COMMUNISM.

As a term, communism became adopted among networks of revolutionary artisans in western Europe during the 1830s and 1840s, denoting both the distinctiveness of their own political movement and the main quality of the society they hoped to create. Bespeaking a collectivist or cooperative ideal of the good society, it was always linked to a passionate critique of emerging capitalism as a type of society based on private property, necessary inequality, and unregulated market relations. With the rise of the European labor movements between the 1860s and 1890s, communist became largely supplanted by socialist and social democratic, but that earlier language of the 1840s still left some permanent traces. Most famously expressed in the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847–1848, these traces included the idea of an inner core of revolutionaries seeking the general overthrow of society, the ideal of a future cooperative and egalitarian world, the fundamental critique of capitalism, and a politics focused sociologically on the massed agency of the working class.

FORMATION OF COMMUNIST PARTIES

These resonances were not properly reclaimed until the European socialist movement was thrown into crisis by the First World War. After the initial disorientation of July–August 1914, bitterly contested divisions were opened in each national party around issues of support for the war. Vladimir Lenin in particular embraced the rhetoric of "communism" as a means of separating himself from the given leaderships of the Second International, the federation of socialist parties and trade unions founded in 1889. As the antiwar Left regrouped through conferences in the Swiss villages of Zimmerwald and Kienthal between September 1915 and April 1916, and popular discontent proliferated through the winter of 1916–1917, the appeals of such language grew. For Lenin and the "Zimmerwald Left," the need for a split and refoundation became paramount: opposing the war required unequivocal revolutionary opposition to capitalism; supporting the war ("social patriotism") spelled reformism and betrayal of the movement's best traditions. Massive working-class unrest unfolded across most of Europe between April and September 1917, reaching a spectacular climax in the Russian Revolutions of February and October. Riding this wave of success, the victorious Bolsheviks changed their name from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to the Communist Party in March 1918. As revolutionary turbulence engulfed the Continent at the end of the war in November 1918, with principal storm centers in Italy and Germany, divisions now widened between the older socialist parties, whose leaderships pursued broadly reformist and pragmatic strategies of reform, and the new militancies increasingly inspired by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

In April 1917 a major break had been wrought in Germany when the Social Democratic Party (SPD) expelled its large left-wing opposition, who then regrouped as the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Smaller breakaways occurred elsewhere, while in Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland during 1918 small Communist parties were formed as such. The launching of the Third International in March 1919 then drew representatives from these early initiatives to the founding congress in Moscow, augmented by delegations from most of the Russian Empire's former territories and from Turkey, Persia, China, and Korea. They were also joined by individual revolutionaries from various parts of Europe, representing mainly themselves. Further Communist parties were now launched in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Spain.

Yet so far each of these new parties remained isolated fragments and sects. Effective rivalry with the old socialist parties required attracting large sections, even majorities, of their supporters into the new camp. This was especially true of the strong central and northern European "social democratic core" of the German-speaking countries, the Czech lands, and Scandinavia, where socialist parties won more than 25 percent of the popular vote in national elections before 1914, but it also applied to the major countries of France, Italy, Britain, and Spain. Yet even the German USPD, the largest of the new left-wing formations issuing from the wartime divisiveness, still balked at a final break with the past. Neither of the two largest parties moving strongly to the "maximalist" left during 1918–1919, the Italian Socialist Party and the Norwegian Labor Party, were ready to affiliate with the new Communist International. Nor were the strong left oppositions in parties like the Swiss, Czech, or French. On the other hand, the revival of the pre-1914 Second International at Bern in February 1919 was not a success. After only a year all but the German SPD, the British Labour Party, and the moderate socialist parties of Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands had abandoned it, including the large left-wing parties of Italy, France, Austria, and Norway. If the new communism was to take off, these were the parties it needed to win.

Thus a further process of radicalization was required across Europe before most left-wing socialists were willing to take the plunge and identify themselves with communism. This could involve either disillusionment with a moderate socialist party whose intransigence drove radicals to the left, as happened in Germany via the conflicts between the SPD and USPD, or else the exhaustion of other left-wing alternatives, such as the syndicalist chimera of the general strike in France or Italy. But the main impetus came from a drastic radicalizing of popular militancy during 1919–1920, which brought new cohorts of working-class revolutionaries into politics and overwhelmed the reservations of more seasoned voices on the left. This last effect was most apparent in Germany and Italy. In response to the new revolutionary upswing in western Europe, accordingly, the Third International's Second Congress in July 1920 issued a renewed call for affiliation on the basis of "Twenty-One Conditions," which now defined who qualified to become a Communist Party (CP). In a series of dramatic congresses, beginning with the USPD in October 1920 and continuing with the French socialists (December), the Italians (January 1921), and the Czechs (May), some of Europe's largest socialist parties voted to join the Communist International. In the course of 1920–1921 this process was repeated elsewhere, until each European country had acquired its national CP, however tiny and marginal within the national polity. For a while some left-wing socialists sought to hold a middle ground between the Second and Third Internationals, most notably the large and prestigious Austrian Socialist Party. But by 1923 the differences had hardened. Socialists and Communists faced each other from two angrily distinct and mutually hostile camps.

