A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (77 page)

Already at the turn of the century the state had played a central role in the development of large-scale industry in Japan and tsarist Russia. The First World War and the crisis of the inter-war years had massively increased its role in the advanced countries. By the late 1930s the scale of state control of industry in Nazi Germany was such as to persuade the ‘Austro-Marxist’ economist and former finance minister Hilferding that capitalism had been replaced by a new mode of production.
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Even in the most ‘free market’ of the Western countries, the US, the state built most plants and controlled most economic activity in the years 1941-44.

The trend towards state capitalism went furthest where locally controlled industrial development was weakest. So the state played a central role in the attempts to reorganise capitalism and industrialise Brazil under Vargas, the populist president of Brazil in the 1930s, and under Peron, the dictator of Argentina in the 1940s and early 1950s. Against such a background not only the Communists but also the social democratic and bourgeois politicians who shared government with them in most of Eastern Europe in 1945-47 took it for granted that the state would control most of industry and rely on central ‘planning’. In India, even before Congress took power, a group of industrialists had got together in 1944 to approve a ‘Bombay programme’ for state planning very much on the Russian model, although using private as well as state capital.

So India, China, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Algeria all had powerful state-owned sectors and long term plans. But this was not a trend confined to states which called themselves socialist. Much of industry had been state-owned in Kuomintang China, and the pattern continued in Kuomintang Taiwan—while the South Korean general, Park, who seized power in a coup in 1961, saw state planning and control (although not necessarily ownership) of industry as the only way to overtake North Korea, which was then more advanced.

The flipside of economic growth under Stalinist ‘planning’, as with that during the industrial revolutions of the West, was the appalling conditions workers had to endure. But those who ran the growing apparatuses of industry and the state were not workers, even if some had been once.

In its early years state capitalism seemed to be effective. India and Egypt in the late 1960s were still overwhelmingly agricultural countries, with most of their people living in deep poverty, and their new industry faced all sorts of problems. But they were visibly different to 20 years earlier and much more part of the modern world. This was expressed in a certain confidence in their rulers among wide sections of the middle classes, providing stability to the regimes. Where state capitalist development was accompanied, as in China, India and Egypt, by land reform which broke up the big estates to the benefit of the peasants, the rulers also sank strong roots in the countryside—even if the reform benefited the middle and richer peasants rather than the poorer peasants and landless labourers.

But the euphoria began to wear off in time—and even as regimes like that in Egypt began to implement elements of the Stalinist model, signs of its limitations were already appearing in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The road to 1956

Stalin died in 1953 after a quarter of a century of near-total power. Sometimes the death of a ruler serves to concentrate the minds of their associates on problems accumulated over the years, and so it was now.

Stalin’s henchmen were dimly aware that there was enormous discontent beneath the surface. They also feared that one of their number would gain control of Stalin’s apparatus of state terror and use it against the rest. Barely was Stalin’s funeral over when they enacted limited reforms while quarrelling secretly among themselves (the near-psychopathic police chief Beria was taken at gunpoint from a leadership meeting and executed).

Then in February 1956 Khrushchev, the Communist Party general secretary, decided to reveal some home truths to party activists in order to strengthen his hand in the leadership struggle. He told the 20th party congress in Moscow that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people and the deportation of millions of members of national minorities. What is more, he said, Stalin had been incompetent and cowardly at the time of the German invasion of Russia in 1941. The impact of these revelations on tens of millions of people across the world who had been taught to regard Stalin as a near-god was shattering, even if many tried to close their minds to them.

In the meantime something else had happened that was more important than the words of Khrushchev about his predecessor. The masses beneath the apparatus of state capitalist rule had begun to revolt.

The first uprising was in East Germany in June 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death. Building workers on a giant construction site in East Berlin walked out on strike when told they would have to work harder for the same pay. Tens of thousands of people joined them as they demonstrated through the centre of the city. The next day every major industrial centre in East Germany was strike-bound. Demonstrators broke into prisons, and attacked police stations and offices of the ruling party. In the end only the intervention of Russian troops put down the rising. It was a classic spontaneous workers’ revolt, such as Germany had seen again and again in 1918-19, but directed against a state capitalist regime which claimed to rule in the name of the workers. The sections of workers who struck were those who had been the most left wing during the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Some 68 percent of those purged from the Communist Party in East Berlin for taking part in the rising had been members before Hitler’s rise to power.
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They were old militants who saw the rising as a continuation of the struggle for workers’ control to which they had dedicated their youth.

Shortly after the East German rising there was a revolt in Russia itself, at the giant slave labour camp in Vorkuta. The quarter of a million prisoners who worked the mines there went on strike. The government surrounded the miners with armed troops, offered to negotiate, and then executed the representatives chosen by the strikers, killing 250. But the action showed how explosive the discontent could be, and the regime released 90 percent of the camp inmates in the next two years. As in the US after the civil war, slave labour gave way to wage labour, the form of exploitation appropriate for ‘primitive accumulation’ to that which fitted an industrialised economy.

