Richard Pipes
Every Communist country or Party has its own specific history and its own particular regional and local variations, but a linkage can always be traced to the pattern elaborated in Moscow in November 1917. This linkage forms a sort of genetic code of Communism.
The linkage alluded to in the above citation derives from the fact that Communism everywhere came into existence in one of two ways: either imposed by the Soviet army (as in Eastern Europe) or else emerging, usually with Soviet help, in countries whose political culture (an absence of established traditions of private property and rule of law, a heritage of autocracy, etc.) as well as social structure (preponderance of peasantry, weakly developed middle class) resembled those of pre-1917 Russia. Although designed for advanced industrial societies, in practice Communism struck root only in underdeveloped agrarian societies. Hence the recurrent pattern.
The features of Marxism-Leninism that such countries copied were: 1) rule by a single, monopolistic party organized along military lines and owed unquestioned obedience; 2) this rule being exercised without any external restraints; 3) the abolition of private property in the means of production and the concurrent nationalization of all human and material resources; 4) disregard of human rights. Such regimes insisted that the party was omniscient and omnipotent: it was always right; it acknowledged no limits to its power. In nearly all cases, the "party" was embodied in a leader who personified the cause and came to be deified.
Conventional wisdom holds that poverty breeds Communism. Reality is different poor countries do not opt for Communism. Nowhere in the world has a poor majority, or any majority for that matter, voted the Communists into power. Rather, poor countries are less able to resist Communist takeovers because they lack the institutions that in richer, more advanced societies thwart aspiring radical dictators. It is the absence of institutions making for affluence, especially the rights of property and the rule of law, that keeps countries poor and, at the same time, makes them vulnerable to dictatorships, whether of the left or right variety. In the words of a student of the Cambodian Communist regime, the most extreme on record, "the absence of effective intermediary structures between the people and their successive leaders predisposed the society to the unrestrained exercise of power." Thus, the same factors that keep countries poor-above all, lawlessness-facilitate Communist takeovers.
These factors have a further effect. In the Orient, since the earliest times, the absence of private property in land meant that distinction and affluence could be gained in one way only: by acquiring prominence in the sovereign's employ. Government posts, consequently, were viewed not as service to the country but as a means of personal enrichment. It was natural, therefore, that participation in Communist regimes, which concentrated all power and all wealth in their hands, was perceived as the principal means of gaining status as well as fortune. (This, of course, held true also in Russia.)
In the early years of the twentieth century, European socialists wondered why capitalism did not collapse as Marx and Engels had predicted. The Revisionists resolved the problem by acknowledging that Marx and Engels had been mistaken on this particular point. For orthodox Marxists, however, this was not an acceptable solution, because the doctrine, said to be scientific, could tolerate no deviations or exceptions: it stood or fell as a whole.
Confronting this problem, Lenin drew on the work of the English economist J. A. Hobson, who in his imperialism (1902) explained the colonial drives of the time as the result of the capitalists' quest for new markets for their goods and new outlets for their capital. Lenin elaborated this thesis in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916-17), in which he argued that the colonies were essential to the survival of advanced capitalism by propping up its ailing economies and enabling it to buy off the working class. An assault on the imperial possessions of the great powers was therefore an indispensable component of modern revolutionary strategy.
The difficulty with this plan was that the colonies, as well as the semicolonial dependencies of the capitalist countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, had few if any industries and therefore no significant industrial base proletariat Lenin sought to resolve the predicament of promoting a proletarian revolution in countries without an industrial base by asking the Second Congress of the Comintern to adopt a colonial program based on two premises: 1) that these regions could bypass the capitalist stage and proceed directly from "feudalism" to socialism; and 2) that the Communists active there forge an alliance (temporary, of course) with the native "nationalist bourgeoisie" against foreign imperialists.
Lenin's proposals aroused considerable opposition from the handful of Comintern delegates representing the colonial regions, who found their native bourgeoisie no less odious than they did foreign imperialists. But Lenin held his ground, and the Comintern committed itself to what came to be known as wars of "national liberation," in which the Communists, while retaining their distinct identity, championed the nationalist cause and collaborated with other anti-imperialist groups.
Attempts to implement this policy invariably failed: instead of exploiting the nationalists for their own purposes, the Communists found themselves exploited by them. In 1918-19, Allied armies occupied western Anatolia and Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, a defeated partner of Germany in World War I. Expelling these foreigners became the avowed mission of a Turkish nationalist movement, headed by Kemal Pasha (Ataturk). In 1920, Kemal proposed to Moscow collaboration against the occupying powers. Moscow readily agreed and in 1921 signed with him a Treaty of Friendship, committing the two countries to pursue jointly the struggle against "imperialism." Following Comintern practice, Moscow accompanied this state-to-state collaboration with subversive activity. A recently declassified document from the Soviet Communist Party's archive reveals that even as it was publicly embracing the Turkish nationalists, Moscow secrecy plotted to overthrow them. Drafted by Lenin, the directive, from late 1920, reads as follows:
Do not trust the Kemalists; do not give them arms; concentrate all efforts on Soviet agitation among the Turks and on the building in Turkey of a solid Soviet party capable of triumphing through its own efforts.
