VOLUME 3

HISTORY OF THE
INTERNATIO NAL
1943-1968
VOLUME 3

HISTORY OF THE
INTERNATIONAL
1943-1968

Julius Braunthal

Translated by Peter Ford

and Kenneth Mitchell

Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1980 by Westview Press, Inc.

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Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xi

PART ONE: The Destiny o f Socialism 1

Introduction 1
1 The British Labour Initiative 5
2 Socialists and Communists in France 15
3 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist Movement 45
4 The Problem of Unification in the German Labour Movement 68
5 The Origins of the ‘Cold War’ 92

PART TWO: The Reopening o f the Split 133

6 The Revival of the International 133
7 The Founding of the Cominform 144
8 The Reconstitution of the Socialist International 182

PART THREE: Socialism and Communism in Asia 213

9 Oriental Key Positions in the World Revolution 213
10 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 219
11 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 242
12 Socialist and Communist Movements in Buddhist Countries 256
1. Burma 256
2. Ceylon 270
3. Nepal 278
13 Islamic Socialism and Marxism in Indonesia 283
14 Socialism and Communism in Japan 311
15 The Chinese Revolution 342
16 Socialism in Israel 349
17 The Asian Socialist Conference 366
vi Contents

PART FOUR: The Moral Crisis o f Communism 375

18 Yugoslavia’s Revolt against Moscow’s Hegemony 375
19 The Insurrection in East Berlin 392
20 The Dethronement of Stalin 396
21 Poland’s October 404
22 The Tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution 412
23 ‘The Spring of Prague’ 429
24 Peking’s Break with Moscow 475

PART FIVE: The First Hundred Years 491

25 Destiny of a Vision 491
Appendix One: Socialism as a World Movement: an attempt at a
numerical assessment 521
Appendix Two: Aims and Tasks of Democratic Socialism 531
Appendix Three: Statement on Socialism and Religion 537
Appendix Four: Socialist Policy for the Underdeveloped Terri-
tories 538
Appendix Five: Principles and Objectives of Socialism in Asia 543
Appendix Six: Declaration on Colonialism 548
Appendix Seven: Manifesto of the Cominform 549
Appendix Eight: Declaration of the Extraordinary Fourteenth
Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party 551
Appendix Nine: The World Today: The Socialist Perspective 552
Appendix Ten: Table of Presidents and Secretaries and Table of
Congresses and Conferences 560

Bibliography 565

List of Abbreviations 587

Name Index 590

Subject Index 596

List o f Plates

facing page
1 First Congress of the Socialist International in Frankfurt,
July 1951 208
2 Congress of the Socialist International in Milan, October 1952 209
3 Congress of the Socialist International in London, July 1955 241
4 Congress of the Socialist International in Vienna, July 1957 241
5 The Chair at the Asian Socialist Conference 304
6 Congress of the Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay 305
7 Head of Stalin’s statue in Budapest, pulled down in
October 1956 336
8 Soviet tanks in Prague, August 1968 336
Foreword

As this book is a work of contemporary or on-going history, a few words

must be said here about the time-gap between its completion and its appear-
ance in print.
The third and final volume of Julius BraunthaPs History o f the Inter-
national was completed by him in February 1971. By May it had appeared
in German, published by Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH., Hanover,
and preparations for producing the English edition were well under way. It
was originally planned for publication in the winter of 1972. However, Julius
Braunthal died on 28 April that year, a week before his eighty-first birthday.
A number of difficulties and delays cropped up, the translated typescript was
mislaid, the Appendices were lost; it even seemed for a period of years as if
the third volume was destined never to see the light of day. Nevertheless,
Julius’s wife Tini (who died in 1975), we, his sons, his nephew, Gerard
Braunthal, as well as many friends, felt it essential that the final volume of this
great work should become available in English and patiently strove to this
end. Its publication, after this long delay, is for us a source of deep satisfaction,
and we should like to express our gratitude for the encouragement and support
we received in particular from Livia Gollancz and John Bush of Victor
Gollancz Ltd and from Peter Marold of Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH.
The delay, however, posed a certain dilemma: should intervening events
be taken into account? The book, for instance, contains detailed tables in the
Appendices; they provide lists of congresses of the Socialist International,
and of its leaders and officials up to 1969, and, in particular, figures for the
state of Socialist and Communist parties for 1969-70 and of Socialist parties
in power. These have patently and considerably changed over the years and,
in revising the original typescript of Mr Peter Ford’s translation, the question
arose whether or not efforts should be made to bring it up to date at least in
some respects.
Finally, on the advice of Mr J. R. van der Leeuw, Director of the Inter-
national Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, we decided against
incorporating changes; there have been too many of them to do them
justice marginally. The only concession we made to the passing of time was
x Foreword
to add where available the dates of death for some of the persons mentioned
in the book who have died in the intervening years.
In revising the typescript, we have taken great care to ensure accuracy;
however, in the absence of the author, and because of the dispersion of the
original source material, which was written in several languages, an occasional
minor error in such things as titles of organizations or books, or in the mis-
spelling of transliterated names, may have slipped through: for these, we
would ask the reader’s forbearance.
Frederick G. Bonnart-Braunthal Thomas O. Barry-Braunthal
Preface

With this volume the history of the first century of the International reaches
its conclusion. Originally I had intended that the trilogy would come to a
close with the centenary of the founding of the First International in
September 1964. But before I could finish writing the third volume the
tragedy of the Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia had played itself
out. ‘The Spring of Prague’ of 1968, having set in motion a process of change
from a Communist dictatorship to a Socialist democracy, was followed
within a few months by the invasion of the armies of the five Warsaw Pact
powers to forestall reformation in Czechoslovakia. Both revolution and
counter-revolution were events of the utmost significance for the history of
Socialism—the revolution, for showing that it was possible for a Communist
system of totalitarian dictatorship to be transformed without resort to force;
and the counter-revolution, for showing how the regime in the Soviet Union
has remained essentially unaltered since Stalin’s death. The invasion of
Czechoslovakia brutally called in question any optimistic perspective of
development within the Soviet Union itself.
It did not then seem possible that the present work could be concluded
without any discussion of the historical significance of these two events.
The chapter on ‘The Spring of Prague’ constitutes a postscript to the story
of the first hundred years of international Socialism.

The history of the period covered by the present volume begins, as the first
chapter describes, with the expectations of both Socialist and Communist
parties that, in the aftermath of the catastrophe of the Second World War,
the conflict between European Socialism and Russian Communism might
be surmounted, the split in the international workers’ movement repaired
and a new Socialist Europe constructed on the ruins of the old continent.
These expectations were to founder on the profound mistrust existing
between the Eastern and Western powers. The Soviet Union, fearing a new
war with the United States and its European allies, sought security by
expanding its power zone across the Eastern European countries which it
had occupied during the war and afterwards changed into satellite states.
xii Preface
The process of Sovietizing Eastern Europe prompted fears in Western
Europe and the United States that the Red Army might overrun the defence-
less continent and place it under Russian rule—a fear which turned to panic
when, in February 1948, the Communist party in Czechoslovakia seized power
by a coup d'etat and reduced the country to a satellite of the Soviet Empire.
The ‘Cold War’, developing out of the mutual mistrust between the great
powers, governed the destiny of European Socialism. In Part Two an attempt
has been made to describe the origins and the events of the ‘Cold War’ from
the viewpoint of the Socialist movement so as to explain the reopening of
the split, the founding of the Cominform and the re-establishment of the
Socialist International.
Part Three is concerned with the amazing phenomenon of the spread of
the Socialist idea throughout Asia, and how the concept of Socialism, which
had developed in the tradition of European culture in a capitalist civilization,
was able to put down roots in the pre-capitalist civilization of the Hindu-
Buddhist and Islamic cultures and win mass followings for both Socialist
and Communist parties.
Part Four describes the severe moral crisis suffered by the Communist
world movement after the end of the war: the revolt of the Communist
party of Yugoslavia against Moscow’s overlordship, the rising of the Berlin
workers in the Soviet Zone, the destruction of the myth of the Soviet Union
as the ideological centre of the Communist world movement, the collapse of
its moral basis as a consequence of Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union about Stalin’s reign
of terror, the Polish October, the revolutions and counter-revolutions in
Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and finally Peking’s break with Moscow.
Finally, to close the trilogy, at the same time as trying to draw up an
interim balance sheet of the historical achievements and failures of Socialism
in the course of the first century of its history, I have had the temerity to
enter into some reflections about its future.
The Appendices will be found to contain a statistical summary of the
present state of the world Socialist movement in every shape of party—Social
Democratic and Communist as well as those parties with Socialist leanings
which are not formally allied to either of the two main groups; the basic
documents of both the Socialist International and the Asian Socialist Con-
ference; the manifesto of the inaugural congress of the Cominform, which
was to become decisive in determining the attitudes in the Communist
movement during the post-war period; and the declaration by the Fourteenth
Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia over the invasion by
the Warsaw Pact forces.

The work of which this is the last volume can by no means be regarded as
comprehensive; with considerable misgivings I am only too aware of the
 Preface xiii
yawning gaps which occur in my description of these hundred years. As
Professor Adolf Sturmthal quite justly remarked in his review in the American
Political Science Review, it lacks a detailed description of the relationship
between the international Socialist movement and the international trade
union movement; and as Professor Val R. Lorwin—certainly one of the
work’s most competent critics—very properly regrets in the Annals o f the
American Academy, it does not contain any comprehensive comparison of
the structures of the Socialist and Communist parties, of their techniques of
membership recruitment and election propaganda, their relationships with
the trade unions, and most importantly, of their strategies and tactics in
opposition, coalition or government.
But having said this, the list of gaps is by no means complete. Above all,
it contains no study of Socialism in Africa or Central and South America,
no examination of the ideologies and social structure of the parties in these
continents which are professing to be Socialist parties, and no description
of their histories. The movements of Central and South America have been
treated in monographs in great profusion. African Socialism, on the other
hand, is a barely-explored area of study. But however sparse or otherwise
the sources, it would still have been desirable at least to sketch in the outlines
of the currents of Socialism in these continents in any universal history of
Socialism.
In return for his criticism of the work’s imperfections, Professor Lorwin
generously offered some gentle comfort. ‘The task,’ he wrote, in his discussion,
‘which he [the author] has set himself is most probably impossible, even if
one spent a lifetime at it.’

Yet this qualification could never excuse such a prejudiced omission as that
of which I have been accused by my critics in the Soviet Union: the omission
of any appreciation of Lenin’s role in the Second International as ‘repre-
sentative of the revolutionary line’ in the fight against reformism. In their
critique in the Moscow periodical Voprosi Istoriki, the authors, I. A. Bach,
W. E. Kunina and B. G. Tartakovsk, stated that I had ‘completely ignored
the part which the Bolsheviks, with Lenin at their head, played in the Second
International’.
The question of Lenin’s role in the fight against reformism in the Inter-
national is indeed of no small historical interest for it was Lenin who morally
justified the fateful split, as the second volume showed, by asserting that
since it was ‘eaten up with opportunism’ it had become incapable of carrying
out its task in the revolutionary struggle of the working class against
capitalism and imperialism. It would therefore have been dishonest of me
had I, as accused, intentionally neglected to describe and assess his leading
role in the International, before its collapse in 1914, as ‘representative of the
revolutionary line’ in the struggle against reformism.
xiv Preface
An examination of Lenin’s activities in the Second International leads to
an amazing result. Although he was a member of its Bureau, he appeared at
no more than three of the nine congresses of the Second International (at
Amsterdam in 1904, Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910), and at
none of these did he take the floor. In the chronicles of the International he
puts in only three active appearances: at the meeting of the Bureau in 1908,
with an explanatory additional statement in support of the admittance of the
British Labour party to the International which Kautsky had proposed and
for which he voted, even though it had not pledged itself to the class struggle;
by a textural alteration to a resolution at the Copenhagen congress over the
role of co-operatives in the battles for Socialism; and, lastly, at the Stuttgart
congress with a supplementary statement to Bebel’s resolution on the attitude
of the working class to the war, drafted by Rosa Luxemburg and proposed
by her also in the names of Lenin and Martov.
As is described in the first volume of the History o f the International, the
question raised by this resolution had been passionately debated at a number
of congresses and was concerned with the possibility of averting the danger
of war by a general strike, that is by revolutionary methods. Lenin’s sup-
plementary statement had left the question open. It had become critical when,
at the beginning of November 1912, tensions between the European powers
reached a climax, intensified by the Habsburg Empire’s annexation of Bosnia
and the Balkan War, both events giving rise to fears of an immediate outbreak
of hostilities. An extraordinary congress of the International was hastily
summoned to Basle on 24 November to discuss how the danger was to be
averted. Victor Adler and Jean Jaures in their speeches hardly disguised
their threat of revolution which would follow in the wake of war. But Lenin’s
voice went unheard at the congress. He had not appeared. He even stayed
away from the meeting of the Bureau of the International which was sum-
moned to Brussels by telegraph with every sign of alarm for 29 July 1914—
that tragic meeting five days before the outbreak of the First World War
when the International should have resolved the important question of the
attitude of the working class to the international crisis.
Consequently, in any account of Lenin’s role in the struggle between the
revolutionary and reformist lines in the International, there is only the
Stuttgart additional statement to be recorded; this was naturally fully quoted
in its proper place in the text, and its importance was discussed. Beyond this
there is nothing to record of Lenin’s struggle as ‘representative of the
revolutionary line’ against reformism within the International.

Now a word of gratitude to friends who have assisted me in my work on the

book. The chapter ‘The Spring of Prague’ was read in manuscript by
Dr G. W. Brugel, author of the study Tschechen und Deutsche 1918 bis 1939,
and the final section, ‘The First Hundred Years’, by W. L. Guttsmann,
 Preface xv
Chief Librarian of Norwich University and author of the work The British
Political £lite, and both were enriched by their suggestions. For the statistical
material on the world Socialist movement I am much indebted to my young
friend Alan Day, editor of Socialist Affairs. I am also grateful to the Librarian
of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Miss Marie
Hunink, and the Librarian at Chatham House, London, Miss Dorothy
Hamerton, who both lightened my burden through their efforts to obtain
books and periodicals; and Mr J. R. van der Leeuw, Head of the Archives
of the International in the Amsterdam Institute, who has furnished me with
various documents. For illustrative material, I am indebted to the picture
archive of the Secretariat of the Socialist International, to the Arbeiter-
Zeitung, Vienna, to the Amsterdam Institute, and to the chief editor of the
Berlin daily newspaper Telegraf, Amo Scholz.
Teddington, 10 February 1971 Julius Braunthal
 PART ONE

The Destiny o f Socialism

Introduction

When Stalin concluded his pact with Hitler on 25 August 1939, the unity of
the international labour movement was shattered. The United Front of
Socialists and Communists against the menace of Nazism, for which the
Communist International had campaigned so single-mindedly since 1935,
was laid in ruins. While throughout the world Social Democrats stood firmly
in the camp for war against Hitler, Stalin placed the Communist International
at the disposal of Hitler’s psychological war effort.1
It took Germany’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 to rectify Stalin’s
momentous blunder. Now the Soviet Union and the Western Allies found
common cause in the fight for democracy against Fascism; once again
Social Democrats and Communists stood shoulder to shoulder in the face
of a common enemy. The heroism shown by the Red Army in first hold-
ing back the Nazis at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, and then
dealing them a numbing defeat at Stalingrad, aroused an enthusiastic
response among Social Democratic workers everywhere. The bitter
political quarrels of the past twenty years were forgotten. It seemed that
an era o f unity within the international labour movement had dawned at
last.
The hopes entertained by many Socialists that the split could indeed be
overcome received new impetus from the dissolution of the Communist
International in May 1943. The Socialist International had ceased to exist
after the last meeting of its Bureau early in April 1940,4 and the disappearance
of the Communist International seemed to remove the last obstacle to
reconstituting a united International. Harold Laski (1893-1950), who was
among the most renowned intellectual leaders in the British Labour move-
ment, spoke for many thousands of its members when he welcomed the
dissolution as ‘one of the most hopeful political developments since 1919’
1. Julius Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 504-26.
2. For the dissolution of die Communist International and the end of the Socialist
International, see ibid., pp. 529-30 and 491-2.
2 The D estiny o f Socialism
from the viewpoint of re-establishing working-class unity throughout Europe
and Asia.1
In all of Europe—with the exception of Britain, which had successfully
resisted invasion, and Sweden and Switzerland, which were both spared
invasion altogether—Fascism had crushed Socialist and Communist parties
alike. Now, having participated in the defeat of Fascism, would they renew
their struggle to lead the working class, or might a united workers’ party at
last emerge from their common ruin? This was the question which pre-
occupied Socialists of every shade of opinion when, towards the end of the
war, the outlines of a new Europe began to emerge.
The potentiality of a triumphant Socialist renaissance seemed very real.
The old bourgeois parties had been discredited. World war had been preceded
by a world economic crisis condemning millions in the leading industrial
countries to the hunger and demoralization of long-term unemployment.
And the bourgeois parties, confronted by this crisis, were at a loss how to
overcome the disaster. They had also been surprisingly quick in abandoning
their own liberal, humanitarian values when faced with a working-class
threat to property and privileges. In Italy, Germany and Austria, they had
joined forces with Fascism. In Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Baltic
States, they had been ready to back semi-Fascist dictatorships. Nor could
they avoid responsibility for the war itself. In Britain and France, instead of
resisting Hitler, they had tried to appease him with concession after con-
cession, and in France capitulation was followed by collaboration. In the
lifetime of a single generation the old bourgeois parties had plunged Europe
into two world wars. It seemed hardly conceivable that millions of people
would ever again be willing to leave their fate in such hands, and to many it
seemed far more likely that the finish of the war would witness the dawn of
Socialism in Europe.
Against this background, the question of mending the split in the inter-
national labour movement took on new significance. No Socialist government
emerging after the war could hope to revive exhausted economies on a fresh,
Socialist basis without freely-given and self-sacrificing co-operation from the
whole working class. Should the labour movement remain divided and the
old pre-war rivalries be allowed to reassert themselves, then, it was clear,
working-class governments would founder and the bourgeois parties return
to power.
It is true that in Britain, whose Labour party had the unchallenged
allegiance of the organized working class and whose Communist party was
practically negligible, the question of the reunification of the labour movement
was not crucial. But in France, Germany and Czechoslovakia there had
been mass Communist parties before the war and it was impossible to predict
1. Quoted in Milorad M. Drachkovitch (ed)., The Revolutionary Internationals 1864-
1943 (Stanford, 1966).
 Introduction 3
the increase in strength likely to be obtained by the Communists in these and
other countries which had experienced the war and Nazi occupation at close
quarters and been affected by the immense prestige gained by the Soviet
Union’s war effort. The problem of reuniting the workers’ parties had assumed
the utmost importance.
This problem was, however, inextricably bound up with the issue of
East-West relations. Most particularly, the continuing friendly relationship
between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the task of
establishing a lasting peace settlement was essential to a united labour
movement. For it became clear that, in the event of any conflict developing
between the Soviet Union and a non-Communist country, then that country’s
Communists, even if they were within a united workers’ party, would continue
to pursue their policy of unquestioning allegiance to the Soviet Union,
regardless of whether or not their country had a Socialist or non-Socialist
government; for they would continue to see in the Soviet Union the leading
genuinely Socialist state, on whose strength and survival, they believed, all
the hopes of the world revolution depended.
The idea of reunifying the international labour movement could therefore
only be realized on the solid foundation of a community of mutual interests
existing between the Great Powers. Only if the great war-time alliance
between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union were to be carried
over into the post-war world and made the basis of a lasting peace settlement
could the international labour movement be reunited. But if the alliance
broke down, then the split would inevitably recur.
The destiny of international working-class unity had therefore come to
depend on friendly relations between Communist Russia and a United States
whose social system and political ideology formed an antithesis to Com-
munism. They were united only by the vaguely formulated agreements
concerning the future division of Europe into spheres of influence that were
reached at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. It was on the conflicting
interpretations of these agreements, made as the war approached its climax,
that the alliance was to founder within barely two years of peace. Cohesion
between Socialists and Communists quickly followed suit. Their unity had
not lasted long enough to put down roots, and the concept of an all-embracing
International was buried beneath the rubble of the Grand Alliance.
It was not long, however, before the disintegration of the international
labour movement reached a new stage. International Communism itself,
whose monolithic unity had seemed forged in steel, began to break up. In
Europe the Communist party of Yugoslavia, faced with the crucial choice
between national independence and subjugation to Soviet imperialism, came
into open conflict with Moscow. Of incomparably greater moment was the
breach in relations between the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and
China when, after a few honeymoon years of common triumph, they came
4 The D estiny o f Socialism
into conflict over their rival claims to the leadership of the world Communist
movement. Even as the disintegration of the Grand Alliance had broken the
links between the Socialists and the Communists, so did the imperialistic
rivalries between the two Communist super-powers, only thinly veiled by
ideological slogans, destroy the unity of world Communism.
Socialism had emerged from the war with immense prestige and con-
siderable political power. A Labour government was in command of the
British Empire. Scandinavia had for long been under Social Democratic
rule. Elsewhere in Europe, Socialists were prominent in coalition govern-
ments. And whereas Socialist movements had in the past largely been confined
to the white races, now, for the first time in history, Socialism was to become
influential in Asia and Africa. Yet, as had so often happened in the past,
when the concept of international solidarity seemed to clash with national
self-interest, it was the latter which was to triumph.
1 • The British Labour Initiative

The initiative for ending the split in the international labour movement was
taken by the British Labour party. In their opinion the key lay in Moscow.
As early as the spring of 1942, a year before the dissolution of the Communist
International, the National Executive Committee of the Labour party had
decided to send a delegation to Moscow in order to reach an understanding
with the Soviet government towards solving the problems which had divided
the international labour movement so as to lay down foundations for what
Harold Laski, speaking at the party’s annual conference in 1942, described
as ‘the permanent and unshakeable unity of the Labour movement for
ever’.
The timing of the discussion had of necessity been left to the Soviet
government, and it seemed improbable that any invitation would be issued
in 1942. The German assault on Moscow had been halted in the winter of
1941, but in 1942 Leningrad was still under siege. That summer, German
forces broke through into the Caucasus, while simultaneously in the Don
basin forces were deployed against Stalingrad in a vast semi-circle that
stretched from Voronezh to Rostov. In the autumn the decisive battles began
for this fortress on the Volga. It was to prove one of the bloodiest battles in
all the annals of war, and it ended, in January 1943, with the destruction of
the German forces and the capture of 350,000 German soldiers. With this,
Germany’s power to take the offensive was broken and the way cleared for
the Soviet counter-attack.1
Even if Stalin had wished for a discussion with the British Labour party,
1. Russian resistance in the face of overwhelming German might had won the world’s
admiration. ‘In the course of my life,’ General Douglas MacArthur wrote in February 1942,
‘I have taken part in a number of wars and have witnessed others. I have also made a
detailed study of operations conducted by great commanders of the past. In none of these
wars did I find such an effective resistance against the heaviest blows of an enemy, till now
regarded as invincible—a resistance which was followed by a devastating counter-attack
which drove the enemy back into his own country. The extent and magnitude of this feat
makes them the most distinguished military power in history.’ Quoted in Robert E.
Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York, 1948), p. 497.
6 The D estiny o f Socialism
this was hardly the most propitious moment. The British Labour party
patiently awaited the Russian leader’s decision. At its annual conference of
June 1943, it reaffirmed its desire for a discussion to settle the main differences
in the international labour movement. ‘It would be a tragedy of the first
order,’ Laski declared in an address to the conference, ‘if the twenty-five post-
war years, like the twenty-five inter-war years, were to be characterized by
destructive conflicts.’1 In its Report to the next annual conference, in
December 1944, the executive recorded that it had requested the Soviet
Ambassador in London to arrange for the delegation’s visit, and at its next
conference, in May 1945, Hugh Dalton once again reaffirmed the executive’s
wish for talks with the Russians.
No such discussion was to take place. An official Labour party delegation,
led by Harold Laski, did in fact visit Moscow in July 1946 and conducted an
interview with Stalin. But the Soviet leader pointedly refrained from any
mention of mending the split in the world labour movement.2 While the
Labour leadership genuinely wished to reach an understanding with the
Russians, it had no particular desire to establish closer relations with the
British Communist party. In Britain, the Communists had little popular
support. The party had been badly compromised by its opposition to the
war during the first two years, and its already small membership had dropped
by a third. After the Soviet Union had been drawn into the war and inter-
national Communism changed its line, the British Communists had not had
the chance given to their comrades in France, Italy and the other occupied
countries to cancel out the stigma by a heroic record of resistance. While
the heroism of the Red Army evoked immense sympathy, from which
British Communists to some extent benefited, no Nazi occupation had
occurred to consolidate solidarity between Socialists and Communists in
the shared risks and sufferings of an underground movement. While the
Communists no longer made open attacks on ‘bourgeois democracy’ or
voiced their belief in proletarian dictatorship, this was seen as a temporary
tactic, and most Labour party members considered the objectives of Com-
munism as being incompatible with their own.
Yet there was no way of avoiding discussion with the Communists. As
early as 18 December 1942, six months before the dissolution of the Com-
munist International, the central committee of the Communist party had
sent a letter to the Labour party executive requesting that Communist
affiliation be placed on the agenda for the forthcoming annual conference.3
This letter stated that the Communist party was willing ‘to fulfil all the
1. Report of the Forty-Second Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 1943, p. 150.
2. For a record of the discussion of the British Labour delegation with Stalin, see
Report of the Forty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 1946, pp. 218—19.
3. Because of its federal structure, which included trade unions, co-operative societies
and Socialist organizations, the Labour party could accept affiliation from outside bodies,
political parties included.
 The British Labour Initiative 7
conditions of Labour party affiliation and to carry out loyally all conference
decisions’.
This letter began a lively correspondence between J. S. Middleton
(1878-1962) and Harry Pollitt (1890-1960), secretaries of the Labour and
Communist parties respectively, which lasted for several months. It repays
examination in some detail since it quite clearly illustrates the wider issues
involved in restoring unity to the European labour movement.1
In replying to Pollitt’s letter, J. S. Middleton, speaking for the Labour
party, stated that he could not consider the Communists to be an auto-
nomous party. As an affiliated section of the Communist International,
they were, by the rules of that organization, bound to act on all its
decisions. The British Communist party was not, therefore, a free agent,
nor was it in any position ‘to carry out loyally’ the decisions of Labour
party conferences.
Pollitt denied that this was the case. He stated ‘categorically’ that his
party’s policy was ruled solely by its ‘democratically elected congress and its
democratically elected leadership’, and that any of its decisions were taken
entirely in the light of ‘prevailing conditions in Britain and in the interests
of the British labour movement’.
Middleton then had no trouble in quoting six paragraphs from the
Constitution of the Communist International, binding all its units to act on
its decisions and to place themselves under the authority of its executive
committee in every question of principle, programme, rules or tactics. Besides
which, the principles of international Communism stood in glaring contrast
to Labour party principles. And as to Pollitt’s claim that his party enjoyed
total autonomy, and that its policies were directed exclusively in the light of
‘prevailing conditions in Britain and the interests of the British labour
movement’, this seemed hard to reconcile with the party’s behaviour during
the war, when, having denounced the fight for democracy in September 1939,
it had performed a complete volte-face in June 1941. Such a change of line,
he remarked, had had nothing to do with ‘prevailing conditions in Britain’.
It had been ‘ordered by the Communist International and was not the result
of a free decision by a democratically elected congress of the Communist
party of Great Britain’.
Pollitt did not attempt to reply to Middleton’s accusation directly. He
simply repeated that the British Communist party was independent and
autonomous. He also refrained from any attempt to justify its policy during
the early stages of the war. Instead he quoted Leon Blum, who, at his trial
before the Vichy authorities at Riom in February 1942, had told the court:
‘The past opposition between the Communists and myself is no longer
relevant; I have erased all that from my memory. All that matters now is
1. For the correspondence and related documents, see Report of the Forty-Second
Annual Conference, pp. 9-19 and 227-31.
8 The D estiny o f Socialism
that the Soviet Union is participating in the common struggle and that the
Communist party is making heroic sacrifices in the occupied zone.’
But then, Middleton could remind Pollitt, while ‘Blum and thousands of
his French comrades were being handed over to the mercies of the German
Fascists’, the British Communist party was denouncing its country’s role in
the war against Nazi Germany as ‘imperialist’, and had gone on to try to
undermine it ‘on direct orders from the Communist International’. ‘The
Labour party,’ Middleton declared, ‘does not accept that the blood of the
French Communists and the Red Army has cancelled out the British Com-
munist party’s and the Communist International’s share of guilt for the
collapse of democracy and the spread of Fascist power.’
Again, in replying, Pollitt made no reference to his party’s vacillations
over the question of the war; it was clearly a subject which caused him some
embarrassment. He did, however, repeat his earlier claims that, its member-
ship of the Communist International notwithstanding, the Communist party
of Great Britain was a self-governing body and that it was fully prepared to
accept the Labour party’s programme, principles and policy.
If that was so, Middleton asked, how was one to interpret the sudden
‘overnight’ switch in policy in September 1939, when the party had abruptly
turned from a position of extreme anti-Nazism and support for the war to
one of denouncing Britain as responsible for what it described as an ‘im-
perialist war’ in which the Communist position was tantamount to ‘revolu-
tionary defeatism’?1 ‘As you know,’ Middleton wrote, ‘this distortion of
the facts was as stupid as the earlier description of the leaders and
members of the Labour party as “ Social Fascists”—at a time when they were
fighting for an agreement with the Soviet Union on a system of collective
security.’
He was quite sure that not one of these tactics had resulted from free
decisions being taken by an autonomous party; rather they had been forced
on it by the Communist International which, from its headquarters in
Moscow, imposed an iron discipline on its affiliated members. Earlier,
Pollitt had proposed an informal meeting between representatives of the
two parties to clarify the disputed questions, but Middleton had said that
his own executive declined to negotiate with a party which ‘as a subordinate
section of an international party has neither the authority to negotiate on
its own behalf nor is in any position to carry out decisions without approval
from a superior outside organization’.
The correspondence continued until the beginning of May 1942, when,
having received a further letter from Pollitt on 30 April, the Labour party
executive said there was no point in pursuing the discussion. But, it went on
to state, ‘Should conditions seem suitable for an attempt to bridge the gap
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 500, 506-7, 512-13
and 522-3.
 The British Labour Initiative 9

between the two Internationals, any discussion must take place on a broader,
more representative and more responsible level.’ In other words, the chances
of reuniting the two sections of the international Labour movement depended
entirely on the possibility of reaching an agreement with Moscow.
Three weeks later, on 23 May, the Communist International was dissolved,
and on the very next day the Communist party renewed its application in a
letter that proposed joint discussions. The unexpected dissolution of the
Communist International had, indeed, brought about new conditions, and
the Labour party acknowledged the necessity of a reassessment when it
convened an extraordinary executive meeting on 28 May.
Hitherto discussion had, as we have seen, hinged on relations with the
Communist International. Now that this had ceased to exist, it might seem
possible that with the national Communist parties no longer bound by its
statutes and resolutions,1 the leading obstacle to Labour-Communist unity
had been removed. In a new statement the Labour party executive went so
far as to admit that ‘certain circles’ appeared to assume that no valid
objection remained to Communist affiliation and that this could henceforth
be regarded as inevitable.
A majority on the executive, however, took a different view. The dis-
solution of the Communist International, they reasoned, in no way implied
that the Communists had either abandoned their support for a ‘revolutionary
dictatorship’ or become loyal pillars of parliamentary democracy. Even if the
Communist party were no longer bound by international commitments, this
gave no reason for believing that it had jettisoned the principles on which
it had been founded and which had subsequently guided its policy. And
after all, the Labour party executive stated, had Communist policies been
successful in the early phase of the war, ‘we should all have been crushed by
the Fascist hordes and the defeat of Russia would have followed. The entire
world would have become a Fascist empire, and the Gestapo murderers
would have strutted, in all their arrogance and brutality, through the streets
of Moscow and London.’
The Communists were now professing their loyalty to the idea of labour
unity, but the true test of their sincerity, in the view of the Labour executive,
lay in their attitude to maintaining themselves as a separate organization.
Should they insist on preserving themselves as a separate party, this would
demonstrate that they pursued objectives different from those of the Labour
party, in which case their entry into the Labour party could only be a cause
of mistrust and dissension. If, on the other hand, they were genuinely
concerned to foster unity in the British labour movement, they should follow
the example of the Communist International and go into dissolution. For
these reasons, the Labour party executive decided to oppose any affiliation
of the Communist party as a separate organization. In its view, a separate
1. ibid., p. 528.
10 The D estiny o f Socialism
Communist party functioning within the Labour party could only be a
source of weakness and disunity, and so it submitted a resolution in these
terms to the party’s annual conference.1

The conference met in London on 14 June 1943. The ensuing debate, during
which eleven delegates spoke, lasted only a few hours. The Executive’s
resolution was moved by George Ridley, leader of the Railway Clerks, while
the resolution supporting Communist affiliation was moved by Will Lawther,
president of the powerful Miners’ Federation. The executive submitted the
entire correspondence to conference, and the debate covered much the same
ground. The executive had chosen Herbert Morrison (1888-1965) to wind
up. He enjoyed a large popular following, with all the prestige derived from
his successful leadership of the Labour majority which had controlled the
London County Council since 1934, and he received a tumultuous ovation
as he mounted the rostrum. He added nothing new to the discussion, but
confirmed the executive’s readiness to hold discussions with the Communists,
provided they first agreed in principle to dissolve their own party. In an
emotional speech, he appealed to the Communist party to seize the historic
opportunity presented to it by the dissolution of the Communist International
and, in the interests of labour unity, to dissolve itself while calling upon its
members to join the Labour party as individuals. After Morrison had spoken
the motion was put to the vote, and the Communist party’s application was
defeated by 1,951,000 votes to 712,000.
Morrison’s appeal to the Communist party evoked no response. It merely
continued its campaign to affiliate to the Labour party as a separate organiza-
tion, though no Labour conference debated the question again until June
1946. Meanwhile, the Labour party’s massive victory in July 1945 undermined
the argument that unity with the Communists could provide a decisive source
of strength. Out of a total of 640 seats in the House of Commons, the Labour
party held 394, the Communists only two. The new Labour government,
with its substantial parliamentary majority, had no need of Communist
support. In any case, the national membership of the Labour party was over
sixty-five times that of the Communist party.12
Consequently, the debate at the 1946 Labour conference was brief and
concerned only with conflicting assessments of the value of the Communist
party’s declaration of loyalty. The only speeches were one by Herbert
Morrison, for the executive’s point of view, and a second by Jack Tanner for

1. For the text of the resolution, see Report of the Forty-Second Annual Conference
of the Labour Party, 1943, pp. 18-19.
2. In 1945, the Communist party had 45,435 members, the Labour party, 3,037,697.
See Report of the Executive Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist
Party of Great Britain (1945), p. 16, and Julius Braunthal (ed.), Yearbook o f the International
Socialist Labour Movement (1956), p. 234.
 The British Labour Initiative 11
the Amalgamated Engineering Union, favouring Communist affiliation. This
time the application was defeated by 2,678,000 votes to 468,000.1
This was the last occasion when the question was to be debated at any
annual conference. The 1946 discussion had already been held in an atmo-
sphere of worsening relations between Britain’s Labour government and the
U.S.S.R. Two years later, after the Cold War had come to dominate the
international scene, the frail ambition to construct an international brother-
hood on the foundation of Socialist-Communist unity was completely dead.
The British Labour party’s attempt to solve the problem of unity by a direct
approach to Moscow had come to nothing. The trade unions, on the other
hand, had a greater measure of success1 23and it was mainly as a result of the
British Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.) initiative that the World Federation
of Trade Unions came into being.
Britain did not, of course, have the problem of separate Communist
unions. The Red International of Labour Unions (R.I.L.U.) established on
Lenin’s initiative at the Communist International’s second congress in 1920,®
never got off the ground in England. While in France, Germany and Czecho-
slovakia sections of the R.I.L.U. engaged in bitter conflicts with the Socialist-
led unions, there was no serious attempt to set up splinter unions in the
United Kingdom, where the idea of trade union unity was more deeply
rooted.
As a result, Britain’s union leaders had fewer inhibitions than their
European counterparts when it came to working for international links. As
early as 1925 the T.U.C. had tried to reach an agreement with the Soviet
trade unions on establishing a comprehensive trade union international,4
and it renewed its attempt during the war. The Trades Union Congress,
meeting in Edinburgh in September 1941, three months after Hitler’s attack
on the U.S.S.R., authorized the general council to commence joint talks with
the All Union Central Council of Trade Unions5 with a view to establishing
a single trade union international.
By the autumn of 1941, Russia’s situation had become desperate. The
German invasion had caught the Red Army unprepared, and initially it
crumbled before the ferocity of the Panzer attacks. During the first three
weeks some 620,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans.
1. Report of the Forty-Fifth Annual Conference, 1946, p. 174.
2. It must be kept in mind that the British Labour party receives the bulk of its support
from trade union affiliations, and that twelve of the twenty-seven seats on its executive
are elected directly by the unions. Affiliated trade unionists outnumber individual members
of constituency parties by more than seven to one, and the trade union block vote is thus
the most important single factor determining conference decisions.
3. Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 173-5.
4. For an account of the formation and break-up of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union
Committee, see ibid., pp. 303 and 306-7.
5. Report of the Seventy-Third Annual Trades Union Congress, Edinburgh, 1941,
p. 243.
12 The Destiny o f Socialism
During September the Germans captured Kiev and advanced to the gates of
Moscow. Since France had capitulated and the United States had not yet
entered the war, Britain was Russia’s solitary ally, and the government of the
U.S.S.R. naturally welcomed the T.U.C.’s declaration of solidarity with
Russia in her time of greatest need.1 Friendly messages were exchanged
between the two trade union centres, and the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union
Committee held its first meeting in Moscow in October 1941. In the following
year the T.U.C.’s general secretary, Walter Citrine (b. 1887), went to the
United States to seek the support of that country’s two trade union organiza-
tions—the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial
Organizations—for an international trade union conference.2 The T.U.C.,
at its annual conference of September 1943 in Southport, which was attended
by a Soviet trade union delegation led by N. M. Shvemik, decided to convene
an international trade union conference to lay the foundations for a world
trade union organization.
In November the invitations, signed by Citrine on behalf of both organiza-
tions, went out to seventy-one trade union bodies in thirty-one countries;
the conference was intended to be held in London and to open on 5 June 1944.2
In fact the ‘World Trade Union Conference’, as it was officially called,
began at County Hall, London, on 6 February 1945. This was the first
occasion in over a quarter of a century that Socialists and Communists had
been able to come together on a world scale for discussions on a friendly
basis. It was an impressive gathering, representing sixty-three trade union
organizations with a total of sixty million members from forty-six countries,
even though the war was still in progress and a number of countries still
under Nazi domination—notably Germany, Austria and Hungary—could
not be represented. During talks which lasted eleven days,4 the conference
decided to set up a world organization at a congress to be held in Paris in
September 1945. The conference also drafted a set of rules, a basic charter
of trade union rights and a declaration on post-war reconstruction. In a
manifesto to the international working class, the conference affirmed the
right of the trade union movement to participate fully in laying the founda-
tions of the post-war world. ‘The organized workers,’ it declared, ‘who have
1. Another expression of solidarity was the strike which took place in British aircraft
factories in September 1941 in protest against a remark made by a cabinet minister, J. T. C.
Moore-Brabazon, who was responsible for aircraft production and who said that British
interests would best be served by Germany and Russia inflicting maximum casualties on
one another. Labour pressure, including pressure from Labour members of the cabinet,
led to Moore-Brabazon’s resignation.
2. The C.I.O. accepted the proposal. However, the A.F. of L. refused to take part in
an international conference with the Soviet trade unions on the grounds that they were not
so much genuine unions as agencies of the Soviet government.
3. The postponement of the conference occurred as a result of the opening of the
Second Front, the name given to the Allied landing in Europe in June 1944.
4. See Report of the World Trade Union Conference, 6-17 February 1945, County
Hall, London.
 The British Labour Initiative 13
played such a great part in winning the war, cannot leave to others the sole
responsibility for the peace settlement.’1
The inaugural congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions
(W.F.T.U.) took place as planned in Paris in September 1945. The fratricidal
conflicts which had largely undermined the power of trade unionism on an
international scale were momentarily held in abeyance. ‘The great experiment
began in an atmosphere of widespread enthusiasm and a belief in mutual
good faith,’ as Arthur Deakin, the general secretary12 of the T.U.C., recorded.
But this experiment also failed within a few years as the Grand Alliance
disintegrated. The W.F.T.U. had been founded on the assumption that
friendship between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies could
outlast the war and become permanent.

The progress of the common struggle of the United States, Britain, the Soviet
Union and the other Allies [Arthur Deakin recalled] had given rise to a sentiment of
international unity; feelings of allied solidarity were strengthened and a great hope
swelled in all men’s hearts. It was hoped that military victory over Fascism and
National Socialism would be followed by an all-embracing and honest friendship
which would fulfil the hopes for a fruitful co-operation between the nations of the
world.3

These high hopes turned sour. On the very day following the German
surrender, at the Potsdam Conference of the Big Three in July 1945, the gulf
that separated Russia and the West became apparent. Over the next year or
two it grew steadily wider, reaching its climax in the Cold War. At no point
was there the remotest possibility that trade unions in the Soviet Union and
the other Communist countries might remain neutral in any conflict between
Russia and the West. And, from the outset, the influence of the Communist
bloc in the W.F.T.U. was dominant. The Soviet trade union movement,
with twenty-seven million members, was by far the largest single organization
to be affiliated. The Communists, moreover, led the trade union movements
of France, Italy, Latin America and China, while Louis Saillant, a Communist
sympathizer, was elected general secretary of the W.F.T.U. and there was
soon a Communist majority on the executive.
Disagreements between Communist and democratic elements on the
executive were therefore inevitable, and as the breach widened between
Russia and the West, so relations inside the W.F.T.U. grew worse. In
November 1947, the Communists declared open war against their opponents
in the executive; Trud, the official organ of the Soviet trade unions, demanded

1. ibid., pp. 230-50. For a summary of the decisions, see Hans Gottfurcht, Die Inter-
nationale Gewerkschaftsbewegung im Weltgeschehen (Cologne, 1962), pp. 169-80.
2. Arthur Deakin, et al., Free Trade Unions leave the World Federation o f Trade
Unions (1949), p. 6.
3. ibid., p. 5.
14 The D estiny o f Socialism
the elimination of ‘reformist’ leaders.1 Controversy over the Marshall Plan
lasted for a full year before culminating in an open split.12 The non-
Communist unions seceded in January 1949, and at a meeting held in
London in December 1949 set up the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (I.C.F.T.U.).3
Thus, within four years of its restoration, the unity of the international
trade union movement was broken up. Once again, two international federa-
tions—the I.C.F.T.U. and the W.F.T.U.—faced one another in bitter rivalry.

1. Trud, 16 November 1947. See Deakin, et a l, op. cit., p. 8.

2. See Gottfurcht, Die Internationale Gewerkschaftsbewegung, pp. 189-98. For the
Communist version, see Saillant’s speech in Report of the Proceedings of the Second
World Trade Union Congress, Milan, 1949, pp. 21-30. G. Monmousseau, a French
delegate, told the Congress that the ‘split in the W.F.T.U. was planned and organized by
Jouhaux on the order of the American billionaires with the object of furthering the anti-
Soviet war aims of NATO’ (p. 44). The Soviet leader, Kuznetsov, attributed the split to
the pressure of the Labour government on the T.U.C. (ibid., p. 134).
3. See Gottfurcht, Die Internationale Gewerkschaftsbewegung, pp. 201-24. For the
structure and development of the I.C.F.T.U., see Julius Braunthal and A. J. Forrest (eds),
Yearbook o f the International Free Trade Union Movement (1957-62), 2 vols.
2 • Socialists and Communists in France

In France, relations between Socialists and Communists were more complex

than in Britain, and they developed along different lines. In Britain a minu-
scule party with hardly any political influence had sought unity with a giant.
But in pre-war France the Communists had been a mass party which, with
seventy-two parliamentary deputies, constituted a major political force. Like
its British counterpart, the Communist party of France had been seriously
compromised by its attitude during the war’s early stages. If it could hardly
be said that the record of the French Socialists represented a source of pride,
the betrayal by the French Communists had been more serious and certainly
more spectacular. After 1935 the party had called more stridently and
persistently than any other in France for resistance to Hitler—the Com-
munists were, indeed, the one parliamentary party to vote against the Munich
Agreement—and, at the outbreak of war, it had thrown itself with patriotic
fervour into the struggle to defend the mother country. But after a few weeks,
when instructions were passed through from Moscow, it turned in its tracks
to denounce the ‘imperialist war’, which, it said, was a consequence of the
machinations of British capitalists. Like its sister party in Britain, it pursued
this line right up to the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. The entire inglorious
episode was epitomized in the behaviour of Maurice Thorez, the party
general secretary, who demonstratively joined his regiment at the outset
of hostilities, only to desert within a few weeks and, from exile in the
Soviet Union, called upon workers and soldiers to make peace with
Germany.1
By contrast with the French Communist party, which had initially given
unanimous support to the war and had then just as unanimously opposed it,
only one section of the French Socialists jettisoned its anti-Fascist principles.
At the time of Munich, the party became divided over the question of whether
Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia should be opposed even at the
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 507 and 510.
16 The Destiny o f Socialism

risk of war.1 The party’s leader, Leon Blum, stood for outright resistance,
but another group, led by the general secretary, Paul Faure, wished for an
understanding with Hitler in an attempt to avert war, and it was this pacifist
section which had secured a majority. In the interests of party unity, Blum
and his followers had bowed to the majority opinion and voted for the
Munich Agreement.2 While the Communists were condemning the agreement
as an act of treason, the Socialists were giving it their official support. After
war broke out, however, the Socialist party rallied whole-heartedly to the
war effort, and denounced the Communist campaign for peace talks with
Hitler, which began with the fall of Poland in September 1939, as a cynical
betrayal.
But for France the serious fighting did not begin until eight months later
with the German offensive in May 1940. Within five weeks the struggle was
over. By-passing the Maginot Line, the German armoured divisions broke
through the French defences on the Meuse, overran northern France almost
unresisted and entered Paris on 14 June. The government, having evacuated
itself to Bordeaux together with the deputies of both houses of parliament,
had to decide in the midst of a nation-wide panic whether to abandon the
mainland and continue the war from Africa or whether to sue for an armistice.
On 16 June, two days after the fall of Paris, the Reynaud administration
resigned, and the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, requested the
eighty-four-year-old Marshal Petain, the ‘Hero of Verdun’, to form a new
government. Petain personified the essence of the monarchist, clerical and
social reaction. He represented those elements in French society which most
loathed the Republic and which had hated above all the government of the
Popular Front. Their hatred had run so deep that, once the possibility of
war with Germany seemed to be growing, they had demanded an under-
standing with the Nazis under the slogan ‘better Hitler than Blum’. Con-
sequently, no sooner had Petain been asked to form a government than he
announced the cessation of the struggle and requested Hitler to grant an
armistice. This was duly signed on 22 June, and under its terms Alsace and
Lorraine were annexed by Germany while northern France, including Paris,
was occupied by German troops.3
One group of Socialists, led by Leon Blum and Vincent Auriol, called
for the war to be continued in the Jacobin spirit of 1792 and the Communard
spirit of 1871. But a vast majority of the French people had had enough.4
This was the end of the Third Republic. Democracy had been assassinated,
and reaction moved in to claim its inheritance. A joint meeting of senate and
deputies on 10 July 1940 decided, by 569 votes to eighty, to appoint Philippe
1. For a detailed study of the pre-war split of the party, see Georges Lefranc, Le
Mouoement socialiste sous la Troisieme Republique: 1875-1940 (Paris, 1963).
2. Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 488-9.
3. In November 1942 German troops occupied the remainder of the country.
4. See Alexander Werth, France 1940-1955 (New York and London, 1956), pp. 27-9.
 Socialists and Communists in France 17
Petain head of state with almost unlimited powers. Among the eighty
delegates voting against the new constitutional law, there were only thirty-
six Socialists. A clear majority of the parliamentary Socialist party voted in
support of the law1 and several leading Socialists, including Paul Faure, the
party secretary, Spinasse, who had been minister of commerce in Blum’s
government, and the trade union leader, Rend Belin, shortly afterwards
accepted appointments under Petain.
But despite this betrayal by so many of its parliamentary representatives,
the Socialist party nevertheless took up the struggle against the Vichy regime—
Vichy being the seat of the French government under the Occupation. The
party itself was suppressed and many of its deputies, senators and officials,
including Leon Blum, Vincent Auriol and Salomon Grumbach, were arrested.
It went underground, and by November 1940, within four months of the
start of the occupation, it had launched one of the earliest resistance organiz-
ations under the leadership of Jean Lebas, the Socialist mayor of Roubaix.
It also produced the monthly journal, L'Homme libre} At about the same
time, Socialists, in company with members of the illegal trade union move-
ment, set up the Federation Libiration-Nord to co-ordinate the activities of
underground groups within the occupied zone. The Federation issued a
clandestine weekly, edited by Christian Pineau and Jean Texier, which
achieved an astonishing circulation of 50,000 copies an issue. Socialists
likewise played a leading role in such underground groups as Combat and
Liberation*
By January 1941 it had become possible to begin the reconstitution of the
Socialist party in the shape of the Comite d'Action Socialiste C.A.S.), led
first by H. Ribiere, and then by Daniel Mayer, a friend and disciple of
Leon Blum. By December 1941, they were able to publish a bulletin Socialisme
et Liberte, and in May of the following year Le Populaire began to reappear.1234
By the summer of 1943, the party had re-established a nation-wide network
of activists, and in July it issued a ‘Charter’ of demands to be implemented
immediately following liberation. This became the charter for the whole
1. For a description of the political and psychological atmosphere, see Dorothy M.
Pickles, France Between the Republics (London, 1946), pp. 13-16.
2. The paper was duplicated in a room which was separated from the German gar-
rison headquarters only by a glass door. The duplicating machine, paper and vehicles for
distributing it were all supplied by Lebas from the mayor’s office. Lebas was arrested in
May 1941, but the group continued its activities and a conference—the first such inter-
national gathering in occupied Europe—was held at Namur in May 1942, in company
with Socialists from Belgium and Holland—see Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 143.
3. For detailed descriptions of the Socialist resistance movements, see Robert Verdier,
La Vie clandestine du Parti Socialiste (Paris, 1944); Daniel Mayer, Les Socialistes dans la
Risistance. Souvenirs et documents (Paris, 1968); Jules Moch, Le Parti socialiste au peuple
de France (Paris, 1945); and Jean-Pierre Bloch, M es jours heureux (Paris, 1946).
4. The underground Populaire attained a circulation of well over 100,000. See Peter
Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy. The Purge o f Collaborators in Liberated France
(London, 1968), p. 19.
18 The Destiny o f Socialism
resistance movement, and after the war it formed the programme for France’s
first liberation government.

On 9 November 1944, the party held its first conference since the outbreak
of war. It met in an atmosphere of imminent victory. The tone of the con-
ference was expressed in its concluding manifesto, which declared that:
‘Steeled by sacrifice and reinforced in its beliefs, the Socialist party emerges
from the resistance with a new spirit and a new structure.’ Accordingly, the
party had been completely overhauled, the manifesto continued:
So as to fulfil its national and international mission, the party has purged itself
morally. Traitors, cowards and those who fell by the wayside have been removed
from office and replaced by comrades who have earned our trust through their work
in the resistance.
The conference expelled all those deputies and senators who had voted
for the Petain constitution,1 and it elected Daniel Mayer, who had played a
leading role in the underground, to be its general secretary. As a result, the
Socialist party emerged from the war freed from the stigma it had acquired
through the activities of Paul Faure and his fellow collaborators.

The Communist party, on the other hand, made no attempt to justify its
policy during the first stage of the war2 nor to make any kind of critical
1. The conference expelled ninety-six of the surviving 151 members of the party’s
parliamentary group. The groundwork for an out-and-out purge of the party after the
Liberation had been laid during the war, in May 1941, by the Comite ctAction Socialists#
the party’s underground executive committee, which had decided to expel not only those
of the party’s senators and deputies who had voted full power to Petain, but also those
who had abstained. After the Liberation every departmental federation carried out a root-
and-branch purge, carefully examining old members and new applicants alike. ‘No other
party carried out a purge which even approached that of the Socialists in scope and rigor’
—Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy, p. 108. The Communist party in the main purged
only those members who had opposed the Russo-German Pact of August 1939. ‘Many of
these “renegades” were summarily executed both before and after the Liberation’—ibid.,
p. 109.
2. A defence of Communist policy was contained in a letter written to Petain by
Francois Billoux on 19 December 1940. Billoux was a leading Communist deputy who,
together with a number of Communist deputies, had been arrested at the beginning of
October 1939 and given a long prison term in April 1940. Writing from prison in Le Puy,
in his letter (which proved a great source of embarrassment to the Communists when it
was published after the war) he demanded the release of Communists from prison; he
pointed out that their one crime lay in sharing the anti-war convictions of Petain and his
government. ‘We were hauled before the Court,’ he wrote, ‘because we were the only ones
with the courage to call for the overthrow of the Daladier government responsible for the
war___ I told the Court that the war would be disastrous for France. If we lost, we should
be slaves of Hitler; if we won, the lackeys of Chamberlain. We ought to have followed the
Soviet Union and stayed neutral. Our country would then, like the Soviet Union, have
kept out of the war’—quoted in Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 193. For a Communist view
of the period, see Florimond Bonte, Le Chemin de Vhonneur (Paris, 1949). Bonte had been
one of the imprisoned deputies. For another view, see Germaine Willard, La Drole de
guerre et la trahison de Vichy (Paris, 1960); and for a dissident Communist view, see Auguste
Lecoeur, UAutocritique attendue (St Cloud, 1955).
 Socialists and Communists in France 19
assessment of its own role. The devotion of its members to the resistance
had been as fervent and self-sacrificing as their earlier ‘revolutionary
defeatism’ had been total.1 They had responded eagerly to the uncompro-
mising anti-Fascist line as soon as it had once again become Communist
orthodoxy, and their revolutionary background made them more effective
members of an underground movement than did that of either the Social-
ists, Catholics or liberals. Consequently they secured many key positions
in the resistance, particularly in its leading organizations: the Front
National (F.N.), and its military wing, the Francs-Tireurs Partisans-Franfais
(F.T.P.F.).
Recruitment to the resistance was greatly stimulated when, in February
1943, the Service de Travail Obligatoire, an agency of the Vichy government,
began to deport thousands of French workers to forced labour in Germany.
By the end of the war, the number of deportees may have run as high as
900,000.12 It was a threat which caused thousands to join the Maquis in the
woods and mountains of the Central Plateau as well as in the Pyrenees.
During the course of the war, the numbers recruited in this way may have
reached 100,000.3The Vichy government and its press denounced all members
of the underground without distinction—those who opposed the regime on
straightforward patriotic grounds as much as the Communists. Far from
attaching any stigma to Communism, this inevitably became a great source
of strength to the Communist party.
The underground resistance movement was not the exclusive confine of
any one party. Politically, its membership ranged from the far left through
the centre to the patriotic right, but the Communist party, with a certain
degree of effrontery, declared itself to be the ‘party of the resistance’. The
Vichy regime as well as the Gestapo persecuted resistance members with
ferocity and without any regard for ideological convictions: Communists
suffered heroically in company with but, so far as the evidence goes, to no
greater extent than did other sections of the resistance.4 This did not

1. For an account of the underground, see Werth, France, 1940-1955, pp. 133-78.
For the role of the Communists, see Franz Borkenau, Der Europaische Kommunismus
(Berne, 1952), pp. 296-316. Though hostile the account contains valuable documentary
material.
2. See Henry Ehrmann, French Labor. From Popular Front to Liberation (New York,
1947), p. 271. Val R. Lorwin estimates the number of Frenchmen deported to forced labour
as being 600,000—see The French Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), p. 94.
3. Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 157.
4. According to Domenach, some 350,000 Frenchmen died at the hands of the Germans
—250,000 perishing in concentration camps and 100,000 being executed. The total number
of Communists in the two categories is given as at least 60,000—see Jean-Marie Domenach,
‘The French Communist Party’, in Mario Einaudi (ed.), Communism in Western Europe
(Ithaca, 1951), p. 99. The numbers seem exaggerated. The French government reported a
total of 29,660 executions to the Nuremberg tribunal—Agence France Presse, 12 September
1947, quoted in Alfred J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941-1947 (New
York, 1962), p. 144.
20 The Destiny o f Socialism
inhibit the French Communist party from claiming a lion’s share of the
credit and describing itself as the ‘party of the 75,000 executed’.

Co-operation between Communists and Socialists in the resistance led, on

27 May 1943, to the setting up in Paris of the Conseil National de la Resistance
(C.N.R.), on which the Socialists were represented by Andre Le Troquer
and the Communists by Andre Mercier. The C.N.R. assumed control over
the eight federations into which the early free-ranging groups of resistance
fighters had gradually coalesced, and also over the illegal trade union organiz-
ations of Socialists and Catholics, represented by Louis Saillant. A year later,
on 16 March 1944, the Socialists and Communists, together with the demo-
cratic resistance groups, reached agreement on a mutual programme for post-
war reconstruction, the ‘Charter of the C.N.R.’. This was, to all intents, the
programme of the revived Socialist party to which we have already referred.
The programme’s key demand was for the restoration of the democracy
which the Vichy regime had destroyed, including universal suffrage, freedom
of thought and conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the
‘absolute equality of all citizens before the law’. It called for the establishing
of a ‘genuine economic and social democracy’, the destruction of those ‘vast
concentrations of economic and quasi-feudal financial power’ which effec-
tively controlled the country’s economy, the nationalization of the great
private monopolies ‘created by the people’s labour’, and, specifically, for the
nationalization of mines, the electric power industry, banks and insurance
companies. The programme also demanded the setting up of a Welfare State
with guaranteed minimum earnings compatible with security, dignity and a
fully human existence, full employment and a comprehensive programme of
social benefits.1

Under the Vichy government, the trade union federations as well as political
parties had been made illegal, and in November 1940, the Confederation
Generate du Travail (C.G.T.) had been formally abolished and its general
secretary, Leon Jouhaux (1879-1954), deported to Germany. The Com-
munist unions had been expelled from the C.G.T. as early as the end of
September 1939, when their party reversed its policy towards the war. After
that, Communists and Socialists ran their separate underground unions.
But the general unification of the resistance made it feasible to think in
terms of the Communists re-entering the C.G.T. On 17 April 1943, represen-
tatives of both sides reached agreement at Le Perraux to annul the expulsion
of the Communists from the C.G.T. The balance of voting power on the
executive was restored to that prevailing in September 1939, with the
Jouhaux section holding five votes to the Communists’ three.
1. For the text of the Charter, see David Thomson, Democracy in France: The Third
Republic (London, 1946), pp. 299-301.
 Socialists and Communists in France 21
The Communists had been working towards reunion with the C.G.T. as
a result of their conviction that their efficient methods for forming cells in
trade union branches and factories would enable them to win complete
control of the organization and utilize it for party purposes. Their confidence
proved to be well founded. When the C.G.T. held its first post-war congress
at Toulouse in March 1946, with an impressive total membership of five
million, the real balance of power became obvious during a vote on a Com-
munist proposal that seven of the largest trade union federations should be
allowed a voting strength equal to their affiliated membership.1 The proposal
was carried by a majority of four to one, or 21,238 votes to 4,872.2 Ever since
its foundation in 1895, the C.G.T. had made a point of remaining free of any
political control. Now, for the first time in its history, it had become the
instrument of a political party, the Communist party.3
The Socialist party had made no attempt to adjust its traditional attitudes
to the conditions prevailing in post-war France. The historical division of
the political spectrum into parties of left and right was complicated by the
emergence of a new Catholic party of the left, the Mouvement Republicain
Populaire (M.R.P.) in association with a broad Catholic trade union move-
ment. The possibility of an alliance with the new party, however, ran counter
to the traditional anti-clericalism of the French Socialist party. The question
was debated at the latter’s first post-Liberation conference, at an extra-
ordinary meeting on 9 November 1944 in the Palais de la Mutuality where
the delegates tried to reassess their fundamental principles in the new era of
the history of France.
The traditional anti-clericalism of the Socialist party had its origins in
the struggle for democracy as it had developed in France ever since the
Revolution of 1789. For over 150 years, the Catholic Church had sided
consistently with the forces of reaction.4 The Catholic hierarchy had sup-
ported the Fascist Vichy regime and had, as a result, formed one of the main
targets of the resistance.
But with France subjected to a Fascist regime, a broadly-based Catholic
workers’ movement had repudiated the political leadership of the Catholic
Church for the first time in French history and worked shoulder-to-shoulder
1. The seven federations—metal-workers, miners, textile workers, railwaymen, build-
ing workers, farm workers and workers in the food industry—were all Communist-led.
In all, twenty-one of the thirty largest unions came under Communist control.
2. Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 109.
3. At the Toulouse congress the rules adopted were in accordance with the foundation
statutes of 1895, confirmed by the Amiens Charter of 1906, insisting on ‘the complete in-
dependence of the trade union movement from . . . political parties, philosophical sects
and other groups outside the labour movement’. Nevertheless, within eighteen months the
Communists had the C.G.T. under firm control. For the text of the preamble, see Ehrmann,
French Labor, p. 283; for the story of the Communist capture of the C.G.T., see Rieber,
Stalin and the French Communist Party, pp. 220-4; Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy,
p. 134.
4. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1863-1914, pp. 161-2,
22 The D estiny o f Socialism
with other anti-Fascist organizations in the resistance. The illegal Catholic
trade unions, in co-operation with Socialist resistance groups, had affirmed
their support for democratic and Socialist principles.
In all this Leon Blum saw the possibility of creating in France a non-
sectarian workers’ organization modelled on the British Labour party—a
labour movement founded on mutual political and social ideals but treating
ideology as the ‘private concern’ of its individual members and taking no
specific line on Church-State relations.
But, in France, the role of the Church within the state was not to be
divorced so easily from party politics, if only because laicite—the secular
character of the state schools—had for so long been at the centre of party
controversy. Nearly a quarter of all school children at the primary level
attended Catholic schools, and throughout the history of the Third Republic
the question of state subsidies to these schools had formed a subject of hot
controversy between the anti-clerical parties of the left and the clergy, who
enjoyed the support of conservative parties on the right. Whenever right-wing
parties came to power, they made a point of subsidizing Catholic schools,
and Petain, heading the most reactionary French government in a hundred
years, had given very substantial subsidies. Now the Socialists had to decide
whether, as a matter of principle, they should stand firm on the policy of
laicite, or whether they should make concessions in return for an alliance
with the Catholic labour movement.
While this question was being debated at the party congress, Leon Blum
was still in Germany as a prisoner of the Gestapo. He would certainly have
supported concessions to the Catholic workers, but an overwhelming majority
in the party was less flexible, and wished the party to remain as uncompro-
misingly anti-clerical as it had been since its inception. In the words of the
resolution carried by the congress, ‘Whatever alliances may be considered,
it is essential that the Socialist Party should remain totally committed to
laicite___ ’ ‘This Congress,’ the resolution continued, ‘demands the repeal
of the Act of 1942, decreed by Petain, under which government money was
given to private schools.’1
The party’s desire to remain uncompromising in its traditional viewpoint
became clear during the debates at its first regular post-war congress (the
thirty-seventh), which met in Paris in August 1945. Leon Blum, who had
returned from Germany in May, put forward a draft for a new ‘Declaration
of Socialist Aims and Principles’. This was intended to supersede the
declaration of principles by which the Marxist Parti Socialiste de France,
led by Jules Guesde, had joined with the reformist Parti Socialiste Francois,
led by Jean Jaures, to form the united Parti Socialiste: Section Frangaise de
PInternationale ouvriere (S.F.I.O.) at the Paris congress in April 1905. The
1. Quoted in Ronald Matthews, The Death o f the Fourth Republic (London, 1954),
p. 172.
 Socialists and Communists in France 23
declaration had contained elements both of Marxism and reformism, but
he party’s description of itself as ‘a class party which stands for the socializa-
tion of the means of production . . . a party of class struggle and revolution’
was unmistakably Marxist.
During his time in prison, Blum had had leisure to reflect on the party’s
principles in the light of his suspicion that somehow it had lost its way.
I have asked myself [he wrote], after very m any years [of party activity] an d after
m any m onths o f careful thought, whether the blame [for the party ’s failures] did n ot
lie with the leaders in whom the workers had placed their confidence. D id they really
understand their m ission? D id they really grasp the significance o f w hat Jaures had
made out o f M arx’s initial insights? M arx gave the w orkers’ movement trem endous
vitality by convincing them th at the currents o f history were on their side. . . . But
Jaures went on to show th at social revolution is not simply the inevitable result o f
economic development; it is also the end product o f hum anity’s eternal, basic
strivings and beliefs.1

In the revision of the 1905 declaration which he submitted to the congress,

Blum had tried to incorporate something of the spirit of Jaures in an attempt
to transform his party into a party of freedom and human rights—a party
concerned not only with ‘the political freedom and rights of the working
class’, but with broadening its objectives to include a social order working
in the interests of the entire human race, for, as he expressed it in his draft,
‘individual rights and free institutions are inseparable’.
In his speech supporting the proposed revisions, Blum argued that the
aims of Socialism went far beyond mere economic and social change.
Social change [he insisted] is n o t an end in itself. It is a means. It should be
regarded as a condition for a m ore fundam ental change in the way men live. The aim
o f the revolution is not only to free men from economic and social exploitation and
all the derivative forms o f hum an servitude. It must also guarantee to each member o f
the collective society the full enjoyment of hum an rights and freedom to follow his
personal inclination. The aim o f the revolution [he concluded] is to restore harm ony
between the individual as a social unit and the collective society o f which he forms
an essential part.

Blum’s draft was inevitably opposed by many delegates as a watered-down

version of the traditional Marxism on which they had been reared. In
particular, his suggestion that the term ‘class struggle’ should be replaced by
‘class action’ had, as Blum admitted in his speech to the congress, ‘caused
grave offence to many of our brothers’. He went on to plead with his critics
that ‘tradition does not mean blindly repeating the actions of our predecessors.
It means, rather, trying to act as they would act if they stood here in our
place.’ He asked the congress to bear in mind that, ‘we have to reconstruct
the party from scratch. Have all the years of underground struggle taught us
1. Leon Blum, A I'Echelle humaine (Paris, 1946). The book had been written in prison
in 1941.
24 The Destiny o f Socialism
nothing?’ What he had intended, he argued, was not so much to revise as to
adapt Marxism to prevailing political and social conditions. His draft was
quite compatible with the basic ideas of Marxism, and, indeed, his analysis
was based entirely on the Marxist theory of the class nature of capitalism.
But he was trying to present a concept of revolution which would have a
more universal appeal than that put forward in the 1905 declaration. The
objective of the revolution must be presented not only as ‘social upheaval’
and the simple replacement of one economic system by another. It had to
be much more—‘the transformation of the conditions of human life . . . not
just an end to economic exploitation and domination but a guarantee of
fundamental human rights’.
After a heated debate,1 the congress decided to refer Blum’s draft to the
federations (regional organizations) of the party for comment and to
authorize an editorial committee to prepare a new document, so far as possible
reconciling majority and minority views. The proposal was considered by a
conference of federation secretaries in February 1946, and it was adopted by
3,053 votes to 768, with 639 abstentions.
The new statement managed to incorporate the essence of Blum’s draft
without apparently impairing the party’s commitment to Marxism. The
party was to remain what it had been from its inception: a party of ‘pro-
letarian class struggle’, not merely a party of ‘class action’. As a result, the
relevant paragraph in the new statement declared:
The Socialist party is by its nature a revolutionary party. It aims a t replacing
capitalist private property by a society in which natural resources and the means o f
production are socially owned and classes have been abolished. Such a revolutionary
transform ation, though in the interests of all m ankind, is to be achieved only by the
w orking class. Irrespective o f the means by which it is brought about, it constitutes a
social revolution. In this sense the Socialist party is a party o f class struggle founded
on the organized working class.
Having reaffirmed the party’s commitment to Marxism, the statement
proceeded to incorporate the spirit of Blum’s draft by emphasizing its
democratic character and insisting on the necessity of fighting for social
reforms within the capitalist system. It declared:
The Socialist party is by nature a dem ocratic party. Individual rights and class
freedom are inseparable. The workers can only be free in a society which guarantees
full freedom to all citizens. Com plete dem ocratic freedom is an essential p art o f any
Socialist society. It also provides favourable conditions in which the workers can
fight for reform s within a capitalist society, so raising their standard o f living and
simultaneously increasing their revolutionary fighting strength.®

But while the Socialist party was wrestling with its conscience and battling
1. For a review of the congress proceedings, see the excellent study by D. B. Graham,
The French Socialists and Tripartisme, 1944-1947 (London, 1965), pp. 87-114.
2. Bulletin intirieur, February-March 1946, quoted in Graham, The French Socialists
and Tripartisme, p. 158.
 Socialists and Communists in France 25
out its differences in the open, the Communists experienced no such qualms.
References to Marxism, let alone to Marxism-Leninism, disappeared from
its public pronouncements.1 The term ‘class struggle’ completely vanished
from its vocabulary. When speaking directly to workers, it continued to
describe itself as the party of the working class. But, in its general publicity,
it made its appeal to every social class as the ‘Party of Anti-Fascism’, or the
‘Party of the Resistance’. It beat the big drum of patriotism as ‘the party of
French renaissance’, declaring its aim to be the restoration of the grandeur
of France.2 It denounced its critics not only as enemies of the working class
but also as enemies of the nation. It was an approach which paid dividends.
The party conference held in June 1945 was able to announce a membership
of 545,900, as compared with a membership of 335,705 for the Socialist
party; and at the first elections to the National Assembly, in October 1945,
it gained 5,005,000 votes as against the Socialists’ 4,561,000.

Both parties were represented in the two successive governments which

followed—the Provisional Government, set up in Algiers in April 1944, and
the ‘Government of National Unity’ which General de Gaulle formed on
10 September 1944, two months after the liberation of Paris. For the first
time in its history, the French Communist party participated in a coalition
government with Socialist and capitalist parties.
Now Socialists and Communists were working together in government
as they had previously worked together in the underground. It seemed to
many that the fratricidal strife which had been the bane of the labour
movement for so long was at last finished. The pressure grew to consummate
the alliance by merging the two parties—an idea which had a particular
appeal to thousands of active Socialists.
But many Socialist leaders, including Leon Blum and Daniel Mayer,
viewed the proposal for organic unity with more scepticism. While they
were concerned to avoid any recurrence of pre-war conflicts and to establish
a good relationship with the Communists, their experience of co-operative
work in the days of the Popular Front had left its scars. The Communists
had campaigned with the Socialists for a Popular Front government. But
when Blum formed such a government following the election victory in
April 1936, the Communists chose to stand outside rather than to share
responsibilities with their allies. They had thus been able to claim credit for
the government’s social reforms while attacking the unpopular measures
1. According to one conservative critic, ‘Capitalism has received a splendid camouflage.
Communism hardly dares to use its own name’—Le Figaro, 11 April 1945, quoted in
Pickles, France Between the Republics, p. 19.
2. Jacques Duclos (1896-1975), after Thorez the most prominent member of the party,
appealed at the Congress of the National Front, which was dominated by the Communists,
for the ‘unity of all Frenchmen of good will, wherever they come from, prepared to work
for the renaissance and greatness of France’—quoted in Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 244.
26 The Destiny o f Socialism
adopted to deal with the economic crisis. In parliament they had voted for
Blum’s policy of non-intervention during the early stages of the Spanish
Civil War, but then had denounced his ‘betrayal of Spanish freedom’ in the
streets. It was hard for Socialists who had lived through these experiences to
place much faith in Communist loyalty.1
The question of closer links between the two parties first arose during the
second half of 1944 while Blum was still in a German concentration camp.
When, at the beginning of that December, official discussions were held
between representatives of each organization, they agreed to lay a foundation
for unity by trying to create an ‘atmosphere of mutual understanding and co-
operation’, and a comite d'entente was set up to co-ordinate activity. Yet,
when the committee held its first meeting a few days later, the question of
fusion was immediately revived by the Communists.
The question came up for decision at the August 1945 congress of the
Socialist party. In the meantime, Blum had returned from prison camp with
his prestige among party members standing higher than at any other time
during his career. The reforms achieved by the Popular Front during his
premiership were unforgotten, and all France had been moved by his
memorable and dignified address to the special court at Riom in February
1942.12 He had become a national hero overnight. We have already referred
to his analysis of the crisis of Socialism and democracy, written during the
early period of his imprisonment in 1941, which was to have such a profound
influence over the development of Socialist ideology in France.
Blum was seventy-three when he returned from prison, broken in health
but with his enthusiasm and his faith in the victory of Socialism stronger
than ever. He even believed that the Socialist era had already begun, and in
A Vfchelle humaine he wrote:
Socialism is approaching its final victory. The system it has consistently opposed
is crumbling in ruins, and, where it survives, has lost faith in itself. M en and parties
who were am ong Socialism’s m ost intransigent opponents are now adopting its
views and principles. W hether deliberately or otherwise, society will be rebuilt on
Socialist foundations.

He had been able to write in these terms in 1941 at the height of Nazi
power in Europe, and it was in the same spirit that he proclaimed to the
party congress after it had given him a rapturous welcome, ‘Socialism is
now in the ascendant: one day it will control the world.’

Two months before the Socialist congress the Communists had published in
UHumanite, their party organ, a ‘Charter of Alliance’ proposing the fusion

1. Julius Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 435 and 438.
2. Leon Blum before his Judges, with an Introduction by Felix Gouin and a Foreword
by Clement Attlee (London, 1943).
 Socialists and Communists in France 27
of the two parties into a Parti Ouvrier Frangais to be based on ‘the dialectical
materialism of Marx and Engels, as developed by Lenin and Stalin’. The
objective of the party was to be ‘the conquest of power by the working class’,
and its organization would be founded on ‘the principles of democratic
centralism’ which had governed the original Bolshevik party, and by which
the executive controlled the whole organization, including its parliamentary
representatives and its press. And while it was prepared to recognize the
prime need to popularize the ‘great achievements of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.
under the leadership of the Communist party of the Soviet Union’, it would,
according to the Charter, remain independent of all governments, even
including that of the U.S.S.R.1 What the Charter was proposing in principle
was a virtual takeover of the Socialist party by the Communists.
The Charter was vigorously discussed at regional conferences of the
Socialist party, and the executive decided to place it on the congress agenda.
Before the congress took place, however, Blum made his opposition to
organic unity clear in a series of articles in Le Populaire. He claimed from the
outset that there was no question of the Socialist party ever participating in
any domestic anti-Communist alliance, nor would it ever support French
membership of an anti-Soviet bloc. The party was, moreover, committed to
joint action with the Communists in the struggle for a new social order and
in the fight against domestic reaction. But, he maintained in his articles, and
subsequently repeated in his speech to congress, organic unity was impossible
until the differences existing between the two parties had been examined and
eliminated.
During the congress Blum laid great stress on these differences. First,
since Communist principles were incompatible with democracy they were
also incompatible with ideals for which the Socialist Party had stood from
its foundation. It was true, he agreed, that the Communists had kept to the
Charter of the C.N.R. which had called for the restoration of all the demo-
cratic rights destroyed by the Vichy regime. But serious doubts still stood
about the sincerity of the Communists’ devotion to democracy. And as long
as such doubts remained, he argued, any fusion of the two parties had to be
seen as ‘impossible’.
There was secondly, said Blum, the further and probably decisive con-
sideration of the French Communist party being virtually under the domi-
nation of the Soviet Union. He reminded delegates of the party’s volte-face
over the war in September 1939. Certainly Thorez had fervently proclaimed
his patriotism after his return from Moscow under de Gaulle’s amnesty in
November 1944. Certainly, also, the Communists had played a respected role
in France’s post-war rehabilitation. But Communist professions of loyalty
to France had not in any way weakened the party’s fundamental loyalty to
1. L’Humanite, 12 June 1945, quoted in Graham, The French Socialists and Tripartisme,
pp. 97-8; see also Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, pp. 212-14.
28 The Destiny o f Socialism
the Soviet Union. This might do no great harm so long as the interests of the
Soviet Union and France coincided. But how might the Communists be
expected to act in the event of a future conflict between the two? Would they
not, Blum asked, automatically take the side of the Soviet Union against
France? And what would they do in the event of future disagreements
between Russia and the new Socialist International? To judge from past
experience, and from what he knew of the Communist cast of mind, it
seemed only too likely that, given such an eventuality, they would persist in
their apparently unshakeable support for the Soviet Union whatever its
actions. In such a situation a reunified workers’ party would once again
experience an agonizing split. A merger between the two parties was there-
fore, in Blum’s view, out of the question while the intellectual and
emotional bonds linking French Communism to the Soviet Union remained
intact.1
Representatives of the Socialist party’s left wing, speaking at the con-
ference, objected that should unification not take place, then the Socialist
party would find itself forced further and further towards the right, and that,
under the existing electoral system, it would have to depend on right-wing
and centre votes to get its candidates returned.12 Moreover, the separate
existence of two working-class parties could only weaken the left and increase
the danger of reaction.
In the end, a resolution submitted by the conference resolution committee
and supported by Jules Moch (b. 1893) was carried by 9,921 votes to 274.
This stated that the unity of the labour movement was one of the Socialist
party’s prime objectives. But no merger with the Communist party could
develop before a prolonged period of successful joint activity had had time
to generate the necessary atmosphere of loyalty and mutual trust. At all
events, there were certain conditions which would first have to be satisfied:
a frank statement of the principles of the two parties, guarantees of democracy
within the united party, an unambiguous commitment to democracy and to
the need to defend it against enemies at home and abroad, and complete
freedom from any special relationship with a foreign government. Since the
Communist ‘charter of unity’ did not satisfy these conditions, it did not
provide a basis for discussions which could lead to a merger. The congress
was not, however, in any way opposed to working in conjunction with
Communists. Therefore, as a first step, it authorized the executive to reach
an agreement with the Communist leadership in the comite d’entente on co-
1. Leon Blum, Le Probleme de Vunite (Paris, 1945).
2. Under French electoral law, a candidate must receive an absolute majority of the
votes cast in order to be returned on the first ballot. In the event of a second ballot, the
candidate is returned who obtains the largest number of votes. This system lends itself
to the formation of electoral alliances between parties, who agree to withdraw after the
first ballot in favour of whichever member of the bloc obtained the largest number of
votes.
 Socialists and Communists in France 29

operation in the forthcoming election campaign, and, after the elections, to

renew discussions on the continuation of joint activity.1

On 21 October 1945, two months after the Socialist congress, the elections
to the Constituent Assembly took place. In June, at their tenth congress, the
Communists had discussed their electoral programme. Maurice Thorez, who
as we saw returned from Moscow in November 1944 and was back in France
for the first time since his desertion from the army, delivered a speech which
left no room for doubt that the Communists saw themselves as a government
party and intended to remain so after the election. It was, however, a moderate
speech, based on the party’s acceptance of responsibility for the recon-
struction of France, and it contained a thoroughly realistic approach to the
problems of economic and foreign policy.2 ‘We are,’ Thorez claimed, ‘a
party participating in government responsibility. Two of our members have
seats in the government. Communists hold responsible posts in public
administration, the army and industry. We control thousands of local
authorities.. . . We must not lose sight of the weight of responsibility we
carry for both party and nation.’3 The tone of the passage was typical of
Communist pronouncements at this time. ‘Yesterday we were in opposition,’
said Gaston Monmousseau, a brilliant Communist trade union leader, in a
speech to a C.G.T. conference, ‘and did not need to be too fussy in our
choice of tactics. But now it is the big capitalist magnates who are in
opposition while we hold responsible positions.’4
During this period the Communist party’s actions were consistent with
its fresh conception of its role. It threw enormous energy into restoring
industrial production. During the hard winter of 1944-5, output fell to less
than a third of its pre-war level and large numbers of workers found them-
selves in desperate straits.5 The Communist trade unions, however, responded
to the crisis by opposing the workers’ demands for pay rises and insisted that
production must first be increased. ‘Only through work can we win the
battle for democracy,’ ran the slogan in huge letters across the hall in which
the C.G.T. held its congress in 1946. ‘The highest expression of our duty as
a class is the development of production to the maximum,’ one of the miners’
1. See Graham, The French Socialists and Tripartisme, pp. 98-101.
2. For the text, see Maurice Thorez, ‘Une Politique franfaise: renaissance, democratic,
unite', in Rapport au X e Congris du P.C.F. (Paris, 1945).
3. ibid., p. 59.
4. Vie ouvriire, 28 March 1946, quoted in Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 106.
5. Having suffered devastation during the course of the fighting, France had then been
bled white during the ensuing occupation. ‘Occupation costs’ of 400 million francs a day
were imposed on a country whose harbours, bridges and railways had been destroyed by
the Germans, before being subjected to repeated bombing by the Allies and finally sabo-
taged by the resistance. By the end of the war, every bridge across the Seine and the Loire
had been destroyed, while France had lost in all 1,900 railway bridges and 1,850 miles of
track—see Matthews, The Death o f the Fourth Republic, p. 178; Dorothy Pickles, French
Politics. The First Years o f the Fourth Republic (London, 1953), p. 48.
30 The Destiny o f Socialism
leaders declared at the congress. Another claimed that ‘only the big capi-
talists want to hinder the development of production so as to sabotage the
reconstruction of our economy, increase the misery of the people and, on
the basis of the resulting discontent, replace our democratic government by
one which is reactionary’. The congress manifesto made the same point when
it said: ‘The first duty is to increase production.’1 And when, in January
1946, the printers of Paris came out on strike for more pay, they were
denounced in a broadcast by Ambroise Croizat, the Communist leader of the
metal-workers and minister of labour, while Monmousseau stated: ‘It is no
accident that such a notorious Fascist organ as L'fipoque [a Paris daily]
defends the right to strike at a time when production has become by far the
most crucial issue facing our people.’ In similar vein, the theoretical journal
of the Communist party wrote:
In the recent past we have seen manoeuvres designed to create splits in certain
sections of the working class—manoeuvres which, needless to say, have been
applauded by the worst type of reactionary. We have seen sinister elements setting
out to provoke strikes through demagogic tactics. We have seen agents provocateurs
trying to stir things up. . . .2
Talking to miners in July 1945, Thorez, himself an ex-miner, said: ‘I tell
you frankly, comrades, speaking for the central committee and in accordance
with the decisions of our party—we cannot countenance the smallest strike,
particularly after it has actually broken out.’3 And, indeed, there were no
significant strikes in France through 1945 and 1946.
Under the leadership of Maurice Thorez (1900-1964), the French Com-
munists stuck to this policy as consistently and for as long as was practicable.
Naturally the party still aimed at achieving political power, but Thorez had
opposed the policy of seizing power by force which had been advocated by the
party’s left wing, led by Andre Marty and Charles Tillon, at the moment when,
in September and October 1944, German power was collapsing and it seemed
as though the Communists might move swiftly into the vacuum created.4
The question became critical when de Gaulle’s government ordered the
1. C.G.T. Congres, 1946, Compte rendu . . . , pp. 52 and 373, quoted in Lorwin, The
French Labor Movement, p. 106.
2. Cahiers du Communisme, September 1946.
3. Quoted in Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, p. 231.
4. ‘A number of leading comrades,’ according to a declaration by the party’s central
committee in October 1952, ‘believe that the workers should have seized power at the
moment of liberation.’ That, the statement continued, ‘would have been a serious error.
It would have ended in a bloody defeat and would have left the party isolated in France’—
UHumanite, 4 October 1952. When, in December of that year, Marty and Tillon were
expelled from the party for opposing Thorez, it was alleged against them that their 1944
policies would have led to a catastrophic worsening in relations between the Soviet Union
and the West. Marty had also opposed the decision to dissolve the Milices patriotiques
and had gone on to criticize the Communist participation in the governments from 1944
to 1947, ‘in the thoroughly irresponsible, romantic spirit of Blanqui, which was strongly
condemned by Marx as well as by Lenin’—quoted in Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 588.
 Socialists and Communists in France 31
dissolution of the milices patriotiques, which were under Communist control,
and the ‘liberation committees’—equally dominated by the Communists—
which had taken over in many towns and villages in the chaos following the
German withdrawal. The militias had represented the party’s armed wing,
the ‘liberation committees’ its political instrument for taking over local
administration. The Communists at first protested strongly against the decree.
L ’Humanite spoke of a virtual return to Petainism. Jacques Duclos called
for millions of recruits to the milices so as to prevent their dissolution and the
two Communist ministers threatened to resign. Yet, in the end, the party
took no action and allowed the militias to be dissolved. To the party’s great
surprise, Thorez on his return approved the dispersal of militias and liberation
committees. De Gaulle, he said, had acted correctly. Thorez was convinced
that they would attain power by legal and constitutional means, particularly
if they succeeded in infiltrating and absorbing the Socialist party, as had in
effect been done with the C.G.T. The policy of merging the two parties thus
became of supreme importance in the Communist party’s overall strategy.

The Communists emerged from the election of 21 October 1945 as the

strongest individual party, with five million votes (26 per cent of the total)
and 161 seats in the Constituent Assembly. Next came the Socialist party,
with over four and a half million votes (24 per cent of the total) and 150 seats.
The two parties together held an overall majority of 311 out of 586 seats.
The third party of the left, the Catholic Mouvement Republicain Populaire
(M.R.P.), which polled about the same number of votes and obtained the
same number of seats as the Socialists, had been formed only in January
1944, at Lyons, the centre of the Catholic underground, through the merging
of several Catholic organizations. By August 1944 it had a membership of
100,000.1 It had campaigned on a moderate Socialist programme and
declared its support for the C.N.R. charter.2 Among its active members it
could count on a large number of genuine Christian Socialists and left-wing
democrats. But the bulk of its four and a half million voters were conser-
vative; finding their previous leadership compromised through collaboration
with Vichy, they turned to the M.R.P. as the one substantial non-Marxist
force in politics and a potential bulwark against Communism.
But one decisive influence over the M.R.P.’s character, and it was a
factor which tended to direct it towards the left, was its close association
with the Catholic trade union movement, the Confederation Frangaise des
1. See Gordon Wright, The Reshaping o f French Democracy (London, 1950), p. 76.
2. The M.R.P. programme included a passage which read: ‘An economic and social
democracy. . . must ensure the participation of the workers in leading posts in the economy
through the strengthening of the trade union movement, participation in control at the
place of work and profit-sharing.’ It declared itself unambiguously in favour of the
nationalization of enterprises, ‘in both the management and profits of which employees
will participate’—Feuilleton de I’Assemblee Nationale, 29 November 1945.
32 The D estiny o f Socialism
Travailleurs Chretiens (C.F.T.C.). From having unkindly been dubbed ‘a
crowd of choir-boys’ in 1919, with a mere 150,000 members as late as 1936
(compared with over five million in the C.G.T.), this had grown by 1945 into
a mass movement with some three-quarters of a million members.1 It had
held back from joining the Popular Front in 1935 but when in 1940, despite
its being ‘unsullied by Marxism’, the Vichy government dissolved it together
with the C.G.T., the two organizations co-operated in illegal actions. In
occupied Paris, nine leading members of the C.G.T. and three from the
C.F.T.C. had produced a joint ‘Manifesto of the Twelve’ protesting against
the withdrawal of ‘the inalienable right’ of the workers to organize freely,
and, at the same time, to lay down as a principle common to both organiz-
ations: ‘The French workers’ movement cannot tolerate anti-Semitism,
religious persecution, violation of the freedom of thought and the confiscation
of personal property on any pretext or in any circumstances.’12
From this joint publication stemmed co-operation between the two
federations in the resistance, and when, in August 1944, the Allied armies,
having broken through the German front and advanced swiftly across
France, began to approach Paris, the C.G.T. and C.F.T.C. issued a joint
call for a general strike. ‘Brothers in factories and farms,’ it ran, ‘unite . . . to
win back our lost freedom.’3
The C.F.T.C.’s attitude under the occupation conflicted sharply with that
of the Catholic hierarchy, which not only supported Petain’s regime as the
de facto legal authority, but had even gone out of its way to sing its praises
as a gift of Providence. Many priests who had performed years of work
in the Catholic trade unions turned propagandist for the ‘Christian social
order’ which Fascism had introduced into France.45The leading Catholic
paper, La Croix, appointed itself as the political voice of Vichy. It glorified
Petain as a ‘redeemer’ who had rescued France from the evils of anti-
clericalism, freemasonry and democracy.
Following the Liberation, the C.F.T.C. had every intention of maintain-
ing its working alliance with the C.G.T., though without wishing in the least
to fall in with the Communist proposal for a merger. This, in the C.F.T.C.’s
view, was out of the question in the light ‘of the very great differences in the
principles and policies’ existing between the two organizations.®

For the first time in French history, the country’s predominantly petty-
bourgeois agrarian electorate had given the Communists and Socialists a
1. See Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 101; for the relation of the C.F.T.C.
to the M.R.P., see ibid., pp. 294-8.
2. Quoted in Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 91.
3. L ’Humanite, 21 August 1944.
4. See Ehrmann, French Labor, p. 265. See also Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy,
pp. 130-1.
5. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, pp. 224-6.
 Socialists and Communists in France 33
clear majority.1 More than anything else, this bore witness to the depth of
the crisis in French society, in both towns and villages, which had resulted
from defeat and occupation. The electorate was expressing an overwhelming
desire by French people to see a new France, and not merely a restoration
of the democracy they had experienced under the Third Republic. They
longed not only for political freedom, but also for social justice, and they
were inspired by the prospect of a Socialist France.
After the Liberation, however, neither the Socialists nor the Communists
took up the slogan that had been popularized by the militant underground
paper Combat under Albert Camus’s editorship: ‘From Resistance to
Revolution!’ The Socialist and Communist parties alike visualized a complete
transformation of the economic and social system, but, in the words of the
Communist slogan, it was to be a ‘revolution based on law’ and carried
through entirely by constitutional means.2 Nothing was further from the
minds of the Communists than to precipitate a civil war. The unity of the
French nation, for which they had striven during the heroic years of under-
ground struggle, was to be preserved. And while the Socialist and Communist
parties enjoyed a small overall majority in parliament, neither wished to
exclude non-Socialist parties from the government. The Communists hoped
for a coalition with the Socialists as well as the Radical Socialists, a republican,
anti-clerical party which had represented the middle-class element in the
Popular Front government, although its representation in the chamber had
now dropped to twenty-five. The Socialist party, on the other hand, while
naturally desiring a coalition with the Communists, also wanted one with the
M.R.P., whose trade union wing appeared as a useful source of support for
carrying through social reforms, and particularly because a coalition extending
to the M.R.P. would be founded on a broader social basis and thus ensure
1. In the local elections, held six months earlier on 29 April and 6 May 1945, the
Socialists and Communists either separately or jointly had won a majority in half of the
957 communes of France with over 4,000 inhabitants. They had also won majorities in a
number of smaller communes. Altogether, the Socialists had control of more than 4,000
local authorities compared with 1,400 before the war, while the Communists controlled
1,400 against a pre-war total of 300. The tremendous increase in the influence of both
parties was reflected in the increase in the numbers of their respective newspapers and their
circulations. The number of Socialist newspapers grew from ten in 1939 to twenty-five in
1944, and their share of total circulation from 6-2 to 21 per cent; the number of Com-
munist newspapers increased in the same period from three to thirty-one, and their share
of total newspaper circulation from 5-2 to 26-8 per cent—see Jean Mottin, Histoire poli-
tique de la presse: 1944-1949 (Paris, 1949), p. 143. In 1939, the Radicals and the parties
of the right controlled newspapers with 46-2 per cent of the total newspaper circulation;
the Socialist and Communist press combined accounted for only 11-4 per cent of the total
readership. In 1944, the share of the Radicals and the right dropped to 12-7 per cent; the
Socialists’ and the Communists’ share rose to 47-8 per cent; see Novick, The Resistance
versus Vichy, p. 118.
2. Marty was highly critical of the party leadership on this point. He considered it to
have ‘adopted a Social Democratic position, aiming at the peaceful and painless transition
from capitalism to Socialism’—Andre Marty, VA ffaire M arty (Paris, 1955), p. 248, quoted
in Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, p. 166.
34 The Destiny o f Socialism
greater stability in government. The Communists were prepared to accept
this. They voted for a Socialist, Felix Gouin, to be President of the chamber
even though, as the largest party, they could have claimed the post for their
own nominee. General de Gaulle was also elected ‘Head of State’ with the
aid of Communist votes in the Constituent Assembly.
The coalition formed by de Gaulle—with Auriol and Thorez as vice-
premiers—was made up of the three great parties of the left: Communist,
Socialist and M.R.P., and these, between them, held nearly 80 per cent of
the seats in the chamber. The government was faced with two main tasks:
to carry out the reform programme contained in the Charter which intended
to pave the way for Socialism in France; and to draft a new constitution,
which was to be approved by referendum.
The three government parties therefore constituted a left-wing bloc within
the chamber. Their overwhelming majority meant that they encountered
hardly any resistance. Mines, electricity, gas, the merchant navy, air transport,
the Bank of France and the other four leading banks together with thirty-
four of the largest insurance companies were all nationalized, while the
great automobile firm of Louis Renault, who had collaborated with the
Nazis, was taken over without compensation. The social security system
was reorganized, works councils were made compulsory by law in large
companies and a National Economic Council for the planned reconstruc-
tion of France was set up in co-operation with the two trade union
federations.1
The new constitution presented more formidable problems. The draft,
having been approved by the three government parties after prolonged
discussion, was opposed by General de Gaulle.
De Gaulle’s whole cast of political mind was aristocratic. He had rebelled
against the government of Petain when it capitulated to Hitler and he sought to
arouse the spirit of France against the disgrace of capitulation to foreign rule.
He felt himself to embody in his own person a renaissance which would
restore to France all her former greatness and glory. But the new France, as
he saw it, could not be a democratic republic with a government responsible
to a parliamentary majority. He envisaged instead a constitution which
granted full power to the Head of State independent of parliament, which
was thus to be relegated to a largely advisory role. In such a system, the
Head of State would derive his authority from the people by direct election—
not indirectly from a parliamentary majority.
Such an authoritarian constitution was, as a matter of course, rejected by
all three of the left-wing parties.2 They insisted on a fully sovereign chamber
1. Pickles, French Politics, pp. 52-4; Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, pp. 102-5.
2. There were also considerable differences between Socialists, Communists and the
M.R.P. over the draft constitution. For the Socialist point of view, see Graham, The French
Socialists and Tripartisme, pp. 74-87 and 131-7; for Communist policy, see Rieber, Stalin
and the French Communist Party, pp. 270-3, 284-9, and 297-9.
 Socialists and Communists in France 35
with the President of the Republic elected by parliament. De Gaulle, having
failed to impose his will on the majority of the chamber, resigned as Head of
State on 20 January 1946.
A new government then had to be formed, and the Communist party
proposed a Socialist-Communist coalition under its leadership. The Socialists,
however, insisted on the participation of the M.R.P. There were immense
problems of economic reconstruction that needed to be solved if the country
was to recover from its war-time devastation, and the Socialists did not wish
to share this responsibility with the Communists alone. Consequently the
government of the left was re-formed with Gouin as prime minister, while
Thorez retained his post as one of the two vice-premiers.

The Constituent Assembly had completed its task once it had agreed on the
draft of a new constitution. But, in the referendum held on 5 May 1946,
the draft was rejected by 10,500,000 to 9,000,000 votes and a second
Constituent Assembly had to be elected. At these elections, held on 2 June,
the Communists improved their position by adding another 150,000 votes
to their previous total, bringing their poll to 5,154,000; the Socialist vote
fell to 4,199,000. But, on this occasion, the M.R.P. emerged as the
strongest single party, having won nearly 5,500,000 votes—an increase of
900,000.
The second draft proved more acceptable and received a majority of
votes by referendum, after which the first parliament of the Fourth Republic
could be elected.1 The Communists increased their vote by a further 300,000
while the Socialists lost almost another 700,000 votes and the M.R.P. vote
dropped by 600,000. Once again the Communists were the strongest party
in the Chamber, with 183 deputies compared to the Socialists’ 105 and the
M.R.P.’s 167.
Three days after the election, the Communist party officially demanded
that it should lead the next government, putting forward Maurice Thorez’s
nomination for the prime ministership. The prospect of a French government
actually being led by Communists provoked great alarm among businessmen
in Britain as well as in France. Thorez, giving an interview to The Times of
London, went to great pains to reassure the capitalist world. He stated that
his party had no intention of setting up a proletarian dictatorship.
It is clear [he said] that the Com m unist party, as a m em ber o f the governm ent
working w ithin the fram ew ork o f a parliam entary system which it has itself helped
to establish, m ust adhere strictly to the dem ocratic program m e by which it has won
the support o f the mass o f the people. D espite rare exceptions which confirm the
1. For a full analysis of the constitution, see O. R. Taylor, The Fourth Republic o f
France (London, 1951), pp. 18-76. For the text of the constitution, with appendices, see
Philip Williams, Politics in Post-War France. Parties and the Constitution in the Fourth
Republic (second edition, London, 1958), pp. 423-36. For the position of the various parties
during the discussion, see Pickles, French Politics, pp. 37-46.
36 The D estiny o f Socialism
rule, the progress of democracy throughout the w o rld . . . perm its us, in the m arch o f
Socialism, to foresee other roads than those travelled by the Russian Communists.
In any case, the ro ad is necessarily different for each country.1

Meanwhile, the M.R.P. had nominated its own leader, Georges Bidault,
for the post of prime minister. The Socialists, who remained allied to both
the M.R.P. and the Communists in the Assembly, decided to vote for
Thorez. But since neither Thorez nor Bidault received the necessary majority,
it fell to Blum to form a purely Socialist government with the support of the
other two parties. He announced that, as soon as a President of the Republic
was elected, he would hand in his resignation.
The election of the first President of the Fourth Republic took place on
16 January 1947, a month after the formation of Blum’s caretaker govern-
ment. The Socialists had nominated Vincent Auriol (1884-1966), one of the
party’s old guard, who had been secretary of the parliamentary party, finance
minister in the pre-war Popular Front government and a vice-premier in
de Gaulle’s post-war administration. A joint session of both chambers,
meeting in Versailles, elected him by an absolute majority which included the
votes of the Communist deputies.
His first task was to form a new cabinet as soon as Blum, who was now
nearly seventy-five, had announced his resignation. Auriol selected another
Socialist, Paul Ramadier (1888-1961), to form a government, which, on the
insistence of the Socialists themselves, was again to consist of a coalition of
the three parties of the left: Socialists, Communists and the M.R.P.—an
arrangement that was termed ‘Tripartism’.

The system of Tripartism, by which France had been governed since the end
of the war, apart from the brief period of Blum’s caretaker government, was
reinstated by Ramadier. But it broke down after only five months. It had
proved unduly costly to the Socialist party, which during the year following
the elections of October 1945 lost nearly a million votes—half to the Com-
munists, half to the M.R.P. In fact it got the worst of both worlds, for while
its own left wing distrusted the M.R.P. its more bourgeois supporters were
terrified by the Communist alliance. One group of its supporters found it too
conciliatory; the other too revolutionary.
Yet, even though the coalition system was involving them in costly
concessions to both the Communists and the M.R.P., the Socialists saw the
maintenance of a stable government of the Left in office as an essential
alternative to de Gaulle’s return. In no respect had the general renounced his
political ambitions, and a dangerous assortment of reactionaries and
1. The Times, 18 November 1946. Thorez confirmed this view as late as November
1960 in a speech to the Conference of the Eighty-one Communist and Workers’ parties in
Moscow, quoting his statement of November 1946. For the text of his speech, see Alexander
Dallin (ed.), Diversity in International Communism. A Documentary Record, 1961-1963
(New York and London, 1963), p. 837.
 Socialists and Communists in France 37
nationalists had rallied to his side. The Socialists considered that the sacrifices
which Tripartism involved were justified to counter this threat, and they
paid the price by a considerable loss of popularity. Commenting on the drop
in the Socialist vote, Blum claimed that ‘the electorate held us, and us alone,
responsible for the three-party coalition and blamed us for all the difficulties
inherent in the situation’.1
For the success of Tripartism, the Socialists had had to presuppose that
there would be no lack of loyalty from the Communists, with whom they had
established particularly close relations. The comite d ’entente, formed by the
two parties in December 1944, had, it was hoped, been created to prepare the
way for a united party of the working class. The committee had met regularly
for over a year and had sponsored a certain amount of joint activity. But it
had not succeeded in its main task of establishing an atmosphere of mutual
trust. Disagreements within the committee had grown, and during the
elections of October 1945 there had been public disputes, including mutual
attacks in the press.
The Communists sat in the government and in theory shared responsi-
bility for its policies. But as a party they did not consider themselves as
bound to support the government outside the chamber. To the public at
large, they often appeared to be the most vigorous section of the opposition.
As a government party, for example, the Communists were committed to a
policy of wage stabilization as part of the struggle to check inflation, and at
one stage Benoit Frachon, the C.G.T. general secretary, gave his official
support. In April 1946, he even went so far as to denounce as ‘traitors’ those
who were ‘demanding that wages be linked to prices on a sliding scale, a
policy calculated to undermine France’s economic recovery’. But scarcely a
month later, during the election campaign of June 1946, the Communist-
controlled C.G.T. demanded a general wage increase of 25 per cent with the
full backing of the Communist party.2 By such methods the Communists
managed to increase their vote by another 150,000. ‘Their attitude in Cabinet
discussions,’ said Andr6 Philip (b. 1902), finance minister in the coalition
government in a speech to the Lyons congress of the Socialist party at the
end of August 1946, ‘is governed entirely by electoral considerations. They
table demagogic proposals which are sure to be rejected by their colleagues
so as to provide themselves with ammunition for subsequent use against
those same colleagues.’ Co-operation with the Communists was extremely
difficult, he added, since they seemed to lack the necessary minimum of
intellectual honesty.3 In fact the congress had already come to the conclusion
that any attempt to find a basis for fusion with the Communists into a single
party would be a waste of time.

1. LePopulaire, 4 June 1946. 2. Pickles, French Politics, p. 26.

3. Le Populaire, 2 September 1946; quoted in ibid., p. 25; see also Lorwin, The French
Labor Movement, pp. 114-15.
38 The D estiny o f Socialism
However, the question of relations with the Communist party was now
only part of a much wider problem concerned with the future of the coalition
of the left, and, more immediately, with whether the Socialist party could
remain in coalition with the M .R.P.1 The growing strength of the conservative
section within the M.R.P., which opposed further social reform, made the
continuation of Tripartism of very doubtful value to the working class. It
had already forced the Socialists to make compromises which had alienated
large numbers of workers and driven them into the arms of the Communists.
Following the loss of votes in the elections of October 1945 and June 1946,
the Socialist left wing, led by Guy Mollet (1905-75), called on the party to
leave the government and to go into opposition with a clear Socialist pro-
gramme. Guy Mollet, with his distinguished record as a fighter in the
resistance, represented the Pas de Calais—the party’s strongest federation
(he was also mayor of Arras, eternally associated in French history with
Robespierre). His uncompromising advocacy of a strong, Marxist line created
a powerful impression at the congress. Daniel Mayer pleaded in vain that,
failing the participation of the Socialist party, there could be no stable
democratic government in France; that, if the Socialists returned to opposi-
tion, one of the main pillars of the Fourth Republic would be broken and the
way laid open for de Gaulle and the reactionary authoritarianism which he
represented. Mayer, Blum’s closest associate, was defeated as general
secretary, and Mollet was elected in his place.
This change in the Socialist party leadership did not have any immediate
effect on its position in the coalition. There still seemed to be no escape from
its basic dilemma. It remained reluctant to staunch the flow of voters to the
Communists by resigning and so to risk handing the Republic over to a
government of the right. It seemed that it must remain within the government,
if only to block de Gaulle’s return to power. Consequently Guy Mollet, after
his election to the general secretaryship of his party, joined Blum’s government
as a vice-premier; and after Blum’s resignation, Ramadier, with the approval
of the party’s executive, undertook to revert to a coalition policy.

Similar pressures were mounting within the Communist party to put a finish
to the coalition. It was true that, in many ways, the system of Tripartism had
paid off handsomely. The party had gained votes at each election and won
positions of considerable state influence. Several key positions in the admini-
stration of the nationalized industries had been filled by Communists, and
there were Communist ministers of mines and aviation. But it had been
prevented from holding the key positions of power in the state: the ministries
of interior and defence. It was the strongest party in the Chamber, representing
over a quarter of the electorate and an overwhelming majority of wage-
1. For the congress debate on Tripartism, see Graham, The French Socialists and
Tripartisme, pp. 197-219.
 Socialists and Communists in France 39
earners. But by this stage a point had been reached where continued partici-
pation in government with the clerical M.R.P., which was capable of blocking
any further concessions to the working class, was endangering the Com-
munist party’s popularity as a party of the left. In its public pronouncements
it had never hesitated to dissociate itself from unpopular government
measures, but the Socialists had always been there to remind it that its
members continued to form part of the government. The Communist party
wished to attain state power but once the attempt to build a united party with
the Socialists had failed there was no further hope for them of obtaining
power through parliament. Andre Marty, one of the leaders of the Com-
munist old guard, urged the party to withdraw from the government and
commence a struggle for power by extra-parliamentary methods. But in
the light of the threat to the Republic posed by de Gaulle, the executive
decided in favour of continued participation. ‘When the Republic is in
danger,’ said Jacques Duclos, ‘it is better for us to be in than out.’1
The threat represented by de Gaulle was real enough. He had declared
himself to be a contender for power and, at a speech made at Bruneval in
Normandy on 29 March 1947, he made it clear that he intended to replace
the parliamentary system of the Fourth Republic with an authoritarian
regime based on presidential power. A fortnight later, on 7 April, he launched
the Rassemblement du Peuple Frangais (R.P.F.) at a meeting in Strasbourg
to which hundreds of thousands rallied. Members of the middle classes and
small shopkeepers flocked to the party in great numbers, and more than
800,000 were enrolled during its first few weeks.2 Within scarcely six months
the R.P.F. was winning nearly 38 per cent of the votes in the local elections
and securing majorities in thirteen of the largest towns.

Yet even in the face of the threat posed by de Gaulle and his massive following
in the country, the three parties of the left coalition remained deeply divided.
Towards the end of April 1947, a government crisis was sparked off by a
strike for higher wages by engineers in a number of departments in the
nationalized Renault car works. At first it was denounced by the C.G.T. as
a wild-cat strike. Benoit Frachon (b. 1893), the Communist general secretary
of the C.G.T., condemned it outright, while the Communist secretary of the
Paris section of the C.G.T. referred to the strike leaders as ‘Hitlerites and
Trotskyists in the pay of de Gaulle’.3 But as soon as the strike spread to all
the 30,000 employees in the vast concern, the C.G.T., with full Communist
party support, placed itself at the head of the movement. Indeed, it had little
alternative since the metal-workers’ union was the most powerful of the
1. Quoted in Werth, France, 1940-1955, p. 352.
2. Taylor, The Fourth Republic o f France, p. 100.
3. Pickles, French Politics, p. 77. According to L ’Humanite, the strike was ‘led by a
handful of Trotskyists who had succeeded in pulling out 1,500 of the 30,000 workers’—
L ’Humanite, 27-8 April 1947.
40 The D estiny o f Socialism
C.G.T.’s federations while the Renault works represented a Communist
stronghold.
This strike, occurring as it did in one of the largest nationalized industries,
carried clear political implications, because it placed the government’s entire
economic policy in jeopardy. During the months preceding Blum’s entry into
the government in the middle of 1946, inflation, which had been a problem
in France even before the outbreak of war, had increased rapidly. Prices
had risen by 50 per cent in six months; higher living costs provoked claims
for higher wages which raised costs and hence prices. To break the vicious
spiral, Blum’s government had, as a temporary measure, decreed a general
price reduction of 5 per cent, accompanied by a wages standstill agreed to
by the C.G.T. Ramadier’s government continued this policy and on the
assumption that wages would remain stabilized, ordered a further price reduc-
tion of 5 per cent. The Renault strike cut across this policy by attempting to
force the government to violate its own wage freeze in a nationalized industry.
When the strike was debated in the chamber, the Communists, who now
fully supported the strike, argued that it was not necessary for wage increases
to be followed by price increases if they were paid for out of profits. The
Communists also made it clear that they no longer felt bound to support the
government’s incomes and prices policy.
A second occasion was to arise within a few weeks to bring the Com-
munists into conflict with Ramadier. In French Indo-China a war of national
independence had broken out in February, and at the end of March an
uprising took place in another French colony, Madagascar, which ended in
widespread and merciless slaughter by French colonial troops. The Com-
munist cabinet members had threatened to resign, and had made it clear
that Communist deputies no longer felt committed to voting for the govern-
ment’s colonial policy. Then, on 4 May, when the chamber held a debate
on incomes and prices policy and the Communists emerged openly to oppose
government policy, Ramadier asked the House for a vote of confidence;
whereupon the Communist members, including the ministers, voted against
the government.
It would have seemed logical in these circumstances for the Communist
ministers to resign from the government, but they did nothing of the sort
and had to be relieved of office by Ramadier on the following day.1 This was
the end of Tripartism, and 5 May 1947 became a landmark in the history of

1. For a description of the government crisis, see Taylor, The Fourth Republic o f
France, pp. 162-4. On the day when the Communist ministers were dismissed, the National
Council of the Socialist party met and Guy Mollet proposed that the Ramadier government
should be forced to resign. He argued that the left-wing and working-class pressure which
had forced the Communists to break with Ramadier must operate equally on the Socialist
party. But Blum and Ramadier urged the need to continue the coalition under Socialist
leadership in view of the threat of Gaullism. Blum’s resolution was carried by a narrow
majority (2,529 votes to 2,125).
 Socialists and Communists in France 41
the Fourth Republic as the day on which the Communists, as the largest
party in the Republic, were excluded from an active share in the government
of France.
A number of historians have seen these events as a victory for the Fourth
Republic in the ‘struggle for Prague’,1 as though the French Communists,
like their Czech counterparts, had hoped to win control by infiltrating the
state apparatus and awaiting a favourable opportunity to seize power.
However, this view is very difficult to reconcile with the actual behaviour of
the party at the time. No evidence exists to show that the leaders of the
French Communist party were thinking in terms of violent revolution. While
their followers did hold prominent posts in the state apparatus, the party had
kept strictly to legal methods, whatever its motives.2 At the time when the
Vichy regime was collapsing into chaos, a genuinely revolutionary situation
had existed in France. The state machine had ceased to function, production
had ceased, the country, devastated by war, had faced the threat of famine and
the workers were in a mood of revolutionary ferment. In this confused
situation the Communists had held important bases of power. They had
their armed militia units, and through the liberation committees were in
control of local government in a number of towns. They had objected to the
dissolution of the militia units, but had offered no armed resistance when the
government insisted.3
In fact the policies of the party were concerned not so much to foment
revolutionary situations as to prevent them from arising in the first place. It
was the driving force for the reconstruction of French industry immediately
after the war. As late as December 1946, the Communist party had stated its
belief in a democratic road to Socialism.
The great advances made by democracy throughout the world (despite certain
exceptions which tend only to confirm the general trend) [said an article in its
theoretical journal] allow us to envisage other paths to Socialism than that trodden
by the Russians. In any case, each country has its own route. We have always
believed and stated that the French people, enriched by their unique and glorious
traditions, will find their own means of building on our past achievements a society
with ever-widening democratic rights, progress and social justice—though history
shows that progress is always won as a result of conflict. . . .4
1. e.g. Williams, Politics in Post-War France, p. 20, and Rieber, Stalin and the French
Communist Party, p. 354.
2. ‘Though the Communists were fond of condemning revisionism verbally and
laying great stress on their party’s revolutionary traditions, they made full use of the legal,
parliamentary and constitutional means of gaining power’—Rieber, p. 361.
3. Documents which some historians have used, and which purport to show that the
Communists were planning a violent seizure of power, are, as Rieber has shown, forgeries.
He acknowledges that some local organizations of the party contained leftists who, defying
instructions from the centre, printed and distributed calls for revolution. But ‘not even the
most painstaking scholar or the most intransigent of the party could quote more than one
or two such documents’—ibid., p. 151.
4. Cahiers du bolchevisme, December 1946, quoted in Borkenau, European Communism,
p. 447.
42 The Destiny o f Socialism
Even after the Communists had voted against Ramadier in the vote of
confidence on 4 May, and had taken up a position o f ‘constructive opposition’,
Duclos stated that they would persist in their previous policy and would
continue to struggle for higher production and against industrial conflicts.
‘While we are no longer in the government,’ he said, ‘we are still a government
party.’1
Nevertheless, another major strike occurred within a few weeks. At the
end of May, 80,000 dockers, gas and electricity workers came out on strike
and in June they were joined by the railwaymen, miners, Paris bakery
workers, bank employees and other workers.2 Ramadier described the strike
wave, as it spread from industry to industry, as an ‘orchestra with a hidden
conductor’ whose object was clearly ‘to undermine the authority of the
government’.3
In fact the services of a ‘hidden conductor’ were scarcely necessary to
bring the workers out on strike. They had suffered untold hardships during
the war and the early post-war years. The policy of wage and price restraint
which Blum had introduced, though generally welcomed at the outset, had
begun to founder. In April, prices again began to rise, and in May the bread
ration was cut. In the end, the strikes broke out as the spontaneous result
of a cumulative resentment that had been building up over a long period.
Though the Communists supported the strike movement once it had broken
out, they had done nothing to incite it. The strike movement had no political
objectives; its demands were purely industrial and, as it happened, its duration
was short-lived. It ended as soon as the unions reached an agreement with
the government on a revised scale of minimum wages.

Until the autumn of 1947 the Communists continued to avoid any serious
conflict with government or state. They intended to proceed with their role
of a thoroughly national party, a ‘party of the French renaissance’. And,
having been forced out of the government, their first objective was to get
back in again.
In November 1947, however, Communist tactics underwent a drastic
change. The party unleashed a strike movement on a massive scale that was
clearly aimed at paralysing the French economy. It began following an
incident in Marseilles. De Gaulle’s R.P.F. had just supplanted the Com-
munists as the majority party in the town’s council chamber, and when the
new local administration pushed up tram fares as one of its first acts, the
Communist party called a protest demonstration in front of the town hall
where four youths were arrested. A few days later, demonstrators stormed
1. Pickles, French Politics, p. 78; Matthews, The Death o f the Fourth Republic, p. 245.
2. The strike wave during May and June 1947 caused the loss of 6,416,000 working
days, or twenty times the loss during the whole of 1946—see Lorwin, The French Labor
Movement, p. 118.
3. Quoted in Pickles, French Politics, p. 78.
 Socialists and Communists in France 43
the court, freed two of the prisoners, broke into the offices of the public
prosecutor and destroyed the prosecution files. Simultaneously there were
severe clashes between Communists and Gaullists, and as a result of these
one Communist was killed. The Communists retaliated by calling a strike.
Forty thousand workers stopped work, troops were called out and Marseilles
seemed poised on the brink of civil war.
While the strike in the south was still in progress, in the north miners in
the departements Nord and Pas-de-Calais came out in protest against the
dismissal of an official who had refused to raise the price of coal after the
ministry had instructed him to do so. The resulting strike was supported by
stoppages in other Communist-controlled unions, metal workers, railwaymen,
building workers, dockers, gas workers—a movement which, according to a
C.G.T. estimate, embraced three million workers.1 This movement also
stemmed from genuine economic grievances. Rising prices had reduced the
level of real wages. The C.G.T. demanded a rise of 25 per cent, and entrusted
leadership of the strike movement to a national strike committee led by
Communist trade union leaders.
In opposition to the Communist-controlled C.G.T. the Socialists and the
unions which were under their influence organized a movement through the
weekly journal Force Ouvriere (Workers’ Force), led by Leon Jouhaux. This
group also demanded higher wages, but it criticized the Communists for
subordinating an industrial movement to political ends and refused to
recognize the national strike committee. When the committee rejected con-
cessions offered by Daniel Mayer, the Socialist minister of labour, and refused
to accept them even as a basis for discussion, the non-Communist unions
ordered their members back to work.
The movement now degenerated into bitter three-way strife between
strikers and non-strikers on the one hand and strikers and the state authorities
on the other. The Communists occupied factories, railway stations and mines
to prevent the resumption of work, and troops were called in to clear occupied
premises. In the mining areas striking miners clashed with troops in heavy
fighting; street battles were fought in Lyons when about 1,000 Communists
tried to storm the central police station; the Paris-Lille express was derailed
by sabotage and twenty lives were lost. At the end of November, the govern-
ment counteracted by introducing an emergency Bill which imposed heavier
sentences for acts of sabotage for a limited period; at the same time it called
up 80,000 reservists. By early December the strikers’ determination was
exhausted and two-thirds of them had returned to work. On 9 December the
national strike committee called off the strike; in order, it said, ‘to gather
our strength for the hard struggles which lie ahead’.2
By comparison with what it had been during the immediate post-war
period, the Communists’ strategy had obviously undergone a drastic change.
1. Le Peuple, 13 December 1947. 2. Le Peuple, 13 December 1947.
44 The D estiny o f Socialism
The strike movement which they had set in motion was not primarily con-
cerned with wage demands. The conflict had broken out initially in Marseilles
with a general strike accompanied by street fighting following the arrest of
four young men. In the mining areas of the Pas-de-Calais, the general strike
had been called as the result of the dismissal of a Communist official. Such
comparatively minor incidents could not, in normal times, have been claimed
as justifying a nation-wide upheaval on such a scale. Nor, if the movement
had been mainly for higher wages, would the national strike committee have
dismissed so peremptorily the concessions offered by the government; it
would at least have been prepared to use them as a basis for discussion. The
Communists were now, it seemed, ready to undermine the French national
economy, and to this end to prolong strikes as far as was possible.
Despite the defeat of the strike movement, the Communists considered
that a ‘positive result’ had been attained by the opening of a rift between
workers and government as well as between workers and the Socialist party.
‘The brutality of the government,’ wrote Benoit Frachon, ‘and the reactionary
attitude of the Socialist leadership . . . have both done much to open the
eyes of the workers... .n It had therefore been one of the objectives of the
strike movement to discredit the Socialist-led coalition and to ‘expose’ the
Socialist party.
Following the Liberation, the Communist party of France had assiduously
courted the Socialist party, treating it as a ‘fraternal party’ with which it
wished to establish the closest possible relationship. Now the Socialist party
was being unequivocally classified as an enemy. It is a change that can only
be understood in the light of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy and the
growing rift between Russia and the Western Allies, particularly with the
United States. The beginnings of what was to be known to history as the
‘Cold War’ had destroyed the chances of working-class unity, not only in
France but also throughout Europe.
But before examining the reasons behind this wider conflict and the
subsequent developments in East-West relations, it may be as well to look
at the relations existing between the working-class parties in two other major
European countries—Italy and Germany.
1. Benoit Frachon, 'Une Etappe de la lutte des classes en France: Les grandes graves
de novembre-decembre 1947\ in Cahiers du Communisme, January 1948, quoted in Lorwin,
The French Labor Movement, p. 125.
3 • Unity and Division in the Italian
Socialist Movement

By the time Socialism had been forced underground in Italy in 1925 after
enduring four years of Fascist persecution, it was already split in three
directions. Increasingly intensive attacks by the Fascist authorities had
brought about its fragmentation. A number of heroic individuals had main-
tained a degree of organization within small units to keep up the apparently
hopeless struggle against repression, but their leaders, threatened with
imprisonment and death, had fled abroad one by one—Togliatti to Moscow;
Modigliani, Treves, Nenni, Saragat, and eventually Turati, to Paris—over-
whelmed by the deMcle which had destroyed their formerly powerful
movement. In 1921 the Socialists had made up the strongest parliamentary
group, with several hundreds of thousands of members, and membership of
Socialist-led unions ran into millions. The party controlled the civil admini-
strations in Milan, Bologna and Turin as well as almost half the municipal
authorities in Italy. It had seemed to stand on the brink of power. Yet
within four years its organization lay in ruins.
The reason behind such a dramatic reversal of fortune was all too
obviously the three-way split in the Socialist movement—first by the for-
mation of the Communist party in January 1921, and then by the expulsion
of the reformist wing, led by Turati, in October 1922. These breakaways
to left and right left the movement defenceless in the face of a Fascist
offensive.1
However, after such a disaster the disagreements over ideology and
tactics which had been the cause of the schism became insignificant when,
under conditions of exile, the task was clearly to mobilize all anti-Fascist
forces in the struggle against the regime in Italy. As a result, in 1927, the two
1. For the history of the split and the consequent defeat, see Braunthal, History o f the
International, 1914-1943, pp. 208-13. The split stemmed from the ideology of the Socialist
party, which was close enough to Bolshevism to advocate a revolutionary struggle for
power culminating in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Italian Socialism, therefore,
made no attempt to co-operate with non-Socialist democratic forces in the defence of
parliamentary democracy threatened by the rise of Fascism.
46 The D estiny o f Socialism
Socialist parties, the revolutionary ‘Maximalists’ (Partito Socialista Massi-
malista) and Turati’s reformist followers (Partito Socialista Unitario) joined
forces with the emigre leaders of the trade union federation (Confederazione
Generale del Lavoro) and the middle-class radical Republican party at a
congress in Nerac to form the Concentrazione Antifascista, a broadly-based
anti-Fascist coalition which published from Paris the weekly Liberta, edited
by Claudio Treves (1869-1933), a close friend of Turati.
Another group which shortly joined the Concentrazione was the emigre
Giustizia e Liberta (‘Justice and Freedom’), founded by Carlo Rosselli
(1899-1937) in 1929. Rosselli was an unusually gifted and dedicated anti-
Fascist revolutionary who, in 1927, together with Ferruccio Parri—subse-
quently a prime minister in post-Fascist Italy—had got Turati out of Italy
in a motor-launch, taking him from Savona to Corsica. For this action a
Fascist court had, after he had made a courageous speech, sentenced him to
incarceration in the concentration camp on the island of Lipari. Rosselli
escaped in 1929, and eventually after many vicissitudes reached France by
way of Tunisia. While deprived of his freedom he had worked out in his
book Socialismo Liberale a somewhat eclectic version of Socialism in which
great emphasis was laid on the value of personal freedom and which
attracted a group which gathered about him in exile. He saw his group as the
nucleus for a future Italy, a ‘microcosm of a new, completely liberal state’,
as he put it, ‘a new world of justice and freedom which will rise on the
morrow of the revolution—a cell capable of infinite expansion, the germ of
a new society encapsulated in the present’.1
Rosselli was not, however, destined to live to see his country’s liberation.
He fought with the International Brigades in Spain, became ill and went with
his brother, Nello, a historian, to Normandy to convalesce, where both were
murdered by Fascist agents.
By working together in the Concentrazione, the two emigre Socialist
parties grew closer to one another. Yet, at the same time, the gulf between
Socialists and Communists had widened. Following the fiasco of the German
uprising in October 1923, the Communist International had made increasingly
bitter attacks on Social Democracy, culminating in its definition of Social
Democrats as ‘Social Fascists’ at its Sixth World Congress in the summer of
1928—the Congress which had, under the slogan ‘Class against Class’,
denounced all non-Communist Socialists as enemies of the working class.12
In such circumstances, the Italian Communists could not consider co-
operating with the Socialists either in the Concentrazione or in any other
organization.
The problems of unity were therefore faced only by the two Socialist
1. Quoted in W. Hilton-Young, The Italian Left. A Short History o f Political Socialism
in Italy (London, 1949), p. 155.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 337-40 and 423-4.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 47
groups which had split in 1922. There could be no questioning the wish of
Turati and his reformist wing to see the achievement of reunification.
For Filippo Turati (1857-1932), the unity of the Socialist movement was
of the utmost importance, and to preserve it he was ready to make funda-
mental sacrifices. Although he had rejected the Bolshevist ideology which
had permeated the Socialist party after the triumph of the October revolution
in Russia and opposed the party programme founded upon it as well as the
adoption of Bolshevist tactics, he had never resigned from the party volun-
tarily. To avoid hazarding party unity, he had accepted the majority decision
of the 1919 party congress—which he had uncompromisingly opposed—to
seek entry into the Communist International, loyally representing in
Parliament a policy which he had personally condemned as fatal. He did not
found his opposition party—the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani,
organized in exile as Partito Socialista Unitario (Socialist Unity party)—
until, despite his pleading, his group had been expelled.1 Reunification with
the parent party, which after the split called itself the Maximalist party, was
for him and his followers the realization of a sincere ambition.
But the same wish was not held unanimously within the Maximalist
party. According to their programme they were a Communist party, but
despite all their efforts they had never been accepted into the Communist
International because of their refusal to expel Turati, who, as founder of the
party and its spiritual leader over three decades, was held in the highest
esteem by the working classes. Their sympathies with the Communist
International cooled notably, however, after the pro-Moscow faction split
off to re-constitute itself as a Communist party and to commence a bitter
struggle with the Maximalists for working-class leadership. An attempt made
in 1923 by Giacinto Serrati (1872-1926), the leader of the Maximalists, to
unite the Maximalists with the Communists, was rejected by a majority
in the party. Serrati acted as a consequence of this defeat; he joined the
Communist party. And when, soon afterwards, Mussolini suppressed all
Socialist parties in Italy, any talk of unification became merely academic.
The theme was, however, taken up by the exiles in France, where many
active members of local organizations had fled in the face of threats. Here
they organized themselves into groups aligned along the old divisions. Many
Maximalist emigres had slowly come to realize that, since the Socialist
movement had been the victim of its split, only a united Socialist move-
ment could effectively combat the Fascist dictatorship. Yet many, still in
the grip of the Bolshevist ideology, opposed any partnership with the
reformists.
The most passionate advocate of unity was Pietro Nenni (b. 1891), who
had begun his political career before the First World War as a revolutionary
Republican, becoming a Socialist only after 1918. During the years 1919 to
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 211-12 and 228-9.
48 The Destiny o f Socialism
1921, when ideological conflicts shattered and finally split the Socialist party,
he had been Paris correspondent for the party’s daily newspaper, Avanti! He
saw clearly how the split, occurring at the historic moment when Fascism
went on to the offensive, was a genuine disaster; that healing the split was
consequently the most urgent task. He had returned to Italy in 1922 to
attempt the then impossible reunification of the Socialist movement. For
Serrati, reuniting the Maximalists with the reformists was out of the
question; his aim was affiliation with the Communist International through
union with the Communist party. Nenni, on the other hand, persuaded a
majority of Maximalists that fusion with the Communist party and their
consequent bondage to the Communist International would perpetuate the
split in the labour movement. His first priority was unification with Turati’s
party, which, supported by most of the trade unions, represented a large
mass of the working class. But a majority of the party, having rejected
Serrati’s proposal under the impact of Nenni’s speech, threw out Nenni’s
proposal for an understanding with the reformists just as decisively. Thus
the Socialist movement remained split in three.
After Serrati left the party, Nenni became his successor as chief editor of
Avanti!; and he continued to edit the paper in exile. The experience of the
tragic ideological confusion that had manifested itself in the Socialist
movement—and which he described in an intriguing book, Storia di quattro
anni, 1919-1922,1 influenced his attitude to the problem of the split, parti-
cularly in exile. In the Partito Socialista Unitario he found sympathy for
the idea of reuniting with the Maximalists. Turati, as we have seen,
stood consistently for unity in the labour movement, and one of his most
prominent followers, Giuseppe Saragat, canvassed the question among the
reformists.
Nenni’s attempt at reunification met the biggest resistance from the
Maximalist left wing, since the question of unity also raised the question of
joining the Socialist International. The party had split from it in 1918,
hoping to join the Communist International, but had been rejected. The left
wing of the Maximalist party in exile still felt ideologically bound to the
Communist International. Turati’s party had in the meantime joined the
Socialist International, so providing one more reason for the left to resist
unity. It even resorted to physical force to prevent it. When, in 1930, a
congress was called in Grenoble to decide on the question, the dissidents
occupied the hall and locked the gates. But later in the year, when the
congress met in Paris, Nenni was able to win a majority.
Thus reunited, the party called itself, as it had before the schism, the
Partito Socialista. The splinter group continued to publish Avanti! in Lugano,
but the organ of the united party, edited by Nenni, reappeared under the
name of Nuovo Avanti! (New Forward). The united party then affiliated
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, p. 213.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 49
formally to the Socialist International, being represented in the executive by
Nenni for the Maximalists and Giuseppe Modigliani (1872-1947) for the
reformists.

An unexpected change of policy within the French Communist party towards

the French Socialist party also brought about a change in the attitude of the
emigre Italian Communists to the Italian Socialists. In June 1934, a con-
ference of the French Communist party at Ivry proposed an ‘anti-Fascist
united front’ with the French Socialists.1 Until this point the Communists
had been in fierce conflict with the Socialists as the party of ‘Social Fascists’.
Overnight they came to see them as a fraternal proletarian party with which
they would hope to form an active alliance.
This obscure change of attitude may be explained by the change of
direction in his foreign policy which Stalin undertook in the spring of 1934.
Since Hitler came to power at the end of January 1933, Stalin had been
genuinely concerned that friendly relations should exist between Germany
and Russia. He did not, however, discover any warm response on Hitler’s
part, and so approached France with a view to a Franco-Russian alliance
against Hitler’s Germany. If this was to succeed, however, he needed the
support of the highly influential French Socialist party.
The Italian Communist party in exile could therefore no longer perpetuate
its hostility towards the Italian Socialists, but had similarly to seek an
understanding. The French Socialist party accepted the Communist proposal
of an anti-Fascist ‘action group’, and on 27 July 1934 signed the agreement.
Three weeks later, on 17 August, a ‘united action’ agreement between the
Italian Socialists and Communists was concluded.12
This agreement was rudely shattered, however, when, in the summer of
1939, Stalin once again abruptly turned about his foreign policy and signed
the Nazi-Soviet Pact on 23 August as an immediate prelude to the Second
World War. While Nenni condemned the pact in Nuovo AvantU, he continued
to do all he could to avoid a total break with the Communists, remaining
mindful of the fateful consequences which had attended the labour move-
ment’s split into Socialists and Communists in Italy, Germany and France3—

1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 425-6.

2. For Stalin’s wooing of Hitler’s Germany, see ibid., pp. 396-9; for the change of
policy by the French Communist Party, see Cecil and Albert Vassart, T h e Moscow Origin
of the French “Popular Front’” , in Milorad M. Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch (eds),
The Comintern—Historical Highlights (New York, 1966), pp. 234-52. Albert Vassart was
a member of the central committee of the Communist party and its representative in the
executive committee of the Communist International. For the conclusion of the Italian
‘united action’ agreement, see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, p. 476.
3. As in Italy, so in Spain, where he was a political commissar of the International
Brigade, Nenni had witnessed the tragedy of the split at first hand; for the history of the
split during the Spanish Civil War, see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943,
pp. 447-9,453-4 and 463-7.
50 The D estiny o f Socialism
all quarrels which had led to a mutual downfall. When the party executive
decided despite his opposition to dissolve the Socialist-Communist ‘united
action’ pact and to sever all connection with the Communist party, he
resigned as party secretary and from the editorship of Nuovo Avanti!

The turning-point of the war, marked by Hitler’s defeat before Stalingrad in

January 1943, eventually created conditions in which the fight against the
Fascist regime in Italy could commence. The myth of Hitler’s invincibility
had been destroyed, the spirit of resistance, atrophied by many years of
dictatorship, reawakened. On 5 March 1943 more than 20,000 workers of the
Fiat-Mirafiori works in Turin went on a strike which spread like wildfire
through Northern Italy and brought engineering works in Milan, Piedmont,
Lombardy and Liguria to a standstill. It was a strike for bread and peace.
In vain the government brought in troops and military tribunals against the
strikers. Work did not begin again until 2 April when the government
sanctioned increases in wages and food rations. This defiance of Mussolini’s
militia represented the first sizeable blow against his regime.1
Another was to follow shortly. While the Red Army threw back the
Panzer divisions in Russia, the Western Allies began their European offensive.
On 10 July 1943 Allied troops landed on the southern coast of Sicily, and
on the 22nd they occupied Palermo. The days of the Fascist regime were
drawing to their close. On 25 July, Benito Mussolini was dismissed by
King Victor Emanuel III and arrested; Marshal Pietro Badoglio was
appointed prime minister in his place.
It was now only natural that Socialists and Communists should once
again move closer as the struggle began for Italy’s liberation. Divisive enmities
had already been bridged in a common sympathy felt for the Soviet Union
as a victim of Hitler’s treachery, the earlier conflict becoming insignificant
in the face of a common cause. Italy stood on the threshold of at least a
political revolution. And if this was to develop into a social revolution, unity
within the working classes would be an essential factor.
As early as 26 July, the day after the fall of Mussolini, representatives of
the Socialist, Communist and anti-Fascist middle-class parties met in Milan
and formed a ‘Committee for National Liberation’ (C.N.L.). Socialists and
Communists thus once again became united in their aims. On 4 August
1943 they renewed the pact for mutual Socialist-Communist action. This
entrusted a joint permanent committee with the task of unifying the reborn
Socialist and Communist organizations. Both parties, the pact stated,
‘recognize the Soviet Union . . . as the people’s most certain friend in the
struggle for independence and freedom against the reactionary, imperialist
1. See Roberto Battaglia, The Story o f the Italian Resistance (London, 1957), pp. 32—3;
Maurice F. Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening. Die Italian Labor Movement in its
Political, Social and Economic Setting from 1800 to 1960 (New York, 1961), p. 449.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 51
powers, and place their faith in the solidarity of the British Labour party’.1
Nenni, once again leader of the Italian Socialist party, aspired to an even
closer unity: an alliance sealed with a contract. The Communists accepted,
and a ‘pact of alliance’ was signed on 8 August 1944 by both Nenni and
Togliatti.
The armistice signed between the Allies and Badoglio’s government on
8 September 1943 had divided Italy into two areas: the South, to which
king and government had fled, now occupied by the Allies and administered
by Badoglio’s government; and the North, continuing as a war zone and
occupied by twenty-five German divisions, under whose protection Musso-
lini, escaped from incarceration, had set up in Salo on Lake Garda a so-
called ‘Social Republic’. Thus the focal point of Italy’s internal politics was
centred on the South. As in the North, the anti-Fascist factions of the
South had come together in a national liberation committee, which met
on 23 January 1944 at a congress in Bari to formulate its political pro-
gramme.
The Socialists, Communists and Partito d'Azione—the Action party led
by Ferruccio Parri which had emerged from Rosselli’s group, Giustizia e
Liberta—made up the left wing, while the Christian Democratic party
(Democrazia Cristiana), led by Alcide de Gasperi and previously known as
the Populari (the Catholic People’s party), together with the Liberal party,
led by Bededetto Croce, the historian, and Count Carlo Sforza and a
‘Democratic Labour party’ formed the right. At Bari the congress was
unanimous in demanding the eradication of Fascism and the restoration of
civil and political freedoms. The left wing, however, went further, demanding
an immediate coalition government made up of all the anti-Fascist parties,
the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. The
parties of the right, on the other hand, wished to preserve the monarchy.
While prepared to sacrifice King Emanuel, who had assisted at the birth of
Fascism and continued as its protector through twenty-two years, they
demanded his abdication in favour of his son, Crown Prince Umberto. For
this reason they declared themselves with the left against participation in
Badoglio’s government, which had been installed by the king.

That was how the situation stood when, at the end of March 1944, Palmiro
Togliatti (1893-1964) returned to Naples from Moscow after his eighteen-
year exile. Following the death of Gramsci, he had been accepted as leader
of the Italian Communist party, representing it in the executive of the
Communist International. He now appeared as a well-briefed delegate of the
Soviet government. His arrival on the scene signalled a dramatic volte-face
in the Communist camp. For seven months the Italian Communists had
repeatedly stated in accord with the whole of the left wing that, before a
1. Quoted in Hilton-Young, The Italian Left, p. 170.
52 The D estiny o f Socialism
free democratic regime could be installed in Italy, a government had to be
formed from which every trace of the king’s influence had been erased.
They had vigorously demanded the dismissal of Badoglio, the marshal
who had conquered Abyssinia for Mussolini. But then, in March 1944,
Stalin recognized Badoglio’s government and thus effectively disarmed
the Italian Communists in their opposition to the king and his prime
minister. It was significant that Togliatti, in his propaganda broadcast from
Moscow after the fall of Mussolini, had avoided touching on the question
of the monarchy—undoubtedly in line with the directives of the Soviet
government.1
Now, armed with Moscow’s authority, Togliatti bluntly opposed the
earlier policies. The question of democracy, freedom or form of government,
he stated to a conference of the national council of the Communist party in
Naples on 1 April, was one for the future so long as the war against Germany
continued. ‘It is impossible,’ he stated, ‘to grant the Italian people any
guarantee of freedom until the Nazis have been banished from our country.’2
Nothing mattered beyond the present war of liberation. But this demanded,
he insisted, total co-operation between all forces within the nation—a
national government of all the anti-Fascist parties, irrespective of whether
they were capitalist or clerical, monarchist or republican, with or without
Badoglio. The Communist party was in any case, he declared, itself prepared
to join a Badoglio government.
Togliatti’s ‘elastic tactic’, as an anonymous Communist historian has
called it,8 broke the front of the opposition to Badoglio. The Socialists,
surprised by such a drastic shift in Communist policies, found themselves
faced with a fait accompli. Leaderless in the South—Nenni had left for the
North—they joined the Communist line so as not to jeopardize their hard-
won unity. And now none of the other parties represented in the C.N.L.
could persist in opposition. They agreed to co-operate with Badoglio on
condition that the king declared himself at least willing to abdicate in favour
of his son as regent after the liberation of Rome. This being agreed to,
Badoglio formed his second government on 24 April from representatives of
the six parties of the C.N.L., Togliatti becoming a minister without portfolio.
In its first announcement the government declared that it was necessary for
the decision of the character of the Italian state to be postponed until the
war had ended.
Togliatti’s ‘elastic tactic’ determined the policy of the Italian Communist
party until 1947, when its participation in the government came to an end.
Revolutionary tactics were at all events out of the question so long as the
1. See Paolo Robotti and Giovanni Germanetto, Dreissig Jahre Kampf der italienischen
Kommunisten 1921-1951 (Berlin, 1955), p. 204; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (London, 1966),
p. 505.
2. Quoted in Battaglia, The Story o f the Italian Resistance, p. 109.
3. Die Kommunistische Partei Italiens (Berlin, 1952), p. 88.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 53
Allied forces faced German divisions in Italy. And so the Communist party
had to try to win power and influence by democratic means. They reached
an understanding with the monarchy and the army—regardless of how these
institutions had been compromised as the organs of Fascism—to safeguard
their position in the government. Their policies were thus aimed at retaining
the power they held as members of the government, and since they went to
some lengths to avoid serious conflict with any of the bourgeois coalition
parties which might have questioned their participation, any talk of measures
to attain social revolution was severely discouraged. For this reason Togliatti,
even after the liberation of northern Italy in April 1945, continued to reject
as ‘utopian’ demands for a planned economy and he recognized private
enterprise as a driving force for economic development, setting a limit to the
control of the economy by the state. ‘The only way out of this present difficult
situation,’ he still stated a year and a half later, in September 1946, in a
resolution of the Communist party central committee, ‘lies in this: that a
“new course” be set in economic policies, in which private enterprise is
offered an extensive freedom, the state interfering only to prevent speculation
which might lead to the collapse of the monetary system and threaten the
people with starvation so that it can act to achieve complete economic
rebuilding in the national interest.’1
The Communist party did not even flinch from a striking betrayal of its
principles when, to stay on an equal footing with the strongest party, the
Christian Democrats, as well as to gain the sympathies of the Catholic
electorate, it voted for the inclusion in the new constitution of the Lateran
Treaty, concluded between Mussolini and the Holy See in 1929, which
safeguarded the Catholic Church’s territorial and financial imperatives as
well as its privileged position within the state.2
This was hardly a policy to fulfil the expections of the workers in the
factories or of the guerrillas who had fought so heroically in northern Italy.
Their hopes had been for a new Italy, a ‘second Risorgimento' , rising from
the ruins of the Fascist regime. What they expected was a radical political
revolution which would not be satisfied simply with the king’s abdication,
but which would demolish the whole institution of the monarchy and firmly
establish true republican democracy: a social revolution which would give
Socialism its place in the economic system. ‘Socialism,’ Nenni had stated in
a speech in September 1944, ‘is no longer in Italy a matter of propaganda,
1. Quoted in Die Kommunistische Partei Italiens, p. 105; see also Aldo Garosci, ‘The
Italian Communist Party’, in Mario Einaudi (ed.), Communism in Western Europe (New
York, 1951), p. 186.
2. The Communist group in the constituent assembly was prepared even to vote for
an article in the constitution stipulating the prohibition of divorce. Togliatti, who had been
in Sicily on an election campaign when this decision was taken by the Communist
deputies, convinced his fellow members that, in their worthy attempts to win Catholic
votes, they had drifted a little too far from party principles and had the decision negated;
see Hilton-Young, The Italian Left, p. 197,
54 The Destiny o f Socialism
of the sun in the future of which Garibaldi spoke, but a problem of the day
in the most concrete and positive sense.’1
Thus the revolution had been postponed to a remote future. The consti-
tution, adopted at the end of 1947, did, to be sure, state in Article III that it
was a task of the state ‘to remove those economic and social obstacles which,
in that they de facto curtail the freedom and equality of the citizen, hinder
the full development of the human personality and the participation of
every worker in the political, economic and social organization of the
country’. But it was only a promise, and one which in the event was never
redeemed.2

The conflict between Nenni’s and Togliatti’s views on the task of the working
class during the crisis did not, however, shake the Socialist-Communist
alliance. Though other conflicts inevitably developed from time to time, they
all left the new concept of unity intact.
In November, soon after the conclusion of the pact, Ivanoe Bonomi, who
had formed the June 1944 government of the six parties represented in the
C.N.L., resigned. But he handed his resignation not to the Committee of
National Liberation, which had nominated him, but to the newly installed
regent. For Nenni this represented a question of high principle (as it must
have been for the Communists), since he saw the Committee of National
Liberation as the nation’s representative and the organ of its sovereignty.
Now, in handing the regent his resignation, Bonomi had acknowledged the
royal prerogative and denied the people’s sovereignty. Nenni at once issued
a manifesto stating that if Bonomi was again entrusted by the regent to form
a government, the Socialists would withdraw their participation. But when
Bonomi was appointed as prime minister by the regent, the Communists, not
unduly alarmed by conflicts over questions of principle, joined his government
without hesitation. The Socialists went into opposition, as they had said they
would, but even so the pact for joint Socialist-Communist action remained
in force.3
Not even the open conflict which arose between the Socialists and
Communists over the question of the Lateran Treaty succeeded in jeopardizing
the pact. Nenni protested bitterly against any revival of the Treaty, and the
Socialist faction voted against its inclusion in the constitution—a provision
ironically achieved with Communist votes.
The initiative for the policy of the Socialist-Communist alliance was to
remain with the Communist party from the moment when Togliatti arrived
1. Quoted in ibid., p. 171.
2. ‘To compensate the left for the lack of a revolution, the powers of the right agreed
to incorporate a guarantee of revolution into the constitution’; see Piero Calamandrei,
Cenni introduttivi sulla Costituente e i suoi lavori (Florence, 1950), quoted in Hans
HinterMuser, Italiener Zwischen Schwarz und Rot (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 23.
3. For a description of this episode, see Hilton-Young, The Italian Left, pp. 172-5.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 55
on the political scene in Italy in April 1944 up till the dissolution of the
alliance in 1965. Under Nenni’s leadership, the Socialist party periodically
opposed Togliatti’s policies, but was careful to avoid any open break.

This predominant position of the Communist party did not stem from the
actual ratio of power between the two parties alone. In the first election after
the war—the election to the constituent assembly on 2 June 1946—the
Socialists received 4,758,192 votes (21 per cent of votes cast), to the Com-
munists’ 4,356,686 (19 per cent of the total vote). But it was of small account
that the Communist party should have collected 2 per cent fewer electors to
support them than had the Socialist party, and of great account that in terms
of power they were pressing the Socialist party so closely.
The rapid rise of the Italian Communist party to a party of mass support,
soon to leave the Socialist party far behind, is a remarkable phenomenon.1
When in 1921 the Communists had separated from the Socialists at Leghorn
and formed their own party, they represented 42,000 members against a
quarter of a million Socialist supporters; and in the elections of May 1921,
the last free election before Mussolini seized power, they gained only thirteen
seats in parliament against the Socialists’ 128. The Fascist dictatorship had
forced both parties underground and had worn down their underground
movements by a brutal twenty-year suppression. Neither party had been
able to express itself through an underground organization,123and both, after
the fall of Fascism, had to build new foundations. In competing with the
Communists, however, the Socialists had the advantage of their tradition as
a workers’ party representing a heroic past. Furthermore, the industrial
centres of northern Italy, among which the movements of both parties
restarted, were Socialist strongholds.
But, at the elections of 18 April 1948, in which the Communists and the
left wing of the Socialist party led by Nenni stood jointly under the title
Democratic People’s Front (Fronte Democratico Popolare), the Communists
won 135 seats to Nenni’s fifty-one, the splinter right wing of the party,2 led
by Giuseppe Saragat, winning only thirty-three. Within two years the balance
of power between Communists and Socialists had shifted heavily in the
Communists’ favour.

