8.9: Communism in the USSR and China

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

The victory of the Bolshevik-led “Reds” over the “Whites” in the Russian Civil War led to the creation of a communist political system in Russia, the first state to implement the idea of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of communism.  Following their overthrow of the Provisional Government in October/November 1917 (the dates vary due to the use of the Julian calendar by the Russians and the Gregorian calendar by the rest of Europe) the Bolsheviks had immediately begun to make changes to governmental and economic policies, including expanding the roles of women, (who had been granted the right to vote by the Provisional Government in 1917), creating new structures to oversee the workings of the state, and centralizing many of the major industries, including banking and communications; however, the efforts were stymied by the outbreak of the civil war.  Once the civil war had ended with the victory of the Reds, the new rulers, led by Vladimir Lenin, began to enact other changes, including withdrawing from most diplomatic efforts around the world other than with the communist parties outside of Russia and the border states.  In December 1922, Lenin’s government created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which included the Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian republics (others would be added after World War II).  Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy (NEP), which adhered to many elements of Marxism while allowing for some limited private ownership, in an attempt to mollify many of his citizens who owned small businesses or farms.  Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922 and was somewhat incapacitated for the remainder of his life; following his death in 1924, the remaining leaders divided into three major groups:  the left, formed around Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s close ally during the revolution and the successful commander of the Red Army; the center, formed around Joseph Stalin, an extremely capable organizer who controlled much of the Party machinery; and the right, formed around Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda newspaper and Lenin’s closest friend.  Trotsky argued in favor of a “permanent revolution,” constantly perfecting the workers’ state, which included eliminating private property in the countryside and collectivizing the agricultural sector. Stalin insisted that Lenin had already established a precedent by allowing a degree of market orientation in farming and that it seemed to be working well. Stalin allied himself with Bukharin, and they succeeded in expelling Trotsky, first from the Party and then from the country.  Trotsky went into exile in 1928, traveled around the world attempting to foment another revolution, became friends with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and was assassinated in 1940 in Mexico City, by a Soviet agent. Figure 8.9.1 shows Leon Trotsky (far left, on gang plank) walking with Frida Kahlo (center, in white blouse and shawl) and others. 

Figure 8.9.1: Trotsky and Kahlo, Les Etats et Empires de la Lune, in the Public Domain

Discussion Question

Why would Trotsky’s friendship with people such as Kahlo and Rivera matter to Stalin?

Stalin, in the meantime, continued to consolidate his power.  He announced the first in a series of Five-Year plans to industrialize the Soviet Union even more rapidly. He also essentially came around to Trotsky’s view that small land-holders would become bourgeois anti-revolutionaries and forced the collectivization of farming as well as the centralization of small businesses.  These actions alienated Bukharin, and he and Stalin split as allies. Peasants resisted the loss of their land by planting and harvesting fewer crops and by killing their livestock before they could be seized. Many peasants were punished by the authorities, who confiscated everything they had and left them to starve. By 1932 when Stalin announced to the world that the wildly successful five-year plan had been completed ahead of schedule, hundreds of thousands of farmers, primarily in Ukraine, had already died. The famine is known in Ukraine as Holodomor, or the Ukrainian Genocide, and it continued through 1933, with the death toll eventually reaching as high as 5 million people.

Stalin was becoming increasingly paranoid of any individual or group that he thought threatened his own authority, including his hold over the Communist Party, the government (including the Comintern, the international arm of the Communist Party), and the apparatus of the Soviet bureaucracy. He began to suspect everyone was plotting against him, and as the claims made by Stalin diverged more and more from reality, dissenters had to be dealt with. Stalin began sending critics to gulag prison camps in Siberia, or simply having them executed by his secret police. When the party leader of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in 1934 (probably by the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, and likely on Stalin’s orders), Stalin used the death to launch what became known as the “Great Purge”. Thousands of party members, including many leaders who had worked closely with Lenin, were targeted. A series of show-trials in Moscow featured shocking scenes of senior Party officials confessing to counter-revolutionary crimes and begging to be executed for their crimes. Among the people accused of treason were Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Russia’s most brilliant military commander who had been awarded Marshall of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest military rank; Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s former ally and Lenin’s closest friend; and Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD.  All of them were eventually executed. Stalin wiped out an entire generation of seasoned military leaders who had helped the Bolsheviks achieve their power. By the end of the purge in 1938, based on Soviet records, about 1.7 million suspected dissenters had been arrested and more than 700,000 people had been executed or died in the prisons; however, given the lack of veracity of many of the Soviet records, outside historians estimate that as many as 3 million people may have been imprisoned in this time. Among these were hundreds from the Red Army officer corps, who Stalin suspected were sympathetic to the ideas of Trotsky. Both the purge and the famine in Ukraine would make it easier for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union in 1941: the Germans found willing collaborators among the Ukrainians, while they rapidly chased the ill-led Soviet army all the way to the gates of Moscow itself.

