Seeing Red: Why Communism Really Failed

The Russian Communists faced a problem older than themselves, a problem that had pervaded their country throughout much of the nineteenth century: modernization. The consciousness of Russia's backwardness obsessed and united the elites. But the Bolsheviks were divided over what strategy to adopt in order to catch up with the West. Should they follow the same path as had advanced countries, pay the same price, and become as they were, or was there a distinctive Russian way? In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's alter ego, Levin, wonders why laws of development should be considered to be universal since Europe's are not applicable in Russia. He muses, "Why shouldn't we search for them on our own?"

The victorious Communists' answer was a hybrid between East and West: they forged their own way to industrialization but under the aegis of an older ideology, Marxist socialism, that had originated in western Europe. Marx's socialism served the Bolsheviks well, offering a messianic goal that provided them, and the people they dragged along, with the necessary fervor and an ultimate objective -- a classless society -- that could justify anything, even the most atrocious crimes.

The Russian Communists initially assumed that their revolution could not survive in isolation, that they would need the success of their Western comrades, and that they, in turn, would need the prestige of Russia's success to supplant their local reformist rivals. But from its inception, the international communist movement was torn by an irresolvable structural tension. In the East, the Communists were in charge of an underdeveloped society that needed to be industrialized as rapidly as possible, whereas in the West, where industrialization was no issue, the Communists wanted a revolutionary break with capitalism.

It became clear as early as 1921 -- before most communist parties had even been formed -- that the revolution in the West had failed, and the Bolsheviks found themselves directing an international network of communist parties, the Comintern, far too weak to do much for their new state. Nowhere in interwar Europe did the Communists succeed in establishing a dominant position within the vaster socialist movement. They lost every electoral battle they fought. At best (in Germany in the 1920s and France in the 1930s), they were a minority force of some significance. At worst (in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s), they were pulverized by right-wing authoritarian regimes. By the late 1930s, the international communist movement was in grave danger.

Communism was saved by World War II. Although its proponents never gained a lasting hold on politics in western Europe, a number of communist states emerged in eastern Europe -- thanks to Soviet victories, however, rather than indigenous support. There is considerable literature and a little folklore about how Europe was partitioned at conferences during 1945, but the truth is that the continent was divided on the battlefield. With a few exceptions -- Austria, Finland, Trieste, and parts of Berlin -- communism's reach coincided with the Red Army's advance.

The war and postwar decolonization also led to the success of communism in Asia, notably in China (where Mao's armies had been ineffectual before 1941) and the northern parts of Korea and Vietnam (this is another point that Service fails to conceptualize). In Cuba, meanwhile, the revolutionaries turned communist -- an unprecedented outcome soon reinforced by the United States' anti-Castro campaign. Communism's later expansion into the rest of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was also the result of violent conflicts.

As the Cold War got colder, the international communist movement appeared increasingly monolithic. This was partly due to its own rhetoric but also to the West's overreaction to the threat it actually posed. To be sure, the threat seemed real enough: the Soviet Union had become a major industrial, military, and scientific power at unbelievable human cost. But the communist movement also suffered internal contradictions because of local resistance to either communism per se or its Soviet incarnation. Some states were successful in achieving autonomy from Moscow: Yugoslavia (in 1948), China (in 1958), Albania (in 1958), and Romania (in the 1960s). Others were not: East Germany (in 1953), Hungary (in 1956), Poland (in 1956 and again during the 1980s), and Czechoslovakia (in 1968). Nevertheless, by the 1980s, Hungary was well on its way to becoming a mixed economy. Poland held its first free elections in June 1989, five months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, resulting in a landslide victory for Solidarity and the designation of a noncommunist, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as prime minister. China had already gone its own way, having begun a transition to capitalism in 1979, well before the formal end of communism.

In the early 1980s, even Moscow was having second thoughts. The Soviet Union had become a military superpower capable of counterbalancing the United States, and it could boast significant achievements in health and education. But it had failed to achieve for its citizens the quality and quantity of consumption that had become the hallmark of modernity over the last quarter of the twentieth century. (What good is a successful space program if the telephones do not work?) And then, by a process that was largely triggered internally -- thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev -- the whole system imploded. It was as if the old guard had been right to stonewall on reform for as long as it had: "socialism with a human face" was an oxymoron -- or, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said of socialist democracy, like "boiling ice."

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