Kemal, for his part, while welcoming Moscow's help and planning to found a one-party state on the Soviet model, had no intention of tolerating Communists on Turkish soil. Two (months after a Comintern agent had organized the Turkish Communist Party, the agent and his associates were found dead, almost certainly murdered by the Kemalists.
A fiasco on a much grander scale but similar in nature met Soviet policies in China. China was highly important to the Comintern and unusually promising. The most populous country in the world, it had been ruthlessly exploited by the European powers and Japan. The exploitation gave rise to xenophobia: China seethed with hostility toward foreigners, which periodically erupted into violence. Sun Yat-sen, the head of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which ruled China since 1911-12, admired the Soviet Union for having shaken off foreign economic and political domination. Although primarily an agricultural country, China also had a working class employed mostly in light industry and concentrated in Shanghai. Lenin placed great hopes on China, even if he undoubtedly engaged in hyperbole when he told a visiting diplomatic mission from Peking that "the Chinese revolution . . . will finally bring about the downfall of world imperialism."
Chiang Kai-shek, who emerged as the leading figure in the Kuomintang during the 1920s, was greatly impressed by the Soviet example and welcomed Soviet "advisers," who poured into China. The Chinese Communist Party, formed in 1921 on Moscow's directives and made up almost exclusively of literati and students, retained its separate identity, as the Comintern rules required, but after 1923 many of its members enrolled individually in the Kuomintang This they did on orders from Moscow, which hoped in this manner to build up in China an anti-imperialist front. To this end, it offered the Kuomintang military and political advice. Disagreements between the two partners proliferated, however, especially after 1925, when Sun Yat-sen died and Chiang Kai-shek took charge. In April 1927, Chiang expelled the Communists from his party and had thousands of them killed.
Stalin deduced from this debacle that it was futile to attempt to harness Third World nationalism for Communist purposes. On these grounds, in 1928, at its Sixth Congress, the Comintern abandoned the policy of lending support to the "national bourgeoisie." Henceforth, until Stalin's death twenty-five years later, the USSR sharply reduced its activities in the colonial and quasi-colonial regions. In the process, it abandoned collaboration with the native "bourgeoisie," whom it came to regard, even after their countries had gained independence, as "lackeys of the imperial powers. Thus in 1953 the Great Soviet Encyclopedia described Mahatma Gandhi as an "agent of British Imperialism." Instead, the USSR relied on the Communist parties, whether legal or illegal, regardless of how small they were. In 1948 Moscow instigated a series of Communist armed revolts in Southeast Asia-Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines-all of which were suppressed. The Communists succeeded only in Indochina (Vietnam), where in 1954 a native guerrilla army expelled the French from the northern half of the country. As long as Stalin was alive, the foreign policy of the USSR was concentrated on building up its own industrial and military might and sowing dissent among the Great Powers.
On the face of it, the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communists over the Kuomintang and their conquest of all of mainland China represented an immense triumph for the Communist cause. All of a sudden, the Marxist-Leninist movement spread to half a billion people, nearly twice the number previously living under its rule. But this triumph turned out to be a mixed blessing, for it was purchased at the price of the movement's international unity: Communist China soon went its own way, splitting the movement. Nationalism once again triumphed over class allegiance.
In October 1927, what was left of the Chinese Communist organization after Chiang Kai-shek's crackdown retreated into the rural hinterland. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), one of its leaders, once an ardent supporter of the Kuomintang, spent the following twenty years in the political wilderness, building up a guerrilla army. In 1931, the Chinese Communists proclaimed a Chinese Soviet republic. Neither then nor during World War II, however, did Stalin show any inclination to support them. For one, he was more concerned with safeguarding the interests of the USSR in the Far East than in promoting Communism there; and the interests of the USSR required a strong, unified China, able to contain Japan. In Stalin's eyes, the Kuomintang was much better suited for this role, for which reason he preferred to subsidize Chiang Later, Stalin was mindful of his experience with an independent Communist Party in Yugoslavia, which in 1948 under the leadership of Jo sip (Broz) Tito had refused to obey Moscow's orders and had broken with it. Apprehensive lest China develop into another "Titoist" state, Stalin tried to persuade Mao to come to terms with Chiang. Mao ignored this advice and proceeded, at the head of a peasant army, to conquer all of China.