DEFINING THE MOVEMENT

What did this new communism signify? Most simply put, it stood for "revolution" as against "reform." In the period from 1917 to 1923, it stood above all for the successful making of a revolution. The Bolsheviks had seized state power, won their civil war, and consolidated a socialist regime. Abstracting further from this experience, the communist model of revolutionary change seemed to entail a strategy of armed insurrection coordinated by the leadership of a disciplined revolutionary party, profiting from extreme social polarization and collapse of the liberal center. Given such polarization of the class struggle, a pitched confrontation against the recalcitrant forces of reaction was then thought to be inevitable, culminating in a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In contrast with the inevitabilist understandings of most pre-1914 socialists, for whom revolution was the natural consequence of the maturing of capitalist contradictions, the ripening of the economy for socialist control, and the amassing of unstoppable working-class majorities in elections, this Bolshevik model of revolutionary change was also voluntarist. Rather than waiting for the objective logic of history to do its work, revolutionaries could now make their own opportunities; socialist revolution was no longer the necessary exit from the inevitable capitalist crisis but could be conceived as a creative political act.

Further linked to this loosening of economic determinism was an argument about "Russian backwardness." That is, revolutions could be made not only in the most completely industrialized societies but also where extremes of uneven development (an exceptionally mobilized working class, an exceptionally exploited peasantry) had concentrated social tensions to the point of rupture. In Lenin's formulation, Russia was "the weakest link in the imperialist chain"; once it snapped the effects would certainly be transferred elsewhere. Other features of Bolshevik success, such as their willingness to take up the demands of the peasantry or their advocacy of national self-determination, were less immediately inspiring for revolutionaries farther to the west. But two final perspectives advanced by Lenin and his main ally in these years, Leon Trotsky, were crucial. One was internationalism, the idea that Russian backwardness would cease to be an impediment to the building of socialism providing revolution also occurred in the more industrialized societies to the west. The other was the role of the soviets—factory-, neighborhood-, and city-based participatory organs of direct democracy—whose historical superiority the Twenty-One Conditions now aggressively asserted against parliamentary institutions.

During the period from 1919 to 1923 the idea of the soviets was perhaps most important of all. In the manifestos issued by the founding congress of the Third International, communism was contrasted with the moribund system of "bourgeois democracy," which not only right-wing socialists ("social patriots") but also many on the left sympathetic to the revolutionary camp ("the amorphous, unstable Socialist center") were still defending. Against parliaments and the classic liberal freedoms were counterposed the soviets or workers' councils as "the conditions and forms of the new and higher workers' democracy." For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as for all genuine revolutionaries willing to take the communist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat had become the instrument of working-class emancipation, just as "insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slave owners and their attempts at restoration" had previously been the unavoidable means of the bourgeoisie's ascent. Under the circumstances of Europe's current revolutionary crisis, therefore, forming an international revolutionary vanguard in the form of the new CPs, to be coordinated via the Third International, had become the utmost priority.

Through this process of popular radicalization, conflict among socialists, and contentious differentiation, the category of communism reentered European political discourse with a clear set of meanings. By the early 1920s it denoted the main home of revolutionary politics, whose goal was the violent overthrow of capitalism rather than its peaceful and piecemeal transformation via ameliorative regulation, constitutional action, and cumulative reform. Yet by the end of 1923, that sharpness of contrast between Communists and their socialist rivals—between polarized confrontation and the pragmatics of negotiation, between the immediacy of revolution and a politics of the long haul, between attacking the system and working within it—was already becoming blurred. The "actuality of the revolution," as the Hungarian Communist Georg Lukács called it, had started to recede. If in 1920–1921 Communist politics meant soviet as against parliamentary state forms, by 1923–1924 the new parties were being drawn once more into participating in the given political order—in parliaments, elections, and the entire institutional world of the reviled "bourgeois democracy." Lenin and the Bolsheviks found themselves conceding the necessity of parliamentary, trade union, and other "legal" forms of action, in however tactical or cynical a form. Furthermore, once the new parties started expanding, their new heterogeneity of support posed unavoidable problems. The disciplined adherence to a unified outlook imagined by the Twenty-One Conditions quickly dissolved amid the actual diversity of beliefs the new cohorts of supporters brought with them—embracing everything from council communism and syndicalism to parliamentary socialism of the pre-1914 variety and an extreme ultraleftism that refused truck with parliaments of any kind. Indeed, the strongest of the new parties in Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia faced mobilized constituencies of young working-class militants who were angrily resistant to any suggestion of a coordinated political line. Making disciplined Communists out of such volatile and localistic insurgencies would be no easy thing.