1. The Italian Communist party, according to its own figures, had in 1926 only ‘about
20,000 members’, and until 1944 ‘the Communist ranks remained thin’. But by 1945 it
could claim 1,800,000, and by 1947 2,252,000 members. See Robotti and Germanetto,
Dreissig Jahre Kam pf der italienischen Kommunisten, p. 254.
2. D. Manuilsky reported to the eighteenth congress of the Russian Communist party
in the spring of 1939 as a representative of the Communist International, that it was
necessary to ‘recognize a certain weakness in the Italian Communist party. In all the long
years of Fascist dictatorship, it has been in no position to form a strong underground
organization’—Imprecorr, 1939, p. 381, quoted in Franz Borkenau, Der europdische
Kommunismus. Seine Geschichte von 1917 bis zur Gegenwart (Berne, 1952), p. 268.
3. For the history of the split of the Socialist Party, see pp. 63-65.
56 The Destiny o f Socialism
Both parties were reborn in the struggles of the underground movement
in the north, Socialists and Communists organizing illegal cells in the
factories and guerrilla fighters in the field—the Socialists, the Matteotti
Brigades, and the Communists, the Gramsci Brigades. The clandestine
factory cells had created recurring waves of strikes involving many thousands
of workers. The mass strike of March 1943 was followed by a general strike
in March 1944 embracing over a million workers1 and another on 25 April
1945 which incited the workers to rise as the Allies prepared for the last
decisive blow against the Germans in northern Italy. And while the resistance
movements in the industrial centres were paralysing by strikes and sabotage
economic life in the districts occupied by the Germans, the guerrillas, with
Allied arms, met German as well as Italian Fascist troops in full-scale battles.
At the height of the fighting the partisans had an army of 200,000 to 300,000
men2formed from followers of every political alignment, Christian Democrats
fighting in the ‘Brigade of the Green Flame’, members of the Action party
in the ‘Rosselli Brigade’ and liberals and neutrals as well as Socialists and
Communists in the Garibaldi Brigade. The resistance movement in Italy was
a political as well as a national liberation movement; its history forms a
major epic of modem times.3
The leadership of the guerrilla groups and the clandestine factory cells
rested with the Communist party. It was superior to every other party in its
organizational techniques, in the discipline of its members, and in its spirit
of daring and self-sacrifice. It had taken the initiative in organizing the
guerrillas, founding the first group—the Garibaldi Brigade—in November
1943 under the command of two veteran Communists, proven in battle:
Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia. Longo, one of the founders of the Com-
munist party, had been a political commissar of the International Brigades
in the Spanish Civil War, and Secchia had been one of the leading organizers
of the Communist underground during the years of Fascism, imprisoned for
seventeen years until released in 1943 under the Badoglio government’s
amnesty. Even in those brigades not under direct Communist leadership, the
Communists represented the most active and daring elements. ‘They organ-
ized,’ as one unbiased historian reported, ‘the strongest partisan brigades
and won, through their bravery, the respect of most of the patriots.’4
1. See Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening, p. 452.
2. See Hilton-Young, The Italian Left, p. 178. A report prepared by a member of
Mussolini’s general staff on the ‘danger of rebellion’ estimated the strength of the partisans
in the summer of 1944 to be 82,000; see Battaglia, The Story o f the Italian Resistance, p. 166.
3. For a detailed description, see Battaglia’s standard work; the author was a member
of the Action party and commander of a guerrilla division. See also Leo Valiani, Dopo
died attni (Florence, 1946). Valiani, a historian who was imprisoned for several years under
the Fascists, was one of the leaders of the resistance movement in northern Italy and one
of the organizers of the Milan uprising in April 1945; he represented the Action party in
the provisional government in northern Italy, and after the liberation joined the Socialist
party.
4. Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening, p. 458.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 57
They were also the most forceful and effective element in the factories.
Among the 20,000 workers in the Fiat-Mirafiori works in Turin, whose
strike in March 1943 unleashed the mass strike which followed, they counted
only eighty members.1 But it was by their initiative that the strike had been
called in association with the Socialists. And while the majority of politically
active workers in northern Italy most probably felt themselves in sympathy
with the Socialist party, the Communists maintained an initial responsibility in
the wave of strikes during the resistance campaign. Their revolutionary
dynamism won the Communist cause thousands of followers.
It was moreover admiration for the Soviet Union that in Italy as well as
in France had moved countless numbers of workers and intellectuals alike
to join the Communist party as the party standing closest to Communist
Russia. ‘The myth of October,’ one historian of the Communist party of
Italy commented in describing the attraction that was generated by Russia,
‘the figure of Stalin, the five-year plans, the hydroelectric power stations
growing like mushrooms, the Red Army which had smashed Hitler’s invin-
cible forces: all held a fascination for intellectuals outside the Soviet Union
as a great epic, and it attracted the mass of the people who saw in the strength
of a country which had proclaimed itself as a Socialist country and abolished
injustice and exploitation, a beacon for the oppressed and a weapon for the
realization of their ambitions.’12

It also won the Communist party a predominant place in the trade union
movement. The Italian trade union congress, the Confederazione Generale del
Lavoro (C.G.L.), had been unaffected by the split in the Socialist party; the
Communists did not, as in France, start their own. But side by side with the
Socialist-led trade union movement was the Catholic trade union federation,
the Confederazione Italiana dei Lavoratori (C.I.L.), founded in March 1918
and grouping many thousands of workers. Both these trade union movements
had been ruthlessly suppressed by the Fascist regime.
Their reconstruction began when Bruno Buozzi (1881-1944), leader of
the metal workers’ union and General Secretary of the C.G.L. before its
suppression, returned to Italy in 1943 from exile in France. Commencing
his illegal activities in a Rome still occupied by the Germans, he strove to
achieve a single trade union movement for Socialist, Communist and Catholic
workers by bringing together the Socialist C.G.L. with the Catholic C.I.L.
In this he was supported by the most distinguished trade union leader in the
Catholic movement, Achille Grandi (1883-1946), who canvassed for this
unity in the Catholic camp. In February 1944, both federations constituted
1. See Battaglia, The Story o f the Italian Resistance, p. 32.
2. Giorgio Galli, Storia del Partito communista italiano (Milan, 1958), pp. 258-9,
quoted in Donald L. M. Biackmer, Unity in Diversity. Italian Communism and the Communist
World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 28-9.
 58 The D estiny o f Socialism
themselves, initially in congresses in Salerno but entering without delay into
discussions regarding their unity. On 3 June 1944, the day before the Allied
troops approached the outskirts of Rome, Emilio Canevari for the Socialists,
Giuseppe di Vittorio for the Communists, and Achille Grandi for the
Christian Democrats, signed a ‘declaration affirming the unity of the
workers’—the Pact of Rome. Buozzi’s signature was missing from the
document, which he had seen as the crowning glory of all his endeavours;
as the Allies were approaching he had been arrested by the Fascists to be
murdered by the Germans on 4 June—the day after the signing of the
declaration.
The trade union federation which emerged from this merger under the
title of Confederazione Generate Italiana del Lavoro (C.G.I.L.) was pledged
by the declaration to respect democratic principles at every level of the
hierarchy, to ensure proportional representation for minorities and to
guarantee political and religious freedom of thought. The statutes, promul-
gated later at the inaugural congress, specifically guaranteed participation by
representatives of the three main political streams as well as of minorities
in any resolution of outstanding importance. The declaration emphasized
the C.G.I.L.’s independence of any party, while reserving the right ‘to co-
operate with the democratic parties—the representatives of the working
masses—in any act necessary to preserve the people’s liberty or to defend
the interests of workers and country’.1
A provisional executive committee consisting of a general secretariat
and five representatives for each of the three political alignments—Oreste
Lizzadri as member of the secretariat for the Socialists, di Vittorio for the
Communists and Achille Grandi for the Christian Democrats—was formed.
On 28 January 1945, the C.G.I.L. constituted itself at its inaugural congress
in Naples in the presence of fraternal delegates of the International Federation
of Trade Unions as well as leaders of the British, American and Russian
trade union movements.2
Yet in less than two years the Communist party had gained full control
of the C.G.I.L. It was hardly their radical spirit which won them a majority.
Togliatti continued to sit with the middle-class parties in the coalition,
stepping carefully so as not to endanger the position of the Communists in
the government; and di Vittorio’s policy was openly reformist, trying to
raise the workers’ living-standards by traditional methods of negotiation
with employers and government to gain wage increases and improve social
conditions. But, simultaneously, di Vittorio was attempting to transform
the C.G.I.L. into an instrument of the Communist party.
Giuseppe di Vittorio (1892-1957) had served the party faithfully since its
inauguration and, like Longo, had been a political commissar in the Spanish
1. Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening, p. 455.
2. See ibid., pp. 451,454-5 and 457.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 59
Civil War, moving on to edit a Communist newspaper in exile in France.
He was by far the most powerful personality in the triumvirate of the
secretariat. His colleague, Oreste Lizzadri (b. 1896), the representative of
the Socialist party, faced the tasks which confronted him helplessly; he had
neither trade union nor political experience and could only submit himself
passively to di Vittorio’s leadership. As for Achille Grandi, the Christian
Democrats’ representative, he was hindered from action by the ravages of
cancer. In these circumstances the leadership soon fell to di Vittorio. Trained
in the Bolshevik techniques of conspiracy in organizing the masses, he
systematically infiltrated key positions in the trade union movement with
Communist sympathizers and so won control over an enormous organization
embracing many tens of thousands of Social Democratic as well as Christian
Democratic workers.1

At length, like the C.G.I.L., the Socialist party also became a Communist
auxiliary. This was clearly how Togliatti saw its function when, at the end
of April 1945 in the Communist national council, he proclaimed the
concept of a ‘party of a new type’. ‘We have today arrived at a point,’ he
said, ‘where it is important not only to propagate an idea, but also to renew
the country through that democratic idea, to save it from its ruin and defeat.
We therefore need, besides party members and officials, to find a way for us
to lead the mass of the people’2—as, for example, the masses of trade union
workers by infiltrating the organizational machines of the trade union
movement and the Socialist party through the united action pact.
Ideology had to adapt to Togliatti’s ‘elastic tactics’. Of the dogmatic
inflexibility which had split the Socialist movement before the war there was
now no sign. Article II of the statutes which the Communist party formulated
at the end of December 1945 allowed ‘all honest workers . . . regardless of
race, religious belief or philosophical conviction’ to become members of the
Communist party. The statutes showed, wrote Unita, the official party organ,
that ‘the Communist party is not the party of atheism’ and that belonging to
it by no means involved embracing ‘the philosophical teachings of material-
ism’—namely, the teachings of Marxism. Pietro Secchia, the party’s vice-
secretary, explained the statutes to be the ‘statutes of a national party . . . a
party of a new type . . . a party of unity’.3 It was therefore necessary, Longo
1. The transformation of the C.G.I.L. into an instrument of the Communist party
illustrates the role that chance as much as personality may play in history. Had Bruno
Buozzi not been murdered, he would have represented the Socialist party in the triumvirate
of the general secretariat, and the independence of the trade union movement would
most probably have been preserved. Buozzi was a veteran trade union leader with an
integrity comparable to Ernest Bevin’s in Britain and capable of lighting off any attempt
at a political takeover.
2. Die Kommunistische Partei Italiens, p. 91.
3. Quoted in Garosci, ‘The Italian Communist Party’, in Einaudi (ed.), Communism
in Western Europe, pp. 201-2.
 60 The Destiny o f Socialism
stated at the party congress, to extend the united action pact with the
Socialists into a pact to combine the very organizational machinery of each
party, since without proletarian unity it would be impossible to create a
spearhead for democratic action.
While the Socialist party had pledged itself at its first congress after the
war, in April 1945, to the principle of proletarian unity, the fundamental
question of organic fusion between the two parties had been left open. And
at the next congress, in April 1945 in Florence, even the principle of united
action with the Communists was questioned vehemently in debate by the
group known as the Saragats—the ‘pure Socialists’.
Giuseppe Saragat (b. 1898) had worked as a financial expert in a bank
before he left Fascist Italy in the 1920s and had played no part in the ideo-
logical struggles of 1921 between the majority party, led by Serrati, and the
reformists who gathered about Turati. He did, however, share Turati’s
reformist convictions, which had made an even deeper impression on him
through his studies during his exile of the history of the English labour
movement. Elected after his return from exile to be president of the con-
stituent assembly, his position in the executive as well as his writings in
Critica Sociale, the periodical founded by Turati, stood out clearly for a split
away from the Communists; he was supported in this by Ivan Matteo
Lombardo, a representative of the party’s right wing, as well as by Ignazio
Silone and Angelica Balabanoff. Silone and Balabanoif, however, were not
reformists. Silone (b. 1900), whose distinguished novels and stories had
established his name abroad as a writer,1 was a former ardent Communist
who had only left the party when, as he wrote, he came to the realization
that Communism was ‘no more than a new version of that inhuman reality
against which we, as Socialists, had originally been inflamed’.12 Angelica
Balabanoff (1876-1966), a disciple of Lenin’s who had worked with him and
been secretary of the Communist International during the year following its
inauguration, had also turned away from the Communist movement in
disillusion.3
Opposition to united action also came from a group of adamant anti-
communists of the younger generation of Socialists—the ‘Young Turks’, as
they were known. They had assembled about the periodical Iniziativa
Socialista under the leadership o f Mario Zagari and Matteo Matteotti,
whose father had been murdered in 1924 at Mussolini’s instigation. This
group likewise demanded the dissolution of the pact and a break with the
Communists.
At the same time, on the left wing, a group of Communist sympathizers,

1. Above all his novels Fontamara (London, 1934) and Bread and Wine (London,
1934), neither of which could appear in Italy before the fall of the Fascist dictatorship.
2. See in R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (London, 1950), p. 103.
3. For her strange biography, see her Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse (Berlin, 1927).
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 61
the ‘Fusionists’, stood with their periodical, Compiti Nuovi, for organic
fusion with the Communist party, while a group of the old majority party,
dose to the Communists, whose organ was Quarto Stato and who were led
by Lelio Basso, demanded at least a continuation of the concept of united
action.
: Nenni himself took up a central position. Elected at the 1945 congress as
president of the party, his wish had been to see an organic unification of the
left. The question of proletarian unity was one that had always occupied him
profoundly, representing a principle that he had stood for constantly and
uncompromisingly in AvantiL But he also knew that the majority of even his
naost faithful followers would refuse to follow him into a united party and
that any decision by congress to impose unification would inevitably split
his party asunder. So for the sake of unity he avoided laying the resolution
before congress. In an alternative resolution he proposed as a compromise
that the question be postponed and that, with no prejudice to the autonomy
of the party, the current policy of united action be continued.
In the event, the group surrounding Saragat and the Critica Sociale also
sought a compromise, declaring themselves against organic unity with the
Communist party—a question left open by Nenni’s resolution—but in
favour of retaining the united action pact so as not to endanger party unity.
The Iniziativa Socialista group, however, stood by their demands for an
annulment of the pact and a separation from the Communists.
Nenni’s resolution in fact received the most votes (338,000), but since the
resolutions by Saragat’s group and the ‘Young Turks’ had received 300,000
and 83,000 respectively, this did not represent an absolute majority. There-
fore, to avoid a crisis, the congress also had to find a compromise solution
for the party’s leadership. It re-elected Nenni as president, but at the same
time elected Lombardo as its general secretary to represent the right
wing.
The congress met, as the Bulletin of the Socialist International recorded,
‘in an atmosphere of fanaticism difficult to describe. A majority of delegates
supported the “unionists” [Nenni, Basso and the “Fusionists”], but a
minority, raving and shouting, demonstrated continously.’1 But the majority
had hardly been short on the quality of ‘fanaticism’, forcing, for example,
Angelica Balabanoff to leave the stand under a hail of abuse after she
had accused Nenni of complacency towards the Communists, criticized
the Soviet dictatorship and attempted to expose the seemingly democratic
fa$ade of the Communist party.
Before the congress had even begun to debate the relationship with the
Communist party, it had considered the programme for the election to the
constituent assembly arranged for 2 June 1946: a programme in the tradition
1. S.I.L.O . Bulletin, III, February 1947, published by the Socialist Information and
Liaison Office.
 62 The D estiny o f Socialism
of democratic Socialism causing no differences of opinion. Then, when the
conflicts in attitudes towards the Communist party were later resolved by a
compromise between left and right, it seemed as though the badly shaken
unity of the party had been fully restored. And success in the elections was
not denied to the Socialist party. Five weeks later it emerged as the second
strongest party in the constituent assembly and as the strongest party in the
Socialist-Communist alliance, winning 115 seats against 104 for the Com-
munists.

But, within a few more weeks, the quarrel between left and right had broken
out afresh. Under the influence of the Florence congress, the Socialist party
executive had to some extent held aloof in its relationships with the Com-
munist party. Togliatti moved to make a public attack on the Socialists.
Evidently, he stated, relations with the Socialist party were poor, the united
action pact had remained ineffective for several months, and this was ‘the
fault of the group of reformist opponents of unity who in fact control the
Socialist party’.1
Instead of contradicting Togliatti, Nenni, anxious for the future of the
Socialist-Communist alliance, hurriedly discussed the revival of the pact with
the Communist party leadership. The proposed result was a pact which
would bring still closer the relationship between the two parties, while
envisaging a ‘joint executive committee’. The pact, Togliatti announced,
‘would create a solid block of two fraternal parties . . . Socialist and Com-
munists would work together to create a policy of concord’.12
But this ‘joint executive committee’ was in fact only mentioned in the
pact as a desirable expectation, Nenni being well aware that, unless he were
to take the risk of gambling with the unity of his party, any such expectation
must remain unfulfilled. The Communist party, however, began without
hesitation to build the United Front ‘from below’. Pietro Secchia, its
secretary, circulated to all cells and branches of the party an instruction, ‘in
agreement with our Socialist brothers’, to seize the initiative in calling
meetings in factories, urban districts and villages for the purpose of ‘creating
joint executive committees’3—in other words, those instruments by which
the Communist party could gain a direct influence over the great mass of
Socialist party members in factories and local organizations and so infiltrate
the party organization. The Saragat group at once accused Nenni of dis-
regarding the decisions of the congress in Florence and thus of endangering
the party’s autonomy. The differences between the left, whose policy was
aimed at unification with the Communist party, and the right, which
1. Gazzettino, 17 September 1946, quoted in Garosci, ‘The Italian Communist Party’,
in Einaudi (ed.), Communism in Western Europe, p. 212.
2. Gazetta, 1 November 1946, quoted in ibid., p. 213.
3. Quoted in ibid., p. 213.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 63

strove for a clear-cut division, were forcing events towards an explosive

crisis.
The crisis broke when an ordinary congress called by the party executive
met in Rome on 19 January 1947. While the majority of party delegates
assembled in the university building, a counter-congress of the opposition
groups met in the Palazzo Barberini under the banners of Marx, Turati and
Matteotti—the group Saragat, and the Critica Sociale and Iniziativa Socialista
groups. Saragat himself did not appear at the congress until the fifth day,
when he made a vehement speech to the majority in the university hall
condemning the party leadership for its sanguine attitudes towards the
Communists. He then returned to the Palazzo Barberini to announce the
formation of a new Socialist party—‘The Socialist party of Italian Workers’
(Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani—P.S.L .I.); this was the name that
Turati had chosen for the party he had founded after his group’s exclusion
from the Socialist party in 1922.

Meanwhile the main congress of the P.S.I. went on to discuss the question
of a unified list of candidates with the Communists in the forthcoming
parliamentary election. The idea of a ‘People’s Front’ and a unity list had
been mooted between the Communist party and Nenni before the congress
had reached an understanding with Togliatti. The debate on unity lists ended
with three resolutions. The first, put by the party executive and seconded by
Lelio Basso, the party secretary, proposed the acceptance of a unity list and
a People’s Front. Against this, the second resolution, put by Lombardo,
declared itself against a People’s Front, and the third, put by Giuseppe
Romita (1887-1958), while in favour of a common struggle with the Com-
munists in a ‘People’s Front’, wished to see the party retain its individual
list. The executive’s resolution received nearly two thirds of the votes
(525,332), while Romita’s received 257,099 and Lombardo’s a mere 4,337.
Thus the left, led by Nenni and Basso, triumphed at the congress.
The initial effect of this victory of the Socialist left wing was the splitting
away of the group led by Lombardo and Silone, which thereupon constituted
itself as ‘Alliance of Socialists’, canvassing in association with Saragat’s
party on one list—the Lista delVUnita Socialista. In the event, the elections
of 18 April 1948 ended for the Socialist party in deep disappointment. The
unity list of the People’s Front gained 8,137,000 votes, but only about one
third of these had been cast for the Socialist party; this gave them fifty-one
seats to 135 for the Communists.1 The Communist party had outflanked its
Socialist confederates.

1. In the elections to the constituent assembly on 2 June 1946, the Socialist party had
won 4,758,000 votes and 115 seats against 4,356,000 votes and 104 seats going to the
Communists. Saragat’s party, which had separated itself from the Socialist party in the
interim, received 1,858,000 votes and thirty-three seats in the elections of April 1948.
64 The D estiny o f Socialism
The disappointment of defeat worked itself out in a stormy five-day debate
at a congress in Genoa at the end of June, two months after the elections.
While Basso defended the policy of the party executive, Romita demanded
the break up of the People’s Front; this policy, he stated, as had been shown
by the experience of countries in Eastern Europe, was one of suicide. He
proposed the dissolution of the pact with the Communist party. Riccardo
Lombardi, who had been secretary of the Action party, also demanded the
breaking up of the People’s Front, but insisted that the pact should be
preserved.
In the voting on these three resolutions the executive suffered a decisive
defeat. Nenni’s and Basso’s resolution received only 161,000 votes against
240,000 for Lombardi’s resolution; Romita’s received 141,000. Nenni resigned
as president of the party and as chief editor of Avanti!, but retained the
presidency of the parliamentary group; Basso gave up the secretaryship.
Riccardo Lombardi’s group thereupon took over the party’s leadership with
A. Z. Jacometti as secretary and Lombardi as chief editor of Avanti!. The
party’s relationship with the People’s Front was dissolved at once, but the
united action pact was left intact. The right, led by Romita and Carlo
Spinelli, separated itself during the course of the next few months from the
P.S.I. and eventually joined the P.S.L.I.

In both parties, as well as in the Socialist International, efforts were con-

tinuously being made to bring about a reunification, but the gulf which
separated them widened in the same degree as the Cold War conflict between
the Soviet Union and the Western powers increased in intensity. Solidarity
with the Soviet Union had been a tradition of the P.S.I., but it was one
which had preserved the freedom to criticize Moscow, as when it had, for
example, opposed the policy of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The same sympathy
with the Soviet Union had been reborn as Russia, in alliance with the
Western powers, had faced the treachery of Hitler’s Germany. In the clash
between the Great Powers following the war, the P.S.I., under Nenni’s
leadership, had, even before its split, leaned towards identifying its foreign
policy with that of the Soviet Union (this had indeed been one of the reasons
for the split). And following the split, it agreed unreservedly with each
manifestation of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, regardless of any criticisms
made by the other Socialist groups. It declared its solid sympathy with
Russia’s policies in Poland, Romania, Greece and Czechoslovakia as well as
with its attitudes towards the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty.
In the view it took of the Soviet Union, the Socialist party did not stray one
inch from that displayed by the Communist party. As a member of the
Socialist International, the P.S.L.I. under Saragat stood in the camp of
democratic Socialism; the P.S.I., though it was a party of democratic
Socialism, found itself in the Communist camp because of its foreign policy.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 65
In the light of this fundamental disparity, any attempt to bring about a
reunification of the Socialist groups was bound to fail.

A change of course in Alcide de Gasperi’s government in May 1947 finally

provoked a radicalization of the Communist policy and led to the breaking
up o f the trade union movement. The government had, until then, rested on
a coalition of the Christian Democrats with the Socialists and Communists.
While restructuring his government, de Gasperi dismissed his Socialist and
Communist ministers without further explanation. It soon became clear that
this surprising change o f policy had been suggested to him in the United
States, where he had gone a few months before to discuss a possible loan
and where it had been hinted that Italy could expect generous American aid
were he to exclude Communists and Socialist left-wingers from his coalition.1
And, indeed, a month after their exclusion Italy received over $600 million
as a first instalment from Washington.
Over the years, Togliatti had supported the principle of a government
coalition between the three democratic parties and, by an impressive display
of statesmanship, had sought to prove the value of Communist co-operation
in the rebuilding of democracy and the country’s economy. Now the Com-
munists found themselves removed from the government for no apparent
concrete reason. By inciting unrest they therefore tried to show how, lacking
their co-operation in the government, the country would be threatened with
chaos. From July until the middle of December 1947 there was a series of
short-term strikes, combined with stormy street demonstrations, in town
after town: Milan, Ancona, Leghorn, Lecco, Messina, and above all, in
Rome. All these, however, fell short of confrontations with the armed forces
of the state, and it was obviously not a part of Togliatti’s plan to push the
struggle as far as a violent revolutionary uprising. With the general strike
which began in Rome on 11 December and which, in the face of massive
police opposition, was broken off on the second day, the strike movement
was for the moment exhausted.
It began again on a greater scale on 14 July 1948, triggered off by an
attempt made on Togliatti’s life as he left the parliamentary building by a
young Fascist; Togliatti, struck by four pistol bullets, was seriously wounded.
The general council of the C.G.I.L. at once called for a general strike, and,
above all in the north, but also in the south, street demonstrations led to
violent clashes with the forces of the state. The indignation of the working
classes against the de Gasperi government’s tolerance of an undisguised
Fascist movement, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, had, as in the strikes of
1947, broken out once again. De Gasperi’s party had, however, won a clear
majority in parliament in the election in April and the prime minister felt
himself strong enough to defy the storm evoked by the attempted murder.
1. See Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening, p. 470.
66 The D estiny o f Socialism
The strike was broken off after thirty-six hours without any concessions
being made.
The political character of the strikes from July until the middle of
December as well as of the general strike was obvious; they were organized
by the Communists in their fight against de Gasperi’s government. The
C.G.I.L., whose general council carried responsibility for the strike move-
ment, was, however, a confederation not only of Communist and Socialist
trade unions, but also of the Catholic unions. Giulio Pastore (1902-1969),
the leader of the group of Catholic trade unions after Achille Grandi’s death,
had protested in the general council of the C.G.I.L. against the strikes of
1947 as a political movement, had denounced the general strike of July 1948
as being in breach of the Pact of Rome and had asked the Catholic-organized
members to return to work. He and his followers were branded by the
Communists and Socialists as traitors, whereupon the Catholic trade unions
separated from the C.G.I.L. and reconstituted themselves at a congress in
Rome in October 1948 as a trade union federation under the title of Libera
Confederazione Generate Italiana del Lavoro (L.C.G.I.L.).
The great achievement of the Pact of Rome of 1944 had been to unite
the trade union movements of every alignment; this unity had now been
broken, but it was not yet the end of the splitting process. A month later, in
May 1949, the trade unions led by Saragat’s party left the C.G.I.L. to form
the Italian Workers’ Federation (Federazione Italiana del Lavoro—F.I.L.)1 at
a congress in Rome.
The Italian labour movement, its political as well as its trade union wing,
was now split three ways. In the last analysis, it was the break-up of the
alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union which had broken
the unity of the labour movement in France as well as in Italy. The struggle
between Communists and the Social Democrats was not about the question
of a Communist versus a democratic form of constitution or whether the
working-class struggle for power should be achieved through democracy or
revolution; nor about differing economic and socio-political demands. As
in France, the Communist party in Italy during the period 1944 to 1948 (or
at any later date) neither proclaimed the setting up of a Soviet dictatorship
as the objective of its efforts, nor attempted to seize the reins of power by
revolutionary means. At each step it declared itself in favour of democracy
and, in common with the reformist Socialists, directed its policies towards
social reform rather than towards revolution. It remained profoundly aware,
however, of its deep-rooted alliance with the Soviet Union, and thus it
became necessary for it to call into being impassable barriers between itself
and Social Democracy, which was once again outlawed by Moscow as
traitor of the working classes. And when in the autumn of 1947 Moscow
1. For the strike actions of the Communists and the splitting of the trade union move-
ment, see Neufeld, Italy: School fo r Awakening, pp. 470-6.
 Unity and Division in the Italian Socialist M ovement 67
finalized its breach with the Western powers with the founding of the
Cominform and called upon the Communist parties of all countries to begin
a revolutionary offensive,1 the Italian Communist party aligned its policy
with the rest. It took up its position of solidarity with the Soviet Union
opposing the Marshall Plan—the offensive’s actual objective—and thus
placed an unbridgeable chasm between itself and the democratic trends in
the working classes.

1. See pp. 144-46,148-51.

4 • The Problem o f Unification in the
German Labour Movement

The split in the German labour movement had a more profound significance
than in any other European country. In Britain, Belgium, Holland and
Scandinavia, as in Austria and Switzerland, the Communist movement
remained largely sectarian and powerless to influence political developments.
Even in those countries in which Communism enjoyed a mass following,
such as France (until the coming of the Popular Front in 1935) and Czecho-
slovakia, the split, while it weakened any influence the working classes might
have had on political processes, hardly amounted to a full-scale catastrophe.
In Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria it was not the split itself which precipitated
the defeat of the Socialist movement, but the spectre of the ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’.1
It was in Germany, however, that the struggle for alignment between the
Social Democrats and Communists degenerated into a bitter internecine
strife—a struggle waged with passionate hatred between worker and worker
in assembly halls, factories, mines, on the streets and even on the barricades.
Only in Germany did the split become the tragedy of the working class and
indeed of the country and the whole world. When the collapse of the imperial
regime gave the working class its opportunity of state power, it was its
dissensions which prevented the restructuring into a Social Democracy
governed by the working class of a country hitherto controlled by an alliance
of capital and the Junkers. While the working class bled to death in fratricidal
struggle, the counter-revolution organized itself and, in its triumph, destroyed
the whole Socialist labour movement—with dreadful consequence for all
mankind.
From this utter defeat at the hands of the new Nazi regime, the realization
slowly dawned on Communists and Socialists alike that the split in the
labour movement had been a tragic error of enormous dimensions. Thus a
determination grew among the broad mass of Socialists that, once the Nazis
1. For the struggle between Communists and Social Democrats, see Braunthal,
History o f the International 1914-1943, passim.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 69
had been overthrown, the unity of Socialist interests should never again be
hazarded for the sake of theoretical or tactical conflicts.
This was the solemn attestation behind the first statement put out by the
Social Democratic party executive in exile at the end of January 1934 in
Prague, where they had fled in 1933. The so-called ‘Prague Manifesto of
1934’ was drawn up by Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941). It outlined a pro-
gramme for a revolutionary struggle to overthrow Hitler together with the
policies to be followed after this had been achieved. It stated:

We have shown the way; we have shown the aim o f the struggle. The differences
within the labour movement have been annulled by the enemy. The reason for the
split has become void. . . . The unification o f the working class becomes a priority,
which history itself demands. G erm an Social Democracy, having freed itself from
sectarianism, is awake to its mission to unite the working class in a party o f revolu-
tionary Socialism. . . . It refuses to sanction the self-destruction which others have
sought to perpetuate, since victories can hardly be gained while the division o f the
working class remains the [Nazi] dictatorship’s surest safeguard.1

The Communist International, however, maintained its implacable

hostility towards Social Democracy. Its May appeal, appearing three months
after the manifesto, once again denounced Social Democracy as the ally of
Fascism;2 underground Communist propaganda in Nazi Germany continued
to direct its spleen against Social Democracy as a leading enemy of the
working class.
But the hope of the manifesto, that revolution would prove the force to
forge the working class together, remained unfulfilled. During the course of
three years, the power of Hitler’s police state destroyed all cells of resistance
and broke down any fighting spirit which may have remained. And, after the
Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, the gap between Social Democrats and
Communists became absolute. Communist propaganda savagely attacked
the Social Democrats as agents in the service of British imperialism who
were ‘against the working people’ of Germany.3
Only after the Soviet Union itself had fallen victim to Hitler’s duplicity
did the unification of all the enemies of Fascism under one banner to fight
Hitler’s dictatorship become the Communist watchword. When Stalin dis-
solved the Communist International in May 1943, it seemed as if the last
obstacle in the way of working-class unity had disappeared. The question
became urgent when, in the spring of 1945, the defeat of Hitler’s Germany
became only a question of time. With the fall of Fascism close, the Socialists
1. Neuer Vorwarts (Prague), 28 January 1934. The manifesto was issued under the
title: Kampf undZ iel des revolutiondren Sozialismus. Die Politik der Sozialdemokratischen
Partei Deutschlands. For the text, see Wolfgang Abendroth, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen
Sozialdemokratie (Frankfurt, 1964), pp. 114-22.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 394-6.
3. For Ulbricht’s article, see Die Welt (Stockholm), 9 February 1940, quoted in ibid.,
p. 532.
70 The D estiny o f Socialism
faced the problem of rebuilding the labour movement to carry out its tasks
in the new Germany which would rise from the ruins.
Again, the initiative for unification came from the Social Democrats—in
fact from inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp. Hermann Brill,
sentenced by a people’s court in 1939 to twelve years’ hard labour, had been
brought after four years of his sentence to Buchenwald, and there, in April
1945, with Benedikt Kautsky, who had already been in the concentration
camp for almost seven years, drew up a manifesto outlining the measure
which they saw as ‘necessary to save Germany from this historic and
unprecedented collapse’.
It is a moving document, coming, as it does, from martyrs for the cause
of Socialism.
W e have [it states as an introduction] borne prison and concentration camps
because we have believed th a t even under dictatorship it was essential to w ork for
the ideals and aims o f Socialism and for the preservation o f peace. In prison and
concentration camps we have continued with our conspiratorial activities despite the
daily threat o f a terrible death___ In the spirit of those victims o f o ur ideals who
died a t the hands o f H itler’s executioners . . . we feel duty-bound to inform the
G erm an people o f measures which we see as necessary if G erm any is to be saved
from unprecedented historical collapse.

The thirty-three signatories of the manifesto identified themselves as

representative of the whole spectrum of Socialist prisoners. The measures
which they proposed for transforming the Fascist state into a truly ‘Socialist
people’s republic’ therefore carried the marks of democratic Socialism. To
realize its ideals, the manifesto stated, ‘the unity of the Socialist movement is
indispensable.. . . Founded on the ideals of the class struggle and of inter-
nationalism,’ it continued, ‘and on the fact that the realization of Socialism
is not a question of a future state but an immediate task, we wish to establish
the unity of the labour movement as a unity of practical, proletarian action.’
In particular, the manifesto appealed to those ‘parties and trade unions who
are at the roots of the class struggle’ urgently to set up after initial discussion
a preparatory committee which would have the task of organizing a con-
stituent congress to determine the statutes of a Socialist Unity party and to
set up the party organs.1

Unity in the Socialist movement following the fall of Fascism in fact became
a dominant theme at both Socialist and Communist meetings. Kurt Schu-
macher first formulated this viewpoint on 6 May 1945—two days before the
capitulation of Germany when former officials of the Social Democratic
party assembled in Hanover to form a local party. Hanover had been
1. For the text of the Buchenwald Manifesto, see Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und
Verdammte. Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse aus sieben Jahren in deutschen Konzentrations-
lagern (Zurich, 1946), pp. 299-304; Abendroth, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Sozial-
demokratie, pp. 123-7.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 71
occupied by American troops on 10 April, and within nine days the group
had passed a resolution to rebuild the party organization, though they could,
of course, concern themselves initially only with rebuilding at local level.
With the collapse of totalitarian rule, the social and economic structure of
the state collapsed also in a dissolution unparalleled in modern history. The
land was divided by the Allies into four occupation zones, each closed to the
others, the highest power of state devolving to the appointed military
governors, who, apprehensive that the forces of National Socialism might
regroup inside camouflaged organizations, at first forbade the founding of
any party. For this reason, the local association in Hanover was only able
to constitute itself in secrecy.
Kurt Schumacher (1895-1952), who had called this local group into being and
who in his report developed the future aims and policies for German Social
Democracy, had been a leader of the Reichsbanner (a para-military
Social Democratic force for the defence of the Weimar Republic) and a
Socialist deputy before suffering ten years in prison and concentration camps.
Severely wounded in the First World War, his right arm had been amputated,
and through an eye-infection picked up in the concentration camp, he had
lost his full vision. His appearance seemed to personify Germany’s tragedy:
crippled and emaciated, glaring eyes and a face drawn with pain. But his
speech, which developed his thought on the destiny of German Social
Democracy, shone with inspiration. Through the rare gifts of personality
that he displayed, it became obvious that he would be the one called upon to
lead the party.1
As in Hanover, so in other towns, above all in Berlin, former Social
Democrats began to reconstitute their local groups. But the inaugural
assembly of the organization in Hanover had a particular significance for
the history of Social Democracy in Germany, since it established the basis
for the renewal of its ideals.
Schumacher considered that one of the most important tasks facing the
party was to safeguard its intellectual and political independence from the
forces of occupation. ‘The Social Democratic party,’ he wrote in the summer
of 1945, ‘aligns itself with the political and social needs of the German
working population. It cannot and will not agree to becoming the manipulated
instrument of any one of the victorious powers. Even as it is independent
internally, it must remain independent of foreign influence. Our party is
neither Russian nor British, French nor American.’12

1. See Friedrich Heine, Kurt Schumacher. Ein demokratischer Sozialist europaischer

Pragung (Gottingen, 1969); Lewis J. Edinger, Kurt Schumacher. A Study in Personality and
Political Behaviour (Stanford, 1965); Fried Wesemann, Kurt Schumacher. Ein Leben fiir
Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1952). For a biographical essay, see Werner Blumenberg, Kampfer
fiir die Freiheit (Berlin and Hanover, 1959), pp. 163-71.
2. Amo Scholz and Walter G. Oschilewski (eds), Turmwachter der Demokratie. Ein
Lebensbild von Kurt Schumacher (Berlin, 1953), vol. n. Reden und Schriften, p. 33.
72 The Destiny o f Socialism
Pursuing this theme, he went on to examine the question which, as he
said, was ‘closest to our hearts as Socialists in co-operating with other
parties’: the future relationship between Social Democrats and Communists.
While admitting that a Socialist Unity party appeared to many workers to
be ‘the ideal and, for the German experience, the most suitable solution’,
he turned decisively against it. The Unity party idea, he stated, was im-
practicable owing to power-political factors and external ties. The dividing
line arose from the obligations of the Communists towards a single one of
the major victorious powers, that is Russia as a state and its external policies.
‘But we, as Social Democrats,’ he continued, ‘will not depart from our
belief that we must take notice of the political and social needs of the German
working classes, and from this first principle, must work for international co-
operation between every workers’ party. We cannot,’ he stated, ‘and do not
wish to become the puppet instrument of foreign imperialist interests.’
This was also, it will be remembered, the cardinal argument used by
Leon Blum against an organic unification of the French Socialist party with
the Communists.1 In France, however, the argument had only had a theo-
retical significance. In Germany, on the other hand, partly occupied by
Russia, it carried direct political import for the country’s future social and
political make-up. ‘The Communists,’ Schumacher stated, ‘with their
complete orientation towards Moscow, hope to graft the example and
method of one country on to the political and economic conditions prevailing
in other countries and to declare this as the orthodox method to be used in
the struggle. But we do not wish for any such one-sided tie of obedience, nor
do we recognize any categorical pattern of class struggle or any absolute
rules which could be valid for all countries and at all times.’2
Schumacher’s attitude to the principle of a Unity party, however, repre-
sented a conflict with the prevailing general mood, especially in Berlin and
the cities under Soviet rule in the Eastern Zone. Conquered by a revolutionary
Socialist power, as the Soviet Union appeared in the eyes of many, the
workers believed that now at last the era of Socialist revolution had dawned
in Germany and that therefore, as had been laid down in the Prague Manifesto
of the S.P.D. executive, the reasons for the split had become invalidated and
the solidarity of the working class was now the top priority. At its conference
in Berne on 1 February 1939 the Communist party in exile had also declared
itself in favour of a ‘united revolutionary party’, asking Communists working
with the underground ‘to create a united organization for a single future
party of the German working class’.3
1. See p. 26.
2. Quoted in Wesemann, Kurt Schumacher, p. 73. The book contains a shortened
transcript of the report; the complete manuscript text is in the S.P.D. archives in Bonn.
3. For the text of the resolution, see Zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei
Deutschlands. Ein Auswahl von Materialien und Dokumenten aus den Jahren 1914-1946,
(Berlin, 1955), pp. 393-410, subsequently referred to as Materialien und Dokumente.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 73
So while in Hanover a majority of Social Democrats, apparently under
the impact of Schumacher’s speech, declared themselves against any union
of the two Socialist factions, the group of Social Democrats in Berlin
emerged strongly in favour. Schumacher’s Hanover speech could hardly
have been known to the party members in Berlin ; and Berlin represented a
special claim to authority in expressing the wishes of all German Social
Democrats. It was not, of course, an authority that lay exclusively in the
hands of the Berlin group either but, simply as a result of Berlin’s position
as the former capital and as the traditional centre of Social Democracy,
their action carried special weight.
Berlin fell to the Red Army a few weeks after the taking of Hanover.
Immediately after the capitulation had been signed on 8 May, a Social
Democrat group, led by Otto Grotewohl (b. 1894), a former member of
parliament and minister of state in Brunswick, Max Fechner, at one time a
Prussian parliamentary deputy, and Gustav Dahrendorf, a member of
parliament who had been sentenced by the Nazis to seven years’ hard labour,
attempted to contact Walter Ulbricht who had been leader of the Communist
party under the Weimar Republic. Ulbricht had arrived in Berlin on 1 May
in a Soviet aircraft direct from Moscow, and the Social Democrats were
anxious to commence discussions on the founding of a Socialist Unity party
as soon as possible. But, to their intense surprise, Ulbricht was not available.1
In repeatedly refusing invitations to discuss the founding of a Unity party,
Ulbricht was acting, according to Wolfgang Leonhard, in line with directives
that he had received before departing from Moscow.2 According to these,
not even the rebirth of the Communist party was envisaged as being part of
the original plans for the Soviet Union’s political strategy for Germany. In
every country at that time occupied by the Red Army, the Communists had
been instructed not to appear as an independent party, or even as a ‘workers’
party’, but to create broadly based anti-Fascist organizations which under
oblique Communist leadership were to become the basis of Communist-
1. The following account is based on a detailed study by Albrecht Kaden, Einheit
oder Freiheit. Die Wiedergriindung der S.P.D . 1945-46 (Hanover, 1964); and on Waldemar
Ritter, Kurt Schumacher. Eine Untersuchung seiner politischen Konzeption (Hanover, 1964);
Carola Stem, Portrdt einer bolschewistischen Partei. Entwicklung, Funktion und Situation
der S.E.D . (Cologne, 1957); Dokumente und Materialien der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung,
Series 3, vol. i; M ai 1945-April 1946 (Berlin, 1959). The preface to this collection (sub-
sequently referred to as Dokumente) outlines the official Communist view of the rise of the
S.P.D. See also Hermann Weber, Von der S.B.Z. zur D.D.R. 1945-1958 (Hanover, 1966),
Chapter 1. For accounts from a Communist viewpoint, see Horst Lipski, Deutschland und
die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1945-1949 (Berlin, 1963); Hans Miiller, Die Entwicklung
der S.E.D . und ihr Kam pffur ein neues Deutschland 1945-1949 (Berlin, 1961).
2. Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entldsst ihre Kinder (Cologne and Berlin, 1955),
p. 327. Leonhard, who had grown up in the Soviet Union and been educated in the Comin-
tern school, was a member of the ten-man ‘Ulbricht group’ which arrived in Berlin on
1 May 1945. Before its departure, a selected group of German emigrants had been given
their directives for working in the Soviet state system; Leonhard became a member of the
Central Bureau of the Communist party.
74 The Destiny o f Socialism
controlled government ‘blocs’. This, as we shall see, happened with the
‘Democratic Bloc’ in Poland, the ‘National Democratic Bloc’ in Romania
and the ‘Fatherland Front’ in Bulgaria.1 In the Soviet Zone of Germany the
‘Bloc of Fighting Democracy’ was intended to fulfil the same task.
But then, a month after Ulbricht’s return to Berlin, a further delegation
of important party dignitaries under the leadership of Wilhelm Pieck (1876—
1960) arrived from Moscow with fresh instructions. These reiterated the
necessity of forming a ‘bloc’, but at the same time instructed the immediate
formation of a new Communist party while rejecting the concept of Socialist
unity which had been supported at the Berne Conference of the Communist
party in February 1939.12 By 10 June, the right to form political parties had
been granted by Marshal Grigori Zhukov, the military governor of the
Soviet Zone, and on the following day the announcement of the forthcoming
formation of the Communist party appeared in the Berlin press; it constituted
itself on 12 June in the Big Hall of the Berlin Senate.
Grotewohl and his colleagues were taken unawares by this turn of
events. Their hope had been that from the very start of the struggle to build
a new Germany, a single Socialist Unity party would stand at the head of
the working classes instead of a Social Democratic party and a Communist
party; but now this plan had been thwarted by the Communists. At once
Grotewohl’s group constituted itself as the ‘Central Committee of the
S.P.D.’ and dispatched Dahrendorf to the inaugural meeting of the Com-
munist party, at which he was to state in ‘the name of the reborn Social
Democratic party the wish to bring about the organizational unity of the
workers’ and to affirm a readiness ‘to talk on every question of unity with
Communist friends’.3
It was Ulbricht’s speech which opened the debate, and it made no reference
to Socialist unity. In bringing about the rebuilding of a new Germany, the
co-ordination of all the anti-Fascist democratic factions was, he stated, an
absolute necessity; the Communist party would suggest to the ‘S.P.D., the
Christian Democrat party and the other anti-Fascist democratic organiza-
tions’ that they should consider forming a bloc with the Communists.4 Yet
every speaker who followed Ulbricht in the discussion was in support of the
idea of forming a single united Socialist party.5
Three days after the Communists’ inaugural meeting, the S.P.D. central
committee issued a proclamation announcing the formation of the new

1. For Poland, see p. 103; for Romania, p. 114; for Bulgaria, p. 117.
2. See Leonhard, ibid., pp. 389-90.
3. Quoted in Kaden, Einheit oder Freiheit, p. 38.
4. For the text of Ulbricht’s speech, see Dokumente, pp. 21-4.
5. See Leonhard, Die Revolution entlasst ihre Kinder, p. 399. In the report which
Leonhard, who attended the inaugural meeting, wrote for Deutsche Volkszeitung, the
central organ of the Communist party, all references by speakers to the necessity for a
unified Socialist party were deleted.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 75
Socialist party, and posters were put up in the streets inviting all Socialist
representatives to attend an inaugural meeting called for 17 June. Thus, as
in Hanover, the labour movement in Berlin was with reluctance divided into
two parties.
The inaugural manifesto of each party already showed conflicts of
intention. The Social Democrats’ appeal was for the party to aim at forming
the new Germany on a truly Socialist basis: ‘Democracy in state and com-
munity, Socialism in economy and society’. The manifesto ended its ex-
planation of the immediate measures needed to realize this aim with the
slogan: ‘Fight Fascism, for the people’s freedom, for democracy and for
Socialism.’1
In the inaugural manifesto of the Communist party, however, no reference
is to be found to the word ‘Socialism’. It openly acknowledged the capitalist
economic system; it demanded a ‘completely uninterrupted development of
free trade and private employers’ initiative on the basis of property owner-
ship’. As Leonhard recorded, the Communist officials selected to go to
Germany had been instructed in Moscow that they were not to consider
either the realization of Socialism or the preparation for Socialist development
as being their immediate task.
Socialism [the directive instructed] m ust be condem ned as a dam aging tendency
and one which m ust be fought. Germ any is now facing a dem ocratic middle-class
transition which, in content and spirit, is a culm ination o f the dem ocratic middle-
class revolution of 1848. It is im portant to support this culm ination actively while
resisting any Socialist solutions, since under present conditions they would am ount
to com plete demagogy.12

The task as defined by the Communist party’s manifesto was ‘to bring to
a conclusion the move towards a democratization of the middle classes
which had begun in 1848’. But this avowal of democracy was not completely
unqualified, the next paragraph going on to state:
W e are o f the opinion th at to force the Soviet system on G erm any w ould be to
take the w rong path, because this path does not correspond with present develop-
m ent conditions in Germany. W e are rather of the opinion th at the param ount
interests o f the G erm an people in the present situation prescribe a different path,
namely the path o f the resurgence o f an anti-Fascist dem ocratic regime, a parlia-
m entary republic incorporating dem ocratic rights and people’s freedom.3

1. For the text of the manifesto, see Dokumente, pp. 28-31.

2. Leonhard, Die Revolution entlasst ihre Kinder, p. 325. The official Communist
attitude to this question can be found in the Foreword to Dokumente: ‘After the defeat of
Fascism, many honest Communist and Social Democratic workers, who were not sufficiently
familiar with Marxism-Leninism, felt that the time was right to erect Socialism forth-
with. The right-wing S.P.D. leaders of Schumacher’s group tried to exploit this confusion
by attempting to cloak their co-operation with the imperialist forces of occupation and
reactionary elements in Germany, to sabotage working-class unity and prevent democratic
development under the demagogic phrase, “Socialism as a daily task” ’ (pp. 12-13).
3. For the text of the appeal, see Dokumente, pp. 14-20. (The italics are the author’s.)
 76 The Destiny o f Socialism
Democracy was therefore in no way acknowledged as a fundamental
principle but rather as being suitable for the ‘present situation’, while the
system of dictatorship—the so-called Soviet system—was by no means
discarded, but simply reserved for possible future ‘development conditions’.
In this way the German Communist party reoccupied the stage of history
with a programme which, on the face of it, any democratic, middle-class,
capitalist party might support without qualm, since it guaranteed the pre-
eminence of a middle-class, capitalist social order.1
The content of the programme, however, had been composed not in
Berlin but in Moscow; Wilhelm Pieck had brought it in his luggage, together
with the new directives.12 It spoke not with the voice of the ‘honest Communist
worker’ of Germany, but with the voice of Joseph Stalin. His evident intention
was to convince Truman and Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, due to
take place in the middle of July and which could play a decisive part in the
plans he had for Eastern Europe and the Balkans,3 that nothing was further
from the Soviet Union’s mind than the concept of world revolution. More-
over, the approval of capitalist economics in the inaugural manifesto was
no doubt aimed at winning German middle-class parties over to the idea of
a ‘bloc’.
In complete contrast to the Communist programme, that of the Social
Democrats demanded that the way to Socialist change should be paved by
the nationalization of banks, mines, power industries, insurance companies
and mineral deposits.4 Socialism, it declared, now had a direct appeal to all
‘honest Social Democratic workers’, as the obvious consequence of the fall
of Fascism, for, with it, Schumacher stated in Hanover, ‘German capitalism
. . . has itself collapsed together with its political systems and parties’. There-
fore the realization of Socialism had become the task in hand for the working
class. ‘The crucial necessity,’ he wrote, ‘is to bring about the abolition of
capitalist extortion and to take the means of production out of the hands of
the tycoons to make of it a common property, the direction of the whole
economy then being not in the interests of private profiteering but following
the necessities of required planning’. And, speaking in harmony with
Grotewohl’s group in Berlin, he defined the nationalization of all large
industrial enterprises and high finance as well as the redevelopment of landed
property as being absolute essentials. ‘Above all,’ he wrote, ‘the mines,
heavy industries, power industries, transport, a large section of the manu-
facturing industry as well as the insurance and banking economies are not
1. Even with such agrarian reform as the Communist programme visualized, only the
‘great estates of the Junkers, counts and dukes’ were to be included. ‘It will be obvious,’
it stated, ‘that these measures will in no way affect the land or the economy of the big
farmers’—Dokumente, p. 19.
2. See Leonhard, Die Revolution entlasst ihre Kinder, p. 392.
3. See the next chapter, ‘The Origins of the “Cold War” ’.
4. Dokumente, p. 30,
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 77
only ripe for socialization, but must be nationalized if the German economy
is to function effectively.’1
It was inevitable that the whole idea of a Unity party should founder,
considering the one fundamental conflict in the respective aims of the
Communist and Social Democratic parties, for, as Schumacher wrote, it
would become ‘a playground of the most bitter internecine quarrels and of
reciprocal deceit’. Yet, even so, Schumacher did not turn against an action
alliance with the Communist party. ‘We accept without reservation,’ he
stated, ‘a practical co-operation with the Communist party on all social
questions and all aspects relating to the stamping-out of Fascism. This co-
ordination will be organized in such a way that the Social Democratic and
Communist parties will retain their respective ideological and organizational
independence.’ Such a co-ordination of effort, ‘with no attempts at reciprocal
deceit’, would, he believed, bring about an atmosphere suitable for creating
‘improved conditions for a possible union in the future, instead of forcing
through the idea of unity.’2
On the other hand, Otto Grotewohl (1894-1964), as chairman of the
central committee of the S.P.D. in Berlin, wished to see the immediate
founding of a Unity party without waiting for the processes of co-operation
between the two parties to bring about an atmosphere of mutual trust. For
his group the Unity party seemed to be the one effective guarantee against
a resurgence of the schism which had proved such grave disaster to the
German working class. And whatever doubts the Berlin Social Democrats
felt about the Communists’ policy, they believed it would be possible to
bring sufficient influence to bear for the Social Democrats to form a working
majority in any such party.3

Yet while in Britain the Communist party executive was striving for repre-
sentation in the Labour party, and in France pressing hard to bring about a
fusion of the two Socialist parties, in Germany it dismissed any proposal for
organizational unification as untimely.
In their understandable haste to see an organizational unity being created within
the w orkers’ movement as quickly as possible [the justification in the official
history ran], it was overlooked by certain com rades that, despite an extensive agree-
m ent over m any questions th a t were soon to be solved, there were nevertheless
politico-ideological differences, and this prejudice and m istrust would have had to
be re m o v e d .. . . Failing a m odicum o f politico-ideological understanding, any
1. Quoted in Turmwachter der Demokratie, vol. n, pp. 37 and 38.
2. Kurt Schumacher, Politische Richtlinien (Hanover, 1945), quoted in Kaden, Einheit
oder Freiheit, pp. 79 and 80. This memorandum was submitted as a basis for the state
conference of the S.P.D. in October 1945.
3. And, indeed, a few months after the rebirth of the S.P.D., in the elections of a works
council of thirty-two members in the Leuna works, twenty-six Social Democrats, five
centre parties’ representatives and one Communist were elected; see Kaden, Einheit oder
Freiheit, p. 84.
 78 The Destiny o f Socialism
fusion o f the tw o w orkers’ parties w ould have been useless. A unification which
neither rested on a solid M arxist basis nor m ade it possible for a U nity party to
evolve into a party of a new type would, from its very inception, have carried
within itself the seed of a renewed split.1

On 19 June, the central committees of the two parties, however, agreed

at least to form an action alliance, and they set up a joint committee to work
for ‘closer co-operation in the building of an anti-Fascist democratic society’
as well as ‘to clarify ideological questions’. The S.P.D. had also, on 14 June,
joined the constituted ‘bloc of anti-Fascist democratic parties’ (the bloc
embracing, apart from the two worker parties, the Christian Democratic
Union and the Liberal Democratic party). But the central committee of
the Communist party still declined to discuss the formation of a unified
party with the Social Democrats; for them this had to remain a ‘distant
objective’.
It was an attitude which they maintained for six months, up till the
beginning of November 1945. One can only speculate on what their motives
may have been, since the official archives remain sealed. But it does not
seem unreasonable to suggest that Moscow would have been prepared to
sanction a unified party only provided it could have been guaranteed as a
willing instrument of Soviet policy. This being so, the Communists would
have had to change in their favour the balance of power between them-
selves and the Social Democrats before giving consideration to the formation
of a unified party in whose structure they would be ensured a dominant
influence.
The Soviet occupation forces naturally spared no pains in attempting to
promote such a development. In filling administrative positions in the
provincial and district councils, they favoured Communist applicants; they
impeded the licensing of Social Democratic newspapers while making con-
cessions of newsprint allocations to the Communist press.2 Above all, they
supplied the Communist party apparatus with officials carefully schooled in
Russia—German prisoners of war repatriated en masse.
For the Social Democratic central committee, however, a unified party
remained the ‘immovable aim’, as Grotewohl had expressed it at a mass
meeting of 3,000 S.P.D. officials in Berlin on 14 September. But he could
not suppress his disappointment at the predominating lack of encouragement
for true co-operation with the Communists. The ideological differences
between Communists and Social Democrats had hardly been spanned by the
ambiguous gesture towards democracy which was contained in the Com-
munist inaugural manifesto, for in practical terms this remained no more
1. Dokumente, p. 16.
2. While the Communist press was enjoying at the turn of the years 1945-6 a total
circulation of more than four million copies, the whole circulation of the Social Democratic
press was restricted to under a million issues; see Stem, Portrdt einer bolschewistischen
ParteU P- 84.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour M ovement 79

than lip service. ‘Our friends in the Communist party central committee,’
Grotewohl protested with careful diplomacy, ‘are experiencing a degree of
difficulty in convincing their followers that acknowledging the application of
democracy has become a historic necessity.’ The Social Democrats, he said,
‘could only harbour doubts about an honest conviction being contained in a
Communist orientation’. Mistrust between the two parties had not by any
means been overcome, and Social Democrats were being slandered by the
Communists. Yet, if the quest for a common workers’ party were to be
fulfilled, the Communists should not look towards ‘their Social Democratic
comrades in any search for traitors’. Grotewohl also complained of the
breach of the agreed principle of parity through the preferences being given
to Communists in filling vacant posts at the top of the civil service as well
as in local government. From both sides, he stated, ‘opinions against minor
eccentricities and petty jealousies must be expressed, because without the
genuine mutual trust of true comradeship any unified organization will be
condemned to inaction’.1
Grotewohl went on to develop the idea of how he saw the historical
destiny of Social Democracy in the new Germany. As the standard-bearer
of Socialist tradition, it was the party’s duty to stand up for democratic
principles in face of Communist opposition, and for Socialist principles in
face of objections by the bourgeois parties. Its historic function must be to
act as a mediator between the varied concepts of the ‘bloc’ parties now, as in
government and state in the future, as a focal point for all the political ideas
and aims of the other parties in general. This function would win for the
party the leading role in the future German Republic.
But the Communist executive was not prepared to grant the Social
Democrats any leading position in the new state. It demanded that function
exclusively for the Communist party, which, Ulbricht stated, ‘had proved
itself through the fight it had carried out against German imperialism’, and
was therefore entitled to claim its role as the ‘dynamo of democratic recon-
struction’ with special responsibilities. He also decisively rejected Grotewohl’s
concept of Social Democracy as playing the mediator in ideological strife.
‘The action unity of the K.P.D. and S.P.D. allows for no “middle position”,’
he said. ‘Any attempt to occupy such a middle position must weaken the
unity of the working class and only aid the infiltration of reactionary influences
into their numbers.’12 And Franz Dahlem, also a member of the Communist
central committee, replied to Grotewohl’s complaint at the damage being
done by unfairness in filling official posts by saying ‘that for us Communists
the question of any numerical equality between the K.P.D. and S.P.D. in

1. Otto Grotewohl, Wo stehen wir, wohingehett wir ? Der historische Auftrag der S.P.D .,
(Berlin, 1945), quoted in Kaden, Einheit oder Freiheit, pp. 81-2.
2. Deutsche Voikszeitung, 14 October 1945, quoted in Stem, Portrat einer bolschewist-
ischen Partei, pp. 26 and 27.
80 The D estiny o f Socialism
filling positions is less important than the necessity of establishing a strong,
democratic and anti-Fascist sense of direction.1
These high-handed rejections of Grotewohl’s statement and protest were
hardly calculated to fire enthusiasm for a Unity party among the Social
Democratic factions; but the Communists remained unconcerned, for the
Unity party concept did not feature on the agenda they were laying down, in
which it remained a ‘distant objective’.

Then, three weeks later, the Communist executive underwent a startling

volte-face in its attitude to the whole question. At a mass rally in Berlin on
9 November to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution in Germany,
Wilhelm Pieck, supreme leader of the Communist party, declared that now
it must strive ‘with all its strength’ to bring into being ‘a unified German
workers party. Only in this way will the decisive influences in anti-Fascist
democracy be safeguarded for the working class.’12 Unification with the Social
Democrats to form a single party, hitherto regarded as merely a ‘distant
objective’, was now all at once to be realized ‘as quickly as possible’.
The reasons for this sudden turnabout in Communist tactics are again
a matter for speculation; since it had been ordered by confidential directives
from Moscow, it could hardly be otherwise. Evidently Stalin had begun to
realize that he had miscalculated how the ratio of power between the Social
Democratic and Communist parties would develop. Considering the mood
of the hard-pressed population in the Russian occupation zone, it was a
remarkably elementary mistake. The excesses of the Red Army soldiers when
they had entered Germany, the dismantling of plant and machinery under-
taken by the Russians and the reparations which they had secured as a toll
out of current production would hardly have awoken warm sympathies for
the Soviet Union; and the Communist party was clearly regarded as a tool
of the Soviet Union, as the Russian party.
When Moscow directed that, for the time being, no united workers’ party
was to be formed with the Social Democrats, the view prevalent there, as it
was for the Communist executive in Berlin, was that eventually the people
would come to accept the Russian occupation as a permanent factor in their
lives, would recognize that their future depended upon the benevolence of
the Soviet Union and would then come to see the Communist party as their
most effective guardian. But as symptoms of the prevailing public temper
became more obvious as, for example, in the works’ council election at the
Leuna works,3 so this illusion was progressively destroyed. However, local
elections had already been proposed by the Allies for all the zones in Germany
1. Deutsche Volkszeitung, 26 October 1945, quoted in ibid., p. 26.
2. Deutsche Volkszeitung, 10 November 1945, quoted in Stem, Portrat etner bolschewist-
ischen Partei, pp. 27-8.
3. See p. 77.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 81
to take place in 1946. Moscow could not face the risk of elections which
would not secure the Communist party its claim to leadership of the working
class because all Stalin’s plans for Germany depended on Communists
holding leading positions in the new state. Now that it had become doubtful
whether the Communist party could ever emerge with effective power from
an election in the Soviet Zone, the Social Democrats had to be called on to
act as ‘blood donors’, as Schumacher put it, and to be wooed to join with the
Communist party. Hence the sudden urge of the Communists to see the
formation of a proletarian Unity party.
But now it was the Social Democratic party’s central committee which
hesitated to launch itself precipitately into a Unity party enterprise. At their
celebration of the revolution, which took place two days after that of the
Communists in Berlin, Grotewohl formulated the conditions for alliance. It
could not, he said, be brought about as a result of a decision by the party
leadership, as the Communists seemed to think, but could only emerge if it
was the ‘will of all German comrades’ that it should do so; nor could it
come about as ‘a result of external pressure or indirect force’—a warning
against possible Communist attempts to force unity by terrorist techniques.
Moreover, any unification of the parties must apply throughout the whole
German state and not in the Russian Zone alone. So after Pieck had, two
days earlier, called for a total unification of the two parties as quickly as
possible, Grotewohl now described this as a ‘distant goal’ which might ‘one
day’ be brought about.1

Meanwhile, for the first time since the catastrophic year of 1933, Social
Democratic delegates from all over the country had assembled on 6 October
1945 for a conference at Wennigsen, a small village near Hanover. Seventy-
six delegates had come from the three Western Zones, with Grotewohl,
Fechner and Dahrendorf from the Eastern Zone, and, from London, Erich
Ollenhauer and Fritz Heine, two of the surviving members of the party
executive who had left the country in 1933. But while the Allies had approved
the formation of political parties at the Potsdam Conference, these were not
to be permitted at a national level; as a result the conference could not
undertake a formal restoration of the German Social Democratic party.
Since no overall party leadership could be established, it was agreed tem-
porarily to give responsibility for the leadership of the party in the Eastern
Zone to the central committee in Berlin, and that for the three Western
Zones to Kurt Schumacher, as political representatives.
The question of a Unity party was dealt with at the conference as one of
great significance, but the delegates abstained from committing the party to
any decisions that belonged to the future. Grotewohl advocated the necessity
1. See Kaden, Einheit oder Freiheit, pp. 188-9; Stern, Portrat einer bolschewistischen
Partei, p. 29.
82 The Destiny o f Socialism
of eventual unity for the workers’ movement, while Dahrendorf feared disaster
if, following reunification of the state and of the parties, ‘the unity of the
labour movements were not also established; our fight would then have
been in vain’. According to the official report, however, the delegates were
unanimous in agreeing that the question of organic unity with the Communist
party could be decided only at a state congress for a binding decision which
represented the view of the whole party. Neither was it a decision which
could be made in isolation from the influence of developments in the inter-
national labour movement. ‘The question of unification,’ the report stated,
‘is not a German but an international one.’ Emphatic in their wish to
overcome the split in the workers’ movement, the delegates were nevertheless
of the ‘opinion that a lasting and effective unity can only be achieved when
there is agreement on the main Socialist aims and if the party is founded on
a true democracy, submitting its leadership and policies exclusively to the
control and decisions of its members’.1
What made the Unity party a theme of burning urgency for the Com-
munist leadership was an event in Austria: the devastating defeat of the
Austrian Communists in the elections to the constituent national assembly
of 25 November 1945. Until only a few months previously and for seven
years before that, Austria had been the Ostmark (Eastern Province) of
the Third Reich and was now partly occupied by the Red Army. If
the Communists had been defeated there so decisively in spite of the
Russian occupation forces, how could the German Communists expect to
emerge as the dominant party from free elections, even in the Russian
Zone?
But while Austria, like Germany, was subjected to military occupation
by the Allied powers—the Russian Zone in Austria embraced the districts of
Vienna and Lower Austria where industry was concentrated and the working
class was a decisive factor—unlike Germany it was not a vanquished
country; rather, like Poland, it was one which had been ‘liberated’. In the
Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943 the Allies had declared Germany’s
annexation of Austria to be null and void, defining the restoration of Austria’s
independence as a war aim. Thus the question of forming a provisional
government arose as soon as the German army was beaten in mid-April 1945
and Austria freed.
In liberated Poland, Stalin had installed a ‘Soviet-friendly’ government
the moment the Red Army was across its eastern borders and still facing a
long, heavy fight to gain control of the country;2 the Polish government was,
so to speak, smuggled in on the Red Army’s baggage train. In Austria,
1. 'Die Wiedergeburt der deutschen Sozialdemokratie'. Bericht iiber die Vorgeschichte
und den Verlauf der sozialdemokratischen Parteikonferenz von Hannover vom 5. bis 7.
Oktober 1945 (manuscript in the S.P.D. Archives in Bonn), pp. 13-14; see also Kaden,
Einheit oder Freiheit, pp. 132-53; Wesemann, Kurt Schumacher, pp. 90-4.
2. See p. 94.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 83
however, Stalin caused general astonishment by appointing Karl Renner
(1870-1950) as head of the provisional government.
Renner was one of the leading but most controversial figures in Austrian
Social Democracy. During the First World War he had supported the
German position and the Habsburg Monarchy;1he led the Social Democratic
right wing in the First Republic and in Hitler’s plebiscite of March 1938 had
declared himself publicly for the Anschluss annexing Austria to Germany. In
calling him to the leadership, Stalin had, as Renner’s biographer Jacques
Hannak stated, ‘a sly chess tactic in mind’. Simply because Renner appeared
‘tainted’ by his past, Stalin believed he would evidently be ‘an ideal sort of
puppet for the role of president in a satellite government’.2
Renner, however, was equal to Stalin’s cunning. He unhesitatingly showed
Stalin the required deference. In a letter written on 15 April 1945, the day
after his summons to office, he paid him homage as the ‘highest leader,
crowned with glory’ of the Red Army. ‘Without the Red Army,’ he wrote,
‘none of my moves [in taking over office] would have been possible; and for
this not only I, but the future Austrian “ Second Republic” and its workers,
remain indebted to you and your victorious army for all time.’ And he
finished the letter with the declaration:

Due to Russia’s astonishing demonstration of her power, our whole country has
come to see through the falsehoods of twenty years of National-Socialist propa-
ganda and to be filled with admiration for the great Soviet achievement.
The trust of the Austrian working class in particular in the Soviet Union has
become boundless. The Austrian Social Democratic party will consult together with
the Communist party in fraternal affection and they will work together as equals in
the establishment of the new republic. That the country’s future lies with Socialism
is beyond question and need no longer be stressed.3

According to the instructions of the commander of the Russian forces of

occupation, Marshal F. Tolbuchin, Renner was to form a coalition govern-
ment from among the three ‘anti-Fascist parties’: the Social Democrats, the
Communists and even the Austrian People’s party, as the Christian Demo-
cratic party, which had destroyed the First Republic and installed a Fascist
dictatorship, now called itself.4 Under Tolbuchin’s pressure, Renner agreed
to allow the Communists to take control of the Ministry of the Interior with
power over the political and civil police as well as of the Department of
Education and Information with influence over the press and public opinion.
But on one point he remained adamant: he insisted that there should
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 17-18 and 142-3.
2. For, Hannak reasons, ‘what trust could they [the Russians] place in a man who had
been classified by Lenin as one o f the “most despicable lackeys o f German imperialism”
and as “a traitor to Socialism” ?’— Jacques Hannak, Karl Renner und seine Zeit (Vienna,
1965), pp. 670-1.
3. For the full text o f the letter, see Hannak, Karl Renner und seine Zeit, pp. 672-5.
4. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 403-14.
84 The Destiny o f Socialism
be the earliest possible calling of elections for a constituent national
assembly.
Marshal Tolbuchin, having sought to delay the holding of elections as
long as possible, finally gave in to Renner’s insistence, confident of the rapidly
growing influence of the Austrian Communist party. The Communists had
been a very small party at the time of the First Republic; in no general
election had they been able to win more than 20,000 votes against 1,500,000
for the Social Democrats, or to gain a single seat in Parliament. But in the
eight months between the beginning of Soviet rule and the date of the
elections, they had succeeded in capturing strong positions under the wing
of the Soviet occupation forces. Through the Ministry of the Interior they
controlled the police force and gendarmerie of several thousand men and the
administrative apparatus of the state; through the Department of Infor-
mation, they controlled the radio and a large part of the press. They controlled
the factories, impounded as reparations by Russia, with their tens of thousands
of workers and staff; with financial aid from the occupying Soviet power they
were able to flood the country with journals and leaflets. They felt they could
view the outcome of the elections with confidence.
But it was all to culminate in a catastrophic defeat for the Communist
party, which received only 174,000 votes, against 1,435,000 for the Social
Democrats; 5 per cent of votes cast, and only four seats out of 165 in the
assembly.
Marshal Tolbuchin was naturally profoundly disappointed. The failure of
the Communist party, Renner recorded, ‘startled the Russian occupation
regime, disillusioning it considerably and providing a lasting irritant. The
hope that its party would force back Social Democracy in the workers’ esteem
and take over the leadership had thereby been rendered null and void.. .u

This catastrophe for the Austrian Communist party cast its shadow over the
situation in Germany. Any assurance that the Communists might emerge as1
1. Karl Renner, Osterreich von der Ersten zur Zweiten Republik (Vienna, 1953), p. 239.
Later the Communists tried to reverse their failure at the polls by violent tactics. On the
morning o f 5 M ay 1947 they called workers out o f the factories and on to the streets, and
during a battle with police forces attempted to occupy the offices o f the Federal Chancellor.
A second attempt at an uprising, in September and October 1950, which had the support
o f the Soviet forces o f occupation, was more serious. A conference o f Communist shop
stewards had called a general strike to take place on 26 September and had presented the
government with an ultimatum, due to expire on 3 October, demanding the fulfilment o f
certain econom ic conditions. The Communists sent out raiding parties in attempts to
bring the factories to a standstill, block the railways and erect road blocks and barricades
in the streets o f Vienna. This action was also to falter on the resistance put up by the
Social Democratic workers, who defended the factories against the invading Communists
and finally forced the abandonment o f the strike. See A d olf Scharf, Osterreichs Erneuerung
1945-1955 (Vienna, 1955), pp. 161-3 and 254-9; Alfred Migsch, Anschlag auf Osterreich.
Ein Tatsachenbericht iiber den kommunistischen Putschversuch im September-Oktober 1950
(Vienna, 1950).
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 85
the leading party in a German election was now finally dispelled. A unified
party had therefore become for the Communists a vital and urgent necessity.1
The Communist executive suggested to the Social Democratic central
executive that there should be a joint conference of thirty representatives
from each party to discuss the whole question.
The ‘conference of the sixty’ sat on 20 and 21 December in Berlin. The
S.P.D. (Social Democratic party) central executive had submitted a memo-
randum to the K.P.D. (Communist party) central committee before the
meeting to serve as a basis for discussion and to explain the Social Democratic
attitude to unification. According to this concept, both parties were initially
to retain full organizational autonomy until fusion was completed; each
party was to pledge itself ‘to attempt everything possible, and also to lobby
the occupying powers, to ensure a cessation of any preference for or prejudice
against any one of the parties, be it in respect of the freedom of the organi-
zation, be it in respect of the provision of agitation’.2 Each of the two parties
should, ‘at least in the first round of elections,’ have their own candidate list.
Furthermore, favouritism towards Communists in filling administrative
positions and ‘all inadmissible pressure on the S.P.D. and its individual
members’ was to cease. Also, the question of unification would have to be
decided by a national party congress representing all Social Democrats in
Germany.
Yet in the event it was not the Social Democratic memorandum but a
Communist draft which served as a basis for discussion. According to this,
the parties were to head the election campaign from the outset with joint
candidate lists; and they were to ‘reach a fraternal understanding’ in respect
of the selection of candidates and the holding ‘of political positions within
the joint administration’. The Unity party programme was at its least to
achieve ‘the fulfilment of a democratic revival in Germany in the spirit of
building an anti-Fascist, democratic and parliamentary republic’, and, at its
most, ‘the realization of Socialism . . . through working-class political rule
in the spirit of the teachings of Marxism’. The Social Democrats’ demand
that any decision on the merger of the parties should be reserved for a
national party congress was rejected by the Communists since, ‘in view of
1. Leonhard recorded: ‘The Austrian election and its consequences were the main
topic o f discussion with us in the central committee. . . . From that day the great unity
campaign began. There was only one theme: unity. A t every discussion the question o f
unity was always at the top o f the agenda . . .’— Leonhard, Die Revolution entlasst ihre
Kinder, p. 425.
2. H ow things stood regarding ‘freedom’ for the Social Democrats, even in the ‘honey-
m oon’ months o f Social Democratic-Communist co-operation, was illustrated by Gustav
Klingelhofer, a member o f the S.P.D. central executive, during the conference debate.
‘You, comrades o f the K .P .D .,’ he said, ‘you can speak openly. Y ou have nothing to fear.
Y ou can talk anywhere, and say what you like without even being taken to task. It is
a fact that many o f our comrades do not feel able to speak what they feel in their
hearts, since they wish to exercise restraint because o f certain fears resulting from past
experience . . . ’— quoted in Stern, Portrdt einer bolschewistischen Partei, p. 44.
86 The Destiny o f Socialism
the situation in the whole of Germany’ it would, they said, ‘mean a delay for
many months’, while on the other hand, ‘the fusion of the organizations of
both parties in the respective zones is immediately possible.’
In the speech he made on the Communist draft, Grotewohl made it clear
that the S.P.D. rejected joint lists for the impending elections; it would be
through these elections that the true ratios of party strength would be
defined, since the parity demanded by the Communists could not possibly
be reached by purely mechanical considerations. He also emphasized that
for the organizational fusion of both parties, a national unified organization
and the assembly of national party congresses were essential conditions,
while on this question ‘conflicting concepts may arise for which there can
never be a bridge unless the central committee of the K.P.D. insists less
strictly on its point of view’.
In the resolution passed by the conference, however, the presence of
conflict remained unacknowledged. Each party pledged itself to an ‘extended
and deepened unity of action’ as a ‘prelude to the realization of political and
organizational unity within the labour movement which would lead to the
coming together of the German Social Democratic and Communist parties
into one organization’.1
But a few days later, Max Fechner reaffirmed the Social Democrats’
condition for unity. ‘Decision on unity can only,’ he wrote, ‘be made in the
name of the whole party within the German state. Such a decision may only
be realized following confirmation by a national party congress. . . if necessary
by referendum among its members.’12
The referendum was decided upon at the end of December by an enlarged
Berlin S.P.D. district executive, and three weeks later a conference of regional
delegates in Berlin called on Social Democrat party members in the Soviet
Zone to declare by ballot whether they wished for an immediate amalga-
mation of both labour parties, or only for an alliance which would ‘safeguard
the task before them and avoid fraternal strife’.
This decision, however, ran contrary to the policy of the S.P.D. central
executive which, while it had indeed formulated conditions for the fusion,
had held firm to seeing unity as an ‘ultimate aim’. But now this policy met
strong opposition, organized by Franz Neumann, who unconditionally
rejected a Unity party and proposed to force a decision by referendum. The
Berlin district executive, whose majority stood in opposition to the central

1. See Kaden, pp. 196-213; Stem, pp. 30-3; for the text o f the resolution, see D o k u -
m e n te , pp. 346-54.
2. T a g lic h e R u n d sc h a u , 1 January 1946, quoted in Kaden, p. 216; this paper was the
organ o f the Soviet occupation. On the other hand, the decisions o f the central executive
o f 15 January, that national parties must first be founded before unification could be
accomplished, was suppressed by the Russian military government censor in the press o f
the Soviet Zone. The Social Democratic paper in Dresden which published this decision
had to be pulped; see Kaden, p. 228.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 87
executive, called a conference of Social Democratic functionaries for 1 March
and, by an overwhelming majority from the 2,000 delegates, sanctioned
the decision to hold the vote and stipulated 31 March as the day for the
ballot.
The central executive attempted to undermine the decision, seeking
through appeals and meetings to influence party members against taking
part. In the Soviet Zone the ballot was forbidden by the Russian military
government, and so it took place only in the three Western Zones of Berlin.
Of the 33,247 members entitled to vote, 23,755 participated. Of these,
2,937 voted in favour of amalgamation while 19,529 (or over 82 per cent)
rejected it.
This vote was of deep concern to the Communist party leadership, who
could no longer anticipate that a national Social Democratic party congress
would come out in favour of unity. They therefore urged the central executive
to settle the question of a Unity party without further delay in the five
districts of the Soviet Zone.
Grotewohl had also come round to the view that, were the question of a
Unity party to be decided by a national party congress, it would never see
the light of day.1 In company with many Social Democratic supporters, he
was honestly convinced that it was imperative to overcome the split in the
labour movement through the organizational integration of the two workers’
parties. The tragic experience of fraternal strife at the time of the Weimar
Republic had embedded itself deeply in the consciousness of Germany’s
workers. ‘We could never wish to experience again,’ he stated at a Communist
conference, ‘what we went through between 1933 and 1945. We could never
wish to find ourselves once again stepping side by side to the scaffold or into
the penitentiary. Our wish is to work jointly together.’2 Divided, the German
working class had been powerless; united, it would form the leading force
in the coming Germany.
At the same time many Social Democrats felt that Germany’s future
would depend economically and politically upon the occupying powers and
that they would have to choose between orientation towards capitalist
America or Communist Russia. Orientation towards the West was likely to
lead to a renaissance of German capitalism, but orientation towards the East
at least held out a hope of seeing Socialism realized.
1. In a number o f districts within the Soviet Zone— in Saxonia, Thuringen, Mark
Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Pomerania— the Social Democratic party organizations
had declared themselves in favour o f integration; and in some towns in the Western
Zones— Hamburg and Bremen—there was a strong feeling in favour o f fusion. On
the other hand, a conference o f Social Democratic delegates in the British Zone and the
district executives o f the three districts in the American Zone rejected the fusion by,
respectively, a unanimous vote and 144 against six votes. It may therefore be assumed that
at any national conference o f the party a majority would have declared themselves against
unification.
2. See D o k u m e n te , p. 522.
88 The Destiny o f Socialism
In any case, a fusion of the two workers’ parties in the five districts of the
Soviet Zone appeared inevitable since the Soviet government would hardly
tolerate an independent Social Democratic party. As long as discussions on
integration continued the Russians would sanction their existence. Once they
declared themselves against integration however, they would clearly stand in
opposition to the occupying power and would inevitably be suppressed. This
was certainly a factor in the views developed by many Social Democrats in
the Soviet Zone.
There was one further consideration behind the thinking of the central
executive. Should it continue to resist an early integration of the two parties,
the Soviet authorities would arrange for the executive to be voted out and
replaced by more pliant officers. But if, on the other hand, the executive was
to offer its full co-operation, it could expect, as Grotewohl said, to be able
‘to co-ordinate Social Democratic thinking organizationally, and to be able
to utilize it’.1
For these reasons the central executive decided upon co-operation. They
agreed with the Communists that a party congress on unification should be
called for 21 April 1946. Two days earlier separate conferences of the S.P.D.
and K.P.D. were held—the Social Democratic conference representing only
the Social Democratic organizations within the Soviet Zone and East Berlin—
to define every aspect of unification. Then, at the main conference, the joint
congresses agreed unanimously on the integration of each party into the
German Socialist Unity party (S.E.D.).12
With this decision the seal was set on the fate of Social Democracy in the
five districts of the Soviet Zone. In these areas the S.P.D. had been able to
claim 619,000 members, many thousands of whom were no doubt against
integrating their organization with the Communist party. But now there
would never be any question of their being able to separate out again from
the S.E.D. and to reconstitute themselves as the S.P.D., since the Soviet
occupation authorities would have refused them the necessary recognition.
In effect the re-establishment of a Social Democratic party had been banned
throughout a third of all German territory. Only in the Russian sector of
Berlin which, with the three sectors under Allied administration, was
administered by the Allied Control Authority, was the S.P.D. unaffected by
the ban.
The actual ratio of power between the S.P.D. and the S.E.D. became clear
in the municipal elections that took place in all four sectors of the city on
20 October 1946. The S.P.D. obtained 48 per cent of all votes and the S.E.D.
19 per cent; even in the Russian sector 43 per cent of votes were cast for the

1. Quoted in Kaden, p. 290.

2. For the history o f the conflict in the S.P.D . on the question o f unification, see a
detailed report in Kaden, pp. 220-40, 242-56; Stern, pp. 30-40; see also Leonhard, pp.
431-6. For the resolution at the party congress, see D o k u m e n te , pp. 623-33.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 89
S.P.D. against 29 per cent for the S.E.D.1 The results left no room for doubt
that an overwhelming majority of Social Democrats in the Soviet Zone had
been against integrating their party with the Communists and that the issue
of unification had been forced upon them.2

Less than three weeks after the founding of the S.E.D., German Social
Democracy reconstituted itself during the course of a party congress in
Hamburg from 9 to 11 May 1946 at which 258 delegates represented Social
Democratic organizations in the three Western zones of occupation and the
western sector of Berlin. No reference to the question of integration with the
Communists appeared on the agenda. The only mention came in a resolution
by Schumacher on the ‘tasks and aims of German Social Democracy’. In
this he justified a rejection of the concept of unification by drawing attention
to the sharp contrasts of attitude existing between each party on points of
principle.
The German Communist party, he said, had once again emerged with
nationalistic slogans, ‘and this fact alone,’ he stated, ‘that a unification [of
the S.P.D. and the K.P.D. into the S.E.D.] has taken place under a national-
istic banner, is enough for us to say n o . . . . We can never reconcile ourselves
with nationalism.’ He reminded the congress of Leon Blum’s words, as
appropriate to the situation in Germany as they had been to that in France.
‘The French Socialists,’ Blum had said, ‘are French patriots and international
Socialists, but the French Communists are French chauvinists and Russian
patriots.’ ‘But we,’ Schumacher continued, ‘do not wish for politics with

1. The actual ratios o f votes between the S.P.D. and S.E.D . in each o f the four sectors
were:
S.P.D. S.E.D.
0/ 0/
/o /o
American Sector 52-0 12-1
British Sector 50-9 10*3
French Sector 52-5 21-7
Soviet Sector 43-6 29-8
For the whole o f Berlin 48-0 19-0
—Weber, Von der S.B.Z . zur D.D.R. 1945-1958, p. 44.
2. The integration o f the Social Democratic party with the Communist party could be
imposed only because the country was under Russian rule. ‘The creation o f a Unity party
o f the working class in Germany,’ M elnikov admitted, ‘was only possible thanks to the
great victories o f the Soviet Army. . . . Stalin’s clever tactics in the German question laid
the foundations for the advance forces o f the German working class to create a single
workers’ party’— D . Melnikov, Borba, quoted in Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist
Party, p. 336. For the part played by the Russian authorities in Berlin in bringing about
the amalgamation o f the two parties, see Erich W. Gniffke, Jahre mit Ulbricht, with a
preface by Herbert Wehner (Cologne, 1966). Gniffke was a member o f the S.P.D. Berlin
central committee in 1945 and had been from April 1946 a senior official o f the S .E .D .; in
October 1948 he fled to West Berlin. From his first-hand experience o f the events which
led up to the fusion, he asserts that it is General Bokov, the Chief o f Staff in the Soviet
military administration, and Colonel Tulpanov, the head o f its information department,
who should be regarded as the real founders o f the S.E.D.
 90 The Destiny o f Socialism
principles where the principles have become simply a tactic leading on to
adaptable opportunist manoeuvres.’
But even if integration remained out of the question in the three Western
Zones where Social Democracy could continue to exist unhindered, ‘a definite
working basis with the Communist party remained quite possible,’ he said,
always provided that there were no attempts to ‘try to lie to us, undermine
us or to take over our leadership’.1
The conference unanimously agreed with Schumacher’s views on the
Unity party, as it showed during the debate which followed his resolution.
Not a single delegate supported union with the Communists. Gustav
Dahrendorf, who had earlier, as a member of the Berlin central executive,
strongly pleaded the cause for unification, now described from direct
experience how it had been forcibly imposed in the Russian Zone ‘as one
move in carrying through a political design which had, as its aim, the
subjection of all Germany by means of political and pseudo-national
propaganda, and under the influence of which the Soviet Zone had already
succumbed’.12 Schumacher’s undisputed position as party leader was con-
firmed when he was unanimously elected as chairman; Erich Ollenhauer,
a former member of the party leadership in exile, was elected as his
deputy.
For Germany the whole question of the amalgamation of the Socialist
with the Communist party was of far more vital significance than it was
perhaps for any other country in Europe. It is imaginable that in Britain,
even in France or Italy and certainly in the smaller countries of Western
Europe, an integrated Socialist-Communist Unity party might not necessarily
succumb to Communist control and might succeed in asserting its indepen-
dence of the Soviet Union. This was unthinkable, however, in countries
under Russian occupation since in the long run the Soviet authorities would
never have tolerated the existence of a party which remained free of Com-
munist control. A united party in these countries could never be more than
a thinly disguised Communist party, irrespective of the number of Social
Democratic members that it might contain. And no Communist party in any
of these countries could hope to maintain its independence from the Soviet
Union or be anything other than an instrument of Soviet policy.
What might have been the consequences of such an amalgamation of the
two parties throughout the whole of Germany? The Soviet Union controlled
a third of the German state, their area embracing such traditional working-
class strongholds as central Germany and Berlin. Based on these areas, the
Communist-dominated Unity party would have been able—but for the
counterprevailing weight of the Social Democratic party—to seize control of
1. Protokoll der Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei
Deutschlands (Hamburg, 1947), pp. 47, 200 and 30-1.
2. Protokoll, p. 113.
 The Problem o f Unification in the German Labour Movement 91
the labour movement throughout the whole of Germany and thus ensure the
predominance of the Communist party over the entire state.
For those Socialist parties in other Western European countries contem-
plating integration with the Communists, the question of what the relationship
of a future Unity party should be towards the Soviet Union was of no great
significance. In Germany, on the other hand, it was a critical factor involving
the extension of Russian influence across the whole German state as far as
the Rhine. Thus, short of sacrificing the ideal of independence for a future
Germany, the concept of a Socialist Unity party was bound to fail.
So once again the German labour movement had entered the stage of
history in a state of schism. And even as the conflict between the Western
powers and the Soviet Union intensified and degenerated into the Cold War,
so the conflicts between the two workers’ parties increased and degenerated
into a passionate hostility.
 5 • The Origins o f the ‘Cold War’

During the course of the Second World War, relations between the Western
powers and the Soviet Union had remained on the friendliest possible terms.
Roosevelt kept himself free of any suspicions towards Stalin’s plans and,
apparently, Churchill’s trust in Stalin remained unshakeable. As he reported
in the speech that he made in the House of Commons on 27 February 1945
after returning from the Yalta Conference:
T he im pression I b rough t back from the C rim ea, and from all m y oth er con tacts,
is th at M arshal Stalin and th e S oviet leaders w ish to live in h o n o u ra b le friendship
w ith the W estern dem ocracies. I feel a lso that their w ord is their b on d . I k n o w o f n o
G o vern m en t w h ich stan ds to its ob lig a tio n s, even in its o w n desp ite, m ore so lid ly
than the R u ssian S oviet G overn m en t. I d ecline a b solu tely to em bark here o n a d is-
c u ssio n a b o u t R u ssian g o o d faith. It is qu ite evid en t that th ese m atters to u c h the
w h o le future o f th e w orld . Som b re in d eed w o u ld be th e fortu n es o f m an k in d if so m e
aw ful schism arose betw een the W estern dem ocracies and the R u ssian S oviet U n io n .1

And a few weeks later, on 29 April, he wrote to Stalin: ‘. . . there has

grown up throughout the English-speaking world a very warm and deep
desire to be friends on equal and honourable terms with the mighty Russian
Soviet Republic’.2
The United States was similarly motivated by a warm sympathy for
Russia. ‘Two months ago,’ Harry Hopkins told Stalin in conversation on
26 May 1945 when sent to Moscow by President Truman, ‘there had been
overwhelming sympathy among the American people for the Soviet Union. . .
primarily because of the brilliant achievements of the Soviet Union in the war.’3
1. W inston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. vi: Triumph and Tragedy (London,
1954), p. 351. 2. ibid., p. 431.
3. Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers o f Harry L. Hopkins, vol. ii (London,
1948), p. 876. See also James F. Byrnes, who recorded in his notes: ‘If one remembers the
attitude o f the peoples in the days o f the German d e fe a t. . . everyone will agree that the
Soviet U nion possessed a treasure o f good will in the United States as great if not greater
than in any other country’— Speaking Frankly (New York, 1947), p. 71.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 93

But Hopkins’s objective in describing America’s sympathies for Russia

was to convey to Stalin the fact that there had been a change of the mood.
American opinion was now, he stated, ‘seriously disturbed about [the
deterioration in] their relations with Russia’. Churchill’s long letter to Stalin
of 29 April similarly indicates the presence of a conflict which carried within
it the seed of a split in the Western alliance and which related to the interpre-
tation of agreements over Poland at the Yalta Conference.

Four months before the Yalta Conference took place, Churchill had agreed
with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 that there should be a division of the
spheres of influence between the two powers in the Balkans: a 90 per cent
predominance in Romania was to go to Russia while Britain took a 90 per
cent predominance in Greece; a 75 per cent Russian predominance was to
be accepted in Bulgaria, while each was to exercise a 50 per cent influence in
both Yugoslavia and Hungary.1 But the question of Poland’s future had
been left in abeyance, reserved for decision at the Yalta Conference itself.
At the Yalta Conference, which began on 4 February 1945, Stalin soon
reached an agreement with Churchill and Roosevelt on the eastern border of
the future Poland.2 The Soviet Union was to keep the eastern half of the
1. Churchill’s own description o f how his agreements with Stalin were arrived at
provides an illustration o f the way in which the fate o f a people and their country may be
decided. Churchill and Eden had reached M oscow on the afternoon o f 9 October, and
both had withdrawn after supper for a discussion with Stalin and M olotov. They had
hardly sat down at the table when Churchill raised the question o f the future o f the Balkans.
‘D o n ’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways,’ he said. ‘So far as Britain and Russia
are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Romania,
for us to have ninety per cent o f the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Y ugoslavia?’
Then, while this was being translated, he wrote on a half-sheet o f paper:
‘Romania
R u s s ia ................................... .. 90%
The o t h e r s .......................... .. 10%
Greece
Great Britain .. •• 90%
(in accord with U .S.A .)
Russia .. .. •• 10%
Yugoslavia .. .. .. 50-50%
Hungary .. .. .. 50-50%
Bulgaria
Russia .. .. •• 75%
The others . . .. .. 25% ’
Churchill pushed the list across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There
was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed
it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down. . . . After this
there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre o f the table. A t length I said,
‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed o f these issues, so
fateful to millions o f people, in such an offhand manner? Let us bum the paper.’ ‘N o,
you keep it,’ said Stalin— Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 198.
2. For a documentary description o f the discussions on the territorial new order for
Poland, see Boris Meissner, Russland, die Westmachte und Deutschland>. Die sowjetische
Deutschlandpolitik, 1943-1953 (Hamburg, 1953), pp. 40-4.
94 The Destiny o f Socialism
country up to the Curzon Line, which Russia had been conceded by the
Western powers after the First World War and which it had annexed in the
Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland in September 1939, while Poland was to be
‘compensated’ with German provinces. But the actual definition of Poland’s
western borders—the Oder-Neisse Line, as proposed by Stalin—was to be
held in reserve for the peace conference.1 The prior concern at Yalta was to
discuss the character of the provisional government in liberated Poland.
But in the event the Yalta Conference faced a fait accompli Stalin had
already established a pro-Soviet government—a ‘Polish Committee of
National Liberation’—which on 22 July 1944 proclaimed itself the pro-
visional government and declared that it would take over the administration
of the provinces liberated by the Soviet army;2 its seat was in Lublin, and it
therefore became known as the Lublin government.
But, long before the Lublin government appeared on the scene, the Polish
government in exile, with General Wladyslaw Sikorski as prime minister,
had constituted itself in London following the fall of Poland in September
1939. Sikorski’s government was recognized by the Western Allies, and, after
Russia’s entry into the war against Germany, by the Soviet Union as well;
it had organized guerrilla forces in Poland as well as an army of 150,000 men
under British command.3 Stalin, however, had broken off relations with the
London government in exile on 25 April 19434 and had formed a counter-
1. A s early as the Tehran Conference at the end o f November 1943 Churchill and
Roosevelt had recognized the Curzon Line in principle as Russia’s western border. See
W. D . Leahy, I Was There (London, 1950), p. 249; see also Stanislav Mikolajczyk, The
Pattern o f Soviet Domination (London, 1948), pp. 107-8.
2. The manifesto to the ‘Poles in the country, in foreign lands and in German captivity’
stated: *. . . The N ational Council [of the Polish Committee o f the National Liberation]. . .
is the only authority o f Poland’s sovereignty . . . based on the constitution o f 1921, which
has been legally approved and is valid’; the London government, on the other hand, ‘is a
self-nominated body based on the illegal Fascist constitution o f 1935’— quoted in Brian
Ireland, ‘Poland’, in R. R. Betts (ed.), Central and South-East Europe, 1945-1948 (London,
1950), pp. 132-3.
3. See Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 330.
4. The reason for breaking off relations was the crisis precipitated by the ‘Katyn
massacre’. The Germans claimed that in April 1943, on their retreat through the woods
o f Katyn, near Smolensk, they had found a mass-grave containing the corpses o f several
thousand Polish officers. N azi propaganda at once accused the Soviet government o f
having allowed them to be murdered three years previously through the ‘Jewish executioners
o f the G .P .U .’ The Russian government naturally countered that the Polish officers had
been murdered by the Nazis. When, however, the Polish government in London took up
the Nazi accusation, the Soviet government broke off all relations with it. N o impartial
examination could convincingly apportion the blame for the massacre. That, however,
Hitler and Stalin were equally capable o f having done it requires no special proof; both
had systematically exterminated people who were embarrassing them in hundreds o f
thousands. For the attitude o f the Polish government in London, see Mikolajczyk, The
Pattern o f Soviet Domination, pp. 30-42; for the text o f the Soviet note, see ibid., pp. 294-5.
Alexander Werth, who had as the correspondent o f the Sunday Times o f London taken
part in the investigations into the incident and carefully examined the evidence, took a very
sceptical view o f the Russian version despite his sympathies for the Soviet U nion; see
Russia at War (N ew York, 1964), pp. 661-7.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 95

government, which, on 4 January 1945, a month before Yalta, was officially

recognized by the Soviet government in all its forms as the legal provisional
government of Poland.
As a result, the Yalta Conference found itself with two Polish governments
to deal with: the one in Lublin and the one in London. Stalin had persuaded
Roosevelt and Churchill that the Soviet Union would only tolerate in Poland
a government which was friendly towards it. ‘To this we are pledged,’ Stalin
wrote in a letter to Churchill, ‘apart from all else, by the blood of the Soviet
people, which has been profusely shed on the field of Poland in the name of
the liberation of Poland.’1
There was also the issue of the security of the Soviet Union. ‘For our
people,’ Stalin told the Yalta Conference, ‘the question of Poland is a question
of security.’
P o la n d h as th rou gh ou t her h istory been a corrid or th rou gh w h ich th e en em y has
driven in to R u ssia. T w ice in th e past thirty years h ave ou r en em ies th e G erm an s
p assed th rou gh th at corridor. It is in R u ssia ’s interests that P o la n d sh o u ld be stron g
an d pow erfu l en o u g h to be ab le to c lo se th at corrid or by its o w n strength. . . . F o r
th e S o v ie t U n io n this is a q u estio n o f life an d d e a th .2

No special show of friendship towards the Soviet Union could, however,

be expected from the Polish government in London, which was made up of
a coalition of the Polish National party, a nationalist party of the bourgeoisie,
the conservative Polish Peasants’ party, the Christian Democrats and the
Socialists. Stalin’s main problem was that, the Polish Communists apart, not
a single Pole could be found who felt genuine friendship towards the Soviet
Union.3 Hatred of Russia, which had governed Poland as a province for
over 150 years, suppressing all national freedom movements with fire and
sword, was a national tradition deeply rooted in the thought and feelings of
the Polish people.4 It had been drastically revived at the time when the
Soviet Union had joined with Hitler’s Germany to attack the young republic
in 1939, so destroying the Polish state and dividing the country between
1. Quoted in Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 430. Churchill, however, reminded
Stalin o f his reply o f 29 April 1945, that Great Britain had declared war on Germany in
1939 for the sake o f Poland’s independence.
2. Quoted in Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, pp. 31-2; Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy,
pp. 322-3.
3. Even the Polish Communists harboured few exuberant sympathies for the Soviet
U nion. In M ay 1938 Stalin had dissolved the Polish Communist party and exterminated
almost all o f its leaders— among them Henryk Walecki, A d olf Warski, Wera Kostrzewa
and Julian Lenski. Only Wladislaw Gomulka and Boleslaw Bierut escaped this ‘purge’.
See Branko Lazitch, ‘Stalin’s Massacre’, in The Comintern— Historical Highlights, pp.
146-51. For the dissolution o f the party, see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-
1943, pp. 336-9.
4. ‘There is no people,’ Lenin said, ‘which has suppressed Poland as much as the
Russians’— speech on the national question to the Seventh Congress o f the Russian Com-
munist Party, 12 M ay 1917, Sochineniya, xxrv, pp. 264-5, quoted in D avid J. Dallin, From
Purge to Coexistence (Chicago, 1964), p. 171.
96 The Destiny o f Socialism
Germany and Russia for the fourth time. The regime of bloody terror which
Russia had then established in eastern Poland to match that of the Nazis in
western Poland in no way helped to pacify Polish hatred of the Russian
nation.1

Then, finally, one towering catastrophe had heaped glowing coals on to their
already burning hatred. Towards the end of July 1944, the Soviet army of
Marshal Rokossovsky was advancing up to the River Vistula. The Germans
had withdrawn to the western bank and were entrenched in a suburb of
Warsaw. While Soviet fighter planes bombarded the German positions,
Moscow radio on 29 July appealed to the people of Warsaw to rise to meet
the hour of their liberation.12 Upon this, General Tadeuz Bor-Komorowski,
commander of the Polish underground army, in agreement with the Polish
government in exile, gave orders that the armed uprising in Warsaw was to
take place on 1 August.
It began in the early hours of the morning. The Polish underground army,
with 46,000 men in its ranks, rose, expecting that the Soviet Army, only
twenty miles distant, would support them by an advance across the Vistula.
Instead, Marshal Rokossovsky halted the offensive, the Russian artillery fell
silent, and the Soviet army maintained its inactivity during the city’s nine-
week death-struggle. When the uprising began, Warsaw contained only bare
reserves of food and ammunition. Mikolajczyk, who had been appointed
prime minister of the Polish government in exile following Sikorski’s death,
had arrived in Moscow two days before the start of the uprising to ask Stalin
for help.3 This Stalin not only refused; he also blocked help from the British
and United States air forces by forbidding their landing on the Russian-
occupied airport near Warsaw, since ‘the Soviet government did not wish’,
as the Russian note to the Allies stated, ‘to associate itself either directly or
indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw’.4 Roosevelt and Churchill tele-
graphed a joint appeal to Stalin on 29 August to consider the moral effect
on world opinion. Stalin, however, remained obdurate; the incident, he
replied, concerned a ‘group of criminals who have embarked on the Warsaw
adventure in order to seize power.. .’.5And so the city of a million inhabitants

1. Wladyslaw Gomulka, secretary general o f the Communist party, which had reorgan-
ized after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet U nion under the name o f the Polish Labour party,
emphasized this on 12 January 1944 in a letter to the Polish Communists, who had formed a
Federation o f Polish Patriots in M oscow; quoted in Hansjakob Stehle, ‘Polish Commun-
ism’, William L. Griffith (ed), Communism in Europe (Massachusetts, n.d.), vol. i, p. 93.
2. ‘The hour o f liberation has arrived! People o f Poland, take up arms! D o n ’t hesitate
for one m om ent!’ Thus ended the appeal. For its text, see Mikolajczyk, The Pattern o f Soviet
Domination, p. 76.
3. For his discussion with Stalin, see Mikolajczyk, The Pattern o f Soviet Domination,
pp. 79-82.
4. Quoted in Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 118.
5. For the text o f the two documents, see ibid., pp. 119-20.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War' 97

was left to its fate. On 2 October, after sixty-three days of bitter fighting,
Bor-Komorowsky capitulated. Three hundred thousand Poles had been
killed or deported and the city was one vast ruin.
The motive which governed Stalin in his attitude towards the Warsaw
rising was to be found in his reply to Roosevelt and Churchill. He saw the
leaders of the uprising as men who, owing allegiance to the Polish government
in London, formed ‘a group of criminals’ who had plotted the insurrection
in order to ‘seize power’. It was exactly this which he wished to avoid—that
the Polish government in exile should gain a foothold in Warsaw. Conse-
quently he wished to see the failure of the uprising and the destruction of
the Polish underground. In his plans for the future of Poland, Warsaw was
not to be allowed liberation under the aegis of the government in exile.

The Yalta Conference devoted six of its seven full meetings to the question
of the future character of the Polish government.1 Stalin wished to gain
recognition for the Lublin government, at whose head stood men—he named
Bierut, Osobka-Morawski and General Rola-Zymierski12—who had been in
the resistance movement and who, he asserted, were highly popular with the
Polish people. Churchill and Roosevelt demanded that the basis of the Lublin
government should be widened by the inclusion of members of the London
government and that there should be elections for a democratic people’s
parliament at the earliest moment. Following lengthy discussion, the con-
ference finally agreed on a declaration by which the Soviet government
undertook responsibility for reorganizing the Lublin government.3
Upon this, Roosevelt asked Stalin what the earliest possible date would
be for the election. ‘Within a month,’ Stalin replied, ‘unless there is some
catastrophe on the front, which is improbable.’4
Stalin gave this assurance on 11 February 1945, two and a half months
before the entry of the Soviet army into Berlin and the end of the war in
Europe. No election took place in Poland, however, until almost twenty-
three months later, on 19 January 1947.

Churchill and Roosevelt had expected from their agreements with Stalin that
developments would take place in Poland along the pattern of the Western
democracies—that they would see the creation of a Poland that would
ideologically and politically fall within the Western powers’ sphere of
influence.

1. For a review o f the discussions, see ibid., pp. 320-4 and 329-39.
2. Boleslaw Bierut was a leader o f the Polish Communist party who had been its
representative at the Communist International; Edward Osobka-Morawski was a left-wing
Socialist who, in December 1943, together with a group from the Socialist party o f Poland,
opted out to join forces with the Communist party.
3. For the text o f the declaration, see Churchill, T riu m p h a n d T r a g e d y , p. 338.
4. Quoted in ibid., p. 333.
98 The Destiny o f Socialism
These expectations were, however, in total conflict with the demand made
by the Soviet Union—recognized in all its implications by both Churchill
and Roosevelt—for a Poland friendly to the Soviet Union. They had sought
a tempering of the Lublin government through the acceptance of representa-
tives of the bourgeois parties. These were not, however, sympathetically
disposed towards the Soviet Union, but regarded it with loathing. The Polish
government in London, of which they were a part, had accepted with alacrity
the German districts of East Prussia and Silesia up to the Oder which had
been given to the future Poland at Yalta, but had refused to recognize any
concessions to Russia in the eastern parts of the country. It could not
therefore be expected that a Poland influenced by men of the London govern-
ment and their parties would become Russia’s friendly neighbour. Poland
remained a Catholic country, and the Church was the arch-enemy of
Bolshevism; it governed the attitudes of the peasants, who formed a pre-
dominant majority, while the middle classes were equally anti-Soviet.
Therefore it was unthinkable that any pro-Soviet government could emerge
from free and secret democratic elections. Moreover, Stalin feared that an
independent Poland, founded on democratic principles, might actually
become a hostile force, the object of whose foreign policies would be to
regain the Polish provinces east of the Curzon Line lost at Yalta in a future
war in alliance with anti-Soviet powers. So he refused to allow in the Warsaw
government the presence of any middle-class politicians whose attitudes
towards the Soviet Union might be questioned.
Then, two months after Yalta, an event occurred which decisively changed
the foreign policy of the United States towards the Soviet Union. Roosevelt
who throughout the war had honestly striven for a friendly relationship
between America and Russia, out of his conviction that the peace of the
world could only be safeguarded by a permanent agreement between these
two great powers, died on 12 April 1945. With his successor, Harry S. Truman,
an anti-Bolshevik strain of feeling emerged within the United States govern-
ment. Truman himself, in any case, felt as little sympathy for Bolshevik
Russia as he had for Nazi Germany; as he had publicly declared a few weeks
after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, his wish was to see a battle of
attrition and the destruction of both sides.1 Now Russia had won her war
with tremendous aid from the United States, and Truman was obliged to
accept this fact. However, he remained determined as far as was within his
power to prevent the subjection of Russia’s neighbour states to the dominance
1. New York Times, 24 July 1941, quoted in D avid Horowitz, The Free World Colossus.
A Critique o f American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (London, 1954), p. 61. Roosevelt, on
the other hand, had assisted the Soviet U nion even before America entered the war after
Pearl Harbor. Harry Hopkins, sent by Roosevelt to M oscow, had on his orders pledged the
United States unconditionally ‘to grant Stalin all possible aid in tanks, aeroplanes and
whatever was required’; see Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (N ew York, 1948),
pp. 327-8, 333.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War’ 99

of the Soviet Union and, above all, of Poland. Only forty-eight hours after
Roosevelt’s death, even before the funeral of the deceased president, Truman
wrote to Churchill suggesting they should dispatch a joint note requiring
Stalin to invite representatives of the Polish middle-class parties to Moscow
to agree on the formation of a new Polish government.1 Then, a few weeks
after the entry of the Red Army into Berlin, he called a halt to aid—as
heavy a blow for Russia as for Britain.2
When the American Secretary of State, Harry Hopkins, arrived in Moscow
towards the end of May to discuss the candidates for the Warsaw government
proposed by Truman and Churchill, Stalin rejected them all,3 with the
exception of the leader of the Polish Peasants’ party, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk,
who had become the prime minister of the Polish government in exile after
the death of General Wladyslaw Sikorski in July 1943, and who had agreed
to Poland’s new territorial order. In his attitude he stood alone in the cabinet,
however, and so resigned from it in November 1944. Furthermore, he had
openly stated that he considered ‘a close and lasting friendship with Russia’
to be ‘the keystone of future Polish policy’ and that he recognized the
borders of Poland as they had been agreed at Yalta.4 As a result of this
declaration of loyalty, Stalin consented to accept him as a member of the
‘Provisional Government of National Unity’. He became its vice-premier.
It represented a compromise on Stalin’s part, and now Truman and
Churchill could no longer reject a government which, while it was evidently
ruled by Communists, included a representative of the Polish Peasants’
party and, quite apart from the Socialists, representatives of a ‘democratic
party’ even though it had been founded and was led by Communists.
This government was recognized by Britain and the United States on 5
July 1945.
1. See Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 424-6.
2. Hugh Dalton, the British Chancellor o f the Exchequer in the new Labour govern-
ment, remarked in his memoirs on the effect o f the cessation o f ‘Lend-lease’. ‘This very heavy
blow struck us without warning and without discussion . . . now we faced . . . total econo-
mic ruin.’ Britain, he continued, had to reckon with a deficit in its trade balance o f £1,250
million ($5,000 million)—Hugh D alton, High Tide and After. Memoirs 1945-1960 (London,
1962), pp. 68 and 72. The blow which struck Russia was, however, a great deal harder
because Russia had been far more devastated by the war than Britain. The Germans had
partially destroyed fifteen large cities, 1,710 smaller towns, 70,000 villages and 31,850
industrial complexes. For a summary o f the Russian war damage, see D . F. Fleming, The
Cold War and its Origins 1917-1960 (London, 1961), vol. i, p. 252.
3. Stalin stated his position very clearly in a letter to Churchill o f 5 May 1945: ‘. . . we
cannot be satisfied that persons should be associated with the formation o f the future Polish
government who, as you express it, “are not fundamentally anti-Soviet”, or that only those
persons should be excluded from participation in this work who are in your opinion
“extremely unfriendly towards Russia” . Neither o f these criteria can satisfy us. We insist,
and shall insist, that there should be brought into consultation on the formation o f the
future Polish government only those persons who have actively shown a friendly attitude
towards the Soviet U nion and who are honestly and sincerely prepared to co-operate with
the Soviet state.’ For the text o f this letter, see Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 435-7.
4. For the text o f the declaration, see ibid., pp. 426-7.
100 The Destiny o f Socialism
Yet Truman and Churchill were not fully confident. A delegation from
the Provisional government was invited to the Potsdam Conference—
assembling in the middle of July 1945—so as to bring home to the Russians
the prime importance which Britain and the United States attached to the
holding of free elections in Poland. The promise that such elections would be
held was renewed in the Potsdam Declaration, while Churchill asked
Boleslaw Bierut, the Communist president of the Provisional government,
for a tete-a-tete in order to subject him to a ‘strict’ explanation. He asked
him whether Poland would plunge into Communism, and Bierut assured him
that nothing was further from their intentions than a Communist Poland.
Poland, he said, wished for friendly relations with the Soviet Union, but it
had no wish to imitate the Soviet system, and whoever attempted to impose
this by force would encounter resistance. ‘Poland,’ he said, ‘will develop on
the principles of Western democracy’; it would, in fact, become the most
democratic state in Europe, while elections in Poland would be more
democratic than those in England itself.1

Yet the calling of elections was once again delayed, for soon after Miko-
lajczyk’s return to Poland, where he was received by vast, jubilant crowds,
there occurred a series of heavy and frequently bloody battles between his
followers and the Communists causing thousands of casualties on both sides.
The Polish People’s party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe—P.S.L.), which he
had founded after his return, and of which he was the leader, had become a
rallying point for all those who were afraid of Soviet Russia and the Com-
munists—the aristocrats, big landowners, peasants, the middle and upper
classes, and, above all, the Catholic hierarchy with its legion of priests.
Mikolajczyk believed that his party could, in free elections, collect at least
60 per cent of the votes.
Of the consequences of such an election result there could be no doubt.
An anti-Communist middle class, united in its bitterness towards the Soviet
Union and in control of Parliament and the government, and even despite
Mikolajczyk’s declaration of loyalty, would come into sharp conflict with
the Soviet Union.2 The principles of democracy were incompatible with the
principle of Russia’s security under Stalin’s definition, which had been agreed
to at Yalta by Britain and the United States: a Poland friendly towards
Russia. For only a Communist-led Poland could ensure a permanent alliance
1. For Churchill’s talk with Bierut, see ibid., pp. 575-7.
2. In fact Gomulka, making an election address in Lodz as the general secretary o f the
Workers’ party, as the Communist party now called itself, stated that the Soviet U nion
would not tolerate any government in which the Workers’ party was not the leading element;
should the P.S.L. emerge from the elections as the leading party, the Red Army would
occupy Poland — G lo s L u d u (Warsaw), 5 January 1947, quoted in ‘R .’, T h e Fate o f Polish
Socialism’, in F o re ig n A ffa ir s , vol. xxvm (October 1949), p. 132. The Red Army had been
withdrawn from Poland in June 1945, but Soviet troops remained in Poland to maintain a
‘line o f communication’ between the U .S.S.R . and the Red Army occupying East Germany.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War’ 101

of friendship with the Soviet Union, while the Communists, as a political

minority,1 could not expect that free elections, even in alliance with the
Socialists, would win them a parliamentary majority.
Thus it was unimaginable from the outset that any election might take
place in Poland which had any regard to the spirit and methods of democracy.
The Communist leadership made no attempt to conceal the fact. ‘Democracy,’
Zambrowski, a Politbureau member, declared, ‘can never mean freedom for
the enemies of freedom. While powerful organizations of political bandits
remain active and infiltrate the judiciary as well as the State administration,
we can allow such people none of the privileges of democratic freedom.’2
The Communists, in command of the powers of the state—the minister of
the interior, with authority over the civil and secret police, was naturally a
Communist, apart from the actual presence of Russian divisions in the
country—had ruthlessly invoked these powers to ensure the suppression of
their opponents. Active members of Mikolajczyk’s party were arrested in
large numbers, while the party’s press was stifled, its election meeting broken
up and its list of candidates declared void in ten out of twenty-five con-
stituencies.
The only other opposition party in Poland, the Polish Socialist party or
P.P.S. (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) had by the time of the election already
joined the Communist camp. As early as December 1943, when, as we have
seen, a group under the leadership of Edward Osobka-Morawski and
Stanislaw Szwabbe split off from the P.P.S. to constitute itself as the ‘Workers’
party of Polish Socialists’ (Robotnicza Partia Polskich Socjalistow—R.P.P.S.)
and formed an alliance of action with the Communist Polish Workers’ party
{PolskaPartia Robotnicza—P.P.R.) under Wladyslaw Gomulka’s leadership.3
1. The Polish Communist party at the height o f its recruiting drive in 1931 could claim
12,000 members, and in 1941 (in the areas occupied by the Russians as well as by the
Germans) 20,000 members; see Nowe Drogi, January 1951, quoted in Richard F. Staar,
Poland 1944-1962. The Sovietization o f a Captive People (Louisiana, 1962), p. 72. The party,
shaken by internal crisis, was dissolved by Stalin in March 1938 under the accusation o f
having been infiltrated by ‘Fascist agents in the leadership’; see Braunthal, History o f the
International, 1914-1943, pp. 316-17. In 1955, however, J. Dzierzynski declared in the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 34, ‘any suspicion that the leadership o f the Polish Communist
Party had been saturated by enemy elements . . . has proved to be unfounded. The Polish
Communists stood during this period at the head o f the anti-Fascist struggle by the Polish
nation for their country’s freedom and independence’— Pravda, 3 September 1955. The
Communists had had to cease their struggle, however, when Stalin and Hitler reached agree-
ment to destroy and divide Poland between them; see Braunthal, History o f the Inter-
national, 1914-1943, p. 531. After the entrance into Poland o f the Soviet army, the number
o f party members rose to 364,000 in July 1946 and to 848,000 in July 1947; see Staar, Poland,
1944-1962, p. 167.
2. Rom an Zambrowski, ‘The Party before the Elections’, in Nowe Drogi, January 1947,
quoted in ibid., p. 49.
3. For the bringing into line o f the P.P.S., see Adam Ciolkosz, ‘Poland’, in D enis
Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, with a Foreword by Aneurin Bevan (London, 1951), pp. 38
and 56; ‘R .’, ‘The Fate o f Polish Socialism’, in Foreign Affairs vol. xxvm (October 1949),
pp. 125-42.
102 The Destiny o f Socialism
A national conference in September 1944 declared itself to be the represen-
tative of the ‘official’ P.P.S. Osobka-Morawski, installed by Moscow as
president of the Lublin Committee, was elected chairman, with Jozef
Cyrankiewicz as general secretary.
Two parties of the P.P.S., the ‘official’ and the ‘original’, thus existed
side-by-side and it was the original which had led the guerrilla resistance
and the Warsaw rising. Its general secretary was Kazimierz Puzak, one of
the foremost figures in the history of the Polish Socialist movement. He had
joined it in its early years in 1904, had in 1910 been sentenced as an active
revolutionary by a Tsarist court to eight years’ hard labour, and been
imprisoned for seven years in chains and solitary confinement in the infamous
Schlusselburg Fortress until released in March 1917 by the onset of the
Russian Revolution. As general secretary of the P.P.S. in the period between
the wars and during the German occupation, he had been the symbol and
inspiration of the underground. Then, in March 1945, his arrest by the
Soviet authorities excluded him from having any influence over the realign-
ment of the P.P.S.1
The party’s leadership now fell to Zygmunt Zulawski, who had been
general secretary of the Polish trade union confederation in the period
between the wars. The original P.P.S. now found itself under heavy pressure
from the state machinery, legal promotion of its activities being almost
impossible. Zulawski therefore tried to organize under the title of ‘Social
Democratic party of Poland’, but Osobka-Morawski, who had meanwhile
been made prime minister of the Lublin government, refused to allow its
registration as a lawful party. So Zulawski asked all members of the ‘original’
P.P.S. to join the ‘official’ party in the hope it would prove possible to
preserve its Social Democratic character. And as it happened, a great many
members of the original party did in fact transfer their allegiance. The
original P.P.S. having thus vacated the public scene, the official party
was recognized in May 1946 by the International Socialist Conference
(COMISCO)—the forerunner of the post-war Socialist International—as
representing the Socialist movement in Poland.
But Zulawski’s hopes never materialized. The Communist dominance
within the party became more and more evident. Even Osobka-Morawski,
who had promoted the pact to form a United Front with the Communists
and who had defended this move against Zulawski’s wing of the party, was
moved to protest against the domination which the Communist party exerted.
‘A United Front should not rest on the principle,’ he wrote in August 1946,
1. After imprisonment and a remand for an eighteen-month period, Puzak was sen-
tenced in Novem ber 1948 with five other leading officials o f the P.P.S. by a military court
‘as agents o f Polish and international capitalism’ to ten years’ hard labour; see T h e T r ia l o f
P o lis h S o c ia lis t L e a d e r s . Report presented by the Polish Socialist Party to the International
Socialist Conference, Copenhagen (1950), Archives o f the Socialist International, Amster-
dam.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 103

‘that one [member of the front] governs, while the other subordinates itself;
that one decides the policy, while the other obligingly nods its head.’ This
conflict between the Socialist and Communist elements was settled by a
discussion in Moscow in November 1946, to which representatives of both
parties were summoned, which formulated a new pact on a United Front
basis, declaring the Socialist party and the Communist Workers’ party to be
‘separate, independent and equal organizations’, which would ‘mutually
respect their organizational structures’.1
This pact did not, however, hamper Communist efforts to drain power
away from the Socialist party so as ultimately to incorporate it by fusion
with the P.P.R. On 1 May 1947, Wladyslaw Gomulka declared both parties
to be ‘on the road towards complete working-class unity’, and any resistance
by the Socialist leaders was broken by pressure from Moscow. At a joint
conference in Warsaw on 15 December 1948, the two parties coalesced to
form the ‘Polish United Workers’ Party’ (.Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza—P.Z.P.R.).2
Zulawski, who had strongly resisted the absorption of the Socialist party
by the Communists, had left the organization two years before in November
1946 and stood in the elections as an Independent Socialist. The elections
were held on 19 January 1947 in a general atmosphere of fear. The result
was not unexpected. The ‘Democratic Bloc’, formed by the Socialists with
the Communists, received 80 per cent of the votes, representing 394 of the
443 seats in the Polish parliament, while Mikolajczyk’s P.S.L. received only
10 per cent of the votes and twenty-seven seats; the remaining 10 per cent
were distributed among a group of smaller parties. The Polish Socialist
party, canvassing in tandem with the Communist party, had already agreed
before the elections to a distribution of seats in the Polish parliament,
each party being allotted 119 seats. Together they formed a combined
majority.
At Yalta and Potsdam Stalin had given his personal pledge that the
Polish government would hold ‘free, unimpeded elections’, and on the
basis of these pledges it had received recognition from the British and
United States governments. The elections as they were in fact held were
1. R o b o tn ik (Warsaw), 6 August and 29 November 1946, quoted in ‘R .’, ‘The Fate o f
Polish Socialism’, pp. 130-1 and 132.
2. See page 350. The third Socialist party Of Poland, the Polish Jewish Social Democratic
party, the ‘Bund’, which had counted 100,000 members before the war, so far as it had
escaped Hitler’s destruction in the western half o f Poland, was exterminated by Stalin when
the Red Army occupied the eastern half o f the country in 1939. ‘Bundists’ were killed en
m a s s e or deported to the slave camps in Siberia, while two o f the Bund’s most important
leaders, Heinrich Erlich and Victor Alter, members o f the Bureau o f the Socialist Inter-
national, were executed in December 1942 under the fantastic accusation o f having, as Ivan
M aisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, informed the British Labour party, ‘appealed
to Russian troops to cease from bloodshed and to make peace with Germany without delay’.
For M aisky’s letter, see the Report o f the Forty-Second Annual Conference o f the Labour
Party (London, 1943), p. 41.
104 The Destiny o f Socialism
neither free nor unimpeded.1 Both Britain and the United States denounced
them in protest notes as being in clear breach of the Yalta and Potsdam
agreements.

The delays to the holding of elections in Poland and their consequent

falsification were not the only grounds on which the conflict between the
Western powers and the Soviet Union reached a crisis. President Truman
had stated bluntly in a memorandum to the Potsdam Conference, assembled
on 17 July 1945, that the Soviet Union had failed to fulfil the Yalta agreements
concerning conditions for peace in the whole of Eastern Europe.
The agreements represented a solemn ‘declaration concerning liberated
Europe’. The three Great Powers had pledged themselves, ‘under joint
responsibility’, to solve ‘by democratic means’ the urgent political and
economic problems of the liberated countries, to instal provisional govern-
ments representative of ‘all democratic elements in the population’, and, ‘as
early as possible, to establish through free elections responsible governments
which will comply with the wishes of their people’.12
The declaration naturally contained no mention of Churchill and
Roosevelt having recognized at Yalta, upon Stalin’s insistence, Russia’s
right to friendly governments in the countries bordering on the Soviet
Union—governments which, according to Stalin’s concept, could only be
Communist-dominated.
When Truman raised at Potsdam the question of the form governments
were to take in the countries of Eastern Europe, he had already, as we saw,
come to accept a compromise concerning the government in Poland in the
light of Stalin’s guarantee of ‘free, unimpeded elections’. It was the form of
government that was to prevail in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary which
Truman now placed on the agenda. No power, he stated, owned a sphere of
influence in those three countries, and he proposed that there should be
joint action to reorganize the Communist-dominated governments in
Romania and Bulgaria so as to safeguard the participation of ‘all democratic
groups therein’.
However, Truman’s statement that no power had a sphere of influence
in Romania or Bulgaria ran contrary to the agreements reached between
Churchill and Stalin at the Moscow Conference in October 1944, which
1. Zulawski, elected as the only Socialist independent, stated in his first speech in the
Parliament: ‘These were no free elections. It was n o election at all, but an invocation o f
organized brutality against the voter and his conscience’— quoted in Ciolkosz, ‘Poland’, in
H ealey (ed.), T h e C u rta in F a lls , p. 47.
2. Quoted in Byrnes, S p e a k in g F ra n k ly , pp. 49-50.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 105

divided the powers’ respective spheres of influence in the Balkans.1 It will be

remembered how, according to these agreements, the Soviet Union was to
enjoy a 90 per cent predominance in Romania and a 75 per cent predominance
in Bulgaria. ‘Thus,’ Churchill wrote in the report he sent back to his Cabinet,
‘it is seen that quite naturally Soviet Russia has vital interests in the countries
bordering on the Black Sea, by one of whom, Romania, she has been most
wantonly attacked with twenty-six divisions, and with the other of whom,
Bulgaria, she has ancient ties. Great Britain feels it right to show particular
respect to Russian views about these two countries, and to the Soviet desire
to take a lead in a practical way.’12

When Churchill conceded the Soviet Union a 90 per cent predominance in

Romania and 75 per cent in Bulgaria, he had secured for Britain the 90 per
cent predominance in Greece. As he reported to his Cabinet, he had agreed
with Stalin that Great Britain would ‘take the lead in a military sense and
try to help the existing Royal Greek government to establish itself in Athens’.3
To put it in less diplomatic language, this meant that Churchill and Stalin
had reached an agreement whereby they were to promote governments
according to their judgement, if necessary under military pressure, in the
Balkan countries occupied by their respective armies—the Russians in
Romania and Bulgaria and the British in Greece.
At the time when Churchill was discussing in Moscow the division of
spheres of influence in the Balkans, the British invasion of German-occupied
Greece had already begun. At the beginning of October 1944, British troops
occupied Patras on the southern coast and entered Athens on the 18th to be
greeted with warm enthusiasm by the population. By the end of the month
the Germans had been driven from the country. The return of the Greek
king from exile now became a critical question.
George II had fled to London in May 1941 at the start of the German
invasion of Greece, settling in Cairo two years later. In the meantime, a
Greek army of about 20,000 men had been built up from Greek refugees and
Greeks living in Egypt who were liable for military service. But at the time
of the British invasion Greece itself, with the exception of the state of Epirus,

1. It should be remembered that the Balkans were not the only area to be divided into
spheres of influence. A 1941 agreement between Britain and the Soviet Union had divided
Persia into British and Russian spheres of influence, while the Yalta Conference divided
Manchuria and the Kuril Islands; then a few months later, North Korea up to the 38th
parallel was assigned to the Soviet Union as a sphere of influence, Japan and the Pacific
Ocean going to the United States. The Mediterranean, Turkey, Greece and Italy were
similarly recognized as British spheres of influence; see Leahy, I Was There, pp. 173 and 264.
2. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 203. 3. ibid., p. 204.
106 The Destiny o f Socialism
was firmly under the control of the E.A.M. (Ellenikos Apelevtherotikon
Metopon), or ‘National Liberation Front’ formed and led by the Communist
party.1 This was a federation of all Greek republican and democratic groups,
including the Socialist party led by Alexander Svolos, and the Democratic
People’s Union, led by Elias Tsirimokos. It was a mass movement of some
100,000 men and women out of a population of seven million, and it had,
during the course of German occupation, built up a formidable guerrilla
army—the E.L.A.S. {Ellenikos Laikon Apelevtherotikon Straton) or ‘National
People’s Army of Liberation’—which had been recognized by the Allied High
Command in the Near East as a regular force of the Allies and was armed
by them. With about 30,000 to 40,000 men2 it was by far the most strongly
armed underground group in Greece, besides being, according to Brigadier
Berker-Bentfield, head of liaison service between the British High Command
and the guerrillas, the most effective group in the fight against the German
occupation forces. ‘We would never,’ he told a press conference on 18 October
1944, ‘have been able to gain a foothold in Greece without the brilliant
achievements of the E.A.M. and E.L.A.S.’3Among non-Communist guerrilla-
groups, only the E.D.E.S. {Ellenikos Dimikratikos Ethnikos Syndesmos),
formed by Napoleon Zervas, had made any sort of mark as an armed
organization of the right.
The National Liberation Front set up a provisional government in March
1944 with the Socialist leader, A. Svolos, as president. During the following
month the Greek army in Egypt as well as the Greek fleet, stationed in
Alexandria, rose in an anti-royalist mutiny and demanded the recognition of
the provisional government. The mutiny was put down by the combined
forces of the British army and navy; almost 10,000 of the mutinous troops
were rounded up and interned in Eritrea.
George Papandreou, summoned to be prime minister of the Royal Greek
government in Cairo after the mutiny, reached an understanding between the
left and the right to promote the formation of a coalition government in
1. Since its formation in 1924 under the leadership o f Georgios Siantos and N icolas
Zachariades, the Communist party o f Greece, Kommunistikon Komma Ellados, had won
over the majority o f the working class. At the 1936 election— the last election before the
outbreak o f the war—they had won fifteen seats. The Socialist Labour party, founded in
1911, had never developed into a party with a mass following; it had no representation in
parliament.
2. See William Hardy M cNeill, The Greek Dilemma. War and Aftermath (London
1947), p. 92. M cNeill, an American historian, was in Greece from Novem ber 1944 until
June 1946, and had witnessed the events that occurred.
3. Quoted in Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, vol. i, p. 183. According to an
estimate by Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, 75 per cent o f the guerrillas came under
E.L.A.S. leadership — Speech in the H ouse o f Commons, 5 April 1944. Field Marshal
Alexander, Commander o f the British Forces in the Mediterranean, reminded Churchill
during the course o f the struggle between British troops and the E.L.A.S. in a letter dated
21 December 1944 that the E.L.A.S. ‘had during the German Occupation six to seven
Divisions on the mainland and a further four divisions in the Greek Islands’ in the field. F or
the text o f this letter, see Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 269.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 107

which the left-wing Liberation Front and the right-wing E.D.E.S. were each
represented. The provisional government dissolved itself, and a pact was
negotiated—the Caserta Agreement—to share out control of the liberated
districts: the command of the regular Greek forces in Athens and Attica
was handed over to a British general, Ronald M. Scobie, while Salonika
and Thrace came under Papandreou’s government and by far the largest
part of the country was controlled by the E.L.A.S.
However, immediately after the liberation of the country, a bitter struggle
broke out between the royalist right and the republican left over the issue of
the form of government in Greece. The right wished to see the king’s return
from exile, while the left opposed his re-establishment and demanded that
there should be a plebiscite to decide the form of government. The Greek
people had not forgotten how in 1936 George II had flouted the constitution
to dissolve Parliament and install a Fascist dictatorship under the leadership
of the since-deceased pro-German general Ioannis Metaxas. The National
Liberation Front, carefully veiling its Communist roots and leadership by
electing as its general secretary the respected Socialist George Elonomau,
had gained a surprisingly wide following also among the middle classes and
especially among the intellectuals,1 as the most effective party of republican
patriotism in the fight against the Germans. The mutiny of the army and the
navy in Egypt had similarly demonstrated the republican attitude prevailing
among the Greek regular troops.
Support for the cause of the throne came only from the E.D.E.S. on the
Greek mainland and from the royalist ‘Mountain Brigade’ in Egypt, which
had been organized after the mutiny by General Vendiras, a sworn enemy
of Communism. The Mountain Brigade was landed immediately after
the liberation. But the king had a far mightier ally at his side: Winston
Churchill.

Churchill did not consider the form of government in Greece to be in any

way a question for the Greek people alone. As decisively as Stalin had made
it known that he would not tolerate anti-Soviet governments in Russian
neighbouring states, so Churchill moved to block the development of an anti-
British government in Greece—or, at any rate, to ensure that British
predominance in a Greece, destined to be a base for the British Fleet in the
Mediterranean, was in no way endangered by any decision made by the
Greek people. He now feared that, should the E.A.M. come to power,
Greece would fall under a Soviet-Communist regime. ‘If the powers of evil
prevail in Greece, as is quite likely,’ he wrote on 22 December 1944 in a
1. In a letter to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden of 21 December 1944, Harold
Macmillan, sent by Churchill to Greece as political adviser, warned against underestimating
the sympathies of the Greek people for the E.A.M. ‘I am sure,’ he wrote, ‘that the E.A.M.
has a great volume of sympathies in Greece’—Harold Macmillan, The Blast o f War 1939-
1945 (London 1967), p. 622.
 108 The Destiny o f Socialism
letter to Field Marshal J. C. Smuts, ‘we must be prepared for a quasi-
Bolshevized Russian-led Balkan peninsula, and this may spread to Italy and
Hungary.’1
Such danger could, in his opinion, only be prevented by reducing the
power of the National Liberation Front and re-establishing the monarchy.
With this aim in view he intervened in the internal political struggle between
the royalists and republicans. On 7 November he had written in a minute to
Anthony Eden, who visited Athens on his return trip from the Moscow
conference: ‘We should not hesitate to use British troops to support the
Royal Hellenic Government. . . . I hope the Greek Brigade [the royalist
Mountain Brigade]. . . will not hesitate to shoot when necessary.’12
Three weeks later when the government attempted to disarm the National
Liberation Front, civil war broke out. Papandreou had demanded soon
after the landing of British troops that the E.L.A.S. should be disarmed and,
at the same time, organized a National Guard. The Front, which was
represented in the government, agreed to the demobilization of the E.L.A.S.
on condition that the Mountain Brigade should also be dissolved. But at
this the British Ambassador, Sir Reginald Leeper, acting on Churchill’s
instructions,3 raised a protest, and General Scobie, as Commander of the
Allied Forces in Greece, decreed towards the end of November that the
dissolution of the E.L.A.S. was to take place by 10 December. Upon this,
the Liberation Front resigned from the government and called upon the
workers of Athens to attend a protest demonstration on Sunday, 3 December,
while it also proclaimed a general strike for the following day. The enormous
crowds which streamed into Constitution Square on Sunday to take part in
the protest demonstration broke through a police cordon, whereupon the
Greek police opened fire. Troops of the E.L.A.S., who were being held in
reserve, at once stormed the police station, and then the British troops
swung into action.4

Churchill had issued instructions that British troops were to intervene in the
Greek Civil War on his own initiative and without consulting the Cabinet,
which contained Labour party representation.5 On 5 December he had wired
to General Scobie: ‘You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens and
for neutralizing or destroying all E.A.M.-E.L.A.S. bands approaching the
city. . . . Do n o t . . . hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city
where a local rebellion is in progress. . . . We have to hold and dominate

1. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 270.

2. ibid., p. 250.
3. See Leland Stowe, While Time Remains (N ew York, 1946), p. 249; see also M cNeill,
The Greek Dilemma, p. 131; C. M. W oodhouse, Apple o f Discord (London, 1948).
4. For an eye-witness report, see M cNeill, The Greek Dilemma, pp. 137-42.
5. See Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 251.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War * 109

Athens . . . without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if

necessary.’1
The events of 3 December were the prelude to civil war. The next morning
General Scobie ordered the withdrawal of all E.L.A.S. troops from Athens
and the Piraeus within seventy-two hours, upon which the leadership of the
National Liberation Front, under pressure from the Communists and against
Socialist protest—whose representative Alexander Svolos resigned as
president—decided to seize the parliament building and to proclaim itself as
the government.
Their attack began in the early hours of the morning of 6 December.2
General Scobie’s troops had occupied the government buildings, and during
the course of the battle, which lasted for several days, they systematically
stormed street after street in the workers’ districts of Athens. The numbers
of dead in the street-fighting among both insurgents and British soldiers ran
into many thousands.3 Hundreds of houses were destroyed and well over
10,000 suspects arrested and deported to North Africa. In a desperate act of
vengeance, the E.L.A.S. seized as hostages close on 15,000 men and women
whom they suspected of holding right-wing views and transferred them to
the north of the country; about 4,000 perished miserably on this march.4
The intervention of British troops in the Greek Civil War raised a storm
of protest in both Britain and the United States. In the House of Commons
debate on the war on 7 and 8 December 1944, Aneurin Bevan and Emanuel
Shinwell attacked the government and, although the Labour party was a
member of the Coalition, a vote of confidence found only twenty-three out
of 154 Labour M.P.s to support the government.5 Roosevelt, as his son
recorded, was disgusted by the British intervention,6 and the American
Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, dissociated the United States from
1. For the wording o f the telegram, see ibid., p. 252. Churchill, who had accompanied
Eden to Athens on their return from the M oscow Conference to attend the conference o f
Greek party leaders arranged by Macmillan for 26 December 1944, ‘stated categorically
that Stalin supported [British] intervention’— see Macmillan, The Blast o f War, p. 682.
2. For a description o f the battle, see M cNeill, The Greek Dilemma, pp. 145-50.
3. See Stowe, While Time Remains, p. 242; the British lost more than 1,000 men. See
also Churchill’s letter to Roosevelt o f 25 December 1944, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 278.
4. See M cNeill, The Greek Dilemma, p. 155; see also Macmillan, The Blast o f War,
pp. 600-1, 608 and 638. Macmillan blamed the Greek king as much as the Communists for
the catastrophe, since he had refused to make his return to Greece dependent on a plebiscite.
In a diary entry for 11 January 1945 he noted: ‘I have the feeling that apart from the
Communist plotters, the King o f the Hellenes is the real villain o f the d ra m a .. . . One must
remember that Greece had always been divided equally between republicans and monarch-
ists. The K ing was the head o f a party . . . not o f the state’— ibid., pp. 638-9.
5. At the Labour Party Conference, meeting three days later on 11 December,
Churchill’s policy in Greece was outspokenly condemned. Only Ernest Bevin, as a member o f
the war-time cabinet, came to its defence, mainly with the argument that, ‘The British
Empire cannot surrender its position in the Mediterranean’— Report o f the Forty-Third
Annual Conference (London, 1944), p. 147. For Bevin’s attitude, see Alan Bullock, The Life
and Times o f Ernest Bevin, vol. i i : Minister o f Labour 1940-1945 (London, 1967), pp. 340-7.
6. See Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw It (N ew York, 1946), p. 222.
 110 The Destiny o f Socialism
the events in Athens in open criticism. ‘The vast majority of the American
press,’ Churchill reported, ‘violently condemned our action, which they
declared falsified the cause for which they had gone to war.’1
Churchill found some consolation for his embarrassment in Stalin’s
attitude. ‘The Times and the Manchester Guardian,' he wrote, ‘pronounced
their censures upon what they considered as our reactionary policy.2 Stalin,
however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and
during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens
not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia,’s Even in neigh-
bouring Yugoslavia, under Tito’s rule, the Communist press observed an
aloof silence.4 When Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, sent a
number of dismayed telegrams to inform Churchill of the indignation invoked
in Canada by the British action in Greece, Churchill referred to Stalin’s ‘verbal
approval of our entering Greece and liberating Athens. Although I concluded
[in the reply to Mackenzie King] Communists are at the root of the business,
Stalin has not so far made any public rejection of our action.’5
The first phase of the civil war ended with defeat for the Communists.
On 11 January 1945, the E.L.A.S. stopped fighting and asked for a cease-
fire. This was confirmed on 12 February in the Treaty of Varkiza; the
E.L.A.S. agreed to surrender its arms and to vacate Athens, Salonika and
Patras. An amnesty for ‘political crimes’ committed during the period of
occupation and the civil war was guaranteed. Furthermore, the government
pledged itself to submit a decision on the question of the constitution as
early as possible and to call elections for a constituent assembly.
Alexander Svolos and Elias Tsirimokos, who had opposed the decision
to seize power by armed struggle, withdrew their respective followers from
the E.A.M., the two groups constituting themselves as the ‘United Socialist
party’. As a result, the E.A.M. lost its character of a National Front; it was
now openly a Communist party organization.
British forces remained in the country until the spring of 1947, when they
were relieved by American troops. The triumph of the right in the civil war
enabled it to take power and, in breach of the Treaty of Varkiza, it took its
1. Churchill, T riu m p h a n d T r a g e d y , p. 255.
2. T h e E c o n o m is t accused Churchill of justifying his policies in Greece by invoking the
‘Bolshevik bogey’, commenting: ‘A British policy which stands in open hostility to the Left
would place our country into the position of Mettemich—without a Holy Alliance which
could support us’— T h e E c o n o m is t, 9 December 1944.
3. Churchill, T riu m p h a n d T r a g e d y , p. 255. According to the minutes of Churchill’s
War Cabinet, after he returned from the Yalta Conference he reported to his colleagues on
the Russian attitude to the British military intervention in Greece as follows: ‘As regards
Greece, the Russian attitude could not have been more satisfactory. There was no suggestion
on Premier Stalin’s part of criticism of our policy.. . . ’
4. After the outbreak of the Greek Civil War in autumn 1946, Tito supported the
insurgent Communist troops and therefore came into conflict with Stalin; see Vladimir
Dedijer, T ito S p e a k s : H is S e lf - P o r tr a it a n d S tr u g g le w ith S ta lin (London, 1953), p. 331.
5. Churchill, T riu m p h a n d T ra g e d y , p. 266.
 The Origins o f th e ‘Cold War’ 111
revenge for the left’s acts of terrorism during the civil war. The new govern-
ment issued 80,000 arrest warrants and the military tribunals which it set up
passed hundreds of death sentences and imprisoned many thousands.1
In this general atmosphere of persecution of anyone suspected by the
police of holding left-wing views—Socialists and Republicans as well as
Communists—the Communists rekindled the civil war in the autumn of 1946.
The struggle began a year before the establishing of the Cominform,12 which
signalled a change of direction in the Soviet Union’s policies towards the
Western powers, and it lasted for almost three years.3

The elections had in fact been called under the regime of white terror to take
place on 31 March 1946, and the E.A.M., with all other parties of the left,
had boycotted them. As a result, the Royalist People’s party easily succeeded
in winning an overwhelming parliamentary majority, taking 231 out of 354
seats. Under its rule, the plebiscite of September 1946 yielded a majority vote
for the return from exile of George II.
The counter-revolution which now unfolded itself was by no means, as
has been generally believed, aimed solely against the Communists. The right,
as A. Gregoroyannis, a member of the Greek Socialist party executive,
reported in the spring of 1948, turned ‘with the same savagery against the
Socialists as against the whole working class. All local Socialist party
organizations, with the exception of those in the three large towns and
Crete, were disbanded together with a number of trade union organizations,
the distribution of the Socialist press being suspended in the provinces while
many Socialists were imprisoned or deported’.4 And a year later a party

1. The official figure for the number o f death sentences issued between 1945 and 1948
for acts performed during the liberation and civil war was 2,961 — M a c hi, 24 M ay 1948. For
the wording o f this survey o f persecutions, see Circular N o . I l l , S.I.L.O. (Socialist Inform-
ation and Liaison Office).
2. See pp. 144-5.
3. The rising was obviously not started on Stalin’s initiative, since in the autumn o f 1946
an easing o f the difficult relationship between Russia and the Western powers seemed
imminent. They had agreed on finalizing the peace treaty with Bulgaria, Hungary and
Romania, who all came within the Russian sphere o f influence; also the quarrel over the
Trieste question had been patched up. In any case, Stalin had no illusions about the likely
outcome o f the uprising in Greece. In a discussion with Kardelj on 29 February 1948, at
which Djilas was present, he remarked: \ . . This uprising has no hope whatsoever o f
success. D o you [Kardelj] believe that Great Britain and the United States— the United
States, the mightiest state in the world—would allow the endangering o f its lines o f com -
munications in the Mediterranean? Rubbish! We have no Navy. The uprising in Greece
must com e to an end as quickly as possible’— quoted in M ilovan Djilas, C o n v e rsa tio n s w ith
S ta lin (London, 1962), p. 164. A m otion o f solidarity with the Greek insurgents, proposed
by the Yugoslav delegation at the inaugural conference o f the Cominform in September
1947, was rejected by the Russian delegates on Stalin’s orders; see Eugenio Reale, T h e
Founding o f the Cominform’, in T h e C o m in te rn — H is to r ic a l H ig h lig h ts , p. 264.
4. A. Gregoroyannis, ‘The Socialist Movement in Greece’, in S o c ia lis t W o r ld , vol. i,
M arch-M ay 1948. This quarterly publication was the official organ o f the International
Socialist Conference.
 112 7%e Destiny o f Socialism
resolution stated: ‘The regime of political persecution is becoming worse by
the day. . . . Techniques of despotism, typical of a Fascist police rule, have
stripped away all the liberties of the individual and swept aside elementary
civil rights. . . .’1
Thus, as Churchill expressed it in closing his account of the episode,
ended the struggle for ‘freedom in the Western world’.1 2

When Churchill decided on military intervention in Greece so as to prevent

the country from falling under Communist rule and becoming a Soviet base
in the Mediterranean, he had not reckoned that this action would present
Stalin with the political justification for Russia’s military intervention in
Romania, Bulgaria and, ultimately, Poland.3
In Poland, Stalin’s use of military pressure to obtain the formation of a
government to his liking had remained covert. In Romania, on the other
hand, a new government was imposed by a Soviet commissar backed by the
presence of Russian tanks in the streets of Bucharest. But then Romania was
a vanquished enemy, having proclaimed a ‘Holy War’ against Russia
immediately in the wake of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, on 22 June
1941. It had invaded the country with twenty-six divisions to recapture
Bessarabia,4 which Russia had seized in June 1940, and had annexed and
systematically plundered south-western Ukraine, including Odessa. In
General Rodion Malinovsky’s counter-offensive in 1944, Soviet troops
liberated the occupied territories and entered Romania, which then capitulated
in the armistice of 12 September 1944, while Russian troops occupied the
country.
Romania was hardly a democracy, having been subjected from September
1940 to the brutal Fascist rule of General Ion Antonescu and his ‘Iron
Guard’. On the day of the capitulation, Antonescu’s government was over-
thrown by a coup d'etat and Constantin Sanatescu charged by King Michael

1. Resolution o f the Third N ational Conference o f the Socialist Party o f Greece E .L .D .,

27-28 February, Circular N o . 15/49 o f the Socialist International. The martial law imposed
at the start o f the war was rescinded only at the beginning o f 1950— when the number o f
political prisoners amounted to 10,000, am ong them 3,000 who had been sentenced to death;
see A . Svolos’s Report on the Situation in Greece, COMISCO Conference, Hastings,
March 1950, Circular N o . 74/50.
2. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 283.
3. Stalin had earlier formulated a theoretical justification for the military intervention
when, in conversation with Tito in April 1945, he had commented on the special character
o f the war: ‘Whoever occupies a district, subjects it to his own social system. Everyone
enforces his own system as far as his army is able’— quoted in Djilas, Conversations with
Stalin, p. 105.
4. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 517-18.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 113

with the formation of a government to represent the four anti-Fascist

parties which had combined during the war within the underground move-
ment as the ‘National Democratic Front’ (F.N.D.): the Social Demo-
cratic party, the National Peasants’ party, the Liberals and the Communist
party.
But, the Communists apart, none of these parties represented a reliable
ally for Soviet Russia. The Peasants’ party, led by Juliu Maniu, was con-
servative; the Liberal party, led by Ion Bratianu, was an anti-Socialist party
of the middle class, and the Social Democratic party (Partidul Social Democrat
din Romania), led by Constantin Titel Petrescu, had for two decades fought
for democratic principles against Communism and was certainly no friend
of Russia. Admittedly it had combined in April 1944 with the Communist
party in the F.N.D. to fight Fascism and the war, and had reached mutual
agreement with them on a programme of reform to be carried through in the
early days of peace. But it included no agreement on Romania’s future
relations with the Soviet Union.
Thus the government promoted by King Michael was by no stretch of
the imagination one which might be termed pro-Soviet. Within the course of
a few weeks, the king had changed the government twice, finally at the
beginning of December nominating as prime minister General Nicolae
Radescu, a declared enemy of Communism. While the Communists with
the other parties of the National Democratic Front continued to be
represented the government’s character remained remote from Stalin’s ideas
or wishes.
So Stalin took a hand. The general secretary of the Communist party,
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a government member, was invited to talks in
Moscow and returned to Bucharest on 16 January with instructions to
promote mass demonstrations by the Communist-dominated F.N.D., to
demand the sacking of Radescu and the setting up of an exclusively F.N.D.
government, and to eliminate Maniu, the Peasants’ party’s leader, from
political life.1 The mass demonstrations commenced at the beginning of
February, while the Communist-dominated press—papers of other sympathies
having been suppressed by the Soviet mission—demanded Radescu’s over-
throw. During a mass demonstration in Bucharest on 24 February, eight
demonstrators were killed in clashes with troops, and Radescu was at once
branded by the Communist press as a criminal. The psychological moment
for Radescu’s overthrow had been reached. On the next day Russian troops
occupied the Romanian General Staff H.Q. and other government buildings
and disarmed all Romanian troops in the city. The scene had been set for a
Communist coup d'etat.
It is interesting to see how, in fact, the change of government ordered by
Stalin took place. In the late afternoon of 27 February 1945, the deputy
1. See E. D. Tappe, ‘Roumania’, in Central and South-East Europe, p. 6.
114 The Destiny o f Socialism
people’s Commissar for foreign affairs, Andrei Vishinsky, arrived at the
Royal Palace in Bucharest direct from the Moscow plane and demanded that
the king should instantly dismiss Radescu’s government and nominate a
government of the National Democratic Front as representing the ‘true
democratic power in the country’. When the king hesitated, Vishinsky, with
a glance at his watch, told him that he had until 8 o’clock to make a public
announcement on the dismissal of Radescu’s government and the nomination
of its successor, which gave him two hours and five minutes. Vishinsky then
left the king, but the ultimatum having expired without the demands being
fulfilled, he returned the next day to inform him that the Soviet government
requested that the leader of the ‘Ploughmen’s Front’, Petra Groza, should be
appointed to form a government. When the king raised objections, Vishinsky
banged his fist on the table and declared that, in the event of a government
led by Groza not having been nominated by the following afternoon, he
would wash his hands of any responsibility for the continuation of Romania
as an independent state. Upon which he left the room, slamming the door
loudly. Meanwhile Russian tanks and troops had occupied strategic positions
throughout the city.1
Groza was nominated a few days later, the provisional government of
the ‘National Democratic Front’ which he formed resting on a coalition of
the Communists with the Communist-dominated ‘Ploughmen’s Front’, a
farmers’ movement founded in 1934, the Social Democrats, and a group of
Liberals sympathetic towards Russia. As a government it was, of course,
completely Communist-controlled. Communists occupied all the key political
positions: the Ministry of the Interior, with command over the civil and
political police, the War Ministry and the Ministry of Justice. Also, as the
American note of 18 August 1945 stated, there were ‘important elements of
democratic public opinion’ which remained unrepresented. Under pressure
from Truman, Stalin agreed in discussion with Byrnes, the American
Secretary of State, that he would accept into the government representatives
of the conservative National Liberal party and the National Farmers’ party
and would, in answer to Truman’s demand, hold elections as ‘early as
possible’.
The elections were originally called for May 1946, but postponed until
November when the Allies protested that they were clearly being prepared in
Romania’s political tradition—the tradition by which the party in control of
1. See Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, pp. 50-2; Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 368;
Tappe, p. 7. The Russian coup d'etat had ‘deeply disturbed’ Churchill as a prelude of things
to come. ‘The Russians,’ he wrote, ‘had established the rule of a Communist minority by
force and misrepresentation. We were hampered in our protests because Eden and I during
our October visit to Moscow had recognized that Russia should have a largely predominant
voice in Romania and Bulgaria while we took the lead in Greece. Stalin had kept very
strictly to this understanding during the six weeks’ fighting against the Communists and the
E.L.A.S. in the city of Athens, in spite of the fact that all this was most disagreeable to him
and those around him’— Triumph and Tragedy, p. 369.
 The Origins o f the'C old War' 115
the apparatus of government invariably emerged from the polls as triumphant
victor.1

The Romanian Communist party (Partidul Comunist din Romania), having

been banned for twenty years since 1924, began its rise to power after the
end of the war in September 1944 with only 1,000 members. A year later, at
the party’s first national conference on 16 October 1945, it was able to report
a membership of 800,000. The miracle of this 800 per cent increase in party
membership during the course of a year had been brought about by Anna
Pauker, second in command of the party hierarchy. She won over not only
industrial and agricultural workers, but also, as she later had to answer for,
members of the middle classes, generals and bishops, members of Antonescu’s
secret police and, above all, members of the Fascist Iron Guard.12 A party
card meant bread, work and, in certain cases, a career, and in others immunity
from prosecution for past misdeeds.
However, the fundamental task facing the Communists was the absorption
of the Social Democratic party. This had always been by far the stronger of
the two labour parties in Romania and had developed its traditions in the
course of an honourable history over half a century. But now it found itself
overtaken in terms of membership by about 600,000. When both parties had
agreed in April 1944 on the formation of a ‘United Labour Front’, it was an
arrangement which left their respective autonomy untouched. Now, however,
the Communists wished to create a closer relationship with the Social
Democratic party, and in particular to form joint lists for the elections due
to take place in 1946. This proposal was declined on 1 December 1945 by a

1. On the influence of governmental powers on the results of Romanian elections, see

the following examples collected by Fleming. In 1926, General Averescu was nominated as
prime minister and won 280 seats against 105 for the opposition. In the following year,
Stirbey became prime minister, who, while having won only 7 per cent of the votes in the
1926 elections, now gained 62 per cent. In 1928, Maniu, the leader of the National Farmers*
party, became prime minister, winning 85 per cent of the votes and 385 seats. In 1931 he was
relieved of office by the king, and Jorga, leader of a nominal party, was nominated: upon
which he received 48 per cent of the votes and two thirds of the seats. In 1933, the National
Liberals came to power, the number of seats which they won leaping from that of 30, which
they had held up till then, to 274; see T h e C o ld W a r a n d its O r ig in s , vol. I, p. 308.
2. ‘Elements foreign to the working class’, so the June 1948 resolution of the central
committee of the party stated, ‘have infiltrated the party ranks—elements previously active
in the Iron Guard movement, opportunists and those aiming at personal advancement,
whose attitudes do not confirm with proletarian morality and who do not belong within the
party’—quoted in Ghita Ionescu, C o m m u n ism in R u m a n ia 1 9 4 4 - 1 9 6 2 (London, 1964),
p. 119. In the process of purging the party over the next two years, 192,000 ‘Fascists’,
‘opportunists’ and ‘careerists’ were expelled; see Stephen Fischer Galati, T h e N e w
R u m a n ia . F ro m P e o p le 's D e m o c r a c y to S o c ia lis t R e p u b lic (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 39.
At a conference of the central committee on 15 December 1961, Alexandru Draghici, a
Politbureau member, accused Anna Pauker of having, through her delegate, Teohari
Geogescu, made a pact with the leader of the Iron Guard, Nicolae Patrascu, which made it
possible for a considerable proportion of the members of the Fascist organization to enter
the Communist party—see Ionescu, C o m m u n ism in R u m a n ia , p. 98.
116 The Destiny o f Socialism
party conference under the leadership of C. Titel Petrescu and Serban Voinea
despite the opposition of the party’s pro-Communist wing led by Lotar
Radaceanu and Stefan Yoitec.
The Communists now began to work to split the Social Democratic party.
In their propaganda they differentiated between Petrescu and Radaceanu
Socialists—fighting the first and supporting the latter—and gained control
of the party by infiltrating its ranks up to the highest levels with their own
secret members. By 1946 over half those sitting on the central and executive
committee of the Social Democratic party were undercover Communist party
members.1
The split finally occurred during a congress on 10 March 1946 over the
question of unity fists with the Communists. The Communist undercover
influence in the party secretariat guaranteed a pro-Communist majority, but
Petrescu refused to accept the decision and withdrew from the congress,
accompanied by his followers, to form the Independent Social Democratic
party (Partidul Social Democrat Independent din Romania). The parent party
thereupon formed a ‘Democratic Bloc’ with the Communists and fought the
elections with joint lists. The election results of 19 November 1946 were as
anticipated. The joint lists of the pro-Communist parties—the Democratic
bloc—won 347 seats, while the two middle-class parties counted thirty-six
and the Independent Social Democrat party, while receiving 66,528 votes
(10 per cent of votes cast), gained not a single seat. Six weeks later, on 30
December 1947, the monarchy was overthrown and a ‘People’s Democracy
of Romania’ proclaimed. In this way Stalin secured the 90 per cent predomi-
nance in Romania promised to him by Churchill.
To gain total rule over the country, however, the absorption of the Social
Democratic party into the Communist party was a necessity. The impetus
for this action was given by the formation of the Cominform.2 Four days
after the end of the inaugural conference, both parties declared in a joint
statement that they were in favour of amalgamation into a ‘Romanian
Workers’ party’. A few days later, on 5 October 1947, the congress of the
official Social Democratic party decided upon fusion with the Communist
party; it had, as Barber Solomon, one of the party secretaries, reported to the
congress, 560,201 members and a further 193,000 members in youth and
women’s organizations.3 The amalgamation of both parties into the
Romanian Labour party took place at an ordinary congress of 23 February
1948. The programme resolution passed by the congress declared that ‘the
teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’ would provide the ideological
basis for the party.