There is considerable debate about the number of people killed under Stalin’s rule. At the time, most of the world’s communists either refused to believe or tried to justify Stalin’s excesses, and his regime certainly did not advertise its deeds. The low estimates are 10 to 15 million killed and the high estimates of non-war-related deaths reach 60 to 65 million. One of the advocates for the 60 million number was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian dissident author who had been sent to Siberia when accused of writing anti-Soviet propaganda in 1945 (while on the front lines of the war as a tank officer in the Red Army), and who won the Nobel Prize for his writing in 1970 while in exile in the United States.

China

In 1911, Sun Yat-sen and his Xinhai Revolution finally overthrew the empire that had ruled China for over two thousand years, but the revolutionaries were not strong enough to install an effective government throughout China.  Warlords (army generals and minor regional nobility) quickly organized troops to bring order to the countryside. However, they were not interested in respecting or supporting the new republic, which was seen as a European novelty. In the power struggle between Sun Yat-sen and General Yuan Shih-kai, the head of the Imperial Army, Yuan won. Instead of Sun Yat-Sen, a warlord became president of the republic under the new constitution. In the chaos of the republic’s early years, remote imperial provinces were able to establish their own nations, separate from China -- Mongolia remains independent, while Tibet was reconquered by China in the 1950s and is still seeking independence.

Civil conflict broke out between the republic and the warlords. Yuan had declared himself emperor in 1915, and additional provinces had broken away in protest. Sun and the nationalists experienced a resurgence on May 4, 1919, when students revolted in Beijing against the Versailles Treaty, in which Japan, rather than China, received the German protectorates in Shandong province. These demonstrations marked an important modernizing moment for the new Republic. By 1921, Sun had reestablished the republic in Canton; that same year, western-educated intellectuals began organizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai, supporting Sun and the Kuomintang against the warlords.  Figure 8.9.2  shows Sun Yat-sen in 1924, a year prior to his death, seated with documents.

Figure 8.9.2: Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Canton, Author unknown, in the Public Domain

Discussion Question 

Why was Sun Yat-sen successful as a leader within China?

While the North remained in conflict, Sun died of cancer in 1925, and his protege, General Chiang Kai-shek, took over the leadership of the Kuomintang. Chiang was a capable leader who was able to unite the government. In 1927, Chiang married U.S.-educated Soong Mei-ling, the sister of Sun’s widow Soong Ching-ling.  By 1927, the “Northern Expedition” against the warlords found success under the leadership of  Chiang with CCP and Soviet support.  A few months later, however, a new civil war began in China. Chiang turned against his communist allies, who he feared were strengthening KMT support in the cities. Chiang purged CCP members from the Kuomintang, and beginning in Shanghai, started rounding up and executing many Communist leaders while imprisoning others. In 1931, the Japanese military invaded Manchuria and created the puppet Kingdom of Manchukuo, installing the heir to the Qing dynasty, Pu Yi, as the monarch. The Chinese Republic, in the midst of a new civil war, was not in a position to fight the Japanese, and so the invasion went unchecked.

With so many communists imprisoned or executed, Mao Zedong, a charismatic leader of peasant origin, rose to prominence in the Chinese Communist Party by the early 1930s. The KMT armies reconquered parts of China’s interior under Communist control and surrounded the communists in the Jiangxi Province in October 1934, including the majority of the CCP’s military known as the Red Army. The CCP forces broke out of the trap and began what became known as the Long March. In 370 days, the communists covered 5,600 miles including some of the most rugged terrain in China, but not without substantial losses – it’s estimated that less than 10% of the Red Army survived the march. Following the end of the march in October 1935, Mao Zedong emerged as a leader of the CCP, along with Red Army leader Zhou Enlai. Zhou would become the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China and Mao would become the Chairman of the CCP.