Stalin continued to patronize Mao even after the latter had become the undisputed master of China. Mao was so dependent on the USSR for economic and military support that for the time being he had to swallow his pride and accept the Soviet Union as a leader and model. But with the advent of Khrushchev Mao's attitude changed, because he perceived Stalin's successors as traitors to the cause. In 1959 relations between Moscow and Beijing reached a near breaking point, in large part because of Moscow's refusal to share with Beijing nuclear technology. The following year Khrushchev unilaterally withdrew Soviet technical advisers from China.
Mao soon developed an idiosyncratic variant of Communism. In the words of a leading authority on the subject, the "dominant values" of Mao's ideology "seem completely alien to Marxism": it merely serves to illustrate "the unlimited flexibility of any doctrine once it becomes historically influential. On nearly every important issue, Mao stood Marx on his head. Instead of relying on industrial workers to make revolution, he elevated the peasantry to the rank of the leading revolutionary class: the world revolution, he asserted, would be accomplished not by Europeans (among whom he included Russians) but by the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He also rejected Marx's adage "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness," i.e., coping with material necessities defines how humans think and feel. Instead Mao insisted that ideas shape behavior: "objective factors" that Marxism treated as decisive were for Mao a "bourgeois" concept.
Even before he had become ruler of China, Mao claimed for himself authorship of a Marxist doctrine designed for the world's non-Western countries, in which revolutions would be made by the peasantry. As early as 1945, one of Mao's close associates claimed, "Mao Tse-tung's great accomplishment hhas been to change Marxism from a European to an Asian form" that would guide a great part of humanity living under the same conditions as the Chinese. Later, in seeking to elbow the Soviet Union out of Africa, Beijing resorted to racist arguments, charging that the Russians, being "white," could not possibly understand either Orientals or Africans. Mao was celebrated at home as the prophet of the true faith. Not untypical was the title of a book published in Beijing in 1966: The Brilliance of Mao Tse-tungs Thought Illuminates the Whole World. Thus, "what began as a dispute over alternative revolutionary strategies... developed into an incipient struggle for power in the international Communist movement."
The Sino-Soviet conflict revealed an elemental and irremediable weakness of the Communist cause. It demonstrated that foreign Communists were prepared to follow Moscow's leadership only as long as they lacked a significant domestic base and depended on Moscow for financial and military assistance. But-under these conditions they were marginalized and powerless. If they succeeded in acquiring significant support at home, as happened first in Yugoslavia and then in China, they turned into an autonomous political force and hence an asset to international Communism, but then they no longer wanted to take orders from the Russians or acknowledge the national interests of the Soviet Union as supreme. The result was a dilemma: the more successful foreign Communists were, the more independent they became and the less able was Moscow to control them. Moscow, therefore, had to choose between its own interests and those of the international movement. If the Soviet leadership was serious about spreading Communism, then it had to give up its claims to leadership and abandon the theory that the interests of Communism and the interests of the Soviet Union were one and the same. But then the international movement would become fragmented and subject to centrifugal forces, thereby losing what to Lenin was the essential feature of his regime rigorous centralism.
The strategy of assisting anti-imperialist forces in the Third World, adopted by Stalin's successors after his death, appeared much more feasible in the 1950s than it had been thirty years earlier, because after World War II the imperial powers had granted independence to most of their colonies Among them were such populous and strategically located countries as India, Indonesia, and Egypt They were governed by inexperienced nationalist leaders, usually short of money who viewed political sovereignty as merely a first step to genuine independence based on economic self-sufficiency. They admired the Soviet Union as a country that had emerged from backwardness into industrial might; desiring to emulate it, they welcomed Soviet counsel and assistance. In some cases, aspiring dictators also saw in the Soviet Union assurance that they would stay in power: in return for proclaiming themselves "socialist," they obtained the help of the Communist bloc's security organs and armed forces against domestic and foreign rivals.
After 1956, Moscow engaged itself actively in the Third World, seeking to build up an alliance embracing half of the world's population against the West, notably the United States. The means of securing a foothold varied. In India, it financed and supervised the construction of a giant steel mill elsewhere it built power stations and bakeries. In Egypt, Moscow helped construct the Aswan Dam, which for the first time made it possible to control the annual flooding of the Nile. Such actions were meant to contrast with the "selfish" behavior of the capitalist West Moscow armed the Arabs against Israel and Ethiopia against Somalia. In all these cases Soviet "advisers" accompanied the aid, enabling Moscow to establish a worldwide physical presence. Aid also created an economic dependency that could be translated into political dependency.
