Anna M. Cienciala

Lawrence, Kansas

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Preface.

In 1988, communist states made up about one-third of the world. Of these, the Soviet Union or USSR constituted one-sixth of the global land area; it also controlled most of Eastern Europe. The USSR finally collapsed after the Moscow coup of August 19-21, 1991. It was fortunate that the coup failed. The organizers, who proclaimed a state of emergency, had prepared to arrest at least two hundred thousand people (this was the number of handcuffs ordered), but they did not have the support of the armed forces and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was isolated with his family in their vacation home on the Black Sea, refused to cooperate. When the coup failed, he ordered the arrest of the conspirators and returned to Moscow.

However, it was soon very clear that power in the Russian Federal Republic had passed to its elected President, Boris N. Yeltsin, who had rallied military and popular opposition to the coup in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Yeltsin then proceeded to try to work within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose community of some former Soviet republics. However, despite the signing of several agreements, the CIS existed more on paper than in reality. Meanwhile, the economy of the largest state, the Russian Federal Republic, went into decline. There was also a continuing power struggle between Yeltsin and the Russian Duma (parliament). Both communists and right-wing deputies opposed radical moves toward a free market economy. The stand-off between parliament and president led to a referendum in spring 1993, which, in turn, decided that there would be elections to a new parliament in late 1993. However, these elections, held on December 12, 1993, produced another oppositional parliament, in which, moreover, the "Liberal-Democratic Party" lead by the extreme nationalist, Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky, won about 23% of the seats. Yeltsin countered by holding a referendum on a new constitution which gave power to the President and made Duma resolutions non-binding.

In February 1994, the new parliament granted an amnesty to the leaders of the October 1993 revolt against Yeltsin, a revolt headed by Aleksandr V. Rutskoi, former Vice-President of Russia, and Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, the former Speaker of parliament. A new government was formed under Premier Chernomyrdin, which promised to slow down reforms, and dismissed the reformist ministers. However, Chernomyrdin also proved reluctant to hand out automatic subsidies to Russia's giant industries. Russia's GNP continues to fall and people continue to suffer, while hundreds of Mafias terrorize private businessmen and even assassinate Russian parliamentarians. In the elections of June 16, 1996, Yeltsin was only a few percentage points ahead of the leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennadi Zuyganov. However, in the run-off elections held on July 3, 1996, Yeltsin, having co-opted the popular General Aleksandr Lebed into his government, won the run-off presidential election against Zuyganov by some 10%.

In the meanwhile ,fighting continued on the fringes of the former empire. In Georgia, Russian troops first helped Abkhazians against the Georgians, then switched sides when Premier Edward Shevardnadze agreed that Georgia would join the CIS. Fighting continued between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh; between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and in Moldova (in Russian: Transdniestria, or across the Dnieper River). In December 1994, Russian forces invaded the autonomous republic of Chechnya, a moslem country conqured by Russia in the 19th century, which had declared independence from the Russian Federation. War has been raging there ever since, although Yeltsin has promised to end it.

Although we know a great deal more about the USSR than we did a few years ago, new information on its past is now appearing in such quantities that even specialists find it hard to keep up. Far from being a "dead" discipline, history is very much alive in this part of the world. Indeed, the publication of some of the archival material that had been closed for years ended the "big lie" by giving people back some of their history. This history had to be learned in order for reforms to proceed. The Stalinist version of Soviet history, which prevailed in the USSR until 1988, was discarded, along with the Stalinist political-economic system. However, in the turmoil that fills daily life in the former USSR, especially Russia, the editing of sources and the writing of history is desperately short of funds, so scholars find it very difficult to make ends meet. At the same time, there are many defenders of Stalin and his times (Zyuganov). They find an audience because there is much labor unrest among the masses of the people, great discontent in the armed forces, and a growing trend to recall the "good old days" when, bad as things were, everyone at least had a job and Moscow was the heart of an empire. It is still too early to tell whether Russia will develop into a truly democratic state, or whether she will revert to tradition with some type of authoritarian government. If the latter comes about, we may well see a revival of Russian military power and imperialism.