CENTRALIZATION AFTER 1923

Accordingly a new phase in the early history of communism opened with the exhaustion of immediate revolutionary hopes after late 1923, as the new parties began retooling themselves for a different kind of politics. This transition had three main dimensions. One was organizational consolidation. Most of the new parties, especially the large and prestigious German KPD, suffered from massive and rapid turnovers of membership, frequent changes of leaders, and volatile oscillations of political line; the ability to hold local militants to the policies of the party central was also slight. Thus pressures grew for a tightening of internal discipline behind the approved party line: there was less tolerance for dissenters; earlier diversity of outlooks became flattened; relations with other left-wing organizations were severed; successive leaderships were disgraced and expelled. Wagons were circled against a hostile capitalist world. This drive for "democratic centralism" took bolshevism as its model. Between the Fifth Comintern Congress of 1924, which issued detailed instructions for reshaping each party in the Bolshevik image ("bolshevization)," and the next congress of 1928 the European Communist parties were dragooned into much stricter uniformity of organization, as leaderships demanded higher degrees of internal discipline and overall conformity to a single political line. As a result, by 1928 many of the founding Communists had gone. Conversely, in most parties extraordinarily long-lasting leaderships were now locked into place. Examples included Ernst Thälmann in the KPD (from 1925 until his arrest by the Nazis in 1933 and murder in 1944); Maurice Thorez in the French PCF (1930–1964); Harry Pollitt in the British CPGB (1929–1956); Klement Gottwald in the Czechoslovak KSC (1929–1953), and Palmiro Togliatti in the Italian PCI (1926–1964).

Second, the same years saw a ruthless imposing of Moscow's dominance through the Comintern, the association of Communist parties (Communist International) established in 1919. This was preceded by the power struggle inside the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) in 1923–1924 following Lenin's illness and death, which by 1925–1926 brought Joseph Stalin to undisputed leadership. The failure of revolution to occur in the advanced capitalist West combined with the Soviet Union's embattled isolation to produce a severe contraction of internationalist perspectives. Under the policy of "socialism in one country" announced by Stalin in January 1926, European Communists regrouped around the overriding priority of defense of the Soviet Union. But compelling arguments for ensuring the survival of the one successful revolution slid easily into the rationalizing of Soviet self-interest and thence into uncritical conformity with Soviet demands. The independent importance of the other CPs became demoted and their roles redefined. The autonomy of the Comintern was taken away, differences across national contexts were ignored, and its executive committee was brought under Soviet control. Despite misgivings, even the shrewdest and most independently minded of European Communists, such as Togliatti or Lukács, fell into line, not least because by this time extreme political repression had driven their own parties into exile and underground. The Soviet leadership's immense authority precluded effective opposition.

Third, this process of "Stalinization" in the European CPs sealed the finality of the split within socialism. The divisiveness of the war years, driven to a high pitch of rhetorical and actual violence via the revolutionary conflicts of 1917–1923, was given lasting institutional form by the welding of the new CPs into rigidly demarcated formations. Those parties emerged from the mid-1920s as austerely revolutionary organizations, digging themselves down into redoubts of proletarian militancy, bitterly denouncing social democrats for betraying the revolution, and uncritically upholding Soviet superiority. Henceforth Communists dourly patrolled the ideological walls separating themselves from socialists and other parts of the Left, an attitude entirely reciprocated by their socialist opponents, for whom anticommunism remained the defining glue of their own creed. At another level, the CPs discharged a hard task remarkably well by shaping the chaotic radicalism of the postwar years into more stable organized form. But in the event a peculiarly rigidified set of political cultures became the unfortunate result. The Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 was again the decisive event, enforcing new standards of uncritical obedience to its decisions, instating Moscow-loyalist leaderships inside the individual parties, and demanding strict separation from other parts of the Left. Under the terms of this so-called left turn the Sixth Congress opened the period of communism's most extreme ultraleft isolation, insisting on a new period of revolutionary opportunity and denouncing social democrats ("social fascists") as the main enemy.

It was mainly from this period, 1928–1935, that the familiar stereotypes of the Communist politician were to come: secretive, manipulative, and disciplined; rigidly loyal to Moscow; never deviating from the line; using democracy for his own purposes; seeking allies mainly in order to outmaneuver and undermine. The bolshevization process, brought to its ugly climax in 1928, sharpened the boundaries separating Communists from other parts of the Left. The various CPs emerged with new leaders, often trained in Moscow, especially if the party was illegal and underground. They were now much smaller in membership. They recruited new cohorts of workers with little previous labor movement background. Moreover, the new rules of discipline imparted a distinctive quality to life inside the party. Becoming a Communist demanded a special loyalty, which spread into all parts of a militant's life, especially where the party remained a small cadre organization. It required full-time daily commitment, marking Communists off from other workers. Passionate identification with the Soviet Union and the discipline of international solidarity were also a vital part of the positive appeal, but opened the way to a knee-jerk dependence on Moscow's authoritative leadership. Here the rules of "democratic centralism" also spelled a collectively embraced authoritarianism. All of these characteristics came to define "Stalinism" as a distinctive political culture, which reigned more completely in some national parties than others. This never reached straightforwardly down into the local working-class cultures where Communist popular strengths were embedded. But equally, no party leadership or full-time apparatus kept free of its constraints.

In the Soviet Union itself, the most extreme version of a centralist and bureaucratic party-centered regime took shape. Tolerance for dissent, whether inside the CPSU or in society at large, had always been uncertain during the 1920s, despite a certain loosening under the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted in March 1921. But at the end of that decade the drives for industrialization and collectivization of agriculture now imposed a brutally coercive climate of policing, public values, and interventionist state power. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a potential rival to Stalin, in December 1934, a grand-scale state terror unfolded, marked by a series of grotesque show trials in 1936–1938, by a thoroughgoing purge of the party, Red Army, and other institutions, and by the sheer scale of the victims—for example, 680,000 executed during 1937–1938 alone, 3,000,000 imprisoned. By these means a massive turnover of leadership was effected: of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934, only 59 were present at the Eighteenth Congress in 1939; of 139 Central Committee members, only 24 remained, with no less than 98 convicted of treason and shot. The Soviet Communist Party of the mid-1920s was already profoundly different from the Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized power in 1917, but the thoroughly Stalinized apparatus emerging from the Great Purges was now entirely removed from that earlier Bolshevik heritage. Stalin himself had secured an extraordinary concentration of personal power.