In the end, this ambitious and costly policy brought very modest rewards. The Soviet Union simply lacked the economic resources to play the kind of role called for by its new Third World policy. In country after country, from the Middle East to Africa, Moscow rushed to-exploit power vacuums, extending financial and military assistance, only to find that an unforeseen event had removed its ally, or else he had changed his mind. As someone said, Third World leaders could not be bought; they could only be rented.
The principal effect of Moscow's Third World activities was to alarm the West and exacerbate the Cold War. They also heavily strained its treasury.
Marxist-Leninists, regarding their doctrine as a science, tried to analyze their experiences and learn from their mistakes, not so much as concerned the movement's ultimate objective, which remained beyond criticism, but its strategy and tactics. Lenin learned from Marx that to prevent a counterrevolution he had ruthlessly to demolish the entire institutional structure of capitalism. Observing the Revisionism of Stalin's successors, Mao concluded that demolishing institutions was not enough: one had to change man. Changing human beings was, of course, the ultimate objective of Marxism. But Mao decided that it had to be realized without delay, Land he committed his entire rule to make it reality.
The Chinese Communists established a totalitarian regime closely modeled on the Soviet Initially, Mao also faithfully copied Stalin's economic policies, collectivizing agriculture and introducing Five-Year Plans of industrialization. But there were differences. One of them was that whereas the Soviet dictatorship, the heir of tsarism, did not much care what people thought as long as they conformed and pretended to believe, the Chinese Communists were determined to attain genuine intellectual and spiritual conformity. This aspiration was rooted in Confucianism, which laid stress on moral perfectibility and demanded that government rest on moral virtue rather than mere coercion. But it was immediately inspired by Mao's fear that unless his subjects' minds were reshaped so that they fully assimilated the doctrines of Marx, Lenin, and Mao himself, China would suffer the same fate as Soviet Russia-i.e., turn Revisionist and abandon the true faith.
Mao's premises led to fantastic experiments, all of which miscarried, at great cost in human lives and to the nation's well-being. Chinese citizens, especially intellectuals, suspected of holding anachronistic or subversive thoughts were subjected to systematic "reeducation," often in concentration camps, in which they were exposed to what has been aptly called "brainwashing." It was mental torture designed to break the spirit.
The same assumptions also spawned the so-called Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958. Inspired by the desire to demonstrate to the world that China had found a better and speedier way to overcome economic backwardness than the Russians, Mao declared that China's goal was to surpass in five years Britain's output of coal and steel. This was to be accomplished by over half a billion people, who were herded into twenty-four thousand "people's communes," which combined primitive household industrial pursuits with agriculture. A perfect example of Mao's willingness to ignore economic reality, it rested on the theorem, spelled out in Quotations from Chairman Mao (popularly referred to as Mao's Little Red Book), which for a time was the only book available in China, that the Chinese people were a tabula rasa:
Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding
thing
about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and
blank." This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good
thing Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for
action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper
free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters
can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be
painted.
This was said of a nation that had behind it thousands of years of statehood.
There was to be no limit to what humans could accomplish once they set their mind to it one slogan of the Great Leap Forward pledged, We shall teach the sun and moon to change "places. We shall create a new heaven and earth for man." Thus Marxism, which to its founders was a strictly materialist doctrine, turned in the hands of China's self-proclaimed Marxist dictator into a utopian idealism that subordinated reality to the human will.
The Great Leap wrought such economic chaos that it had
to be abandoned. Its cost in human lives was staggering
American demographers, given access to population statistics after Mao's death,
determined that at least 30 million Chinese
perished in a famine of which the outside world had not even been aware. But
failure did not discourage Mao, as his
megalomania reached pathological dimensions. Feeling increasingly isolated from
his own party, he launched in 1966 another bizarre and disruptive campaign,
this time directed against intellectuals and party of officials,, who, he feared,
would lead China along the same treacherous path that the Soviet Union had followed.
This crusade recruited urban youths into the Red Guards to carry out what was
officially labeled the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution but which is more
accurately described as a vicious cultural counterrevolution. It was an occurrence
without precedent in which a ruler, driven partly by his desire to reignite
revolutionary zeal and partly by folie des grandeurs, brought the country's
cultural life to a standstill. For several years China, one of the oldest civilizations
in the world, was ravaged by barbarian hordes who had been taught to treat everything
beyond their understanding as fit for destruction. At its height, all schools
were closed and no books were available except for textbooks and Mao's own works.
Performances of Western music were forbidden. The Red Guards assaulted intellectuals
and forced them to humiliate themselves publicly; they tortured and killed many
of them. Thousands of party officials suffered similar treatment. This anti-intellectual
frenzy was brought to a halt only with Mao's death in 1976. Its consequences
were not only to deprive an entire generation of an education but also to eviscerate
it morally and psychologically.