However, it was in 1956 in the months after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin that the potential for revolt really showed itself. A strike in the Polish city of Poznan turned into a virtual uprising. The regime succeeded in crushing the movement before it had time to spread, but could not prevent the shockwaves from it shaking the whole social order. The country seemed on the verge of revolution in October and November, as rival factions fought for control at the top of the regime. Censorship broke down, and workers began to elect their own committees and vow to defend their rights by force. People talked of a ‘spring in October’ as Gomulka, one of the party leaders imprisoned in the late 1940s, was brought back to office. He faced down a threat of military intervention by Russian troops and persuaded the workers to put their trust in him—with the help of the Catholic church and the US propaganda station, Radio Free Europe.
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The Polish events acted as a detonator for one of history’s great revolutions, in Hungary. A demonstration of students gained the support of tens of thousands of workers as it made its way through Budapest. One section tore down a huge statue of Stalin. Another went to the radio station, only to be fired upon by police agents inside. Workers grabbed guns from sports clubs inside factories, won over soldiers from one of the barracks, and soon took control of much of the city. In every town in the country similar movements left effective local power in the hands of factory councils and revolutionary committees.

Peter Fryer, who was sent to Hungary by the British Communist Party paper, the
Daily Worker
, reported:

A section of the regime tried to regain control of the movement, very much as Gomulka was doing in Poland, by putting another disgraced Communist, Imre Nagy, at the head of a coalition government. But on 4 November—just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking Egypt—Russian tanks swept into Budapest and seized key buildings. They faced bitter armed resistance, which they eventually crushed only by killing thousands, reducing parts of the city to rubble, and driving more than 200,000 to flee across the border into Austria. A general strike paralysed the city for more than a fortnight and the Greater Budapest Central Workers’ Council fulfilled the role, in effect, of an alternative government to Russia’s puppet ruler, Janos Kadar. But eventually the workers’ councils were crushed too and their leaders sentenced to years in prison. There were 350 executions, ‘three quarters of them of workers around 20 years of age’.
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Among those to die were Imre Nagy and four other members of his short-lived government.

The official Communist line was that the revolution was simply a pro-capitalist escapade planned by Western spies. As in so many other cases in the Cold War era, the most common account of the revolution in the West was very similar. It claimed that the revolution simply aimed to establish a ‘free society’ along Western capitalist lines. In fact most of those who played a leading role in the revolution had a wider perspective. They remembered the pre-war dictatorship which had ruled Hungary in the name of capitalist ‘freedom’ and looked to a different system in which workers’ councils would play a key role, even if the speed of events did not give them time to clarify what this system might be. Anyone who doubts this should read the various collections of documents from Hungary 1956 which have been published since.
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A recent authoritative Hungarian study of the revolution recounts:

The Hungarian Revolution challenged the ruling ideologies of both sides in the Cold War. It proved, to those who had the courage to look facts in the face, that the USSR had long since ceased to stand in the tradition of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Rosa Luxemburg. It also showed how wrong the liberals and social democrats were who held that Stalinist totalitarianism could suppress any move for change from within and, therefore, that it was necessary to support Western imperialism against it. This pessimism had befogged the minds of innumerable intellectuals who had once been on the far left—John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Max Shachtman, Stephen Spender, Albert Camus, James T Farrell, John Strachey, George Orwell, Saul Bellow, the list was endless. The imagery was of George Orwell’s
1984,
of a dictatorship so powerful that it could brainwash its opponents into saying 2 + 2 = 5. Hungary showed how quickly such a dictatorship could collapse and out of it emerge forces pressing for real liberation. If it could happen in Hungary, it could happen one day in the heartland of Stalinist state capitalism, in Russia.

Rulers of both blocs hastened to bury the memory of the revolution. For more than a quarter of a century it was forbidden to mention the event in Hungary other than as a ‘counter-revolution’. As late as 1986 police beat a student demonstration commemorating it off the streets. In the West it was soon forgotten. By the early 1970s the butcher Kadar was being talked of in the Western media as a liberal ‘reformer’. Mutual amnesia enabled both sides to forget the monolith could crack apart. When it did so again, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, they were both taken by surprise.

The Cuban Revolution

The United States had its own satellites scattered around the world. In the late 1950s they were concentrated in Central America, south of the Mexican border (Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Guatemala), the Caribbean (Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and east Asia (the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam and Thailand). US troops were based permanently in the Canal Zone which divided Panama, and in South Korea. They had landed several times in Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba in the earlier part of century, had run the Philippines as a colony until 1946, and maintained huge bases both at Guantanamo on the coast of eastern Cuba, and in the Philippines.

These nominally independent states were usually run by small and often extremely fragmented ruling groups made up of military figures, landed oligarchs, political bosses and, occasionally, local capitalists. They had narrow bases of support locally and tried to compensate by mixing the most extreme forms of corruption and the nastiest forms of repression. Their weakness benefited US policy by making them dependent on US aid and military advisers and ensuring they would not threaten US business interests. But it also meant that they could easily fall apart if the ability of the US to intervene in their support ever seemed in doubt. That the US was willing to make such interventions was shown in 1954 when the CIA organised the overthrow of a mildly reformist government in Guatemala.