterrevolutionaries, forced to confess to elaborate plots, and excesses, forged in the worst of conditions, came to
and then executed. More than half a million were killed. dominate a left living in an unrecognizable world. 

34
WE’VE GOT MORE GRAPHS
THAN GOSPLAN.
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
VULGAR EMPIRICIST

As Long Central planning led

as It Catches to modernization in poor

countries — and stagnation
Mice in rich ones.

West Germany

East Germany

Bulgaria
east german and bulgarian per capita gdp
as a percentage of west german For years other than 1950–1989, East and West Germany refer
per capita gdp, 1936–1992 to the respective territories of those countries.

105%
100% 100%

34% 33%

24%

1936 1945 1950 1989 1992

36 № 27  /  FALL 2017 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 37

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
educational levels of the gulag population versus the ussr as a whole, 1937
VULGAR EMPIRICIST
Gulag Total USSR
Population, % Population, %

Higher

Secondary

Elementary

As Stalin advanced his vision of Semi-illiterate

Workers’ “socialism in one country,” prisons Illiterate

sprouted like a thousand flowers
Paradise Lost across the USSR.

Traitors’ family members political prisoners in camps 1934

by type of crime,
Other counterrevolutionary crimes 1935
1934–1941
Leader of a counterrevolutionary organization 1936
Participation in a rightist-Trotskyite organization 1937
Abuse of power; economic and military crimes 1938
Socially harmful and dangerous elements
1939
Theft of social property
1940
Counterrevolutionary crimes
1941

1942

1943
1,200,000
1944 gulag
population outflows,
1945
1934–1953
1946
900,000 Escaped
1947
Died
1948
Freed
1949
600,000 To prisons
1950
To other nkvd administrations
1951

1952
300,000 1953

1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941

0 300,000 600,000 900,000 1,200,000 1,500,000

38 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 39

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
TRANSITIONS

cpusa majority Our allies

That supports, minority want us here!
February 1917 was a lot
forms ccds
February Revolution of fun!

The
1979
greatest Soviet invasion of
October 1917 event 1985 eurocommunism Afghanistan
October Revolution in human Order must Gorbachev
history be restored in power

When Did It
Go Wrong?
Let’s take We need Let’s just not
it slow Baby- democratic, have the East
1928 1991 Bathwater national roads German
Stalin USSR coup to socialism. troops help

consolidates
power
1968
social erich Prague Spring
democracy honecker
A short century filled with crushed
long disagreements.
Stalin is the anti-revisionism maoism
personification
of the
I’ve seen bureaucracy
the future,
and
it works Resist
adventurism Peaceful
Resist coexistence is
the red slow suicide.
bourgeoisie
shachtmanism trotskyism

1960
February 1956 Sino-Soviet Split
Change
We can’t Late 1930s Khruschev’s Anti-Stalin is necessary
“critically Hitler-Stalin Pact / Invasion Secret Speech
support”
this
of Finland

One
October 1956 weak link
These
The workers’ 1948 nationalist
Hungarian Revolution will collapse
state needs Yugoslav-Soviet suppressed the system
elements
a buffer zone have to be
Split
stopped

cpusa
membership Et tu, Nikita?
titoism Tito = bae plummets

40 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 41

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
UNEVEN AND COMBINED BY JONAH WALTERS
East to West

Moscow
Globetrotters

Statues of Lenin, once ubiquitous in Communist countries,

now cast shadows across the capitalist world.

LUGANSK to CAVRIAGO LANCHKHUITI to DALLAS

The Lenin bust that today stands in the town square of In 1991, as a bloody civil war raged in Georgia, Texas billion-
POPRAD to SEATTLE MOSCOW to NEW YORK CITY Cavriago, in central Italy, isn’t the real one — it’s a replica aire Harlan Crow sent his twenty-five-year-old assistant to
This Lenin, cast by the Bulgarian sculptor Emil Venkov at Today, the Lenin of New York’s Lower East Side perches installed by local communists. The real bust, minted in the the former Soviet territory on a mission — bring me back
the request of the Czech Communist Party, stood in front gargoyle-like atop an apartment building on Norfolk Street. Ukrainian town of Lugansk in 1922, had to enter protective a Lenin. Tie Sosnowski, a humble history major without a
of the Poprad regional party offices. First installed in 1988, Before that, for more than twenty years, it stood sentry over custody decades ago after a string of twentieth-century word of Georgian, managed to contact David Uruchadze,
the statue was removed in the early 1990s. a $100 million Houston Street property, a twelve-story misfortunes, including a thwarted Nazi kidnapping during whose 1970 Lenin statue stood in Lanchkhuti until it was
Lewis Carpenter of Issaquah, Washington spent the condo development called Red Square. But originally, it the fascist period and an attempted bombing during Italy’s toppled by a crowd and discarded, legless, behind a dump-
early 1990s tromping across the former Soviet world. In was fashioned in Moscow by sculptor Yuri Gerasimov in tumultuous 1970s. ster in 1991.
1993, he sighted the sixteen-foot, eight-ton Lenin partially 1989 — a very bad year for Lenin statues. The workers who minted Lenin in 1922 had humble Sosnowski bought the sculpture from Uruchadze, who
interred in a gravel lot in Poprad. He promptly purchased In 1994, a pair of maverick real estate developers — one ambitions for their creation — the bust was to stand in front had rescued it from further ruin, and rented a Russian mili-
the sculpture and arranged for it to be shipped to Seattle, of whom, Michael Rosen, worked a day job as a professor of of the local train station. But during the German occupa- tary helicopter to transport it out of the war zone. But Lenin
mortgaging his house to cover the costs. Carpenter died “radical sociology” at New York University — discovered tion of Ukraine in the 1940s, it came under attack. After a proved too heavy a load to bear: he had to be transported
in 1994, but not before his Lenin was installed in Free- the junked Lenin in a cluttered Moscow backyard. They bitter struggle, it was finally trafficked to Italy in the hands by flatbed truck to Istanbul, through a landscape dotted
hold Square, becoming an eccentric Seattle landmark. His wasted no time in getting it to New York to coronate their of Italian partisans, who safeguarded it through the years of with Georgian and Turkish military checkpoints. “I had
arrangement with the city was peculiar kind of public con- Houston Street passion project. But in 2016, Red Square fascist rule until finally returning it to the Soviet embassy to sleep with one eye open for three days,” the assistant
signment: he hoped installing the statue outdoors would was sold, and Lenin went underground. in 1970. The embassy promptly donated it to the city of later recalled. From there the statue was shipped to Texas.
facilitate its prompt sale. A few months later, he reemerged just blocks away. He Cavriago as a tribute to its historic socialist movement, Today, Lenin stands behind the hedges of the Texas
Venkov, the artist, died earlier this year in Bratislava. now presides over another of Rosen’s buildings, and waves which held local power during the interwar years. mogul’s private sculpture garden, sheltered from the out-
The statue is still held in trust by Carpenter’s family, and towards Wall Street once again. Today, the original sits behind glass in Cavriago’s cul- side world.
remains on sale, with an asking price of $250,000. tural center, weathered but intact.

42 № 27  /  FALL 2017 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 43

 UNEVEN AND COMBINED
Internal Exile

BERLIN, Germany KHUJAND, Tajikistan KHARKIV, Ukraine

Originally, the sixty-two-foot Lenin of East Berlin was In 1992, the residents of Khujand, Tajikistan’s second largest After a massive anti-Russia demonstration toppled this The political sympathies of Lenin’s assailants were
posted before two prominent housing blocks, the proud city, voted in a plebiscite to abandon the Soviet-era name iconic thirty-foot Lenin in 2014, bystanders dismembered transparent — one vendor offered a fragment of Lenin’s
accomplishment of Nikolai Tomsky, then the head of the Leninabad. The iconic, twenty-three-meter Lenin remained, its prostrate figure. Days later, pieces of Lenin’s visage, nose to anyone who could “provide a battalion of soldiers
Soviet Academy of Arts, and the many workers who hauled however, until May 2011 when, in the dead of night, city including his ears and nose, appeared on online auction sites with underwear and uniforms,” and the UK’s Daily Mail
its stone blocks from Russia on a convoy of trucks. But when officials dismantled it. with advertisements like, “Come and listen to the sound of reported that profits from other sales were funneled into
political fortunes changed in 1989, this statue suffered an It now presides over “Victory Park,” an empty field change — through Lenin’s ear!” anti-Russian militias.
especially grisly fate. on the city’s periphery. International travelers en route
Lenin was dethroned, decapitated, and his head interred to the Lenin are advised to watch out for livestock and to
in a massive grave outside the city. But in 2015, at great seek advice from locals before attempting to cross the river.
effort, the head was exhumed — one news outlet reported,
somewhat incredulously, that “the 3.5 ton piece is to be
resurrected from a sandpit under a pile of rocks which is
home to a colony of lizards.”
Twenty-four years after his inglorious burial, Lenin sits
under museum lights, part of an exhibition of important
figures in German history.

ODESSA, Ukraine BUDAPEST, Hungary

After the passage of decommunization laws in Ukraine in No fewer than three Lenins stand in Budapest’s Memento
2015, pop artist Alexander Milov circumvented the decree Park, the sprawling colony of rejected sculptures where the
that all Lenin statues be destroyed. Instead of dismantling city’s Soviet art is quarantined. The park was opened on
the small Lenin of Odessa, he encased it in strategically June 29, 1993 and includes dozens of sculptures and reliefs to
molded titanium, bringing forth a new subject from within Communist personalities (Bela Kun, Lenin, Stalin, Dimitrov)
the frame of the old. and archetypes (the worker, the soldier, the proletarian wife).
Where once stood Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, now stood
Darth Vader.

44 № 27  /  FALL 2017 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 45

BUT YOU DON’T HAVE
TO TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT.
 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES

Brussels, nato leaders from across

the political spectrum found common
Dec. 12, 1975 cause opposing Eurocommunism.

MEMORANDUM
OF CONVERSATION
administration.
Officials of the
Gerald Ford

Participants
(1974–1977)

US Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

Secretary of State
General Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
Officials from Germany’s coalition government led by Social Democrat
Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982). Genscher, the foreign minister, was from

Commander in Chief, US Forces, Europe

Helmut Sonnenfeldt
Counselor of the Department of State
Wilson’s Labour

Peter W. Rodman
government.
from Harold

National Security Council Staff

(1974–1976)
Officials

(Notetaker)
UK James Callaghan
Secretary of State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs
the liberal Free Democratic Party.

government.

Alan Campbell
center-right

(1974–1976)
of Jacques

Deputy Under Secretary

Chirac’s
Officials

France Jean Sauvagnargues

Minister of Foreign Affairs
Francois de Laboulaye
Political Director
West Germany Hans-Dietrich Genscher
Vice Chancellor and Minister
of Foreign Affairs
Guenther van Well
Political Director
Dr. Heinz Weber
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Interpreter)

49
50
Kissinger  We have a rather full agenda. The Political Directors have
been meeting and we have to discuss: Soviet relations (or East-West
relations); Spain; Yugoslavia; Angola; Italy; Cyprus; Portugal; and the
Northern Flank.
Is there any particular order you would like to discuss these?
FIELD NOTES

Van Well  In that order.

Kissinger  East-West relations first?

Van Well  Yes. East-West Relations (European Communist Parties)

Kissinger  On East-West relations, I outlined our thinking at the

restricted meeting [of the North Atlantic Council]. Would my colleagues
like to express a view?

Callaghan  I think the reading we haven’t yet had is the reaction of the
Soviet Union to the other European Communist Parties who seem to
be declaring their independence to a certain extent. To what extent, if
any, will this affect Soviet policy? We didn’t cover this aspect in the
nato discussions. I have no particular information on it. Jean, what
about France?

Sauvagnargues  The French Communist Party has shown some inde-

pendence but not much. My general impression is that it didn’t come

West détente but controversial in the United States.

Cold War tensions, they were a high-point of East-
borders and respect human rights. Intended to ease
participating states agreed to recognize existing
European agreements signed in August 1975 in which
The Helsinki Accords were a set of nonbinding
out just as Brezhnev wanted. The way Helsinki came out. He seems to
be running into some trouble. I’ll bet there is some criticism of Helsinki
aspects of USSR foreign policy.

in the USSR.
In the 1970s, some Western European

Kissinger  It’s not easy to have a conference that creates domestic dif-
the Soviet model, they began to exercise
more political independence and oppose

ficulties in every country. [Laughter]

the “march to socialism” in stable capitalist
democracies. Along with moving away from
Communist parties developed theories about
51
De Laboulaye  Two of our experts studied this problem. They looked into
the relations of the Communist Parties after Helsinki, relations of the
Soviet Union to Communist Parties, and détente itself. I gave copies to
my colleagues.
With respect to the relations of the Soviet Union to the Communist
Parties in the West, a discussion seems to be taking place in Russia
regarding what advantage the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and
the Communist Parties can make of the so-called crisis of capitalism. They
can’t agree. Their press indicates this. Also there is a doctrinal difference
on whether they should accept alliances with left-wing parties. This too
came out in their specialized press.

rangues from their Chinese counterparts.

accustomed to hearing anti-Soviet ha-
to world peace. Global leaders became
Union and its allies as the greatest threats
had increasingly come to view the Soviet
policy stance under the aging Mao Zedong
Since the late 1960s, China’s foreign
Kissinger  Did the Chinese give you a lecture on this?

Sauvagnargues  Yes. It was part of the aggressive Soviet policy. They are
partly right. It is not consistent with détente.

Kissinger  To us the Chinese expressed opposition to all the European

Communist Parties without distinction. They consider revisionism just
a Soviet tactic. They showed uncompromising opposition to any
alliance.
terminal “crisis” became a focal point of both
Amid the oil crisis and stagflation of the mid-1970s,

Callaghan  Can’t we make use of this to play on with the Italian Commu-
the notion that capitalism was experiencing a possibly

Soviet propaganda and anxious Western commentary.

nist Party, to force them to declare their independence or not? Or would

it backfire? If they are not dancing to Moscow’s tune, we can’t get Moscow
to control them in our countries.
These parties will have considerable electoral appeal if they are inde-

Western cp.
pendent of Moscow. When they say the capitalist system doesn’t work,

Berlinguer, the

Communist Party
they seem to have a good case when there are six million unemployed.

Headed by Enrico

of over one million,

making it the largest
They may not be in government, but they could have substantial impact

reform-minded Italian

of the vote in 1976 and

boasted a membership
peaked at 34.4 percent
Brussels, Dec. 12, 1975

on government.
52
To the extent we can show they are not independent, it can be very
useful to us electorally.

Kissinger  How do we know if they are independent?

De Laboulaye  I was with Rumor last night at dinner. He said that

FIELD NOTES

Berlinguer would have to be kicked out if they ever got to power. It is

just a mask.

Kissinger  The acid test isn’t whether they would come to power dem-
ocratically; the test is whether they would allow a reversal. It is difficult
from 1973 to 1974.

for a Communist Party to admit that history can be reversed, and allow
Democrat who served

themselves to be voted out of power.

1968 and 1970 and again
Mariano Rumor: Christian

Van Well  Their papers say they are for a change in power democra-
as Italian prime minister between

tically.

Kissinger  Coming in?

Van Well  No, going out.

Genscher  We need some better assurance.

Kissinger  It is almost inconceivable that in power they won’t seek to

bring about such political change that they couldn’t be voted out.

their acceptance of democratic principles.

the French, Italian, and Spanish parties emphasized
European Communists in which
Likely a reference to two recent meetings of
Van Well The essence of that Conference was that they would accept
democratic change.

Kissinger  To the extent one can trust the Chinese view, they claim the
a constitutional monarchy.
the restoration of liberal democracy under
Leninism and were preparing to support
Carrillo had already shed much of their earlier
the Spanish Communists under Santiago
Still underground following Franco's death,

Spanish Communist Party is more independent of Moscow than the

French or Italian.
53
De Laboulaye  The Soviet Union themselves know that a Communist
Party in government isn’t compatible with détente.

Kissinger  They may realize that if one gets in, the right wing parties in
the US and Europe will use it against détente.

Genscher  There is not one single Western Communist Party that has
given up its final objective. They still want the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat. That is the decisive point. The danger is they become more
attractive to the voters. It is easier for us to accept orthodox parties
than parties that give the appearance of being independent. They become
more popular the more independent they become. The Italian Com-
munist Party has one objective, to become independent.
Rumor was afraid that if there was a discussion of Italy’s internal
affairs here, it would have a dangerous effect on the Socialists. In other
words, he sees a Popular Front as possible.
There is no problem in Germany and in Britain.

Callaghan  Except that it weakens the alliance if it happens elsewhere.

My point is we should recognize they are still the true enemy and not
let them increase their appeal. Although the nuisance value is more

the greater headache.

activities of Trotskyist union militants posed
wing of the Labour Party, however, the
within nato circles. For many on the right
of some union leaders provoked anxiety
to the left. The alleged Soviet sympathies
militancy, British trade unions were shifting
Amid an atmosphere of shop-floor
from these little parties that worm into the trade unions, the Commu-
nists are in fact less trouble to deal with. But we shouldn’t be deceived.
alliance with the Communists.

Sonnenfeldt  No matter how much they are trouble for Moscow, their
rise in our countries will affect the whole discussion of security issues
were fears that it would move towards
the pci, but relatively radical at the time.

and domestic priorities, and this will affect the balance of power over
the long run.
The party had been in crisis for years and there
Reference to the Italian Socialist Party: smaller than

Van Well  The question is whether to cultivate them or to expose them

and challenge their pretentions. They might be pushed even more to
Brussels, Dec. 12, 1975
54
prove their independence.

Callaghan  We’ve got to recognize that they are the real enemy, even
if they are more independent. Secondly, presentationally, we should
try to make them appear as not independent, to make them try harder
FIELD NOTES

to prove their independence.

Kissinger  The problem is, if we stress their independence, we create

the impression that that’s the only obstacle. I agree with your first point:
they’re the real enemy, partly for Sonnenfeldt’s reason and partly
because it would weaken support for the Alliance in America.

Genscher  The problem would still be the same even if a party com-
pletely independent of Moscow — like Albania — came into power.

Callaghan  Where does this discussion lead to? Do we want them more
independent or less independent?

Van Well  We have to confront them on both counts: as part of the inter-
national Communist movement and on their commitment to
parliamentary democracy.

Sonnenfeldt  Make them prove their loyalty to democracy for 20 years,

and then see.

Kissinger  But we don’t want to encourage our intellectuals to try a

“anti-revisionist” stance targeted Moscow.

dialogue with them.

The Hoxha dictatorship was the only ruling
Communist government in Europe that took the

Genscher  It’s not just the intellectuals. The Church, too, and other groups.
Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split. Their hardline

Callaghan  We are strong enough intellectually to handle it; that’s why

we are for détente. But not the trade unions. I find it very hard to talk
55
to the trade unions on this.

Kissinger  I don’t know if contacts with Soviet groups are as bad as what
the Italian Communists are doing in the U.S., making themselves
respectable. To the extent they become accepted in the U.S., they can
use this in Italy to prove their respectability. The Soviet groups are so
clumsy.

Van Well  Refusal of contact means we ignore them.

Kissinger  What do we gain by talking with them?

Van Well  We should confront them, challenge them. Especially labor groups.

Kissinger  You mean the ilo?

Van Well  Yes.

had been waging a long-running campaign to push

afl-cio leader George Meany, a hardline anti-communist,

dues payment to the ilo.

in winning the cancellation of a scheduled
in the labor body. A few months earlier, he had succeeded
over what he claimed was excessive Soviet influence
the US to withdraw from the International Labour Organization
Kissinger  That’s domestic politics. That was the price we had to pay
to George Meany to avoid cutting off all un funds.

Callaghan  My Labour friends asked me to raise this. I wasn’t going to.

Kissinger  Our objective is to use the next two years while we’re in it to
get reforms so we can stay.

Callaghan  Let me know what reforms you want and our people will help.
The Soviet Union constantly is making approaches, and other East
Europeans, saying: “Why can’t we have a dialogue?”

Genscher  It does make a difference with the Western trade unions

whether they cooperate with the Communists in their own countries
Brussels, Dec. 12, 1975
56
or whether they have contact with East Europeans. Our unions have
contacts everywhere in Eastern Europe but are free of Communist
influence at home.

Kissinger  The problem is people like Mitterrand or the Italians delib-

FIELD NOTES

erately seeking high-level contacts in the US and using that at home to

prove they can conduct a pro-Western policy. That will lend to reduc-
tion of concern with security and an undermining of the Alliance.

Genscher  I didn’t make myself clear.

Kissinger  I understand your point.

I’m getting under pressure for blocking contacts with Italian Com-
munists, and also some of your left wing people, Jean.
France would undermine nato.

Back to the Soviet Union. The consensus of the Political Directors

seemed to be that they would continue even after Brezhnev, and this
any Socialist-Communist government in
In 1972, the French Socialist Party under

the Communist Party and shifted sharply

age group, to conduct the same policy.

François Mitterrand forged an alliance with

to the left. Many Western leaders feared that

De Laboulaye  Yes, but there will be temptation, such as Portugal

and Cuba were increasingly involved.

was in the midst of a civil war, in which the Eastern Bloc
Meanwhile, the former Portuguese colony of Angola
were fears of a takeover.
took advantage of the opening and there
Portugal moved radically to the left. Pro-Soviet Communists
Following the April 1974 Carnation Revolution,
and Angola.
 READING MATERIEL
DOSSIER

A Red
by Any Other
Name

Wondering
what to call your
newborn?
Poster, Govorkov V.I., 1936

Vladimir Alexandrovich Willy Brandt

Bazarov The young socialist Herbert Ernst
Born Vladimir Alexandrovich Carl Frahm took the name Willy
Rudnev. Bolshevik Party member Brandt in 1933 to avoid detection by
known for pioneering economic Nazi agents. In 1969, he became
planning. The pseudonym Bazarov the first social-democratic German
comes from the main character chancellor since the Weimar Republic.
of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

Alexander Bogdanov Dazdraperma

A doctor who became an early Short for “Long Live May First!”
Bolshevik, he was born Alyaksandr Needless to say this comically
Malinovsky. Malinovsky took his unpronounceable name didn’t stick.
party name from the middle name of
his wife, Natalya Bogdanovna Korsak.

57
 DOSSIER

Gertruda
An old name of Germanic origin
that got reinterpreted in the Soviet
Union as a shortening for “Geroj
Truda” (“Hero of Labor”).

Mike Gold Still from Stilyagi (“Hipsters”) by

Valeriy Todorovsky featuring Anton Shagin
as Mels Buryukov (2008).
Itzok Isaac Granich, the American
Communist editor and writer,
took the name Michael Gold during
the first Red Scare from a Jewish
Civil War veteran he admired.
Nikolai Lenin his sister Lydia and “Martov” because
Maxim Gorky Sometimes, Vladimir signed as
he thought March (mart) was a
“particularly revolutionary month.”
Originally Alexei Maximovich N. Lenin. People mentally filled in
It was in March 1848, after all,
Peshov. Highly regarded chronicler the gap with Nikolai, a common
when The Communist Manifesto
of Russia’s working class and Russian name. The N. didn’t, in fact,
was published and revolt spread
associate of the Bolsheviks. He stand for anything.
across Europe.
signed off his articles, which
were usually about poor working Vladimir Lenin
Mels
conditions in Russia, with the One assumption is that Vladimir
A popular Soviet name, made up of
name “Gorky,” which means “bitter.” Ilyich Ulyanov took the pseudonym
the initials for Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Lenin after workers on the river
and Stalin. In a recent Russian
Iskra “Lena” went on a strike. But even
musical about 1950s youth sub-
The rsdlp’s newspaper, whose staff Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife,
culture one of the main characters
included Lenin, Plekhanov, and didn’t know for sure.
(Mels Biryukov) leaves out the
Trotsky, as well as a common female
last letter of his name as a part of his
name in the early Soviet Union. Julius Martov
cathartic transformation.
Iskra Polyakova is the name of the Also L. Martov. First Yuliy Osipo-
main character of a 1984 novel vich Tsederbaum, this Menshevik
Ho Chi Minh
and its film adaptation about the founder settled on the name Martov
Born Nguyen Sinh Cung.
tragic fate of the war generation. in 1901. He took the “L.” to honor
Using characters signifying “will”
and “bright” — “chi” and “minh”
respectively — the name forms the
phrase “He who has been
enlightened.”
Still from Zavtra Bila Voina (“Tomorrow There
Was a War”) by Yuri Kara featuring its main
heroine Iskra Polyakova (1984).
 A Red by Any Other Name

Ninel’ Myshkova born in 1926 was a prominent

actress during the late forties.

