Why the Drive to Difference?

This chapter inquires as to the factors that drove the drive to difference within the communist world. Factors discussed include limited guidance from the ideological heritage (Marxism and Leninism) as to how to proceed after “building socialism,” the clash between the ideals of Marxism and the realities of governing an elite-dominated system, the shortage economy, the reality of bureaucratism, varieties of nationalism among the communist states, diverse pathways to power among those states, differences in the timing of the many communist revolutions, nuclearism, the realities of affluence and liberty in the capitalist world, and the idiosyncrasies of certain leaders within the communist world.

The World Communist Movement

The death of Stalin also led to a loosening of controls within the world communist movement. Strict subordination to Stalin gave way to a pluralistic relationship within the movement, whereby Moscow, while still the leader, allowed for an interplay of interests and greater consensus building among the communist parties to become the norm. This resulted —sooner in some places, later in others—in a variety of postures toward the world communist movement as led by Moscow: attempted withdrawal from the movement, straddling of several camps in world affairs, loose bloc discipline, schism, and abandonment of anti-imperialist struggle in favor of pragmatic foreign policies that sought to advance the national-security and economic interests of the communist state.

Market Leninism in Vietnam

After a decade of recovery from the decades-long Vietnam War, a reunified Vietnam began a process in the 1990s of privatizing and opening its economy on the Chinese model. It also abandoned anti-imperialist struggle in favor of pragmatic relationships with China and broader capitalist countries.

China in a Postcommunist World

Many theories of modernization would predict that one-party rule, strict controls against organized or dramatized dissent, and a marketized and privatized economy—as exist in China—are incompatible. This chapter offers a skeptical view of claims that either revolution from below (à la Hungary and Poland) or democratization from above (à la the Prague Spring or Gorbachev) are likely in coming decades in China. More likely is the combination of cooptation and repression that has taken place thus far.

“Building Communism”

In 1958–1959, Khrushchev launched his program for the “full-scale construction of communism.” Not coincidentally, in the same time period, China’s Mao launched his disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” Yugoslavia generalized its program of “workers’ self-management” as a blueprint for the communist world moving forward, while North Korea presented the late-Stalinist policy of monolithic, terroristic control as the only true path to communism.

The Collapse of the World Communist Movement and the Rise of Détente

At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, China’s army initiated confrontations and battles with Soviet troops along their contested border. Schism within the world communist movement now amounted to warfare among established communist states. Under these conditions, US-Soviet détente and the opening to China by the Nixon administration were made possible by skilled diplomacy and the fact that both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China came to view themselves each as closer to the United States in defending their national interests than they were to each other. Pragmatism prevailed over proletarian internationalism.

Communist Parties Come to Power in Korea and Vietnam

In Korea, the USSR occupied the northern half of the country after Japan withdrew its occupation forces. The Soviets installed a regime of North Korean communists who enjoyed popular support due to their sacrifices in fighting the Japanese during World War II. The leadership convinced Moscow and Beijing to sanction and support an invasion of South Korea that they hoped would reunify the country. This led to the Korean War, which merely restored the status quo ante at the expense of millions of lives. The pathway was different in Vietnam, where a guerrilla war against Japanese, then French, occupation led to the victory of the Vietnamese communist party in the North.

Was Stalin’s Revolution from Above a Rational Strategy of Modernization?

Strategies of modernization are legion within the social science literature. Stalin’s Revolution from Above—but not the Great Terror—is set within this literature as a revolutionary, as opposed to a reformist, strategy. Features of the revolutionary strategy may have been considered necessary to urgently create the capacity to defend the country in a hostile world. But the extent of revolutionary violence against the peasantry cannot be justified in those terms.

Building Socialism

After Stalin won the power struggle, he adopted a strategy for building socialism that entailed a frenzied pace of industrialization, city-building, collectivization of agriculture, state-building, and social transformation, accompanied by the vast use of revolutionary violence against the peasantry in particular, causing the deaths of over six million people. The rhetorical basis for both the scope and the pace of change was the claim that the national security of the Soviet state required the earliest possible construction of a communist state with the capacity to mobilize its population for war and defend itself militarily.

World War II and the Creation of Asian Communist States

Mao’s formula for coming to power differed from the Bolshevik pathway. It entailed a peasant-based guerrilla war that helped to defeat Japanese occupation and that went on to defeat the Nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in conventional warfare after World War II was over. There were many differences between the Maoist and Soviet models of revolution, but there were also many similarities in the willingness to attempt a “socialist” revolution in a peasant society, in the glorification of revolutionary violence, in the determination to ensure that the communist party monopolizes power and politics after winning the civil war, in the determination to build socialism thereafter, and in the commitment to anti-imperialist struggle within a world communist movement led by Moscow.