Although anyone in China who dared to criticize either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution risked immediate imprisonment, not a few radical intellectuals in the West sympathized with Mao's barbarities and sought wisdom in his insipid writings.
Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, put an end to the wild experimentation. In 1979, he initiated a policy of free-market reforms, which revived the entrepreneurial spirit. Since then, China, although Communist in ideology and form of government, has taken the path of economic privatization that, in effect, meant the abandonment of the most fundamental precept of Communism, the abolition of private property.
Revolutionary movements and regimes tend, up to a point, to grow more radical and more ruthless. This happens because, after successive failures, their leaders, rather than reexamine their fundamental premises, since these provide the rationale for their existence, prefer to implement them more ruthlessly in the conviction that failure was due to insufficient resolve.
Ultimately, when nothing succeeds, fatigue sets in and the heirs of the founding fathers settle down to enjoy life, but not before resorting to the most extreme forms of inhumanity.
Just as the Holocaust expressed the quintessential nature of National Socialism, so did the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia (197S-78) represent the purest embodiment of Communism: what it turns into when pushed to its logical conclusion. Its leaders would stop at nothing to attain their objective, which was to create the first truly egalitarian society in the world: to this end they were prepared to annihilate as many of their people as they deemed necessary. It was the most extreme manifestation of the hubris inherent in Communist ideology, the belief in the boundless power of an intellectual elite guided by the Marxist doctrine, with resort to unrestrained violence in order completely to reshape life. The result was devastation on an unimaginable scale.
The leaders of the Khmer Rouge received their higher education in Paris, where they absorbed Rousseau's vision of "natural man," as well as the exhortations of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre to violence in the struggle against colonialism. ("One must kill," Sartre wrote. "To bring down a European is to ... suppress at the same time the oppressor and the oppressed.") On their return to Cambodia, they organized in the northeastern hills a tightly disciplined armed force made up largely of illiterate and semiliterate youths recruited from the poorest peasantry. These troops, for the most part twelve- to fourteen-year-old adolescents, were given intense indoctrination in hatred of all those different from themselves, especially city dwellers and the Vietnamese minority. To develop a "love of killing and consequently war," they were trained, like the Nazi SS, in tormenting and slaughtering animals.
Their time came in early 1975, when the Khmer Rouge overthrew the government of Lon Nol, installed by the Americans, and occupied the country's capital, Phnom Penh. The population at large had no inkling what lay in store, because in their propaganda the Khmer Rouge promised to pardon servants of the old regime, rallying all classes against the imperialists" and landowners. Yet the instant Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh, they resorted to the most radical punitive measures. Convinced that cities were the roots of all evil-in Fanon's words, the home of "traitors and knaves"-the Khmer Rouge ordered the capital, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, and all other urban centers to be totally evacuated. The victims, driven into the countryside, were allowed to salvage only what they could carry on their backs. Within one week all Cambodian cities were emptied. Four million people, or 60 percent of the population, suffered exile, compelled to live under the most trying conditions overworked as well as undernourished. Secondary and higher schools were shut down.
Then the carnage began. Unlike Mao, whom he admired and followed in many respects, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, did not waste time on "reeducation" but proceeded directly to the extermination of those categories of the population whom he suspected of actual or potential hostility to the new order: all civilian and military employees of the old regime, former landowners, teachers, merchants, Buddhist monks, and even skilled workers. Members of these groups, officially relegated to the lowest class of citizens and deprived of all rights, including access to food rations, were either summarily shot or sent to perform forced labor until they dropped dead from exhaustion. These condemned unfortunates constituted, potentially, over two-thirds of the population. They were systematically arrested, interrogated, and tortured until they implicated others, and then executed. The executions involved entire families, including small children, for Pol Pot believed that dissenting ideas and attitudes, derived from one's social position, education, or occupation, were "evil microbes" that spread like disease. Members of the Communist Party, considered susceptible to contagion, were also subject to liquidation. After the Vietnamese expelled the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia, they discovered mountains of skulls of its victims.
The peasants were not spared, being driven into "cooperatives" modeled on the Chinese. The state appropriated all the food produced by these communes and, as in pharaonic Egypt, having stored it in temples and other government depositories doled it out at its discretion. These measures upset traditional rural practices and led to food shortages that in 1978-79, following an unusually severe drought, produced a massive famine.
The killings intensified throughout the forty-four months that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. People were executed for such offenses as being late to work, complaining about food, criticizing the government, or engaging in premarital sex. In sadism, the brutalities were fully comparable to those perpetrated by the Nazis. Thus on the Vietnamese border Khmer Rouge soldiers would rape a Vietnamese woman, then ram a stake or bayonet into her vagina. Pregnant women were cut open, their unborn babies yanked out and slapped against the dying mother's face. The Yotheas [youths] also enjoyed cutting the breasts off well endowed Vietnamese women.
