The Party Comes Back

This chapter looks back at the diverse efforts to maintain order in the communist world. Here, one might reasonably credit the Soviet regime and its “small bloc” allies with seriously attempting to preserve some of the international movement's original ideals. In an important way, “developed socialism” meant that their populations could expect to enjoy relatively decent lives. Nonetheless, the chapter contends that the primacy of single-party rule made it increasingly difficult to sustain the basic elements of the Brezhnev consensus. Despite the best efforts of socialist planners to modernize their economies, these regimes could not keep up with their citizens' rising expectations. As conditions grew more uncertain, party members undercut their credibility by seeking to insulate themselves from these trials and using their positions to their exclusive benefit.

The Party in Peril

This chapter describes the decline of the communist party and its attempts to salvage major disasters, such as the Chernobyl fallout. Unlike in the preceding decades of communist rule, when they could supplement a Marxist interpretation of their conditions with references to looming threats to national security, Cold War tensions, and economic perils, the credibility of these rationales had faded. This is not to say that opponents of significant change were equally disadvantaged in other parts of the communist world. In the case of China, the chapter highlights, the regime managed to defend its rule. But China's leaders faced a different type of party crisis and responded with a different remedy—the use of brute force—that neither the Soviet Union's leader nor his Eastern European allies dared to implement. Otherwise, the need for the vanguard that had made sense in its original European and Russian contexts vanished.

A Different Type of Party

This chapter reveals that, although Mao Zedong would present the communist victory in 1949 as the inevitable result of the class struggle and the death battle with imperialism, his success in establishing his perspective as the predominant conception of political action was not the result of a logical progression from one stage of history to the next. Like Russia's revolutionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he benefited from the misperceptions and missteps of others, friends and foes alike. In fact, had certain events not occurred, it is conceivable that the ideas embedded within the Hunan Report would never have taken concrete form. To understand both the evolution of Mao's thinking and his circuitous path to power, the chapter turns to the circumstances more than a century before his travels to Hunan. These circumstances convinced legions of Chinese radicals like himself that the creation of a fundamentally different type of political order was necessary and achievable.

Creating the Leninist Party

This chapter examines the challenges of creating a ruling party as well as the powerful personalities who were involved in making it. For much of the 1920s, a group of so-called Right Bolsheviks led by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin, and largely supported by Lenin before his death, had the upper hand in this endeavor. They pressed for a party with the capacity to lead Soviet Russia out of the turmoil of war and international strife. Another group, composed of left-wing Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev, favored a militant party that was attentive to the social and economic roots of the revolution and determined to drive the country toward the eventual realization of socialism. By the late 1920s, the Left opposition was soundly defeated. But this was a pyrrhic victory for the advocates of sobriety, especially Bukharin. Once one set of rivals was eliminated, a suddenly uncompromising Stalin turned on his former allies and transformed the party into a rigid organization that was expected to carry out an orchestrated revolution from above.

A Revolutionary Idea

This chapter shows that Marx's communist party is about something much greater than a mere assembly of individuals. It is linked to an idea about revolutionary inevitability. As an expression of the looming specter of communism rather than a mundane organization, the party comes into being as a result of social and economic forces that transcend the interests of any specific person. It offers its members the privilege of riding atop an advancing wave of events. To be included in this community, Karl Marx suggests, one must only decide to be on the right side of history and join the workers who are moving humanity forward.

The Revolution Returns

This chapter demonstrates how some of Mao Zedong's deputies had different ideas about what was, and was not, required for the successful construction of socialism. In fact, years later, in the late 1970s and 1980s, their conceptions of single-party rule would lead China down a path that was much less turbulent than the years of Maoist supremacy. Here, the difference between Mao's view of the party's destiny and a major strand of Marxist thought is not as great as it appears at first glance. At the heart of his thinking, Mao shared with predecessors like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky the instinctive distrust of all political organizations, the party included. Such human constructs threatened to sap the revolutionary moment's potential. Later, and even more than these iconic figures, Mao extended his animosity beyond the state to the party. But his target was the organizational party, not the idea of the revolutionary group that he had cultivated in Yan'an. Far from abandoning this conviction, he aggressively returned to it again and again after the People's Republic of China's founding.

Monolithic Socialism

This chapter demonstrates how those parties that came into being as a result of their leaders' long years in Moscow and their postwar dependence on the support of the Red Army's troops were at a monumental disadvantage. Importantly, their association with the Soviet Union meant that they were deprived of the national narrative; indeed, they were regarded by their populations as agents of an enemy power. Since most of the Eastern European parties fell into this category, it is no wonder that they welcomed the black-and-white simplicity of the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. There was a cost to this conformity, however. Their acceptance of a Stalinist, state-centered model of leadership meant that they, like their Soviet overseers, were prepared to sacrifice the motivating idea of communist party rule. Given the fact that they had few alternative sources of legitimation than state power, most paid this price, even at the cost of ignoring their national identities.

Internationalizing the Party Idea

This chapter argues that the same factors that made the Bolshevik Revolution possible in Russia—above all, the catastrophe of World War I—had the opposite effect in Europe. There are four key cases discussed here: Germany, Hungary, Great Britain, and France. In different ways, communist leaders sought to present their ideas about the path to socialism as uniquely suited to move Europe forward. But for equally different reasons, each ended up accepting the Communist International's (Comintern) directives. The communist party in Germany advocated a mass-based conception of revolutionary action that contrasted sharply with Lenin's advocacy of a conspiratorial vanguard. Hungary's communist leaders attempted to transform their society according to a radically voluntarist conception of party rule during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Well before the British Communist Party was even formed, the party's founders were overshadowed by the postwar popularity of the reform-minded Labour Party. Finally, France's communists seemed to have the greatest chance of establishing an independent identity.

A Revolutionary Party Emerges

This chapter traces the beginnings of a communist party under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and how that party came to be defined. When Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders spoke of their party in the early 1900s, they still viewed it primarily in revolutionary terms and only secondarily appreciated the benefits of greater organization. As revolutionaries, they viewed their mission in terms of working together to ensure that the proletariat followed through on its historically appointed task. Thus, there was considerably more room for debate among them about the party's purposes than is commonly assumed. The organizational structures would eventually come. But this would be a slow process, reflecting an abiding tension between the idea of the party's function in the Revolution and the organs that were required for effective governance thereafter.

The Party Vanishes

This chapter considers three of prominent socialist states that were not directly affected by the revolutions of 1989–1991—North Korea, China, and Cuba. At the time, these states had recognized that they, too, were no longer living in the world of Marx and Lenin. In different ways, each of these states drifted away from the different conceptions of single-party rule. In North Korea, the break was complete. Under successive despots, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un, the party's leading role was fully supplanted by the institution of dynastic rule. In China, the shift was gradual and less conspicuous. A new generation of leaders, represented by Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, routinely invoked the principle of party rule to justify their policies. But they did not necessarily practice it. Indeed, by the 2000s, one was hard-pressed to say what specifically made the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) communist. Only Fidel Castro showed any consistency, but in a way that did not serve the party idea. Although he had two options to institutionalize his vision, the party and the military, he evidently remained convinced until his final days that he was the epicenter of his country's revolution.