1. See ibid., pp. 122-3. 2. See pp. 144-5.

3. Scanteia, quoted in Ionescu, Communism in Rumania, p. 150.
 The Origins o f the *Cold War ’ 117

By contrast, the case of Bulgaria demanded other methods of subjection to

Russian influence than those applied in Romania. Russia had been able to
occupy Romania as an enemy country. Bulgaria, although it had been an ally
of Hitler’s Germany and had served as a base for the German campaign
against Yugoslavia and Greece, had never actually entered into a state of
war with Russia; it had declared war on Britain and the United States, but not
on the U.S.S.R. But since Stalin deemed the military occupation of Bulgaria
to be indispensable for its transformation into a Russian satellite state, the
Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria, though not until 5 September 1944,
ten days after Bulgaria had asked Britain and the United States for a cease-
fire. Now Bulgaria also asked Russia for an immediate cease-fire and the
Soviet army occupied the country without opposition.
Three days before the entry of Russian troops into Bulgaria, the national
committee of the National Front ordered an armed insurrection against the
government. The National Front (Otechestven Front) had been founded in
June 1942 by the Communist party underthe leadership of Traichko D. Kostov
as an underground fighting organization against Fascism and the war; the
left wing of the Social Democratic party, led by Grigor Cheshmedzhiev,
joined it, as did the radical Peasants’ Union, under Nikola Petkov (which
had in 1931 split off from the conservative Agrarian Alliance), and the Zveno
Group, an organization of middle-class intellectuals allied with the powerful
Military League. Colonel Kimon Georgiev, leader of the Zveno Group, had
organized volunteers in an underground movement grouping approximately
10,000 men.1
In the early hours of 9 September 1944, a few hours before the Russian
troops entered Sofia, the National Front undertook its planned coup d'etat.
Detachments of volunteers occupied government buildings while a group of
Military League members invaded the building of the Presidency of the
Ministers Council, surprised the government in the conference room, where
it had assembled for discussion, and arrested the ministers. A government of
the National Front was proclaimed, representing a coalition between the
Communists and the Zveno Group, with Colonel Georgiev as prime minister
and Petkov as deputy prime minister; the Social Democrats were represented
in the government by Cheshmedzhiev.
But even though the parties of the farmers and the middle class were
admittedly represented, Truman withheld his recognition; its Communist
character was only thinly disguised and it had attained power by means of a
coup d'etat in the shadow of the Soviet army’s occupation of Sofia. In a
memorandum submitted to the Potsdam Conference, Truman declared the
1. See L. A. D. Dellin (ed.), Bulgaria (London, 1957), p. 116,
 118 The Destiny o f Socialism
formation of the government to be in breach of the Yalta Declaration and
demanded as a condition for its recognition that it should be re-formed by
the inclusion of representatives of those conservative middle-class national
parties not represented and that elections should be called.
The government was not, however, re-formed, and the elections, originally
fixed for 26 August 1945, but postponed under pressure from the Western
powers, were not held until 18 November. Meanwhile, in the period following
the cease-fire, the Bulgarian army had been purged of ‘unreliable elements’
and, by a decree of 6 October 1944, ‘people’s courts’ set up to prosecute war
criminals. Rumours indicated the execution of between 20,000 and 100,000
during their first six months of activity, but according to official details only
about 11,000 of the accused had been sentenced by March 1945.1 Either way,
disagreeable enemies of the regime had been eliminated from public life.
Furthermore, by a decree of March 1945, the right to political activity was
granted only to those parties represented in the National Front.
Soon afterwards the ‘purging’ of the member parties of the National
Front commenced. At the request of the Communists, Petkov was removed
from the leadership of the Farmers’ Alliance and replaced by the more reliable
Alexander Obbov; and Kosta Lulchev, the general secretary of the Social
Democratic party, was displaced by Dimiter Neikov.12 Both these parties had
split into separate pro-Soviet and opposition parties. Furthermore, in the
elections only candidates who had been entered on the joint list of the National
Front were acknowledged. Therefore the opposition parties—the breakaway
Social Democratic party and the split Farmers’ Alliance as well, of course,
as the middle-class national parties—were unable to nominate candidates.
The November elections, so thoroughly prepared, resulted in an over-
whelming majority for the government; it received 86 per cent of all the
votes cast. But the United States and Britain refused to recognize the elections
and demanded as a condition for signing a peace treaty that new elections
should be held in the letter and spirit of the Yalta Declaration. These were
called, but for a date almost a year ahead, 27 October 1946. Soviet troops
remained in the country and, with their support, the Communists, their
hands on the reins of power, entrenched their rule against any threatening
opposition. They were therefore able to fulfil the demands of the Western
powers for free elections to the extent of granting at least the Social Demo-
cratic splinter group and the Farmers’ Alliance an independent canvass. The

1. According to official details, 10,897 accused were found guilty in 131 cases, 2,138
being sentenced to death and executed, 1,940 being sentenced to twenty years’ imprison-
ment, 962 to fifteen years, 727 to ten years and 3,241 to shorter terms; see Phyllis Auty,
‘Bulgaria’, in R. R. Betts (ed.), Central and South-East Europe (London, 1950), p. 30.
2. Kosta Lulchev and seven other members of the executive of the Social Democratic
party were in 1948 sentenced to a heavy term of imprisonment in a mock trial involving
fantastic accusations; they received between ten years and life imprisonment according to
the extent of their prestige with the working class.
 The Origins o f the'C old War' 119
result of the elections was, as could only be expected, a victory for the parties
of the National Front. Of the 465 seats in the Sobranje (the Bulgarian
parliament) they won 364 to 101 for the opposition parties, the Communist
representation rising from ninety-four at the elections of 1945 to 277; the
Social Democrats won only nine seats.1
With the Communists enjoying an absolute majority in the Sobranje,
Vassil Kolarov, Communist party leader, became president, while Georgi
Dimitrov, the last general secretary of the Communist International—he had
returned from Moscow in November 1945—was made prime minister.
To fulfil the conditions for its recognition laid down by the United States
and Britain, the government had allowed the opposition parties to nominate
independently. The Western powers therefore confirmed their recognition,
and now that formal obstacles to peace treaty negotiations had been removed,
they were brought to completion on 10 February 1947. On the day following
the ratification of the peace treaty by the United States Senate, on 4 June
1947, Petkov was arrested, the opposition Farmers’ Alliance dissolved, and
he himself executed within a few months. The Social Democratic party, led
by Neikov, already a part of the National Front, was amalgamated with the
Communist party in February 1948; the Social Democratic party splinter
group was demolished by administrative methods. The Constitution, pro-
claimed on 4 December 1947, declared Bulgaria to be a ‘People’s Democracy’,
and now Moscow could also feel secure in the knowledge that there existed
in Bulgaria a completely reliable pro-Soviet government.

6
By the time Truman, Churchill and Stalin had assembled with their foreign
ministers on 17 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, Poland, Romania and
Bulgaria were in effect already ruled by pro-Soviet governments. These were
Communist coalition governments, each containing a nominal representation
of the parties of the Social Democrats, peasants and the middle class. They
were not governments which had sprung from a democratic demonstration
of the people’s will in free elections, but had been installed by Stalin. At the
heads of these governments stood leaders of non-Communist parties—in
Poland the Socialist Osobka-Morawski, in Romania the peasants’ leader,
Petru Groza, and in Bulgaria Colonel Georgiev, leader of the radical middle-
class Zveno Group; but the real power lay in Communist hands. In none of
these three countries had the Communist party enjoyed mass support before
the war. In Poland, it had been dissolved in May 1938 on instructions from
Moscow;2 in Romania, even before the settingup of the Fascist dictatorship,
it had been hardly more than a sect; and in Bulgaria, after an insurrection in
1. See Auty, ‘Bulgaria’, in Betts (ed.), Central and South-East Europe, p. 37.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 316-17.
120 The Destiny o f Socialism
September 1923 and their attempt to blow up the cathedral of Sofia,1 the
Communists had been practically extinguished in bloody persecutions.
They had now received their impetus from the Soviet army which had
entered their countries and was keeping them under occupation in accordance
with the cease-fire arrangements agreed with the Western powers. As agents
of the Soviet government, Communists were thus able to secure the crucial
positions of power, even though they were a minority in each country: the
Ministry of the Interior, with its command of the civil and political police
and the state administrative apparatus, and the Ministry of Defence, with its
command of the army. In each country occupied by the Soviet army the
government was committed by the cease-fire agreement to purge the police,
army and state administration of Fascist and anti-Soviet elements. Therefore,
during the sanitation process and without openly infringing the cease-fire
agreements, the Communists were able to transform the armed power of the
state and its administration into the instrument of a Communist dictatorship.

This was the situation existing in the three Russian-occupied countries at the
time of the Potsdam Conference, and it could only alarm and provoke the
mistrust of the Western powers. ‘Like you,’ Churchill wrote to Truman a few
weeks before Potsdam, ‘I feel deep anxiety because of their [the Russians’]
misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions, their attitude towards Poland, their
overwhelming influence in the Balkans.’2
But Churchill, in company with Roosevelt, had recognized the principle
of installing ‘pro-Soviet’ governments in the states bordering on Russia and
had, in his separate agreement with Stalin, legalized that very ‘overwhelming
influence in the Balkans’. Any protest against Russian policy in the occupied
countries could therefore only come from Truman, and he, as we have seen,
demanded a change of government in these countries and the implementation
of the Yalta Declaration. This meant, in principle, the setting up of bourgeois
democracies in some form, though these would unavoidably—in Poland and
Romania at least—come into sharp conflict with the Soviet Union, which
with Allied approval had annexed parts of their countries.
Stalin interpreted Truman’s demands as a breach of his agreement with
Churchill. As he told Churchill at Potsdam, he felt hurt by the American
demand for a change of government in Romania and Bulgaria. He was not
meddling in Greek affairs, he stated, and the demand was unjust. Further-
more, he assured Churchill, ‘in all the countries liberated by the Red Army
the Russian policy was to see a strong, independent, sovereign State.. . . They
would have free elections, and all except Fascist parties would participate.’3

To this disagreement between the Western powers and the Soviet Union on
the Russian policy in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, was added disagreement
1, ibid., pp. 289, 290. 2. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 498, 3, ibid., p. 550,
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 121

on Poland’s western borders. At Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt had ‘in

principle’ agreed to Stalin’s proposal that Poland should be compensated
for the loss of her regions east of the Curzon Line by the German districts
in East Prussia and Upper Silesia.1 But any final decision on the extent of
these districts and, above all, on Poland’s western border—the future eastern
German border—had been reserved for the peace conference. Under the
terms of the Yalta agreements, East Prussia and Upper Silesia fell within
the Russian zone of occupation and were to be transferred to Poland by the
peace treaty.
Without any reference to the Western powers, Stalin had already handed
over these districts to Poland, and not only those east of the Oder allotted to
Poland at Yalta, but also the region west of the Neisse against the separation
of which from Germany Churchill had objected.
Therefore the Western powers found themselves at Potsdam facing a fait
accompli, which, as Truman declared, was in breach of the Yalta agreements.
Stalin admitted that no settlement of boundaries had been reached at Yalta,
apart from the plan to grant Poland an increase in territory; he emphasized,
however, he had by no means transferred these districts to Poland as an
occupation zone but, since the Germans had fled from the Russian troops and
someone had to administer the districts, had allowed the Poles to take over
their administration. After all, he said, the Soviet government must be
allowed to ensure ‘orderly conditions in the rear of the Red Army’.2
The Western powers, unable, of course, to appeal to force of arms, were
therefore powerless to alter the situation created by Stalin in the districts
occupied by the Red Army and colonized by the Poles. They thus agreed to
a ‘temporary’ administration of these districts by the Poles, but refused to
recognize the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland’s future western border. Any
border settlement, they insisted, must, as had been agreed at Yalta, be kept
for the peace conference.3 President Truman was extremely annoyed. ‘At
Potsdam,’ he wrote, ‘we were . . . forced by the circumstances to agree to the
Russian occupation of East Poland and the Polish occupation of the German
districts east of the Oder. It was an arrogant act of violence.’4

Shortly afterwards a new Russian demand further inflamed the mistrust of

the Western powers towards Stalin’s plans. At the first meeting of the Council
of Foreign Ministers in London (10 September to 2 October 1945),5 which
had been arranged in Potsdam for the drafting of the peace treaty, Molotov
surprised the assembly with the totally unexpected Communist demand for
1. See page 94. 2. See Byrnes, S p e a k in g F r a n k ly , p. 204.
3. For the Potsdam discussions on this question, see Meissner, R u s sla n d , d ie W e s t-
m a c h te a n d D e u tsc h la n d , pp. 62-8.
4. Harry S. Truman, M e m o ir s (New York, 1955), vol. t: Y e a r o f D e c is io n s, 1 9 4 5 , p. 552.
5. At this meeting the following were present: Bevin (Great Britain), Byrnes (U.S.A.),
Molotov (U.S.S.R.) and Bidault (France).
 122 The Destiny o f Socialism
a colony in Africa. Italy had lost its African colonies in the war, and when
the conference discussed their future Molotov demanded the cession of
Tripolitania to the Soviet Union. Russia, he declared, had earned the right
to one of the Italian colonies in Africa since it had had to fight against ten
Italian divisions; furthermore, he declared, the Russians were exceptionally
successful in civilizing backward peoples. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘if you won’t
give us one of the Italian colonies, we should be quite content to have the
Belgian Congo.’1
Already at Yalta, as five years earlier from Hitler,12 Stalin had demanded
a Russian base in the Dardenelles—the fulfilment of one of Tsarism’s most
cherished ambitions, and one which Britain had always frustrated through
war or diplomacy. The possibility of Soviet Russia now installing itself in
the straits of the eastern Mediterranean and so, under certain conditions,
being in a position to threaten Britain’s lines of communications with India,
could only produce in Churchill feelings of acute anxiety. But Stalin, whose
Red Army was of overwhelming importance for ending the war in Europe,
could not be antagonized by a flat refusal; and so the whole question had
been left open at Yalta.
Now Stalin had put forward his demand either for Tripoli on the southern
edge of the Mediterranean, or alternatively the Congo in the heart of Africa.
Britain could hardly take the demand seriously,3 but the refusal to recognize
Russia’s colonial ambitions introduced a further element into the tension
already existing between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

Then a new conflict broke out over Russian policy in Persia. Russia and
Britain had, in August 1941, deposed Shah Reza Khan of Persia, a friend of
Hitler’s, by a combined invasion and had occupied the country—the British
taking the south and the Russians the province of Azerbaijan in the north.
It had been mutually agreed that both would withdraw from the country
within six months of the end of the war but, while the British duly withdrew
their troops in December 1945, the Russians had remained.
In the social unrest which developed after the fall of Reza Khan, the
Communists had, in 1942, formed the party of the Tudeh (‘Party of the
Masses’), an apolitical democratic movement which attracted a tremendous
mass following from among the Persian proletariat and the radical intellec-
tuals. In Azerbaijan the movement had organized itself under the leadership
of Jaafar Pishevari4 as the Democratic party, and in December 1945, with
1. Quoted in Dalton, H ig h T id e a n d A f te r , p. 56; Byrnes, S p e a k in g F r a n k ly , pp. 95-7.
2. See Braunthal, H is to r y o f th e I n te rn a tio n a l, 1 9 1 4 -1 9 4 3 , pp. 520-1.
3. General Smuts was, as Dalton reported, ‘horrified by the idea of having the Russians
in Africa, since he thought they would stir up the tribes everywhere’—H ig h T id e a n d A f te r ,
p. 56.
4. Pishevari had, under the name of Sultan Zadeh, been commissioner for internal
affairs in the Persian Soviet Republic of Ghilan, proclaimed after the Soviet conquest of
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War' 123
the connivance of Russian occupation troops, had begun an insurrection in
Tabriz, the capital of the province, and proclaimed Azerbaijan an independent
republic.
The proclamation of the republic took place a few days after the opening
of the second Foreign Ministers’ Conference, which assembled on 16
December 1945 in Moscow. There Molotov repeated his request for a Soviet
base on the Dardenelles and additionally demanded that Russia should be
given the Turkish districts of Kars, Ardahan and Trapezunt on the Black
Sea coast. It had, in any case, become clear that Stalin was not going to
pull his Russian forces out of the Azerbaijan Republic at the agreed
date.1
Truman reacted to Russia’s policy in the Near East by introducing a
switch in American policy towards the Soviet Union—one which he had, in
fact, been planning for some time. In a memorandum dated 5 January 1946,
three weeks after the establishment of the Republic of Azerbaijan, he
directed Byrnes, the Secretary of State, ‘to protest as forcibly as possible
against Russia’s schemes in Persia. Nothing can justify them___ They are in
line with the assumptions and arbitrary methods by which Russia has
operated in Poland___ We have been faced in Persia with a fait accompli___
I have no doubt that Russia proposed to invade Turkey and to conquer the
Black Sea straits to the Mediterranean. If Russia does not find itself con-
fronted with an iron fist. . . it will come to a new w a r . . .’2

But Truman’s memorandum, a secret state document, ran counter to the

frame of mind prevalent in the United States and in Britain. Popular admira-
tion for the heroism of the Red Army had not by any means evaporated at
this time, nor had sympathies towards the Soviet Union cooled; general
confidence in Russia as an ally of Western democracy remained unshaken.
The strife between Allied ministers at their conferences over the form govern-
ment was to take in the states bordering on Russia appeared insignificant
beside the overwhelming importance of attaining lasting friendship between
East and West as an indispensable guarantee for world peace. In the hostile
language of his memorandum, the President of the United States could speak
only for himself and was in no way reflecting popular opinion, which would
have been shocked and disgusted at the very thought of a possible war
against Russia.
In the event it was Churchill who took upon his own shoulders the task
of awakening America to the ‘Bolshevist danger’. Defeated in the 1945
Azerbaijan in 1920 by the Persian rebel Kushik Khan with the support of the Russian
troops. After the defeat of the Ghilan Soviet Republic in 1921 by Reza Khan, Pishevari fled
to Moscow and worked there in the Secretariat of the Communist International as adviser
on the Near East.
1. They were actually withdrawn in March 1946.
2. Truman, Y e a r o f D e c is io n s, p. 552.
 124 The Destiny o f Socialism
elections, succeeded by a Labour government and freed from responsibilities
of government, he made a visit to the United States. In a speech delivered at
Fulton, Missouri, on 5 May 1946, he denounced in Truman’s presence
Russia’s expansionist ambitions, calling on the United States and Great
Britain to set a limit by means of military co-operation to Soviet territorial
ambitions. ‘Nobody knows,’ he said, ‘what Soviet Russia and its Communist
international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what
are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. . . .’
But, in order to do justice to the prevailing mood of the people of Britain
and America, he emphasized his feeling of ‘high esteem and admiration
for the brave Russian people and my comrade from war-time, Marshal
Stalin’; he also mentioned the feelings of ‘sympathy and well-wishing’ which
Britain—‘and surely America too,’ he added—‘harbours for the people of
Russia’ and that he was determined ‘in spite of all differences and set-backs
to work unflinchingly for the construction of a lasting friendship with
Russia’.
But then he turned to describe the ‘Bolshevist danger’. ‘From Stettin in
the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he said, ‘an iron curtain has descended
across the continent of Europe. Behind this line lay all capitals of the central
and eastern European countries: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest,
Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities lay within the Soviet
sphere and all are in one form or another exposed not only to the Soviet
Russian influence, but in ever increasing degrees subjected to the control of
Moscow. . . . The Communist parties, which had in all these countries been
very small until now, have been cultivated everywhere, they have achieved
incongruous power and now aim to seize everywhere total rule. In almost
every case there now exists a police state.’ He did not believe, he said, that
Soviet Russia wished for war. ‘What they desire,’ he stated, ‘is the fruits of
war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.’ For defence
against this danger he recommended an Anglo-American policy of military
strength. Because ‘there is nothing for which they [the Russians] have less
respect for than . . . military weakness’.1
Churchill felt it to be important that any conflict of interest between
Russia and the Allies should appear a conflict between irreconcilable
ideologies: Communism and ‘freedom and democracy’. So long as the Soviet
Union was fighting on the side of the Western powers in the name o f ‘freedom
and democracy’ against Hitler’s Germany, there had been no talk of the
‘danger of Communism’. Russia’s system of government had been accepted
as a fact with which the world had to come to terms, and no Western
statesman had paid a more respectful tribute to the Communist dictator,
1. Quoted in Desmond Donnelly, Struggle fo r the World. The Cold War from its Origins
in 1917 (London, 1965), pp. 211-12; Meissner, Russland, die Westmachte und Deutschland,
pp. 79-80.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 125
Stalin, than Churchill. But now Churchill called upon the United States
and Britain to defend the principle of democracy throughout the world by
opposing the Communist threat posed by the Soviet Union with military
force.
But those who had just passed through the hell of the Second World War
were in no mood to receive with applause Churchill’s call to arms in pre-
paration for a Third World War. Byrnes hastened to explain that the United
States government had not been consulted by Churchill over the content of
the speech, and that it ‘had nothing to do with it’; 105 British Labour
Members of Parliament condemned the speech, stating in a motion to the
House of Commons that it constituted a ‘hostile attack on the cause of world
peace’. Even the conservative London Times criticized Churchill’s theory of
the conflict between ‘western democracy and Communism’. ‘Although
western democracy and Communism,’ it wrote, ‘contradict each other in
many aspects, both [systems] have to learn a lot of each other—Communism
from the experience of political institutions and the justifications of the right
of the individual, western democracy from [the Communist system’s]
economic and social planning.’ ‘It would,’ it continued, ‘be a counsel of
despair to assume that western democracy and Communism are condemned
to a struggle to the death.’1
Stalin was understandably exercised over Churchill’s speech. He de-
nounced it as ‘a dangerous act aimed at dividing the Allied governments and
preventing their co-operation. . . . I do not know,’ he continued, ‘whether
Churchill and his friends will succeed after the Second World War in
organizing a new armed camp against Eastern Europe; but should they
succeed, it may confidently be said that they may expect to receive a
hiding.. . ’2 He was concerned that America’s monopoly of the atom bomb
might tempt them into contemplating an attack on Communist Russia.
Barely five months after the end of the war, the Moscow New Times had
given a warning of this danger. ‘The atom bomb,’ it wrote, ‘is a signal for
reactionaries throughout the world to agitate for a new crusade against the
Soviet Union.’3 Ernest Bevin, who as British foreign secretary was fairly well
informed of the political trends in Washington and Moscow, was under the
impression, as he said in conversation with Hugh Dalton, that ‘both the
Americans and the Russians’ were each ‘afraid of the other’; both were ‘too
bomb-minded’. And he confirmed that in certain American circles it was felt
that ‘since they had the bomb now and the Russians hadn’t, they had better
have a show-down at once’. ‘Stalin,’ he explained, ‘has, since Churchill’s
Fulton speech, convinced himself that the Tories, who the Russians thought
1. Quoted in Wilfrid Knapp, ‘The Partition of Europe’, in Evan Luard (ed.), T h e C o ld
W ar, (London, 1964), pp. 53-4.
2. P r a v d a , 13 March 1946, quoted in Donnelly, S tr u g g le f o r th e W o rld , pp. 212-13.
3. N e w T im e s (Moscow), 18 November 1945, quoted in Fleming, T h e C o ld W a r a n d its
O r ig in s , vol. i, p. 329.
126 The Destiny o f Socialism
would soon return to power in this country, would get in line with the
Americans to oppose them.’1
Truman, however, still hesitated to show the Soviet Union the ‘iron fist’
and Stalin strove not to lay down a challenge. In an interview with Alexander
Werth on 24 September 1946, he declared that he believed absolutely ‘in the
possibility of friendly and lasting co-operation between the Soviet Union and
the Western democracies-----1 do not doubt,’ he said, ‘that the possibilities
for peaceful co-operation are likely to increase rather than decrease.’12 And
then, a few weeks later, in December 1946, Molotov demonstrated the desire
of the Soviet Union to avoid a break with the Western powers when, in the
closing discussions of the New York conference of the Council of Foreign
Ministers on the peace treaties with Italy, Hungary, Romania and Finland,
he made a number of surprising concessions.

The most outstanding question facing the Allies and emphasizing the
differences between them was the problem of Germany—how to prevent
this country which, twice in the lifetime of a single generation, had unleashed a
world war, from becoming a renewed menace to the world. When the Allies
first discussed this question at Tehran at the end of November 1943, Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin had all agreed that Germany should be divided so that
it might never again challenge the world by force of arms. Roosevelt’s plan,
submitted to the conference, suggested a division into five autonomous
states. Not unexpectedly, it was Stalin who spoke most decisively for the
dismantling of Germany, since it was Russia which had suffered most from
the war caused by Germany. As he told the conference, he was convinced
that Germany would quickly recover from the war and might ‘start on a
new one within a comparatively short period’. Therefore, he said, it would be
‘far better to break up and scatter the German tribes. Of course they would
. . . always want to reunite. . . . Germany should at all costs be broken up
so that she could not reunite.’3 Even at the Yalta Conference in February

1. Quoted in Dalton, H ig h T id e a n d A f te r , pp. 155-6. For the mutual mistrust between

the former allies which erupted shortly after the end of the war, the memorandum which
Molotov submitted to the Foreign Ministers’ conference in Moscow in December 1945
provides a good illustration. In this he charged the British government—the government
of the Labour party!—with rebuilding the Austrian army and organizing military groups of
Nazis and anti-Communist Russian White Guards, with the evident intention of employing
them against the Soviet Union. Bevin, in his counter-statement, said that the accusations
were, of course, ‘completely without foundation’ and that he ‘denied them categorically’;
see Byrnes, S p e a k in g F r a n k ly , p. 163.
2. S u n d a y T im e s (London), 25 September 1946.
3. Winston S. Churchill, T h e S e c o n d W o r ld W a r, vol. v: C lo sin g th e R in g (London,
1952), pp. 317 and 356.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 127

1945, the partition of Germany remained a unanimous war aim of the

Allies.
Then, three months later, on 9 May 1945, Stalin declared that the Soviet
Union had no intention of ‘dismembering or destroying Germany’.1 And at
the Paris conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers (June-July 1946),
which had been called to prepare the ground for the peace treaties, Molotov
not only turned against the partition or even a forced federation of Germany,
but also against the cession of the Rhineland, the Ruhr and the Saar, as
France demanded. ‘It has lately become fashionable,’ he said, ‘to speak of
German partition as separate “autonomous” states, of German federalism,
of the cession of the Ruhr districts from Germany. All such proposals spring
from the same aim: to destroy Germany and to transform it into an agrarian
state, for it is certainly clear that without the Ruhr Germany could hardly
exist as an independent, viable state. But as I have already said, our task
must not be the destruction of Germany if the interests of peace and quiet
are dear to us.’2
A number of historians have taken the view that Stalin retracted his
demands for German partition and began to plead for a unified German
state after coming to believe that the Communists, or at least such segments
of the middle classes as were ready for a return to the Rappallo policy against
‘Anglo-American capitalism’, would attain power.3
Yet, while Molotov declared his opposition to any cession of the Ruhr,
he proposed a four-power control for the Ruhr industry—a control by the
United States, Great Britain, France and, of course, Russia. Bevin, on the
other hand, proposed that the Ruhr should remain a political part of
Germany, but that its industry—Germany’s most powerful war potential—
should be internationalized by being transferred to the ownership of an
international consortium of governments—not only of the four great powers
but also of the smaller states which had united in alliance against Hitler’s
1. Quoted in V. M. Molotov, Questions o f Foreign Policy (Moscow, 1949), p. 427.
2. ibid., pp. 70-1.
3. This consideration might have played a part in Stalin’s well-known order of the day
of 23 February 1942, when he emphasized that nothing was further from the Soviet Union’s
intention than the destruction of Germany. ‘In the foreign press,’ he said, ‘there is talk about
the Red Army’s aim to exterminate the German people and destroy the German S tate.. . .
The Red Army has no such idiotic aims, and never can have. The Red Army has set itself the
aim of dislodging the German occupants of our country.. . . It is quite possible that the war
for the liberation of our country will lead to the expulsion or destruction of the Hitler clique.
We would welcome such a result. But it would be laughable to compare the Hitler clique
with the German people, with the German state. The experiences of history foretell that the
Hitlers will come and go, but the German people, the German state, will remain’—J. Stalin,
Over the Great National War o f the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1946), pp. 49-50. The purpose of
this speech was the founding of the ‘Free Germany’ National Committee in July 1943 and of
the ‘Federation of German Officers’ in September. Both organizations were dissolved on 2
November 1945. It was, of course, kept from the public that Stalin, at the same time as he
pledged himself to the retention of the German state, was demanding its partition in
confidential discussions with Churchill and Roosevelt.
128 The Destiny o f Socialism
Germany, such as Belgium and Holland.1 The United States, however,
rejected both proposals, being anxious to prevent a Western European sphere
of influence opening out to the Soviet Union as a consortium member, and
perhaps also to secure an investment market in Germany’s heavy industry
for American capitalism.
Besides blocking Stalin’s plans for the Ruhr, the United States also strove
to check his demands for German reparations. At Yalta he had proposed
that Russia should receive total reparations in the form of goods and means
of production to the value of $10,000 million, a demand he renewed at
Potsdam. But at neither of the two conferences did the Allies agree to
reparation settlements for Russia. Byrnes was therefore able to deny at the
Paris conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers2 that any binding
agreements had been made, and implied that the Soviet Union was already
sufficiently compensated, having won an increase in ‘taxable wealth’ in
Konigsberg and the northern part of East Prussia, allocated to it at Potsdam,
as well as in the districts given to Poland, which far exceeded the reparation
sum demanded. The United States was not, of course, able to prevent the
Soviet Union from collecting their reparation demands in the Russian-
occupied zone, but in May 1946 it blocked the delivery of reparations to the
Soviet Union from the American zone.
The attitude of the United States government to the question of a joint
administration of the Ruhr and to Russia’s reparation demands demonstrated
symptoms of a change in American thinking towards the Soviet Union. It
accorded with the humiliating response which met Russia’s request for
American loans.
When, during the course of the war, Stalin had raised the possibility of
an American loan to rebuild Russia’s ruined cities and industries after the
war, he found Roosevelt sympathetic; it was not to be forgotten, as Churchill
had said, how the Soviet Union had carried ‘the brunt of the war’. Thus
encouraged, the Soviet Union early in January 1945 submitted a formal
application for a post-war loan of $6,000 million. It was, however, a request
which could only be discussed after the war had ended, and by then Roosevelt
was dead, while his successor, Truman, was in no mood to help the Soviet
Union to overcome economic ruin. Not only did he stop Lend-Lease three
weeks after the end of the war in Europe but, in a memorandum of January
1946, he directed his Secretary of State to ‘enforce’ settlement of Russia’s
Lend-Lease debt.3 There was no further talk of Russian requests for a loan.
1. See Dalton, High Tide and A fter, pp. 105-6.
2. The questions of Russian reparation demands and the Ruhr were discussed at two
further conferences of the Council: in Moscow in March 1947 and in London in November-
December 1947. For a detailed report of the discussions, see Meissner, Russland, die
Westmdchte und Deutschland, pp. 105-6.
3. See Truman, Year o f Decisions, p. 552.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War ’ 129

8
On 12 March 1947, President Truman startled the world with an open
declaration of war against Communism as the instrument of the Soviet
Union’s expansionist policies. In a message to both houses of Congress he
stated that the United States government had made a decision to curb the
spread of Communism in the world and to check the expansionist ambitions
of the Soviet Union.1
Truman’s statement was prompted by the decision of the British Labour
government in the spring of 1947 to withdraw its troops from Greece. The
country was still witnessing the terrible civil war unleashed by the Com-
munists in the autumn of 1946,2 and its disrupted economic life and govern-
ment administration was only being kept from collapse by military and
economic help from Britain. But Britain, bled dry by the war and burdened
with the crippling cost of feeding the population in the British occupation
zone in Germany, felt itself unable to continue with the financial burden of
an occupation in Greece. London informed Washington that it would
withdraw its troops on 31 March.
Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, described in his
memoirs the panic which the cabinet decision unleashed in Washington.
‘The Americans,’ he wrote, ‘took fright lest Russia should overrun the whole
of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean.’ He quoted a radio address
by Joseph Harsh in Washington, which explained the motives which moved
Truman to announce his ‘policy of restraint’. Should Greece go Communist,
he said, ‘it might mean the spread of Russian influence to Italy in one direction
and as far as the borders of India in the other’. The expansion of Russia, he
continued, ‘would not require a single Red Army soldier or a single overt
act by the Russian State, and here also was the type of possible Russian
expansion which could not be answered by any atomic bomb’.2
The United States government undertook responsibility for Greece,
Truman justifying the decision by a principle which has gone down in
history under the name of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ and which was to direct
the future international policy of the United States: the principle of resistance
to Communist revolution wherever it may appear. ‘In a number of countries,’
Truman said, ‘totalitarian regimes have been forced on to nations.. . .’ He
mentioned Poland, Romania and Bulgaria which, in spite of repeated
protests by the United States government, had been subjected ‘through force
and intimidation’ to totalitarian rule. In Greece a belligerent minority had
been able to create chaos by exploiting the poverty and misery which so far
had made the country’s economic recovery impossible. ‘I believe,’ Truman
1. Truman, Year o f Decisions, p. 552. 2. See pp. 108-111.
3. Dalton, High Tide and After, pp. 207-8.
130 The Destiny o f Socialism
stated, ‘that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples
who resist attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.’1
The Truman Doctrine rested on the assumption of an irreconcilable
antagonism between states with democratic and Communist systems of
government. But this was in fact only an ideological cover for the struggle
by the United States and its allies to restore in Europe the balance of power
overthrown by the war. The collapse of the countries of Eastern and Central
Europe had created a vacuum and in trying to fill as much of it as possible,
the Soviet Union was driven by its paramount need for strategic security. It
was not so much the idea of a Communist world revolution which provoked
Russia into subjecting Poland, the Baltic and eastern Balkan states, as the
fear of encirclement should these countries ever come under the rule of
hostile powers. The Communist ideal served the Soviet Union simply as an
ideological cover for its power policy and as a moral justification for the
imperialistic methods it harnessed to subject other countries—methods which
in fact stood in such sharp contrast to the ethos and fundamental principles
of Socialism. The rule of Communism set up under the system of Soviet
dictatorship in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union was not the object
of their subversion, but only a means towards strengthening Russia’s pre-
dominance in these states. In fact there was at that time nothing further
from the interests of Stalin, that most pragmatic of politicians, than the
expansion of Communism by world revolution. What he strove for was a
balance of power in Europe which would ensure the security of the Soviet
Union.
Yet, because the power policy of the Soviet Union cloaked itself in the
ideology of Communism, the expansion of Russia in Eastern Europe and the
Balkans appeared as a prelude to world revolution. This was the myth upon
which Truman founded his doctrine. Its object was to contain not only
Russian expansion in Europe but also, by threat of war if necessary, to
prevent the spread of Communism wherever in the world it attempted to
seize power. It represented a turning-point in the history of the alliance
between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union, putting an end to
any exuberant hopes that the peoples of all the nations had felt for a lasting,
friendly co-operation between the Great Powers in a world of peace and
prosperity. It triggered off the ‘Cold War’ and the years of stock-piling
colossal atomic arsenals which have swallowed up the peacetime wealth of
the people, who would in any case be destroyed by their actual use in war.
It suggested the possibility of armed conflict between East and West, giving
impetus to the development of an atmosphere of international tension in
which each power bloc seemed to threaten the existence of the other.
1. On 22 May, nine weeks after Truman’s declaration, Congress passed $400 m. for
military and economic support of the Greek and Turkish governments, which, as Truman
said, were threatened by the danger of Communism.
 The Origins o f the ‘Cold War' 131
In the atmosphere of the Cold War, any hopes of overcoming the split
in the international Labour movement could only remain unfulfilled. What-
ever the rights or wrongs of the situation, Communists naturally aligned
themselves with the Soviet Union in the face of the general threat, while
Socialists identified themselves with their own countries, which in turn felt
threatened by the Soviet Union.
 PART TWO

The Reopening o f the Split

6 • The Revival o f the International

The Socialist Labour International did not survive the Second World War;
its bureau met for the last time on 3 April 1940. Six days later the German
army invaded Norway and Denmark, and, a month later, overran Belgium
and Holland and had begun its offensive against France. When French
resistance collapsed after a few weeks, only three European countries
remained whose labour movements had escaped destruction by Fascism:
Great Britain, Switzerland and Sweden. The International had been ineffective
ever since the Munich agreement of October 1938;1 then the catastrophe of
war, swallowing up almost all its members on the Continent, put an end to
its effective existence. It had not, however, been entirely dissolved. While no
death certificate had been issued in the name of the International,*123it had
departed from the stage of history.
The vacuum thus created had been filled, however sparsely, by a small
international group of leaders from the suppressed European Socialist parties
who had found asylum in Great Britain. Their meetings, convened by the
British Labour party, were, however, held in camera and they issued no
statements.®
The first Socialist International conference since the beginning of the war
did not meet until early March 1945 in London under the chairmanship of
Hugh Dalton. It was called by the British Labour party, but was attended
by representatives of only thirteen Socialist parties. The Socialist parties of
1. See Braunthal, H is to r y o f th e In te rn a tio n a l, 1 9 1 4 -1 9 4 3 , pp. 487-92.
2. The formal dissolution of the Socialist Labour International did not take place until
November 1946 by a decision taken at an international conference in Bournemouth.
3. I n te r n a tio n a l S u p p le m e n t, a supplement to the Labour party’s L a b o u r P r e s s S e r v ic e ,
which appeared at the beginning of 1942, established contacts between emigre Socialist
groups in Britain. To discuss the peace aims of Socialism and the problem of the future
International, I n te r n a tio n a l S o c ia lis t F o ru m , a monthly periodical, was founded in 1941 by
Julius Braunthal in association with Harold Laski, a member of the Labour party executive,
and Louis de Brouckere, a former president of the International. Its editorial board rep-
resented almost all Socialist groups of exiles, and it appeared as a supplement to the L e f t
N e w s , edited by Victor Gollancz.
134 The Reopening o f the Split
those countries which were fighting the Allies in the war—Germany, Austria
and Hungary—were not invited, while representatives of other parties were
unable to attend owing to the difficulties of travel imposed by war-time
conditions. This conference was not therefore able to speak in the name
of the International. But it did assume some importance, for it was the
first occasion since the beginning of the war that any form of the Inter-
national had appeared in public and expressed opinions on the political
and economic problems facing the world in constructing the imminent
peace.
The focal point for discussion1 was the problem of Germany, which
had been at the centre of passionate debate in the British Labour party
as well as among Socialist emigre groups during the war. At the time of
the conference the seal had still to be set on the defeat of Nazi rule.
What was to happen to Germany afterwards? This was the question for
debate.
The conference’s resolution on Germany reflected the mood which the
outrages of National Socialism had evoked in the world at large. It declared
that the German people had, under Hitler, ‘burdened itself with a collective
guilt greater than that of any people in history’. Although it should never be
forgotten that large sections of the German population had opposed Hitler’s
rise to power and many had become victims of its terror, it remained
impossible to take measures which would not strike Germany as an entity;
‘the whole German people must suffer the consequences’ of the deeds of the
Third Reich. As a result of the outrages of Hitlerism and its barbaric methods
during the war, the German people had forfeited their right to self-
determination which, up till now, ‘the civilized world’ had acknowledged.
Germany must, the resolution insisted, place itself for a while under the
control of the United Nations and submit to military occupation by the four
Great Powers until such time as it became clear that Fascism had indeed
been purged from the national consciousness. The country must be totally
disarmed, the landed estates of the German aristocrats broken up, the
captains of heavy industry dispossessed, and the industrial complexes of the
Ruhr and the Rhineland internationalized. On the other hand, the conference
declared against any division of Germany into several states, though it did
not oppose ‘necessary adjustments of borders’ or the setting up of special
regimes in the Rhineland, Ruhr and Saar.
The main concern of the British Labour party in calling the conference
was, however, the renewal of the Socialist International. The conference
instituted a steering committee charged with drawing up a plan on the basis
of its memorandum to re-establish the International, with its principles,

1. No minutes are available for any Socialist International conference up to 1950. This
account is based on documents and resolutions of the conference in the Archives of the
Socialist International, International Institute for Social History. Amsterdam.
 The Revival o f the International 135
structure and main functions to be discussed and approved at a general
conference to follow ‘in the near future’.1

More than a year elapsed, however, before an international Socialist con-

ference met again. Once more it was called by the British Labour party and
it met in May 1946 at Clacton, the seaside holiday town on the Essex coast
not far from London.
It seemed as though a conference to discuss the re-establishment of the
International could hardly have met under more hopeful auguries. For the
first time in history, the working class had entered the scene as a decisive
factor in world policy. In Britain the Labour party had attained power in the
triumphant election victory of July 1945; in Sweden, Norway, Australia and
New Zealand there were Labour parties in sole control of government, and
in almost every other European country the Social Democratic parties par-
ticipated in coalition governments. And while the fundamental split in the
International Labour movement had not yet been overcome, in most of
Europe, as in France, Italy and Czechoslovakia and all other Eastern
European countries, Socialist parties were co-operating with Communist
parties in joint action alliances or coalition governments. An International,
based on the power and influence of the European Socialist parties, was for
the first time in a position to become a true power factor capable of direct
influence over world policy.
But it could only attain a reality as a power factor provided that the
reopening of the split in the international labour movement could be avoided.
This realization had already shown itself in a declaration of the London
conference of March 1945, which had stated: ‘The conference recognized
the urgent need to unite the working class.’
Unity in the international labour movement could only be preserved by
an understanding between the Social Democratic International and the Soviet
Union. Such an understanding was seen to be simply the precondition for
the development of Socialist power. ‘If there were to be collaboration between
Russia and the Socialist International,’ Harold Laski commented in a
memorandum which he laid before the Clacton conference,12 ‘then Europe
would become a Socialist continent within twenty years.’ But if collaboration
with Russia should fail, he added, then the greater part of Europe would
become prey to monopoly capitalism, which carried within itself the seeds of
a Third World War. ‘To prevent this catastrophe at the same time as uniting
the working classes of the world,’ he stated, ‘the new International must

1. For the text of the declaration and resolution, see Report of the National Executive
Committee, in Report of the Forty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 1945,
pp. 163-70 and 13.
2. The memorandum may be found in the Archives of the Socialist International,
Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
136 The Reopening o f the Split
strive to gain the friendship of the Soviet Union.’ This, he said, was its
central task.
However, the chaotic world situation which followed the end of the war
threw up political and ideological conflicts between the Socialist parties
which were not easily reconciled. These stemmed from contrasting attitudes
towards the conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union
which had already become apparent at the Potsdam Conference in July
1945. The French and British Socialist parties, as ruling parties responsible
for their own governmental policies, were guided by loyalty to the position
of the West, while Socialist parties of countries within the Russian sphere of
influence—Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia-
supported the alliance of their states with the Soviet Union as being the
most effective guarantee of security against a possible threat posed by
Germany. Thus differences of aims between the governments of the Western
powers and Russia—as, for example, over the question of Germany’s
future—threw up differences between the Socialist parties of the West and
East.
To these were added differences of ideology. The Western Socialist parties
were traditionally Social Democrat, while those of the East, now carrying
joint responsibility for government with Communist parties, found themselves
unable under prevailing conditions to act in the spirit of Social Democracy
to carry through social and economic changes if they were to avoid the
return to power of the old ruling class. Each one of these countries, with the
exception of Czechoslovakia, was a country with no democratic tradition,
always subjected to one form or other of dictatorship by the landed gentry,
the aristocracy or the officer caste. They were agrarian societies in which
the industrial proletariat—the traditional catalyst for social revolution—
formed only a minority of the population, while the great mass of peasants,
still at an early stage of political development, remained subject to the
reactionary influence of the Church. The Socialist parties in Eastern Europe
were thus honestly convinced that a system of genuine democracy, on the
model of the Western states, would undermine the social revolution which
they had undertaken in alliance with the Communists. It would permit the
forces of reaction to regain power by manipulating parliamentary democracy;
it would demolish democracy, as had happened between the wars in Poland,
and even in states with democratic traditions, such as Germany and Austria,
and would, as it had then, subject the working class to a Fascist dictatorship.
The dilemma faced by Socialist parties in these countries was impressively
described by Emanuel Buchinger, a Hungarian Social Democrat leader, in
the speech of welcome which he made to the German Social Democratic
party congress in July 1947:
We are [he said] about to build up democracy in Hungary. But it cannot be like
English democracy which has developed in the course of centuries. Let us assume
 The Revival o f the International 137
that the British L abour government were defeated at the next election. Its defeat
would, at worst, slow dow n the pace o f Socialist transform ation in G reat Britain.
However, should the old reactionary classes regain power in H ungary, there would
n o t be enough trees in the forest o f Bakony on which to hang honest dem ocrats and
Socialist workers, who would be doom ed by a counter-revolutionary regime. The
three million landless peasants who have been settled by a land reform on the vast
estates of the big landowners, w ould again be reduced to serfs, the coal mines and
foundries which have been nationalized w ould be returned to their form er capitalist
owners, and the industrial workers would be thrust back into the misery from
which they have now emerged. O ur country, which had never know n freedom under
the H absburg dom ination, was poisoned by the reactionary spirit o f the H orthy
counter-revolutionary dictatorship and Fascism, which ruled it for a quarter o f a
century.1

What the Socialist parties of these countries visualized was a somewhat

modified form of parliamentary democracy which would, on the one hand,
realize the principle of the political equality and democratic right to freedom
for every citizen, while, on the other, ensuring a leading role in the state for
the alliance of Socialist and Communist parties as representing the working
class.
It was a system which, as our survey of the development of parties in
these countries has shown,12 could not avoid terrorist methods in imposing a
Communist dictatorship and so met with criticism from the West. The
British Labour government protested against the system as being in breach
of the Yalta Declaration, while the Socialist parties of the West in general
protested in their press against the excesses of these systems of government
as a violation of democratic principles.

It was on these differences of ideology and political methods that the first
attempt to re-create the International foundered. Only the Socialist parties
of France, Belgium and Austria were in favour of its renewal in all its forms.
The Labour parties of Britain and the Scandinavian countries, which all
happened to be in power, were reluctant to accept the proposal for re-creating
the International at this stage, since it might infringe their autonomy. The
strongest resistance, however, came from the Socialist parties of the Eastern
European countries. For these parties, directly allied with the Communists,
and with their policies closely attuned to friendship with the Soviet Union,
any formal alliance with an international organization that would inevitably
be led by the parties of the West was unacceptable. They pleaded at the
conference for the creation of a labour international embracing both Socialist
and Communist parties along the lines of the World Federation of Trade
Unions, founded in Paris in September 1945.3 Pietro Nenni, leader of the

1. P r o to k o ll d e r V e r h a n d lu n g e n d e s P a r te ita g e s d e r S o z ia ld e m o k r a tis c h e n P a r te i D e u tsc h -

la n d s , N iirn b u rg , 2 9 J u tii-2 J u li 1 9 4 7 (Hamburg, 1947), p. 29.
2. See pp. 100-103, 116-119. 3. See page 13.
138 The Reopening o f the Split
Italian Socialist party, then closely allied with the Communist party in a
joint action pact, was also in favour of this idea, as were a number of French
Socialist party members and Louis de Brouckere, representing the Belgian
Labour party. It did not, however, meet with the approval of a majority of
the conference, and the question of renewing the International was once
again postponed.
On the other hand, a positive decision was taken at the Clacton conference
to create a forum by organizing periodic conferences between Socialist parties
so as to hold confidential discussions on international problems. It was
agreed that any political resolutions taken by this body would require
unanimity, that only one party from any one country was to be eligible to
participate and that no Socialist parties in exile were to be invited—a rule
insisted upon with particular emphasis by the Eastern European representa-
tives, whose parties had split over the question of joint action with the
Communists. Finally it was agreed to set up a small secretariat in London—
the Socialist Information and Liaison Office (S.I.L.O.)—whose sole function
was to pass information reports to the parties and to prepare the adminis-
tration of future conferences. The British Labour party placed its inter-
national department at the disposal of the S.I.L.O., and its secretary, Denis
Healey, was responsible for the secretariat of the S.I.L.O.
The renewal of the International was once again brought up for debate
at the next international Socialist conference, held in Bournemouth in early
November 1946. Again the conference was almost unanimously of the opinion
that any ‘new organization of Socialist International is impractical at the
moment’. Crucial for this decision was the attitude taken by the Socialist
parties of Eastern Europe, which made it absolutely clear that they would
not be able to join a formally constituted International. The result would
have been an International geographically split between West and East, and
the British Labour party was seeking above all to avoid breaking with the
Socialist parties of Eastern Europe who had representation in their respective
governments—in order, as Dalton put it, ‘to avoid a split between West and
East Europe’.1

At the centre of the discussion at Bournemouth, however, loomed the

question of admitting the German Social Democratic party into the inter-
national community of Socialist parties. The enormity of the crimes which
the Nazi regime had committed in the name of the German people had
engendered a profound hatred, at first only for the Nazis themselves, but
which, during the course of the war, as the Nazis invaded country after
country in Europe, came to be transformed into a hatred for the entire
German people. What those whose countries had been attacked and torn by
Hitler saw was, to all effects, a united German people supporting a barbaric
1. Report of the Forty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 1947, p. 107.
 The Revival o f the International 139
dictatorship and condoning a war against all the peoples of Europe. The
phenomenon of the apparent total unity of the German people during the
war was explained in the hate propaganda directed against Germany as a
pre-eminent characteristic in the psychology of the German people—a people
described as possessing an inherent love of war and greed of conquest and
who, as history had demonstrated down the centuries, would willingly and
obediently submit themselves to the dictatorship of war-like leaders. Thus
not only the Nazis were responsible for the misdeeds of Hitler’s regime: the
whole German nation must carry the burden of a collective guilt.1 Hence,
Germany had to be destroyed.
This blanket condemnation of the whole German nation was, of course,
in sharp contrast with the principles of international Socialism. But in spite
of this, many prominent Socialists, in particular those from nations which
had suffered most from the brutality of the Nazi regime—for example,
Camille Huysmans (1872-1968), the Belgian president of the Socialist Labour
International12—declared themselves uncompromisingly for the outlawing of
the whole German people. They were prepared to make no differentiation
between Nazis and anti-Nazis, between German reactionaries and German
Social Democrats. The blood sacrifices of those who had fallen in the struggle
of German Social Democracy against the Nazi movement were forgotten.
Because there had been no visible signs of mass resistance to Hitler during the
war, they declared that the German Social Democrats had, with other
Germans, supported the war efforts of the Nazi regime. They accepted the
thesis of the collective guilt of the whole German people and rejected any
common ground with German Social Democracy.
The British Labour party had certainly not remained unaffected by the
propaganda of hate, but at its party congresses both during the war and
even more so afterwards, an overwhelming majority had declared in favour
of a policy of conciliation with the German working class. The attitude of
most other Socialist parties towards German Social Democracy being in
dispute, however, the British executive had decided not to invite German
representatives to the first formal conference at Clacton, but to leave any
decision to admit German Social Democracy over till the following conference
at Bournemouth. When a majority there spoke out against admitting the

1. For a report on the propaganda of hate and its consequences, see Julius Braunthal,
Need Germany Survive?, with an Introduction by Harold J. Laski (London, 1943). One
source of a passionate propaganda of hate was Radio Moscow, stirred by Ilya Ehrenburg.
This propaganda did not, however, start until after Hitler’s attack on Russia and it fell
silent after the capture of Berlin. It was, however, continued by the Austrian Communist
party, which held fast to the thesis that ‘the German working class had opposed Fascism
with no more real resistance than any of the other classes of the German nation’, and that it
had, ‘with the rest of the German nation supported Hitler’s war of conquest’—Otto
Langbein, ‘Our Attitude to Germany’, in Weg und Ziel, January 1947, p. 23.
2. See Julius Braunthal, ‘The Socialist International and Its President’, in Inter-
national Socialist Forum, January 1945.
 140 The Reopening o f the Split
German Social Democrats, a decision was once again postponed and it was
simply decided initially to invite a number of German Social Democratic
representatives to the following conference so that they could answer for their
attitude.

This conference had been called for 6 June 1947 to take place in Zurich.
Three hundred and eighty delegates representing twenty-four parties
assembled on the last day to interrogate the German delegates, Kurt
Schumacher, Erich Ollenhauer and Fritz Henssler. Somehow the conference
had managed to get itself involved in the role of a historical tribunal when it
called upon the German delegation, practically as defendants, to answer the
question: ‘Why was Germany the only state in which no attempt was made
to overthrow the Nazi regime?’
Schumacher began his reply by describing the internal differences in
conditions for resistance in Germany as opposed to those in the German-
occupied countries.
‘In the countries occupied by Germany,’ he said, ‘the resistance movements
certainly contained men and women who were motivated solely by the ideals
of Social Democracy and freedom. But the mainspring of these resistance
movements was the fact that an enemy army, personifying Hitler’s Germany,
had invaded the country and oppressed the population. No such motive for
resistance existed in Germany. . . . Also the web of security extended by the
Gestapo was incomparably tighter in Germany than it had ever become in
France, Norway or Czechoslovakia. . . . In Germany,’ he continued, ‘the
Gestapo installed its agents in every factory, beside every desk, inside every
house, and in many thousands of cases even within individual families. This
is a fact to prevent false comparisons.’
Despite these conditions, Schumacher told the conference, there had been
resistance among the German Social Democrats. ‘I will not,’ he said, ‘lay
before you a list of the mass trials that took place in many German towns;
I do not intend to produce the death sentences and imprisonments.’ He wished
only to recall a personal experience. At the first meeting of Social Democrats
held after the war, on 6 May 1945, a day after Germany’s capitulation, about
a hundred men and women from the resistance movement had gathered in
Hanover.1 They were asked to write nothing more on a piece of paper than
the lengths of the sentences passed on them by the Nazis. ‘I looked at these
pieces of paper,’ Schumacher said, ‘and over a thousand years of imprison-
ment faced me.’
‘Do not speak to me of the weakness of the resistance movement among
German Socialists,’ he told the delegates. ‘No one without personal ex-
perience of the Nazi system can imagine how deeply it infiltrated the whole
of society, even private family life, and so allowed the unthinkable to
1. See page 70.
 The Revival o f the International 141
happen—mothers denouncing their children, fathers their sons, and sending
them to concentration camps. Even so, a resistance movement did exist,
though unlike those in the occupied countries it lacked the incentive of a
struggle for national freedom.’
In conclusion, Schumacher commented that a refusal to admit the German
Social Democratic party (S.P.D.) into the new International could only
‘cause pain, though we would not react to this with bitterness,’ he said. ‘The
spirit of internationalism which flows through our movement will remain
alive under every circumstance.’ He requested of the delegates one thing
only: ‘That you do not use towards us a double standard of justice and do
not further delay your inquiry. This we should find unbearable. If differences
of opinion on this question turn out to be so insurmountable that they
could endanger international Socialist co-operation, then we are prepared
to withdraw. . . . But my appeal is to the principles of Socialist ethics.
Either we are to be respected as international Socialists, enjoying equal
constitutional rights, or we can find no place in the international Socialist
community___ ’
Following on the discussion the conference appointed a commission
consisting of Louis de Brouckere (Belgium), Salomon Grumbach (France),
Joe Reeves (Great Britain), Vilem Bernard (Czechoslovakia), Franz Jonas
(Austria), W. Thomassen (Holland) and John Sannes (Norway). When it
appeared, their Report, drafted by de Brouckere in his position as chairman
of the commission, reached the following decisive conclusions:

The S.P.D. differs in its program m e neither in w ord n or deed from the Socialist
parties o f other countries. It is therefore a fraternal party.
It has been stated th at the S.P.D. has never dissociated itself from H itler’s policies
o f conquest and cruelty. This stands in contradiction to the facts. The resolutions by
the S.P.D. party congresses an d the speeches of its members have invariably
denounced Hitlerism in the strongest possible terms.
It has been said that S.P.D. members did not offer enough resistance to the
H itler regime. This statem ent is contradicted by the fact th at very m any am ong
present active Social Dem ocrats suffered for years in concentration camps—
Schumacher himself over ten years. These officials are the survivors o f an elite which
did not hesitate to risk torture and death for the sake o f their ideals.
Accusations and recrim inations have been voiced against the attitude taken
by the S.P.D. before the war. The S.P.D. has a great history behind it, a history
with m any glorious and some less glorious pages. . . . International Socialism
has m ore urgent problem s to solve than to pass a verdict on shortcom ings which
have been revealed in the past in the Socialist party o f G erm any or any other
country.
There is one party only which can effectively help to create a Germ any with a
m ore fruitful, dem ocratic and, above all, peaceful future. This is the S.P.D.
A re we ready to assist the S.P.D. in the fulfilling o f these tasks, which are
also ours? O r do we wish to refuse the S.P.D. our help and abandon them to
a struggle w ith the G erm an Com munists, supported by the Com munists o f all
countries, with the G erm an Catholics, supported by the Catholics o f the whole
142 The Reopening o f the Split
world, and with German capitalism, supported by our old enemy, international
capitalism?
If international labour refuses to assist the S.P.D. we shall have to carry the
moral responsibility for the consequences, and these consequences will be highly
dangerous.1

Acting in the spirit of the report, the Socialist International Conference

meeting at Antwerp, at the end of November 1947, agreed to admit the
S.P.D. as an equal member.12 A broad gap in the representation of Europe’s
Socialist Labour movement in the International Conference had been closed.
The Zurich conference had also appointed a commission to study the
possibility of re-establishing the International and had committed it to
submitting its proposals to the next conference, planned for the beginning
of December 1947 at Antwerp. The commission, meeting twice in Paris,
had looked at the question mainly from the viewpoint of the relationship
existing between the Western powers and the U.S.S.R. The intensification of
the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was threatening
the world with a division into a confrontation of two hostile power blocs—a
development carrying the danger of a Third World War. In such a situation
it appeared particularly important to preserve relations between the West
European parties and Socialist parties in countries within the Russian
sphere of influence, because these parties collaborated with Communists in
governments closely allied with the Soviet Union and so represented a
potential link between Western and Eastern Socialism. But, as we saw earlier,
the Socialist parties of Eastern Europe were not able to affiliate themselves
with a revived International, and so its re-establishment appeared to the
commission to be untimely.
It did, however, suggest changing the over-loose structure of the S.I.L.O.
into a tighter organization: a permanent committee of the International—the
Committee of International Socialist Conferences, to be known by the title
COMISCO—in which all member parties would be represented by the
mandates of their representatives. The Zurich conference therefore appointed
a select committee to act as executive committee to COMISCO under the
chairmanship of Morgan Phillips, secretary-general of the British Labour
party. The committee was made up of one delegate each from the parties of
Great Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Austria and representation for the
Scandinavian parties by a delegate they had nominated.

1. For the text of Schumacher’s speech at the Zurich conference and the commission’s
report, see Julius Braunthal, ‘K u r t S c h u m a c h e r u n d d ie S o z ia lis tis c h e In te r n a tio n a le ’, in
T u rm w a c h te r d e r D e m o k r a tie , vol. i, pp. 510-22.
2. The admission of the S.P.D. into the International was decided by twelve votes to
four (Palestine, Poland, Czechoslavakia and Hungary), with two abstentions (Switzerland
and Italy). For a short survey of the debate on the question, see COMISCO Circular
88/47, pp. 21-3, Archives of the Socialist International, Institute for Social History,
Amsterdam.
 The Revival o f the International 143
But, by the time the Antwerp conference met, Moscow had already
broken with Social Democracy. Two months earlier Stalin had re-created
the Communist International, which had been dissolved in May 1943, in a
new guise—the ‘Cominform’, which entered into existence with a declaration
of hostility towards Social Democracy and the Western powers.
7 • The Founding o f the Cominform

The founding of the ‘Cominform’, a ‘Communist Information Bureau’, by a

select group of Communist leaders at a conference, meeting from 21-27
September 1947 in Szklaraska Poreba in Poland, is a crucial factor in the
history of the Communist movement.
The event itself was veiled in secrecy. To those Communist parties who
had not been invited it came as much as a surprise as it did to the rest of
the world. The conference was held in a castle in the middle of a huge estate
ringed by police guards; only nine parties were represented, and not all of
these, the Italian Communist party, for example, had been informed of the
purpose of the conference.1
The basis on which parties had been selected for the conference was also
cryptic. Except for the Russian Communist party, which had, of course,
called the conference, only countries under Communist governments—
Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and
only two Western European Communist parties—those of Italy and France—
were represented. Conspicuous by their absence, therefore, were those parties
which were at that time of special importance in the Communist world
movement, such as the Greek Communist party, then involved in an armed
struggle for power2 and relying on the moral and material support of its
fellow parties, or the German Communist party in the Russian Zone of
Occupation, to whom a special task had been allotted in Stalin’s strategy.
Neither were any non-European Communist parties invited to take part, not
even the powerful Chinese Communist party, which had now entered the
critical phase of its struggle against Chiang Kai-shek. Whatever plans Stalin
1. See Eugenio Reale, ‘The Founding of the Cominform’, in Milorad M. Drach-
kovitch and Branko Lazitch (eds.), The Comintern—Historical Highlights (New York, 1966),
p. 259. Eugenio Reale, jointly with Luigi Longo, represented the Italian Communist party at
the inaugural conference of the Cominform.
2. Seepp. 108-111.
 The Founding o f the Cominfotm 145
was pursuing with the Szklaraska conference, its peculiar make-up did not
indicate anything resembling a revival of the Communist International in its
old form.
The idea of such a revival had been mooted by Tito in discussion with
Stalin in 1945 shortly after the end of the war, and he had welcomed it ‘with
open arms’.1 Yet not until a year later, in June 1946, did Stalin take up the
suggestion. Tito had arrived in Moscow for Kalinin’s funeral with a Yugoslav
delegation, while Dimitrov, the last Secretary of the Communist International,
had arrived with one from Bulgaria. At a dinner given by him for both
delegations, Stalin raised the subject of the Communist International without
in any way attempting to hide from his guests his true feelings—namely
contempt—for Lenin’s creation. ‘What made me feel deeply hurt,’ Alexander
Rankovic, who was sitting next to Tito, commented, ‘was the aggressive,
almost spiteful tone in which he spoke of the Third International and the
way he directed his shafts at Dimitrov. The blood shot to the head of the
aged Dimitrov . . .’.12 Stalin explained to his guests that reviving the Com-
munist International in any form was out of the question. On the other hand,
an organization for exchanging information could be founded, the members
of which could meet at conferences from time to time to compare experiences
and pass resolutions. These resolutions would not ‘of course’, he added, ‘be
binding on those parties which did not vote for them’.3
Stalin then hesitated for one further year before consolidating the idea.
In the summer and autumn of 1946 it had seemed as if an understanding
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union was still possible. In his
interview with Alexander Werth in September 1946, as was seen earlier, Stalin
declared that he ‘believed absolutely’ in the possibility of their future peaceful
co-existence.4 Obviously he wished to prevent any action, such as setting up
an international Communist organization, which would exacerbate the
impression that he was trying to revive the concept of world revolution.
Stalin’s good faith, if genuine, was evidently badly shaken by the Truman
Doctrine announced in March 1947. Yet it seems remarkable that he accepted
this declaration of America’s hostility towards Communism without making
a counter-declaration or any evident change in his foreign policy. Oddly

1. See Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks. H is Self-Portrait and Struggle with Stalin
(London, 1953), p. 300.
2. Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 284-5. Reale recorded as a ‘deceitful omission’ the fact that
the word ‘Comintern’ was not mentioned once during the six days of the Szklaraska Poreba
Conference—‘clearly an intentional taboo,’ he remarked—Reale, ‘The Founding of the
Cominform’ in Drachkovitch and Lazitch (eds.), The Comintern, p. 258. It may be recalled
that Stalin, on the eve of Lenin’s funeral, had solemnly declared: ‘In leaving us, Comrade
Lenin enjoined on us fidelity to the Communist International. We swear to thee, Comrade
Lenin, to devote our lives to the enlargement and strengthening of the Union of the workers
of the whole world, the Communist International’—quoted in Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A
Critical Survey o f Bolshevism (New York, 1939), p. 352.
3. Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 301. 4. See page 126.
146 The Reopening o f the Split
enough, he took a generous United States scheme for economic assistance
to Europe—the Marshall Plan—as his excuse for making such a change, and
deciding to revive an organ of the Communist world movement, he summoned
the Szklaraska Poreba conference.

The Marshall Plan had been outlined by George Marshall, Byrnes’ successor
as Secretary of State, at the beginning of January 1947, in a speech delivered
at Harvard University on 5 June 1947. The United States government was,
he said, prepared to finance a programme for rebuilding the ruined economies
of the European states, provided the governments of Europe would together
grasp the initiative to carry out the programme. Marshall emphasized that
this assistance was by no means intended to be a weapon for the United
States administration to use against any system of government. ‘Our policy,’
he declared, ‘does not turn against any one country or doctrine, but against
hunger, poverty, despair and chaos.. . . Every government,’ he said, ‘which
is prepared to collaborate in the task of rebuilding would find full support
with the government of the United States.’1 He therefore made it clear that
Communist-governed countries could participate as well as all others in the
aid action. He added, however, that ‘no government attempting to hinder the
economic rebuilding of other countries could expect any help from us’. And
in a vague phrase, the meaning of which was, however, unmistakable, he
stated, in the spirit of the Truman Doctrine: ‘Governments or political
parties which attempt to perpetuate the state of misery of people, in order to
profit by it either politically or in other ways, will encounter the opposition
of the United States.’12
While the Marshall Plan in no way excluded Communist-ruled states or
questioned their doctrines or attached any conditions to the granting of
American financial aid, it was undoubtedly intended as a factor to stem
Communist expansion in Europe. Under the impact of the general strikes in
France and Italy during the spring of 1947,3 Ernest Bevin, the British foreign
secretary, had written to Marshall a few days before his speech to say that,
unless the United States government could at once produce a huge and
comprehensive plan for Europe, it was going to be too late. Bevin believed
that, in the face of the desperate situation in most Western European

1. George F. Kennan, an adviser to President Truman, had insisted in a memorandum

on active American aid for Europe, that this should not be allowed to appear as an act
aimed at the Communists; on the contrary, it was intended to cancel the impression created
by the Truman Doctrine that the economic assistance of the United States was only a
‘side-product’ of its ‘defensive reaction towards the Communist pressure’, and not an action
to establish healthy economic conditions in Europe. Therefore, the memorandum insisted,
economic aid was to be offered to all European states, and, he added, ‘should anyone
wish to split the European continent, then this should be Russia by its attitude [to the aid
action] and not through our offer’—Memoirs 1925-1950 (London, 1968), pp. 341—3.
2. Quoted in Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (London, 1967), P- 130.
3. See Chapters 2 and 3.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 147
countries, the Soviet Union was working to unleash a civil war, starting with
strikes; a beginning could be seen in the general strikes in France and Italy.1
The Marshall Plan, the declaration of which may have been accelerated
by Bevin’s alarm call, was meant to soothe a general desperation with
promises of easing the misery of the masses for the present and of creating
prosperity in the immediate future, thus immunizing them against Com-
munist propaganda.
However, as long as the possibility of co-operating with the Western
powers had seemed open to him, Stalin had in no way incited the Communist
parties of France or Italy, by unleashing strikes and unrest so as to sabotage
economic revival in their countries, to create a revolutionary situation which
would allow them to seize power. On the contrary, he had instructed them to
co-operate with the non-Communist parties12 in reconstructing their countries,
and the Communists, particularly in France, were not lacking in patriotic
zeal.3 A change of attitude towards the state began only after Stalin had
presumably been convinced by the Truman Doctrine that United States
policy was directed at breaking with the Soviet Union.

The Marshall Plan could not, however, be regarded as a hostile act against
the Soviet Union meant to set the seal on a permanent rupture. It might
rather be interpreted as an invitation to avoid a break between East and
West by participating in a plan for the economic reconstruction of Europe.4
Stalin at first appeared in doubt as to how he was to interpret it and
react towards it. When Bevin, with Georges Bidault, the French foreign
minister, on 19 June invited the Soviet government to a conference in Paris
on the 27th to plan preliminary discussions between the three powers on how
the rebuilding of Europe was to be achieved by means of the Marshall Plan,
Molotov accepted at once. The amazing number of advisers—twenty-three
in all—that he brought with him to the conference seemed a clear indication
of the Soviet Union’s willingness to co-operate in implementing the plan.

1. Desmond Donnelly, Struggle fo r the World. The Cold War from its Origins in 1917
(London, 1965), pp. 242-3.
2. Mathias Rikosi, leader of the Hungarian Communist party, who, like Thorez and
Togliatti, had returned at the end of the war from a Moscow exile, remembered Stalin’s
instructions. ‘After the liberation of 1945,’ he said, ‘we, in common with all Communist
parties in the Hitler occupied countries, followed Stalin’s instructions and set up the
Hungarian National Independent Front, a coalition with other anti-Fascist parties’—
Tarsadalmi Szemle, February-March 1952, quoted in Socialist International Information,
17 May 1952.
3. See Chapters 2 and 3.
4. The speech in which Marshall announced the plan, was, as Andre Fontaine, the
foreign editor of Le Monde, observed, ‘very different from Truman’s speech three months
earlier. It contained no accusations [against the Soviet Union] and no appeal for a crusade
[against Communism]. It was a call for reconciliation and collaboration for the common
weal’—Andre Fontaine, History o f the Cold War. From the October Revolution to the
Korean War, 1917-1950 (London, 1968), p. 327.
 148 The Reopening o f the Split
But, to general astonishment, Molotov left the conference after only two
days, explaining that the Marshall Plan threatened the independence of the
European states and was not, therefore, acceptable to the Soviet Union.1
But this was not, of course, the impression gained by a number of
Communist parties. When, on 4 July, the British and French governments
invited the governments of every European state [except Russia and Spain]
to Paris for a conference on the 12th for the realization of the Marshall Plan,
the Communist-controlled governments of Czechoslovakia2 and Poland
accepted and the French Communists’ theoretical journal declared: ‘Of
course France, like England, must not reject American aid, but its indepen-
dence must, as Comrade Thorez made clear, be jealously protected.’3
For Stalin, who regarded the Communist parties as agents of the Soviet
Union and looked upon those countries governed by them as satellite states,
this ‘deviation’ by the Czech, Polish and French Communist parties from the
line he had laid down was intolerable. There was an immediate ‘correction’.
On Stalin’s order,4 Klement Gottwald, prime minister of Czechoslovakia, had
to revoke the unanimous decision his government had taken to participate
in the Paris conference. Wladislaw Gomulka, in the name of the Polish
government, did likewise. A rejection of the invitation on behalf of the other
Communist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe was made over Radio Moscow
before a number of their governments had in fact reached any decision.

It was at this point that Stalin, as shortly became obvious to the whole
world, decided on a new direction in his foreign policy, and therefore called
together those Communist parties, which would have to play a part in his
‘cold war’ strategy, to the conference at Szklaraska Poreba so as to inform
1. Isaac Deutscher assumes that Stalin rejected the Marshall Plan because he did not
want to disclose the economic state of Russia; in the framework of the Marshall Plan, the
requests of states seeking aid was to be worked out on the report of their exact economic
situation and their resources. Russia had during the war lost twenty million people, not
seven million, as Stalin said; moreover in 1946 the country was in the wake of the worst
climatic disasters for over half a century and afflicted by a severe economic crisis. A report
Of the actual economic condition of the Soviet Union would have disclosed its military
weakness; see Stalin (London, 1966), pp. 559-60 and 567. Not until 1963 in the Statistical
Yearbook o f the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1963), p. 8, were Stalin’s figures for the loss of
Russian lives during the war corrected; it recorded a loss of twenty millions.
2 . Gottwald said in a discussion with Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, in May 1947, that
Czechoslovakia would welcome American credits, provided they were granted without
political strings. See ‘The Czechoslovak Revolution’, in Foreign Affairs, vol. xxvi (July,
1948), p. 636.
3. Cahiers du Communisme, 9 September 1947, quoted in Val R. Lorwin, The French
Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 118.
4. Two days after the decision by his Cabinet, Gottwald was summoned by Stalin to
Moscow. Of their discussion he told the two cabinet ministers, Jan Masaryk and Prokop
Drtina, who had accompanied him: ‘I have never seen Stalin so angry. He remonstrated
bitterly on our accepting the invitation to the Paris conference. He could not understand
how we could do it. He said we had acted as if ready to turn our backs on the Soviet Union’
—see Hubert Ripka, Le Coup de Prague (Paris, 1949), pp. 58-9.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 149
them of the special tasks allocated to them in the coming struggle. He did
not himself put in an appearance, but he was, as Reale reported, the con-
ference’s ‘absolute ruler’. Andrei Zhdanov and Georgi Malenkov, as members
of the Politbureau, had been entrusted with the task of informing the parties
of the new policy direction; further instructions were issued during the
course of the conference over a direct telephone line from the Kremlin.1
The most important requirement in Stalin’s strategy was to consolidate
his control over the Communist parties whose countries fell within the
Russian sphere of influence and the two Western European parties winch
represented power factors in their own countries. This was the whole purpose
of the Cominform, the founding of which was to be achieved by the con-
ference. The dissolution of the Communist International had, as it were,
created a vacuum; Moscow no longer enjoyed the use of an instrument by
which it might exert direct influence over the organization and policies of
other Communist parties. ‘Many comrades,’ said Zhdanov, giving the
reasons for the setting up of the Cominform, ‘have taken the dissolution of
the Communist International to mean the breaking of all connections and
every contact between Communist brother parties. But experience has shown
that this kind of isolation of the Communist parties one from another is
wrong, harmful and at bottom unnatural.’2
Yet the Cominform, whose foundation the conference promulgated, was
by no means an organization of all Communist parties, but simply of the
nine parties represented. As the conference resolution declared, it was to
form an ‘organization for the exchange of information and, where necessary,
to co-ordinate the activities of Communist parties on the basis of mutual
consent’.3
But the true function which Stalin in fact envisaged for the Cominform
emerged in a letter to Tito on 22 May 1948 when he was involved in conflict
with him. ‘During the organization of the Cominform,’ he said, ‘all the
1. Reale, ‘The Founding of the Cominform’, in Drachkovitch and Lazitch (eds.), The
Comintern, pp. 258-9.
2. For a Lasting Peace andfor a People's Democracy, 10 November 1947. This periodical
was founded at the conference to be an organ of the Cominform; it appeared bi-monthly, its
first issue printed in Russian, French and English, from 1 November 1947. It was edited and
printed in Belgrade. It actually came under Stalin’s direct control. He had installed Pavel
Yudin as chief editor, and arranged a direct radio-telephone link between Belgrade and
Moscow. Several copies of each number were flown to Moscow by special plane before
issue to be censored ‘personally by Stalin and Molotov’. ‘Sometimes there were so many
alterations [to be made] in articles, that the paper had to be recomposed, made up again and
returned to Moscow, whereupon new corrections would arrive from there. It also happened
that when a number had already passed all the phases of censorship and its French, English
and Russian texts had already been printed, the order would come from Moscow to with-
draw the num ber.. . . It was burnt in an oven during one complete day and night under the
supervision of Yudin’s a ssista n t. . . The reason for the destruction of the number was an
article by the general secretary of the Communist party of Greece, whom Stalin disliked*—
Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 307-8.
3. For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People's Democracy, 10 November 1947.
 150 The Reopening o f the Split
Communist parties were agreed on the unequivocal principle that each
Communist party should be responsible to the Cominform. The Cominform,’
he explained, ‘is the party-political basis of our united international front;
any deviation from it leads to betrayal.’ What he had in mind in founding
the Cominform was the restoration of his direct control over the Communist
parties at large. Dimitrov spoke for him when he said in his declaration of
8 December 1948: ‘All the Communist parties of the world form a single
front under the direction of the most powerful and most experienced
Communist party, the party of Lenin and Stalin. In Comrade Stalin all
Communist parties possess a universally recognized leader and teacher.’1
The conference agreed that Prague should be the Cominform’s head-
quarters, but following telephone instructions from Stalin, the choice was
altered to Belgrade.12 The purpose behind Stalin’s choice was soon to become
obvious.3

The resolution on the political tasks before the Communist parties was based
on Zhdanov’s analysis of the world situation, as seen by Stalin. Since the
end of the war, Zhdanov said, the world’s political powers had coalesced
more sharply into two camps: ‘the imperialist, anti-democratic camp
[gathered about the United States] on the one hand, and the anti-imperialist,
democratic camp on the other’. United States’ imperialism had, since the
end of the war, followed an aggressive, expansionist course; both the Truman
Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, he declared, ‘embodied America’s plan to
enslave Europe’. Both plans interfered with the internal concerns of other
states and were an attack on the principle of national sovereignty.
By contrast, he said, the Soviet Union had interceded ‘unflaggingly for
the principle of real equality and to safeguard the sovereign rights of all
countries’; it formed ‘a reliable bastion against interference in the rights of
equality and self-determination of nations’; it stood ‘as a bulwark in the path
of America’s attempts at world domination’. This was why, he said, ‘the
expansionist and reactionary policy of the United States is directed against
the Soviet Union . . . against the working-class movement in every country
and against the anti-imperialist forces of freedom everywhere’. The American
imperialists, Malenkov added in his own speech, were ‘hatching new plans
for war against the Soviet U n ion.. . . The clearest indication of their policy
can be seen in the Truman and Marshall Plans.’
‘The Soviet Union,’ Zhdanov announced, ‘will harness all its forces to
defeat the Marshall Plan.’ This was also to be the task of the other Communist
parties. They must, he said, ‘take the lead in every field—governmental,

1. Quoted in the declaration of the COMISCO secretariat, 20 December 1949.

2. See Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (London, 1962), p. 129. Djilas had
attended the conference as delegate of the Yugoslav Communist party.
3. See Chapter 18.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 151
political, economic and ideological—in the campaign of resistance to those
imperialist plans for expansion and aggression. They must close their ranks,
unite their efforts on the basis of a common anti-imperialist and democratic
platform and gather around them all democratic forces of the people.’ And,
he emphasized, to the Communist parties of France, Italy and Britain he
allocated ‘a special task’. They must, he stated, ‘raise the banner of defence
for the national independence and sovereignty of their countries. . . in the
struggle against all attempts at the political and economic enslavement of
their countries’.1
The resolution passed by the conference confirmed Stalin’s theory that
the world had been divided into two camps: the imperialist camp, whose aim
was world domination and the destruction of democracy through the
imperialist power politics of the United States; and the anti-imperialist
camp, whose objective was to undermine imperialism and strengthen
democracy. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the resolution
stated, were only part of a larger all-embracing plan to extend the power of
the United States to all parts of the world. ‘The plan to bring about the
economic and political enslavement of Europe by American imperialism,’ it
continued, ‘is supplemented by plans for the economic and political enslave-
ment of China, Indonesia and the Latin American countries,’ while the
‘right-wing Socialists,’ such as ‘Blum, Attlee and Bevin’, were supplying a
‘democratic mask’ for American imperialism. To thwart the imperialists’
plans to enslave the world, the ‘anti-imperialist camp’ must above all
mobilize its strength ‘against the main force of the imperialist camp’—
‘American imperialism and its British and French allies’.2

To comply with the spirit of the Szklaraska Poreba resolution, the Communist
parties of France and Italy faced a radical change of policy. Up till then, as
has been seen, both parties had co-operated in coalition governments with
Social Democrats and middle-class democratic parties to achieve the economic
and political rebuilding of their respective countries; and even after their
expulsion from government in May 1947, their immediate goal had been to
regain admission. It was beyond question that Thorez and Togliatti had
1. For a Lasting Peace andfo r a People's Democracy, 10 November 1947. For the text of
the resolution, see Appendix Seven, pp. 549-51. For comprehensive reports on the
conference, see Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 301-6; ‘The Foundng of the Cominform’, in
Drachkovitch and Lazitch (eds.) The Comintern, passim', Gunther Nollau, International
Communism and World Revolution (London, 1961), pp. 216-26; Halle, The Cold War as
History, pp. 150-2 and 155-6.
2. For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People’s Democracy, 10 November 1947. The Comin-
form’s resolution gave the parties of southern Asia the signal for armed uprising in India,
Burma, Malaya and Indonesia. See Chapters 10, 12, 13.
152 The Reopening o f the Split
guided the policies of their parties in line with instructions received in the
Kremlin before returning from exile in Moscow.
Even so they found themselves being severely criticized at Szklaraska
Poreba by Zhdanov, Kardelj and Djilas, who accused them of having un-
reservedly supported parliamentary democracy; of having pinned their hopes
upon impotent parliamentary action by a ‘revision of Marxism-Leninism’;
of having, ‘out of opportunism’, worked with the bourgeois elements in
governments while only feebly attacking Blum and Ramadier in France and,
in Italy, seeking favour from de Gasperi and subserviently fulfilling the
wishes of the Vatican. By allowing the dissolution and disarming of the
resistance movements and granting the forces of reaction concession after
concession, finally accepting their exclusion from government without a
fight, they had exposed their countries to the mercies of American imperialism.
They showed no understanding of the United States’ true motivations, which
were to dominate the world—a danger, as Djilas said, worse even than
Fascism. The Italian Communist party had even coined the opportunist
slogan: ‘Neither London, nor Washington, nor Moscow!’1
Togliatti, however, was not prepared to change the policies which,
without invoking the methods of intimidation or terror resorted to by the
Communists in those countries which they ruled, had won for his party a
considerable measure of mass support. Its aim remained parliamentary
democracy, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its undertaking, as the
programme of its first congress after the end of the war in January 1946
stated, was to bring about ‘a democratic republic of workers and intellectuals
. . . governed by parliamentary rule’. Togliatti emphasized the distinction
between the ‘Italian road to Socialism’ and the Russian. ‘International
experience,’ he said in a speech made in Florence in January 1947, ‘shows
us how at the present stage of the class struggle in the world, the working
classes can find new paths to Socialism—namely that development of
democracy to its farthest borders which is nothing other than Socialism.
These paths,’ he continued, ‘differ from, for example, that of the proletariat
in the Soviet Union.’2
It was notable that Togliatti made no appearance at the inaugural
conference of the Cominform—obviously he had no wish for the ‘Italian
path to Socialism’ to be questioned. The adoption of the more aggressive
tactics which he undertook following the expulsion of the Communists from
the Italian government in July 1947, and which he intensified under pressure
of Cominform decisions in October and November, consisted of short-term
general strikes and rowdy street demonstrations in northern Italy and Rome,
1. For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People’s Democracy, 10 November 1947; foracom pre-
hensive report of the debate, see Reale, ‘The Founding of the Cominform’, in Drachko-
vitch and Lazitch (eds.), The Comintern, pp. 265-6.
2. Rinascita, July 1947, quoted in Georgio Galli, ‘Italian Communism’, in Communism
in Europe, vol. n, pp. 305-6.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 153
but which nevertheless carefully avoided clashes with the powers of the
state1and represented hardly more than a gesture of loyalty towards Moscow.
Apart from this he avoided the challenge of criticism by the Cominform and
kept to the ‘Italian path to Socialism’.
On the other hand, Thorez, without hesitation, aligned the policy of the
French party with the course of Stalin’s new foreign policy. He set in motion
his change of policy by acknowledging ‘tactical errors’ committed by the
party. ‘As a result of these mistakes,’ he wrote, ‘we failed to unmask ruthlessly
the attitudes of Socialist leaders.’2 Neither had the party, he told the central
committee in a speech of 30 October 1947, recognized in time the danger to
France’s independence which was threatened by the Marshall Plan—that
‘attempt by war-mongering American capitalism . . . to enslave Europe.’3
The National Committee of the Communist-controlled French trade union
federation, the C.G.T., meanwhile condemned the plan as ‘part of a scheme
to subject the world by capitalist trusts and to prepare for a new world
war’.4
The party now prepared itself for a struggle on the grand scale. At the
beginning of November 1947 it took, as we have seen,5 an insignificant event
in Marseilles as the occasion for inciting a national strike movement which
embraced three million workers. For the workers, hard hit by economic
distress, the motive was to win a settlement for their wage demands. But
what were the true intentions of the Communists? They had tried to extend
the action into a general strike; they had put forward demands that were
economically impossible; they had sabotaged wage negotiations; they had
provoked clashes with the state powers. What was their actual aim? ‘The
taking of power by force; their reinstatement in the government; a dress
rehearsal for a later uprising; the sabotaging of American aid?’—Georges
Lefranc, the contemporary historian of the French trade union movement,
in formulating these questions could find no answer. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote,
‘the leaders themselves did not know it.’6
But even if the Communist party leadership was not setting itself any
concrete aims, it was at least achieving a powerful demonstration—a
demonstration to show a changeover from its earlier policy o f ‘opportunism’,
now condemned by the Cominform, to a policy of revolutionary action.
Obviously nothing beyond this was planned, since in any case the party
leadership drew back from pressing the general strike to the point of a
revolutionary rising. Thus the strike exhausted itself after only a month and
had to be broken off without any gains being won.
1. See page pp. 65-6, 2. Cahiers du communisme, October 1947.
3. Quoted in Domenach, ‘The French Communist Party’, in Mario Einaudi (ed.),
Communism in Western Europe (Ithaca, 1951), p. 78.
4. Quoted in Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 121.
5. See pp. 42-3.
6. Georges Lefranc, Histoire du syndicalisme franpais (Paris, 1947), vol. I, p. 190.
154 The Reopening o f the Split
An intense expenditure of energy had been wasted and what suffered
most was the unity of the French trade union movement. Once the strike’s
political character had become obvious, the Socialist and syndicalist trade
union leaders in the C.G.T., centred around the periodical Force Ouvriere,
refused to continue with it.1 After the collapse of the strike, a split in the
C.G.T. became inevitable. During the strike it had shown itself to be a
Communist party weapon directed against the Social Democratic party; its
attacks had been concentrated upon the Socialist ministers in the coalition
government—Ramadier, the prime minister, and Daniel Mayer, the minister
of labour—and it could not be expected that the Socialist trade union leaders
would capitulate. Several leading Socialist trade union federations severed
their link with the C.G.T. and at a congress in April 1948 founded the trade
union federation Confederation Generate du Travail—Force Ouvriere (F.O.).
The F.O. embraced the railwaymen’s trade union as well as the unions
of municipal workers, civil servants and splinter groups of textile workers,
dockers and metal-workers; according to official statistics, it counted a
million members.12 While this estimate may be on the high side, the numbers
of workers embittered by the strike debacle who fell away from the trade
unions was even higher. The C.G.T., which in 1946 grouped five million
members, had lost almost half its membership through a mass desertion by
disillusioned workers.3

Yet despite this strike defeat, the Communist leadership returned within a
year to the tactics of revolutionary action. Like all Communist parties, it
was committed by the resolution of the founding congress of the Cominform
‘to use every means to wreck the Marshall Plan’—a somewhat difficult task,
since the Marshall Plan represented relief from unprecedented misery and its
announcement, as Alexander Werth reported, had been ‘received with feelings
of relief and gratitude by practically the whole of France’.4 It was hard for
the Communists to make out a convincing case for the Marshall Plan as an
imperialist conspiracy. In fighting against it, they could not count on rousing
the passions of the workers; it was hardly a suitable target for revolutionary
action.
One was found, however, in the miners’ strike of October 1948. The
reasons for this were measures introduced by the new Socialist minister of
labour, Robert Lacoste, to strengthen working discipline and reduce the level
of employment in the coal industry. The Communist-led miners’ union rejected
these measures as breaches of the miners’ statute and a strike ballot produced
a majority vote in favour of striking. Miners’ conditions were hard; their

1. See pp. 43-4. 2. See Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, p. 127.
3. Domenach, ‘The French Communist Party’, in Einaudi (ed.), Communism in Western
Europe, p. 125.
4. See Alexander Werth, France, 1940-1955 (New York and London, 1956), p. 396.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 155
wages were low and the defeat which they had suffered a year before had
embittered them.
When the strike began on 4 October 1948 under C.G.T. leadership, the
government condemned it as politically motivated and refused to negotiate
with the C.G.T. The C.G.T. thereupon called on the pit safety teams to
cease work. This was the first time in the history of the French miners’
struggle that safety measures had been placed under dispute. And the mines
were now no longer privately owned; they had been nationalized. They were
no longer administered by the mine-owners’ directors, but were run collectively
with participation by shop stewards and trade unions. Yet the C.G.T.
introduced a weapon to threaten the mines with floods and gas.1
Again the question was raised: what was the objective of Communist
tactics? Could it have been to attain a maximum weakening in the public
economy so as to annul the benefits of Marshall Aid; or to provoke clashes
between state and strikers and so place the Socialists in the government in
an antagonistic position towards the miners? It could certainly be anticipated
that the government would use force to prevent the destruction of the mines.
The strike dragged on for seven weeks until the miners were completely
exhausted. The Socialist minister of the interior, Jules Moch, had had the
mines occupied by security troops, and in violent clashes three strikers were
killed and hundreds injured. The prisons were filled with many more hundreds
of workers.2 The country lost 5,000 million tons of coal, while one eighth of
the value of Marshall Aid was negated within the year by indirect losses to
the nation’s economy. And a new element of embitterment intensified the
conflicts between the Communists and Socialists.

The British Communist party received no invitation to the founding con-

ference of the Cominform, even though Great Britain was the United States’
most powerful ally, and the Labour party held sole governmental power.
The conference did, however, describe how the ‘right-wing Socialists’ of
England, such as Attlee and Bevin, ‘supported loyally the imperialists in
every respect, dividing the ranks of the working classes and poisoning
their outlook’.3 Thereupon, the Communist party executive did not hesitate
1. Even the left wing of the workers’ movements protested against this action. Revolu-
tion proletarienne, for example, wrote: ‘If it was really only concerned with gaining its
demands, how could it [the C.G.T.] decree the senseless order by which it called on men of
the safety service to strike? Such an unbelievable idea would never enter the minds of
French trade unionists, who feel at one with the cause of the working class. It is foreign to
our movement, standing in contrast to its thought and traditions’—Revolution proletarienne,
20 November, quoted in Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, pp. 129-30.
2. See Werth, France, 1940-1955, pp. 404-5.
3. For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People’s Democracy, 10 November 1947.
156 The Reopening o f the Split
to line up with the new direction in Russian policy. ‘Since the world is
clearly divided into imperialist and anti-imperialist camps,’ the report of its
general secretary, Harry Pollitt, due to be discussed by the executive in
December 1947, stated, ‘and the Labour government is an active partner in the
imperialist camp, important changes in the policy of the Communist party are
necessary.’1 ............
Until this point the British Communist party had loyally supported the
Labour government’s efforts to further the economic reconstruction of the
country; it had encouraged increased productivity and had tried to contain
any strike outbreaks. This policy, Pollitt stated in his report, had been
‘absolutely correct’; but it was ‘correct’ no longer, for, he continued, ‘it would
lag behind the government’s reactionary policy’.12
During the winter of 1947, when the Communist party began its open
opposition to the Labour government, Britain was afflicted by the most
severe economic crisis in its history. The country had emerged from the war
completely drained of its lifeblood. On 17 August 1945, the United States
had stopped deliveries of food and raw materials under Lend-Lease, and
Britain was faced, as a Treasury memorandum recorded, by ‘an economic
Dunkirk’. It had an unsecured foreign debt of £2,879 million, and by 1946
the deficit in its trade balance ran to almost £300 million. Lacking con-
siderable American aid, Britain would have been bankrupt. In 1945 the
United States and Canada had granted her a loan of $5,000 million to
reconstruct the means of production and transport which had been damaged
or destroyed. Within two years, however, this loan had been exhausted in
buying food and raw materials. An unusually hard winter with a series of
heavy snowstorms at the beginning of 1947 had crippled transport and the
coal mines. Quotas of coal to industry were cut by half, and the electricity
supply to private dwellings had to be rationed to five hours daily. In many
districts industry came to a standstill owing to the shortage of coal, and at a
stroke five million workers became unemployed.3
It was in these circumstances that the Communist party began the fight
against the Marshall Plan to which it felt committed by the Cominform
conference. ‘Official declarations of the British Communist party,’ stated a
resolution of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress in October
1948, ‘prove without doubt that it has as its aim the sabotage of the European
programme of reconstruction.. . . It is trying [by strikes] to bring industry
to a standstill.’4 And Jack Tanner, president of the metalworkers’ union,
which before the war had stood close to the Communist party, declared
that, ‘The Communists hope and work for the economic collapse of the

1, World News and Views, vol. xxvn, p. 584. 2. ibid., p. 585.

3. See A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 599; Halle, The
Cold War as History, pp. 112-13.
4. Quoted in Henry Pelting, The British Communist Party (London, 1958), p. 154.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 157
country, the weakening of the Labour movement and the Labour govern-
ment.’1
It was not a tactic to win the workers’ sympathies for the Communist
cause as the elections of 1950 were to reveal. The Labour government had
kept its promises. It had, in the face of terrible economic problems, con-
structed a welfare state. It had considerably raised the living standards of the
working class. It had nationalized a massive sector of the country’s productive
industries—the coal-mines, the electricity and gas companies and the whole
transport system—and it had taken the Bank of England into public owner-
ship. It had also set in motion the dissolution of the British Empire. While the
Communist government of the U.S.S.R. was significantly enlarging Russia’s
empire—during the war it had annexed half Poland and Bukovina, the whole
of Bessarabia, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and
part of East Prussia with the German city of Konigsberg—the British
Socialist government had freed the peoples of India, Pakistan, Burma and
Ceylon from subjection under British imperialism. Communist statements
calling the Labour government ‘reactionary’ and ‘imperialistic’ did not carry
much conviction. But the Communist party, obsessed by this surprising self-
deceit, was so confident of support at the polls that, in 1950, it opposed
Labour party candidates with its own in a hundred constituencies—almost
four times the number of opposition candidates in 1945. Yet, in these
hundred constituencies, only 91,000 electors gave them their vote, while the
number of Labour votes increased from twelve to thirteen million. The
Communists lost even the two seats which they had won in 1945. They were
thus and remained during subsequent decades without parliamentary repre-
sentation.

4
Stalin had founded the Cominform to be an instrument in his Cold War
strategy. In Western Europe the two Communist parties with a mass
following—the French and the Italian—had been immediately subordinated
to Moscow’s leadership, and in Eastern Europe the countries were brought
into line under the Russian sphere of influence.
At the time of the Cominform’s founding congress, in none of these
countries—Poland, Romania or Bulgaria—had the process of Stalinization
been completed, since Social Democratic parties continued to exist there,
though they were, admittedly, allied with Communists in coalition govern-
ments, if not subjected to Communist leadership. The process of their
elimination through fusion with the Communist party had begun before the
founding of the Cominform; now it was intensified. All Socialist parties
were ‘purged’ of those who opposed fusion with the Communist party, and
1. ibid., p. 156.
158 The Reopening o f the Split
by February 1948 unification congresses in Bucharest and Sofia had set their
seal on the end of the Social Democratic parties in Romania and Bulgaria;
they had been merged with the Communist parties, in order, as was intended,
to be finally absorbed.
By contrast to the Romanian and Bulgarian Socialist parties, that in
Poland put up a more stubborn resistance. The Polish Socialists represented
a mass party with a deep-rooted tradition—and consequently the terror
invoked by the Communists in the government to break its resistance was
that much harder. In the summer of 1947, 200 Socialist leaders were arrested
on suspicion of espionage, and by the autumn of 1948, 82,000 out of 800,000
members had been expelled from the party. Only then was the drastically
‘purged’ party ready for self-dissolution; as we have seen, it merged on
15 December 1948 with the Communist party1 at a congress in Warsaw.
With the liquidation of the Socialist parties in these three countries, the
final obstacle to constructing a totalitarian system under Stalin’s dictatorship
was removed; they became, if not in constitutional form, at least in terms of
political and economic reality, provinces of the Russian empire.2

It seems idle to speculate whether Stalin had planned to destroy sovereign

independence in these countries at Yalta when he had claimed Russia’s right
to ‘pro-Soviet governments’ in her neighbouring states. Moscow’s predomi-
nance in those countries occupied by the Red Army was never called in
question, even under the coalition regimes, since in each country state power
was in the hands of Communists and the non-Communist coalition parties
were, in fact, pro-Soviet; they genuinely wished to see the closest friendly
relationship between their countries and the U.S.S.R.
But under the system of coalition governments, Moscow’s rule fell short
of being absolute, since the elements of democracy on which they rested,
however mutilated, allowed the non-Communist participant parties a certain
right in joint decisions and, through independent associations and newspapers,
to make this right effective. Also, as members of the COMISCO, the partici-
pant Eastern European Socialist parties in coalition governments enjoyed in
its conferences a world forum.
1. See Adam Ciolkosz, ‘Poland’, in Denis Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, with a Fore-
word by Aneurin Bevan (London, 1951), pp. 48-56. Stalin’s agent in this process was Josef
Cyrankiewicz, general secretary of the Socialist party; he had been installed as prime
minister in February 1947.
2. Ministers in these governments were the Kremlin’s representatives, and if they lost
the confidence of Moscow they were disposed of. Thus, for example, Osobka-Morawski was
deposed in 1947 as prime minister of Poland for having objected to the unification of the
Socialist with the Communist party; and Gomulka was relieved of his joint position as vice-
president and general secretary of the Communist party in August 1948 for having held
out for a limited Polish independence and for trying to circumvent the absorption of the
Polish armed forces and industries into the Russian apparatus. He was finally arrested and
imprisoned for many years; only the Polish rising against Moscow’s dictatorship in October
1956 freed him from prison and returned him to power.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 159
As long as Stalin had believed in the possibility of peaceful co-operation
with Britain and the United States, it had appeared that, for the countries
concerned, he had come to terms with a system of rudimentary democracy
under Communist party rule. His change of policy came with the announce-
ment of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947. Now he saw the United States
as planning to encircle Russia in preparation for war. His fears were not
entirely without foundation. The United States had a monopoly of the
atomic bomb, and an influential circle was actually agitating for a preventive
war against the U.S.S.R. before it could make itself into a nuclear power.1
Stalin did not hesitate to secure the countries under the Russian influence,
not only as a bridgehead in the event of war, but also for their full war
potential. What had been undertaken in the Stalinization of these countries
was their incorporation into the war apparatus of the Russian empire.

Of greater importance than the Stalinization of the three Russian neigh-

bouring states was that of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Churchill and Roosevelt had accepted Russia’s demand for pro-Soviet
governments in Poland and Churchill had agreed to Russia’s predominance
in Romania and Bulgaria.2 The right of the Soviet government to exercise
direct influence on the composition of their governments was thereby con-
ceded, and so their sovereign independence was limited from the outset.
However, the Soviet Union had pledged itself by the Yalta Declaration to
establish democratic governments in the countries concerned—a condition
which remained unfulfilled. While the Allies had protested against the breach
of the declaration by rigged elections, they finally recognized the Communist-
controlled governments and concluded peace treaties with them. The
transformation of these semi-independent states into Russian satellite states
therefore seemed inevitable.
But Hungary and Czechoslovakia did not fall within the Russian sphere
of influence as recognized by the Allies. They did, however, fall within the
Soviet occupation zone agreed at Potsdam; both countries had been occupied
by the Red Army.

In Hungary, which had been occupied by Germany during the war, Marshal
Klementi Voroshilov had, soon after the Red Army offensive began in
1. The distinguished journalist Walter Lippmann disclosed several years later that, ‘in
the late forties’ (probably 1947 or 1948), a ‘high official’ of the War Department of the U.S.
government had tried to persuade him ‘to stand up in his articles for a preventive war
against the Soviet Union’—New York Herald Tribune, 25 June 1965, quoted in Halle,
The Cold War as History, p. 170.
2. See page 93.
160 The Reopening o f the Split
October 1944, installed in Debrecen a provisional government made up of
Communists, Social Democrats and representatives of the farmers’ parties.
After the conclusion of the campaign at the beginning of 1945, this govern-
ment had removed to Budapest and, supervised by the Allied Control
Commission, had undertaken to administer the country under Voroshilov’s
presidency. It decreed an electoral law based on democratic principles and
called elections to form a parliament for 4 November 1945.
The Hungarian Communist party, Stalin’s policy instrument, came into
existence only after the invasion of the Red Army began. A Communist
party had effectively been formed in November 1918; but within ten months
it was wiped out in bloody persecutions at the hands of the triumphant
counter-revolution1 and was finally suppressed by law. Hungary had therefore
had no legal Communist party for a quarter of a century. Unlike the Italian
Communist party, for example, which had also been officially suppressed for
over two decades, it was not reborn in any heroic war-time resistance
movement—there had been no armed resistance in Hungary—but was rather
resurrected by Hungarian Communists returning from exile in Moscow in the
wake of the Red Army.
Its leader was Mathias Rakosi (1892-1963), a strong personality and a
master of political manoeuvre. He had received his initial Communist
schooling as a Russian prisoner of war during the First World War and then
became prominent after his return as one of the leaders of the young
Communist party. Invited by Bela Kun to be commissar for the Hungarian
Soviet Government, he had been entrusted with the command of a Red
Army division. After the collapse of Kun’s republic, he had fled to Moscow
and become active in the Communist International. During a clandestine
visit to Hungary in 1922, he had been arrested and sentenced to death.
Under pressure from an international Socialist protest movement, the
sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and only after fifteen years
was he released through an exchange agreement for Hungarian prisoners still
in Russia.
The Communist party was fostered and protected by the Red Army. It
was, as Antal Ban wrote, ‘a refuge for the guilty’, for ‘opportunists of all
kinds and classes’.1
2 The Communist party membership card provided a safe-
guard against arbitrary arrest by Red Army soldiers and secured living
accommodation, work and food rations. It was not long before the masses
had rallied to the Communist party, drawn, not by a tradition, for it had not
1. Hundreds of Communists and Socialists were murdered, 27,000 were brought to
trial, 329 were executed, 70,000 were interned and 100,000 fled abroad. See Julius Braunthal
(ed.) Yearbook o f the International Socialist Labour Movement 1956-1957 (London, 1956),
p. 262. See also the Report of the Commission of Inquiry dispatched to Hungary by the
British Labour Party: The White Terror in Hungary (London, 1921).
2. Antal Ban, ‘Hungary’, in The Curtain Falls, p. 66. B in was a leader of the Hungarian
Social Democratic party and Minister of Industry, 1945-8.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 161
inherited any, but by the power which it radiated as an apparent arm of the
Red Army. The Communist party membership grew from about 2,000 in the
autumn of 1944 to 30,000 in February 1945 and to 150,000 during the
following three months. In 1947 there were 700,000 card-carrying members.1
The Socialist party (Magyarorszdgi Szoci&ldemocrata Part) had for over
six decades—it was founded in 1869—stood against the semi-feudal aristo-
cratic regime under the Habsburgs and the semi-Fascist regime under
Horthy. In the revolutionary ferment which gripped the country after the
fall of the Habsburgs, it had joined with the Communist party in March
19192 and been dragged into the catastrophe which followed. But it re-
organized, and in the first parliamentary election, in 1922, won twenty-four
seats. By 1939 it counted several hundred local organizations and about
150,000 members. Thus, unlike the young Communist party, it had the
backing of a tradition developed through decades of hard battle and firmly
established organization.
But the Communist party, with the backing of the Russian occupation
forces, had caught up with the Social Democratic strength within a year. In
the November 1945 election it won 802,000 votes, against 823,000 for the
Social Democrats, both taking 17 per cent of the total poll.
As was to be expected in a predominantly agrarian country, the victor
emerging from the elections was the ‘Party of the Small Farmers’, which
received 2,697,000 votes, or 57 per cent of the total poll, and 245 out of the
409 seats. The Communists gained sixty-nine seats and seventy went to the
Social Democrats.
Even though the Small Farmers’ party had won an absolute majority in
parliament, only a coalition between it and the Communists and Social
Democrats could be considered under the conditions of the Russian occu-
pation. The Small Farmers’ party did, of course, take precedence in the
administration. Its two leaders, Zoltdn Tildy and Ferenc Nagy, were
respectively elected president and prime minister of the Hungarian republic.
But in the praesidium of the Cabinet the Communists were represented by
Mathias Rakosi and the Social Democrats by Arpad Szakasits as vice-
premiers; and under pressure from the Kremlin3 a Communist, Imre Nagy,
1. See Paul E. Zinner, Revolution in Hungary (New York and London, 1962), p. 75.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 149-50.
3. The Ministry of the Interior was originally allotted to the Small Farmers’ party.
Rdkosi then, however, demanded it for the Communists, threatening to withdraw from the
government otherwise. To the objections of Ferenc Nagy, he replied: ‘You do not seem to
understand! Have a look at the whole of eastern Europe and see if you can find a country there
in which the Ministry of the Interior is not in the hands of the Communist party.’ ‘We have
been given to understand,’ Nagy added to the report of the discussions, ‘that the Com-
munists raised their demand on instructions from the Soviets’—Ferenc Nagy, The Struggle
behind the Iron Curtain (New York, 1948), p. 163. Antal Bdn, Social Democratic minister for
industry, who took part in the discussions, confirmed that, ‘the Russians insisted that a
Communist should be nominated as Minister of the Interior’—B^n, ‘Hungary’, in The
Curtain Falls, p. 68.
 162 The Reopening o f the Split
was nominated as minister of the interior, though he was soon relieved by
Laszlo Rajk.1

The coalition government was the instrument of a social revolution which

began soon after the cease-fire. The Small Farmers’ party did not obstruct
its course, being only interested in agrarian reform—equally urgently wished
for by the Social Democrats and the Communists—and so the fate of
industry was left in the hands of the two working-class parties. The semi-feudal
landed estates, on which the rule of the Hungarian aristocracy had rested for
1,000 years, were abolished and the land—about 3,200,000 hectares—divided
among 642,000 agricultural workers and small landholders.2 Simultaneously
the mines, heavy industry, electricity plants, the whole transport system
and the National Bank together with the largest private banks were
nationalized.3
But the over-riding question remained Hungary’s independence. Could it
be maintained or would it fall under Russian domination? The heavy
reparations imposed by the peace treaty, the trade agreements which Russia
forced on Hungary, and the seizing of German property in key industries to
which she was empowered under the Potsdam Agreement, appeared to be
symptoms of a policy aimed at achieving Hungary’s economic dependence
upon Russia. And was not Stalin’s successful endeavour at Potsdam to secure
a common border between the Soviet Union and Hungary in the western
Carpathians also an indication of his intention to submit Hungary to the
Russian sphere of influence?
The Social Democratic leaders, meeting in secret in March 1946 to discuss
trends in Russian policies, came to the conclusion like the majority of the
population that the Soviet Union intended to ‘create a situation to bring
Hungary into total dependence upon the Soviet Union’.4
Stalin, however, tried his best to dispel such fears. In April 1946 he
explained to the Hungarian prime minister, then on a state visit to Moscow
in the company of Rakosi and Szakasits, that nothing was further from the
Soviet Union’s intentions than to tamper with Hungary’s independence. ‘In
my opinion,’ he told them, ‘it is easy enough to create friendly relations
between Russia and H ungary.. . . The Soviet Union has no wish to interfere
in Hungary’s internal affairs. The peoples of smaller nations have no reason
to fear Soviet oppression. The Soviet Union would be betraying Lenin’s
ideology and revoking its former practice if it were to subject or influence
smaller nations.. . . We believe,’ he continued, ‘that true friendship between
a great power and a small country is possible without hazarding the latter’s
1. Both were sentenced to death by a Communist court and executed some years later.
2. Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, p. 51. The Act of Land Reform, by which the aristo-
cratic landholdings were abolished and redistributed, was promulgated on 15 March 1945.
3. See Socialist World, vol. x, No. 4, p. 313.
4. B&n, ‘Hungary’, in The Curtain Falls, p. 68.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 163
independence.’1 Nagy now became convinced, as he wrote, ‘that Hungary
no longer needed to fear that it would be forced to become a member of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’.1 2
It is possible that Stalin’s assurance of April 1946 for Hungary’s indepen-
dence was sincere. But, from the spring of 1947, when the break in relations
between the United States and the Soviet Union became evident, and Stalin
saw Russia being threatened with war, it became obvious that his intention
was total rule over Hungary.
A time limit was set for this objective. The Hungarian peace treaty was
signed on 10 February 1947, to come into force on 15 September. On that
day direct Soviet influence on the Hungarian government, granted by the
Potsdam Agreement, was to be terminated, the Allied Control Commission
dissolved and the occupation of the country to cease. So, by the time the
Soviet army was to be withdrawn in September 1947, it was necessary for the
Communist party to have secured a position which would give it the power
to transform Hungary into a Russian satellite state.
But the Communist party had rallied only 17 per cent of the electorate.
Under the country’s democratic constitution, it could only attain a ruling
position if it could reduce its two rival parties to total impotence—the Small
Farmers’ party, representing a majority of the people, and the Social
Democratic party, rooted in the industrial working class.
The Communists were able to initiate their fight against the Small
Farmers’ party in the name of democracy, since it was the party not only of
the conservative farmers, who had not yet awoken to political consciousness,
but also of all reactionary elements in society—the expropriated landed
aristocracy, the Church, the discharged officers, old civil servants3 and the
conservative wing of the middle classes—all, in fact, who detested democratic
Socialism no less than totalitarian Communism. Like the Christian Social
party in the Austrian Republic, it represented no guarantee for democracy.
It was thus also opposed by the Social Democrats, but by normal democratic
methods.
The Communists, on the other hand, as in all Russian-occupied countries,
in fighting opposition invoked their tactic of terror combined with disinte-
gration and schism. Following the occupation of Hungary more and more
active members of the Small Farmers’ party were arrested by the Russian
secret police, the N.K.Y.D., and by the Hungarian state police under
accusations of Fascist machinations. At the beginning of January 1947,
Rajk, the Communist minister of the interior, announced the discovery of a
conspiracy by high-ranking officers and members of parliament of the Small

1. Nagy, The Struggle behind the Iron Curtain, pp. 212-13.

2. ibid., pp. 216-17.
3. Ferenc Nagy admits that his party had opened its doors ‘to the aristocrats, the
priests and the old officials’; see The Struggle behind the Iron Curtain, p. 450.
 164 The Reopening o f the^Split
Fanners’ party, among them its general secretary Bela Kovacs. Now a
general terror against the Small Farmers’ party was set in motion. ‘We
demanded the expulsion of the reactionary elements from the party of the
Small Farmers’, and under the pressure of the terror ‘21 members of
parliament were expelled as a start,’ reported Rakosi, when describing, during
a course of instruction to the Communist party a few years later on 29
February 1952, the political miracle that had enabled the Communist party,
starting with the support of only 17 per cent of the population, to seize
power within two years. ‘Naturally,’ he emphasized, ‘from the very beginning
the state police were under our control.’
This provided one explanation of the success of terrorist methods. ‘After
this success’—namely the decimation of the Small Farmers’ party in parlia-
ment—Rakosi continued in his speech, ‘we adopted salami tactics. That is,
we continued, so to speak, to reduce the power of the Small Farmers slice by
slice.’ The Communists fragmented the party by introducing farmers’ parties
which they both called to life and controlled: ‘The party of the farm labourer
and small farmer’ and the ‘National Peasant party’, also called the ‘Party of
the New Landowners’, i.e. those farmers who had received land under
agrarian reform; and they also founded, under the leadership of Father
Stephan Barankovics, a Roman Catholic party. ‘The camp [of the Small
Farmers’ party], which three years ago represented the overwhelming
majority in the country,’ Ferenc Nagy concluded his account, ‘has shrunk
to nothing. Their leaders submit obediently to the instructions of Moscow
and the Communists.’1
‘Then it was the turn of the Social Democratic party,’ Rakosi reported.
‘We had to fight harder and harder against them.’12
The Social Democratic party was divided into three groups in its attitude
towards the Communist party. One small group, which was the furthest to
the right and was led by Karoly Peyer, rejected any relations with the
Communist party whatsoever. Peyer’s origins were in the trade union
movement, and after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic he had
been general secretary of the trade union federation and leader of the Social
Democratic party. With the Hungarian prime minister, Count Stephan
Bethlen, one of the leaders of the counter-revolution, he had made the
‘Bethlen-Peyer’ pact, by which the party pledged as the price of its legal
recognition as a ‘loyal opposition’ to refrain from propaganda among the
peasants and to limit its activity to industrial workers. It had been a secret
pact, not unveiled until later and then evoking a serious crisis within the
party; it had naturally proved objectionable to the Socialist International.
Opposition to Peyer’s leadership within the party had been powerless under

1. ibid., p. 441. _ .
2. T-arsadalmi Szemle, February-March 1952. For the text of RAkosi’s speech, see
Socialist International Information, 17 May 1952. :
 The Founding o f the Cominform 165
the Horthy regime. An opposition party did, on the other hand, organize
itself abroad—the Hungarian Socialist party in exile ( Vilagossag)—under the
leadership of men who had stood at the head of the old party and who had
been members of the Hungarian Soviet government: Siegmund Kunfi, Zoltdn
Ronai and Wilhelm Bohm.
Peyer had only returned in the summer of 1945 from the Mauthausen
concentration camp, where he had been deported by the Gestapo in 1944.
Meanwhile Arpad Szakasits, chief editor of its journal Nepszava, had been
elected general secretary of the party. He stood to the far left, supporting
the closest co-operation with the Communists.
The centre was led by Wilhelm Bohm, army commander of the Red
Army in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Imre Szelig, a prominent trade
union leader, Anna Kethly and Antal Ban; it represented the majority. It
saw co-operation with the Communists as essential for succeeding in building
a new Hungary through social and economic reform as well as for preventing
the revival of Fascism, a serious latent danger. It strove to construct a true
democracy in Hungary—which had never in fact known democracy—and
rejected the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ for which the Communists
stood. It sincerely wished for friendly relations between the Soviet Union and
an independent Hungary, but not, as the Communists did, for her incor-
poration into the Russian empire. It fought above all to preserve the party’s
independence as a guarantee for the independence of Hungary itself against
Communist attempts to swallow it in the process of unification.
‘The fight against Social Democracy,’ Rakosi reported in the lecture
already quoted, ‘lasted longer and was more severe.’ The Communist party
advanced under the slogan of the unity of the proletariat. It infiltrated Social
Democratic organizations, in particular the left wing of the party executive^
and simultaneously attempted to terrorize Social Democratic opponents of
unity; among others, Gyula Kelemen, a member of the executive, was
sentenced to life imprisonment on a ludicrous charge of treason, and Sari
Karik, leader o f the party secretariat, was deported by the N.K.V.D. to
Siberia.
The Communist party’s dominance in the country rested, as its leader
freely admitted, on the Russian forces of occupation. As Joszef Revai, the
Communist minister for culture, commented when describing the metamor-
phosis of democracy in Hungary into a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’,
We Were a minority in parliament and in the government, but at the same time
we represented the leading force. We had decisive control of the police forces. Our
1. Gyorgy Marosan, deputy general secretary of the party, ZoM n Ronai and Stephan
Ries, members of the party executive and members of the government, were secret members
of the Communist party. See Bdn, ‘Hungary’ in Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, pp. 72-3,
Marosan publicly admitted that members of the illegal Communist party had been instruc-
ted during the war ‘to continue with their work inside the Social Democratic party’. See
For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People's Democracy, 15Junel949.
166 The Reopening o f the Split
forces, the force of our [the Communist] party.. . was multiplied by the fact that the
Soviet Union and the Soviet army were always there to support us with their
assistance.1

But to maintain that dominant position after the withdrawal of the

Soviet army, it was essential that new elections should be held before the
direct influence of the occupying power was ended so as to secure parlia-
mentary rule by an appropriate manipulation of the ballot. Under Soviet
pressure, new elections were called for 1 August 1947, and an apparently
harmless clause was added to the electoral law which, however, enabled the
Communists to carry out election rigging on a tremendous scale. The clause
allowed electors who were absent from their place of residence on the day
of the elections to vote with special voting slips in any other electoral district.
The Communist minister of the interior then had hundreds of thousands of
these slips printed and distributed throughout the Communist party, whose
trusted members voted dozens of times; 300,000 such voting slips were
counted.2
From these elections so openly manipulated the Communist party
emerged as the strongest in parliament and the majority party of the coalition.
It had increased its representation from sixty-nine to 100 seats, but these
tactics had not weakened the Social Democratic party significantly; they lost
only three of their seventy seats.3 The Small Farmers’ party was, however,
routed, having lost 177 out of 245 seats. The remnant which escaped
‘submitted,’ as Nagy said, ‘obediently to instructions from Moscow and the
Communists’. The National Peasant party, which had gained thirty-two seats,
was in reality an auxiliary arm of the Communist party.4
Now it became important to destroy the last obstacle to the Stalinization
of Hungary—the Social Democratic party. Up until the elections, Communist
propaganda had done no more than try to slander the ‘rightist leaders’ of
the party6 as ‘dollar imperialists’ and ‘anti-Soviet agents’. But following the
elections all opponents of unification with the Communists—the whole active
membership of the party supporting the centre—were simply defamed ‘as
1. Joszef Revai, ‘On the Character of our People’s Democracy’, in Tdrsadalmi Szemle,
March-April 1949; for the text, see Foreign Affairs, vol. xxvm (October 1949), pp. 143-51.
2. See Bin, ‘Hungary’, in Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, p. 73.
3. In the process of Stalinization, however, thirty-five of the sixty-seven Social Demo-
cratic deputies were expelled from parliament by the ‘salami-tactic’; see ibid., p. 75.
4. Concerning the infiltration by secret Communist party members of the National
Peasant party, which participated in the Communist-dominated coalition government,
Joszef Revai reported to the founding conference of the Cominform: ‘The secretary [of the
party] is Communist, fifteen of the thirty-two deputies are Communists, and eight are close
to the Communists’—quoted in E. Reale, Avec Jacques Duclos au Banc des Accuses (Paris,
1958). As was mentioned earlier, Reale attended the founding conference of the Cominform
as delegate of the Italian Communist party.
5. Peyer and his group had parted with the party before the elections and aligned them-
selves with the middle-class Radical party. It was the leaders of the centre who were now
the ‘rightist leaders’.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 167
traitors to the working class’; an odium meant to serve as both warning and
threat.
The psychological moment for an all-out attack on the centre Social
Democrats had arrived. Szakasits, now a puppet in Communist hands,
submitted to their instructions and called a meeting for 18 February 1948 of
the active party members in Budapest, at which Marosan announced the
resignation of the leaders of the centre—Szelig, Ban and Kethly—and an
imminent amalgamation with the Communists. In fact, none of these leaders
had actually resigned; on the contrary, the party executive had only recently
agreed, with Szakasits’ and Marosan’s approval, that at their forthcoming
congress they should propose the preservation of the party’s independence.
But the ruse met with extraordinary success. The great majority of party
members, believing that their leaders had capitulated under Communist
pressure, thought that unification was in fact agreed upon. Bewildered,
demoralized and afraid, they deserted by the tens of thousands—often as
intact party organizations—into the Communist ranks; according to official
Communist statistics, 200,000 Social Democrats were, during the course of a
few weeks, admitted into the Communist party, while a further 40,000 applied
for admission. Before the Social Democratic party congress could assemble
on 6 March 1948 to take its formal decision, the Social Democratic party
was already swallowed up by the Communist party. A joint congress of the
two parties on 12 June 1948 ratified their formal union into the ‘United
Workers’ party’.1 Thus Revai was able to record accurately: ‘[Hungary’s]
development into a dictatorship of the proletariat was crowned in June 1948,
and finally secured by the destruction of the right wing of the Social Demo-
cratic party and by the founding of the United Workers’ party.’

The setting up of a Communist dictatorship in Hungary was justified by its

apologists as being essential for securing the achievements of the social
revolution against the threat of counter-revolution. That this was a latent
danger cannot be denied. Hungary had, until the day of the Red Army’s
entry, known nothing beyond a thousand years of autocratic rule by the
aristocracy and the Catholic church.12 It had, in fact, remained untouched by

1. See Antal Bin, ‘The Last Months of Social Democracy in Hungary’, in Socialist
World, vol. i, No. 5; Ldzlo Revesz, ‘Die Liquidienmg der mgarischen Sozialdemokratie’,
in Die Zukunft, June 1968. Szakasits became chairman and Rdkosi general secretary of the
United Workers’ party; one of its three deputy secretaries was Marosan, the other two were
the Communists Jdnos Kdddr and Mihaly Fdrkds.
2. The nine-month revolutionary interim period between November 1918 and August
1919 can be disregarded; the failure of the revolution strengthened rather than weakened
the power of the aristocracy and the Church.
168 The Reopening o f the Split
the vast social and political upheavals which had taken place during the
century and a half since the French revolution in the countries of Europe
west of the River Leitha. In no other European country had church and
aristocracy been so freely able to maintain their vast landed estates while
keeping the peasants in semi-feudal servitude.1 The social traditions of
feudalism were so deeply rooted in the villages that even the agrarian reform
left the dominant influence of the church over the peasants unbroken. And
the church remained a reactionary power, while the peasantry formed an
overwhelming majority in the population. Therefore the pre-eminence of
industrial workers, which in Marxist thought formed a prerequisite for
Socialist development, could not be hoped for in Hungary under democratic
conditions. Democracy in Hungary presented the traditional conservative and
reactionary forces—the dispossessed aristocracy in alliance with the church,
the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie—with the possibility of using democratic
means to destroy the predominant position of the working class and ultimately
to destroy democracy itself and construct on its ruins a counter-revolutionary
dictatorship.12
In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the social revolution was threatened by
no latent counter-revolution. Czechoslovakia was a highly developed
industrial state with a mass labour movement and a middle class which had,
in the Czech nation’s struggle for independence under the Habsburg
monarchy, evolved a democratic tradition; and which had, after the fall of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918, built up in alliance with the
working class a genuine democratic republic. History had destroyed the
breeding-grounds of social reaction among the Czech people. After the battle
at the ‘White Mountain’ in 1520, the Czech aristocracy had been exterminated,
the Hussite religious movement suppressed and the Catholic church forced
upon the people from outside. Czechoslovakia itself possessed, as Thomas
Masaryk recalled, ‘no dynasty, no national aristocracy, no venerable military
tradition and no church which, as in the old absolutist states, was politically
recognized’.3 The strongest party of the urban middle class, the party of
Masaryk and his successor Benes, was a progressive party of social reform,
calling itself the National Socialist party—and the rural Catholic People’s

1. A description of the social relationship between dependence and conditions of life

for the land-starved fanners can be found in Gyula Illyes, People o f the Puszta (Budapest,
1967).
2. But even if, from a Socialist viewpoint, a dictatorship of the proletariat to defend the
achievements of a social revolution can be historically justified in a country which had never
known democratic traditions, there could never be any justification for a Communist party
dictatorship destroying democracy within the labour movement and subjecting the working
class to rule by a Communist politbureau. The alternative in Hungary to a parliamentary
democracy based on the English example did not necessarily imply the imposition of a
Communist dictatorship patterned on the Russian model.
3. Thomas Masaryk, The Making o f a State (London, 1947), p. 436, quoted in Paul E.
Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1948 (London, 1963), p. 5.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 169
party, though conservative, was by no means reactionary, as, for example,
the Christian Social party was in Austria.1
These then were the characters of the two middle-class parties, urban and
rural, with whom the two Socialist parties had to share the power of the
state.
The leading roles of the two Socialist parties were beyond question.
They had been the strongest parties in the First Republic. The Czecho-
slovak Social Democratic party (Ceskoslovenska Socialni Demokracie,
C.S.D.) had emerged with 1,500,000 votes as the strongest individual party
in the republic’s first elections; and the Czechoslovak Communist party
(Komunisticka Strana Ceskoslovenska, K.S.C.) could at the time of its
formation in 1921 call on 350,000 members. Shaken by a severe internal
crisis, it lost 300,000 members between then and 1938, but it maintained its
strength in elections, and in 1935, in the last election before the war, it
won 850,000 votes, as against 1,034,000 votes which went to the Social
Democrats.2
The balance of power between these two parties shifted rapidly after the
country’s liberation by the Red Army. The Czech people were conscious of
a long-standing sense of relationship with the people of Russia as members of
the broad Slav community. Further, the Soviet Union had, before the war,
been an ally of the Czechoslovak Republic, renewing during the war an
agreement for mutual aid and friendship towards the Republic, which was
signed in Moscow on 12 December 1943 by President Eduard Benes. The
majority of Poles, Romanians and Hungarians had viewed the Red Army
with fear, hatred and contempt when it entered and occupied their countries.
The Czechs, on the other hand, had greeted the Red Army with demon-
strations of enthusiasm. In Poland, Romania and Hungary, the Communist
party was the ‘Russian party’ in a disparaging sense. But in Czechoslovakia,
the sympathy felt by the broad masses towards the Soviet Union, which had
smashed the arch-enemy Germany, was a source of strength to a Communist
party with close connections with Moscow.3 In May 1945, when Marshal
Ivan Koniev’s armoured division entered Prague, the Communist party
1. Even the right-wing Agrarian party was, until the time of the Munich Agreement in
September 1938, free of Fascist tendencies. But since it later collaborated with the Nazi
government during the German occupation, its revival was prohibited in the Second
Republic.
2. For the membership shift in the Communist party, 1921-38, see Zinner, Communist
Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, Table 1, p. 250; and for the respective numbers of
voters for the two parties, 1920-35, see ibid., Table 5, p. 253.
3. The Communist party in its propaganda tried to present itself to the Czech people as
the party and even the organ of the Soviet Union. In its policy guide-lines, party officials
were instructed ‘to emphasize at every opportunity the strength and power of the Soviet
Union and its army; at all assemblies to use not only Czech but also Soviet flags and
emblems, and to try to convince the people that the real master of the country was the
Soviet Union and the local representative the local section of the Communist party’—
quoted in Jan Stransky, East Wind over Prague (London, 1950), p. 45.
170 The Reopening o f the Split
counted 37,000 members;1 a year later, immediately before the post-war
elections, it could claim 1,159,264 members.2 It was not the use of terror, as
had occurred in Romania and Hungary, nor opportunism alone3 which
could explain this general shift to the Communist party; at the constituent
national assembly elections on 26 May 1946—which were genuinely free
elections as in the Western democracies—the Communists won 2,695,000
votes against 855,000 for the Social Democrats.
The Communists had thereby gained 114 seats; the Social Democrats
thirty-nine. Both parties had joined together in an alliance back in 1944.
With 153 seats, this alliance now held a slender majority in the constituent
national assembly, which contained 300 delegates; together they had won
51 per cent of votes cast—representing more than 47 per cent of the total
electorate (3,550,000 out of 7,583,000 voters had exercised their prerogative).4
The alliance between Communists and Social Democrats had, moreover,
been strengthened in June 1945 by a further association with the National
Socialist party, all three committing themselves to social reform—‘a Socialist
bloc of workers in town and country’, now shown, as claimed, to represent
‘clearly a majority of the people’.5 The National Socialist party, with fifty-
five seats, had emerged as the second strongest individual party; and thus
the ‘Socialist Bloc’ counted a majority of fifty-eight deputies in Parliament.

The firm foundations for a Socialist order in Czechoslovak society were

already well laid before the elections. The instrument for social revolution
had been the ‘National Front’, a provisional coalition government formed by
President BeneS in Kosice, the capital of Eastern Slovakia, on Communist
initiative in March 1945 when Prague and Brno were still in German hands.
The provisional coalition government had embraced six legally recognized
parties; Communists, Social Democrats, National Socialists, the People’s
party and two Slovak parties. On a proposal made by the Communists, the
leader of the Social Democratic party, Zdenek Fierlinger, who had been
Czechoslovakia’s Ambassador in Moscow, was elected prime minister of the
provisional government, Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist party,
becoming deputy prime minister. The Communists took for themselves the
1. See Zdenek EliaS and Jaromir Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in William Griffith (ed.),
Communism in Europe, vol. n (Massachusetts, n.d.), p. 124.
2. See Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, p. 124.
3. Not surprisingly, many thousands joined the strongest party for reasons of self-
interest. But they did not find themselves in a comfortable position. In a ‘new registration of
members’, 177,000 ‘unreliable elements and enemies, self-declared opportunists and profit-
eers, who had crept into the party’ were expelled between June 1946 and January 1947. See
Dejiny Komunisticki Strany Ceskoslovenskd (Prague, 1961), p. 150, quoted in EliaS and
Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe, p. 199.
4. See R. R. Betts (ed.), Central and South-East Europe 1945-1948 (London, 1950),
p. 179.
5. Provo Lidu, 12 May 1945, quoted in Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in
Czechoslovakia, p. 150.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 171
ministry of the interior, and with it gained control over the police as well as
a dominant influence over the army through the nomination of General
Ludvik Svoboda—who was a Communist sympathizer and who had com-
manded the First Brigade in the Soviet Union—to the post of minister of
defence.
The coalition parties had agreed on a rebuilding programme for the
republic—the ‘Kosice Programme’. The republic was to be based on political
rights of freedom as well as on a comprehensive system of social welfare
and on economic democracy based on trade union participation. The pro-
gramme promised an agrarian reform by distributing the land and property
of Germans and Hungarians who had been expelled from the country as
well as that owned by the church and the Counts Schwarzenberg, Thun and
Waldstein. The key industries—the mines, electric power stations and banks
—were to be nationalized.1
The provisional government did not hesitate to carry through its pro-
gramme, signed by the representatives of the six coalition parties in Kosice
on 27 March 1945. Within ten days of the country’s liberation, on 19 May,
the Communist minister for agriculture, Julius fiuris, publicly announced
the guide-lines for agrarian reform: by a decree of 21 June nearly three
million hectares were to be appropriated without compensation and divided
among over 300,000 small farmers.
A few weeks later, on 18 July, the Social Democratic minister for industry,
Bohumil Lausman, submitted to the president the decrees worked out by a
commission for the nationalization of industry: 3,119 companies, including
particularly the mines, the iron, steel and engineering industries, were to be
taken into public ownership.2

This was not, however, a social revolution taking place under conditions of
parliamentary democracy. The sovereign power of the state rested in the
hands of the National Front central committee, in which the parties were
represented by their respective leaders. All decisions taken by the central
committee were given legal effect by an Act passed by the provisional
assembly. Yet even this assembly had not been elected, but was made up
from forty delegates from each party and sixty representatives from special-
interest groups. The provisional government itself, nominated by President
Benes in agreement with the National Front parties, was really no more than
an executive organ of the central committee, representing and executing the
committee’s decisions following formal agreement.
This system of government, established in the emergency brought about
1. For a comprehensive description of the KoSice Programme, see W. Diamond,
Czechoslovakia between East and West (London, 1947), pp. 1-7.
2. For a short review of the agrarian reform and the nationalization of industry, see
Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, pp. 171-5; see also Betts (ed.),
Central and South-East Europe, pp. 173-4.
 172 The Reopening o f the Split
by the collapse of the administration of the state and its economic life, could
be defined as a system of dictatorship—a dictatorship by the central com-
mittee of the National Front. However, it was a dictatorship founded not on
the exclusive rule of a single party, but on a coalition of the legal parties that
left democratic rights fundamentally untouched. Such rights had been with-
drawn with the authority of the Allies at the Yalta Conference only from
those parties which had co-operated with the Nazi regime—the Agrarian
party and the Czechoslovak German minority.
Moreover the dictatorship was intended, even by the Communists, to be
no more than a temporary measure precluding full parliamentary democracy.
During this period no serious consideration was given to the possibility of a
dictatorship on the Russian pattern. The Communists had in no way
attempted to obstruct or manipulate elections to the constituent National
Assembly. And upon entering parliament as the strongest individual party,
they had, together with all the other parties, voted for Benes’s re-election as
prime minister of the republic and had joined the coalition with Klement
Gottwald as deputy prime minister. What they sought was the construction
of a Socialist order of society on a democratic basis—a ‘particular Czecho-
slovak path to Socialism’, as Gottwald defined it to the Communist central
committee after the elections in September 1946; and, he added, it was a
‘path’ which Stalin had approved in conversation with him.1 When, in
January 1947, the approved government plan for ‘rebuilding the Czechoslovak
Republic’ was put into action—a detailed plan by which the 1937 industrial
productivity figures were to be overtaken by 110 per cent2—Gottwald again
emphasized the party line: ‘We advance towards Socialism along our own
Czechoslovak path.’3

During the twelve months following the election there were no overt indi-
cations of any possibility of the Communist party departing in the near
future from the ‘Czechoslovak path to Socialism’ and opting for the ‘Russian
way’. Immediately after the elections, the Communist leader Jiri Hronek
explained the policy his party had decided upon. ‘Further revolutionary
upheavals,’ he declared, ‘are neither anticipated nor necessary.’ This, he
1. Quoted in Elias and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), C o m m u n ism in E u r o p e ,
p. 179. Tito, however, stated in a conversation in the summer of 1946 with W. Rust, then chief
editor of the British D a ily W o r k e r , that Gottwald had fallen ‘into disgrace’ as a result of his
policies. For Tito is alleged to have said, ‘whilst the other new democracies introduced a
regime which aims at the classic dictatorship of the proletariat. . . the Czechoslovak party
claims that under the special conditions of its country it could progress to Communism by
a democratic form of organization. . . . This,’ Tito said, ‘the other Communist leaders
considered to be pure heresy, which makes things difficult for them. The matter will soon
reach its final conclusion.’ For the conversation, see Douglas Hyde, I B e lie v e d (London,
1951), p. 234. Hyde was then news editor of the D a i l y W o r k e r .
2. See Betts, (ed.), C e n tr a l a n d S o u th -E a s t E u r o p e , pp. 180-2.
3. Quoted in Elias and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), C o m m u n ism in
E u r o p e , p. 179.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 173
stated, was not only the view of the majority of the population, but also, he
emphasized, ‘was shared by the leading men and women of Czechoslovakia’s
strongest party, the Communist party.. . . The party,’ he continued, ‘has as
its programme the consolidation [of revolutionary achievements] and future
development.’1
They held to this line, which had already proved itself. The Czechoslovak
Republic was indeed on the road to Socialism. Two thirds of the industrial
means of production and the whole basis of finance had been nationalized,
capitalist laissez-faire in the production of goods having been overcome by a
Socialist planned economy. Industrial production had rapidly developed,
coming close to fulfilling the two-year plan target of increasing production
by 110 per cent over 1937. A comprehensive social security scheme and the
basic law of the constitution, which solemnly confirmed rights to democratic
freedom, were in the final stages of preparation. It seemed as though
Czechoslovakia was on the way to becoming an example to the world of
how, even under Communist leadership, a Socialist commonwealth might
be founded on a democratic basis.

Moscow in the event respected Czechoslovakia’s independence up until

July 1947. While in Hungary the Soviet army remained in occupation until
the end of 1947, being employed as the instrument of its Stalinization, it had
been withdrawn from Czechoslovakia as early as the end of 1945. Stalin had,
according to Gottwald’s evidence, approved Czechoslovakia’s ‘path to
Socialism’; at any rate, he had made no attempt to block it. Perhaps he
hoped to demonstrate to the world through Czechoslovakia’s example that
the Soviet Union would even leave freedom and independence intact in a
country under Communist rule.
The change in his policy towards Czechoslovakia came with the change
in his policies towards the United States and Britain. When, at the end of
June, at the Paris conference, Stalin rejected Marshall Aid, he broke his
bridges with the West. And when the Prague government, on 7 July, never-
theless unanimously accepted Marshall Aid, as has already been mentioned,
Gottwald was ‘summoned to Moscow’ on the following day,2 where Stalin
unhesitatingly confronted Czechoslovakia with the necessity of choosing
between Marshall Aid and an alliance with the Soviet Union. Faced with
such a choice, Czechoslovakia could only capitulate, for it was politically
and psychologically unthinkable that its alliance with Russia should be
hazarded. In the eyes of most of the Czechoslovak people Russia represented
the only true friend of the republic and its only reliable ally against the danger
of a ‘German revenge’. As Poland had been chained to Russia by the
annexation of East Prussia, so was Czechoslovakia through the expulsion of
1. Quoted in Betts (ed.), Central and South-East Europe, pp. 183-4.
2. See page 148.
 174 The Reopening o f the Split
the Sudetenland Germans. Thus the Prague government, under pressure from
Stalin, repealed its decision. But having rejected Marshall Aid, it could now
expect economic help only from Russia. On 12 July Gottwald signed a five-
year trade agreement which brought Czechoslovakia into economic depen-
dence upon the Soviet Union.
By his intervention on the issue of the Marshall plan, Stalin had incor-
porated Czechoslovakia into the Soviet economic bloc.1 The founding
conference of the Cominform in September 1947 set in motion the process
of its incorporation into the bloc of Soviet-dominated states. T he decision
to set up the Cominform,’ the Communist historian Karel Kaplan reported
on these events in retrospect, ‘influenced the entire development of the
Socialist camp, the individual countries and their Communist parties.’2
The first priority in the Stabilization of Czechoslovakia, as in Hungary
and Poland, was to destroy the independence of the Social Democratic
party and finally to see it absorbed by the Communist party. Even before the
liberation of the country the Communist leadership had set itself the task of
fusing the two Socialist parties. Fierlinger tells in his memoirs of how the
question of fusion had been raised as early as the winter of 1942-3:
In the discussion [with the Soviet leaders] on the jo in t action to be taken by our
country’s two parties of the left after the liberation, which we had in Kuibyshchev
[as has been m entioned, Fierlinger was at the tim e Czech A m bassador to Russia],
each side was o f the opinion th at the economic and social programmes o f the Com -
m unist party and the Social D em ocratic party w ould certainly coincide and jo in t
action between the parties w ould not be a tem porary make-shift arrangem ent. It
would lead to its logical conclusion—a co-ordination o f tactical principles and in
the end to the fusion of both parties.8

Zdenek Fierlinger, chairman of the Social Democratic party after the

liberation, had no doubt wished for the merger between the two Socialist
parties from the beginning; but it was also the aim of the majority in govern-
ment and parliament. ‘The idea of Socialist unity,’ Vdclav Majer, an eminent
trade union leader, who had been in the provisional as well as in Gottwald’s
government, reported, ‘was very popular and accepted from the outset as a
natural consequence of new life in the liberated republic.’4
But after the elections Fierlinger’s policy of close co-operation with the
Communists met with growing opposition from the party leadership as well
as from the rank-and-file. The party’s defeat at the polls—they had won less
than a third of the votes gained by the Communists—was attributed to its
alliance with the Communists which had resisted its policy of independence.
1. See Betts, (ed.), Central and South-East Europe, p. 183.
2. Karel Kaplan, ‘Class Struggle after February 1948’, Prispevky, No. 3, 1963, quoted
in Elias and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe, p. 207.
3. Zdenek Fierlinger, In the Service o f the Czechoslovak Republic (Prague, 1949), pp.
124-5, quoted in Vaclav Majer, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, p. 89.
4. Majer, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Healey (ed.), The Curtain Falls, p. 87.
 The Fotmding o f the Cominform 175
A document published on 12 September 1947, jointly signed by three
leading Social Democrats (Fierlinger, with the party secretary Blazej Vilim,
and a member of the party executive, Frantisek Tymes) as well as three
leading Communists, engendered a crisis in the party. It amounted to a
Social Democratic-Communist pact, committing both parties to a united
attitude on any decisive political problem. Fierlinger had negotiated and
signed it in secret since he feared opposition to the pact from the party
executive but believed that it would be approved by a majority at the party
congress. However, the party congress, meeting in an excited mood on 16
November 1947 in Brno, rejected the pact, deposed Fierlinger and elected
Bohumil Lausman in his place as party president by 283 votes against 162.
Fierlinger did not, however, abandon the fight; he was now determined to
lead the Social Democrats into the Communist camp. He organized within
the party a general staff to work to seize control: a six-pronged political
directorate, a three-pronged political secretariat, an organizational sec-
retariat, and a left-wing group within the party executive and the parlia-
mentary group.
While Fierlinger’s fall had been a set-back for the Communist party,
Lausman’s election to the party presidency by no means implied a breaking-
off of relations with the Communists, for Lausman was a left-wing Socialist.
On the other hand, the party conference made it perfectly clear that the
Social Democrats intended to defend their autonomy. The Communists
could therefore no longer, as had been the case under Fierlinger’s leadership,
count on their unconditional support in the government and the national
assembly. Their predominant influence could therefore now be called in
question, since it was only with the votes of the Social Democrats that they
constituted an overall majority in the cabinet and parliament. It was also now
in doubt whether they could maintain their earlier strength in the elections
due to be held in the spring of 1948. An official public opinion poll taken in
January 1948 indicated a Communist loss of 10 per cent of votes; a similar
poll before the 1946 elections had been accurate to within half of one per
cent.1 The Communist party could not, in any case, expect to gain a majority
at the elections and maintain their domination of the country on a parlia-
mentary basis.
Yet even a decrease in the parliamentary strength of the Communist
party would hardly have obstructed the ‘Czechoslovakian path to Socialism’.
It would have remained the strongest individual party. Its membership out-
stripped the membership of any other party; it controlled the trade unions
and also enjoyed a mass following among the small farmers, who had,
through the agrarian reform, gained land holdings. It was, above all, the

1. See Tana Adam Smidt, Anatomy o f a Satellite (Boston, Mass., 1952). The Institute
of Public Opinion polls came under the Ministry of Information, headed by the Communist
minister, Vdclav Kopecky.
 176 The Reopening o f the Split
party trusted by the Soviet Union, the protector of Czechoslovakia against
the possibility of a German revenge. It would have continued to be the most
influential element in the government and would have been able in alliance
with the Social Democrats and unhindered by the party of the National
Socialists, which had participated in the coalition government since the
liberation, to carry on the process of constructing the new social order.