Cases were reported of children being ordered to kill their parents.
The toll of these massacres was appalling According to reliable estimates, the population of Cambodia at the time the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 was 7.3 million; when the Vietnamese took over in 1978, it had declined to 5.8 million. Allowing for the natural population increase during the intervening four years, it should have been over 8 million. In other words, the Pol Pot regime was responsible for the death or population deficit of some 2 million Cambodian citizens, or over one-quarter of the population. These victims represented the best educated and most skilled elements of the nation. The gruesome experiment has been characterized as a "human tragedy of almost unprecedented proportions [that] occurred because political theoreticians carried out their grand design on the unsuspecting Khmer people."
The Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970-73 presents an unusual case of a Communist revolution attempted in a democratic country by democratic means.
In the 1960s the government of Chile was controlled by Christian Democrats, whose leader, Eduardo Frei,, pursued fairly radical social and economic policies. In particular, Frei carried out an ambitious agrarian reform program that called
'Some Western intellectuals, unwilling to blame this unprecedented slaughter on the Communists, attributed it to the Americans, who in 1969-73 had bombed Cambodia in an attempt to destroy the Vietcong forces that had sought refuge there. It is difficult to see, however, why the Cambodians' rage against the Americans would vent itself in the killing of 2 million of their own people.
for the expropriation, with compensation, of large estates. Frei also nationalized much of the mining industry. These measures had the effect of polarizing Chilean society between the right, which thought they went too far, and the left, which saw them as inadequate. The popularity of the Frei administration was further undermined by inflation, which on the eve of the 1970 presidential election rose to 35 percent.
In that election, the three leading candidates ran neck and neck. The largest number of votes (36.3 percent) was cast for Salvador Allende,, a medical doctor of Marxist sympathies, who represented the Popular Unity Party, a bloc of socialists and Communists. The conservative runner-up received 34.9 percent of the vote. Because no candidate had won an absolute majority, the issue was referred to the Congress. During the two months that followed the election, Allende struck a deal with the Christian Democrats, who agreed to support his candidacy provided he subscribed to a set of conditions committing him to honor Chile's constitution. These included respect for law and political pluralism. Spelled out in the Statute of Constitutional Guarantees, passed by Congress, it enabled Allende to assume the presidency.
Allende's "Chilean Road to Socialism" was thus from the beginning subject to restraints that impeded the radical designs of its socialist and Communist constituency. Despite his admiration for Fidel Castro,, Allende was a romantic idealist rather than a fanatical revolutionary. But his doctrinaire backers, determined to introduce into Chile a "dictatorship of the proletariat" on the Soviet model, kept pushing him to the left, and as his measures failed, he became radicalized. Allende believed that he could achieve socialist objectives by legal means on the assumption that his reforms would in time gain him the support of the nation's majority. The Communists supported this strategy, convinced that in Chile their objectives
could be attained peacefully. Unfortunately for them this did not happen, in part because Allende's socialist legislation alienated much of the country, and in part because it reduced the country's economy to shambles.
After assuming the presidency, Allende entrusted the economic ministries in his "United Popular Government" to Communists, who proceeded to nationalize the remaining mining industries, banking, and much of manufacturing Enacted by decree, these measures bypassed the legislature. The confiscation of the Anaconda and Kennecott copper mines caused foreign investments to dry up. The Soviet Union came to Allende's assistance, extending to him over half a billion dollars in loans. Other countries also offered aid, but it was not enough to rescue Chile's battered finances. To pay for the various social measures, including hikes in wages, the government resorted to the printing presses, which produced an inflation that far surpassed anything seen under Frei:: in the three years of Allende's presidency, the value of the currency in circulation increased by a factor of fifteen, and inflation exceeded 300 percent a year.
Concurrently with the nationalization of enterprises, the government proceeded to collectivize\ agriculture. To this Lend, it tolerated and even encouraged land seizures. The result was a dramatic drop in food production, with wheat crops declining by almost 50 percent. Acute shortages followed: when Allende's government fell, the country had flour reserves for only a few days.
Protests mounted. The most serious of these were organized by truckers-small private entrepreneurs-who objected to government plans to compete with them by means of a national transport company. On two occasions these strikes, which involved as many as 700,000 people, brought the country 's transport and much of the economy to a stand
still. In an orthodox Communist country, such demonstrations would have been declared counterrevolutionary plots instigated by the CIA and suppressed. But in Allende's Chile, although the government controlled the radio and much of the press, there remained considerable freedom of information, which could not be silenced without provoking a national revolt Opposition parties functioned and criticized the government And, above all, there was the Congress and the Supreme Court.