Ninel’ Josip Broz Tito Vilen

One of the many names derived Given name Josip Broz. He took An acronym of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
from Lenin’s nom de guerre. While up a number of pseudonyms before and is the given name of Willi
others came in and out of fashion settling on Tito due simply to its Tokarev, a Russian-American
this one stuck. popularity in his home district. (Tito singer-songwriter who became famous
means “saved” in Latin — Titus in the 1980s for his songs about
Karl Radek was the Biblical Greek missionary to life as a Russian émigré in New York’s
Polish Comintern representative whom Paul wrote a canonical letter.) Brighton Beach.
and writer whose birth name was
Karol Sobelsohn. Pseudonym is xxHitchcockGangster49xx
Leon Trotsky
taken from his favorite character in Slavoj Žižek’s Call of Duty handle.
Stefan Żeromski’s The Labor of Lev Davidovich Bronstein took his
Sisyphus. famous pseudonym when he fled to Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev
London from Siberia. Originally Hirsch Apfelbaum, the
Victor Serge important Bolshevik stole “Zinoviev”
Trotsky — the name he wrote in his
As a young anarchist, Victor Lvovich from a rich Russian family. That
fake passport — belonged to a prison
Kibalchich went by “Le Rétif” — family had its assets confiscated after
guard he knew from a stint in an
meaning a mule that refuses to be the revolution.
Odessan jail.
broken. He later took the name
“Victor Serge” in a March 1917 Tierra
y libertad article, for unknown reasons.

Joseph Stalin Vilen (“Willi”) Tokarev is a Soviet singer-

songwriter born in 1934 who rose to fame after
emigrating to New York City in the eighties.
Before the world called him Stalin,
to his mother he was just “Soso,”
Georgian for “Little Joey.” His first
pseudonym was “Koba,” meaning
“raven,” the name of the Robin Hood-
esque hero of Alexander Kazbegi’s
1882 novel, The Patricide. Then, after
experimenting with the names
“Stefin,” “Salin,” and “Solin” — he
was searching for a name like
“Lenin” — he settled on “Stalin,”
“steel-person,” in a 1912 Pravda article.

59
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER BY DAVID BRODER

The Man
Who Brought
Pizza Review of Gorbachev: His Life
and Times by William Taubman
(Simon & Schuster, 2017)

Mikhail Gorbachev’s journey A family in a Moscow restaurant argues over Mikhail

from Communist reformer to Gorbachev’s legacy. “Because of him we have economic

confusion,” the father complains. “Because of him, we
“capitalist tool.” have opportunity,” the son protests. Claim is followed by
counterclaim: “Because of him, we have political
instability” — “Because of him, we have freedom” —
“Complete chaos” — “Hope!”

The mother interjects: “because of him we have many

things … like Pizza Hut.” Now the family agrees. They
and the whole restaurant rise from their seats, pizza slices
in hand, to salute his achievements. The camera cuts to
Gorbachev himself, basking in the attention.

Appearing during the 1998 Rose Bowl, this Pizza Hut ad

was a rather strained portrayal of Russians’ view of the
former president. It was not shown in Gorbachev’s own
country. In Russian media he was instead widely
ridiculed for taking part in the stunt, selling his past
status for advertising purposes. This was not, however,
simply a story of a politician reviled in his own country
and appreciated abroad. For all his honorary degrees and
his Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev had hardly become a
World Summit of Nobel Peace laureates held in revered global statesman. He was a symbol of an abortive
Chicago — Scott Olson/Getty Images.
reform project, a failure.

Gorbachev never got the liberal saint status conferred on

Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, or (until recently) Aung
San Suu Kyi. Each of these figures could be depoliticized
and canonized as modern-day saints, standing above the
fray of ideological sparring. Gorbachev’s bid for such

60 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 FOR ALL HIS HONORARY DEGREES
status soon ran aground. His AND HIS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, IN
perestroika (restructuring) and RUSSIA, GORBACHEV WAS A SYMBOL
glasnost (openness) policies as Soviet OF A FAILED REFORM PROJECT.
leader never lived up to their
promise. The reform effort was
followed by the Soviet Union’s
collapse, then a slide into chaos, gangsterism, and Following Stalin’s death in 1953, it was more liberal
reimposed “order” under Putin. Russia’s new rulers elements who asserted their control over the state, and
repudiated Gorbachev’s record. new General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev began a
reform process. This was most notably expressed in
Faced with the dubious successes of post-Soviet Russia,
Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech denouncing
William Taubman’s new biography, Gorbachev: His Life
the cult of personality and unjust acts of repression.
and Times, is an attempt to present the leader’s record in
Nonetheless, this posed the broader questions of where
a more heroic light. The product of eleven years of
these ills had stemmed from, and what change the system
research and interviews, this past biographer of Nikita
would now undergo.
Khrushchev presents Gorbachev as the most important
political figure of the second half of the twentieth At Moscow State University Gorbachev showed a certain
century. It was he who brought an end to the Cold War, diffidence toward the rituals of the regime. But resistance
and, against his own intentions, to the USSR itself. to dogma didn’t lead him to form any substantively
Nonetheless, Taubman also presents Gorbachev as different idea of what the Soviet Union might become.
something of a tragic figure, breaking up the sclerotic Gorbachev steered clear of more properly “dissident”
Soviet system yet lacking the means to create a liberal elements seeking the system’s overthrow.
democracy in its place.
He instead stayed close to the Khruschevite mainstream,
FROM PEASANTRY TO NOMENKLATURA hoping for an end to the worst Stalinist repression.
However, the leadership’s own line of march was not
Taubman is above all concerned with the human side of
clear. It was first tested in the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
the Gorbachev story, and to this end devotes over a
Moscow’s response was to send in tanks, bloodily
quarter of the book to his life before his six-year spell in
reimposing Soviet domination. Whatever the liberaliza-
power. This includes a rich detailing of Gorbachev’s
tion within the USSR, there was no prospect of Moscow
youth, starting with the humble family to which he was
allowing the disintegration of its sphere of influence won
born in 1931. From his teenage years he worked long days
through the sacrifice of war.
in the fields, including when his father was sent to the
front in the fight against German invasion. Too young to Gorbachev himself outwardly supported the action, just
fight in the war, Gorbachev still lived the ravages of Nazi as he would Brezhnev’s 1968 suppression of the Prague
occupation firsthand. Spring. Indeed, these events illustrated the basic problem
of the USSR’s relations with the rest of the Eastern Bloc.
From his youth Gorbachev was a party man, first in the
To allow even a single socialist regime to break from
Komsomol (Communist Youth). His Order of Banner for
Soviet hegemony would threaten the unity of the Bloc
Labour (achieved together with his father, for his toil as a
and the Soviet role as the “leading state” in the socialist
farmer) together with his academic brilliance allowed
camp. Yet thwarting efforts to create “socialism with a
him to attend Moscow State University, the most
human face” itself undermined the unity and idealism of
prestigious school in the Soviet Union. Graduating in
the Soviet-led Communist movement, giving it a nakedly
1955, he became a local Komsomol leader in the city of
repressive character.
Stavropol, and by 1970, he was the Communist Party
boss in this Southern city. As general secretary from 1964 onward, Leonid Brezhnev
developed a hardline doctrine of collective security
These were times of great change in the USSR. Victory
within the Eastern Bloc, imposing an iron unity from
over Nazi Germany meant the need to rebuild, but also
Moscow. This conformed to his wider emphasis on
the hope that the worst sacrifice was now at an end.

61
 CANON FODDER

stability. Yet the regime was also losing its prestige, both Chinese leadership, this approach in fact put relatively
internationally and at home. This was particularly clearly little premium on economic privatization. Internally, the
highlighted by the rise of China, Cuba, and Vietnam as most important change was the loosening of press
alternative centers of revolutionary authority. Gorbachev controls and increased toleration of public criticism.
was essentially the inverse product of this period. Too Gorbachev’s intention in 1985 was not the dissolution of
young to be part of the USSR’s heroic war generation, he the Soviet state. However, taking the lid off the repres-
was among those Communists who rose through party sive atmosphere opened up a swirl of contradictions.
ranks as economic growth slowed and the Soviet state
Historians are not agreed on the role of economic factors
lost its remaining sense of historical mission.
in triggering the USSR’s final crisis. Soviet military
IN POWER spending had built up over a long period, and did not
suddenly increase in response to Reagan’s expansion of
By the time Gorbachev joined the Communist Party
the US defense budget.
Central Committee in 1971, the
However, there was a combina-
Soviet Union was no longer in
tion of disruptive factors. The
the ascendant. The next decade
fall in world oil prices coinciding
would see economic stagnation
with Gorbachev’s rule was a
and the hardening of a
severe blow to an already
gerontocratic ruling elite
debilitated system, and the
focused above all on stability. It
failing economies of states like
constantly had to firefight
Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
challenges from the periphery.
and Poland increasingly relied
The Polish strikes of 1980–81
on Western loans.
crystalized Central and Eastern
European opposition to the In this sense, the developments
Warsaw Pact system, an in the Eastern Bloc countries
opposition also expressed in played a decisive role in
dissident intellectual move- breaking up the Soviet Union.
ments like Czechoslovakia’s Most important in this regard
Charter 77. And all this while was Gorbachev’s explicit
the USSR was bogged down in reversal of the Brezhnev
a military quagmire in doctrine, making clear that the
Afghanistan. USSR would not intervene to
shore up the beleaguered
The Soviet leadership reflected
Eastern Bloc regimes. The debt
these challenges. Gorbachev
Gorby 80 Gala at The Royal Albert Hall — Concert — crisis in the late 1980s, and the
was allied to figures like Yuri Ian Gavan/Getty Images
resulting pressure on the price
Andropov, who in 1981
of consumer goods, only fed mounting street protests in
counseled Brezhnev against direct military intervention to countries like East Germany and Poland. In certain states
suppress the Polish opposition. General secretary of the these were partially animated by left-wing and indepen-
Soviet Communist Party from just late 1982 until his early dent trade union movements, but they were also shaped
1984 death, the elderly Andropov groomed Gorbachev as by a strong rejection of Soviet control.
his successor. After a brief interregnum under Konstantin
Chernenko, in January 1985 Gorbachev became the leader Gorbachev was not directly allied to reform movements
of both party and state. in other Eastern Bloc countries or the advocate of a
specific alternative path to socialism. His privileged
His signal policies of perestroika and glasnost sought to interlocutors were reforming but non-ruling parties like
break the Soviet Union out of the conservative retrench- the Italian Communists, like him bound to a specifically
ment of the Brezhnev period. However, unlike the 1990s “Communist” identity and yet standing at odds with the

62
 The Man Who Brought Pizza

GORBACHEV’S INTENTION IN 1985 WAS

NOT THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET transported around the United
STATE. HOWEVER, TAKING THE LID OFF States in a plane owned by Forbes
THE REPRESSIVE ATMOSPHERE OPENED magazine, the self-proclaimed
UP A SWIRL OF CONTRADICTIONS. “Capitalist Tool.” In 1994 he
appeared as a witness in the trial of
the August 1991 plotters, but his
USSR’s reality. Within the Warsaw Pact states them- appearance produced only a shouting match between him
selves, the conflict set shaky Communist establishments, and those who accused him of betraying the USSR.
dependent on Soviet backing, in opposition to pro-
Gorbachev’s ill-fated decision to stand in the 1996
democracy movements.
presidential election illustrated how far he had fallen in
Gorbachev’s refusal to intervene in defense of the other Russian domestic politics. The election marked a revolt
Warsaw Pact governments would in 1989 allow partly by the electorate against the soaring unemployment and
free elections in Poland and the fall of the Berlin Wall. social chaos of the early transition period, with the
However, the specifically nationalist dynamic of these Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov running
movements also fueled tensions within the USSR itself. neck-and-neck with Yeltsin in the first round. The contest
Imitating the national movements in Central and Eastern pitched the desire for a return to former stability against
Europe, parts of the Soviet Union themselves demanded the promise that Russian capitalism could eventually
independence from Moscow. As the republics began to recover. Standing as an independent, Gorbachev
splinter, ethnic tensions spread in the Baltic states and achieved a feeble 0.5 percent of the vote.
Caucasus. Leader of the Russian republic Boris Yeltsin in
If Gorbachev’s greatest achievement was to end the Cold
turn asserted himself against Gorbachev and the unitary
War, at twenty-five years’ distance, this looks less like a
Soviet state.
complete success. In 1991 he gave the green light to the
The final crisis came from a backlash within the Soviet US-led war in Iraq, and the dissolution of Soviet
establishment. On August 19, 1991, with Gorbachev on counterpower would embolden neocons in their project
holiday in Crimea, Soviet hardliners declared a new of remaking the world in Washington’s image. The rise of
regime. Within two days the coup had failed, the army democracy in the former Eastern Bloc was a more
declaring its loyalty to Yeltsin. Gorbachev was restored to definite success, though even Gorbachev himself
his post, but the reform project had failed. National bemoans nato expansion into his own country’s former
tensions had developed over decades; the liberalization sphere of influence.
process did not calm them, but rather, finally allowed
The peasant boy had risen through the ranks of the Soviet
them out into the open. Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian
system, becoming its “ideal product.” Yet ultimately,
and Belarusian leaders to declare a looser “Common-
Gorbachev was left unable even to defend his own
wealth of Independent States.” Resigning as Soviet
actions, or identify with the shallow progress made. 
president on Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev sounded
the death knell for the USSR.

REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW

Taubman presents Gorbachev in a sympathetic light, but
as a figure who unleashed events beyond his control. The
rapid escalation of liberalization into the total destruc-
tion of the USSR immediately forced the Soviet
president out of political life. He was reduced to touring
the Western world in search of public acclaim, even being

63 THE FIRST RED CENTURY

 Straying from the Party Line
My last years in the USSR.

by georgi derluguian
STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

i knew that i was in trouble again when one cold Moscow night
in early spring of 1989, my dissertation advisor at the ussr Academy of
Sciences, the prominent and splendidly named Africanist scholar Apollo Bor-
isovich Davidson, called on the phone and asked me tenderly: Dear Georgi
Matveevich (the manners of old Saint Petersburg intelligentsia prescribed
politely addressing even students by their first name and patronymic and, of
course, never as “comrade”), we all know that you do not value your life and
your career. But I beg you explain, why you do not value MY life and career?
Admittedly, in academic circles my sanity was regarded as somewhat sus-
pect ever since my recent return after two years as an interpreter of Portuguese
and Swahili in Mozambique. Such a reputation was not helped by my shaggy
beard, unseasonal tropical tan, camouflage pants with so many handy pockets,
and not in the least, the rumor that while doing my dissertation fieldwork I
had nearly earned the Combat Red Star (Posthumous) in an encounter with
the apartheid-supported “Contras.” But since I had survived, there could be
no decoration, only a rumor. At most, curious colleagues would politely ask:
Did you kill many? The Soviet participation in Cold War “regional conflicts”
was always officially denied. What was undeniable was a hefty dissertation
detailing the “social aspects of guerrilla wars in Southern Africa.” The most
respected scholars studied something like Renaissance Italy, and they proudly
bore their personal eccentricities. But someone had to study contemporary
Africa, and were we not entitled to certain eccentricities, too? It was, how-
ever, the dissertation on contemporary Mozambique that unexpectedly got
me in trouble with no less than the supreme organ, the TseKa. The Russian
acronym stood for the apparat of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Soviet Union. They obtained my drafts from a vigilant, or simply
diligent, journal editor and, in the worried words of Professor A. B. Davidson,
became “rather irate.”
But who exactly were “they”? And what earned me their thunderous
charge of “grossly if not maliciously exaggerating the challenges of socialist
orientation in the conditions of newly independent states in Africa”?
If I have any confessions to make, let it be this: yes, I did question what was
previously regarded as obvious. My dissertation sought to explain why Frente
da Libertação de Moçambique (frelimo) radicalized and adopted Marxism-
Leninism as an ideology and organizational model during the anticolonial

67 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 Georgi Derluguian

war in the 1960s. I sincerely wondered how African peasants interpreted the
revolutionary discourses of their Western-educated leaders, such as the
intellectually formidable and very likable Eduardo Mondlane with his sociology
phd from Northwestern University in Chicago.
Even in Swahili the word “socialism” usually had to be either transliter-
ated phonetically as usoshalismi or conveyed more metaphorically as ujamaa,
literally “community-ness,” or even something like shamba la ushiriki, “a
jointly cultivated field,” the commons. The word “imperialism” (ubeberu) was
derived, as our textbook said, from mbuzi, meaning “goat” — a straightfor-
ward insult, like cabrones in Spanish. The African service of Radio Moscow
was competing with Voice of America and the bbc in inventing and spreading
the words to their audiences. What was happening in local languages like
Likonde or Chichewa?
Yet somehow the peasants in northern Mozambique (though, for some
important reason, not further down south) got the message and heroically
mobilized for the war of national liberation. Surely there was something very
important to be explained there. At the time, I did not know yet how useful

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JIA SUNG 68

STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

two famous concepts from the works of James Scott, “moral economy of
the peasant” and “hidden transcripts,” would be.
At TseKa my dissertation was accused of being dangerously naïve
or worse, potentially sacrilegious, in positing as research the
oppressed’s conversion to Marxism-Leninism. What was there to
explain when, according to the party slogan, our “teaching is all-
mighty because it is true”? Once the “light of the Great October
Revolution” had reached the remotest corners of Africa, the people there
were naturally expected to join the “historical march of the humanity
towards liberation and progress.” This seemed a pretty religious
interpretation of what had once started as nineteenth-century social
science theory.
Moreover, “they” from the Central Committee turned out to be a
few career apparatchiks handling the cpsu International Department’s
policy towards Angola and Mozambique. At first, they might look
like orthodox Communists, which is perhaps how they really felt, at
least at some level. But in daily reality, they were also bureaucrats
engaged in turf wars against other of the superpower’s influential
agencies: the kgb spies, the military, the diplomats, the economic
planners from Gosplan. I already had some personal experience with
such interagency feuds.
A year earlier, in 1988, while still in Mozambique I was briefly assigned
as translator to the Soviet delegation visiting Maputo to negotiate regular
renewal of the aid agreements. The delegation head was a folksy and rather
meaty red-faced comrade P–ov. He had never been to Africa in his
life. Instead, back in one of the economic ministries in Moscow he
occupied a medium-high ranking position with a rather complex
designation: the deputy head of the subdepartment for socioeconomic
development in the regions of Far North and East, or something like
that. For him, the trip to Mozambique was a well-paid tourist
excursion.
In accordance with protocol, during negotiations the leader of the
Soviet delegation sat at the middle of a long mahogany table directly oppo-
site His Excellency Comrade Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of
Mozambique. Funnily, this African revolutionary was to be simultaneously
addressed by both titles. But then, many African nationalists in former
colonies came from the families of petty officials. Their parents’ knowledge
of Portuguese language and literacy qualified them for the formal stamp

69

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 Georgi Derluguian

of assimilado, or “civilized natives.” Revolution and national indepen-

dence allowed the children of such local elites to overcome racist stigma
and advance to the top government positions about which their parents
could not dare dream. This certainly was part of the liberation process.
But along with the spacious offices, mahogany desks, the culture of
letter-heads and multiple rubber stamps, these sons of petty officials —
turned revolutionaries — turned rulers of a national state have also
inherited the colonial rituals of officialdom.
The premier, as host, opened the negotiations with a long litany of
death and destruction “inflicted upon our Pátria revolucionária” by the
apartheid regime of South Africa in the undeclared subversive war waged
through their local puppets, the armed bandits. (“Armed bandits” was
the official designation of domestic insurgency actually fostered by the

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STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

White Rhodesians and later South Africans. A few years later the
same bandidos armados, or Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, would
share the parliament with the then already ex-Marxist frelimo in a
negotiated transition to democracy).
The high Soviet counterpart, with sighs of sympathy, diligently wrote
down the numbers of burnt schools, hospitals, wrecked bridges, transports,
and other losses. About fifteen minutes later, the premier ended his lengthy
enumeration with a striking bottom line: This is why we request our great
Soviet allies and internationalist supporters in our struggle to increase aid
for the coming period to the total amount of … The big number was in US
dollars. As a nosy young interpreter, I just happened to know that on a
different floor in the same building sat the International Monetary Fund
delegation from Washington, whom the premier was asking for an even
bigger stabilization loan. Market adjustment would soon begin in Mozam-
bique and, at least by imf standards, become a success story. But for now,
the frelimo government was desperately shopping for foreign aid.
Startled by the sudden arrival of his turn to speak, the head of the
Soviet delegation chewed his lips and started with a broad generous grin.
I was preparing to interpret word for word in Portuguese when something
extraordinary hit me, literally, from the left side. Number two in our del-
egation, a visibly overworked middle-aged man of an unhealthy, greenish
complexion who had been absentmindedly leafing through a fat folder of
documents kicked my foot under the table really hard. Looking completely
stone-faced, he ordered me through clenched teeth:

Do not translate. Our delegation head is an incompetent fool.

But I must say something, I responded in a baffled whisper.

Speak about glasnost, perestroika, and Gorbachev’s new humanistic

thinking.