But it was not the danger of a counter-revolution threatening Socialist de-

velopments which, in February 1948, provoked a Communist insurrection. In
Bohemia and Moravia—the republic’s industrial centres—a successful
counter-revolution was unimaginable in the face of a powerful labour move-
ment. One source of reaction, however, was Slovakia, culturally and socially
backward, a predominantly agrarian country with a predominance of
Catholic, conservative peasants. Under the leadership of Father Joseph Tiso
and with Hitler’s help, it had broken away from the republic and constituted
itself as an independent state in March 1939. In the autumn of 1944, however,
the separatist Fascist regime had been swept away by a revolutionary up-
rising and Slovakia was once again incorporated with certain autonomous
rights into the republic. Until the autumn of 1947 there had been no signs
whatsoever of a separatist revival in Slovakia. Then, in September, a con-
spiracy to assassinate Benes and overthrow the republic came to light. The
conspirators were arrested, and there the matter ended.
This episode had occurred before the founding conference of the Comin-
form in September 1947, and had no effect on the Communist party’s course.
But, two months after the conference, on 29 November, a speech by Gottwald
to the Communist party central committee indicated a change in its policy.
Czechoslovakia would have to reckon ‘in the coming weeks and months’, he
said, ‘with increasing pressure from foreign reaction’. To contain this attack,
the Communist party would have to eliminate ‘agents of reaction and counter-
revolution in the National Front, and in its foreign policy it must suppress all
signs, tendencies and actions which could damage Czechoslovakia’s relation-
ship in its alliance with Soviet Russia’.1 ‘Foreign reaction’ was, according to
the resolution of the Cominform conference, ‘American imperialism’. Ten
days after Gottwald’s speech, the Communist minister of the interior,
Vdclav Nosek, announced the arrest of ‘spies’ on the Bohemian-Bavarian
border who, it was hinted, had been recruited in Bavaria by the American
occupying power. Communist propaganda now declared the republic to be
threatened by the intrigues of foreign powers, Slovak separatism and Czech
counter-revolutionaries.
Nevertheless, during the course of the next three months, these pronounce-
ments in no way disturbed the concord between the parties in the coalition
1. Svobodne Noviny, 30 November 1947, quoted in Betts (ed.), Central and South-East
Europe, p. 187.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 111
government. It was only at the beginning of February 1948 that disagree-
ments between the Communists and other parties in the cabinet began to take
on a hectic tone; but these did not involve any fundamental ideological
differences. In one case it was a question of whether the date for the forth-
coming elections should be settled for April or May; in another it was
whether the salary increases for civil servants, approved by all parties, should
be fixed proportionately or equally for all grades. None was the kind of
conflict to place the coalition in jeopardy.
Then, on 17 February, a conflict arose between the Communist ministers
and those of other parties in the cabinet which unleashed a fateful government
crisis; it was fateful because it was selected by the Communist party as a
justification for seizing state power. The conflict centred on the nomination of
Communists to senior positions in the police by V&clav Nosek, the Com-
munist minister of the interior. With the votes of the Social Democrats, a
majority in the cabinet decided to instruct him to cancel these appointments.
Yet on the same day the Communist party central committee issued a
manifesto accusing ‘certain parties’ of having deliberately precipitated a
government crisis, mainly to cause internal political chaos which might
seriously threaten the elections. It was planned, the Communists asserted, to
iiistal before the elections by unconstitutional means a government of civil
servants ‘which would attempt to snatch power out of the hands of the
sovereign people and, in the service of reaction, in an atmosphere of political
and economic unrest, prepare undemocratic elections’. The manifesto called
upon ‘all true Czechs and Slovaks, irrespective of their party loyalties, to nip
in the bud these infamous plans of the reactionaries’.1 Gottwald had stated
earlier in his speech of the end of November 1947 that ‘reactionary forces
would at the critical moment create a government crisis and try to form a
government of civil servants. Such a step,’ he declared, ‘would politically
speaking be the equivalent of a reactionary putsch, a reactionary coup
dyita t\12
■ When the Cabinet next met on 20 February, Gottwald avoided answering
a question on whether the countermanding of the police appointments had
been carried out, and the ministers of the National Socialists, the People’s
party and the Slovaks announced their resignations. The Communists now
demanded that Benes should form a new government under Gottwald but
excluding the three parties whose ministers had resigned. Benes, however,
refused to accept the resignations and appealed to the Communists to solve
the crisis ‘by parliamentary means’. ‘It is clear to me,’ he wrote to Gottwald,
‘that the prime minister will be the president of the strongest party, Mr

1. Svobodne Noviny, 18 February 1948. For the text of the manifesto, see Betts (ed.),
Central and South-East Europe, pp. 189-90.
2. Quoted in Elia§ and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe,
pp. 202r*3*
178 The Reopening o f the Split
Klement Gottwald. It is also clear to me that Socialism is the pattern of life
which a majority of our people desire.’ Freedom and unity, he continued,
were the main principles of national life, and compatible with Socialism. He
asked Gottwald to prevent the division of the nation into two camps at one
another’s throats.1
The Communists declared, however, that the three parties whose ministers
had resigned had ceased ‘to represent the interests of working people in town
and country’; they had ‘betrayed the fundamental principles of a people’s
democracy . . . and had taken up a position of seditious opposition’. Co-
operation with these parties was therefore out of the question.
Meanwhile the Communist party had mobilized the masses. A workers’
militia was organized and armed and action committees were set up in towns
and villages; a series of mass demonstrations took place in streets and squares
and on 24 February the workers in the factories held a one-hour general
strike to demonstrate their support for the Communist demand that Benes
should accept the ministers’ resignations and form a new government. On the
next day, a crowd 100,000 strong gathered in St Wencelas Square to await the
president’s decision. Benes capitulated, fearing that refusal to meet the de-
mands might unleash civil war, or even a war between the Great Powers. (An
intervention by Russia, or the United States, whose troops were stationed in
Bavaria, was within the scope of possibilities.)12
Gottwald formed his government on the same day. It was a Communist
government. Twelve of its twenty-four members were Communists, and only
three were Social Democrats—Fierlinger, Lausman and E. Erban, secretary of
the trade union council. The remainder were nonentities from the middle-
class camp who had placed themselves at the service of the Communists.
Fierlinger’s participation in the government was a logical consequence of
the views he had advanced since 1942 on co-operation between the two
Socialist parties, convinced from the beginning that the correct course was to
lead the Social Democratic party into the Communist camp. After his rejec-
tion by his party in November, he had organized his plans to take it over.
As the crisis began, he prepared to seize control. When, on 24 February, the
day before the Communists took power, the party executive met to express its

1. For the Benes-Gottwald correspondence, see What Happened in Czechoslovakia?

(Prague, 1948), pp. 40-6.
2. Whether the U.S. government had ever considered intervening in Czechoslovakia is
unknown. But the Truman Doctrine had indicated the possibility of intervention in countries
where the Communists seized power by insurrection. This was probably the contingency
that one Communist historian had in mind when he wrote: ‘At the moment when the
Czechoslovakian reaction attempted an internal overthrow, it was the Soviet Union which
by its authority prevented any interference in internal matters in Czechoslovakia and there-
by objectively helped to solve the government crisis constitutionally and without loss of
blood’—Jaroslav Sedivy, ‘February and the Bourgeois World’, in Prispevky, No. 1, 1962,
quoted in Elias and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe, p. 203.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 179
attitude to the situation, an armed group of the left wing broke into the party
headquarters and reinstalled Fierlinger as party chairman.
Lausman’s participation, on the other hand, was seen as an attempt to
preserve the party independence. The Communists had always been anxious
to encourage official participation of Social Democrats in the government. ‘It
is essential,’ they had stated in their proposals for a Communist-Social Demo-
crat government, ‘that our parties . . . form a solid Socialist core to which all
democratic and socialistic forces can rally.’ They anticipated that ‘the Czech
Social Democratic party, together with ourselves, will, on a basis of co-
operation between equals, take its place on the side of peace, order and the
consolidation of the state’.1
However, Lausman very soon became aware that he had been nursing an
illusion. On 9 April 1948, six weeks after the Communist seizure of power,
the central committee of the Communist party, as the Communist historian
Jaroslav Nedved revealed twenty years later, reached a decision to eliminate
the Social Democratic party. ‘After February 1948,’ he wrote in explanation
of this decision, ‘it had gone beyond any possibility that the Communist
movement. . . would tolerate the existence of a rival Socialist force.’12
Fierlinger, as an accomplice of the Communist plot, now held back no
longer. He called a conference of those left-wing members of the central com-
mittee of the Social Democratic party who had approved the fusion with the
Communist party. ‘The unification of the Social Democratic party with the
Communist party was decided,’ Nedved recorded, ‘not by a congress of the
party, but by a central committee in the absence of the right-wing leaders who
had been expelled.’ This action, as he emphasized, was ‘unquestionably a
gross breach of the statutes’.3
In fact there was no genuine fusion between the two parties. Only local
fusion committees, composed of Communists and Fierlinger’s left-wing
Socialists, were set up and in an impetuous campaign members of the Social
Democratic party were urged to join the Communist party as individuals. Up
until 31 July 1948—the date set for the termination of the campaign—no
more than 22,201 Social Democrats had joined the Communist party, and by
the end of the year the total was 118,104.4 Thus, of the 371,580 members of
the Social Democratic party registered on 1 January 1948, more than two
thirds had refused to join the Communist party in spite of being subjected to
political and economic pressure.

1. What Happened in Czechoslovakia ?, p. 48, quoted in Zinner, Communist Strategy and

Tactics in Czechoslovakia, p. 212.
2. Jaroslav Nedved, ‘Cesta ke slouceni socialni demokracie s kommunistockou stranou v
roce 1948’, in Academica (Prague), vol. vm, 1968, p. 72. See also Vilem Bernard, 'Czecho-
slovakia: The Spurious Unification of the Labour Movement’, in Labour’s Call, March
1961.
3. Nedved, ‘Cesta ke slouceni. . . ’, in Academica, vol. vm, 1968, p. 70.
4. ibid., p. 79.
180 The Reopening o f the Split
LauSman, in protest against the Communist action, resigned from the
government. He fled to Austria under threat of arrest in 1949. In 1953 he was
kidnapped by Czech secret police agents in Salzburg, and after being detained
in prison awaiting trial for four years, was sentenced to seventeen years’
imprisonment on 2 September 1957; he died in mysterious circumstances in
prison in 1963.
Meanwhile the National Assembly declared eighty-two of the 300 deputies
to have forfeited their seats and called elections for 30 May 1948. Only joint
lists of National Front candidates were permitted. The Communists won 214
of the 300 seats; the Social Democrats twenty-three. Within a few weeks
of the elections, the parliamentary group of Social Democrats had been
absorbed into the Communist group.
Nothing now stood in the way of the transformation of the Czechoslo-
vak Republic into a Russian satellite state through the Stalinization of its
Communist party. The process was completed in less than four years. The
climax to Stalin’s triumph came in 1952 with the trial of Rudolf Sldnsky, the
general secretary of the Communist party and the strongest man in the
party after Gottwald.1 He was arrested at the beginning of December 1951
and sentenced to death a year later as a ‘Trotskyist-Titoist, Zionist, bourgeois
national traitor’, together with ten other top Communist leaders, including
the foreign minister, Vladimir Clementis, and was hanged.2 These trials were
the high point to the ‘great purge’ of those party leaders whom Stalin found
uncongenial.3

Socialism in Czechoslovakia became the tragic victim of Stalin’s power

policy. Conditions for its development had been more favourable in Czecho-
slovakia than in any other country of Eastern Europe. The working class
there was numerically superior to every other class and its size and strength
were developing steadily with the rapid growth of industry. The peasants, like
the capitalistic middle class, were a minority. The social atmosphere was
permeated with the ideas and ideals of Socialism. Socialism was, as Benes had
said, ‘the pattern of life which the majority of the people wish for’.4 Thus it
was possible, while fully preserving rights to freedom, to accomplish under
the conditions of democracy within three years a social revolution which had,
before the Communist power seizure in February 1948, transferred into
1. Sl&nsky held the Order of Communist Socialism, and only six months before his
arrest, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, he had been feted in Rude Pravo, the party’s
central organ, as ‘a devoted and fiery fighter under the flag of Lenin and Stalin’ and as ‘a
distinguished example of a Communist revolutionary’—see Edward Taborsky, Com -
munism in Czechoslovakia 1948-1960 (Princeton, 1961), p. 103.
2. See Proceedings against the Leadership o f the Centre o f Conspiracy Hostile to the
State with R udolf Sldnsky at the Head (Ministry of Justice, Prague, 1953), p. 8.
3. See Elias and Netik, ‘Czechoslovakia’, in Griffith (ed.), Communism in Europe, pp.
210-16.
4. See page 178.
 The Founding o f the Cominform 181
public ownership 80 per cent of industry, reckoned by the numbers of workers
employed.1 In every other country of Eastern Europe in the Soviet Union’s
zone of power, the social revolution had taken place under the auspices of
the Red Army’s bayonets. In Czechoslovakia, a country evacuated by the
Soviet army within six months of its liberation, the social revolution had been
the fruits of a genuine national movement. In every other East European
state the Communists had, before the war, represented no more than a small
minority of the people; the Russian forces of occupation then installed them
in positions of power which they could maintain only by imposing the system
of dictatorship. In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the Communist party had
before 1939 enjoyed the status of a national movement representing about
half the working class, and had after the war rallied an overwhelming
majority of the workers to its support to become by far the strongest party.
It did not need the power of a dictatorship to consolidate its predominant
influence. Nor, under the existing ratio of class strength, was the leading role
of the Communist-Social Democrat alliance in the state ever in question.
Thus Czechoslovakia could have developed a genuine Socialist society on
the basis of civil rights and democracy. Such a society had, indeed, been the
solemnly proclaimed goal of the Communist party. Until the founding of the
Cominform in September 1947, it had striven for ‘a Czechoslovak path to
Socialism’—a way of peaceful transition to Socialism under conditions of
democracy. Its shift to a policy aimed at seizing power had been ordered by
Stalin when he decided to switch his policy vis-a-vis the Western powers.
Stalin’s concern was not with the fate of Socialism in Czechoslovakia, but
with the power and security of the Soviet Union. Since he believed in the
contingency of a war by the United States against the Soviet Union, he
wished to secure for Russia Czechoslovakia’s war potential.
The sequels to Stalin’s action were disastrous. The Truman Doctrine had
declared the Cold War. The Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia
had commenced it. And it was the coup d'etat in Prague in September 1948
which destroyed any attempt to bridge the gulf between democratic Socialism
and the Communist movement.
1. See Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia, p. 357.
8 • The Reconstitution o f the Socialist
International

The Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia unleashed panic throughout

Western Europe and the United States. ‘The Prague coup d'etat had destroyed
the last illusion [that peaceful co-existence with Russia was possible],. . .
The Soviet Union was about to conquer the rest of Europe’—thus ten years
later Paul-Henri Spaak, the general-secretary of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), described the mood from which the pact had
stemmed.1 The most impressive illustration of the reaction in the West to the
international tension of those weeks and months appears in the much-
discussed letter of the great British humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell,
written on 5 May 1948, a few weeks after the coup d'etat. In the danger, as he
saw it, of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, he ‘urged that all
nations favouring international control of atomic energy should form an
alliance, and threaten Russia with war unless Russia agreed to come in and
permit inspections’. In the opinion of ‘professional strategists’ whom he had
consulted, ‘at present neither air power nor atomic power could prevent
Russia overrunning all West Europe up to the Straits of Dover’. Europeans,
he wrote, were ‘more vividly conscious than Americans of that danger’. For,
he continued,

If Russia overruns West Europe, the destruction will be such as no subsequent

reconquest can undo. Practically the whole educated population will be sent to
labour camps in Siberia or on the shores of the White Sea, where most will die of
hardships and the survivors will be turned into animals (see what happened to the
Polish intellectuals)___Unless West Europe can be preserved from invasion, it
will be lost to civilization for centuries.

He was aware that, in such a war, ‘the Russians, even without atomic
1. Quoted in Paul E. Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia 1918-
1948 (London, 1963), p. vi.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 183
bombs, will be able to destroy all the big towns in England .. .\ Yet, ‘even
at such a price I think war would be worthwhile’.1
But the reaction of the United States government was an even graver
matter, since any decision for war or for peace depended upon its evaluation
of the danger. General Lucius Clay, military governor of the American Zone
in Germany, had tried for months to convince Washington that fears of an
imminent Russian war of aggression were without basis and that an armed
conflict with the Soviet Union ‘appeared improbable for at least ten years’.
But a week after the coup d'etat, on 5 March, he cabled Washington that a
change in the Soviet attitude had become clear, ‘which makes me feel that it
could develop with dramatic speed’.12 The war panic in Washington became
so acute that, to quieten it down, the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), the
intelligence arm of the United States government, reported to President
Truman on 16 March that, the way they saw it, an outbreak of hostility was
at least ‘not likely within sixty days’.3

The foundation of the Cominform was looked upon in the West as an act to
resurrect the concept of Communist world revolution. Before the war, the
Soviet Union had been seen as a power watching for, encouraging and
working for such a revolution, and for this reason Stalin had dissolved the
Communist International during the war in an attempt to obliterate this
image.4 Now, in founding the Cominform, he had once again raised its
spectre. The general strikes unleashed by the Communists in France and
Italy in the autumn of 1947, following hard on the founding of the Comin-
form, helped to confirm the West’s belief that the Soviet Union had returned
to its policy of pursuing the world revolution, and that the analysis of the
world situation put forward at the Cominform conference5 reflected Russia’s

1. For the text of the letter, see Saturday Review, 16 October 1954. For the history of the
letter, see The Autobiography o f Bertrand Russell vol. h i : 1944-1967 (London, 1969), p. 18.
On the mood in France, Alexander Werth reported from his own experience: ‘It must be
said that during the years 1948-49 the French non-Communist left had been forcefully
anti-Communistic___ The political strikes towards the end of 1947 were very unpopu-
lar___ It also seemed as if Russia had taken up the position through the Cominform, that
the war is more or less unavoidable and the liquidation of the Bene§ regime in Czecho-
slovakia was considered as a strengthening of this attitude. Czechoslovakia appeared until
then as a life symbol of the adjustment [of conflicts] between the East and West and the
east-west co-existence within one country; it had now been ruthlessly destroyed___ ’
—France 1940-1955, p. 409. In her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir described how the
coup d'etat in Prague, like the establishment of the Cominform before it, intensified the
mood of anti-Communism among French intellectuals and generated a general war
psychosis. ‘There was much talk of [the possibility of] a Russian invasion’—Force o f
Circumstances (London, 1965), p. 146.
2. Quoted in Walter Millis (ed.), The Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951), p. 387.
3. ibid., p. 395.
4. For the dissolution of the Communist International, see Braunthal, History o f the
International, 1914-1943, pp. 528-9.
5. See Appendix Seven.
184 The Reopening o f the Split
view that a war between the ‘imperialist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ camps—or
between the Western powers and Russia—appeared inevitable.
The Russian coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia seemed to the West to herald
the opening of a Russian offensive intended to carry the Communist revolu-
tion across Europe with the Soviet army as its spearhead. Certainly the
Soviet Union possessed the forces to overrun Europe to the Atlantic coast,
for while the United States and Britain had demobilized their armies, leaving
only token troop units on the Continent, 180 Russian divisions stood ready
in the East to march into what was militarily speaking practically a vacuum.
In a speech in the House of Commons on 22 January 1948, a month
before the Prague overthrow, Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the British
Labour government, deeply disturbed by the Communist-led strikes in
France and Italy,1 had called upon the countries of Western Europe—
France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg—to join with Britain in a defence
alliance—the ‘Western Union’. The Prague coup hastened the realization of
this plan; it was ratified on 17 March by the signing of the Treaty of Brussels.
On the same day, President Truman welcomed the conclusion of the Treaty
before a combined meeting of both Houses of Congress, declaring, ‘That the
decision of the free countries of Europe to defend themselves will find a com-
parable determination [in the United States] to help in their defence.’2 Two
weeks later, on 31 March, Congress voted $6,000 million in foreign aid,
mainly to arm the western states of Europe.
The fever of rearmament even gripped the Scandinavian countries. ‘The
coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia,’ Tage Erlander, Sweden’s Socialist prime
minister, declared in a speech of 1 May 1948, ‘was a test not only for Prague,
but also for Stockholm.’3 He withdrew a proposed law intended to decrease
the armament budget and asked Parliament instead to approve a 50 per cent
increase to the air force with a doubling of air-force personnel. Similarly,
Norway’s Socialist government and the Socialist coalition in Denmark
hurried to rearm.

A few weeks after the Prague coup an event occurred which had the effect of
intensifying the international anxiety psychosis—the Russian blockade of
Berlin. When General Clay announced a currency reform for the three
Western Zones of Berlin on 30 March, Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, com-
mander-in-chief of the Soviet occupation forces, first barred the access roads
traversing the Russian Zone surrounding Berlin and then, on 23 June, an-
nounced a total blockade of the city.4 Now it seemed as if the world faced an
1. See pp. 42-3.
2. Quoted in George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (London, 1967), p. 401.
3. Quoted in Howard K. Smith, The State o f Europe (New York, 1949), p. 185.
4. The blockade of the two million Berliners lasted from 23 June 1948 until 12 May
1949. For a detailed description of the confrontation, see Boris Meissner, Russland, die
Westmcichte unci Deutschland (Hamburg, 1953), pp. 158-81.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 185
immediate outbreak of war and that Stalin had invoked the blockade to
provoke war and overrun Western Europe.
Yet Stalin’s attempts during the blockade to ensure a peaceful conclusion
lent weight to the interpretation that, in reality, nothing was further from his
mind than the plan of ‘overrunning’ Western Europe, and finally he lifted the
blockade without any concessions having been made. In his memoirs General
Clay recollected that, ‘The care with which the Russians avoided anything
that might have provoked resistance by force convinced me that the Soviet
Union had no wish for a war, even though it believed that the Western Allies
would rather surrender an essential point in their position than risk war as
an alternative.’1
To damp down the war scare in the United States, Stalin told Kingsbury
Smith, director-general of the U.P.I. press agency, in an interview on 27
January 1949 that he was prepared in conjunction with the United States to
issue a declaration ‘to confirm that neither government had any intention of
venturing into a war against the other’.2 And a few days before, on 21
January, Pravda had quoted from an open letter from Stalin to a prospective
presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace: ‘Despite the differences in the
economic systems and ideologies of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., the co-
existence of these systems and the peaceable removal of differences of opinion
between them is not only possible, but absolutely necessary in the interests of
general peace.’3
But Stalin’s protestations of innocence had been spoken to the wind. The
U.S. government, as well as the people of the United States and Western
Europe, were obsessed by a fear of Russia and with the possibility of the
Soviet Union starting to move its million-strong army to establish a Com-
munist reign over Western Europe. On 22 January 1949, President Truman
laid before both Houses of Congress the draft treaty for a pact to cover the
‘collective security of the North Atlantic area’; it was signed on 4 April by
twelve countries. By the pact the partners in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) pledged themselves ‘to consider an armed attack
against any one or more [treaty powers] in Europe or North America to be
an attack against them all’. The publicity for NATO declared it to be a
bastion to protect the ‘free peoples of Europe’ against the threat of Com-
munism.4 ‘The pact,’ declared Belgium’s Socialist prime minister, Paul-Henri
1. Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (London, 1950), p. 174.
2. For the text of the interview, see Meissner, Russland, die Westmachte und Deutsch-
land, p. 180.
3. Quoted in ibid.
4. It must, however, be remembered that, among the twelve governments who had
signed the pact, pledging themselves to the collective defence of the ‘free peoples’ against
attack by Communist Russia, were, apart from the United States, Canada and the five
countries of Western Europe with Denmark and Norway, three countries in which
any popular freedom movements were instantly suppressed—Portugal, Greece and
Turkey,
 186 The Reopening o f the Split
Spaak, ‘is a shield, but not a sword . . . a pact of defence aimed at no
one.’1
The Soviet Union, however, saw the pact as the ‘weapon of an aggressive
Anglo-American bloc in Europe . . . whose objective was the setting up of
Anglo-American world rule’.12 T he North Atlantic Treaty,’ a note from the
Soviet government to the signatory powers stated, ‘has nothing to do with the
self-defence of the participant states, which are threatened by nobody and
whom nobody intends to attack. On the contrary, the pact has an obvious
aggressive character and is aimed against the U.S.S.R., a fact not even con-
cealed in public declarations by the official representatives of the participant
states.’3
The pact’s consequences were disastrous. It sealed the split of Germany,
of Europe and the world. It represented the ultimate link in a chain of
illusions and misinterpretations. The Yalta Declaration, which had envisaged
the setting up of democratic governments in Poland and the Russian border
states, rested on misapprehensions that the Soviet Union’s demand for
governments friendly to the Soviet Union in these countries could be fulfilled
under a democratic system. But an overwhelming majority of the people of
Poland and Romania was far from being ‘Soviet-friendly’, hating Russia
with an enmity rooted in their historical tradition, while the Russian annexa-
tion of large areas of these countries, sanctioned at Potsdam by the Western
Allies, was bound to deepen and perpetuate their resentment. Little support
for a ‘Soviet-friendly government’ could therefore be expected from the
democratic elements in these countries. So the Soviet Union had, not un-
expectedly, subjected the countries under their administration to a Com-
munist predominance, for only by placing Communists in power could
Russia ensure the governments it wished for.4

1. Quoted in D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins 1917-1960 (London, 1961),
vol. I, p. 616.
2. Soviet Press Translation, July 1949, p. 401, quoted in Fleming, The Cold War and its
Origins, vol. I, p. 515.
3. Quoted in Meissner, Russland, die Westmachte und Deutschland, p. 183. The protest
of the French Communists was particularly outspoken. The executive committee of the
C.G.T. issued a ‘solemn declaration’ announcing that the French working class would
never feel ‘itself bound’ by the government’s signing of the North Atlantic pact—Le
Peuple, 17 May 1949. And Thorez declared that the French people would welcome the
Soviet army if it were to occupy Paris in the lawful ‘pursuance of an attack’—UHumanite,
23 February 1949, quoted in Val R. Lorwin, The French Labor Movement (Cambridge,
Mass., 1954), p. 283.
4. Finland was the one Russian border state which, even though it came within the
Soviet sphere of influence and could have been transformed into a Russian satellite state,
remained free of Communist party rule. The Communist party, which operated an electoral
front organization called the ‘Finnish People’s Democratic League’ (S.K.D.L.), had
emerged from the March 1945 election as the strongest party with fifty-one out of 200
seats (the Social Democrats gaining fifty seats). In 1946 the S.K.D.L. leader Mauno
Pekkala succeeded Juho Kusti Paasikivi as prime minister, and it seemed that the danger
of a Communist takeover was imminent. In February 1948, a week after the Communist
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 187
Yet the actions undertaken by the Soviet Union out of concern for its
security to prevent the growth of hostile states along its borders were in-
terpreted by the United States as a stage in a policy of spreading its sphere of
influence across the whole of Europe right up to the Atlantic coast. The
Truman Doctrine was a reply to the Stalinization of the Russian border states.
The Truman Doctrine was basically intended to contain Russia’s desire for
expansion: it was a warning directed at the Soviet government: ‘Thus far,
and no further’. But it had the very opposite effect. The Soviet Union saw in
it an advance warning of a war of aggression planned by the United States,
and so countered by establishing the Cominform to enable Moscow to regain
control over the world Communist movement and by incorporating Hungary
and Czechoslovakia into the Russian orbit, to strengthen its war potential and
advance its outposts in the event of war. The Prague coup, however, hardened
fears and attitudes in the West, which replied with the North Atlantic Treaty.

The Communist coup in Prague set a term to the history of endeavours to

reach an understanding between the international Socialist labour movement
and the Communist movement. Until Prague the International Socialist
Conference had, as it stated at its London meeting on 20 March 1948, worked
for ‘a fraternal relationship’ with all Socialist parties in general, but in par-
ticular with the Socialist parties in the countries of Eastern Europe, for in
each of these countries the Socialist parties were coalition partners in pre-
dominantly Communist regimes. As members of the International Socialist
Conference—the only common platform for Socialists in the East and West—
they formed at the same time a bridge of understanding across the gulf which
had opened between East and West. Because of the particularly difficult
position of its Eastern European member parties, the International Socialist
Conference had hesitated to revive the Socialist International in all its
coup in Czechoslovakia, the Finnish government received a note from Moscow calling for
the signing of a mutual aid treaty. Street riots followed. Finland seemed on the verge of
incorporation into the Communist bloc. But suddenly the crisis was overcome. The Finnish
army took steps to curb the disturbances. In Moscow, Stalin acceded to President Paasi-
kivi’s terms for the friendship treaty, by which Finland preserved her independence and
neutrality. This Soviet-Finnish treaty of mutual assistance, signed on 6 April 1948, pledged
Finland to come to the defence of the Soviet Union should it be attacked through Finland—
but even then only on Finnish territory. In the elections of July 1948, the Communists lost
thirteen of their seats and the Social Democratic party formed a minority government under
the leadership of Karl August Fagerholm, which was subsequently transformed into a
coalition government with the Agrarians and which lasted until 1959. The Social Democrats
were then excluded from government for almost a decade, until the elections of 1966, from
which they emerged with fifty-five out of 200 seats as Finland’s largest party in the Diet.
Under Rafael Paasio’s leadership they formed a ‘grand coalition’ government in which
Communists were represented again for the first time since 1948.
 188 The Reopening o f the Split
aspects,1 and had refrained from any criticism of Russia’s terrorist policies in
the countries it occupied. The conference had even kept silent on the declara-
tion of war against Social Democracy made at the founding conference of the
Cominform.12
But this declaration of war was shortly followed by hostile acts in the
form of a ‘co-ordinated action by the Soviet Union and the Cominform’, as
the conference resolution ascertained: the enforced merger by terror of all
Social Democratic with Communist parties in those countries under the
power of the Soviet government, and finally by the coup in Prague. Now
Moscow had completed its alienation from the parties of democratic Social-
ism. The International Socialist Conference could no longer remain silent.
‘The Communist parties have been ordered to destroy democratic Socialism,’
it declared. The International Socialist Conference now faced ‘the problem
of defending democracy’.
First the resolution defined the dividing-line between the parties of demo-
cratic Socialism and of Communism. It stated that the parties in Romania,
Bulgaria and Hungary, which had agreed to merge with the Communists,
had by this action excluded themselves from the community of the Inter-
national Socialist Conference. From the Czechoslovak Socialist party, which
had supported the coup d'etat, it withdrew recognition as a representative of
Socialism. It appealed to the Polish Socialist party to withstand fusion with
the Communist party ‘as long as it was able’, and to demonstrate through its
attitudes ‘its belief in the active solidarity of international Socialism’.
This was the first occasion since the end of the war that the International
of democratic Socialism had come into the open to challenge the Com-
munist movement. The illusion that any understanding might be reached
with Moscow on co-operation with the Communists had finally been de-
stroyed. The resolutions of the International Socialist Conference in London,
in March 1948, confirmed the renewal of the schism. Responsibility for the
split, the conference had declared, ‘lies alone with the Cominform, whose

1. See page 137.

2. The International Socialist Conference in Antwerp, meeting at the end of November
1947, two months after the founding of the Cominform, was the last conference at which
the Socialist parties of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) were rep-
resented. To avoid breaking with them, the conference refrained from condemning the
Cominform, which had called for a struggle against the ‘reactionary right wing of the
Social Democratic leadership in the West’. It passed a resolution against the attacks
on Social Democracy, but without mentioning the Cominform or the Communists. It
declared its solidarity with ‘the people’s struggle to defend democracy, being kept alive at
a cost of so heavy a sacrifice and destruction’, but without pointing directly at the Com-
munists who endangered it. Harold Laski did, however, indicate the danger in the debate.
‘In France,’ he said, ‘democracy is threatened by the strategy, tactics and manoeuvres of
the Communist party. It is as much in danger from the Communist camp as from the camp
of de Gaulle.’ The most detailed description of the conference discussions may be found in a
report by Madhu Limaye of India’s Socialist party, who took part; see Socialist Party of
India; Report of the Nasik Conference (Bombay, 1948), pp. 122-38.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 189
policy has been guided exclusively by its interests in serving the Soviet
Union’.1
The defence of democracy against attempts at its destruction by the
Soviet Union had now become a central policy for the Socialist International.
Two months after the London meeting, there was another conference in
Vienna on 4 June 1948 to formulate its attitude towards the ‘people’s demo-
cracies’, as the Communist governments in Eastern Europe, the Balkans,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia were now described.
These ‘people’s democracies’, the conference resolution stated, were in
reality ‘dictatorships’. ‘They are governments which deny by political means
the fundamental rights of the citizen and which seek the economic replace-
ment of private enterprise by state capitalism. They betray democracy as
well as the Socialism which they claim to represent... .’ And, in exception-
ally solemn words, the resolution declared: ‘The parties represented at this
conference are determined to stand together in their struggle to preserve and
extend political democracy.’
The resolution next formulated the concrete guarantees necessary for the
personal rights to freedom—in fact, putting them down in black and white
for the first time in the International’s history, for from its foundation it had
regarded the personal rights to freedom, as the French Revolution of 1789
had proclaimed them in the declaration of the human rights as obvious basic
tenets of Socialism which required no further specific definition. It had pro-
tested against the suppression of these rights by the Communist dictatorship
in Russia, but had never explicitly codified the principles in a document. In
Russia itself, rights to freedom remained suppressed in the name of ‘the
dictatorship of the proletariat’; and now in those countries under the Soviet
Union’s subjection they were suppressed by the system of a ‘people’s demo-
cracy’, which camouflaged a dictatorship by the Communist party within a
one-party state. The Conference therefore considered it appropriate to restate
the principles of political democracy. It declared in its resolution:

The parties represented at this conference are opposed to the one-party state
and all systems o f government based upon it.
They are o f the opinion that a system of political democracy m ust combine in
itself a recognition o f the pre-eminence of the individual which is to be guaranteed
by the following freedoms:
Freedom of thought, opinion and speech; security in law and protection against
interference by other in d iv id u als;. . . equality before the law and protection against
political tam pering with the machinery o f justice ; unimpeded freedom and guaran-
tees o f rights in elections; the right to an opposition; the political and lawful
equality o f all citizens, irrespective o f class, race or sex.

The decision by the International Socialist Conference to oppose the

1. The circular, with the text of the resolution, can be found in the archives of the
Socialist International; it is dated 20 March 1948, but is unnumbered.
 190 The Reopening o f the Split
Cominform in a clearly defined battle front did, however, encounter resist-
ance from Nenni’s Partito Socialista Italiano. This was one of the largest
member parties of the International, having emerged from the June 1946
elections with 4,760,000 votes as the second strongest party in Italy. As we
saw earlier, it had in the spring of 1944 entered into open struggle against
Fascism after two decades of underground activity. Then, in August 1944, it
had concluded the ‘pact of alliance’ with the Communist party which had
been renewed in November 1946 in the face of protests from Saragat’s anti-
communist wing. The party had split on the whole question in 1947.1
Before the Prague coup the Socialist International Conference had made
no criticism of the pact between the P.S.I. and the Communists, even though
the formation of the Cominform as an active opponent to Social Democracy
had raised the whole question of whether a Social Democratic party could
maintain an alliance with Communists. But the conference had, as we have
already seen, decided to enter into open conflict with the Cominform only
after the Prague coup; and at its London conference in March 1948 it appealed
to the Italian Socialists ‘to demonstrate by their attitudes how, faced with a
choice between subjection by the Cominform and free Socialist co-operation
in the reconstruction of Europe, they had chosen the Socialist path’. Yet upon
the resolution being read out, the Italian delegates left the conference in
protest. The P.S.I. executive drafted a memorandum to the conference re-
jecting its interference in the internal policies of the party and stating that
it had no intention of dissolving the alliance with the Communists, which
remained necessary to combat the forces of reaction in Italy.
When the conference met in Vienna, in June 1948, it suspended the P.S.I.
and accused its leaders of having ‘preferred, even after the Cominform had
declared open war against international Social Democracy, and even after
democracy in Czechoslovakia had fallen victim to totalitarian tyranny, rather
to forfeit the sympathies of their foreign brethren than to break off relations
with international Communism’.
The P.S.I. executive reacted with an open letter to the conference, in
which they again justified their alliance with the Communists as an in-
dispensable instrument for united action by the forces of democracy in Italy
against the alliance between Italian and foreign capitalism and the Vatican,
which aimed at setting up a conservative-clerical Italy.2
1. See pp. 60-65.
2. For the text of the open letter, see Avanti!, 18 July 1948. The Catholic hierarchy
had, in fact, already made clear its position in its opposition to Socialism and Communism.
Pope Pius XII had made a speech on 1 June 1946, the day before the plebiscite to select the
form of government in Italy, to agitate in favour of monarchy; in July 1949 he excommuni-
cated all Marxists. Cardinals and bishops instructed priests to refuse the sacrament to
Catholics who, in the April 1948 election, voted for the Socialist-Communist unity list.
‘Never in the history of unified Italy had the Catholic Church been so powerful and in-
fluential as in the two decades following the end of the war’—see Norman Kogan, A
Political History o f Postwar Italy (New York, 1966), pp. 37, 51-2, 53, 124-5 and 217.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 191
The International Socialist Conference at their meeting in Clacton-on-Sea
early in December 1948 now addressed a ‘final appeal’ to the P.S.I. Unless
they had by 10 March 1949 declared their willingness to be reunited with the
Social Democrats on terms ‘acceptable’ to the Socialist International, they
would be excluded from membership of the conference. The P.S.I. should
understand, Morgan Phillips, executive chairman of the International
Socialist Conference, said in an open letter to the P.S.I. executive, that
democratic Socialism was ‘incompatible’ with totalitarian Communism. ‘The
offensive against international Socialism begun by the Cominform,’ he con-
tinued, ‘excludes any common ground between a democratic Socialist party
and a party which continues at every level to liaise with a Communist party.’
The P.S.I. executive, however, persisted in their view that the political
fight in Italy was not between Communists and anti-Communists, but be-
tween a conservative-clerical reaction which stood in opposition to the
working classes. ‘The united action pact,’ they said, ‘despite its unpleasantness
and danger, keeps the solidarity of the workers alive—a solidarity without
which it would be impossible to defend democracy.’1
As a consequence the International Socialist Conference, at its meeting in
Baam, Holland, in the middle of May 1949, expelled the P.S.I. for having
‘refused to dissolve the pact with the Communists’.2 The P.S.I. did not return
to the Socialist International until almost two decades later when it reunited
itself with the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani at a mass meeting in
Rome on 30 October 1966.3

Meanwhile leading Socialists who had fled from the Soviet-dominated

countries of Eastern Europe had organized emigre groups and founded, in
1. For the text of the two letters, see COMISCO, Circular No. 11/49.
2. See COMISCO, Circular No. 27/49. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s disclosures of
Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist party, Nenni had
placed responsibility for the degeneration of Communism on the system of the Com-
munist dictatorship. After the crushing of the revolution in Hungary in October 1956 by
the Soviet army, which he strongly condemned, Nenni handed back the Stalin Peace Prize
awarded to him several years earlier. The pact with the Communists had, in fact, been
ineffective since the early 1950s and had in reality, if not officially, become meaningless.
The party congress in February 1957 condemned the Communist dictatorship in a resolu-
tion which Nenni sponsored and which laid down that democracy and freedom were
questions equal in importance to the nationalization of the means of production, and that
democracy founded on a plurality of parties was not only a means to an end, but an end
in itself. But in October 1958 the majority of the party’s central committee voted against
Nenni’s resolution to dissolve the pact, and so he resigned the general secretaryship. He
did, however, win a majority vote from the party congress on 19 January 1959; the pact
was formally dissolved and Nenni re-elected as general secretary. The left wing of the
party eventually separated itself from the party in January 1964 over the question of
participation in government; it formed the Partito Socialista Italiano di Unita Proletaria
(P.S.I.U.P.). See Kogan, A Political History o f Postwar Italy, pp. 101, 103, 137-8 and 198.
3. In August 1956 Nenni had proposed the reunification of the two Socialist parties
during a discussion with Saragat in Pralogna; as Nenni intimated, Saragat was then not
yet ready for it.
 192 The Reopening o f the Split
Paris, a Bureau International Socialiste (B.I.S.). But the parties in exile were
themselves divided into two hostile camps: of Socialists who had opposed
participation in Communist-dominated coalition governments and those who
had approved of them. It was a conflict which was to reduce the B.I.S. to
impotence.
Until that point the parties in exile had not been invited to attend the
International Socialist Conferences in accordance with a decision taken by
the Clacton conference of 19461 upon the insistence of the Socialist parties in
Eastern Europe which had refused to recognize emigre groups that had split
away over the question of co-operation with the Communists. But now
these Socialist parties themselves had been dissolved during the process of
merging with the Communist parties. The parties in exile had therefore in
fact come to represent the Socialist oppositions of their respective countries.
The recognition of their right to representation in the International Socialist
Conference could no longer be withheld. The Clacton conference which met
at the beginning of 1948 proposed that a centre be set up for the splinter
groups of Socialists in exile and that their parties be incorporated into the
International as advisory members. The International Socialist Conference
(the resolution stated) ‘refuses to recognize as permanent the division of
Europe into a free region and an enslaved region. It considers that the East
European Socialist parties will some day recover their right to full organiza-
tion and activity. In this belief the International Socialist Conference calls on
the Socialist parties of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia to set up a common centre in exile to meet under its auspices.’2
The centre was founded at a conference of parties in exile in London in
July 1949. It adopted the title Socialist Union of Central-Eastern Europe and
elected as chairman Zygmunt Zaremba, with Vilem Bernard as secretary.
The member parties of the Socialist Union were now recognized as consul-
tative members of the International Socialist Conference.3

The depths of conflict existing between Social Democracy and the Soviet
Union which came to a head over the Prague coup explain their attitude to
1. See page 138.
2. See Julius Braunthal (ed.), Yearbook o f the International Socialist Labour Movement
1956-1957 (London, 1956), pp. 92-3.
3. See COMISCO, Circular No. 38/49. The founding members of the Socialist Union
were the exiled Socialist parties of Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugo-
slavia; soon afterwards those of Estonia, Lithuania, Romania and the Ukraine also
joined. The decision to incorporate these parties into the International apparently caused
the Cominform great alarm. Its press release stated that the Clacton conference did in fact
nothing less ‘behind closed doors’ than ‘to lay plans for the organization of a widespread
net of espionage and terror against the democratic regimes of Eastern Europe’. This
organization ‘under the leadership of the British Labour party and the right wing of
European Social Democrats’, it reported, ‘would co-ordinate the action of the reactionary
“socialist” emigrants from Eastern Europe with the already existing espionage system
organized by the German Social Democrats in the closest co-operation with the British and
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 193
the Brussels Treaty of March 1948 and, a year later, to the North Atlantic
Treaty.
It must be remembered that the Treaty of Brussels had been proposed by
the British Labour government and that seven of the twelve governments
which signed the North Atlantic Treaty had been directly Socialist govern-
ments or coalition governments in which Social Democrats played a promi-
nent role.1 If the Western Union founded by the Treaty of Brussels already
appeared as a thinly disguised military defence alliance ranged against
Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty left no further doubt about its character
of a defensive alliance between Western Europe and the United States—a
pact of collective security against the eventuality of a Russian attack.
The Soviet Union had emerged from the war immensely strengthened,
while Western Europe had become a military and defensive vacuum. The
Prague coup had thrown further doubts on the practicality of containing
solely by diplomatic means Russia’s expansionist drive, already made mani-
fest by the incorporation of Poland and the Russian border states into her
sphere. It seemed essential to balance the might of the East with a cor-
responding war potential in the West; but a parity of military potential
could only be achieved through an alliance of the countries of Western
Europe with the United States. This was the problem which faced the
Socialists of Western Europe, who now took a heavy share of responsibility
within Western European governments and whose decisions had given rise to
the North Atlantic Treaty.
Yet the very idea that Social Democracy might approve an alliance with
the capitalist United States against the Soviet Union had been unthinkable
before the Prague coup d'itat. Despite their fundamental differences with the
system of Communist dictatorship, the Social Democratic parties regarded
the Soviet Union as the world’s leading revolutionary power—the first and
only state which had genuinely abolished capitalism and had established
conditions for the development of a Socialist society. In 1923 the inaugural
congress of the Labour and Socialist International had declared that it
‘considers it the duty of workers throughout the world to throw their full
weight into the struggle against attempts of the imperialist powers to inter-
vene in the internal affairs of Russia’. And whenever Russia was threatened
by an intervention by the imperialist powers, it had urged the working classes
to resist such designs, calling on them in resolution after resolution ‘to fight
the policies of aggression aimed against the Soviet Union’.2 This was an
American espionage machine in Europe . . . ’— Daily Worker (New York), 19 December
1948; this article also appeared in a number of Communist papers in Eastern Europe. For
the text, see also COMISCO, Circular No. 3/49.
1. See page 184.
2. For the attitude of the Socialist International to the question of intervention by
capitalist governments in Russia, see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943,
pp. 268-70 and 338-40.
 194 The Reopening o f the Split
attitude rooted not only in the natural solidarity which linked the European
with the Russian working class, but also in the conviction that the overthrow
of the revolutionary regime in Russia through a war by the imperialist-
capitalist powers would usher in an age of counter-revolution that could set
back the international Socialist movement for decades.
Yet in the meantime the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist
power; it had annexed the countries of Eastern Europe or subjected them to
an imperialist type of domination. It had become a super-power in its own
right—the most powerful state in the world after the United States. It no
longer appeared, as it had in the pre-war period, to be vulnerable to the old
capitalist-imperialist governments but, since the Prague coup, to have become
a positive threat to the independence of the peoples of Western Europe.
This, at all events, was the image of itself which Russia displayed to the
world after 1945. It was enough to explain the fundamental change in attitude
of European Social Democracy towards the Soviet Union, as shown by its
support for the North Atlantic Treaty.1

The renewed outbreak of open hostility between Social Democracy and the
Cominform once more threw up the whole question of the reconstruction of
the International. It had already in effect been reborn under the title ‘Inter-
national Socialist Conference’ in May 1946: first as a loose union, to be
consolidated a year later by the setting up of its permanent executive,
COMISCO; and secondly by the election of an official secretary in December
1949. As a forum for exchanging opinion between Socialist parties and as an
organization to co-ordinate common policies it was in any case already
essentially fulfilling the function of an International. But the International
Socialist Conference did not possess that moral authority which had, as it
were, been inborn in the historic International.
1. While the International Socialist Conference did support the treaty’s principle of
collective security, it refrained from placing the treaty itself on the agenda, since the
Swedish and Swiss Socialist parties supported their own countries’ neutrality and thus the
unanimous approval needed for a resolution in favour of the treaty would not have been
forthcoming. The Swedish Social Democratic party’s congress of May 1948 unanimously
approved the declaration of Sweden’s Socialist foreign secretary Oesten Unden: ‘We not
only reject any alliance with Western or Eastern power-blocs, but also any indirect alliance
with a Great Power, which could lead to involvement in a future conflict.’ A congress
resolution of the Swiss Social Democratic party in April 1948 declared: ‘The party categor-
ically defends Switzerland’s neutrality as the basis of its foreign policy and pursues a
policy of independence from any bloc, irrespective of whether it is of the Eastern or Western
powers.’ In Italy, not only did the Socialist Party under Nenni declare against the Atlantic
Treaty but so did a majority in the executive of Saragat’s party, as its general secretary,
Ugo Mondolfe, informed the International Socialist Conference in a circular of 25 June
1948. See COMISCO, Italy File, in the Archives of the Socialist International, in the
International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 195
Its revival was requested by a majority of parties, though as we have
seen,1 it met with initial resistance from the Socialist parties of Eastern
Europe, which had co-operated with the Communists in coalition govern-
ments. The dissolution of these parties after the founding of the Cominform
had, however, removed this particular obstacle.
But still doubts expressed by several parties—above all by the British
Labour party and the Scandinavian parties—concerning the possible in-
fringement of their autonomy by decisions of the International delayed its
reconstitution. Decisions taken by the Second International had not been
mandatory, though they had been morally binding upon its member-parties.
But its successor—the Labour and Socialist International founded in 1923—
though it left untouched the parties’ autonomy concerning their own internal
policies, had made decisions on foreign policy binding in Article 3 of its
statutes; it stated:
The L abour and Socialist International can be a living reality only in so far as
its decisions on all international questions are binding on all its members. Every
decision o f the international organization thus represents a voluntarily accepted
lim itation o f the autonom y o f the parties in the individual countries.2

Yet that rule necessarily remained ineffective whenever it involved

passionately contended matters as, for example, the question of joint action
with the Communist International during the years 1936-8; a majority de-
cision for a United Front would at that stage have broken the International
asunder.3 In practice the Labour and Socialist International—like the Inter-
national Socialist Conference—could only take decisions in agreement with
all its member parties. Article 3 was never in any case invoked during the
course of its history.
In the event, the impetus to reconstitute the International came from the
Belgian Labour party, which proposed it at a congress in December 1950.
Their resolution in no way sought to change the workings or structure of the
International Socialist Conference, as Victor Larock, a member of the
Belgian party’s executive committee, stressed in an open letter to Morgan
Phillips, then secretary of the British Labour party; what it asked for was
simply to restore the historical name to the international organization of the
working class, for ‘the profoundest and most strong inspirations were
associated with the name Socialist International which crystallized its
international solidarity’.4
The British Labour party executive, to which the Belgian party had
appealed, accepted the Belgian motion on condition that the autonomy
1. See page 137.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, p. 266.
3. ibid., pp. 391-3.
4. LePeupie (Brussels), 5 January 1951; Le Populaire (Paris), 5 January 1951; Socialist
International Information (S.I.I.), vol. i, No. 2.
196 The Reopening o f the Split
of individual parties would remain untouched. The Belgian and British
parties then together submitted to the International Socialist Conference in
London, in March 1951, the following resolution, which was accepted
unanimously:

For nearly five years the International Socialist Conference has organized co-
operation between the democratic Socialist parties of the world. Its members are a
major force in the affairs of their countries and the world.
The International Socialist Conference has proved the value to Socialists of
regular consultations on common problems. There is now general agreement that
the best method of co-operation between Socialist parties is pursued in the Inter-
national Socialist Conference.
Socialist co-operation must be based on consent. The resolutions passed by an
international Socialist body must reflect agreement freely reached. They cannot
constitute a binding command on parties which are individually responsible to their
own members and to a national electorate. An international Socialist body cannot
claim mandatory power.
The achievements of the International Socialist Conference justify it in assuming
the moral authority of the Socialist International. No change is required in the
principle of co-operation by consent whose virtue has now been proved to the
satisfaction of all parties.

The resolution moved that the formal foundation of the Socialist Inter-
national be placed on the agenda for the forthcoming full meeting of the
International Socialist Conference.14

The congress called for the reconstitution of the Socialist International

assembled on 30 June 1951 in the Congress Hall at Frankfurt-am-Main, The
choice of a German city to be witness to the rebirth of the International was
deliberately symbolic. A great majority of the delegates gathering in Frank-
furt were from countries which the German armies had invaded and occupied,
and from which many thousands of human beings had been deported to be
incarcerated or murdered. Only six years had gone by since the end of the
Nazi reign of terror. They had not been forgotten. But not forgotten also
were the innumerable German Socialists who had fallen in resisting Hitler’s
barbaric regime. The choice of a German city was meant to demonstrate the
solidarity of the Socialists of all countries with the German Social Demo-
crats. The feeling of solidarity manifested itself in the election of Kurt
Schumacher as president of the congress on a proposal by Guy Mollet,
general secretary of the French Socialist party, who had been one of the
French resistance leaders against the German forces of occupation. The
choice, he said, was a token of ‘deep gratitude to a man who had pledged his
1. COMISCO, Circular No. 71/51.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 197
life to defend democratic Socialism’. Erich Ollenhauer was elected deputy
president.1
The congress was attended by 106 delegates, representing thirty-four in-
dividual parties with 9,783,000 members altogether, and the aggregate votes
of 43,534,000 electors. The International actually encompassed all Socialist
parties from countries in Europe which were not subjected to Communist or
Fascist dictatorships, as well as the Socialist parties of the Argentine, India,
Japan, Canada, Malta, Uruguay, and the United States of America and
finally the International Union of Socialist Youth with 466,000 members.2
The first act of the congress was formally to re-establish the International
by passing the following resolutions: The International Socialist Conference,
assembled in Frankfurt-am-Main on 30 June 1951 for its eighth meeting:

in consideration that the International Socialist Conference has attained by its

activity the moral authority of the Socialist International,
grants hereby the proposals of the committee of the International Socialist
Conference (c o m is c o ), agreed at its London Conference, 2-4 March 1951,
(a) that the International Socialist Conference change its name to ‘The Socialist
International’;
(b) that the committee of the International Socialist Conference ( c o m is c o )
change its title to ‘General Council of the Socialist International’;
(c) that the sub-committee o f c o m is c o change its title to ‘Bureau of the Socialist
International’.
In accordance with this decision, the conference here assembled is to be entered
in the minutes as the First Congress of the Socialist International.®

Victor Larock, who seconded the resolution, emphasized in his speech the
principle of the parties’ freedom in their choice of tactics adapted to their
individual situation—a principle which had to remain inviolate. ‘What mat-
ters,’ he added, ‘is the will to act in common in Europe and throughout the
world, the determination to stand together and to leave behind all purely
national considerations.. . . ’ It aroused, he said, ‘a tremendous hope in the
hearts of millions of workers. Now it has been reborn at the moment when it
may well play a decisive role in the political and social history of the peoples.
It is up to all Socialist parties, to every one of their leaders and members, not
to disappoint the new hope generated by the Socialist International.’ And he
cpncluded with a warning derived from the experience of the Second Inter-
national. This, he said, had had ‘a deep influence over the masses and events
1. See Report of the First Congress of the Socialist International held at Frankfurt/
-Main, 30 June-3 July 1951, Circular No. 100/51, p. 8, subsequently referred to as Report
(Frankfurt). The minutes of the congresses of the Socialist International never appeared in
print; they were circulated to member parties and delegates. A collection of the minutes
may be found in the archives of the Socialist International in the International Institute for
Social History, Amsterdam.
2. For a list of the parties and their strength, see report of the secretariat, Circular
No. 71/51.
3. See Report (Frankfurt), p. 104.
198 The Reopening o f the Split
so long as its responsible leaders put the Socialist cause above all considera-
tions of mere expediency or purely national interest’.1
The act of reconstituting the Socialist International by the formal adoption
of the resolution was, as the minutes recorded, received by the Congress with
enthusiasm. While the chairman announced the decision, a huge red flag,
carried by four ‘Red Falcons’ (members of the youth movement) was brought
into the congress hall while the delegates rose to their feet to sing the
Internationale}

Two documents for the re-establishment were then laid before the congress:
a draft of the statutes and a declaration of principles.
In the statutes the Socialist International was described as an ‘association
of parties which seek to establish democratic Socialism as formulated in the
declaration of the Aims and Tasks of Democratic Socialism’. Its purpose was
‘to strengthen mutual relations between the affiliated parties, and to co-
ordinate their political attitudes and actions by consent’.
Four agencies were defined to carry out its functions:

(a) The Congress of the Socialist International.

(b) The Council of the Socialist International.
(c) The Bureau of the Socialist International.
(d) The Secretariat of the Socialist International.

The congress is the supreme body of the Socialist International. It pro-

claims its principles, determines its statutes and decides by a two-thirds
majority of all members the admission and status of new members and of
organizations in relation to the Socialist International. The congress, to be
convened by the council, assembles every second year. The statutes differen-
tiate between full members and consultative members and observers (i.e.
parties in exile or international organizations such as the International
General Council of Socialist Women or the International Union of Socialist
Youth); consultative members and observers have the right to speak but not
to vote. Each party entitled to vote has only one vote at its disposal irrespec-
tive of strength, as was the rule in the First and Second Internationals. The
statutes of the Labour and Socialist International had, on the other hand,
allotted votes to member parties according to the size of their membership.
The General Council assembles at least once a year. Its task is to co-
ordinate the attitude of the member parties towards current political issues,
to elect the chairman of the International, the vice-chairmen and the sec-
retary, to approve the budget and stipulate membership fees. Since every
party is represented on the General Council, it forms in effect a miniature
congress.
The executive function within the International is the preserve of the
1. ibid., pp. 14-15. 2. ibid., p. 18.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 199
Bureau, whose members are to be the chief executive figures in the Inter-
national; its secretary, as head of the secretariat, is responsible to the bureau.1
The general council elected Morgan Phillips, former chairman of the
Bureau of the International Socialist Conference, as president, Erich Ollen-
hauer and Louis Levy as vice-presidents and Julius Braunthal as secretary;
the latter had previously been elected secretary by the International Socialist
Congress in Paris in December 1949.

The Frankfurt Declaration, the ‘Declaration of Aims and Tasks of Demo-

cratic Socialism’ which the congress now considered, stands with the Com-
munist Manifesto of 1848 and the Inaugural Address of the First International
of 1864 as a fundamental document in the history of the International. In a
number of resolutions and manifestos, the Second International and the
Labour and Socialist International had formulated their basic attitudes to
political and economic questions, but neither of the two earlier Internationals
had proclaimed the fundamental ideas on which they were based and the
objectives which they were trying to achieve.
The Communist Manifesto and the Inaugural Address originated from a
single man—Karl Marx. The Frankfurt Declaration is, by contrast, a collec-
tive work of all member parties. There is no other document in the history of
the International which was the fruit of so much intensive collective work by
individual parties. Never before had any resolution or manifesto been sub-
mitted to the parties for previous discussion; they had always received the
texts of proposed resolutions on arrival at the congress assembly and had left
their formulation to discussion by the resolution committee.2
The Frankfurt Declaration was, on the other hand, discussed between the
1. For the structure of the International, see Yearbook o f the International Socialist
Labour Movement, vol. r. 1956-1957, pp. 15-17; for the German text of the statutes, see
Report (Frankfurt), pp. 111-13.
2. This had also been the procedure of the Communist International. Lenin’s major
thesis on Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship, for example, which formulated
the principles and objectives of the Communist International, and was submitted to the
first Comintern Congress in March 1919, as well as the Manifesto o f the Communist Inter-
national, drafted by Trotsky, and read out by him on the last day of the inaugural congress
(6 March 1919), were approved without any previous discussion, and even without debate.
The only voice to oppose this procedure was that of Hugo Eberlein, delegate of the German
Communist party, who had been instructed by his executive to protest against the founding
of the Communist International without discussion between the parties concerned. He
‘insisted’, as an official announcement stated, ‘that the guide-lines accepted here should
first be submitted to the workers in the various countries; not until they have accepted
these established guide-lines can the official founding of the Third International take
place.. . . ’—quoted in Hermann Weber, Die Kommunistische Internationale. Eine Doku-
mentation (Hanover, 1966), p. 29; see also Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-
1943, pp. 163-4.
200 The Reopening o f the Split
member parties in the course of nearly a year and a half. Its history began
with a resolution moved by the French Socialist party in mid-December 1949
at the Paris conference of the International Socialist Conference. This called
for the appointment of a commission to work out a declaration of the basic
ideological principles common to all the parties. A few weeks later, in early
January, a draft by the secretary of the principles of democratic Socialism
was circulated to individual parties, inviting them to submit memoranda
stating their views. At the same time the subject of the projected declaration
was placed on the agenda for the International Socialist Conference to be
held in mid-June 1950 in Copenhagen, and the submitted memoranda
circulated before the debate. Not until after the debate, introduced by Guy
Mollet, was a commission of twelve parties elected to incorporate the com-
ments and suggestions of the member parties into the draft. The corrected
draft was then again submitted to the parties and, acting on their criticisms,
further corrections were made. In all, three further drafts went through the
same ‘long-drawn-out and painstaking process of inserting additional ma-
terial and alterations, and repeatedly restyling the text’, as the French
Socialist, Salomon Grumbach, chairman of the editorial commission, re-
ported to the congress. The draft laid before the Frankfurt Congress was the
fourth, and was the one which the parties finally voted for.1
The Frankfurt Declaration represents a synthesis of the basic principles
common to all Socialist parties, irrespective of whether their ideology rests on
Marxism or on any other of the theoretical systems prompted by humani-
tarian or religious thought.
It condemns capitalism, which, despite its enormously developed powers
of production, which ‘could be made to provide a decent life for everyone’,
is by its nature incapable of satisfying the elementary needs of the world’s
population.

It has proved unable (the declaration continued) to function without devastating

crises and mass unemployment. It produced social insecurity and glaring contrasts
between rich and poor. It resorted to imperialist expansion and colonial exploita-
tion, thus making conflicts between nations and races more bitter. In some countries,
powerful capitalist groups helped the barbarism of the past to raise its head again
in the form of Fascism and Nazism.

Socialism, it continued, had originated in Europe as a movement of pro-

test against the inbred evils of the capitalist system of society; as a mass
movement by those workers ‘who suffered most from capitalism’. Socialism
appeals to all men ‘who believe that the exploitation of man by man must be
abolished’.
1. Report (Frankfurt), p. 21. The congress revised the suggested title from Declaration
o f the Principles o f Democratic Socialism to The Aims and Tasks o f Democratic Socialism.
Declaration o f The Socialist International, resolved in Frankfurt-am-Main on 3 July 1951.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 201
Socialism aims to liberate the peoples from dependence on a minority which
owns or controls the means of production. It aims to put economic power in the
hands of the people as a whole and to create a community in which free men work
together as equals.
The declaration was headed by a statement on the principle of freedom:
‘Without freedom there can be no Socialism. Socialism can be achieved only
through democracy. Democracy can be fully realized only through Socialism.’
With its statement on the principle of freedom and democracy the
Socialist International said its final word on the question which had so
deeply disturbed the Socialist movement from the beginning of the Bol-
shevik Revolution in Russia to the outbreak of the Second World War: the
question whether a Socialist reorganization of society was possible only on a
foundation of democracy, or whether it necessitated the establishment of a
system of dictatorship; whether the capitalist society could be changed by a
process of evolution into a Socialist society, or whether it required revolution-
ary methods.
The example of Soviet Russia had demonstrated the consequences of the
theory of dictatorship. While it had shown that a dictatorship of the pro-
letariat was indeed an effective instrument for destroying the bourgeois-
military organization of the capitalist state, it had also shown how the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ inevitably developed into a dictatorship by
the party which holds power, and that the dictatorship of the monopoly
party ultimately deteriorated into a reign of despotic terrorism.
The example of Bolshevism further showed that while a Communist
dictatorship was indeed capable of destroying the capitalist structure of
bourgeois society, it destroyed at the same time the creative potential for
development in a Socialist community, because it suppressed the freedom of
the people to participate in the process of building the new society. The
Communist dictatorship in fact replaces private capitalism with state capital-
ism, and the capitalist wages system—which at least leaves the workers
their personal freedom—with a system of state servitude which suppresses all
the individual’s rights.
The lesson of Russian Communism was therefore that the abolition of
private capitalism by a Communist dictatorship could be done only at the
expense of fundamental human rights. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’,
which the Bolshevik Revolution had established, had degenerated inevitably
into despotic tyranny. Rather than a society of justice, freedom and equality,
which had been the objective and justification for the revolution, it had pro-
duced a totalitarian system of state power, based on a hierarchical bureau-
cracy imposing universal economic, political and spiritual subjugation. And
then, following the Second World War, international Communism had, as
the declaration said, become ‘the instrument of a new imperialism’—the
‘imperialism of the Soviet Union’.
202 The Reopening o f the Split
Above all it was those parties which, in memoranda and during the
debate, acknowledged their own basis in the Marxist tradition, which de-
manded that the declaration should condemn Communism and its claim to
derive its moral justification from Marxism.
In summing up its indictment, the declaration stated that Communism,
which had split the international labour movement and set back the realiza-
tion of Socialism for decades in many countries, ‘falsely claims a share in the
Socialist tradition. In fact it has distorted that tradition beyond recognition.
It has built up a rigid theology which is incompatible with the critical spirit
of Marxism.’
In the light of the experience of the Communist dictatorship, the principle
of political democracy and the value of freedom assumed a new significance
in the struggle of the Social Democratic parties for a Socialist society; they
recognized political democracy and civic rights as essential prerequisites for
Socialism. They had in fact as a matter of course fought from the very be-
ginning for the individual’s right to freedom and democracy as essential
elements of Socialism. But in the struggle against capitalism their theory and
propaganda emphasized its economic and social aspects under the assump-
tion that, by the overthrow of capitalist class rule, freedom and democracy
would automatically be attained. At all events, prior to the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion in Russia, Socialist society had been visualized by Socialists of every
shade, including the Bolsheviks, as a fully developed democratic society
founded on the principles of individual freedom.
In Communist countries capitalist class rule had indeed been destroyed,
but freedom and democracy had gone along with it. It was in protest against
this fundamental aspect of the so-called ‘peoples’ democracies’ that the
Vienna International Socialist Conference of 1948 had passed its resolution
affirming the principles of political democracy.1
The Frankfurt Declaration supplemented these with a list of basic political
rights—an outline followed by a programme for realizing social and economic
democracy, covering the various forms of common ownership of the means
of production and the democratic control of economic power.

One other reaction to totalitarian Communism was a revival within the

Socialist parties of their humanitarian tradition. The roots of Marxism, like
any other Socialist alignment, lay in the European tradition of the Judeo-
Christian and liberal philosophical ethics. English Socialism had sprung from
a long tradition of religious nonconformity and political radicalism, while in
the Socialism of France, Belgium and Italy, which had developed under the
impressive influence of Jean Jaures, fimile Vandervelde and Filippo Turati,
the philosophical liberal tradition was predominant.
1. See pp. 188-9.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 203

In its affirmation of humanitarian Socialism the newly constituted

Socialist International stated:
Socialism means far more than a new economic and social system. Economic
and social progress have moral value to the extent that they serve to liberate and
develop the human personality.
Socialists oppose capitalism not only because it is economically wasteful and
because it keeps the masses from their material rights, but above all because it
revolts their sense of justice. They oppose totalitarianism in every form because it
outrages human dignity.

In contradiction to Marx’s theory of the realization of Socialism as an

imminent ‘economic necessity’, the declaration stated in Article 13 of the
preamble: ‘The achievement of Socialism is not inevitable. It demands a
personal contribution from all its followers.’
As Willi Eichler, the S.P.D. delegate, commented during the debate, this
represented ‘a break with the beliefs of the past’.1 The theory that Socialism
would come about as a necessary result of the processes of history had been
hotly disputed since the great debate on revisionism at the turn of the century,
but never before had this theory been questioned by a congress of the Inter-
national. It had been a source of inspiration for the Socialist movement,
holding out the hope of ultimate triumph. Yet during the last few decades
events had shown how barbarism could in all its horror become an alternative
to capitalism.12 The declaration wanted to impress upon Socialists the realiza-
tion that only by their concerted efforts could the danger of barbarism be
averted and Socialism achieved.
Socialism was international from its inception, the declaration stated, ‘for
it aims at liberating all men from every form of economic, spiritual and
political bondage’. It called for transcending the system of absolute national
sovereignty and urged the establishment of democracy on a world scale under
an international order of law, guaranteeing freedom for nations and respect
for human rights. It rejected any form of imperialism, and demanded a new
distribution of the world’s wealth in favour of the economically under-
developed countries. Above all, it recognized the maintenance of peace as the
supreme task of our time.
The declaration closed with the following appeal:
Socialists work for a world of peace and freedom, a world in which the ex-
ploitation and enslavement of men by men and peoples by peoples is unknown, for
a world in which the development of the individual personality is the basis for the
fruitful development of mankind. They appeal to the solidarity of all working men
in the struggle for this great aim.3
1. Report (Frankfurt), p. 31.
2. Marx had touched upon this point in the Communist M anifesto when he had
commented on the class struggle of the past, ‘a fight that each time ended either in a revolu-
tionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes’.
3. For the full text of the declaration see Appendix Two, p. 531.
 204 The Reopening o f the Split
The declaration made no attempt to develop a theory of Socialism. As
Article 11 of the preamble says:
Socialism is an international movement which does n o t dem and a rigid uni-
form ity of approach. W hether Socialists build their faith on M arxist o r other
m ethods o f analysing society, whether they are inspired by religious o r hum anitarian
principles, they all strive for the same goal—a system o f social justice, better living,
freedom and world peace.

Even so, the question of the attitudes of individual parties to the Marxist
tradition had been thrown up in memoranda and debate—a question which
had never before been a theme for discussion in any congress of the Inter-
national.
The debate on Marxism took place at the Copenhagen conference on 1-3
June 1950, and was introduced by Guy Mollet as chairman of the pro-
gramme commission to which the memoranda had been submitted.1
The Dutch Labour party’s memorandum asserted that, since two world
wars had separated European Socialism from Marx, even ‘if European
Socialism does not go to the length of excluding those who are convinced that
the Marxian doctrine is still important, it must in any case make room for
those who feel nearer to Jaures and Thomas Masaryk [than to Marx]’.2
The sternest rejection of Marxism, however, came from Morgan Phillips,
secretary of the British Labour party. The British party had, in fact, in its
official memorandum already stressed that the intellectual make-up of
British Socialism had been shaped not under the influence of Marxism, but
rather by the radical ideas of John Stuart Mill, the teachings of the Fabians,
Sydney Webb and Bernard Shaw, and the social reformers within the Anglican
Church ;3 there existed a contrast between the ideology of the British Labour
movement and that of Marxism.
‘British Socialism,’ Phillips declared, ‘owes little to Karl Marx, either in
theory or in practice, or in its methods of organizing the working class.’
‘Marx’s conception of the political organization required for the waging of
the class war’, he continued, ‘is not accepted by the British Labour move-
ment.’ British Socialism, he said, pointed ‘the way to the achievement of the
rarest phenomenon in history—a revolutionary change in political control
and class relations without physical conflict’.
Phillips emphasized ‘the profound influence of religious thought’ upon
the Labour movement and the example of the Methodist Church upon its
structure. ‘The essential point,’ he said, ‘is that Marxism as a philosophy of
materialism, as an economic theory and as a form of political organization
1. Report of the International Socialist Conference at Copenhagen, Circular No.
155/50, subsequently referred to as Report (Copenhagen).
2. ibid., p. 54.
3. For a history of the ideas behind British Socialism, see Hugh Gaitskell, 'D ie ideolo-
gische Entwicklung des demokratischen Sozialismus in Grossbritannien\ in Julius Braunthal
(ed.) Sozialistische Weltstimmen (Berlin and Hanover, 1958), pp. 108-38.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 205
with revolutionary intention and aim, is historically an aberrant in the
development of British Socialism.’1
Morgan Phillips’s blunt rejection of Marxism met with no response from
the congress. When all was said and done, for all the parties of the European
continent Marxism had been the source of inspiration most deeply in-
fluencing their ideology, and it remained an element of a tradition to which
they felt indebted. Even the British Labour party had officially acknowledged
this by deciding to celebrate the centenary in 1947 of the publication of the
Communist Manifesto with a new edition and commissioning Harold Laski to
write a historical appreciation as a foreword. Laski’s foreword ran2 some-
what in contradiction to Morgan Phillips’s statement:
‘In presenting this centenary volume of the Communist Manifesto . . . the
Labour party acknowledges its indebtedness to Marx and Engels as two of the
men who have been the inspiration of the whole working-class movement.’
The foreword referred to the peculiar English sources which had formed the
ideology of English Socialism but, it added, ‘the British Socialists have
never isolated themselves from their fellows on the continent of Europe. Our
own ideas have been different from those of continental Socialism which
stemmed more directly from Marx; but we too have been influenced in a
hundred different ways by European thinkers and fighters and, above all, by
the authors of the Manifesto.’3
In fact it was only Dutch Social Democracy which had broken with its
past. Under the leadership of Koos Vorrink, it had founded a new party at a
congress in Amsterdam in February 1949—the Partij van de Arbeid (Labour
party), representing a merger between the old Social Democrats and a number
of religious Socialist parties and groups: the Calvinist Christian Democratic
Union, the Progressive Democratic movement, the Dutch People’s movement
and the Christophorus movement, a Catholic group.
But no single party, irrespective of its views on Marxism, had categorically
dissociated itself from Marxism at the congress. At the least they were, like
the Swedish party, ‘not interested in discussions on theory’, as Tage Erlander
openly confessed. But he admitted that from its inauguration it had been
strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, though it had never built up a body of
doctrines.4
So far as the parties were able to define their attitudes towards Marxism,
they confessed themselves to be its standard-bearers. In France, Guy Mollet
said, ‘the entire party—including Guesde, Jaures and more recently Leon
. 1. Report (Copenhagen), pp. 57-60.
2. The official nature of this declaration is indicated by its title: ‘Foreword by the
Labour Party’.
3. See Communist Manifesto. Socialist Landmark, A New Appreciation written for the
Labour Party by Harold J. Laski together with the original text and prefaces (London,
1948).
4. Report (Copenhagen), pp. 62-4.
206 The Reopening o f the Split
Blum and Alexandre Bracke—had accepted without reserve the analysis of
capitalist society made by Marx.
No French Socialist was bound, he continued, to avow himself to dialec-
tical materialism as a philosophical method, though many do it freely, but
‘all French Socialists consider historical materialism to be a marvellous
application of that method to the history of human society’.1
For the Italian Socialist party, Angelica Balabanoif stated, Marxism was
not simply a method for recognizing the social forces within society, but also
a source of faith and strength for the working class. ‘If the working class,’
she said, ‘does not understand its proper role in society, if it does not acquire
a historical sense of its own mission, if it does not understand that it is an
instrument of the historical change from capitalism to Socialism—how on
earth can we develop the strength and confidence of the working classes?’2
The Austrian Socialist party, Oscar Poliak declared, ‘considers itself to be
the very modest heirs to the school of Austro-Marxism’.3

In concluding this survey of the congress reconstituting the Socialist Inter-

national, the attitude of the Cominform towards this event has yet to be
recorded. This was formulated in its official organ, For a Lasting Peace and
for a People’s Democracy, in an article headed: ‘International Traitors and
Accomplices of Warmongers’. The article which followed stated:

Last week, Frankfurt-am-Main (Western Germany) witnessed a gathering of

hardened Wall Street agents—the right-wing Socialist leaders who, with much noise,
announced the re-creation of a ‘Socialist International’.
Among the motley crew represented in this newly formed agency of traitors and
accomplices of the warmongers, intimately linked with the general staffs, intelligence
services and ruling cliques of the capitalist countries, were the Labour party sec-
retary, Morgan Phillips, European loudspeaker for the American-British armaments
drive, Jules Moch, chief American policeman in France, Schumacher, leading
American agent provocateur in Western Germany, Saragat, inveterate betrayer of
the Italian working class, and Spaak, who has waxed rich by selling to the trans-
atlantic atom-bomb makers uranium mined by slave labour in the Belgian Congo.
Others present included ‘representatives’ from the countries of Eastern Europe,
right-wing Socialists, that is, exposed and played-out American and British in-
telligence agents who fled from the countries of People’s Democracy to escape the
wrath of the people.

The article further stated that ‘the main premise of the Frankfurt rally of
traitors was: not imperialism, but Communism is the main enemy.. . .
Speaking from the Frankfurt rostrum, the orators complained that rearma-
ment was proceeding too slowly.’ They had, the article claimed, demanded the
1. ibid., p. 55. 2. ibid., p. 68. 3. ibid., p. 27.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 207

acceleration of rearmament, and ‘the Fascist Tito came in for special praise’
for having ‘mobilized more divisions than the whole of Western Europe put
together’. Then the question was raised: ‘Why did the American-British
warmongers decide to stage the disgusting farce of an international ‘Socialist
Congress’ precisely at this moment?’
Because, the article offered its explanation, ‘the growth and consolidation
of the world camp of peace, democracy and Socialism. . . seriously alarm the
imperialists and force them to bring their main reserves into action—the
right-wing Social Democrats—in a desperate endeavour to split the world
peace movement and the unity in the ranks of the working people—a unity
which is growing stronger every day’.
But, the article concluded, ‘these calculations are doomed to failure!. . .
The working people of the world spurn with contempt this police inter-
national, created for the purpose of justifying and supporting the monstrous
plans for world domination by the U.S. imperialists___ n

During the debate at the Frankfurt congress on the report of the programme
commission, the S.P.D. delegate Willi Eichler had complained that in reject-
ing totalitarianism in the form of Fascism and Communism the declaration
had neglected its much older form—the hierarchical totalitarianism of the
Roman Catholic Church; a totalitarianism which, he said, was based on a
theory of the state which was definitely anti-democratic, which as a principle
rejected the idea of the people’s sovereignty and which was therefore in
essence an enemy of democracy and freedom as well as of Socialism itself as
the bearer of the idea of freedom. He reminded the congress of the treaty
which the Vatican had made with Hitler, as it had made one earlier with
Mussolini, and of how the Church had supported Franco in the Spanish
Civil War. To oppose this enemy of democracy, a common attitude among
Socialists was needed, based on a dialectical argument with theocratic
theory.12
The matter which Eichler had raised prompted a declaration of faith by a
Christian Socialist, sanctioning the principles of Socialism. The Dutch
delegate, Geert Ruygers, who as a member of the programme commission
had participated in drafting the declaration, stated that the declaration con-
tained no single word which he could not support as a practising Christian.
This fact, he said, was ‘of great significance in view of the serious and tragic
conflict between Socialism and the Christian churches existing in many

1. For a Lasting Peace andfo r a People’s Democracy, No. 28. For a transcription of the
full text, see Socialist International Information, 1 September 1951.
2. Report (Frankfurt), p. 30.
208 The Reopening o f the Split
countries of Continental Europe. It was a conflict delaying the development
of Socialism, and one which had to be overcome. The Frankfurt Declaration
represented the ‘first great step’ towards this objective and hence was ‘a
matter of great historical importance for our Continent’.1 This was the first
occasion at a congress of the International that a Christian Socialist had
taken the floor to defend Socialism on behalf of Christianity.12
Since the Second World War the question of the relation between Social
Democracy and the churches had become a matter for serious examination
for many Socialist parties. In France, Belgium, Austria and Holland, Social
Democratic parties were partners in coalition governments with Catholic
parties which had won for themselves considerable support from the workers
and, above all, from the rural proletariat. These could only be won for
Socialism if they could be persuaded that Socialism did not contradict the
Christian faith. In many countries Socialists had sought a dialogue with
Catholic circles to bridge Socialist and Christian conviction.
In the Netherlands such attempts had been especially lively, for in the
deeply religious country the whole structure of political and social life was
built upon religious foundations. There are both Protestant and Catholic
political parties, as well as Protestant and Catholic trade unions, and a
barrier divided religious workers from Social Democracy. The transformation
of Dutch Social Democracy into the Partij van de Arbeid had represented an
experiment to try to break through this barrier. The party changed not only
its name, but also its structure; its party organization allowed for special
representation for Protestantism, Catholicism and Humanism, and its party
programme recognized the ‘profound relationship between the deeply re-
ligious convictions of the people and their political beliefs’, declaring them
valid, if their members express their basic convictions clearly in their work for
their party. And to free the party from the stigma with which it had been
marked by Church propaganda as representing anti-religious and anti-Church
ideas, the Church should, the programme stated, ‘be free to fulfil its calling
and to preach Evangelism at the same time as giving its service to the world.
The churches are also to have complete freedom to state their attitude to
political and social life for the spiritual and ethical welfare of the people.’

Acting on a proposal of the Dutch party, the Bureau of the International

called a special conference to discuss the relationship between Democratic

1. Report (Frankfurt), pp. 36-7.

2. A number of delegates with religious affiliations had been present at earlier con-
gresses of the International. Arthur Henderson, for example, the president of the Labour
and Socialist International, was also a Methodist lay preacher, and F. Domela Nieu-
wenhuis, founder of the Anarcho-Socialist movement in Holland, had been a priest of the
Lutheran Church in The Hague. But neither Nieuwenhuis nor Henderson nor any other
religious Socialist had made a statement linking their political ideas with their religious
convictions to any congress.
1 First Congress o f the Socialist International in F rankfurt, Ju ly 1951
2 Congress o f the Socialist International in M ilan, O ctober 1952.
C lem ent A ttle e speaking; n e x t to him A ngelica Balabanoff.
In profile in the foreground ( f r o m le f t t o r i g h t ) : K oos Vorrink,
Pan l-H enri S p a a k, G uy M o Ilet, Giuseppe R om ita
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 209
Socialism and its ethical and religious sources. It met from 9 to 11 March
1953 in Bentveld in Holland, and was the first occasion since the founding of
the International that the relationship between Socialism and Christianity,
and between Social Democracy and the Church, had formed a theme for an
international congress.
The Declaration on Socialism and Religion adopted by the Bentveld
Conference should not be seen as a declaration of principles of the Inter-
national, which could only be issued by a congress. Yet it is important
because it presents an aspect of the Socialist ideology which had actually
been an effective element from the beginning, but which had never been
officially defined. It augments the usual definition of Socialism as a social and
economic movement with the characteristics of a great moral and cultural
movement.
Socialism, [the declaration stated], is a m oral protest against the debasement o f
m an in m odem society. It proclaims hum an dignity and the right o f every m an an d
w om an to equality o f opportunity, to spiritual, intellectual, political and economic
freedom and to the exercise o f responsibility in decisions affecting w ork and
life. . . .
Socialist policy, inspired by these principles, is therefore the practical w orking
o u t o f an ethic which m ay be derived either from religious o r non-religious sources.
The ethical principles on which Socialist ideals and policies are based are associated
with the finest traditions o f creative culture. Socialism which uplifts those who have
been deprived o f their hum an rights, is becoming a world-wide force for the en-
riching o f life.

The declaration stressed, however, that ‘Socialism is in itself neither

religious nor anti-religious; it is a political movement for the transformation
of society,’ and that ‘there should be no denominational parties’.1

The Frankfurt declaration had outlined the ideas prevalent among the parties
of the Socialist International on the principles and tasks of Socialism; the
declaration of Bentveld emphasized the ethical and religious elements which
are manifested in those principles. These are ideas, ideals and principles
which are rooted in the cultural and religious tradition of Western civiliz-
ation. The task which the parties had set themselves was to realize those
ideas by changing the capitalist order of society in the industrialized
countries.
1. For the text of the declaration, see Appendix Three, p. 537; for the discussions
of the Bentveld Conference, see Report of the Special International Socialist Conference
on Socialism and Religion, Circular No. 80/53; for the memoranda submitted by the
parties to the conference, see Socialist International Information, vol. in, Nos. 12, 13,14
and 15.
 210 The Reopening o f the Split
But since the end of the Second World War the Socialist movement had
turned into a world-wide movement which had also gripped the peoples
and races of Asian civilization in pre-capitalist countries. The Frankfurt
declaration additionally called for a statement on the principles and
duties of Socialism in pre-capitalist countries, especially those of Asia and
Africa. This was discussed at the second congress of the newly constituted
International.
The Frankfurt declaration had laid down the attitude of the Socialist
International towards imperialism particularly clearly. ‘Democratic Social-
ism,’ it stated, ‘rejects every form of imperialism. It fights the oppression or
exploitation of any people.’
But the declaration did not only assure those countries still subjected to
imperialism and colonialism of the moral and political solidarity of the
International; it also called for the active solidarity of all Socialists with the
people liberated from imperialism and colonialism in their struggle against
poverty and want. ‘A negative anti-imperialism is not enough,’ the declara-
tion states:

Vast areas of the world suffer from extreme poverty, illiteracy and disease.
Poverty in one part of the world is a threat to prosperity in other parts. Poverty is
an obstacle to the development of democracy. Democracy, prosperity and peace
require a redistribution of the world’s wealth and an increase in the productivity of
the underdeveloped areas.

The second congress of the International, which met in Milan from 17 to

21 October 1952, undertook to define a programme of Socialist policy for the
underdeveloped countries. A conference of experts, called by the Bureau to
study the economic and social problems involved, assembled in Vienna in
November 1951. It submitted to the general council the results of its exam-
ination in a memorandum, and a programme was thereupon instituted to be
drawn up on the basis of the memorandum. Suggestions from the member
parties and from the Socialist parties of Asia were then incorporated into
three consecutive drafts. The final wording of the draft submitted to the
congress was, with certain amendments moved during the debate, accepted
unanimously.1

1. The Vienna conference of experts, presided over by Karl Waldbrunner, minister for
nationalized industries in Austria, met with the participation of ten parties: Austria,
Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
and the International Union of Socialist Youth. For the wording of the memorandum,
see Socialist International Information, vol. n, No. 8; for the discussions of the commission
under the chairmanship of Hein Vos, and the drafts repeatedly amended according to
proposals from the Socialist parties of Ceylon, Japan, India and Canada and a number of
European member parties, see the minutes submitted by the congress secretary, Circular
No. 65/52, pp. 19-21; for the congress debate on the declaration, see Report of the Second
Congress of the Socialist International, Milan, 17-21 October 1952, Circular No. 1/53,
pp. 95-117.
 The Reconstitution o f the Socialist International 211
In its preamble, the declaration of ‘Socialist Policy for the Under-
developed Territories’ formulated the basic principles determining the
attitude of the Socialist International to imperialism and colonialism:
The Socialist International aims a t the liberation o f all m en from economic,
spiritual and political bondage and the creation o f a w orld society based on the
rule o f law and voluntary co-operation between free peoples.

In accordance with these basic principles, it continued:

It seeks to establish in every country equal citizenship and dem ocratic institu-
tions through which to m aintain and expand the political freedom and economic
wellbeing of all the people. It rejects every form of racial discrimination. It seeks to
create between countries relationships which express the fundam ental unity o f
m a n k in d .. . .
The Socialist International therefore rejects w ithout reservation capitalist im-
perialism which binds peoples in the chains o f political dom ination and economic
exploitation and which creates the disastrous m yth o f racial superiority. . . . The
oppression and exploitation o f any people, whatever ideological justification may be
sought for it, is diametrically opposed to the principles o f dem ocratic Socialism.

The declaration further stated the International’s solidarity with the

freedom movements in those countries not yet liberated from colonial rule,
and pledged all Socialists ‘to work for the earliest possible creation of condi-
tions under which full self-government may be achieved’.
The elimination of poverty and misery in the underdeveloped countries,
the declaration said, was ‘a moral responsibility for the peoples of those
countries in a more advanced stage of development’. Far-reaching economic
and social changes would be necessary to create living conditions worthy of
humanity for those millions who were oppressed by misery. And since the
accumulation of capital in the underdeveloped countries was totally in-
adequate to bring about speedy developments in their economies, financial
assistance from the advanced countries was an essential condition.
In a ‘World Plan for Mutual Aid’, the declaration laid down in detail the
methods and international organizations which would be necessary to bring
about improvements in the material and cultural conditions of life for the
masses of the underdeveloped countries and ‘to close the gap between living
standards in the different parts of the world’. It would, the declaration
stated, make ‘an all-out attack on misery everywhere and would express in
action the international solidarity of working people the world over’.1
At its third congress, meeting in Stockholm in July 1953, the Socialist
International defined its attitude towards colonialism anew, stating in its
resolution:

The Congress o f the Socialist International expresses once again th at the

abolition o f the colonial system in all its form s is a m ain objective for dem ocratic
1. For the text of the declaration, see Appendix Four, p. 538.
212 The Reopening o f the Split
Socialism .. . . It welcomes the awakening o f national consciousness am ong the
peoples o f the colonial countries and declares the Socialist International support for
them in attaining independence and dem ocratic self-government.1

Thus, during the first three years following its reconstitution, the Inter-
national had formulated the main ideological principles behind its policy,
which now gained a new dimension with the spread of Socialist ideas in Asia
and Africa.
1. Report of the Third Congress of the Socialist International, Stockholm, 15-18
July 1953, Circular No. 115/53.
 PART THREE

Socialism and Communism in Asia

9 • Oriental Key Positions in the

World Revolution

One of the most amazing phenomena in contemporary history has been the
rapid spread of Socialist ideas throughout Asia and Africa following the end
of the Second World War. Socialist parties had, it is true, been formed in
Japan and Indonesia before 1914, and in India and China between the world
wars. Only in China, however, then enmeshed in the prevailing chaos of civil
war, was the Communist party able to win a mass following.1 Elsewhere in
Asia, Socialist and Communist parties represented only small groups of
intellectuals.
Thus the Second International had, in reality, been no more than an
International for the white races of the industrial countries, and had made no
attempt to encourage life in Socialist movements in pre-industrial areas.
According to accepted dogma, genuine Socialist parties could never put
down roots in a social structure of a feudal, pre-capitalistic kind, for Socialism
—as the antithesis of capitalism—could only make a mass appeal in capitalist
countries as a concept of the struggle for liberation by a modern industrial
proletariat. And of all the countries of Asia, at that stage only Japan and
India stood at the beginning of industrial development and the creation of a
new proletarian class. The national freedom movements existing under
colonial rule in Asia were not social but political movements; they aimed at
the overthrow of their European masters, but not at the change of the
structure of society.*12

1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 321-8.

2. The view which motivated the attitude of both the Second International and the
Socialist Labour International had been formulated by Otto Bauer in an article of 1911:
‘The revolutionary movements of the peoples of the Orient,* he wrote, ‘are, in origin and
aim, completely different from that of the European proletariat. Even if, at times, Turkish,
Egyptian, Persian, Indian or Chinese movements in these countries are adopting certain
slogans of the European Social Democrats, they remain unrelated to the class movement of
the proletariat. None the less, it is our duty to give these movements serious attention.
The world-political change for which they are preparing in the world of Islam, in the
Indian and the Mongol world, will influence the conditions under which the European
proletariat must lead the struggle’—Otto Bauer, ‘Orientalische Revolutionen,' in Der Kampf,
 214 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The attitude of the Second International towards colonialism and im-
perialism was clear; it had rejected colonialism and imperialism without
reservation and so supported the cause of the Asian peoples against foreign
rule in a moral and political sense,1 even though it had not identified itself
with the national freedom movements concerned. It had never attempted to
associate those movements with the Socialist movement.

Yet from its very inception Lenin set the Communist International the task
of making the cause of the national freedom movements in the colonies its
own. In his Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, submitted to the
Second Congress of the Communist International in July 1920, he declared
that
our policy must be to bring into being an alliance of all national and colonial
liberation movements with Soviet Russia___ All Communist parties are to support
by action the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries___ Above all,
efforts must be made to give the peasant movement as revolutionary a character as
possible, organizing the peasants and all the exploited wherever possible in soviets
and thus to establish as close a tie as possible between the West European Com-
munist proletariat and the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, in the
colonies and in backward countries.

Soviet Russia was embattled and threatened by the leading imperialist

powers. ‘All events in world policy,’ Lenin stated in his theses, ‘are necessarily
concentrated on one central point, the struggle of the world bourgeoisie
against the Russian Soviet Republic, which is rallying round itself both the
Soviet movements among the advanced workers in all countries, and all the
national liberation movements in the colonies and among oppressed peoples,
convinced by bitter experience that for them there is no salvation except in

vol. v, p. 115. In commenting on the repercussions that revolutionary movements in Asia

were likely to have on those in Europe, Marx observed in an article on the Taiping peasant
uprising in China in the New York Daily Tribune, 14 June 1853: ‘It may seem a very
strange and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, in
their next movement for republic freedom and economy of government, may depend more
probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire—the very opposite of Europe—
than on any other political cause that now exists’—Dona Torr (ed.), M arx on China 1853-
1860 (Bombay, 1951), p. 1.
1. The guide-lines for the attitude of the Second International to colonialism had been
laid down by the London congress of 1896 in resolutions demanding ‘the full autonomy of
all nationalities’ and declaring ‘its sympathy with the workers of any country at present
suffering under the yoke of military, national, or other despotism’. It condemned colonial-
ism as an aspect of capitalism. ‘Whatever the religious and civilizing pretexts invoked to
support colonial policies,’ the resolution stated, ‘the extension of capitalist exploitation has
the exclusive interest of the capitalists as its aim*—International Socialist Workers and Trade
Union Congress (London, 1896), p. 31. The question of colonialism in general and im-
perialism in particular in connection with militarism and the dangers of war was debated
at the next three congresses (Paris, 1900; Amsterdam, 1904; Stuttgart, 1907). For a review
of the debates and the attitudes of individual parties, see Braunthal, History o f the Inter-
national, 1864-1914, pp. 305-19.
 Oriental Key Positions in the W orld Revolution 215
union with the revolutionary proletariat and in the victory of the Soviet
power over world imperialism.’1
Lenin believed, as he stated in the debate which followed, that it was by
no means necessary for people in a feudal, pre-capitalistic colony to pass
through a capitalistic phase of development, as Marx had presumed, before
conditions became right for a Socialist order of society. ‘If the victorious
revolutionary proletariat organizes systematic propaganda and the Soviet
governments give them all the help they can, it is incorrect to assume,’ he said,
‘that such people must pass through the capitalistic stage of development.’2
The congress not only supported the theses, but also laid down the duty of
individual parties—as the eighth of the twenty-one conditions for member-
ship of the Communist International—to fight against colonialism and im-
perialism. ‘Every party which wishes to join the Communist International,’
it declared, ‘is obliged to expose the tricks and dodges of its imperialists in
the colonies, to support every colonial liberation movement not merely in
words but in deeds; to demand the expulsion of their own imperialists from
these colonies, to inculcate among the workers of their country a genuinely
fraternal attitude to the working people of the colonies and the oppressed
nations___ ’3
The importance attached by Lenin to the congress decisions was echoed
in the pages of Izvestia.
H undreds o f millions o f Indians, Chinese, Negroes, M alays and other sup-
pressed nationals [it wrote] will receive news o f the decisions o f the second congress
o f the Com m unist International as a message of good fortune and also as a call to a
renewed and broadened struggle against their exploiter, capitalism ___ The fact
th at the Com m unist International was first to raise the flag o f battle and to rally to
this cause the suppressed peoples together w ith the organized proletariat will rem ain
a living act o f service.4

The Communist International’s executive committee had, prior to the

Second Congress, called a ‘Congress of Eastern Peoples’ to take place on 1
September 1920, at Baku, so as to mobilize them in the anti-imperialist
struggle.’8
1. Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919-1943,2 vols. (London, 1956),
pp. 141 and 143.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 139.
3. ibid., p. 170. See also Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, p. 540.
4. Quoted in Frank N. Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1960), p. 246.
5. Trotsky had supported immediate action in Asia in a letter he wrote to Lenin on
5 August 1919, immediately after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. ‘Until
now we have paid too little attention to agitation in Asia,’ he wrote. ‘However, the inter-
national situation is evidently shaping in such a way that the road to Paris and London lies
via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.’ He suggested the setting up in the
Urals or Turkestan of a ‘Revolutionary Academy’—a ‘political and military headquarters
of the Asian Revolution, which,’ he continued, ‘in the period immediately ahead may turn
out to be more effectual than the Executive Committee of the Third International’. For the
text of the letter, see Trotsky Papers 1917-1922 (The Hague, 1964), vol. i, pp. 621-7.
216 Socialism and Communism in Asia
In its call ‘to the oppressed popular masses in Persia, Armenia and
Turkey’, the executive committee had appealed for them to attend the con-
gress ‘in as large numbers as possible’. ‘Every year,’ it continued, ‘you make
a pilgrimage across deserts to the Holy Places. Now make your way across
deserts and mountain and river to meet together, and to deliberate together,
how you can free yourselves from the chains of servitude, how you can join
in brotherly union and live as free and as equal men.’1
According to Zinoviev’s report, 1,891 representatives from thirty-two
nations attended the congress, mainly from the Caucasus and the Central
Asian districts of Russia, but also including many Turks and Persians; two
thirds of the delegates, Zinoviev alleged, were Communists.
In his opening speech Grigori Zinoviev (1883-1936) stated: ‘We are ready
to help any revolutionary struggle against the English government.. . . Our
task is to help the East to liberate itself from English Imperialism. . . .
Our task is to kindle a real holy war against the English and French
capitalists.’ In its manifesto the congress called on the peoples of the
East ‘to raise themselves as one man in a holy war against the British
capitalists’.2
Yet, except in Turkey, the congress awoke no responses among the peoples
of the Near East. It was planned to assemble the congress annually; but the
first congress remained an isolated occasion. The congress had elected a
‘Council of Propaganda and Action of the Eastern Peoples’, attached to the
Executive Committee of the Communist International, but it was never
assembled. The one practical outcome was the foundation of an Institute for
Oriental Studies in Moscow in 1920, and, in the following year, of the
‘University of the Toilers of the East’.3

The Baku congress had, however, given an impetus to the founding of the

1. Degras (ed.), The Communist International, p, 109.

2. See ibid., p. 105.
3. See ibid., pp. 105-9. But by then the Soviet government had during negotiations for
a trade agreement with Britain pledged itself to refrain from anti-British propaganda in the
East. L. B. Krassin, the Soviet representative in London, was charged by a note of 18
April 1921 to assure the British government that ‘From our point of view the signature of
the agreement is a turning-point in our relations with Great Britain.. . . We always con-
sidered that we had no obligations in regard to Great Britain until the signature of the
agreement___ Now that the agreement is signed, we shall do everything possible to prevent
anything which might provoke hostile actions or propaganda against British interests.. . . ’.
In a note to Lord Curzon dated 27 September 1921 after he had accused Russia of having,
in breach of the agreement, continued anti-British propaganda in the East, Litvinov replied
that the Russians had after the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian Agreement issued strict
instructions ‘ordering its representatives to abstain from any anti-British propaganda and
to adapt their activities to the new relationship created between the Russian and British
governments’. For the texts of the two notes, see Jane Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on
Foreign Policy, vol. i: 1917-1924 (London, 1951), pp. 245-6 and 257-62. For the congress
in Baku and the text of the appeal of the Comintern to the people of the East, see Degras
(ed.), The Communist International, pp. 105-9. 1
 Oriental Key Positions in the World Revolution 217
Turkish Communist party.1 A few days after the congress, a member of its
presidium, Mustafa Subhi, organized a conference of members of the
Turkish group in the Russian Communist party and including Communists
from Turkey. As a student in Paris, Subhi had joined the French Socialist
party and, after his return home, became the leader of the Turkish Socialist
party, which had been founded in 1909 in Salonika. In 1913 he was arrested,
but escaped in the following year and fled to Russia. There he joined the
Bolsheviks and after the Russian Revolution became head of the Turkish
department in the Central Bureau for the Peoples of the East in Stalin’s
office of the Commissioner for Nationalities. He edited the Turkish periodical
Yeni Diiya (New World)—published first in Moscow and later in Baku—
translated the Communist Manifesto into Turkish, wrote a biography of Lenin
among other things and returned to Turkey in November 1920.
Most recruits to Subhi’s party were drawn from among Turkish prisoners
of war whom he had trained in Communist propaganda. But independently,
in 1919, a group of Turkish refugees returning from Germany after the war
and calling themselves ‘Spartakists’ had formed Communist groups in Con-
stantinople and Angora (as Ankara was formerly called). Earlier still the
Angora Communist party had been formed—a rival to the Communist
party, allied to Moscow—led by intellectuals, with a following among the
peasantry and, above all, in the army. Their ideology was a curious mixture
of pseudo-Marxist, pan-Turkish and pan-Islamic ideas—an ‘adaption of
Marxism to Turkish conditions’ in the search for a ‘Turkish road to
Socialism’.
The Turkish Communist movement was, however, to be short-lived.
Kemal Atatiirk who, in 1919 as Commander of the Turkish Army in Ana-
tolia, had overthrown the government of the Young Turks by insurrection
and been proclaimed Head of State by the Turkish National Assembly in
August 1920, had at first tolerated the Communists since he was seeking an
alliance with Soviet Russia to help in resisting the victorious allies. But even
while his negotiations with Moscow were still in progress he suppressed the
Angora Communist party and liquidated the leadership of the other—Subhi’s
—Communist party. In the winter of 1920 the executive had decided to trans-
fer its base to Turkey and in January 1921 seventeen of its leaders travelled by
sea from Baku to Ankara. Upon landing at Trebizond they were arrested,
Mustafa Subhi among them, to be drowned at sea on 28 January 1921—‘the
traditional Turkish method of secret execution’, is Carr’s comment on the
ruthless action.12
But the event left Moscow’s friendly relations with Kemal untroubled. In

1. The following description is based on Walter Z. Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism

in the Middle East (London, 1956), p. 205-13; Edward Hallet Carr, The Bolshevik Revolu-
tion 1917-1923 (London, 1953), vol. in, pp. 298-304.
2. ibid., p. 301.
218 Socialism and Communism in Asia
its state of world isolation, an alliance with Turkey was of greater importance
to the Soviet government than the Turkish Communist party. On 16 March
1921, within seven weeks of the Communists being murdered, a pact of
friendship was signed between Soviet Russia and Turkey.1
The Turkish Communist party, deprived of its leadership, reconstituted
itself in 1922 but was again prohibited after several months. Two years later,
when the general political atmosphere had cooled down to some extent, it re-
emerged from illegality. But a decree in March 1925, aimed at stabilizing the
‘safety of the state’, once again declared it illegal, and most of its leaders were
arrested. This was the end of the Communist movement in Turkey—the only
one in the Near East to have taken its impetus from the Baku congress.
1. For the ground-work for Soviet Russia’s relationship with Turkey, see ibid., pp.
244-50, 294-8 and 301-4; Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World A ffairs (Princeton, 1951),
vol. I.
10 • Bolshevism and Social Democracy
in India

In the event it was India which was to take up the key role in the Communist
International’s strategy for the revolution in Asia: ‘If Russia is justly con-
sidered the citadel of the world revolution, then India may be described as the
citadel of the revolution in the East,’ wrote K. Troyanovsky in 1918.1 The
Communist International therefore strove above all in India for a break-
through in its colonial policy. In 1920 it founded in Tashkent the Central
Asian Bureau for the instruction of Indian Communists.
The pioneer figure in the Communist party of India (C.P.I.) was Mana-
bendra Nath Roy (1886-1947), a revolutionary nationalist who in 1915 fled
to Mexico to escape persecution by the British-Indian government and there
turned to Communism. Invited to attend the Second Congress of the Com-
munist International in Moscow in 1920, he made an impressive speech
which ran counter to Lenin’s theses on the colonial question, advancing the
view that the conditions for a proletarian class struggle had already de-
veloped in India, and that the Communist party, as yet to be created, would
become the standard-bearer of the revolutionary independence movement,
not in alliance with the middle class but in the struggle against it. After the
congress, he was dispatched with two consignments of arms, gold and Indian
currency to Tashkent to head the Central Asian Bureau and organize an
international brigade. This venture failed,12 however, and from Tashkent he
moved to Berlin where he founded in 1921 the English-language periodical
Vanguard o f Indian Independence (it later changed its title to Masses o f India),
to be smuggled into the country.
The first attempt at founding a Communist party in India was apparently
undertaken in 1923; at all events, from February of that year Vanguard was

1. K. Troyanovsky, Vostok i Revolyutsiya (1918), p. 29, quoted in E. H. Carr, Socialism

in One Country, 1924-1926 (London, 1964), vol. m, Part 2, p. 658.
2. See Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 35-6. This work is by far the most thorough history of the
Communist movement in India.
 220 Socialism and Communism in Asia
issued with the sub-title, Central Organ o f the Communist Party o f India.1 But
two years later, when Percy E. Glading was dispatched to India as a rep-
resentative of the British Communist party to examine the party situation
there, he found that ‘no Communist Party in fact existed’.1 2
In September 1925, Satya Bhakta founded an ‘Indian Communist party’.3
About eighteen months later, at the time when the English Communist,
Philip Spratt, seconded from the British Communist party to the service of
the Communist movement in India, arrived in Bombay early in 1927, it had
‘fifteen or twenty members, four in Bombay’.4 S. Tagore, leader of the
Bengali Labour and Peasants’ party, told Ossip Piatnitsky, general secretary
of the central committee of the Communist International, in June 1927, in a
conversation in Moscow, that the number of Communists in India was
‘hardly more than a dozen’, despite the fact that, as Piatnitsky implied, the
Communist International had financed the movement with ‘enormous sums
of money’.5
The Communist party of India really only emerged at the conference
which sat in Bombay in May 1927, and at which the various splinter groups,
which had hitherto fought amongst themselves, agreed to elect a general
secretary (S. Ghate) and a presidium (Muzaffar Ahmed, K. S. Iyengar and
S. A. Dange). The party’s organizational machine was, however, in the hands
of Philip Spratt and Benjamin F. Bradley, another English Communist.
These represented ‘the de facto leaders of the Communist party of India.
It was only under their leadership that the Communist movement received
that impetus which the Indians were not able to convey.’6 They organized
the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ party (W.P.P.) in the United Provinces,
Delhi, Meerut, Bombay and several other towns.
But the ascendant of the young Communist movement was broken at
one stroke in March 1929 when the government arrested thirty-one leaders.

1. See ibid., p. 49.

2. Quoted in Carr, Socialism in One Country, vol. in, Part 2, p. 667; see also Overstreet
and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 74. On the other hand, Zinoviev, as president of
the Communist International, had reported to the Fourth Congress in November-Decem-
ber 1922 concerning Communist successes in India. ‘We can,’ he said, ‘show valuable
results for our work in India. I can tell the congress that during the last few months the
work of our comrades has been crowned with success. Comrade Roy has, with a group of
colleagues, founded a paper___ Our comrades have brought together Communist elements
in India___ I believe this to represent a major step forward’—Fourth Congress o f the
Communist International (London, 1923), p. 291.
3. See Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp. 77-80.
4. See Philip Spratt, Blowing Up India. Reminiscences and Reflections o f a Former
Comintern Emissary (Calcutta, 1955), p. 35.
5. For the conversation with Piatnitsky, see Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in
India, p. 97. The Indian government stated that the Communist International had placed
at M. N. Roy’s disposal the following amounts: £120,000 in July 1922, £120,000 in Novem-
ber 1922 and £2,000 in February 1923; see ibid., pp. 53 and 97. Roy reported in March
1924 that ‘almost unlimited sums of money have been placed at our disposal’—ibid., p. 98.
6. ibid., p. 90.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 221
In January 1930, having been found guilty at their trial in Meerut of a
revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the existing order they were
sentenced to heavy terms of imprisonment.1 Thus for four years the
movement was deprived of its leaders, who were not released until the end
of 1933.
Yet this trial—which stood among the most sensational of all political
prosecutions, and which dragged on for almost three and a half years—
became possibly the most effective instrument in assisting the spread of
Communist ideas and aims in India. ‘The revelation of our clandestine
techniques,’ Spratt reported, ‘evoked admiration for us among the people:
we had done what most of the young people hoped to do-----During the
hearing we were able to make big speeches, which were published in the
press; and what it was possible to say in favour of Communism was said.’12
The case created martyrs and, in India especially, martyrs arouse warm
sympathies. Furthermore, new leaders shortly took the places of the original
imprisoned ones, among them B. T. Ranadive, who was to play a decisive role
in the later history of the party.

Meanwhile a revolutionary situation had developed in the country. In 1930

and 1932, under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-
1948), the Indian National Congress called upon the masses to join the fight
for national independence. And, for the first time in the history of the
Indian continent, this diverse population of millions of peasants and workers
had begun to move. The weapon used by Gandhi in the struggle was that of
non-violent resistance to British rule. It took the form of an open denial of
the law’s status, of a refusal to co-operate in any way in public institutions,
of a boycott of the authorities and of English goods, of a refusal by the
peasants to pay taxes, and of mass demonstration by the workers in the face
of official prohibition. The numbers of those arrested and imprisoned during
the campaign were legion. What came into being was a formidable, non-
violent revolution by an unarmed nation against the armed might of the
British Empire.
Out of this revolutionary enthusiam arose the first Socialist groups. In
1931, the Socialist party of Bihar, the Punjab Socialist party and the Labour
1. The accused were not sentenced for any concrete acts contrary to the law, but for
illegal tendencies of the Communist International. The court stated in its findings that it
had been proved that the Communist International was ‘the head of all Communist
organizations in the world’, and that the ‘setting-up of workers’ republics in every country
was its aim; that its policy was to incite to violent revolution’; that it was ‘determined,
particularly in India, to provoke a revolution whose immediate aim was to overthrow
the sovereignty of the King-Emperor in British India’. The Communist party and the
Workers’ and Peasants’ party were, therefore, as members of the Communist International,
in the conspiracy to unleash revolution. For the text of the sentences, see M. R. Masani,
The Communist Party o f India. A Short History (London, 1954), pp. 37-8.
2. Spratt, Blowing Up India, pp. 51-2.
 222 Socialism and Communism in Asia
party of Bengal were formed, to be followed during the next two years by
groups in Bombay, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.1
The founders of these groups were, like the Communists, left-wing
middle-class intellectuals who, inspired by a conviction that liberation from
colonial rule was an essential prerequisite for the development of Socialism
in India, had joined the fight for national independence. As members of the
Indian National Congress, they stood in the front line during the stormy mass
movement of 1932 and were arrested in great numbers. In the Nasik Prison,
near Bombay, a meeting of the group leaders, among them Jayaprakash
Narayan, M. R. Masani, S. M. Joshi, N. G. Goray and Asoka Mehta, re-
solved to found the Congress Socialist party as a focus for the left wing in the
National Congress.
The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885 by liberal
nationalist intellectuals. During the early decades of its existence it had
striven with emphatic loyalty to the British overlordship to win by constitu-
tional means some participation in the existing system. Not until the early
1930s did the Congress develop, under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, in-
to a nation-wide revolutionary movement no longer satisfied with modest
constitutional reforms but with its sights firmly set on attaining complete
independence for India.8
The National Congress became divided over the question of tactics
after the British government, under the pressure of the mass-movements of
1932, granted a degree of self-government through the channels of elected
provincial parliaments. The Congress right wing, led by Sardar Patel, con-
sidered self-government in the provinces to be the first step in a gradual
development which would have India’s independence for its objective; it
advocated calling off the revolutionary struggle and supporting the pro-
vincial elections. The left wing, on the other hand, under the leadership of
Jawaharlal Nehru (1899-1964) and Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945),
called for the struggle to continue until national independence had been
realized, and so in effect rejected the offered constitutional reform and
supported a boycott of the elections.
The National Congress had assembled in Patna on 17 May 1934, and,
on the decision of its majority, proclaimed the cessation of hostilities and con-
firmed its participation in the elections. On the same day a conference of
Socialists had assembled, also in Patna, under the chairmanship of Archarya
Narenda Deva (1889-1950), to prepare for the founding of the Socialist
party. It instituted a commission to sketch out the party constitution and
1. The following account of the history of the Socialist party of India is based on
P. L. Lakhanpal, History o f the Congress Socialist Party, with a Foreword by Prem Bhasin
(Lahore, 1946); Hari Kishore Singh, A History o f the Praja Socialist Party (Lucknow, 1959);
Praja Socialist Party. A B rief Introduction (Bombay, 1956); and Saul Rose, Socialism in
Southern Asia (London, 1959), pp. 14-58.
2. B. P. Sitaramayya, The History o f the Indian National Congress (Bombay, 1947).
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 223
programme, nominated an organizational committee, with Deva as president
and Narayan as general secretary, and fixed 21 October 1934 as the date of
the founding congress in Bombay.
Over 150 delegates, representing thirty-one local Socialist groups, as-
sembled for the inaugural congress, which also met under Deva’s chairman-
ship. The party thus brought into being had been planned as a party within
the National Congress, not as one in opposition. It recognized the National
Congress—which had come to form a focal point for the forces of anti-
imperialism and had won the trust of the broad masses in the nation—as a
necessary instrument in the struggle for independence; and it had no wish to
weaken it though, as the left centre in the Congress, it hoped to gain a
leading position.
In his opening speech Narenda Deva analysed the historic situation
which must govern the Socialists’ attitude towards the National Congress.
‘We should not forget,’ he said, ‘that the present stage of India’s struggles is
that of the bourgeois democratic revolution and therefore it would be a
suicidal policy for us to cut ourselves olf from the national movement that the
National Congress undoubtedly represents___ Capitalist democracy is, in
any event, preferable to serfdom under subjection to alien rule.’1
So the party took the title of Congress Socialist party (C.S.P.) to de-
monstrate its unity with the National Congress, and laid down in its statutes
that only members of the National Congress could qualify as members of
the C.S.P.12
The party’s objective, the congress declared, was India’s ‘complete in-
dependence in the sense of separation from the British Empire and the
constitution of a Socialist social order’. Its programme sought the nationaliza-
tion of key industries, railways, mines and banks as the initial phase in the
progressive nationalization of all the means of production, as well as the
setting up of co-operative and credit societies for the private sectors of
economic life; it also sought to dispossess without compensation the princes
and big land-owners and to redistribute land and estates among the peasants
by an agrarian reform.3
Jayaprakash Narayan (b. 1902) was elected as general secretary, while
Ram Manohar Lohia (1910-67) was to be chief editor of the party organ, an
English-language weekly appearing under the title Congress Socialist.
At its second congress, meeting in Meerut on 20 January 1936, the C.S.P.
defined itself as a Marxist party. ‘Only Marxism,’ its declaration on the

1. Archarya Narenda Deva, Socialism and National Revolution, edited by Yusuf

Meherally (Bombay, 1946), pp. 4-5.
2. The Kanpur Conference (February-March 1947) struck out this condition and
dropped the word ‘Congress’ from the party’s title.
3. For the text of the party constitution, its programme and other resolutions, see
Lakhanpal, History o f the Congress Socialist Party, pp. 37-8; Singh, History o f the Praja
Socialist Party, pp. 235-7.
 224 Socialism and Communism in Asia
character and tasks of the party stated, ‘can lead the forces of anti-imperialism
to their destiny. Therefore a knowledge of revolutionary technique, of the
theory and practice of the class struggle, of the character and structure of
a state moving towards being a Socialist society, is essential for party
members.’1
In its origins, however, the Congress Socialist party was not simply a
Marxist party in the tradition of the European Social Democratic parties,
but rather a party of the Bolshevik version of Marxism. ‘When the party was
founded in 1934,’ Jayaprakash Narayan said in a speech in 1952, ‘we con-
sidered ourselves to be a Marxist party. Yet what did we, at that time,
understand by Marxism? What did Marxism mean to the Socialists through-
out the world? That was the time,’ he said, ‘when the Russian Revolution
and the attempts by the Bolsheviks to construct Socialism were an inspiration
to all Socialists. It may generally be said,’ he declared, ‘that, at that time,
Marxism was, by us at least, largely identified with everything that Russia
stood for.’12
Thus the Indian Socialists looked to Moscow for enlightenment rather
than to Western Europe. It was one achievement of the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution to have rooted Marxism in India. ‘The revolution in Russia is
thought in India to be a triumph over depotism,’ Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy
of India, reported to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, in his
Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms submitted to the British govern-
ment.3 Marxism had inspired the revolution in Russia which overthrew
Tsarist depotism; now it became a source of inspiration for the Indian in-
tellectuals who strove to overthrow British depotism in India. The revolution
in Russia had apparently metamorphosed an established rigid social and
economic order and had set in motion daring plans for the regeneration of
society; and its example fired those who sought India’s regeneration.4

1. For the text of the so-called ‘Meerut Theses’, see Lakhanpal, History o f the Congress
Socialist Party, pp. 142-4.
2. Report of the Special Convention of the Socialist Party, Pachmarhi (Madhya
Pradesh) 1952 (Bombay, 1952), pp. 28-9. Narayan also described the disillusion which
soon followed. ‘We began’, he said, ‘as enlightened admirers of Soviet Russia. But the first
shock came with the first “great purge” of 1936. During the first and second “purges”
practically the entire old guard of the Bolshevik party, the men who had made the revolu-
tion, were annihilated___ Then came other shocks, the hardest being Stalin’s pact with
Hitler shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, and then, when the war began, when
Stalin divided Poland with Hitler . . .’—ibid., p. 29. See also Jayprakash Narayan, Why
Socialism (Benares, 1936), pp. 55-6, 60 and 62.
3. Quoted in Masani, The Communist Party o f India, p. 11.
4. Apart from its identification with the Communist regime, Marxism remained a
seminal idea for Indian intellectuals. ‘The appeal of Marxism,’ the sociologist Edward Shils
observed in his study of the Indian intellectual, ‘which is very great indeed, and not just
among Communists, rests on its claim to create a modem society, a modem India different
from the India in which the Indian intellectuals are so enmeshed and by which they are so
often abashed. Marxism . . . permits intellectuals who feel derogated to envisage a society
in which their own ideas as to the good life will prevail. It promises the overthrow of the
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 225
‘Russia,’ said Narenda Deva, in his speech at the inaugural congress of the
Congress Socialist party, ‘is the only land without unemployment___
Factories, land, transport and credit systems have been socialized___ In
place of anarchy we have planned guidance of economic development-----
The first Five-Year Plan had a tremendous success-----The fact that the
Soviet State is progressing rapidly despite the hostility of an antagonistic
world, and even in the midst of widespread economic crisis, is in itself a
proof positive that it has a message to give-----u For Indian Socialists,
Soviet Russia was the standard-bearer of the message of Socialism.
So it came about that India’s Socialists, having adopted the Bolshevik
version of Marxism, differed hardly at all from the Communists in their
basic principles. ‘The profound conflict which separates the Socialist from
the Communist party did not exist in those days,’ Madhu Limaye recollected
from personal experience. ‘Had the Communists adopted a friendly attitude
towards nationalism and taken part in the struggle for independence, it is
doubtful whether the Congress Socialist party would ever have seen the
light of day.’3

The Communist party of India, however, remained implacably opposed to

both the National Congress and the national independence movement under
Gandhi’s leadership. Its attitude was delineated by decisions taken by the
Communist International. At its sixth congress, in August-September 1928,
it had taken a sharp turn to the left in its tactics, had condemned the Social
Democrats as ‘Social Fascists’, and had, contrary to Lenin’s Theses of 1920,
called on the Indian Communist party to oppose any alliance with the middle-
class nationalist freedom movement. The resolution, passed in Moscow on
‘Communist strategy in China and similar colonial countries’, set the Com-
munist party of India the task o f ‘freeing the masses from the influence of the
national-reformist bourgeoisie. . . and rejecting the formation of any kind of
block between the Communist party and the national-reformist opposition’.
The duty of the Communist, it continued, was to ‘unmask the national-
reformism o f the Indian National Congress and to fight the Gandhist phase
of non-violent resistance’.3

hated and dazzling British and the Anglicized ruling groups who are guided by their ideas.
It promises the liberation of coloured men from the white men who are equated with
capitalists and foreigners. It permits India to deny the West, which it knows as a British
West, and to do so on behalf of an ideal which is, at the same time, Western in content and
origin’—Edward Shils, T h e Culture of the Indian Intellectual’, in Sewanee Review, reprint
April-July 1959, pp. 38-9. For Jawaharlal Nehru’s avowal to Marxism, see his Auto-
biography (London, 1937), pp. 591-2.
1. Deva, Socialism and National Revolution, p. 19.
2. Madhu Limaye, Evolution o f Socialist Policy (Hyderabad, 1952), p. 2. Limaye was a
member of the C.S.P. executive.
3. Quoted in Masani, The Communist Party o f India, pp. 30-1 and 42-3.
 226 Socialism and Communism in Asia
In the spirit of the resolution, the Communist International published in
1930 its ‘Platform of action for the Communist Party of India’:
The greatest threat to the victory o f the revolution in India is the fact th at o u r
people continue to harbour illusions regarding the N ational Congress, and have n ot
understood how it is a class organization o f capitalists, w orking against the funda-
mental interests of the working masses in our country.

Above all, this document denounced the left wing in the National
Congress:
The m ost dam ning and dangerous hindrance to In d ia’s revolution is the agita-
tion o f leftist elements in the N ational Congress___ The exposure o f the left-wing
leaders o f the N ational C ongress.. . . The m ost ruthless fight against the ‘left’
national reform ists are necessary co n d itio n s. . . for the m obilization o f the workers
and peasants under the Com m unist party banner.1

The formation of the Socialist party had, understandably, been a great

inconvenience for the Communists. Throughout a decade, and without com-
petition from any other Marxist party, they had controlled the whole area of
Socialist propaganda. But now a Socialist party independent of the Com-
munist International had arisen which also declared itself for Marxism and
canvassed for supporters among the workers and peasants. The Communist
party was itself divided into small cells and, despite a decade of propaganda,
had remained isolated from mass opinion.12 The Congress Socialist party, on
the other hand, had succeeded in uniting Socialist groups scattered over the
huge Indian continent into a common organization and had established itself
as a champion of national independence in the eyes of the broad mass
of people.
The Communist International, having decided at its sixth congress to
turn the party line leftwards and to wage a ‘most ruthless’ fight against
‘Social Fascists’ (even while remaining unheedful of the triumph of Fascism
in Germany), fought the Socialists as arch-enemies from 1928 until the be-
ginning of 1935. Then, when Stalin’s attempts to reach an understanding
with Hitler had failed, it undertook to switch the party line back at its seventh
congress in July-August 1935 and to support an anti-Fascist popular front
with all democratic parties, and especially to promote a unity front with the
Socialists.3 Of ‘Social Fascists’ there could be no further mention, not even
by Indian Communists.

1. Quoted in Masani, The Communist Party o f India, pp. 42-3.

2. As Wang Ming informed the seventh congress of the Communist International in
1935 in his Report on the Revolutionary Movement in Colonial Countries, \ . . the Indian
Communist has, until a short time since, been to a high degree isolated from the mass of
the people and the anti-imperialist mass struggle.. . . The small, dispersed Communist
cells were unable to combine themselves into an All-Indian Communist party’—quoted in
ibid., p. 57.
3. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 396-9 and 468-74.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 227
Along with the new policies to which the Communist party was now
committed, its attitude to the National Congress underwent a change; from
being labelled a ‘bourgeois party’ it became ‘a major anti-imperialist people’s
organization’,1 and the Congress Socialist party, from being despised as a
‘camp-follower of the bourgeoisie’, was now transformed into a Marxist
sister-party. Communist policy was aimed at creating the ‘unity of the whole
left’. This task it allocated to the Congress Socialist party, which was to
‘emerge as a powerful united party of the left welcoming with open arms all
true and active anti-imperialists and all true Socialists and Communists into
its ranks’.12
The initiative in creating a Socialist-Communist United Front had in
fact been undertaken by the Congress Socialist party under Jayaprakash
Narayan’s leadership. From its very inception it had worked for a united
Socialist party to include all Marxist factions, including the Communist
party and the group led by M. N. Roy.3 While this concept was strongly
supported by Narayan, however, it did encounter a degree of opposition
from several outstanding Social Democrats, among them Ram Manohar
Lohia, M. R. Masani and Asoka Mehta. But a majority at the C.S.P.’s
Meerut Congress in 1936 declared itself in favour of a United Front, and even
for admitting individual Communists as C.S.P. members.
The Communist party naturally seized the chance of using the C.S.P. for
its own purposes with enthusiasm. Having been driven underground by the
ban since 1934 it had been seriously inhibited in its activities. As C.S.P. mem-
bers, Communists could now work undeterred. Schooled in conspiratorial
techniques, they were soon able to take over key positions in the party and its
allied trade unions. Within a year of the Unity Front having been set up, the
C.S.P. was thrown into chaos by conflicts between its Socialist and Com-
munist members. But it was only in 1940 that the C.S.P. made the decision
at its Ramgarh conference to expel the Communist party and dissolve the
Unity Front.4
The Congress Socialist party had almost bled itself to death through its
alliance with the Communists. Three of its biggest regional organizations in

1. National Front, 13 February 1938, quoted in Limaye, Communist Party, p. 32. The
National Front was the official organ of the Communist party. In its zeal to form an anti-
Fascist Popular Front, the Communist party even declared its support for the ‘fight of
Indian capitalists against the dominance of British capital’; and a resolution by its Polit-
bureau in February 1937 demanded the additional inclusion of ‘certain organizations of
business people and industrialists’—Communist, March 1937, quoted in Overstreet and
Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 164.
2. National Front, 13 March 1938, quoted in Limaye, Communist Party, pp. 32-3.
3. See Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party (Bombay,
1941), p. 3.
4. For Communist tactics in infiltrating the C.S.P., see Masani, Communist Party o f
India, pp. 66-71; Limaye, Communist Party, pp. 33-9; M. R. Dandavate, Three Decades o f
Indian Communism (Bombay, 1959).
228 Socialism and Communism in Asia
the states of Andhra, Tamilnad and Kerala had fallen under Communist rule,
while in the other states it had lost many members; its foothold in the trade
unions, the Peasants’ Alliance and the Students’ Federation had been pre-
empted by the Communists.

The heavy losses of these five years were, however, to be recouped in the
final struggle of the Indian independence movement.
When the Second World War broke out the British Viceroy proclaimed
India a participant country. The National Congress at once demanded from
the British government an assurance of India’s independence as a condition
of support for the war with Nazi Germany. This was refused. The Congress
thereupon refused its collaboration, while abstaining, however, from any
action that might have weakened the Allied war effort; as a symbolic protest
it announced individual passive resistance. Yet not until after discussions be-
tween the British government and the National Congress on the future of
India had broken down in the summer of 1942 did the Congress unleash,
under the slogan of ‘Quit India’, a powerful subversive mass movement ‘in
which the Socialists played a magnificent role. All Socialist leaders who had
escaped arrest went underground to organize the mass struggle against the
British.’1 Jayaprakash Narayan had been arrested in 1939, but escaped soon
after the inception of the ‘Quit India’ movement to play, as the government
recorded, ‘an increasingly important role in the leadership of a movement
which could no longer be differentiated from a revolutionary underground
movement’.1 2 The youth of the national freedom movement ‘gathered in great
numbers about the C.S.P. as the vanguard in the resistance movement against
British rule in India’.3
The attitude of Indian Socialists to Britain’s war with Hitler’s Germany
was clear. They wished to see the defeat of Fascist imperialism in Europe, but
equally they wished to see an end to the rule of British imperialism in India.
They could not advocate the Indian people’s participation in the war so
long as their country’s freedom was not assured. ‘How is an enslaved
nation,’ they argued, ‘to fight with enthusiasm for the freedom of other
countries?’

The attitude of Indian Communists towards the war was rather more com-
plex. Up to the conclusion of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939 they had,
in company with Communists everywhere, been passionate advocates of a
confrontation with Nazi Germany. The magic sea-change worked by the
pact, however, made the war against Fascism, for which they had canvassed

1. Praja Socialist Party, a B rief Introduction, pp. 7-8; Masani, Communist Party Oj
India, p. 82.
2. Quoted in Rose. Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 25.
3. Praja Socialist Party, p. 8.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 229

so consistently, into a ‘war of imperialism’ and Britain and France were

charged with being responsible for it.1
Moscow’s version of the war, which condemned Britain as its creator,
released the Indian Communists from any embarrassment of conscience in
the crucial struggle of democracy against Fascism. Now, as Indian patriots
and arch-enemies of imperialism, they could mobilize the masses in good
conscience to fight the British. The National Congress, as we have seen,
during the first phase of the war avoided mass actions which might have
undermined the Allied position. The Communists, on the other hand, called
on the masses to fight the British government, and organized protest strikes
against the war—including one of 90,000 textile workers in Bombay in
October 1939, among others—to try to paralyse Britain’s war effort in India.
They demanded that the National Congress should ratify a declaration put
out under the title ‘Proletarian Path’, advocating ‘the exploitation of the war
crisis by the revolution’. The first step was to be a ‘political general strike,
together with a rent and tax strike’, followed by a ‘phase of armed uprising’,
including the ‘storming of military and police posts in town and country
districts, the destruction of government institutions and an actual offensive
on the largest possible scale against the government armed forces’.123Gandhi
and Nehru were branded as agents of imperialism, and the Socialists as
Gandhi’s lackeys.
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 overnight trans-
formed Moscow’s version of the ‘imperialists’ war’ into a ‘people’s war of
democracy against Fascism’. The rapid volte-face threw the Indian Com-
munists into a considerable dilemma. Since the autumn of 1939, they had
been attempting to sabotage Britain’s war effort and had gained respect
among the people as the most decisive pioneers of national liberty. But now
Moscow expected them to ally themselves with Britain and her imperialist
regime in India.
The Communist party hesitated for nearly six months. It only undertook
to change its policy after Moscow had relayed strict instructions through the
British Communist party in a letter signed by Harry Pollitt, the general
secretary. Pollitt’s letter was transmitted to the Indian Communist party by
the British Minister for Home Affairs in the Indian government, Sir Reginald
Maxwell.8
The Communist Politbureau thereupon issued a new proclamation con-
demning its earlier attitude to the war as a ‘bourgeois nationalistic deviation’
and declared its enthusiasm for Britain’s fight against Germany in alliance
with Russia. ‘Today there bums in every Communist,’ a C.P.I. circular

1. For the attitude of the Communist International towards the war, see Brauntha»,
History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 504-14.
2. Quoted in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 181.
3. See Masani, Communist Party o f India, p. 80,
 230 Socialism and Communism in Asia
stated, ‘irrespective of whether they are in prison, free, or in the underground,
an intense desire to do everything they can to co-operate in the war effort,
even under the present government’.1 The British government then released
all arrested Communists,123*restored on 24 July 1942 the Communist party’s
legal status of which it had been deprived in 1934, and encouraged it to found
a number of papers, including the English-language periodical, The People's
War. Immediately afterwards, in August 1942, the government declared
illegal the Congress Socialist party.
The Communist party had undertaken to change its attitude while the
National Congress was still in conference with the British government over
India’s future. It had called for the acceptance of the British proposals and
attacked Congress heavily for turning them down. When, following the
breakdown of discussions, Congress called upon the Indian people to resist
the British government under the ‘Quit India’ slogan, the Communist party
threw itself into opposing the formidable and growing resistance movement.
It defamed the Socialist parties active in the ‘Quit India’ movement as a
Fascist ‘fifth column’, and called on the workers to support the war with all
their strength. ‘It is the workers’ patriotic duty,’ it stated, ‘to take the initia-
tive in organizing higher productivity and avoiding strikes___ The Com-
munists fight openly and energetically against strikes which damage the
country’s defences.’8
As could have been anticipated, their attitude to the freedom movement
discredited and isolated the Communists. To escape the odour of ostracism,
the party changed tack once more after the end of the war, seeking contact
with the nationalist camp and pleading for a ‘united freedom front against
the imperialist rulers of our fatherland’, with whom it had co-operated while
the war lasted. After India’s independence had been proclaimed on 15
August 1947, the Communists, with reservations, declared their support for
an Indian National Congress led by Nehru. A speech entitled ‘A Stimulating
Appeal to the People to Rally to Pandit Nehru’ was given by the party general

1. Quoted in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 205.

2. In an appeal to the British government to release Communist detainees, P. C.
Joshi, general secretary of the Communist party, stated: ‘Most of those arrested who are
still imprisoned as Communists have, since the beginning of the year, categorically changed
their attitude towards the war. Those Communists who are free have for several months
given enthusiastic support to the war by speeches and in other ways-----Those still im-
prisoned are denied the freedom to support the war’—quoted in Masani, Communist Party
o f India, p. 278.
3. The congress of the Communist party of India, which assembled in Bombay on 23
May 1943, had stated in a resolution: ‘The fifth column is being built by the “Forward
Bloc” , the party of the traitor Bose; from the Congress Socialist party which betrayed
Socialism at the outset of the war . . . and has finished up in the camp of the Trotskyist
traitors; and the Trotskyist group is a criminal band in the pay of the Fascists___ The
Communist party declares that each of these three groups should be treated by any honour-
able Indian as the nation’s worst enemy, and must be banned from political life and de-
stroyed’—quoted in Limaye, Communist Party, pp. 48-9.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 231
secretary, Puran Chand Joshi. In it he declared: ‘All power to the govern-
ment! It is threatened by reaction, and it is the duty of every one of us to
rally in all sincerity to the government and assure it of our whole-hearted
support.’1
Yet this tack to the right had to be changed again to the left after the
founding of the Cominform in September 1947.123
The Cominform had called on the Communists of all countries to take up
a revolutionary offensive. The Second Congress of the C.P.I., meeting in
Calcutta at the end of February 1948, gave the new policy its inception.
P. C. Joshi, having led the party as general secretary over twelve years and
been responsible for its ‘right’ moderate policies, was ousted, to be replaced
by B. T. Ranadive, his rival on the left wing. Ranadive was convinced, while
also convincing a majority of his colleagues, that even as capitalist Europe
‘was under the immediate threat of the revolution and stood on the brink of
catastrophe’, so was India ripe for the proletarian revolution. The congress
resolution declared that ‘a revolutionary upsurge’ was in the making in
India and the final phase of revolution, the phase of ‘armed conflict’, had
already begun. It condemned the Indian Socialists, who ‘preached the
illusion that Socialism could be brought about by constitutional means’. It
called on Communists to form ‘a democratic front of all true revolutionaries’.®
Communist party policy was now directed at unleashing the revolution.
It organized shock-troops45 to attack railway stations, undertake bomb
assaults and set buildings on fire. And, by a wave of general strikes, it
attempted to paralyse the young state’s administrative apparatus.®
The first mass strike planned for this purpose was a general strike of
railwaymen scheduled to take place on 9 March 1948. Its specified task, laid
down by a party circular of 23 February, was to set the revolution in motion.
Party members were ‘to prepare for clashes with the police. . . and to plan to
capture key positions of the government. Not only the Socialist leaders,’ it

1. People's Age, 19 October 1947, quoted in John H. Kautsky, Moscow and the Com-
munist Party o f India. A Study in the Postwar Evolution o f International Communist Strategy
(New York, 1956), pp. 19 and 23; Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp.
260-4.
2. See pp. 144-5, 148-51.
3. Quoted in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 273; Masani, Com-
munist Party o f India, p. 90.
4. A handbook was issued instructing the shock-troops in the use of weapons and
hand-grenades and giving instructions for the formation of guerrilla forces with their
instructions, tactics and tasks. These included, to quote at random, ‘Attacks on police
stations and the houses of the great landowners; ambushing police patrols, destroying
them and seizing their weapons; sabotaging the enemy’s lines of communication, the
telegraph and telephone lines. . . ’. The objective was, the handbook explained, ‘to promote
the mass movement which has developed in the country and to raise it to a higher level,
when the whole country will take up arms’—quoted in Overstreet and Windmiller, Com-
munism in India, p. 279.
5. For a review of these events, see Masani, Communist Party o f India, pp. 90-6.
232 Socialism and Communism in Asia
continued, ‘but all of their followers who resist the strike are to be attacked.’1
During 1947-8 India had been involved in a terrible crisis. The proclama-
tion of independence and the simultaneous constitution of Pakistan as a
sovereign state had precipitated a devastating religious war involving mass-
slaughter between Muslims and Hindus. Millions of Hindus, fleeing from
Pakistan, had crowded out India’s cities. A general strike by railwaymen,
by preventing the transport of food, would have spread famine and paralysed
the government machinery, creating chaos though hardly the required condi-
tions for a Marxist proletarian revolution. But the All-Indian Railway
Union, led by its president, Jayaprakash Narayan, came out against the strike,
and the Communist action ended, as Joshi observed, in a ‘complete fiasco*.
Further attempts by the Communists to unleash general strikes similarly
miscarried.12
The Communists met with more success, however, with their revolution-
ary tactic in the agrarian revolutionary situation which had developed in
Telengana, a district of the Sultanate of Hyderabad in southern India.
Early in 1946 the peasants had risen against a predominantly semi-feudal
agrarian structure. Under Communist leadership, the movement developed
towards the end of 1947 into a guerrilla war against the landowners. Within
a few weeks ‘soviets’ had been set up in hundreds of villages, the landowners
expelled and the land divided among the peasants. As Ranadive explained
with some satisfaction to the party’s second congress: ‘Telengana is a major
turning-point in the history of the battles taking place under our party’s
leadership.’3 But when, in September 1948, the Indian army occupied the
Sultanate to bring the country within the Republic of India, the Communist
insurrection in Telengana collapsed.4
The course of action intended to unleash the revolution, adopted by the
party at its Calcutta congress in February 1948, and which they continued to

1. Quoted in Limaye, Communist Party, p. 61.

2. ‘We called for a general strike of the railwaymen on 9 March,’ Joshi wrote; ‘it was
a complete fiasco. Not even our own comrades answered the call to strike___ In June we
called for a general strike in Bengal to support a hunger strike by our comrades in prison.
Again a fiasco, and Bengal is our best organized trade union province. In November 1949
we called on all jute workers to take part in a general strike; not a single factory came to a
standstill. On 2 January 1950, we called all the textile workers in the country out on strike.
Our press claimed that 75,000 had struck in Bombay; the semi-official agency reported
1,500 strikers. In no other textile centre was there a strike’—P. C. Joshi, ‘Letter to Foreign
Comrades’ in Views (Calcutta), May 1950, quoted in Masani, Communist Party o f India,
pp. 284—5.
3. Quoted in Kautsky, Moscow and the Communist Party o f India, p. 49. For the
events in Telengana, see Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp. 285-7 and
292; Masani, Communist Party o f India, pp. 93-4, 292-3 and 300.
4. The Communists’ activities in Telengana had in fact been criticized by leading
Communists. In one analysis, a former member of the party’s central committee reported:
‘The guerrilla forces indiscriminately killed civilians in large numbers along with the big
landowners and their agents. Their actions gave the party and the whole movement a bad
name in the villages and cities’—quoted in Limaye, Communist Party, pp. 62-3.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 233
pursue until 1951, had failed. The terrorist methods used, meant to stir the
masses into revolutionary ferment, had in practice repelled the majority.1
S. A. Dange, leader of the Communist trade unions, stated in a memorandum
of September 1950 that, since the Calcutta congress of 1948, the Communist
party had lost 80,000 out of about 100,000 members; that the Communist
trade unions were in a ‘totally paralysed and stagnant state’; that the peasants’
organizations had ‘practically been swept away’; and that the party had
fallen prey to ‘inertia and disintegration’.12 The party itself admitted, in a
circular of 16 September 1950, that it was ‘on the verge of collapse and in a
state of chaos, as a result of errors by the party leadership’.3
Total collapse was only to be avoided by a change of party policy.
Accordingly a new programme was announced in April 1951. The concepts
of revolution and Socialism as immediate practical solutions were now
abandoned. On the contrary, it declared: ‘. .. The Communist party is not
demanding the establishment of Socialism in our country. In view of the
backwardness of the economic development of India and the weakness of the
mass organizations of workers, peasants and toiling intelligentsia, our party
does not find it possible at present to carry out Socialist transformations in
our country.’4*
The central committee elected as general secretary Ajoy Gosh, who with
S. A. Dange and P. C. Joshi had headed the opposition within the party to
the former ‘adventurers’ policy’, and it revoked the call to terrorist action.
‘No Communist,’ it was now stated, ‘can have anything to do with the
tactics and methods of terrorism by individuals or guerrilla forces.’6 The
insurrection in Telengana, the party asserted, had not had the overthrow of
government as its objective, but had been aimed solely at the feudal op-
pression which prevailed in the area. The party was ready to co-operate with
the government in the peaceful dispersion of the guerrillas and by October
their activities had ended.
Now it concentrated its attention on the parliamentary elections called

1. They also met opposition within their party. It said in a criticism of the Bengal
party: ‘Is it right to attack railway stations, to throw bombs at trams and buses, to set
houses of Congress alight?’—quoted in ibid., p. 62.
2. S. A. Dange, Ajoy Gosh and S. V. Ghate, A Note on the Roots o f our M istakes A fter
Calcutta, pp. 4-5, quoted in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 302.
.3 . Quoted in Masani, Communist Party o f India, p. 107. The following table of Com-
munist party membership, based on official party sources, illustrates the effects of the
policies of those years.
Year Number o f members
1948 89,000
1950 20,000
1952 30,000
1954 75,000
See Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 357.
4. Quoted in Kautsky, Moscow and the Communist Party o f India, p. 135.
5. Quoted in ibid., p. 143.
234 Socialism and Communism in Asia
for the winter of 1951-2. A manifesto of 1 May had already announced the
setting up of the ‘democratic people’s front’ to bring together not only
Socialists and the masses of the workers and peasants, but also the bourgeois
middle class and ‘non-monopolistic capitalists’. In its election manifesto, pub-
lished in August 1951, it set the front the objective of a ‘democratic people’s
government’, ‘a government to represent the workers, peasants, middle
classes and national bourgeoisie’. It would, the manifesto promised, ‘work
together with private industries and guarantee them their profits and in-
terest’ to encourage industrial development. Agrarian reform would similarly
leave capitalist landowners enough land to operate profitable cultivation___
The revolution will not harm the rich peasants. They also, having suffered
to some extent from feudal exploitation and usurers, will profit by the
revolution.’1

The Socialist party, from its inception in 1934 and up to the constitution of
India as a sovereign state in August 1947, had remained a loyal member of
the Indian National Congress as its left wing. But while the Congress had
been the instrument of the national freedom struggle, it could hardly be
expected that, following the attainment of independence, it could be trans-
formed into an instrument of Socialism. The Socialist party had, as it hap-
pened, succeeded, as Narayan said at the annual congress in Nasik in March
1948, in producing ‘a climate of Socialism within the congress’. ‘The fact,’ he
continued, ‘that every congressman today is anxious to describe himself as a
Socialist . . . is a tribute to the work of our party.’12 And at its meeting in
Karachi in 1931, the National Congress had indeed incorporated a Socialist
element into its constitution by a resolution on ‘fundamental rights’ which
declared: ‘The state shall own or control the key industries, mines, railways,
waterways, shipping and other means of public transport.’3
The National Congress, however, embraced followers of all classes and
ideologies. As the organization of a national movement, it had fulfilled its
aim with the attainment of independence. Now it decided to constitute itself
as a political party. But the Socialist party felt that it would not then be able
to represent effectively within the Congress the interests of peasants and
workers. At its Kanpur conference in February 1947 it decided to break
away from the Congress and, in the terms of its resolution, to ‘march forward
outside the Congress, carrying the triumphant standard of a Socialist state’.4

1. For the Communist election manifesto and an analysis, see Masani, Communist
Party o f India, pp. 139-51.
2. Report o f the Sixth Annual Conference o f the Socialist Party, Nasik, 1948, p. 68.
3. For the wording of the resolution, see Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity o f India (London,
1941), p. 406.
4. For the wording of the resolution, see Nasik Report, pp. 35-8. The party had, as
already mentioned, removed the word ‘Congress’ from its title at the Kanpur congress in
the previous year.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 235
Within the Indian National Congress, the Socialist party had been a
cadre party. At the time of the Nasik conference, in March 1948, it had
numbered 5,139 active members and 3,671 candidates.1 (Active members
were pledged to devote fourteen hours a week to working for the party.) At
the Patna congress, in March 1949, it decided to become a party seeking mass
membership. The statutes were changed to end the two-tier system of mem-
bership, and a category of collective membership for individuals in the trade
unions, peasants’ federations and Socialist youth and student organizations
was created.12
The party’s growth was surprising. By the time of the Patna conference in
1949, it totalled 12,360 members; a year later, in June 1950, this had grown
to 151,972 members, made up of 129,447 individual members and 22,525
collective members, mainly in the trade unions.3
The party’s influence over the pre-war trade union movement had been
dominant. During the war, with the Socialist leaders imprisoned, the Com-
munists had been able to agitate unhindered and to seize the leadership of the
trade union federation, the All-Indian Trade Union Congress (A.I.T.U.C.).456
Shortly after the war, in May 1947, the National Congress founded a new
trade union organization, the Indian National Trade Union Congress
(I.N.T.U.C.), upon which, in December 1948, the Socialist party founded a
Socialist trade union federation under the title HindMazdoor Sabha (H.M.S.).
Its leaders were Jayaprakash Narayan and Asoka Mehta, with D. Desai as
general secretary. At its inauguration, the trade union confederation em-
braced 427 trade unions with a total of 606,427 members; over the next two
years its numbers increased to above 800,000.®

While the Socialist Party of India had from the beginning been a party ori-
entated towards a Bolshevik version of Marxism,® Communism had lost
much of its magic during the years of its tragic history. It had failed to

1. See Nasik Report, p. 104.

2. For the wording of the new statutes, see Report of the Eighth National Convention
of the Socialist Party (Madras, 1950), pp. 203-12.
3. Madras Report, p. 154.
4. For the Communist infiltration of the A.I.T.U.C., see Overstreet and Windmiller,
Communism in India, pp. 371-4.
5. At the end of 1952, the proportions of strength between the three trade union
organizations, according to a report submitted to Parliament by the Minister of Labour,
were as follows:
Indian National Trade Union Congress 1,548,568
Hind Mazdoor Sabha 804,337
All-Indian Trade Union Congress 758,314
See Oscar Omati, ‘Indian Trade Unions Since Independence’, in Far East Survey,
August 1954.1.N.T.U.C. and H.M.S. are members of the International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions; the A.I.T.U.C. is a member of the Communist World Federation of
Trade Unions.
6. See pp. 223-5.
236 Socialism and Communism in Asia
emancipate the Russian proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat, set up
by Lenin for the duration of society’s transformation from a capitalist into
a Socialist order, had degenerated into the dictatorship of a despotic bureau-
cracy, clamping the proletariat into new chains and, instead of building a
Socialist society, had developed a system of state capitalism.
In the light of this experience, the realization grew in the ranks of the
Socialist party that, as a method of achieving Socialism, Bolshevism had
failed. This conclusion reached its expression in a new statement of principles
adopted by the party’s first post-war congress, held in March 1947 at Kanpur.
This statement opted for democratic Socialism and ‘the construction of a
democratic Socialist society in India’ and ‘the eradication of imperialism,
racialism, colonialism and other forms of national oppression and economic
inequality among nations and the creation of a democratic Socialist world’.
The Kanpur conference was indeed, as the party’s official survey stated, ‘a
landmark in the ideological evolution of Indian Socialism’. The policy state-
ment which it adopted, ‘for the first time in the history of the party, clearly
distinguished democratic Socialism from totalitarian Communism and, while
firmly rejecting the latter, emphatically asserted that there could be no
Socialism without democracy’.1 In the heated argument about the methods
to be used in the struggle for Socialism, the party’s general council decided
that, under present conditions in India, not violence but the peaceful working
of democracy was ‘the only proper method’ for bringing about a Socialist
change of society.12
Thus, over sixteen years and ‘by a slow and painful process’, as Narayan
described it at the 1950 party congress in Madras, the Socialist party evolved
from the Bolshevik version of Marxism to a Marxist version of humanitarian
democratic Socialism.3
This principle was further developed in an extensive programme of the
Praja Socialist party, which emerged in September 1952 from the merger of
the Socialist party with the Kisan Mazdoor Praja party. The programme,
issued under the modest title of Policy Statement, is among the most fascinat-
ing documents of Asian Socialism—an outline for a Socialist order of society
in India on the basis, explained at the outset, of ‘a creative synthesis of the
accumulated knowledge and experience of both Europe and India’.
In its conclusions it defines the conflict between democratic Socialism and
Communism. Hierarchical concepts of the social order are rejected, as is ‘the
political and economic rule by a single person or a priviledged class by any
kind of despotism, dictatorship, feudalism or capitalism’. It sought the rule of
the working people over the social, economic and political forces of society
by a system of self-government in every social, political and economic sphere,

1. Praja Socialist Party, p. 9.

2. Statement o f policy o f the Socialist Party (Bombay, 1951), p. 7.
3. For Jayaprakash Narayan’s speech, see Madras Report, pp. 132-42.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 237
as well as the democratic decentralization of power and responsibility. The
people are considered as the source of authority, and the right to insurrection
is recognized in the event of any single person or minority group or class
attempting to seize control of the institutions of government or society.
Therefore democratic Socialism [the programme continued] is certainly opposed
to Communism, which tends to be more totalitarian, authoritarian and dictatorial
in character. In the Soviet Union—still considered to be their fatherland, by Indian
Communists—Marxism has been transformed into bureaucratic Socialism, the pro-
letarian revolution into a revolution of the bureaucracy, the dictatorship of the
proletariat into a dictatorship by industry over the peasants and the dictatorship by
a Communist party clique into a dictatorship over the whole of the population.. . .
None of which equates with Socialism.1

The Socialist party had entered into the election campaign of 1951 with a
manifesto based on a programme adopted by its Madras conference in 1950.123
This developed plans for a far-reaching agrarian reform and Socialist legisla-
tion—reforms which would introduce ‘light and hope into millions of homes
darkened by poverty and ignorance’. But, at the same time, it declared that
‘without a fundamental change in the social and economical structure of
society, the problems of poverty and ignorance can never be surmounted’.
‘As long as the present social order continues to rest on exploitation,
inequality and privilege,’ it continued, ‘poverty cannot be banished.’
The party went into the campaign with high expectations. It had, during
the course of a year, almost doubled its membership from 151,972 in 1950
to 295,554 in 1951,® and it had laid before the electorate its well-defined ideas
for far-reaching reforms.4 It could not, of course, hope to defeat the National
Congress, the triumphant symbol of the national freedom struggle with its
leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, the most popular figure in India. But its hope had
been to emerge as the second strongest party, and so to win the recognized
rights of an opposition party to the Congress government.
In the event the expectation was not fulfilled. While the Socialist party did
indeed emerge as numerically the second strongest party according to the
votes cast, the Communist party emerged as the second strongest party by
parliamentary seats. The Socialist party vote was threefold that of the
Communist party—11,216,000 to 3,484,000—but it gained only twelve seats

1. Policy Statement, adopted by the second national conference of the Praja Socialist
Party, Gaya, December 1955 (New Delhi, 1956), pp. 6 and 93-4.
2. Programme fo r the National Revival in Madras Report, pp. 189-201. The manifesto
appeared under the title We Build fo r Socialism (Bombay, 1951). For a review of the mani-
festo, see Singh, History o f the Praja Socialist Party, pp. 137-49.
3. See Prem Bahsin’s report in Report o f the Special Convention o f the Socialist Party
(Pachmarhi, 1952) p. 120.
4. ‘The Socialist party had issued the largest and best-written manifesto’, W. Morris-
Jones, ‘The Indian Elections’, in Political Quarterly, July-September, 1950, cited in Singh,
History o f the Praja Socialist Party, p. 137.
238 Socialism and Communism in Asia
to the Communists’ sixteen; furthermore, the Communists were in alliance
with two parties which together had won 1,866,000 votes and ten seats in the
Lok Sabha.
The Socialist party had not faced the Communist party alone in the
election fight, but had had to compete for votes with ten other parties com-
mitted to a programme of Socialist change. Eight of them were splinter
parties with revolutionary Marxist principles, of which two, with nearly
seven million votes, could be considered ideologically close to the Social
Democrat position. The strongest of these, the Kisan Mazdoor Praja party
(K.M.P.P.), with more than six million votes and ten seats, merged
shortly after the election with the Socialist party to become the Praja Socialist
party (P.S.P.).