In August 1973 the Chamber of Deputies voted 81 to 45
that Allende had violated the constitution by usurping its legislative powers,
ignoring the country's laws, and infringing on the freedom of speech. The Supreme
Court, for its part, con-
demned Allende for subordinating the judiciary to his political needs. In view
of the absence in the Chilean constitution
of provisions for impeachment, the Chamber requested the armed forces to restore
the laws of the land. Obeying this
mandate, eighteen days later, Chile's military, led by General Augusto Pinochet,
forcibly removed Allende from office. The
new regime was a dictatorship that dealt quite brutally with the defeated socialists
and Communists.
Cuba-the first and only enduring Communist state in Latin America-presents an interesting case of a personal dictatorship by an exceedingly ambitious politician who found in Communist ideology justification for his ambition. In the words of one scholar, "Historically ... Castroism is a leader in search of a movement, a movement in search of power, and power in search of an ideology."
Contrary to widespread opinion, pre-Communist Cuba was
neither a backward nor a predominantly rural country. It had the second-highest
living standard m Latin America (after Venezuela, which derived its wealth from
petroleum);), the majority of its inhabitants were literate and resided in the
cities. Nor is it correct to say that its economy depended
on sugar: sugar was indeed the leading export commodity, but it accounted for
only one-third or less of national in-
come In other words, the archetypal preconditions widely believed to account
for Communist revolutions-poverty
and backwardness-were absent.
The Communists took over Cuba on the wave of essentially middle-class rebellion against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who in 1952 abolished the democratic constitution that he himself had promulgated during his earlier legitimate terms of office (1933-44). Fidel Castro, the son of a wealthy plantation owner and a student at the Havana Law School, rode to power on this wave of discontent Although displaying left-wing sympathies he was, to begin with, no Communist: indeed, he had no ideology at all but only a cranny for power. Marxism-Leninism was imbued in him by the Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara. Castro's pro gram, designed to rally all the classes of the nation behind him, stressed above all the need to restore the 1940 constitution.
Very quickly, however, after assuming dictatorial authority in what was a genuine popular revolution, Castro veered leftward.. He introduced a one-party government, carried out a radical land reform, and in 1960, with Soviet encouragement, expropriated all U.S. holdings, which led President Eisenhower to retaliate with a trade embargo. The embargo in turn made Cuba increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union. Moscow, though initially cautious in supporting Castro for fear of U.S. reaction, nevertheless found itself gradually drawn into Cuban politics, especially after April 1961, when Castro proclaimed Cuba a "socialist" country. The fiasco of the U.S.-instigated Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961) and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), which ended with Washington's pledge to respect Cuban sovereignty laced the island firmly in the Soviet bloc. During this crisis, Castro had urged Moscow to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States, being prepared to sacrifice Cuba in order to assure the worldwide triumph of "socialism." Moscow, which had restrained him, became now the primary economic supporter of Cuba, purchasing a large share of Cuban sugar at artificially high prices, supplying her with oil and many industrial goods, and providing her with generous loans. According to Fidel Castro's brother Raul,, before its dissolution the Soviet Union had provided Cuba, free of charge, with $10 billion worth of military equipment. Cuba's economic dependence on Moscow was near total.
In return, Castro loyally supported every Soviet foreign venture, from the invasion of Czechoslovakia to that of Afghanistan; provided Moscow with intelligence listening posts; and undertook to spread Communism throughout Central and Latin America. At its founding congress in Havana in mid-1967, the Castroite Latin American Organization of Solidarity (OLAS) called for guerrilla wars throughout Latin America.
Internally, Castro introduced the standard Soviet-style regime. Within ten years of his ascent to power all sectors of the economy were nationalized, except for agriculture, 30 percent of which was 'left in the hands of small and medium-sized farmers. The party monopolized politics.
Workers, forced to join state-controlled unions, lost the right to organize on their own, to bargain, or to strike. Considerable advances were made in social services-schooling, medicine housing---financed largely with assets acquired from the pre-Communist economy. Dissent was disposed of in two ways: by allowing a large part of the middle class to emigrate and by creating Soviet-style Revolutionary Tribunals and "labor camps.
While it was common for Communist leaders to be deified,, most of them preferred to stay in the background, as befitted deities. Not so Castro: he was everywhere, haranguing his captive audiences for hours on end with speeches in which he cajoled, inspired, and threatened. Much of his rhetoric was focused on the United States, which he demonized and blamed for whatever went wrong in Cuba.
Living standards declined relentlessly, in part because of the resistance, mostly passive, of workers and farmers, in part. because the most enterprising and best educated Cubans had emigrated to the United States. The survival of the Communist regime came to depend on Soviet support.