In the meantime, comrade P–ov had paused and benevolently nodded

to me to begin interpreting his response. My shirt at once stuck to my
sweating back. I felt all eyes in the room turn on me. If I were caught
mistranslating at the negotiations of such level, would it be the end of
my academic career, or worse? Yet the instinct momentarily suggested

71 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 Georgi Derluguian

following orders from the real boss in charge of the delegation. Staring at the
ceiling fan, I went into a wild improvisation: As comrade General Secretary
Mikhail Gorbachev said in his recent interview, the common goals of survival
today unite the whole of humanity …
Judging from their bemused glances, the prime minister and especially his
very intelligent aide, a young Indo-Portuguese economist who had joined the
revolution at independence, understood the charade. But they also understood
that it was not merely my mistranslating and said nothing. The only person
in the room oblivious to what was going on was comrade P–ov. He continued
deliberating while my heart was pounding: Damn, what am I saying next?!
How long this ordeal lasted I honestly cannot tell. An hour, two hours?
Finally, a break was announced. I rose, holding onto the table, and staggered
on shaking feet into the corridor where the green-faced handler was waiting
for me with an open pack of cigarettes: Have one, it will help. You deserve a
decoration though you won’t get it because nobody would know. Still, you have
just spared our Motherland a substantial expense and political problem which
she can no longer afford.
He patted me on the shoulder and added in fatherly tone: You are a quick
thinker. What the heck is in your dusty academia? Let’s get you a job in the
apparat. Within a year you would be granted a decent apartment in Moscow,
nice package of benefits, eventually you could get a car if you want one. Our job
includes a lot of paperwork, including nights and many weekends, especially
right before the party congresses. But you are young and you can handle it. Just
one big condition. From day one you must learn how to live with an idiot right
above yourself. All this is for the good of our great country.
This common wisdom from the patriotic bureaucrat contained a clue to
my predicament. I did not wear the wreath of principled anti-Soviet dissi-
dence, not at all. I was patriotic and ideologically loyal. Yet I was perhaps just
too curious and irreverent to fit in the prescribed social positions in Soviet
institutions. The ill-fit of these traits with the hierarchy of dull and cautious
elders, many of them dating back to the scary times of Stalinism, was my true
infraction and career handicap.
Shortly before the scandal with my dissertation, a lesser imbroglio should
have alerted me. Arriving at the institute late on a Monday morning (what was
there to do before the usual department meeting anyway?) I was greeted by

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STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE
 Georgi Derluguian

the kind grey-haired Rufina Rudolfovna, our secretary for research,

who looked more worried than usual: My dear Georgi Matveevich, why
are you so late? The institute’s director himself passed here right at 9:00
am and demanded to see YOU. He did not say why, only demanded to dis-
patch you to his office at once. Go now. But, please, try not to say
anything offensive. In fact, just say nothing and listen to him attentively.
She sent me off, heartily blessing me for good luck with a big Russian
Orthodox sign of a cross. By the way, when I visit Moscow these days, I
occasionally see the same indestructible director of our big research
insti-tute still holding to his position after all these years. He greets me
like a prodigal son and asks to add my list of scholarly publications in
various languages to embellish the institute’s general output reports and
citation index. But back in 1989, my treatment was different.
I sat in the director’s anteroom for six hours while an imposing
secretary loudly typed his official orders and letters on the big East Ger-
man-made electrical typewriter. At the end of the workday, I was
finally informed that the director had left for a meeting at the
Presidium of Academy of Sciences and was not expected back. I would
be seen by his deputy, a younger, very tall Latin Americanist dressed in a
smart Western suit imported from Finland. He stared at me through
his fashionable aviator glasses and started with a surprising apology:
Let us not consider our institute conservative. It is rather, ehh …
swamp-like. The esteemed Academician B. has spent his lifetime writing
about the English bourgeois revolution, and yet he never saw the foggy
Albion except on tv. The no less esteemed Corresponding Member Z.
made her mark in world historical science studying Byzantine Empire,
but obviously she never did any field-work abroad. So, she wondered at a
recent meeting, why would they let you go to Africa? And now this letter
from Paris … Tell me honestly, how did you arrange for it?

What letter? I wondered honestly.

Oh, come on! The invitation to give talks about your African escapades.
Stop pretending. The prominent French Marxist anthropologist M.
personally writes to our director inviting to Paris, all expenses paid, not
the director himself, not any head of department, not even a junior-level
scholarly employee, but [he hissed mocking a French accent] “votre

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STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

chercheur” meaning YOU, merely a graduate student! Do you realize

that this is simply indecent?! How would you look into the eyes of senior
colleagues after this?

Suddenly it dawned on me. It must have been Michel, the French

researcher with whom I became friends in Mozambique. We were both
interested in the same issues of state formation, nationalism, and polit-
ical violence. He was a devoted Trotskyist, lest this compromising fact go
unmentioned. Luckily, Michel showed just enough wits to get the letter
signed by his erstwhile advisor, the prominent Marxist anthropologist
with an acceptable academic reputation in Moscow. Like many Trotskyists
in the mother country of Great Revolutions, Michel was also an ardent
French nationalist. He reacted with horror and indignation to my first
English publication in an American journal. To repair the upset balance,
Michel personally translated my Portuguese draft of the summary of my
dissertation chapter about renamo, the Mozambican “Contras.” And
then he arranged to invite me to Paris to meet the French Africanists —
and also his “true Marxist-Leninist” comrades.
This time, I was absolved and the whole affair was to be quietly for-
gotten. Our director, in a marvel of bureaucratic maneuvering, wrote back
to Paris that, regretfully, they must have been misled. No such person as
Georgi Derluguian had ever been employed at the Institute. Technically,
this was true. My position was aspirant, a graduate student.
The TseKa guys, however, were no academic slackers. At seven in the
morning the old widow with whom I was renting a room in the far-flung
concrete outliers of Moscow, still wrapped in her night gowns, woke me
up and said with big eyes: There is a government courier for YOU! (Oh,
no, not for me again.) He needs you to sign on a personal delivery.
The large pale blue envelope was imprinted with the resounding logo

communist party of soviet union

Central Committee

Inside was a single sheet of paper, typewritten on letterhead and stamped.

The letter summoned me to appear at a given hour at an address in the
historic center of Moscow. It was not at the TseKa headquarters but
somewhere nearby.

75 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 Georgi Derluguian

There, behind an ancient desk upholstered in green plush cloth

(stained with ink where the inkwell must have once stood), sat a strict-
looking man who held in front of him a typewritten copy of my submission.
On virtually every page, sentences and whole paragraphs were neatly
high-lighted in red pencil, so neatly that it had to have been done with a
ruler. The man tersely offered that I sit down and opened with a phrase
which promised nothing good: We wanted to hear your explanations
regarding some questions that arise from reading your manuscript.
So, I realized, it must be him, my previously invisible and unnamed
censor. I once fancied myself becoming a journalist and writing about inter-
national affairs for the popular Communist Youth magazine, Rovesnik. The
editor, an energetic chain-smoking woman, returned my first attempted
article about the horrific damage to African wildlife done by the war, and
conveyed the verdict of “an authoritative comrade” familiar with the cur-
rent situation in Mozambique in a tone of the sincerest sympathy: Vivid
descriptions. Things may seem rough at the moment. But why should we
depress your young readers with such stories?

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STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

77 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 Georgi Derluguian

Still, I desperately wanted the magazine job and tried to write another
article about something which, in my understanding, had absolutely
nothing to do with “socialist orientation” in Africa. From a safe distance,
I savaged the wildly grotesque anticommunist dictatorship of Malawi’s
senile President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. This time I was called in to
see the editor-in-chief himself. The diminutive Georgian, extremely
well groomed and irritable like a Siamese cat, carefully extinguished
his silver-tipped cigarette in the crystal ashtray and asked me softly:
Derluguian, help me decide. Are you a fool? Or an enemy cleverly
passing himself for a fool? How should we understand your story about
this Malawi where everyone is waiting for the death of a senile leader,
where blue jeans and rock-n-roll are banned and instead folk choruses
sing praises, and the squads of “Young Pioneers” conduct purges of
suspected enemies of the people? Are these not thinly veiled references
to certain periods in the recent past of our own country?
On that occasion, I also escaped with merely probation. The edi-
tor-in-chief ended the conversation with, what seemed for a moment, a
mischievous twinkle in his eyes: Since you proved yourself entirely incapable
of writing anything publishable in the Soviet press about East Africa, we are
sending you to West Siberia. Try to write something more upbeat about the
summer construction brigades of student volunteers who are helping build
homes for the wounded internationalist fighters returning from Afghanistan.
Needless to say, I failed that assignment too. A group of young Sandi-
nistas from Nicaragua, who studied engineering at a famous technological
university in Moscow, stopped my interview with a bitter question in
Spanish: Compañero, if all this disorganization, drinking, and corruption
that we are witnessing at this construction site is really a socialist planned
economy, then what are we fighting and dying for back in our country?
So, I should have had enough personal experience to anticipate that
my conversation at TseKa was going to end badly. The questions I was
asked to answer sounded rhetorical and sometimes downright stupid.
The only surprise was that this “authoritative comrade” really did not
know much about the history of Mozambique or the actual workings of
Portuguese colonialism. Nor that he cared. He had the party line — which
was his departmental line — and it sounded pretty fantastical to me. It

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STRAYING FROM THE PARTY LINE

did pain me that the country was collapsing before my eyes. Unlike
him, I actually saw burnt villages, mutilated women, and dead children.
I also met many decent and dedicated people who had really believed in
the independence of their country and socialist development.
Our conversation ended in a shouting match. To my stubborn
refusal to admit fault and attempts to explain anything, the man
holding my manuscript in his hands finally said:

Very well, you might be smart. But, remember, as long as I am sitting

in this chair, you will not publish a word anywhere in the Soviet Union,
and the doors of your career will close on you. What would you say?

I would say that in my old age I will be telling tales about this conversa-
tion to my grandchildren, and they will ask, grandpa, what was TseKa?

Out of here!!!!

I wasn’t as heroic as it sounds. It was, after all, 1989. The Berlin Wall
would fall a few months later. The Party machine was still working as if
nothing was happening. But a lot was happening.
Besides, a couple days earlier I did something daring by way of pre-
paring myself to visit TseKa. I knocked on the door of the first otdel
(office) which was, everybody knew, the kgb curator assigned to watch
our aca-demic institute. Greeting me with a curious stare was a slick
diplomat-like man in civilian suit which could hardly conceal his
shoulder set of career officer. He was probably biding his time between
foreign assignments. To my question about the possible consequences
of my articles appearing in the scholarly journals in France and
America, he laughed and pointed to the heavy safe box in the corner of
his office: Ha-ha, do you mean you bypassed publication in the
proceedings of the spring conference of young scholars at Teachers
Institute somewhere in Voronezh, circulation one hundred copies?
Instead you went straight for Paris and New York? That is our next
generation! Of course, I had this information. In this sacred box behind me sits

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 Georgi Derluguian

the detailed instruction on dealing with such smart alecks. Fortunately for
you, another instruction arrived last week that rescinded a whole bunch of
previous instructions. Therefore, nothing is going to happen, not from my
side. We are all into glasnost, perestroika, and democratization now, right?
A year later, in 1990, the same officer saw me in the institute’s
cor-ridor and advised with memorable directness: Don’t you have a job
offer in America? Good for you. Get out of here before the whole thing
collapses. I will sign off on your exit visa.
Obtaining an exit visa and the prized Aeroflot ticket to New York
amidst the collapsing Soviet Union, moving to the improbable position
at Binghamton University; that all belongs to a different story. So do the
later encounters with the infinitely subtler and more effective American
versions of academic censorship: Too bad, he was not among the finalists
for this job … No, I am not carping. I did fine, eventually. Life in the Soviet
Union provided superb survival skills.
Still, the biggest academic honors I have ever received were the parting
words from my long-suffering advisor Apollo Borisovich Davidson: For
everything that I was ever lauded, I was first criticized. Let your life be
different.
And, of course, the memorable bright morning in early May, the day
after I had been banned from publishing. In the institute’s corridors, I was
greeted as an intellectual hero. Above all, by Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich
himself, the pride and conscience of our institute and a world-famous
medievalist. His eyesight almost gone in old age, Gurevich was moving in
a slow stately gait, helped by his students. I politely stepped near the wall
to give way when somebody whispered in the ear of old maître: That Afri-
canist whose dissertation … at TseKa. Aron Iakovlevich turned slowly, like
a supertanker, and headed toward me with his hand outstretched to shake
mine: Well done, young man! I am pretty sure he had no inkling of what my
dissertation was about. But to be banned at TseKa? It had to be good.

THE FIRST RED CENTURY 80

Georgi Derluguian
The Soviets
Abroad

Throughout its existence, the Soviet

Union played the role of both
liberator and oppressor.
by Daniel Finn
 W
hen the Bolsheviks
seized power in 1917,
they didn’t give much
thought to the foreign policy their
new state would follow. Lenin
This unexpected scenario posed a dilemma for the Bolshe-
admitted as much in 1921: “Before viks. On the one hand, they would have to govern a vast

the Revolution and even after it, multinational state and set about constructing a socialist
economy as best they could; on the other, they had prom-
we thought: if not immediately ised to direct a worldwide revolutionary movement, the

then in the worst case scenario Communist International (Comintern), from its Moscow
headquarters. The Soviet leadership’s refusal to acknowl-
very soon, the revolution would edge the existence of any dilemma made it harder still.

win in other more developed When Stalin won the power struggle after Lenin’s
death, and the Bolshevik dictatorship began hardening
countries from a capitalist point into the system that we know as Stalinism, he gave pri-

of view; if this did not occur, we ority to socialist construction on the home front, while
insisting that there was a perfect harmony between Soviet
would have to succumb.” national interests and the world revolution. In practice this

By then, the leader was forced to meant subordinating the Comintern to the twists and turns
of Soviet foreign policy. In the words of Stalin: “He is an
concede that “the movement has internationalist who is prepared to defend the USSR unre-

not been as linear as we expected.” servedly, without hesitations, without conditions.” “Defence
of the USSR” was implicitly conflated with the power of
The Bolsheviks had managed to the ruling bureaucracy, and of Stalin himself.

defeat their opponents in a bloody The structure of the Comintern allowed its Mos-
cow-based directorate to oust leaders from the various
civil war, seeing off interventions Communist Parties (cps) if their performance was deemed

by several foreign powers, and unsatisfactory. Stalin used this power to ensure that every cp
had a leadership team that would do exactly what it was told.
their position looked secure for The instructions from Moscow were often based on a faulty

the time being. Yet European rev- assessment of local conditions, and sometimes proved to be
disastrous, as in China and Germany. The habit of reliance
olution had not materialized — the on outside authority drilled into leading Communist cadres

Soviet Union would now have to was also profoundly debilitating. Party leaders trained to
follow orders from afar weren’t likely to make the right call
survive in a world of hostile cap- when a sudden political crisis put revolution on the agenda.

italist states for a period whose

length nobody could foresee.

84
 THE SOVIETS ABROAD

Unity Against Fascism suffering enormous casualties, the Red Army started to roll
back its genocidal adversary from 1943 onward, continuing
For much of the 1930s, Stalin’s priority was to cultivate the pursuit all the way to Berlin. By the time Germany sur-
a defensive alliance with the capitalist democracies of rendered, Soviet power was at its peak, along with that of
Western Europe against the threat of Nazi Germany. This the Communist movement.
led the Comintern to push for broad antifascist coalitions,
resulting in the election of Popular Front governments in
France and Spain. When the Spanish right staged a coup
Superpower
against the new administration, the popular classes’ reac- Soviet foreign policy would be dominated for the next four
tion snowballed into a revolution without parallel in the decades by its rivalry with the United States. Talk of a Cold
interwar period. War between two “superpowers” obscured the fundamental
In theory, this moment should have been exactly what asymmetry between the two states. The US was already
the Comintern was designed for, but Stalin saw the upheaval the world’s richest economy before the war began, and its
as a threat to his alliance policy. The Soviet Union was the position had only grown stronger in the meantime. There
only European state willing to assist the Spanish Republic, had been no fighting on American soil, and limited battle-
and threw its weight wholeheartedly behind the most con- field casualties.
servative elements on the Republican side. Soviet agents The contrasting Soviet experience was later described
were also despatched to pursue a murderous vendetta by John F. Kennedy, in a rare moment of empathy for a US
against the poum, a party of the anti-Stalinist left, casting president: “At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless
an ugly shadow over the struggle against Franco. This was millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A
all justified in terms of the necessity to win the war, but third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds
the Republic was crushed anyway, leaving Europe’s fascist of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss
powers triumphant. equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chi-
A conservative policy in Spain could not even secure cago.” For the most part, this trauma was shrugged off by
the alliance Stalin wanted, as the French and British gov- American officials, who denied that the Soviet Union could
ernments preferred to appease Hitler. Purges of the officer have any legitimate security concerns.
corps had also gravely weakened the Soviet military just as According to the Cold War ideology that soon took
war seemed imminent. In August 1939, Stalin repaid the root in Western countries, the Soviet Union was hell-bent
cynicism of the Munich agreement with interest by signing a on expansion and would only be deterred by the threat
nonaggression pact with the Nazi regime. The pact came as a of overwhelming force. In fact, Stalin’s policy was rela-
shock to the European cps, whose antifascist line now went tively cautious and pragmatic. His main priority was to
against the grain of Soviet policy. The British and French secure the USSR against future attacks so that it could set
parties tried to walk a tightrope by endorsing Stalin’s agree- about repairing the damage suffered during the war. That
ment while supporting a military struggle against Hitler by meant keeping a firm grip on the territory occupied by the
their own governments, but Moscow quickly brought them Red Army in Eastern Europe, but there was no question of
into line: Communists were told to argue that the main launching an aggressive war beyond this sphere of influence.
responsibility for war lay with Anglo-French imperialism. As long as the wartime alliance endured and there was still
The Soviet leader was hoping for a lengthy conflict that hope of obtaining US aid for reconstruction, Stalin was even
would sap Germany’s strength. Instead, the Wehrmacht willing to allow some degree of political pluralism in his
conquered most of Western Europe in a lightning offensive, East European buffer zone. But when the Cold War began
and Hitler was free to turn his attention eastwards. In June in earnest, he ruthlessly imposed Soviet-style regimes on
1941, a giant invasion force crashed into Soviet territory all the satellite states.
and penetrated as far as the Moscow suburbs before it was
contained. The Soviet government and the Comintern now
swung back to the antifascist policy of the 1930s, negoti-
ating a military alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt and
organizing resistance movements throughout Europe. After

85
 Daniel Finn

This was certainly a crime against democracy and Yugoslav leader Tito had broken with Stalin after deciding
self-determination, but it did not form part of a scheme that Soviet arrogance was too much to bear.
for world conquest. US military planners found no evi- At the very outset of the Cold War, this was clear evi-
dence of any Soviet plan to invade Western Europe in the dence that, even when a revolution was led by Communists
late 1940s, and concluded that war would be the result of trained in the Moscow school, it need not simply result in
miscalculation if it came about. The main flash point of the the extension of Soviet power. But this ideological fantasy
early Cold War was Korea, where US and Chinese forces was much too valuable for the US ruling class to discard. By
confronted each other directly on the battlefield. Stalin presenting every revolutionary movement as a Soviet proxy,
had given Kim Il-sung a green light to invade South Korea they could mobilize support for a global crusade in defense
in 1950, but only on the understanding that he shouldn’t of the established order. Freely elected, non-Communist
expect Soviet troops to bail him out if things went wrong — reformers who threatened US economic interests would be
that would be China’s responsibility. targeted by this crusade as much as Communist insurgents.
Such reformers would often have no choice but to ask the
Washington’s Crusade Soviet Union for its help against US aggression.

In order to explain why the Cold War developed in the way

that it did, we have to look beyond the stated goal of US
policy — to contain Soviet aggression — and recognize that
Washington had a much wider ambition: to make a world
safe for capitalism in general, and US capitalism in partic-
ular. The main threat to this project came from homegrown When
revolutions, not Soviet military aggression.
Cold War ideology maintained that Soviet power and
world revolution were two sides of the same coin: revolu-
communist-led
tions were made on orders from Moscow, and successful
ones would produce new satellite states under its thumb. revolutions
On both counts this analysis was false. Stalin was deeply
ambivalent about the prospects for revolution outside his
security zone in Eastern Europe. He had ordered Com-
did take place
munist Parties in France, Italy, and Greece to cooperate as
traditional elites were restored to power. When the Greek after the war,
communists took up arms against the monarchist regime
in 1946, Stalin gave them lukewarm support, believing their
cause to be hopeless.
it was in spite
And when communist-led revolutions did take place
after the war, it was in spite of Stalin’s advice, not because of Stalin’s advice,
of it. The Soviet leader told Chinese and Yugoslav commu-
nists to form governments of national unity with their rivals,
only to have his instructions disregarded. Having come to
not because
power without the help of the Red Army and the nkvd,
these new regimes had a life of their own. By 1948, the of it.

86
 THE SOVIETS ABROAD

Coexistence and Conflict his successors cast their net wider in search of allies. The
goal of Soviet policy in the Third World was by no means
After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors tried to ease ten- to promote revolution across the board. On the principle
sions with the West. Three years of immensely destructive that an established government in the hand was worth any
war in Korea ended in stalemate. The new Soviet leader number of communist guerrillas in the bush, Moscow often
Nikita Khrushchev began speaking of “peaceful coexis- struck up warm relations with nationalist regimes that were
tence” as the framework for international relations, with staunchly anticommunist at home. This helped scupper a
economic competition between capitalist and communist once-powerful Arab communist movement: in Egypt, com-
states replacing violent revolution as the lever for systemic munists dissolved their organization to join Nasser’s Arab
change. Socialist Union; in Iraq and Syria, they were dragooned into
For Moscow, maintaining control over Eastern Europe subordinate alliances with the ruling Ba’athists.
was challenging enough: troops had to be sent into Hungary From Europe to Latin America, Moscow-aligned Com-
to crush an anti-Soviet rebellion in 1956. Khrushchev had munist parties generally moved away from promoting
no desire to get involved in clashes with the United States revolution in favor of constitutional politics. One of the
or its allies further afield, and would have liked to dial down main exceptions was in Vietnam, where the local Com-
the arms race so money could be spent on raising living munist leadership decided to launch a revolutionary war
standards instead. But there was one insuperable barrier to against the US client state in the south. The Vietnamese
long-term coexistence between the superpowers. As long Communists held their Soviet and Chinese allies responsible
as the Soviet Union continued to support revolutionary for pressuring them to sign a compromise peace deal in the
movements, the US would never accept it as a normal player 1950s; they kept their own counsel thereafter, soliciting
in world politics. military aid from Moscow and Peking alike but allowing
The Soviet leaders had inherited this commitment from neither to determine war strategy. Without Soviet backing,
the early years of the revolution, and could never shrug the Vietnamese Communists probably could not have held
it off entirely, even if the aid they supplied was selective their own against the US invasion, but that assistance was
and opportunistic. Giving up on the idea of “proletarian always of secondary importance: the main fuel propelling
internationalism” would have meant abandoning the main the revolution came from inside Vietnam.
ideological prop for their occupation of Eastern Europe If Soviet policy led Communists in the Middle East to
(and for the multinational Soviet Union itself, which might prostrate themselves before nationalism, elsewhere its effect
otherwise look very much like the old, Russian-dominated was to pull nationalists towards communism. The most
tsarist empire). Support for revolutionary struggles was important example of this phenomenon was Cuba. Fidel
also a valuable weapon in the contest for global influence Castro and his allies took power in 1959 with a program of
with the United States. The USSR was never in a position social reform that soon put them at odds with the United
to wage full-scale wars on the other side of the world, as the States, and had little choice but to reach out to Moscow for
US did in Korea and Vietnam. Beyond its East European support against the threat of invasion. As Soviet economic
protectorates, Moscow relied more on “soft power.” And aid flooded in, Castro merged his organization with the
when the Chinese communists broke with Khrushchev in Cuban Communist Party and declared his allegiance to
the early sixties, there was now a rival communist power Soviet-style Marxism.
willing to support Third World revolutions if the Soviet Khrushchev welcomed the Cuban Revolution, which
Union turned its back on them. gave his country an unexpected ally on Washington’s
doorstep. But the Soviet leadership found Castro to be
Third World in Revolt a troublesome protégé. He accused them of conservative
With politics in Europe seemingly frozen, the main the- immobility and tried to foment revolutions throughout
ater for superpower competition during the 1960s and
’70s lay in the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. Stalin had shown little interest in the non-
European world — he once described the Vietnamese
leader Ho Chi Minh as a “communist troglodyte” — but

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 Daniel Finn

In truth, most of the unwelcome (from Washington’s

perspective) developments of the period had little or nothing
to do with the USSR. Robert White, the US ambassador
to El Salvador who was cashiered by Reagan, explained to
his bosses that the revolutionary movements in Central
America were fuelled, not by Cuban or Soviet money, but by
“decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of
the elite to make any concessions to the masses.” The Marx-
ist-Leninist who deserved most credit for the liberation of
Portuguese Africa was the Guinean leader Amílcar Cabral,
not Leonid Brezhnev. And the most traumatic experience
“Krushyovka” apartment building in Germany.
of all for US public opinion, the Iranian Revolution, was
Africa and Latin America. In the late 1960s, relations led by Islamic fundamentalists who were equally hostile
between Moscow and Havana were so poor that many to both superpowers.
expected an open breach. Castro later settled down as a Brezhnev and his colleagues naturally welcomed these
more predictable Soviet client, but his government kept setbacks for their rival, which came as a timely distraction
looking for opportunities to disrupt the status quo in world from the problems they faced closer to home. The Soviet
politics, when Moscow would have preferred to let sleeping economy was slowing down, an aging leadership had no
dogs lie. idea how to get it moving again, and Moscow had effectively
The Cuban experience was later repeated in a number abandoned any hope of winning consent for Communist
of countries where radical nationalists came to power, from rule in Eastern Europe after sending in troops to crush
Mozambique to South Yemen. Soviet economic and mili- a reform experiment in Czechoslovakia. Even the cps of
tary assistance often played a crucial part in helping these Western Europe had started to distance themselves from
revolutions survive in the face of pressure from the US the USSR. Any relief from this depressing vista could only
and its allies, and enabled them to raise living standards delight the Soviet leadership. But for the most part, they
in some of the world’s poorest countries. But the turn to were spectators observing the new wave of Third World
Moscow usually meant importing the pathologies of the revolutions and hoping to take advantage where they could.
original Soviet model, based on a one-party state and a rigid, There were three notable exceptions to this rule. In
centrally planned economy. Only in Nicaragua did a group Angola, the left-wing nationalists who had taken power
of Marxist revolutionaries break with this pattern and con- after decolonization in 1975 were threatened by rival cia-
struct a model of socialism based on democratic pluralism. backed movements, supported in the field by South Africa
and Zaire. Fidel Castro decided to send a Cuban task force
Indian Summer to beat back the South African invasion, and the Soviet navy
helped ferry them across the Atlantic. This enraged the
In the late 1970s, there was much talk in Washington of a
foreign policy elite in Washington, whose leading figures
worldwide Soviet offensive behind all of the recent setbacks
had expected to get rid of Agostinho Neto’s mpla as easily
for US foreign policy. This argument was used by Ronald
as they had dealt with Patrice Lumumba in the Congo a
Reagan and his New Right backers to justify a massive mil-
decade earlier. Thwarted in their bid to impose Jonas Sav-
itary buildup and a spate of Third World interventions that
imbi as the Mobutu of Angola, they gave enough support
claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. It led to a period
to his unita force to allow it to wreak a decade of havoc
of heightened tension between the two blocs and brought
in the country.
the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Another large-scale Soviet and Cuban intervention in
Africa had much less admirable results. Support for the
military junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia helped it
repel a US-backed Somali invasion, but also kept one of Afri-
ca’s most brutal regimes in power as it massacred the civilian
left and crushed the Eritrean independence movement

88
 THE SOVIETS ABROAD

(ironically led by pro-Soviet Marxists, who eventually dis-

posed of Mengistu, in partnership with their Tigrayan allies,
after his lifeline from Moscow was cut in the early nineties).