The fact that over a fifth of the electorate who went to the ballot box, or
nearly twenty-four million electors,1 voted for parties which stood for a
Socialist transformation of society, reflects how the Socialist idea had
developed in India following independence.
Even more indicative of the political mood, however, was the attitude
which the National Congress party adopted during the campaign. To win the
sympathies of the electorate it was also obliged to canvass in Socialist
language, carefully taking on the appearance of a Socialist party; it obtained
forty-seven million votes, or 45 per cent of those cast.
After the election, the Congress party allowed its Socialist colouring to
emerge to an even greater extent. At a conference in Avadi, in 1955, it
announced ‘the establishment of a Socialist pattern of society’ as the objective
of the Congress. And two years later, in January 1957, the Congress amended
its constitution, proclaiming as its aim ‘the establishment in India of a
Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth’. ‘Essentially, this means,’ the White
Paper on India’s Second Five-Year Plan explained, ‘that the basic criterion
for determining the lines of advance must not be private profit but social
gain___ The benefits of economic development must accrue more and more
to the relatively less privileged classes of society, and there should be pro-
gressive reduction of the concentration of incomes, wealth and economic
power___ The public sector has to expand rapidly.’ And the White Paper
even declared that the First Five-Year Plan, which had ended in March 1956,
had already laid the foundation on which to construct a society of a Socialist
pattern.2
The Congress party’s election manifesto in 1957 announced ‘as its objec-
tive a society Socialist in character’, in which, it explained, ‘there would be
1. Over eleven million for the Socialist party, six million for the Communist party and
its allies and eight million for the ten parties mentioned above. For an analysis of the
election result and the characters of the parties, see Asoka Mehta, The Political M ind o f
India (Bombay, 1952).
2. Second Five-Year Plan (Delhi, 1956), viii , 10.
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 239
no exploitation and no monopolies and where inequality of income would
progressively be reduced’.1
The Socialist party thus came to stand in competition for votes both with
the Congress party, confronting it in raiments of Socialism, and with the
Communist party, which had meanwhile renounced any revolutionary aspira-
tions and had taken on the mantle of a respectable, constitutional democratic
opposition party, while trying to gain the trust of the masses as the rep-
resentative of radical Socialism.
In its conflict with the Congress version of Socialism on the one hand and
the unscrupulous opportunism of the Communists on the other, the Socialist
party suffered a setback in the election campaign of April 1957. Certainly it
won 11,640,000 votes, which were ostensibly 400,000 votes more than in the
previous election, but since it had in the meantime amalgamated with the
K.M.P.P. and both parties had together polled more than seventeen million
votes in the earlier election, six million votes had actually been lost. The
Communists and their associates won, by contrast, 11,400,000 votes, or six
million more than previously.2 They even won a small majority in the state of
Kerala in southern India, and under the leadership of E. M. S. Namboodiri-
pad, formed the first purely Communist government within a democratic
state.

The Praja Socialist party had been enfeebled by a split which occurred a year
and a half before the elections. In 1955, Ram Manohar Lohia, one of the
party’s most brilliant leaders, had broken away to form the Samyukta
Socialist party (S.S.P.), which, in the elections of 1957, gained in its struggle
with the P.S.P. over a million votes.
Differences rather in the cultural orientation of the party than in its
fundamental principles had, in the last resort, destroyed its unity. The
ideology and methods of the P.S.P. had been moulded on the Western
European style of Social Democracy. Like the Congress party, it was orien-
tated towards the West and sought to modernize India through the ideas,
technology, institutions and democratic methods of Western Europe. Lohia,
on the other hand, disdained westernization. In his search for an Indian road
to Socialism, he stood for cultural nationalism, as was shown by his attitude
to the complex problem of language in India whose many nations possess no
common language. The second language which serves as a common language
for the conglomerate of nations on the Indian sub-continent—for use in
Parliament, the courts, the administration and universities—is English.
But in practice English serves only the educated middle class as a second
1. Quoted in Fact and Fiction in the Congress Manifesto, a Praja Socialist party publica-
tion (New Delhi, 1957), pp. 3 and 6-7.
2. In the earlier 1951-2 elections the Socialist party had won 11,216,000 and the
K.M.P.P. 6,226,000 votes, equalling 17,442,000 votes together. The Communists won
3,484,000 and their associates 1,866,000 votes, amounting together to 5,350,000.
 240 Socialism and Communism in Asia
language. Lohia perceived the umbilical cord existing between India’s privi-
leged elite and their English education. Thus the English language in fact
assumed the character of a class barrier, strengthening and sanctifying the
exclusiveness and privileges of the educated middle class. Lohia therefore
attacked the privileged position held by English as the second language, since
in his view it was preventing the development of India’s languages and culture.
He demanded that it should be supplanted by Hindi, a language understood
by a majority of the people.
The P.S.P. was not by any means opposed in principle to the substitution
of Hindi for English as India’s ‘link language’, but it saw the need for a
longer transitional period than Lohia had visualized, and had declined to
make the language question one of high priority, as Lohia had demanded.1
Lohia’s alliance with cultural nationalism became a source of strength for
the S.S.P. So did his party’s association with the depressed classes—the
harijans—for although the Constitution had abolished untouchability and
made it an offence under the law, untouchability remained rampant in every
town and village. In the elections of 1967, the S.S.P. outstripped the P.S.P. It
polled 7,171,000 votes to the P.S.P.’s 4,456,000.

But far more fundamental were the dissensions within the Communist party.
It split over differences of opinion over the methods and tactics to be used in
its struggle for state power—whether this was to be achieved by armed
insurrection or by parliamentary democracy, and whether it should pursue
the Russian road to Socialism or an Indian road.
Following the collapse of the insurrection in Telengana and the fiasco of
the revolutionary strikes of 1946-8, B. T. Ranadive, the leader of the party’s
left wing, as mentioned earlier,2 had been overthrown as general secretary
and replaced by Ajoy Gosh, leader of the party’s right wing, who had opposed
Ranadive’s ‘adventurist policy’. Under Gosh’s leadership the party changed
its tactics radically. It disclaimed force as a method in the political struggle
and avowed its recognition of democratic constitutional methods as the
instrument for the peaceful transformation of existing society into a Socialist
commonwealth. It proclaimed an ‘Indian road to Socialism’ and stood with
the leftists and centrists of the Congress party to support a ‘national demo-
cratic front’ as a milestone on the road to Socialism. The party’s left wing,
however, condemned this policy as both a betrayal of Marxism and ‘parlia-
mentary revisionalism’.3
China’s invasion of India across the Himalayas in 1962 introduced a new
element of dissension into the conflict within the party. While the right wing,
now led by S. A. Dange (Ajoy Gosh died in 1962), supported the Nehru
1. For a brief survey of the controversy, see Sitanshu Das, The Future o f Indian Demo-
cracy (London, 1970), pp. 33-4.
2. See page 231.
3. See Das, The Future o f Indian Democracy, p. 21.
3 Congress o f the Socialist International in London, Ju ly 1955.
On the p latform ( f r o m le ft t o r i g h t ) ; Julius Braunthal, Edith S um m erskill,
M organ Phillips, Guy M ollet, Erich Ollenhauer
4 Congress o f the Socialist International in Vienna, Ju ly 1957
 Bolshevism and Social Democracy in India 241
government’s armed resistance to the Chinese attack, the left wing, under
the leadership of Namboodiripad, stood for the solidarity of the Indian
Communists with Communist China. In an effort to preserve party unity, the
C.P.I. national council, meeting in April 1962, divided its leadership between
the left and right wings: Namboodiripad was elected general secretary and
Dange chairman.
The party eventually split under the impact of the Moscow-Peking
conflict1 in July 1964, when the pro-Chinese left wing broke away to
establish itself as the ‘Communist party (Marxist)’. In the 1967 elections it
polled 6,140,000 votes as against the 7,564,000 which went to the Moscow-
recognized C.P.I. But the Communist party (Marxist) did become the
strongest party in Kerala and West Bengal and in both states it was able
to form governments in coalition with non-Socialist parties.12
Yet, in the event, the Communist party (Marxist) was also to be rent
asunder by conflict over Peking’s policy towards the India-Pakistan dispute
over Kashmir. While the party supported India’s claim to Kashmir, Peking
supported Pakistan. Furthermore it recognized parliamentary democracy as
the method for India’s road to Socialism, while Peking despised this as a
method. The policy of peaceful coexistence which it supported was rejected
by Peking as a ‘modern revisionism’. The press and radio of Peking
relentlessly denounced the leaders of the Communist party (Marxist) as
‘revisionists’. Ultimately its dissenting left wing split away in April 1969 to
form, under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the
‘Communist party (Marxist-Leninist)’.
As a revolutionary party, it adopted Mao Tse-tung’s tactics of guerrilla
warfare. In Naxalbari, in the northern regions of West Bengal, it established
a base to promote a guerrilla war by the agricultural proletariat against the
peasant landowners, taking over their land and killing not a few of them. The
movement spread to Calcutta, subjecting the vast city to a rule of terror. By
the end of 1969 well over 700 political murders had been reported.
The coalition government of West Bengal, led by the Communist party
(Marxist), made an attempt to suppress the ‘Naxalists’ and arrested several of
their leaders, but was unable to quell the movement. Under the impact of the
violence which it had unleashed, the Communist coalition government
foundered in March 1970.3

1. See page 475f.

2. The C.P.I. had become the strongest party in Kerala in the elections of 1957, ruling
there as the leading force in a coalition government until 1959.
3. See Das, The Future o f Indian Democracy, pp. 30-1.
 11 • Hindu and Buddhist Socialism

Two thirds of India’s electorate, numbering seventy-two million people, had,

as we have seen, voted for the parties which had canvassed them in Socialist
terms. In Burma, every party had pledged itself to some version of Marxism
in competing for the votes of the electorate, however vaguely this was
formulated. ‘Marxist slogans’, J. S. Thomson began an essay on Marxism
in Burma, ‘dominated the speeches in Burma’s election battle of 1956.
From the Prime Minister Nu, the leader of the Anti-Fascist People’s
Freedom League (A.F.P.F.L.), and Dr E. Maung, leader of the Communist-
directed National United Front (N.U.F.), to U Tun Pe on the democratic
right, the political leaders of Burma relied on a Marxist appeal to the
electorate.’1
That Socialist ideas, let alone Marxist theories, could spread within a
Hindu culture is a measure of the tremendous social and spiritual revolution
which had been unchained by the struggle of the Asian peoples for national
independence: for the concepts of Socialism are obviously in sharp contrast
to the fundamentals of Hindu philosophy.
The Socialist ideas of a new economic order of human society and
Socialism’s concern with the material and social conditions of man contradict
the Hindu belief in the vanity of human existence. According to the Hindu
doctrine, Professor Prasad observed, ‘the human being is on a pilgrimage to
salvation. Material existence is a halting place on the way. Wealth, desire
and the preservation of the individual are meaningless—illusory maya. Life
is an endless cycle of desires and miseries. The individual’s task is to free
1. John Seabury Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Frank N. Trager (ed.), M arxism
in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1960), p. 15. Another study of Burma emphasized that,
‘Marxism, although not Communism, was in fact the theory favoured in varying degrees by
most of the political parties and organizations after the war, and so it has remained until
the present day’—Malcolm D. Kennedy, A Short History o f Communism in Asia (London,
1957), p. 442.
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 243
himself from this cycle: to renounce the world, scorn material things
and ultimately annihilate the self by merging in the Shtmya—the void or
zero.’1
Thus Hinduism inculcates a complete detachment from the affairs of this
life and complete indifference to social and economic suffering. The extinction
of being is its noblest aim, non-existence being in its scale of values the highest
ideal, the longing for non-existence being an expression of profound religious
feeling. ‘The Indian concept of life,’ Jayaprakash Narayan, a leading con-
temporary Socialist, explained in one of his speeches, ‘is that we live in order
to achieve our deliverance—whether we call it Nirvana with the Buddhists or
Mokshe with the Hindus—deliverance from the limitations of time and space,
from the limitations of life and death, from bondage. This was regarded as the
noblest effort, the noblest ideal for humankind to follow: deliverance. Every
individual was expected to fight his own battle, not the state for him. Every
individual had to struggle in order to free himself from the limitations
that his Karma had imposed upon him.’2 Thus Hinduism, rejecting the
value of life, stands in contrast to Socialism, which sees life as the highest
value.
Also completely incompatible with the religion of Hinduism is the
premise of Socialism that all human beings are bom equal, and that social
and economic inequalities are caused by the social and economic structure of
society. For Hinduism, human beings are by no means bom equal, but are
bom into a hierarchy of castes—one into a higher, another into a lower caste,
according to the merits and demerits of a being in past existences. The
human individual is at the mercy of the inescapable round of rebirth and the
soul’s reincarnation, the infinite succession of life and death with the law of
Karma being fulfilled—the inexorable law of retributive justice, according to
which one is rewarded for good action and punished for evil, even if not in
the present existence.3 And each man has no choice except to be reconciled to
his fate.
The very concept of social justice is therefore foreign to Hindu philosophy.
According to the laws of Manu, each one of the four basic castes has been
allotted by divine law a clearly defined social position in the hierarchy of
Hindu society. Privileges go to the highest castes, and duties to the lowest—
the caste of the Sudras, which, regarded as inferior by nature, is sentenced to
1. Narmadeshwar Prasad, ‘Social Immobility in Asia’, in Jayaprakash Narayan,
Cultural Freedom in Asia (Tokyo, 1956) p. 144.
2. The speech quoted was given by Narayan at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in
Rangoon in 1955; see ibid., p. 19.
3. The Upanishads teach that ‘one can be reborn as a worm or a moth, or as a bird or
as a tiger . . . or as a human being . . . according to one’s Karma’—quoted in Edward J.
Thomas, The History o f Buddhist Thought (London 1933), p. 110. The Rig Veda universalize
the concept of Karma. According to their teaching, all manifestations in the universe are
subject to the law of Karma—from the course of the sun to the duties of every human
being according to his caste; see ibid., p. 109.
244 Socialism and Communism in Asia
servitude under the higher castes, and even more so the casteless, the so-called
Untouchables rejected by Indian society.1
Within such a framework of a philosophy of life, social and economic
disparities in human society can never be bridged by any social and economic
change. For, in the Hindu’s view, the hierarchical order is independent of any
political, social or economic structure of society, and therefore remains un-
touched by social reform.2 Like the movement of the heavenly bodies, it
remains unchangeable.
Thus no human being is able to escape the fate imposed by the law of
Karma, for merits and demerits in previous existences govern his present
condition of life and his destiny in any future existence.3 Within such a con-
text, contemplating reforms with the object of setting up a social order of
equals would naturally appear to be wanton interference with divine or
cosmic laws. As one Indian Socialist lamented in despair: ‘Hinduism militates
against the spirit of modem Socialism. . . . The Gods in India tolerate
indifference to the world, injustice to the suppressed, distinction for the
dogmatist and agony for the social revolutionary.’4

Most of the young Indian intellectuals who had been inspired by Socialist
and Marxist ideas in the 1920s and 1930s felt nevertheless that their roots
still lay in the Hindu tradition; they did not, at any event, fundamentally
challenge the Hindu concept of life. But they did seek a new interpretation of
Hinduism.
The first real attempt to reconcile Socialism with the Hindu religious
tradition was made by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) during his later years.
He had, he recorded, reached the conclusion from his studies of religious
writings—even before reading Das Kapital and other works of Marx, Engels
and Lenin during his imprisonment in the camp in the Aga Khan’s palace—
that ‘Socialism was the only way to liberate mankind from its misery’. Yet he
could only have reached this conviction by a fresh interpretation of the
religious writings. As an orthodox Hindu, a sanatani, as he called himself,
Gandhi held to the doctrine of a caste-order, the varnashrama dharma. ‘I
1. The Laws o f Maim in the Sacred Books o f the East, vol. xxv, 1, pp. 88-91.
2. The Indian constitution has relieved the inequality under the law of the casteless
pariah; but in practice the caste system has remained untouched by the political changes
which have taken place in India since the struggle for independence began. See the excellent
study by Narmadeshwar Prasad, The M yth o f the Caste System (Patna, 1957).
3. T h e castes can exist side by side in embittered hatred only because each one has
“earned” his fate, but this does not make the better fate of the other any more comforting
for the socially injured. The ideas of revolution or aspiring to “progress” were unthinkable
on this basis, as long and as far as the Karman teachings remained immovable’—Max
Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. n: Hinduismus und Buddhismus
(Tubingen, 1923), p. 122.
4. Biij Mohan Toofan, The March o f Science and Socialism and Indian Religious
Society, Paper of the Second Political Forum of the Asian Labour Institute (Friedrich
Ebert Stiftung), Tokyo, October 1968.
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 245
believe,’ he wrote, ‘in the varnashrama dharma, but in the strictly vedic
meaning, not in the present outward sense___ Varnashrama is inborn in
human nature___ It is destined by birth. A person cannot change his varna
[caste] according to free will___ 51 But varna he interpreted as being ‘the law
of heritage’ and the heritage of the professions. He rejected the hierarchical
character of the caste-order as well as its scale of social and moral values;2
just like every profession, so every caste was equal. And he rejected the over-
whelming Hindu concept of the inherited inequality of the individual. ‘I
believe implictly,’ he wrote, ‘that all men are born equal.’3
He substantiated his profession of Socialism in a new selection of
religious writings. ‘As I have contended,’ he wrote, ‘Socialism, even Com-
munism, is explicit in the first verse of the Upanishads.’4 He rejected the
principle of private ownership on the grounds of religious conviction, be-
cause, he said, it conflicted with the law of God’s possession. ‘Everything,’ he
stated, ‘belongs to God and was from God. Therefore it was for his people as
a whole, not for a particular individual.’5
But, with the idea of non-violence uppermost, he strove to abolish private
property and to resolve economic conflict not by a class confrontation
brought about by state legislation, but by friendly persuasion to convert the
propertied classes to their duties as ‘trustees’ of society. As ownership came
from God, and therefore possessions were given to the whole people, so, he
concluded, ‘when an individual had more than his proportionate portion he
became a trustee of that portion for God’s people.’*
‘Non-violent Socialism,’ as Gandhi envisaged it, had to rest on the
principle of ‘trusteeship’. ‘Trusteeship,’ he maintained, ‘provides a means of
transforming the present capitalist order of society into an egalitarian one. It
1. Mahatma Gandhi, Jung-Indien. Aufsdtze aus den Jahren 1919 bis 1922, edited by
Romain Rolland and Madeleine Rolland (Erlenbach and Zurich, 1924), pp. 345 and 347.
2. Gandhi passionately condemned the degradation of the untouchables as social out-
casts. ‘If we as Indians are the outcasts of the British Empire,’ he wrote, ‘then it is only a
just reprisal meted out by a just God. Can we ask the English to wash their blood-stained
hands before we wash our own? The principle of untouchability has lowered us, has
reduced us to castelessness. As long as Indians consider untouchability to be a part of their
religion, so long will freedom remain unattainable for us’—Jung-Indien, p. 278; see also
pp. 221 ff.
3. Jung-Indien, 29 September 1927, quoted in K. G. Mashruwala, Gandhi and M arx,
with an Introduction by Vinoba Bhave (Ahmedabad, 1954), p. 75. Rabindranath Tagore
not only rejected the hierarchical character of the caste-order, but the caste system in
general. India’s liberation from British rule would not be adequate, he wrote, if India
could not free herself from the source of the main social evil—the caste-system. ‘The
narrow-mindedness which has made it possible for us to impose on a human majority [the
Sudras, members of the lowest caste, and the casteless outcasts] the heavy yoke of in-
feriority, will support itself in a policy of tyranny___ The regeneration of the Indian
people depends, in my view, immediately and perhaps only on the abolition of the caste-
system’—quoted in Helmuth von Glasenapp, Der Hinduismus (Munich, 1922), p. 328.
4. M. K. Gandhi, Towards Non-Violent Socialism, edited by Bharatan Kumarappa
(Ahmedabad, 1951), p. 132.
5. ibid., p. 135. 6, ibid., p. 135.
 246 Socialism and Communism in Asia
gives no quarter to capitalism, but gives the present owning class a chance to
reform itself.. . . It does not recognize any right to the private ownership of
property except in so far as it may be permitted by society for its own welfare.
It does not exclude legislative regulation of the ownership and use of wealth.
Thus under state-regulated trusteeship, an individual will not be free to hold
or use his wealth for selfish satisfaction or in disregard of the interests of
society.. . . The character of production will be determined by social necessity
and not by personal whim or greed.’1
For the peaceful process of realizing Socialism by the method of trustee-
ship, Gandhi coined the expression ‘sarvodaya’—‘all goods for all’. Vinoba
Bhave later developed Gandhi’s ideas, and attempted to realize them.
Gandhi’s technique of non-violent resistance to the ruling power of the state
in India’s struggle for independence had been a moral revolt, supported by a
mass movement. By a similar technique of religious and moral appeal,
Bhave attempted to achieve an agrarian revolution—a redistribution of land
among the landless peasants by a mass movement of land donations—he
called it the bhoodan movement—and the transfer of property rights to land
to the common ownership of a village—called gramdan, ‘common usufract’ of
the lands. In fact, since the beginning of the bhoodan movement in 1951,
several hundred thousand square kilometres of land have been redistributed
and thousands of villages been transformed into gramdan villages.1 2 None of
this has been effected by law or direct force, but solely by an appeal to
religious and social conscience—an appeal which rests on the belief that all
property is given by God for society at large and that the occupier is therefore
not the owner, but only the administrator and trustee.
Like Marxist Socialism, sarvodaya strives to attain a classless order of
society. But it rejects the Marxist road to Socialism: the class struggle, the
fight for political power, the theory of state power as an instrument for
changing a capitalist economy into a Socialist one as well as the role of force
necessary to the process. It seeks to build a Socialist society, not by the
state, but through the initiative of the masses; not by a class struggle, but
through the harmonious co-operation of all classes; not by the overthrow of
the ruling classes by a proletarian revolution, but through their conversion by
moral and religious appeal.
In contrast to the Marxist’s ‘state Socialism’, sarvodaya Socialism has
been defined by Jayaprakash Narayan as a ‘people’s Socialism’. It seeks the

1. M. K. Gandhi, Economic and Industrial Life and Relations, edited by V. B. Kher,

vol. i (Ahmedabad, 1957), p. 127. For a Marxist analysis of Gandhi’s social ideas, see
Buddhadeva Bhattacharyya, Evolution o f the Political Philosophy o f Gandhi (Calcutta,
1969). For a Marxist interpretation of Gandhi’s historical role, see Julius Braunthal,
‘Mahatma Gandhi und Indiens Revolution', in Der Kampf, vol. xvn (1924).
2. For a survey of the successes as well as the setbacks of the gramdan movement, see
Gene D. Overstreet, ‘India’, in James B. Christoph (ed.), Cases in Comparative Politics
(Boston, 1965), pp. 486-95.
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 247
utmost decentralization of economic and political power, the highest degree
of self-government and self-administration by the people, and the least
degree of interference in economic and social life by the power of the state. It
strives towards a ‘non-party democracy’, like that effected within the bhoodan
movement by the co-operation of followers from different political parties
who have common ideals and aims. And as an indispensable prerequisite for
the realization of Socialism, it strives to develop social forms of life through
a radical reassessment of the prevailing values and by a moral revolution.1

Gandhi’s ethical and social ideals had exerted a deep influence on the Socialist
party following its fusion with the K.M.P.P. under the leadership of Gandhi’s
disciple Acharja Kripalani. The ‘Political Statement’ adopted by the Gaya
Conference in 1955 declared ‘that Indian Socialists had recognized under
Gandhi’s impact the importance of non-violence in the struggle and the
purity of his methods, like the decentralization of democracy and the econ-
omy’. For them also, it stated, ‘the Socialist movement has never been
exclusively an economic movement; it is also an ethical and cultural one. We
have, therefore, worked for the moral and cultural as well as for the economic
revolution.’
But, in variance with Gandhi’s ideas, the declaration went on to say that
‘class struggle is unavoidable in the social revolution’ and that ‘the party has
never been deceived that moral appeals to justice might move the ruling
classes voluntarily to liquidate their rule and exploitation’.
In affirming its Marxist concept of the class struggle, the conference
declared: ‘The class struggle must remain an insoluble symptom of the class
society in its various forms so long as society is divided into classes___ No
radical change in the economic order has ever taken place automatically.
Even if the economic conditions were ripe for change, the ruling class would
resist it. History knows of no single instance when a class has accepted
the liquidation of its rule and privileges on a moral appeal and without a
fight. And there is no reason to believe that India’s capitalists would show
themselves to be more human than their brothers in the rest of the
world.’2
While the Praja Socialist party did not identify itself with the bhoodan
movement, it gave it moral support.3
1. For the discussion of the differences between the Marxist concept of Socialism and
sarvodaya Socialism, see Jayaprakash Narayan, From Socialism to Sarvodaya (Rajghat,
1958). For a profile of Vinoba Bhave, his teaching and action, see Suresh Ramabhai,
Vinoba and his Mission (Sevagram, 1954). For a biographical essay on Narayan, see Herbert
Passin, ‘The Jeevan Dani: A Profile of Jayaprakash Narayan’, in Encounter, June 1958,
pp. 46-55.
2. Report of the Second National Conference of the Praja Socialist Party, Gaya,
December 1955 (New Delhi, 1956), pp. 172 and 197. This ‘political declaration’, drawn up
by Narenda Deva, is the most searching theoretical explanation of the party’s ideology.
3. ibid., p. 182.
248 Socialism and Communism in Asia
If there is any other Socialist party which is ideologically close to us [wrote one
of its leaders], then it is the bhoodan movement. We cannot, however, in the present
political and economic situation, accept the ideal of a ‘non-party democracy’ and a
stateless society. But the general objectives and new values which the bhoodan
movement is attempting to bring forth stem from our common rich past.1

In Burma, the national freedom movement had developed much later than in
India. It received its initial impetus from a peasants’ revolt in 1930-1. It was
not until the 1930s that Marxist literature found its way into the country.
When it did, the young nationalist intellectuals eagerly seized on Marxism as
a source of enlightenment. It provided them with a theoretical basis and
moral justification in their fight against British Imperialism as well as against
the foreign capitalism whose exploitation had reduced their country to
poverty. English capital was in possession of teak forests, petroleum sources
and mineral mines, and had developed the production and export of rice to
a high degree. Every village had its Indian, and often also its Chinese,
moneylender, whose rates of interest were between 15 and 36 per cent. And
when the price of rice dropped as a result of the rapid expansion in rice
production, the Burmese peasant fell into debt and finally lost his land. ‘The
Indians, particularly the Chattyar moneylenders, came near to destroying the
Burmese peasantry of Lower Burma.’2 The peasants’ reaction was the revolt
of 1930.
About two thirds of the cultivated land in Burma had fallen into the
hands of the Indian and Chinese moneylenders; Indian coolies, brought in
from Bengal, had forced down the wages of the Burmese workers;8 Indian
and Chinese capitalists governed the rice-mills and the rice trade and, in
Rangoon, the retail trade and most of the industrial factories. A capitalist
middle class hardly existed among the indigenous Burmese. Rangoon, the
capital of Burma, was more an Indian than a Burmese city. ‘Almost all
local-bom nationalists belonged to the “suppressed” class, while the capitalist
and imperialist, an almost complete stranger, belonged to the class of the
“oppressor” .’4
A social conflict—the peasants’ revolt—had ignited the national struggle
1. Ishwarlal Desai, ‘Need for a New Dimension’, in The New Socialist, vol. i (1958).
2. Angus Maude, South Asia (London, 1960), p. 81; see also J. S. Fumivall, Cobnial
Policy and Practice (Cambridge, 1948), and Introduction to the Political Economy o f Burma
(Rangoon, 1957).
3. In December 1930 in Rangoon the situation came to a head in a riot by the Burmese
dockers against the Indian immigrants, especially the Indian coolies. See D. G. E. Hall,
Burma (London, 1950), p. 158.
4. Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager ed., M arxism in Southeast Asia, p. 20.
See also U Ba Swe, The Burmese Revolutbn (Information Department, Union Burma,
1952), pp. 10-11,
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 249
in Burma, and it became, unlike the national struggle in India, at the same
time a fight against capitalism. It was a class struggle of the propertyless
Burmese people against their exploitation by the property-owning classes of
foreign nations. Marxism triumphed in Burma as an ideology because it
offered the intellectual an understanding of the economic and social relation-
ships in colonialism and showed him a way and an objective.
Yet, even as the oppressed in the religious age in Europe had over the
centuries sought to justify their risings against oppression in religious con-
cepts and by ‘Holy writ’,1 so in Southern Asia Socialist ideas could only be
formulated in religious language and concepts. Thus Gandhi deduced his
version of Socialism from the holy scriptures of the Rig Veda, and the
Islamic religious Socialists, as we shall see later, derived theirs from the Koran.
In Burma, a profoundly religious country, Marxism could only become
the ideology of a mass movement by a symbiosis with Buddhism, which is
deeply rooted in the country’s religious, cultural and national traditions. Over
many centuries of dynastic history it has come to govern overwhelmingly the
emotions and thinking of the whole nation, and so Marxism had to be
assimilated into Buddhist concepts and terminology.
The Theravada version of Buddhism found in Burma offers less resistance
than Hinduism to the assimilation of Marxism. Buddhism is hardly touched
by the Hindu concept of caste; the Buddhist monasteries include members
of every caste as well as outcasts in their monastic communities. Buddhism
entirely rejects the hierarchical structure of the caste-system.12
In contrast to the Hindu community, the modem Buddhists of Burma
could draw upon ideas expressed centuries before the spread of Socialist and
Marxist ideas and conclude from the teachings of Buddha ‘that all men are
bom equal and that [social] differences are superficial and the work of men’.3

1. The classic documents which justify a social uprising by invoking the gospels are
the Twelve Articles of the insurgent German peasants of 1525 in their fight for freedom from
bondage. Bondage, the Articles stated, ‘is most wretched seeing that Christ has released and
bought us with his dearly shed blood, the shepherds as well as the illustrious, with no
exceptions. Therefore it is shown by the gospel that we are free, and we wish to be so’. For
economic and social motives in the early Church, see Karl Kautsky, Ursprung des Christen-
tums (Stuttgart, 1908). For social-revolutionary elements in religious guise in the chiliastic
movements of the Middle Ages, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit o f the Millennium (London,
1957); for a religious-Socialist undercurrent in the English revolution of the seventeenth
century, see Eduard Bernstein, Sozialismus und Demokratie in der englischen Revolution
(Stuttgart, 1908), and H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (London,
1961). The French Revolution of 1789 was the first political and social revolution to be free
of religious undercurrents.
2. ‘Not by birth does one become a Brahman, not by birth does one become caste-
less One becomes casteless by deeds, by deeds a Brahman,’ the Buddhist writings
stated; quoted in E. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds o f the Burmese Revolution, with a
Preface by Dr Paul Mus (The Hague, 1965) pp. 24-5. This work is the most thorough study
of the social aspects of Buddhism so far undertaken.
3. Maha Bodhi and the United Buddhist World, vol. xv (August, 1907) cited in ibid.,
p. 121.
 250 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The Buddha gave the monastic order which he founded a democratic, re-
publican constitution, which remained unweakened during two and a half
millennia and which became, in the twentieth century, a source of inspiration
for democratic ideologies.
Under the influence of Marxism, the teachings of Buddha were interpreted
in their deepest social sense and were defined by some Buddhist thinkers as
forerunners of Marxist ideas. As U Ba Yin, the minister for education, wrote,
for example, Karl Marx must ‘have been influenced directly or indirectly by
Buddhism’. ‘Buddhism is communistic,’ he commented, ‘because it rejects
any form of rule and exploitation.’1 Within the Samgha, the community of
Buddhist monasteries, a ‘Society of Marxist Monks’ was formed, and these
welcomed the beginning of Socialism in Burma as the dawn of an epoch
which was to see the fulfilment of the Buddha’s teaching.12
But above all it was U Ba Swe (b. 1915), in his attempt to harmonize
Marxism with Buddhism, who impressed upon Burmese Socialism the peculiar
character of a Buddhist-Marxist ideology. U Ba Swe stood among the
outstanding leaders of the Burmese revolution and was one of the architects
of the Burmese Republic; he had been general secretary of the Socialist party,
president of the Trade Union Council and president of the Asian Socialist
Conference.
U Ba Swe saw Buddhism, like Marxism, as a philosophy which strove to
release mankind from suffering; Buddhist philosophy sought release from
spiritual suffering, Marxist philosophy from economic suffering. Both
philosophies pointed the way to Nirvana; Buddhism to a spiritual Nirvana—
a spiritual state of the total release of human beings from passion and the
demands of selfish greed; Marxism to a ‘worldly Nirvana', the Loka Nibban, a
‘state of peace and harmony’.8
Marxist theory, he stated in December 1951 at a conference of trade
union leaders, ‘is not antagonistic to Buddhist philosophy. The two are,
frankly speaking, not merely similar. In fact, they are the same in concept-----
Marxist theory deals with mundane affairs and seeks to satisfy material
needs in life. Buddhist philosophy, however, deals with the solution of
spiritual matters with a view to seeking spiritual satisfaction in this life and
liberation from this mundane world.’
He then made a confession of faith. ‘I declare,’ he said, ‘that I have
implicit faith in Marxism, but at the same time I boldly assert that I am
a true Buddhist. In the beginning, I was a Buddhist only by tradition.
The more I study Marxism, however, the more I feel convinced in
Buddhism.’
Yet, for the tasks which faced the Burmese revolution, only Marxism

1. Quoted in Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds o f the Burmese Revolution, pp. 192-3,

198.
2. See ibid., p. 199. 3. Quoted in ibid., pp. 169-70.
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 251
could provide it with an ideology. Marxism, he stated, ‘is the guide to action
in our revolutionary movement, in our establishment of a Socialist Burmese
State for workers and peasants. Our revolution can only be achieved with
Marxism as a guiding principle. Only Marxism can pave the way for the
attainment of the goal to which we look forward. Our revolution is impossible
without Marxism as a guide.’1
But, he hastened to add, the acceptance of Marxism as the guide to the
revolutionary movement did not ‘mean the adoption of Russian methods or
Chinese methods or Yugoslavian methods. The Burmese revolution should
be achieved by Burmese methods.’
Like U Ba Swe, so did U Nu (b. 1907) find his belief in Socialism mirrored
in Buddhist philosophy. He was an ardent Buddhist, not merely by tradition,
but through a deep study of Buddhist texts and he saw his destiny in the
fulfilment of Buddhist teachings. To celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of
Gautama Buddha’s birth in 1954, he convened, as a Buddhist prime minister,
the Sixth Grand Council in Rangoon to revive the purity of Buddha’s original
doctrines through a fresh scrutiny of the Pali canon. The expansion of
Socialist ideology in Burma owed its success in no small degree to his con-
version to Socialism. Together with Aung Saw and U Ba Swe, he stood in the
forefront of the revolution; and after Aung Saw’s assassination in July
1947,12 he became its leader.
U Nu had received his impetus towards Socialism from Marxism after
translating a selection from Das Kapital into Burmese, and Marxism had
become the predominant influence in his view of social problems. Yet when
he analysed them in his speeches and writings, he used the terminologies of
Buddhism. When, for example, he defined the institution of private property
as the cause of class division and class struggle, he was following in Marx’s
own footsteps. ‘Since the inception of private property,’ he said, paraphrasing
the Communist Manifesto, ‘the history of the world has become [a history of]
class struggles.’ In Marxist terms, he described how, through the institution
of private property, humanity had been divided into the exploiting and the
exploited, into oppressors and oppressed, and how the majority of people
had become increasingly impoverished despite the abundance of natural
resources. To justify the need to abolish private property, however, he
turned to a ‘correct’ interpretation of Buddhist writings. Its abolition would,
he said, ‘not only end the bloody conflict between classes, but will also . . .
eliminate class differences, overwork, theft, squabbling and fraud. . . . The
world will rise to freedom out of this misery.’3 But as he described the
Socialist order of society in the picture he painted of the ideal future, it was
as it had been promised in the Buddhist writings—a society without

1. U Ba Swe, The Burmese Revolution (Rangoon, 1952), pp. 7 and 4.

2. See page 261.
3. Quoted in Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds o f the Burmese Revolution, p. 215.
 252 Socialism and Communism in Asia
oppressors and oppressed, without capitalism, imperialism, or the bloodshed
of wars and class struggles.1
While U Nu accepted the economic theories of Marxism, he rejected,
however, its theory of the state, for he believed this might lead to a totalitarian
system of government and the economic system of state capitalism, as it had
in Russia. In a speech before the third congress of the A.F.P.F.L., the ruling
party, in January 1958, he rejected Marxism as a philosophical-political
ideology. But at the same time he confirmed his belief in the economic
doctrine of Marxism and declared that ‘the fundamental goal, which we must
always keep in view, is the construction in the Union of Burma of a Socialist
state in which capitalism plays no part’.2
Socialism he saw as an economic system, which would, in a sense, bring
about the fulfilment of Buddha’s teaching, at any rate as a way forward to the
goal he had indicated; for the ending of greed, hate and passion at which
Buddhism aims have their origins in the institution of private property. It
was this attitude which won Socialism the support of the monks. When U
Nu’s Socialist programme for the February 1960 election was rejected by the
so-called Buddhist Democratic party as being ‘non-Buddhist’, the abbots of
the most respected monasteries declared themselves in favour of the pro-
gramme and praised U Nu as the statesman who had come closest to the
ideal of a Buddhist statesman in the tradition of the great King Ashoka.
The Socialist ideas advocated by U Nu and U Ba Swe had originally
manifested themselves in the constitution defined by the constituent assembly
on 24 September 1947. This had laid the foundations for a parliamentary
democratic form of government as well as for a welfare state. The Two-Year
Plan for Burma’s Economic Development, which was also ratified by the
constituent assembly, declared its aim to be ‘the development of a fully
Socialist economic constitution in Burma’.3 Political and economic aims
were explained in detail in an interim programme published by the govern-
ment in December 1953, the introduction to which stated:
The ultimate objective of the government and the people of the Union of
Burma, as embodied in the constitution, is to create a democratic Socialist state.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the Socialist state which we wish to set up
includes neither Communism nor state Socialism. The tyranny inborn to both
systems must never be allowed to develop in the Socialist state as we wish to create
it___Socialism in Burma must be fully harmonized with the religious beliefs and
cultural background and heritage of the people.. . . The new epoch is nothing less
than the Pyidawatha state [welfare state], for whose creation we have pledged our-
selves.4
The principles guiding the Burmese government in its setting up of a
1. See ibid., p. 223. 2. U Nu, Towards a Socialist State (Rangoon, 1958), p. 3.
3. U Mya, The Two-Year Plan fo r Economic Development in Burma (Rangoon, 1948),
p. 40.
4. Our Goal and Our Interim Programme (Rangoon, 1953).
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 253
Socialist order of society were formulated in the ‘Interim Programme’ as
follows:
(a) In the Socialist state that we shall create, commerce and industry must serve
the interests of the ludu [masses], and the ludu must not serve the interest of com-
merce and industry. It must not be a system which will extract the maximum profit
from the ludu without any regard for its welfare and interest.
(b) Ultimately, all trade and industry must be organized into public corpora-
tions and co-operatives controlled and managed by the representatives of the
workers and consumers.

The programme stressed above all the necessity to realize the idea of
equality and to develop a system of people’s self-government in every sphere
of political and economic life. The rights of equality and freedom were de-
fined in Article II of the Union of Burma’s constitution as ‘basic rights’, and
democracy as ‘our most treasured possession’.
To protect democracy the parliament passed the Democratic Administra-
tion Act, which delegated political power right down to the smallest village.
‘Through this delegation of power’, the ‘Interim Programme’ declared:
(a) the whole people of the Union will be pledged to take responsibility for the
administration of their own affairs;
(b) by accepting this responsibility, the people will themselves become a
bastion against the misuse of power by the government or power-hungry elements;
(c) the problems of ludu will [by self-administration] be solved far more care-
fully and more satisfactorily;. . . and
(d) the execution of democratic rights and responsibilities in every village unit
will lead to many people becoming educated to a strong belief in democracy and
gaining the experience and knowledge necessary for democratic responsibility.1

The ‘Interim Programme’ embodied an important Socialist principle—

the principle of solidarity in the struggle for human emancipation, unknown
to Hinduism or Buddhism, which preaches indifference towards the world
and its needs—an aspect particularly emphasized in the Theravada Buddhism
which is predominant in Burma, Ceylon, Cambodia and Thailand. This
defines the individual’s liberation as an ultimate goal—not for humanity as a
whole, but by a solitary quest along the Noble Eightfold Path by which the
individual may achieve release from the recurrent cycle of worlds and
existences.
Yet, even so, the people and government of a Buddhist country were able
to pledge themselves constitutionally to establish a Socialist order of society,
founded on the solidarity of the people. This phenomenon alone is a measure
of the influence that Socialist ideas had in southern Asia on a religious
reformation which had received its impetus from social and political
upheaval.
1. Interim Programme, pp. 6 and 1-3.
254 Socialism and Communism in Asia

Socialism in Asia, as an idea and a movement, emanated from the nationalist

revolution of its peoples. This shook the vast proletarian masses in the
villages and towns out of the paralysing apathy into which they had sub-
sided over the centuries. Hitherto they had accepted misery as an inescapable
factor in that religious fatalism upon which the philosophies of Hinduism
and Buddhism, as well as of Islam, rest. The national freedom movement had
awakened their national consciousness. For the first time in their history
they had entered into a conscious struggle to achieve specifically political
aims.
Yet the nationalist revolution had also aroused their social consciousness.
They had become aware of their own misery as no longer an inescapable fate,
but as something which they could expect to be ameliorated by the state,
which was now their state. They began to exert pressure to change the
emphasis from a national to a social revolution—a revolution that would
bring about the fulfilment of social justice.
However, Socialism in Asia received its impetus from economic as well as
from nationalist imperatives. In the countries of southern Asia—pre-
capitalist and industrially underdeveloped countries with small, embattled
capitalist enclaves—the economic misery of the vast and fast expanding
masses could only be relieved by the rapid development of the means of
production; social justice could only follow upon an improved level of
economic development.
The architects of the new independent states therefore faced the question
of the method they would choose to bring about the rapid development of
the means of production. The capitalist method, by which the agrarian
countries of Europe and North America had been industrialized and which
had increased their means of production a thousandfold, would have had the
effect of subjecting the nations of Asia once more to the foreign rule from
which the national revolution had liberated them. Yet since the rate of
accumulation of indigenous capital would have been far too small to allow
for rapid and extensive industrialization, the task, if left to foreign capital,
would inevitably develop a system of a new colonialism. And if profit re-
mained the sole motive behind industrialization, then only those branches of
industry which could expect a relatively high return on capital would be de-
veloped, while immeasurable productive resources would remain unexploited.
But, above all, capitalism hardly seemed an appropriate tool for constructing
a society based on the principle of social justice which had inspired its
national revolution.
The surprising expansion of Socialist ideas in southern Asia may thus be
explained also by the fact that the governments of the newly independent
 Hindu and Buddhist Socialism 255
states pursued economic progress by Socialist methods. They did not leave
the development of the means of production to private capitalist enterprise
working on an anarchical contest basis for the highest possible profit, but
themselves took the initiative by creating a planned economy which, like
India’s Second Five-Year Plan, for example, saw its ‘main task’ as being ‘to
increase the income of the propertyless classes and to reduce the wealth and
privileges of the propertied classes’.1
None of the new states of southern Asia planned a comprehensive
socialization of the economy. They left one sector of industry to private
enterprise and left the land in the hands of the peasants. But they secured the
state’s power over the economy by its control of key sectors. These, according
to India’s Second Five-Year Plan, were ‘all industries of basic and strategic
importance’—seventeen in all—which the government had developed as
nationalized industries using Socialist methods. In a further group of twelve
industries the state had taken the initiative for development while leaving
private enterprise some room for manoeuvre, and the remaining industries
were left entirely in the hands of private enterprise.2
Similar plans for economic reconstruction to those in India were followed
by the governments of Burma, Ceylon and Indonesia. According to the
varied conditions in those countries, they differed in details and degree. But
a Socialist trend was general to them all.
1. See Second Five-Year Plan 1956, p. 17. 2. See ibid., pp. 13-16.
 12 • Socialist and Communist Movements
in Buddhist Countries

1. Burma

A Buddhist-Socialist ideology as the ideology of the Burmese nation had, as

we have seen, developed in the course of the nationalist revolution. The
group which was to become the spearhead of the revolution— Dohbama
Asiayone (the ‘We-Burmans Association’)—was a nationalist organization
founded in 1930 by students of the University of Rangoon. Their members
referred to each other as Thakin, ‘Master’, taking the Burmese form of
address to Europeans so as to demonstrate their objective: to make the
Burmese masters in their own land.
But in the course of the 1930s under the influence of Marxist literature,
many leaders of the Thakin party became either Socialists or Communists. In
August 1939 the Socialists—Thakin Mya (1897-1947), U Ba Swe and Kyaw
Nyein among them—founded a Socialist party under the title of the Burma
Revolutionary party; and in 1943 the Communists, under the leadership of
Thein Pe (alias Myint), Thakin Soe and Thakin Than Tun, founded the
Burma Communist party.1 Both parties were groups within the Thakin
movement, which did not, however, declare itself for any Socialist ideology
until the gaining of independence; it remained an exclusively nationalist
movement.
The national movement, which until the uprising in Rangoon in July 1938
—an eruption of hatred between Burmese and Indians—was largely one of
the intellectuals, provided the impetus for its transformation into a mass
movement of workers and peasants; it accepted the leadership of the Socialist
Thakins. In the wake of the uprising, U Ba Swe, together with Ba Hein,
1. See J. S. Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Frank N. Trager (ed.), M arxism in
Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1960), pp. 26-7,29 and 306-7. This description is founded mainly
on this essay, as well as on Malcolm D. Kennedy, A Short History o f Communism in Asia
(London, 1957); J. H. Brimmel, Communism in South-East Asia. A Political Analysis
(London and New York, 1959); and Saul Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia (London,
1959), pp. 95-143.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 257
organized a strike of the workers in the oil wells of Yenanyaung and Chank,
and led them in a protest march from the wells to Rangoon. While the strike
continued, the Thakins called for the first All-Burma Labour Conference to
take place in July 1939. From this emerged the All-Burma Trades Union
Congress (A.B.T.U.C.), founded on 30 January 1940. Several months later, in
August, it announced its programme to include the setting up of a Socialist
state, the nationalization of the means of production, minimum wages,
social welfare, and equality under the law irrespective of race.1
Together with the striking oil workers, the peasants had massed to join
the march to Rangoon. An All-Burma Peasants’ Conference, organized by
Thakin Mya, assembled under his chairmanship in the Shwe Dagon Pagoda
and decided upon the formation of an All-Burma Peasants’ Organization
with the declared aims of national liberation for Burma, the raising of
peasants’ living standards, the revocation of rights to land tenure, the col-
lectivization of land and oil, and the setting up of a Socialist state under
worker and peasant leadership.8
The founding of the All-Burma Trades Union Congress and the All-Burma
Peasants’ Organization under the leadership of Socialist Thakin members
were events of great historical significance. They alone had succeeded in
arousing a national consciousness among the workers and peasants and in
implanting Socialist ideas into the movement; and they, above all, had given
the national and social revolution which they strove to achieve a mass base
from which to work.

The Japanese occupation of Burma during the Second World War gave the
Thakin movement its chance to organize a military force. Before the outbreak
of war the Japanese government had offered military and financial aid to the
Burmese in their struggle for independence. When, in 1931, Japan attacked
China and occupied Manchuria and several of the northern provinces, it had
set itself the objective not only of dominating the Chinese Empire, but also
the whole of South-East Asia. To this end it tried to win the revolutionary
independence movement in Burma as an ally. In view of the prevailing inter-
national situation, Japan was indeed the only foreign power which was in a
position to assist the Burmese independence struggle. In secret negotiations,
conducted by Aung San on behalf of the ‘Burmese Revolutionary Group’
with accredited representatives of the Japanese government, solemn pledges
for the independence of Burma were demanded from and in fact given by the
Japanese.
However, the Communists as well as some of the Socialists in the Thakin
movement leadership declared themselves against any alliance with the
Japanese: the Communists because the Soviet Union supported China
1. See Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.), Marxism in Southeast Asia, p. 27.
2. See Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 97.
258 Socialism and Communism in Asia
against Japan; the Socialists because Japan was a Fascist state. A majority of
the Socialist Burma Revolutionary party as well as the revolutionary national-
ists, on the other hand, advocated accepting the Japanese offer, because they
did not believe that the fight against Great Britain for Burma’s independence
could be won without the support of a foreign power.
The agreement with the Japanese government was at length concluded
early in 1940 by the ‘Freedom Bloc’—a coalition formed after the outbreak
of the war between the Thakin party and the Nationalist party, led by Ba Maw.

It was Bogyoke Aung San (1916-47) who was to emerge as the outstanding
figure of the Burmese revolution. He finished his studies at the University of
Rangoon in 1938, and shortly afterwards became general secretary of the
Thakin party. To escape the threat of arrest he fled to China in 1940, and
from there went to Japan, having already laid the foundation for the Burma
Independence Army (B.I.A.) organized by Ne Win. The Japanese govern-
ment had undertaken to give military training to the ‘Thirty Heroes’ re-
cruited through the Socialist party, and to send them afterwards to Siam to
liaise from there with the B.I.A. With the ‘Thirty’, Aung San returned to
Burma in January 1942 in the wake of the Japanese invasion army as com-
mander of the B.I.A.
The Japanese government had, as has been mentioned, given a solemn
pledge that it would recognize Burma’s independence, and the Japanese
troops who marched into Burma were hailed as liberators by the population.
The Japanese invasion had begun on 18 January 1942, and within five
months, by the middle of May, the last British and Indian troops had either
withdrawn from the country or been placed in prison camps. Burma was now
in the hands of the Japanese.
But the Japanese government proved very reluctant to honour any of its
promises. Over a year passed before, on 1 August 1943, when the fortunes of
war had already turned against Japan, they would allow the independence
of Burma to be declared and a government installed under the prime-
ministership of Ba Maw. Thakin Mya became deputy prime minister, Aung
San minister of defence, U Nu foreign minister, Than Tun minister of
agriculture and Kyaw Nyein secretary of the cabinet and deputy minister for
information.
But this government was only a facade; the country continued in practice
to be ruled and plundered by the Japanese conquerors. It now became im-
portant to organize a powerful resistance movement to expel the Japanese,
and while the Communists and Socialists remained within the government,
they began the dangerous game of mobilizing forces for a planned uprising
against the army of occupation.
Aung San, as minister of defence and commander-in-chief, took the
initiative. By November 1943 he had already established radio contact with
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 259
the British government in India,1 and in March 1944 the Burma Revolutionary
party (it changed its name in September 1945 to the Socialist party) reached
agreement with the Burma Communist party on the formation of a United
Front to fight the Japanese occupation. The agreement was sealed on 1
August at a discussion between representatives of both parties (Thakin Mya,
U Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein for the Burma Revolutionary party, Thakin
Soe and Than Tun for the Communists) and General Aung San in U N u’s
apartment in Rangoon. On the same day that the United Front (it later took
the title Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League—A.F.P.F.L.) entered into
existence it issued a manifesto calling on the Burmese people to: ‘Arise and
chase out the Fascist Japanese bandits!’ The army undertook the necessary
clandestine printing and distribution.2
But the Socialist-Communist alliance did not survive for long. The
A.F.P.F.L. leadership was divided between Aung San as president and Than
Tun as general secretary; and Than Tun was, at the same time, president of
the Communist party. The overwhelming majority of the A.F.P.F.L.’s mem-
bership of about 200,000, including army personnel, were in 1945 in the
Revolutionary party’s camp. The Communist party, differently and more
strongly disciplined, tried to capture the leadership of the resistance move-
ment. So that it would be clearly differentiated from the Communist party,
the Burma Revolutionary party reconstituted itself in September 1945 as the
Socialist party with Thakin Mya as president, U Ba Swe as general secretary
and Kyaw Nyein as his deputy.
The latent conflict between the Socialists and Communists within the
A.F.P.F.L. came to a head over the vital question of the tactics to be adopted
after the re-entry into Burma of the British army. To assist the British invasion,
the A.F.P.F.L. organized an armed uprising for 27 March 1945. The B.I.A.,
trained and armed by the Japanese, attacked the Japanese army on all fronts
until the arrival of the British forces.3
But from the ruins of Japanese rule in Burma there arose not a free
independent state, but once again a colonial country under the administration
of a British governor. The utmost concession that Britain was willing to
grant was to promise a transition from colonial to Dominion status over the
course of six years; the independence for Burma demanded by the A.F.P.F.L.
was categorically rejected.4
The Socialist party within the A.F.P.F.L. wanted to continue the fight by
1. See Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast Asia,
p. 29.
2. See Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast Asia,
pp. 29-30; Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, pp. 102-3.
3. For the role played by the B.I.A. in these battles, see M. Collis, First and Last in
Burma (London, 1946), pp. 232-7.
4. For a review of the development of the relationship between Britain and Burma in
the years following the end of the war, see J. S. Fumivall, ‘Twilight in Burma’, in Pacific
Affairs, March and June 1949, pp. 3-20 and 155-72.
260 Socialism and Communism in Asia
revolutionary methods until Burma’s independence had been gained. The
armed forces of the national revolution were to be of decisive importance in
this struggle. The B.I.A., or, as it later came to be called, the ‘Burmese
Patriotic Forces’, had after the re-establishment of British rule largely been
amalgamated into the Burmese army, under British command. But Aung
San had organized those troops of the B.I.A. who escaped amalgamation
into an armed ‘People’s Volunteer Organization’ (P.V.O.) to constitute a
fighting army of the A.F.P.F.L. in the coming ultimate struggle.
The Communists, however, rejected the revolutionary tactics adopted by
the Socialists out of respect for the alliance between the Soviet Union and
Great Britain. Like the Communists in India,1 the Burmese Communists, in
accordance with Moscow’s policy, allied themselves with the British against
the nation’s struggle for independence. They betrayed the preparations for
the uprising planned by the Socialists, and gave away the locations of their
concealed arms depots.12 Thus the treachery of the Communist party forced
the A.F.P.F.L. to revert to a non-violent mass struggle.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1946, the Communist party, led by Than Tun,
split into two. Its left wing, under the leadership of Thakin Soe, formed a new
Communist party under the title ‘Red Flags’ to fight the original Communist
party, now called ‘White Flags’, as well as the Socialist party and the
A.F.P.F.L. The A.F.P.F.L. expelled it from its ranks. The ‘Red Flags’ aimed
to seize state power by armed insurrection, taking Mao Tse-tung’s method
and strategy of guerrilla warfare as a model in their attempt to conquer the
countryside.

The tussle for the leadership of the A.F.P.F.L.—between its Socialist and
Communist members and between Aung San, its president, and Than Tun,
its general secretary—became acute as the struggle for Burma’s independence
entered its last phase. In September 1946, Sir Hubert Rancer, the last British
Governor of Burma, had, under pressure of a general strike, asked Aung San
to form a provisional government. Aung San, wishing to secure for the
A.F.P.F.L. a predominance on the ministerial council and to reduce Com-
munist influence to a minimum, nominated among the nine council members
six A.F.P.F.L. representatives, though these included only one Communist,
passing over the party chairman, Than Tun, and nominating his rival, Thein
Pe (alias Myint). The break-up of the Socialist-Communist coalition finally
became inevitable when, the government having been formed, the question
of the future policies in Burma’s struggle for independence arose. Before its

1. See page 228.

2. For this accusation, see the testimony of the Socialist party, cited in Rose, Socialism
in Southern Asia, p. 105; see also Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.),
M arxism in Southeast Asia, p. 32.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 261
formation Aung San had pursued the technique of mass resistance by strikes
and street demonstrations. Now he hoped the objective could be attained by
negotiations.
In the meantime, however, the ‘White Flag’ Communist party had
changed its policy course sharply to the left in line with the change of course
made by the Soviet Union following the collapse of the alliance with the
Western powers as a result of their differences about the countries of Eastern
Europe and Germany. Britain was now to be treated as Russia’s enemy. The
Communist party condemned Aung San’s new tactic as a betrayal of the
revolution, and in October Thein Pe resigned from the ministerial council’1
Upon this the Socialists suspended the ‘White Flag’ Communist party from
A.F.P.F.L. membership.
The discussions which Aung San had initiated with Clement Attlee’s
Labour government on the independence of Burma were concluded, despite
Communist resistance, in January 1947. The Attlee-Aung San Agreement
guaranteed Burma ‘full independence within one year’ provided a clear
majority of a constituent assembly, which was to be elected, declared its
support. The Communist party condemned the agreement, accusing Aung
San of having betrayed the country, and then attempted to set off national
strikes in workshops, schools and universities.
In the event the elections to the constituent assembly in April 1947 saw
them defeated; the predominantly Socialist A.F.P.F.L. gained 173 of the 220
seats and the Communist party only seven. On 17 October 1947, in fulfilment
of the agreement, Attlee and U Nu signed the Treaty of Burma’s Independ-
ence, to be proclaimed on 4 January 1948.
Aung San was not to live to see this triumphant conclusion to the struggle
he had led. On 19 July 1947, when the government met under his chairman-
ship, nationalist fanatics invaded the conference room and murdered him
together with six of his colleagues; among them was Thakin Mya, the founder
and greatly esteemed leader of the Socialist party. The constituent assembly
thereupon elected the president, U Nu, to succeed Aung San as prime
minister.

Burma was now a free and sovereign state. In the Constitution, passed by
Parliament on 24 September 1947, a month before the signing of the Attlee-
U Nu Agreement, the setting up of a democratic Socialist order of society
was proclaimed as the aim of the people and government of Burma. The
prohibition of private monopolist undertakings was declared among the
fundamental rights. The state was declared as the ultimate owner of all land,
with the right to alter land tenures or to assume possession with a view to

1. Thein Pe was criticized by the Communist party for having accepted a post on the
Council of Ministers, and he was expelled from the central committee and finally debarred
from the party he had helped to found.
262 Socialism and Communism in Asia
redistribution. Large landholdings were prohibited. For workers the state was
to provide protective legislation designed to secure the right of association,
limit hours of work, ensure annual holidays and improve working conditions.1
The ‘White Flag’ Communist party took up the position of a parlia-
mentary opposition, but pledged its loyalty to the Constitution, for which it
had voted. Very shortly afterwards, however, they found themselves having
to decide whether to co-operate in the evolutionary process of setting up a
young Socialist state, or whether, like their brothers of the ‘Red Flag’, they
should attempt the revolutionary experiment of overthrowing the democratic
Socialist regime to seize power by an armed insurrection. When the founding
of the Cominform at the end of September 1947 finally confirmed the great
gulf between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, it gave the signal for
a radical leftward swing in the politics of Communist parties in all countries.2
After an initial hesitation, the Burma Communist party decided to follow suit.
The new political course decided upon by the party became clear in an
interview given by H. N. Goshal (alias Ba Tin) on 20 December 1947.
Goshal, a member of his party’s Politbureau, was Than Tun’s closest adviser.
He declared the Anglo-Burmese treaty to be a deception which ‘virtually sub-
jects Burma to permanent enslavement’. ‘We Communists,’ he said, ‘regard
this treaty as a treaty of national humiliation and permanent slavery.. . .
Thakin Nu and his colleagues. . . have gone over to the imperialists and have
become their willing tools.’3 In a number of theses addressed ‘to the present
political situation in Burma and our tasks’, he argued that the time to fight
for power had arrived and that it was the duty of the Communist party to
organize a national insurrection against the government of the A.F.P.F.L.
The theses were ratified by the Communist party on 18 February 1948 and,
at the end of the month, Than Tun declared in his opening address to the
Calcutta congress of the Indian Communist party, to which he had led a
delegation, that the Burmese party was determined to seize power—if
possible without civil war but, if necessary, by a struggle during which the
Communists would ‘smash the feudal imperialist bourgeoisie’.4 On 27 March
he made a speech in Rangoon calling upon the masses to join a national
insurrection against the A.F.P.F.L. government, and two days later the
Communist rebellion began.

Burma now became for over two years the setting for a terrible civil war. In
July and August 1948 the units of Communist troops in the P.V.O. and the
army mutinied and joined the rebellion, and then in January 1949 the
Karens—a national minority—also arose, demanding the establishment of an
1. See also pp. 252-3; Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 110. 2. See pp. 148-51.
3. Quoted in Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast
Asia, p. 38.
4. Quoted in Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’ in Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast
Asia, pp. 38-9.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 263
autonomous state within the framework of the Union of Burma. Within less
than a year the Irrawaddy delta from north Rangoon to beyond Mandalay in
the heart of the country was in the hands of the insurgents—the ‘White Flag’
and ‘Red Flag’ Communists, the P.V.O. and the Karens.
U Nu tried to reach an understanding with the Communist party. In
June 1948 he put forward a ‘programme for a united left’, which formulated
in fifteen points the aims of a joint government. Among them were the
establishment of a political and economic relationship with the Soviet Union
and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe similar to that which Burma
maintained with Great Britain and America; the nationalization of mono-
polistic capitalist enterprises and foreign trade; the abolition of privately-
owned large estates and their redistribution among the peasants; minimum
wages and an eight-hour day; the right of association and the right to strike,
to old-age pensions and other social benefits. Finally, in the fifteenth point,
he proposed the formation of a ‘League for the Propagation of Marxist
Doctrine’, ‘to read, discuss and propagate the writings of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Tito, Dimitrov and other apostles of Marxism’.1
The Communists rejected this programme, as well as the invitation to
join the hated Socialists in a coalition government, with contempt. To deflect
Communist enmity and make an understanding with them easier, the Social-
ists decided to surrender their position in the government; they resigned in
April 1949 though without withdrawing their support from the government.
Yet this attempt to call a halt to the bloodshed of the civil war also failed. The
Communists were determined to carry their battle for power through to the
bitter end—to the wrecking of democracy in Burma.
The insurrection was at length put down, but even so Communist guerrilla
bands roaming the land succeeded in paralysing the administration of the
republic for long afterwards. ‘We can plan all we want to,’ the government
stated in desperation on 3 July 1956, eight years after the inception of the
civil war, ‘but so long as we have still not eliminated this cancer [the guer-
rillas] completely, we cannot hope to make economic and social advance.
This unrestrained element has not only destroyed our attempts to raise
productivity, but has also hindered our endeavours to export our products,
with the result that the real income per capita in our country is now con-
siderably lower than it was before the war.’12 The Communist uprising had
crippled the growth of the young Socialist republic, had paralysed its demo-
cratic processes and finally paved the way for a military dictatorship.

On U Nu’s invitation, the Socialist party came back into the government in
January 1950. Shortly afterwards an internal crisis finally split the party.

1. Thakin Nu, Towards Peace and Democracy (Rangoon, 1949), pp. 92-4. For the text
of the fifteen points, see also Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 112.
2. Burma Weekly Bulletin, 12 July 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 130.
264 Socialism and Communism in Asia
In the last analysis the party broke upon the rocks of ideological conflict.
Its adherence to Marxism had never posed such a problem, despite the fact
that the party contained a left wing, led by Thakin Lwin, which advocated
a united front with the Communists, and a right wing, led by Kyaw Nyein,
which rejected any form of Communist alliance. U Ba Swe represented the
centre. Under his leadership the party had tried to reach an understanding
with the Communists, and had even surrendered its position in the govern-
ment to make room for the Communists. But he had failed.
Thakin Lwin, as president of the Trade Union Congress of Burma, formed
with U Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein the triumvirate of party leaders. At the
beginning of 1950 he demanded the resumption of discussions with the
Communists on the basis of a programme of ‘Left Unity’, and while this was
welcomed by them, it was unacceptable to a party majority. In a speech
to celebrate May Day, he vigorously attacked the party right wing and
demanded that, for the sake of proletarian unity, the Trade Union Congress
of Burma should become affiliated to the Communist-dominated World
Federation of Trade Unions.1 A division in the party had already shown itself
over the question of a United Front with the Communists. It finally broke
apart over attitudes to the Korean War.

The war in Korea presented the Socialist world with a question of conscience.
It had begun with an attack by North Korea on South Korea when, on 25
June 1950, the North Korean army crossed the border between the two
states along the 38th parallel.8
The North Korean state was, like the German Democratic Republic, one
of Stalin’s creations. Both areas had been occupied by the Soviet Union after
the war—eastern Germany after it was conquered by the Red Army, North
Korea after the victory of America and Great Britain against Japan. (Russia
had remained neutral in the war of the Allies against Japan; it did not
declare war until 8 August 1945, a week before the Japanese capitulation.)
At the Cairo Conference on 1 December 1943 and again on 26 June 1945
at the Potsdam Conference, the Allies had proclaimed the liberation of
Korea from Japanese rule and the re-establishment of Korea as an inde-
pendent sovereign state as being among their war aims. They had agreed
that, after Japan’s defeat, Soviet troops were to occupy Korea north of the
1. For the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions, see pp. 11-14.
2. For detailed descriptions of the war in Korea and its background, see Max Beloff,
Soviet Policy in the Far East 1914-1951 (London, 1953), pp. 155-207: David J. Dallin,
Soviet Russia and the Far East (New Haven, 1948), pp. 258-67 and 284-313. According to
Communist historiography, Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea, had planned the
military seizure of North Korea with the help of American arms. ‘When the United States
finally gave the green light to Rhee to go ahead . . . and Rhee’s army began the invasion of
North Korea, its collapse was immediate and the North Korean People’s Army met with
universal welcome from the people of South Korea’—see R. Palme Dutt. The International
(London, 1964), p. 305.
 Socialist and Communist Movements in Buddhist Countries 265
38th parallel and American troops the south until such time as the Korean
people could, by free elections, install a government for the whole country.
In breach of the Potsdam Agreement, however, the Soviet government
considered the military demarcation line to represent a political border, and
the area occupied by them to be a Russian sphere of influence. It set up a
military dictatorship in North Korea, organized a North Korean army, and
installed a provisional government with Kim II Sung, a Korean Communist
who had lived many years in Russia, as president. They then sealed the
country off from the South. When the United Nations ordered elections for
Korea, the Soviet government declared the demand invalid and refused entry
to a commission sent by the United Nations to supervise the elections. The
elections therefore took place only in South Korea and the Republic of
Korea was duly constituted—proclaimed on 15 August 1948 and recognized
in December by the United Nations. A month later, on 9 September, the
establishment of the Democratic Republic of Korea was declared in the
North. Thus Korea was divided into two separate states.
The background to the history of the Korean War is necessary to our
understanding of the discord between Socialists throughout the world—and
not only in Burma—which it engendered at that time. It must also be re-
membered that the United Nations Security Council, which met within a few
hours of the outbreak of the war, had demanded the immediate cessation of
hostilities and the withdrawal of the North Korean Army to the 38th parallel,
and that two days later it called upon members of the United Nations to
support South Korea in resisting North Korea’s attack. (As the Soviet
Union had boycotted the Security Council since January it was unable to
reverse these decisions by exercising its veto.)
Until this point the A.F.P.F.L. government of Burma had maintained
neutrality towards the rivalry between the power blocs of the West and East.
While India, Pakistan and Ceylon had stayed within the British Common-
wealth Burma had left it so as to avoid the appearance of being in alliance
with any one power of the Western bloc. It did, however, maintain good
relations with the Western powers, though also equally good ones with the
U.S.S.R., the Communist states of Eastern Europe and China; in December
1949 Burma had been the first Asian country to recognize the Communist
government of China.
But now the Security Council resolution put Burma’s neutral position in
question; it could not evade expressing an opinion on the Korean War. Like
the British Labour government and the Socialist coalition governments of
Western Europe, after momentary hesitation it declared its unequivocal
support for the decisions of the Security Council. It had been shown beyond
doubt that North Korea had attacked the Republic of South Korea and had
refused to cease hostilities and to withdraw its army in accordance with the
Security Council’s demand. With its support for the Security Council’s
 266 Socialism and Communism in Asia
resolution, the Burmese government had inevitably taken sides in the struggle
of rivals.
Communists of all countries declared their solid support for North
Korea; this war, they argued, was a national war of liberation—a war, they
claimed, to liberate the people of South Korea, enslaved by American
imperialism and subjected to a Fascist regime.
The Socialist International, on the other hand, had declared its solidarity
with the United Nations’ action against North Korea; while not directly
charging the Soviet government (which had protested its innocence) with
responsibility for the war, it did so accuse the Cominform, which had at its
inaugural congress called on all Communist parties to direct their policies
towards kindling revolutions in Europe and Asia. Until the outbreak of the
Korean War, their methods for inciting revolutions had remained the mass-
strike, as in France and Italy, or the armed uprising, as in India, Burma,
Malaya and, as will be described later,1 in Indonesia. Korea was the first
occasion since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 19292 that direct warfare
had been used by a Communist power as a means of gaining supremacy in a
neighbouring country.3 The Korean War was a ‘danger signal’, the Socialist
International declared at its inaugural congress. ‘It has shown that the
Cominform does not shrink from using military aggression as a means of
extending its power.’4
Many Socialists did, however, feel conscientious doubts over their
attitude towards the war. They were under no illusions as to its origin; it had
been planned by Stalin and Mao Tse-tung with the aim5 of destroying the
American strategic base in Korea which was aimed against the Soviet Union
and China, as well as to set up the Communist regime in the southern half of
the Korean peninsula. But while the war of South Korea against North
Korea carried all the marks of a war by the United Nations to defend the
independence of one of its member states, many Socialists saw it as a war for
1. See pp. 294-5.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 241-5.
3. The attempt to impose Communist domination by war in Korea, undertaken at the
cost of terrible sacrifice, was a failure. After three years of war (June 1950 to July 1953)
during which over two million people died in the fighting and almost three million from
epidemics while North and South Korea were both devastated, it remained, as it had been
at the outbreak, a country bisected by its previous frontiers—the North under a Com-
munist dictatorship and the South under a military dictatorship.
4. Report of the First Congress of the Socialist International, Circular No. 100/51,
Frankfurt (1951), 51, p. 137.
5. For this statement there is, of course, no documentary proof, since decisions of this
kind are not retained on records by the Soviet authorities. But it seems unthinkable that the
almost three months of discussion between Mao Tse-tung and Stalin in Moscow—which
included among other things a military defence treaty (signed on 14 February 1950)—
contained no reference to their common strategy for Korea. It appears equally unthinkable
that the North Korean government could have been able, without the agreement of Stalin
and Mao Tse-tung, to mount a military action such as to provoke the armed might of
America.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 267
retaining America’s power position in the Far East, now threatened by
Russia and China. And while they held no brief for the character of the
Communist system of government to which the people of South Korea would
be subjected in the event of a victory by the North, it seemed to them a
lesser evil than the semi-Fascist dictatorship which General Syngman Rhee,
the president of South Korea, had established.

In no country except Burma, however, did the discord generated by the

attitudes of Socialist parties towards the war produce a fundamental split.
Lwin left the party in protest and, with forty-three leading members of the
Socialist party, the Trade Union Congress of Burma and the Peasants’
Organization, formed the Burma Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (B.W.P.P.)
on 8 December 1950.
In the declaration with which the B.W.P.P. tried to justify the split, it
accused the Socialist party leadership of having deviated from its original
purpose. ‘The foundations of its original policy’, it stated, which had been
Marxism and Leninism, had been ‘displaced by deviations and imitations . . .
and the people’s democratic revolution has been delayed’. The B.W.P.P.,
on the other hand, would never deviate from its Marxist-Leninist ideology
and would, in the event of a Third World War, support those ‘who support
our people’s democratic ideology’.1
The split dealt a crushing blow to the Socialist party. It was estimated
that, following this event, party membership dropped from about 2,000 to no
more than 200.1 2
U Ba Swe believed none the less, as he said, that the party had been
strengthened and purged by the falling away of its left wing. It had un-
doubtedly been relieved of people who differed very little from the Com-
munists in their ideology. The truth was, however, that it had not emerged in
any way strengthened. It was in fact practically destroyed, and its leadership
of the trade union movement had been lost to the Communists.
But it shortly recovered. The B.W.P.P. and the wing of the trade union
movement affiliated to it were expelled from the A.F.P.F.L.; the Trade
Union Congress, with U Ba Swe as president, was reorganized. At the elec-
tions in May 1951 the Socialist party emerged as the strongest individual
party in the national front of A.F.P.F.L. and parliament. The A.F.P.F.L.
had won about 80 per cent of the 375 seats to the two houses of parliament;
three quarters of its representatives were members of the Socialist party.
The Socialist party was, however, no more than a cadre party; the number
of its individual members was small—about 6,000 in its best period. Its
strength lay in its dominant position in the A.F.P.F.L., which in 1956

1. Quoted in Thomson, ‘Marxism in Burma’, in Trager (ed.), M arxism in Southeast

Asia, p. 44.
2. Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 44.
268 Socialism and Communism in Asia
embraced about 435,000 individual and 625,000 collective members—the All-
Burma Peasants’ Organization, the Trade Union Congress, and the women’s
and students’ organizations. The Socialist party had the majority on the
executive committee, and thus a majority in the A.F.P.F.L. government—
nine of the twelve seats on the Ministerial Council. U Nu, as president of the
A.F.P.F.L. (he was affiliated to no party), became prime minister, and U Ba
Swe, as general secretary of the Socialist party and vice-president of the
A.F.P.F.L., deputy prime minister and minister of defence.
The A.F.P.F.L. emerged from the second parliamentary elections of
April 1956 with its majority reduced, while the Communist-led opposition
strengthened its position. In place of the ‘White Flag’ Communist party,
which had won seven seats in the 1951 elections but had soon afterwards
been made illegal and so had not canvassed in the 1956 elections, there was
the left-wing Socialist B.W.P.P. which joined forces with a number of
opposition parties to form a National Unity Front (N.U.F.), which won
forty-five of the 248 seats.
Small as were the number of N.U.F. votes, they became of crucial signifi-
cance during the government crisis which arose from a conflict between U
Nu and Kyaw Nyein in April 1958. This developed into a bitterly fought
struggle between U Nu and the Socialist party and caused the A.F.P.F.L.
to split itself apart.1
The conflict, which tore the A.F.P.F.L. asunder, had its cause neither in
ideological, political nor tactical disagreements within the government. It
was a clash of personality: a struggle between U Nu and the Socialist party
for the leadership of the A.F.P.F.L. and the government.
On 4 June 1958 the Socialists left the government to submit the conflict to
the verdict of parliament, and on the following day, during an extraordinary
meeting of the house, put forward a motion of no-confidence against U Nu
as prime minister. A majority of A.F.P.F.L. delegates—ninety-seven to fifty-
one—supported the motion. The decision thus rested with the N.U.F., which
decided against the Socialists and in favour of U Nu. The Socialists, the
N.U.F. declared, were bourgeois agents in the pay of capitalistic imperialism,
while U Nu, on the other hand, ‘is a nationalistic bourgeois and therefore the
lesser of two evils’.2 So they cast their votes into the balance against the
motion of no-confidence and it was rejected by a majority of eight votes
(127 to 119).
Three weeks later the split of the A.F.P.F.L. occurred. A majority on its
general council—140 of the 260 members—expelled U Nu and his supporters
and elected U Ba Swe as president. U Nu, however, refused to accept this
1. For a detailed history of this incident, see Sein Win, The Split Story (Rangoon
1959). Sein Win, chief editor of The Guardian (Rangoon), as a dispassionate observer,
regarded U Nu as being responsible for the split. See also Frank N. Trager, ‘The Political
Split in Burma’, in Far East Survey, vol. x x vi i (October 1958),
2. See Sein Win, The Split Story, p. 68.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 269
decision, the conference having been boycotted by his supporters, and with
his following he constituted the ‘pure A.F.P.F.L.’. In this way the original
unity front broke into two mutually hostile camps.

The schism of the A.F.P.F.L. was an ill omen for the fate of democracy in
Burma. It had formed the strongest front against the Communists; but now
it was splintered. On its unity had rested the overwhelming government
majority in parliament; but the government had been forced to rely on the
support of the Communists and had had its majority reduced to eight votes.
U Nu now sought peace with the revolutionary Communists. Three weeks
after the extraordinary meeting of parliament, he announced a proposal for
a decree of total amnesty for all crimes committed during the uprising and of
the legalization of those parties prepared to return to legality. The revolution-
ary Communists, however, demanded the incorporation of their guerrilla
bands into the army before they would consent to a cessation of the armed
struggle. For the army, which had fought a bitter eleven-year war against the
Communist guerrillas, such a demand was unacceptable. The peace dis-
cussions broke down.
Unable to resolve the political crisis, U Nu resigned as prime minister at
the end of October 1958, and passed power to General Ne Win (b. 1911),
Chief of the General Staff. U Nu had urged that, whatever happened, the
constitution should be preserved; he had proposed that the general should,
with the sanction of parliament, form a caretaker government to run the
country for a specified period during which Burma’s political leaders could
reorganize and prepare for a general election. Ne Win accepted these
proposals.1
When the elections took place at the beginning of February 1960, the
A.F.P.F.L. wing led by U Nu won a majority. But shortly after U Nu’s
return as prime minister, the Karens, backed by the Communist guerrilla
bands, once again arose in armed conflict. General Ne Win, in order, he
claimed, to save the country from disaster, now seized power by a coup d'etat
at dawn on 2 March 1962, arrested U Nu and all the cabinet members as well
as the president and chief justice of the Union of Burma, abolished the
constitution and the legislature, and set up a Revolutionary Council, consist-
ing of about a dozen military officers, to rule by decree. On 30 April, in a
manifesto, The Burmese Way to Socialism, he pledged himself to the full
nationalization of economic life. This was a promise which, as an old Thakin
and Socialist, he attempted to keep. The banks were nationalized and three
quarters of trade and industrial businesses were placed under state control by
a ‘People’s Bank’ and a ‘People’s Civil Stores Corporation’.
Ne Win’s coup marked the end of parliamentary democracy in Burma.
1. For the exchange of letters between U Nu and Ne Win regarding the handing over
of power, see Sein Win, The Split Story, pp. 87-9.
270 Socialism and Communism in Asia
He formed a party—the Burma Socialist Programme party—as the organ of
his government and in March 1964 dissolved all other parties. Burma was
now subjected to a total military dictatorship.
The revolution in Burma, having attained independence, now set itself the
objective of building a democratic Socialist society. This was originally the
common aim of both Communists and Socialists. The Communists had
co-operated loyally with the Socialists to support the constitution as a base
for social democracy. They had switched their policies only under the impact
of decisions by the Cominform. Their aim had now become the destruction of
democracy and the establishment of the Communist dictatorship—not by
popular mass action, but, inspired by the triumphant tactics of Mao Tse-tung,
through the actions of guerrilla bands. And indeed they did succeed in
undermining democracy, paralysing the civil administration and dissolving
constitutional order into chaos. But the dictatorship which arose from the
ruins of democracy was not a Communist one, but an anti-Communist
military dictatorship.

2. Ceylon

Ceylon’s sovereignty as an independent state, proclaimed on 4 February

1948, had not been won by any dramatic national revolution, such as had
occurred in India and Burma. By 1931 this British Crown Colony already
possessed a considerable degree of national self-administration, and in 1946
it received by Privy Council decree full self-government on the basis of a
parliamentary democratic constitution on the English model; only the
country’s defence and foreign policy remained under British control. Less
than two years afterwards a British Act of Parliament granted the state full
sovereignty—and, again, not under any pressure from a revolutionary mass
movement, but in discussion with the indigenous aristocracy and middle
class, organized in the Ceylon National Congress.1 But because Ceylon’s
national freedom had not had to be fought for by the mass of the people, the
transformation from crown colony to independent state, a transformation
not accompanied by any social change, was not felt as a revolution in the
consciousness of the masses.
The real revolution in Ceylon did not take place until 1956, when a
Socialist party—the Sri Lanka Freedom party (S.L.F.P.)—gained an over-
whelming victory in the elections and formed a coalition government with
one of the country’s three Marxist parties. It initiated a process which was to
change feudal Ceylon into a social welfare state.
The S.L.F.P. was the youngest of the parties within the Socialist move-
ment in Ceylon; it had been formed in 1951. A workers’ party under the title
1. For Ceylon’s constitutional development, see Sir Ivor Jennings, The Constitution o f
Ceylon, third edition (Bombay, 1954).
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 271
of Ceylon Workers’ Congress had been founded as early as 1928, and in 1935 a
Marxist party, the Lanka Sama Samaya Party (L.S.S.P.), had come into being.
The workers’ party, under the leadership of A. E. Goonesiaha, was a
small party consisting of several organized groups of industrial and agri-
cultural workers. The L.S.S.P., on the other hand, was a party representing a
broad mass of the urban proletariat as well as of intellectuals which, origin-
ally, like the Socialist party of India, had brought together Marxist Socialists
of every alignment—Communists, Trotskyists and Social Democrats.
The founders of the L.S.S.P. were young intellectuals who had studied in
England—N. M. Perera, Leslie Goonewardene and Colvin R. de Silva among
them—and who, like a majority of members, were Trotskyists. The Com-
munists, considering the Trotskyists to be the worst traitors to the cause of
Socialism, had joined the L.S.S.P. to seize the party leadership and to change
it into an orthodox Stalinist-Communist party affiliated to the Communist
International. Thus almost from its inception the L.S.S.P. had fallen victim
to a tussle between its Trotskyist and Communist factions until finally in
1940 the Trotskyist majority expelled the Communists from their ranks.
But the opportunity to found a Communist party did not arise until after
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Until then the Communists, as
well as the Trotskyists, had condemned the war as a ‘war of imperialism’.
They had been persecuted by the government and their leaders arrested, and
the L.S.S.P. had been declared illegal. Russia’s alliance with the Western
powers brought an end to the persecution of the Communists, but not to that
of the Trotskyists. For while the Communists now proclaimed the war an
‘anti-Fascist democratic war of freedom’, which the workers were to support
with all their strength, the Trotskyists continued to consider it as an
‘imperialist’ war.
Thus, so far as the government of Ceylon was concerned, nothing more
stood in the way to the founding of a Communist party. This party also
fulfilled all the expectations placed in it. It prevented, as far as it was able, the
outbreak of strikes, called upon the workers to attain higher levels of pro-
duction and defamed the anti-war Trotskyists in the underground movement
as Japanese spies1 (during the war Ceylon was threatened by a Japanese
invasion).
The expulsion of the Communists from the L.S.S.P., however, by no
means brought about internal unity. Shortly after the founding of the
Communist party, a left group split away from the L.S.S.P. and formed
another Trotskyist ‘Bolshevist-Leninist Party’.
Until the formation of the S.L.F.P. in 1951, the Socialist movement in
Ceylon was divided into four parties: two Trotskyist parties, one ‘orthodox’
Communist party and a workers’ party. Their comparative strengths were
1. See Leslie Goonewardene, The Difference Between Trotskyism and Stalinism, with
an Introduction by Colvin R. de Silva (Colombo, 1954), p. 2.
272 Socialism and Communism in Asia
revealed in the elections of 1947. Of the ninety-five parliamentary seats, the
L.S.S.P. won ten, the Bolshevist-Leninist party five, the Communist party
three and the workers’ party one. After the elections, the Bolshevist-Leninist
party split in turn; one faction returned to the L.S.S.P. and the remainder
joined with the Communist party to form a United Front.

The surprising phenomenon of the Socialist movement in Ceylon had been

its predominantly Trotskyist complexion from the very outset.1 With the
exception of Spain, whose Trotskyist mass movement had been bloodily
crushed by the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War even before a trium-
phant Fascism exterminated all Socialist alignments,12 Trotkyism had not
been able to create an organized mass movement in any of those countries
where it had won adherents—the United States, Mexico or France. Ceylon—
a small, predominantly agrarian country with a population at the end of the
war of hardly more than six and a half million—was the only country in
which a Trotskyist mass party attracted hundreds of thousands of electors.
But since the Trotskyist party was at root a Communist party, though un-
contaminated by Stalinism, it represented an obstacle to the development of a
Communist party obedient to Moscow. What divided the Trotskyists from
the Communists ideologically was their attitude towards the Soviet Union,
which it charged with having betrayed the principles of the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion and with having changed Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat into a
bureaucratic system of despotism under Stalin’s rule. Furthermore, the
L.S.S.P. stood for a Communist ideology in the spirit of Trotsky’s inter-
pretation. This showed itself in the ‘basic aims’ of their programme, formu-
lated at their party congress of 1950. (It is given here in some detail as a
historic document of the only existing Trotskyist mass-party.) According to
this the party strove to bring about:

1. The overthrow of the capitalist state, maintained in Ceylon through a

political alliance between British imperialists and the Ceylonese
bourgeoisie.
2. The seizing of political power by the working class at the head of the
toiling masses and the establishment of a democratic Workers’ and
Peasants’ (Soviet) government, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat
supported by the urban and rural poor.
3. The achieving of real national independence. The severance of all political
ties with the British Empire. The ending of all forms of colonial subjection
to foreign capital.
4. The confiscation by the workers’ state without compensation of all banks,
1. See George Jan Lerski, Origins o f Trotskyism in Ceylon. A Documentary History o f
Lanka Soma Samaya Party 1935-1942 (Stanford, 1968).
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 486-9.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 273
factories, plantations, big commercial concerns, means of transport, mines,
etc., which will be run and developed as state-owned enterprises for the
public benefit and not for private profit.
5, The nationalization of land. The transfer of all land (excluding large-scale
modernized agricultural enterprises) for the use of the toiling peasants.
The development of collective farms in peasant agriculture.

‘These fundamental aims’, the programme stated in conclusion, ‘cannot

be realized through bourgeois parliaments. The inevitable resistance of the
bourgeoisie to their achievement necessarily calls for mass revolutionary
action as the only means of realizing the will of the majority.’1

The Communist party was unable to compete with the radicalism of the
L.S.S.P. programme. This contained all the characteristic features of Lenin-
ism: the role of the working class in its conquest of political power in alliance
with the peasants; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the abolition of
parliamentary democracy; the establishment of a Soviet system of govern-
ment; the complete nationalization of the means of production; and revolu-
tionary mass action as ‘the only method’ for winning the struggle for power.
By contrast, the Communist party, between its founding during the
Second World War and until the end of 1947, avoided mentioning any of
these principles even in its propaganda. It pursued a policy not of revolution-
ary mass action by the working class in a struggle against the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie, but in accordance with the directives received from Moscow
before the collapse of the Russian alliance with the Western powers, one of
class co-operation with the ‘anti-Fascist’ wing of the bourgeoisie in the
fight against the revolutionary L.S.S.P.2
Not until 1947, when Russia’s alliance with the Western powers had
broken down and the inaugural conference of the Cominform had made a
transition to left-wing policies obligatory on all Communist parties, did it
undertake a sudden switch of policy direction. Its propaganda declared that
conditions for a Socialist revolution in Ceylon were now ripe and, until 1950,
it tried to spark it off by promoting strikes and sabotage. This adventure
foundered; not only on the prevailing power relations—a general strike in
Colombo in 1947 had to be called off after a severe defeat—but also because
the L.S.S.P., which was in fact at this stage the leading working-class party,
refused to allow itself to be dragged into any such adventure. Thus the ‘revolu-
tionary period’ in the history of Ceylon’s Communist party came to an end.
The subsequent history of the Communist party may be chronicled
briefly. It returned to a rightist course and allied itself in a United Front with
1. Quoted in Julius Braunthal, Report of the Bureau Meeting of the Asian Socialist
Conference, Tokyo, November 1954, Circular No. 60/54, p. 7. For the theoretical basis of
the programme, see Colvin R. de Silva, Outline o f the Permanent Revolution (Colombo, 1955).
2. See Colvin R. de Silva, Their Politics—and Ours (Colombo, 1954), pp. 20-2.
274 Socialism and Communism in Asia
the Bolshevist-Leninist party, which had splintered off from the L.S.S.P.
and now called itself the Viplavakari (‘Revolutionary’) L.S.S.P. (V.L.S.S.P.)
canvassing with it on a common list in the elections of May 1952.
Meanwhile, the S.L.F.P. had been formed and had laid its own Socialist
programme before the electorate. In the election there were thus four parties
within the Socialist movement facing each other. Their relative strengths
showed themselves in the following results:
Votes Seats
S.L.F.P. 361,250 9
L.S.S.P. 305,133 9
Communist party (V.L.S.S.P.) 134,528 4
Workers’ party 27,096 1

Following the elections, the Communist party at first sought a United

Front with the L.S.S.P., but discussions broke down over the question o f ‘the
right to criticize’—the right of the L.S.S.P. (disputed by the Communists)
to criticize the Soviet Union or other Communist states. Subsequently it
attempted to form an alliance with the S.L.F.P. by setting up a ‘Democratic
Front’, but this the S.L.F.P. declined. Finally, in preparation for the 1956
elections, it sought to create a ‘Grand Alliance of the People’s Progressive
Forces’. In a memorandum of the party programme, drawn up by the
general secretary, Dr S. A. Wickremasinghe, the Communists declared: ‘It is
a present-day error to believe that the Communist party fights only on behalf
of the workers and poor peasants. In our economic as well as our social pro-
gramme, we fight for the genuine interests of the workers and peasants, the
farmers and the unemployed, the intellectuals and the capitalist middle class’.1
‘We have to be frank’, the memorandum stressed. ‘Today’s Communist
party does not demand Communism.’1 2 ‘The reorientation of the economy,’ it
stated, ‘in no way seeks the usual solution for the agrarian problem by boldly
confiscating feudal property. Immediate requirements do not, in fact, demand
that we should take the property of present landowners, but that we
should cultivate new, virgin land.’ And as the Communist party guaranteed
the retention of landed property by the aristocracy, so it also guaranteed the
extension of capitalism during the process of Ceylon’s industrialization.
‘With the exception of key industries,’ the programme stated, ‘which will be
organized by the state, the industrial sector will remain open to private
enterprise by the people of the country___ Rapid industrialization can only
be brought about with the participation of privately owned industries’.3
This, the programme stated in conclusion, was ‘the new economic path
of Ceylon’s Communist party. . . . The people as a whole, apart from the
1. S. A. Wickremasinghe, The Way Ahead. An Economic Policy fo r Ceylon (Colombo,
1955), p. 84.
2. ibid., p. 83. 3.. ibid., p. 77.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 275
imperialists and the capitalist middle men who work with them, will stand
to gain... .n

At the May 1952 elections the four parties within the Socialist movement
between them won 828,000 of the 2,302,000 votes cast, or almost a third. The
party, which had ruled Ceylon since 1947, the United National Party (U.N.P.),
won 1,026,000 votes, however, and an absolute majority with fifty-four out of
ninety-four seats.
Surprisingly the Sri Lanka Freedom party, founded on 2 September 1951,
only nine months before the elections, emerged with its 361,000 votes as both
stronger than the far older Socialist parties and as the second strongest party
in the country. But the event which may be considered to have been the real
revolution in Ceylon was its overwhelming victory in the next elections, in
April 1956. Its number of votes increased from 361,000 to 1,046,000 and in
alliance with the Trotskyist V.L.S.S.P. and two other groups, it gained a
parliamentary majority with fifty-two seats.12
The Sri Lanka Freedom party was the creation of Solomon W. R. D.
Bandaranaike (1899-1959). He was the son of a rich, landed aristocratic
family, for whom loyalty to the British Crown had become a tradition; his
father had received a knighthood from the British government. He had been
brought up as Christian and was educated at Oxford, where he absorbed
Social Democratic ideas, but at the same time developed a strong conscious-
ness of Singhalese nationalism. After his returning to Ceylon in 1925, he
abandoned Christianity to become a Buddhist, and exchanged his European
style of dress for that of the simple traditional Singhalese national costume.
He then formed a national movement—the Sinhala Maha Sabha—to promote
Singhalese culture, religion and language.
The Sinhala Maha Sabha became a group within the United National
party, which had been formed during the Second World War by a merger
of several middle-class nationalist parties; the four parties within the Socialist
movement were not affiliated. It was the left wing of the U.N.P. which
pressed for social reforms, but evidently with little success. In July 1951
Bandaranaike withdrew his group from the U.N.P., of which he had been
vice-president and in whose government he had been a minister, and in
September founded the S.L.F.P. as a Socialist party.
Its ideals and objectives were formulated in a manifesto at the inaugural
congress which declared:
The Sri L anka Freedom party is a Social D em ocratic party. Economically, it
believes that policy m ust be formed on the needs o f the com m on m an. In our
country, where the great m ajority of people are living in poverty and problem s o f

1. ibid., p. 77.
2. The number of votes for the L.S.S.P. fell from 305,000 in 1952 to 274,000; and the
Communist vote from 134,000 to 119,000.
276 Socialism and Communism in Asia
unem ployment and serious underem ploym ent are growing in gravity, the approach
to these problem s on Socialist principles is the only effective m ethod for their
satisfactory solution. Politically it believes th at the preservation and fostering o f the
dem ocratic ideals and freedoms are essential for the true progress and happiness o f
our people, whose initiative and self-respect have been underm ined by m any years
o f servitude.

The Sri Lanka Freedom party aimed, the manifesto declared, at ‘building
a Social Democratic order of society by a government dependent upon the
utmost participation by the people’. And it pledged itself to nationalize by
stages the essential industries, the larger plantations, the transport system, the
banks and insurance companies.
The realization of Ceylon’s full national liberty and independence was
also demanded. While Ceylon had indeed become a sovereign state, it had
remained under the British Crown as a self-governing dominion within the
British Commonwealth. The manifesto declared, however, ‘the Government
of Ceylon must be a free Republic, independent of the British Common-
wealth and of all external control___ Therefore no bases can be permitted in
our country for any foreign Power and all foreign troops must immediately
be withdrawn from our country.’
But the factor which gave the party its particular attraction for the
traditionally religious peasants as well as for the urban proletarian masses
was, as the elections showed, its national religious character. Ceylon’s ruling
classes had become ‘Westernized’; they had become Christians in consider-
able numbers, spoke English and dressed in European style. ‘In culture and
religion’, the programme declared, ‘our people can achieve the status of a
truly free people only if the principles proclaimed go hand in hand with a
revival of our cultures and the use of our national languages and the revival
and stimulation of spiritual values, so that religion once again attains its
rightful place as a vital force in the lives of our people.’ Therefore, the
manifesto demanded, the Singhalese language and Tamil, the language of the
southem-Indian proletariat in Ceylon, should immediately be recognized as
official languages, ‘so that the people of this country may cease to be aliens in
their own land; so that an end may be put to the iniquity of condemning
those educated in Singhalese and Tamil to occupy the lowliest walk of life.’1
With this programme, the S.L.F.P. gained the position of being the
second strongest party in the 1952 elections. For the 1956 elections it formed
an alliance with the Trotskyist V.L.S.S.P. as well as with a Buddhist and a
Singhalese nationalist group in a ‘United People’s Front’—the Mahajama
Eksath Peramuna (M.E.P.)—on the basis of the programme outlined in
the S.L.F.P.’s manifesto. It added two further demands: the eight-hour
day and a guaranteed minimum wage. But it also intensified its stress on
the Singhalese national character. The manifesto had demanded the recog-
1. M anifesto and Constitution o f the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (Wellampitiya, 1951).
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 277

nition of Singhalese as well as Tamil—the language of the Indian minority

of almost two million—as official languages. But in its election programme,
the M.E.P. pledged itself to declare Singhalese as ‘the only official language
of the country’, should it win.1
It was, however, this synthesis of Social Democratic, Buddhist, and
nationalist elements in its programme that carried the M.E.P. to victory ; its
most passionate canvassers had been the Buddhist monks.
The government formed by Bandaranaike was a coalition of the S.L.F.P.
and the V.L.S.S.P.; the other two groups had merged with the S.L.F.P.
following the elections. The V.L.S.S.P. was represented in the government by
its leaders, Philip Gunawardena and William de Silva.
The assassination of Bandaranaike—he was shot on 25 September 1959
by a fanatical monk—awoke deep sympathies throughout the country, above
all among those who supported his party, for his widow, Sirima Ratwatte
(b. 1916). She had been working in the social welfare movement, and had
taken no active part in politics. The S.L.F.P. urged her to take up the party
leadership in succession to her murdered husband. Under her leadership,
and carried along by a wave of sympathy, the party once again achieved a
brilliant victory in the elections of 1960. Thereupon she became prime
minister—the first woman in the world to become a prime minister—and
continued with the policy of reformist Socialism begun by her husband.
From 1964 she governed in coalition with the parliamentary Trotskyist
group, whose leader, Dr N. M. Perera—a brilliant politician who had become
a highly respected Mayor of Colombo—was appointed to the government as
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
From the elections of March 1965, the middle-class U.N.P. narrowly
emerged with fifty seats as the strongest single party; but the S.L.F.P.
retained forty-six seats and the three other Socialist parties held twenty-three
seats between them.2
In the next elections, five years later, in May 1970, the coalition of the
S.L.F.P. with the Trotskyists and neo-Moscow Communists gained an
overwhelming majority of the seats: 115 out of 151, the S.L.F.P. holding
ninety, the L.S.S.P. nineteen and the Communist party six. On this basis,
Sirima Bandaranaike formed her second coalition government.
Thus these elections once more demonstrated the phenomenon of a
1. Joint Programme o f the M.E.P. (Colombo, 1956). This concession, which Bandaran-
aike made to Singhalese nationalism in defiance of the Socialist principle of international
solidarity, was to have tragic consequences. The law he introduced in parliament as prime
minister declaring Singhalese to be an official language provoked, during May and June
1958, bloody confrontations between Indian and Singhalese in which, according to official
estimates, 159 people were killed. The state of emergency then proclaimed was not lifted
until the following March.
2. The L.S.S.P. won ten seats, as did the ‘Marxist United People’s Front’, which had
split away from the Trotskyists under Philip Gunawardena’s leadership, and the Com-
munists held three seats.
278 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Socialist movement, deeply rooted in the Buddhist and Hindu masses of
the country.

3. Nepal

In the history of the expansion of Socialist ideas in Asia, Nepal occupies a

special position. This small country, almost entirely shut away from the
outside world in the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, remained a feudal
state into the 1950s. The aristocracy owned the land and the peasants who
cultivated it were tied to the land by the ubiquitous agrarian system of Birta,
and hence were the property of the landowner in a form of serfdom. Even as
the estates of French aristocrats had been exempt from taxation until 1789,
so, until only a few years ago, was the landed feudal property of Nepal. And
like Japan under the Shogunate, Nepal, nominally an autocratic monarchy,
had come to be ruled throughout the century from 1846 to 1951 by an
aristocratic clan—the Rana family, whose head occupied the hereditary
office of prime minister and enjoyed absolute power. The king had become
to practical effect a prisoner in his own palace.
It is therefore all the more remarkable that this country, with its feudal
economic, social and political structures, which had remained virtually un-
touched by changes in the modern world, should see the introduction of
Socialist ideas, and that a Socialist party—the Nepali Congress—should take
root and, in the first elections in Nepal’s history, win an overwhelming
majority and rule the country for a year and a half.
The predecessor of the Nepali Congress had been the Nepal National
Congress, founded in Calcutta in January 1947. This was a national front
uniting liberals and conservatives as well as Socialists in the common task of
overthrowing the rule of the Rana clan, transforming Nepal’s feudal autocracy
into a constitutional monarchy and setting up a parliamentary democracy.
Among the founders of the National Congress had been Bishewar Prasad
Koirala, who was to emerge as the outstanding personality of the Nepalese
revolution. His father, a Brahman, had fled to India to escape political
persecution, and when he returned after years of exile, had been placed in
prison, where he died. His son was bom in India, and after growing up
there and completing his university studies, he joined the Congress Socialist
party of India. Arrested in 1942 as an agitator of the revolutionary ‘Quit
India’ movement, he spent the following two and a half years in prison at
Patna. After his release in 1945, he canvassed for the idea of a Nepal National
Congress along the lines of the Indian National Congress.
Shortly after the foundation of the Nepal National Congress in 1947, the
first strike in Nepal’s history occurred—a wage strike of cotton and jute
workers in Biratnagar. It was brutally suppressed by the government, and
many of the workers involved as well as their leaders were arrested, Koirala
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 279
among them; he spent six months in prison. In the following year, after the
National Congress, which had begun its struggle for constitutional reforms,
was suppressed by a new wave of reaction, he was again arrested, but forced
the authorities to release him after several months by a hunger strike lasting
twenty-one days.
The National Congress hoped to lead the struggle for constitutional
reform by Gandhi’s method of non-violent resistance. Koirala, on the other
hand, advocated the tactics of an armed rising for, he believed, only by the
use of force could the rule of the Rana family be cast down.
This was obviously a conviction shared by King Tribhuvan, who could
only gain his personal freedom through the defeat of the Rana clan. At all
events, it was a member of the Nepalese royal family, Mahendra Bikram
Shah, who, with a member of the Rana clan, Subama Shamsher, formed
early in 1949 an organization to bring about the fall of the Ranas by an
armed rising. This was known as the Democratic Congress.
Koirala now tried to negotiate a fusion of the National Congress with the
Democratic Congress, and he finally succeeded despite the opposition of one
faction within his party. The fusion took place, after long discussions, in
April 1950. Taking the title of Nepali Congress, the new organization had,
according to its own estimates, 40,000 members at the time of its foundation,
and rose to 100,000 half a year later.1
The Nepali Congress began to prepare for the rising without delay. It
purchased arms, organized a para-military force, the Raksha Dal, and
planned, with the king’s agreement, to attack Kathmandu, the capital of
Nepal, early in November 1950, to free the king and install him as con-
stitutional monarch. This plan, however, came to the knowledge of the
government. The force of 200 men dispatched to Kathmandu to carry out
the coup was arrested, and the king fled to India.
The Nepali Congress did not, however, accept defeat, but called upon the
country to rise. Under Subarna Shamsher’s leadership the Raksha Dal
attacked Birganj. The insurgents occupied the town, freed hundreds of
political prisoners and repelled a counter-attack by government troops.
From this strong-point the rising spread quickly throughout the country.
It had become a revolution. ‘The revolution,’ recorded Bhola Chatteiji,
‘received incredibly strong support from all classes of the Nepalese people.
Their repressed indignation at the ancient monstrous rule of the Ranas
became a mighty flood in which the defenders of feudal barbarity were
drowned.. . ; It was only a matter of days before the army of the Nepali
Congress marched in triumph into Kathmandu.’12

1. See Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, p. 72.

2. Bhola Chatterji, ‘Nepal Today’, i: ‘Emergence from Feudalism’, in Janata (Bombay),
12 October 1958. For a review of subsequent events, see the three following articles in the
issues for 19 October, 26 October and 2 November 1958.
280 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The Rana government faced a desperate situation which it was incapable
of mastering. The Rana prime minister, Mohan Shamsher, flew to Delhi to
request the good offices of the Indian government in the role of adviser. A
compromise was proposed by which the king was to return to Nepal as con-
stitutional monarch, while a coalition government was to be installed with
a Rana as prime minister and including five representatives of the Nepali
Congress and four of the Rana clan; a constituent assembly was to be
summoned. The compromise was accepted by a conference of congress and
Rana representatives called in Delhi by King Tribhuvan in January 1951,
and on the basis of the Delhi Pact the Nepali Congress ceased the armed
struggle and the king returned to Kathmandu to announce the agreed coali-
tion government, with Koirala as minister of the interior.
Democracy had now made its entrance into feudal Nepal. But it remained
for the principles of democracy to be constructed into democratic institutions.
The revolution had annulled the inherited right of the Ranas to lead the
state, but it had not disarmed the Rana clan. It had installed the king as a
constitutional monarch, but it had not safeguarded the constitution against a
return to autocracy. This was the task which was to face the constituent
assembly. But King Tribhuvan held back from issuing the writ to call the
constituent assembly elections. Not until October 1957, two years after his
death in March 1955, did his successor, King Mahendra, announce the issue
of the writ; and the elections did not, in fact, take place until February 1959.

Several parties had emerged into the open following the outbreak of the
revolution in Nepal: a Communist party under the leadership of Monmohan
Adhikary; a United Democratic party under the leadership of K. I. Singh; a
party with the title of Praja Parishad, formed by Tanka Prasad; and a party
of the aristocracy, the Gorkha Parishad.
The Nepali Congress developed its ideology in competition with these
parties. Under Koirala’s leadership it had maintained a close connection
with the Socialist party of India, but did not differ ideologically from other
parties which had declared their loyalty to democracy. It was only in January
1956 at a conference in Birganj that the Nepali Congress proclaimed itself a
Socialist party and became affiliated to the Asian Socialist Congress.
In its manifesto, which was to serve as a programme for the forthcoming
elections, the Birganj conference declared the party’s resolve ‘to bring about
a society based on the principles of social justice and on equality of oppor-
tunity, and of political, economic and social rights. In such a society there
will be no privileges of birth and possession, nor exploitation of one another.*
The Nepali Congress believes [the manifesto continued] th a t such social objec-
tives can only be achieved in a Socialist society, where the state owns o r effectively
controls the principal instrum ents and means o f production an d guarantees equit-
able distribution of wealth.
 Socialist and Communist M ovements in Buddhist Countries 281
The manifesto categorically rejected the Communist methods of social
change. ‘The Communists claim,’ it said, ‘that the end justifies the means.
Their strategy is the simple one of overthrowing the government of the day
by revolutionary and violent means and of setting up their dictatorship.. . . ’
The Nepali Congress [the manifesto declared] is opposed to m ethods th at seek
to achieve Socialism at the cost of democracy and spiritual values. It believes th at
it is no t necessary to sacrifice democracy to achieve Socialism. In fact it believes
th at a true Socialist society can com e into existence only when Socialism is wedded
to democracy. The Nepali Congress therefore stands for the achievement o f
Socialism by peaceful and dem ocratic methods.

The main part of the programme, which outlined the concrete economic
reforms which the Nepali Congress intended to put into practice, was of
course devoted to agriculture: the reform of land tenure and measures for
the increase of agricultural production; placing a maximum limit on land-
holdings; encouraging co-operative farming; the state farming of newly
reclaimed lands; and the distribution of good seed and fertilizer.
As for the industrialization of that underdeveloped country, the pro-
gramme proposed the establishment of the basic key industries—especially
transport, energy and mining—by the state, which would own or control
them. Meanwhile the development of medium-sized consumer-goods indus-
tries by private enterprise was to be encouraged, and cottage industries
and small-scale industries were to be organized on a co-operative basis.1

The most powerful though not the most dangerous opponent of the Nepali
Congress party was the Communist party. It was a comparatively small but
well-organized party with a large following among students and intellectuals.
Its standing rested on the prestige of the Chinese Communist party, which
had seized power in that huge country by a glorious revolution. Its close
alliance with its sister party in China lent it further weight. Nepal, embedded
between the gigantic states of China and India, is dependent upon their
goodwill. In any relationship between Nepal and China, the Communist
party was a factor to be reckoned with.
It had taken no active part in the revolutionary struggle because, as its
propaganda stated, it regarded it as an attempt of the bourgeoisie to place
itself in power. The transformation of the Nepalese feudal state into a
democracy appeared as obviously unwelcome to Peking as it did to Moscow.
In any case, the party made no attempt to help in consolidating democracy.
It concentrated its strength on the struggle against the Nepali Congress
party, the sole power capable of building democracy.

By the Delhi Pact of 1951 the king, as we saw above, had pledged himself to
1. Nepali Congress, Manifesto Adopted at Birganj (Patna, 1956). For an analysis of the
manifesto, see Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, pp. 76-9.
282 Socialism and Communism in Asia
summon a constituent assembly. But the election writ was only issued in time
to allow elections to be held eight years later, in February 1959.
The elections represented an experiment in democracy in a country of
high mountains, with no proper roads, with a population whose overwhelm-
ing majority was illiterate and who had, until very recently, known only
centuries of despotic rule.
The result of this experiment was surprising. O f an eligible electorate of
4,121,000 men and women, 1,083,000, or 43 per cent, had gone to the polls.
More surprising still was the election result. The Nepali Congress won an
absolute majority of seats, with seventy-four out of 109.1
It was, therefore, a democratic Socialist government which the King of
Nepal had to summon to be the first parliamentary government in the
history of Nepal—a government of the Nepali Congress party under the
leadership of Bishewar Prasad Koirala as prime minister and Subarna
Shamsher as deputy prime minister.
Its life span was to be a year and a half. In December 1960 King Mahendra
put an end to both the government and the experiment in democracy by a
coup d’etat. He dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution, arrested
Koirala and other Congress party leaders and, in breach of the Delhi Pact,
usurped the powers of government as an autocratic monarch. A few weeks
later he suppressed all political parties by proclamation. Koirala, who had
inspired and led the revolution of 1950 and overthrown the rule of the Rana
clan to which the king had also been subjected, was only released after
seven years of imprisonment.
1. Four parties and 267 independent candidates campaigned in the elections. The
results were: Percentage o f
Votes votes cast Seats
Nepali Congress 660,000 38 74
Gorkha Parishad 305,000 17 19
United Democratic party 117,000 10 5
Communist party 130,000 7 4
Independents (collectively) 280,000 23 7
See Asian Socialist Conference, Information No. 4/1959. The system of representation on
the English pattern which was used in the Nepalese elections favoured the strongest party.
So the Congress party won its majority with barely two-fifths of the votes cast.
13 • Islamic Socialism and Marxism in
Indonesia

‘Among the many political parties in Indonesia today,’ Soetan Sjahrir wrote
in 1956, ‘there is not a single party which would not declare its sympathies
with a Socialist and collective order of society.. . . In Indonesia we are all
Socialists, or at least leaning in the direction of Socialism, and this, too, is the
spirit of our constitution.’1
In no other Asian country did Socialist ideas find such fertile ground as
they did in Indonesia. As in Burma, no indigenous capitalism existed, no
native bourgeoisie, hardly any urban middle class and only a thin scattering
of aristocratic landowners. The big capitalist undertakings—plantations,
petroleum industries, mines, shipping, banks and the big trading companies
—were run by the Dutch; the retail trade and light industry by the
Chinese.2
Indonesian nationalism was anti-capitalist, for the capitalism of Indonesia
was not Indonesian, but a capitalism of the West. Indonesian intellectuals
saw capitalism as a European economic system and colonialism as a political
system to allow capitalism to exploit the people of Asia by subjecting them to
European imperialism. They identified capitalism with both colonialism and
imperialism. And since they hated colonialism and imperialism, they also
hated capitalism. In Indonesia’s struggle for national independence, they
sought liberation from capitalism as much as from Dutch colonial rule.3 The
1. Soetan Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism (Rangoon, 1956), pp. 30-1. This account is
based on this book and the classic work of George Mctuman Kahin, Nationalism and
Revolution in Indonesia (New York, 1952); Jeanne S. Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and
Marhaen. The Roots o f Indonesian Socialism (London, 1965); Arnold C. Brackman,
Indonesian Communism. A History (New York, 1963); Donald Hindley, The Communist
Party o f Indonesia 1951-1963 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964); D. N. Aidit, A Short
History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia (New Delhi, 1955): Aidit was general secretary
of the Communist party; Sjahrir was founder of the Indonesian Socialist party and prime
minister in three governments.
2. See Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, pp. 14-15; Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism,
pp. 70-1.
3. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, pp. 51-2, Sjahrir, Indonesian
Socialism, p. 30.
284 Socialism and Communism in Asia
concept of Socialism as the antithesis of capitalism was an important element
in the conception of Indonesian nationalism. The Indonesian nationalist was
also a Socialist and, in either instance, anti-capitalist.
Moreover, the economic factor in Socialist theory—the concept of com-
mon ownership in the form of primitive communism—had been familiar to
the broad masses of the peasant population from ancient times. Until only
one or two generations earlier, the idea of private ownership of the land had
been alien to the overwhelming majority of Indonesians, almost 90 per cent
of whom lived in villages. The land was the property of the village. Its sale
was forbidden by an ancient prescriptive law (adat). And although rural
village property had decreased during the course of the several decades pre-
ceding the revolution, the principle of common ownership had remained
fundamental to the way they thought and felt.
Socialist ideas were also embodied in the political organization of the
villages, which rested on three principles. First, the principle of democratic
self-determination: all the affairs of the village were subjected to discussion
among all members of the community—the musjawarah. Secondly, the prin-
ciple of unanimous decision—the mufakat; the notion that the will of the
majority is decisive and that the minority must bow to majority opinion
was foreign to village tradition. Decisions were compromises of all the
opinions represented in discussion and thus they embodied the collective
will of the village community. From this stemmed the third principle of
gotong rojong, the principle of joint responsibility for executing decisions,
of solidarity and of mutual aid.1
A non-religious cultural movement among Indonesian intellectuals, the
Budi Utomo, which sprang up in 1908, saw Marxist Socialism as a modern
form of Indonesia’s centuries-old system of gotong rojong, which embodied
the Indonesian ideal of collectivism and rejected the socially destructive
forces of liberalism and individualism in the capitalist West,12

The most important factor of all in the spread of Socialist ideas through
Mohammedan Indonesia, however, was the Islamic reform movement known
as the ‘Modernists’. In contrast to the deeply ingrained individualism of
Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, from which
it originated, is a social religion teaching the brotherhood at least of
all ‘true believers’ and their equality in the eyes of God,3 and it carries

1. See Mintz, Mohammad, M arx and Marhaen, pp. 12-13.

2. See Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, p. 30.
3. Thus teaches the Koran: ‘Believers are brothers, therefore make peace between
your brothers and fear Allah, so that compassion may be bestowed.’ Social and economic
inequality, however, is defended as a social order instituted by God. Thus God pronounces
through the Koran: ‘We ourselves distribute your keep among you in your worldly exist-
ence, and We raise some of you in rank above others, so that the one may take the other
into care.’ Yet ‘the Muslim tenet that all men are equal on account of their having been
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 285
within itself a nucleus of ideas of social justice. It had, however, become
stultified by a ritual and dogma which taught the sanctity of traditional
institutions.
The impetus in the Islamic reform movement had come from the Egyptian
theologian, Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905). He had set out to purge religion
of its accumulation of corrupt and superstitious influences and rituals and
to develop it into a living and effective social force. ‘His writings formed,
and still form,’ H. A. R. Gibb observed, ‘a shield, a support and a weapon
for the social and political reformers.’1 He was the pioneer figure in the
Islamic ‘Modernist’ movement which, before the First World War, spread
its influence also to Indonesia, especially the aspiration to define the principles
of the Islamic ethic by its social aspects—the principles of social and political
justice.
In endeavouring to realize these principles, the ‘Modernists’ in Indonesia
became the instruments of nationalism as well as the carriers of Socialist
ideas. Some of them even discovered in the Koran traces of Socialism,2 like
Hadji Agus Salim, one of the Islamic popular leaders, who in a controversy
with the Communists stated that twelve centuries before the birth of Karl
Marx, Mohammed had preached Socialist economics.3 The Islamic party
Masjumi (Madjelis Sjaro Moslimin Indonesia), the largest single party in
the country, embraced under Mohammed Votsir’s leadership a faction of
religious Socialists, who influenced the whole party with their concept of
Socialism. In declaring its principles, the party stated its duty ‘. .. to lead
the people on the road to Socialism and in the spirit of the teachings of
Islam, to brotherhood and equality under a [republic]. . .’.4
This was the social and cultural soil in which the ideas of modern Socialism
put down roots. An amplification of these ideas may be found in the constitu-
tion drawn up by parliament in August 1950 after the revolution. Article 31
stipulates:

created by the same Almighty God is dynamite under the foundations of the social struc-
ture’—C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuyze, Aspects o f Islam in Post-war Indonesia (The Hague and
Bandung, n.d.), p. 36.
1. H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago, 1947), p. 42.
2. To take one example, the prohibition of usury—the charging of interest on loans.
3. Quoted in Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 76.
4. Kepartaian dan Parlementaria di Indonesia (Jakarta, 1954), p. 441, quoted in Mintz,
Mohammed, M arx and Marhaen, p. 88. Under the influence of its Religious Socialist
section, the Masjumi council declared as its principles (among others): ‘Opposition to
capitalism in principle, but acknowledgement of the necessity of its continuance for some
time in certain sectors. A mixed political economy should be followed—co-operative,
socialist and capitalist. Emphasis should be on the co-operative sector, with the state
advancing credit to develop this. As the government acquires sufficient capital and ad-
ministrative personnel, it should gradually nationalize transportation, communications,
mining, oil production, large plantations and any large-scale industry whose nationaliza-
tion will be in the country’s best interests—quoted in Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in
Indonesia, p. 311.
 286 Socialism and Communism in Asia
1. The economy shall be organized on a co-operative basis.
2. Sectors o f production which are im portant to the state and which affect the lives
o f m ost people shall be controlled by the state.
3. L and and water, nature’s wealth, shall be controlled by the state and shall be
exploited for the greatest welfare o f the people.

As a ‘fundamental principle’, the constitution states, ‘the right of property

is a social function’.1
In accordance with the religious temperament of Indonesians, the con-
stitution declares in Article 29: ‘The state shall be based upon the belief in
God of all mankind.’12

First among Indonesia’s Socialist parties had been the Communist party—
the Partai Komunis Indonesia (P.K.I.). It came into being two and a half
decades before any other Socialist party, and was moreover the oldest Com-
munist party in Asia and, until 1966, the largest Communist party in the
world outside the Soviet bloc and China. It had been founded on 23 May 1920
in Semarang in Java and during its subsequent stormy history attracted over
six million followers.
It had emerged from the Indies Sociaal Democratic Vereeniging (I.S.D.V.),
the first Marxist organization in the history of southern Asia, founded in
May 1914 in Semarang by the Dutch revolutionary Socialists, Hendricus
M. Sneevliet,3 H. W. Decker and P. Bergsma, and a group of Indonesian
intellectuals. Its aim was to spread Socialist ideas to the broad masses of
Indonesia. It started with 125 members and in October 1915 launched its
periodical, Het vrije woord; seven years later this periodical was suppressed
by the Dutch colonial government.4
The only Indonesian political mass organization which had developed at
that time was the Serakat Islam party (S.I.), founded in 1912. Within four
years it had won 300,000 members, and by 1919 its followers numbered two
and a half million and it included twenty-two Indonesian trade unions with a
collective membership of 77,000.5
The group organizations of peasants, workers and intellectuals formed
1. This article was officially interpreted by the Minister of Justice as follows: ‘The
social function of property is fundamental and must be interpreted so as to mean that
property should not be used to harm society’—quoted in ibid., p. 462.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. Sneevliet (1883-1942) had belonged to a left-wing group in the Dutch Social Demo-
cratic Workers party, which had split away in 1909 to form the Social Democratic party,
from which was to emerge in 1918 the Dutch Communist party. Sneevliet, who arrived in
Java in 1914, represented the P.K.I. at the second congress of the Communist International
in 1920 under the alias of ‘Mahring’. In 1918 he was arrested by the Dutch colonial govern-
ment and expelled from Indonesia.
4. A. B. Belenki, ‘La Gauche Social-Democrate Indonesienne et la Revolution Russe’,
in Georges Haupt and Madelaine Reberioux (eds), La Deuxieme Internationale et l'Orient
(Paris, 1967), p. 320.
5. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, pp. 65-6 and 75.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 287
ideal targets for the Socialist propaganda of the I.S.D.V. In Semarang,
with local Serakat Islam leaders, Semaon and Darsono, Sneevliet organized
Serakat Islam groups within the I.S.D.V. and tried to bring their national
aspirations into line with Socialist aims. Serakat Islam had originally been a
national movement with no social objectives; it worked for self-government
within the framework of the Dutch Empire. But by its second congress in
October 1917, under the influence of its Socialist wing, it was demanding
Indonesia’s complete independence and calling for a fight against capitalism
—admittedly only foreign ‘sinful’ capitalism, out of deference to the Indo-
nesian businessmen who supported Serakat Islam with donations.
In the meantime most I.S.D.V. members had become Communists. At
the second congress of the I.S.D.V. meeting on 23 May 1920 at the head-
quarters of Serakat Islam in Semarang, it was decided by thirty-three votes to
two to constitute the Communist party simply by changing the title of the
organization. Semaon was elected president, Darsono vice-president and
Bergsma secretary.1
Their active membership was small—1,140 in 1924. But the party enjoyed
a predominant influence over the masses of the peasants, whom they had
grouped into a new organization, Serakat Rakjat,2 of 31,000 members
within Serakat Islam, and also over the workers organized in the trade
union council, founded by Semaon in 1922.

The Communist party, however, soon fell victim to that ‘infantile disease of
radicalism in Communism’, about which Lenin could not give impressive
enough warnings. It geared its policy to the assumption that the Communist
revolution was imminent. At its fifth congress, in June-July 1924, the Com-
munist International had asked all parties to concentrate their strength on
capturing the trade union movement as an indispensable precondition for
successful revolution. The mass following of the Indonesian party, however,
was based not so much on the industrial workers as on the peasants, organ-
ized in Serakat Rakjat. Its conference of December 1924 decided to dissolve
Serakat Rakjat—for the reason, the proposal said, that it included too many
bourgeois nationalists who could not be relied upon in a revolution—and to
replace this by a trade union base. And it proclaimed as its aim the setting up
of a Soviet Indonesian Republic under a dictatorship of the proletariat.
This new party course, however, was not ‘in line with Stalin’s policy’ at
that time. In a speech made in May 1925 he accused the Indonesian Com-
munists of ‘leftist deviation’ which ‘overrates the revolutionary potentialities
of the liberation movement and underrates the importance of an alliance
between the working class and the revolutionary bourgeoisie against imperial-
ism’. The Communists in Java, he said, ‘who recently erroneously put forward
1. Sneevliet, expelled from Java in 1918, had emigrated to Moscow.
2. See Aidit, A Short History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 6.
288 Socialism and Communism in Asia
the slogan of a Soviet government for their country suffer, it seems, from this
same deviation. That is a deviation to the left which threatens to isolate the
Communist party from the masses and to transform it into a sect.’1
But Stalin’s warning had been spoken to the winds. The party left wing,
under the leadership of Alimin and Musso, gained control of the party. A
conference of the party executive and trade union leaders in Prambanan in
October 1925 decided to unleash a revolution by the Communist party to
overthrow Dutch colonial rule and seize power. At this time the Communist
party had no more than about 3,000 members, with a mass base of some
31,000 peasants and a somewhat smaller number of urban workers.2 The
date for the outbreak of the revolution was fixed for 18 June 1926 to allow
time for the plan to be submitted to the executive of the Communist Inter-
national for appraisal. Alimin and Musso went first to Manila, to discuss the
plan with Tan Malaka,3 the representative of the Communist International
in South-East Asia, before going on to Moscow.
Moscow’s reaction to the plans for the uprising has never been made
public. It would seem unlikely, however, that after Stalin’s condemnation of
the party’s leftward course the Communist International would have given
its approval.4 It was certainly rejected decisively by Tan Malaka. A revolution,
he said, could only achieve its goal provided it had the support of the masses.
And it was questionable whether the revolution which the party had planned
could find the necessary mass support. A coup by the leaders without popular
backing was doomed to fail. However, disregarding Tan Malaka’s warning,
the P.K.I. continued with its preparations for an armed uprising.
The Dutch colonial government, evidently deducing that the party was
preparing for revolutionary action, withdrew its right to hold assemblies at
the end of November 1925 and, after a strike by dock workers in Surabaya
in December, it arrested many of the party’s leaders. Yet not even then did
the party relinquish its plan for revolution; it simply postponed the date.
The insurrection broke out in Java during the night of 12 November 1926,
and was crushed by Dutch troops within a few days. In Sumatra, where it
did not begin until early in the following January, it collapsed after a few
weeks of guerrilla warfare. The P.K.I. had hoped to carry the masses of
workers and peasants but its call to revolution did not meet with the expected
response. ‘The masses of the workers in the cities as well as on the
1. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (Moscow, 1940),
p. 192; quoted in Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 79.
2. See ibid., p. 84.
3. Tan Malaka (1895-1949), one of the outstanding leaders of the Indonesian Com-
munist party, had been arrested in 1922 and given the choice of imprisonment or exile; he
chose exile, and had gone to Moscow.
4. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 83. Brackman, on the other
hand, does not believe that Stalin rejected the plan; he trusted Musso until his death. See
Brackman, Indonesian Communism, p. 16 ; see also Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and Marhaen,
p. 40.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 289
plantations,’ Semaon reported, ‘adopted an attitude of indifference towards
the rebel movement.’1
The defeat was disastrous. Seven insurgents were hanged, 13,000 arrested,
5,000 sentenced to imprisonment and over 800 deported to the penal colony
of Boven Digul in New Guinea. The party was declared illegal, and remained
impotent for almost two decades.2

Several months after the defeat of the Communist party, on 4 June 1927, a
Socialist party of a peculiarly Indonesian character came into being which
was to emerge from the Indonesian revolution as the most powerful party in
the country. This was the Nationalist party of Indonesia—Partai Nasional
Indonesia (P.N.I.). Its founder, a young engineer from Java, was Achmed
Sukarno (1901-70), whose eclectic Socialism intertwined threads of Marxism3
and Islam to form a synthesis with Hindu-Buddhist mysticism. He called his
synthesis ‘Marhaenism’ (‘Proletarianism’): ‘A kind of Socialism. . . especially
suited to the Indonesian community and its spirit’, which rested in principle
on the concept of gotong rojong, the system of mutual aid, which is one of the
tendencies in the Indonesian mentality. Marhaen, he wrote in his Manifesto
o f Marhaenism, was ‘the collective term for the small peasants, agricultural
workers, factory workers and other employees in Indonesia . . . the 91 per
cent of the population who live in desperate poverty’.4 Sukarno was a
fascinating personality and an inspiring orator who was able to develop his
thoughts in the language of peasants and workers.
The aim of the party was to secure Indonesia’s independence. It was not,
1. Semaon, The Situation in Indonesia, Co-Report before the 30th Session of the
Comintern, Inprecor, 4 October 1928, quoted in Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in
Indonesia, p. 84; The Communist International declared itself solidly behind the uprising.
Bukharin, its president, stated in a speech to a meeting of its executive: ‘From this platform
we welcome the workers and peasants of Indonesia, the broad masses of this Dutch colony,
who lead in a bloody battle against capitalism. Our utmost support to the Indonesian
people!’ See International Press Correspondence, November 1926, p. 1429.
2. For the history of the uprising, see Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia,
pp. 80-5; Brackman, Indonesian Communism, pp. 15-21; Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and
Marhaen, pp. 31-3 and 38-42. For documentary material on the uprising, see Harry J.
Benda and Ruth T. McVey (eds), The Communist Uprising o f 1926-1927 in Indonesia: Key
Documents (Ithaca, 1960). As an example of Communist historiography it mentions that,
according to Aidit’s statements, the uprising had not been decided, planned and executed
by the party, but was a spontaneous reaction by the ‘people’ against ‘provocations’ by the
Dutch Colonial government. It was only after the uprising began, he declared, that ‘the
Communist Party came forward to give it as good a leadership as possible . . . ’—Aidit,
Short History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 8.
3. An example of Sukarno’s wide reading in Marxist sources occurs in an important
speech he made on 1 June 1945, in which he discussed Otto Bauer’s definition of national
character in his book Die Nationdlitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna, 1907). His
knowledge of European Socialist literature—he quoted Jean Jaurds in the same speech—
seems all the more noteworthy since he had studied not in Europe, like a majority of
Indonesian intellectuals, but in Indonesia. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in
Indonesiat pp. 123 and 125.
4. Manifesto o f Marhaenism (Djakarta, 1954), pp. 6-7.
290 Socialism and Communism in Asia
as Sukarno often stressed, an Islamic party, for the independence it strove for
was the simultaneous objective of Indonesian Christians as well as of Moham-
medans. It would be pointless, he said, ‘to await an aeroplane from Moscow
or a caliphate from Istanbul’ to come to support the struggle. Above all the
party sought to organize the workers into trade unions, and it attracted many
of the Communists whose organization and trade unions had been destroyed.
Within two years the P.N.I. had attracted over 10,000 members.
The rapid growth of the P.N.I. and its anti-capitalist propaganda alarmed
the Dutch colonial government. Sukarno, with seven other party leaders,
was arrested at the end of December 1929, and after seven months of deten-
tion on remand was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, because, the
verdict stated, he had ‘by words’ recommended the government’s overthrow;
at the same time the P.N.I. was declared illegal. Sukarno was, however, re-
leased in December 1931 before serving his full term, but after several months
he was again arrested and following court proceedings was banished to an
island. It was nine years before he was given his freedom in 1942 by the
Japanese shortly after they began their invasion of Indonesia.

The same fate overtook Soetan Sjahrir (1909-66), an outstanding figure in the
history of Indonesian Socialism and, with Achmed Sukarno and Mohanypad
Hatta (b. 1902), a member of the triumvirate which led the revolution and
created the Republic of Indonesia. He had been brought up in Sumatra and
had studied at Leiden University in Holland before returning to Indonesia in
1932. At the beginning of 1934 he was arrested as a result of his activities in
nationalist organizations that had come into being after the suppression of
the P.N.I. He was then imprisoned without trial for a year, and afterwards
deported to the concentration camp in Boven Digul before finally being
banished to the island of Banda Neira. He, too, was only able to return to
Java after the Japanese occupation.1

The Japanese invasion began with the attack on Sumatra on 14 February

1942 and on 1 March on Java; eight days later the Dutch commander in
charge of the Allied forces2 capitulated. The Japanese, welcomed by the
Indonesians as liberators from Dutch colonial rule, held out the promise of
self-government so as to win the support of nationalist leaders, especially that
of Sukarno and Hatta. For tactical reasons, both agreed to co-operate.
Sukarno became president of an organization formed under Japanese auspices
and representing all nationalist movements—the ‘Centre of the People’s
1. See Soetan Sjahrir, Out o f Exile, with an Introduction by Charles Wolf, Jr (New
York, 1949). This collection of Sjahrir’s letters from prison is an important source for
the history of the Indonesian freedom movement as well as a remarkable record of his
personality.
2. Some 8,000 British and American soldiers were stationed in Java besides the Dutch
troops.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 291
Power’ (Poeiera), planned as an interim measure leading to self-government.
Sjahrir, on the other hand, went underground to organize in Djakarta and
other towns in Java a revolutionary movement which particularly attracted
the student youth and developed into the most formidable underground
movement to confront the Japanese.1
After Indonesia’s declaration of independence on 17 August 1945,
Sjahrir saw the time as being ripe to establish a Socialist party (Partai
Socialis) designed to influence the character of the emerging state. The
Socialist party was formed in Cheribon early in December 1945 by the
fusion of two Socialist groups which had come to life independently in
November; one was the group Sjahrir formed in Djakarta, the other one
which Amir Sjarifuddin organized in Jogja. Sjahrir became chairman of the
new party, and Sjarifuddin deputy chairman.2
The Socialist party rapidly developed into a party with a mass following.
Members of Sjahrir’s and Sjarifuddin’s anti-Japanese underground move-
ments, as well as young intellectuals, university students and many Com-
munists, flocked to its ranks. Allied with the party, or affiliated to it, was the
Socialist youth organization, Permuda Socialis Indonesia (Pesindo)—an
alliance of seven militarily trained and armed youth organizations, ‘the most
dynamic and powerful of all youth organizations in the Republic’;3 the
Labour party, Partai Buruh Indonesia, a foundation of trade union leaders;
the largest peasant organization in the country—the Barisan Tani Indonesia—
and, above all, the Indonesian Trade Union Council (S.O.B.S.I.), a federation
of trade unions both of industrial workers in the towns and of plantation
workers which included several hundred thousand members.4
In alliance with the sister organization, the Socialist party formed the
left wing of the revolutionary camp. During the first years of the republic it
was to be the dominant influence in both the government and the provisional
parliament. Its leaders were to provide prime ministers for the young republic
between November 1945 and February 1948: Sjahrir, from June 1945 to
July 1947, and Sjarifuddin, from July 1947 to January 1948.
The promising development of the Socialist movement was, however,
frustrated by the Communist party, which had re-emerged on 21 October
1945 after two decades of illegality. Re-organized under Mohammed Jusuf’s
leadership, it developed only slowly. Three years after its re-emergence it
1. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 112.
2. Amir Sjarifuddin, leader of a nationalist organization before the war, organized an
underground movement with financial aid from the Dutch government. This was un-
covered by the Japanese, and Sjarifuddin and several other leaders were arrested and
sentenced to death. On Sukarno’s intervention, Sjarifuddin’s death sentence was commuted
to life imprisonment; but four of its other leaders were hanged.
3. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 162.
4. See Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, p. 34. Kahin estimated the membership of the
Trade Union Council as being at that time between 200,000 and 300,000— Nationalism and
Revolution in Indonesia, p. 261.
292 Socialism and Communism in Asia
counted, according to its reports, no more than 3,000 members against the
60,000 of the Socialist party.1 It played no role in the first phase of the
revolution. ‘The weakness of the party in the political, ideological and
organizational spheres,’ Aidit recorded, ‘made it incapable of giving [the
revolution] a lead, even though the situation was objectively very favourable
at that time.’2 In the provisional parliament it was represented by only two
members against the Socialist party’s thirty-five.
The immediate task which it set itself was to gain the leadership of the
Socialist mass organizations—the youth organization Pesindo, the Labour
party and, above all, the Socialist party—by infiltrating undercover Com-
munists. ‘It is of importance to note,’ Kahin stressed in his analysis, ‘that
a large number of Indonesian Stalinists, including some of the most im-
portant of them, did not join the Communist party. Instead they joined one
or the other of the three chief non-Communist Marxist parties—the Socialist
party, the Labour party or the Pesindo'.3 Thus, for example, two leaders of
the Socialist party, the deputy chairman, Amir Sjarifuddin, and the general
secretary, Tan Ling Djie, who was also a member of the party executive,
later openly admitted they had for a long period been clandestine Communist
party members and had worked within the Socialist party only as Com-
munist cells.
The key strategic position which the Communists had to occupy in their
struggle for power was in effect the Socialist party, which, standing at the
head of the group of Socialist organizations, exercised a predominant influence
over both the provisional government and the provisional parliament. It
was taken for granted that Sjahrir would be summoned as the first prime
minister of the newly-formed republic; and following his resignation at the
end of June 1947, that the deputy chairman of the Socialist party, Amir
Sjarifuddin, should succeed him to the post.
Sjahrir had resigned as prime minister because the concealed Communist
wing within the party, led by Sjarifuddin, had refused to support the negotia-
tions with the Dutch government which were to lead to Indonesia’s sover-
eignty under the Linggadjati Agreement.4
With Sjarifuddin’s manoeuvre, the mounting crisis within the party,
provoked by the Communists’ tussle to gain its leadership, came into the
open. He had, moreover, insisted on forming, in alliance with the Com-
munists, a ‘People’s Democratic Front’ (F.D.R.), which was in effect designed
to serve as the instrument of Russia’s power politics in Indonesia. A split had
become inevitable.
1. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, pp. 257 and 277.
2. Aidit, History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 23.
3. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 159.
4. For Sjahrir’s negotiations with the Dutch government, and Sjarifuddin’s opposition,
see Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, pp. 206-8; Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism,
p. 36.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 293
It occurred on 13 February 1948. Sjahrir, with twenty-five members of the
executive, declared their separation and in the Foundation Manifesto o f the
Partai Socialis Indonesia (P.S.I.) announced the establishment of a new
Socialist party. The manifesto claimed that Sjarifuddin’s wing of the old
party, by forming the F.D.R., would split ‘the national force’ of the Indo-
nesian revolution. Yet ‘the national struggle for Indonesia’s independence’,
the manifesto declared, ‘is a common cause for all the peoples of Indonesia’.
It was a struggle of historical significance for Asia’s future. The Second World
War had created a vacuum in power politics. It was the task of the new
Asian states to fill this and so to prevent either American capitalism or the
Soviet Union entrenching themselves in Asia. ‘The Republic of Indonesia,’
the manifesto said, ‘must, in a common endeavour with the other Asian
countries, strive to achieve the unity of Asia as a third world power and must
therefore refrain from any alignment towards the United States or the Soviet
Union___ The P.S.I. regards it as its duty to pave the road for this new
policy in Asia.’1 The conference founding the new Socialist party elected a
provisional executive with Sjahrir as chairman and Sumartojo as general
secretary.
Yet the split became a triumph for the Communists. Despite the fact that
a majority of party leaders—nineteen of its thirty-five representatives in the
provisional parliament and four of the five members of the parliamentary
working committee—followed Sjahrir’s leadership, the great majority of the
60,000 rank-and-file members remained within the old party under Sjari-
fuddin.
Meanwhile the Communists had also managed to gain the leadership of
the Socialist group of parties in parliament. Two weeks after the Socialist
party had split away, on 26 February at a mass meeting at Surakarta, they
formed the ‘People’s Democratic Front’—Front Demokrasi Rakjat (F.D.R.)—
composed of the old Socialist party, the Communist party (P.K.I.), the
Labour party and the youth organization Pesindo, in close alliance with the
Indonesian Trade Union Council (S.O.B.S.I.).
Sjarifuddin, who had succeeded Sjahrir as prime minister on 3 July 1947,
resigned on 28 January 1948 as a result of differences of opinion within the
Cabinet. Sukarno as President of the Republic then appointed Mohammad
Hatta, vice-president and leader of the Masjumi party, in his place. When
Hatta invited the old Socialist party to join his coalition government they
demanded the key ministries of defence and of the interior, which Sjarifuddin
had combined with his office as prime minister; after Hatta rejected this
demand the party went into opposition.
About three weeks after Sjarifuddin’s resignation, on 17-21 February

1 . Foundation Manifesto o f the Partai Socialis Indonesia, one manuscript copy of

which may be found in the Archives of the Socialist International in the International
Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
294 Socialism and Communism in Asia
1948, leaders of the Communist parties in South-East Asia, including the
delegates of the P.K.I., met at a conference in Calcutta to discuss Stalin’s new
policy as laid down at the founding conference of the Cominform at the end
of the previous September.1 Under the influence of Moscow’s challenge, as
the Calcutta conference stated, the Indonesian Communist party resolved to
commence the struggle for power through revolutionary means. It was, in
fact, in itself no more than a small party which, according to Suripno, a
member of the P.K.I. Politbureau, had a membership of only 2,500 in Java
and 500 in Sumatra.123But it did dominate the old Socialist party, the powerful
youth organization, Pesindo, and, indeed, the F.D.R. itself.
In a detailed plan of action, put together by the leaders of the F.D.R., an
attempt was to be made to invoke political pressure in the shape of a large-
scale campaign of demonstrations by workers, peasants and soldiers, and
ultimately by a general strike, to force the resignation of Hatta’s government
and its replacement by an F.D.R. government. Should the government fail to
capitulate despite this pressure, the F.D.R. was to pursue ‘the struggle
through an insurrection or as a separate government’. Regular army units
whose loyalty had been won for the F.D.R. and other armed elements within
its organization had been assigned the role of shock troops in the action
to follow.8
The military strength upon which the F.D.R. could call was far from
negligible. While he was prime minister, Sjarifuddin had taken control of the
ministry of defence and had infiltrated the officers’ corps in the army with
his followers; the F.D.R. could thus rely on some army units to support the
rising. Furthermore, it could count on the militarily organized and armed
Socialist youth organization, Pesindo, and several other para-military
groups. And its predominant influence over the trade union leadership
ensured support among the masses of the organized workers.
The country’s situation now became critical. The Dutch government,
refusing to grant Indonesia independence, blockaded the Republic, and a
Dutch force of 145,000 stood by on Indonesian soil, ready to subjugate the
country by force. (The second Dutch campaign against the Republic began in
mid-December 1948.)
This was the situation when the F.D.R. began its action.
It organized mass demonstrations against the government [Sjahrir recorded],
organized strikes and incited the peasants to redistribute the land. It tried to extend
its influence in the army. The armed youth organization Pesindo developed into an
independent force within the Republic, ruled by a spirit of hostility for the govern-
ment___There was a general fear that the actions of the Front Demokrasi Rakjat
would finally escalate into an armed campaign with the aim of subjecting the state
to its control. The number of clashes between the government forces and the armed
1. See pp. 179-80.
2. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 257.
3. For the text of the relevant documents, see ibid, pp. 270-1.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 295
organizations o f the Front D em okrasi increased day by day----- The tension be-
tween the Front D em okrasi and the government, supported by all non-Com m unist
groups in the Republic, had [in A ugust-Septem ber 1948] reached such a degree o f
intensity th at an explosion was inevitable.1

The explosion occurred on 19 September, and ignited a civil war—the

‘Madiun rebellion’—which ended after three months of fighting in a disastrous
defeat for the Communists and the deaths of many thousands.2

In the last analysis, the Communist rising failed due to its inability to carry
with it the broad mass of the people.
By far the m ost im portant factor which brought ab o u t o ur defeat [Suripno,
a mem ber of the party Politbureau, wrote], was the highly inadequate support
received from the people. O utside the tow n o f M adiun, where support by the people
could be described as good, the support was very slender. In certain cases the
inhabitants o f a village assembled so as to take us prisoner___ The lesson which
we learned—a highly valuable though bitter lesson—was th at the people did n o t
support us.3

There were whole provinces where not even the F.D.R. organizations
gave their support. The parties in Sumatra and Bantam, affiliated to the
F.D.R., declared themselves at the outset of the insurrection to be loyal to the
government. In Java, a number of local organizations of F.D.R. parties, in-
cluding even the local Communist party in the town of Bodjonegoro, refused
to support the uprising, accusing its leaders of being ‘Trotskyists’.4
Another factor in the Communist defeat had been the premature outbreak
of the uprising. The central committee of the Communist party had, ad-
mittedly, pursued a policy in the summer of 1948 which took account of the
eventuality of an imminent revolution. But as all evidence seemed to show, it
had not unleashed the rising. At all events, it had not prepared for an
immediate insurrection, but had been taken by surprise. It had, it is true,
created a revolutionary tension. It was precipitated into the turmoil not by
its own decision, but by the action of subordinate local leaders in the move-
ment.5 When the civil war began, however, it placed itself at the head of the
rising as a matter of course.
This outbreak of the revolution was a belated echo of the call for revolu-
tionary action which had been issued by the founding congress of the Comin-
form at the end of September 1947, and which had been taken up by the
Calcutta Conference of the Asian Communist parties in February 1948. But
1. Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, pp. 38-9.
2. For an objective survey of these events, see Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in
Indonesia, pp. 288-300; see also the detailed description in Brackman, Indonesian Com-
munism, pp. 91-9.
3. Suripno, Why We Lost in Mutiara (Djakarta, June 1949), quoted in Brackman,
Indonesian Communism, p. 100.
4. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 301.
5. See the reasoning in ibid., pp. 284-6.
296 Socialism and Communism in Asia
while the Communist parties of India and Burma lost no time in inciting
uprisings and unrest in their own countries,1 the Communist leadership in
Indonesia had refrained from a radical change of policy until the summer
of 1948.
One personal factor had also been important in the development of events.
In the middle of August 1948, a month before the outbreak of the rising,
Musso, the founder of the illegal Communist party of Indonesia in 1920, had
unexpectedly arrived in Java after a twenty-two-year absence. After the
failure of the rising of 1926, which he had planned and led jointly with
Alimin, he had fled to Moscow and had there been working in the service of
the Communist International. His return to Java was hailed jubilantly by
the party, and he was at once elected general secretary.
It can only be assumed—for decisions of this kind never find their way
into the documentary record—that in accordance with Moscow’s offensive
against the West, he had been sent to promote a Communist revolution in
Indonesia like that already begun by the parties in India and Burma. He
came, at any event, with a plan for the Communist seizure of power which he
called the ‘Gottwald Plan’. Even as in February 1948, Gottwald had forced
the nomination of a government under Communist leadership as an alterna-
tive to civil war by massing armed workers in the streets of Prague, and
then, having possessed himself of power, had established a Communist
dictatorship in Czechoslovakia,2 so, under pressure from the masses, with the
F.D.R. at their head, was Indonesia to be forced to accept a new government,
whose key political power positions would go to Communists. According to
the ‘Gottwald Plan’ the armed rising was only to be considered in the event of
the peaceful method failing.
Musso’s plan did not differ fundamentally from the F.D.R.’s plan of
action. But it seems that under his leadership the action was speeded up. An
extraordinary Communist party conference decided a week after his return to
amalgamate Sjarifuddin’s old Socialist party and the Labour party ‘into a
single party of the working classes with the historic title of Communist Party
of Indonesia’,* and the leadership of each party accepted the decision
unhesitatingly, the Labour party on 27 August, the Socialist party two days
later, in the face of protests from many of their members.4

On 18 December 1948, a few weeks after the fighting between government

troops and Communist guerrilla forces had ended, the Dutch government
once again employed its army in Indonesia against the Republic. (The first
Dutch military action against the Indonesian Republic had begun on 20
July 1947, finishing with a cease-fire at the beginning of December.) After

1. See pp. 231 and 262. 2. See page 178.

3. Quoted in Aidit, History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 29.
4. See Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 277.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 297
seven months of fighting the Indonesian people united in resistance, it
capitulated: it agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations, and on 2 November
1949 an agreement was signed recognizing Indonesia’s independence.1 On 27
December 1949, the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (R.U.S.I.)
came into existence as an independent, sovereign state. The national revolu-
tion had been triumphantly concluded.
Only now, when Indonesia had finally gained her sovereignty, did it
become possible to think of rebuilding the Socialist parties destroyed by the
civil war and the Dutch military action.
The Socialist party had to be reconstructed from scratch. Hundreds of its
most active members had, as Sjahrir recorded, been killed in the front line of
the battle against the Dutch. When the party executive assembled on 3
February 1950, two years after its formation, it showed ‘that it could count
only a few thousand members___ Its numbers were relatively so small that
one could hardly speak of a party organization.’2 And when, two years
later, in February 1952, it met for its first congress in Bandung, it numbered
within 150 local organizations no more than 17,529 members, and of these
only 3,049 were full members.3
The party executive had drawn the appropriate lesson from the fate of
the Socialist party. Before its split it had enjoyed a mass following, but then,
infiltrated by Communists, it had become a tool of Communist policy and
within six months of splitting had gone over to the Communist party lock,
stock and barrel. The Communists had been successful in their manoeuvre
because the genuinely convinced Socialists within the party had not been
very numerous; the party brought together an amorphous mass which leant
vaguely towards Socialist ideas but which was unable to distinguish between
the democratic ideal of humanitarian Socialism and Communism’s totali-
tarian concept.
The executive therefore decided first of all to build up a closed organiza-
tion, an exclusive, cadre party of convinced Social Democrats, and only
these were to be recognized as full members. Candidates for membership
were to be proposed by two full members, and only admitted to full member-
ship after a period of studying the party principles and its political attitude,
and only if their manner of life matched Socialist principles. The party
executive had assumed that the first congress would open the party door to
1. The agreement states in Article 1: ‘The Kingdom of the Netherlands unconditionally
and irrevocably transfers complete sovereignty over Indonesia to the Republic of the
United States of Indonesia and thereby recognizes the said Republic of the United States
of Indonesia as an independent and sovereign state___ The transfer of sovereignty shall
take place at the latest on 30 December 1949’—quoted in Kahin, Nationalism and Revolu-
tion in Indonesia, p. 449. West Irian (West New Guinea), the western half of a jungle-clad
island twelve times the size of Holland, but with a population of only 700,000, remained
under Dutch rule; it was not transferred to Indonesia until August 1962.
2. Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, pp. 46 and 47.
3. Partai Socialis Indonesia (Djakarta., 1956), p. 5.
 298 Socialism and Communism in Asia
the masses, but the congress decided to retain the principle of a closed party.
So its membership grew slowly.
The declaration of principles decided upon at the first congress particu-
larly emphasized the democratic and humanitarian character of Socialism in
sharp contrast to totalitarian Communism which denied rights of freedom to
the individual.
Socialism, as we understand it [the declaration said], is a Socialism resting on
democracy, safeguarding hum an values and respecting the equality o f all men. The
realization o f individualism shows itself through the treatm ent o f the individual
under the theory and practice o f Socialism. Respect fo r the hum an individual is, in
fact, the essence [of the ideas] of all the great architects o f Socialism such as M arx
and Engels. Socialism is, in fact, nothing m ore than the full realization o f the
dem ocratic ideals, hum an liberty, and em ancipation in the real meaning o f the
word.