The democratic impoverishment of the Comintern's internal regime, the appalling violence of the Great Purges, foreign Communists' uncritical adulation for Stalin, the instrumentalizing of the European CPs for the purposes of Soviet foreign policy—all these features of Communist history painted a bleak picture by the late 1930s. Yet, paradoxically, this was a period of enormous Soviet prestige. By its remarkable feat of forced industrialization, massive projects of social engineering, and apparent harnessing of natural and human resources for the pursuit of the collective good, with all the utopian fervor of building a "new civilization," socialist construction in the Soviet Union attracted widespread Western admiration during the 1930s, often from the unlikeliest of quarters. This prestige acquired particular momentum from two sources. On the one hand, Soviet planning seemed to record exceptional successes at a time when the 1929 stock market crash had thrown Western capitalism into a crisis that many radicals believed might be terminal. On the other hand, the Soviet Union seemed the only international source of resistance to the threat of fascism.

THE POPULAR FRONT

That dual context of the 1930s—catastrophic unemployment and a massive failure of the capitalist system, combined with the rise of Nazism and the broader right-wing assaults on democracy—formed the setting of a remarkable European Communist advance. After a period of willfully magnified isolation between 1928 and 1933–1934, the CPs responded belatedly but creatively to the destruction of democracy in Germany and Austria by seeking to emerge from their isolation. With the PCF in France setting the pace, a new strategy of coalition building was adopted, taken up first by Communists in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Spain, before being adopted officially by the Seventh Comintern Congress in July 1935. This was the new Popular Front strategy, which called for the broadest possible democratic alliances against fascism. Such People's Fronts were to be based on all those forces that the Comintern had repudiated so decisively in 1919 at its birth—not only the immediate socialist rivals but also the previously reviled forces of bourgeois democracy, including liberals, radicals, and republicans; peace movements; humanitarian organizations; where possible the churches; and even conservative groups open to the defense of democracy. Communists should now support any government willing to uphold democratic rights. This was vital for the forming of international coalitions against the further advance of Nazi Germany, not least for the protection of the Soviet Union itself.

Although in each case it later went down to defeat, this strategy won its greatest initial victories in France and Spain, forming the French Popular Front government of 1936–1937 and rallying the Second Republic against the Nationalist uprising in the Spanish civil war (1936–1939). Associated especially with the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, key figures in the Comintern of these years, the rhetoric of the Popular Front recast socialism as the highest form of older progressive traditions rather than their implacable opponent. Communists now affirmed the importance of universal humanist values ("civilization versus barbarism"), invoked their own country's authentic popular democratic traditions, and took their stand on the common ground of democracy. Through the fight against fascism, moreover, such a broad democratic Left could use this strategy to begin accomplishing the transition to socialism. Rather than stressing the revolutionary climacteric of the insurrectionary seizure of power on the model of 1917, the Popular Front strategists proposed a different perspective: building popular support patiently over a longer term; drawing progressive aspirations from all parts of society; commanding ever greater public influence via existing institutions; building the working-class movement's moral authority into the democratic foundations of the transition. Such a theory of revolution refocused attention away from armed struggle and pitched confrontations and toward changing the system from within by incremental gains.

For Communists this approach marked a decisive departure from the form of revolutionary politics to which they had committed themselves from 1917 to 1923. It allowed for the repairing of bridges to social democracy. With the exception of France and Spain, however, socialists refused to be drawn into coalition. More fundamentally, the Popular Front had failed as an international strategy: the governments of Britain and France rejected an alliance with the Soviet Union; in September–October 1938 Hitler's demands on Czechoslovakia had been disgracefully appeased; and the Spanish civil war was lost. When the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU convened in March 1939, Europe's Communists seemed more isolated and embattled than ever before. Illegality had become the norm of Communist existence: the CPs in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary were all underground. With the outbreak of World War II, the PCF too was banned, soon to be joined by the CPs in those countries invaded by Nazi Germany and in Switzerland. The small CPs in Britain and Sweden were then the only ones remaining aboveground. The split between Communists and socialists seemed as bitter as ever. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on the very eve of war made the collapse of the Popular Front strategy complete.