A Soviet Vietnam Withdrawal

But the most disastrous Soviet adventure was in Afghani- When Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader
stan. The Afghan Communists had seized power in a 1978 in 1985, he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan and scale
military coup and tried to impose radical reforms despite back the nuclear arms race, a crippling burden on the Soviet
having a minuscule base of support. Facing violent opposi- economy. Gorbachev soon developed this foreign policy
tion, they responded with mass executions, and also began turn into a blueprint for a new world order based on coop-
purging their own cadres. At first the Soviet leadership eration and universal human values. This was certainly an
rejected pleas for military assistance. As the kgb boss Yuri attractive vision, which did much to explain his soaring
Andropov remarked in March 1979: “To deploy our troops popularity outside the USSR. But Washington had no
would mean to wage war against the people, to crush the interest in playing along.
people, to shoot at the people. We will look like aggressors, At one of his summit meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev
and we cannot permit that to occur.” proposed a joint statement affirming that “equality of all
But within months, as the regime looked set to collapse, states, noninterference in internal affairs and freedom of
a full-scale Soviet invasion began: the first time troops had sociopolitical choice must be recognized as the inalienable
been deployed outside the East European buffer zone since and mandatory standards of international relations.” It
the Cold War began. The Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin, was rejected out of hand by Reagan’s team of advisers. US
a thuggish figure disliked intensely by Soviet officials, was demands for Soviet cooperation in solving regional conflicts
summarily executed and replaced by Babrak Karmal, who in practice meant that Washington would be given a free
had been given strict orders to broaden the base of his gov- hand to impose its will on countries like El Salvador and
ernment and moderate its policies. Whatever benefits this Nicaragua by force.
reorientation might have brought to Karmal were more than The end of the Cold War proved to be as uneven as its
cancelled out by the stigma of being seen as a Soviet puppet. prosecution. Gorbachev followed through on his rhetoric,
Initially the intervention was meant to last for a few allowing the East European satellite regimes to fall in 1989
months, but the Afghan rebels had ideal terrain on which after promising not to repeat the invasions of Hungary and
to fight and backing from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Czechoslovakia. But there would be no US withdrawal from
United States. The Soviet Union found itself fighting an Latin America to match the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern
unwinnable war, no matter how many bombs it dropped. Europe. Desperate to normalize relations with the West,
US officials could hardly believe their luck. Though the Gorbachev was prepared to make sweeping concessions
Soviet invasion was the product of desperation, not over- which meant abandoning Moscow’s role as revolutionary
confidence, it supplied the ideal backdrop for Reagan’s sponsor for good.
election campaign and the global offensive that followed. As Angola was a notable exception. As the Cold War fizzled
cia chief Bill Casey gleefully observed: “Here is the beauty out, the apartheid regime in South Africa geared up for an
of the Afghan operation. Usually it looks like the big bad all-out offensive to oust the mpla for good. Without con-
Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just sulting Moscow in advance, Castro again dispatched a huge
the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys.” military force that inflicted a crushing defeat on the South
Africans — a crucial turning point in the demise of white
supremacy across the region, and one that was achieved in
spite of Reagan’s triumphalism and Gorbachev’s placations.

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 Daniel Finn

Desperate
to normalize
relations It is unlikely that the fortunes of
socialism will ever again be iden-
with the West, tified with a single country in the
Gorbachev way they were with the Soviet
Union. However, the idea of a
was prepared simultaneous worldwide revolu-
tion is clearly utopian — power
to make sweeping will be taken one state at a time,
concessions or not at all. International soli-
darity is vital, but the interests of
which meant political forces in different coun-
tries and continents will inevitably
abandoning come into conflict. The best way to
Moscow’s role manage the ensuing tensions will
be to acknowledge their existence
as revolutionary and resolve them through negoti-
ation, without subordinating an
sponsor international movement to the
for good. interests of any one state. The
demise of the Soviet Union has
posed challenges for anticapitalist
struggle around the world, but the
absence of a single coordinating
center is not one of them.  

90
 MEGA N E R I C K S O N

RED
DIAPER
BABIES
In America, school is
preparation for “real” life.
In the early Soviet Union,
school was filled with life.

92
 RED DIAPER BABIES

worked in a private by Nixon due to its “family-weakening implications.” For

I
day care for three their part, American liberals have failed utterly to articulate
years, giving tours to a positive vision for social upbringing — instead, attempting
parents obsessed with to justify programs for children through a kind of morbid
risk and liability. Did accounting, in which kids are entitled to care today because
we fingerprint and it’s cheaper than imprisoning them down the line. “roi” or
background check return on investment is a favorite metric of both Democratic
employees? How politicians and billionaire education reformers.
often? Did male staff School systems are the spaces in which modern societies
do diapers? And if so, balance the needs, rights, and interests of parents, children,
could their child have and the state. From schools, parents need childcare; children
her diaper changed by the female teacher instead? It was need an upbringing; and the state needs a future. But where
sad that these questions were foremost on parents’ minds, Americans tend to view these as conflicting interests, the
above ones about what their child would be doing all day Bolsheviks saw state-run schools as having the potential to
in our care. liberate mothers from the private drudgery of housework
In capitalist societies, each nuclear family is thought to and economic dependence, while freeing children to par-
be a private entity, operating in opposition to each other and ticipate in public, collaborative play. Almost immediately
distinct from the state. Evangelicals might insist there be a upon seizing power, they declared education from preschool
patriarch at the head of that family, while liberals envision a to university the right of every citizen.
broader spectrum of possible arrangements. But the family Before the October Revolution, 70 percent of
form is the same: atomized, and financially self-reliant. Russians were illiterate. Under the tsar, schools were gen-
The child is the responsibility of the parents who almost erally reserved for the rich and overseen by the church.
solely invested in her, and parents are expected to vigilantly Catherine II had made it known that she believed too much
monitor risks to their investment, even when they aren’t education was dangerous for the monarchical social order.
around. If your child is harmed or becomes ill, damage has The Bolsheviks agreed — identifying illiteracy as “an enemy
been done to you, not to society, and it’s your job to fix it. of communism,” they launched likbez in 1920, a campaign
The United States has the worst child abuse record in demanding all citizens learn how to read and write in their
the industrialized world — but the vast majority (about four native language. For the first time, textbooks were produced
out of five cases) are perpetrated by parents, not day-care
providers. Still, parents’ anxieties about leaving their child
in day care are not unfounded. American childcare is highly
unregulated and availability is mediated by family wealth,
leaving it to individual families to exercise “choice” and
The only serious
monitor program quality. A 2007 survey by the National
Institution of Child Health Development found that only attempt to provide a
10 percent of American childcare centers offer high quality
federally funded universal
care. Most were rated “fair” or “poor.” And an oecd report
on child well-being found that the United States ranks twen- childcare system in the US
ty-fourth out of thirty countries on health and safety, due
was vetoed by Nixon due
in part to a lack of social policies for children.
This situation is perpetuated, on the one hand, by to its “family-weakening”
conservatives’ commitment to the idea of the patriarchal
implications.
nuclear family and hostility to state interference in parental
rights. The only serious attempt to provide a federally
funded universal childcare system in the US was vetoed

93
 Megan Erickson

in hundreds of minority languages. Trade unions and youth year writing and producing a play about a theme they chose.
organizations organized reading groups to promote lit- To learn about anatomy, children examined each other’s skin
eracy, with great success: according to the 1926 census, before and after a run. Teachers of all ages were instructed
most people could read. to use children’s interests to determine a course of study.
The early years of the revolution saw the planning and As one American principal put it, “Soviet Russia is actually
ad hoc creation of thousands of schools, distribution centers, giving to the masses in its state-supported public schools
children’s clubs and communes, playgrounds, and crèches — the kind of education that progressive private schools in
many of them, initially, in the former homes of aristocrats. this country and in Europe have been striving earnestly to
Libraries, art galleries, and museums which had once been give to the relatively few who come to them.”
open only to scholars were made public and heated to attract Lucy Wilson was an American educator who inter-
visitors. Women were given viewed hundreds of Russian
paid leave at childbirth, and teachers working around the
“Palaces for the Protection world and visited the USSR
of Maternity and Childhood,” twice in the 1920s. In a book
offered food and medical ser- recording her observations
vices. Despite a profound of “the new Russia,” she
lack of resources, Alexandra described both utter depriva-
Kollontai, the People’s Com- tion and a sense of incredible
missar of Social Welfare, possibility. Teachers who
aimed to cover the country didn’t have paper and pen-
with a network of institutions cils instead took children on
for the social upbringing of field trips and nature walks,
children. “I considered it to and “everywhere, every
be my main task to chart the pleasant day, in the streets,
course that the labor republic round the town walls, in
should adopt in the sphere of public buildings, in industrial
protecting the interests of establishments, in museums,
woman as a labor unit and in art galleries, may be seen
as a mother,” she recalled. groups of school children
By 1921, there were 7,784 of all ages, oblivious of the
institutions serving 350,000 world, absorbed in seeing and
children. understanding.” The early Bolshevik school system more
Children were enticed to the new schools with free closely resembled the experimental “real city as school”
meals. But what to teach them once they were there? How vision of anarchists like Paul Goodman than it did anything
should a young communist learn? The Bolsheviks had an out of 1984.
ambitious political agenda — children could have been seen In capitalist societies like the United States, where
as nothing more than blank slates on which to write this public schools are increasingly used as tax-funded training
radical new reality into existence. Yet rather than attempt camps for corporate workplaces, curriculum and standards
to engineer the future with a didactic curriculum, they focus more on preparing children for the demands of adult-
designed an educational system informed by America’s hood than on their immediate needs and development. Tech
then-progressive teaching methods, emphasizing self-ex- ceos from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Tim Cook
pression, collaborative play, “hands on” activities, and have advocated that coding be taught starting as young as
student-directed group projects. Preschool students were to kindergarten, and policymakers like Obama agree (mean-
be taught to run their own games instead of having teachers while, the trendiest private schools in Silicon Valley don’t
run them for them. Fourth-year students spent the entire allow computers in the classroom). In America, school is

94
 RED DIAPER BABIES Megan Erickson

preparation for “real” life. In the early Soviet Union, the Nadezhda Krupskaya, the influential deputy Commissar for example, charts documented improvements to the chil-
school was life; maybe even more real than the adult world of Education, read and enjoyed discussing his work, and dren’s working-class neighborhood that they’d planned and The early Bolshevik school
outside its doors. School and Society was official recommended reading for brought about over the course of ten years. Meanwhile, all
Another American who toured the Soviet Union with Soviet teachers. Dewey documented his observations on over the country, self-governing youth groups supported
system more closely resembled
a group of educators in 1927, John Dewey, was convinced unofficial excursions as well as official tours of “model” by Krupskaya promoted student engagement with local the experimental “real city
that the Bolsheviks were attempting on a large scale a schools, which during famine and civil war served as artic- politics.
democratic project which had only been tried by philan- ulations of what every Soviet school of the future should A constant refrain among American educators who
as school” vision of anarchists
thropists and private schools in the United States. Dewey look like — inside schools and out, he wrote, children’s work observed the Soviet system was that it seemed to take seri- like Paul Goodman than it did
was called a communist dupe by conservatives for his was taken seriously and always intended to culminate in ously the democratic values to which American schools only
praise of Soviet educators, but the admiration was mutual: authentic participation in social life. In one model school, paid lip service. While it’s true Soviet educators borrowed
anything out of 1984.

95 № 27  /  FALL 2017 ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB PYBUS 96

 RED DIAPER BABIES

inspiration from bourgeois theorists abroad, homegrown immigrant families. US kindergarten teachers were told
psychologists were hard at work trying to apply historical to make home visits to check up on immigrant mothers,
materialism to theories of human development. The greatest and to teach English in mothers’ meetings, “because of
of these, Lev Vygotsky observed that individual develop- the ‘danger’ of the ‘new electoral power’ these women’s
ment was inextricable from social interaction and human husbands wielded.”
progress, arguing that the language and tools available to
us shape our intellectual possibilities as learners. Thus,
skills like reading and writing should be honored in the
classroom as complex cultural activities, and taught in ways uring the famine

D
that are meaningful to children and relevant to life, with years, millions of bez-
teaching “organized in such a way that reading and writing prizorni (orphaned
are necessary for something.” Only when children embraced children) roamed the
reading and writing as tools for shaping their environment, streets, and the Bol-
he argued, would they be motivated to master them. shevik promise of
It is striking that a society whose literal existence was free, universal public
every day under siege made the conscious choice to affirm childcare went unful-
children’s present value over their future value-added, while filled. In response to
a society as powerful as the United States continues to place widespread starva-
anxiety over future productivity on the shoulders of stu- tion, malnutrition,
dents. Dewey was shocked by how little job training went on and tuberculosis, mid-1920s nep reforms slashed gov-
in Soviet schools compared to their American counterparts. ernment funding for all but the basic necessities of life.
Despite the Soviet Union’s urgent need for trained workers Nevertheless, Soviet teachers and parents were vocally
as it attempted to industrialize, every administrator from critical of school closures and worked to ensure they
Lenin to Krupskaya to People’s Commissar of Education remained open, not just as feeding points, but as educa-
Anatoly Lunacharsky insisted that technical education take tional institutions were children encountered art, music, and
place only after primary and secondary education. stories. To keep schools open until the economic situation
Both Dewey and Wilson were surprised to find no evi- improved, parents volunteered in classrooms and pooled
dence of the indoctrination or intolerance they’d expected to their resources to pay for supplies.
encounter in Soviet schools. In a speech before the Third All- Compared to attempts in the famished Soviet Union,
Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, developments in the booming United States were unim-
Lenin insisted that pamphlets and propaganda had no place pressive. In the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression,
in the schools, and that the way to raise communists was by only 800 nurseries — more holding cells than educational
promoting equality and self-governance: programs — and about 300 preschools were in existence.
Surveys of day nurseries in Chicago, New York City, and
The old society was based on the principle: rob or be
across Pennsylvania found inadequate hygiene, health care,
robbed.… When the workers and peasants proved that
and nutrition in many day nurseries. The basic safety reg-
they were able, by their own efforts, to defend them-
ulations that social workers won in the mid-1920s went
selves and create a new society — that was the beginning
largely unenforced.
of the new and communist education, education in the
Even in 1944, at the height of the war effort, with 19 mil-
struggle against the exploiters.... That is the reply to
lion American women in the labor force, the Lanham Act
the question of how the young and rising generation
provided funding for just 1,900 childcare centers serving
should learn communism.
75,000 children across the nation. The federal government
In contrast, the United States integrated preschools into the provided about two-thirds of the funding with parents
public school system during World War I with the express supplying the rest, and the program ended after the war.
purpose that they would serve as tools for Americanizing Until the mid-twentieth century, the dominant enduring

97
 Megan Erickson

childcare policy in the United States was “mothers’ pen- to promote child welfare by strengthening the family and
sions,” which offered low-income women payments to Nixon’s refusal to “commit the vast moral authority of
stay home and take care of their children. Finally recog- the National Government to communal approaches to
nized as inadequate, these were replaced with childcare child rearing against the family-centered approach.” In the
tax credits which “permitted the taxpayer to hold gainful absence of a broad social solution, or even recognition of
employment.” But tax credits do little to make childcare the problem, families struggle on their own to manage, and
more affordable for American families. The lowest-income working-class women often end up taking on the burden
families in the United States receive a tax credit worth a of housework and childcare on top of their jobs.
maximum of $1,050 a year per child. Before long, things weren’t that different abroad. With
For Bolsheviks, schools were important both as public the rise of Stalinism, the Soviets abandoned the dream of
spaces where the youngest communists could be cared socialized childcare and began to sentimentalize house-
for while their parents worked, and as the means through wives like Americans. Historian Lisa Kirschenbaum writes,
which the oppressive, traditional nuclear family form “Stalinist ‘emancipation’ meant a double, even triple shift
would be destroyed, transcended, or remade. Meanwhile, for women, who were enjoined to work outside the home,
the United States remained ideologically committed to undertake public political work, and devote themselves to
upholding the nuclear family with a housewife at its core, the task of raising future communists.” Sadly, after years of
even as industrialization and the integration of women into aggressive economic liberalization, Russia is back where it
the workforce made this effort increasingly futile. Childcare started, with elite private schools and rampant inequality.
policy has changed little since Roosevelt’s 1909 instructions One contemporary financier and founder of “the Orthodox
Eton” aims to literally prepare students for the reinstate-
ment of Russian monarchy (“For me it’s very important
to restore the traditions that were broken off in 1917”).
It’s not a surprise, given the economic and political
For Bolsheviks, limitations of the time, that the Bolshevik vision of creating
schools that were tools of self-actualization rather than
schools were important exploitation was ultimately a failure. Far more shocking
both as public spaces to the conscience is the fact that this goal continues to be
seen as impossible in the richest country in world history.
where the youngest At my old job — a high-quality, state-licensed non-
communists could be cared profit with a sliding tuition scale — the wait list was three
to four years long. For those paying full cost, the program
for while their parents was $30,000 annually. The only parents who were able to
worked, and as the means secure spots were those who joined the wait list while their
child was still in utero. The only children who started with
through which the us as infants were siblings of kids that had been enrolled.
oppressive, traditional Every day I spent at least an hour fielding desperate phone
calls from parents. But there was a reason demand was
nuclear family form so high. Our program was regulated and safe, a rarity in
would be destroyed, the United States, where the death rates for infants in
home-based day care is seven times higher than in day-care
transcended, or remade. centers. Some home-based day cares are great; others are
horrifying. One parent told me that when she left her son
with a provider in the morning, he was crying hysterically
in a high chair — and when she returned that evening, the
toddler was in the same high chair, screaming hysterically,
while the provider ignored him.
Such is the way things are done in the United States. 

98
OUT-OF-CONTEXT
MAYAKOVSKY QUOTES
GO HERE.
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BEYOND A BOUNDARY BY KEITH GESSEN

The Miracle
on Ice with curved sticks held in one hand
and a ball. The new hockey
was thus called “Canadian hockey,” or
“hockey with a puck.”

There wasn’t a single indoor rink in

the Soviet Union at the time. Most
Without even an indoor rink, of the games were played at one end
the Soviets changed hockey forever. of Dynamo Stadium. To make sure
the ice didn’t melt, they were played
at night. Players didn’t have
proper equipment: their sticks were
of domestic manufacture and
easily broke, and they had no hockey
helmets. Some wore bicycle helmets;
some wore boxing headgear, which
covered part of their faces; and a few
players just put on their old infantry
The order to start playing hockey defensemen to take it, then scuttled
helmets. It didn’t matter much,
came, in 1946, from the very past them with a burst of speed.
because no one could figure out how
top. Stalin believed that with the war He missed the first Soviet hockey
to lift the puck. In between periods,
finished and his objectives in season, 1946–47, with a knee
to save electricity, the stadium lights
Eastern Europe achieved, the Soviet injury sustained while playing soccer
would be shut off, plunging every-
Union’s isolation was at an end. for the national team, but in the
thing into darkness.
The USSR had good athletes. They league’s second season he scored fifty-
could send them to international two goals in just eighteen games, Red Army’s rival for supremacy was
championships and win over the for tsdka, the Central House of the the Air Force team, run by Vasily
nonaligned nations. As Charlie Red Army — Red Army, for short. Stalin. Despite his high parentage,
Chaplin once quipped, of early Soviet Vasily had bad luck. He poached
Bobrov’s linemate on that team, and
movies, it’d be better propaganda players from Tarasov’s Red Army team,
also his coach, was Anatoly Tarasov.
than executions. including Bobrov, but then lost
Tarasov had grown up playing soccer,
most of them in a plane crash. Bobrov
The first great Soviet player was as well as an old Russian game
wasn’t on the plane, and survived.
Bobrov. He wore #8. He liked to hang known as “hockey” but which in the
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Vasily was
out by the red line and wait for West is known as “bandy,” played
arrested and imprisoned, and Tarasov
a pass to send him on his way. He on a large ice surface the size of a soccer
got back Bobrov.
dangled the puck before him, daring field with eleven players on each side,

101
 DEPARTMENT NAME
SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME BY AUTHOR NAME

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Dolor Sit Amet

DEK: Nam aliquet, ipsum et

semper convallis, quam lacus luctus
nisi, ac cursus enim diam ut leo.

