communism

communism, the generally accepted name for the ideology of Marxism–Leninism, and for the regimes based upon it. Though communists call themselves ‘socialists’, their movement had little in common with non-communist forms of socialism, or with earlier forms of communism in history, including Christian communism.

Although several conflicting brands of communism were to develop after the Second World War, in 1939–45 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) entirely dominated the movement, and was the only such party to have taken control of a state. During the war, therefore, the main distinction to be made was between the Soviet ‘Centre’ in Moscow and its numerous dependent non-ruling communist parties which operated, often illegally, in most countries of the world (see Comintern).

Marxism–Leninism—the version of Marxism propagated by V. I. Lenin (1870–1924), the founder of the Soviet state—did not regard other brands of Marxism and Socialism as legitimate. It accepted the basic philosophical tenets of Marx's historical materialism, whilst laying special emphasis on the theory and practices of political power. Lenin was most concerned with the role of a disciplined élite or political army, called ‘The Party’: with the dictatorship to be exercised over society and over all state institutions: and with the ‘class war’ to be waged in the name of the proletariat. By giving total power to the party, he put the interpretation of Marxism at the mercy of party controllers and censors, who soon subordinated all serious philosophical matters to the immediate requirements of the regime.

The CPSU traced its roots to Lenin's faction within the illegal, pre-revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). This faction, which was heavily outnumbered by socialist rivals both inside and outside the RSDLP, had taken the name of Bolsheviks or ‘majoritarians’ at one of the few meetings where it was appropriate. Having seized power in Petrograd in October 1917, it suppressed the Provisional government that had earlier overthrown Tsarism, and moved swiftly to eliminate all other political organizations in areas under its control. It adopted the name of Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918. Having emerged victorious in the Russian Civil War of 1918–21, it reconquered most of the republics which had taken the opportunity to declare their independence and forced them into a new empire of its own making—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR (1923–91). (To avoid confusion, the central organs of the CP (b) were often referred to as the ‘All-Union Communist Party’ as distinct from the subordinate republican, regional branches of the organization.) The formal title CPSU was not adopted until 1952.

Soviet communism underwent several fundamental changes in the inter-war period. Under Lenin, it had sought to act as the avant-garde of an international revolution which theoretically would break out in western Europe especially Germany, but never did. Having been heavily defeated in Poland in 1920, in its one concerted attempt to export revolution by means of the Red Army, it was obliged to modify the extreme coercion of ‘war communism’ and from 1921 to adopt the compromise of a New Economic Policy. Under Josif Stalin, General Secretary from 1922, it abandoned the primacy of Lenin's internationalism, and, with the slogan of ‘Socialism in One Country’ gave priority to making the USSR a first-class economic and military power. To this end, no means were spared. Stalin first removed then killed all members of the former Bolshevik leadership. From 1929, he introduced a Command Economy based on central planning, Five Year Plans, heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and re-militarization. From 1934 he introduced a series of campaigns of mass terror, the ‘Purges’ which accelerated from the elimination of specified groups within the party and the army (see USSR, 6(a)), to the random destruction of large sections of the population. In ideological matters, he revised chauvinistic Russian nationalism and grafted it onto a vulgarized brand of Marxism–Leninism. The Russian nation was now awarded a ‘leading role’ among the other Soviet peoples parallel to that of the party within the state. Stalinism was formalized by the constitution of 1936.

The principal opposition to Stalinism within the Marxist– Leninist camp came from Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), sometime commissar for foreign affairs and for war. Trotsky advanced a theory of ‘permanent revolution’, and strongly opposed the growth of the all-mighty Soviet bureaucracy. Exiled in 1927, he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940.

The Stalinists promoted a coherent body of political beliefs, of organizational methods, and of psychological traits. As ‘builders of socialism’, they laid emphasis on the collective aspects of political life, minimizing the rights and interests of individual citizens. To this end, they launched the cult of Stalin as the Vozhd (leader). They invented the system of parallel party organs to control all state institutions (a practice subsequently common also to fascism); and within the vast security apparatus of the OGPU/NKVD they maintained élite internal military forces answering directly to the party leadership. Ironically they were ultra-nationalists, frequently believing in the special mission of the USSR within the world and of the Russian nation within the USSR. They saw unswerving loyalty to the party as the highest virtue, and took special pride in their privileged status above ordinary citizens. In return, they were conditioned to pay extravagant flattery to ‘the higher organs’, to obey orders implicitly, and to bear all impositions and humiliations without protest. In the 1930s and 1940s they saw hundreds of thousands of their fellow members liquidated, without a murmur of opposition. Like the followers of fascism, they thrived on the paranoia which was eternally seeking enemies ‘within and without’.

In many ways, therefore, the onset of the Second World War suited the purposes of Soviet communism very well. It seemed to justify the state of psychological war which Stalinism had imposed during the 1930s; it provided the total conflict which the ideologists had always demanded; and it revealed a real enemy that everyone could understand and fight. The Soviet Union performed better in wartime than in peacetime. Stalin's appeal for a ‘Great Patriotic War’, together with his wartime reconciliation with the Orthodox Church (see religion), touched deep chords within the popular Russian nationalism which he had earlier sought to foster.

Though Stalin had laid special emphasis on the internal reorganization of the USSR, Soviet communism never resigned from its aspirations to world supremacy. In this, it presented the fascists with one of their principal raisons d'être. Hitler, in particular, was wedded to the notion of a death struggle against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’.

In the 1930s, the Soviet party's main instrument for co-ordinating international subversion, the Comintern, was grievously weakened by the Purges. In the period of the Popular Fronts after 1935, Stalin preferred alternative methods; and in 1943, the Comintern was dissolved. Even so, the task of training communist cadres to take over occupied countries was not abandoned. Tito, who had been trained in Moscow before the war, was unique in spending the whole war fighting in his native country: but in 1944–5 a string of Soviet agents, such as the German W. Ulbricht (1893–1973), the Pole B. Beirut (see Lublin Committee), and the Czechoslovak K. Gottwald (1896–1953), were produced with all the requisite staffs to take over their countries as soon as the Red Army moved in.

Norman Davies