POSTWAR STRENGTH

This situation was transformed by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, which at last brutally imposed the conditions for an international anti-Hitler alliance. With the confusing interlude of the Nazi-Soviet Pact now behind them, Communists could rally for cooperation with socialists and other progressives, country by country, in the interests of the primary antifascist cause, a stance that socialists finally reciprocated. First under the auspices of the national resistance movements and then during the liberation in 1944–1945, when the postwar coalition governments began to be formed, Communists emerged with unprecedented positions of recognized legitimacy and political strength. Partly riding the transnational popularity of the Red Army and Soviet Union, the CPs briefly entered the accepted political arena in most of Europe. As stalwarts of the European resistance, they prospered in postwar elections, becoming the Left's majority force in Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and recording their highest ever successes in democratic elections everywhere else. They also participated in postwar coalition governments, not only in the "People's Democracies" of Eastern Europe where the regional presence of the Red Army provided obvious sanction, but also in the West. The first postwar elections brought palpable evidence of popular desires for change, borne by rhetorics of national reconciliation and new beginnings. Between the autumn of 1945 and summer 1946, accordingly, in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Italy, and France, varying configurations of Socialists, Communists, and Christian Democrats commanded around three-quarters of the popular vote. In Belgium, Italy, and France, Communists joined in forming the postwar reforming governments.

Four points may be made about this dramatic growth of Communist strength. Most obviously, it marked a decisive break from the Bolshevik origins. The violent and insurrectionary model of revolutionary change associated with 1917 was set aside, to be replaced by a broad democratic conception of restructuring. Communists wished to build the new society inside the frame of the old, both pre-figuratively by exemplary institutions and behaviors in the working-class movement and legislatively by reforms. This new gradualist approach was predicated on several key recognitions: the lower than expected ceilings of left-wing electoral support (which seldom reached more than 40 percent of the popular vote, usually far less); the resulting necessity of coalitions with nonsocialist forces; and the inevitability of strategic moderation and slowness of forward advance. Confrontational violence, disrespect for pluralism, and resort to coercion could only isolate Communists from the rest of society; breadth of consensus was essential to the Left's success. Consequently, Communists needed to take their stand unequivocally on the ground of democracy, building on their own society's "national-popular" traditions. This new version of communism became broadly ascendant across Europe, varying inevitably party by party, during the brief moment of antifascist unity from 1943 to 1947. It was developed most consistently by Togliatti and his supporters in the PCI. One of its main theoretical inspirations was the earlier leader of the PCI, Antonio Gramsci, who had died in Mussolini's prisons in 1937.

Second, the main lasting features of the postwar settlements in Europe owed a great deal to Communist support and participation. From their new positions of influence Communists threw their weight behind the process of reconstruction in 1945. The resulting achievements included new constitutions, especially in France (1946) and Italy (1947), which restored parliamentary democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law, enfranchised women in France, Italy, and Belgium for the first time, and introduced progressive taxation, antitrust laws, and public ownership. The unifying themes of the broader settlements included comprehensive social security, full employment, planned modernizing of the economy, and moral renewal via attacks on Nazi collaborators and the "old gang" of discredited pre-1939 elites. Country by country, the postwar social reforms were mainly laid down during 1945–1946, while Communists were still accepted members of the consensus. Those reforms also ranged across public health and public housing, food programs and family allowances, education, the length of the working week, and the full restoration of trade union rights. Altogether this was a structural transformation that framed Western European political action well into the 1970s and in some ways beyond. It was fundamentally a part of the new Communist program.

Third, the popular communism of the mid-1940s was a dramatically new phenomenon. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPs had been almost without exception small and persecuted cadre parties, marginal to their national polities, at daggers drawn with socialist rivals, still in thrall to the insurrectionary memories of 1917–1923, and beholden to Moscow loyalism. In contrast, the Communists recruited through the resistance movements knew nothing of the founding years or the bolshevization drive; they escaped the machinery of Stalinist socialization, which wartime circumstances effectively interrupted; their outlook was shaped by the cooperative logic of antifascism rather than the earlier culture of sectarian isolation; and they were inspired by ideals of national reconstruction. At most they looked back to the Popular Front campaigns, which in many respects prefigured this antifascist élan. The growth in Communist popularity could be startling—the PCI grew from barely 5,000 members to over 1,750,000 between mid-1943 and late 1945—making the new CPs entirely different from the small and battered circles of militants ten years before. The potential for tensions with those earlier generations, or with the old Moscow-loyalist leaders who resurfaced from prisons and exile, was a serious problem, and after spring 1947 the impact of the Cold War restored such Stalinists to influence, forcing the new "National Communisms" into recession. In Eastern Europe that process acquired deadly force, as after 1947–1948 Stalin unleashed vicious and systematic assaults on the legitimacy of these "national roads to socialism."

Fourth, the onset of the Cold War—via the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan aid in the West, through the attack on "Titoism" and the purging of the Eastern European CPs in the East—abruptly severed the politics of antifascist unity and banished communism once again to the margins. In Italy, France, and Belgium, Communists were expelled from the coalition governments in May 1947. More generally, the split between Communists and Socialists was crudely reopened, making anticommunism into the litmus test of loyalty to the main political consensus in the West. Some CPs, such as the French and a number of smaller parties, embraced this renewed isolation with Stalinist alacrity; others, like the Italian or the smaller British and Scandinavian parties, sought ways of keeping alive the newly fashioned politics of democratic participation. When Soviet communism entered its own crisis with the dramatic onset of destalinization after the death of Stalin in 1953, leading to the Polish and Hungarian uprisings of 1956, the ideas of 1943–1947 slowly reemerged. But it required the subsequent sociocultural changes associated with the next pan-European upheaval of 1968, encompassing Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia in the East, and especially France, Italy, and West Germany in the West, before these continuities were properly resumed.