As seen in previous chapters, by embracing Western technology and government, Japan went in the opposite direction of China in the late 19th and early 20th century. By 1910 the Japanese Empire extended its territory to include the Ryuku Islands and Taiwan, defeated the Russians in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and had taken control of the Korean peninsula. Japanese industrial goods, especially textiles, found markets in the U.S. and other parts of the world. As part of the victorious Allied coalition in the Great War, the Japanese were awarded the Marshall Islands and Shandong peninsula from Germany, although their proposal to condemn racism was not approved by the Allied diplomats in Paris.  With the invasion of Manchuria (which had been under the control of Japan since 1911) in 1931, and subsequent military action around Shanghai, it was becoming clear the Japanese were not content with remaining confined to their home islands. 

In China, the battle for control of the government had left the state vulnerable, and by 1937 the Japanese had invaded China and seized control of the city of Nanking, resulting in the “Rape of Nanking” which saw tens of thousands of ordinary Chinese murdered and raped at the hands of the invading Japanese army.  China was unable to regain control of the country until after the end of World War II, when another civil war led to the Kuomintang being ousted and the CCP taking control and establishing a communist state on the Chinese mainland.

Primary Sources: Requiem, by Anna Akhmatova

Most of the artists that lived in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist Era were silenced or forbidden from working.  Anna Akhmatova was an exception.  She continued to write throughout the Stalinist period and while her loved ones, including her second husband and her son, were imprisoned, she remained free.  This poem, written during the imprisonment of her family, is perhaps the most poignant and important of all of the works to come out of the Soviet Union during this period.

Discussion Questions:

• How did Akhmatova's work reflect the actions of the Communist Party at the time?
• Why do you think Akhmatova chose to write "Requiem"?

Not under foreign skies

Nor under foreign wings protected - I shared all this with my own people

There, where misfortune had abandoned us. [1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.

On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in

her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.

[The 1st of April in the year 1957.]

INTRODUCTION [PRELUDE]

It happened like this when only the dead Were smiling, glad of their release,

That Leningrad hung around its prisons Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece. Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang Short songs of farewell

To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering, As they, in regiments, walked along -

Stars of death stood over us As innocent Russia squirmed

Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres

Of the black marias.

I

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you As one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house.

A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . . The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat

On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather

To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy (1) Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.

[1935. Autumn. Moscow]

II

Silent flows the river Don

A yellow moon looks quietly on Swanking about, with cap askew

It sees through the window a shadow of you Gravely ill, all alone

The moon sees a woman lying at home Her son is in jail, her husband is dead

Say a prayer for her instead.

V

Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling, The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo (2) If only you could have foreseen

What life would do with you -

That you would stand, parcel in hand, Beneath the Crosses (3), three hundredth in line,

Burning the new year's ice With your hot tears.

Back and forth the prison poplar sways With not a sound - how many innocent Blameless lives are being taken away. . . [1938]

V

For seventeen months I have been screaming, Calling you home.

I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers For you, my son and my horror.

Everything has become muddled forever - I can no longer distinguish

Who is an animal, who a person, and how long The wait can be for an execution.

There are now only dusty flowers, The chinking of the thurible,

Tracks from somewhere into nowhere And, staring me in the face

And threatening me with swift annihilation, An enormous star.

[1939]

 VII
 

THE VERDICT

The word landed with a stony thud Onto my still-beating breast.

Nevermind, I was prepared, I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone

Then teach myself to live again. . .

But how. The hot summer rustles Like a carnival outside my window; I have long had this premonition

Of a bright day and a deserted house.

[22 June 1939. Summer. Fontannyi Dom (4)]

 FOOTNOTES
 

An elite guard which rose up in rebellion against Peter the Great in 1698. Most were either executed or exiled.

1. The imperial summer residence outside St Petersburg where Ahmatova spent her early years. 
2. A prison complex in central Leningrad near the Finland Station, called The Crosses because of the shape of two of the buildings.
3. The Leningrad house in which Ahmatova lived.

Public Domain Poetry, in the Public Domain

Review Questions

• How did Stalin come to power over his adversaries?
• Why was China so ill-prepared for the invasions that occurred in the 1930s?