Soviet ice hockey star Vsevolod Bobrov Merited Master of Sports

102
 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Practically from scratch, Tarasov combination. In fact, I feel sure that poor quality of Soviet hockey sticks,
invented the Soviet version of the game. even the best defensemen in the which players were afraid to break.
In terms of skating and passing, world could not stop a line of three Nonetheless this fast-paced passing
he was building on a long tradition Babiches. Because Babich could style, and the use of all five players
of Russian-style hockey. But beyond do everything. He could wind up a to mount wave upon wave of attacks,
that, tactically, Tarasov had very little. beautiful attack, he could feed was a revelation for a game that had
He had never been to Canada, his partners sizzling passes, and if need become, in its birthplace, primarily a
where the game was born, nor did he be, he could play defense.” Bobrov matter of one man taking the puck
have films of games that he could never played defense. and trying to get through the rest of
watch. In the first few years of Soviet the other team while his teammates
hockey, Tarasov would later write, looked on. North Americans defended
he did not have “one person who this as an expression of “individua-
knew European or world hockey. lity.” The Soviets didn’t argue.
We learned the game out of a void.” Between 1956 and 1990, they won
In the first few years seven of the nine Olympic gold
The result was a new kind of hockey.
Making a virtue of necessity, Tarasov of Soviet hockey, medals, and twenty-one of thirty-
four world championships.
used the lack of ice time to pioneer Tarasov would later
a set of dry-land exercises that stressed But this was later. In the early fifties,
write, he did not
lower-body strength and balance. the Soviets played their first friendly
He had his team play a lot of soccer, have “one person who matches. They missed the world
which helped them develop quick knew European championship in 1953 because Bobrov
and nimble feet. Analyzing the game, was hurt and Stalin decreed, over
or world hockey.
Tarasov concluded that the key to Tarasov’s fierce objections, that they
it was passing, that no matter how fast We learned the game should skip the tournament rather
a man traveled on his skates, the out of a void.” than lose without their best player. But
puck could travel faster. He described Stalin was soon dead, and in 1954
his years of playing on a line with they entered the world championship
the great scoring machine Bobrov and tournament in Stockholm. Tarasov
the excellent passer Babich as a and his team had no idea how they
kind of mistaken hockey; because would do; they had never faced
Later on, when he had visited the
Bobrov was the best scorer and international competition. They knew
United States and been amazed both
the strongest skater, Tarasov and their country was poorer than
by the prodigiousness of its cities,
Babich were always passing other countries, less developed, and
the variety of its supermarkets, and
him the puck. But this was wrong. had lost an entire generation of
the tricks of the animals at Sea
athletes during the war. The point of
“If we rejected this principle,” wrote World, he would say to an American
the international sports program
Tarasov, “then how were we to build scout: “Your people can build the
was to prove to themselves and others
our forward line? Perhaps we should world’s tallest buildings. You can make
that things were not so bad in the
include three aces, three Bobrovs, all forty-nine different kinds of
USSR; but what if they were? As one
the more so since with the passing mayonnaise. You can teach dolphins
Soviet sports doctor who ended
of time more high-caliber players to do the most complex tasks. Why
up in the gulag sarcastically put it, of
appeared? However, was it possible can’t you teach your hockey players
the top Russian soccer team: “If
for three Bobrovs to play on the to pass the puck more than two
Dynamo can beat a French team, obvi-
same line — three outstanding but meters?” He would eventually even
ously the French have even less
quite similar attacking players? come to rue the overemphasis on
bread and meat than we do.” But was
I do not think so. But three men like passing in the Soviet game that he
the converse also true? If the French
Babich could have made a winning developed, and in fact blame the
had more bread and meat — and they

103
 The Miracle on Ice

did, by far — would that mean they’d Title-winners. From

left to right: Vladimir
make short work of the Soviet teams? Nikanorov, Grigory
Mkrtychan, Mikhail
Soviet athletes, traveling abroad, Orekhov, Yevgeny
Babich, Anatoly
could not have failed to see the contrast
Tarasov, Vsevolod
between a place like Stockholm Bobrov, Vladimir
Venevtsev.
or Paris and the poverty back home.
Tarasov, during his first team’s
trip abroad, to Prague, refused to put
his players in their assigned hotel,
forcing them instead to sleep in cots
at the workout facility. This has
been both praised and criticized as an
example of Tarasov’s commitment
to fitness. But it may also have been
the case that Tarasov did not
want his players to be intimidated by
a nice hotel.

Nonetheless, in 1954 in Stockholm,

the Soviets won gold, initiating four those who were good enough left sticks, scoop up supplies,” he said.
decades of hockey dominance. In for the nhl. “The trainer would ask if he could have
1972, after years of beating all amateur a few Band-Aids, and he’d reach in
Nonetheless, Tarasov had forever
competition, the Soviets played an and take the whole box. Here they
changed the game of hockey. If five
all-star team of Canadian professional were, the greatest team in the world,
attackers, using the entire ice,
stars, including Phil Esposito, Ken a superpower, and they didn’t
weaving back and forth and launching
Dryden, and Brad Park, to a virtual tie, have anything.”
long passes to one another, does
and they would likely have won the
not sound entirely unfamiliar, that is But people working together, and
series had Bobby Clarke of the Phila-
because Wayne Gretzky’s passing each other the puck,
delphia Flyers not deliberately
Edmonton Oilers adapted much of and doing lots of plyometric exercises,
broken the ankle of the Soviets’ best
the Soviet style during their can accomplish anything. Saith
player with a vicious slash.
1980s championship run. Tarasov Tarasov, of his great Alexandrov,
Tarasov had been removed as the revolutionized the game by Almetov, and Loktev line,
coach of the national team just making it less individual and more which dominated international hockey
before that tournament: he was too collective. And he did it despite throughout the 1960s:
cantankerous and independent- immense obstacles. It took until 1956
I can see if a player is happy when
minded and had apparently refused for an indoor rink to be built in
his teammate scores, whether
an order to throw a game against the USSR. Thirty years later, after
he shares this happiness. And even
the Czechs (to screw over the Ameri- three decades of total international
though they say it does not
cans). He was replaced as head dominance, there were, across the
become men, athletes, to hug each
coach by his old rival Bobrov, and then entire Soviet Union, 102 indoor
other out on the ice, I know
as the head of the national program rinks; in Canada at that point there
that when Loktev gives Almetov
by the less charismatic, more dictato- were 9,000. In 1980, during the
a bear hug or loving rap on
rial Viktor Tikhonov, who took Olympics at which the Soviets lost to
the behind, or when Almetov hugs
Tarasov’s ways and regimented the the US in the “miracle on ice,”
Alexandrov, this is only a sincere
life out of them. As soon as the the American trainer noticed that the
way of displaying their recognition
Soviet Union opened up a bit in the Soviets were still badly equipped.
and gratitude. 
late eighties, the players rebelled; They “were always looking to trade

104
105
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BASS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE BY JULIA DAMPHOUSE

The Elvis
of East Germany

If you asked an East German back in How a young man from Colorado
the 1970s who the most famous
became the Eastern Bloc’s
American in the world was, they
wouldn’t have said Elvis or JFK. biggest pop star.
They would have said Dean Reed.

It was a strange journey for Reed. He

had an idyllic childhood, riding
horses on a Colorado farm and
playing guitar in local restaurants to
pay his way through meteorology
school. But before he could become
While other peace activists were freedom. He regularly portrayed
Denver’s next weatherman, he went
burning the US flag in opposition to archetypal cowboy characters in
to Hollywood to study acting.
the Vietnam War, Reed made East German films, and in concert
There, less for his musical talent than headlines by standing in front of the his renditions of American folk
his good looks, Reed caught Capitol American embassy in Chile trying to songs “We Shall Overcome” and
Records’ interest. He didn’t quite scrub one clean. He decried “This Land Is Your Land” endured as
catch on as the teen pop idol he was American imperialism and vocally crowd favorites, rather than his
groomed to become in the United supported Chilean socialist Salvador original work.
States, but his 1961 single “Our Allende’s presidential campaign, but
In 1973, after marrying an East
Summer Romance” became a hit in when he traveled across Eastern
German woman, Reed moved to
South America. After touring and Europe, he would often describe his
Berlin. A famous artist choosing to
living in Chile, Reed encountered vision for a better Americanism,
live and work in the Eastern Bloc
poverty and inequity that made him trying to show his adoring fans that
was unusual, and great pr for
sympathetic to socialist ideas the empire had produced its fair
Communists. Even better: this
emerging in the region at the time. share of progressives too.
American was keen to profess his
This conversion took him all over the The novelty of being “the American” deeply held socialist ideals. East
world, rallying support for left-wing quickly propelled him to a stable German politician Egon Krenz, who
struggles from Vietnam to Palestine. career, but limited his artistic arranged for Reed to play at the

106
 BASS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE

A famous artist choosing to live

and work in the Eastern Bloc was great
pr for Communists. Even better: was “absolutely, without a doubt” a
this American was keen to profess more just, moral, and peaceful man
than the US president.
his deeply held socialist ideals.
A few weeks after his 60 Minutes
appearance, Reed’s body was found
floating in a lake near his East Berlin
home. He was just forty-seven years
old. A suicide note, addressed to
Communist Free German Youth By the mid-eighties, Reed’s
Reed’s friend and long-time DDR
movement’s summer festival in 1979, audiences were shrinking. Front
propaganda minister Eberhard
described the singer-songwriter’s rows once packed with screaming
Fensch, was found scrawled on the
relationship with state officials as young women now held polite party
back of a screenplay in his car. The
a “fruitful and reciprocal.” Unsur- functionaries. The East German and
Stasi hid the letter. Fensch explained
prisingly, others accused him of Soviet cinema boards were throwing
the decision was meant to protect
being a puppet. up obstacles to his latest film project.
the feelings of Reed’s wife Renate
He considered returning to the
Reed recognized the gap between Blume, whom Reed blamed for his
United States.
his socialist politics and the reality of suicide.
everyday life in the German Reed hoped that a May 1986
Reed didn’t live to see the fall of the
Democratic Republic (DDR). He interview with 60 Minutes would
Berlin Wall, and his belief in a
hoped that his music and public help relaunch his career back home.
socialist future remained with him
presence would inspire people to Instead, he proved himself to be out
until the end. In his suicide note’s
improve the system. Faced with the of touch with most Americans’
final postscript, addressed to sed
more concrete questions of political sentiments. Reed tried to
general secretary Erich Honecker,
opposition to the politics of the East compel left-liberals to take up the
Reed wrote, “I have not agreed with
German state, Reed showed himself cause of revolution, insisting “we
everything, but socialism is still
unwilling to challenge authority. In were very proud of it one time, to
developing. It is the only solution to
1976, some influential residents call ourselves American revolution-
the main problems facing humanity
launched a petition against the aries.” He suggested that he could
and the world.”
expulsion of actor Wolf Biermann — bring change himself: “I would love
an outspoken critic of the ruling to go back to Colorado and be a With the note concealed, official
Socialist Unity Party (sed). Reed senator.” His wistful idealism didn’t statements ruled his death a “tragic
refused to add his name. stand up to Mike Wallace’s harsh accident.” And though the circum-
interview style. stantial evidence made available to
Indeed, he preferred to stay on good
his friends and family pointed to
terms with government officials, Reed sounded naïve or, at worst,
suicide, a series of inconsistent
focusing his criticism vaguely on the foolish, but the public reacted
reports produced countless
state bureaucracy as a whole. Any bitterly to his more brazen state-
conspiracy theories. Some suspected
reservations he may have had didn’t ments. He defended the Berlin Wall,
the Stasi or kgb of murder; others
stop him from acting as a Stasi compared Reagan and Stalin, and,
blamed the cia. But most paid no
informant. with some merit, said Gorbachev
notice at all. 

107
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
RED CHANNELS BY EILEEN JONES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ANDREY KASAY

17 The October Revolution

Soviet unleashed cinematic brilliance

that even decades of political censorship
Films couldn’t extinguish.
to for the level of visual interest

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST

IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS (1924)
director Lev Kuleshov

If you’re an American, it’s rare and refreshing to watch a film featuring

Russian communists mocking American capitalists. This silent slapstick
comedy is about the misadventures in the newly formed Soviet Union of
an American named J. West, “President of the ymca,” who looks like a
middle-aged, slightly demented Harold Lloyd. He’s read “certain New
York magazines” before his trip and consequently brings with him a defen-
sive American flag to wave plus a maniacal cowboy sidekick. Mr. West
sees menacing “Bolshevik barbarians” behind every tree, all of them, in
his fevered imagination, sporting hugely overgrown moustaches, ratty fur
hats, and a lot of murderous weaponry. Though Mr. West does get men-
aced in Russia, it’s by impoverished aristocratic White Russians running
long cons. Eventually Mr. West is rescued by kindly Reds.

Though the film drags on a bit and comedy doesn’t seem to be Kuleshov’s particular forte, it’s one of the first to
emerge from the Moscow Film School he co-founded, where he taught basic film theory and practice to pioneers
of Soviet montage cinema including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Kuleshov demonstrated through
experimentation that editing is central to cinematic art. If you’ve heard of Kuleshov, it’s because of his famous
experiment revealing the “Kuleshov Effect.” The experiment showed that an audience would attribute the appro-
priate emotion to the actor whose face was intercut with shots of various stimuli such as a bowl of soup, a coffin, or
an open prison door. Viewers praised the actor’s ability to convey hunger, sorrow, and joy. The punch line was that
it was the same shot of the actor’s neutral face each time — a revelation that helped to squelch film theorists’ desire
to study film performance seriously for decades to come.

108
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STRIKE (1925)
director Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature film after years of directing radical agit-
prop theater, Strike is best remembered today for its climactic scene
showing the massacre of striking workers symbolically intercut with
the grisly slaughter of a bull. It’s still agonizing to watch. The symbolic
bull-slaughtering conceit was stolen by Francis Coppola for Apocalypse
Now’s ending.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

director Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein’s most famous film, this is the one that awed the world and got banned in several Western nations for
decades. Even Stalin wound up shelving it for fear of its power to incite rebellion. As Third Reich minister of pro-
paganda Joseph Goebbels expressed it in grudging admiration, “Anyone who had no firm political conviction could
become a Bolshevik after seeing the film.” Eisenstein’s sensational montage techniques in certain famous sequences

109
 17 Soviet Films

look better and better as time goes by and popular film-cutting styles get almost as fast and furious as Eisenstein’s.
When an abused sailor of the Russian Imperial Navy stationed on the battleship Potemkin gets fed up with another
serving of maggoty meat and breaks a plate, that plate gets broken in a fusillade of cuts that makes plate-breaking
an extended act of smashing violence that will carry Russia from the fomenting year of 1905, when the film is set,
with its worker strikes, peasant revolts, and military mutinies, right through the world-shaker of the 1917 revolu-
tion up to 1925, when Eisenstein gleefully sliced and diced the film in accordance with theories of Marxist dialectic.
The film’s legendary “Odessa Steps” sequence is still film history’s most famous editing tour de force, with the
possible exception of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In it, a tsarist military force of formidable
machine-like uniformity marches down the steps slaughtering Odessian citizens who scatter before them. Those
who hesitate, protest, or plead for mercy are cut down in the same mechanical rhythm, and you’ll remember all the
victims’ faces — the mother bearing her trampled child, the widow with the baby carriage that gets knocked down
the steps as she is shot and falls against it, and the bespectacled woman whose glasses are bloodily broken by Eisen-
stein’s film cut that represents a sword strike.

MOTHER (1926)
director Vsevolod Pudovkin

Based on a novel by Maxim Gorky, Pudovkin’s silent film drama about the
political radicalization of a downtrodden middle-aged woman still packs
a surprising punch. In the USSR, it was the most popular of all the Soviet
montage films. Note the clever camerawork at the beginning of the film
featuring high-angle shots looking down on the abject creature worn out
by work and abuse at the hands of her drunken brute of a husband. The
shots level out as Mother is drawn into the revolutionary activities of her
idealistic son, then end in low-angle shots gazing up admiringly at the
transformed revolutionary as she catches the fallen red flag and leads the
marchers on their way to free political prisoners, her son included. Moscow
Art Theater graduate Vera Baranovskaya as sad-faced Mother will slay you.

OCTOBER: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1928)

directors Sergei Eisenstein & Grigory Aleksandrov

Named after John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, this film commemorated the tenth anniversary of the
Bolsheviks’ revolt. Intended to celebrate revolutionary heroes Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the film was
harshly truncated as Trotsky fell dramatically out of favor and was eliminated from the film. Still, it contains
some of Eisenstein’s boldest experiments in “intellectual montage,” generating ideas from the collision of images.
Eisenstein illustrates the dreadful ease with which monarchies return to power through shots of a statue of the tsar,
pulled down earlier by revolutionaries, reassembling itself. He satirizes Provisional Government head Alexander
Kerensky’s lofty ambitions, through shots of his climb up a long flight of stairs intercut with shots of lavish crystal
goblets and china figures of Napoleon seeming to watch his progress approvingly.

110
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MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929)

director Dziga Vertov

Vertov’s camera
Director Dziga Vertov scorned Eisenstein’s films for what he considered can go anywhere,
their hopelessly old-fashioned nineteenth-century theatrical narratives.
This should give you some idea of Vertov’s visionary radicalism and
surveying
furious montage techniques. Man With a Movie Camera is nominally the bustling urban
part of the “city symphony” documentary trend paying tribute to the populace on top
day in the life of a single city, but Vertov adapts the subgenre to his own of buildings during
purpose, creating a dynamic composite Soviet city by assembling bits
of what he called “life caught unaware” in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, and
the workday or
Kharkov. Vertov’s camera can go anywhere, surveying the bustling urban hiding in a glass
populace on top of buildings during the workday or hiding in a glass of of beer to surreptitiously
beer to surreptitiously observe Russians at leisure. Through the use of observe Russians
superimpositions and dissolves, fast motion and slow motion, freeze
frames, jump cuts, stop-motion animation, and a reflexive examination of
at leisure.
how cinema works by showing us footage of Man With a Movie Camera
being shot, edited, and watched by an audience in a theater, Vertov advo-
cated for the power of the “Kino-eye” to reveal the moldable plasticity
of modern reality and to launch humanity into the communist future as
technologically enhanced super-beings.
TURKSIB (1929)
director Viktor A. Turin

A documentary about the Turkestan-Siberia Railway’s construction, Turksib features awesome footage of the USSR’s
harsh landscapes and the people who lived there, including fur-hatted Turkic men mounted on camels. Turin’s pro-
pulsive shots of seemingly unmanned railcars transporting lumber and other materials necessary to keep building out
the railroad suggest the force of the people’s will behind the immense project. Turksib was a big influence on John
Grierson’s left-wing gpo Unit documentaries that distinguished 1930s British filmmaking.

EARTH (1930)
director Alexandr Dovzhenko

Ukrainian director Alexandr Dovzhenko’s mesmerizing drama of a rural village community’s

transition to collectivized farming. Their biggest obstacle is presented as being “kulaks,” whose
affluence depended on hoarding land granted to them under the tsars. Dovzhenko’s ability
to represent with equal seriousness and beauty farmers, horses, cattle, and newly harvested
vegetables would inspire the poetic cinema of directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parad-
janov. The celebrated “It’s here!” sequence is an ecstatic montage of hope as the poor villagers
welcome the delivery of their first tractor.

111
 17 Soviet Films

CHAPAYEV (1934)
directors Sergey & Georgi Vasilyev

A definitive film in the Socialist Realist style instituted by Stalin and his appointed head of the film industry, Boris
Shumyatsky. Stalin banned the Soviet montage experimentalism of Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov on
the grounds that it was aligned with decadent Western art movements. Instead, “people-centered,” “party-minded”
films were mandated that were almost invariably tales illustrating how to be a better communist. Chapayev, a huge
hit, was Stalin and Shumyatsky’s Exhibit A. A fictionalized celebration of Russian civil war hero Vasily Ivanovich
Chapayev, the film features stirring scenes of bravery in battle, such as the one introducing the title character
riding across open fields in a wagon adorned with jingling bells, urging his fleeing comrades to stand and fight.
Stalin particularly loved the scene when Chapayev uses assorted potatoes to explain complex military maneuvers.
The plot functions allegorically, with the barely literate Chapayev representing the revolutionary fervor
embodied in the Red Army as he’s taught to appreciate the sophisticated organizational leadership of his superior
officer, representing the Communist Party. Teamwork makes them great!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART I (1945) IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART II (1945)
director Sergei Eistenstein director Sergei Eistenstein

Stalin loved it, which was all that mattered. Stalin hated it, which was all that mattered.
He watched practically every film that came Unless you study up on it, you might be puzzled to
out in Russia and was one of those harsh critics who understand why Part I got the Stalin Prize but Part II
might send you to the gulag if he didn’t like your film. got Eisenstein a one-way ticket to early retirement.
Ivan the Terrible represents director Sergei Eisen- Maybe there’s a bit more paranoia and plotting and
stein’s attempt to preserve a film career that was assassination in it that could be seen as an uncomfort-
founded on radical montage experiments through able allegory for life under Stalin. For example, there’s
this new, lethal era when those experiments were an astonishing color sequence late in this black-and-
strictly forbidden. He cannily chose to film a histor- white film, a wild and sinister party where murder
ical biography of a figure Stalin identified with — the plots collide, shot all in red, gold, black, and green.
“terrible” tsar (“terrible” meaning scarily awesome) The sickening blacks and greens take over the image
who sought to unify Russia and repel foreign invaders as Ivan saves himself from imminent assassination by
with extreme prejudice. tricking the most vulnerable dumb bunny in the court
But while Stalin was admiring Ivan’s ruthless into putting on the tsar’s robe and crown and walking
machinations in acquiring and holding power in the into the dark cathedral alone, where he’s promptly
cutthroat imperial court, Eisenstein snuck past him mistaken for Ivan and stabbed to death.
a ton of stylized formalism that looked nothing like But apparently what really ticked Stalin off about
Socialist Realism’s approved techniques. As long as Part II was the flashback structure, showing pre-
he stuck to the “no montage” rule, Eisenstein was terrible Ivan as an androgynously beautiful boy cow-
allowed every baroque flourish and bizarre operatic ering in shadowy corners of the imperial court. All that
artifice imaginable, such as fantastically coiffed, cos- tender young vulnerability, seared in terror, is shown
tumed, and bejeweled actors, lit by ostentatiously by Eisenstein to be at the root of Ivan’s adult ruthless-
fake painted-on rays of sun or plunged into expres- ness, and you could see how Stalin would say that kind
sionistic shadow, holding mad poses as if imitating of psychologizing is a bunch of bourgeois bullshit.
hawks, bears, and other beasts of prey.

112 THE FIRST RED CENTURY

 RED CHANNELS

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957)

director Mikhail Kalatozov

During the “thaw” period following Stalin’s death,

a “New Humanism” manifested itself in film. Films
about World War II now focused on the plight of BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959)
young people caught up in devastating events, and director Grigoriy Chukhray
sympathized with their lack of traditionally daunt-
less Socialist Realist heroism. Young filmmakers like
Mikhail Kalatozov were allowed to draw on Western The loveliest mother in the world waits on a dirt road
trends like widescreen filmmaking, and Kalatozov for the return of her young soldier son coming home on
responded with an internationally heralded work of leave. It takes him so long to get there on foot that he
genius, dynamizing that daunting long rectangular only has time to embrace her once before he must turn
frame that German director Fritz Lang condemned around and start the long walk back to the front, where
as good only for filming “snakes and funerals.” we already know he’ll be killed. Another “New Humanist”
Tatiana Samoilova as Veronika set a new standard film of the post-Stalin thaw, Ballad of a Soldier features
for psychological realism in Soviet cinema with her some amazing battle cinematography including a rotating
complex and compelling portrayal of a young woman camera shot to convey the world-turned-upside-down
braving the loss of her boyfriend and her parents in terror felt by our young soldier as he’s relentlessly pur-
the appalling violence of World War II. sued across the war-torn landscape by a Nazi tank.

IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962)

director Andrei Tarkovsky

The bitter and the beautiful combined is a hallmark of Soviet cinema, and this film is among the greatest examples.
It deals with a scout spying on the Nazis for the Soviet army, whose traumatic experience of the war, and obsession
with avenging the deaths of his mother and sister, have made him a freakishly hard-bitten old veteran in a boy’s body.
Ivan’s childhood before the war haunts him, and us, in his dreams. All the film’s scenes are noteworthy, but two
absolute stunners include the use of foreboding, irradiated-looking negative imagery during Ivan’s dream of his
apple-picking outing with his little sister, and the mesmerizing seduction scene in a birch-tree forest.