There are also problems in studying the history of other communist states. Except for China, Western interest in these states was, for a long time, overshadowed by interest in the USSR. This was largely due to U.S.- Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, so it was natural for Western scholars to focus on the Soviet Union. Many of them at first saw other communist states as carbon copies of the USSR. This was particularly the case with the so-called Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, which had come under Soviet domination and had communism imposed on them by Moscow after World War II. However, the change of leadership in Poland in late October 1956 and the Hungarian revolution of October-November that year showed that East European countries could develop their own versions of the Communist system even if they remained under Soviet domination.. Therefore, the number of Western historians specializing in these countries steadily increased. This meant an increasing number of books, though always fewer than those published on the USSR.

There has been a growing awareness of the fact that the pre-communist history of all communist states, i.e., their national cultures and traditions, have exerted a major influence on their development. Indeed, without a knowledge of Russian history, we could not possibly understand how Vladimir Il'ich Lenin came to power in Moscow in November 1917, how the Bolsheviks managed to stay in power, and how one of the greatest tyrants the world has ever seen, Joseph S. Stalin, managed to reign as the absolute ruler of the USSR for twenty-five years (1928-1953), as well as expand its territories and domination over most of Eastern Europe. Likewise, without some knowledge of the history of the Russian and non-Russian peoples of the former USSR, we could not understand the problems that Mikhail S. Gorbachev faced in trying to reform that huge empire, and its final disintegration in August 1991. In the same way, without a knowledge of the history of East European states, we could not understand their peoples' revolts against the Stalinist system and Soviet domination. These began with the June 1953 workers' revolt in East Berlin, which was crushed by Soviet tanks. It was followed by Polish and Hungarian revolts in 1956, Polish revolts in 1970, 1976 and 1980, until finally, the people of Eastern Europe threw off communism in 1989.

Here we should note that the rejection of the Stalinist political-economic-social model began outside the USSR. It started in Yugoslavia when Josip Broz Tito broke with Moscow. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet Bloc in 1948 and thus became the first independent communist state, i.e., outside the Soviet bloc. Within the bloc itself, the process of change was, of course, connected with leadership and policy changes in the USSR, but often went far beyond them. This can certainly be said of the "New Course" in Hungary in 1953-55, under Imre Nagy, which was the prelude to the revolution of October-November 1956, crushed by Soviet military intervention. The process advanced a little in Poland under Wladyslaw Gomulka after October 1956, but then came to a stop. However, the "New Economic Mechanism," introduced in Hungary by Janos Kadar in the late 1960s, again went far beyond the timid reform experiments in the USSR. Similar economic reform plans were drawn up in Czechoslovakia in 1968, but there was no time to implement them. In any case, they had to be preceded by political liberalization, which took place under Alexander Dubcek. The "Prague Spring" was crushed in late August of that year by the Warsaw Pact invasion, spearheaded by the USSR, but dissent soon raised its head in Czechoslovakia and produced some of the leaders of the new democratic state which emerged in late 1989.

In the meanwhile, Poland led the fight with workers' revolts in December 1970, June 1976, and July-August 1980. The last revolt led to the extraordinary coexistence of the party state with the national "Solidarity" movement, led by Lech Walesa from September 1980 to early December 1981. Although the movement was crushed with the imposition of martial law by General Wociech Jaruzelski in December 1981, its ideas and leaders survived to win the elections of June 4, 1989, and then establish the first majority non-communist government in Eastern Europe in September that year. Meanwhile, in Hungary, communist leaders agreed to the establishment of a multiparty system, rehabilitated Imre Nagy and the revolution of 1956, and then dissolved their party, transforming it into a democratic one. These developments were the signal for the rest of Eastern Europe; they led to the mass flight of East Germans to West Germany through Hungary, to demonstrations against the East German government, changes in that government and finally to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in early November, which opened the way to the reunification of Germany, as well as to the "velvet" revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the old communist leaders in Bulgaria and a violent revolution in Romania. In 1990-91, the last Stalinist stronghold in Eastern Europe, Albania, also began to crumble. We should note that all these dramatic events took place without armed Soviet intervention. This was due probably to Gorbachev's pressing need to continue building detente with the United States.