Given this reality, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the refusal of the successor Yeltsin government to provide further aid to Cuba seemed to doom the Castro regime. Nevertheless, it managed to survive. It did so by making concessions to foreign capitalists, who were allowed limited but not insignificant opportunities to invest in Cuba. Dollars began to circulate freely in the country. The regime made a major and successful effort to promote tourism, extolling not only Cuba 's beaches and cheap resorts but also the beauty and availability of its young women. In 1992, in a speech to the National Assembly, Castro touted the advantages of Cuban prostitution by declaring his country to have the lowest incidence of AIDS. The campaign, which in 1999 brought in 1.7 million foreign tourists, made Cuba '"one of the mostpopular stops on the sex-vacation circuit, right up there with Thailand .
If in the case of Mao and even Pol Pot one can still discern, at least in the
early phases of their political careers, socialist ideals, in many other regions
of the Third World, especially Africa, such a commitment was strikingly absent.
Here Marx and Lenin were invoked by ambitious politicians with minimal knowledge
of Communist doctrine and history for two purposes: to seize private wealth
and to qualify for Communist bloc assistance against domestic and foreign enemies.
A classic example of such fraudulent invocation of Marxism is furnished by the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam,, who between 1974 and 1991 transformed his country into a full-fledged Soviet satellite. Member of a group of army officers disgruntled by slow promotions, Major Mengistu took part in a revolt that in September 1974 overthrew Ethiopia's venerable emperor Haile Selassie.. Power passed into the hands of a committee called the Derg,, in which Mengistu played a -prominent role. Rivalries soon broke up the Derg, and three months later Mengistu staged a military coup in which he took power. He declared Ethiopia a socialist country, a pledge he promptly implemented by nationalizing banks: and insurance companies. In March 1975, he abolished private land ownership and forced peasants into communes modeled on Mao's.
In 1976, Mengistu launched his own "Red Terror": its main-victims, numbered in the thousands, were Marxist students. The massacres were carried out with the assistance of some ten thousand security agents supplied by the Soviet Union and East Germany. The Soviet Union which had incidently gained a foothold in the Horn of Africa by backing the "scientific socialism"' proclaimed by a military junta in neighboring Somalia, now abandoned Somalia in favor of Ethiopia When, in 1977, Somalia invaded Ethiopia with the view of annexing the Ogaden region, the Communist bloc provided Mengistu with massive help, which included a force of up to fifteen thousand Cuban mercenaries. As a result of this military assistance, the Communist bloc gained much influence in Ethiopia. It proved decisive in crushing Somali incursions, as well as the Eritrean movement for independence.
The ruin of the economy, however, brought about by forced collectivization, which was further aggravated by droughts, resulted in famine (1984-85) in which nearly- 1 million Ethiopians perished. Following the collapse of East Germany in 1989, Mengistu's internal position deteriorated; by 1991, when the USSR dissolved, the Ethiopian ruler found himself isolated. Overthrown that year, he found refuge in Zimbalwe Thus ended what has been described as the "most far-reaching Marxist-Leninist experiment in Africa"
It is difficult, however, to perceive in nominally "socialist" Ethiopia anything but a ruthless military dictatorship that aped Soviet and Chinese practices for its own political ends.
As had happened in Western Europe and Japan,, in the 1970s and 1980s the Third World witnessed the emergence of terrorist movements that assailed democratic and capitalist institutions in the name of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism,, although they had, in fact, more in common with anarchism.
Typical of the genre was the Communist Party of Peru, popularly known as the "Shining Path." Founded by a former professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman Reynoso, and composed of young intellectuals, it exploited the grievances of the Indian people to pursue, by means of terror, a Maoist program. Its terrorism claimed twenty-five thousand victims and greatly harmed the Peruvian economy. When Guzman was captured and put behind bars in 1992, the movement collapsed.
In some other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, "Marxism" served and continues to serve to give the patina of respectability to armed gangs (the so-called Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Army of National Liberation) that combine terror, kidnappings, and extortion with drug trafficking Since 1964, these two groups have inflicted on Colombia an estimated 120,000 casualties and displaced 2 million people.
Countries living under Communism share striking similarities not only in the means used to bring it into being but also in its consequences. All experience a sharp decline in living standards, often accompanied by famine: droughts seem to have an uncanny affinity for Communist regimes. The loss of civil rights and freedoms rationalized by the need for equality is offset by the emergence of a supreme leader-a generalissimo or rider maximo-who concentrates in his hands all the power of which his citizens have been deprived and is elevated to the status of an Oriental divinity. Needless to say, such an-outcome is the very antithesis of the Marxist vision, which saw Communism as driven by impersonal economic forces and leading to boundless freedom for all.