113
 17 Soviet Films

SOY CUBA (1964)

director Mikhail Kalatozov

A hot contender for the international Greatest Cinematography of All Time Award, this Russian-Cuban copro-
duction mourns the Western exploitation of this “most beautiful island in the world” from its ill-fated discovery by
Christopher Columbus through its rescue via the Cuban Revolution, whereupon the film turns triumphant. Each
major segment is shot in a different gorgeous style, as Kalatozov shows off his own stellar technique in celebrating
the wonders of Cuba and its people. Pay special attention to the beginning of the painful sequence showing Cuba
at the mercy of the sex tourism industry. It features a jaw-droppingly complicated, unedited tracking shot as the
camera threads through bikini-clad Cuban women being judged in a beauty contest by cocktail-swilling American
and European cavorters on a Havana hotel rooftop, then glides down the side of the building onto a lower-level
terrace where it plunges into the pool to swim with the jetsetters.
 RED CHANNELS

SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1965)

director Sergei Paradjanov

Born in Georgia of Armenian descent, and aesthetically inspired by

Tarkovsky’s film Ivan’s Childhood (1962), director Sergei Paradjanov
departed from what he considered to be the worthless films he’d made up
to that point and plunged into the folkloric mists of Ukraine’s long ago
Carpathian Mountains culture. Paradjanov’s spell-casting tale is of Ivan, a
Carpathian man of constant sorrow, whose loss of his great love Marichka
turns the richly colored world of the film to black-and-white. After much
suffering, Ivan’s magical reunion with Marichka, who drowned, takes
place in the autumn forest where he finds her again in the dark reflection
of the water. Her long white reaching hands uncannily take on the look
of surrounding tree branches as they extend toward him. The scene cul-
minates not in an embrace but in Ivan’s haunting off-screen scream, and
a series of images of red branches frozen into twisted sculptures.
Paradjanov paid a big price for his departure from the principles of
Socialist Realism with films such as Shadows and the even more avant-
garde Color of Pomegranates. His creative defiance plus his bisexuality
put him in the crosshairs of the kgb, and he was packed off to a Siberian
labor camp for four years. “The bugs covered you instantly,” he recalled
calmly in interviews, and “never left you until you died or were freed.”
His international fame was instrumental in getting him an early release,
but his ability to make films was in constant peril thereafter. STALKER (1979)
director Andrei Tarkovsky

Stalker is an allegorical Kids, don’t try this at home, because only Andrei Tarkovsky is any good at
this kind of hypnotically slow, enigmatic, mind-blowing dystopian sci-fi.
journey through
(See: Solaris.) One of Tarkovsky’s last films before he defected to Europe,
a ruined postindustrial Stalker is an allegorical journey through a ruined postindustrial landscape
landscape into into “the Zone” where, rumor has it, human desire can be fulfilled at cer-
“the Zone” where, tain possible costs to one’s progeny. Filmed in murky blues and browns
by the notoriously color-phobic director who manages, as always, to
rumor has it,
allegorically suggest both political condemnation and cosmic significance.
human desire can
be fulfilled
at certain possible costs
to one’s progeny.

115
 17 Soviet Films

COME AND SEE (1985)

director Elem Klimov

As brilliant
Well, I’ll never see it again, but if you have a high tolerance for the hor-
as the film is, I never
rors of war captured convincingly onscreen, I can recommend this brutal
and harrowing film about two teenagers caught between armies trying wanted to leave
to survive the Nazi invasion. This takes the tentative “humanizing” of a theater so badly,
young people caught in the savagery of World War II much further into in hopes of avoiding
chaos and the abject struggle for survival. As brilliant as the film is, I never
what I knew was
wanted to leave a theater so badly, in hopes of avoiding what I knew was
coming — the scenes of Nazi rape, torture, and massacre of an entire vil- coming.
lage. The film’s highly immersive bombing scenes, which create the effect
of traumatic near-deafness in the audience, inspired aspects of the great
D-Day sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Director Elem Klimov, a friend of Mikhail Gorbachev’s, played an
active role in the aspects of perestroika (restructuring) that applied to the
film industry. As head of the Soviet filmmakers union, Klimov supervised
the release of formerly banned films and the removal of censorship rules
in preparation for a planned new era of glasnost (openness) in the Soviet
Union. It never came to be.
WE’RE NOT MAD,
WE’RE JUST DISAPPOINTED.
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS BY SETH ACKERMAN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
BALDUR HELGASON

Our
Favorite
Hours after Harry Truman fired
Dupe
him from the cabinet in September
1946, Henry Wallace issued a
statement. He’d been dismissed over
a speech implicitly criticizing the
president’s hardening anti-Soviet
stance. Now, as US and Soviet Henry Wallace was a brilliant
negotiators wrangled over occupied
progressive with an open mind.
Germany’s future, he hinted at
his own plans: “I, for my part, firmly That’s where the trouble began.
believe there is nothing more
important that I can do than work in
the cause of peace.”

So began a two-year political

odyssey so disastrous, it came to be
rued by almost everyone concerned:
Wallace himself; his followers in the
As a new group of advisers surrounded Straight recalled the meeting
short-lived Progressive Party;
Wallace, his old friends grew years later:
and, not least, the organization that
concerned. After finishing his speaking
played the central role in the whole We were like passengers on
tour in early 1947, he met with
affair — the Communist Party USA. passing ships, Henry heading for
Michael Straight, the New Republic
the land of illusions from which
After leaving the cabinet, Wallace publisher who’d hired him the
I had come. I knew from my own
embarked on a nationwide speaking previous year. Unbeknownst to
experience that collaboration
tour and took up a post as the Wallace, Straight himself had been a
with the Communist Party would
figurehead editor of the New Republic, dedicated Communist in the
destroy Wallace, but I could
then the country’s leading organ thirties — a kgb spy, in fact — but
not share my experience with him.
of Popular Front liberalism. As his had quietly left the party.
presidential ambitions became He looked on collaboration with
The Communists, Straight warned,
clear, the Communists’ attitude toward the Communists, in or out of
had organized all of Wallace’s
him changed. The Daily Worker Russia, as an idea. He had traveled
biggest speaking events. “Can you
had initially denounced the speech he’d on a broad highway from Iowa
prove that?” Wallace asked. “No,
been fired for, labeling it a sinister to Washington, and by daylight. He
I can’t,” Straight replied. “Then you
call for “imperialist intervention.” Now, knew nothing of the back alleys
shouldn’t say it,” Wallace said.
the paper began to praise him. of the political world.

118
GIRONDINS
 Our Favorite Dupe

corn, and in 1926 he and a group of “Century of the Common Man” speech
Henry Agard Wallace was born
partners founded a company to in 1942, a riposte to Henry Luce’s
in 1888 to a family of Iowa notables,
mass produce the seeds. The result was “American Century” screed, was trans-
publishers of Wallace’s Farmer,
Pioneer Hi-Bred, a corporate titan lated into twenty languages,
perhaps the country’s leading farm
acquired by DuPont decades later for with millions of copies distributed
paper. Theirs was a world of
billions of dollars. It was part of overseas. A soaring internationalist
wholesome gentility, of sing-alongs
the mid-century scientific revolu- manifesto, it envisioned a postwar
and picnics and church suppers,
tion in agriculture that multiplied world in which New Deal principles
punctuated by broad-minded ser-
worldwide crop yields. would be stamped into the fabric of
mons in the social gospel tradition.
American foreign policy. Colonial
Wallace grew up a Presbyterian, a Mid- A self-taught economist and statisti-
empires would be dismantled, poor
western Republican, and a teetotaler. cian, his 1920 book Agricultural
countries would be helped to
Prices — packed with charts and tables
Until well into adulthood, Wallace industrialize, modern medical care and
presenting painstakingly gathered
had only two absorbing interests. schooling would spread to every
data — was a landmark in empirical
One was plants. The other was what corner of the globe.
economics. One statistician called
we would now call “spirituality.”
it the first true econometric study “A quart of milk for every Hottentot,”
“All manner of esoteric phenomena
published in the United States. sneered the head of the National
fascinated him,” a biographer
Wallace had no truck with elaborate Association of Manufacturers in an
writes: “seances, symbols, secret
abstract theories, whether in oft-quoted racist jibe. Many,
societies, rituals, astrology,
economics or any other field. An including Roosevelt, came to believe
Native American religion, Oriental
admirer of Thorstein Veblen the phrase had actually appeared
philosophy.” In the early 1930s,
and his institutionalist school of in Wallace’s speech.
Charles Roos, a self-styled Chippewa
economics, Wallace believed
shaman of Finnish extraction,
in hard facts; he was averse to dogma.
persuaded Wallace that the two of
His was a marriage of the mystic and
them had been Seneca warriors
teh tinkerer’s minds.
in their past lives. Wallace trekked
to upstate New York to confirm As Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agriculture By war’s end, the American political
the fact. In 1932, Wallace consulted secretary, Wallace gathered scene was, from today’s perspective,
an astrologist named L. Edward around him a brain trust of idealists an alien landscape. Thanks to
Johndro to help him analyze weather and radicals, many of them Roosevelt’s wartime rhetoric, a “liberal”
statistics. Standard methods Communists, determined to stem the was now understood to be a
were inadequate, he felt, since they flood of human suffering in the champion of “economic planning”
“assume that all terrestrial countryside. Their ambitions some- and “industrial democracy,”
conditions can be accounted for by times outran political reality and an “antifascist” and “anti-imperialist,”
terrestrial causes.” the New Deal revolution in farm policy contemptuous of red-baiting
proved curiously conservative in and eager for the Grand Alliance to
“Very few would have said he was
its long-run effects. Yet seldom has continue. In November 1945,
a screwball,” a loyal aide to Wallace
so much practical idealism been even Dean Acheson, then the number-
once remarked, “but they would
concentrated within a single govern- two man in the State Department,
have said he was queer.”
ment department. Even among spoke at a rally of the National Council
But Wallace was also a genuinely Wallace’s enemies, few questioned his on American-Soviet Friendship
brilliant man. An outstanding intelligence, integrity, or competence. in Madison Square Garden after
amateur plant geneticist, he imme- an address from Paul Robeson
Wallace’s status as a liberal icon
diately grasped the significance hailing Stalin.
crystallized with the coming
of a new, experimental “double-cross”
of war and his elevation to the vice Wallace, however, had been ousted
method for producing hybrid
presidency. His so-called as Roosevelt’s 1944 vice-presidential

120
 GIRONDINS

Wallace’s so-called “Century of the Common

Man” speech envisioned a postwar world in
which New Deal principles would be stamped
into the fabric of American foreign policy.

nominee, in a conservative coup that As historian Thomas W. Devine has damage. Rather than present a realistic
installed Harry Truman in his place. shown in his devastating account of critique of Truman’s Cold War
Truman, who assumed the presidency the Wallace crusade, by the time the policies, Wallace spent the campaign
after FDR’s April 1945 death, campaign was underway practically making ludicrous factual claims
began replacing aging or retiring New every knowledgeable observer could and increasingly nonsensical argu-
Dealers with a new crowd: back- see it was being run by the Commu- ments, a mélange of party
slapping, small-town courthouse-ring nist Party — everyone, that is, propaganda and Sunday-school
types with little loyalty to liberalism. except Wallace. platitudes. Was Moscow interfering
Like many staunch New Dealers, in East European politics? “It is
Calvin “Beanie” Baldwin, his campaign
Wallace was especially alarmed by impossible to know what the truth is
manager and top aide, kept his
Truman’s emerging anti-Soviet line. from the American press.” What
own affiliation secret, but in left-wing
about the Communist coup that had
The Communist Party was changing, circles it had long been widely
just installed a Stalinist regime in
too. Gone was its patriotic wartime assumed. The head of research for
Czechoslovakia? There were
face, festooned with American flags Wallace’s new Progressive Party
no grounds to say “that the present
and encomiums to Abraham was also a secret Communist, and
political situation in Czechoslovakia
Lincoln. Gone, too, was its desire for wrote most of the candidate’s stump
is less democratic than the situation
meaningful alliances on the Left. speeches. In February 1948,
in France,” he insisted. The US,
Responding to signals from Moscow, Wallace presented his alternative to
he charged, had “blocked” plans by
the cpusa effected a postwar the Marshall Plan at a hearing of
Britain’s Labour government to
U-turn, dumping Earl Browder, its the House foreign affairs committee;
nationalize its steel industry — a
Popular Front leader, in favor of his testimony was written for him
claim that prompted left-wing
William Z. Foster, an increasingly by Victor Perlo and David Ramsey,
British mp Jennie Lee, a one-time
sectarian veteran Communist. both secretly Communists. Wallace’s
Wallace admirer, to write in
Foreseeing an imminent revival of convention acceptance speech was
exasperation, “Where does Wallace
fascism and imperialist war, penned by Hannah Dorner, another
get that sort of story?” (A
the party now insisted on playing a concealed Communist.
recent article in the Daily Worker,
“leading role” in any “antimonopoly
Wallace dismissed the fears of friends as it turned out).
coalition” of the Left. The change of
who tried to point out these facts.
line had an element of farce: most Wallace’s critique was grounded in
Such concerns, he thought, could
historians believe the Party misinter- his conviction that no real clash
only lead to red-baiting.
preted Moscow’s signals, which of interests divided the US from the
were mainly aimed at European But it was the content of what he said USSR. Rising tensions were
Communists. on the stump that did the most simply due to the greed and ill will of

121
 Our Favorite Dupe

“He sees only what he yearns to see,”

bemoaned Harold Laski, a leading British
socialist and former Wallace supporter.
“And he has bitter anger for those who cannot
see beyond reality to the visions by which
he is haunted.”

“monopolists” and “warmongers” Dealer Rex Tugwell, began drifting is a skeptical, empirical cast of
in Washington. A lasting peace could away. State party organizations expe- mind. Radicals, in contrast, shackle
be achieved if only “President rienced mass resignations. When themselves to rigid theories. By
Truman would take all those things Wallace first decided to run, his aim that definition, Wallace was no radical.
which he believes we want from had been to win three million votes. “A central characteristic of Henry
Russia, and if Stalin would take all He ended up with less than half that A. Wallace’s personality,” writes a
those things which he believes Russia number, and finished in fourth place. biographer, “was independence
wants from us, and at a meeting of of mind. He was open to any idea,
In the long run, the Wallace campaign
the two heads of government, each item however silly sounding, until he
had three outcomes. It catastro-
was canceled against each other.” could test its validity. He was prepared
phically isolated the Communist
to reject any idea, no matter
“He sees only what he yearns to see,” Party, sundering its ties to the labor
how broadly accepted, that would not
bemoaned Harold Laski, a leading movement and heightening its
stand the weight of inquiry.”
British socialist and former Wallace vulnerability to the coming tsunami
supporter. “And he has bitter of Cold War repression. Partly for But in the end, his open-mindedness
anger for those who cannot see beyond that reason, it accelerated American did him no favors. In 1892, when
reality to the visions by which he liberalism’s drift to the right, from Wallace was still the four-year-old
is haunted.” an adventurous social-democratic refor- child of an antimonopoly Iowa
mism to a sterile “vital center” newspaperman, Friedrich Engels
By the time Wallace accepted the
liberalism. Finally, it cemented the wrote acidly to a friend about the
Progressive Party’s nomination that
Democratic Party loyalties of American reform movements of the
summer, former supporters
key groups in the American working day. “The tenacity of the Yankees,”
were abandoning him in droves. The
class — Catholics, trade unionists, he argued, “is a result of their theore-
convention had put the Commu-
and above all, blacks, who flocked to tical backwardness and their
nists’ cynical maneuvering — and the
Truman’s civil rights program. Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory.
non-Communist delegates’
They are punished for this by a
blinkered unwillingness to challenge
superstitious belief in every philoso-
it — on glaring display. Ordi-
phical and economic absurdity, by
nary voters who’d petitioned to place
religious sectarianism, and by idiotic
Wallace on the ballot were
economic experiments.”
now telling party door-knockers they
wouldn’t vote for him in the fall. Why did Wallace do it? According to Henry A. Wallace was nothing if not
Liberal luminaries, like the famed New that era’s vital-center orthodoxy, open-minded. His mind was so open
the essence of the liberal worldview his brains fell out.  

122
 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR BY RONAN BURTENSHAW

Fascism’s Face-Lift

Anti-communist campaigns
in Eastern Europe aren’t about building
a more democratic society — they’re
about rehabilitating the far right.

Last year, antifascists in Poland song — but it wasn’t exactly an decided to store them all in a single
commemorated the country’s original. Its tune had been written place. Budapest’s Memento Park
international brigades on the by Józef Pławiński and its lyrics by was born and the architect who won
eightieth anniversary of the Spanish Wacław Święcicki, both Polish the competition to design it, Ákos
Civil War. Their gathering came socialist musicians. Their “Warsza- Eleőd, was clear about its intentions.
under attack and a smoke grenade wianka” had been the anthem of the “This park,” he said, “is about
was thrown through the door. 1905 Polish Revolution, when dictatorship.”
Inscribed on the projectile was the worker militias sought to overthrow
But, for a park about dictatorship,
phrase “ha pasado,” “we have the Russian imperial government.
it has an interesting lineup. Alongside
passed,” Franco’s retort to Dolores
Today, progressive history is under monuments to politicians from
Ibárruri’s “no pasarán” on the day
attack not only in Poland but across the Communist period — and Marx,
the Republic fell.
Eastern Europe. From its beginnings Engels, and Lenin — stand those
Another iconic turn of phrase “decommunization” took aim not left-wingers from generations earlier.
associated with the civil war owed only at the Soviet era but at earlier There are commemorations for
much to Poland’s influence. “A socialist and republican history too. figures from the short-lived 1919
las Barricadas,” the anthem of the In the 1990s, as the Hungarian Hungarian Soviet Republic,
anarcho-syndicalist cnt federation, government began the wholesale including Tibor Szamuely and Jenő
became the war’s most famous removal of Communist statues, it Landler, as well as Ede Chlepkó

123 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 and Béla Kun, who were executed in Battalion, founded by members of But Bandera is far from the only
Stalin’s purges. Róbert Kreutz the neo-Nazi Social-National figure to undergo such a rebranding.
and Endre Ságvári, killed by the Nazis Assembly, was officially upgraded to In October 2017 the Ukrainian
and Hungary’s fascist government a Special Operations Regiment city of Vinnitsa unveiled a statue to
during World War II also have statues. of the Ukrainian Army. Its members Symon Petliura, who led an anti-
They are joined by Miklós Stein- celebrated with photos showing their communist uprising against the Bolshe-
metz and I.A. Ostapenko, Red Army ss tattoos, symbols which the govern- vik Revolution. Under his reign,
captains who died liberating ment was supposed to have banned. fifty thousand Jews were killed in
Budapest from German occupation. pogroms in the Ukrainian People’s
And, of course, there’s a memorial Republic. This isn’t a record that
to the Hungarian international bri- the city is hiding from — local autho-
gade to Spain. rities ultimately decided to place
his statue in the city’s historic Jewish
Unfortunately, it is no surprise that
quarter, a short walk from one of
initiatives which purport to
the few remaining synagogues.
challenge dictatorship are instead The Lithuanian
demonizing those who struggled government, Elsewhere, too, decommunization
against fascism. Decommunization has been a cloak for attacks on
has become a tool for resurgent
keen to construct Eastern Europe’s Jews. The Lithu-
nationalist movements to rehabilitate a nationalist anian government, keen to construct
their own record — one which narrative a nationalist narrative which
often involved Nazi collaboration. which justifies justifies collaboration with the Nazis,
has accused its Jewish partisans
In 2015, riding a wave of nationalist collaboration of war crimes. A monument to their
sentiment in the wake of conflict with the Nazis, struggle, once placed prominently
in the country’s east, Ukraine began an
intensive process of decommuni-
has accused in the country’s capital, has been

zation. Since then thousands of streets its Jewish hidden away in another “dictatorship”
park. Today its plaque notes
and hundreds of towns have been partisans of that the partisans who fought the
renamed, statues of Lenin have been war crimes. Nazis — in a country where almost two
torn down in every corner of the
hundred thousand died in the
country, and political parties which
Holocaust — were “mostly Jewish.”
are deemed too sympathetic to the
Lithuanians, it says, “didn’t support
Communist past have been banned —
the Communists.”
including the Communist Party
of Ukraine, which regularly received The institutionalization of fascism The Soviet Union’s record in Eastern
millions of votes. isn’t confined to the military. Europe was bleak — its population
The country’s far right is increasingly transfers, political repression, and
The legislation that Ukraine’s
prominent in official history as well, forced collectivizations contribute to
Parliament voted on wasn’t exclusive
part of a state-sponsored revisionist much lingering resentment. But
to Communism. Its text promised
project designed to venerate the drive to decommunize has little to
to combat celebration of both “Commu-
Ukrainian nationalism. The most high- do with building a more democratic
nist and National-Socialist totali-
profile figure to be rehabilitated society. It is, at its heart, a project
tarian regimes.” But in 2015, as these
is Stepan Bandera, the nationalist designed to rewrite history, forgiving
measures passed, Ukraine’s
leader who collaborated with the fascism and condemning those
government was in fact institution-
Nazis during the Second World War who fought it. 
alizing fascist militias into its
and whose Ukrainian Insurgent
armed forces. That summer the Azov
Army participated in the Holocaust.

124 THE FIRST RED CENTURY

 THE TUMBREL BY HUBERT ADJEI-KONTOH
VERSAILLES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
BALDUR HELGASON

Yacht Party
Men

Not everyone hated

shock therapy.
Vladimir Olegovich Potanin
Potanin’s path to wealth was straightforward. After his
studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Rela-
tions, he worked as a senior clerk for the Foreign Trade
Vagit Alekperov
Ministry. The title was more grandiose than the position:
Born in the capital city of Baku, Azerbaijan, Alekperov he sold fertilizer. In this role, he traveled to the Kola Pen-
came from modest origins — his father worked in the oil insula in the far reaches of Russia where he discovered an
fields and he briefly did the same. He was educated at the incredible amount of recently unearthed metal that would
Azerbaijan Oil and Chemistry Institute. After stints in the later make him his fortune.
Caspian Sea and Siberia, he became the Soviet Union’s In the early nineties, he founded the United Export-Im-
deputy energy minister in 1989. port Bank. By 1994, the Russian government was increasingly
After dissolution, he used his position to his advantage. desperate and lacking in the necessary funds to pay wages
Alekperov ended up with a 10 percent stake in the company and pensions. They accepted Potanin’s offer of a loan and
Lukoil. Formerly known as Langepas-Uray-Kogalymneft, used the state’s resources as collateral. Nornickel controlled
Lukoil was originally a subsidiary of the Ministry of Fuel one of those resources: the nickel deposits of the Norilsk-
and Energy made up of three companies based in three Talnakh. By 1995, Potanin controlled 38 percent of Nor-
Siberian towns. As a result of their merger, Lukoil was nickel, which is today one of the world’s largest producers
reorganized into a firm involved in discovery, extraction, of nickel and palladium.
refinery, and sales.
Industry  Mining
Industry  Fossil Fuels Net Worth  $14.3 billion
Net Worth  $11.3 billion

№ 27  /  FALL 2017

 Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky
Using liberalizing reforms in the 1980s and his connec-
tions to the party — he was deputy chief of the Communist
Youth at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology —
Khodorkovsky gained opportunities to develop small
businesses. Using state money, he funded projects such as
state youth science centers and then recouped the profits
they generated. His connections allowed him to elude
punishment.
Khodorkovsky flirted with other industries, including
counterfeit cognac and computers, but landed in banking.
His bank was instituted in 1988 with capital stolen from state
youth science centers. Khodorkovsky held Soviet authorities
at bay long enough to cheaply acquire state enterprises after
dissolution through a “loans for shares” program.
This program’s putative purpose was to streamline
privatization through the auctioning off of the state’s com-
modities with money lent by banks. Oligarchs who owned
banks such as Khodorkovsky were able to purchase state-
owned enterprises for pennies on the dollar — he got Yukos,
an oil company worth $5 billion, for $310 million.