This concept of Socialism, the declaration continued, separated the

Socialist party from ‘Socialism as it is understood by Moscow’.
The Com inform differs from us in that it disassociates itself from o ur realization
o f hum an individualism. It looks upon individualism as n o m ore than one abstract
factor in the concept o f a group o r class, o r only as a working force, a factor o f
production. It also differs in its spirit and spiritual attitude. N o t only in theory, b u t
also in practice, does it dispute the unity and equality o f all mankind. In practice it
considers and treats all those who do not obey the p arty ’s discipline and accept its
teachings as enemies, who may be dealt with with no regard for m oral consideration.

‘Considering the Cominform’s concept,’ the declaration said, ‘its theories

are . . . a matter of secondary importance. Its spirit and mentality are, how-
ever, in irreconcilable conflict with Socialism as we understand it.’
A Socialist society, it continued, could only be evolved by a spiritually
mature nation, fully conscious of its actions. It could never be fulfilled by
people ‘who remain slaves in character and attitude, unable to act or think
without instructions’. Socialism could never be realized ‘by force or the
deception of the people through the exploitation of their ignorance’.
The declaration emphasized that the party’s objective was revolutionary—
‘nothing less than the changing and elimination of the old society and the
setting up of a new, Socialistic order’. But the best and safest road to this
goal was the democratic way.
If, however, ‘a feudal absolutist state should arise’, then there would be
nothing left for the party to do except to turn to force—‘if necessary by
kindling an uprising in defence against tyranny and despotism’.1

Like the Socialist party, the Communist party also had to be completely
reconstructed. During the insurrection it had suffered terrible losses, includ-
ing both its leaders; Musso had fallen in a skirmish and Sjarifuddin had
1. Partai Socialis Indonesia, pp. 23-4 and 29-31.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 299

been arrested and executed.1 It had been declared illegal and charged with
responsibility for the national catastrophe of the civil war.
Its first concern was therefore to clear itself of the blame for having
instigated the bloodbath, and to shift the responsibility on to President
Sukarno and Hatta, the prime minister. In its justification it affirmed that the
uprising had been an act of self-defence ‘by the people’ in the face of ‘provoca-
tion’. The civil war had been unleashed, it stated in a memorandum, by a
speech made by President Sukarno on the night of 19 September in which he
‘ordered a general attack [on the Communists] and the brutal slaying of all
those whom he branded as agitators’. By this provocation, the Communist
statement continued, the national anti-imperialist front, the F.D.R. ‘which
had been built up by the Communist party on the basis of a national pro-
gramme’, had been broken up. ‘The anti-imperialist, national revolutionary
forces had been destroyed, by, among other measures, the killing and arrest
of 36,000 people who had formed the backbone of the revolution.’2
The party was destroyed. It seemed that its development had been
thrown back by decades.
1. After the end of the civil war ten leading Communists were executed with Sjari-
fuddin in Socerakarta, and forty-one in Magelang—all without trial; see Brackman, Indo-
nesian Communism, p. 109. The numbers of Communists killed and arrested during the
civil war ran into thousands.
2. Quoted in Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and Marhaen, pp. 147 and 149. The chronology
of events, however, contradicts this version. The uprising in Madiun began on 18 September
at 3 a.m. The Communists captured the town by a surprise onslaught, raised the Red Flag
over the town hall and installed a government which announced from the Madiun radio
station: ‘Madiun has risen! The revolution has begun! The people have disarmed the
police and army. The workers and peasants have formed a new government. Our arms will
not be laid down until the whole of Indonesia is liberated’—quoted in Brackman, Indo-
nesian Communism, p. 93.
But Sukarno’s ‘provocation’, which, according to the Communist statement, ‘had
forced the people and the soldiers to defend themselves’ (see Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and
Marhaen, p. 147), was given on 19 September at 10 o’clock in the evening, forty-three hours
after the rising had commenced. In a radio speech from the station at Jogjakarta he
declared: ‘Yesterday morning Musso’s Communist party undertook a sudden attack in
Madiun, and has formed a Soviet government under Musso’s leadership. It considers the
seizure of power by force to be a step preluding the seizure of the whole government of
Indonesia___ Support the government in the fight against the insurgents!’
Musso replied an hour and a half later in a radio speech from the Madiun station,
declaring: ‘On 18 September 1948 the citizens of Madiun took the power of state into
their own hands. With this the citizens of Madiun have fulfilled their duty towards the
national revolution, which must in fact be led by the people of Indonesia to choose between
Sukarno and Musso! The people should reply: “Sukamo-Hatta, the slaves of the Japanese
and Americans! Traitors must die!” .’
Moscow radio reported on the same day that ‘a people’s government has been in-
stalled in Madiun and people’s committees have formed themselves in other leading towns.
This is a popular rising against the government of the Fascist Japanese Quislings, Sukarno
and Hatta.’ For the wording of Sukarno’s and Musso’s radio broadcasts and Radio
Moscow’s announcements, see Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, pp. 292-4).
In Communist historiography, however, the myth of the ‘Madiun provocation’ lives
on, as in the Short History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, published by the general
secretary of the party in 1955. See Aidit, History o f the Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 32.
300 Socialism and Communism in Asia
This made the fantastic growth of the rejuvenated party all the more sur-
prising. Its prohibition was lifted in September 1949 at the end of the Dutch
campaign, and it had begun again with a regrouping of its scattered followers
in 1950. According to its own account, in March 1954 it embraced 165,206
members and by the end of 1955 over a million. Besides this, it held a domin-
ant influence over the Indonesian Trade Union Council, the Sentral Organ-
isasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia (S.O.B.S.I.), which, in 1955, had two and a half
million members, as well as over the youth organization, Permuda Rakjat
(People’s Youth), with 200,000 members, and the Indonesian peasants’
organization, Barisan Tani Indonesia, with 3,315,820 members.1
How is this rapid expansion of Communist influence to be explained in
Indonesia, almost without precedent in the history of those countries where
different parties have been able to canvass for followers in a free contest?
What forces drew such enormous numbers of workers, peasants and the
youth to the Communist party—a party which had, above all, been charged
with responsibility for the national catastrophe of civil war?
The civil war, we must remember, had been followed within a few weeks
by the Dutch military action, and when the party’s renewed ascendant began
in 1951, memories of the civil war episode had already been eclipsed by the
even more profound impression made by the Dutch war campaign. During
the first days of their military action, the Dutch had promptly occupied all
the towns with overwhelmingly superior forces and Sukarno, Hatta and
Sjahrir, the leaders of the resistance, were arrested. The Dutch attempt to
bring the people of Indonesia to their knees had aroused a deep-felt patriot-
ism. They had refused to capitulate and even though deprived of their
leaders, had defended themselves. By numerous hard-hitting guerrilla actions
they had paralysed Holland’s ability to wage war until the government in
The Hague, in the train of seven months of angry fighting, came to reason
and saw that the Indonesian people could never be subjected by brute
force.
Shortly after the Dutch campaign began, the Indonesian government had
released from prison many thousands of Communists arrested during the
civil war; these swelled the ranks of the guerrilla fighters and were equal
patriots with the next man. Through their participation in the national war of
liberation they appeared to be rehabilitated.
After the end of the war with the Dutch, the Communists continued the
national fight. Peace discussions at The Hague had ended in compromise.
While Indonesia’s sovereignty and independence had been recognized by
Holland, it had remained as a dominion within a Dutch-Indonesian Union;
thus Indonesia continued to be legally bound to Holland.12 Neither had
1. See Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, pp. 65, 135, 189 and 165.
2. The Dutch-Indonesian Union was dissolved in discussions between both govern-
ments at The Hague in August 1954.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 301
Holland renounced its claim to West Irian, a territory of the former Dutch
colonial empire.
This compromise, which also placed a heavy financial burden upon the
young republic, was opposed not only by the Indonesian Communists; the
Socialists also opposed it. But the Communist party actively continued to
campaign against The Hague agreement as an implacable anti-imperialist
struggle. While the Socialists, to express their rejection, contented themselves
with abstaining in the vote on the agreement in parliament on 10 December
1949, the Communists voted against it. Their propaganda declared that the
agreement in no way meant liberation from Dutch colonial rule and that the
country would remain enslaved by Dutch capitalism and imperialism.1 This
opposition to any political or economic union with Holland appeared as a
genuine nationalist struggle and so won the Communists sympathy from the
broad masses awakening to national consciousness.

The younger generation of Communist party leaders recognized that, if they

were to develop into a party with a mass following, they had to transform its
image from that of a revolutionary party of class rebellion and to portray
themselves as a national patriotic people’s party. However, when the party
re-emerged in its new legality early in 1950, its leadership was in the hands of
two of its veterans, Alimin and Tan Ling Djie. These were hardly the men to
refurbish the party’s image. Tan Ling Djie was later accused of being a
‘liquidationist’ and was disciplined by the party leadership, for he had
advocated the liquidation of the Communist party and the founding of a
Labour party in its place. Alimin, himself compromised by the failure of the
1926 uprising which he had led with Musso, did not wish to see the party’s
continuation except as a small party limited to conscientious revolutionary
Communists.
The change of the party’s image and its ascendant began when the
leadership went to two young men: Dipa Nurantara Aidit (1923-65) and
H. M. Lukman (1920-65). Aidit, the son of a forestry worker, had been a
member of the central committee since 1947 as well as president of the
parliamentary Communist group. Lukman had grown up in a Dutch intern-
ment camp in West Irian, where his father had been deported for taking part
in the Communist rising of 1926. After being freed he had also occupied
himself in the party secretariat. At the time of the Madiun revolt, Aidit and
1. The ‘dissolution of Indonesia’s semi-colonial status and its replacement by a system
of people’s democracy’ was declared to be the party’s aim in its programme adopted in
March 1954 at its first congress since the civil war. In his report on the political situation,
Aidit, the general secretary, explained that the Hague agreement had ‘transformed an
independent and sovereign Indonesia into a semi-colonial country, a country which
apparently possesses a “right to self-government”, but in which the real power, especially
in the economic sphere, lay in the hands of the imperialists, the Dutch imperialists above
all’—D. N. Aidit, The Road to People’s Democracy fo r Indonesia. Fifth National Congress o f
the Communist Party o f Indonesia, March 1954 (Djakarta, 1955), p. 25.
302 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Lukman had fled into exile, first to Vietnam and then to China, returning to
Indonesia in July 1950. They gained the party leadership on the strength of
their programme to transform it into a party of the masses. Within six months
of their return, the veterans Alimin and Tan Ling Djie had been manoeuvred
out of the leadership. Aidit’s era had begun.
The new strategic plan which Aidit submitted to the conference in January
1952 was aimed at forming a ‘United National Front’ to include ‘the national
bourgeoisie’. The ‘national bourgeoisie’ was, in Aidit’s definition, a capitalist
class, but ‘suppressed by foreign capitalism and local feudalism’ and therefore
‘anti-imperialist and anti-feudal and in this respect a revolutionary force’—in
contrast to the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’, the ‘grand bourgeoisie’, serving the
interests of the big foreign capitalist.
To pioneer a national front, the Communist party had to fulfil the role of
a national, patriotic party. To this end Aidit announced in a speech in
March 1952:
F o r the Communists, w ork for the party is inseparable from w ork in the
national interest, the interest o f the hom eland, the interest o f the people. W hen a
Com m unist fails to serve the interests o f the nation . . . then he fails to serve the
interests o f the party and is no t a good C om m unist.. . . Every Com m unist is a
patriot, and for every p atriot who is no t a Com m unist the gates o f the party stand
open to receive him into m em bership.1

The party surpassed itself in the homage it paid to the symbols of Indo-
nesian Nationalism: the national flag, the national anthem, national holidays,
national heroes. In its basic principles it accepted without reservation the five
principles of Indonesian nationalism formulated by Sukarno on 1 June 1945
during one of his famous speeches under the title Panja Sila: ‘nationalism,
internationalism, parliamentary government, wealth and belief in God
Almighty’, and it declared in its tactical guide-lines, ‘in the fight for national
interest we must hold to the principles of subordinating class and party
interests to national interests, to placing national interests above the interests
of class and party’.2
To win the allegiance of non-political workers, the S.O.B.S.I. trade union
congress in January 1955 even deleted the terms ‘Socialism’, ‘class struggle’
and ‘people’s democracy’ from its former constitution, for these ‘emphasized
the division between the S.O.B.S.I. trade unions and those trade unions which
belonged to no trade union federation’. The former 1947 constitution of the
S.O.B.S.I., the central committee stated in explanation, had hoped ‘to
mobilize the workers for the establishment of a Socialist society’. Such a
revolution would, in any case, have failed under present conditions. It was
therefore ‘no longer the duty of Indonesian workers to fight capitalism and
establish a Socialist society, but together with the peasants, middle classes
1. Quoted in Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 123.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 126.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 303
and non-comprador bourgeoisie, to fight imperialism and establish the
society of a people’s democracy—as a first step. . . on the road to a Socialist
society’.1
The party wished to appear not only as a national party, but also as a
party of parliamentary democracy. In its declaration of October 1951 it laid
claim to the description of ‘a pioneer in defending respect for parliament’,
with the rider ‘so we will always remain’.2 Admittedly in its programme it
advocated the setting up of a ‘people’s democracy’ but, it emphasized,
through the methods of parliamentary democracy, not by means of force. A
peaceful transition to a people’s democracy was, it stated, ‘a possibility which
we must aim to fulfil with all our strength. If this depends on us as Com-
munists, so is this the best way, the ideal way for a transition to a people’s
system of democratic pow er. . . the peaceful road, the parliamentary road.’3
The main task which Aidit gave the party, however, was to win the
sympathies of the broad mass of the peasants through a revolutionary
agrarian policy.
By far the most important immediate task of the Indonesian Communists [he
declared], is to develop an anti-feudal agrarian revolution, to confiscate the land of
the big farmers and hand it over to the dispossessed and impoverished peasants as
their personal property. The first step in our work among the peasants must be our
support for them in their struggle for the realization of this immediate requirement
and demand___This is the foundation on which an alliance of workers and
peasants is to be constructed.. . . The agrarian revolution is the essence of the
people’s democratic revolution in Indonesia. . . . Its slogan is: ‘The land for the
peasants!’4
Aidit had evolved this programme a year before the congress met, in an
article on the future of the Indonesian peasants’ movement in the party’s
theoretical monthly journal. ‘Given these slogans,’ he wrote, ‘the peasants
will not doubt the sincerity of our programme; they will even support it with
all their strength. It is a guarantee for a genuine alliance between workers and
peasants.’5

While from the beginning of 1951 the Communist party was striving to build
a mass party and win a mass following among the peasants as well as the
workers, the second congress of the Socialist party, which met in June 1955
in Djakarta, three months before the first elections for the parliament, showed
no indication of considering any changes in the party’s structure. The con-
gress continued to insist on the principle of a closed organization of con-
vinced Socialists, and considered the theoretical and political instruction of
1. Quoted in ibid., p. 144. 2. Quoted in ibid., p. 127.
3. Quoted in ibid., p. 131.
4. Aidit, The Road to People's Democracy fo r Indonesia, pp. 32-3.
5. D. N. Aidit, ‘Haridepan Gerankan Tani Indonesia’, in Bintang Merah, July 1953,
quoted in Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 161.
304 Socialism and Communism in Asia
its members rather than propaganda among the masses to be its most
important task. To match the Communist-dominated peasants’ organization,
the party had founded its own peasants’ organization, the Gerankan Tani
Indonesia (G.T.I.); and, to match the Communist-dominated trade union
alliance, the S.O.B.S.I., it had formed the Indonesian Trades Union Congress
(K.B.S.I.), while gaining the leadership of a number of trade unions (in
particular those of the railwaymen, dockers, petroleum and plantation
workers). But it was at pains not to jeopardize the autonomous character of
these organizations through party propaganda. Moreover, ‘many members of
the party’, as Sjahrir recorded, had ‘taken on the manner of a political 61ite\
This was why ‘the party disengaged itself more and more from the masses.
Its opponents scorned it as a party of intellectual snobs.’1
The party had, in fact, attracted many intellectuals. But its activity was in
general confined to the large towns, ‘with the result that the peasants in
thousands of villages were unaware of the Socialist party’s existence’.* It
had, admittedly, almost trebled its membership since its first congress in
1952, from 17,529 to 47,192, but the number of full members had increased
only from 3,049 to 4,330.® Despite these facts the congress could not agree
to any fundamental change of party structure; it stood firm on the principle
of a cadre organization of trained Socialists.

This was how the situation stood when, three months before the elections,
the congress decided, hesitantly, and against the opposition of one faction,
to participate. To its surprise its meetings drew such large crowds that, as
Sjahrir reported, ‘some people in the party polled 20 per cent [of the votes]’.
The same people forgot, however, ‘that while they had addressed thousands
at their meetings, there were millions in the villages who had never heard of
the existence of the Socialist party’.4
The elections of 29 September 1955 ended in a crushing disappointment
for the Socialists. They had hoped at least to emerge as one of the large
parties in the country. But the party gained only two per cent of the
37,875,000 votes cast, and only five of the 257 seats in parliament. It had,
admittedly, gone into the election battle as a cadre party and had begun its
election campaign a mere three months before the election date, while the
Communists, with the other parties, had opened their election campaign
many months earlier. It was therefore genuinely surprising that even so they
had managed to win 753,000 votes. But they had lost their position of a
decisive influence in the state which they had until then occupied.
For the Communists, on the other hand, the election results were a
triumph. They had polled 6,179,000 votes, or more than 16 per cent of those
cast, and won thirty-nine seats. Seven years after their ruin in the terrible
1. Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, p. SI. 2. ibid., p. 55.
3. Partai Socialis Indonesia, p. 6. 4. Sjahrir, Indonesian Socialism, p. 57.
6 Congress o f the A sian Socialist Conference in Bom bay.
( F r o m le ft t o r i g h t ) : M oshe S harett, J. B. Kripalani, A so ka M ehta,
Jayaprakash Narayan
5 The Chair a t the A sian Socialist Conference.
( F r o m le ft t o r i g h t ) : U H la A ung , Genda Sing, U Ba Swe,
Soerjokoesoem o Wijono
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 305
defeat of the civil war, they had risen to rank as the fourth strongest party.1
They had become a force to be reckoned with.

Despite its surprising success at the polls the Communist party could not
expect to win at any time a majority of the electorate, and with it the power
of the state by pure parliamentary methods. What it sought was to partici-
pate in state power, either through an alliance with one of the three leading
parties within parliament, or in alliance with Sukarno, who now wished to
consolidate his position as president of the republic by taking dictatorial
powers through the suspension of parliamentary democracy.
What Sukarno had in mind was a change from the system of parlia-
mentary democracy to a system of personal dictatorship under the name of a
‘guided democracy’. In a speech of 28 October 1956, he stated that Indonesia
‘was sick’ of the party system; he asked that ‘the people’s leaders should
mutually agree to bury all parties’.2 A few months later, on 21 February 1957,
he demonstrated in a speech how this ‘guided democracy’ should be con-
structed through a ‘government of mutual aid’, admittedly with party rep-
resentatives in parliament, but with no opposition and with a ‘national
advisory council’ consisting of representatives of the most ‘functional
groups’, such as trade unions, peasants’ organizations and other economic
groupings.3
The Socialist party, like the Masjumi and most of the other parties,
rejected Sukarno’s concept of a ‘guided democracy’, fearing that it would
destroy the most essential elements of democracy and concentrate power into
Sukarno’s hands.

1. The relative strengths of the parties are shown in the following table (the number of
seats that each party had had in the provisional parliament appears in brackets):
Parties Votes Seats
Partai Nasional Indonesia (P.N.I.) 8,434,653 57 (42)
Masjumi 7,903,886 57(44)
Nahdatul Ulama (N.U.) 6,955,141 45 (8)
Partai Komunis Indonesia (P.K.I.) 6,179,914 39 (17)
Partai Serakat Islam Indonesia (P.S.I.I.) 1,091,160 8 (4)
Partai Keristen Indonesia (P.K.I.) 1,003,325 8 (5)
Partai Katolik (P.K.) 770,740 6 (8)
Partai Socialis Indonesia (P.S.I.) 753,191 5(14)
From H. Tinker and M. Walker, T he First General Elections in India and Indonesia’, in
Far East Survey, July 1956, p. 108. In evaluating the influence of Socialist ideas in Indo-
nesia, it must be remembered that, apart from the P.S.I. and the P.K.I., the two strongest
parties—the nationalist (P.N.I.) as well as the Islamic party, Masiumi, with its predominant
fraction of Christian Socialists—had canvassed on a Socialist programme, however vaguely
formulated. These four parties had altogether won over two thirds of the votes cast
(23,268,000 out of 37,875,000), and over two thirds of the seats in parliament (158 out of
257). Neither had the orthodox Islamic parties N.U. and P.S.I.I., nor the two Christian
parties, P.K.I. and P.K., gone into the election campaign on any anti-Socialist platform.
2. Quoted in Mintz, Mohammed, M arx and Marhaen, p. 157.
3. For a detailed analysis of the doctrine of ‘guided democracy’, see ibid., pp. 165-92.
306 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The Communist party, however, welcomed Sukarno’s concept, for it
opened out for them a possibility of attaining that participation in power
which had hitherto been denied them, the parties represented in the govern-
ment having rejected any coalition with the Communists. So now they
turned against the system of parliamentary democracy. ‘The Western system
of democracy,’ stated a declaration from its Politbureau, ‘has harmed the
development of the revolutionary and democratic movement in Indonesia’; it
had shown itself incapable of solving the fundamental problems of society,
and was used ‘by foreign imperialists and their agents in the country’ to play
off party against party. Sukarno’s concept, it continued, by no means
threatened the party system or the parliamentary system; it even allowed for
the development of democracy.1 And to win mass support for the concept of
‘guided democracy’, it formed a non-party committee to organize meetings
and street demonstrations. Within three days of Sukarno’s speech, it set its
propaganda campaign in motion with a grand opening in Djakarta: a
mammoth gathering with a million in attendance.
Sukarno utilized a government crisis of 14 March 1957—brought about
by an insurgent movement in Sumatra for autonomy in the provinces—to
declare martial law throughout the country, and, in breach of the constitu-
tion, to nominate a ‘business government’. The Communist party expressed
its determined solidarity with the president and called ‘on the whole people
and the armed forces to support our President and Commander-in-Chief to
the full’.1
2
It had placed itself absolutely behind Sukarno. During its meetings and
through the speeches of its leaders it excelled in its praises of the president
and in its attempts to identify the party with Sukarno. It justified its policies
with quotations from his speeches and writings. It supported Sukarno in
an action which to all intents would have legalized his dictatorship: the
restoration of the 1945 constitution, which had granted the president
unlimited powers. When parliament rejected the overthrow of the con-
stitution which he put forward, Sukarno obtained what he wanted by decree
in July 1959.
He now took over the trappings of power, installing a government of
followers responsible not to parliament, but to him alone. In March 1960 he
dissolved the elected parliament, replacing it with a parliament of his own
nominees. By a series of decrees the press was brought to heel, and all
political parties, apart from eight parties loyal to Sukarno, were suppressed.3

1. Quoted in Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, pp. 261-2.

2. Quoted in ibid., p. 263.
3. The Socialist party was prohibited in August 1960, and Sjahrir was arrested in
January 1962. He became seriously ill in prison, and was released after three years to go to
Switzerland for medical treatment. He died there in 1966. When his body was brought
back to Java, it was interred in Djakarta with full honours in recognition of his services as
one of the three leaders of the Indonesian revolution.
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 307
The parties recognized by the government were finally incorporated into a
‘National Front’ under Sukarno’s leadership.
The Communist party had, if at times reluctantly, supported the eroding
of the instruments of democracy through all its phases. To allay doubts
within his own party, Aidit advanced the argument that, in the end, Sukarno’s
dictatorship could also find a road to Socialism. It was, he wrote, by no
means inconsistent with Marxism that a man like Sukarno, though not a
member of the working class, should become leader in a Socialist Indonesia.1
In acknowledging the value of his coalition with the Communist party,
Sukarno nominated its representatives in considerable strength to serve in all
branches of the administration: in the provinces and local communities,
above all in parliament, in the advisory council to the government and in the
National Front; and, in March 1960, he also summoned Aidit and Lukman
to enter the government, if only as ministers without portfolio.
The Communist party’s coalition with Sukarno had greatly enhanced its
image in the country at large. In the local Javanese elections in 1957 it won
7,514,000 votes—an increase of 2,036,000 in this province alone over the 1955
elections. Its membership rose to over two million, and the mass organiza-
tions of trade unions, peasants, women and youth movements affiliated to it
had a collective membership of twelve million.
Despite its massive strength, however, in the coalition the Communist
party possessed hardly any degree of real political power. As Aidit told its
congress in April 1962, any efforts by the party were, notwithstanding its
participation in the government, sharply curtailed, for, he said, ‘any proposal
[by us] can be rejected by the government, and any action can be prohibited
or obstructed by the authorities’. He and Lukman were ministers, it was true,
but without possessing ‘any power whatsoever’.1 2

So the Communist party had become a prisoner of its coalition with Sukarno,
and there were no prospects for its escape. Moreover, since the Madiun
revolt, the army had become a deadly enemy of the Communist party. Under
the martial law decreed by Sukarno in 1957, which was to remain in force for
three years, the army had gained tremendous power. During this period it had
become the highest authority in the administrative apparatus of the state at
large and in the provinces, and it was at pains to frustrate Communist
activity. It had dissolved Communist local groups, suppressed Communist
newspapers and arrested Communist shop stewards. It had even forbidden
the party congress due to take place in August 1959; though it was allowed
several weeks later through Sukarno’s intervention, it was held only on the
humiliating condition of supervision by military commissioners. It was, in

1. D. N. Aidit, Peladiaran dari Sediarah P.K.I. (Djakarta, 1960), pp. 22-3, quoted in
Hindley, Communist Party o f Indonesia, p. 286.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 297.
308 Socialism and Communism in Asia
fact, only Sukarno’s absolute authority which shielded the Communists from
total suppression by the army. And Sukarno protected them because the
great weight of political support which they carried represented a counter-
balance to the army, which he felt to be a threat even to his own position.
Dissension against Sukarno among the higher officer ranks was prompted
not so much by his having set up a dictatorial regime—the generals were by
no means opponents of the system of ‘guided democracy’, declared by
Sukarno to be an instrument for fulfilling the revolution in a ‘Socialism a la
Indonesia’—as by their hatred for the Communists. They felt themselves to
be menaced by a growing Communist influence over Sukarno, and were
obsessed with the fear that the Communists would one day seize power by
a coup d'etat and establish under their dictatorship an ‘atheistic Socialism a la
Moscow and Peking’.

It was on 1 October 1956 that upheaval finally gripped the country and a
coup d'etat actually occurred. Indonesia had become involved in a drastic
economic crisis: galloping inflation had rapidly increased the cost of living
for the urban population, and the devaluation of their wages had provoked
mass strikes by the workers.
At midday on 1 October the peoples of Indonesia were unexpectedly
informed by a newsflash over the radio that a so-called ‘Movement of 30
September’, unknown until then, had, under the command of Lieutenant-
Colonel Untung, arrested a number of generals at Halim airport and installed
an ‘Indonesian Revolutionary Council’ to take over the powers of state. This
action had been taken, it continued, to forestall a coup d'etat of a ‘Council of
Generals’, planned for 5 October with secret American backing.1
The coup seemed to both their friends and enemies to be the work of the
Communists. But in reality the ‘Movement of 30 September’ was a conspiracy
of several high-ranking officers who with their troops had in the early-
morning hours of 1 October murdered six of the generals they had arrested
before attempting to occupy government buildings in Djakarta. Their aim
was certainly not Sukarno’s overthrow and the replacement of his dictator-
ship by a dictatorship of the Communist party, or even by a military dictator-
ship of the left, but simply, it appears, to eliminate those right-wing army
generals who constituted a potential threat to Sukarno’s regime.
The coup was put down within a few hours; it was not much more than an
‘incident’ in the history of the Indonesian revolution, which had hardly been
starved of similar ‘incidents’.
This single event, however, set in motion an immense avalanche of hatred
and ruin to engulf the Communists. Generals had been murdered, and a list

1. For a lucid account of these events, see John Hughes, The End o f Sukarno (London,
1968). Hughes describes the events as an eye-witness, having been correspondent in Indo-
nesia for the Christian Science Monitor (Boston).
 Islamic Socialism and M arxism in Indonesia 309
of generals came to light for whom the same fate had been intended. The
surviving generals decided on a terrible revenge—the mass murder of Indo-
nesia’s Communists—the cruelty of which has in the annals of humanity’s
misdeeds been surpassed in our own time only by Hitler’s holocaust of the
Jews and Stalin’s mass extermination of his opponents.
By orders of the generals, the Republic was to be ‘purged’ of Com-
munists. Troops ranged the land, from village to village, and from town to
town, systematically murdering all who came under suspicion of being
Communist. In Central Java three quarters of the electorate had voted for
the Communists; there were villages in which 100 per cent of the people were
Communists. And in these cases the entire population, with the exception of
small children, was butchered. In many villages officers spurred on the
Communists’ enemies to commit murder, surrendering arrested Communists
to them for execution; these were slaughtered by the peasants with knives
and scythes. The mass killing continued for over three months and the
numbers of victims ran into hundreds of thousands.1
Yet the Communist party had had no responsibility for the officers’ coup
in Halim. They had neither planned it nor co-operated in its preparation.2
But they did declare their solid support for it. The edition of the party’s
central organ, Harian Rakjat, which came out in the early hours of 2 October,
contained a leader stating that the ‘Movement of 30 September’ had taken
precautions to safeguard President Sukarno and the Republic of Indonesia
‘against a coup by the so-called Council of Generals’; its action was ‘patriotic
and revolutionary___ We, the people’, it continued, ‘are convinced in our
knowledge of the duties of the revolution, that the action of the Movement of
30 September is correct to safeguard the revolution and the people. The
sympathies and support of the people undoubtedly turn to the Movement of
30 September.’3
This article was fateful. Surprisingly, it did not appear until after the
revolt in Djakarta had been put down and must have been written during the
afternoon of 1 October, when the editor obviously counted on the coup's
success. But by issuing this article the Communist party had affirmed its
support for the coup, and by doing so played into the hands of the generals
seeking revenge for the murder at Halim, presenting them with a docu-
ment to justify their campaign to destroy the Communists: ‘. . . an act of
1. For the description of the mass murders, see ibid, pp. 141-61 and 173-83; for
estimates of the numbers murdered, see ibid., pp. 184-9.
2. The Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun, on the other hand, published an alleged ‘con-
fession’ by Aidit in January 1967. He had been arrested on 22 November in a village in
Central Java, and executed without trial within a few days. In his ‘confession’ he charged
himself and the party leaders with full responsibility for planning the coup. For the wording
of the evidence attributed to him, see Hughes, The End o f Sukarno, pp. 168-72. The authen-
ticity of this document is, however, questionable to the highest degree.
3. Harian Rakjat (Djakarta), 2 October 1965. For the text of the article, see Hughes,
The End o f Sukarno, p. 78.
310 Socialism and Communism in Asia
unbelievable folly by the Communist party’, Hughes comments, ‘which set
the seal on their fate’.1
That the Communist party wished to see the rising succeed—and with it
the extermination of its enemies within the army—was only natural. But
nothing was further from its motives than to overthrow Sukarno and seize
power. Ever since its rejuvenation in 1951 under Aidit’s leadership it had
turned away from the path of conspiracy, had abandoned the class struggle
against native capitalism and sought to harmonize class interests in a national
front, following this rightward course with total consistency. It had firmly
supported Sukarno’s dictatorship in its guise of a ‘guided democracy’, and
had identified itself with its objective—‘Socialism a la Indonesia’. It had
sought to win respect as a party of good patriots.
But its protestations of patriotism in no way convinced its enemies. To
them, the Indonesian Communist party appeared as the party of Moscow
and Peking whose systems glorified the Communist dictatorship. It affirmed
the idea of a ‘people’s democracy’—and what this meant in practice had been
revealed in those countries which had ‘people’s democracies’. It asserted its
wish for a peaceful road to Socialism; but it had twice attempted to grasp
state power by an armed rising.
It was in these historical experiences that mistrust of the Communists and
a fear of Communist dictatorship was rooted; and it was this threat which
fed the hatred against the Communists of Indonesia when it broke into the
open in the terrible catastrophe of the autumn of 1965.
The suppression of the Communists was followed by the removal of
Sukarno from power and the setting up of a military regime under General
Suharto. It marked the end of the first period of Indonesia’s national and
social revolution.
1. Hughes, ibid., p. 77. For the question of the motives behind the coup and the
responsibility of the Communist party, see ibid., pp. 103-15.
14 • Socialism and Communism in Japan

In India, Burma and Indonesia, Socialist ideas had permeated the broad
mass of the people even before the industrial revolution had begun in those
countries. In Japan, on the other hand, the industrial revolution was already
well under way when, during the first decade of the century, the industrial
workers organized themselves into a class. The Socialist movement in Japan
was looking forward to a classless order of society before any other Asian
country had even developed a capitalist class. Here, however, it was to
encounter the resistance of a powerful capitalist class which could rely on the
power of the state to support it in the class struggle. In the rest of Asia,
Socialism was to receive its impetus from national revolutions kindled by the
struggle against European imperialism and colonialism to which those
countries were subjected. Socialism had represented the social content in the
political struggle for national independence. But throughout its thousand-
year history, Japan had never been subjected to foreign domination. Neither
had the Japanese people ever risen in a revolutionary struggle to win their
rights to freedom. The feudal system—the Shogunate—to which Japan had
been subjected over six centuries was admittedly overthrown in 1868, though
not, as in other Asian countries, by a people’s revolution but by a dynastic
revolution. This had not, of course, established the sovereignty of the people;
it had ‘restored’ the position of the crown in the state—an absolute monarchy
which rested on the Emperor’s ‘divinity’.1
1. The emperor’s right to divinity, founded on the doctrine of his ‘descent from the Sun
goddess in unbroken line from time immemorial’, was only retracted on 1 January 1946
by Emperor Hirohito’s solemn proclamation. The constitution of 3 May 1947 declared the
Emperor of Japan to be the ‘symbol of the state and the unity of the nation, who derives his
position from the will of the people, which is the basis of sovereign power’. This second
revolution, which took power away from the emperor and established the people’s sover-
eignty, did not, however, take place until after Japan’s catastrophic defeat in the Second
World War, when the country became democratized under the rule of the American forces
of occupation.
 312 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The dynastic revolution began the process of dissolving the feudal struc-
ture of Japanese society and its transition towards a modern capitalist order.
The development of capitalism in Japan, however, hardly changed the feudal
character of its political structure. The feudal aristocracy remained in
possession of material power. As before, they controlled the army and ruled
the state bureaucracy; in addition, they monopolized industry concentrated
in the hands of financial cliques known as Zaibatsu.
Under pressure from the upsurge of the middle class brought about by the
process of industrialization, Japan finally, in 1899, became a constitutional
monarchy after the Prussian model, as Bismarck had devised it, according to
which actual power rested with the crown and the executive as representing
the imperial will. By tax qualification, the electorate was limited to about
500,000. The constitution gave the middle class a strictly defined influence,
but no power. And the working class remained excluded from any influence
over politics. A year after the Constitution was promulgated, in 1900, a
special police law was enacted against the working class to chain the trade
unions, threaten incitement to strike with imprisonment, subject the press to
an intensified censorship and to throttle the free formation of parties or the
holding of assemblies. Not until a quarter of a century later, in 1925, did the
working class become entitled to vote through the introduction of universal
manhood suffrage, extending the franchise to about fourteen million people.
At the same time, however, as anti-labour movement laws were intensified,
Socialist propaganda against private ownership and the form of government
which rested on the Emperor’s ‘divinity’ (Kokutai) was threatened with the
death penalty, and under the Peace Preservation laws of 1928, a special
police corps was established to seek out ‘dangerous thoughts’.
It was under these economic and political conditions—basically very
different from those in any other Asian country—that the labour movement
in Japan had to develop. Its pioneer was Sen Katayama (1858-1933), the son
of a farmer, who had become a printer and emigrated to the United States to
study at university while earning his keep as a day-labourer.1 After obtaining
his degree, he returned to Japan in 1895, and in July 1897 founded a Society
for Promoting Trade Unions, and, a few months later, the metalworkers’
union; he became its secretary, and published the periodical Rodo Sekai (The
Labour World), the first and only organ of the Japanese labour movement
during these years.12

1. For a biography of Katayama, see Hyman Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, The Life o f
Sen Katayama (Princeton, N.J., 1964).
2. See Sen Katayama, The Labor Movement in Japan (Chicago, 1918), p. 38. See also
Braunthal, History o f the International, 1864-1914, pp. 240-2. The following account is
based on: George Oakley Totten, The Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan
(New Haven, 1966); Allen B. Cole, George O. Totten and Cecil H. Uyehara, Socialist
Parties in Post-war Japan (New Haven and London, 1966); and Robert A. Scalapino, The
Japanese Communist Movement 1920-1966 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967). These three
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 313
The Social Democratic party (Shakai Minshuto) was established under the
leadership of Sen Katayama, Isoo Abe (1865-1949) and Denjiro Kotoku
Shusui with the co-operation of a number of trade unions at a conference on
22 May 1901. The manifesto issued by the conference declared its support for
the nationalization of the means of production and for a fair distribution of
the fruits of labour and of the land. It demanded political rights, particularly
universal franchise, the abolition of the Upper House and the setting up of
parliamentary democracy. It rejected anarchism, a concept advocated by
some Socialists, as well as the use of force in the struggle for Socialism.
The Social Democratic party was, however, to be short-lived. The police
confiscated the manifesto and dissolved the party within a few hours of its
inauguration.
Soon afterwards, however, in 1903, Kotoku Shusui and Toshihiko Sakai
(1870-1933) formed a Socialist propaganda society, which in the same year
founded the periodical Heimin Shimbun (Commoners’ Newspaper); it also
published the first Japanese translation of the Communist Manifesto. But the
life-span of this organization was also short: the society, together with its
paper, was suppressed by the police in October 1905.
A few months later, in January 1906, the party reconstituted itself as the
Socialist party (Nihon Shakaito). It won recognition as a legal party from the
more liberal government which had taken office at the turn of the year, on
condition that it represented a ‘Socialism within the boundaries of the
constitution’.1 It was, at all events, a Social Democratic party in the spirit of
the manifesto of May 1901 in its ideology and methods.
But a strong anarcho-syndicalist stream had come into being in the
labour movement to challenge Social Democratic ideology. This anarchism
was a reflection of the mood of a suppressed, impoverished and despairing
working class. It had been excluded from parliament and in its battle for
equality and the general right to vote it faced an extensive police apparatus
ready to suppress any political movement among the workers. Parliamentary
democracy seemed to be an unattainable goal, the fight for it to be a meaning-
less waste of working-class strength. On the other hand, the anarcho-
syndicalist method of ‘direct action’—the strike and the revolutionary general
strike—seemed to present an irresistible weapon in the battle for working-
class emancipation.
The pioneer of this stream within the party was Kotoku Shusui. He had
travelled through the United States in 1906, and had returned to Japan

works are the most thorough studies extant of the Japanese labour movement. See also A.
Rodger Swearingen and Paul F. Langer, Red Flag in Japan: International Communism in
Action, 1919-1951 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); M. Beckman and Okubo Genji, The
Japanese Communist Party 1922-1945 (Stanford, 1969); Solomon B. Levine, Industrial
Relations in Post-war Japan (Urbana, 1958); and E. S. Colbert, The Left Wing in Japanese
Politics (New York, 1952).
1. Quoted in Totten, Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, p. 28.
314 Socialism and Communism in Asia
deeply impressed by the concept of anarcho-syndicalism, put forward by
Daniel de Leon in founding and leading the trade union council, the Inter-
national Workers of the World (I.W.W.). In a speech to a party conference in
February 1907, Kotoku attempted to convince it of the necessity for anarcho-
syndicalist methods. The social revolution, he explained, could never be
realized through the general right to vote and parliamentary methods, for
parliament would always remain a weapon of the propertied classes. Socialism
could only be attained through direct action by organized workers. He put
forward a resolution demanding the implementation of direct action in the
fight for Socialism. It was rejected by twenty-four to twenty-two votes,
though a resolution in support of parliamentarianism and rejecting direct
action received only two votes.1 At all events, the government reacted to the
conference with the immediate dissolution of the party.
The Socialist movement, having lost with the suppression of the party a
common forum for all opinions, splintered into small groups of Socialists
under Katayama’s leadership, and of the Anarchists under Kotoku’s leader-
ship. Anarchist propaganda now took on the more serious form of sporadic
strikes and industrial sabotage. During a counter-action by the government,
the police ‘discovered’ an Anarchist conspiracy against the life of the Emperor
Meiji. Numerous Anarchists were arrested, and after a sensational trial for
high treason, staged in 1910-11, twelve Anarchists were hanged, Kotoku
among them. The ruthless political persecution of Socialists as well as of
Anarchists which now set in effectively stifled the Socialist movement.
Katayama, his spirit broken, left Japan in 1914, never to return to his
homeland.12 More than a decade was to pass before the Socialist movement
returned to life.

Its revival began gradually after the end of the First World War. In December
1920, the Socialist Party was once again reconstituted, this time under the
title of Socialist Federation of Japan {Nihon Shakaishugi Domex). And the
trade union movement, which had been non-political before the war, became
one of the mainstays of the political labour movement.
Japan’s industry had developed rapidly during the war, and the number
of factory workers had doubled.3 With this growth in the number of industrial
workers the number of trade unions grew also: from forty in 1911 to 273 in

1. See Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 3.

2. Katayama was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for leading a strike of tram-
drivers in Tokyo in 1914, and after his release from prison was placed under police sur-
veillance; he was thus unable to obtain work. He emigrated to the United States at the end
of August 1914, and there met Trotsky, Bukharin and Kollontai, under whose influence he
became a Communist. In 1921 he went to Moscow, and worked there in the service of the
Communist International as a highly esteemed member of the presidium.
3. Their numbers rose from 853,000 in 1914 to 1,777,000 in 1919. See Totten, Social
Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, p. 31.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 315
1920.1 Shortly after the war they came together in a trade union council, the
General Federation of the Workers of Japan {Nihon Rodo Kumiai Sodomei).
Rejecting the concept of harmony in class interests that had been prevalent
among the trade unions before the war, the trade union council declared
itself unequivocally for the necessity of class struggle. In its 1922 programme
it stated:
We shall, with boldness and through effective m ethods, fight to the finish against
suppression and persecution by the capitalist class.
We do not believe th at the working and capitalist classes can co-exist peacefully.
We shall, w ith the backing of the trade unions, struggle to win the full liberation
o f the w orking class and to set up a new society of liberty and equality with the
pressure o f the trade unions.2

After the war, a third force had further developed within the Socialist
movement: the Union of Japanese Peasants {Nihon Nomin Kumiai), founded
in April 1922. Most Japanese peasants held their land on lease. Wild inflation
during the war had impoverished them through rent increases and the rapid
price increase of their means of production. In 1918 they rose in a revolt
which shook the country and unleashed an agrarian mass movement to fight
for lower rents. The Union of Peasants had its origins in this movement;
within four years of its founding it had 67,000 members.3

The Socialist Federation embraced Socialists of variegated tendencies:

Anarchists as well as Social Democrats, and also a number of Marxist-
Leninists. Marxism in Japan had not been taken up by intellectuals or students
until after the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and then
mainly in its Marxist-Leninist complexion.
A Communist party did, however, come into existence following the
secret conference of a small group led by Kyuichi Tokuda (1894-1953),
which met in Tokyo on 15 July 1922. This was, in fact, a creation of the
Communist International. The founding of the party had been decided upon
in Moscow in January 1922 at the First Congress of the Workers of the Far
East. The congress, meeting under Katayama’s chairmanship, was attended
by a Japanese delegation headed by Tokudo and Mosaburo Suzuki (b. 1893).
During detailed discussions with Katayama and the representatives of the
International, the party programme was formulated and its foundation
financed by the Communist International’s Shanghai bureau.4
1. See ibid., p. 32. 2. Quoted in ibid., p. 40. 3. See ibid., p. 38.
4. ‘The proof,’ Scalapino declared in his study, ‘that the Japanese Communist party
originated as a creation of the Communist International and therefore of the Soviet Union,
is overwhelming. In this respect the documentary material could not be more complete’—
Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 19. The Official History o f the J.C.P. (Tokyo,
1932), in no way denies that the party was founded ‘under the direct leadership and with the
help of the Communist International’—quoted in Swearingen and Langer, Red Flag in
Japan, p. 14.
 316 Socialism and Communism in Asia
For the Communist International, the establishing of a Communist party
in Japan was a matter of high importance, for it considered Japan to be a
revolutionary key position in the Far East. In the speech as president of the
Communist International with which he opened the congress of the Workers
of the Far East, Zinoviev stated:
If M arx had once said th at w ithout a revolution in England any revolution in
E urope would be no m ore than an insignificant storm in a tea-cup, England being
decisive in the history o f the E uropean revolution, then we m ust say that, w ithout
a revolution in Japan, any revolution in the F ar East m ust rem ain only a local
concern, a relatively unim portant storm in a relatively small tea-cup___ N o t until
there has been victory in Japan will the revolution in the F ar E ast cease from being
a storm in a tea-cup. Thus a very great responsibility rests on the young w orking
class o f Ja p an .1

At its first congress the Japanese Communist party did no more than
constitute itself and vote in a central committee, under the chairmanship of
the Socialist pioneer Toshihiko Sakai (1870-1933). It was only at its third
congress, in December 1926, that it defined a programme of political demands:
among them, the abolition of the imperial system of government and the
confiscation, without compensation, of the estates of landed proprietors and
religious foundations as well as of the emperor.
A party striving to overthrow the ‘sacred’ principles of the Japanese
constitution, which rested on the emperor’s divinity, could never, of course,
attain legality. It remained illegal until after the end of the Second World
War. From the outset it was a party of intellectuals, and its membership
remained limited; even during its greatest expansion during the pre-war
period, it had no more than 1,000 members.2 But the spread of Marxism
among intellectuals and students won it many potential followers in these
circles, and the radical mood of the working class, oppressed by the state and
by capitalism, formed fertile soil for its propaganda. It was only able to work
under cover of disguise,3 and could only gain influence through the tactical
infiltration of existing organizations within the Socialist and proletarian
movements.

Yet before the Communist party could penetrate the workers’ movement, it
was stopped in its tracks by a single blow from the police. In June 1923,
during the course of one night, nearly all its leaders and stewards were
1. Der Erste Kongress der Kommunistischen und revolutionaren Organisationen irn
Fernen Osten, published by the Communist International, 1922, p. 31. The English report
appeared under the title: Proceedings o f the First Congress o f the Toilers o f the Far East
(Petrograd, 1922).
2. See Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 67.
3. Its monthly journal, Zenei (Vanguard), issued in 1922 by Hitoshi Yamakawa (1880—
1958), one of the party’s founders, was able to appear, despite strict censorship, by the ploy
of limiting itself to discussing theoretical Marxist problems and keeping its party character
under cover.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 317
arrested—about a hundred in all—on the basis, the press claimed, of a con-
spiracy uncovered by the police which had as its aim nothing less than the
murder of the entire government and the setting up of a Communist dictator-
ship by coup d'itat. This version remained the theme of a campaign by the
press and various patriotic organizations, warning of the dangers of an
insurrection, until two months later, on 1 September, an earthquake brought
death and ruin to Tokyo. In the panic which the catastrophe precipitated, the
police indiscriminately arrested radicals of every alignment in great numbers:
Socialists, Communists, Anarchists and trade union leaders. Many were
tortured in prison, and eight trade union leaders were murdered: Sakee
Osugi, a leader of the Anarcho-Syndicalists, was throttled in prison with his
wife and a small niece by a police commandant.
Most of those arrested were released during the spring of 1924. In dis-
cussing the future of their dispersed party, a majority among the freed
Communist leaders opposed its reconstruction, a view advocated particularly
strongly by Hitoshi Yamakawa. Conditions in Japan, he argued, were not
yet ripe for the formation of a Communist party; first a base would have to
be founded within the mass organizations—the trade unions, the peasants’
organization and the Socialist student federations. Communists should con-
centrate on winning over these organizations to their cause. The existence of
an illegal party would, moreover, divide the Communist camp, isolating it
from the masses and inviting persecution to no purpose. In March 1924, a
conference of leading Communists decided to dissolve the party.
Their decision naturally encountered angry resistance from Moscow. How
could Communists ever entertain the idea of abandoning ‘the one true party
of the proletarian masses’! When, in 1925, Tokuda was dispatched with a
small delegation to the Shanghai Bureau, Gregory Voitinsky, the Russian
chief of the bureau, demanded that he should immediately reorganize the
party, and he drew up guide-lines for their tactics (the ‘January Theses’). The
party leadership was instructed to win control over the existing workers,
peasants’ and students’ organizations through the formation of cells within
their leadership, and to bring them under the party’s influence. But almost
two years were to pass before, at the end of 1926, the party reconstituted
itself completely.

Meanwhile the Socialists, whose federation was also dissolved by the govern-
ment in May 1921, had attempted to organize a mass party based on the
General Federation of Workers and the Peasants’ Union. The impetus came
from a Society for Political Studies (Seiji Kenkyukai), which had been
founded in June 1924 by Socialist intellectuals of various stand-points; six
months later it had about 4,000 members in fifty-three local groups. The
initiative to form a ‘proletarian party’ was taken by the Peasants’ Union of
Japan (Kumiai), which convened a conference in June 1925, to which it
 318 Socialism and Communism in Asia
invited the General Federation of Workers (Sodomei), the Council of
Japanese Workers’ Unions (Hyogikai), a Communist-controlled splinter
group which had broken with the federation, the Society for Political Studies
and a student organization which was under Communist influence.
The inaugural congress of the ‘Proletarian party’—it took the title
‘Peasants’ and Workers’ party’ (Nomin Rodoto) met in Tokyo under police
supervision on 1 December 1925. It formulated a programme representing a
compromise between Socialist and Communist ideas, and it elected Motojiro
Sugiyama, a Christian Socialist, to be its president, and Inejiro Asanuma
(1897-1960), a Communist, to be its general secretary. (Asanuma soon left to
become general secretary of the Social Democratic party.) Three hours after
its inaugural meeting the party was dissolved by the police on the grounds
that its programme contained Communist elements.
Shortly afterwards three new proletarian parties came into being in quick
succession: on 5 March 1926, a Workers’and Peasants’party {Rodo Nominto),
under mainly Communist influence; on 5 December 1926, a new Social
Democratic party (Shakai Minshuto), with the backing of the General
Federation of Workers; and on 9 December 1926, the Japanese Workers’ and
Peasants’ party (Nihon Ronoto), a grouping of former Communists (including
Mosaburo Suzuki, who after the war became leader of the Social Democratic
party) and non-Communist Marxists; this latter party represented the centre
in the Socialist spectrum. At about the same time, the Japanese Peasants’
party (Nihon Nominto) organized itself as the right-wing faction within the
Socialist movement.
Thus the Socialist movement in Japan came to be split between four legal
parties and the Communist party. Its relative strength was to show itself
during the first elections of 20 February 1928 to be held under the new
electoral reform, forced through by the prime minister, Takaakira Kato,
under pressure of public opinion and against the opposition of the Upper
House. The right to vote was still, of course, restricted to males of over
twenty-five years of age, and the candidature of the financially weak Socialist
parties was considerably impeded, for the deposit required from every
candidate was 2,000 Yen. Thus none of the four Socialist parties was able to
put up candidates in every constituency. They had few candidates: seventeen
for the Social Democratic party and forty for the Workers’ and Peasants’
party {Rodo Nominto) under the control of the illegal Communist party.
The elections produced the following results:
Percentage o f
Votes workers' votes Seats
Social Democratic Party (Shakai
Minshuto) 120,039 24-5 4
Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (Rodo
Nominto) 193,047 39-4 2
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 319
Japanese Workers’ and Peasants’
party (Nihon Ronoto) 85,698 17-5 1
Japanese Peasants’ Party {Nihon
Nominto) 44,203 9-0 -
Local proletarian parties 46,766 9-5 1

The four Socialist parties received 489,000 votes between them, or 5 per
cent of the total vote, against 9,376,000 votes for the middle-class parties.1

Within a few weeks of the elections, on 15 March 1928, the government pre-
pared to deliver a devastating blow against the Communists. On this day the
police arrested no less than 1,200 Communists, as well as Socialists and trade
union leaders. Soon afterwards the government dissolved the Communist-
controlled organizations: the Workers’ and Peasants’ party, the Council of
Japanese Workers’ Federations and the Proletarian Youth Federation.
The Com m unist party of Japan [the government stated in justifying its action]
seeks, as the Japanese branch o f the w orld proletarian party, the Third Inter-
national, to drag our Empire into the m aelstrom o f w orld revolution. It strives to
change fundam entally the flawless, untarnished character o f our nation, and to set
up a w orkers’ and peasants’ d ic tato rsh ip .. . . The theory and program m e o f the
Com m unist party of Japan, which threaten our national foundation, are crimes
w orthy of death, and are no t to be tolerated under any circumstances.12

Behind its facade of a constitutional monarchy with a constitution

guaranteeing civil rights, Japan was a police state with formidable secret-
police apparatus. The government was determined to use this weapon to
bring about the physical destruction of the Communist party. It was only
necessary to be suspected of Communist sympathies to become subject to
police surveillance. The numbers of those arrested increased from year to
year, and ran into thousands; according to the reports of the Ministry of
Justice, there were 10,423 arrests in 1931, and 13,938 in 1932.3 Many hundreds
of those arrested were sentenced to heavy terms of imprisonment for having
participated in illegal organizations which, according to the charges, set out
to destroy private property and the existing form of government. Several of
those accused received life sentences.
Following a second wave of arrests in 1929, the Communist party was
deprived of almost all its leaders and officers. Their places were taken by new
leaders, mostly young intellectuals, who tried to reconstruct the party; but
these, too, shortly fell victim to the almost constantly recurring police raids.
In 1932, the police found a list of all Communist party members, and most of
them were arrested. The final attempt at rebuilding the party from its ruins

1. For statistics of the election results, see Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement,
p. 33; Totten, Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, p. 300.
2. Quoted in Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, p. 31. 3. See ibid., p. 54.
320 Socialism and Communism in Asia
was undertaken by Satomi Hakamada, a student, who had returned from
Moscow in 1934; but he was arrested at the beginning of 1935. Hakamada’s
arrest confirmed the end of the Communist party as an organization. ‘From
this moment until 1946,’ Scalapino closes his report on the party’s pre-war
history, ‘Japanese Communism remained a concealed thought in the memories
of a few “true believers”, most of whom were in prison.’1

Japan had never been under any threat of a Communist dictatorship. But it
did fall victim to a Fascist-military dictatorship, which involved the country
in the adventure of an imperialist war which ended in a major national
catastrophe.
Japanese Fascism was not, like its German counterpart, a populist move-
ment, but a movement of the officer caste in the imperial army and navy,
recruited in the main from the former samurai class and still imbued with the
samurai tradition. It was because of the prestige attached to the samurai that
the imperial army and navy enjoyed such a special position in the constitu-
tional structure of the state. There were, it is true, reactionary, terrorist-
nationalistic federations such as the ‘Blood-sworn League’ (Ketsumeidan),
which fought against the modernization of Japan and Western ways and
ideas, demanded the abolition of those meagre provisions for democracy laid
down by the 1889 constitution—the parliament and the party system—
loathed the Socialists as much as they did the Communists and worked for a
return to the old-style pure Japanese absolutism. None of these leagues,
however, developed into a Fascist mass movement.
A more serious programme for Japanese Fascism was worked out by
Ikki Kita (1883-1937). He was both a Socialist and an ultra-nationalist. Like
Motoyuki Takabatake, he had translated some of Marx’s writings before
embracing the concept of the samurai ideal, with which he shared a detesta-
tion of twentieth-century capitalism. He came to regard the imperial navy
and army as the instrument which would carry out radical social reforms at
home and realize Japan’s bold national ambitions abroad. In his essay
‘Sketch of a Plan for the Rebuilding of Japan’, he demanded the revocation
of the 1889 constitution and the installation of a revolutionary military
1. Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, pp. 43-4. Hakamada’s arrest also put an
end to the official organ of the Communist party, the illegal journal Akahata (Red Flag)
which had appeared for the first time in February 1928. Moscow was not, however, very
well informed of the scale of the catastrophe which had afflicted the Japanese Communist
party. As late as February 1936, Sanzo Nozaka, one of their most esteemed leaders, who in
1931 had fled to Moscow to escape the threat of arrest, believed that the party was still
operational. In a ‘Letter to the Communists of Japan’ he instructed them to concentrate
their strength, in accordance with the rulings of the Seventh Congress of the Communist
International of 1935, upon the formation of a people’s front, to infiltrate the Social
Democratic workers’ and farmers’ organizations with their members and to replace the
phrase in their programme, ‘the party strives for the overthrow of the imperial system’,
with ‘the party strives for the overthrow of the military Fascist dictatorship’. Quoted in
Totten, Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, p. 96.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 321
government to nationalize the key industries, confiscate substantial wealth,
abolish the ‘barriers between nation and Emperor’—parliament and the
parties—and arm itself for leadership in a revolutionary Asia.1
It was Kita’s ideas which inspired the conspiracy to overthrow existing
democratic institutions when, on 15 May 1932, naval and army officers
bombarded the Bank of Japan, murdered the prime minister, Tsuyoshi
Inukai, and demanded the nomination of a military government. This revolt
was put down, but the ferment of Fascism spread throughout the armed
forces. On 26 February 1936, a regiment rebelled, occupied several districts
of Tokyo, the parliamentary offices, the Ministry of Defence and police
headquarters, murdered the minister of finance, Tolka Korekiyo, Admiral
Saito, and a large number of other outstanding statesmen, and vacated the
city only after four days under the moral pressure of an appeal from the
emperor. The leaders of the revolt, as well as its mentor, Kita, were hanged.
But the army, encouraged by a Fascist mood among the peasants and middle
classes, became a decisive power factor in the state. It set in motion the
Fascist trend in Japan and the policy of harnessing the country’s resources
for equipping the armed forces to give Japan predominance in Asia. In
October 1941, it forced through the nomination of General Hideki Tojo as
prime minister to carry out its imperialistic programme.

But imperialist and Fascist ideas also found their way into the Social Demo-
cratic party and led to its splitting. The question of the Social Democrats’
attitude to imperialism became critical when, on 18 September 1931, the
Japanese army stationed on the Kwantung Peninsula to protect the South
Manchurian Railway, on its own initiative occupied the Manchurian capital
Mukden, and soon after, in 1932, occupied the entire Chinese province,
which was proclaimed as the ‘independent’ state of Manchoukuo, but actually
controlled by the Japanese army.
Such an act of imperialistic aggression by Fascist officers should have
provoked the strongest protests from the party. But one faction, led by
Katsumaro Akamatsu, actually declared itself solidly behind the military
action. Akamatsu, a former Communist who had gone over to the Social
Democrats, had participated at the party’s inaugural assembly, becoming its
general secretary in 1930; he was to finish his political career as a Fascist.
Akamatsu defended the rape of Manchuria by the theory of necessary
‘living space’ for the people. ‘All nations,’ he declared, ‘are pledged to
demand equality under the law for their existence. It is unthinkable that the
Japanese should be confined merely to an island, and that they alone should

1. For Kita’s concepts, see George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Ikk i
Kita, 1883-1937 (Harvard, 1970); for the history and ideology of Japanese Fascism, see
Richard Storry, The Double Patriots: A Study o f Japanese Nationalism (London, 1957);
Ivan Morris (ed.), Japan 1931-1945: Militarism, Fascism, Nationalism (Boston, 1963).
322 Socialism and Communism in Asia
be committed to sacrificing themselves in the cause of “World Peace”.’1
Japan was overpopulated, Manchuria sparsely populated, and Manchuria
offered ‘living space’ for millions of Japanese. It is true, he demanded ‘the
end of bourgeois rule in Manchuria, and its transformation into a National
Socialist regime’. This, however, corresponded precisely with the demands of
the military Fascists. They also demanded ‘an end to the exploitation of
Manchuria by finance capital’.12
In a resolution which he submitted in the name of his minority to the
party’s Sixth Annual Conference in January 1932, Akamatsu demanded a
complete change of policy direction; a ‘new campaign policy’ in a national
spirit. The party should be transformed into a nationalist party, emphasizing
‘reverence for the national life of the community’, and should formulate the
national attitude of the Japanese proletariat in an antithesis of international-
ism.3 Akamatsu’s suggestion that the Social Democratic party should be
transformed into a party representing some kind of Fascism veiled as national
socialism was rejected during the conference debate with much bitterness.
Tetsu Katayama moved a resolution on behalf of the majority at the confer-
ence to reaffirm the three principles which had hitherto guided the party’s
policy and which also ought to guide it in the future: anti-capitalism, anti-
communism and anti-Fascism.
But the conference failed to reach any clear-cut decision out of fear of
splitting the party. In the midst of an astounding ideological confusion, it
passed both resolutions, despite the fact that they were clearly mutually
contradictory.
Yet the split which the conference had tried to avoid by accepting both
resolutions was bound to become unavoidable, for such an ambiguous
attitude could not be maintained. At a meeting of the central committee on
15 April 1932 both resolutions were again put to the vote. The Social Demo-

1. Quoted in Totten, Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, p. 70.

2. Quoted in ibid., pp. 70-1.
3. The Social Democratic party of Japan had, in fact, been in loose contact with the
Labour and Socialist International, but had not become affiliated because it feared that the
government would take its alliance with an organization of foreign workers’ parties as a
pretext for its suppression. In a letter to fimile Vandervelde, the president of the Inter-
national, who visited Japan in the summer of 1930 and brought up the question of its
affiliation during talks with the party’s National Council, Professor Isoo Abe informed him
that after deliberating on the question, the party executive had reached the following
conclusion:
T. We are of the view that the Social Democratic party of Japan is, in its basic prin-
ciples and political demands, in agreement with the Second International on its
main points.
‘2. But we do not believe that the time is yet ripe for us to affiliate ourselves to the
Second International, because our party is not yet strong enough to partake in
international action.’
For the text of the letter, see Fourth Congress o f the Labour and Socialist International 1931.
Reports and Debate (Zurich 1932), p. 417.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 323
cratic resolution, proposed by Tetsu Katayama, was accepted by sixty-one to
fifty-two votes, and Akamatsu at once left the conference with his followers,
forming a few weeks later a Japanese State-Socialist party (Nihon Kokka
Shakaito).
Like the Social Democratic party, the ‘National Workers’ and Peasants’
Mass Party’ (Zenkoku Rono Taishuto) had also shed its nationalist wing and,
at a joint conference on 24 July 1932, the two parties decided to merge in the
‘Socialist Mass Party’ (Shakai Taishuto). Its programme still rejected Fascism,
its proclaimed objectives being ‘the overthrow of the decaying capitalist
system’ and the fight against Fascism and imperialist wars. The conference
elected Isoo Abe (1865-1949), a university professor from Tokyo and a
pioneer of Socialism in Japan, to be its chairman, with Hisashi Aso (1891—
1940), a trade union leader, as general secretary;1 and it founded the paper
Shakai Taishu Shimbun (News of the Socialist Masses) as its official organ.

The Socialist Mass party itself finally succumbed to the growing Fascist
trend throughout Japan. This had been strongly intensified by a sensational
action by the army—a declaration of war against democracy. In October
1934, the Ministry of Defence issued a statement demanding the transforma-
tion of Japan’s economic system into a totalitarian economy to serve as the
basis for military rearmament. It proclaimed the army as the ultimate author-
ity in the nation, and condemned the party system, which, it claimed, had
undermined the nation’s strength. Thus the army sought the subordination of
national economic and political life to a totalitarian state power serving the
preparations for a war which it planned to gain Japan’s predominance in
East Asia.
This concept revolted even the middle-class parties. But Aso, General
Secretary of the Socialist Mass party, came to its defence. He denied that the
army was trying to set up a Fascist system. ‘Fascism,’ he declared, ‘consider-
ing the situation in Japan and the true character of the Japanese Army, is
impossible.’ The army was a socially progressive force, he maintained, and
pleaded for ‘a reasonable co-operation of the working classes with the army’
as being necessary, ‘if capitalism is to be overthrown by a social reformation’.2
He believed that no social revolution in Japan could succeed through the
masses alone: it also needed, as did the ‘Meiji Restoration’ of 1868, support
from ‘above’, from the sources of power within the state.
Aso’s view, supported by his right wing, was initially rejected by most
members of the party, but the nationalist minority slowly grew to a majority.
Japan’s economic life had been hit hard by the international recession of the
1930s and, in the mood of desperation induced by mass unemployment, the
ruin of the middle class and the bankruptcy of the peasants, the army
1. See Totten, Social Democratic Movement in Pre-war Japan, pp. 89-90.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 92.
 324 Socialism and Communism in Asia
appeared as the saviour of the nation. The Socialist Mass party submitted to
the current mood and, carried along by it, gained a surprising success in the
elections of 30 April 1937. It won 928,934 votes and thirty-seven seats out of
466, to become the third strongest party in the lower house of parliament.1
The nationalist trend within the Socialist Mass party received a great im-
petus from the war psychosis which gripped Japan shortly after the elections.
It must be kept in mind that the war in East Asia really began a full two years
before the war in Europe—on 7 July 1937, when the Japanese army com-
menced its military campaign against China, conquered Nanking, Hankow
and Canton and, in the north, Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Shansi
and Shensi. The wave of hysterical nationalism invoked by every fresh
report of a victory also overflowed into the party. Increasingly it came to
identify itself with a state and government steering an open course towards
Fascism. On the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, on 7 July 1938, the
party proposed the formation of a ‘National party’ as an instrument of
‘National unity’. Its purpose was to overcome class and party strife, to em-
body the ‘national will’, to ‘reform’ capitalism, to work to construct a ‘New
East Asia’ and, at all events, to support with all its strength Japan’s ‘sacred
war’ against China.
During the next two years it tried to prompt the other parties into self-
dissolution to help in building a ‘new structure’ of mass organization, and on
6 July 1940, it announced its own dissolution in every form. Several of its
leading members, Tetsu Katayama and Isoo Abe among them, who had
vainly opposed the party’s surrender, had left even before this event occurred.
The middle-class parties followed the lead of the Socialist Mass party, and
the totalitarian ‘new structure’—a Fascist monopoly party—was founded
under the title ‘Society of the Imperial Rule Assistance’ (Tame Yokusankai)
on 12 October 1940. This is the date of birth of the Fascist regime in Japan.
At its head stood the prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe. A number of
leaders of the Socialist Mass party joined the government as the prime
minister’s nominees. Within fourteen months, on 7 December 1941, Japan’s
second fateful phase in its war for the conquest of Asia began with the attack
on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor.

On 2 September 1945, on the American warship Missouri in Tokyo Bay,

the Japanese government signed the document of surrender imposed by the
victorious Allies. Three days later, thirteen former Socialist members of
1. The Japanese Proletarian party, an alliance of Socialist parties, which, in contrast to
the Socialist Mass party, persisted in its fight against Fascism and imperialism, won only
75,820 votes and one solitary seat in parliament. See ibid., p. 308.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 325
parliament decided to form a new Social Democratic party and within two
months, on 2 November 1945, its inaugural congress assembled. Constituted
as the Social Democratic Party of Japan (Nihon Shakaito) it elected Tetsu
Katayama (1887-1976) to be general secretary and, among others, Suehiro
Nishio (b. 1891), a former trade union leader, and Chozuburo Mizutani
(1897-1960), one of the leaders of the main peasants’ alliance, as members of
the party executive. Its manifesto proclaimed democracy, Socialism and
peace to be the threefold aim of the party. ‘Japan,’ it announced, ‘is in the act
of witnessing a historic change.’ It called on the 5,000 people assembled for
the congress, as well as on the nation, ‘to participate in the fulfilment of this
historic effort. The doors of the Social Democratic party of Japan are open to
everyone.’1
The political and social conditions for ‘historic change’ within the
Japanese empire had been delivered at one blow. The empire had collapsed in
a devastating catastrophe, and its collapse had simultaneously destroyed the
myth of the emperor’s divine rule which had supported the ideology of
Japanese Fascism as well as the power of the army and the ruling classes. Its
destiny had been a war to subject Asia to Japan’s predominance, and its
triumphs in China, Indonesia and Burma had been its justification. Yet what
it had captured had been lost as quickly. Japan had been devastated, its cities
reduced to ruins under the weight of American bombing, its forces of produc-
tion destroyed. The futility of Fascism was revealed in the terrible heritage
left by its collapse. The government, army and ruling classes, who had led the
nation over the precipice, were finally discredited. The Social Democratic
party, which had fought for decades under persecution against militarism,
war and Fascism, now asserted its right to lead the nation in the process of
‘historic change’ on whose threshold Japan then stood.

The Communist party had meanwhile also reconstituted itself, and now, for
the first time, became a legal party. Power was vested in the hands of the
military chief of the victorious forces in the East—the Supreme Commander
of the Allied Powers (S.C.A.P.), General Douglas MacArthur. Four weeks
after the occupation of the country by American troops, on 4 October 1945,
the Japanese government was directed to release immediately all political
prisoners and, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, ‘to revoke and
suspend all laws, decrees, orders and instructions which restrict freedom of
thought, religion, meetings and speech’.2
The Communists hastened to mobilize their forces in this new era of
freedom. The first issue of their paper, Akahata, appeared as soon as 10
October, and, on 8 November, 300 Communists assembled in Tokyo for a
‘consultative national conference preparatory to the First Party Congress’.
1. Quoted in Cole, et a i, Socialist Parties in Post-War Japan, p. 4.
2. Quoted in Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, p. 88.
326 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The congress met on 1 December 1945, as the Fourth Party Assembly. It
elected Kyuichi Tokuda (1894-1953), who had founded and led the Com-
munist party and was now released from eighteen years of imprisonment, to
be general secretary.1
The party commenced its activities in the new period by declaring war on
the Socialists. Even before the ‘consultative national conference’ had met to
prepare the new party constitution and programme, the first issue of Akahata
issued an ‘Appeal to the Nation’, edited by Tokuda and other released
Communists, giving rough outlines of the declared aims of the party: among
these was the overthrow of the ‘imperial system’ and the setting up of a
‘people’s democracy’. In its leader the paper stated that the ‘pseudo-Socialists’,
having supported the ‘imperial system’, ‘were unsuitable leaders for the
nation’. Their party was a party of ‘fermenting Fascism’—a ‘social emperor
party’, which ‘dreams’ of rebuilding the collapsed ‘imperial system’. Therefore
the Communists could never form a united front with the Socialists. Instead
they must try to organize, within the Socialist party, a wing opposed to its
leaders and to unite themselves to the masses as a Socialist faction.12
But even in the Communist camp this vehement attack on the Socialists
caused surprise and protests, as the minutes of the congress recorded. The
critics of the policy had expected that the party would, like its European
sister parties, work for a popular front with the Socialists and other demo-
cratic parties to bring about the democratic revolution. The Communist
left wing, however, which dominated the party conference, remained adamant
in its hostility to Social Democracy.
The situation did not last long. At the beginning of January 1946, Sanzo
Nozaka (b. 1892) returned to Japan from fourteen years of exile—having
spent the first nine in Moscow, and the next five in Yenan at Mao Tse-tung’s
headquarters. As a university student in London, he had been a founder
member of the British Communist party, and had, like Tokuda, worked in
the Communist party of Japan from its beginning. He had been arrested and
imprisoned in 1928, but had escaped after three years to become a member of
the presidium of the Communist International in Moscow.3 The Japanese
party therefore received him as the bearer of the political message of Moscow
and Yenan. The party leadership set such store by his return that it sum-
moned a new party congress (the fifth) for February 1946.
Nozaka set about changing party policy even before the party congress
had assembled. In a declaration issued within a few days of his return, he
advocated co-operating with the Social Democrats. The contention that
Social Democracy sought to reinstate the ‘imperial system’, because it did

1. For a biographical sketch of Tokuda, see ibid., pp. 107-11.

2. See Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, pp. 48-9.
3. For a biographical sketch of Nozaka, see Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, pp.
111-15.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 327
not insist on the abolition of the monarchy, he rejected. The fact was, he
declared, that all parties sought ‘with one accord’ to overthrow the ‘imperial
system’, meaning the abolition of a constitution and its institutions which
were vested in the power of the emperor. This was the essence of the matter,
not the question of the emperor as a symbol of the nation.
The ‘imperial system’, Nozaka explained, could only be transformed into
a democracy, serving the welfare of the masses, if all the democratic parties
could work together in a united front. But this would have to be based on a
programme common to all parties, though in no way demanding a uniformity
of concepts and objectives.
In their ‘Appeal to the Nation’, in the immediate wake of Japan’s capitula-
tion, the Communists had welcomed ‘with gratitude’ the commencement of
the ‘democratic revolution’ by the Allied forces of occupation and pledged
their ‘fervent support’. Nozaka reaffirmed this attitude. The American forces
of occupation, he told the party congress, were to be seen as a liberating
power, a power whose historic function was to sweep away feudal remnants
and complete the middle-class, democratic revolution. In fulfilling this
historic task, the Communist party must make up its mind to co-operate
with the S.C.A.P.
The programme defined by the congress and based upon Nozaka’s pro-
posal, laid down the following aims for the ‘middle-class, democratic revolu-
tion’: the abolition of the ‘imperial system’; a democratic constitution
guaranteeing civic rights of freedom to all citizens; an agrarian reform; and
a radical improvement in workers’ living conditions.
The task which the party set itself following the completion of the middle-
class, democratic revolution was to change Japan’s capitalist order of society
into a Socialist one. This change, Nozaka emphasized, could take place
through a ‘peaceful revolution’ provided that the workers, peasants and
‘progressive’ bourgeoisie could ‘come together under the leadership of the
working class and its pioneers, the Communist party’. The Social Democratic
party, Nozaka predicted, would then split in two, its right wing most prob-
ably developing into a middle-class party, and its left wing joining the
Communists.1
This was the concept which Nozaka submitted to the congress; it formed
the theoretical and tactical basis for the party’s new policy.

The Communist party had still, however, to clarify its relationship with the
Soviet Union. It was discredited before the war as a secret society of con-
spirators controlled from Moscow by the Communist International and
which, as the tool of a foreign power, pursued its aims by force; this stigma
still clung to it after the end of the war. It was an image which it naturally
1. For an analysis of Nozaka’s concept, see Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement,
pp. 53-7.
328 Socialism and Communism in Asia
wished to erase; hence the emphasis which the party congress placed on a
peaceful revolution.
The party’s ill-repute as Moscow’s party became a particular disadvantage
when the Soviet Union held back for years from repatriating Japanese
prisoners-of-war, earning it special hatred.1 Tokuda, however, tried to dis-
sociate the party from Moscow. As early as the party congress of December
1945, he had announced a change of attitude towards the Soviet Union.
‘Any direct link with the Soviet Union,’ he said, ‘would damage rather than
benefit our movement.’2 At the following party congress, in February 1946,
he declared: ‘We have at present no relationship with the Soviet Union.. . .
And I would like to explain here that neither will our party have any relations
with the Soviet Union in the future.’3 And, on 4 April, the party issued the
following statement:
M alicious propaganda by other parties has given the impression th at our party
rem ains allied to the Com intern or the T hird International. As is known, this
organization was dissolved in June [actually in May] 1943. It is therefore clear that
o ur party does n ot today m aintain any relations with any international organization.
We hereby declare th at our party is a party of the Japanese people, dedicating
itself to the liberation o f the w orking masses in our country.4

From its new stance, the Communist party now sought a united front
with the Socialists.
In the Social Democratic party, however, opinion was sharply divided on
the desirability of a united front. Its left wing, led by Mosaburo Suzuki and
Kanju Kato, both pioneers of the Socialist movement in Japan, advocated
the front, but its right wing, under the leadership of Komakichi Matsuoka
and Suehiro Nishio, rejected it; both had been involved in the most bitter
struggle with the Communists in the trade unions during the pre-war period,
and both were filled with the profoundest mistrust of their motives.
For the Social Democratic party, its relationship with the trade union
movement, represented by Matsuoka, was of the utmost importance. The
movement had expanded with fantastic speed when, following the instruc-
tions of the S.C.A.P., parliament issued a statute in December 1945 securing
the right to strike and the signing of collective agreements with trade unions.5
Within a year 17,000 trade union groups had emerged, embracing altogether
nearly five million members.6
1. According to a news bulletin from Radio Moscow on 20 May 1949, the number of
Japanese prisoners-of-war in Russia had totalled 594,000, of whom 70,880 were sent home
during 1945, and the rest over the following four years—Akahata, 22 May 1949, quoted in
Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, p. 232.
2. Kyuichi Tokuda, Naigai josei to Nippon kyosanto no nimmu (Tokyo, 1949), p. 247,
quoted in ibid., p. 230.
3. ibid., p. 236, quoted in ibid., p. 230.
4. Akahata, 7 April 1946, quoted in ibid., p. 231.
5. See Levine, Industrial Relations in Post-war Japan, pp. 24-5.
6. See ibid., p. 66,
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 329
The unions were partly under Socialist and partly under Communist
leadership. The Communists wished to see a common central organization
for all trade unions. But a majority of Socialists, familiar with the Communist
tactic of cell formation in the trade unions during the pre-war movement,
rejected any common organization for fear of reviving internal struggles.1
Thus, two separate trade union federations constituted themselves in
August 1946: the Socialist-led ‘General Federation of Workers’ (Nihon
Rodo Kumiai Sodomei) and the predominantly Communist ‘Congress of
Industrial Labour Organizations’ {Zen Nihon Sangyobetsu Rodo Kumiai
KaigU or Sanbetsu). According to their own records, Sanbetsu included
twenty-one trade union federations with 1,600,000 members, and Sodomei
twenty-four trade union federations with 850,000 members. Sanbetsu mainly
had the unions in heavy industry, transport and public services; Sodomei the
unions of the workers in textiles, light industry and the shipbuilding industry.2
When the question of a united front came up in 1946, it was true that the
Communists had a greater influence over the trade union organization than
the Socialists, but it seemed doubtful whether they could emerge from the
impending elections as the strongest proletarian party. This consideration
also contributed to the negative reaction of a majority of Socialist leaders to
the idea of any alliance with the Communists. The elections, in which women
were to vote for the first time, had been called for 10 April 1946, and these
would reveal the proportionate strength of the two parties.
The election results were a triumph for the Socialists. They won four and
a half times the Communist vote—9,858,406 to 2,135,757—and ninety-two
seats to the Communists’ five.3
But of far greater importance was the psychological effect of the elections.
That the two Socialist parties, outlawed and persecuted under the old regime
—the Communists more so than the Social Democrats—could win over
twelve million votes between them was a measure of the extent of the change
of spirit which had taken place in conservative Japan in under a year. The
success of the Social Democratic party was not insignificant; as the third
strongest party, it had become a power factor in the country. Yet perhaps
even more surprising had been the number of votes gained by the Communist
party, whose illegal organization the ‘imperial system’ had tried to throttle by
imprisoning its leaders and officers.
In parliament, however, with five out of a total of 466 members, the
1. Such fears were not totally without foundation. A resolution passed by the central
committee of the Communist party contained the following instruction on the formation
of cells in trade unions and other organizations: ‘Wherever there are three or more party
members [in a trade union], they are to form a faction’—quoted in Swearingen, Red Flag
in Japan, p. 153.
2. See Levine, Industrial Relations in Post-war Japan, pp. 70-1.
3. For a table of the Social Democratic votes in elections from 1946 to 1955, see Year-
book o f the International Socialist Labour Movement 1956-1957 (London, 1956), p. 337; for
a table of the Communist votes, see Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 314.
330 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Communist group was of little importance. Also the Social Democratic party,
with its ninety-two delegates, was powerless in the face of a tight-knit con-
servative majority. All key positions were held by the two leading conserva-
tive parties: the Liberal party, with 139 seats, and the Democratic party,
with ninety-three.
Immediately after the elections the Communists, supported by the Social
Democratic left wing, began a campaign of mass demonstrations for a demo-
cratic people’s government. But in view of the relative strengths of the
parliamentary parties, conditions were not propitious; the two large con-
servative parties had formed a coalition government under the prime minister,
Shigeru Yoshida.
Under the impression that there existed a mass desire for a democratic
people’s front, the Socialist party suggested a Democratic League as a basis
for joint action with the Communists and the trade unions. This attempt
failed, however, as a result of objections by the Communists to the League’s
structure, which had been designed to block Communist infiltration. The
Social Democratic party leadership therefore broke off the discussions,
despite the objections of their left wing.
This episode confirmed the end to any hope of an alliance with the Social
Democrats, which the Communists had sought. The Communists wished to
create a United Front only under conditions enabling them to infiltrate the
Social Democratic organizations and to transform them into a vehicle for
their own policies. They did not conceal their intentions. They demanded
that their party should take the lead in the democratic revolution.
But their demand stood in contradiction to the actual proportional
strengths of the two parties. The first elections of the new era in April 1946
had already demonstrated the overwhelming strength of the Social Democrats
in relation to that of the Communists; it appeared even more impressively in
the second elections of April 1947. The Social Democrats gained 7,168,000
votes and 143 seats, while the Communist vote fell to 1,002,000, their rep-
resentation to four seats.1
Following this Communist defeat, even the leaders of the Socialist left
wing, Mosaburo Suzuki and Kanju Kato, who had hitherto fervently advo-
cated an alliance with the Communists, reached the conclusion, in view of
the incompatibility of the principles and tactics of the two parties, that a
Socialist-Communist alliance would weaken rather than strengthen the

1. See Yearbook, p. 337; Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 314. The

election results were all the more surprising in view of the fact that membership of the
Communist party was much stronger than that of the Socialist party. According to their
own records the Communist party in 1947 numbered 70,000 members, but the Socialist
party only 32,000. (For the Communist membership see Scalapino, op. cit., p. 67; for the
Socialists, see Yearbook, p. 337.) Also the numbers of local Communist organizations
were far greater than those of the Social Democrats; 5,625 to 1,336 in 1949—see Swear-
ingen, Red Flag in Japan, p. 100.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 331
Socialist movement. In a ‘Manifesto of the Left’, which they issued in May
1947, they drew the dividing line between their attitude and that of the
Communists.
The Communists naturally persisted in their attempts to form an alliance
with the Social Democrats, for they considered such an alliance to be the key
to attaining power. But even though the question of Socialist-Communist
unity cropped up in the Socialist camp during the years which followed—
particularly after a split in the Social Democratic party during 1951—the
Communists were denied any success in their endeavours; the political
separation between Socialists and Communists continued to stand.1

The election victory of the Social Democratic party in 1947 placed it in some-
thing of a dilemma. With 143 seats, it had emerged as the strongest individual
party in the lower house; it had won over a quarter (26-3 per cent) of the
votes cast, and had therefore gained the right to lead in government. But the
conservatives, split into two parties (the Liberals with 132 members, and the
Democrats with 126), still represented a parliamentary majority. So the
Social Democrats could only hope to form a government in coalition with
one of the conservative parties. The question was whether, given these
circumstances, the party should participate in government at all.
Its left wing warned against any such experiment. The country had become
involved in a serious economic and social crisis; galloping inflation had
pushed prices higher and higher and had devalued wages, a situation over-
flowing in a wave of strikes by impoverished workers. Any attempt to
overcome the crisis by Socialist economic measures, the left reasoned, would
inevitably founder on the resistance from the conservative coalition partners.
A coalition with the conservatives would weigh down the party, and as a result
would ruin the chances of any future Socialist government under more
favourable conditions.
The right-wing Socialist majority, on the other hand, argued that the
party could hardly desert the proletarian masses in the distress of a serious
economic crisis and deliver them to the mercies of the conservatives alone.
Besides, the new government would be faced with decisions of the utmost
significance for the future of democracy in Japan: the country’s constitution.
Its destiny could not be left exclusively to a conservative government.
The party therefore decided to participate in the government. Tetsu
Katayama, its chairman, became the first Socialist prime minister in Japan’s
history, presiding over a coalition of Social Democrats, the conservative
Democratic party and the small People’s Co-operative party.
But the life-span of Katayama’s government was to be brief. It survived
1. For a comprehensive description of the Socialist attitude to the question of an
alliance with the Communists, see Cole, et al., Socialist Parties in Post-war Japan, pp.
110-20.
332 Socialism and Communism in Asia
for only eight months, from June 1947 to February 1948. It met with no small
success in constructing a democracy in Japan. But above all it failed, as had
been anticipated, over the conflicts existing within the government between
Socialist and capitalist ideology and between their different methods for over-
coming the economic and social crisis.1
Yet Katayama’s government was brought down not by a vote of no-
confidence from the conservative opposition, but by an action of the left
wing of the Social Democratic party. At its congress in January 1948, the left
wing won the majority and while Katayama was again elected as party
chairman, his position as prime minister was undermined. He resigned after
the left-wing Socialists on the budget committee voted against the budget.
Nevertheless the party decided to renew the coalition with the moderate con-
servative Democratic party, so as to prevent the right-wing conservative
Liberal party from taking over power. Katayama even so declined to be
recalled as prime minister. His place was taken by the chairman of the
Democratic party, Hitoshi Ashida, with the leader of the Socialist right wing,
Suehiro Nishio, as his deputy.
But this coalition government was also unable to survive its contradic-
tions. It resigned in October 1948, eight months after taking office.
New elections were thereupon called for 24 January 1949, and ended
with a catastrophic defeat for the Social Democratic party. It lost nearly half
the votes it had won in 1947 (receiving only 4,129,000 votes compared to the
earlier 7,168,000) and nearly two thirds of its seats; it won only forty-nine
compared to its previous 143.2

The Communists, on the other hand, gained an unexpected victory. Their

votes increased almost threefold over the election of 1947, rising from
1,002,000 to 2,984,000, and the seats they held rose from four to 35.3
The Communists’ electoral success seemed to represent a triumphant
vindication for the course o f ‘peaceful revolution’ which, at Nozaka’s prompt-
ing, the party inaugurated at the beginning of 1946. Nozaka had justified it
theoretically with the argument that the bourgeois revolution had first to be
completed in Japan before conditions became ripe for a Socialist revolution;
that the guardian of the bourgeois revolution had, until now, basically been
the American forces of occupation who had broken the rule of militarism,
1. For a history of Katayama’s government, see ibid., pp. 16-22.
2. See Yearbook, p. 337.
3. See Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 314. The Communists had not,
however, only entered the election fight with a far stronger party organization than the Social
Democrats, but also with a far greater financial effort. According to the records of both
parties, the Communists spent 122,876,000 Yen, but the Social Democrats only 11,254,000
Yen; see Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, p. 99. But it was above all the disappointment of
the overwhelming expectations placed by the great mass of the electorate in the Katayama
government as well as the dissension within the Social Democratic party which led to the
defeat of the one and the success of the other.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 333
feudalism and the ‘imperial system’ and were therefore to be considered as
allies of the revolution; and that, to complete the bourgeois revolution, an
alliance of the working class with the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie as well as the
peasants was essential and that, like the bourgeois revolution, so would the
subsequent Socialist revolution take place peacefully.
This policy was in line with that followed by the Communist parties in
France, Italy and Czechoslovakia, as well as in India, Burma, and Indonesia,
before the founding of the Cominform in September 1947; it had seemed until
then also to be in line with the course of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United
States had collapsed and the shadow of the approaching Cold War was
settling over the world. The founding of the Cominform had signalled for the
Communist parties a change of course away from the tactics of ‘peaceful
revolution’. At its founding congress Andrei Zhdanov introduced the concept
of the division of the world into two camps—the American-led imperialist-
capitalist camp and the ‘proletarian Socialist’ camp led by the Soviet Union—
and of an unrelenting struggle between the two.1
But the Communist party of Japan under Nozaka’s leadership obviously
did not feel bound by decisions of the Cominform. At all events, it undertook
no change in its basic attitude at the party congress which assembled in
December 1947, three months after the conference of the Cominform. And
thus it remained until 1950.
Early in January 1950, however, the journal of the Cominform issued a
sharp rebuke to Nozaka. He had, the paper declared, continued to justify his
theory of a peaceful Socialist revolution even under the current conditions of
an American occupation by stating that his concept rested on a Marxism-
Leninism adapted to the special conditions in Japan—to its ‘Japanization’, its
‘naturalization in Japanese soil’.
The Cominform, however, countered with the declaration that ‘Nozaka’s
theory bore not the slightest resemblance to Marxism-Leninism’. It was ‘a
variation of the anti-Marxist and anti-Socialist theory of the amicable con-
quest of reaction by democracy and imperialism through Socialism’. Nozaka’s
theory of the historic role being played by the American forces of occupation
in assisting the process of a peaceful development towards Socialism, the
critic continued, was ‘a theory of embellishment for the imperialistic occupa-
tion of Japan, a theory supporting American imperialism, and consequently
a theory misleading to the masses in Japan . . . an anti-democratic, anti-
Socialist theory. It merely serves,’ the Cominform declared, ‘the imperialistic
forces of occupation in Japan and the enemies of its independence, and it is
therefore an anti-patriotic, anti-Japanese theory.’12
1. Seepp. 148-51.
2. For a Lasting Peace and fo r a People's Democracy, 6 January 1950, quoted in
Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 61.
334 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The dismayed party leadership rejected this attack by the Cominform. It
did not deny that perhaps some tactical ‘errors’ might have been committed,
but it affirmed its confidence in Nozaka. ‘Comrade Nozaka,’ the party’s
declaration stated, ‘is the staunchest proletarian patriot, possessing the trust
of the masses.’1
But hardly had their declaration appeared than the official organ of the
Communist Party of China declared itself solidly behind the attack by the
Cominform. Accusing Nozaka of ‘important errors on points of principle’, it
condemned as entirely false his idea that, by exploiting the middle-class
parliament through peaceful methods, the Communist party of Japan could
gain the power of the state.
The Japanese Communist party now stood caught in the cross-fire
between Moscow and Peking. As the central committee of the Communist
party of the Soviet Union disclosed fourteen years later in a letter of the 18
April 1964 to the central committee of the Communist party of Japan,
the attack by the Cominform had been undertaken ‘on Stalin’s personal
initiative’,12 and had evidently been agreed with Mao Tse-tung when he
arrived in December 1947 for a three-month visit to Moscow, as part of
the framework for Communist strategy in Asia in the anti-American
struggle.3
The immediate consequence of the Russo-Chinese attacks on the Japanese
Communist party was internal disruption. Its left wing, under the leadership
of Yoshio Shiga and Kenji Miyamoto, who as members of the central
committee had both until now tried vainly to push the party leftwards,
received a considerable impetus from the attacks. They formed within the
party a faction of ‘internationalists’, accusing the majority in the party
leadership of having ‘Titoized’ the party and demanding that it should bring
its policies into line with those of the Cominform. The majority, on the
other hand, tried to discredit the left as ‘Trotskyists’.4
This bitter factional struggle, which shook the party to its roots, finally
ended with the capitulation of Tokuda, general secretary, and Nozaka, its
actual leader, under pressure from Moscow and Peking. The Politbureau
submitted to Stalin a new programme entitled ‘Basic Tasks of the Communist
Party of Japan in the Approaching Revolution’—a document which, as the
letter of the central committee of the C.P.S.U. of 18 April 1964 confirms,
‘was supplied on Stalin’s request and with the direct co-operation of the

1. Quoted in ibid., p. 63.

2. This letter emphasizes that the C.P.S.U. central committee ‘not only condemns
such criticism of fraternal parties, but also that the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U.
has strongly criticized Stalin’s personality cult, which caused deviations from Lenin’s rule
of mutual relationships between fraternal parties’—quoted in ibid., p. 62.
3. For a detailed record of Russian and Chinese criticisms of the policy of the Com-
munist Party of Japan, see ibid., pp. 57-67.
4. For a detailed report of this conflict, see Swearingen, Red Flag in Japan, pp. 222-9.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 335
leaders of the Communist Party of Japan—Comrades Tokuda, Nozaka and
others’.1
In these new theses, the American forces of occupation, which had until
1950 been welcomed by the Communist party as liberators from the ties of
feudalism, militarism and the ‘imperial system’, were condemned as instru-
ments of American imperialism, imposing on the people of Japan ‘only
chains and slavery’. There was no further talk of a ‘bourgeois democratic
revolution’; the phrase was replaced by the notion of a ‘democratic revolu-
tion of national liberation’ from domination by American imperialism.
Neither was there any further mention of the concept of the ‘peaceful revolu-
tion’, which had, until 1950, been the basic policy of the party. ‘It would be a
serious error,’ the new programme declared, ‘to suppose that a new demo-
cratic government of national liberation could rise under its own will-power
in a peaceful manner___ No, the peaceful road to liberation and democratic
change in Japan is a fresh path of deceit.’12
These theses were based on the assumption that Japan stood at the
threshold of an imminent national revolution which, under Communist
leadership, would turn into a proletarian revolution.
The left course which the party now took was aimed at such a revolution;
its destiny was to nurture it. The new direction showed itself in the party’s
identification with the Cominform’s view of history—the close approach of
a Third World War and the revolution which this would unleash; in its
acknowledgement of force as an instrument of revolution; in strongly hostile
propaganda against the United States and the occupation forces; in its
declaration of solidarity with North Korea in the war against the South
which had begun in June 1950; and, finally, in instigating acts of terrorism—
sabotage in factories, the bombing of police stations, and violent attacks on
policemen, soldiers and public officials.
Incited by Peking, the party conference of February 1951 debated the
question of an armed struggle—the formation of military and para-military
groups within the party, which were eventually to be developed into guerrilla
formations and ultimately into a Japanese Red Army. The congress resolu-
tion emphasized the necessity for armed struggle against the instruments of
state power.3
This radicalization of the Communist tactics offered the reactionary
forces the chance they needed to open an offensive against the working class.
Under pressure from the S.C.A.P., the freedom of public employees to
organize was curtailed and thousands of workers suspected of being Com-
munist were dismissed from factories and public works.

1. For the text of the letter, see Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 81.
2. For the quotation, see ibid., pp. 81 and 82; for an analysis of the theses, see Swear-
ingen, Red Flag in Japan, pp. 203-7.
3. See Scalapino, Japanese Communist Movement, p. 86.
 336 Socialism and Communism in Asia
The revolutionary tactics to which the party had switched also dis-
credited it among the broad masses. From having gathered almost three
million votes and thirty-five seats as well as attracting close on 10 per cent of
the active electorate in the 1949 elections, in 1952 it lost over a third of its
votes and all its parliamentary representatives.1
But of far greater consequence than losing the trust of a large section of
the electorate had been the loss of the vast masses of workers in the trade
unions. Several of the trade union organizations affiliated to the Communist-
dominated trade union council, Sanbetsu, had even before 1950 organized
themselves in opposition to the Communist leadership to form ‘democratic
leagues’ (the Mindo Movement). This movement replaced the Communist
leadership, disassociated itself from the Sanbetsu and under the leadership of
Minoru Takano formed a new trade union federation, the General Council of
Japanese Trade Unions {Nihon Rodo Kumiai Sohyogikai—abbreviated to
Sohyo); it counted a membership of three million. Sanbetsu had had a
million and a half members at its founding, and by the end of 1949 there were
still 400,000; by the time Sohyo was established the figure had dropped to
47,000.2
Thus the revolutionary course taken by the Communist party ended in a
heavy setback to the promising development anticipated after its brilliant
election victory of 1949. Recognizing the reality of existing power ratios and
the force of tradition in Japan, the party had attempted to achieve its aims on
a ‘Japanese road to Socialism’. The changes of policy undertaken a year
later had arisen not from any recognition of changed conditions for a social
revolution; they had been imposed by Moscow through the Cominform. The
party had not of its own choice departed from the path of ‘peaceful
revolution’; it had been forced off it by Stalin, who, in his Cold War strategy
against the Western powers, had attempted to spark off strong Communist
insurrections in Japan as well as elsewhere.3
Most party leaders gradually came to realize how their ‘adventurous
ultra-left tactics’ had foundered and badly shaken party unity. The 1955
party congress, however, formally reaffirmed the ‘correctness’ of the 1951
theses, but even so returned to the tactics of a ‘right course’. It was not until
after Khrushchev had made his historic speech to the Twentieth Congress of
the Soviet Communist party in February 1956, seeking a detente with the
Western powers and emphasizing the possibility of peaceful co-existence be-
1. The number of Communist votes fell from 2,984,780 in 1949 to 895,765 in 1952;
and to 655,990 in the elections of 1953—see ibid., p. 314.
2. Sanbetsu"s membership fell again in 1952 to 27,000, and in the following year to
13,000; it was dissolved on 15 February 1958; see ibid., p. 331. For the founding and history
of Sohyo, see Levine, Industrial Relations in Post-war Japan, pp. 74-88; for its structure,
see ibid., pp. 89-98.
3. For the Communists’ switch to revolutionary tactics under the Cominform in-
fluence in France, see page 153; in Italy, see page 66; in Czechoslovakia, see page 178;
in India, see p. 231; in Burma, see p. 262; in Indonesia, see p. 294.
7 H ea d o f S ta lin 's statue in Budapest, p u lled down in O ctober 1956
8 S o viet ta n ks in Prague, A ugust 1968
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 337
tween nations of differing social and economic systems, that, in June 1956, a
full meeting of the Japanese Communist party’s central committee revised
the theses on the necessity of revolution by force; they then returned to
Nozaka’s theory of a ‘peaceful revolution’.
Now, once again, the party was slowly able to recoup its heavy losses.
From having polled 655,000 votes in the 1955 elections, it took 1,012,000
votes in the 1958 elections. But even so they won only one seat, compared
with the thirty-five they had held in 1949.

The Social Democratic party, on the other hand, had recovered surprisingly
quickly from its heavy defeat in January 1949; a year and a half later, in the
elections for the Upper House in June 1950, it had become the second strong-
est party with sixty-one out of 250 seats; and in local council elections, which
were held simultaneously, it outstripped its gains at the polls in 1947.
But no sooner had the party regained its former strength than it became
involved in an internal crisis. The dissension between left and right within
the party was intensified by their respective attitudes to the peace treaty. The
party had been unanimous in its insistence that Japan should be declared a
neutral nation, neither concluding any military treaties with a foreign power
nor granting any foreign military bases in Japan. Over and above this the left
demanded, however, that the party should oppose the rearmament of Japan,
for, it argued, Japan rearmed would risk its neutrality and might draw the
country into foreign wars.1 The Social Democrat right wing maintained,
however, that it was impossible for Japan to remain completely defenceless in
the face of a direct or indirect threat of attack from the Communist bloc; it
had to rearm for self-defence.12
The contrasting attitudes between right and left were disputed passion-
ately at the party congress of 1951. The rightist view was rejected by an
overwhelming majority and its dominant position in the party undermined.
The party’s left wing gained fifteen seats on the executive to the ten of the
right wing and the five of the centre; and its leader, Suzuki, was elected
chairman.
The victory of the left did not end the conflict within the party. This in
fact deepened when, on 4 September 1951, a security pact with the United
1. Following Japan’s surrender, her armed forces had been entirely demobilized, and
the Constitution of 3 March 1947, having, under Article IX, renounced war as a ‘sovereign
right of nations’, gave a pledge that Japan’s ‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war
potential, will never be maintained’. But Article IX was compromised by S.C.A.P. when it
decided to form a ‘police reserve’ of 75,000 men during the emergency created by the
Korean War and which, later retitled ‘self-defence’, grew to number over 200,000. A
nation-wide nationalist campaign, which had the backing of both the Liberal and Demo-
cratic parties, demanded during the negotiation of the San Francisco Treaty (which ulti-
mately came into force in 1952) that Article IX should be amended to allow Japan to rearm.
2. See J. A. A. Stockwin, The Japanese Socialist Party and Neutralism. A Study o f a
Political Party and its Foreign Policy (London and New York, 1968).
338 Socialism and Communism in Asia
States was signed in San Francisco together with the peace treaty. The peace
treaty recognized Japan’s right to self-defence but, in addition, the security
pact gave the United States the right to maintain troops in the country until
such time as Japan could ‘take over responsibility for its own defence’.
The Socialist left, having conducted a stormy propaganda campaign
against both pacts during the peace treaty discussions, demanded that the
Socialist group in Parliament should vote against both treaties. The party
split over this question during an extraordinary party congress on 23 October
1951.1 The left-wing Socialists in parliament voted against both treaties; the
right-wing Socialists only against the security pact.
The relative strengths of the two Social Democratic parties—each equally
considering itself to be the ‘true’ party and clinging to its title—emerged
in the elections of October 1952. The left party was supported by Sohyo
and the teachers’ and railwaymens’ trade unions; the right by Sodomei and
the remaining unions. The right won 4,012,000 votes, the left 3,493,000.
Only at the elections of February 1955 was there a shift of power in favour
of the left; it then won 5,642,000 votes compared to 5,071,000 for the
right.2
Even though the two parties had entered the election contest of 1955 as
rivals, the overall poll for the Social Democrats rose by three and a half
million (from 7,168,000 to 10,713,000) and to 156 seats as compared with the
143 won in 1947.
The rank-and-file in both parties had, for a long time, been pushing for
reunification. Under this pressure of opinion, both party executives set up a
commission in August 1953 to clarify the problems of reunification, and
commenced discussions between their presidents and general secretaries to
try to arrive at a common parliamentary policy. In January 1955, the con-
gresses of both parties met simultaneously and solemnly declared in favour
of reunification after the February elections; they charged a joint com-
mission with drafting a programme for a reunited party.
The ‘Congress of the Reunification’ met in Tokyo on 13 October 1955.
Without debate it accepted the programme drafted by the joint commission
and elected an executive on which both wings of the party were represented
1. At its meeting in Brussels on 14-16 December 1951, the General Council of the
Socialist International had addressed an urgent appeal, ‘in the fraternal spirit of Inter-
national Socialism’, to both Social Democratic parties to overcome their differences. ‘The
split in your party,’ it stated, ‘and the formation of two rival Socialist parties, would, we
believe, be a disaster of the first magnitude for Japanese Socialism. It is our profoundest
conviction, gained from experience of so many mistakes and defeats in the history of
International Socialism, that no disputed question, however serious it may appear, can
justify the damage which a split in the Socialist party must inevitably cause. Where a great
Socialist party in a great country is pulled apart, the effects are felt throughout the entire
international labour movement.’ For the text of the appeal, see Report on Activities
(1951-1952) Submitted to the Second Congress of the Socialist International (Milan, 1952),
p. 30.
2. See Yearbook, p. 337.
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 339
in equal strength; Mosaburo Suzuki, of the left, became chairman, and
Inejiro Asanuma, of the right, general secretary.
When the party had been founded ten years earlier, its manifesto merely
asserted its threefold aim: democracy, Socialism and peace. Now, for the
first time, the party formulated its basic principles and objectives into a pro-
gramme. As its example it took the ‘Frankfurt Declaration’ of the Founding
Congress of the Socialist International.1
The programme set out the task of achieving Socialism by peaceful
revolution through parliamentary democratic methods. ‘Socialism,’ it stated,
‘can be attained only through democracy, and democracy can be fully
realized only through Socialism.’ It therefore rejected Communism. ‘Com-
munism,’ the programme declared, ‘has trampled democracy underfoot.
Denying individual freedom and the dignity of man, it has become irrecon-
cilable with Socialism based on democracy.’
The precondition for a peaceful Socialist revolution, the programme ex-
plained, was the capture of political power by an ‘absolute majority in the
Diet’. Such a majority could be won by the party, provided it gathered to ‘the
working-class organizations as its core the organizations of farmers, medium
and small enterprises, women, youth and others’.
The Social Democratic party of Japan [the programme continued] is necessarily
a class party because of its stand for a Socialist revolution by democratic and peace-
ful means___As the realization of Socialism is essentially the historic mission of
the workers, it follows that they must form the core of our party, but farmers and
fishermen, small traders and industrialists, intellectuals and others are also welcome
in our midst as comrades who also suffer under capitalism. Herein lies the character-
istic of our party as a class party of the masses.

The party, the programme explained, had also been set a national objec-
tive: achieving Japan’s full independence. Japan had, in effect, lost its
independence through the Security Treaty with the United States.
Japan [the programme states] is formally an independent state, as the con-
clusion of the Peace Treaty demonstrates, but, in fact, through the Security Treaty
and the Administrative Agreement, [which allow for] the stationing of United
States armed forces for an indefinite period and a network of innumerable military
bases, her important key points are secured.

The programme demanded the renunciation of the Security Treaty, the

withdrawal of all American troops from Japan, and the return of the Japanese
Pacific island of Okinawa by an amendment to the peace treaty, which had
transferred the sovereignty of the island to the United States.2
The fruits of the party’s reunification were reaped in an impressive gain at
the polls in the election of May 1958: the 13,093,000 votes polled represented
1. For the text of the Frankfurt declaration, see Appendix Two, page 531.
2. For the text of the programme, see Yearbook, pp. 338-48.
340 Socialism and Communism in Asia
an advance of 2,380,000 over the 1955 elections when the two Social Demo-
cratic parties had faced one another in competition. And, for the first time,
the party won 33 per cent of the entire poll; it increased its representation in
parliament from 158 to 166 members. The gain in seats had naturally been
inhibited by the tactics of the Communists, who had put up 114 candidates
against the Social Democrats, thereby splitting the Socialist vote but still
gaining only one seat.

However, within a bare eighteen months of this election victory, which

seemed to hold out so much promise for its future, the Social Democratic
party split afresh.
The programme worked out so painstakingly by the commission had been
a compromise between the basic concepts of the Marxist left and the reformist
right. It had not overcome the conflicts between the two factions over the
party’s character and their true intentions. For the left, led by Suzuki, the
fight for Socialism against capitalism was the first priority, for, as the pro-
gramme stated, the realization of Socialism was the ‘historic mission’ of the
workers; the party’s character as a workers’ class party had to be preserved.
Suehiro Nishio, leader of the Socialist extreme right, considered, on the other
hand, that the struggle against Communism to defend democracy was the
most urgent task. He advocated the party transformation into a democratic
people’s party.
This division of views also determined the differences of opinion over the
Security Treaty and of attitudes towards the prevailing hostility between the
Western powers and the Communist bloc. The left demanded the denouncing
of the treaty, the withdrawal of American bases from Japan, Japan’s neutrality
in the Cold War and a detente with Communist China. Nishio, by contrast,
pleaded for solidarity with the Western powers in their conflict with the
Eastern bloc, arguing that, so long as international tension remained un-
resolved through the lack of an effective system of collective security, the
security treaty would be necessary.
Over the years these conflicts, exacerbated by bitter struggles over the
question of party tactics, intensified to an intolerable extent. At the extra-
ordinary congress of September 1959, the left attempted to engineer Nishio’s
expulsion from the party. Thereupon in preparation for the founding of a
new party in alliance with an anti-Communist trade union group, the ‘Con-
gress of the Trade Unions of Japan’ (Domeikaigi), he organized a ‘Society for
the Reconstruction of the Party’, which, as was explained, would seek the
support of the ‘whole nation, and not only workers’ organizations and the
peasants’ alliances, for a new form of “democratic Socialism” ’.
Nishio’s new party came into being on 24 January 1960. It took the title
‘Democratic Socialist party’ (Minshu Shakaito). A blueprint for its pro-
gramme was provided by the Godesberg Programme of the German Social
 Socialism and Communism in Japan 341
Democratic party. Its declared objective was the gradual development of
Socialism by peaceful, lawful means, and opposition to any system of dictator-
ship, of the left as much as of the right. It rejected Marxism-Leninism as well
as class-strife as methods for realizing Socialism. It sought to attain the image
of a ‘people’s party’ as against the image of the Social Democratic party as a
‘class party’.1
Suehiro Nishio, a former metal-worker and trade union leader, had
been a member of parliament since 1958 as well as a minister in Katayama’s
government and deputy prime minister in Ashida’s government. His Socialist
convictions were rooted not in Marxism, but in an idealistic humanism.
The splitting of the Social Democratic party undertaken by Nishio was
deplored by the real leaders of the right, Inejiro Asanuma (1889-1960) and
Jotaro Kawakami (1889-1965). Asanuma, a pioneer of the Japanese Labour
movement, was elected party chairman shortly after the split; and, a few
months later, on 12 October 1960, was murdered by a young nationalist
fanatic. Kawakami succeeded him to the party chairmanship.
The two Socialist parties went into the election of November 1960 as un-
relenting rivals, and the Social Democratic party came out of the elections
by far the stronger of the two. It won 10,900,000 votes and 145 seats, while
the Democratic Socialist party won 3,500,000 votes and seventeen seats.12
Despite the internal strife in the Socialist camp, the total Socialist vote had
increased by 1,300,000 over the 1958 elections, and the Socialist share of the
poll had risen from 33 to 39 per cent.
It seems unlikely, however, that the two parties will remain separate in
their advance into the future. The steady growth of a Socialist electorate,
edging the Socialist movement ever closer to power, carries within itself a
reunifying trend. The conflicts which split the party were disagreements over
tactics—differences over relative values in the ideological justification of
Socialism, and not conflicts over fundamental Socialist principles. Both
parties have remained members of the Socialist International which embraces
Socialists of every complexion—Marxists as well as reformists, religious as
well as ethical humanists—in the spirit of basic principles and objectives
which are common to all. It was a conflict of attitude to an actual political
situation which broke the unity of the labour movement in Japan. Develop-
ments in the political situation may well pave the way to its reunification.
1. See Cole, et al., Socialist Parties in Post-war Japan, pp. 74-5.
2. The election produced the following picture of the relative strengths of the three
workers’ parties: Percentage o f
Votes votes cast Seats
Social Democratic party 10,887,134 27.5 145
Democratic Socialist party 3,464,144 8.8 17
Communist party 1,156,722 2.9 3
15 • The Chinese Revolution

The strangest phenomenon in contemporary history has been the triumph of

the Communist revolution in China: a leap from the fifteenth into the
twentieth century. Marxism in its Leninist and Maoist version has, in only a
few decades, become the ideology of a society whose thinking had been
ruled for millennia by the teachings of Confucius.1 A vast agrarian country,
with hardly more than artisanal production for its goods, has become in-
volved in a rapid process of change into a modern industrial state. China, for
a century the helpless, humiliated victim of the rapacity of European and
Japanese imperialism, is on a prodigious course to become the greatest
world power in history.
The revolution in China took the Communist revolution in Russia as its
example. But it differed from the Russian in both social character and
technique. It was not, like the Russian, a revolution by the urban industrial
proletariat, but a peasants’ revolution, and its technique was not the armed
uprising, as the Russian had been, but the guerrilla war.
But what distinguished it most from its Russian predecessor was its
inevitability. The Communist revolution in Russia in October 1917 had not
by any means been unavoidable; the Communist dictatorship which it set up
had not been the only possibility for the regeneration of Russia. The alterna-
tives had included a democracy under the dominant influence of the three
Socialist parties—the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries—
who together had won an overwhelming majority in the elections to the
constituent national assembly.
In China, on the other hand, the Communist revolution had been the only
hope for social regeneration. The middle-class revolution which preceded it
had failed ingloriously. Its history, beginning in 1911 with the overthrow of

1. For the traditions of China, see H. G. Creel, Chinese Thought from Confucius to
Mao Tse-tung (London, 1954); C. P. Fitzgerald, China, a Short Cultural History (London,
1935); Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. i: Konfuzianismus und
Taoismus (Tubingen, 1922).
 The Chinese Revolution 343
the Manchu dynasty, had ended in 1949 with the fall of the impotent, soulless,
corrupt and thoroughly autocratic dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek. It had
been a history of anarchy, civil war, economic decline and national humilia-
tion during the Japanese invasion. The middle-class regime, fallen into
general contempt, had failed totally; it could only be overthrown by a
Communist revolution. There was no alternative; the revolution’s victory was
historically imperative.
The Chinese empire, which had been tom to shreds by the struggles
between rival war lords and forty years of civil war, was united by the
Communists. ‘They gave China the strongest government which the land had
known since the days of the great Manchu emperors of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Some observers would go farther and call it the strongest
that the Chinese had ever had.’1

The history of the Communist revolution in China in fact has no parallel in

the history of Socialism.12 The Communist party of China, formed in 1921
by a small group of intellectuals, differed during the first phase of its history
in no way whatsoever from the Communist party of Russia by which it was,
in fact, led until its devastating defeat in 1927. The Soviet Union had entered
into an alliance with the Kuomintang, founded by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925),
the party of the national liberation movement which had formed a govern-
ment in Canton and ruled the south of China. The Kuomintang was itself
represented on the executive of the Communist International with the rights
of an associate member. Moscow, therefore, instructed the Chinese Com-
munist party to join the Kuomintang as the vehicle for the historically
necessary bourgeois revolution.
But the main support of the Kuomintang, now led by General Chiang
Kai-shek, came from the landowners and businessmen who felt their position
to be threatened by the Communist party which, following an uprising in
Shanghai in May 1925, had attracted a rapidly growing mass-following.
Chiang Kai-shek, though he was an honorary member of the Communist
International, decided to smash it. He arrested its army commissars and
disarmed the Shanghai workers who, during the uprising, had opened the
town gates to the advancing Kuomintang army. No sooner had he occupied
the town, than he suppressed the Communist party in a terrible blood-
bath.
Stalin, surprised by Chiang Kai-shek’s change in political tactics,
requested the Chinese Communists to adopt the technique of insurrection
and sent Heinz Neumann, an agent of the Communist International, to
organize an uprising in Canton. On 12 December 1927, units of the Fourth
1. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History o f Modem China (London, 1954), p. 208.
2. For an introduction to the history of the origins of the Communist Revolution and
its development, see C. P. Fitzgerald, Revolution in China (London, 1954).
 344 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Army, under the command of Communist officers, occupied the town and
proclaimed the ‘Commune of Kanton’. Within a few days they were drowned
in their own blood. It seemed as though the Chinese Communist party was
finished.1 Its central committee, led by Li Li-san, sought refuge in a foreign
concession in Shanghai, but as a group deprived of leaders and followers it
soon departed from the political scene.

The Chinese party was revived by Mao Tse-tung who after the catastrophe
fled with a small guerrilla group to Chingkangshan in the wild mountain
areas of Kiangsi province. There, under the command of Chu Teh, remnants
of the Fourth Army which had escaped the massacre in Canton joined up
with Mao Tse-tung’s guerrilla group. They were to form the nucleus of the
Red Army which by the beginning of 1929 consisted of about 10,000 men,
and which, after a guerrilla war lasting twenty years, was to conquer the
vast Chinese empire for the revolution.
Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976) was the son of a prosperous farmer in the
central province of Hunan. He graduated from a college in Changsha, the
capital of Hunan, in 1916, and went to Peking University, where, to earn a
living, he became assistant librarian.12 There he came under the influence of
the two Marxist professors, Li Ta-chao and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who founded
the Communist party in China. Mao Tse-tung was among the twelve delegates
at the Communist party’s inaugural conference in his role as organizer of the
revolutionary peasant movement in Hunan. He came to regard the ‘hundreds
of millions of peasants’ rather than the industrial proletariat of the towns as
providing the essential force for the revolution in China, as he wrote in a
report on the peasant movement in Hunan for the fifth Communist party
congress in April 1927.3 Accordingly, he wrote, the party’s strategy for the
revolution, unlike that which had applied in Russia, would have to be based
primarily on the peasantry, and it would have to be carried from the country-
side into the town rather than vice versa. The party would have to attract
the land-hungry peasant to the cause of the revolution by a programme of
agrarian reform, aimed at redistributing the land, and by changes in the
tenant system. Meanwhile the Red Army, composed of peasants, should
pursue a guerrilla war to gain control of the rural districts, by-passing towns
and setting up enclaves of soviets to serve as revolutionary bases.
This, however, was a view which contradicted Lenin’s concept of the

1. For a brief description of these events, see Braunthal, History o f the International,
1914-1943, pp. 320-9. For a detailed examination, see B. I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism
and the Rise o f Mao (Harvard, 1951); Conrad Brandt, John K. Fairbank and Benjamin
Schwartz, Documentary History o f Chinese Communism (Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1952); Harold K. Isaacs, The Tragedy o f the Chinese Revolution (Stanford, 1951).
2. For a biography, see Stuart R. Schram, Mao Tse-tung (London, 1966).
3. See Malcolm D. Kennedy, A Short History o f Communism in Asia (London, 1957),
p. 76.
 The Chinese Revolution 345
revolution. Lenin had also considered an alliance of the working class with
the peasants as a necessary condition for the success of the revolution in
agrarian Russia, but he saw the working class as providing its backbone. In
his strategy, the towns had formed the revolutionary ‘front’ and the villages
the revolution’s ‘hinterland’. Not until he had conquered Petrograd and
Moscow did he spread the revolution into the villages.
But Mao Tse-tung, considering the village proletariat to be the social
basis of the revolution in China, evolved a strategy in which the villages
formed the revolutionary ‘front’ and the towns the revolution’s ‘hinterland’.1
. During a decade of his leadership, from 1927 to 1937, the Communist
movement in China developed from an industrial workers’ party, led by
theoretical Marxists, into an agrarian party of revolutionary peasants. In the
soviets which the Communists organized in the districts they controlled, they
created a new type of Communist regime based on the peasantry; it had the
agrarian revolution as its immediate aim and the method of guerrilla war as
tactics for the revolution. Thus, in adapting the Marxist-Leninist theory of
revolution to the social conditions prevalent in China, Mao developed the
concept of a dictatorship of the peasants rather than a dictatorship of the
industrial proletariat.
The province of Kiangsi emerged as the first soviet republic in China. It
was proclaimed by a congress of district soviets, meeting in Suichan, the
capital of the province, on 7 November 1931. It elected a ‘Provisional Central
Government’ under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung, with Chu Teh as
commander of the Red Army and Chou En-lai as his deputy. It passed the
basic laws of the republic, giving precedence to a law to redistribute the land
among the poor peasants and the landless village proletariat.
Chiang Kai-shek regarded the destruction of the Soviet Republic of
Kiangsi as his most urgent priority in consolidating the power of the
Kuomintang. Between 1930 and 1934 he undertook five offensives against it,
the fifth with an army of no less than 700,000 troops.12 Though he failed to
defeat the Red Army, he did succeed in paralysing the soviet republic with
a blockade. Mao Tse-tung thereupon decided on a withdrawal which was to
go down in China’s history as a heroic epic: 130,000 soldiers and civilians
left the Kiangsi republic in the autumn of 1934, broke through the blockade
and, pursued by Chiang’s troops and in continuous combat against local
forces, marched for 12,000 kilometres through the barren wastes south-
westwards along the Tibetan border through Kansu in the north of Shensi

1. ‘The essential task of the Communist party,’ Mao Tse-tung wrote in 1938, ‘is not to
start the armed struggle only after a long period of legal struggle, and not to attack first
the big towns and then occupy the countryside afterwards, but to take them the other
way round’—Selected Works, vol. n: Problems o f Warnda Strategy (New York, 1954),
p. 267.
2. For a description of this campaign, see O. Edmund Qubb, Twentieth-Century China
(New York and London, 1964), pp. 194-202.
346 Socialism and Communism in Asia
province on the edge of the Mongolian steppe to China’s most remote area.
The ‘Long March’, as it was to be known, took over a year.1
At the end of 1931, a Japanese army, stationed in Manchuria to safeguard
the South Manchurian Railway, occupied the three eastern provinces of China
which constituted Manchuria and, early in 1932, set up a Japanese satellite
state which they called Manchukuo. This was the start of the Japanese
invasion of China, aimed at subjecting the whole of that vast country to
Japan’s predominance.
Chiang Kai-shek, however, made no effort to resist the steady advance
of the Japanese invasion, but instead concentrated his forces in attempting
to wipe out the Communists. To press the battle against them, he directed an
army under the command of Chang Hsueh-liang to attack the new Communist
stronghold in the north-east, where, following the ‘Long March’, Mao
Tse-tung had established a soviet republic with Yenan as its capital.
Then, in December, a sensational episode introduced a change into the
relations between the Kuomintang and the Communist party. Chiang Kai-
shek had gone to Hsian, to Chang Hsueh-liang’s headquarters, to try to
intensify the campaign against the Communists. Instead Chang Hsueh-liang
seized him and forced him, under threat of assassination, to enter into
negotiations with the Communists in response to their appeal to his troops
to cease fighting their fellow Chinese and to join them in ejecting the
Japanese. The negotiations which followed ended open fighting and resulted
in a united front being presented to the Japanese.
Three months later, in an endeavour to consolidate the united front,
Mao Tse-tung went even further. In February 1937, the central committee
of the Chinese Communist party formally told the central executive com-
mittee of the Kuomintang that if the nation’s strength were to be directed
against external aggression, it would place its army under the direct strategic
leadership of Chiang Kai-shek as generalissimo, and would make its govern-
ment a part of that of the Republic of China, even ceasing to expropriate
the holdings of landlords. It seemed that the Kuomintang and the
Communists had reached a substantial measure of agreement, and civil war
ceased.
Now, in the eyes of the nation, the Communist party appeared as the
champion of national unity and as the main active force in the fight against
the Japanese invader. It won the party the sympathies of a large majority of
intellectuals and students, and an even larger number of peasants, who
flocked to join its ranks. Its membership rose from 100,000 in 1937 to
1,200,000 in 1945.1 2 ‘In contrast with the exhausted Kuomintang,’ Latourette

1. For a description of the ‘Long March’ and of the soviets, see Dick Wilson, The Long
March: 1935 (London, 1971); Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London, 1938).
2. See Latourette, A History o f M odem China, p. 185.
 The Chinese Revolution 347
observes, ‘the Chinese Communist party came to the year 1945 with a
tightly knit, disciplined membership, inured to hardship, equipped with
armed forces which had been indoctrinated with its convictions, and with a
philosophy of history and a programme held with unshakeable conviction
and missionary fervour.’ And, as he remarks later in his book, with leaders
of ‘tireless devotion and austerity’ and an ‘absence of corruption in Com-
munist officialdom’.1
In the course of the guerrilla war against the Japanese, who had seized
the towns and lines of communication but not the villages, the Communists
brought the provinces of north and north-east China under their control. It
was inevitable that, after Japan’s capitulation in August 1945, the civil war
should break out once again. ‘Chiang Kai-shek,’ General Stilwell, the
commander of the American armed forces in China, recorded in his diary,
‘hates the Communists. He intends to crush them . . . by occupying their
territory as the Japs retire.’12 In fact, Chiang Kai-shek issued an order to the
Japanese that they were to defend whatever positions and towns they held
in the Communist-controlled areas against attacks by Communists, and
were to surrender only to the troops of the Kuomintang, who were flown in
by the United States Air Force.
The astounding thing was, however, that Stalin, who had declared war
on Japan eight days before its capitulation, issued identical instructions to
the Soviet forces which had occupied Manchuria. Towns occupied by Russian
troops were handed over not to the forces of Mao Tse-tung, but to those
flown in by Chiang Kai-shek. During the Russian evacuation of Manchuria,
the Communist forces in northern China had occupied the plains and taken
possession of vast Japanese war supplies; in this the Russians had not
hindered them. But the Russians did systematically dismantle Manchuria’s
industrial plant installations, removing machines, rolling stock and other
movable goods to Russia as war booty. Had the Russians handed over this
strongly developed industrial area to the Communists intact, the civil war
would, in Fitzgerald’s view, ‘have been decided without further fighting’, for
once in possession of the Manchurian war potential, they would have been
able ‘to overthrow the Kuomintang whenever it suited them’.3

In the event, the civil war dragged on for almost another four years. The
revolution finally triumphed not only on the battlefields, despite the numerical
superiority of Chiang Kai-shek’s American-equipped counter-revolutionary
armies, but also in the villages and towns, for it embodied the hopes of a
new order, while Chiang Kai-shek’s regime had been discredited as impotent,

1. ibid., pp. 187 and 204.

2. Joseph M. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers, edited by Theodore W. White (New York,
1948), p. 340.
3. See Fitzgerald, Revolution in China, p. 98.
 348 Socialism and Communism in Asia
corrupt, reactionary and devoid of ideas or inspiration.1 The Communist
revolution was victorious because it won to its cause not only the broad mass
of the peasants, whom it freed from pressing burdens and raised from
degradation, but also the intellectuals and the mass of the middle classes
as well as the workers. It is a barely disputed verdict among historians of
the Chinese revolution that it was carried to victory by an overwhelming
majority of the Chinese people.
It was this social mass basis on which the construction of a Socialist
order of society was to begin. There was, of course, no existing blueprint;
the new society could only be developed through experimental processes.2
Mao Tse-tung, its master builder, was well aware that Soviet Russian
Communism could not serve as an example. ‘The history of Russia,’ he said
on the eve of his triumphal entry into Peking on 3 February 1949, ‘created
the Russian system; the history of China will create the Chinese system.’3
Marxism had shaped the ideology of the Chinese Revolution, as it had
for the Russian Revolution. But Mao Tse-tung did not believe that Chinese
Communism could accept Marxism in its Russian or any other foreign
version. While still in Yenan he had written in China's New Democracy, the
book in which he set forth the ideals and programmes of the new order:
In the past, China has suffered greatly by accepting foreign ideas simply because
they were foreign. Chinese Com munists should remember this in applying Marxism
in China. We m ust effect a genuine synthesis between the universal tru th o f M arxism
and the concrete practice o f the Chinese Revolution. Only after we have found out
our own national form of Marxism will it prove useful.4

Mao Tse-tung was resolved on seeking a ‘Chinese road to Socialism’.

1. ‘Chiang Kai-shek,’ Stilwell noted, ‘is bewildered by the spread of Communist

influences. He can’t see that the mass of the Chinese people welcome the Reds as being the
only visible hope of relief from crushing taxation, the abuse of the army and Tai Li’s
Gestapo. Under Chiang Kai-shek they now begin to see what they may expect: greed,
corruption, favouritism, more taxes, a ruined currency, terrible waste of life, callous dis-
regard of all the rights of man. . . . I judge Kuomintang and the Communist party by what I
saw: Kuomintang—corruption, neglect, chaos, a ruined economy, taxes, hoarding, black
market, trading with the enemy. Communist programme—reduce taxes, rents, interest.
Raise production and standard of living. Practise what they preach . . . ’—Stilwell, The
Stilwell Papers, pp. 317 and 318.
2. See Rostow, The Prospects for Communist China (New York and London, 1954),
Parts 5 and 6 passim.
3. Quoted in Clubb, Twentieth-Century China, p. 302.
4. Mao Tse-tung, China's New Democracy, p. 61, quoted in Creel, Chinese Thought
from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung, p. 266.
 16 • Socialism in Israel

Socialism in Israel represents a unique historical phenomenon. The state of

Israel came into existence as a result of Socialist initiative. Socialists have
governed it since its foundation, realizing Socialist ideas in economic, social
and cultural institutions, thereby imprinting Socialism more deeply into the
character of the social order than in any other country that has a democratic
system of government. The uniqueness of the Socialism which has developed
in this country has its origin, like the state of Israel itself, in utopian concepts.1
With the founding of the state of Israel a national utopia, and with the
founding of the institution of the kibbutz a Socialist utopia, became reality.2
However, the cradle of Socialist Zionism stood not on the soil of Palestine
where the new state was to arise, but in the vast ghettos of Tsarist Russia
in which, at the turn of the century, nearly a third of world Jewry was living.
Throughout Western and Central Europe, Jewish communities had been sub-
jected to a gradual process of social and cultural assimilation into the nations
where they lived. In Russia, on the other hand, as well as in Romania and
the provinces of Galicia and Bukovina in the Habsburg Empire, they formed
m effect a nation which was sharply distinct from all other nations—not only
by their religion, but also as a separate cultural community jealously guarding
its ancient traditions and customs and speaking its own language (Yiddish).
It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that a national
self-awareness awoke among the Jewish people. From this there stemmed a
national movement driven forward by a force working to bring the Jews
together into an independent historical nation. With the awakening of this
national self-consciousness there also came a class-consciousness to the
Jewish proletariat of Tsarist Russia. ‘The change in the attitudes of Jewish
1. See the essay by Isaiah Berlin, T h e Origins of Israel’, in Walter Z. Laqueur (ed.), The
Middle East in Transition (London, 1958), pp. 204-21.
2. The utopia of political Zionism was first outlined by Theodor Herzel in his book, Der
Judenstaat (Vienna, 1896). The utopia of a Socialist Jewish state was developed by Moses
Hess in Rom und Jerusalem (1862) and by Nachman Syrkin, Die Judenfrage und der sozial*
istische Judenstaat (Berne, 1898).
350 Socialism and Communism in Asia
workers since the outbreak of the Russian Revolution [of 1905],’ wrote
Otto Bauer in 1907, ‘is something which Europe has watched with amazement:
from among the timid Jews of the ghetto there emerged the most heroic
fighters of the great revolution.’1

Individual Socialist groups of Jewish workers had first emerged in Tsarist

Russia in the 1890s. They came together under the leadership of Alexander
Kremer, Noah Portnoy, Bronislav Grosser and Leon Fajner (who was to
lead the Jewish underground movement against the Nazi occupation in
Poland during the Second World War) at a conference in Vilna in September
1897, to form the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Russia, Lithuania and
Poland, a title which became abbreviated to the 'Bund'.
The Bund was a Socialist, revolutionary and, indeed, a Marxist party. It
led the Jewish workers in their struggle against the Polish and Russian as
well as against the Jewish bourgeoisie, and, side by side with the Russian
and Polish and Lithuanian Socialists, it led them in the underground battle
against Tsarism. The central Socialist organization in the Russian Empire,
embracing the Socialist parties of all the nations in the state, was the Russian
Social Democratic Workers’ party, founded in Vilna in 1898, which five years
later was to split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The Bund was one of its
founder members, representing the Jewish proletariat among the Socialists of
all other nationalities in Russia.
The Bund also pursued national objectives. It sought to awaken in the
Jewish working class not only the awareness of their Socialist mission but
also their national consciousness, so as to make them immune to assimilation
with other nationalities and to keep alive and develop Jewish cultural values.
It opposed the inequality under the law which Tsarism imposed on the
Jewish people, and it fought for their recognition as equals among the other
nationalities within the Russian empire.2
But shortly after its beginning the Jewish Labour movement was to split
over conflicting attitudes towards Zionism. The purpose of Zionism was to
win a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people who had been deprived
of their rights and subjected to persecution in certain countries, colonizing
the area by the emigration of Jews from all over the world. The Bund, on the
1. Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna, 1907), p. 372.
2. Ber Borochov, the pioneer of Socialist Zionism which developed out of opposi-
tion to the Bund, paid due respect in an essay he wrote in 1905-6, in which he discussed the
Bund's national programme in association with its historical role: ‘The Bund has earned
itself great praise from the Jewish proletariat. In the history of the Jewish Labour move-
ment its name will stand in letters of gold, and future generations of Jewish workers will
set up a splendid monument in Palestine___It has done well in the development of class-
consciousness among the Jewish workers, it has taught them to defend their interests by
organized struggle, it has instilled in them the spirit of discipline and has developed the
concept of democracy among them’—Ber Borochov, Sozialismus und Zionismus. Eine
Synthese, edited by Mendel Singer (Vienna, 1932), p. 120.
 Socialism in Israel 351
other hand, rejected Zionism as a bourgeois, nationalist concept, seeing it
moreover as an inappropriate solution to the ‘Jewish question’. The situation
of those millions of Jews concentrated in Russia would, it was argued, remain
unaffected by the sparse numbers of Jewish emigrants which Palestine was
capable of absorbing. The Russian Jewish working class could only attain
national emancipation through the overthrow of Tsarism and social and eco-
nomic emancipation through Socialism. The future of the Jewish proletariat
was therefore inextricably linked to the future of the proletarian revolution
in Russia. The Bund countered Zionism with the argument that it distracted
the Jewish workers from their true historic task: the fight against Tsarism.1
But the concept of Zionism had meanwhile seized the imaginations of
Jewish Socialists. In September 1900, three years after the Bund's foundation,
the first group of Socialist Zionists, consisting of about 150 workers and
students, formed themselves into the movement known as Poale Zion
(Workers of Zion) at a conference in Ekaterinoslav.12 This group formed the
nucleus of a movement which was to spread slowly throughout Russia and
Russian Poland. At the inaugural conference of Poale Zion in Poltava in
March 1906, thirty representatives (including Isaac Ben Zwi) from Warsaw,
Lodz, Kiev and Odessa and other Russian towns together represented
16,000 members.3
It was Ber Borochov (1881-1917), the son of a Hebrew teacher in Poltava
in the Ukraine, who was both the founder of Poale Zion and the progenitor
of its ideology. As a high-school student, inspired by Marxism, he had been
active in the illegal Russian Social Democratic party, but had become a
Zionist through a Marxist analysis of the economic and social situation of
the Jewish proletariat in Russia. In his writings he showed that the tragedy
of the Jewish labour movement had its roots in the abnormal social and
economic structure of the Jewish society; the Jewish people lived in economic
isolation, excluded from the basic agrarian and modern industrial processes of
production and restricted mainly to trading and light industry. This abnormal
economic structure condemned the Jewish working class to impotence in the
struggle for Socialism. But the normalization of Jewish society’s economic
and social structure could not be expected to emerge from the ruins of its
present existence; nothing short of a national ideal could awaken the creative
powers of the Jewish nation and only on the historic soil of Palestine could its
renaissance be realized.4
For Borochov, the return of the Jewish people to nature, their establishing

1. See Raphael Abramovitch, ‘Zionismus, Judenfrage und Sozialismus', in Der Kampf,

vol. xxn (1929), pp. 509-19.
2. See Borochov, Sozialismus und Zionismus, p. 331.
3. See ibid., p. 333; there is also a description of the conference by Ben Zwi in ibid.,
pp. 375-6.
4. For a biographical sketch of Borochov by Ben Zwi, see ibid., pp. 365-79; for a
selection of his writings, see ibid., pp. 19-344.
352 Socialism and Communism in Asia
a link with the soil as peasants, was the key precondition for the normaliza-
tion of Jewish society.
We have no land of our own [he wrote], and thus are of necessity separated from
nature. Over the centuries the Jewish masses have blindly sought a path to take them
back to the land. At last we have found it. The road is Zionism; it is the logical,
natural consequence of an economic revolution in Jewish life.. . . It is the one
movement capable of instilling reason, order and discipline, into Jewish life, the one
solution to the economic and historical needs of the Jewish people.1

Borochov’s vision was the prototype for Socialist Zionism, and for many
years it was to remain a dream.

The inaugural conference of Poale Zion also decided to bring together the
Poale Zion parties, formed in a number of other countries, into a ‘World
Federation of Socialist Zionist Parties’ (Ichud Olami). This constituted itself
at a conference in The Hague as the collective representative of the Socialist
Zionist parties of Palestine, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania.2
The Socialist Zionist World Federation naturally thought of itself as a
part of the international labour movement, and hence sought affiliation to
the Second International. But those parties in the International which were
opposed to Poale Zion in their own countries—the Bundists, Mensheviks
and Bolsheviks besides the Austrian Social Democrats—considered Zionism
as a utopian, bourgeois-nationalist concept, and disputed its genuine
Socialist character. And even those parties in the International which in no
way doubted the genuineness of Poale Zion's avowal of Socialism and
accepted its proletarian character, saw it as at best a small sect of utopian
Socialists of no significance to the international class struggle. The Zionist
World Federation approached the Bureau of the Second International three
times (in 1907,1908 and 1911) with its application for membership; and it
was rejected three times.
It was only during the First World War that recognition grew among
Socialist parties of the historical peculiarity of the Jewish problem and with
it an understanding of Zionism. In their peace manifesto of 10 October 1917,
the Dutch-Scandinavian committee of the Second International declared;
‘We recognize the international nature of the Jewish question and the need
for it to be included in the peace treaty. . . . The promotion of the Jewish
colonization of Palestine must have international protection.’ In 1919 the
Socialist Zionist World Federation was invited to attend the Berne conference
of the Second International and, two years later, the founding conference of
1. Ber Borochov, The Economic Development o f the Jewish People (New York, 1916),
quoted in S. Levenberg, The Jews and Palestine, A Study in Labour Zionism, with a Preface by
J. S. Middleton (London, 1945), p. 17.
2. See ibid., p. 111.
 Socialism in Israel 353
the Vienna International—an international of Socialist parties which had
seceded from the Second International but which had also declined to join
the Third International. And when the Second International and the Vienna
International came together at the Hamburg conference of May 1923 to form
the Labour and Socialist International, the recognition of Poale Zion as
a member of the International was no longer in dispute.1

At the time of the founding of the Socialist Zionist World Federation, there
had been in Palestine two small Labour parties: the Poale Zion party and the
Zionist party of Labour Youth (Hapoel Hatzair). After a few years of slow
growth, both groups were suppressed by the Turkish authorities during the
First World War.
After the war, Poale Zion attempted to construct a common organization
for the labour movement in Palestine. In 1919 it combined with the Farm
Workers’ Labour Union, founded in 1911, to form the Zionist Socialist Trade
Union Federation of Palestine (Achdut Ha'avodd), and one year later, on
5 December 1920, at a conference in Haifa, a comprehensive organization
for the Palestinian Labour movement was brought into being with the
Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour in Israel. Among its
pioneers were David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), who, twenty-eight years later,
was to proclaim Israel’s independence and become its first prime minister,
Isaac Ben Zwi (1886-1963), the future president of the republic, and Joseph
Sprinzak (1885-1959), the future president of the Knesset (parliament). The
conference defined the organization’s structure and constitution, and elected
Ben-Gurion to be general secretary.2
It attracted 4,433 members from among the 80,000 Jews who lived in
Palestine at that time. But though it was a small organization, it set out to
achieve nothing short of the construction of a Jewish Society of Labour in
Israel. Its constitution declared:
The General Federation of Jewish Labour, with a view to advancing all the
social, economic and cultural interests of the working class and of building a Jewish
Society of Labour in E retz Israel [the land of Israel], organizes all workers who live
by self-labour and do not exploit the labour of others.
Three years later a Histadrut congress supplemented the constitution
with a concrete programme of tasks and objectives:
1. For the relationship of the Socialist International to PoaleZion, see ibid., pp. 113-19;
for the Berne conference see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 150-9;
for the inaugural conference of the Vienna International, see ibid., pp. 232-63; for the
Hamburg Congress, see ibid., pp. 264-270.
2. For the history and development of the Histadrut, see W. Preuss, The Labour
Movement in Israel, Past and Present (New York, 1963); N. Malkosh, Histadrut in Israel.
Us Aims and'Achievements (Tel Aviv, 1961); Levenberg, The Jews and Palestine, pp. 54-67;
Yearbook o f the International Free Trade Union Movement 1957-1958 (London, 1957),
pp. 299-303; Margaret Plunkett, ‘The Histadrut. The General Federation of Jewish Labour
in Israel’, in Industrial and Labour Relations Review, vol. I, January 1958.
354 Socialism and Communism in Asia

To organize workers in unions according to their trades; to establish and develop

co-operative enterprises in all branches of industry and agriculture; to conduct the
defensive struggle of the workers and improve their working conditions; to publish
newspapers and literature; to promote comradely relations with Arab workers in the
country and to foster links between the Jewish Labour movement and the inter-
national labour movement; to establish and develop mutual aid institutions,
including a workers’ sick fund.