THE COLD WAR

If the antifascist momentum of 1943–1947 gave the new national communisms in East and West a broadly convergent character, the consequences of the Cold War brought a new bifurcation. The Eastern European CPs were the real casualties of Stalin's purges after 1948. They were crushed as creative movements and in the process completely remade: a quarter of the region's aggregate party membership was expelled between 1948 and 1952, or some 2.5 million Communists, with perhaps a quarter of a million imprisoned. In 1945 liberation from Nazism had promised not only social transformation but also new measures of democracy and well-being. But instead the Stalinizing of Eastern Europe now imposed a brutal and hard-faced normalizing. Power became centralized in the party-state's inner leadership, with no constitutional checks or legal opposition, with a captive press and an administered public sphere, and with a local political life frozen into paranoid conformity, whether inside the governing CPs or out. This assertion of political monopoly and single-party rule was the first of three fixed features of Soviet rule in the East. The second was Soviet-style economics, first elaborated after 1928–1929 through the Soviet Union's own experience of heavy industrialization, collectivizing of agriculture, and the use of the five-year plan. The principles of collective property, bureaucratic management, and central planning were instituted across Eastern Europe between 1947 and 1949 and proved subsequently nonnegotiable. Pressures for economic reform—most dramatically in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968—always halted at the inviolability of state ownership and the command economy, whether directed toward regional and sectoral decentralization, profit mechanisms, new accounting methods, enterprise autonomy, or self-management. The third feature was the military dimension. The Stalinizing of Eastern Europe rested on the iron fist of Soviet military rule, based on Europe's geopolitical division in 1945–1949, solidified into NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

These were the three fixed points in the Soviet system from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. The pivotal initiative in Soviet destalinizing, Nikita Khrushchev's denunciations of the crimes of Stalin in his "secret speech" to the CPSU's Twentieth Congress in February 1956, which might have opened the way for a process of internal change, stopped strictly short of attacking Stalin's main policies. Each of these was left carefully intact, whether "socialism in one country" and bolshevization of the Comintern, central planning, industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, or democratic centralism and the one-party state. As the main Communist reform movements learned to their cost—in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—these were the boundaries that could never be overstepped. Thus once the new government of Imry Nagy restored the multiparty system and took Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, the Red Army immediately invaded; likewise, though the Prague Spring meticulously reaffirmed Czechoslovakia's membership in the Warsaw Pact, the ending of single-party rule had the same inevitable result. While decisively impeding regenerative reform inside Eastern Europe itself, moreover, these same fixed features of Soviet rule proved huge liabilities for the Left in the West, whose advocacy for socialism was disastrously handicapped by the unattractiveness of these "actually existing socialisms."

For Communists in Western Europe, the combined trauma of 1956—first Khrushchev's revelations, which opened the possibility of change, then the invasion of Hungary, which left everything still the same—began an uneven process of separating themselves from the Soviet Union and the liabilities of Stalinism. The crisis itself saw a massive hemorrhaging of CP support: between 1956 and 1958 the PCI lost four hundred thousand members, the CPGB eight thousand, or a quarter of the whole. In some smaller CPs (Austria, Germany, Portugal), Moscow loyalists simply hunkered down. But a far larger number of parties moved toward greater independence, usually after losing members and often via splits (Scandinavia, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, the Low Countries). In the largest parties of Iceland, Italy, and France, 1956 worked with the grain of existing history. The smallness of the country allowed the Icelandic People's Alliance to avoid the vagaries of international communism altogether. But if the PCI used the crisis to enhance its own autonomy, the PCF simply flaunted its Moscow orthodoxy. French Communist dissent broke on the rock of Stalinist party discipline. But after the initial securing of party unity by defeating the dissenters at the PCI's Eighth Congress in December 1956, Togliatti moved firmly toward reestablishing a distinct set of Western European Communist perspectives. He tactfully rejected Moscow's single and unqualified leadership, proposing a new concept of "polycentrism" instead, affirming the importance of "national roads to socialism" and reclaiming the experience of 1943–1947.

During the 1960s an uneasy standoff ensued, as Western Communists edged toward greater autonomy without repudiating either the Soviet Union or their own Stalinist pasts. Once the Czechoslovak reform movement (the "Prague Spring") had galvanized such renewed and heady hopes for the East, the Warsaw Pact's invasion in August 1968 shattered any remaining belief in the Soviet Union's benevolent leadership. On the one hand, the Soviet invasion ended socialism's Eastern European prospects. In the Soviet imperium's first quarter century, from 1944 to 1970, reform movements had always involved complex synergies between social pressures and inner-party renewal; Communist traditions had themselves fueled the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring. But this was the possibility brutally terminated on 20 August 1968. Henceforth dulled conformity, social apathy, bureaucratic privilege, Moscow loyalism, and at best a kind of technocratic ambition became generalized across Eastern Europe's governing Communist cultures. After 1968, no democratic impulse could begin from the region's Communist parties; reform politics would come in opposition to the CPs rather than through them. This change was dramatically apparent in the key remaining oppositional episode of Eastern European Communist history, the remarkable rise of Solidarno?? (Solidarity) in Poland in 1980–1981, with its preceding explosions of 1970 and 1976.