Industry  Fossil Fuels

Net Worth  $500 million

Rem Ivanovich Vyakhirev

Rem Ivanovich Vyakhirev was named after “revolution,”
Yury Luzhkov “Engels,” and “Marx.” He didn’t live up to the billing. Vyakh-
irev ascended the ladder of power the usual way. Before the
Luzhkov was integral to the shift from communism to
dissolution of the USSR, he held several positions in the
capitalism. His early years were spent in the Moscow
gas industry. In the 1970s, he worked as a director for the
city government. An early believer in free enterprise, he
regional state gas company Orenburgneft. At the time of
attempted to promote the idea of self-financing. In 1980,
his departure, he held the title of chief engineer.
Luzhkov supported the retention of profits within factories
By the 1980s, he had been promoted to deputy minister
and the sale of research results at Khimavtomatika (Chem-
of the gas Iidustry of the USSR. When it was privatized, he
ical Automatics Design Bureau).
became chairman of the new public-private corporation
He pushed through cooperatives during his tenure at
Gazprom. Vyakhirev used Gazprom’s money to aid the
the Moscow executive committee. After becoming Mos-
debt-ridden Russian state. This brought him influence
cow’s mayor in 1992, Luzhkov used his power to award
and assets, but in 2001 Putin dismissed him from his posi-
lucrative government contracts to his friends before being
tion. Retreating to private life, Vyakhirev died in 2013 of
fired from his post by President Dmitry Medvedev.
natural causes.

Industry  Politics Industry  Fossil Fuels

Net Worth  $1 billion (2013) Net Worth  $1.5 billion (2013)

126 THE FIRST RED CENTURY

 VERSAILLES

Vladimir Viktorovich Vinogradov
A party member since childhood — he was a Communist
Youth leader — Vinogradov studied at Plekhanov Russian
Academy of Economics. After his studies, Vinogradov worked
as head economist at Promstroibank.
In 1988, he went on to make his fortune through the
creation of one of Russia’s first nonpublic and strictly com-
mercial banks: Inkombank. The bank falsified its assets, but
Vinogradov managed to conceal this by suing employees
who reported suspicious balance sheets. Inkombank lost its
license in the 1998 crisis when it was revealed that the bank
would be unable to repay its debts. He died of a stroke in 2008.

Industry  Banking
Net Worth  $25 million (2005) Boris Berezovsky
Though he spent sixteen years studying optimization
and control theory, Berezovsky emerged from the USSR
Vladimir Yevtushenkov
Academy of Sciences with a different skill — political
An engineer by trade, Yevtushenkov worked at Karacharovo maneuvering.
Plastics Works and Polymerbyt Scientific and Production Berezovsky made his wealth through a series of scams.
Association during the 1980s. From 1987 to 1992, Yev- His most infamous involved the use of his connections to
tushenkov headed the Moscow Committee on Science secure a consignment of 35,000 cars from the government.
and Technology. A year later, his connection to the city’s Due to hyperinflation, the ruble was devalued. Therefore,
mayor Yury Luzhkov allowed him to transition the depart- when Berezovsky paid the government back for the cars,
ment to a company, which became Sistema. Sistema was he paid at a much lower rate.
provided with money from the Moscow government and This success led Berezovsky to pursue greater grifts.
Yevtushenkov was able to exert his influence on the city Along with Alexander Voloshin he started a venture fund,
administration. the All-Russian Automobile Alliance (avva), in 1993 to
Yevtushenkov’s bank held the city’s funds, and the city build a factory to make a so-called “people’s car.” The cer-
loaned money to his construction and electronics compa- tificates he sold were supposed to be exchanged for shares
nies. He held a seat on the city council and was also able to in the factory, but they were basically impossible to trade
acquire a monopoly on Moscow’s telephone lines. By 1996, in. The hustle funded Berezovsky’s purchase of the newly
Sistema’s assets were valued at $1 billion. Yevtushenkov — privatized Avtovaz factory. By 2000, avva owned 30 per-
despite a 2014 money laundering charge that led to his house cent of Avtovaz.
arrest — is still thriving along with Sistema. Berezovsky died in 2013 under suspicious circum-
stances.

Industry  Telecommunications Industry  Auto

Net Worth  $3.3 billion Net Worth  $3 billion

№ 27  /  FALL 2017

 SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME

Alexander Pavlovich Smolensky

Smolensky’s path to oligarchy was a fitful one. He grew up
in poverty and felt limited in his upward mobility as a result
of his Jewish heritage. Through his own self-industry, he
managed to make money on the black market. His product:
bibles. He was arrested for stealing ink and subsequently
thrust into construction work for two years as punishment.
Smolensky continued in construction after his sentence.
When the Law of Cooperatives passed in 1988, Smolensky
used his experience to create a cooperative that collected
scrap and built houses. Afterwards, Smolensky realized
there was no restriction on what business cooperatives could
engage in. This led him to found Stolichny Bank in 1989.
The decimation of the Soviet Union provided an opening
for Smolensky. Due to political turmoil and confusion, the
ruble was highly unstable. Therefore, Smolensky’s bank
could “bet” on the vagaries of the ruble-dollar exchange
market. This risky currency speculation business crashing
down in the 1998 financial crisis. When asked what he
owed Stolichny Bank’s investors, Smolensky responded,
“Dead donkey ears.”

Industry  Banking
Net Worth  $230 million (2003)

128
Revolutionary and
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VIVEK CHIBBER OU R ROAD TO POWE R THE FIRST RED CENTURY № 2 7 / FAL L 2017
VIVEK CHIBBER OU R ROAD TO POWE R THE FIRST RED CENTURY № 2 7 / FAL L 2017

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY O

ne hundred years removed from the Rus- for starting a new cycle of organizing — revi- experience. We have to place the Bolshevik
sian Revolution, we’re in a moment unlike talizing left parties where possible, and experiment in the broader story of socialist
any in decades. starting new ones politics in the twentieth century — alongside
With both neolib- if they prove to be examples from Chile, Germany, and Sweden,
eralism and social immune to reform. among others.

LEFT SOCIALISTS PLENTY OF

democracy’s traditional
parties in disrepute,
WE’RE IN A MOMENT UNLIKE But rather than just
looking forward, this is
There are two broad legacies of the Rus-
sian Revolution — an organizational one and
new opportunities are ANY IN DECADES. IF WE also an occasion to look an institutional one. By organizational, I mean
finally emerging for the
radical left.
PLAY OUR CARDS RIGHT, back at the lessons of
the past. The Russian
issues pertaining to building vehicles for col-
lective action in capitalism — unions, parties,
WE COULD START A NEW

LESSONS. WILL WE HEED THEM?

Every crisis finds Revolution remains and the like. By institutional, I mean the basic
a resolution of some CYCLE OF ORGANIZING. the most ambitious structures that will comprise a post-capitalist
kind, and this one will experiment in socialist society — the political system, economic
too. Where we end up politics, and its suc- organization, the structure of rights. The orga-
depends in large mea- cesses and failures have nizational dimension pertains to how you build
sure on how the Left responds. If we play our to be part of any discussion of how to revi- power inside capitalism, and the institutional
cards right, the opening could be the occasion talize the Left. But it isn’t just the Russian refers to what you will build after capitalism.

1 ORGANIZATIONAL 2 INSTITUTIONAL
How should we understand a socialist done. However, given our experience, we don’t
really have a basis to reject our most accom-
How do
party’s internal structure, its relation plished model. we build
to its base, and its strategic vision? What we need to do is look back to the
party’s early years — prior to 1918, when
socialism?
everybody agrees that it was pretty open and
democratic — and study it closely. We need to
STRU C TU R E I
have a sharp understanding of how they main-

I
tained the dynamism that made it the most won’t dwell on the obvious point, which is take the form of some sort of market socialism.

T
he Left is of two attitudes when it comes A party model with strong and resilient dem- but they have had little success sustaining successful organization of its time — where that the lesson from October is in many ways There are many models on the Left of this kind
to Leninist party organization. One is to ocratic structures should have generated a movements, much less achieving real mate- criticizing the leadership was taken as a right, a negative one — we of economy, and they all
see the model as a disaster, or at least as more diverse set of experiences, not a uniform rial gains. Indeed, the cadre-based model has a basic part of what it meant to be a party have to reject whole- have different features.
something of a negative experience. The history of ossification. been so successful that every member. Were there institutional mechanisms sale the political model What’s important is
accusation is that Leninism has always and That being the case, it’s major mobilizational party of that created the culture of debate and account- generated by the Bol- THE POLITICAL STABILITY that whatever market
everywhere ended up in authoritarianism. easy to come to the conclu-
THE DEFENDERS OF the twentieth century repli- ability, beyond the usual ones of elections and sheviks, of a one-party
dictatorship and the abro-
OF THE STATE IS A REALITY socialism’s institutional
structure, the principles
Others have responded by saying, “Well that’s
true, but you are confusing Stalinism with
sion, as most progressives
do today, that the next left THE LENINIST PARTY
cated it to some extent, even
on the Right.
newsletters? Or was it simply dependent, in the
end, on a leadership committed to those values? gation of basic liberties. WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE. underlying its design are
Leninism.” In other words, it is really with has to reject the Leninist
ARE RIGHT THAT IN Given that history, it’s If there were institutional mechanisms It was a calamitous WHAT IS IN CRISIS RIGHT faithful to what socialists
the advent of Stalin that you see the shutting
down of debate.
party model. The problem
with that view is that no ITS EARLY HISTORY
hard to imagine a way for
the Left to organize itself
in place which ensured democracy then we
could just copy them, put them in place. But
mistake to denigrate lib-
eral rights as “bourgeois,”
NOW IS THE NEOLIBERAL seek — putting people
before profits. More
The defenders of the Leninist party are other model has come any- IT WAS REMARKABLY as a real force without some if it was a question of a contingent internal which many Marxists of MODEL OF CAPITALISM, elaborately, whatever
right that in its early history it was remark- where as close to being
OPEN AND DYNAMIC. variant of the structure the culture, it means it means that democratic the early twentieth cen- NOT CAPITALISM ITSELF. the model turns out to
ably open and dynamic. But at the same time, politically effective. All the early socialists hit upon — a practices have to depend on a kind of moral tury did, implying that be, it will differ from cap-
the fact is that its global experience since the putative alternatives coming mass cadre-based party with commitment — which will be harder to rep- those rights were illusory italism in that:
1930s veers much closer to its later, undem- out of the Left since the a centralized leadership and licate, because leaders tend to want to close or fraudulent in some
ocratic form. So while Lenin’s party was very 1960s — the multi-tendency organizations, internal coherence. Now, maybe that will turn down democracy, not uphold it. But that’s way. This rhetorical ploy made it far easier for The market will be constrained
democratic, the Leninist party has not been. the horizontalists, the anarchists and their out to not be true. Maybe we will come up with why it’s important to study the lesson and those rights to be extinguished by Stalin and so it isn’t the arbiter of
And we can’t lay the blame solely on Stalin, affinity groups, the movement of movements, organizational forms that are more open, more the actual practice to see where that democ- before him, by Lenin himself. Liberal rights people’s basic well-being
Zinoviev, or whoever your favorite villain is. etc. — have been able to mobilize for a time, diffuse, yet which also manage to get things racy came from. were all fought for and won by working-class
movements, not by liberal capitalists. Any left
worth its salt has to protect and deepen those Economic decision-makers will
BAS E II rights, not throw them aside. be democratically accountable
What is more challenging is the issue of

T
he second organizational issue is that of the those organizations to generate programs that reactive — showing up for a spell at a picket to feel like they’re involved in change, but economic planning. We have to start with the
party’s relationship to its base. Here the represented their base’s real interests, since line, spreading the word, trying to drum up the involvement is highly individualistic and observation that the expectation of a centrally Wealth inequalities will not
Russian Revolution teaches us something. the parties were in constant communication sympathy. But this means that it is entirely confined largely to acts of symbolic solidarity. planned economy simply replacing the market be allowed to translate
In Cold War historiography, the Bolshe- with them — since they fought alongside the dependent on other people’s organizing, since Since real organizing is typically off the table, has no empirical foundation. We can want plan- into political inequalities
viks are depicted as having taken power base every day, in the workplace and in the it is not in a position to initiate struggle itself. energy tends to be directed inward, toward the ning to work, but we have no evidence that it
through something like a coup. The idea is neighborhood. Second, it gave the party cadre Second, its confinement to these envi- culture and characteristics of the group itself. can. Every attempt to put it in place for more There will, of course, be other principles
that they really didn’t have a mass base, that enormous legitimacy at the mass level, again ronments means that for Anyone who comes to the than short durations has met with failure. constraining the institutional design. But it
they were a small group of fanatically com- because they were there through thick and it to maintain its socialist United States from coun- The Russian experience is the most elaborate is hard to imagine any acceptable model of
mitted ideologues who imposed a dictatorship. thin. This legitimacy was the essential con- commitments, it has to tries with more radical example of that. And the fact of its failure has to socialism — market or planned — that eschews
But what recent historians have shown, in dition for promoting political struggle, since socialize its members political traditions can’t be acknowledged, not sidestepped. It won’t do any of the ones listed. An economy that contra-
dramatic detail, is that the main reason the when cadre encouraged their base to under- into sympathizing with IF THE LEFT IS GOING help but be struck by how to say, as many Marxists do, that “that wasn’t venes any one of these principles will probably
Bolsheviks were able to take and hold onto take any kind of action, they had the trust another class’s inter- BE THE ENGINE OF SOCIAL shrill, moralistic, but ulti- really socialism, so it doesn’t count.” It may not
have been socialism — and maybe real socialism
not qualify as socialist, at least not in the sense
that leftists have understood the concept.
power was that of all the parties in Russia, they
had the deepest, strongest, and firmest links
and support needed to succeed. Third, this
deep and organic connection also supported
ests and another class’s
oppression. This is very JUSTICE AGAIN, IT WILL mately apolitical debates
are within the Left here. with real democracy and real workers’ councils Being clear about what we want out
to the working class in the country’s major a vibrant internal culture — of democracy and different from traditional ONLY DO SO BY REPLANTING They tend to be about and real computers will make it of an economy allows us to
industrial centers. This is why it happened
that, with every shift in working-class political
accountability. A party immersed in everyday
working-class life and struggle not only could
left parties, which were
in working-class settings,
ITSELF WITHIN LABORING language, individual
identity, body language,
work. But the burden of proof is
entirely on those socialists who
understand what is at stake.
Planning is not desirable for
mood — particularly in Petrograd but also in sustain a democratic culture, but benefited were able to recruit from COMMUNITIES. consumption habits, and say it will. The argument can’t OUR STRATEGIC its own sake. It has always been
Moscow — in the months leading up to the
capture of power, it was the Bolsheviks who
from it. After all, a democratic culture was one
of the essential preconditions for gaining the
within that class, and
hence trained their mem-
the like. This is a natural
consequence of a “left”
be won with a wave of the hand
and dismissal of the past centu- PERSPECTIVE HAS embraced as a means to an
end, and the basic end social-
were the most keenly aware of those shifts, trust and support of the class. Having a deep bers to fight around their that’s in fact small groups ry’s experience. TO DOWNPLAY THE ists seek is a humane and just
able to understand the situation, and there-
fore able to generate slogans and programs
base didn’t guarantee success, but not having
one guaranteed failure and marginalization.
own material interests. Struggle was a neces-
sity for these earlier groups, because they were
of people in middle-class settings who have no
organic way of getting trained in class politics.
In other words, we have
to seriously consider the
CENTRALITY OF A social order. It might turn out
that full planning is not only
that captured the popular This is, of course, what fighting for their members’ own livelihoods It has been this way for so long that even the possibility that planning as REVOLUTIONARY unrealistic, but also unneces-
consciousness. most differentiates the early and their own well-being. idea of being based in the working class is seen envisioned by Marx might RUPTURE AND sary — maybe the fundamental
The Bolsheviks weren’t
alone in this outlook. It
HAVING A DEEP socialist parties from left
groups in the West today.
Today’s groups have to largely imagine
what those interests are, since they can’t learn
as either quaint or unnecessary.
If the Left is going to get anywhere, if it’s
not be a real option. Any dis-
cussion has to proceed with a NAVIGATE A MORE goals that socialist seek are
in fact achievable through a
was taken for granted by BASE DIDN’T The socialist left is only about them through direct engagement. They going to recapture the role it once had, as the close examination of the Soviet GRADUALIST market socialism after all. It
all socialist parties in the GUARANTEE SUCCESS, tenuously connected to mostly do so by reading about past events engine of social justice, it will only do so by experience, to try to assess if its
failure was due to the particular
APPROACH. might even be the case that
central planning is in tension
interwar years that the
foundation to their political BUT NOT HAVING working-class communi-
ties, if at all. By and large,
and then trying to find parallels to the cur-
rent scene. But this makes it hard to develop
replanting itself within laboring communities.
As of yet, nobody has shown any evidence that way planning was instituted, with some dimensions of social
strategy was to be anchored ONE GUARANTEED it is structurally separated strategy. It is almost impossible to be inno- changes of the scale we need — to put people or whether the lesson is that justice.
in the everyday life of their
base. And not just in the
FAILURE AND from workers, and oper-
ates mostly as small groups
vative, since most members are not directly
experiencing changes in the workplace, nor
over profits, to save the environment, to erad-
icate social oppressions — can be achieved
a modern industrial economy is just not
amenable to planning. It’s quite astonishing
One of the worst legacies of the Second
International era was to identify socialism
West. This was the sine qua MARGINALIZATION. in middle-class settings — are they in a position to try new initiatives. without taking on capital. And how do you do how little attention this issue gets on the Left with central planning. That equation should
non of socialism across the campuses, nonprofits, study This naturally leads to a kind of dogmatism, that if you don’t harness the capacity of the one today, compared to, say, the energy poured never again be made. Economic models are
world. And it worked. The groups, and so on. This has since the only thing they really know is what social force that can bring capital to heel — the into deconstructing Bollywood movies. not ends in themselves, but instruments for
great era of left expansion — from the early several important consequences. First of all, worked in the past. class that generates its profits? In any case, given the dubious record of achieving what we’re really after — a society
1900s to the early 1950s — happened because unlike the traditional labor left, it cannot The long-term result of being isolated It isn’t just the Russian case, but the entire central planning, we have to seriously consider in which people are able to treat one another
the parties were parties in, of, and for the actually organize and lead working-class from workers is that these organizations tradition of socialism stretching back a cen- that a post-capitalist economy might have to as ends, not as means.
laboring poor. struggles, because it is physically separated become a haven for a kind of lifestyle politics tury and a half that demonstrates this basic
The strategy was successful for several from that class. The overwhelming bulk of for morally committed students and profes- truth. A left isolated from labor is a showpiece,
reasons. First and most importantly, it enabled its political engagement is supportive and sionals. They provide members with a means not a political force.

STRATE GY III
3 LOOKING FORWARD
O
n the question of strategy, the October and the ruling class’s internal cohesiveness workplace and create rings of power in civil against tooth and nail by ruling elites.
Revolution is perhaps less instructive. The give the social order a stability that is orders society, and you use this social power to push The most important reason to study the
Bolshevik seizure of power was not a coup, of magnitude greater than it had in 1917. What through policy reforms by participating in history of social democracy, however, is to

W
but it did embody a violent and sudden that means is, while we can allow for and per- electoral politics. The reforms should have understand its limitations. This is why it can’t
overthrow of a regime, in a context of state haps hope for the emergence of revolutionary the dual effect of making future organizing be dismissed as “merely” reformist. If you e know from the last century of socialist dimension seems to be opening up faster than
breakdown and military disintegration. One conditions where state breakdown is really on easier, and also constraining the power of don’t understand why they failed, you will efforts that the path to a more egalitarian the one at the base — the Left should jump
might describe this as a strategy of a ruptural the cards, we can’t build a political strategy capital to undermine them down the road. simply repeat their failure. It’s important order goes through a confrontation with in, capitalize on it, and then use its gains to
break with capitalism. around it as an expectation — we can’t take it There are many names for a strategy of this to appreciate that, whatever else happens, capital, not around it. And the only par- build the base. At the same time, we need to
Now there’s no doubt that the decades as the Left’s fundamental strategic perspec- kind — non-reformist reforms, revolutionary if people like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders ties that have ever deepen the discussion of
from the early twentieth century all the way tive. Today, the political stability of the state reforms. But whatever you call it, it entails a take power in the next few years, their political had any real success in what we’re fighting for.
to the Spanish Civil War is a reality that the Left has more gradual approach than the ones available agenda will broadly hew to the template laid this endeavor have been It is clear that a viable
mass-based cadre parties socialism will be a plural-
could be described as a
revolutionary period. It
to acknowledge. What is in
crisis right now is the neo-
to the Bolsheviks.
But that means that we
down by social democracy.
This is great in many with deep roots in the THE BIGGEST istic, multiparty order
was an era in which the
LIBERAL RIGHTS liberal model of capitalism, have to carefully study the
WE HAVE TO ways, but social democracy laboring classes. The big-
gest challenge right now
CHALLENGE FOR THE with a significant rolling
back of the market.
possibility of rupture
could be seriously con- WERE FOUGHT FOR
not capitalism itself.
If this is so, then the
experience of parties and
countries that fell short of CONSIDER THE
was a spent force by the 1980s;
its parties degenerated into for the Left is to cut the LEFT IS TO CUT How far we push it back
templated and a strategy AND WON BY lessons that the Russian socialism but achieved real
POSSIBILITY THAT a managerial ethos; their umbilical cord tying it to THE UMBILICAL CORD depends in large measure
built around it. There were
WORKING-CLASS experience has to offer — organizational and political
PLANNING AS
reformist agenda was halted campuses and nonprofits
and return to immersing
TYING IT TO CAMPUSES on practical questions
about what is feasible
lots of socialists who advo-
cated for a more gradualist MOVEMENTS.
as a model of socialist
transition — are limited.
gains nonetheless. We need
to study social democracy, ENVISIONED BY
and then reversed; and they
have proven to be largely itself in the milieu of AND NONPROFITS. and what is not. But pre-
labor. Any viable left cisely because a ruptural
approach, but the revolu-
tionaries who criticized
ANY LEFT WORTH ITS Our strategic perspective
has to downplay the cen-
particularly its more ambi-
tious variants. First of all,
MARX MIGHT NOT uninterested in revitalizing
their own legacy. For this phe- has to also embrace elec- strategy isn’t on the table,
them weren’t living in a SALT HAS TO PROTECT trality of a revolutionary to understand how they BE A REAL OPTION. nomenon to be so widespread toral politics as the other we must start down the
dream world.
The Russian road, as it
AND DEEPEN THEM. rupture and navigate a
more gradualist approach.
combined electoral and
non-electoral dimensions
and so pervasive means that
it can’t have been because of
node of a two-pronged
strategy, in which power at the base is com-
road of social democracy
and then to market socialism. We have a lot
were, was for many parties For the foreseeable future, in an overall strategic perspective. This also individual failings and treachery. There was bined with a parliamentary wing, each feeding of experience about how to get to the former,
a viable one. But starting in left strategy has to revolve entails studying their legislation, the economic something structural behind it. And this means the other. At this moment, the parliamentary not so much about the latter.
the 1950s, openings for this kind of strategy around building a movement to pressure the models they implemented, how they used the in turn that the Left needs to understand the

THE TASK NOW IS TO FIND A WAY OF

narrowed. And today, it seems entirely hallu- state, gain power within it, change the insti- state, how they dealt with capital’s structural structural roots of the failure to at least have
cinatory to think about socialism through this tutional structure of capitalism, and erode power and its hostility to labor’s advance. a fighting chance at avoiding the same fate.
lens. This is indubitably true in the advanced the structural power of capital — rather than The gains made by the most advanced social Hence, while we need to understand how some-
capitalist world, but it also holds for much vaulting over it. This entails a combination of democracies, like the Nordic countries, are thing as ambitious as the Meidner plan came

CHALLENGING CAPITAL IN OUR TIME.

of the South. Today, the state has infinitely electoral and mobilizational politics. quite extraordinary, and their ritual denigra- about in Sweden in the late 1970s, we also need
greater legitimacy with the population than You build a party based in labor, you tion by the Left as merely “reformist” is an to see why it was defeated, and why the Social
European states did a century ago. Further, strengthen the organizational capacity instance of genuine stupidity. Those achieve- Democratic Party became increasingly conser-
its coercive power, its power of surveillance, of the class, you take on employers in the ments came through struggle and were fought vative in the following years.
WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOURSELF
AND GET HOME SAFE. REMEMBER TO TIP
YOUR MAGAZINE ON THE WAY OUT.
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT BRANKO MARCETIC

From Red Square

to Square One

What’s left of the Left in the post-socialist world?