The future of Russia and Eastern Europe is hard to predict, except for the fact that the lives of the people are not likely to improve greatly for some time to come. This is not surprising, for the old economic system had led to rack and ruin, while enormous funds are needed to construct a new, capitalist -- or semi-capitalist -- one. Thus, despite plans to develop private farms in Russia, efforts in this direction have been largely unsuccessful to date. Here, and particularly in the former Soviet Ukraine, we must bear in mind Stalin's extermination of private farmers by deportations and the man-made famine in Ukraine of 1930. We must also recall the Russian tradition of land repartition in the communes, or mirs .Furthermore, there is a current lack of investment capital for private farms, while the state and collective farms are holding on to the agricultural machinery, fertilizers, etc. However, some privately-owned farms have reappeared in the Baltic States and in western Ukraine (previously part of Poland), for private farms existed in both areas as late as 1944/45. Likewise, privatization has made only slight progress in Russian industry, though it is clearly evident in the service sector, especially in the shops, street shopping markets, and restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad; before that, Petrograd, and St.Petersburg).

Meanwhile, privatization has been making much more progress in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, though again mostly in services and very little in heavy industry. Poland has led the way since January 1990, when the new, mainly non-communist government, launched a radical economic reform program designed to lead the country back to capitalism as fast as possible. Still, the problems are great and it is likely that state capitalism will play a role both in the new Russia and in Eastern Europe -- as it did to some extent in the USSR under the New Economic Policy (NEP 1924-28) and in Eastern Europe throughout the interwar period (1919-39). Finally, two of the former multinational East European states have disintegrated. Yugoslavia split up into its component parts and was embroiled in a bloody civil wa in 1991-96, in which the Serbs tried to make their country as large as possible at the expense of Bosnia and Croatia. This was was ended by the Dayton , Ohio, Peace Accords mediated by the United States in December 1995, after which a NATO force entered some of these territories. The future of Bosnia, is, however, still very uncertain, although Slovenia and Croatia seem to be doing very well. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two states: the Czech and Slovak Republics, of which the first is doing extremely well but no the second, which was always economically far behind. Germany is still experiencing great difficulties in financing the economic transformation of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The task is far more expensive than had been expected and will take much longer to complete than was once thought. Meanwhile the economic recession has strengthened German hatred of foreigners, along with the appearance of some virulent anti-Semitism and other latent Nazi characteristics. Similar economic circumstances have been accompanied the reappearance of anti-Semitism in parts of Eastern Europe.

Unlike Eastern Europe -- where, except for Yugoslavia, communism was imposed from the outside by the Soviet Union -- Third World communism was originally fused with the struggle for independence and thus, the struggle against foreign domination. Communism appealed to Third World leaders not only because the European colonial powers they fought were capitalist, but also because communism appeared to them as the best path to swift modernization. Their inspiration was Stalin's transformation of the USSR into an industrial power in the 1930s. Unfortunately, the deep flaws of this model were not obvious either to Third World or East European communist leaders, so it brought great suffering to their peoples.

Despite their nationalistic appeal, the native communist regimes of the Third World encountered various degrees of opposition. As in Eastern Europe, this opposition came from all directions: conservatives, liberals, democratic socialists, the churches, artists, writers and students. However, most of these opposition groups were very small and did not develop into mass movements. Nevertheless, signs of relaxation led to demands for change. Thus, when Deng Xiaoping loosened the reins in his drive to modernize China, students demonstrated in their thousands in Beijing and other cities. But when the hardliners won an inner-party struggle, they sent army units to massacre the students in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 - the very day on which elections overthrew communism in Poland. The massacre of June 4th can be seen as a victory for the ancient Chinese tradition of treating all dissent as a prelude to anarchy, over the almost equally ancient tradition of intellectual protest against obvious misrule and corruption. This time, the Chinese hardliners saw the student protest as much more dangerous than in previous years, because of the evident weakening of orthodox communists in both the USSR and Eastern Europe. They crushed the opposition ; the question is - for how long?

Thus, communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe. The USSR has disintegrated and the surviving communist regimes are experiencing great difficulties. Collectivization of the land was abandoned by Deng Xiaoping in China and may be on its way out in Vietnam, which shows increasing signs of small scale capitalism and has, for some years, accepted western investment.. While the Chinese Communist Party still holds power, it is being challenged by regionalism, and the Communist leadership seems unsure of itsself in Vietnam.. The old communist leadership is still in power in North Korea, although the country is experiencing great economic problems. Meanwhile, the decline of communism is highly visible in the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. In February 1990, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas lost a truly free election to their liberal opponents, led by Violetta Chamorro, the situation in that country is still unstable. In Cuba, Fidel Castro is still in power, but the end of Soviet economic aid, especially oil, has led to a drastic decline of industrial production, more shortages, and thus some experiments with a limited free market, also acceptance of western investment (except U.S). In Africa, the long civil war between communists and anti-communists in Angola ended in 1990,but a bloody civil war broke out between rival, mostly tribal-based factions. Colonel Mengistu Meriam, the communist dictator of Ethiopia since 1977, fled the country in May 1991, leaving a terrible legacy of famine and civil war in Somalia, which led to U.S. and U.N. intervention, but the country is still suffering from fighting between rivals for power. Meanwhile, however,. Eritrea, once part of Ethiopia, seems to be well on the way to recovery.