To fulfil its tasks, the Histadrut developed a character without parallel

in the history of the international labour movement. It became a central
trade union organization, as it would have been in any other country. But
it also became the largest industrial and commercial combine in the land;
a combine of industrial enterprises working either on a co-operative basis or
individually. It set up blast furnaces, brick-works, cement factories, steel,
wood and glass industries and agricultural machine factories. It is by far the
largest building contractor in the Near East. It is a federation of production,
transport and sales co-operatives, but above all a federation incorporating
nearly 1,000 collective and co-operative agricultural settlements. Nearly a
fifth of all Israeli workers are employed in Histadrut enterprises.1 It also
controls the largest health service administration in the land, caring for three
quarters of the entire population through its health insurance, Kupat Holim,
and is the largest educational and cultural organization in the state. It is
indeed, as it was planned from the outset, a federation ‘of state builders and
pioneers of a classless society of labour’.12
One of the leaders of the Praja Socialist Party of India, J. B. Kripalani,
who has made a particular study of Israel’s Socialist foundations, saw in
them patterns which might be followed by the underdeveloped countries of
Asia and Africa. They taught, he wrote, ‘that revolutionary social construction
on an egalitarian basis, free from exploitation, can be effected without
recourse to violence and without dictatorship or impairing the freedom of the
individual. It can be accomplished on the moral basis of justice, fair play and
neighbourly co-operation.’3*

1. The scale of Histadrut9s economic enterprises may best be illustrated by some figures:
in 1965 the building federation, Solel Boneh, employed almost 30,000 workers with a
turnover of I£400 million in Israel and a turnover of I£90 million for work in Africa, Asia
and the Near East. Its agricultural co-operative society, Tnuva, absorbed two thirds of all
agricultural products with a turnover of I£494 million, and the wholesale purchasing
company which supplies the collective and co-operative settlements, Hamashbir Hamerkazi,
had a turnover of I£450 million. The Histadrut altogether brings together over 270 produc-
tive and other co-operatives, and is part-owner of the national passenger and merchant
fleet and airline. See Facts about Israel 1968 (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem),
p. 139.
2. Programme o f the M A P A I1955; see Julius Braunthal (ed.), Yearbook o f the Inter-
national Socialist Labour Movement (London, 1956), p. 310; for the full text of the pro-
gramme, see ibid., pp. 301-14.
3. J. B. Kripalani, Preface to Julius Braunthal, The Significance o f Israeli Socialism and
the Arab-Israeli Dispute (London, 1958), p. 6.
 Socialism in Israel 355

It is true that the extraordinary historical and economic conditions under

which the Jewish community had had to develop in Palestine were quite
unique. They had enabled the working class to develop its powers of production
by Socialist means. The problem facing the Socialists in Asia was to change
an ancient, rigid, economic, social and political social structure. In Palestine,
the Socialist pioneers had stepped into a social and economic vacuum. Until
a few years before the founding of Histadrut, Palestine had been the southern
part of the Syrian province of the Ottoman empire, becoming in 1922 a
mandate of the League of Nations under British administration. Article 2 of
the mandate pledged Britain to guarantee the ‘setting up of a Jewish national
Home’. But this Jewish national home had to be built from nothing; its
economic and social basis had to be created. Palestine was an underdeveloped
country, and the area set aside for the Jewish national home was a countryside
of bare hills and swamps in Galilee in the north and of the Negev desert in
the south. It could not be cultivated on a capitalist basis for, under existing
conditions, no profit could be expected from invested capital. The draining
of the swamps, the transformation of stony hills and sandy deserts into fertile
soil, could only be undertaken by pioneers, fired in their work equally by a
Socialist and a national ideal.
The Socialist pioneers were resolved from the beginning, at a time when
a Jewish national home in Palestine was still not much beyond a utopian
dream, that it should be built up as a Socialist venture on co-operative
principles: in agriculture, in the form of the fully Socialist kibbutz or the semi-
collective moshav; and in industry, by production co-operatives.

The unique economic and social creation which gave the country its charac-
teristic stamp was the form of collective agricultural settlement, the kibbutz.
Translated, the Hebrew word kibbutz means ‘group’. But this simple
word has taken on a special meaning in Israel. It means a group of people
who have joined together voluntarily into a community with no personal
property or money economy to develop a Socialist form of communal life.
When a similar ideal had been tried out by the early Socialists Robert Owen,
Etienne Cabet and Charles Fourier almost a century before in America, it
had failed.1 In Palestine, this dream of a Socialist utopia was to become a
living permanent reality. The Socialist Zionists in Russia who, their imagi-
nations captured by this vision, planned to emigrate to Palestine, had only
a vague idea of the task they had set themselves. As Joseph Baratz (1890—
1968), one of the founders of the first kibbutz, recollected in his memoirs:
What we wanted was to work ourselves, to be as self-supporting as we could
and to do it not for wages but for the satisfaction of helping one another.. . . In
our community we would do away with money altogether. We would have among us
1. For an account of the early Socialist colonies in America, see Mark Holloway,
Heavens on Earth. Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880 (London, 1951), pp. 101—58.
356 Socialism and Communism in Asia
neither masters nor paid servants, but we would give ourselves freely to the soil and
to another’s need.. . . Neither lacking nor possessing anything, we hoped that in
this way we would manage to live a just, peaceful and productive life.1

The kibbutz at Degania, which Baratz among others founded on the

banks of the Jordan in 1909, became the pattern for the several hundred
Socialist settlements subsequently created in Palestine: economic systems
without money circulation, working systems without pay, a social grouping
based on the common ownership of the means of production, a self-governing
democratic community whose inhabitants participated in work and proceeds
in the spirit of the Marxist’s vision of Socialism: ‘From each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs.’12

In 1919, the labour movement in Palestine entered the post-war era divided
between three parties: the Achduth Ha'avoda, the Hapoel Hatzai and the
Communist party. All three parties, as well as various splinter groups in the
labour movement, were represented on the general council of the Histadrut
according to the proportions of seats won at elections. (The eighty-seven
members of the general council were, like parliamentary delegates, elected by
universal, direct elections according to rules of proportional representation.)
On 6 January 1930, the two Socialist parties, the Achduth Ha'avoda and
the Hapoel Hatzai, came together at a congress in Tel Aviv to form the Jewish
Labour Party of Israel (Mifleget Poale Eretz Israel), known as M.A.P.A.I.
for short. It began life with a membership of 6,000.3 As its programme
stated, it worked to create in Israel ‘a social order, founded on Socialist and
democratic principles’. It declared itself to be faithfully at one with the
world labour movement in its fight to end class rule and all forms of social
suppression. ‘The party wishes to become a standard-bearer in fulfilling the
[ideals] of the Zionist movement and a true member of the international
Socialist labour movement.’4
The founders of the M.A.P.A.I. were men and women who were to go
down in history as the architects of the state of Israel: David Ben-Gurion,
Moshe Sharett (1894-1965), Joseph Sprinzack and Zalman Shazar, Ben Zwi’s
successor as president of the republic, to name only a few.

1. Joseph Baratz, A Village by the Jordan. The Story o f Degania (London, 1954), pp.
44-5.
2. For the structure of the kibbutz and its internal life, see M. E. Spiro, Kibbutz.
Venture in Utopia (New York, 1956); Murray Weingarten, Life in a Kibbutz (New York,
1955); see also Rushbrook Williams, The State o f Israel, pp. 100-3; Levenberg, The Jews in
Palestine, pp. 58-61; Julius Braunthal, In Search o f the Millennium (London, 1945), pp.
307-9. Until 1967,212 kibbutzim, with a total population of 82,000, had developed in Israel;
there were also a further 295 semi-collective agricultural settlements of the moshav type with
a total population of 115,000—see Facts about Israel 1968, p. 114.
3. See Yearbook, p. 297.
4. For an outline of the programme, see Preuss, The Labour Movement in Israel
pp. 100-102.
 Socialism in Israel 357

The party ideology was not based on any theoretical system, but on the
belief, as it stated in its Declaration of Principles and Aims: ‘that working-
class unity in taking action, based on common ideals and on broadly
agreed and honestly applied principles, is more important than theoretical
uniformity’.

M .A.P.A .I. is a party of deeds. . . . It believes in Socialism with individual

liberty. W hen it says Socialism it means it. Its record o f creative Socialism is w ritten
over the hills and valleys of this country, in the collective and co-operative villages,
in socialized industries in tow n and country, in the great trade union and co-
operative movement, and in the day-to-day struggle for the em ancipation o f the
working class.1

Thus, the history of the party is largely the history of the economic,
social and cultural achievements of the Histadrut. It is also inseparable from
the history of the Republic of Israel which, as by far the strongest party, it
has governed since its foundation and has shaped its entire social complexion.
In its history, as Ben-Gurion describes it,

the tw o motives of the L abour movement throughout the world—b o th social and
national-—found their m ost outstanding and special m anifestation w ithout parallel
in any other country. It is in Palestine that it has become a pioneer movement in
the truest and deepest sense o f the word. As pioneers o f the national renaissance
and social deliverance o f the Jewish people . . . they had to construct this new hom e
upon the ruins o f millennia—from the foundation to the roof.12

In 1944 a group within the M.A.P.A.I. broke away to merge in January

1948 with the Hashomer Hatzai (Young Guard) founded in 1927 to set up a
left-wing Socialist Marxist party with the title Mifleget Hapoalim Mameuhedet
(United Labour Party), or M.A.P.A.M. for short. Ideologically, it stood
closer to Bolshevism than to Social Democracy. Its programme declared its
‘identification with Marxism and Leninism’, but emphasized its ‘independence
of any ideological and practical interpretation of questions of Marxism and
Leninism by the Communist party congresses’.3
A Stalinist group within the party, however, led by Moshe Sneh (b. 1909),
demanded its unqualified identification with Moscow’s policies, even after
Stalin had in 1952 set in motion a vast anti-Semitic campaign, to which,
among others, M. Oren, a M.A.P.A.M. leader, had fallen victim; arrested
in Prague while returning to Israel from Moscow, he had been sentenced as
an ‘Anglo-American spy’ to a heavy term of imprisonment. Sneh and his

1. See ‘Principles and Aims’, in Yearbook, p. 299.

2. Ben-Gurion, in the Preface to Preuss, The Labour Movement in Israel, p. 11. For the
history of the party, see Samuel Rolbant, M APAI. The Israel Labour Party (Tel Aviv, 1956).
3. See Meir Yaari, From Vision to Reality (Tel Aviv, 1963) pp. 66-7. This book by
M.A.P.A.M.’s general secretary is an outline thesis for its fourth congress, and is the best
introduction to the party’s ideology and policy. See also, by the same author, What Faces
Our Generation (Tel Aviv, 1958),
358 Socialism and Communism in Asia
followers were expelled from the party in 1953; he eventually joined the
Communist party and became a member of its central committee.
In 1954 M.A.P.A.M.’s right wing also separated from it over the question
of the party’s attitude towards the Soviet Union, reconstituting itself as the
Achdut Ha’avoda party. After this split, M.A.P.A.M. became mainly a party
of the kibbutz movement, whose federation embraced about half the
kibbutzim. In the elections of 1961, it won 7-5 per cent of the poll as against
34-7 per cent won by the M.A.P.A.I.1

The rival to these two Socialist parties is the Communist party of Israel
(Miflage Qimunistit Isre'elit), or M.A.Q.I. for short. Founded at the
beginning of 1921, its history is worth recounting in rather more detail, for
it offers a classic example of a Communist party which is prepared, in its
intellectual and political dependence upon Moscow, to sacrifice without
question the vital interests of its own country, people and working class to
the power policy of the Soviet Union.
It had emerged from the Socialist Labour party, a left-wing Socialist
group which had been formed in 1919 under the impact of the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia, and was led by Yitzchak Meirson and Wolf Averbach.12
After a bloody clash with the Histadrut at a May Day parade, it was banned
by the British mandate government in Palestine and remained illegal until
1941, when the Soviet Union became an ally of Britain during the Second
World War. The party was divided from the very beginning into two factions,
and at that time it had between 200 and 300 members. In February 1924 it
was accepted as a member of the Communist International.
As could be expected, Lenin having condemned Zionism as a reactionary
movement, the party was a declared opponent of Zionism, stating its ‘main
duty’ to be ‘to fight Zionism in all its forms and to unmask the bankrupt
Zionist swindle’.3
But in its fight against Zionism it could hardly expect to win the sym-
pathies of the masses of proletarian Jews who had emigrated to Palestine
from the ghettos of Europe in their search for a ‘Jewish national home’. In
the 1925 elections to the representative assembly of the Jews in Palestine (a
kind of provisional government under the mandate), it won only 524 votes
among the 50,436 cast.4
Moscow, which had doubtless recognized from the start that the Com-
munist party of Palestine hardly had a brilliant future before it as a Jewish

1. See Preuss, The Labour Movement in Israel, p. 228.

2. The following description is based on an excellently documented study by Walter Z.
Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East (London, 1956), pp. 73-119;
Moshe M. Czudnowski and Jakob Landau, The Israeli Communist Party (Stanford, 1965),
mimeographed MS.
3. Quoted in Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, p. 77.
4. See Czudnowski and Landau, The Israeli Communist Party, p. 5.
 Socialism in Israel 359

party, instructed it through Karl Radek to ‘Arabize’ itself, to try to win the
masses of the Arab proletariat by supporting the aims of Arab nationalism.
The party installed an Arab, Ridwan al-Hilu, to be its general secretary
and ceased publication of its Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers, replacing
them with one in Arabic. (Only leaflets continued to appear in all three
languages.)
But the attempt to organize the Arab workers was not very successful.
Now the party tried to win ‘the support of the feudal and nationalist elements
. . . openly backing extreme Arab nationalism in Palestine and identifying
itself with the extremist religious nationalist leader, the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haji Amin al-Husaini, and the terrorists he had organized to
oppose the British and the Jews’.1
The first insurrection promoted by the Grand Mufti occurred in August
1929. This was not a rising against the British mandate forces, like the later
Arab rising of 1936-9, but a pogrom in which 133 Jews were killed and nearly
300 injured.2
The massacre in fact aroused the revulsion of the Communists. It brought
into the open the whole question of whether the party’s support for extreme
Arab nationalism could be squared with Communist principles. The party
leadership attempted to call a halt to the bloodshed. ‘Enough of our brothers’
blood has been shed in the cause of Jewish-Arabic co-operation,’ their appeal
to the Arabs stated.
But the executive of the Communist International considered the pogrom
to have been an inevitable concomitant phenomenon of the start of a national
Arab revolt against British imperialism and Zionism. It reproved the
Communist party of Palestine for its pacific attitude and instructed it to
support the Arab insurrection.2
A majority on the party central committee, which met in September,
decided, despite strong protests from a minority, to accept the tactic com-
manded by Moscow. It now took the view that, ‘in a country such as Palestine,
a revolutionary movement without pogroms was impossible’.4 A revolutionary
movement, like that of the Arab proletariat, could neither be rejected by the
Communists nor discouraged, its declaration stated, simply because it carried
the risk of inciting pogroms. Had the Arab proletariat been strong enough,
no pogrom would have taken place; it would not have been possible for the
Grand Mufti to control the revolutionary movement. For this situation, the
1. ibid., p. 7.
2. See Palestine Events 1929, published by the Jewish Socialist Labour Party (Poale
Zion) of England (London, 1929).
3. See J. Berger-Barseli, Hatragedia shel Hamadafecha Hasovietit (The Tragedy of the
Soviet Revolution) (Tel Aviv, 1968), pp. 103-4. The author of these reminiscences was
secretary of the Communist party of Palestine in the 1920s and later a member of the
secretariat of the Communist International.
4. See The Arab Revolutionary Movement and the Tasks o f the Proletariat (October
1929), quoted in Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, p. 84,
360 Socialism and Communism in Asia
central committee argued, ‘the Social Fascists of the Histadrut were respon-
sible’.1
The conflict between the opposition minority—belittled by Moscow as
‘right-wing’ and ‘Bukharinist’12—and the majority was fought out at a
conference in December 1929. The ‘right-wing’ minority was expelled from
the party leadership and in a self-critical admission of guilt, it was stated
that the party had lost itself in a swamp of opportunism and vague anti-
imperialist slogans. The party, the resolution continued, ‘has forgotten that
the fellahin and bedouins are waiting for leadership and want to show what
they can do with daggers and revolvers’.3
The Arab revolt came to life again in 1936 when, following Hitler’s rise
to power, many thousands of German and Austrian Jews emigrated to
Palestine. The Communist party, like the Mufti, demanded the closure of
Palestine to Jewish immigration. In Nazi Germany, the Communists argued,
it was not only Jews who were being persecuted, but also non-Jewish workers;
why should the Jews alone emigrate ? The answer was obvious, the Communist
propaganda asserted; it was because Britain planned to extend Palestine as
a war base against the Soviet Union, and considered the Jewish immigrants
to be potential soldiers of the ‘Zionist-imperialist-Fascist army’.4
Thus the Communist party justified its opposition to Jewish immigration
into Palestine as a fight against British imperialism in solidarity with the
Soviet Union. In its preparations for a rising planned by Arab nationalists
in the spring of 1936, the party’s executive committee reached agreement
with Husaini, the Grand Mufti, on the following strategy: ‘The Arab
Communists are to participate actively [in the fight] to destroy Zionism and
imperialism, while the Jewish members [of the Communist party] are to
weaken Jewish community life from the inside.’ To co-ordinate the actions
of Arab nationalists with those of the Communist party, two leading Arab
Communist party members, Nimr ’Uda and Fuad Nasin, were seconded to
the Arab general staff as liaison officers.
The insurrection commenced in May 1936 with a general strike by the
Arabs which lasted for six months, accompanied by heavy fighting which
constantly renewed itself over the course of the following three years.5
But the uprising was to be the ruin of the Communist party. It lost not

1. Quoted in ibid., p. 84.

2. In 1929 Nicolai Bukharin was removed from the presidency of the Communist
International as a ‘right deviationist’ following his dispute with Stalin; he was executed in
1938.
3. Forward, 25 December 1929, quoted in Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in
the Middle East, p. 85. Forward was the Yiddish monthly of the Communist party; it
ceased publication in 1931, while its Arabic monthly, 'A la'l Amam, continued to be
published.
4. Leaflet of the Communist party, 22 May 1934, quoted in Laqueur, Communism and
Nationalism in the Middle East, p. 93.
5. See John Marlowe, Rebellion in Palestine (London, 1946).
 Socialism in Israel 361
only most of its Arab members, but also most of its Jewish ones. The profound
devotion to the cause of Communism and the Soviet Union demanded a
degree of self-denial in their idealism which, for most of them, proved
intolerable. Thus they fell away from the party. ‘In the year 1939 there
existed a party executive, but no followers.’ A mere 300 Jewish members
remained inside the party at that time.1
Meanwhile the danger of Hitler waging a war which threatened the Soviet
Union had moved closer. Instructed by Moscow, the Communist parties of
all countries called on the workers to form an anti-Fascist united front to
resist Hitler. Accordingly, the executive committee of the Communist party
of Palestine issued an alarm call on 1 August 1939: ‘International Fascism
wishes to occupy the Near East and Palestine. But all patriots will defend
their homeland. . . . Neutrality means support for Fascism.’12
A few weeks later, however, Stalin first concluded his non-aggression
pact and shortly afterwards his Treaty of Friendship with Hitler’s Germany
and sealed it ‘in blood’.3 This abrupt change in Moscow’s policy was, to say
the least, embarrassing for the Jewish Communists in Palestine. They tried
to explain why it was now Chamberlain and no longer Hitler who had to be
fought, why the working class was no longer to resist Nazi Germany but
was rather to resist Great Britain in her war against Nazi Germany. Thus,
in its statement of October 1939, the executive committee of the Communist
party declared:

This Hitler, against whom Chamberlain is now fighting, is no longer the same
one who intended to fight against the Soviet Union. He has ceased to be Chamber-
lain’s policeman and now has to do as Moscow tells him.4

The words ‘Hitler’ and ‘Fascism’ suddenly disappeared from Communist

propaganda. When Jewish soldiers who had volunteered for war service were
shipped by the British High Command to the war zone as a Jewish battalion,
the Communist party addressed an appeal to them to realize that they
would be used as imperialistic ‘cannon fodder’ in the service of the ‘inter-
national finance oligarchy’ to fight not against Hitler, but against the Soviet
Union.5

And, after France had fallen and Great Britain stood alone in the war
against Nazi Germany, the Communist party executive issued the following
appeal to the Jewish workers of Palestine:

1. See Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East, pp. 100 and 104.
2. Leaflet of the Communist party, quoted in ibid., p. 104.
3. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 493ff. and 504ff.
4. Leaflet of the Communist party, October 1939, quoted in Laqueur, Communism and
Nationalism in the Middle East, p. 105.
5. Kol Ha’am, June 1940, quoted in ibid. Kol Ha'am is an Arab monthly of the Com-
munist party.
362 Socialism and Communism in Asia
N o t a single soldier, n o t a single penny for imperialism! The Com m unist party
declares in this critical hour th at a Jewish arm y under the com m and o f the traitorous
Zionist gangsters and British imperialism stands in sharp antagonism with the
essential interests o f the Jewish masses in this c o u n try .. . . Show your opposition
to supporting the w ar in every possible way!1

But when Hitler finally attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the
Communist party called on the Jewish workers to report for war service in
the British army, now ‘brothers-in-arms’ of the ‘heroic Red Army’. The
party was again legalized and organized itself under the leadership of Meir
Vilner (b. 1918) as president and Shmu’el Miqunis (b. 1903) as general
secretary of the Jewish section, while Taufio Tubi (b. 1922) and Emil Habibi
led the Arab section.

After the war, the question of Palestine’s future became essential to the
hundreds of thousands of Europe’s Jews who had escaped extermination in
the gas chambers of Hitler’s concentration camps and now hoped for a
home in Palestine. The question referred to the United Nations for decision
was whether or not Palestine should be set up as an undivided Arab-Jewish
state, or whether the country should be divided into two independent states
of Arabs and Jews. The M.A.P.A.I. under Ben-Gurion’s leadership rejected
the idea of a joint state in which the Jews would inevitably be subjected to
the rule of the Arab majority; it demanded the partition of Palestine and the
setting up of a Jewish state. As the Arab nationalists protested vehemently
against the idea of partition, so the Communist party advocated an undivided
Arab-Jewish state.
To the surprise of the Communist party, however, the Soviet Union did
not reject out of hand the idea of partitioning Palestine and setting up a
Jewish state. When the U.N. General Assembly debated the question of
Palestine’s future on 15 May 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate,
pointed to the fact ‘that no single state of Western Europe has been able to
defend the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to protect them
against the henchmen of Fascism’. Six million Jews had been murdered, he
said, ‘and hundreds of thousands of Jews are now wandering through Europe
in search of a home’. It would be unreasonable, he declared, ‘to deny the
Jewish people the fulfilment of their endeavours to set up their own state’.
A joint Jewish-Arab state would be desirable, but in view of the hostility
existing between Arabs and Jews, which could not be expected to lead to
peaceful co-existence, the partition of Palestine into two independent states—
one Jewish and one Arab—would be the best solution.2 Thus when, on
29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations finally
resolved the question of Palestine’s future the Soviet Union voted for the
1. Leaflet o f the Communist party, July 1940, quoted in ibid., p. 106.
2. For the text o f G rom yko’s speech, see Z io n is t R e v ie w , 23 M ay 1947.
 Socialism in Israel 363
partition of Palestine and the setting up of a Jewish state. The Soviet Union
was also the first government to recognize Israel de jure on 26 May 1948.
(The United States had admittedly recognized it a few days earlier, but only
de facto)
‘The recognition of Israel by the Soviet Union was a blow for the
Communists, who had, from the foundation of their party, fought against
Zionism.’1 But without hesitation the party now changed its policy to
harmonize with the Moscow ‘line’; it had become a Zionist party. When on
15 May 1948 the British mandate forces withdrew from Palestine and the
armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq attacked the state of
Israel proclaimed the previous day, the party called on its members to
participate actively in the Jewish war of defence. After the republic had
consolidated its position, it took up the constitutional role of a Jewish-Arab
party in opposition.

Its following among the workers organized in trade unions and kibbutzim
remained relatively small. In the elections to the general assembly of the
Histadrut in 1960, it received only 2*8 per cent of the votes cast compared
to 86*3 per cent obtained by the three anti-Communist Socialist parties.2
Its share of workers’ votes was greater in the general election to the
Knesset. In the 1961 election it polled 4-1 per cent of the votes—a growth
which can be explained by the Communists’ position as the party representing
Arab nationalism in Israel.
T h e C om m u n ist party has con sisten tly tried to serve n o t o n ly as an instrum ent o f
eco n o m ic an d social p rotest [for th e A rabs], but a lso , an d m ain ly, as th e organ o f
protest against the real an d im agin ed op p ression s o f this m in ority. . . . T h e A rab
n ation alists to a h igh degree see th e C om m u n ist party as an organ ization w h ich is
ab le to su p p ort its feelin gs and h o p es, and they are prepared to ignore the social and
e co n o m ic theories o f C o m m u n ism . T his attitu d e h as been influenced a n d en cou raged
b y th e p enetration o f th e N e a r E ast b y the S oviet U n io n .3

In the purely Arab districts, the Communists won 40 per cent of the votes.4
1. Czudnowski and Landau, The Israeli Communist Party, p. 8.
2. The M.A.P.A.I. received 55*4 per cent of the votes, the M.A.P.A.M., 7*6, and the
Achdut Ha’avoda, 66 per cent; see Preuss, The Labour Movement in Israel, p. 228.
3. Czudnowski and Landau, The Israeli Communist Party, pp. 90-1. For the changes in
Soviet policy and the policy of the Communist party of Palestine, see Scott D. Johnston,
‘Communist Party Politics in Israel’, in Robert K. Sakai (ed.), Studies in Asia 1964 (Lincoln,
1964), pp. 105-20.
4. See Czudnowski and Landau, The Israeli Communist Party, p. 43. In the 1965
elections seven Arab delegates were elected by a poll of over 85 per cent of the Arab elector-
ate: two each for the two Arab parties, the Co-operation and Fraternity party and the
Progress and Development party. These four Arab delegates were allied to the Labour
party in the Knesset. In the Communist group of four delegates, the Arabs had two
representatives, and in the M.A.P.A.M. group of eight members, one delegate. The pro-
portionate strength between non-Communist and Communist (Arab) members of the
Knesset was five to two.
364 Socialism and Communism in Asia
In 1967, however, the Communist party split over the Soviet Union’s
attitude to the Arab-Israeli war in June of that year. Its hostile policy
towards Israel had begun to worry the consciences of some Communists
before the war’s outbreak. For how could a genuine Communist advocate
with a clear conscience the policy of a Socialist state which had allied itself
with the pseudo-Socialist but, in reality, military Fascist dictatorships of
Egypt, Syria and Iraq against a genuine Social Democratic state; a policy
which, moreover, rather than trying to seek a peaceful solution to the tragic
conflict between the Arab states and Israel, incited the Arabs to wage war
against the Jews, and also armed them to promote a war which had the
objective, as the Arab leaders openly proclaimed, of destroying Israel and its
Jewish population in a monstrous pogrom.
Even so, up to the outbreak of the war, the Israeli Communists continued
to support Moscow’s Arab policy with the arguments that it was frustrating
the Western powers’ imperialist plans for the Near East; that by arming the
Arab states it intended nothing beyond establishing a balance of armed
forces between the Arab states and Israel; and that since it wished to avoid
war, its influence over the Arab countries would secure peace.
But the Arab leaders did not feel themselves in any way inhibited in their
war plans by Moscow’s policy; on the contrary, they felt themselves en-
couraged. And when in May 1967 President Nasser of Egypt blockaded the
Straits of Tiran against Israeli shipping and concentrated 100,000 troops and
3,000 Russian tanks in the Sinai ready to attack Israel, what choice (and the
Communists themselves threw up this question) was left to Israel in the face
of this immediate threat to its existence as a state and to the lives of its
population, except to defend itself by a counter-offensive? Moscow, however,
condemned Israel in the Security Council of the United Nations as the
aggressor.
This verdict was intolerable for a number of Israeli Communists. But
still a majority of the party central committee identified itself with Moscow’s
attitude. In its resolution it condemned Israel’s war as having the character
of ‘the continuation of the policy of the imperialistic powers (mainly, and
above all, that of the United States of America)’, a war of ‘Israel’s rulers
against the anti-imperialist Arab states . . . to expand its territory and to
force a settlement which would dissolve the rights of the people of
Palestine’.1
This interpretation of the war’s ‘character’ was rejected by a group in the
party led by its general secretary, Shmu’el Miqunis, and Moshe Sneh.
Following a bitter quarrel with the group led by Vilner and Tubi, they
separated to form their own Communist party. It was subsequently branded

1. See Meir Vilner, ‘The 16th Congress of the Communist Party of Israel’, in World
Marxist Review, May 1969, No. 3, p. 17. The congress, which met at the end of January 1969
in Tel Aviv, endorsed the central committee’s resolution.
 Socialism in Israel 365

by the Moscow-orientated party as a ‘nationalistic, anti-Communist group

in the pay of a pro-imperialist, aggressive government policy’.1

While the unity of the Communist movement fell apart, the split in the
Socialist movement in Israel was healed on 21 January 1968 at an extra-
ordinary congress in Jerusalem in the presence o f2,500 delegates, the president
of the Socialist International and representatives of Socialist parties in
fourteen countries. Three parties—the M.A.P.A.I., Achdut Ha'avoda and the
R.A.F.I. (Reshimat Poale Israel), a group which had splintered off from
M.A.P.A.I. in 1965—combined together into the Labour party of Israel
(Mifleget Ha'avoda Hayisraelit). The congress declared this event to be ‘a
turning point not only in the history of the Israeli Labour movement, but
also in the annals of the Republic of Israel’.2 The congress elected three
general secretaries: Golda Meir of M.A.P.A.I. (she was succeeded by Pinhas
Sapir), Israel Gatili of Achdut Ha'avoda and Shimon Peres of R.A.F.I.
The process of unifying the Socialist labour movement was completed a
year later, on 19 January 1969, with the signing of an agreement of close
alliance between the Labour party and the M.A.P.A.M.; the two parties
reached accord on the basis of a joint programme with common lists for the
electoral campaign and agreed to form a joint representation in the Knesset.
In the 1965 parliament the Labour party had been represented by fifty-
three delegates out of 120—the M.A.P.A.M. by eight. By their alliance, the
two parties together won an absolute majority in the Knesset with sixty-one
delegates. Previously the M.A.P.A.I. had always been by far the strongest
party in the Knesset. In none of the six parliamentary elections since the
foundation of the Republic had it held less than forty seats out of 120 (in
the 1959 elections it had won forty-seven). But as it had never held a majority,
it had to work until then in coalition with the middle-class parties. The
unification of the splintered Socialist movement had laid the foundation for
a truly Socialist government in Israel.
1. See ibid.
2. See Socialist International Information, 10 February 1968; see the same issue for the
‘Charter of the Labour Party of Israel’, which formed the basis for unity.
17 • The Asian Socialist Conference

The emergence of Socialist parties in South and South-East Asia after the
Second World War posed the question of establishing an international
organization to serve as their common forum. Their rivals, the Communist
parties—founded by and directed from Moscow, as earlier chapters have
shown—were integrated within the Communist world movement with
Moscow at its centre.
The Socialist parties in Asia, however, had not been created by the
Socialist International, but had arisen out of their peoples’ struggle for
national freedom and independence against their domination by the European
colonial powers. They had come into being through the initiative of individual
Socialists and had developed in isolation both from their brother parties in
Europe and from the Socialist International.
But the need for a common organization of the Asian parties had become
critical. Some, such as the Socialist parties of Japan and India and the
M.A.P.A.I. of Israel, did join the Socialist International. Yet, in the light of
the particular problems confronting Asian Socialism, they all felt the necessity
for a separate international organization, independent of the Socialist
International though closely associated with it.
Such an organization was founded during a conference assembled in the
town hall of the Burmese capital of Rangoon on 6-15 January 1953. It took
as its title the Asian Socialist Conference.
The Socialist International, as its secretary recorded in his report to the
third congress, considered this conference to be

the m o st m o m en to u s even t in the con tem p orary h istory o f intern ation al Socialism .
It w as the first tim e that representatives o f S ocialist parties from all parts o f the vast
A sian con tin en t had m et and, in sp ite o f the great differences in their cultural and
p olitical b ackgroun d and tradition s, they un ited in a co m m o n fraternity, based o n
c o m m o n principles and a c o m m o n ap p roach to the great p roblem s o f p o lic y .1

1. Julius Braunthal, Report on Activities (1952-1953), submitted to the Third Congress

of the Socialist International, Circular No. 90/53, p. 14.
 The Asian Socialist Conference 367
The conference was attended by 177 delegates representing the Socialist
parties of ten Asian countries. From India there were seventy-seven delegates,
led by Jayaprakash Narayan and Asoka Mehta; from Japan thirty delegates,
led by Suzuki and Matsuoka; from Indonesia a delegation of twenty-six, led
by Soetan Sjahrir; and from Israel a smaller delegation, led by the foreign
minister, Moshe Sharett, and the trade union leader, Reuven Barkatt. The
Burmese Socialist party, which received the congress as its guest, was
represented by a delegation of fifteen members led by the minister for defence,
U Ba Swe, and the minister for industry, U Kyaw Nyein. Delegations were also
sent by the Socialist party of Pakistan, the Pan-Malaysian Labour party
and the Progressive Socialist party of the Lebanon. Present as observers
were delegates from the Tunisian Neo-Destour party, the Algerian Nationalist
party, the Nepali Congress, the African Congress of Uganda and the People’s
Congress against Imperialism. Guest delegates were sent by the Communist
League of Yugoslavia led by the deputy prime minister, Milovan Djilas, and
the deputy foreign secretary Ales Behler, as well as by the International
Union of Socialist Youth and the Socialist International. The importance
which the International attached to this congress was shown by the status of
its delegates: Clement Attlee, leader of the British Labour party, who had as
prime minister made such a historic contribution by granting independence
to Burma as well as to India, Pakistan and Ceylon (he was received in
Rangoon with special honours as the guest of the Burmese president), Guy
Mollet, leader of the French Socialist party, and Kay Bjork, international
secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic party.
The founding of such an international organization had been a suggestion
of the Socialist Party of India. Its general council had decided in August 1947
to take the initiative in calling a congress of Asian Socialist parties. In its
declaration it stated:
The world Socialist movement has, until now, been an exclusively W estern
European movement. In this form its m ain aim has been the abolition o f capitalism.
But if Dem ocratic Socialism is to participate decisively in opposing totalitarian
Com munism by the creation o f a Socialist order o f society, it m ust attach no less
im portance to another task, namely the battle for the development o f political pow er
in the underdeveloped countries.1
The general secretary briefed Shrimati Kamaladevi and Ram Manohar
Lohia to do the preliminary work before calling a world Socialist conference
to take place in Bombay. But nearly five years were to pass before, in March
1952, a conference of the Socialist parties of India, Burma and Indonesia set
up a committee to summon the congress, and a further six months went by
before it met in Rangoon.

Meanwhile the Socialist International was endeavouring to achieve the

1. Socialist Party of India, Report o f the Sixth Annual Conference, Nasik 1948 (Bombay,
1948), p. 115.
 368 Soda sm and Communism in Asia
closest possible relationship with the Socialist parties of Asia. Two of these
parties—the Social Democratic party of Japan and the M.A.P.A.I. of Israel—
were already full members, and the Socialist party of India was an advisory
member of the Socialist International.
At first the Socialist International had sought to formulate an ideological
basis for a world-wide International. Its founding congress in Frankfurt in
1951, at which the Socialist parties of Japan and India were represented, had,
as already described, defined a declaration of the principles of democratic
Socialism. The basic ideas of these were incorporated into a declaration of
principles by the congress of the Socialist parties of Asia.1 Its subsequent
congress in Milan in 1952, at which the Socialist parties of Burma, India,
Indonesia, Israel and Japan had been represented, formulated a declaration
of principles for Socialist policy towards underdeveloped countries.12 This
congress had also included in its debate a memorandum on the relationship
of the Socialist International towards the Socialist movement outside Europe
submitted by Morgan Phillips, president of the International. This stated at
the beginning:
The Socialist International m ust avoid the danger o f becoming merely a ‘W est-
ern’ or ‘W hite’ International. All the parties at present members o f o r associated
w ith the Socialist International are European o r o f European derivation, w ith the
exception o f the Japanese Socialist Dem ocratic party and the Indian Socialist party.

The memorandum proposed that the International should:

(a) encourage and assist the development o f dem ocratic Socialist organizations
in countries where they do n o t exist;
(b) draw into the International as m any o f the existing parties as are eligible.3

The congress raised the places on the bureau of the International from
ten to twelve, elected Japan, Israel and Canada to represent non-European
parties and reserved one seat on the bureau for a further Asian party.

The organization which emerged from the conference in Rangoon—the Asian

Socialist Conference (A.S.C.)—was, as its president, U Ba Swe, stated in his
opening speech, not intended in any sense to be an Asian International.
‘While it has never been the intention of the sponsors of this conference to
establish a rival International,’ he said, ‘they feel that there should be a
machinery for closer contact and co-operation among Asian parties and also
for executing some of the resolutions that might be passed by this conference.’4
1. For the debate o f the declaration o f principles at the Frankfurt Congress, see page
199; for its text, see Appendix Two, page 531.
2. For the discussion o f this declaration, see page 210; for its text, see Appendix Four,
page 538.
3. Braunthal, R e p o r t o n A c tiv itie s 1 9 5 2 - 5 3 , Socialist International, Circular N o . 90/53,
P -17.
4. Q uoted in ibid., p. 20.
 The Asian Socialist Conference 369
The inaugural document of the A.S.C. stated:
1. The organization of Asian socialist parties will be a dem ocratic and voluntary
association o f Socialist parties which seek to establish Socialism as form ulated
in the ‘Principles and Objectives of Socialism’.
2. The purpose of the organization will be:
(a) to strengthen relations between the Asian Socialist parties;
(b) to co-ordinate their political attitudes by consent;
(c) to establish closer relations with the Socialist parties all over the w orld;
and
(d) to establish liaison with the Socialist International.1

During the debate at the founding congress of the A.S.C. about its
relations with the Socialist International, two points were given special
emphasis: first, its independence of the Socialist International, but secondly,
the closest possible co-operation between the two organizations.
The points were dealt with through an agreement by which both organi-
zations assumed the right of representation at one another’s congresses,
conferences and meetings of their bureaux with a view to the close co-
ordination of one another’s political actions.
The Rangoon conference elected U Ba Swe as chairman, Soerjokoesoemo
Wijono (Indonesia) as general secretary, Madhav Gokhale (India), Roo
Watanabe (Japan) and U Hla Aung (Burma) as secretaries, and chose
Rangoon to be the seat of the Secretariat.

The main achievement of the congress during its nine days of deliberations
was to formulate the basic principles and objectives of the Socialist parties
of Asia as well as laying down guide-lines for agrarian policy and policy for
economic and political development in its member countries—a document
nineteen pages long. It is one of the key documents in the intellectual history
of Socialism, since for the first time it developed the basic ideas of a Socialist
ideology in nations that were in a semi-feudal pre-capitalist stage of society
and in transition towards more highly developed social forms.
The declaration of principles outlines briefly the origins of modern
Socialism as a protest against capitalism and the capitalist order of society
and the split of the Socialist movement in two—Communism and democratic
Socialism. It differentiates sharply between democratic Socialism and
Communism.
The essence of dem ocratic Socialism [it declared] is the striving to attain greater
happiness, justice and dignity, and the fullest possible chance o f self-expression for
the hum an being. In seeking to abolish exploitation o f class by class and o f m an by
man, Socialism recognizes m an both as an integral part o f a class o r group and as a
single hum an individual. It therefore avoids totalitarian forms o f government and
m ethods of coercion.
1. For the structure of the organization, see Resolutions o f the First Asian Socialist
Conference, Rangoon 1953 (Rangoon, 1954), pp. 1-2.
370 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Therefore the declaration rejected Communism.
Communism, as practised today in its totalitarian form in the Soviet U nion and
its satellites, has degenerated into a regime which [allows] the com plete subordin-
ation of the individual and the group to the centralized power o f the leadership o f
the ruling party. U nder the Soviet system, state power imposes absolute dom ination
and exacts blind obedience; m an is expected to give up his freedom and individu-
ality, degrading himself to an abstract p art of an all-powerful state in which only one
will prevails.
Com munism therefore stands for the negation o f all the concepts o f freedom,
individual self-expression and genuine mass-responsibility which are the breath o f
dem ocratic Socialism.

Like the Frankfurt declaration of the Socialist International, the declara-

tion by the Asian Socialist Conference represents Socialism as a social and
economic as well as a humanitarian concept.
While striving to build a new society on higher economic productivity and social
justice, Socialism is dedicated to the creation o f a new and richer culture and the
shaping of a new and better form o f life. Social and economic progress have a signi-
ficance only to the extent that they m ake for greater hum an happiness. Hence it
is the am bition o f Socialism to provide a higher satisfaction o f m an’s spiritual
needs.
Socialism opposes feudalism and capitalism, whether conservative o r liberal,
because they are contrary to hum an justice; it opposes totalitarianism , w hether
Fascist o r Com munist, because it is degrading. Socialism strives to secure the sharing
o f each individual in the cultural heritage and spiritual progress o f m ankind.1

In all the Asian countries subjected to European rule, the Socialist parties,
as earlier chapters have shown, fought in alliance with the nationalist parties
for the independence of their countries; they were the standard-bearers of the
national idea. The declaration of principles by the A.S.C. stressed this
attitude. ‘Nationalism in the colonial and so-called underdeveloped countries,’
it states, ‘has, in common with Socialism, a passionate devotion to the cause
of freedom and justice. Although the paths of these two movements may
diverge after the gaining of independence, Socialist and Nationalists remain
brothers-at-arms as long as the struggle for independence lasts.’
But how may nationalism be brought into line with the concept of
internationalism, which is one of the fundamental principles of Socialism?
This question was put to the debate during a seminar at the congress addressed
by Soetan Sjahrir.
Sjahrir justified the nationalism of Asian Socialists as an ideology in the
struggle for their people’s liberation from suppression and exploitation by
foreign countries. And as this struggle represented a struggle against the rule
of foreign capital, it was also a class struggle. The struggle to achieve national
self-determination, which derived its justification from the theory of human
1. For the full text o f the declaration, see R e s o lu tio n s o f th e F ir s t A s ia n S o c ia lis t
C o n fe re n c e , pp. 3-21, and Appendix Five, page 543.
 The Asian Socialist Conference 371
rights and the sovereignty of the people, revealed Asian nationalism as a
struggle for democracy. The struggle against the rule of foreign capital
had been led by Asian nationalism with the tenets of anti-capitalism and
anti-imperialism—‘in other words’, Sjahrir said, ‘with the weapons of
Socialism’.
Therefore, Sjahrir explained, Asian nationalism carried ‘within itself the
seeds of social renaissance, for it opposes the conditions under which people
live under colonial rule—feudalism and colonial autocracy’.1
The nationalism of the Asian Socialists was, therefore, compatible with
the principles of Socialist internationalism so long as it served as a weapon
in the struggle for the political and social emancipation of the Asian peoples.
But after the attainment of freedom in Asia, Sjahrir emphasized, nationalism
will run the danger of turning into an ideological weapon of political and
social reaction, of degenerating into chauvinism—national egotism, self-
glorification and intolerance—as had been the case with many European
countries.
The A.S.C. showed its avowal of Socialist internationalism by a specific
declaration of solidarity with the freedom struggles of colonial peoples.
‘Socialists,’ its declaration stated, ‘share with all fighters for national liberty
the passionate desire for the assertion of human rights and for personal and
collective freedom; they therefore associate themselves with the struggle
against colonial, as any other, oppression’.

To co-ordinate the actions of individual parties against colonialism, the

bureau of the A.S.C. set up an Anti-Colonial Bureau at its meeting in
Hyderabad in August 1953, electing U Kyaw Nyein as chairman and Jim
Markham, a representative of the Convention People’s party of the Gold
Coast, as secretary. It sent U Hla Aung to Central Africa, Kenya and Uganda
on a mission to prepare an All-African Conference and in July 1953 a
delegation, led by its general secretary, S. Wijono, to the Stockholm congress
of the Socialist International, on whose initiative was passed a resolution
on the current problems of colonialism.2

The second congress of the A.S.C. assembled in Bombay under the chairman-
ship of U Ba Swe—who had, meanwhile, become prime minister of Burma
—at the beginning of November 1956. The number of affiliated parties
had increased since the first congress. It now embraced the following
parties:
1. Soetan Sjahrir, N a tio n a lis m a n d In te rn a tio n a lism (Rangoon, 1953), p. 5. This book-
let, published by the A.S.C., is a transcript of Sjahrir’s address to the seminar of the A.S.C.
and the debate which followed.
2. For the resolution, see R e p o r t o f th e T h ir d C o n g r e s s o f th e S o c ia lis t I n te r n a tio n a l ,
S to c k h o lm 1 9 5 3 , Circular No. 115/53, p. 138. For an account of A.S.C. activity, see T h re e
Y e a r s o f th e A s ia n S o c ia lis t C o n fe re n c e (Bombay, 1956).
372 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Socialist Party of Burma
Praja Socialist Party of India
Partai Socialis Indonesia
Social Democratic Party of Japan
Malayan Labour Party
Vietnam Socialist Party
Sri Lanka Freedom Party
Pakistan Socialist Party
Nepali Congress
Israel Socialist Labour Party (M.A.P.A.I.)
Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon.

And the following‘fraternal organizations’:

The Socialist International

The International Union of Socialist Youth
The Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia.

The congress met during an international crisis. A few days before it

assembled, on 2 November, Britain and France undertook their military
intervention in Egypt to occupy the Suez Canal which had been nationalized
by Nasser’s government in July in breach of the agreement concerning the
canal’s administration. Simultaneously, Israeli troops had entered Sinai to
counter the attacks by Egyptian guerrillas (fedayeen) by destroying their
military positions. On 23 October the revolution against the Soviet dictator-
ship broke out in Hungary, to be put down by an invasion of the Russian
army on 4 November.1
These events dominated the congress. It condemned the ‘cynical inter-
vention’ of Britain and France in Egypt as well as their attempt to seize the
Suez Canal. It recognized the right of the Egyptian government to nationalize
the Suez Canal, but it demanded that the canal, which Egypt had blockaded
against Israeli shipping, should remain open ‘as an international waterway
for all nations without exception’.
But opinion in the A.S.C. was not so unanimous towards the intervention
of Israeli troops in Sinai. Mobarak Sagher in the name of the Pakistani
delegation, and Vladimir Bakaric in the name of the Yugoslav delegation,
demanded that a sharp, uncompromising condemnation of Israel should be
delivered, even though the action had been undertaken by a Socialist
government led by M.A.P.A.I. The Pakistanis were prompted in their feelings
by an Islamic solidarity with the Arabs, and the Yugoslavs wanted to show
their solidarity with the Soviet Union which supported Egypt’s position
against Israel. During the debate Moshe Sharett, the leader of the Israeli
delegation, justified Israel’s action on the grounds that the perpetual armed
1. See page 418.
 The Asian Socialist Conference 373
raids of the fedayeen into Israel had been backed by the Egyptian government
and that it now blockaded the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping.
As it happened, the resolution passed by the congress omitted ‘to condemn’
Israel, but it did show its disapproval of the Israeli action, ‘despite the
events that had led up to the occupation of Egyptian territory by Israeli
troops’; it appealed to the government of Israel to withdraw its forces.1
The congress was, however, unanimous in its condemnation of the
Russian invasion against the revolution in Hungary. It acclaimed ‘the heroic
rising’ of the Hungarian people in their fight for freedom, and stated:
The congress is deeply concerned by the arm ed intervention o f Soviet forces
against H ungary’s freedom. It dem ands the withdrawal o f these troops and appeals
to the U nited N ations to m ake its authority felt against this arm ed intervention.

Under the impact of the international crisis, which dominated the debate
in congress, the A.S.C. reaffirmed its attitude towards the United Nations as
an indispensable instrument for averting the danger of a new war. This view
had been formulated in its declaration of the principles and objectives of
Socialism adopted by the inaugural congress in Rangoon, which stated:
The Socialists o f Asia look upon the principles of the U nited N ations C harter as
holding out the best hope for the m aintenance of peace in the world and as capable
o f providing a basis for peace as firm as is possible in the present stage o f the
development of m ankind.

The Bombay congress renewed its declaration of support for the United
Nations. It stated in its resolution:
The A.S.C. affirms the principles o f the U nited N ations and its declaration o f
universal hum an rights. . . . It emphasizes firmly its confidence in a friendly solution
to conflicts between nations and on questions of territorial integrity and the
independence o f states.

The resolution further demanded China’s admittance into the United

1. For the wording of the resolution, see Socialist International Information, 17 Nov-
ember 1956. The General Council of the Socialist International, meeting at the end of
November 1956 in Copenhagen, declared in its resolution that ‘while recognizing the
provocation suffered by Israel. . . [it] deeply regrets the recent resort to armed force in the
Middle East, and in particular the invasion of Egypt by Great Britain and France in breach
of the Charter of the United Nations’. The resolution demanded, among other things, ‘the
unconditional withdrawal of British, French and Israeli forces from Egyptian territories’;
it appealed to the United Nations to prevent Arab attacks and guerrilla battles in the border
districts of Egypt and Israel by using its emergency troops and to ‘press if possible, through
direct negotiations, for a Middle East settlement which will cover the ending of the state of
war [of the Arab States against Israel] and the economic blockade of Israel; mutually
agreed frontier adjustments; the solution of the problem of Arab refugees’. The resolution
demanded ‘free passage for Israeli ships both through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of
Aqaba and effective guarantees both for Israel and the Arab states against aggression from
any quarter’. For the text of the resolution, see Socialist International Information, 8
December 1956.
374 Socialism and Communism in Asia
Nations, and stated its support for the reunification of Korea on the basis
of free elections and for the reunification of Vietnam by friendly methods’.1
The congress confirmed that Rangoon was to be the seat of the A.S.C.
secretariat, and that U Ba Swe was to be chairman. It also elected Prem
Bhasin, a representative of the Praja Socialist party of India, to be general
secretary, with U Hla Aung as his deputy.
But the congress was in fact to be the last in the history of the Asian
Socialist Conference.12 The organization was never formally dissolved, but it
became paralysed by internal crises in a number of its member parties, and,
as has been described in earlier chapters, by the suppression of others; its
activities ceased early in 1960.
Its importance in the history of the International had been its inspiration
of young, budding parties, often existing in still pre-capitalist, semi-feudal
countries and preoccupied with vaguely Socialist and Communist views, by
the ideology of democratic Socialism; and by awakening them to the
awareness of the brotherly solidarity which unites them with Socialists
throughout the rest of the world.

1. For the text of the resolution, see Socialist International Information, 22 December
1956.
2. The last conference of the bureau of the A.S.C. met at the end of March 1958 in
Kathmandu, Nepal. The Socialist International was represented by Reuven Barkatt.
 PART FOUR

The Moral Crisis o f Communism

18 • Yugoslavia’s Revolt against

M oscow’s Hegemony

Stalin had founded the Cominform as one of his instruments to secure the
hegemony of the Soviet Union over the states which had fallen under its
sphere of influence. The role of the Russian Communist party in leading
the international Communist movement had itself seemed to be undisputed
even before the founding of the Cominform. It was based on the same axiom
that Dimitrov reformulated in December 1948:
All Communist parties throughout the world must form a single front under the
direction of the most powerful and experienced Communist party, that of Lenin and
Stalin. All Communist parties have a universally recognized leader and teacher—
Comrade Stalin.1
Yet after the dissolution of the Communist International2 in May 1943
there was no longer any international organization by which Moscow could
bring to bear its direct authority over the leadership of foreign Communist
parties. Such an organization was, however, created in September 1947 in
the Cominform. One of the motives behind its foundation, as soon became
clear, was to bring back under control one party in particular, the Communist
party of Yugoslavia, whose leader, while publicly affirming his loyalty to
Stalin, had in practice come into conflict with him.
Moscow’s right to control those states which fell within the Russian
sphere of influence was, for Stalin, beyond question. He regarded them not
as sovereign countries, simply allied to the Soviet Union by formal agree-
ments, but as Russian satellite states under direct Kremlin rule; and he saw
the Communist leaders who were in control, not as representatives of their
country and party, but merely as governors. He had been responsible for
installing them in each country—with the exception of Yugoslavia—and
dismissing them if they failed in their allotted role.

1. Quoted in the declaration of the COMISCO Secretariat of 20 December 1949. This

document is without a circular number; it is preserved in the Archives of the Socialist Inter-
national in the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
2. Sec Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 528-30.
 376 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
As Gomulka remarked after Stalin’s death, ‘In the bloc of Socialist states
[he had stood] at the summit of a hierarchy of flattery. All those under him
bowed their heads before him. It was not only leading personalities in the
Communist Party of Russia and the Soviet Union who scraped and bowed,
but also the Communist party leaders in the other countries of the Socialist
camp.’1
Thus Stalin believed that he would have no problem in dethroning Tito,
leader of the Communist party of Yugoslavia, marshal and prime minister,
when he declined to submit to his leadership. ‘One hint with the little finger,’
he remarked to Khrushchev, ‘and there will be no Tito. He will fall.’12

Josip Broz Tito (b. 1892), son of a Croatian peasant, had, until his break
with Stalin, been unquestionably loyal to him as a strict and orthodox
Communist. In 1920 he had returned from Russia, where he had been taken
as a prisoner-of-war after fighting as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian
army, as a convinced Communist, and his work in the Communist party
thereafter filled his life. When, in 1928, he was accused of disseminating
Communist propaganda, he made a challenging speech in defence of his
party’s principles and its loyalty to Moscow; he received a sentence of five
years in prison. After his release in 1934, he was sent to Moscow to the
Secretariat of the Communist International and on his return to Yugoslavia
in 1937 he became general secretary of the party, which was then shattered
by internal strife and government persecution.3
Tito had led his party in strict compliance with Moscow’s instructions.
Those were the days of the ‘Great Purge’ of real or imaginary anti-Stalinists
in the Communist movement. Its victims in Russia in 1937-8, according to
Tito himself, included ‘over a hundred’ Yugoslav Communist emigres; they
had disappeared into the prisons never to be seen again.4 After his return,
Tito’s most urgent duty under orders from the Communist International had
been a ‘thorough purging’ of the Yugoslavian party. As he later admitted,
he had devoted himself to this work with complete devotion. His ‘total
occupation’ during 1938-9 had been, as he recorded, ‘purging the party of
suspicious elements—of a good few provocateurs infiltrated into the Com-

1. Speech at the Eighth Party Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Poland (United Workers’ party) in Paul E. Zinner (ed.), National Communism and
Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe. A Selection o f Documents on Events in Poland and
Hungary, February-Novemher 1956 (New York, 1956), p. 228.
2. See Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union on 25 February 1956, in The Dethronement o f Stalin (London, 1956), p. 25.
3. For the history of the rise and development of the party up till the outbreak of the
Second World War, see Ivan Avakumovic, History o f the Communist Party o f Yugoslavia
(Aberdeen, 1964) vol. i; for Tito’s rise, see Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks. His Self-Portrait
and Struggle with Stalin (London, 1953), pp. 36-128; Phyllis Auty, Tito: A Biography
(London, 1970).
4. See Avakumovic, History o f the Communist Party o f Yugoslavia, p. 127.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow’s Hegemony 377
munist party of Yugoslavia by the police’; the standard accusation used to
remove anti-Stalinists from the Communist movement. Tito had proved his
reliability in Stalin’s service.
And he continued to do so throughout the first phase of the war. He did
not hesitate for a moment to call off the fight against Hitler, in which he had
led an anti-Fascist people’s front up till the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
The pact was hailed by him as an instrument for peace, and the Russian
invasion of Poland as an act of ‘the liberation of comrades’ by Russia, while
the ‘British and French imperialists’ were accused of having attacked Germany
so as ‘to safeguard their world rule and the exploitation of the colonial and
semi-colonial nations without competition by other imperialist states’. It was
now, the Yugoslav Communists declared, ‘the English financial oligarchy,
supported by the Social Democratic traitors, Attlee, Citrine and Co., which
is forcing the British people to continue a bloody war for the sole purpose of
safeguarding the suppression and exploitation of colonial peoples’.1

Tito came into conflict with Stalin only in the course of the guerrilla war
which he led against the German forces of occupation in Yugoslavia. The
history of this war, which became a national epic, is touched on here only
as it relates to the conflict between Stalin and Tito.12
It began with the German invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, ten
weeks before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. Belgrade was bombarded,
the Yugoslav army routed by the German troops entering from Hungary,
Bulgaria and Romania. King Peter II and his administration fled, leaving the
country to be dismembered. Parts of Slovenia were annexed by Hitler,
Dalmatia by Mussolini; Croatia, with Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell under the
regime of the Croatian Fascist Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic, and was declared
to be an independent state; Serbia was subjected to the rule of the German
occupation force.
Already by the middle of May, the Chetniks, or Serbian Home guards,
had risen against the Germans under the leadership of Colonel Draza
Mihailovic and within a few weeks had gained control of the Serbian country-
side, with the exception of the larger towns and the main roads. It was not
until after Hitler attacked Russia that Tito entered the fight against the
German occupation forces,3 organizing guerrilla bands and co-operating
with Mihailovic.

1. C o m m u n ist, 6 April 1940, quoted in ibid., pp. 175-6.

2. For the history of the guerrilla war, see F. W. D. Deakin, T h e E m b a ttle d M o u n ta in
Oxford, 1971); Stephen Clissold, W h irlw in d , A n A c c o u n t o f M a r s h a l T ito ’s R is e to P o w e r
(London, 1949); Dedijer, T ito S p e a k s , pp. 129-246; Mosa Pijade, L a F a b le d e I'a id e s o v ie tiq u e
a T in su rre c tio n n a tio n a le y o u g o s la v e (Paris, 1950); Fitzroy Maclean, E a s te r n A p p r o a c h e s
(London, 1949).
3. ‘We cannot stand idly by,’ the party’s manifesto stated, ‘while the precious blood of
the heroic peoples of Soviet Russia is being spilt’—quoted in Clissold, W h irlw in d , p. 31,
378 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
But the alliance between the two men was to break apart on their
ideological and organizational conflicts after only a few months. When in
November the Germans began their counter-offensive against the guerrillas
and in a terrible carnage destroyed the Serbian resistance movement, Tito
withdrew his partisans by a ‘long march’, fighting the Germans and Italians
as they went, through Montenegro and Eastern Bosnia into the mountain
districts of North Bosnia, there to reorganize his battle forces. In the summer
of 1942 he had hardly more than 7,000 men.1

There now existed two resistance movements: the official one of the Chetniks,
recognized by the Allies and commanded by Draza Mihailovic, who had in
January 1942 been promoted by the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London
to the rank of general and made minister of war; and the Communist
partisans under Tito. Mihailovic, a Serbian nationalist like his Chetniks, who
were largely drawn from the conservative farmer class, considered the
Communists to be a greater threat to Serbia than the Germans. After the
defeat of the resistance movement at the end of 1941, he called off his fight
against the Germans and shortly afterwards Chetnik detachments began to
operate side by side with German and Italian troops against the Communist
partisans. Mihailovic had transformed Yugoslavia’s national fight for freedom
into a civil war between the Chetniks and the Communist partisans. Tito
denounced Mihailovic and his Chetniks, not without reason, as national
traitors, and his appeal to patriotism swelled the ranks of the partisans.12
Of even more importance to the rapid growth of the partisan movement
was the religious-national civil war which broke out between Croatian and
Serbian nationalists even before the civil war erupted between the Com-
munists and their enemies. What divided these two peoples was not language
—the common language was Serbo-Croatian—but religion. The Croats were
Catholics, the Serbs Greek Orthodox Christians or Mohammedans. After
being set up by Hitler as dictator of a Croatia enlarged by Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Pavelic was determined either to change the Greek Orthodox
and Mohammedan Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina into Croats by
‘converting’ them to Roman Catholicism, or else to exterminate them.
UstaShi detachments appeared in Serbian villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
assembled their inhabitants in the church and demanded their immediate
conversion to the Roman faith. If they refused—as they almost always did—

1. See R. V. Burks, D ie D y n a m ik d e s K o m m u n ism u s in O s te u r o p a (Hanover, 1969),

p. 155.
2. ‘It is clear from information received by the War Office,’ the British General Staff
reported on 6 June 1943, ‘that the C h e tn ik s are hopelessly compromised by their relation-
ship with the Axis forces in Herzegovina and Montenegro. In recent battles in this district it
has been the well-organized Partisans [of Tito] and not the C h e tn ik s who have held down
the Axis forces’—quoted in Winston S. Churchill, T h e S e c o n d W o r ld W a r, vol. v: C lo sin g
th e R in g (London, 1952), p. 410.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 379
the church doors were locked and the building with the people inside, men,
women and children, was burnt down.
Immediately these massacres began in north-west Bosnia, the Serbs rose
against the Croats in a desperate war of vengeance, while thousands of
Serbian peasants, out of fear of the Ustashi, on the one hand, and Croatian
peasants, out of fear of the Chetniks, on the other, fled from their villages to
join the Communist partisans in the mountains.
The Communist partisans fought against the Chetniks' Serbian national-
ism as well as against the Ustashi’s Croatian separatist movement. While the
Chetniks fought to win control of a future Yugoslavia, and the Ustashi, in
alliance with the Germans and Italians, were defending the Great Croatian
state proclaimed by Hitler and Mussolini, it was the Communist partisans
who sought a united Yugoslavia on the basis of the equality of all its peoples.
They therefore became the true bearers of Yugoslav nationalism.
It was Tito’s historical achievement to place the idea of a united Yugo-
slavia on a supra-national basis as the war’s objective. On 26 November 1942,
an assembly of partisan divisional commanders which he had summoned to
Bihac, his headquarters in Western Bosnia, founded an ‘Anti-Fascist National
Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia’ (Antifasisticko Vjece Narodnog
Oslobodjenja Jugoslavije, abbreviated to A.V.N.O.J.), which at its second
meeting, at Jajce on 29 November 1943, constituted itself as the provisional
government and proclaimed Yugoslavia’s unity on a supra-national basis:
1. The people o f Yugoslavia do no t recognize and have never recognized the
partition o f Yugoslavia by the Fascist imperialists, but have shown in their m utual
fight their determ ination to rem ain united within Yugoslavia.
2. In order to achieve the principle o f sovereignty for the Yugoslav nation, and
in order th at Yugoslavia should become a genuine hom e for all its peoples and no
longer an arena for the m achinations o f reactionary influences, Yugoslavia will be
founded upon federal principles, safeguarding equality for all the nations o f Serbia,
Croatia, Slovenia, M ontenegro, Bosnia, and H erzegovina.1

The concept of overcoming separation and the mutual hatred among the
various populations by a Yugoslavian nationalism gave the resistance move-
ment an ideology which inspired the great mass of the people, especially the
student youth, who flocked to enter the partisan camp. ‘The force which swung
the balance in favour of the Partisans, was the mobilization of the people on
a supra-ethnical basis . . .’.2 The partisan army, which, as we have seen,
numbered barely 7,000 in the summer of 1942, could by September 1943,
1. Quoted in Burks, D ie D y n a m ik d e s K o m m u n ism u s in O s te u r o p a (Hanover, 1969),
p. 133.
2. Chalmers A. Johnson, P e a s a n t N a tio n a lis m a n d C o m m u n ist P o w e r : T h e E m e r g e n c e o f
th e R e v o lu tio n a r y C h in a 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 4 5 (Stanford, 1962), p. 171. This study of the Communist
guerrilla movement in China makes a comparison with the guerrilla campaign of the
Communists in Yugoslavia. See also Burks, D ie D y n a m ik d e s K o m m u n ism u s in O s te u r o p a ,
pp. 230-2.
380 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
according to Churchill’s statement, count on 200,000 men, who ‘had within
a few weeks disarmed six Italian divisions’.1
And a few months later, on 22 February 1944, he reported in a speech
to the House of Commons that Tito’s partisans had undertaken ‘offensives
on a large scale against the Germans and had inflicted heavy losses on the
enemy’. ‘The partisan movement,’ he continued, ‘has quickly overtaken the
fighting forces of General Mihailovic in its numbers . . . and Marshal Tito
has at present assembled about him over a quarter of a million men . . .
organized into several divisions and corps.’2

But Tito had already clashed with Stalin over the very question of setting up
an official resistance movement independent of the Chetniks. Like Britain,
the Soviet Union was allied to the Yugoslav govemment-in-exile and had
therefore recognized Mihailovic’s Chetniks as the only Allied army. Stalin
had raised no objections to the formation of Communist partisan groups,
but had insisted that they should be integrated with the Chetniks under
Mihailovic’s command. Since Tito rejected this condition, Stalin denied the
partisans the moral and material support of the Soviet Union, even though
Tito had kept him fully informed of the fact that, by the end of 1941, the
Chetniks had not only ceased to fight the Germans and Italians but were
actually in league with them in fighting the Communist partisans. Mihailovi6,
who had betrayed the Allied cause, was celebrated in the Soviet press as a
national hero,3 while Tito’s partisan army received no mention whatsoever.
Furthermore, in November 1942, the Soviet government declared its readiness
to supply the Chetniks with arms, as well as to dispatch a military mission to
Draza Mihailovic.4
In the desperate position in which the partisans found themselves, Tito
had sent repeated pleas for help to Moscow. The first appeal had gone out
on 17 February 1942. After six weeks of silence, instead of arms he received
a telegram advising him to collect arms from the enemy, for, it stated, the
‘technical difficulty’ in dropping arms from the air was so ‘formidable’, that
‘it could not be anticipated that this difficulty would be overcome in the near
future’. And when, two months later, on 23 April, Tito again asked Moscow
by telegram whether he could now ‘soon hope for arms’, Stalin replied that
‘you can, unfortunately, expect neither ammunition nor automatic arms from
us shortly’.5
In April 1943, Tito’s partisan army had fought its way southwards through
Croatia and across the Neretva river in Herzegovina. The Germans now
mounted a major offensive against it in an attempt to encircle and finally
destroy it once and for all. Three German divisions, which included battle-
1. Churchill, Closing the Ring, p. 412. 2. ibid., pp. 420-1.
3. See Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 170-1. 4. See ibid., pp. 179-80.
5. For the text of these telegrams, see ibid., pp. 175-7.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 381
hardened alpine troops, attacked the partisan force from the north, and
another German division from the east; and three Italian divisions with
Chetnik and Ustashi units attacked them from the west.
There were under Tito’s command no more than three ill-equipped and
hungry divisions to resist the major assault—and these were hampered by
having to care for about 3,000 sick and wounded from earlier battles. The
position of the partisans had indeed become critical. Against the over-
whelming strength of their enemies, they put up a desperate struggle to
break through the ring of steel, subjected to continual bombardment from
the air and having to fight their way by night through terrain that appeared
impassable. Yet, in the nick of time and during one of the most heroic battles
of the war, they succeeded in breaking out of the ring by forcing the gorge
of the Sutjeska river with two divisions, while the greater part of the rear-
guard division perished together with most of the wounded in its care.1
In this desperate situation, Tito once more appealed to Stalin for help.
‘I must again ask you,’ his telegram said, ‘whether it is really impossible to
send us any kind of support. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are threatened
by starvation. Is it really impossible to help us after twenty months without
the slightest material help from any source?’
Moscow’s reply was: ‘Unfortunately we have, until now, been unable to
find a satisfactory solution to the problems raised by insurmountable technical
difficulties.’2
It was only after the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943
when the Allies—on the prompting of Churchill, not of Stalin—recognized
the partisan army, which had meanwhile been retitled the ‘National Liberation
Army’ by A.V.N.O.J. in recognition of its military achievement as an allied
army—that it was supported by the Soviet Union as well as by Britain.

Yet hardly had this conflict between Tito and Stalin been healed, than another
broke out. While the Tehran Conference was in progress, A.V.N.O.J. had, as
we saw, met in Jajce to constitute itself as the provisional government, with
the ‘sole authority to represent the Yugoslav nation’, revoking the rights of the
government-in-exile and forbidding King Peter II to return to Yugoslavia.
Tito had not told Stalin of this plan, obviously fearing that he would
raise objections. Stalin was taken by surprise. The reaction from Moscow
was, as Tito recorded in his memoirs, ‘furious; the action was condemned as
“a knife in the back of the Soviet Union’” .3 It placed Stalin as much as
Churchill in a position of no small embarrassment, for the Yugoslav
1. For a most impressive eyewitness account of this battle, see Deakin, The Embattled
Mountain. The author, then a captain in the British army, leader of the first British military
mission to Tito, was parachuted into the mountains of Herzegovina in the middle of the
battle in May 1943.
2. For the texts of these telegrams, see Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 190-1.
3. Quoted in ibid., p. 266.
382 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
government-in-exile of King Peter was recognized as an ally by the govern-
ments of Britain and the Soviet Union. And Churchill, to whom Stalin had
granted a 50 per cent influence in Yugoslavia,1 disliked the idea of sacrificing
the king and even more the prospect of Yugoslavia under Communist rule.
Even as later in Greece he supported the king and his right-wing partisans to
prevent a Communist ascendancy in that country, so he supported Mihailo-
vic’s partisans to prevent the ascendancy of the Communists in Yugoslavia.
In Greece, Churchill was to be able to decide the course of the struggle
between the anti-Communist royalists and the Communist republicans by
the deployment of British troops.2 But no British military intervention was
feasible in Yugoslavia, simply because British troops could not be landed
there. And since Britain could not dispatch an army to Yugoslavia, the
defeat of the strong German and Italian forces in that country could only
be expected from the Communist partisans.
Churchill did indeed become convinced by the reports he received from
the British mission dispatched to Mihailovic and Tito that the king could
not be retained, and even the British Embassy in the residence of Peter II
in Cairo had telegraphed to London as early as 25 December 1943: ‘. . . The
partisans will be the rulers of Yugoslavia. They are for us of such military
value that we, subordinating political to military considerations, must give
them our fullest support. It is highly doubtful whether we can continue to
consider the monarchy as a unifying element.’3
Thus, under pressure from Churchill, King Peter was forced to dismiss
Mihailovic as his minister of war and Bozidar Puric as his prime minister,
and to nominate Ivan Subasic, who had been governor of Croatia before the
German occupation, as a prime minister for the provisional government
acceptable to Tito.
While both conflicts were finally resolved and the Soviet Union as well
as Britain came to support the partisan army with arms deliveries, Stalin
never forgot that Tito had dared to disobey him. When Tito visited Stalin
in Moscow in September 1944 for the first meeting he had with him, his
reception was, he recorded in his memoirs, ‘very cold’. When Stalin had
reproved him for forming a provisional government, he had then replied
simply by telegram: ‘If you cannot send us support, at least do not hinder us!’4
This was not the manner expected by Stalin from Communists, even from
those in the highest positions.5
When Tito met Stalin in Moscow, the Red Army, having occupied
Bulgaria,8 was already standing on the borders of Yugoslavia during its
1. See page 93. 2. See page 108.
3. Quoted in Churchill, Closing the Ring, p. 414.
4. Quoted in Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 233.
5. In a later conversation with Tito, Dimitrov described to him how Stalin, when he
received Tito’s telegram, had ‘stamped his feet in rage’—quoted in ibid.
6. See page 117.
 Yugoslavia’s Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 383
advance into Hungary. Tito was determined to prevent any occupation of
Yugoslavia. Through the Soviet High Command Stalin had requested, ‘in the
interests of joint action against German and Hungarian troops in Hungary’,
as TASS reported on 29 September 1944, ‘to allow the temporary passage of
Soviet troops across Yugoslav territory at the borders with Hungary’. Tito
granted this request only on condition that the Soviet troops should ‘leave
the civil administration of A.V.N.O.J. alone’ and ‘that they withdraw after
the fulfilment of their tasks’.1
On 7 December 1944 the Red Army, under the command of Marshal
Malinovsky, crossed the Danube. And, on the following day, the partisan
army was already advancing against Belgrade. In the battle for the city,
which dragged on for days, as well as in the subsequent fighting in Croatia,
the partisan army received the support of Soviet troops. But it was only
with a general offensive by the Yugoslav army, starting on 20 March 1945
and ending in victory on 15 May, that Yugoslavia was finally liberated.12
This victory was of the utmost importance for Tito’s position vis-a-vis
Moscow. All the countries of Eastern Europe under German rule had been
captured and occupied by the Soviet army. Yugoslavia was the one Eastern
European state to have liberated itself from German rule by its own forces—
the forces of the partisan army. This achievement made Tito the only Eastern
European Communist leader who possessed the authority to ward off the
threat of occupation by the Red Army3 and to follow a policy independent
of Moscow which must inevitably meet with Stalin’s disapproval.
The military success of the partisans had ensured political success for the
Communist party in the elections to the constituent assembly called for
11 November 1945. The party had canvassed on a unity-list in the ‘National
Front’, which it controlled but on which all anti-Fascist parties were repre-
sented; and it won an overwhelming majority4—not through a regime of
terror, like the Communists in Poland and Romania, or through a large-scale
electoral fraud, as in Hungary5—but because a majority of the people

1. Quoted in Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 232-3.

2. In this battle 30,000 Yugoslavs and nearly 100,000 Germans fell; the number of
German prisoners of war was 209,000, among them the commander of the German army,
Colonel-General Alexander von Lohr. Yugoslavia’s casualties were terrible. Out of a popula-
tion of less than 20 million, 1,700,000 had been killed in battle or had died in German
concentration camps; see ibid., p. 244.
3. When Tito visited Stalin in March 1945 for the second time, the withdrawal of those
Russian troops still in Yugoslavia was agreed.
4. The National Front polled 90-48 per cent of votes cast. Admittedly only those
parties represented in the National Front could put up candidates, and even though the
elections were free in the unanimous opinion of foreign observers, it must be assumed that
some administrative pressure by the authorities under Communist control must have had
some effect on the results in towns and villages. But even if doubts may be cast on the size
of the Communist election victory, it is certain that a great majority of electors voted for the
National Front of their own free will.
5. Seepp. 101, 116,203.
384 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
recognized that their country had been liberated by the Communist guerrillas
and not by foreign armies, and because the Communist party appeared as
the guardian of Yugoslav nationalism, by which it was hoped to overcome
mutual hatreds between nations within the state.
The power which the Communists won in the elections was consolidated
by setting up a dictatorship of the party on the Soviet Russian pattern,
proclaimed not as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but as a ‘people’s
democracy’, a style of title which was later to be generally adopted for the
system of government in Communist dictatorships. Even so, in its early
years it was a regime marked by no less cruelty and doctrinaire excesses than
the regime in Moscow.
The dictatorship by the Communist party of Yugoslavia differed,
however, from the Communist dictatorships in the Russian satellite states
in its origins, which were a decisive factor in its relationship with the Soviet
Union. It had not been established by force by the occupying Red Army, or
by leaders nominated from Moscow to be representatives of the Soviet
government, but by the leaders of the partisan army who, celebrated as the
liberators of their country, had had power invested in them by the broad
mass of the people. And, although the Communist party’s loyalty to the
Soviet Union was beyond question, Stalin could not expect that under Tito’s
leadership, especially in the light of their war-time experiences, it would
willingly serve the cause of the Soviet Union.
In fact Tito had left him in no doubt whatever concerning this issue. In
a speech made in Ljubljana in May 1945, immediately after the war, he had
stated bluntly: ‘We demand that everybody should be master in his own
house. We have no wish to be used as pawns in international haggling. We
have no wish to become involved in any sphere of influence.’ These comments
concerned Trieste, the annexation of which to Yugoslavia Tito had demanded
in contradiction to Stalin’s agreements with the Allies.
Tito was at once called to heel. The Yugoslav government was informed
by the Soviet Ambassador in Belgrade that the Soviet government ‘considers
Tito’s speech to be an unfriendly attack upon the Soviet Union’ and
threatened that ‘if he permits himself one more such attack against the
Soviet Union, he will be openly criticized and disowned in the [Soviet]
Press’.1
The Communist dictatorship under Tito’s leadership did not therefore
fulfil the function intended by Stalin for the Communist dictatorships in the
Russian satellite countries. For him their purpose was not simply the
expansion of Communism, but predominantly to obtain Soviet control of

1. See the letter from the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia of 4 May 1948 in The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute
(London, 1948), pp. 35 and 36. This letter, as Dedijer mentions in Tito Speaks, was signed
by both Stalin and Molotov.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 385
their war potential. This conception was based on the primary condition
of Moscow’s absolute hegemony over these countries and therefore on the
rule of Communist party dictatorships whose leaders were dependent upon
Moscow.
But Tito was by no means dependent upon Moscow. His prestige in his
country was founded on his military triumph as marshal during the war,
and his position in the party was established as the admired leader of the
Communist revolution. And, as long as he controlled the party machine, his
position was unassailable. Stalin’s threats would have no effect on Tito’s
decision to remain ‘master in his own house’ and to pursue independently of
Moscow a ‘Yugoslav road to Socialism’.
Moscow tried to undermine Tito’s position by infiltrating the party and
state machine with agents of the Russian secret service, the N.K.V.D.1 And
another means by which Stalin tried to secure Tito’s subjection to Moscow’s
authority was the Cominform. He had settled on Belgrade as the seat of its
secretariat12 so as to bring its influence to bear immediately, and when he
finally broke with Tito, he tried to overthrow him by his expulsion from the
Cominform.3

Stalin’s break with Tito became apparent in the middle of March 1948,
when the Yugoslav government was unexpectedly notified by the Soviet
government that it was withdrawing its military and technical advisers from
Yugoslavia forthwith.
The complaints by which Stalin justified his action in the exchange of
letters he had with Tito4 do not, on the face of it, seem very weighty; they
include, for example, a remark made by Milovan Djilas, one of the Yugoslav
Communist leaders, about the not very satisfactory behaviour of Russian
troops in Yugoslavia, but which Stalin took as an insult to the Soviet army;
or Tito’s request that the considerable salaries of Soviet advisers which
Yugoslavia had to pay—they were four times the incomes of Yugoslav army
commanders and three times those of Yugoslav ministers—should be some-
what reduced. And as if Tito were responsible to him for the administration
of the Yugoslavian state, Stalin complained that the Yugoslav state and
party machine remained ‘full of the friends and relatives of the German
Quislings and the murderers of General Nedic, while high-ranking Yugoslav
officials are in the service of British espionage’. Referring to the teachings

1. The N.K.V.D., the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, had been founded in
1934 as the successor of the O.G.P.U., or State Political Administration, which had in 1922
succeeded the Cheka, or ‘Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution,
Sabotage and Speculation’, set up in 1917. In 1946 the N.K.V.D. became the Ministry of
Internal Affairs (M.V.D.).
2. See page 150.
3. See Adam B. Ulam, Titoism and the Cominform (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
4. For the texts of the letters, see The Soviet- Yugoslav Dispute.
386 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
of Marxism-Leninism on party structure, Stalin also admonished the
Yugoslav party for its absence of internal democracy, its hesitant policy
towards the collectivization of agriculture and its hasty nationalization of
industry.
But what Stalin was complaining about in reality was Tito’s refusal to
surrender his position as ‘master’ in Yugoslavia. This seemed to Stalin to
represent no small disloyalty, as the tone of his letters made clear—the
haughty tone of an uncouth superior towards his subordinates, disregarding
the fact that Tito was the leader of a foreign Communist party and the ruling
head of a sovereign state; a tone of voice obviously meant to refresh Tito’s
memory concerning Stalin’s standing among Communist parties and
governments.
Even so, Tito remained anxious to try to make up his quarrel with
Stalin.1 In reply he answered every single point and suggested that a delegation
from the Communist party of the Soviet Union should be sent to Belgrade
to examine points of disagreement on the spot.
Stalin’s concern, however, was not to settle differences but to overthrow
Tito. He saw him as the obstacle to the establishment of Moscow’s pre-
dominance in Yugoslavia and he feared that, if he remained in power,
leaders in other Russian satellite states might also free themselves from the
Kremlin’s hold. Tito’s overthrow was to serve as a warning.

He had intended that the Cominform should execute the plan. It was
called to Bucharest in the middle of June 1948 and Tito was summoned
to attend. The Yugoslav party central committee, however, rejected the
invitation.12
In its resolution the Cominform conference accused the leaders of the
Communist party of Yugoslavia of having pursued an ‘unfriendly policy
towards the Soviet Union’; of having ‘slandered’ it with arguments taken
‘from the arsenal of counter-revolutionary Trotskyism’; of having ‘brutally
suppressed the elementary rights of party members’ under a ‘shameful,
genuinely Turkish regime of terror’; and of having with ‘unbounded
ambition, arrogance and vanity’ refused to acknowledge their errors.
As a result of their attitude and their refusal to appear at the conference
the Yugoslav party leaders had, the resolution stated, ‘placed themselves
outside the community of the brotherhood of Communist parties and the
united Communist front, and thus outside the Cominform’. ‘They have

1. For a very informative debate by the executive of the Communist party of Yugo-
slavia on Stalin’s letters, see Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 335-64.
2. ‘It was clear,’ Dedijer commented on this decision, ‘that there was no guarantee that
Tito would return alive from this conference.’ He recollects the fate of the Politbureau
members of the Ukrainian Communist party who, after resisting Stalin’s Great Russia
policy, were invited by him for a discussion to Moscow and were arrested by the N.K.V.D.
on entering the Kremlin and later shot— Tito Speaks, p. 366.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 387
broken with the international tradition of the party and have taken the road
to nationalism.’1
The resolution closed with a barely concealed call to Yugoslav party
members to rise in revolt against Tito and overthrow him. The Cominform,
it stated, did not doubt that,
there exists within the Communist party of Yugoslavia sufficiently sound elements,
who are loyal to Marxism-Leninism, to the international tradition of the party and
to the united Socialist front.
It is their duty to force their present leaders to confess publicly to their errors
andtocorrect them. Should the present leaders of the Communist party of Yugoslavia
show themselves incapable of doing this, it is the duty [of the ‘sound’ elements] to
remove them and to install a new international party leadership.*
It was unthinkable to Stalin that, faced with choosing between him and
Tito, the Yugoslav Communists would do anything except decide in his
favour as the ‘greatest Socialist after Marx and Lenin, the glorious leader of
the Soviet Union and of the proletariat of the world’—as he was glorified
also in Yugoslavia.
But he was mistaken. Undaunted, Tito faced his party’s court of justice.
On the day following the publication of the Cominform resolution in Pravda
on 29 June 1948, the central committee assembled for a plenary session,
rejected the accusations of the Cominform point by point and decided to
publish at once the Cominform resolution in full with their own explanations
in the party organ Borba, and to summon the fifth congress to Belgrade for
21 July.
The congress was attended by 2,344 delegates representing 468,175 party
members. The hall was decorated with Stalin’s bust, as well as with one each
for Marx, Engels and Lenin, and with a portrait of Tito. The congress lasted
for six days. Its discussions, including Tito’s own report on the conflict,
which took no less than eight hours, as well as the debate which followed,
were broadcast in full by the Yugoslav broadcasting service, and at the end
Tito was re-elected as party chairman by 2,318 votes to five.1 23
There is no question that an overwhelming majority of the party did, in
fact, rally to Tito’s side, and it can hardly be doubted that the secret police
also played their part in ensuring that no opposition to him emerged.

For Stalin, the failure of his action against Tito was possibly the greatest
disappointment of his life. He reacted by an outbreak of insane acts of
1. Dedijer says that Andrei Zhdanov, who, with Georgi Malenkov and Mikhai
Suslov, represented the Soviet Union, had told the conference: ‘We are in possession of
information that Tito is an imperialist spy’—ibid., p. 370.
2. For the text of the resolution, see S o v ie t- Y u g o sla v D is p u te , pp. 61-70.
3. For a description of the congress, see Dedijer, T ito S p e a k s , pp. 377-381; see also
Vladimir Dedijer’s further book on Yugoslavia’s conflict with Moscow, T h e B a ttle S ta lin
L o s t : M e m o ir s o f Y u g o sla v ia , 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 5 3 (New York, 1971).
388 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
persecution. Above all he feared the infection of the Russian satellite
countries with the bacillus of ‘Titoism’. Until Stalin’s break with Tito, the
leaders of individual ‘people’s democracies’ had continued to seek their own
road to Socialism according to the special conditions in their countries—a
path which deviated from the ‘Russian road to Socialism’. Now that Tito
had been outlawed as a ‘Fascist’ and an ‘imperialist spy’, any thought even
of a ‘special road’ to Socialism was branded as ‘Titoism’ and persecuted as
a crime.1 Any heads suspected of such a notion rolled under the axe of the
dictator in the Kremlin. Thus Traichko Kostov, deputy prime minister of
Bulgaria, K od Xote, secretary of the Communist party of Albania, Laszlo
Rajk, foreign minister of Hungary with seven of his associates, Rudolf
Slansky, general secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia, and
the foreign secretary, Ylado dem entis, with nine of their associates, were
executed on charges of having ‘conspired against the state’, of ‘Titoism’,
‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Zionism’. And those who escaped Stalin’s henchmen,
such as Wladislaw Gomulka, general secretary of the Communist party of
Poland, were imprisoned.
Stalin now saw himself surrounded by enemies even in the Soviet Union,
his regime, and even his life, threatened. At the beginning of 1948 he unleashed
a new wave of purges to ‘cleanse’ the Communist party and the country of
‘anti-Stalinists’, purges even more terrible than those of the 1930s, which
threw hundreds of thousands into concentration camps12 and only ceased with
his death in March 1953. During this period the totalitarian system in the
Soviet Union reached completion. Every branch of intellectual and cultural
life—art as well as science, music as well as biology3—became subject to
Stalin’s dictatorship.
Tito reacted to Stalin’s outlawing of Yugoslavia with a criticism of
Stalinism as a monstrous debasement of Communist ideas, and of Soviet
1. Now, for example, the Communist party of the German Democratic Republic
(S.E.D.), under Walter Ulbricht’s leadership, hurriedly refuted the ‘particular German
road’ to Socialism, which had been intensively discussed, inside the party as well as in the
Communist press, and which had been stimulated by one of the most prominent leaders of
the party, Anton Ackermann. ‘The party executive has ascertained,’ it was stated in explan-
ation in September 1948, ‘that there are also in the S.E.D. false theories on a “particular
German road” to Socialism.. . . The attempt to construct such a special German road to
Socialism would lead to it disregarding the great Soviet example’—quoted in Wolfgang
Leonhard, D ie R e v o lu tio n e n tla s s t ih re K in d e r (Cologne and Berlin, 1955), p. 516.
2. Following a debate on the reappearance of concentration camps, the meeting of the
International Socialist Conference in Copenhagen in June 1950 drew ‘the attention of the
free world to the fact, that only five years after the end of the Second World War, after the
destruction of Hitlerism and the condemnation of the cruelties of the concentration camps
by the civilised world’, once again ‘millions of people suffer in concentration and forced
labour camps’—Report of the International Socialist Conference, Copenhagen, June 1950,
Circular No. 155/50, p. 108. . . .
3. For the most bizarre example of the coercion of science by Stalin’s dictatorship and
its disastrous consequences, see David Joravsky, T h e L y s e n k o A ffa ir (London, 1971); see
also Zhores Medvedev, T h e R is e a n d F a ll o f T . D . L y s e n k o (London, 1969).
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 389
imperialism as a rejection of the fundamental principles of Socialism.1 Until
the break with Stalin, the Yugoslav system of government had hardly
differed from the Stalinist system. There is no doubt that this criticism of
Stalinism simultaneously called into question the Yugoslav system of
Communist rule.2 ........
In 1950, a process of liberalizing the dictatorship did in fact begin in
Yugoslavia with the development of an ideology of ‘pure’ Leninism in
contrast to its degeneration under Stalin’s rule and in changes in the economic
structure of Yugoslav Communism.3 The significance of the revolt by
Yugoslavia’s Communists against Moscow’s hegemony can hardly be under-
estimated. It represented a landmark in the history of the international
Communist movement. It initiated the world-historical process of the
emancipation of Communist parties from the domination of Moscow—a
process of possibly not less importance than the Reformation by which the
Protestant Christian churches had gained their emancipation from Rome. It
also created the first condition for the process of transforming despotic
Communism into Socialist democracy.4

Yugoslavia’s revolt against Moscow’s hegemony and the change of her

political and economic structure towards a liberalization of the Communist
dictatorship, which culminated in the adoption of a new constitution in 1953,5
1. M ilovan Djilas, at that time the m ost prominent leader o f the Yugoslav Communist
party after Tito, raised the whole question o f how Soviet imperialism differed from that o f
the old capitalist m onopolies. ‘All that is new here,’ he said, ‘is the fact that the state which
all, or nearly all, believe to be Socialist, has through its own internal state capitalist develop-
ment, turned into an imperialist power o f the first order, but as for the actual forms, through
the relatively poor development o f its forces o f production, what characterizes this new
state-capitalist imperialism is precisely that it has the old colonial-conquest imperialist
forms, accompanied, albeit, in Socialist uniforms, by the old political relations: the export
o f capital is accompanied by a semi-military occupation, by the rule o f an official caste and
the police, by the strangling o f any democratic tendencies, by the establishment o f obedient
governments, by the m ost extensive corruption and by unscrupulous deception o f the
working people’— Borba, 26 November 1950, quoted in John Strachey, ‘Task and Achieve-
ment o f British Labour’, in R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (London, 1952),
p. 206.
2. See M ilovan Djilas, The New Class. An Analysis o f the Communist System (N ew
York, 1957).
3. For an excellent assessment o f Yugoslavia’s econom ic system as it developed after
the break with M oscow and the liberalization o f the dictatorship, see Carl Landauer,
Contemporary Economic Systems. A Comparative Analysis (Philadelphia and N ew York,
1964), pp. 433-87.
4. The treatment o f this event in Communist historiography is itself not uninteresting.
In William Z. Foster’s History o f the Three Internationals (N ew York, 1955), published
before Khrushchev’s penitent visit to Belgrade, Tito is considered, according to convention,
as a ‘Fascist’. In R. Palme D u tt’s The International (London, 1964), which appeared after
the reconciliation between M oscow and Belgrade, the reader may seek in vain for even the
name Tito: this event, which shook the world Communist movement, goes unmentioned.
5. Yugoslavia’s constitution o f 1946, which had been copied from Stalin’s Soviet
constitution o f 1936, was replaced in 1953 by a new constitution based on the principle o f a
kind o f ‘direct econom ic democracy’.
390 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
had raised the question of relations between the Yugoslav Communist party
and the Socialist International. This was debated at the meeting of its general
council in October 1952, on the basis of memoranda submitted to the bureau
by the affiliated parties.
A sympathetic attitude towards Yugoslavia on the part of the International
was advocated above all by the British Labour party. In the autumn of 1952
it sent a delegation to Yugoslavia which communicated its impressions in a
memorandum circulated to the parties of the International. ‘There can be
no doubt,’ this emphasized, ‘that Yugoslavia’s recent development since the
break with Moscow—and particularly since the recent constitutional
changes—represents a bold and important experiment. It is essential to look
at it realistically.
We must [the memorandum continues] accept the fact of a strong, one-party,
national government in Yugoslavia. After the political and social experience of the
inter-war years, and particularly the desperate struggle for independence, such a
government was inevitable; just as it was inevitable that the new leadership should
come from the partisan element. We could not expect the hard-won political power
to be frittered away or national unity to be jeopardized in the face of very real
threats from Yugoslavia’s Stalinist neighbours.

Yugoslavia, the memorandum emphasized, was no parliamentary demo-

cracy ‘as we understand it in Britain, and it probably never will be. . . . Its
social and economic conditions may not be a suitable basis for such a form
of government.’ Nor was Yugoslavia, the memorandum asserted, ‘a Com-
munist state on the Soviet pattern any longer, though it retains many Soviet
features’.
‘Clearly therefore, neither Western-type parliamentary democracy nor
Russian-type Communism is acceptable to the Yugoslavs or workable in
their country. The vital question is whether their revolution is leading them
towards a new form of Socialism which will bring them nearer in spirit and
in practice to our form of Social Democracy.’
The success or failure of the Yugoslav experiment [the memorandum concluded]
has an importance far beyond the gaining of an ally for the Western powers. It is of
vital importance to the Yugoslav peoples, who have suffered misgovemment and
occupation for decades. And if it succeeds in evolving a workable political formula,
it could become an example to other countries with analogous conditions, countries
which are both unsuited to Western parliamentarianism and hostile to Stalinism.1
Likewise the Norwegian Labour party, which had established contact
with the Yugoslav organization, greeted the social and economic reforms in
Yugoslavia as a ‘daring political experiment which will be of importance to
the international Socialist movement’. This development, it declared, ‘has a
right to our support and should be observed by the whole Socialist movement
with sympathy’.2
1. Circular No. 19/53. 2. Circular No. 47/53.
 Yugoslavia's Revolt against Moscow's Hegemony 391
The M.A.P.A.I. of Israel, which had, like the Social Democratic party of
Switzerland, established contact with the Communist party of Yugoslavia, ‘in
principle’ advocated developing ‘existing contacts so as to establish a closer
co-operation which may later lead to its affiliation into the Socialist world’.1
Although no Socialist party came out against unofficial contacts with the
Communist party of Yugoslavia, the general council considered any formal
connection with the Socialist International hardly to be possible, so long as it
declined to show, as the Labour party of Sweden stated by invoking the
Frankfurt declaration, ‘its readiness to recognize, theoretically or practically,
the principle of an organized opposition to the regime’. For although Yugo-
slavia is attempting to realize a new form of Socialism, her regime remains
one that is based on a one-party system, and while she has established a
mass political organization which accepts non-Communists as members—the
‘Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia’—no right to form
political parties apart from the Communist party is recognized. And since
the Socialist International is founded on the principles of democracy, it
cannot accept the Yugoslav Communist party as a member. Any attempt to
do so, the Swedish Labour party warned, would ‘most probably precipitate
an acute crisis’.12
On the basis of the parties’ memoranda, the general council of the
Socialist International decided to establish no official contact with the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but to leave it to individual parties to
regulate their relationship according to their discretion.

The quarrel between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was mended by
Khrushchev’s visit to Belgrade on 26 May 1955. He appeared at the head of
a delegation of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, and declared on
arrival: ‘We sincerely regret what has happened. . . . ’
A year later the Cominform, which Stalin had used as a weapon against
Tito, also ended. After the break with Yugoslavia its seat had been moved
from Belgrade to Bucharest, and it had met only once, in November 1949 in
Budapest, but merely to denounce, once again, ‘the murderers and spies of
Belgrade’ and to call upon the ‘loyal Communists’ of Yugoslavia finally to
chase the ‘Tito band’ from office.3 This was the third and final conference of
the Cominform. On 17 April 1956 it ceased its activities by a decision of its
central committee.4

1. Circular No. 45/53.

2. Circular No. 3/53. For the memoranda of other parties of the International, see
Circulars No. 12/53, 13/53, 14/53, 15/53, 16/53, 18/53, 21/53, 22/53, 23/53, 25/53, 26/53,
41/53, 49/53. These may be found in the Archives of the Socialist International in the
International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam.
3. F o r a L a s tin g P e a c e a n d f o r a P e o p le 's D e m o c r a c y , 29 November 1949.
4. See Zinner (ed.), N a tio n a l C o m m u n ism a n d P o p u la r R e v o lt in E a s te r n E u r o p e , pp.
9-15.
19 • The Insurrection in East Berlin

The uprising of workers in the German Democratic Republic, which broke

out on 16 June 1953, was completely different in character and origin from
the revolt against Moscow by the Communists in Yugoslavia.
On that morning several hundred building workers at a block of flats in
the Stalin-Allee in the Soviet Zone of Berlin stopped work in protest against
the raising of the work norm, decreed by the government a few weeks earlier.
They then marched to the government building on the Wilhelmsplatz to
demand the revocation of the order.
This gesture of protest against the deterioration of working conditions
set in motion an avalanche of feeling against the political system. As the
building workers marched from their construction site through the city
centre and the working-class district around the Alexanderplatz, thousands
of men and women joined them, and, as news of the demonstration spread,
workers from other factories also went on strike and began marching to the
seat of government. Before long an angry crowd of tens of thousands was
encircling the government buildings.
On the following day, 17 June, the workers in most of the bigger industrial
centres of East Germany came out in support of a general strike; in Halle,
Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, Rostock, Chemnitz and Gorlitz. In East Berlin a
huge crowd filled the wide Unter den Linden and the Lustgarten. At one
o’clock the radio declared a state of emergency: demonstrations, meetings,
assemblies and other groupings o f ‘more than three persons’ as well as walking
in the streets between nine o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning
were forbidden. Then, hardly an hour later, formations of Russian tanks,
infantry and police force attacked the demonstrators. In the clashes which
followed seventeen died and hundreds were injured.1

1. For a description of these events, see Amo Scholz, Werner Nieke and Gottfried
Vetter, Panzer am Potsdamer Platz (Berlin-Grunewald, 1954); see also Rainer Hildebrandt,
Als die Fesseln fielen___ (Berlin-Grunewald, 1956); Hermann Weber, Von der S.B.Z. zur
D,D.R. 1945-1958 (Hanover, 1966), pp. 79-92, and, for an eye-witness account by a Com-
 The Insurrection in East Berlin 393
The demonstrations had not been the work of any conspiracy. Nobody
had planned them, nobody had foreseen them. They had surprised the
workers themselves as much as they had surprised the government, the
Communist party and the trade unions. It had been a spontaneous outburst
of resentment among the working class, a fundamental demonstration
against the system of government erected by Moscow in East Germany.
The suppression of the rising with the backing of Russian tanks was
followed by a reckoning. Max Fechner, one of the old guard of the Social
Democratic party, who had, in 1945, advocated the party’s union with the
Communist party and been made minister of justice, was at once relieved of his
office when he stated in a press interview: ‘The right to strike is guaranteed
by the Constitution. The strike leaders will not be punished for their actions
as members of the strike committee.’ He was replaced by Dr Hilde Benjamin,
who introduced a new ‘policy of retribution’. The state of emergency remained
in force until 21 June, and between then and early December 427 demonstra-
tors were sentenced by the ordinary German courts to a total of 1,457 years
hard labour or imprisonment, while two were sentenced to death and four to
imprisonment for life; moreover, sixteen others were sentenced to death by
Soviet summary courts and executed.1

The uprising precipitated a crisis within the party; its leaders were constern-
ated. The central committee of the party, when it met on 21 June, four days
after the rising, stated, as one would expect, that the revolt was a well-
prepared ‘Fascist provocation’ against the state, and it called the demonstrat-
ing workers ‘bandits acting at the instigation of Adenauer, Ollenhauer,
Kaiser and Reuter’.2 But the total number of these ‘bandits’ who actually
went on to the streets to demonstrate against the government, according to
available estimates, came to between 300,000 and 372,000, while the main
support for the rising came from the workers in the big industrial plants:
from Leuna, with a work-force of 28,000, Buna with 18,000, Wolfen with
12,000, Henningsdorf with 12,000 as well as the other large factories who
joined the demonstration in serried ranks.3
This was not a revolt by groups of dissatisfied intellectuals or former
Social Democrats. The whole proletariat had risen against the party’s leader-
ship, Communists as well as Social Democrats. The Communist experiment
of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (S.E.D.), as the Communist party
had been renamed after its merger with the Social Democrats of the S.P.D.,
had failed on ideological grounds. Otto Grotewohl, the S.P.D. leader in the
munist official, ibid., pp. 299-301. See further Stefan Brant, Der Aufstand. Geschichte und
Deutung des 17. Juni 1953 (Stuttgart, 1954); Eugen Stamm, Juni 1953. Der Volksaufstand
vom 17. Juni 1953 (Bonn, 1961).
1. For a list of sentences, see Scholz, Nieke and Vetter, Panzer am Potsdamer Platz,
pp. 200-5.
2. Quoted in Weber, Von der S.B.Z. zur D.D.R., p. 85. 3. See ibid., p. 83.
394 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Soviet Zone, had hesitantly agreed to the merger with the Communist party
expecting confidently that the democratic traditions of Social Democracy
would permeate the united Socialist Party.1
Now the uprising had demonstrated that the Social Democratic tradition
had indeed filtered through to the mass following of the S.E.D. Communists
and Social Democrats had struck, had marched and demonstrated together
against the system of the dictatorship of the party and government. The
ideological basis of the party had been called in question—the dogma of the
‘democratic centralism’ of its structure, upon which the dictatorship of the
hierarchy over the party was founded, as well as the dogma of its role as
leader, upon which the dictatorship of the state rested.
Moscow, however, could never allow these principles to be questioned, for
their abandonment would inevitably emasculate the Communist leadership of
the party. It would, moreover, threaten the Soviet Union’s predominance in
East Germany, which could only be secured by a firm Communist dictator-
ship. So the Soviet armed forces intervened and, once the rising had been put
down, the party was ‘purged’ of its Social Democratic elements. The tragedy
of the uprising had set the seal of failure on Grotewohl’s illusions. Now, as
prime minister, it fell to him to purge the party of the democratic tradition
which he had hoped would permeate the S.E.D.
The first victim of the purge, as already mentioned, was Max Fechner, who,
after being deprived of his office as minister of justice, was expelled ‘as an
enemy of the party and the state from the ranks of the S.E.D.’. Wilhelm
Zaisser was dismissed as minister for state security and, together with Rudolf
Herrnstadt, chief editor of the S.E.D. central organ, Neues Deutschland, was
suspended from the party’s central committee as the leader of a ‘faction
hostile to the party, with a defeatist line aimed against the party’s unity’. ‘The
political-ideological content of the Zaisser-Herrnstadt faction aimed against
the party,’ the central committee stated in justification of the expulsion,
‘rests on their essentially Social Democratic concept of the role of the party,
on their idolization of spontaneity among the disorganized masses and their
policy of capitulation which is ultimately aimed at re-establishing capitalist
rule in the German Democratic Republic.’2
Among other victims of the ‘purge’ there also fell Anton Ackermann, the
theoretician of a ‘German Road to Socialism’; he was dismissed as director of
the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute and as secretary of state in the
Foreign Office. The same fate overtook Elsa Zaisser, chief of the Ministry of
Adult Education, and Elli Schmidt, chief of the State Commission for Trade
and Supply and chairman of the Democratic Guild of Women; as well as
the complete central executive committees of the metalworkers’ and wood-
workers’ trade unions together with many thousands of ‘wavering and
1. See pp. 78-9.
2. Quoted in Scholz, Nieke and Vetter, Panzer am Potsdamer Platz, p. 183.
 The Insurrection in East Berlin 395
capitulating elements’. In the iron grip of Walter Ulbricht, whose instrument
Grotewohl had become, the S.E.D. became the most Stalinist of all Com-
munist parties, and the German Democratic Republic the most servile of all
the Russian satellite states.

The uprising evoked the most profound sympathies throughout the Socialist
world. The congress of the Socialist International, meeting in Stockholm one
month after the events in Berlin, sent fraternal greetings to the workers in the
Soviet Zone of Germany. ‘They dared,’ the resolution stated, ‘to rise against a
totalitarian regime. They demonstrated before the whole world that the urge
for liberty cannot be repressed. They gave a magnificient example to all the
peoples in all countries under despotic domination.’1
1. Report of the Third Congress of the Socialist International, Stockholm, 15-18 July
1953, Circular No. 115/53, p. 140.
20 • The Dethronement o f Stalin

The event which shook the world Communist movement most profoundly
was the posthumous dethronement of Stalin which took place at the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956.
Through his glorification by the Communist world press, Stalin had
become a legendary figure for innumerable Communists during his lifetime:
a symbol of the myth of the Soviet Union and of its ideals for which they were
prepared to sacrifice themselves. ‘We know,’ said Togliatti, ‘how many
Communists in our country have died with his name on their lips. . . . We
know that whole armies of our partisans went into battle carrying this name.’1
He had been elevated to rank with Marx, Engels and Lenin as one of the four
greatest Socialists of all time and, after his death on 5 March 1953, he had
been interred at Lenin’s side in the mausoleum at the Kremlin walls.
Barely short of three years later, on 25 February 1956, his immense
stature was shattered by the speech Khrushchev made to the Twentieth
1. Quoted in Donald L. M. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity. Italian Communism and the
Communist World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 26. In Russia Stalin was blatantly idolized by
Soviet propaganda. The following extract from an ‘Ode to Stalin’ was published in Pravda:
O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,
Thou who didst give birth to man,
Thou who dost rejuvenate the centuries,
Thou who givest blossom to the spring,
Thou who movest the chords of harmony;
Thou splendour of my spring, O Thou
Sun reflected in a million hearts.
—Pravda, 28 August 1936, quoted in Edward Rogers, A Commentary on Communism
(London, 1951). And, as late as two months before Stalin’s dethronement, Izvestia could
still declare in an article entitled ‘The Great Continuer of Lenin’s Work’: ‘In observing the
76th anniversary of the birth of J. V. Stalin, the Soviet people remember with great gratitude
the services to the party and the Fatherland of this true pupil and continuer of the great
work of Lenin. Stalin served our people honourably and earned the universal respect of the
workers. He was an indefatigable organizer, a very great theoretician and propagandist of
Marxism-Leninism, an ardent fighter for the happiness of the workers and for peace and
friendship among the nations’—Izvestia, 21 December 1955, quoted in Panas Fedenko,
Khrushchev's New History o f the Soviet Communist Party (Munich, 1963), p. 126.
 The Dethronement o f Stalin 397
Congress. He described to the amazed delegates how Stalin had secured his
power over the party and state by setting up a personal despotism, purging the
Bolshevik old guard and sending thousands upon thousands of active
Communists to their deaths as spies and enemies of the state.1 And he showed
how Stalin had foisted the cult of his own personality on to the party, so that
his glorification by party and government officials had more or less come to be
a test of their degree of loyalty. Stalin’s personality, as Khrushchev character-
ized it in his speech, bore the stamp of a cruel tyrant, drunk with power, who
had trodden over mountains of his comrades’ dead bodies to become the sole
ruler of the Russian empire.2
Khrushchev’s disclosures spread consternation throughout the ranks of
the Communist parties and especially amongst their intellectual leaders. It
had been admiration for the Soviet Union—‘the myth of October’ as the
historian of the Communist party of Italy had called it3—which had moved
countless intellectuals to join the Communists as the party standing closest to

1. For an investigation of Stalin’s crimes, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror.
Stalin'sPurge o f the Thirties (London, 1968). According to his calculations, at least 6,500,000
lives were destroyed over the decade 1930-40. Approximately one million were actually
executed between 1933 and 1938 (p. 529), at least two million more perished in concentration
camps in the same period (p. 532); and at least three and a half million died during the
enforced collectivization. According to Sakharov, ‘at least ten to fifteen million people
perished in the torture chambers of the N.K.V.D. from torture and execution, in camps for
exiled kulaks and so-called semi-kulaks and members of their families and in camps
“without the right of correspondence” which were in fact the prototypes of the Fascist
death-camps where, for example, thousands of prisoners were machine-gunned because of
“overcrowding” or as a result of “special orders”.’ He asserts that ‘in 1936-39 alone more
than 1*2 million party members, half of the total membership, were arrested. Only 50,000
regained freedom; the others were tortured during interrogation or were shot (600,000) or
died in camps’—Andrei D. Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, with
an Introduction by Harrison E. Salisbury (London, 1968), pp. 52 and 55. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet author, himself a prison-camp victim who made an intimate
study of the system, arrived at quite similar estimates.
2. For the full text, see The Dethronement o f Stalin (London, 1956). The speech was
given at a secret meeting of the Twentieth Congress on 25 February 1956, to which only
delegates of the Communist party of the Soviet Union were admitted, and no delegates from
fraternal parties. The stenographer’s minutes of the congress did not record the speech, but
only reference to a closed session at which Khrushchev gave a report entitled ‘The Cult
Personality and its Consequences’—see Fedenko, Khrushchev's New History, p. 128. The
text of the speech had, however, been reproduced in a document for the information of
foreign Communist parties, a copy of which came into the hands of the United States
government and which was published in the New York Times on 4 June 1956. As soon as
Khrushchev’s secret speech was published in the world’s press, he disowned it as a fabric-
ation by foreign intelligence agencies. But, although never published in the Soviet Union, it
was discussed at Communist party conferences. The official History o f the C.P.S. U. (Moscow,
1959) recorded: ‘On the basis of decisions taken at the Twentieth Congress, the Central
Committee fully revealed Stalin’s great mistakes, the instances of gross infringement of
Socialist legality, abuse of power, arbitrary acts and the repression of many honest people,
including prominent figures in the party and government’ (p. 727}—quoted in Fedenko,
Khrushchev's New History, p. 180.
3. Giorgio Galli, Storia del Partito communista italiano (Milan, 1958), pp. 258-9,
quoted in Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, pp. 28-9.
398 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Communist Russia. But now the aura which had veiled the Soviet Union had
fallen away and a gruesome reality been brought to light. ‘I saw in the face of
my dearest friend,’ Fabrizio Onofri, a member of the central committee of the
Communist party of Italy, was one to describe this disturbing event, ‘the
rising pallor of despair—a profound, intensive and unquenchable despair,
with no escape. And thus I felt the same pallor rising in my face, day by day.
We all felt in the centre of our being that we were struck by death. It was as if
an abyss had opened beneath us, had opened within ourselves.’1
The Communists were now faced with the painful question of how it could
come about that one single person could so monopolize power in party, state
and society, and how Lenin’s creation, the Soviet Union, could degenerate
under the leadership of his successor into a barbaric caricature of Socialism.
In no Communist party was this question discussed so passionately as in
the Italian party,12 for Italy was the only country where a great Socialist party,
the P.S.I. under Nenni’s leadership, was associated with the Communist party
by a pact3 and had therefore until now felt as close to the Soviet Union as did
the Communist party. Hence the Communists were all the more impressed by
criticism from the Socialists, especially that of Nenni, which called in doubt
even the Soviet system itself. ‘The question here,’ he explained in an article in
Mondo Operaio, ‘is not the legality of the Revolution [in Russia], but that of
the institutions—the party, the Soviets—which have been forged by the
revolution in the fire of its experience. Instead of these institutions,’ he
continued, ‘developing forms in which the free political will of the individual
citizen as well as the masses might have been expressed to a growing extent,
they were continually emptied of their democratic content; their power has
been made barren and their function stifled.45In a letter to Mikhail Suslov,
one of the secretaries of the Soviet Communist party, to whom he sent the
quoted article, he went even further in his criticism. He referred to the
degeneration of the Soviet state; to the suppression of democratic life in the
party and in the state; to the transformation of the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat into a dictatorship of the party and ultimately into the dictatorship of
Stalin. The Soviet system, like the party, he continued, had been suffocated in
a crisis.6
Togliatti, as the leader of the Italian Communist party, formulated his
position vis-a-vis the crisis of the Soviet regime only hesitantly. He had been a
loyal follower of Stalin during the long years of his Moscow exile. He had

1. Fabrizio Onofri, Classe operaia e partito (Bari, 1957), p. 107, quoted in Blackmer,
Unity in Diversity, p. 42.
2. By far the best analysis of this discussion, on which this account is based, is to be
found in Blackmer, pp. 22-58.
3. See page 51.
4. Pietro Nenni, 7 vergognosi fatte del rapporto segreto di Krusciov', in Mondo Operaio,
June 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 47.
5. See ibid., p. 48.
 The Dethronement o f Stalin 399
kept silent during the bloody excesses of Stalin’s ‘great purge’, had consented
to Tito’s expulsion from the Cominform and condemned the uprising of
workers in the Soviet Zone in Germany as an ‘imperialist counter-revolution’.
He therefore tried to salvage what he could of Stalin’s reputation. ‘It is
impossible,’ he declared at a party conference, ‘to deny Stalin’s greatness, or
his achievements, or to destroy them.’1 Moreover, Stalin alone could hardly
have been responsible for the ‘mistakes’, as the monstrosities which had
occurred were later euphemistically termed. In a detailed account in Nuovi
argomenti, he pointed to the ‘collective responsibility of the whole group of
political leaders for [Stalin’s] errors, including those comrades who have taken
the initiative in condemning them’. The basis for these events, he continued,
could not be explained merely by Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’. ‘The explana-
tion of the events,’ he argued, ‘can only be found by a careful study of how
the system characterized by Stalin’s mistakes came into being in the first place.
Only then will it become possible to understand how these mistakes were not
of a personal nature alone, but had deeply penetrated the reality of the Soviet
way of life.’12
He did not, however, examine the ‘reality of the Soviet way of life’ which
Stalin had developed, because this would undoubtedly have put in question
Lenin’s concept of the Communist party in Russia: the principle of the
‘leading role of the party within the state’ (the euphemism for dictatorship of
the party in the the state) and the principle o f ‘democratic centralism’ (i.e. the
dictatorship of the leadership over the party). These were the concepts which
had made it possible for the strongest personality within the leading group to
seize power by the control of the party machine, and to establish a personal
dictatorship.
Togliatti stated, however, that ‘Stalin, despite the mistakes he had com-
mitted, had had the support of the greater part of the country. . . and above
all of the leading [party] cadres’. But Stalin had been able to secure this
‘support’ only by his control of the party machine, and through it of the state,
which had given him the power to eliminate anyone who came under even a
vague suspicion of not supporting him.3
Even so, Togliatti, as was to be expected, defended the system of Com-
munist dictatorship in the Soviet Union simply as the basis for genuine

1. L' Unitci, 23 March 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 38.

2. Nuovi argomenti, No. 20 (May-June 1956), quoted in ibid., p. 51.
3. Where the party machine was concerned, Khrushchev commented in his speech:
‘Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient co-operation with people,
but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his concept. Whoever
opposed this concept and tried to prove his viewpoint, as well as the correctness of his
position, was doomed to be removed from the collective leadership and to subsequent
moral and physical annihilation.’ Thus, as Khrushchev recorded, ninety-eight of the 139
central committee members of the party, i.e. 70 per cent, were arrested and shot (mostly in
1937-8), as well as 1,108 out of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress. See The
Dethronement o f Stalin (London, 1956), pp. 6 and 10.
400 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
democracy. The institutional guarantees against the misuse of personal
authority of the kind that existed in the western democracies—the multi-
party system and the independence of the courts—were, he said, unnecessary
to the Soviet Union, damaging and even impracticable. But he pleaded for
reforms so as to create ‘genuinely effective guarantees against mistakes
similar to those made by Stalin’.1
Thus, as Blackmer sums up his analysis, Togliatti had managed to main-
tain his own detachment and that of the Communist party of Italy from the
system of Stalinism by emphasizing the necessity for reforms while, at the
same time, keeping his faith as a Marxist-Leninist.2
The essence of Togliatti’s article for the internal history of the inter-
national Communist movement lay, however, in the revelations it contained
on the relationship between Moscow and the Communist parties. This was
not, as it has been interpreted, a straight declaration of independence by the
Italian Communists aimed at the Soviet Union, but a barely concealed
criticism of control from Moscow. Hitherto Togliatti had submitted himself
to Moscow’s control. In the conflict with the Yugoslav Communists, he had
acknowledged the leading role of the Russian Communist party in the
international Communist movement, he had recognized the principle of
Moscow’s control and condemned ‘Yugoslavia’s road to Socialism’ as a
heresy.
But now he fundamentally disavowed this concept. He demanded that
Moscow should respect the autonomy of individual Communist parties and
recognize their right to pursue a different road to Socialism. The Cominform’s
lack of respect for the independence of parties had, he continued,3 been a
‘grave mistake’. The Russian pattern, he emphasized, was no longer binding,
either in countries governed by Communists, or in those where the Com-
munists did not represent the leading party. ‘The experience of constructing a
Socialist society in the Soviet Union,’ he explained, ‘cannot provide guide-
lines for the solving of questions which we and the Communist parties in other
countries are facing today.’ And since various roads to Socialism were
possible and necessary, there would also spring up various centres of the
international Communist movement to form a ‘poly-central system’ in
accordance with ‘new situations, changes in the structure of the world and
the structure of the workers’ movement itself’.4 According to the logic of
1. Quoted in Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 54.
2. ibid., pp. 54-5.
3. Togliatti disclosed that the Communist party of Italy had declared itself to be
against forming the Cominform, and that he had rejected a proposal by Stalin in January
1951 that he should give up the leadership of the party and take on the office of general
secretary of the Cominform; see Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 61. This episode gives
another indication of the importance of the role Stalin intended for the Cominform, for
Togliatti was one of the most prominent figures in the international movement, and the
party which he led was the largest Communist party outside the Soviet Union and China.
4. L ’Unita, 26 June 1956, quoted in Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 61.
 The Dethronement o f Stalin 401
these arguments, therefore, the Communist party of the Soviet Union had
played out its role both as the centre of the international Communist move-
ment and as its leading party.
It had been the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet party which had broken
the bonds by which the international Communist movement had been
fettered. In this fact lay the significance of the congress as a corner-stone of
its history. Before the Twentieth Congress, any challenge to Moscow’s pre-
dominant position in the international Communist movement had been a
dangerous venture. Tito, having dared to reject Moscow’s demands for
hegemony, had been expelled from the Communist world federation and
condemned as a Fascist, while the leaders of other Communist parties who
came under suspicion of Titoism had paid for it with their lives. Their fate
had served as a warning.
But now the Twentieth Congress had repudiated the expulsion of the
Communist party of Yugoslavia as having been a ‘mistake’ by Stalin, and it
had moreover recognized the right of individual Communist parties to auto-
nomy. The Cominform had condemned the ‘Yugoslav road to Socialism’ as a
nationalist road, and under Stalin’s orders any Communist party leaders who
became suspected of the crime of taking a ‘special road to Socialism’—
Rostov in Bulgaria, Rajik in Hungary, Slansky in Czechoslovakia—had been
executed or, like Gomulka in Poland, imprisoned. The Twentieth Congress
had, however, admitted the feasibility of ‘various roads to Socialism’.
Only a few years earlier, the Cominform had rejected the method of
parliamentary democracy in the fight for Socialism, propagating revolu-
tionary insurrection as the only possible method in the struggle for power.
But the resolution of the Twentieth Congress had stated that ‘radical changes
in the historical situation’—the growing strength of Socialism and democracy
throughout the world—had made it possible for the working class in a number
of capitalist countries to ‘win a stable majority in parliament’ and to create
the conditions ‘to secure fundamental social change’.
The most acute diversion from the spirit of the Cominform which the
congress undertook was in the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. The Cominform
had seen the world as split into two camps—‘imperialist’ and Communist—
and conflict between the two had been declared inevitable.1 The congress,
however, renounced the Leninist precept that ‘wars are inevitable so long as
imperialism exists’, and proclaimed the possibility of and desirability for
“peaceful co-existence’ between states of different social systems.2 With this it
initiated a policy directed at a detente between the Soviet Union and the
Western powers.
Like the Seventh Congress of the Communist International of 1935, the
Soviet congress of 1956, in giving a new direction to Soviet foreign policy,
1. See Appendix Seven, pp. 549-550.
2. For Mao Tse-tung’s opposition to this concept, see page 479.
402 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
suggested a united front with Social Democrats and their parties previously
slandered by the Cominform as ‘auxiliaries to the imperialist camp’. The
congress, however, stated that ‘today many Social Democrats stand for active
struggle against the war danger, for rapprochement with the Socialist coun-
tries, for unity of the labour movement’. It was the unequivocal wish of the
congress to pave the way for friendly relations with the Social Democrats.
‘We sincerely greet these Social Democrats,’ the declaration further stated,
‘and are willing to do everything necessary to unite our efforts in the struggle
for the noble cause of peace and in the interests of the working people.’1
The general council of the Socialist International, meeting in Zurich on 24
March, a month after the congress, now had to define its attitude to the
Communist offer of collaboration. The change in Soviet foreign policy and
Communist attitudes towards Social Democracy had been preceded by a
change in Soviet internal policy. In fact, shortly after Stalin’s death, a ‘thaw’
had begun to loose the ice-hard grip of dictatorship. Many thousands of
political prisoners had been released from concentration camps, the uncom-
promising harshness of the regime softened and the leaden weight which had
hung over the country’s spiritual life eased. Reforms were announced by the
congress which seemed to promise the beginning of an era of democratization
of the Soviet system.
But in fact no idea was more remote from the intentions of the congress
than to change the institution of the Communist party dictatorship into a
Social Democracy. It did, admittedly, decide ‘to create firm guarantees that
henceforth a similar situation [to that brought about by the ‘personality cult’
under Stalin] can never again arise, either in the party or the state, to ensure
that the party leadership be organized on the collective principle, on a correct
Marxist-Leninist policy, with the active participation of the working mil-
lions’.2 But the reforms the congress planned were intended only to prevent
the re-emergence of a dictatorship by a single personality over the collective
Politbureau. They did not therefore attempt to change the system of dictator-
ship, but only to ‘de-Stalinize’ it.3
1. Quoted in R. Palme Dutt, The International (London, 1964), p. 333.
2. History o f the C.P.S. U., p. 643, quoted in Fedenko, Khrushchev's New History, p. 128.
3. This was made quite clear by a resolution of the central committee of the Soviet
party (of 30 June 1956) ‘Regarding the overcoming of the personality cult and its conse-
quences’. It attacked Communist critics who, like Togliatti, ‘tried to explain by some kind
of degeneration’ in the Soviet system how this terrible thing could have happened which
had been condemned by the Twentieth Congress under the heading ‘Stalin’s Mistakes,’ and
who therefore advocated reforms to the system to create effective safeguards against a
return to a despotic regime. The resolution of the central committee rejected such an idea in
no uncertain terms. The personality cult, it declared, should be put down to the special
historical conditions of the Soviet Union’s development and to Stalin’s aberrations, but not
to any degeneration of the Soviet system. ‘It would be a serious mistake,’ it stated, ‘to
conclude from the past that the social system of the Soviet Union had changed in any way or
that the character of the Soviet social system should be seen as the source of such a person-
ality cult’—Pravda, 2 July 1956, quoted in Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 71.
 The Dethronement o f Stalin 403
At all events, the general council of the Socialist International could see in
the decisions of the Moscow congress no more than ‘changes of tactics’, not
providing ‘adequate proof’ of a genuine change in the principles and policies
of the Communist dictatorship and therefore ‘providing no grounds for
departing from the position taken up by democratic Socialism which firmly
rejects any united front or any other form of political co-operation with the
parties of dictatorship’.
‘The general council of the Socialist International,’ the statement declared
at its close, ‘considers the minimum pre-condition, even the possibility of
talks on an international basis, to be the re-establishment of genuinely free
democratic Labour movements in all the countries where they existed before
and have been suppressed or eliminated by the Communist dictatorship.’1
1. Socialist International Information, 10 March 1956.
21 • Poland’s October

The revelation of Stalin’s system of terror at the Twentieth Congress of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been particularly disturbing for
Poland, a country placed under a similar system. The effect, as Edward
Ochab, general secretary of the Polish Communist party,1 wrote two months
later, was ‘prodigious’.12 The accumulations of resentment against the rule
of Moscow felt by a majority of Poland’s workers and intellectuals during
the years since 1945 burst out in a sudden flood of criticism at their own
regime.
Polish nationalism had never, in its pride, come to terms with Russian
predominance. The younger generation of Polish Communists, having fought
as partisans during the war against the German occupation forces, had
sought, under Wladislaw Gomulka’s leadership, to find a ‘Polish road to
Socialism’. But in 1948 such a road was condemned by Moscow as an
‘opportunist and nationalistic deviation’, Gomulka was overthrown and
Boleslaw Bierut (1892-1956) and Jakub Berman (b. 1906), who had both
been appointed by Stalin and had returned from the Soviet Union to Poland
in the wake of the Red Army, took care that the Polish revolution would
follow the ‘Russian road’.
Now the Twentieth Congress had openly displayed the degeneration of the
Russian revolution and discredited the Soviet Union as an example to the

1. The correct title of the party when it merged with the Polish Socialist Party (P.P.S.)
in mid-December 1948 was ‘Polish United Labour Party’ (Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza or P.Z.P.R.); see p. 102.
2. See Oscar Halecki, ‘Poland’, in Stephen D. Kertesz (ed.), Eastern Central Europe and
the World: Developments in the Post-Stalin Era (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1962), p. 47. The
dismay among the old guard of Polish Communists was all the more profound as a result of
the congress’s disclosure that the dissolution of the Polish Communist party in 1938 (see
Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 338-9) had been ordered by Stalin
‘without cause’; almost all the members of its central committee, having been ordered to
Moscow, were arrested and executed as ‘Trotskyist traitors’. Gomulka had escaped this fate,
because at the time of the party’s dissolution he was still serving a long term of imprisonment,
to which he had been sentenced following his arrest in 1936.
 Poland's October 405
Polish revolution. It had, moreover, heralded the end of Stalinism as a
system of government, initiated a new direction in the Soviet Union’s internal
and foreign policies and opened new paths to the Communist world move-
ment. To many Communists, the congress had seemed, as Jerzy Moravski,
one of its secretaries, said a month later, to be ‘a turning point between two
eras’.1

The ferment which the congress evoked among the mass of the workers broke
out in a grass-roots insurrection on 28 June 1956 in Poznan, one of Poland’s
largest industrial cities. The impetus came from a strike of workers in a large
locomotive works, after their complaints against wage reductions were
rejected by the government. This strike rapidly grew into a general strike
which developed into a political strike and an open revolt. With fierce cries of
‘Bread and freedom!’, a demonstration of 50,000 demanded free elections and
the withdrawal of the Russians. Police headquarters and the prison were
stormed by the demonstrators, one policeman being lynched, and the party
headquarters, broadcasting house and local offices were occupied. Supported
by tanks, troops put down the revolt after two days of street fighting.
According to official statements, fifty-three people were killed and over
300 wounded.

The insurrection was a heavy blow for the regime. It demonstrated that it had
lost the confidence and support of the working class. The government, which
sent a delegation to Poznan under the leadership of the prime minister, Jozef
Cyrankiewicz (b. 1911), as soon as the uprising had been suppressed,
attributed these events to ‘provocation by imperialist agents’ and the
‘reactionary underground movement’.2
The party leadership was, however, divided in its attitudes to events. The
Moscow-dominated Stalinist faction, having denounced the revolt as a rising
by the counter-revolution, demanded the tightening-up of censorship and the
throttling of the freedom movement; the ‘revisionist’ faction, which had seen
the uprising as a spontaneous outbreak of deep dissatisfaction with the
regime, insisted on liberalization. A middle-of-the-road position was taken by
Cyrankiewicz as well as by Edward Ochab, who had become general secretary
after Bierut’s death in March 1956. The conflicts between these factions were
fought out during the Seventh Plenary Conference of the central committee
when it met in Warsaw from 18—28 July 1956 in the presence of N. A.
Bulganin and Georgi K. Zhukov of the presidium of the Communist party of
the Soviet Union.
1. TrybmaLudu, 27 March 1956, quoted in Paul E. Zinner, National Communism and
Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe (New York, 1956), p. 55.
2. See Halecki, ‘Poland’, in Kertesz (ed.), Eastern Central Europe and the World, p. 49.
The Moscow edition of Pravda, on 2 July 1956, stated that the revolt had been financed by
the United States government.
406 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
The central committee naturally recognized that ‘events in Poznan could
not be treated in isolation from the situation applying throughout the
country’, and it recommended measures to raise workers’ living standards, to
extend ‘workers’ democracy’ in the factories as well as in the party, in the
‘people’s council committees’ and in parliament, and to ensure strict observ-
ance of ‘Socialist legality’ and legal procedure and finally the rehabilitation
of political prisoners unjustly accused and sentenced.1
The central committee’s decisions did not, however, satisfy the wing of the
party which was asking for a fundamental liberalization of the system by
institutional reform, nor did it quieten the profoundly excited mass of the
workers, and above all the intellectuals, who were awaiting the opening of a
new epoch.
A strong current of anti-Russian feeling, fed by the Poles’ traditional
hatred of the Russians, ran through the Polish wish for independence. The
central committee, however, avoided stating any views on the problem of the
Soviet Union’s predominance in Poland, apparently legalized by the signing
of the Warsaw Pact2 on 14 May 1955. This document had placed Poland
within the Eastern bloc under the leadership of the Soviet Union and the
Polish army, like the armies of other states in the bloc, had been placed under
the command of a Soviet marshal, Ivan Koniev. It might therefore have
seemed all the more important to issue some word of protest against the
intervention of the Soviet Union in Poland’s internal affairs. But the central
committee simply reaffirmed its unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union ‘in
P o la n d ’s n a tio n a l in te re st’. ‘The ties o f so lid arity w ith the C o m m u n ist party
of the Soviet Union,’ the resolution declared, were ‘an infallible guarantee. . .
of the peace and victory of Socialism’. Yet it was this very predominance of
the Soviet Union that had provoked the revolution of the mass of workers
and intellectuals against Russia’s powerful influence over every sphere of
public life in Poland—political and economic as well as intellectual—which
had descended over the country like a nightmare.
Trust in the party leadership had been severely shaken throughout its
ranks, and the central committee decisions had done nothing to restore it. The
recall of Gomulka, who had come to symbolize the renaissance of Polish
national Communism, was no longer in question. He appeared to be the man
of the hour.

Wladislaw Gomulka (b. 1905), a fitter by trade, had served the movement
with devotion from his earliest youth. At seventeen he formed a youth group,
1. For the text of the resolution, see Zinner (ed.), National Communism and Popular
Revolt in Eastern Europe, pp. 145-86.
2. The Warsaw Pact, set up by Moscow to oppose the NATO treaty, was a twenty-year
alliance of friendship and mutual aid between Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria, Albania and the German Democratic Republic under the military leadership of
the Soviet Union.
 Poland's October 407
and a few years later joined the illegal Communist party, suffering repeated
arrests and sentences; altogether he spent five years in prison under Pilsudski's
regime and that of his successor (and later a further four years under the
Communist regime). When the German army overran Poland in 1939, he
managed to escape from prison in the confusion. After Hitler’s attack on the
Soviet Union, he organized the underground Communist movement and in
1943 became general secretary of the newly founded Communist party. When,
after its liberation, Poland began to follow a ‘Polish road to Socialism’, he
was removed from his post as general secretary by Moscow in September 1948
and expelled from the party a few months later. He was arrested in 1951, to be
released only two years after Stalin’s death.1 Now since the party, or at least
its majority, had decided upon taking up once more a ‘Polish road to
Socialism’, it had to recall Gomulka. Already by July 1956 the central
committee had decided to rehabilitate him; one week later the politbureau
restored him to party membership and immediately elected him as member of
the central committee.123*

The Soviet government was disturbed by the way the situation was developing
after the insurrection in Poland. It was apprehensive lest Gomulka’s return to
the party leadership might shake the unity of the Soviet bloc. Its influence had
been directed at strengthening the position of the Stalinists in the tussle
between the party leaders faithful to Moscow and the ‘revisionists’, and it had
tried to block Gomulka’s rise to power.8 When the politbureau summoned the
central committee to its eighth plenary meeting for 19 October 1956 and
Gomulka’s election as general secretary seemed a virtual certainty, it decided
to intervene.
The discussions of the central committee had already begun on the
morning of 19 October, when an aeroplane arrived unexpectedly in Warsaw
with, as its passengers, the presidium of the Communist party of the Soviet
Union—Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovitch and Mikoyan, accompanied by
Marshal Koniev; they demanded an immediate account of the situation from
the Polish party leaders. ‘As the reason for their sudden arrival,’ the President
of State, Aleksander Zawadzki, told the plenum of the central committee,
‘our Soviet comrades gave the deep disquiet of the presidiums of the central
committee of the C.P.S.U. on the course of events in Poland. . . , particularly
those concerning various kinds of anti-Soviet propaganda, against which no,

1. For a biography of Gomulka, with a detailed description of the origins and early
history of the Communist party, see Nicolas Bethell, Gomulka: His Poland and His Com-
munism (London, 1969).
2. See Zinner (ed.), National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe,
p. 187.
3. For a description of Moscow’s influence over the internal party conflict in favour
of the Stalinist faction, see Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 248-67.
 408 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
or at least insufficient, action had been taken by u s .. . . As proof, they
indicated examples in a number of our newspapers.’1
In the meantime a Soviet division stationed in Silesia had been moved in
the direction of Warsaw, on the pretext of autumn manoeuvres, and units of
the Polish army under Marshal Constantin Rokossovsky, who was Moscow’s
man, had also advanced towards the city.
The news of the Russian leaders’ arrival and of the Russian troop move-
ments evoked a fearful agitation throughout the whole country, especially in
Warsaw. The Communist party organization in Warsaw, which had flocked
to support Gomulka, mobilized the workers in the factories, while General
Waclav Komar, commandant of the Polish security forces—who had been
arrested with Gomulka in 1951 and only released after four years—placed his
troops in key strategic positions throughout the city. Workers and students
demonstrated in the streets and called for arms.12
In the talks with the politbureau the deputation from Moscow held out
the threat of military force in the event of Poland withdrawing from its
alliance with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. As guarantee for the
continuation of the existing relationship between the two states, they insisted
on the retention of Russia’s men of confidence—above all Marshal Rokossov-
sky, whom Stalin had installed as chief of staff of the Polish army—in their
positions of power in both party and government.
Breaking with Moscow or dissociating Poland from the Warsaw Pact had
at no point been in the minds either of the central committee or of Gomulka
himself. The pact was seen as much by the Polish nationalists as by the
Communists to be indispensable for the protection of Poland against Ger-
many. What had been called in question was the de facto recognition of the
principles of equality and independence in the relationship existing between
the two states. The politbureau declared that it was prepared to send a
delegation to Moscow to clarify this question or, as the official bulletin put it,
to discuss the problems ‘of strengthening political and economic co-operation
between the Polish People’s Republic and the Soviet Union’. But it left the
Soviet delegation in no doubt whatever that the party, under Gomulka’s
leadership, was determined to follow a fresh course in its internal policies. It
refused to give the personal guarantees for the inviolability of Russia’s
1. No we drogi, No. 10 (1956); see Ost-Probleme, 8 February 1957.
2. The possibility of military intervention by the Soviet Union had been deeply disturb-
ing to the party rank and file before the arrival of the Soviet delegation. ‘I was confronted by
a phenomenon,’ Ochab reported to the plenum of the central committee, ‘that was really a
problem on its own. At innumerable meetings of students and workers all over Poland,
resolutions and speeches declared that the central committee would be defended against
troops—in other words, against the Soviet army, which allegedly posed a threat. Who,’ he
added, ‘would ever have dreamt that one might find oneself in a situation where party
members, people with a radiant faith in the victory of the Communist cause, would be
forced to the desperate realization that they could be threatened by the troops of their
friends?’—Nowe drogi, No. 10; see Ost-Probleme, 8 February 1957.
 Poland's October 409

alliance with Poland that had been demanded under the threat of intervention
by the Red Army. Moreover, the mood within the party, as Ochab described
it, and especially the military mobilization of Warsaw in particular, were
signs that Poland would never capitulate without a fight. Since in the end the
party affirmed its support for continuing the alliance, the Soviet delegation
dropped their insistence on personal guarantees and returned to Moscow on
20 October.1
On the next day Gomulka was elected general secretary of the party
by an overwhelming majority, while Rokossovsky was dropped from the
central committee and the politbureau before being dismissed as minister
of defence three weeks later. The central committee had made clear the
party’s decision to pursue in the future an internal policy independent of
Moscow.

The party programme for this new direction in internal policy had been
unfolded by Gomulka in the speech he made to the central committee the day
before his election. In giving his reasons, he rejected Moscow’s version of the
insurrection as a counter-revolutionary assault against the foundation of
Socialism in Poland. ‘The workers of Poznan,’ he said, ‘went into the streets
to protest not against Socialism, but against the rot which had spread so far
and wide within our social system . . . against the distortion of fundamental
Socialist principles.. . . The clumsy attempt to show the hurtful tragedy of
Poznan as the work of imperialist agents and provocateurs is politically
naive.’ He then referred to the roots of the crisis. ‘The reason for the Poznan
tragedy and the deep dissatisfaction of the whole working class,’ he declared,
‘must be sought within ourselves, in the leadership of the party, in the
government.’2
The central committee’s resolution announced a ‘renewal of Leninist
principles in the workers’ movement’ and freedom to criticize within the
party. ‘The party organs,’ it declared, ‘should not use disciplinary methods to
force party members to renounce deviating viewpoints.’3
Several reforms were then put through in quick succession. The sphere of
operations of the secret police was restricted, an end made to police terrorism,
political prisoners were released, many among them being rehabilitated, and
press censorship was moderated considerably. Above all the Polish parlia-
ment, or Sejm, was acknowledged as ‘the highest organ of state power’ and
its legislative function was recognized. It seemed as though October 1956 had
ushered in a revolution, as though the process of change from a system of
1. For a discussion of Moscow’s policy during the Polish crisis, see Adam B. Ulam,
Expansion and Co-Existence. The History o f Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1967 (London,
1968), pp. 581-2, 590-4.
2. See Zinner, (ed.), National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe,
pp. 207-8.
3. ibid., pp. 243 and 244.
410 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Communist dictatorship to one of Social Democracy had begun, as though
Poland stood on the road to freedom.1

Poland did indeed experience a period of freedom, though it was not to last
for long. The ‘revisionists’ had admittedly won the day; but their victory had
been incomplete. The Stalinists had merely been forced back, not put to flight.
The struggle between revisionists and Stalinists for power over party and
state had lost none of its intensity.
Gomulka was certainly able to reinforce his position against the Stalinist
faction over the course of the next two years. He held back, however, from the
full implications of revisionism. His main objective had been the reform of a
Stalinist economic policy. He had decentralized the state’s industrial appar-
atus, had abolished the compulsory collectivization of agriculture, had
dissolved a majority of collective farms (Kolchos) and had handed over the
land to the farmers to be privately worked.
He had also redefined the position of the Soviet Union in relation to
Poland. In line with the decision of the politbureau, he had visited Moscow
on 18 November, a month after the October revolution in Poland, in company
with President Zawadzki and the prime minister, Cyrankiewicz. Their discus-
sion with the Soviet government on Poland’s position within the alliance had
resulted in a declaration recognizing the principle of equality between the two
states and respect for their ‘territorial integrity, national independence and
sovereignty’; furthermore, the Soviet Union had given assurances that it
would not in future interfere in Poland’s internal affairs.
Gomulka, for his part, opposed any internal political reforms which could
have jeopardized the predominance of the Communist party. The logical
consequences of revisionism, which aimed at realizing intellectual and poli-
tical freedom, seemed, he feared, to threaten its position. He was convinced
that Socialism in Poland—a mainly agrarian country, whose farming com-
munities were dominated by the reactionary power of the Catholic church—
could only be achieved by the Communist party retaining its domination.
Within two years of the changes of October, at the eleventh plenary session of
the central committee in December 1958, he was defining ‘the fight against the
poison of revisionism’ as the party’s main task.12
On this slippery slope under Gomulka’s rule Poland slid more and more
deeply into a system of neo-Stalinism. The revisionist faction within the party
was gradually eliminated, party control over the workers’ movement was
intensified, the process of its democratization was ended, the country’s
intellectual life was shackled and finally even anti-Semitism came to be used

1. For this aspect of the October revolution, see Richard Hiscocks, Poland: Bridge for
the Abyss? An Interpretation o f Developments in Post-War Poland (Oxford, 1963).
2. See Halecki, ‘Poland’, in Kertesz (ed.), Eastern Central Europe and the World,
p. 56.
 Poland's October 411
as a weapon against revisionism. Gomulka did not even hold back from dis-
playing the lowest depths in tragic self-humiliation when, in August 1968,
Polish troops marched into the sovereign Socialist Republic of Czecho-
slovakia together with the Russian army to put down a movement which had
the support of the whole country, and which, like Poland under his own
leadership, had sought a road to Socialism independent of the Soviet Union.1
1. For an investigation of the neo-Stalinist reaction in Poland under Gomulka’s regime,
see Jacek Kurori and Karol Modzelewski, Monopolsozialismus. Offener Brief an die
Polnische Vereinigte Arbeiterpartei, edited by Helmut Wagner (Hamburg, 1969). The
authors of this analytical programmatic study were both lecturers at the university in
Warsaw and members of the Communist party who were arrested in November 1964, and,
in July 1965, sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for the ‘dissemination of material
dangerous to the state’. See also Adam Ciolkosz, ‘ “Anti-Zionism” in Polish Party Politics’,
in the Vienna Library Bulletin, 1968.
22 • The Tragedy o f the Hungarian
Revolution

In Hungary, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union, which had so profoundly shaken the intellectuals and workers as well
as the Communist party of Poland, evoked hardly a response. There was
nothing in the attitudes of the working class during the next seven months to
indicate an impending crisis, nor was there anything revealing a change of
policy in the attitude of the Communist party leadership.1
It is true that ‘a new course’ had been initiated several months after
Stalin’s death. But this had stemmed not from any decision by the leadership
of the Hungarian Communist party, but from direct orders given by the
central committee of the Soviet Communist party. It had sprung from a
realization that Hungary ‘stood on the brink of a catastrophe’ which could
drag down the Communist party with it. Matyas Rakosi, prime minister and
general secretary of the party, together with two of his closest colleagues,
Mihaly Farkas and Em5 Gero, as well as Imre Nagy, one of the most
respected members of the party central committee but who stood in opposi-
tion to Rakosi’s policies, were summoned to Moscow in June 1953. They were
told to undertake an immediate change of direction and to install Nagy as
prime minister.
Within a few days the party central committee met in Budapest and
appointed Nagy as prime minister in accordance with Moscow’s instructions.
He began in office on 4 July with a speech in parliament criticizing Rakosi’s
agricultural policies, condemning police terrorism under R&kosi’s regime and
announcing the closure of the concentration camps. Imprisonment in concen-
1. See Paul E. Zinner, Revolution in Hungary (New York and London, 1962), pp.
196-202. This book, on which this description of events is based, is a classic. For a detailed
bibliography of literature about the revolution, see ibid., pp. 364-70. For the documents of
the revolution, see Paul E. Zinner (ed.), National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern
Europe (New York, 1956). For a review of events, see Stephen D. Kertesz, Eastern Central
Europe and the World: Developments in the Post-Stalin Era (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1962),
pp. 120-55; see also Ference A. Vdli, Rift and Revolt in Hungary (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).
For a Communist version, see Herbert Aptheker, The Truth about Hungary (New York,
1957).
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 413
tration camps was genuinely stopped, political prisoners were released,
farmers were allowed to leave collectives and the production of consumer
goods was increased at the expense of heavy industry.
This was a course which Rakosi could hardly wish to see. He was deter-
mined to block it, and to destroy his rival. He still held Moscow’s trust and, as
general secretary, controlled the party. First he suppressed any reference in
the press to the central committee’s appointment of Nagy as prime minister
or to his reform programme, so as to ‘diminish the importance of the person
as well as the programme of the new prime minister through silence’.1 His
next move was to isolate Nagy in the party by reorganizing the politbureau
and surrounding him with enemies in the government. Emft Gerd became
minister of the interior to undermine Nagy’s internal reforms, and Andreas
Hegedus became minister of agriculture to do likewise for the agrarian reforms.
But what Rdkosi feared most was Nagy’s rehabilitation of those Communists
who, in 1949, had been sent to their deaths or placed in prison. For, as Zinner
remarks, should ‘the truth about K&dar, Kallai, Losonczy and Szakasits,
quite apart from Rajk, have been disclosed, his own fate would have been
sealed’.2
But Nagy, having been installed by Moscow, could only be deposed by
Moscow. So, in the autumn of 1954, Rdkosi went to Moscow and, master of
intrigue that he was, convinced the Soviet leaders that Nagy’s reforms would
endanger the foundation of the Communist regime. Nagy was thereupon
summoned to Moscow in January 1955 and informed that he no longer
enjoyed Russia’s trust. In February, Rakosi told the country that, owing to a
heart ailment, Nagy was no longer able to exercise his duties as prime
minister, and in the following month M. A. Suslov appeared as an envoy of
the Communist party of the Soviet Union to attend a meeting of the central
committee which passed a resolution condemning Nagy’s reforms as ‘oppor-
tunist deviation’. Six weeks later, on 18 April 1955, Nagy was dismissed as
prime minister. In justification of its decision the central committee’s resolu-
tion had explained that,
Com rade Im re Nagy, as a member o f the politbureau and chairm an o f the
Council of Ministers, represented political views which were in the strongest conflict
with the general policy o f the party and hostile to the interests o f the working class,
the w orking farm er and the people’s dem ocracy.. . . These anti-M arxist, anti-
Leninist attitudes of Com rade Nagy represent a comprehensive system.3

This was the end of the ‘new course’. Rdkosi was once again restored to
the possession of full power over party and state. He installed Hegedus as
prime minister, reorganized the politbureau anew, deprived Nagy of all party
1. See Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, p. 164.
2. ibid., p. 171. Janos Kid£r, minister of the interior, Gyula Killai, foreign minister,
Geza Losonczy, a member of the party’s central committee, and Arpdd Szakasits, its
president, had all been overthrown by Rdkosi in 1951, arrested and expelled from the party.
3. Quoted in ibid., p. 174.
 414 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
functions as member of both the politbureau and the central committee, and
finally, in November 1955, achieved his expulsion from the party. Nagy, who
had become a Bolshevik as a prisoner of war in Russia in 1918 before the
formation of the Communist party in Hungary, and who had served the
Communist movement faithfully over nearly four decades, ceased to be a
‘comrade’.1

Nagy’s overthrow, however, did nothing to shake the working class out of the
paralysing apathy by which it had been affected ever since the setting up of the
regime of terror. Not even in the ranks of the Communist party was there any
movement to oppose Rakosi’s return to power; until a few weeks before the
outbreak of the revolution, no organized opposition group existed within the
party or its leadership.
It was three years after the Twentieth Congress that the first signs of an
opposition to the regime became apparent, and then only in the intellectual
camp—among groups of writers and journalists, especially in the Petofi circle,
which was formed in March 1956.2 This was a Communist discussion club of
professional people—university professors, artists, writers and students. It
organized public debates on Marxist themes, in which the ruling regime was
also subjected to critical analysis in the light of Marxism. Thus, for example,
the Marxist philosopher, Gyorgy Lukacs, opened one such debate with a state-
ment on the ‘bankruptcy of Marxism in Hungary’.3 These debates attracted
many hundreds of listeners and its last, on 27 July, even many thousands.
On this occasion a discussion took place between old and young Communists
from seven o’clock in the evening until three o’clock the following morning
in what was already a mood of insurrection. Many speakers demanded press
freedom and Rakosi’s resignation and any who tried to defend the regime
were shouted down. The central committee at once issued an unambiguous
warning and the Petofi circle ceased its activities.
Yet short as its work had been, the criticisms of the regime aired in its
debates had undoubtedly set in motion a fermentation—but still only within
intellectual circles. The Petofi circle had no contact with the workers.
Rakosi remained as unruffled by the mood among the intellectuals as he
had been by the Twentieth Congress, at which he had been present as a
delegate of the Communist party of Hungary. After his return from Moscow
there was nothing in his attitude to imply any shaking of his confidence in the
Stalinist course to which he was committed. He acted as though nothing out
of the ordinary had occurred in Moscow or, at any event, nothing which
1. For an account of Nagy’s personality and political career, see Miklos Molnar and
Laszlo Nagy, Imre Nagy: Reformateur ou Revolutionnaire (Geneva, 1959).
2. Sandor Petofi, a famous Hungarian poet, whose freedom verses had incited Hun-
gary’s revolt against the Habsburgs in 1848; the choice of his name for the club showed its
tendencies.
3. See Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, p. 209.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 415
would make certain reforms of the regime in Hungary desirable. In his report
on the congress to the central committee, he made only a brief reference
to Khrushchev’s criticism of the system which had led to Stalin’s misdeeds,
and to which a generation of Communists in the Soviet Union had fallen
victims, for this might well have invoked criticisms of his own system for
suppressing opponents. So the burning question of rehabilitating innocently
sentenced Communists and Social Democrats, raised as a result of
Khrushchev’s criticism, was left untouched.