131 № 27  /  FALL 2017

 Afghanistan Albania
The fall of the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic After the fall of Communism, two parties have dominated
Party of Afghanistan (pdpa) and the victory of the the Albanian political spectrum: on the right, the Demo-
Mujahadeen in 1992 splintered the Afghan left and cratic Party of Albania and on the left, the Socialist Party of
sent it underground. It survived in the form of groups Albania (ps). The ps has formed a government four times
like the left-nationalist Watan Party of Afghanistan since 1992, including in 2017, when it won 48% of the vote.
(a successor of the pdpa), the small, urban Left Radical While it previously tacked to the center, it has moved some-
of Afghanistan, and the Solidarity Party of Afghani- what left recently, introducing a progressive tax system.
stan, a left-wing, anti-imperialist party currently out The center-left Socialist Movement for Integration, which
of parliament but aligned with independent woman spun off from the ps in 2004, has dodged corruption scan-
senator Bulquis Roshan. dals to become the country’s largest third party.

Angola Armenia
Since the vicious Cold War–infused civil war between the Armenian politics is extremely fragmented, personality
ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola driven, and largely nonideological, but the Armenian Rev-
(mpla) and the National Union for the Total Independence olutionary Federation serves as a decidedly left-of-center
of Angola ended in 2002, the country has remained in the choice. It has pushed for a parliamentary form of govern-
hands of the corrupt, violently repressive mpla while ment since 1995 and calls on the state to provide a decent
maintaining the veneer of a multiparty system. Though standard of living for all Armenians through minimum
the disputed 2017 election saw longtime dictator José wage increases, universal health care, and more. It was
Eduardo dos Santos step down, the mpla retained the third largest party in 2007, winning 16 seats, and came
power. No left-wing parties threw their hats in the ring, fourth this past April, winning seven seats, far behind the 58
though the National Patriotic Alliance promised various won by the ruling (and ideologically opposed) Republican
generous social programs and was rewarded with a mere Party of Armenia.
0.51% of the vote.

132
 POPULAR FRONT

Azerbaijan Belarus
Over the 24 years it has ruled Azerbaijan, the Aliyev regime Left-wing opposition to the authoritarian Lukashenko
(first the father, now the son) has systematically crushed all regime has been somewhat dampened by events in Ukraine,
political opposition, from parties like the dissident Popular as well as government repression of anarchists, environ-
Front and the liberal, pan-Turkist Müsavat (Equality), to mentalists, unions, and opposition activists. A stronger
student movements in the late 2000s that protested cor- left could have capitalized on recent protests against the
ruption, repression, pollution, and forced resettlement. government’s so-called parasite tax.
The most popular opposition group today is Republican
Alternative, which supports the rule of law and free mar-
kets. Even it is facing suppression.

Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria

2011 was the center-left’s biggest electoral victory since The Bulgarian Socialist Party, successor to the country’s
the end of World War II: the Social Democratic Party of Soviet-era Communist Party, was powerful through the
Bosnia and Herzegovina (sdp) won almost 18% nation- 1990s, peaking at 43.5% of the vote, but it has suffered
ally. Massive defeats in 2014, when its support dropped to a remarkable decline in 1997, when it lost 67 seats. Since
6.65%, and 2016, when ethnic nationalist parties won 34 then it has taken turns at power with the center-right,
municipalities to the sdp’s eight, have consigned the left dodging corruption scandals and pursuing its own
parties to irrelevance. austerity agenda.

133
 From Red Square to Square One

Burkina Faso Cambodia

A popular uprising in 2014 ended the brutal, autocratic After losing the UN-sponsored 1993 election, the Cambo-
twenty-seven-year rule of Blaise Compaoré. The next dian People’s Party (cpp) — an outgrowth of Cambodia’s
year, longtime government critic Bénéwendé Sankara — former Communist Party that replaced Marxism-Leninism
a disciple, not a relation, of the country’s original Marxist with an embrace of market principles and membership in
revolutionary president, Thomas Sankara — ran on a the Centrist Democrat International — never lost another
promise to continue his idol’s program. His fourth-place election and has grown increasingly authoritarian. The
result was disappointing (and lower than the third and party has faced sustained pressure only from the Cambo-
second he placed in the last two elections), but his Union dian National Rescue Party (cnrp), a centrist reform party
for Rebirth / Sankarist Party won five seats and two cab- that’s facing severe repression. From July 2013 to July 2014,
inet positions. the country saw protests against election fraud, political
corruption, and poor working conditions.

Croatia Czech Republic

With Croatia’s Social Democratic Party dragged down The Czech Social Democratic Party (čssd), a center-left
by neoliberalism and empty sloganeering, the hunger party that was a dominant force since the end of Com-
for alternatives fostered some leftist activity, as seen in munism, suffered a monumental collapse in this year’s
the annual Subversive Festival and the Workers’ Front. elections, falling 13 points and becoming the lowest-polling
The latter, dubbed the “Croatian Syriza,” recently entered “large” party. The country’s largely unreconstructed Com-
into a coalition with three other left-of-center groups for munist Party still receives a steady percentage of the vote
the Zagreb local elections and won 7.64% of the vote, (a rarity in post-Communist Europe), governs in several
gaining four seats. regions, and slightly outpolled the čssd in 2017.

134
 POPULAR FRONT

East Germany Estonia

After German reunification — which felt more like annex- The Left has struggled in Estonia, where left-leaning parties
ation for many East Germans — the Party of Democratic have only ever been in power as junior partners of cen-
Socialism (pds) regularly won a quarter of the vote in the ter-right-dominated coalitions. Despite economic decline,
former DDR. The legal successor to the former ruling crushing austerity measures, and actions like the elimina-
Socialist Unity Party, it transitioned fully to demo- tion of the corporate tax, left-wing activism is barely visible.
cratic socialism. In 2007, the pds merged with the West
German-based Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social
Justice to form Die Linke. Die Linke today still commands
around 10% of the national vote, but it’s watching its
traditional strongholds in the East erode as its support
base ages and it faces challenges from the far-right Alter-
native for Germany.

Ethiopia Georgia
Since the overthrow of the self-described Marxist-Leninist Georgia’s post-Soviet politics have been defined by a com-
Derg dictatorship in 1991, Ethiopia has been ruled by the bination of nationalism and free-market economics that has
nominally leftist Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Dem- sent inequality soaring. 2012 saw the end of the eight-year
ocratic Front, which has gradually turned the country into authoritarian and corrupt reign of the United National
an authoritarian developmental state. Movement thanks to the six-party Georgian Dream coali-
tion. A billionaire political novice headed this formation,
promising greater social spending, including a public
health-insurance system. In 2016, it brought three law-
makers from the antiwar, pro-labor Social Democrats for
the Development of Georgia (sdd) into parliament. sdd
now makes up one-third of a smaller Georgian Dream
coalition, giving it greater influence.

135
 From Red Square to Square One

Grenada Hungary
The country’s New jewel Movement (njm) took power From 1998 to 2010, a semi-two-party system existed in
in a 1979 coup under the leadership of Maurice Bishop. Hungary. The Hungarian Socialist Party (mzsp) — a
The Marxist-Leninist People’s Revolutionary Government center-left party that renounced Marxism and embraced
instituted a series of reforms with Cuban and Soviet aid austerity in 1994 — had support from its coalition partner,
before bloody infighting led to Bishop’s murder. A 1983 the Alliance of Free Democrats (szdsz). But over the eight
US invasion saw the njm completely overthrown. After- years it was in power from 2002–2010, the mzsp lost 60%
wards, the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement contested of its voters and the szdsz was knocked out of parlia-
in democratic elections without much success. ment, allowing a proliferation of low-polling left and liberal
movements devoted to bringing down Viktor Orbán’s
right-wing government.

Kazakhstan Kosovo
Though nominally a democracy, Kazakhstan is in practice The Left has had tremendous success in Kosovo with
a one-party state dominated by authoritarian president Vetëvendosje (Self-Determination), a political movement
Nursultan Nazarbayev and his Nur Otan (Fatherland) party, and now parliamentary party. It won more seats (26% of the
in power since 2007. Left-of-center parties do exist, such vote) than any other left party this June. First emerging in
as the Social Democratic Auyl Party, but Kazakhstan’s 2004, Vetëvendosje has a unique message that resists both
personality-based politics and onerous rules (a 50,000- Western efforts to manage Kosovan affairs and the power
member requirement and a 7% parliamentary threshold) of former domestic warlords.
hamstring the development of real electoral contests. The
Communist People’s Party of Kazakhstan (cppk) scraped
into parliament the last two elections — owing largely to
the ongoing ban on the Communist Party, from which the
cppk split in 2004 — but it supports Nazarbayev, so it’s
not much of an opposition.

136
 POPULAR FRONT

Kyrgyzstan Latvia
Known as the “democratic experiment” of Central Asia, Latvia’s political spectrum is split along “Latvian” and
Kyrgyzstan’s political parties largely serve as vessels for “Russian” lines rather than the traditional left/right divide,
elite interests rather than divide along ideological lines. and it has a fragmented and unstable party system. Despite
Still, the center-left Ata Meken (Fatherland) Socialist socioeconomic conditions that seem ripe for left-wing tri-
Party has been a fixture since 1992. This pro-Western, pro- umph, the small parliamentary left has been constrained
democracy party wants a strong social safety net, including by various factors, most notably ethnic divisions.
health care and housing guarantees. It belonged to a
four-way coalition with the more centrist Social Democrats
until 2016, when it quit over proposed executive-power-cen-
tralizing reforms. The country also had a Communist Party,
which called for the reconstitution of the Soviet Union and
opposed the formation of a parliamentary republic. It was
the country’s largest and most influential party through the
2000s, after which it has all but disappeared.

Lithuania Macedonia
After decades in the wilderness, various movements came
Through the 1990s, Lithuania’s political left was dominated
together in 2015 to form Levica (the Left), the country’s first
by the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party (lddp), the
unapologetically left-wing party since Yugoslav breakup.
reformed Lithuanian Communist Party that broke from
Though it failed to cross the electoral threshold in 2015,
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1989 and won
ongoing grassroots protests over the right-wing govern-
73 of 141 seats in the country’s first post-Soviet election.
ment’s corruption may boost the Left’s chances.
In 2001, it merged with a left-wing rival to form the Social
Democratic Party of Lithuania, which took up the lddp’s
former spot on the center-left, but a number of scandals
and mistakes forced it to cede ground to a centrist coalition
of farmers and environmentalists in 2016.

137
 From Red Square to Square One

Moldova Mongolia
Moldova was the first European nation where an unre- Mongolia’s former ruling communist party, the Mongolian
formed Communist Party (pcrm) was elected to power in People’s Revolutionary Party — now simply the Mon-
2001. But nothing is as it seems in Moldova: the pcrm is golian People’s Party — has dominated post–Cold War
nationalistic, authoritarian, and socially conservative, and politics, winning parliamentary elections in 1990, 1992
the party that eclipsed it in 2014, the Party of Socialists, (where it took 95% of the seats), 2000, and 2008. Though
is much the same. Then there’s the Democratic Party of it recently returned to power with 45% of the vote and 65
Moldova, a social-democratic party whose chairman and seats, it has moved ever further to the center. The two
funder is a current deputy president of the Socialist Inter- social-democratic parties are little better: the first joined
national and a crooked oligarch. the right-wing coalition that anticommunist gop political
operatives helped take power in 1996; the second ran on a
soft neoliberal platform in 2016.

Montenegro Mozambique
Through a combination of patronage, experience, an already
Since the country’s first multiparty elections, the
existing party structure, and the institution of a first-past-
Democratic Party of Socialists (dps) has loomed over Mon-
the-post electoral system, the formerly Marxist-Leninist
tenegrin politics: its party membership comprises around a
Frelimo (the Mozambique Liberation Front) has stayed in
fifth of all registered voters, it’s triumphed in every parlia-
power since the end of civil war in 1992. It’s getting hard
mentary election (51.9% of the vote most recently), and its
to tell where the party ends and the government begins.
leader won seven terms as prime minister before stepping
Frelimo abandoned socialism for “modernization,” cutting
down last year. Despite its progressive trappings, the dps
social services and privatizing assets to benefit ranking
is a neoliberal party and its president a devoted kleptocrat.
officials’ wallets. It has recently started committing human
The Social Democratic Party, the other nominal left force,
rights abuses in a renewal of its conflict with the former
in fact partnered with the dps from 1997 to 2016.
rebel group, Mozambican National Resistance. Though
unions remain under the government’s thumb, popular
frustration has found outlets in protests over rising prices
and recent transport, education, and sugar mill strikes.

138
 POPULAR FRONT

Poland Romania
The parliamentary left has been all but put out to pasture,
The center-left Social Democratic Party (psd) has had
with no even remotely left-of-center party winning an
unique staying power in Romania, ruling through the first
election since 2001. As of 2015’s electoral massacre, no
half of the 1990s and much of the new millennium. It won
left-wing party sits in parliament for the first time since
46% of the vote — more than double its center-right oppo-
1989. However, Razem (Together), a Podemos-like move-
sition — in 2016 parliamentary elections, despite a string
ment, has emerged. It fell short of the 5% threshold in 2015
of scandals associated with its former prime minister and
but won enough support to receive public funding. It
other prominent party members, including corruption,
organized a successful series of large protests against a
election fraud, and a nightclub fire that left 32 dead.
proposed 2016 abortion ban.

Russia Serbia
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (cprf) The student-led, left-of-center movement Otpor! removed
once controlled many regional authorities, its leader nearly dictator Slobodan Milošević from power before dissipating
beat Boris Yeltsin in 1993, and it continues to maintain in 2002. Today, the Serbian left finds political expression
some support, even after a major party split in 2004 sent it in the Left Summit of Serbia, a coalition of activists that
increasingly toward neo-Stalinism and social conservatism. has helped organize the more-than-yearlong series of anti-
But it has significantly declined, and the other major alter- neoliberal protests known as Ne(da)vimo Beograd.
native — A Just Russia — is viewed as a “pocket opposition.”
It won just over 6% of the vote in 2016.

139
 From Red Square to Square One

Slovakia Slovenia
It’s been five years since Robert Fico’s social-democratic After 2013 anti-corruption protests brought down the
Direction-Social Democracy won a landslide electoral government, left-wing activists founded Združena Levica
victory with 44.4% of the vote, giving it more than half (United Left), inspired by Syriza and Podemos, which has
the parliament’s seats. During this time, it has raised since morphed into Levica (the Left). Supported largely
the minimum wage, reintroduced a progressive income by youth, it won six seats in parliament in 2014 and
tax, and offered free railway tickets to certain groups, remains a model for other radical movements in former
among other measures. The party underperformed in Yugoslavia, though it recently suffered an exodus of 94
2016, but its 28.7% still far outdid its rivals. More radical members who cited a lack of internal democracy and a
movements remain dormant. decline in outreach efforts.

South Yemen Tajikistan

Communists made their biggest Middle East breakthrough Things are not good for the Left in this Central Asian
in Yemen, where most of the country was once governed by country, which has been ruled by an authoritarian presi-
the Marxist-Leninist National Liberation Front (nlf). The dent since 1994. The sham 2015 election results say it all:
NLF and its successor, the Yemeni Socialist Party (ysp), ruled the Socialist Party entered parliament for the first time ever,
the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen from 1967 until but it’s considered a puppet opposition; the Communist
after the USSR’s collapse and the unification of the country. Party lost its parliamentary seats, but it largely backed the
Following a 1994 civil war, the party declined and government anyway. The regime’s only true opposition is
fragmented. As a more moderate, democratic socialist the Islamic Renaissance Party, which was kicked out of
opposition, the ysp received 4.7% of the vote in 2003, the parliament for the first time since 2000.
last time parliamentary elections were held. It also played
a part in the 2011–2012 Yemeni uprising, giving hopes of a
left resurgence, which were soon dashed as a result of the
ongoing civil war.

140
 POPULAR FRONT

Turkmenistan Ukraine
On paper, Turkmenistan has three political parties: the The Left in independent Ukraine was at first represented
Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, which has ruled by parties that grew out of the initially banned and unre-
unopposed since 1991, the Party of Industrialists and Entre- formed Communist Party of Ukraine (kpu), such as the
preneurs, and the Agrarian Party of Turkmenistan. But the Socialist Party of Ukraine — which moved gradually toward
latter two were created at the government’s behest after middle-of-the-road social democracy — and the Peasant
2012, and they serve as opposition in name only. Move- Party of Ukraine. The kpu itself took the largest share
ments calling for democracy and freedom do exist, but of the national vote in 1994 and 1998 and nearly won the
repression has driven them underground and forced their 1999 presidential election. Partly because of this, socialism
leaders into prison or exile. remains linked to Stalinism in the popular imagination.
Amid current turmoil, the pro-Russian kpu fell below the
5% for the first time in 2014 before being re-banned. In the
meantime, the far right is ascendant and left-wing activists
from groups like Social Movement — a local analogue to
Podemos — are being attacked and kidnapped.

Uzbekistan
For virtually its entire post-Soviet existence, Uzbekistan
has been ruled by the authoritarian government of Islam
Karimov, and its various political parties — including
the renamed Communist Party — support him unani-
mously. The chief opposition has been the radical Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan, which aims to set up an Islamic
state in the region.

141
 LEFTOVERS
THE DUSTBIN BY JONAH WALTERS

Choose Your Own Adventure

When your God that fails is Pol Pot.

 THE DUSTBIN Choose Your Own Adventure

it’s almost a tradition. For They arrived in Phnom Penh to a of men and women living as equals celebrating what had happened Malcolm Caldwell’s killing must website deriding the cp-ml’s
generations, Americans eager for state banquet, where another in a proud revolutionary society  — in Cambodia as “a really radical rural have been disquieting for naivete. His message is simple and
insurrection have traveled the member of the expedition, Dan and of near-universal support for the revolution, breaking away in impor- Burstein, Kline, and their associates. undefensive: “I was an idiot.” Kline
world in search of an exemplar to deify. Burstein, rose to offer a toast. Khmer Rouge government, which tant respects from all previous models.” They had been guests of the same continues,
Sometimes what they’ve found He was moved by “the profoundest villagers say delivered Kampuchea murderous regime less than a year
In July 1978, just a few months after Like many other youthful
has horrified them. Other times it revolutionary feelings,” he explained, from darkness. Of Sary, who earlier, swearing to “march forward
Burstein and Kline returned from ideologues and utopians
hasn’t — but it should have. to offer his party’s “complete and oversaw the purging of “subversives” on the road of socialism” alongside
their sight-seeing mission, Caldwell throughout American history, I
utter support” for the “great battle” from government and mass the Khmer Rouge, and describing
By 1978, American left groups had wrote, “It is good that more and allowed myself to be duped. And
waged by the Communist Party of executions of Muslim and Vietna- their friendship with Kampuchea as
grown increasingly distant from more visitors are now going to the I regret it more than any other
mese minorities, they report positive “sealed in blood.”
mass politics yet ever more radical country.” In fact, he continued, “I mistake I’ve made in my life.
impressions: he was “friendly
in their aspirations. So it’s hardly a am ... holding out completion of my
and down to earth,” and generously Only a year after proudly describing
surprise that three years into the death own book on Kampuchea lest a
The entertained their many questions Cambodia as “a nation reborn,” he
camp revolution that would kill a
American over tea.
chance presents itself for me to see it After withdrew from political life entirely,
quarter of the country’s population, for myself.” He got that opportu-
an American Marxist could cele- delegation, The American delegation, nity just six months later.
threatening his spending the 1980s working as a war

brate Cambodia as “a nation reborn, eager to ogle a eager to ogle a successful peoples’ companions at reporter in Afghanistan, Ethiopia,
While in Phnom Penh, Caldwell and elsewhere.
a nation that has regained its soul.”
successful peoples’ insurrection, was duped.
dined privately with Pol Pot one
gunpoint, they
The man who wrote those words was insurrection, Of course, sometime between their evening. He was giddy after entered Caldwell’s Burstein, today “a small time
venture capitalist,” became an
David Kline, one of the few
was duped. visit and the Khmer Rouge’s discussing peoples’ revolution with bedroom... author of trade books about
Americans permitted a visit to the ouster in a 1979 Vietnamese interven- his political idol — the professor’s
international commerce and
Khmer Rouge’s bloody playground. tion, they were forced to recant. traveling companions, two journalists,
business. He continues to
As a guest of Foreign Minister Ieng Any evidence of killing fields was recalled his “euphoric” demeanor
collaborate with Kline, his longtime
Sary, he traveled to Democratic hidden from them, they said, when he returned to their
A personal and political crisis rocked coauthor. “As for my former
Kampuchea along with three other Kampuchea and comrade Pol Pot. and at the time they had no reason shared accommodations. But his
the cp-ml once they realized the youthful leftism,” Kline reports in
members of the Communist The purpose of his visit, he said, was to doubt the authenticity of the tour of Kampuchea would soon
severity of their error. Burstein, his email, “if you’ve scanned my
Party Marxist-Leninist (cp-ml) — “to bring the truth about Kampu- euphoric revolutionary peasants come to an end.
then in his mid-twenties, foreswore work since you’ll see that I finally
a Maoist organization grown out chea’s revolution to the American they encountered on their tour.
A group of men, almost certainly Marxism-Leninism and left the came to appreciate the social value
of the October League, which, like people, who are currently being
Maybe the Khmer Rouge’s treatment agents of the regime, entered the party, which started “a process of of entrepreneurial capitalism.” 
so many New Left groups, had subjected every day to the most
of other international visitors had guest house at about eleven that liquidation” that quickly disbanded
itself sprouted from the remains of outrageous lies.”
something to do with the cp-ml’s night. After threatening his compa- the group.
Students for a Democratic Society.
In a remarkable pamphlet published change of heart. At the end of nions at gunpoint, they entered
A few years ago, an email supposedly
after their trip, the cp-ml members that year, a Scottish Marxist named Caldwell’s bedroom, where they
written by David Kline found its way
describe the success of rural Malcolm Caldwell visited Demo- remained for about an hour.
onto the comments section of a
cooperatives in triumphant terms, cratic Kampuchea in much the same Gunshots sounded. Before they left,
boasting of unprecedented rice circumstances as his American they informed the two American
yields, of a landscape cleansed of counterparts. A left-wing professor journalists that Caldwell was
lethal malaria-bearing mosquitos, and enthusiast of Asian revolu- dead — shot in the chest, for reasons
tions, Caldwell had become one of that still remain a mystery.
the English-speaking world’s biggest
defenders of Pol Pot, fond of

143 THE FIRST RED CENTURY 144

 LEFTOVERS
MEANS AND ENDS

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145
pictured on reverse cover
Row 6: Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky
Row 5: Antonio Gramsci, Joseph Stalin, Julius Martov
Row 4: Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai
Row 3: Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro
Row 2: Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker
Row 1: Slavoj Žižek, Felix Dzerzhinsky’s coat, Tony Blair
Projection Booth: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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 You stuck listening devices
all over the dacha — even in
the bathroom. You spend the people’s
money to eavesdrop on my farts.

— Nikita Khrushchev