On the other hand, Western European Communists broke decisively with the Soviet Union. In contrast with 1956, Soviet actions in 1968 were almost universally condemned. At the CPSU's Twenty-Fifth Congress in February 1976 and a Conference of European CPs in East Berlin in June, the criticisms were reaffirmed: Western Communists demanded "equality and respect for the autonomy of all parties," together with support for individual and collective freedoms under socialism. A shared position coalesced around the Italian, British, and Swedish speakers, and in East Berlin an unprecedented debate ensued. The official document validated internal debate, international nonalignment, and "dialogue and collaboration with democratic forces." The old Bolshevik or "Leninist" talk, where the CPs were "vanguard forces" with "identical objectives" and "a common ideology," was gone. Instead, the Soviet Union was asked to respect the "equality and sovereign independence of each party" without interfering in its "internal affairs." Each CP should be free to work out its own "national road."

EUROCOMMUNISM

Concurrent with the loosening of Communist conformities and the accumulating critique of Stalinism was a remarkable revival of critical Marxist thought, sometimes beginning inside the organized Communist frameworks of East and West, sometimes occurring outside them altogether. That revival was intimately connected in the later 1960s with both the growth of student radicalism in the greatly expanded higher education systems of Western Europe and the broader intellectualcultural ferment of the time. The practical import was dramatized by the Paris "May events" of 1968. But these were only the most spectacular moment of a European-wide political crisis linked to student insurgencies, the rise of a new feminism and associated social movements, and the pan-European strike wave of 1967–1975. Such new radicalisms issued a challenge not only to the established liberal norms of political life in Western Europe but also to the Communist parties as the main guardians of an anticapitalist critique. By the mid-1970s certain of those CPs, essentially the most consistent of the Soviet Union's critics since 1968 (and those drawing the clearest lessons from 1956) were enunciating a creative response. Through intensive consultations between 1975 and 1977, inspiring similar ideas among Communists in Britain, Scandinavia, and other smaller countries, the important Italian, Spanish, and French CPs arrived at a common outlook. Tagged as "Eurocommunism," the resulting program sought to sustain a commitment to socialist transformation by further distancing Western European Communists from the Soviet model, committing them unambiguously to democratic pluralism and opening them to the new post-1968 radicalisms.

As a programmatic strategy, Eurocommunism was a failure. When the French Left's common program fell apart in September 1977, the PCF reverted to sectarianism, and in the 1978 elections its vote was surpassed by the Socialists for the first time since 1945; after the Socialist electoral victories of 1981, the PCF never recovered, sinking to a terminally marginal place in the polity. Having been the mainstay of resistance to Franco's dictatorship, the Spanish Communists made a vital contribution to Spain's democratic transition, brokering the key negotiations of 1975–1977 and defending the parliamentary parameters of the ensuing consolidation; yet this never translated into electoral success, and by 1979 the party had become permanently outflanked by the newly created Socialist Party. The strongest Eurocommunist showing was in Italy, where in 1976 the PCI recorded its highest ever electoral success (34.4 percent) while pressing hard for a fundamental realignment of Italian society. Appealing to the heritage of Togliatti, Gramsci, and 1943–1947, its new leader Enrico Berlinguer sought to draw the ruling Christian Democrats into his "historic compromise," both to defend Italy's constitution against a threatening social polarization and to initiate a fresh stage of democratic restructuring. By decisively repudiating the old language of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," taking its stand forthrightly on the ground of democracy, patiently building new coalitions, and casting off the handicaps of Moscow, the PCI hoped to shed its permanent opposition and demonstrate its right to govern. But Berlinguer was outmaneuvered by the Christian Democrats. By the 1979 elections the PCI had lost 1.5 million votes. Abandoning the historic compromise, the party returned to opposition.

In other respects Eurocommunists produced lasting results. In Italy and Spain they defended democratic constitutions against serious right-wing destabilization. They also brought southern Europe finally into the fold of social democracy. While Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and German-speaking Europe formed a north-central European "social democratic core" in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Mediterranean Europe had a different labor movement, one shaped by anarchosyndicalism and then in the Cold War by strong CPs marginalized by regimes of the Right. Only by the 1970s were southern European Lefts winning leverage on government via organized labor followed by electoral growth. Socialists in France, Spain, and Portugal now challenged the primacy of the CPs in this regard, but Communists themselves adopted perspectives indistinguishable from the more ambitious forms of social democracy in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Eurocommunists also rejected the traditional Leninist model of the cadre party, seeking broader-based forms of social-movement-type organizing more akin to the politics encouraged by 1968. Democratic centralism was dismantled and the parties opened toward diverse currents and issues; concurrently, the historic identification with the industrial working class was exchanged for broader social appeals, particularly to women and the university educated. Thus Eurocommunists not only embraced pluralism, multiparty competition, free elections, and parliamentary government for both West and East, but they also prioritized issues that could not be subsumed within class-struggle perspectives based on industrial workers, including everything from the big identity axes of gender, ethnicity, religion, and race to problems of youth, sexuality, ecology, international relations, and a cultural politics embracing both uplift and entertainment.