In the Middle East, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen collapsed and united in May 1990 with South Yemen in the Republic of Yemen. However, after four years of unification, a civil war has broken out between the north and the south, with the latter receiving support from Saudi Arabia. The communist regime of Najibullah collapsed in Afganistan in spring 1992, but the new government is still opposed by Islamic fundamentalists who are shelling the capital, Kabul. As of this writing, the remaining communist states are Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos and China.

This text is not intended to provide a detailed history of each communist or former communist state, but to give a historical background of communist states before 1917, and then survey their development from that time to their collapse or survival at present.

The present work developed out of lecture outlines written for students in this course over the years. It has been revised several times on the basis of extensive, ongoing reading. Here I am glad to say that my forecast of spring 1991, has been largely borne out by events. I then wrote that whether the Soviet economic crisis would lead to peaceful secession or civil war. Thus, we could assume that Russia would lose the Baltic states, and perhaps also the Caucasian republics and the Ukraine (1991 edition, p. 389).

Of course, one person cannot be an expert on all the countries involved. I am, therefore, most grateful to my colleagues in the History Department for the comments and suggestions they made on previous editions. Here I wish to thank Professor Norman Saul for his comments on the chapters on Russia and the Soviet Union; Professor Daniel Bays for his guidance to the chapters on China; Professor Cameron Hurst - now elsewhere -, for help on Korea; Professor Emeritus Grant Goodman and Professor Chester J. Pach Jr. (left 1993) for help on Vietnam; Professors Emeriti William Griffith and Robert Gilmore, also Professor Charles Stansifer, for help on the Caribbean and Central America; and Professor Rose Louise Greaves for help with Afghanistan. My principal responsibility is for chapters 1 through 8, but any errors both here and elsewhere are my responsibility, as is the presentation of key leaders and events.

I would also like to thank Jan Emerson and Terri Rockhold of the History Department, Pam LeRow, Paula Courtney and Lynn Porter of the Word Processing Center , also Janet Crow of the Hall Center for the Humanities of the University of Kansas, for their technical help with the various editions of this text. My thanks also go to Bill Drummond for his careful editing and corrections of the 1994 edition. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Lynn Nelson for his help in penetrating the mysteries of Word Perfect and Windows, as well as his most valuable aid in putting this text on-line.

Anna M. Cienciala

Lawrence, Kansas

Summer 1996

Preface ......................................... pp. i-viii.

chapter 1. Marx and the Marxists. The Origins and Development of Marxism in Western Europe; Russian History: Key Problems and Revolutionary Traditions; Russian Marxism before 1914, pp. 1-42.

chapter 2. The Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Russian Civil War; Revolutions in Finland, Germany, and Hungary; The Polish-Soviet War, pp. 43-95.

chapter 3. Russia under Lenin and Stalin, 1921-1939, pp. 96-132.

chapter 4. Soviet Russia and the Western World, 1921-1941, pp. 134-183.

chapter 5. Soviet Aims and Gains in World War II and the Soviet Takeover of Eastern Europe, 1939-45, pp. 184-256.

ch. 6. The Cold War Begins. The USSR, the USA, Eastern Europe, Germany, 1945-56, pp. 257-293.

ch. 7. Politics, Economics, Foreign Policy and Dissent in the USSR and Eastern Europe, 1957-1970, pp. 294-334.

ch. 8. Eastern Europe and the USSR, 1980-1994, pp. 335-443.

ch. 9. The Chinese Revolution and Chinese Communism to 1949, pp. 442-462.

ch. 10. China Since 1949, pp. 463-501.

ch. 11. Nationalism and Communism in Korea, pp. 502-531.

ch. 12. Indochina and the Vietnam War: Cambodia and Laos, pp. 532-570.

ch. 13. Nationalism and Communism in the Caribbean and Central America, pp. 571-615.

ch. 14. Nationalism and Communism in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan, pp. 616-646.