Most importantly of all, Eurocommunists finalized the break with the Soviet Union. The crises of 1956 and 1968 in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had given the earlier impetus for this independence, and the next Eastern European upheaval in Poland in 1980–1981 proved terminal. Support for Solidarity's challenge to Soviet rule was the final test of Western Communist independence. Thus if the PCF at best equivocated in the face of this Polish struggle for democracy, the PCI gave a ringing endorsement. In a series of debates and resolutions, the Italian Communists drew a thick line beneath the epoch of the Bolshevik Revolution: "We must accept that this phase of development (which began with the October Revolution) has exhausted its driving force, just as the phase which saw the birth and development of socialist parties and trade union movements mustered around the Second International [before 1914] also ran out of steam." As Berlinguer continued: "The world has moved on.… The point is to overcome the present by looking ahead."

After these two final episodes—Eurocommunism's disappointments in the West, the suppression of Solidarity in the East—communism really had run out of steam. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev to the leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985 still initiated an extraordinary process of change. But what thereby began as socialist restructuring and democratic renewal ended in the implosion of state and society. Gorbachev hoped to move Soviet communism into a modernized future, recuperating non-Stalinist reform traditions going back to the 1920s and much of the Khrushchev era. For inspiration he drew both on the Prague Spring and on Swedish social democracy. Beneath the twin watchwords of perestroika (restructuring or radical reform) and glasnost (openness), he sought a democratized Soviet Union and a revived CP, reinvented as a social democratic party committed to market socialism. In the process he courageously dismantled all three of the pillars of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe: the military security system of the Warsaw Pact, the command economy, and the Communist Party's sole political rule. The end of the Cold War, marketization, and multiparty democracies were the result. But in the process all distinctiveness of the communist tradition was gone. The remaining denouement—dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, following the Eastern European revolutions of autumn 1989—brought formal closure to a process already long decided. Communism was at an end.

See alsoAnticommunism; Antifascism; Bolshevism; Destalinization; Eastern Bloc; Eurocommunism; Lenin, Vladimir; Popular Front; Russian Revolutions of 1917; Social Democracy; Socialism; Soviet Union; Warsaw Pact.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Martin S., and Helen Graham, eds. The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.

Ali, Tariq, ed. The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth-Century World Politics. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1984.

Anderson, Perry. "Communist Party History." In People's History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 145–156. London, 1981,

Andrews, Geoff, Nina Fishman, and Kevin Morgan, eds. Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party. London, 1995.

Banac, Ivo, ed. The Effects of World War I: The Class War after the Great War: The Rise of Communist Parties in East Central Europe, 1918–1921. Brooklyn, N.Y., 1983.

Berlinguer, Enrico. After Poland: Towards a New Internationalism. Nottingham, U.K., 1982.

Bull, Martin J., and Paul Heywood, eds. West European Communist Parties after the Revolutions of 1989. Basingstoke, U.K., 1994.

Fowkes, Ben. The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. London, 1993.

Gruber, Helmut. International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History. Ithaca, N.Y., 1967.

——. Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern. Garden City, N.Y., 1974.

Gruber, Helmut, and Pamela Graves, eds. Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe Between the Two World Wars. New York, 1998.

Gundle, Stephen. Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991. Durham, N.C., 2000.

Hobsbawm, Eric. "Fifty Years of People's Fronts." In Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing 1977–1988, 103–109 . London, 1989.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Giorgio Napolitano. The Italian Road to Socialism. Translated by John Cammett and Victoria De Grazia. London, 1977.

Jensen, Jane, and George Ross. The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis. Berkeley, Calif., 1984.

Leonhard, Wolfgang. Child of the Revolution. Translated by C. M. Woodhouse. Chicago, 1958.

Loebl, Eugen. Stalinism in Prague: The Loebl Story. Translated by Maurice Michael. New York, 1969.

Lukács, Georg. Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch. Edited by István Eorsi. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London, 1983.

Macintyre, Stuart. Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain. London, 1980.

Naimark, Norman M., and Leonid Gibianskii, eds. The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949. Boulder, Colo., 1997.

Rees, Tim, and Andrew Thorpe, eds. International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943. Manchester, U.K., 1998.

Rosenhaft, Eve. Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1920–1933. Cambridge, U.K., 1983.

Rupnik, Jacques. "The Roots of Czech Stalinism." In Culture, Ideology, and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, edited by Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, 302–320. London, 1983.

Samuel, Raphael. "The Lost World of British Communism." New Left Review, no. 154 (November–December 1985): 3–53.

——. "Staying Power: The Lost World of British Communism, Part Two." New Left Review, no. 156 (March–April 1986): 63–113.

——. "Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part Three." New Left Review, no. 165 (September–October 1987): 52–91.

Sassoon, Donald. "The Rise and Fall of West European Communism 1939–1948." Contemporary European History 1 (1992): 139–169.

Spriano, Paolo. Stalin and the European Communists. London, 1985.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York, 1998.

Vidali, Vittorio. Diary of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Translated by Neil Amter Cattonar and A. M. Elliot. Westport, Conn., 1974.

Wheaton, Bernard. Radical Socialism in Czechoslovakia: Bohumír Šmeral, the Czech Road to Socialism, and the Origins of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, 1917–1921. New York, 1986.

Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.

Geoff Eley