But the rehabilitation of Rdkosi’s victims of oppression was the question

which now ate into the body of the Communist party like a festering wound;
it had become a weapon for the anti-Stalinists to use within the party against
Rdkosi. He now appeared to be burdened with the murders of innumerable
comrades, and it was in particular upon the demand for the rehabilitation of
Rajk, who had come to stand for the victims of Rdkosi’s system of terror, that
the opposition within the party focused.
Rdkosi at length came to believe that he could disarm the opposition by
making a frank confession of his complicity in Rajk’s judicial murder. He
finally did so in May 1956 in a speech to a meeting of Budapest party stewards.
But he did not, as might have been expected, resign as a consequence.
Furthermore, in the same speech Rdkosi attacked the anti-Stalinists who were
striving for the liberalization of the regime. The class struggle, he declared,
was by no means ended, and so the party must not grow weak in the struggle
against the enemy. Instead of liberalization, a new wave of persecutions was
in the air. Rumours began to circulate in Budapest that Rdkosi was contem-
plating an increase of police terror and planning the arrest of several hundred
opponents, leading intellectuals among them. The situation had now become
intolerable. The conflict in the party organization between Stalinists and
anti-Stalinists threatened the leadership with collapse. But there was not an
organized force within the party which might have overthrown Rdkosi; the
opposition was disorganized and had no leaders.

It was in this atmosphere of tension that a change of scenario came about in

classic Moscow style. On 18 July 1956, when the central committee was
assembled in Budapest for a meeting, suddenly and unexpectedly there
appeared Anastas T. Mikoyan, a member of the presidium of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and deputy prime minister, to inform Rdkosi
that he was no longer general secretary of the party. Rdkosi, more than a
little surprised, protested and asked Khrushchev for an explanation over the
telephone. Khrushchev confirmed the decision of the Soviet leaders.1

1. About the motives for this decision, taken by the inner circle of Soviet leaders, it is
only possible to conjecture. The overthrow of Rdkosi, who had heaped abuse on Tito after
his break with Stalin, might be interpreted as a gesture of appeasement by Moscow towards
416 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Rakosi was now powerless. He offered his resignation to the central
committee, confessed his responsibility ‘for the errors which have seriously
damaged our Socialist development. . have reduced the attraction of our
party and hindered the development of Leninist standards in party life’. It
had, he admitted, also been his fault that the process of rehabilitating the
innocent victims of persecution had taken place so awkwardly and with so
many setbacks.1 With these words Rakosi departed from the Hungarian
political scene.
But what had taken place was simply a change of scenario, not of regime.
Moscow had picked Emo Gero to be Rakosi’s successor, and Ger6 was
R&kosi’s alter ego, like him an out-and-out Stalinist. Hegediis also remained
as prime minister. As concessions to the opposition, however, General Mihaly
Farkas, commander of the security police, having been responsible for brutal
infringements of ‘Socialist legality’, was demoted, expelled from the party and
later arrested; and Laszlo Rajk, General Gyorgy Palffy, Tibor Szonyi and
Andreas Szalai, all of them hanged in 1949, were rehabilitated by the central
committee on 3 October 1956. It also decided to re-bury the victims of the
terror at a state funeral, so that, the resolution declared, ‘we may pay our
final respects to these honourable fighters and revolutionaries. . . , comrades
who were sentenced and executed as a result of political processes in days
gone by’.2
The ceremony of reburial was set to take place on 6 October 1956. This
day was to be the prelude to the Hungarian revolution. For the first time since
the setting up of the Communist dictatorship, the people marched in the
streets in hundreds of thousands to demonstrate their objection to the regime.
‘The silent demonstration of hundreds of thousands of mourners,’ the central
organ of the party wrote on the following day, ‘represented a vow that we
shall not only remember the four dead leaders with clarity, but that we should
also remind ourselves of the dark workings of tyranny, of unlawfulness,
slander and the deceit of the people.’3

The political paralysis which had seized the country was at last dissolving.
The opposition dared to emerge into the open. On 17 October the Association
of Writers, a Communist trade union, demanded that a party congress should
be summoned to elect a new party leadership. ‘The unanimous condemnation
by the people of the crimes and the errors,’ the resolution declared, had
Yugoslavia. Khrushchev was at this time seeking a reconciliation; it might then follow that
the Soviet leaders, informed of the crisis within the Hungarian party, had decided to bring
about the necessary change of general secretary which the central committee was incompetent
to achieve as their solution to the crisis. For a discussion of this question, see Zinner,
Revolution in Hungary, pp. 215-17.
1. For the text of Rdkosi’s farewell speech, see Zinner (ed.), National Communism and
Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe, pp. 341-2.
2. For the text of the resolution, see ibid., p. 385.
3. Szabad Nep, 7 October 1956; for the wording, see ibid.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 417
'consequences which only a new and democratically elected party leadership
was capable of fulfilling’.1
A few days later news of events in Warsaw reached Hungary. This had an
intoxicating effect upon the students. ‘Meeting is followed by meeting in our
universities in Budapest, Pecs, Szeged,’ the party central organ reported on
23 October. ‘They meet in a passionate and stormy atmosphere, like a raging
river that is overflowing its banks.. . . They recall the tremendous excitement
in the Hungarian universities and among students immediately following the
liberation.’12
At a number of students’ meetings on 22 October it was agreed that on the
following day they should march to the Petofi monument in Budapest to
demonstrate the Hungarian people’s solidarity with the people of Poland. The
resolution accepted by these meetings had demanded that the party central
committee should assemble to take measures ‘to safeguard the development
of a Socialist democracy’; to summon Imre Nagy and other comrades who
had fought for Socialist democracy and for Leninist principles to lead the
party and government; to eject Rikosi from the party central committee and
to finish ‘current attempts to bring about a Stalinist and Rlkosi-ist restor-
ation’.3
These were most certainly not revolutionary demands; there had been
no talk of reforming the institution of dictatorship; nobody at that time was
thinking in terms of revolution. The party’s central organ, which printed the
resolution on the next day, stated:
. . . our student youth has m ade know n its political attitude before a wide public.
W e welcome the standpoint which student youth has taken. W e share their view th at
those w ho have sullied Socialist hum anism ought to be publicly judged. W e agree
with their view th a t the veteran fighters o f the labour movement should find a role in
leading the party and country. W e share their view th a t no room exists in th e party
leadership for those no t consistently willing to advance along the ro ad which the
Twentieth Congress . . . has described.4

The student demonstration began, as announced, on 23 October with a

rally before the Petofi monument. An actor recited one of Petofi’s poems that
had inspired the revolution of 1848: ‘Arise, Hungary, the Fatherland is
calling. Now or never!’ And this was followed by the oath: ‘We are no longer
willing to be slaves.’ Then the demonstration marched to Kossuth Square
before the parliament building; the square was filled with a huge crowd.5
‘The calm and orderly behaviour of the demonstrators was impressive,’

1. Trodalmi UJsag, 20 October 1956, quoted in Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, p. 229.

2. Szabad Nep, 23 October 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 232.
3. For the text of the resolution, see ibid., pp. 230-1.
4. Szabad Nep, 23 October 1956; for the complete text, see ibid., p. 393.
5. The numbers were estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000—Szabad Nep, 28
October 1956; see Zinner (ed.), National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe,
p. 425.
418 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Charles Coutts, an English Communist, reported back from Budapest to the
Daily Worker.1 The crowd then awaited a speech by Emo Gero, which had
been announced for eight o’clock in the evening.
In the meantime groups of students had marched to the radio building
and had asked that their resolution should be put out over the air. After
this request had been turned down and the crowd repeated its demand
more and more threateningly, detachments of the secret police, with fixed
bayonets, stormed from the building and opened up on the crowd with rifle
fire.
This act of violence was the spark which ignited the revolution. Through-
out the night Budapest echoed with small-arms fire in exchanges between
demonstrators and troops. In the early hours of the next morning, students
and workers stormed the radio building and the printing works and editorial
offices of the party paper, Szabad Nep, and besieged government buildings.
That night, in the panic which seized the party leadership, Ger6 called
upon the Soviet troops garrisoned near the capital for help.12 In the early
hours of 24 October the first Russian tanks rolled into Budapest.
The Communist party central committee assembled during the evening of
23 October and sat through to the early hours of 24 October. It decided to
declare martial law, to change the politbureau and to recall Imre Nagy as
prime minister.
On the next day, despite the enforcement of martial law, thousands of
demonstrators again assembled before the parliament building. Russian tanks
had taken up positions, but did nothing to disperse the crowds. Suddenly
Hungarian security police troops, who had occupied the roofs of surrounding
houses to protect the near-by party headquarters, opened fire on the crowds,
killing and wounding not only demonstrators, but also members of the tank
crews. The Russian troops returned fire, and in the panic also fired on the
crowds. The numbers of dead and wounded ran into hundreds.
The turmoil unleashed by the massacre in Budapest was phenomenal.
Workers left their places of work, set up barricades and armed themselves
with rifles, revolvers and ammunition taken from armament factories, and
even from the police and Hungarian troops themselves, who, led by Colonel

1. Quoted in Peter Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy (London, 1956), p. 44. This book is a
description of events during the revolution. Fryer, a member of the British Communist
party and for many years one of the editors of its daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, arrived
in Budapest, where he was sent by his paper, only during the last stages of the revolution.
His reports on earlier events were based on information from Hungarian Communists as
well as from Charles Coutts, who lived in Budapest at that time and edited the Communist
periodical, World Youth.
2. Up until the signing of the treaty with Austria on 15 May 1955, Russian troops had
remained in Hungary on the pretext of safeguarding the Soviet Union’s communications
with Austria, whose Eastern Zone they occupied. Subsequently, the Soviet Union derived
its right to station Russian troops on Hungarian soil from the terms of the Warsaw Pact of
14 May 1955.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 419
Pal Maleter, had joined the revolution. The rising, having begun as a pro-
test movement against the Stalinist regime in Hungary, now also became a
powerful protest movement against the presence of Soviet troops in the
country.
Meanwhile Mikoyan, accompanied by Mikhail A. Suslov, arrived in
Budapest from Moscow. They saw that to recall Nagy as prime minister was
not enough to silence the insurrection, and that a new party leader was
essential. Mikoyan had overthrown Rikosi four months before; now he
overthrew Ger6, whom the central committee had allowed to stay on as
general secretary while the politbureau was changed, and in his place put
Jdnos K&ddr. He had been one of the party leaders since its revival in 1945;
he had become minister of the interior in 1948 to succeed Rajk, but in 1951
had been deposed by Rdkosi as a potential rival, arrested, expelled from the
party and not rehabilitated until 1955.

The leadership of the revolution was now in the hands of Imre Nagy as prime
minister and Janos K&ddr as general secretary of the party.
Nagy, a professor of agriculture, possessed neither a revolutionary temper-
ament nor a leader’s strength of decision. He had criticized Rdkosi’s policies
of over-centralizing the economy and forcing through the collectivization of
agriculture, but he had never fought for power within the party; he had
proved incapable of attracting about him the opposition to Rakosi. In 1953,
he had been placed in power by the Soviet leaders, not by the revisionist
faction within the party and, after his overthrow in 1955, abandoned by
friends and comrades, he had withdrawn from active politics.
During the revolutionary ferment which gripped the masses in October
1956, he had come to represent a symbol for the ideas behind the freedom
movement although nothing was further from his intentions than to stand as
its figurehead. His name was on the lips of all those who had gathered in
front of the parliament building on 24 October but he resisted pressure from
his friends to seize the leadership of this leaderless movement. After m a k in g a
short address to the crowds calling out for him in front of the parliament
building, he went to the party secretariat, where the central committee was
assembled, and remained there until 26 October, the day after his nomination
as prime minister. Not even then did he feel himself to be the leader of the
revolution; it was a role that had been forced on him by events.
Meanwhile the revolution had spread from Budapest across the entire
country. Workers and students formed ‘revolutionary councils’, or, as in
Debrecen, ‘Socialist revolutionary councils’, and took over public offices.
With a few exceptions, this takeover of power occurred without any use of
force.
On 26 October the central committee, having sat in permanent session
since the 23rd, issued a proclamation. It announced the /mpending formation
420 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
of a new government on the ‘broadest national basis’ so as to regularize the
relationship between Hungary and the Soviet Union on the basis of indepen-
dence, complete equality and mutual non-interference, and promised ‘the
return of Soviet troops to their garrisons after order had been re-established’;
it also announced an amnesty ‘for all those who have taken part in armed
combat and who have laid down their arms by ten o’clock this evening’; but
for any who continued the fight, it threatened ‘destruction without mercy’.
Yet the clashes in Budapest were halted only two days later, after Nagy had
changed the government and had announced on the radio the dissolution of
the hated secret police and the cease-fire order to the troops. His speech, and
the announcement of the composition of the new government, which included
Gyorgy Lukacs, the Marxist philosopher, as well as Zolt&n Tildy, the former
leader of the Small Peasants’ party and president of the republic from 1946 to
1948, seemed to signal the victory of the revolution.

The decisive shift in the revolution occurred on 30 October. Over the radio
Nagy announced ‘the abrogation of the one-party system and the formation
of a government based on the democratic co-operation among the coalition
parties of 1945’. This was nothing less than the end of the rule of dictatorship
and the beginning of a rule of democracy. Moreover, he declared, the govern-
ment had decided to commence ‘negotiations with the Soviet government
about the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary’ and not from Budapest
alone. And he appealed to the Soviet Government, as a first step, to withdraw
Soviet troops from Budapest without delay.1
Nagy’s exciting announcement was followed on the radio by one no less
sensational from Kadar, which stated basically that the Communist party had
placed itself in liquidation. This colossal organization of 900,000 members
had in fact fallen into ruin during the initial impetus of the revolution. The
party, Kadar said, which had once ‘inspired our people and country with the
noble idealism of Socialism’, had ‘degenerated through the blind and criminal
policies of Rakosi’s Stalinist gang into an instrument of despotism and
national enslavement’. He announced that, ‘in accordance with the wishes of
many true patriots and Socialists who have fought against Rdkosi’s despot-
ism’, a new party would be formed to come into being on 1 November. This
would ‘once and for all purge itself of the crimes of the past’ and would
develop democracy and Socialism ‘not in slavish imitations of foreign
examples, but in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist teachings, free from Stalinism,
along a road which matches our country’s economic and historical character’.*
1. For the text of the declaration, see Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, pp. 453-4.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 464. The nominated party leaders were Jdnos Kadar, Imre Nagy,
Sandor Kopacsi, Geza Losonczy, Gyorgy Lukacs, Zoltan Szanto and Ference Donath.
Nagy, Donath, Kopacsi and Losonczy were arrested during the Soviet counter-revolution;
Nagy was executed and the others sentenced to between twelve and fifteen years’ hard
labour. Losonczy died in prison.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 421
The coalition government which Nagy had announced was formed on 1
November. It incorporated the Communist party, represented by Nagy,
Kid£r and Losonczy, the Social Democratic Party, represented by Anna
Kethly, Gyula Kelemen and Jozsef Fischer and representatives of the Small
Peasants’ party and the National Farmers’ party (which retitled itself the
Petofi party); one other member of the government was Colonel Pal Maleter,
who had joined the revolution together with the troops under his command,
to represent the revolutionary committees, which in the meantime had been
set up in towns and villages throughout the country.

The question overshadowing all others, even before the new government took
up office, was the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and the settling
of the legal relationship between Hungary and the Soviet Union. The political
revolution, soon after it began, had been transformed into a passionate
national revolution, inflamed by the massacre committed by the Russian
tank troops in Budapest on 24 October. Hungary’s national pride had revolted
against the predominance of Moscow in Hungary which had shown itself
with so much provocation in the streets of Budapest. The national indepen-
dence of Hungary, her separation from the Warsaw Pact and the declaration
of her neutrality had become the slogans of the revolution.
It appeared at first as though the Soviet government had recognized the
strength of the national current in the Hungarian revolution, and was seeking
a compromise solution of the conflict. Once again it sent Mikoyan and Suslov,
who had returned to Moscow on 26 October, to Budapest on the 30th,
declaring at the same time that, ‘in view of the fact that the presence of Soviet
military units in Hungary could serve as a pretext for any deterioration in the
situation, the military commandant has been ordered to withdraw the Soviet
military units from the city of Budapest as soon as this is considered to be
necessary by the Hungarian government’.
It went on to state that the Soviet government was prepared ‘to enter into
appropriate discussions with the government of the Hungarian People’s
Republic and the other members of the Warsaw Pact over the question of the
presence of Soviet troops in Hungarian territory’.1
On the 30th, Russian troops did, in fact, vacate the capital. But already on
the following day fresh Soviet armoured divisions, stationed in Romania,
were pouring back into the country to occupy airports and railway stations
and to take up strategic positions. On the morning of 1 November, Nagy
summoned the Soviet Ambassador, Y. V. Andropov, to his office—Mikoyan
and Suslov having returned to Moscow the previous night—to protest against
the Soviet troop movements, which were in breach of the Warsaw Pact. He
demanded an authoritative statement on whether the Soviet Union still stood
by its declaration of 30 October. Having referred the matter back to Moscow,
1. Pravda, 31 October 1956, quoted in ibid., p. 488.
422 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
the ambassador reassured Nagy that the Soviet Union considered its declara-
tion still to be in force and that it proposed to set up commissions to discuss
the Warsaw Pact and the military and technical questions concerning a
withdrawal from Hungary.
Thereupon Nagy called together nine leading personalities of the Com-
munist party, including Kdddr, Lukdcs and Szanto, to ask their advice over
Hungary’s future relations with the Soviet Union. Seven of them advocated
Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and the declaration of her
neutrality, though Lukacs and Szanto were undecided. The cabinet, meeting
afterwards, stated its solid support for the decision taken by the conference of
the Communist party leaders. Within a few hours, Nagy, in the presence of
members of the government, informed the Soviet Ambassador of their
decision and cabled it at once to the secretary general of the United Nations,
Dag Hammarskjold. He also asked that ‘the question of Hungary’s neutrality
and its defence by the four Great Powers’ should immediately be placed on
the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly.
In the night of 1 November the Soviet Ambassador visited Nagy with a
proposal by the Soviet government that he should withdraw the Hungarian
government’s appeal to the United Nations, and that thereupon Soviet troops
would be withdrawn from Hungary. Nagy accepted. On the next day he was
told by the Soviet Ambassador that the Soviet government had taken note of
Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and requested an early meeting
of the commission, which was to discuss the future relationship between the
two states, as well as of the technical and military commission.1
The Hungarian-Soviet commission for technical and military questions
met on 3 November in the Russian headquarters on Tokol, an island in the
Danube. After several hours, four members of the Hungarian delegation,
including the minister of defence, Colonel Pal Maleter, were arrested by the
chief of the Russian secret police, General Ivan Serov; they were never seen
again.

Unsuspectingly, Nagy remained through the night of 3 November in the

parliament building awaiting the return of his military delegation. Meanwhile
Russian troops had surrounded Budapest, and in the dawn of 4 November
they opened fire. By using the discussions as a stratagem, the Soviet govern-
ment had lulled the Hungarian government into a false sense of security.
Nothing had been done to prepare for defence, the Hungarian army had not
been placed on the alert, the nation had remained unwarned about the
immediate danger of military intervention. The Russian attack came as a
total surprise. At five o’clock on that morning the Hungarian nation was
startled by Nagy’s declaration over the wireless:
1. For a detailed description of Nagy’s negotiations with the Soviet Ambassador, see
Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, pp. 326-31 and 334-5.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 423
Today in the early hours o f the morning, Soviet troops have begun an attack on
the capital with the undoubted intention o f overthrow ing the legal dem ocratic
government o f Hungary. O ur troops are fighting. The government is at its post.

Yet within barely an hour of this declaration, Communist members of the

Nagy government, K idar among them, issued a statement transmitted by a
radio station in east Hungary—an area already occupied by Russian troops—
that they had in fact dissolved their connection with the government on 1
November, having realized that Nagy had fallen victim to reactionary
influences and that ‘our people’s republic, the strength of the workers and
peasants, and our social achievements are being threatened with destruction
by the growing strength of the counter-revolutionary threat’. They had there-
fore taken the initiative in forming a counter-government—a ‘Hungarian
revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government’. Then Kddar stepped up
to the microphone to announce the composition of the government he had
formed. He announced reforms and promised, with particular emphasis, that
‘workers who have taken part in these most recent events will under no
circumstances be persecuted’.1

There had been nothing in Kaddr’s behaviour on 1 November to indicate any

impending break-off of his loyalty to Nagy’s government which he had helped
to form. At the conference of the nine Communist leaders on 1 November, he
had advocated the denouncing of the Warsaw Pact and the declaration of
Hungary’s neutrality, and when the Soviet Ambassador had been informed of
this decision in the presence of the government, it was Kdddr who had told
him that he would, if necessary, ‘fight with rifle in hand’ against the Russians
in the streets.2 On the same day he had announced over the radio the setting
up of a new Communist party planned for 1 November, and had celebrated
the revolution, which ‘had overthrown the Rdkosi r6gime [and h a d ]. . . won
freedom for the people and independence for the country, without which there
can be no Socialism’.
In this broadcast Kadar had also given a warning of the dangers of a
counter-revolution.3 ‘The people’s revolt,’ he said, ‘had arrived at a cross-
roads. Should the democratic parties fail to show the necessary strength to
consolidate the achievements of the revolution, they will find themselves
facing a counter-revolution.’ But, he stated, ‘the blood of the youth of
1. Quoted in ibid., pp. 337-8. 2. See ibid., pp. 325 and 329.
3. The struggle against the dangers of a counter-revolution was in these days as much a
slogan for the Social Democrats as for the Communists. Anna Kethly, in an article on
re-establishing the Social Democratic party, had also written on 1 November in Nepszava,
the Social Democratic daily, appearing for the first time since its suppression in 1947: ‘The
Social Democratic party . . . has won potential life from a regime which termed itself a
people’s democracy, but which was no democracy either in form or appearance.. . .
Liberated from a prison, we need to watch that our country does not become another
prison in another colour, that the factories, mines and the land remain in the possession of
the people’—quoted in Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, pp. 74-5.
424 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Hungary, our soldiers, workers and peasants, has not been spilt to replace
Rikosi’s despotism with the rule of a counter-revolution. . . . We must,’ he
declaimed, ‘destroy the hiding-place of counter-revolution and reaction.. . .
We must ultimately safeguard our democratic society.’ And he appealed to
the ‘newly formed democratic parties to overcome the danger of the threaten-
ing counter-revolution and of foreign intervention by consolidating the
government’.
The ‘danger of foreign intervention’, to which Kdddr had referred, had
however been threatened only by the Soviet Union; the only way to ward it
off was by the withdrawal of Russian troops from Hungary. ‘The people,’
he said, ‘had proved by their spilt blood that they decisively support the
efforts of the government to achieve a total withdrawal of Soviet troops. We
have no wish,’ he declared, ‘to be dependent any longer. We do not wish our
country to become a battlefield.’1
This speech, as we have seen, was broadcast on 1 November, at ten o’clock
in the evening to be precise. After making it, Kadar mysteriously disappeared
from Budapest. He had fled, and only returned in the wake of the Russian
armoured divisions to head the counter-revolution.
The death struggle of the revolution lasted for four days. The guns of the
Soviet artillery laid Budapest in ruins.2 The numbers of dead and wounded
totalled thousands, and over 100,000 fled to Austria and Yugoslavia. Nagy
himself sought refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy. When he left it on 22
November, equipped with a letter of safe-conduct signed by Kiddr, he was
a rre ste d in th e stree t by the S oviet police and abducted to Romania. In
1958, with three of his fellow Communists, including Pal Maleter, he was
accused of high treason, sentenced to death by a secret court and executed.
The anonymous revolutionary fighters were dispersed and broken, many of
them being deported to Russia3 or imprisoned by Hungarian special courts.
It was not until an amnesty in March 1963 that about 3,000 political prisoners
were set free.

The Soviet action in Hungary had evoked the most profound concern
1. Quoted in Zinner, Revolution in Hungary, p. 364.
2. Peter Fryer, correspondent of the London Daily Worker, who left Budapest on
11 November, sent his paper the following eye-witness account: ‘Vast areas of the city,
above all the workers’ districts, are in ruins. Budapest has for four days and nights been
under continual bombardment. Dead lie in the streets—streets ploughed up by tanks and
sown with the ruins of a bloody w a r . . . . I saw this city, once so beautiful, shot to pieces,
destroyed and subjected to attrition. It was heart-breaking for one who loves the Soviet
Union as much as he does the Hungarian people’—Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, pp. 83 and
84. The report did not, of course, appear in the paper, and Fryer, who resigned as editor as a
consequence, was suspended from the British Communist party.
3. Gyorgy Lukacs had also been arrested as a member of the Nagy government, and
deported to Romania. The Communist party did not hesitate from excluding from its ranks
even this brilliant Marxist thinker. He was, however, allowed to return to Hungary after a
time, but it was only in 1962 that he was again accepted as a party member.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution 425
throughout the world; what had occurred seemed unbelievable. In deepest
peace a great power had suddenly overnight attacked by force of arms a
sovereign state, had overthrown its legal government and in a bloody fight
had cast down the masses who rose to defend their country. The General
Assembly of the United Nations, convened for an extraordinary meeting on
4 November, demanded that the Soviet Union should ‘cease immediately its
armed attack on the people of Hungary’.
The general council of the Socialist International, at its meeting in
Copenhagen on 30 November 1956, issued a resolution stating:
The Socialist International is following the events in Hungary with the deepest
sympathy for the Hungarian people. It is profoundly shocked by the suppression of
the freedom movement by the Russian military forces and full of admiration for the
continued resistance of the Hungarian workers.
In the name of freedom-loving Socialism, we solemnly protest against the
Russian war against the Hungarian people. The action of the Soviet government is a
brutal negation of the humanitarian and democratic principles of Socialism. . . .
The desire for freedom .. . must not be drowned in blood by Russian tanks.
The resolution demanded that the right of every nation to self-
determination should be recognized—‘a right which formerly was also
proclaimed by the Soviet Union’. And it demanded the immediate implemen-
tation of the resolution of the United Nations requesting the withdrawal of
Russian troops and the granting of access to U.N. observers.1
Communists now found themselves in a state of utter confusion. For how
were they to square Soviet action with fundamental Socialist principles—‘the
elementary principle,’ as Lenin said, ‘to which Marx was always true, namely,
that no nation can be free which suppresses other nations’ ? The Soviet action
was all the more confusing as only a few days before these events, the Soviet
government had itself proclaimed anew the principle of the equality of all
Socialist nations.
Five days before invading Hungary, in its declaration of 30 October, the
Soviet government had, in fact, stated its willingness to withdraw its forces
from Hungary and had laid down the principles which it regarded as forming
the basis for relations between Socialist countries:
The countries in the broad community of Socialist countries, united by common
ideals to construct a Socialist society and by the principles of proletarian inter-
nationalism, can only set up their mutual relationship on a basis of complete
equality, respect of territorial integrity, national independence and sovereignty and
mutual non-interference in internal affairs.2
1. For the text of the resolution, see Socialist International Information, vol. vi, 10
December 1956. The general council had also elected a delegation to examine the situation
in Hungary on the spot, ‘so as to speak, as the representatives of twelve million democratic
Socialists, with the Hungarian workers’. The Hungarian government, however, refused
entry to the delegation of the International, as well as to the commission set up by the
United Nations.
2. Pravda, 31 October 1956. For the text of the declaration, see Zinner (ed.), National
Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe, pp. 485-9,
426 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Without doubt Hungary was for the Communists a Socialist country.
How then was an action of the Soviet government against a Socialist country
to be morally justified, an action which was no different from the naked use
of force employed by imperialist governments and which, above all, so
blatantly transgressed against the sacred principles which they had themselves
proclaimed?
Moscow’s propaganda resolved any contradiction between principles and
the action of the Soviet government by the well-tried method of ‘dialectics’,
by which they had, for example, condemned Britain’s war with Germany as
an imperialist war of capitalistic high finance and then, the moment Hitler
attacked the Soviet Union, by the magic of dialectics had transformed it into
a people’s war of independence. In the same way they explained the Soviet
Union’s war against Hungary as an act of Socialist solidarity, intended to
save a Socialist country from the seizure of power by a counter-revolutionary
reaction.1
From the very beginning Moscow had in fact denounced the revolution
in Hungary as a ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracy’. The rising of the people
after the demonstrations in front of the parliament building on 24 October,
which had been broken up by fire from the Russian tanks, had, wrote
Pravda, been ‘provoked by the British and American imperialists’—it was an
‘adventure aimed against the people’, but one which had ‘collapsed’.*
The central organ of the Hungarian Communist party, however, at once
rejected this concept as an ‘error’. ‘What has occurred in Budapest,’ wrote
Szabad Nep, ‘was neither aimed against the people nor was it an adventure.
Above all, it did not collapse.. . . What collapsed was the rule of the Rakosi
gang. . . . We may state with certitude that the accusations by Pravda that
the revolt was incited by British and American imperialists has deeply
offended and insulted the million and a half inhabitants of Budapest.’ It
was not imperialist intrigues, said Szabad Nep, which had unleashed this
‘bloody, tragic but enlightening struggle’, but ‘the errors and crimes’ of
those Hungarian leaders who had been overthrown by the insurrection,12
1. This was the version of events which came to be accepted by all Communist parties.
Thus, for example, the Communist party of Italy, the largest Communist party outside the
Soviet bloc, declared: ‘It is essential to decide either to defend the Socialist revolution or to
support the white counter-revolution—the old, Fascist and reactionary H ungary.. . . No
third camp exists’—L'Unitd, 25 October 1956, quoted in Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 82.
2. Pravda, 28 October 1956. For the text of this article, see Zinner (ed.), National
Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe, pp. 435-40. The Soviet delegate, V.
Kuznetsov, declared to the General Assembly of the United Nations on 13 November that
the uprising in Hungary, led by Fascists, had been a ‘bloodthirsty orgy’ organized by
counter-revolutionary forces. The Communist press surpassed itself with descriptions of the
murders of Communists under the rule of a ‘white terror’. Fryer confirms that in Budapest
several members of the dreaded and hated secret police were lynched. In this act of venge-
ance, he remarked, some Communists may also have fallen victim. But he denies emphatic-
ally that such murders had amounted to a mass symptom under the ‘rule of a white terror’—
Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, pp. 79-81.
 The Tragedy o f the Hungarian Revolution A ll

and above all by their failure to safeguard ‘the sacred flame of national
independence’.1
‘By no means can we agree with those,’ Szabad Nep had written on the
previous day, ‘who characterize the events of the last few days as counter-
revolutionary attempts at a coup d'etat. The movement began with a demon-
stration by the student youth expressing a deep-seated emotion, a noble and
glowing passion, shared by the entire nation. . . .’ From this movement, ‘a
great national democracy has developed in our country, embracing all the
people and welding them together, a movement that was forced underground
by past tyranny but which, touched by the first breath of freedom, has begun
to burn in high flames’.2
How could the statement by Moscow by which it had tried to justify the
Russian invasion of Hungary—that the revolution had been a ‘counter-
revolutionary conspiracy’—be reconciled to the fact that at its head had
stood the senior and most prominent of Hungarian Communists—Imre
Nagy, Zoltdn Szanto, Gyorgy Lukdcs—and that it had been the works
councils in the factories which had organized the working class to oppose
the Russian invasion?
If the Soviet intervention really was necessary to p u t down a counter-revolution
[Fryer w rote on 11 N ovem ber in his report to the D aily W orker], then how can it be
explained th at it was in the workers’ districts o f Ojpest to the n o rth o f Budapest and
C sep elto th e south—both Com m unist strongholds—th at Soviet troops encountered
the strongest resistance? O r how is it to be explained why the workers in the famous
steel tow n of Stalinvaros declared th at they would defend their Socialist town— built
with their own hands—against the Soviet invasion?

‘I saw for myself,’ Fryer described his own experience of the invasion,
‘how the Soviet troops, thrown into battle against the “counter-revolution” ,
fought not Fascists or reactionaries, but the people of Hungary: workers,
peasants, students and soldiers.’3
That the revolution had genuinely been a people’s movement against the
tyrannical rule of R&kosi’s regime can be denied as little as the fact that it
was the proletarian masses who were defending the liberty won in the
revolution against Russian troops.

The question must now be examined why the Soviet Union should have
undertaken such an action which discredited it throughout the world and
shook the faith of innumerable Communists who fervently considered it to
be a Socialist, anti-imperialist power. Initially, it seemed, the Soviet Union
had hesitated. There are no indications that the Soviet government planned
any military action before 30 October. Its declaration of that date showed
1. Szabad Nep, 29 October 1956. For the text of the article, see Zinner (ed.), National
Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe, pp. 449-51.
2. Szabad Nep, 28 October 1956. For the text, see ibid., p. 425.
3. Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, pp. 78-9.
428 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
its readiness to solve the question of the Russian troops in Hungary by
negotiations with the Hungarian government.
But the same day, Nagy had announced the transformation of the
Communist regime into a democracy by the repeal of the one-party system
on which it had been based. In this act Moscow saw a threat to the cohesion
of the Soviet bloc, since the guarantee of its unity remained the power
position in the bloc’s member states of Communist parties loyal to the
Soviet Union. It was not to be expected that Hungary would feel itself
linked to the Soviet Union by any special loyalty under a democratic regime.
For Hungary, moreover—which was under no threat from any of its
neighbouring states—the most effective guarantee of its security was obviously
its position as a neutral state, and not an alliance with Russia, which carried
the risk of Hungary becoming once again, as Kiddr said, ‘a battlefield’ in a
war between East and West. For these reasons, Kad&r himself, at the con-
ference of Communist leaders on 1 November as well as afterwards in the
discussion with the Soviet Ambassador, had supported a declaration of
Hungarian neutrality.1
The Soviet government apparently decided for military action only after
30 October when Nagy had announced the changing of the Communist
dictatorship into a democracy, and Russia became convinced that Hungary
would, under a democratic regime, leave the Soviet bloc. Thus when on
1 November Nagy did indeed renounce the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet govern-
ment began to move the Soviet army against Hungary.

The action of the Soviet Union against Hungary provides a classic example
of imperialist power policy—the subjection by military force of a small,
helpless country to the predominance of a great power, and the safeguarding
of this predominance by an imposed government. But it also provides a
classic example of a reactionary counter-revolution—the overthrow of a
government brought to power by a revolution and the destruction of the
liberty which the revolution had won.
The Soviet action, like the Hitler-Stalin pact, proved a watershed in the
history of the Communist movement. Under its ideological pretence, the
Soviet invasion had been presented as an episode in the world-wide struggle
between the forces of Socialism and capitalism, and many Communists
salved the resulting conflict of conscience with this interpretation. But for
many others the Soviet action seemed to be what it really was—a brutal
violation of a fundamental principle of Socialism—and they parted from a
movement which, in the service of the great-power interests of the Soviet
Union, had betrayed its ideals.
1. What actually took place when K4d4r disappeared from Budapest after his radio
speech, to return at the head of a Russian-nominated government in the wake of the invading
Soviet troops, is a carefully guarded official secret, though the inferences of the event are
obvious.
23 • T h e Spring o f Prague’

The ‘Spring of Prague’—the revolution which took place in Czechoslovakia

in the spring of 1968—is among the most momentous events in the history
of the Communist movement. A Communist party in full possession of state
power had revoked the Communist system of government and had decided
to change the institutions of society, on which rested the dictatorship of the
party, and to create a ‘new model of Socialist democracy’.
The action of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia in the spring of
1968 had not, like those of the Communist parties in Yugoslavia and
Hungary, stemmed from a revolt against Moscow’s predominance; the
friendly relationship between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union was not
in question at the time of these events. The action was the first attempt by a
ruling Communist party, undertaken with a full awareness of its significance
—and it was this awareness which gave it its historical importance—to
realize, by changing the political structure of the Communist state, the
idea of freedom and the self-determination of the people in a Socialist
society.
This action did not contradict Lenin’s concept of the struggle for Socialism.
He had proclaimed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (as the dictatorship of
the Communist party was euphemistically termed) as the proletarian type of
regime for the period of transition from the capitalist to a Socialist order of
society—a type of regime which, he assumed, would ‘die away’ after the
resistance of the capitalist classes to the construction of Socialism was
broken.1
The Czech Communists had now felt that it was this stage of development
which had been reached in their country. The material foundation for a
Socialist order of society had been laid, the means of production had become
common property and the resistance of the capitalist classes to Socialist
change had indeed been broken. ‘Since the end of the 1950s,’ the ‘Action
1. V. I. Lenin, Staat und Revolution: Ausgewdhlte fVerke (Moscow, 1947), vol. n,
pp. 225-7.
430 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Programme of the Party’ explained in justifying the reforms that were
destined to transform the regime of dictatorship into a Socialist democracy,
‘our society has entered upon a new stage of development.. . . The charac-
teristic of the present stage is that already there no longer exists any antag-
onism between classes’; and that the ‘dictatorship of the working class has
[in our country] fulfilled its most important historical mission’.1
And thus there grew among the Czech Communists the perception that
the system of dictatorship, resting on the principle of the denial of freedom
of autonomy, had turned into fetters hindering the development of Socialism,
because Socialism means, in Marx’s interpretation, the realization of the
highest degree of individual freedom and of the people’s autonomy. They
now began to seek the means to overcome the system of dictatorship by a
system of Socialist democracy.

The dictatorship of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had, as soon as

it was established in February 1948 by a coup d'etat,2 degenerated under
Klement Gottwald’s rule into a soulless, bureaucratic despotism; under
Antonin Novotny (1904-1975), Gottwald’s successor as the party’s general
secretary after his death in 1953 who four years later became president of the
republic, it had stultified into barrenness.
The impetus for the spiritual revolt against the system, as in Poland and
Hungary, came from the Communist intellectuals, who awoke within the
party a consciousness of the contradiction between the ideals of Socialism
and the reality of the dictatorial regime. Thus Eduard Goldstiicker, professor
of German literature (and later Rector) at the Karlova University in Prague,
who began the process of criticizing the regime, wrote in 1963: ‘If the history
of our time has shown something beyond any shadow of doubt, it is the
misfortune of believing that a new, higher, social order may be reached
without humanity or justice, and that while great human achievements may
1. See K. Paul Hensel, et al., Die sozialistische M arktwirtschaft in der Tschechoslowakei
(Stuttgart, 1968), pp. 289 and 300. The ‘Action Programme of the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia’, which carried the sub-title ‘The Czechoslovakian Road to Socialism’, had
been decided by a plenary session of the central committee on 5 April 1968. This comprehen-
sive document, which will be examined in the pages which follow, appeared as a supplement
to the party’s central organ, Rude Pravo, on 8 April 1968. For the full text, see Hensel et al.,
pp. 286-337. For the most detailed description of the events, on which this presentation has
been based, see Harry Schwartz, Prague's 200 days. The Struggle fo r Democracy in Czecho-
slovakia (London, 1969); see also Philip Windsor and Adam Roberts, Czechoslovakia 1968.
Reform, Repression and Resistance (London, 1969); Robert Rhodes James (ed.), The
Czechoslovak Crisis 1968 (London, 1969); Z. A. B. Zeman, Prague Spring. A Report on
Czechoslovakia (London, 1969); Wolfgang Horlacher, Zwischen Prag und Moskau (Stutt-
gart, 1968); and Robin Alison Remington (ed.), Winter in Prague. Documents on Czecho-
slovak Communism in Crisis (London, 1969).
2. See page 178.
 'The Spring o f Prague' 431
be represented in theory, they can in practice be trampled on.’1 It was with
this appeal to the party to make a personal appraisal of its destiny that the
struggle for a ‘Socialism with a human face’ began.
But under Antonin Novotny’s rule no basic reforms were to be expected.
It was true that, following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party
of the Soviet Union, the severity of the regime in Czechoslovakia had
gradually been eased, and in 1960 many political prisoners were released by
amnesty. But none of the regime’s institutions had been ‘de-Stalinized’.
Novotny had risen to power under the Stalinist system and he had reinforced
it by infiltrating the party machine with his trusted followers. He feared
reforms, not simply because they conflicted with his concept of the road to
Socialism, but also because they threatened his position in power. The path
to reforms could only be opened by a complete change of leadership—from
the top right down to the local organizations. The fight for reforms began
with a bid by the reformists to liberate the party from its Stalinist leadership.
The reformists began their fight against the party leadership by demanding
the rehabilitation of the innocent victims of Gottwald’s and Novotny’s reign
of terror. Seventy thousand Communists and non-Communists considered to
be non-conformist by the regime had been imprisoned, and eleven Com-
munists occupying the most eminent positions in party and state—including
Rudolf Slansky, general secretary of the party and deputy prime minister,
and Vladimir dementis, leader of the Communist party of Slovakia and
foreign secretary—had been sentenced to death at a show trial in November
1952 as ‘Trotskyist, Titoist and Zionist conspirators’ and hanged.12 In the
same year, fifteen writers were given sentences totalling 220 years.
While the regime persecuted suspected Czech Communists on the charge
of ‘Trotskyist and Titoist deviation’, it persecuted suspected Slovak Com-
munists who demanded national autonomy for their country for ‘bourgeois
nationalist deviations’. Among the numerous victims of these persecutions
by Gottwald and Novotny had been the Slovak leaders, among them
Clementis, executed in 1952 following the Sl&nsky trial, Gustav Husak and
Ladislav Novomcsky, both sentenced during a show trial in 1954 to life
imprisonment, and only released by the 1960 amnesty but not rehabilitated
until 1963.
In the eyes of Slovak Communists, Clementis, Husak and Novomcsky
were national martyrs, while Novotny, who had unleashed the wave of
persecution against the Slovaks in 1952, was the arch-enemy of their national

1. Literdrni Noviny, February 1963, quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, p. 20.
Goldstucker, one of the most outstanding leaders of the revolt of the intellectuals, was
sentenced to life imprisonment in 1954 and pardoned in 1960.
2. For the history of this monstrous trial, see Eugen Lobl and Dusan Pokorny, Die
Revolution rehabilitiert ihre Kinder. Hinter den Kulissen des Slartsky-Prozesses (Vienna,
1969). L6bl, deputy minister of foreign trade, had been arrested in 1949 and was only
amnestied in 1960. He had been one of the defendants in the Slansky trial.
 432 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
aspirations. They urged the rehabilitation of the victims of these persecutions,
not only out of an injured sense of justice, but also as a tactical device in
their struggle against Novotny and his regime.
Under the pressure of this movement, a commission of investigation into
the political trials of the 1950s was set up by the Twelfth Congress of the
Communist party of Czechoslovakia at the request of the Slovak Communists,
supported by the Czech reformists. Novotny sacrificed as scapegoats three of
the most hated representatives of the rule of terror: the minister of police,
Karol Bacilek, the President of the High Court, Josef Urvalek, who as
attorney-general in the Stensky trial had asked for the death sentence to be
passed on the eleven accused, and the prime minister, Villiam Siroky, who,
although a Slovak, had been responsible for the proceedings against the
Slovakian leaders. Bacilek was dismissed as minister of police and expelled
from the presidium of the party, Urvalek was relieved of his post and in
September 1963 Siroky was dismissed as prime minister.
With Bacilek’s overthrow began the rise of Alexander Dubdek, who, five
years later, was to be carried to power by a revolutionary upsurge. Bacilek
had at the same time been general secretary of the Communist party of
Slovakia as well as its representative in the presidium of the central organi-
zation of the Czechoslovak party. In April 1963 a congress of the Slovak
party relieved him of both functions and elected Alexander DubSek, one of
a group of younger local party leaders who were unsullied by the regime’s
Stalinist misdeeds, to be his successor.

Following their success at the Twelfth Congress on the issue of rehabilitation,

the reformists took as target for their criticism the stagnation of economic
life which had set in at the beginning of the 1960s and made fundamental
reforms of the economic system their immediate objective. A severe economic
crisis in 1963 had shown the inefficiency of the centralized planned economy
which had been set up on the pattern of the Soviet Union. It had become, as
the Czech Marxist economist Ota Sik, director of the Economic Institute in
the Academy of Science, had shown in his analysis, an obstacle to economic
growth. He developed a programme for the reorganization of the economy
through comprehensive decentralization, based on the autonomy of manage-
ment and workers’ participation.1
This programme, which was discussed within the party for a year and a
half (though not published until October 1964) was approved finally in
January 1965 by the central committee and placed before the Thirteenth
Congress for approval in June 1966. But the programme for economic
reforms also had political significance. ‘It represented,’ Ota Sik said in his
1. The most thorough documentary examination of the programme for economic
reforms may be found in Hensel, The Social M arket Economy in Czechoslovakia; see also
J. F. Brown, The New East Europe (London, 1966), pp. 96-100.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 433

speech to the congress, ‘a large step along the road to democratizing our
society.’ This was, however, only a beginning: ‘The whole problem of
democratizing the party’s internal relations’ had to be thoroughly studied,
and it was necessary to prepare true institutional and constitutional changes
throughout the whole political sphere and administration’.1
The Stalinist wing of the party, still in control of the central committee,
watered down the programme and, when it was finally accepted by the
congress, its execution was delayed and sabotaged. Novotny was determined
to prevent any weakening of the government’s authority that could result
from democratic reforms. A new press law, which came into force on
1 January 1967, was intended once again to tighten up the shackles on the
press, which had been relaxed somewhat since 1963. By this new law, the
press was placed under direct control of the Ministry of Culture, the right to
edit papers was granted only to organizations, not to individuals; and the
ministry could refuse to register a paper or periodical (and without registration
they could not appear legally) unless they guaranteed to ‘fulfil their social
mission’. For the first time in the history of the Czechoslovak Republic, the
press became subjected to pre-censorship and its attitudes prescribed by
ideological and political ‘guide-lines’ laid down by the Communist party.
The press law provoked a revolt among writers and journalists; it broke
out at the congress of the Union of the Czechoslovak Writers which met at
the end of June 1967. The congress became, in effect, a court of justice for
airing charges against a political regime that was crippling the nation’s
intellectual life and degrading its writers and journalists to the status of party
hacks.
The key-note was struck by the opening speech given by Milan Kundara,
a member of the presidium of the union. ‘The period between the two world
wars,’ he said, ‘was a period of the greatest flowering in the history of Czech
civilization.’ Its development was interrupted by the Nazi occupation and
later by Stalinism, and these had, he explained, ‘isolated our country from
the outside world and reduced our literature to naked propaganda’. This,
he said, was ‘a tragedy which threatens the Czech nation with removal to the
farthest limits of European civilization’.
Under the prevailing system, the Czech novelist Ludvik Vaculik, who was
also a veteran Communist party member, explained in another speech, fear
penetrated all the pores of society. ‘We have fallen,’ he said, ‘into political
indifference and a state of resignation, worrying over petty details and
dependent upon petty authorities, into a slavery of a new and unusual
k in d .. . . ’
I do not believe [he said], that independent citizens can exist in our country. . . .
I do not myself feel safe as a citizen. I see no guarantees for my safety__ But do the
authorities, the government and its members, themselves hold guarantees for their
1. Rude Pravo, 5 June 1966, quoted in Janies, (ed.), The Czechoslovak Crisis, p. 6.
434 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
personal safety, and without which creative work, including that of politics, remains
impossible ? Our society faces the bankruptcy of its expectations and hopes. Through-
out these twenty years [of the Communist regime] no single human problem has
been solved in our country—neither that of fulfilling such basic necessities as
apartments, schools and economic prosperity, nor that of satisfying life’s cultural
requirements, and which no undemocratic system can satisfy: a full sense of social
values, and the subordination of political decisions to ethical criteria.

The resolution of the congress protested against the introduction of

censorship as well as the party’s influence over literature and the press. In a
concluding address, the chairman, Jan Prochazka, a deputy member of the
party’s central committee, stated his agreement with the criticisms that had
been voiced by various speakers and with ‘all who fight oppression, per-
secution and the venom of anti-Semitism’.

The question of anti-Semitism, raised during the congress, had become urgent
in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. When
the war began, the Czechoslovak government had broken off diplomatic
relations with Israel, as had the Soviet Union, and, like the Soviet Union, had
condemned Israel as the aggressor, while Communist propaganda, with anti-
Semitic undertones, had identified Zionism with Nazism. But this political
line had turned out to be in marked contrast to the enthusiasm with which
Israel’s victory over its enemies, many times its superior in manpower and
armaments, was greeted by many Czechs. In his speech to the congress,
which met a few days after the war, the playwright Pavel Kohout, who had
formerly been the party’s most effective propagandist but who had developed
into a rebel, had defended Israel’s ‘right to fire the first shot’, even, he said,
as it had been Czechoslovakia’s right in 1938 to defend itself against the
threatened Nazi invasion by a strategy appropriate to the situation. Also, as
a Communist, he could not forget Israel’s achievements. ‘In Israel,’ he said,
‘they have transformed the desert into a garden-----Almost the entire system
of agriculture is organized along Socialist and Communist lines.’1
Israel’s victory also proved to be Novotny’s defeat. His regime had
supplied Egypt with Czech arms and, after their defeat, he promised the
Arab states full support in rearming. Also, as general secretary of the party,
he had led the anti-Israel propaganda campaign.
The criticisms of his anti-Israel policies at the writers’ congress irritated
Novotny considerably as it placed the odium of anti-Semitism on his
shoulders. This was sensationally amplified by an unusual act taken by one
of Czechoslovakia’s most popular writers, Ladislav Mnacko, who had been
decorated with the highest literary medal and whose books enjoyed sales of
over a million copies. Shortly after the congress he travelled to Israel so as
1. For extracts from the speeches at the congress, see Zeman, Prague Spring, pp. 56-65;
Schwartz, Prague’s 200 Days, pp. 42-8.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague' 435
to protest, he said, in a broadcast which was transmitted to Czechoslovakia
over foreign radio stations, against the Czech government’s policy, for, he
said, ‘in Czechoslovakia one is prevented from speaking about the crisis in
the Near East’. It had become impossible for him, he continued, ‘even by
silence to support a policy which could lead to the extermination of an entire
nation and the destruction of a complete state. . . .’ For an explanation of
this policy, which he found incomprehensible, he referred to the wave of anti-
Semitism which had swept the country after the Slansky trial, and against
which so far no action had been taken. ‘But if,’ he said, ‘we wish to remain a
healthy, Socialist humanitarian country, the system in Czechoslovakia has to
be completely changed.’1

Novotny reacted to the writers’ criticisms with suppressive measures. A few

days after the congress the young novelist Jan Benes, who had been held in
detention since September 1966, was sentenced to five years’ hard labour,
and Pavel Tigrid, the editor of a Czech periodical in Paris, was sentenced
in absentia to fifteen years’ hard labour for ‘mutinous activity and espionage’.
Vaculik and two other writers who had criticized the regime at the congress
were expelled from the party; Prochazka was expelled from the central
committee; and the Union of Writers was deprived of its organ, Literarni
Noviny, the reason being given that it had become a ‘platform for dissemi-
nating liberal tendencies’ and ‘political opposition’; the periodical was placed
under the control of the Ministry of Culture. Mnacko was stripped of his
literary decoration, deprived of his Czech nationality and expelled from the
party. And in a speech at the beginning of September Novotny issued a
warning to the rebel intellectuals; the party, he said, had until now tolerated
differences of opinions. But democracy and freedom had their limits. The
Communist party ruled the country and was determined to assert itself by
any means necessary. It was not, of course, a warning meant to win him the
trust of the intellectuals.

It would perhaps have been possible for Novotny to ignore the criticism of the
intellectuals had it not become obvious that he had simultaneously lost the
trust of the wide circles within the party—above all, that of the Slovak
Communists. The crisis in the party leadership came into the open on 30
October 1967 at a conference of 110 members and forty-six candidates of the
central committee, summoned to discuss the ‘position and role of the party
during the present stage of the Socialist society’.
The campaign against Novotny’s regime was opened by Dubcek. He
demanded changes in the party structure, a transition to new methods and,
above all, a change in its relationship to the state: the separation of the
party from the state, and especially of the function of party general secretary
1. Quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, p. 50.
436 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
from that of the president of the republic. With this latter demand Dubcek
placed on the agenda the resignation of President Novotny as general secretary
of the party.
Novotny was taken by surprise by this turn of events, and to gain time to
organize a counter-attack, his supporters pressed for a postponement of the
conference before it could take any decisions. But the subsequent conference
of the central committee, assembled on 19 December, was also unable to
reach any decisions. The presidium was prevented from laying before it a
resolution concerning the general secretary, since no majority could be found
to support any of its proposals. This question revealed it as being split down
the middle; the party leadership was paralysed. During a three-day debate,
the pent-up hatred, accumulated over the years, discharged itself in bitter
criticism of the presidium. Ota Sik openly declared its bankruptcy, pointing
to the catastrophic economic situation in the country and the urgent need
for drastic action to avert a crisis. He demanded not only the election of a
new presidium, but also forms of democracy within the party which would
uproot Stalinism: an end to the ban on organized opposition groups within
the party and their legalization.
Novotny defended himself to the best of his ability. He pleaded guilty to
certain errors and promised that concessions would be made to meet the
desires of the Slovaks. But the course which the debate took made it clear
that his overthrow was imminent. To prevent any decision being taken in this
climate, Novotny’s supporters forced a further postponement until the
beginning of January.1
The conference curtailment was followed by an intensive round of
meetings of Novotny’s opponents. His supporters, on the other hand, were
trying to gain not only the support of party officials, but also that of the
Soviet Ambassador in Prague, Stepan Czervonenko, whom they tried to
convince that any liberal regime following Novotny’s overthrow would be to
the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. And rumours were circulated that the
Soviet Union would intervene should the party go over to a ‘revisionist
course’. At the same time, the head of the security department on the central
committee, Miroslav Mamula, mobilized the army. On his instructions,
Major-General Jan Sejna canvassed senior army officers for declarations of
loyalty to Novotny and prepared a military insurrection. Dub5ek, informed
of this threat by General Vaclav Prchlik, revealed the plans for an army
insurrection at a meeting of the presidium. Novotny protested that he had no
knowledge of them and issued orders to stop the uprising.2
This was the last phase in the power struggle between the conservative and
revolutionary forces in the party. On 5 January 1968, the Czech broadcasting
service announced the resignation of Antonin Novotny as general secretary
of the Communist party and Alexander Dubdek’s election as his successor.
1. See ibid., pp. 58-9 and 63-6. 2. See ibid., pp. 66-7 and 105-6.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 437

The fall of Novotny, which ended nearly fifteen years of his control over
party and state, happened at a meeting of the central committee, on 3 January.
With Novotny the old, Stalinist regime had also gone down. The way was
now open to the reform and regeneration of Communism.

Alexander Dubdek (b. 1921), whose leadership was expected to bring about
the needed reforms, conceived them as a means of realizing true Marxist-
Leninist principles, which ought, in his opinion, to guide the party in the
construction of Socialism but which had become distorted under Novotna’s
regime. Thus, in the first statement issued after his election as general
secretary, Dubcek reaffirmed his belief in Lenin’s fundamental principles, as
well as his ‘loyalty to Marxism-Leninism’.1
The social and party reforms which he sought to achieve were certainly
in the spirit of Marxism, though they were not compatible with the Leninist
concept of the Communist party’s role in state and society, at least not as it
had developed under Stalin to become the tradition of Soviet Communism.
The issue of the ‘Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslo-
vakia’ provided a blueprint for reform devised by Ota Sik, Pavel Auersperg
and Radovan Richta, with Dubdek’s co-operation. The ideas it contained
had been discussed at numerous party meetings and in articles in the party
press, and it was finally accepted as the official programme on 5 April 1968
at a plenary session of the central committee.
The Action Programme rejected the doctrine of the leading role of the
party in state and society as it had prevailed until now and reinterpreted it
in a new spirit. ‘The leading role’ of the Communist party had in the past, it
declared, often been ‘understood as a monopoly, as a concentration of power
in the hands of the party organization. This has stemmed from the false
doctrine that the party is the instrument for the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat.’
This damaging concept [it stated] has weakened the initiative and responsibility o f
national and social institutions, damaged the party’s authority and m ade it impossible
fo r it to fulfil its own functions.
The aim o f the party is no t to become an overall ‘adm inistrator’ o f society,
binding all organizations and every step in life by its directives.2

The party should of course endeavour to maintain the leading role in

state and society which it possessed—though not through the force of
dictatorship, but through the ‘people’s voluntary support’. ‘It cannot realize
its leading role by dominating society,’ the programme explained, ‘but only
1. Quoted in James (ed.), The Czechoslovak Crisis, p. 10.
2. See Hensel, Die soziaiistische M arktw irischaft. . . , p. 297,
438 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
by faithfully serving free, progressive Socialist developments. It cannot gain
authority by force, but must always win it anew by its action. Its policies
cannot be put in motion by decrees, but only through the efforts of its members
and the integrity of its ideals.’1
The system of dictatorship into which the party had degenerated under
the previous regime was condemned as a ‘bureaucratic system’. ‘In the internal
life of the republic’ it had shown ‘sectarianism, the suppression of democratic
rights and personal freedom’, while ‘breaches of legality, and elements of
caprice and the misuse of power’ had come to light. The consequences had
been ‘stagnation in standards of living. . . catastrophic housing conditions. . .
an inefficient system of public transport, a low standard of goods and
services and a lack of culture___It is understandable that fears for Socialism,
for its humanist message and human face, should have arisen.’2
. . . We wish [the A ction Program m e declared] to develop in our country a
progressive Socialist society, free of all class an tag o n ism . . . [a society] offering
through the richness o f its resources a decent hum an existence . . . and which makes
room for the development of the hum an personality.
We wish to advance tow ards the construction o f a new model o f a Socialist
society, profoundly dem ocratic and suited to the Czech situation. [But] our personal
experience as well as scientific Marxism have led us to the unanim ous conclusion
that these objectives can never be achieved on the old lines and by using rude means
which have outlived their usefulness and continuously hold us back.
We take full responsibility for declaring that our society has entered a difficult
period in which we can no longer rely on traditional methods. We can no longer
force life into moulds. . . .
The task now before us is to pave the way, in unknow n circumstances, to experi-
ment, to give Socialist development a new character, by which we seek support from
the creative ideas of M arxism and from international recognition.3

Further, the Action Programme maintained:

We are no t undertaking these measures so as to surrender any o f o u r ideals—
even less to begin a retreat before our opponents. On the contrary: we are convinced
th at these measures will help us to free ourselves from the burden which has given
o ur opponents the advantage for so m any years, and by means o f which they have
blunted and prevented the effectiveness of Socialist ideas and negated the attraction
o f the Socialist example.4

In the Soviet Communist tradition, the working class constitutes the object
of Communist party policy as the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’, and the party
itself the object of the policies of its leadership group, the politbureau. On
this system was founded the dictatorship of the leadership group over the
party, and of the party over the proletariat. The leadership group alone
made the decisions, with no participation by the party’s rank and file, whose
role was to act as ‘transmission belt’ for the decisions passed down by the
1. See ibid., p. 297. 2. See ibid., pp. 288 and 291.
3. ibid., pp. 335-6. 4. ibid., p. 336.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 439

politbureau. And since it possessed a monopoly in the dissemination of

thought and opinion, the leadership group alone decided what the people
should and should not be allowed to know.
It was this tradition, on which the Communist system had rested hitherto,
with which the Action Programme now broke. ‘Socialism,’ it stated, ‘cannot
mean only the liberation of the working people from the predominant
exploitation of class relationships, but must also, more than in any other
democracy, make it possible to bring the individual personality to full
development.’
The working class, no longer dictated to by an exploiting class, is n o t to be
instructed by arbitrary interpretations o f power about w hat it is and w hat it is n ot
allowed to be inform ed about, when it is allowed to express its public view and when
it is n o t.1

Neither should it be allowed to suppress opinions under the pretext of

being ‘anti-social’. Every restriction upon freedom of opinion, the programme
said, should be based on a law defining what was anti-social. It was possible
that the ideological enemies of Socialism might try to misuse the democratic
process. But, ‘in our present stage of development, the principle remains
valid that in the conditions prevalent in our country it is possible to confront
bourgeois ideology only by a public confrontation of ideas’.2
Under no circumstances, the programme declared, should the use of the
state secret police be permitted as an instrument to suppress freedom of
opinion. Their task was ‘to protect the state against the activities of hostile
enemy agencies’.
Every citizen not guilty in this respect m ust live assured th at his political
convictions, ideas, personal faith and affirmations will n ot become a m atter o f
attention to the security police organization.
The party states categorically that the use of this machine m ust never be allowed
in solving internal political questions and conflicts in a Socialist society.
The party’s policies [the program m e continued] m ust never lead to a situation
where non-Com m unist citizens feel that the party is restricting their freedom and
rights, but rather that they should perceive in the party ’s activities a guarantee o f
their rights, freedom and interests.3

The sharpest contrast with traditional Soviet Communism was the part
of the programme which postulated freedom of opinion for Communist
party members. This was a right which had never been questioned under
Lenin.4 It had been annihilated only by Stalin, whose regime had condemned,
1. ibid., p. 303. 2. ibid., p. 304. 3. ibid., pp. 310 and 289.
4. During the terrible economic crisis in the Soviet Union in 1921, the Tenth Congress
of the Communist party had accepted a motion put forward by Lenin forbidding the
formation of opposition groups within the party, but it had not in any way restricted
freedom of opinion for its members. But this decision, which Lenin had probably seen as no
more than a temporary emergency measure, laid the foundation stone for the monolithic
totalitarian structure of the Communist party as it was developed by Stalin.
440 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
suppressed and often cruelly persecuted every opinion of party members
which was in conflict with the opinion of the dominating leadership group.
It was this destruction of the freedom of opinion of party members which
had made the dictatorship of the leadership group over the party possible,
and which had led to its degeneration into the despotic rule of one man over
party, state and society which had come to be termed the ‘cult of personality’.
The Action Programme secured for party members not only unrestricted
freedom of opinion, but further deduced from this right the duty to realize
it in serving the party.
Each party member and party organization [the program m e declared] has n o t
only the right, but also the duty, to take the initiative in com ing forw ard according
to the best o f their knowledge and belief with criticisms o r views on debated ques-
tions which deviate from the official one. . . .
It is no t acceptable that Com munists should have this right restricted, o r th at an
atm osphere o f m istrust and suspicion should be created against those who come
forw ard w ith different views. The use of reprisals against m inorities under whatever
pretext, as has occurred in the past, is no t accep tab le.. . -1

A few months later the draft of this concept was incorporated by the
central committee into the new party statutes submitted to the Fourteenth
Congress, summoned to take place on 9 September 1968.* The minority, the
new statutes stated, ‘has the right to stand up for its views (even if these have
been rejected by the majority), and to ask that they be reconsidered in the
light of new knowledge and experience’. And, to ensure freedom of expression,
the statutes declared that minority representatives should be ‘exposed only
to ideological influences’; hence they could represent their views without fear
of reprisal.
As a further measure in democratizing the party, the draft statutes
provided for secret ballots for party officials and restricted their periods in
office to prevent the creation of a party bureaucracy. Moreover they decreed
the separation of state from party functions; party leaders were no longer to
be allowed to hold high state office at the same time.123
The demand for the separation of party from state function had already
been emphasized in the Action Programme. In the Soviet Communist
tradition which Czechoslovakia had inherited, the Communist party was the
state. But the power monopoly which gave it this position in the state was
incompatible with democracy, which rested on the principle of active self-
government by the people, as well as irreconcilable with the right to these
freedoms without which democracy, and particularly a social democracy, was
unthinkable—the freedoms of thought, speech, assembly and organization.

1. Hensel, Die sozialistische M arktw irtschaft. . . , p. 299.

2. The draft statutes were published in R u d e Prdvo on 10 August 1968; see Windsor,
Czechoslovakia 1968, p. 60.
3. See James (ed.), The Czechoslovak Crisis, p. 28.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 441

The programme had stated consistently: ‘The power of the Socialist state
cannot be monopolized by any single party or a coalition of political parties ;
it must be available to all political organizations.’1
But it had, on the other hand, evaded the question Of any return to the
pluralist system of political parties existing before the Communists had
seized power. Yet this was inseparable from the logic of the democratizing
process. ‘A democracy,’ Vaclav Havel reasoned in Literarni Listy, ‘can only
be taken seriously provided the people have the opportunity freely to elect
those who are to govern them. This, in turn, presupposes the existence of at
least two genuine alternatives, which means two equally independent forces
standing an equal chance to become the leading power in the state should the
people so decide.’
Thus, it seemed to Havel that the ‘only consequential and effective method
in our situation. . . is a revival of the two-party system, adapted to a Socialist
structure of society. And since this will naturally not involve any parties
which are based upon class principles, and therefore have varying and
contradictory ideas dictated by class interests on the country’s agrarian and
social development, their interrelationship might be based on a historically
new type of coalition co-operative.. . .’12

Havel’s second party could only, of course, be the Social Democratic party
which, in breach of its constitution, had been merged with the Communist
party in 1948.3 The majority of Social Democrats had not in fact joined the
Communist party, and many of them, stimulated by the sense of freedom
which now ran through the country, began to demand the revival of the old
party. In May, five of its veteran officials, who had been cruelly persecuted
by the Communist regime (including Zdenek Bechyne, who had been
imprisoned for fourteen years) issued a public declaration announcing the
party’s re-establishment. ‘Only now,’ it stated, ‘in this time of democratic
Socialism, has it become possible to renew the party’s real work in the spirit
of our ninety-year-old Socialist and democratic tradition. . . . The renewed
activity of Social Democracy will not dissipate the forces of the working
people, but, on the contrary, will reactivate the democratic, Socialist and
freedom-loving masses, who have so far stood aside.’ And the declaration
issued a reminder of the ‘historical fact’ that, ‘wherever in Europe Social
Democracy has disappeared from political life, citizens’ rights to freedom
and democracy have disappeared with it’.
This declaration awoke a strong response among the ranks of veteran
Social Democrats, above all in the working population, as well as among

1. Quoted in Zeman, Prague Spring, p. 123.

2. Literarni Listy, No. 6, 1968, quoted in Horlacher, Zwischen Prag und Moskau,
pp. 65-6.
3. See page 179,
442 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
students. Within a few weeks, fifty-four Social Democratic organizations had
come to life in Prague, Brno and other towns, and nearly 500 workers’ and
students’ groups had been formed.1
It was only to be expected, however, that Moscow should consider the
revival of a Social Democratic party in a Communist state as an intolerable
provocation of Soviet Communism. A letter from the Communist parties of
the five Warsaw Pact powers which later invaded Czechoslovakia underlined
the danger that Social Democracy represented to the Communist regime:
The Social Democrats persist in demanding the establishment of their party; they
organize illegal committees, and strive to split the Czechoslovak labour movement
and take the country’s leadership into their hands so as to re-create a bourgeois
social order.8
For the leaders of the Czech Communist party, the demand for the revival
of the Social Democratic party was certainly an embarrassment. Accused by
Moscow of allowing the activity of ‘anti-Socialist forces’, they were unable
at this stage to legalize the Social Democratic party, which Moscow had
denounced as being among the most dangerous. They therefore rejected the
Social Democrats’ demand on the grounds that ‘any step which splits the
unity of the Marxist party will weaken the difficult struggle for new policies
in the construction of Socialism’. Restoring the system of the old political
parties would run contrary to the spirit of the Action Programme.3
But the Action Programme had not by any means been advocating a one-
party system to support the Communist power monopoly, but a system,
however undefined as yet, which would assure different political streams of
a participation in power through their organizations.
The programme’s main significance in this respect was defined by Gustav
Husak, leader of the Slovak government from 1946-50, a few months before
it was drawn up. His views are particularly interesting as symptoms of the
mood of the ‘Prague Spring’, since as a politician he was a pragmatist rather
than a revolutionary and had within barely a year become the main instrument
of Russia’s counter-revolution. A few weeks after Dubcek’s election as party
general secretary early in January 1968, Hus&k had written in the periodical
Kulturny Zivot:
The citizen wants guarantees that he may freely exercise his right to vote
[between various trends], to be in control and [a position of] responsibility. This is a
problem for the progressive democratization of the social order, which embodies
the liberation and development of all the creative forces dormant in the people,
their physical and intellectual potentialities and duties. The problem is to find
institutions that warrant the co-operation of millions of hands and brains.4
1. Vilem Bernard, Report to the Eleventh Congress o f the Socialist International in
Eastbourne, June 1969; Socialist International Information, vol. xix, 4 October 1968.
2. For the text of the Warsaw Pact letter, see Horlacher, Zwischen Frag und Moskau,
pp. 139-46.
3. Rude Prdvo, 8 June 1968. 4. Quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, p. 81.
 'The Spring o f Prague' 443
The leverage to bring about the fundamental transformation of a society
based on dictatorship into a Socialist democracy was to be provided by the
structural reforms in the means of production, planned by the Action
Programme. These, like the political reforms, were based on a system of
balance between necessity and freedom, between the autonomy of the
producers in the production process and the needs of the community at
large within the state.

The Action Programme in fact provided a full outline for the building of
a Socialist order of society in a highly developed industrial state. It was
not a utopian programme. It was based on concrete measures destined to
realize the idea of freedom in Socialism under prevailing economic and
social conditions. It was a programme for the final phase of a social
revolution which had begun after the liberation of Czechoslovakia in
May 1945.
The Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia, like the Communist
revolution in Russia, had destroyed the class rule of capitalism based on the
private ownership of the means of production; it had, as the Action Pro-
gramme stated, ‘freed the working people from the rule of an exploitative
class relationship’. The essential means of production had become the
property of the nation; they had been nationalized. The social relationship
of the working class to the means of production was no longer that of a class
relationship between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but a relationship between
the working class and the state as the monopoly owner of the means of
production.
But, at the same time, taking Stalin’s Soviet Communism as its model, it
had destroyed the historic achievements of the bourgeois revolution which
contained the seeds of the essentials of Socialism: civil liberties and political
democracy. For Socialism, as seen within the movement since its inception
a century ago—and as it was most certainly seen by Karl Marx—is a concept
intended to realize the highest degree of individual freedom and the fullest
participation of the masses of the people in their own destiny. Since the
Communist revolution was based on dictatorial coercion, the superstructure
of society (in the Marxist meaning of the term) which it developed—the
political and social institutions, the law and judiciary, the theories and
ideologies—necessarily became subjected to the system of a totalitarian
dictatorship.
There have been not a few Communists—above all Lenin himself—who
were (and still are) aware of the tragic contradiction of the Soviet Communist
reality as against the essential idea and ideal of Socialism. The Communist
revolution in Russia, a socially and culturally backward and predominantly
agrarian country which was only in the early stages of modern industrial
development, was faced with the tremendous problem of achieving rapid
444 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
industrialization. This could only be achieved by the brutal force of dictator-
ship through a sequence of experiments which had the ultimate objective of
realizing a truly Socialist society as their inspiration. These were Lenin’s
New Economic Policy (N.E.P.), which followed the period of ‘war Com-
munism’; then, after the failure of the N.E.P., the Five-Year Plans; then the
first attempts to overcome the despotism of Stalinism by introducing the
principle of the ‘collective leadership’ of the party; and finally Khrushchev’s
experiment of ‘liberalizing’ the dictatorship.
Yet none of these experiments had brought forth in Russia an essentially
Socialist society. They had failed, because they did not attempt to overcome
the system of dictatorship as it had developed under the pressure of the
process of industrialization. They were, in fact, seeking to consolidate it,
even after the process of industrialization was completed. The object of
economic liberalization was merely to loosen the fetters of dictatorship over
the productive apparatus, and which hindered productive growth. And the
object of liberalizing the political system was to eliminate the brutal despotic
features introduced by Stalin’s rule of terror, since these had in any case
become superfluous, and were hardly appropriate for winning the sympathy
of the people.
The Czechoslovakian experiment, however, sought not merely to liberalize
the dictatorship, but nothing short of its total dissolution by introducing a
‘Socialism with a human face’, in Dubcek’s gripping phrase. It sought to set
up a ‘new, vigorous democratic model of a Socialist society’, as the programme
said, not in the remote future, but without delay.
The importance of the Czech Communists’ Action Programme cannot
easily be overestimated. Philip Windsor has praised it as ‘among the most
outstanding political achievements of modem history’.1
It was an experiment which, had it not been strangled at birth by the
Soviet invasion of the country, could have become a ‘new model of Socialist
society’ of immeasurable significance as a pattern for a crisis-free transition
from dictatorship to Socialist democracy.2 It could also have enriched the
methods of democratic Socialism, and could, above all, have paved the way
to overcoming the conflicts which have split the international labour
movement.
1. Philip Windsor, ‘Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe and Detente’, in Czechoslovakia
1968, p. 10.
2. A. D. Sacharov, the most respected nuclear scientist in the Soviet Union, hailed the
Czech experiment in an article, widely read in the Soviet Union, under the title: ‘As I
Imagine the Future’: ‘We are convinced that Communists throughout the world equally
oppose all attempts to revive Stalinism in our country. After all, the power of Communist
ideas to attract would thereby be drastically reduced. Today the key to a new progressive
order of the system of government lies in intellectual liberty alone. This the Czechs have
understood particularly, and there is no doubt that we should support their daring initia-
tive, so important to the future of Socialism and all humanity’— The Times, 9 August 1968.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague' 445

One of the most astonishing phenomena about the Czech revolution was the
way in which it developed. It had begun with a palace revolution in the
central committee of the Communist party, the instrument of state power.
An alliance between the Czech ‘revisionists’, demanding political and
economic reforms, and the Slovak Communists, demanding national auto-
nomy, had overthrown the political status quo. Antonin Novotny, embodying
in his person the ancien regime, had been forced to resign as party general
secretary and Alexander Dubcek, a symbol, as it were, of the new regime,
had been elected in his place.
The party rank and file had remained indifferent to the change in the
central committee and the shift in the balance of power between reformists
and conservatives which had brought it about; they had begun to play their
part only after the palace revolution on 5 January 1968. Novotny himself
had given the impetus. He was not prepared to accept his overthrow; he
carried his fight to retain power into the party organizations, an apparatus
which he controlled.
But the struggle for leadership between reformists and conservatives had
become a struggle over principles. The problems of regenerating the party
and society, until then discussed only in small groups of intellectuals or in
the conclave of the central committee, became a subject for open and
passionate discussion at party meetings. And criticism of the previous
regime, until then voiced only in secrecy at small party committees and in
private conversation, now became a public issue.
It grew into a scandal which opened the gates to a deluge of criticism of
Novotny’s former rule. On 1 March 1968, the country was startled by the
news that Major-General Jan Sejna, who, it was publicly revealed, had been
under investigation for the misappropriation of a vast sum of money, had
used his diplomatic passport to escape to the United States. Sejna had been
secretary of the politbureau in the Ministry of Defence, a member of parlia-
ment and a protege of Novotny, who, in the face of objections from the
officers’ circles in the army, had promoted him to the rank of general in 1960
when he was still only thirty-three. When his escape became known, General
Prchlik, who had secretly informed Dubcek in December of the planned
military coup to save Novtony, also publicly disclosed that Sejna, together
with General Vladimir Janko, the deputy minister for defence, had issued
marching orders to an armoured division stationed in Western Bohemia for
the coup against Prague in March. Janko shot himself a few days before he
was due to appear before a government commission to be examined about the
military conspiracy.
The nation’s excitement, aroused by the disclosure of the coup as well as
446 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
by Sejna’s escape and Janko’s suicide, which could be interpreted only as a
confession of guilt, was considerably intensified when it also became known
that Sejna together with Novotny’s son, the head of the International Printing
Corporation in Prague, had been involved in several sordid incidents of
corruption. In fact the corruption which had permeated Novotny’s regime
seemed to become personified in these two men, and Novotny was himself
compromised. A flood of petitions and resolutions implored the government
and party to investigate Sejna’s case in all its shabbiness, to clean up political
life and to purge the offices and positions of influence of all people who were
soiled by corruption. A huge meeting of students in the Congress Palace in
Prague on 20 March, at which, among others, Sik and Goldstiicker had
spoken, sent a message to the National Assembly demanding Novotna’s
resignation as president of the republic. Two days later, on 22 March, he
resigned as head of state, and on 30 May he was expelled from the central
committee and had his party membership suspended.
With Novotny toppled from his last position of power, the party apparatus
on which his rule had rested also collapsed. His followers, who had controlled
the local party organizations, were overthrown, and the party, from having
been the instrument of Novotny’s conservative regime, became the powerful
standard-bearer of the revolution.

The Russian intervention, however, was shortly to unite the whole Czech
nation in a testimony to the revolution. It began shortly after the plenary
session of the central committee on 5 January which had elected Dub£ek as
general secretary. Dubcek’s life history left no doubt of his loyalty to the
Soviet Union. He had grown up in the Soviet Union from the age of four,
when his father, a veteran Communist, had emigrated there. After returning
to Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had fought in the illegal Communist movement
in Slovakia and been twice wounded in combat against the German forces of
occupation. Four years later he had risen to be secretary of a local organiza-
tion and, to prepare him for higher party functions, he had been sent by his
party to attend the training college in Moscow from 1950 to 1958. Shortly
after his return he became a member of the central committee of the Slovak
party and, in 1963, its general secretary.
It seemed that while the Soviet leaders did not mistrust Dub£ek himself
and were not really worried over his election, they were alarmed by the
‘revisionist’ trend which had carried him to power. Three weeks after his
election they summoned him to Moscow and warned him, as Pravda reported,
about the development in Czechoslovakia of situations which might lead to a
‘weakening of the Czech Communist party and to a strengthening of danger-
ous attitudes among certain circles in Czech society that were vulnerable to
middle-class ideological influences and imperialist propaganda’. There was
taking place in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet leaders claimed, a ‘revival of
 'The Spring o f Prague' 447
rightist, revisionist elements, who could exploit the complicated situation
which has developed in the country for their own aims, which are remote from
the interests of Socialism’.1
This report did not appear in Pravda, however, until seven months after
Dubcek’s visit and a few days after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by half a
million Russian troops. This somewhat belated information of the conver-
sation which the Soviet leaders had had with Dub&k was no doubt intended
to show how Moscow had warned him that it would not tolerate any extension
of ‘revisionism’ in Czechoslovakia.
The rank and file of the Czechoslovak Communist party were, however,
never informed of Moscow’s warning. But even if they had been they would
not, given their prevailing mood, have been deeply impressed. The warning
could not have held back the basic flood of ‘revisionism’ already under way.
Moscow now applied more pressure. On 23 March, the day after
Novotny’s dethronement from the presidency, the Soviet leaders called
together the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries (with the exception of
Romania) in Dresden for a meeting to warn Dubcek and his delegation in the
name, as it were, of the pact countries about a development which, they
declared, ‘could lead to a counter-revolutionary coup'. ‘Anti-socialist
elements’, the report in Pravda (which did not appear until after the invasion)
said, had wrested control of the broadcasting system and press from the
party and had consolidated their position. To prevent the ‘counter-
revolutionary danger’, the Communist parties of the Warsaw Pact were ready
‘to help their Czech comrades to repel the increasingly impudent anti-Socialist
elements and to strengthen the position of Socialism in Czechoslovakia’.2
It seems, however, that the Soviet leaders failed to convince the Czecho-
slovak delegation at Dresden either that their country was threatened by a
counter-revolution or that the reforms planned by the party could lead to a
‘counter-revolutionary coup', any more than that the supporters of the reform
movement were in truth ‘impudent anti-Socialist elements’. For hardly two
weeks after the meeting, on 5 April 1968, a plenary session of the central
committee of the Czechoslovak party took the historic decision to accept
the Action Programme which would, it announced, engender a renaissance of
Socialism in Czechoslovakia.
However, in any case, the Action Programme contained no grounds for
concern that the relationship between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union
as well as the other Warsaw Pact countries might be changed. It placed full
emphasis on the loyalty of the Czechoslovak Republic to the Soviet Union
and its Warsaw Pact allies.
The fundamental direction of Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy [the programme
declared] emerged and proved itself during the national freedom struggle as well as
1. Pravda, 22 August 1968; quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, pp. 76-7.
2. Quoted in ibid., 118-19.
448 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
during the processes o f Socialist change in our country. It was based on the alliance
and co-operation with the Soviet U nion and the other Socialist s ta te s .. . .
It will rem ain our endeavour to deepen our friendly relations with o ur allies—
the states o f the Socialist w orld com munity—on the basis o f m utual esteem,
sovereignty and equality, m utual respect and international solidarity.1

So far as Russia was concerned, these words were not empty assertions.
Czechoslovakia was, in fact, the only country in the Soviet bloc on whose
genuine friendship the Soviet Union could depend. The peoples of the other
member states of the Soviet bloc (with the exception of Bulgaria) despised and
hated the Russians. The Czechs had, however, since the birth of Czech
nationalism over a century before, felt a bond of kinship with their Slav
brothers. And since the Second World War, after which Czechoslovakia had
expelled three million Germans from her territory, an alliance with Russia had
become an essential element in her security, for who but the Soviet Union
could protect her against a German revenge, by which the Czechs, rightly or
wrongly, felt themselves to be threatened? Germany was, for the Czechs, the
arch-enemy. Most of them loathed the Germans who, during the Habsburg
Monarchy, had treated them as helots following the battle of the White
Mountain in 1620, and who in 1938 had again subjected them to their rule.
And it was the Soviet army which in 1945 had liberated them from this brutal
alien regime. Like the Czech hatred of Germany, Czech friendship for Russia
had its roots in the nation’s history. The Action Programme had re-
emphasized this friendship.
But this fact did not allay Moscow’s anxieties. It had no need to fear that
Czechoslovakia might dissolve its alliance with the Warsaw Pact powers and
declare its independence, like Hungary in 1956. But the democratization of
the Communist party and the state, for which the Action Programme had
paved the way by restoring freedom of thought and opinion as well as the
emancipation of the press and radio from the shackles of censorship, appeared
to threaten the rule of Stalinism which remained the system of government for
the Communist parties in the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany. For
should such a ‘new, vigorous democratic model of a Socialist society’ emerge
as a result of the reforms and demonstrate that it was indeed possible to
realize Socialism without suppressing freedom, then no moral justification
remained for the system of dictatorship in these countries. In any case, the
Czech example would certainly strengthen those forces which were seeking to
transform the system.12
1. See Hensel, Die sozialistische Marktwirtschaft, pp. 333-4.
2. It was Walter Ulbricht, dictator of East Germany, who was most appalled by the
prospect of the Czech virus of liberty infecting his own country. In a memorandum circu-
lated as early as May to the top leaders of the East German Communist party, the situation
in Czechoslovakia was described as catastrophic: T he counter-revolution is on the brink of
victory. . . . A return to the pre-war bourgeois regime is in principle proposed by the Action
Programme of the Czechoslovak Communist party, directed implicitly against the found-
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 449

The Soviet leaders had made up their minds to put an end to this experi-
ment, either by diplomatic pressure, or, if necessary, by military intervention.
They invited Dub£ek to Moscow for a fresh discussion on 4 May together
with the prime minister, Oldrich Cernik, the chairman of the National
Assembly, Josef Smrkovsky and the general secretary of the Slovak Com-
munist party, Vasil Bilak, to demand their approval for manoeuvres in
Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies, and for the permanent stationing
of Russian troops in the country. Dub&k sanctioned the proposed man-
oeuvres, for, he feared, otherwise Russian troops would enter the country as
an invasion force, but he rejected the garrisoning of Russian troops on
Czechoslovakian soil.

The manoeuvres began on 20 June. Tens of thousands of Russian, Polish,

East German, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops, supported by hundreds of
tanks, marched into Czechoslovakia. This display of men and armament was
intended to intimidate the ‘revisionists’.
But they did not allow themselves to be frightened. A week later, on the
27th, four Prague daily papers printed a manifesto under the title ‘Two
Thousand Words’, describing in moderate terms the degeneration of the old
Communist regime and calling on the party and nation to continue the process
of regeneration begun by the Action Programme, and to ‘complete the work
of the humanization of the r6gime’. Written by the distinguished writer,
Ludvik Vaculik, the article carried the signatures of about seventy scholars,
writers and artists—almost all of whom, including Vaculik, were Communist
party members.
Moscow took the article as its cue to sound a warning roll of thunder in
the direction of Prague. Pravda denounced it as ‘an open call to battle against
the Communist party of Czechoslovakia and against the constitutional
power’; and DubCek was put under pressure from Moscow by telephone to
undertake ‘decisive measures’.
What exacerbated Moscow’s especial wrath was evidently a passage at
the end of the article:
The possibility [it said] th at foreign troops m ight interfere in o u r development
has led to considerable unrest. In view o f the powerful superiority o f the forces with
which they are able to confront us, there is nothing to do except to rem ain stead-
fast and polite and n o t begin [the fight] ourselves. W e can dem onstrate to o u r

ation of Socialism . . . the assurances of friendship towards the U.S.S.R. and its Socialist
allies. . . are worthless, since those who offer them can no longer guide the developments of
their own country and no longer hold any power. . . . Class enemies and imperialist agents
are infiltrating Czechoslovak territory without difficulty.. . . Things have reached the point
where the situation has ceased to be an internal problem for Czechoslovakia.. . . The
Czechoslovak government is thus violating its treaty obligations and is guilty of treason
against its allies’—Literdrni Listy, 30 May 1968, quoted in Francois Fetjo, ‘Moscow and its
Allies’, in Problems o f Communism, November-December 1968.
450 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
government th at we stand behind them, with arm s should this be necessary. A nd
we can reassure our allies th at we shall fulfil our alliances, friendship and trade
agreements.1

A few days later, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Russian Communist

party, hinted during a speech in Moscow that the Soviet Union would not
tolerate any development in Czechoslovakia which, in his words, might upset
the ‘national pattern’ of the Communist system and weaken the ‘comradely
alliance between Socialist countries’. The Soviet Union, he declared, ‘cannot
and will not remain indilferent to the fate of Socialist construction in other
countries’.12
Thus it was announced to the whole world that the Soviet Union claimed
the right to interfere in the development of other states under Communist
party rule which deviated from the system of Soviet Communism—a doctrine
which was to become known as the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.
Immediately after Brezhnev’s speech, Dubdek was asked to appear before
the Warsaw Pact leaders so that measures could be decided against the threat
to Communist power in Czechoslovakia. Such an obvious interference in their
internal affairs was, however, rejected by the party presidium; it politely
turned the invitation down. Moscow thereupon summoned the leaders of the
pact forces which were participating in the manoeuvres to a conference in
Warsaw on 14 July. And in an article entitled ‘Attack on Basic Socialist
Foundations in Czechoslovakia’, Pravda branded all those who had supported
the manifesto of ‘Two Thousand Words’ as ‘counter-revolutionaries in the
service of foreign imperialists’.3
The numbers of Czechs and Slovaks who declared their solidarity with
the manifesto were legion. Their ranks were swelled as a result of the embitter-
ment felt at Moscow’s hostile attitude towards the reforms they strove for.
And if the manifesto had, for Moscow, become the symbol of the ‘counter-
revolutionaries’, for the Czechs it became the rallying-point for their protest
against the Soviet Union’s interference in their country’s internal affairs. The
flood of resolutions declaring support for the manifesto grew, as Schwartz
has shown, into a kind of plebiscite rejecting Moscow’s interference.4

The crisis came to a peak on 15 July with a letter from the five-power confer-
ence in Warsaw to the Czech Communist party. The development in Czecho-
slovakia, it stated—‘the rise of the forces of reaction supported by imperial-
ism’—had pushed the country away from the Socialist path, ‘and therefore
threatens the interests of the whole Socialist system’. The danger referred to
was that of Czechoslovakia ‘separating itself from the Socialist community’.

1. An English translation of the full text appeared in The Times Literary Supplement,
18 July 1968.
2. Quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, pp. 174-5.
3. See ibid., pp. 178-90. 4. See ibid., p. 179.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague' 451
This, the letter declared, ‘is no longer a question for the Czech Communist
party alone. It is a question involving all Communist parties and states united
in alliance.. . . ’ The victory over Nazi-Fascism had advanced the borders of
the Socialist world into the heart of Europe as far as the Elbe and the
Bohemian forests. ‘We will never accept,’ the letter stated, ‘that this historic
achievement of Socialism . . . might be endangered . . . , that imperialism,
from outside or from within, might breach the Socialist system and change
the balance of power to its advantage.’
On the basis of this right, which the Soviet Union had hereby usurped, the
conference instructed the Czech Communist party to undertake measures to
fight the ‘danger of counter-revolution’ and of the ‘separation of Czecho-
slovakia from the Warsaw bloc’. It specifically demanded ‘a decisive and
courageous attack on the right wing [of the party] and anti-Socialist forces;
the suppression of any political parties which oppose Socialism’; and the
re-introduction of censorship in the press, broadcasting and television.1 (The
censorship had been abolished on 26 June 1968.)
The party presidium at once published the Warsaw letter together with its
reply. It emphatically rejected any assertion of a ‘counter-revolutionary
danger’ in Czechoslovakia as completely unfounded. It admitted that ‘the
strong current of healthy Socialist action is accompanied by extremist trends,
with which the remnants of anti-Socialist forces in our society are trying to
swim’.
We do, however, see no real reasons [the presidium continued] to allow our
present situation to be described as counter-revolutionary and to issue statem ents
ab out an immediate danger to the basis o f the Socialist system o r th at Czecho-
slovakia is preparing to change the direction o f its Socialist foreign policies.

‘Our alliance with and friendship for the Soviet Union,’ the presidium
declared, ‘is deeply rooted in our social system, in the historical tradition and
experience of our people, their interests as well as their thoughts and feelings.’
Considering our bitter historical experience o f G erm an imperialism and m ilitar-
ism [the presidium emphasized], it is inconceivable th at any Czechoslovak govern-
m ent m ight ignore these experiences and foolishly endanger the fate o f o u r country,
even if it were no t Socialist. W e categorically reject any suspicion in this respect.

The presidium as decisively rejected the suppressive measures demanded

by the Five-Power Conference.
A ny sign o f a return to these m ethods [it stated], would provoke the resistance o f
an overwhelming m ajority o f party members, as well as o f the w orking classes—
Workers, peasants in co-operatives and intellectuals. By such a step the party would
endanger its leading role and create a situation in which a conflict o f pow er could
well arise. This would indeed endanger the people’s Socialist achievements as well
as o ur m utual interests in the anti-imperialist front put u p by Socialist society.
1. For the text of the Warsaw letter, see Horlacher, Zmschen Prag und Moskau,
pp. 139-46.
452 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
The Communist party, declared the presidium, was
dependent upon the voluntary support of the people. It does n o t fulfil its leading
role by the fact th at it rules society, but by the fact th at it serves a free, progressive
Socialist development. It cannot impose its authority, but m ust all the time earn it
by its actions. It cannot enforce its policies by decrees, but only through the w ork
o f its members and the credibility of its ideals.

In particular, the presidium once again rejected the demand of the

conference that it should place the press and broadcasting back under
censorship.
A n overwhelming m ajority o f all classes and ranks in o u r society supports
the abolition o f censorship and is in favour o f freedom o f opinion. The Com -
munist party o f Czechoslovakia has tried to show th at it is capable o f a political
leadership and adm inistration distinct from the discredited bureaucratic-police
methods.

Finally the presidium turned against the interference by the Warsaw

conference parties in the country’s internal affairs. ‘We do not believe,’ they
stated, ‘that the common cause of Socialism can be promoted by holding
conferences where the policies and activities of a fraternal party are judged
without their representatives being present.’ And it reminded the conference
of the declaration by the Soviet government of 30 October 1956, which had
affirmed the principles of mutual relations between Socialist countries:
complete equality, respect for territorial integrity as well as for national
independence and sovereignty and mutual non-interference.1
The answer from Prague was clear. But to dispel any doubts in his own
country, Dubcek, in a broadcast speech of 18 July, affirmed the Communist
party’s determination to carry through the Action Programme and ‘not to
abandon even one of its principles—principles of a Socialism which has not
lost its human face’.
‘After many years,’ he said, ‘an atmosphere has now been created in our
country where everyone may openly and with dignity voice his opinion, so
demonstrating the fact that the cause of our country and the cause of Social-
ism is a common cause for us all.’

1. For the Soviet declaration, see page 425; for the text of the Czechoslovakian reply to
the Warsaw letter, see Horlacher, Zwischen Prag und Moskau, pp. 149-62. Over a year after
the Soviet declaration of 30 October 1956, the right to autonomy and sovereignty of
Communist-ruled countries was more explicitly confirmed by a meeting of twelve parties in
Moscow, on 14 November 1957, who stated in their declaration: ‘The Socialist countries
base their relations on principles of complete equality, respect for territorial integrity, state
independence and sovereignty and non-interference in one another’s affairs. These are vital
principles’— Soviet News (London), 22 November 1957. And. in March 1965, only three
years before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, these same principles had been reaffirmed by a
conference of nineteen Communist parties, again held in Moscow: ‘Each Communist party
is entirely independent and autonomous. Only decisions which have been made by the
party itself are binding on the party’—Pravda, 12 March 1965.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 453
We therefore declare, openly, quietly, but firmly, th at we are aware w hat it is all
about. There is no other way for our people apart from the m ost profound dem o-
cratic and Socialist transform ation in our country.1

On the next day, the 19th, it became known that the Soviet leaders
wished for a meeting between the Soviet politbureau and the Czechoslovak
presidium, to take place on 22 or 23 July in either Moscow, Kiev or Lvov.
But just as Tito during his conflict with Stalin had declined an invitation to
Moscow in view of doubts whether he would ever come back,12 so the presi-
dium declined to meet the Soviet leaders in the Soviet Union; it insisted on a
meeting on Czechoslovakian territory. The meeting took place in the little
town on Cierna-nad-Tisou in eastern Slovakia on the Russian border.
To set the scene for the conference, Pravda ‘disclosed’ that a box contain-
ing American arms had been found in Czechoslovakia close to the German
border—unmistakable proof, it asserted, of plans for a coup by American
imperialists in Czechoslovakia—and that NATO and F.B.I. documents which
had come into the possession of the Soviet government had revealed the
actual plans. It also announced that reservists in the Soviet Union had been
called up to take part in manoeuvres on the western borders of the Soviet
Union near the Czech frontier. And at thousands of meetings the Russian
people were being warned of the imperialist threat to Czechoslovakia. The
campaign against Czechoslovakia in the Soviet press had reached a pitch
which anticipated an imminent Soviet military action.
It was in this tense atmosphere that the Soviet-Czechoslovakian confer-
ence assembled at Cierna-nad-Tisou.

Three days before, a special issue of Liternarni Listy had published an appeal
drafted by the dramatist Pavel Kohout to the party presidium to remain stead-
fast in Cierna and not to capitulate. It reminded them of the enslavement of
the Czech people over the centuries. ‘With the exception of two brief interim
periods,’ it stated, ‘we have been condemned to create our national existence
in secrecy. In fact, we have been repeatedly on the brink of destruction.’
[But now] the m om ent has come, when, after centuries, our country has again
become a cradle o f hope . . . , a m om ent in which we can prove th at Socialism is the
one true alternative for the whole of civilized humanity.
We had expected that in particular all the members o f the Socialist camp would
greet this fact with sympathy. But instead we have been accused of treason. We are
accused o f a crime which we have not com mitted and are suspected o f dark motives
which we have never entertained.
The threat o f an unjust sentence hangs over us. A nd whatever form this may
take it will leave a tragic stain on the idea o f Socialism throughout the whole world
in future years.

1. For the text of Dubcek’s speech, see Windsor and Roberts, Czechoslovakia 1968,
pp. 169-73.
2. See page 386.
454 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
‘Comrades!’ the appeal to the presidium said in closing, ‘it is your historic
duty to avert this danger. . . . Defend the path which we have begun to
traverse. . . . In our name write a fateful page in the history of Czecho-
slovakia.’1
Feverishly circulated as a petition, this appeal had been signed within a
few days by a million Czechs and Slovaks.

The conference at Ciema was stormy and almost broke off several times. The
Czechs demanded the evacuation of the Russian troops, who had remained in
the country even though the manoeuvres had terminated on 30 June. The
Soviet leaders, on the other hand, demanded the ‘normalization’ of the
political conditions in Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist tradition: the reversion
to a system of totalitarian dictatorship by the Communist party, and,
especially, the reintroduction of censorship and the suppression of all freedom
movements. And as a guarantee of ‘normalization’, they demanded the right
to impose a military occupation on Czechoslovakia.
At length, however, it seemed as though the conflict had been resolved.
The Czech delegation evidently reaffirmed Czechoslovakia’s loyalty to the
Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, pledging itself to retain the Communist
party’s leading role in the state in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. These
concessions were not, however, made public, though in a broadcast on 2
August Dub&k declared that the Communist party ‘would persist in the path
it has taken since January. There is no alternative for our nation or the
working people of our Czechoslovak fatherland.’2
The threat to Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, which had been the most
hotly disputed contention at the conference, seemed to have been averted. On
3 August, the last Russian troop units moved back over the border. The
Soviet press ceased its attacks on Czechoslovakia, and on the same day the
delegates met in Bratislava, in the hall of mirrors in the old town hall, to sign
the document resulting from the Ciema discussions. It renewed affirmations of
the principles ‘of equality, respect for the sovereignty, national independence
and territorial integrity of the powers of the Warsaw Pact’.

Seventeen days after the signing of the peace of Bratislava,3 on 20 August at

eleven o’clock at night, a Russian army, half a million strong and with
1. Quoted in Schwartz, Prague’s 200 Days, pp. 190-1. 2. ibid., pp. 195-6.
3. For the question whether the discussions in Ciema and the signing of peace in
Bratislava had been a manoeuvre of deception—‘the most complicated political and diplo-
matic fraud in history’, as Schwartz calls it—see Prague’s 200 Days, p. 203. See also Heinz
Brahm, Die Intervention inderC .S.S.R ., Berichtedes BundesinstitutsfiirOstwissenschaftliche
und Internationale Studien, 15/1969. For a detailed investigation of this question, see James,
 ‘The Spring o f Prague' 455
thousands of tanks, invaded Czechoslovakia from the east, north and south
with the support of East German, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops.
By three o’clock the next morning, parachutists dropped from Russian war
planes had occupied the presidium building of the government in Prague and
arrested the prime minister, Oldrich Cernik, while armoured troops had
surrounded the Hradschin Castle, the residence of the president, as well as the
secretariat of the central committee. Two hours later, the following report was
broadcast by ‘Vltava’, the Soviet Union’s illegal radio station:
TASS [the official Soviet news agency] is authorized to state th a t the leaders o f
the party and government o f the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic have requested
the Soviet U nion and other allied nations to come urgently to the aid o f the fraternal
nation o f Czechoslovakia with arm ed forces.
This request was made as a result o f the threat to the Socialist system in Czecho-
slovakia by counter-revolutionary forces who had conspired with foreign hostile
forces.1

The Soviet government’s action, like their action in Hungary in November

1956, had been planned as a combined invasion and coup d'etat. In Hungary,
as Soviet troops were crossing the border, KAd&r, a member of Nagy’s
constituted government, announced over the radio the formation of a new
government.2In the same way, as Soviet troops were entering Czechoslovakia,
Dubcek was to be overthrown as general secretary and Cernik as prime
minister, and a pro-Soviet government was to be proclaimed, with the task of
calling at once on the Soviet Union to provide armed help against the
‘counter-revolution’. The Soviet government was so certain of the success of
its plan, that it instructed its delegate at the United Nations to declare to the
Security Council on the evening of 21 August:
Armed units from the Socialist countries have, as is know n, entered the territory
o f the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in response to a request from the government
o f th at state, which has turned to its allied governments for aid w ith arm ed forces.*

The scheme, however, misfired. In their quest for a Czech Kad&r, the
Soviet leaders conspired with Alois Indra, one of the secretaries of the
Communist party central committee, who, together with Vasil Bilak and
Drahomir Kolder, did in fact try to depose Dub&k at a meeting of the presi-
dium during the night of 20 August, two hours before the invasion began.
Cernik branded the attempt as treason and the unsuspecting presidium,
‘Invasion and Resistance’, in Czechoslovakia 1968, pp. 102-5; for the development of the
events preceding the invasion in the complex of the inner-political problems of the Soviet
Union, see the excellent examination in Windsor, ‘Eastern Europe and Detente’, pp. 55- 79.
1. Pravda, 21 August 1968. For the text of the radio broadcast, see Robert Littell (ed.),
The Czech Black Book (New York, Washington and London, 1969), pp. 23-4. The Czech
original of this book—a collection of diary entries and documents—was issued by the
Historical Institute of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science, and printed and distributed
in Prague in the autumn of 1968.
2. See page 422. 3. Quoted in Schwartz, Prague's 200 Days, p. 215.
 456 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
surprised by news of the invasion, at one o’clock in the morning of the 21st
issued a proclamation ‘To the people of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’.
The armies of the Soviet Union and four other powers, it stated, had ‘two
hours ago crossed our borders without the knowledge of the president of the
republic, the presidium of the National Assembly or the first secretary of the
Communist party’. This action, it declared, was ‘in conflict with the funda-
mental principles governing relationships between Socialist states and a denial
of the basic standards of international law’. It called on the citizens of the
Republic ‘not to resist the invading armies, since defence of our borders is
impossible’. It requested the party stewards to remain at their posts and
announced the assembly of the central committee.1
In Hungary, Soviet troops within a few days had arrested all the members
of the government they could get their hands on, and so had stifled any
possibility of constitutional protest. Certainly in Prague the prime minister,
Cernik, had been arrested at once, with, a few hours later, Josef Smrkovsky,
president of the National Assembly, and Dubcek, general secretary of the
party, and all three taken, handcuffed, in an aircraft to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet leaders held back, however, from arresting General Ludvik
Svoboda (b. 1896), Novotny’s successor as president of the republic. He had
fought for Russia in two world wars; in the first in the Czech Legion, and in
the second as commander of the Czechoslovak Army Corps; and he had been
decorated as a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ and a ‘Hero of the Czechoslovak
Socialist Republic’. They evidently hoped that this old and ailing man would,
under pressure, sanction the invasion as Benes had sanctioned the coup d’etat
of February 1948. In the early hours of 21 August, General I. Pavlovsky,
supreme commander of the invasion forces, appeared in the Hradschin in the
company of Indra and J. Lenart, both members of the party presidium, to ask
Svoboda to appoint a new government. He rejected this request as unreason-
able.12
In Hungary, the Soviet army had entered the country as an army at war;
it had bombarded Budapest so as physically to destroy the possibility of
organized resistance. Moscow’s policy in Czechoslovakia was to occupy the
country without bloodshed if possible and by sheer weight of its huge
invasion force to suppress any possible attempts at resistance at the outset,
while at the same time staging a coup d’etat by the Stalinist group within the
party. For the Soviet leadership, it was inconceivable that they might not
gather a sufficient number of Communist party officials ready to stage the
necessary coup for the sake of their deep-rooted loyalty to the Soviet Union.
It was here that the policy failed. Unperturbed by the arrest of their prime

1. For a description of the meeting at which the Presidium occupied itself with prepar-
ations for the Fourteenth Congress, called for 9 September 1968, see The Czech Black Book,
pp. 12-18; for the text of the proclamation, see ibid., pp. 10-11.
2. See Brahm, Die Intervention in der C ,S.S,R ., p. 23,
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 457

minister, the Czechoslovak government had already by seven o’clock in the

morning of 21 August issued a proclamation which stated:
Against the will of the government, the N ational Assembly, the leaders o f the
Com munist party and people, Czechoslovakia was today occupied by troops o f the
five W arsaw P act powers.
Thus, for the first time in the history o f the international Com munist movement,
an act o f aggression has been undertaken by the allied armies o f Socialist countries
against a state led by a Com m unist party.

The proclamation then demanded the evacuation from the country of the
troops of the five Warsaw Pact powers, that they should respect the Warsaw
Pact and acknowledge Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, and appealed to the
citizens of the country not to tolerate any government that was not elected
under free and democratic conditions.1
On the same morning, the National Assembly met in an extraordinary
session attended by 162 members and issued a proclamation declaring:
The N ational Assembly o f the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic, elected by
the Czechoslovakian people as the highest organ o f the pow er o f state and called
together by the President o f the R e p u b lic. . . declares, th at no constitutional organ
o f the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic has been empowered to discuss [the entry
o f foreign troops into our country], nor has it sanctioned such discussions o r invited
the occupation troops o f the five Warsaw Pact countries.

Moreover, the president of the National Assembly, Joseph Smrkovsky,

testified that ‘shortly after 21 August 1968, the presidium of the National
Assembly asked all members of parliament to submit sworn statements in
writing saying whether any of them had invited the troops. All 296 deputies
(that is, the number who were in parliament at that time) submitted to the
presidium their written statements that they had not invited anybody or any
troops into Czechoslovakia.
The National Assembly categorically demanded ‘urgent information from
one of the responsible leaders of the five Warsaw Pact states so as to explain
the illegal action authoritatively to the highest organ of state power in
Czechoslovakia’.2
Thus the statement by the Soviet government, that it had been ‘urgently
requested’ by the leaders of the Czech government to send armed troops into
the country, was unmasked as a lie by the government as well as by the
National Assembly.

TASS was authorized by the Soviet government to state that leaders of the
Communist party of Czechoslovakia had requested the entry of the Warsaw
Pact troops. This statement was also rejected within twenty-four hours by a
remarkable announcement.
1. For the text of the proclamation, see The Czech Black Book, pp, 56-5.
2. ibid., pp. 74-5.
458 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
The central committee of the Communist party had, on 31 May 1968,
decided that an extraordinary fourteenth congress should convene on 9
September, to discuss the Action Programme, debate the new party statutes
and elect a new central committee. Delegates to the congress were elected
during June and July at party meetings of local, district and regional organiza-
tions.
In the face of the invasion, the leaders of the central committee quickly
took the decision to convoke the Fourteenth Congress at once. On the morn-
ing of 21 August, while Soviet troops were pouring into the country, the
central committee used a clandestine radio station to summon the delegates
to the conference. They were to assemble in the strictest secrecy on the
following day, 22 August, in a huge factory block in the Prague suburb of
Vyscocany. So as not to awake the suspicions of Soviet patrols, delegates
arrived in working clothing and mingled with other workers going into the
factory.
Under these extraordinary circumstances, 1,192 of 1,543 elected delegates
arrived for the congress. ‘It was indeed an historic congress. Each delegate
risked his life. Again and again the reports came: occupation troops are
moving closer to u s . . . .V General Svoboda described the event.
The congress elected a new central committee which included Dub&k,
Cernik, and Smrkovsky, who were absent in prison, as well as Svoboda,
Husdk, Goldstiicker and Ota Sik, and then issued a proclamation to the
‘Comrades and Citizens of the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic’:
Czechoslovakia is a sovereign and free Socialist state, founded on the free will
and support o f its people. Its sovereignty, however, was violated on 21 August 1968,
when it was occupied by troops o f the Soviet U nion, Poland, the G erm an D em o-
cratic Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary.
This action is being justified on the grounds th at Socialism was endangered an d
th at the intervention was requested by some leading officials.

However, the proclamation continued, it had been ascertained with

absolute clarity, through statements made by the president of the republic, the
National Assembly, the presidium of the government and the central com-
mittee, that no constitutional authority and no authorized representative of
the Communist party had requested the foreign intervention.
Nor was Moscow’s moral justification for the invasion in any sense true.
There is no counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia [the proclam ation declared],
and Socialist development is no t in danger. As has been dem onstrated by the
trem endous confidence shown in the new leadership o f the party by Com rade
Dubcek, the people and the party are fully capable o f solving by themselves the
problem s th at have arisen.
Indeed, action is being taken th at is leading tow ards the realization o f the funda-
mental ideas o f M arx and Lenin on the development o f Socialist democracy.
1. For Svoboda’s description, see ibid., pp. 83-5.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 459

Czechoslovakia had loyally fulfilled its commitments to the Warsaw Pact,

the proclamation continued. But by contrast, ‘the sovereignty of Czecho-
slovakia, the bond of the Warsaw Pact and the agreements of Ciema and
Bratislava have been trampled underfoot’. Then the congress solemnly stated:
A Socialist Czechoslovakia will never accept either a government o f a m ilitary
occupation adm inistration nor a domestic collaborationist regime dependent on the
forces o f occupation.

The congress demanded the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops. If

discussions between the Soviet representatives and the free constitutional
representatives of the government and party had not opened within twenty-
four hours, the entire working population of the country would be called upon
to demonstrate its protest against the invasion by a one-hour general strike
on 23 August.1
This proclamation by the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist party
was followed by one from the presidium of the Trade Union Council. In the
name of the trade union movement, it declared ‘full support for the president
of the republic, the government of Cernik, the National Assembly and the
central committee of the Communist party under Dubcek’s leadership’ and,
‘in this serious hour for our nation’, it appealed to the chairman of the Trade
Union Council of the Soviet Union, Alexander Shelepin, as well as to the
workers in Russia, to demand the immediate withdrawal of the occupation
armies from the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The invasion had taken place, the appeal said, ‘at a time when our people
strongly believed in the assurances given by the statesmen of the Soviet Union
at Cierna and Bratislava that the sovereignty of our Socialist state was
guaranteed unconditionally’. But now a ‘tragic error’ had occurred ‘which can
have unforeseeable consequences for the international workers’ movement
and the Socialist and Communist world’.2

As all these documents show, there was no constitutional state organ—the

president of the republic, the government or the National Assembly as well as
the constitutional representatives of the working class, the Communist party
and the Trade Union Council—which did not categorically reject Moscow’s
claim that the Soviet Union had sent its forces into Czechoslovakia in
response to a request from ‘leaders of the party and government’. No party or
government leader had been authorized to summon foreign troops, and no one
could be found to substantiate Moscow’s statement; the Soviet government
was itself unable to name these leaders. There can therefore be no doubt
1. Rude Pravo, 22 August 1968. For the text of the proclamation see The Czech Black
Book, pp. 80-1; see also Appendix Eight, p. 551. For the proceedings of the congress, which
were tape-recorded, and other relevant documents, see Jifl Pelikdn (ed.), The Secret
Vyscocany Congress (London, 1969).
2. For the text of the proclamation, see The Czech Black Book, pp. 149-50.
460 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was initiated by the Soviet government
alone.

The attempt was made by Moscow to justify this monstrous rape com-
mitted by a Communist government against a state governed by Communists
as a life-saving operation for Socialism. ‘Counter-revolutionary forces’, the
Kremlin stated, had threatened the foundations of Socialism in Czecho-
slovakia. ‘The objective of the counter-revolution,’ a publication prepared
in Moscow for distribution in Czechoslovakia said, ‘was to rob the Czecho-
slovak Communist party of its leading role, to snatch power from the workers
and peasants, to destroy the state and the public corporations founded by the
people. . . and to guide Czechoslovakia into the road to the re-establishment
of capitalism.’1
This claim, as the documents quoted show, was also decisively rejected as
false by all the organs of the state and society. ‘The claim that there was a
threat of, or actual, counter-revolution in the country,’ Joseph Smrkovsky
declared, ‘is a propaganda invention. There was no force in the country which
could have removed the Communist party from power or overthrown the
social system. At any time, the vast majority of the citizens spontaneously
supported the then policy of the Czechoslovak Communist party.’ When, a
year after he had been overthrown, Dubcek was summoned to a plenary
session of the now Stalinist central committee, held on 26 September 1969, he
was able to state without encountering any contradiction:
There has never been any p ro o f th at a centre o f counter-revolutionary forces
existed. N either our secret service nor a foreign secret service have discovered any
p ro o f o f this nature.8

According to Moscow’s theory, however, the counter-revolution was not

amenable to proof; it was, Pravda wrote, ‘a new historical phenomenon’—
the phenomenon of a counter-revolution which, while it existed, was not
perceptible, or was, in Moscow’s words, ‘a peaceful counter-revolution’.123
This phenomenon of a ‘peaceful counter-revolution’ against Socialism was
all the more strange, S. Kovalev explained in Pravda, for having been under-
taken by a group within the Communist party.
W hat the anti-Socialist forces o f the right wing [of the Com m unist party] in
Czechoslovakia tried to bring about [he wrote], was n o t the development o f Social-
ism in its original form or the adaptation o f M arxist-Leninist principles to the

1. Quoted in Robert Littell’s Introduction to The Czech Black Book, p. ix. This publi-
cation, entitled On the Events in Czechoslovakia, was distributed in many thousands of
copies by Soviet troops in Czechslovakia during the autumn of 1968.
2. Guardian, 8 November 1969.
3. Pravda, 11 September 1968, quoted in The Czech Black Book, p. viii.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 461
special conditions in the country, but the truncation o f the foundation o f Socialism
an d o f the fundam ental principles of M arxism -L eninism .. . . U nder a cloak o f
‘dem ocratization’, these elements had step by step shaken the Socialist s ta te .. . .
They gradually prepared a counter-revolutionary coup d 'e ta t}

It had, of course, to be admitted that Moscow had repeatedly and

emphatically warned the Communist party of Czechoslovakia against the
democratization of the Socialist regime; the freedoms of thought, speech and
press were, in its eyes, anathema to the Socialist system.
The Czech Communists, however, saw the path to Socialist democracy as
the one road possible for the regeneration of the Socialist system. And even if
that road was mistaken in the opinion of the Soviet leaders, in the opinion of
the Czech Communist leaders it was the correct one for their country. It was
one which they had chosen after careful consideration and with full constitu-
tional sanctions. And it had seemed at Ciema and Bratislava as though the
Soviet leaders had accepted this fact and had assured the Czech delegates that
they had no need to fear any restriction of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty.
To Prague it had seemed unthinkable that the country’s sovereignty could
be placed in question. Mutual respect for sovereignty between Socialist states
and the principle of mutual non-intervention in internal affairs clearly formed
the basis of their interrelations. Not only had these principles been reaffirmed
in the Soviet Union’s declaration of 30 October 1956,2 but they were already
contractually incorporated in Article 8 of the Warsaw Pact.
The signatory powers state th at they will act in the spirit o f friendship. . . guided
by principles o f m utual respect; they will not interfere in one another’s internal
affairs.

And Article 1 of the Warsaw Pact specifies that no conflict arising between
in d iv id u al c o u n tries m u st b e settled by fo rce:

The leading parties to the contract pledge themselves in accordance w ith the
covenant o f the U nited N ations to refrain in international relations from threats o f
force or the use of force and to solve international conflicts by peaceful means.3

The Czech Communist leaders therefore considered an invasion by the

Soviet Union to be beyond imagining. They saw the Warsaw Pact as providing
adequate protection against the use of force for them as for their allies. The
stark notion that a Socialist government could breach the Socialist principles
of the people’s right to independence and self-determination and unexpectedly
attack another Socialist country by force of arms was not to be entertained.
The possibility of a Russian invasion had not been considered for a moment
1. Pravda, 26 September 1968; for the text of the article, see Current Digest o f the Soviet
Press, vol. xx, No. 39.
2. See page 425.
3. For the text of the Warsaw Pact, see James (ed.), The Czechoslovak Crisis 1968, pp.
161-5. For an examination of the role of the Warsaw Pact in the Russo-Czech conflict, see
ibid., pp. 31-55.
462 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
by Communist party and government leaders; in fact, neither party nor
government, which had at their command over eighteen divisions of one of
the best-trained and best-equipped armies in Eastern Europe, had made any
sort of defence preparation.

So how did the Soviet leaders justify this invasion which contradicted the
Socialist principles of sovereignty and self-determination to which they
ostensibly subscribed?
The theoretical solution for this contradiction was developed by S.
Kovalev in the article in Pravda which has already been quoted. He admitted
that ‘the action by the five Socialist countries [against Czechoslovakia] con-
tradicted the Marxist-Leninist principles of sovereignty and the right to self-
determination of nations’—but this was only an ‘abstract sovereignty’ and
only an ‘abstract right of a people’s self-determination’. ‘Marxistic dialectics,’
on the other hand, ‘reject one-sided explanations for historical phenomena.’
The sovereignty of Socialist states, he wrote, ‘was not to be interpreted in the
spirit of the Marxist concept of legal criteria, valid also for relations between
Socialist countries, in a formal sense, and divorced from its connection with
the class struggle’.1 Sovereignty and the right to self-determination were not
for Socialist countries absolute, unlimited rights, since ‘they must not be
allowed to contradict the interests of world Socialism’ in executing these
rights. Decisions taken by Communist p a rtie s in Socialist co u n tries o v er the
path their development was to take ‘must damage neither Socialism in their
own country nor the fundamental interests of other Socialist countries’.
‘World Socialism is a social system “indivisible”,’ he declared, ‘and its defence
is a common cause for all Communists.’
The development in Czechoslovakia, he stated, had threatened the
country’s Socialist foundations. ‘The Communists in its fraternal countries
could not, of course, remain inactive for the sake of an abstract sovereignty
while the country was endangered by an anti-Socialist degeneration. . . .
Formal respect for the freedom of self-determination in the special
situation pertaining in Czechoslovakia,’ he wrote, ‘would have meant self-
determination not for the working people, but for their enemies.’2
A few weeks later, on 12 November 1968, this theory was proclaimed as an
official doctrine by the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, Leonid I. Brezhnev, at the Fifth Congress of the Polish Communist
party in Warsaw.
1. Marx, it may be recalled, considered it to be ‘one of the duties of the working classes’
—as he proclaimed in his Inaugural Address— to vindicate the simple laws of morality and
justice which ought to govern the relations of private individuals as the rules paramount in
the intercourse of nations’.
2. Pravda, 26 September 1968.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague' 463
In his opening speech he said:
The Socialist states stand for the strict respect o f the sovereignty o f all countries.
They decisively oppose any interference in the affairs o f all states and any violation
o f their sovereignty.

This general principle, however, was not unconditionally valid for

Socialist states, as Brezhnev pointed out. For, he continued,
if internal o r foreign forces hostile to Socialism should attem pt to turn the develop-
m ent o f any one Socialist country tow ards the restoration o f the capitalist order, if
a danger to Socialism develops in th at country, then it becomes n o t only the prob-
lem for the country in question, but a general problem which is a m atter o f concern
for all the Socialist countries.1

How the doctrine was to be interpreted was shown by the Soviet leaders
during their conflict with Czechoslovakia. They considered the action
initiated by the Communist party of developing a Socialist democracy as an
attempt by ‘internal and foreign enemies of Socialism’ to restore capitalism
and so, according to the views of the Soviet leaders, ‘endanger the common
interests of the Socialist camp’. And since the Czechoslovakian Communists
had persisted in their path, pointing to their rights to self-determination and
their country’s sovereignty, the country had been occupied by the Soviet
Union ‘in the mutual interest of the Socialist camp’.
An earlier example of the practical application of this doctrine had already
been given by the Soviet leaders in their invasion of Hungary in 1956. The
Hungarian situation, however, had been more complicated. The revolution in
Hungary had been aimed not only at the transformation of a Communist
society into a Social Democratic one but the state also broke away from the
Warsaw Pact and declared Hungary to be neutral. It thus challenged the
Soviet Union’s interests as an imperialist power.
For Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, the Warsaw Pact was, as we have
seen, a binding condition for its security, which no government in the country
could have avoided. It was not therefore Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy
which had been called in doubt, but its internal development: the process of
transforming a Communist dictatorship into a Socialist democracy. The
Soviet leaders’ fear was that the Czech experiment might offer an impetus to
similar developments in other states of the Soviet bloc, and ultimately in the
Soviet Union itself. So to vitiate the experiment, they lashed out. The
Brezhnev doctrine was therefore intended not merely to justify Soviet
action against Czechoslovakia, but also to serve as a warning to any other
countries in the Soviet bloc which might attempt to democratize their
system.
The basic implication of its message was that the Communist parties of
Socialist countries were not by any means free to develop their political
1. Neues Deutschland, 13 November 1968.
464 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
system in accordance with their own wishes. Their sovereignty and right to
self-determination was, in practice, limited. Should in the view of the Soviet
leadership any of their decisions ‘endanger the common interests of the
Socialist camp’, then the Soviet Union is justified to intervene. This was
particularly applicable to any decision to democratize the Communist system,
which would, according to the theory of the Soviet leaders, inevitably lead to
the restoration of capitalism. Therefore any attempt by states in the Soviet
bloc to change the system of Soviet dictatorship into a system of Socialist
democracy would be suppressed by the Soviet Union with force of arms.

The action that the Soviet Union had taken against Czechoslovakia aroused
an outcry of indignation in the democratic Socialist world and precipitated a
profound crisis in the Communist movement. The general council of the
Socialist International, meeting in Copenhagen on 21 August, the day of the
invasion, passed a resolution declaring:
The Socialist International condemns the invasion as an act o f naked aggression
which lays bare the imperialist character o f the relationship which the Soviet U nion
seeks to impose upon her W arsaw Pact allies. . . .
This act of imperialism, reminiscent o f H itler’s invasion o f Czechoslovakia,
outrages the sovereign right o f the Czechoslovak people to determine w ithout
foreign interference their own way o f lif e .. . .
The Soviet U nion and her accomplices in this act have revealed to the world
once again their long abuse o f the terms ‘Socialism’ and ‘D em ocracy’.1

The Communist world was profoundly dismayed. ‘The international

labour movement,’ wrote Ernst Fischer, who was then a member of the
politbureau of the Austrian Communist party, ‘has been hit by the greatest
intellectual crisis in its history.’ He asked that the Communist party of Austria
should break off relations with the Communist party in Moscow. The
invasion, declared Roger Garaudy, a leading Marxist philosopher who was a
member of the politbureau of the French Communist party, had been ‘a crime
against hope, a crime against Socialism, a crime against the future’.2 He
demanded the resignation of the Soviet leaders. The leader of the Swedish
Communist party, Carl-Henrik Hermanson, requested the severing of rela-
tions between Sweden and the Soviet Union. With the exception of the five
Communist parties whose governments had undertaken the invasion, the
Soviet action was criticized by nearly all the European Communist parties.
But reactions to the event were not unanimous throughout the whole of the
world Communist movement, nor even within the European parties them-
1. Socialist International Information, vol. xvm, 21 September 1968.
2. Roger Garaudy, LaLiberte en sursis-Prague 1968 (Paris, 1969), p. 24.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 465

selves.1 In the conflict of conscience between their avowed principles on the

one hand and their loyalty to the Soviet Union as the supreme bulwark of the
world Communist movement on the other, many Communists chose to
sacrifice Socialist principles to the duty of Communist solidarity.
To Socialists of all tendencies it seemed inconceivable that a Communist
government could undertake an act of warfare against a fraternal Socialist
country. Communists could only perceive these events as a tragedy. The idea
which raised Socialism to a universal ideal was its concept of universal peace.
For the century from the birth of the modern Socialist movement, this had
been one of its dominant ideas. Socialism held out a promise for world peace.
In a world that was tom by nationalist and imperialist conflicts, war had
seemed unavoidable, and warfare between capitalist and Communist states
well within the bounds of possibility. Wars between Socialist states had
seemed unimaginable.
It was an ideal which had been shattered earlier by the war of the Soviet
Union against Socialist Hungary in 1956. But at that time the Soviet leader-
ship had been able to convince the astounded world that it had taken up arms
to defend Socialism against a brazen imperialistic assault. Under Nagy’s
leadership, they asserted the Hungarian Communist party had lost control of
the country, and the capitalist counter-revolution had arisen openly. What
occurred in Hungary, the Kremlin insisted, had been a war between Socialism
and capitalism.
But in Czechoslovakia the Communist party had not lost its authority.
When its conflict with Moscow broke out, the whole nation flocked to its side,
making it stronger and mightier than ever before. Unlike agrarian Hungary,
which only two decades earlier had emerged from a semi-feudal society,
the foundations of the Communist party had not been laid on sand to
fall apart at the first impact of the crisis. The party in Czechoslovakia
was solid and established, with its roots in the soil of a highly developed
industrial nation and with a million and a half members; already in the
days of the First Republic it had been one of the largest parties in the
country.
Even Moscow had been unable to prove that there had been any acute
danger of a capitalist counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia. What had actu-
ally occurred was a peaceful change in the leadership of the party—the
Stalinists being replaced by ‘revisionists’—and the beginning of a process of
democratization of the Communist regime—a process admittedly stimulated
by the ideas of Socialist intellectuals, but which had received the powerful
support of the Communist party. Moscow’s war against Czechoslovakia had

1. For an analysis of the reactions of individual Communist parties to Moscow’s

armed intervention, see Heinz Brahm, Der Kreml und die C .S.S.R. 1968-1969 (Stuttgart,
1970); see also Kevin Devlin, ‘The New Crisis in European Communism’, in Problems o f
Communism, November-December 1968.
466 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
not been a war between Socialism and capitalism, but a war between the
Soviet Union and ‘revisionism’, a war against a ‘new model of Socialism’.1

The Soviet action against Czechoslovakia threw up two fundamental ques-

tions for Communists: that of the autonomy of Communist parties and that of
the true character of ‘revisionism’.
The ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, by which the Soviet action had been justified,
disputes the unconditional right to autonomy of individual Communist
parties in Socialist countries; they were not free to pursue a policy which
might threaten the Socialist foundations in their countries and therefore
damage the interests of other Socialist countries.
The principle of international solidarity is certainly unchallengeable. But
who is the international moral authority in the Communist world entitled to
judge the policy of individual Communist parties? While the Communist
International, and later the Cominform, remained in existence, they were
recognized by the Communist parties as the supreme moral authority. But
since both these international bodies have been dissolved, there has been no
international Communist court of justice to which Communist parties are
accountable. Neither are they to be bound by criticisms made by individual
fraternal parties. The principle of mutual respect of sovereignty—proclaimed
by both the Moscow declaration of 1956 and the Warsaw Pact of 1956—
safeguards their right to follow a course of policy which, in the light of their
own knowledge and conscience, does not contradict the spirit of international
solidarity.12
After the dissolution of the Cominform, the Soviet leaders had taken
upon themselves the prerogative of an international Communist court of
justice which could, so to speak, give its verdict in the name of ‘Socialism’
on the policies of Communist parties in Socialist countries. The sanction that
the Communist International and the Cominform had employed against
parties that did not submit to their verdict had been expulsion—as, for

1. The armed intervention by the Soviet Union and its allies had, of course, been a war,
but not one involving mass slaughter (though the Soviet Union had been quite prepared for
this), because unlike the Hungarians, the Czechoslovak Communists had, on the advice of
their party leaders, offered no resistance to the overwhelmingly superior forces of the
invading armies.
2. This was reaffirmed in a declaration at the conference in Moscow in November 1960
which was attended by eighty-one Communist parties. A French Communist, Andre
Wurmser, referred to it in supporting the protests of the French Communist party against
the Russian invasion. ‘In truth,’ he said, ‘the tragic decision of this month of August is
wrong, not only according to our opinion but according to our law, the law of the Commun-
ist parties of the whole w orld.. . . Who took the responsibility for the intervention ? Not the
Communist parties, since the French Communist party, the Italian Communist party, and
the very great majority of the eighty-one parties that signed the 1960 declaration, were
opposed to it, but only some Communist parties, which set themselves up on their own
authority to be judges without appeal’. Andre Wurmser, 'Le M ois tragique', in France
Nonvelle, 4 September 1968.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 467

example, the expulsion of the Swedish and Norwegian parties from the Inter-
national,1 and the Yugoslav party from the Cominform.2 The sanction that
the Soviet leaders employed against parties in Socialist countries which did
not bow down before their verdict was war—war against Hungary in 1956,
and against Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The crime which Czechoslovakia had committed, and for which it was
invaded and occupied, was, in the view of the Soviet leaders, ‘revisionism’.
For, according to the Soviet theory, ‘revisionism’ is a heretical deviation
from Marxism-Leninism, as corrupting for Socialism as ‘social-democracy’,
which, if it took root in countries under Communist rule, would endanger
their Socialist foundations and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism.
But what, in fact, is ‘revisionism’ ? It is a concept of Communist policy
which aims to develop Socialism beyond the stage of dictatorship towards a
new type of Socialist society, radically different from the Russian type.
Yet, for Lenin, it was self-evident that each country, according to its
peculiar conditions, would develop a ‘particular originality’ of Socialism on a
particular road. In an article which he wrote in October 1916 he said:

All nations will attain Socialism; this is inevitable. But they will attain it n o t
quite on the same road. Different forms of democracy, variations o f the dictatorship
o f the proletariat, and differences in the pace o f the transform ation o f society will
im part a peculiar originality to Socialism.3

Stalin, however, saw any deviation from Moscow’s type of Socialism as a

crime, like the ‘crime’ of ‘Titoism’, and he delivered any leaders of a ruling
Communist party whom he suspected of it to the executioner. And Stalin’s
heirs in the Kremlin, regardless of their criticism of his ‘cult of personality’,
have in practice remained Stalinists. They no longer call the pursuit of a type
of Socialism different from the Russian type ‘Titoism’, since they crave Tito’s
friendship, but they do call it ‘revisionism’. Like Stalin, as Roger Garaudy
wrote when protesting against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, ‘they tend to
confuse Stalinism with the historical form which it has happened to take in
their country. Anything which contradicts this form is, for them, in conflict
with Socialism.’
The essence of the conflict between Moscow and Prague was in reality the
doctrine that Soviet Communism as it had developed under the particular
historical and economic conditions in Russia—a system of Socialism with-
out freedom—was the only conceivable form of Socialism and that the
synthesis of freedom and Socialism as envisaged by Karl Marx was a
utopia.
But the historical conditions under which Socialism could be developed in
1. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 311-13.
2. See pp. 386-7.
3. V. I. Lenin, Samtliche Werke, vol. xix, p. 281.
468 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Czechoslovakia were entirely different from the conditions under which
Socialism had developed in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union it had been
necessary for the agrarian society to be transformed into an industrial society
to serve as a basis for a Socialist society and the Czechoslovak Communists
did not dispute the need for a totalitarian dictatorship to enforce this
process.
Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, was an industrial society, even before
the Communists seized power in the country and, following its liberation in
1945, the means of production had been progressively transferred from
capitalist to public ownership. Capitalism had by this stage been abolished,
the capitalist class dissolved and the material and social foundations for a
Socialist society created.
Such an achievement could have been possible in Czechoslovakia, even
without invoking the force of a dictatorship, and a Czechoslovakian road to
Socialism would have been feasible there since Socialism was the acknow-
ledged creed of a great majority of the people. It had been Moscow which had
enforced the ‘Russian road to Socialism’ on the country.
The Czechoslovakian Communists had come to lose any confidence in the
‘Russian road to Socialism’, in the need for force as an instrument to achieve
Socialism; and all the more so after the economy had stagnated and the
intellectual life of the nation become sterile under the system of bureaucratic
dictatorship on the Russian model. They no longer accepted that the Russian
type of Socialism was the only possible structure. They were seeking for a
new model.
They therefore took the decision to complete the revolution of the material
conditions of Socialism by revolutionizing its ‘superstructure’ and to enter a
new phase of Socialist development—in Friedrich Engels’s words, the phase
of transition ‘from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’. The
reforms proposed in their Action Programme—new statutes to change the
party structure and, above all, the restitution of freedom of opinion, of press
and radio—were designed to be the means of this transition.
It was the concept of a new type of Socialism against which the Soviet
leaders inveighed, condemning it as a ‘revisionist’ concept which contradicted
Marxism-Leninism. It was the abolition of the censorship which had, above
all, aroused their profoundest displeasure. Just as Mettemich had enforced
his infamous ‘Karlsbad Decisions’ in September 1819, committing the
German federal states to the suppression of freedom of thought, press and
learning, so, 150 years later, the Soviet leaders had in their negotiations with
the Czechoslovakian leaders insisted on the reimposition of censorship over
press and radio—in the name of ‘Marxism-Leninism’.
The Czechoslovak Communists would have had very little difficulty in
demonstrating convincingly that their concept was based not only on the
 'The Spring of Prague' 469
tenets of Marxism, but that it was also in harmony with Lenin's theory· of
transition from a proletarian dictatorship to a system of freedom. 1 And so far
as Marx was concerned, he regarded the freedom of the press as such a valu-
able element, both for civic government and human dignity, that he devoted
an essay of no less than fifty pages to making his point. 2 But the Czecho-
slovak Communists chose not to engage in a theoretical discussion over
interpretations of Marxism-Leninism, but simply insisted on their right to
autonomy-their right to decide their own road to Socialism.
The Soviet leaders, however, saw the establishing of freedom of thought,
press and radio in a Communist-ruled country as the most basic manifestation
of 'revisionism'. In their opinion, it was damaging to the interests of the other
Communist-ruled countries and since the Czechoslovak leaders had refused
Soviet demands to reimpose censorship and abandon 'revisionism', they had,
in Moscow's view and according to the Brezhnev doctrine, forfeited their
party's right to autonomy and their country's right to sovereignty.

The frustration by the Soviet Union of the Czechoslovak experiment of

creating a 'new model of Socialism' was the heaviest blow which Socialism
had ever suffered-a blow of even more importance historically than that
which had struck it through Fascism. For while Facism had been able
physically to suppress the Socialist parties, it had not been able to kill their
spirit; this continued to live on in the masses as was manifested by the rapid
reconstruction of the parties once Fascism had collapsed.
Moscow's struggle against 'revisionism' is, on the other hand, a crusade
against the very spirit of Socialism. It is an attempt to exterminate the very
ideas without which the regeneration of Socialism in Communist-ruled
countries would be impossible. The destruction of 'revisionism' in Czecho-
slovakia, the nipping in the bud of all new forms of Communist regime, which,

1. ' ... if the resistance of the capitalists has finally been broken, if the capitalists have
disappeared, if there are no longer any classes (i.e. no differences between the members of
society as they relate to the co-operative means of production)-only then .•. can there be
talk of freedom. Only then will a genuine comprehensive democracy, in truth without
exception, become possible and be realized,' wrote Lenin in Staat und Revolution, pp. 225-6.
2. This essay appeared in the Rheinischer Zeitung in 1843 under the title: 'Debatten
iiber Pressefreiheit und Publikationen der landstiindigen Verhand/ungen'; it is reprinted in
Franz Mehring (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels 1841-1850,
vol. I (Stuttgart, 1913), pp. 208-58. One would search in vain for this text in the four
volumes of selected works by Marx and Engels issued by the Foreign Languages Publishing
House in Moscow in a popular edition for the Marx, Engels and Lenin Institute in 1950, and
which were issued by the Communist S.E.D. in Berlin in 1953. Considering the state of the
press in the Soviet Union and East Germany at that time, the republication of Marx's views
would hardly have been appropriate.
470 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
had they been allowed to mature, would have eroded the despotic character of
Soviet Communism, the reimposition of a system which suppressed the
elementary rights of freedom through the Soviet Union’s military might,
shattered the faith in a gradual transformation of that Russian autocracy
which had made the Soviet Union into one of the great reactionary forces
of the present age.
It was the belief of many Socialists—Otto Bauer, the leading theoretician
of Austrian Marxism, among them—that the system of the Communist
dictatorship under which Russia has been industrialized would, through its
own internal pressures, develop into a system of Socialist democracy. For, it
was assumed, the industrial revolution, by creating the material conditions for
a Socialist order of society, would necessarily be accompanied by a cultural
revolution, which in turn would create the intellectual conditions for the
establishment of Socialism. Given both conditions in the realization of
Socialism, the system of dictatorship would lose its historical function: it
would become superfluous and, as Otto Bauer expected, would wither away.
The craving for freedom of the masses awakened to self-consciousness by
the cultural revolution would, with the demands of modern technology,
form an irresistible force for liberating the spirit from the shackles of
dictatorship.1
Such an optimistic perspective had seemed to be justified when, after
Stalin’s death in 1953, the harshness of his regime was softened and it
appeared that the measures of liberalization then taken were heralding the
reform of the system. It proved an illusion. So far no real signs of any change
have been seen in the totalitarian system. And the action of the Soviet leaders
against Czechoslovakia’s ‘revisionism’ had once again demonstrated their
iron determination to see that their system remained immutable. The liberal-
ization of the Stalinist regime had, it is true, moderated its most barbaric
excesses.2 But the system itself remained untouched by the aspirations of
liberalization; the optimistic expectation that it would necessarily change
during the process of the economic and technical development into a demo-
cratic system remained unfulfilled.
Yet how are we to understand this incredible paradox, that a Communist
party, inspired by the Marxist concept of the emancipation of humanity, and
creating over half a century of its rule one of the greatest industrial states of
1. See Otto Bauer, Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen? (Bratislava, 1936), pp. 165-8, 207,208.
2. Thus, for example, the writers Andrei Sinyavski and Yuri Daniel were not eliminated
by a bullet in the back of the neck for the over-explicit social criticism in their work, as
would most probably have happened to them under the Stalinist regime. In strict observance
of ‘Socialist legality’, they were sentenced respectively to no more than seven and five years’
hard labour in Siberian concentration camps. For the conditions in the Siberian labour
camps to which political prisoners were sent, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the
Life o f Ivan Denisovich (London, 1963), and Anatoli Marschenko, M y Testimony (London,
1969). Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner in these camps from 1945 to 1953, Marschenko from
1960 to 1966.
 ‘The Spring o f Prague’ 471
the world, whose means of production are exclusively state property and in
which the capitalist classes no longer exist and capitalist class rule has been
completely eliminated, should continue to maintain a regime denying liberty?
And how are we to explain why it is that these leaders of state and party
should, like Mettemich a century and a half before them, fear freedom of
thought like the plague and hence maintain all the instruments of free thought
—press, radio, literature and film—under subjection to an air-tight system of
censorship?
The fear of freedom of thought has always been synonymous with the
fear of the ruling classes of the rebellion of the ruled; the struggle of the
subjected classes for freedom of thought was inseparable from their struggle
for economic and social emancipation. So if the Soviet Union is indeed a
classless society, how can the phenomenon of the suppression of freedom of
thought be explained? If in the history of class struggles class-ridden societies
had indeed suppressed it because it threatened the existing class structure,
what institution could freedom of thought possibly endanger in a classless
Socialist society?
The very institution of the Socialist foundation on which such a society is
based—the institution of the common ownership of the means of production
—makes the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union not only completely
unthinkable (and, in fact, wished for by none) but also the material pre-
conditions for the development of a new capitalist class are completely
absent.
If, then, freedom of thought is not a threat to the existing order, what
purpose is served by its suppression? Together with all other civic rights,
freedom of thought was suppressed in the Soviet Union at a time when the
revolution was threatened by the class enemies of Socialism and, later on,
when it had to face the immense problems of industrializing the country.
Freedom of thought was suppressed to protect the Bolshevik Revolution. In
the meantime, the class enemies of Socialism have been destroyed and the
problems of industrialization solved.1 The period of transition from a class-
divided to a homogeneous, classless society, and from an essentially pre-
capitalist economy to a new, industrialized and highly developed state-owned
economic order, has long been concluded.
1. More than thirty years ago, at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist party of
the Soviet Union, in March 1939, Stalin had declared: ‘We have destroyed the exploiting
classes; in our country there are no longer classes of enemies.’ So what purpose continued
to be served by the system of dictatorship based on a formidable secret police machine
which had, at the time of the ‘Great Purge’, executed thousands of Soviet citizens and sent
tens of thousands to the concentration camps? In his view, the rule of terror was still
necessary, because, he explained, the Soviet Union was encircled by capitalist states which
‘infiltrate our country with spies and murderers’—as, he asserted, the trials of Trotsky and
Bukharin had revealed. ‘So long,* he said, ‘as the capitalist encirclement is not replaced by a
Socialist encirclement, so long must the power of the state, the army and the secret police
remain strong’—Problems o f Leninism (Moscow, 1947), pp. 632 and 634.
 472 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
What other purpose then continues to be served by the suppression of the
freedom of thought in the Soviet Union? Clearly only the protection and
perpetuation of an absolutist system of bureaucratic state power, as this has
developed out of the Soviet state under Stalin’s rule—a totalitarian system
based on the bureaucratic apparatus of a centralized monolithic party and a
state monopoly of ideology and all the instruments for the formation of
public opinion.1
The Soviet action against Czechoslovakia was an act in defence of the
system of absolutism in Russia. Freedom of thought in Czechoslovakia had
to be suppressed, the democratization of the Communist regime in that
country thwarted, since the spread of freedom and democracy in any
Communist-ruled country could have aroused a movement of freedom
and democracy in the Soviet Union itself, so threatening the system of
Soviet Communism. This is the historical significance of the Soviet action.
It became a tragedy for Socialism.

The tail-piece to the history of the subjection of Czechoslovakia to Moscow’s

predominance may be briefly told. On 24 August 1968, three days after the
invasion began, a delegation of the presidium of the Czechoslovak Com-
munist party was informed by the Soviet leaders in Moscow that Czecho-
slovakia was to be occupied by the Russian army until the state and its
institutions had been ‘normalized’.
This was followed by a classic example of the re-Stalinization of a de-
Stalinized state and society. The passive resistance put up by the Czecho-
slovakian nation, in particular by its working class, was unique in history.
The process of ‘normalization’ had therefore only been able to proceed step
by step. DubCek was overthrown as general secretary and Gustav Hus4k
installed as his successor. Gradually the ‘revisionists’ were forced out of the
positions they held in the party—from the top down to the local organizations
—and replaced by Stalinists. The ‘purge’ was then extended to the press and
radio, the trade unions, the administrations of state and public institutions
and the universities and schools. During the first two and a half years follow-
ing the occupation, nearly half a million party members were either expelled
or left of their own accord.2
But now the Soviet government had to face the more intricate problem of
1. For an interesting investigation into this phenomenon, and, in particular, into the
position of the bureaucracy in Soviet society, see Bertram D. Wolfe, An Ideology in Power.
Reflections on the Russian Revolution (New York, 1969).
2. As Hus&k reported to the central committee of the party in December 1970,259,670
members had been expelled and another 150,000 had left since August 1968—Guardian,
16 December 1970.
 'The Spring o f Prague’ 473

how to remove the stigma of having invaded a fraternal state—the Socialist

Republic of Czechoslovakia—with which it was marked by the proclamations
of the Czechoslovak government, the National Assembly and, above all, by
the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist party.
To rewrite history so as to reinterpret the historical fact of the invasion as
a generous act of international Socialist solidarity in response to an appeal by
the Czechoslovak leaders for help against the threat of an imminent counter-
revolution proved a complex task. It took more than a year of the re-
Stalinization of the party before its central committee felt in any position to
repudiate the party’s original attitude to the invasion. At its plenary session on
26 September 1969, it revoked the proclamation of the Fourteenth Congress,
which had indicted the Soviet Union of the crime of invasion, by the simple
expedient of declaring the congress illegal and its decision null and void. Still
a further year was to pass before the central committee had the courage to
offer their official version of the events of August 1968, which blatantly con-
tradicted the experience of the nation. A statement issued on 14 January 1971
under the title ‘Lessons drawn from the Critical Developments in the Party
and Society after the 13th Party Congress’ declared:
In August 1968 . . . our country was on the verge of civil war. It was necessary
to decide whether to wait until the counter-revolution had provoked a fratricidal
fight in which thousands would die and to grant international assistance only
afterwards, or whether to arrive in time to prevent a bloody tragedy. . . . The entry
o f the allied troops . . . prevented such bloodshed and was therefore the requisite
and only correct solution.

Yet, the crucial question remained, ‘who in Czechoslovakia had considered

the country to be on the verge of civil war’, and, above all, who had decided
on allowing ‘the entry of allied troops’ into the sovereign Socialist Republic of
Czechoslovakia? In answer, the statement asserted:
Thousands of Communists, individual citizens, and entire collectives o f working
people, representatives of all the strata of the people and o f diverse organizations,
including members of the party central committee and the central committee o f
the Slovak N ational Council . . . began to turn to the leadership o f the fraternal
parties and also the governments of our allies, begging them, in this historically
grave moment, to grant international assistance to the Czechoslovak people in the
defence o f Socialism.1

And, three months later, Gustav Husdk declared in Moscow as the head of
a fraternal delegation of the Czechoslovak Communist party to the Twenty-
Fourth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union:

On behalf of our delegation, we w ant to express from the rostrum o f this

congress our sincere thanks to the Com munist party o f the Soviet Union, to the
1. Pravda (Bratislava), 14 January 1971, quoted in the Guardian, 14 January 1971, and
in Problems o f Communism, May-June 1971.
474 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Soviet government and the Soviet people, for having understood the anxieties o f the
Czechoslovak Com munists regarding Socialism and their appeals for help.1

It was this farce which constituted the final act to the great tragedy of
the spring of Prague.
1. Radio Moscow, 1 April 1971, quoted in Problems o f Communism, May-June 1971.
It may be recalled that Hus£k, having a few days after the invasion returned with other
leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist party from Moscow, where they had been told that
the Russian troops would stay in their country, said in a statement: ‘The question poses
itself, who invited these armies? . . . The question was never discussed to the end: it has not
been resolved. No names have been published. When the matter was discussed in Bratislava,
Prague and Moscow with our leaders, all members of the leadership of the federal and
Slovak parties without exception gave their word of honour that they were not involved in
the demarche and had no knowledge of it. I know of no leading personality in Czech or
Slovak political life of whom it could be said with certainty that he had taken this step’—
Pravda (Bratislava), 28 August 1968, quoted in Problems o f Communism, May-June 1971.
24 • Peking’s Break with M oscow

The position of central authority which the Communist party of the Soviet
Union held in the Communist world movement had been called in question
by the revolt in Yugoslavia, the revolution in Hungary and the reformist
movements of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Peking’s break with Moscow
shattered it.
The conflict between China and the Soviet Union grew out of a disagree-
ment over the ideology and strategy to be adopted in the struggle to attain
Communist predominance in the world.1 These questions had originally been
thrown into relief by the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. in February
1956. This, as we saw,12 toppled Stalin from his plinth; recognized ‘different
roads’ to Socialism; declared in favour of peaceful methods to bring about
the Socialist revolution; and, above all, proclaimed the principle of peaceful
co-existence between Communist and capitalist states as a guiding principle in
the foreign policy of Communist countries.
Mao Tse-tung to all intents stated his firm agreement with the decisions of
the Twentieth Congress when, in November 1957, as head of the Chinese
delegation, he took part in the conference of sixty-four Communist parties
assembled in Moscow to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution. The conference declaration, drafted by representatives from
twelve ruling Communist parties, contained an appreciation of the ‘immense
importance’ of the ‘historic decisions’ of the Twentieth Congress as ‘the start
of a new phase in the world Communist movement’. Three years later, in
November 1960, a conference of eighty-one Communist parties, attended by

1. The following description is based on: John Gittings, Survey o f the Sino-Soviet
Dispute. A Commentary and Extracts from Recent Polemics 1963-1967 (London and New
York, 1968); Alexander Dallin (ed.), Diversity in International Communism. A Documentary
Recordf 1961-1963 (New York and London, 1963); Heinz Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der
Vormacht. Der chinesisch-sowjetische Konflikt vom Juli 1963 bis Marz 1965 (Cologne, 1966);
and Richard Lowenthal, World Communism. The Disintegration o f a Secular Faith (New
York, 1964).
2. See pp. 396-7.
476 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Chou En-lai as leader of the Chinese delegation, unanimously affirmed
the decisions of the Twentieth Congress and the declaration of November
1957.1
The change in Peking’s and Moscow’s relationship did not become
publicly obvious until the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist party
of the Soviet Union was held in October 1961. In their speeches Khrushchev
and Mikoyan strongly attacked the leaders of the Albanian Communist party,
Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu, who had refused to de-Stalinize the party
and rehabilitate its victims of Stalinism. Chou En-lai, present at the congress
as head of Peking’s delegation, rejected their attack in his opening speech.
‘This public one-sided condemnation of a fraternal party,’ he declared,
‘does not encourage unity’; China, he warned, would not sanction
Albania’s expulsion from the Communist camp. And without waiting for
further debate, he demonstratively left the congress to lay a wreath on
Stalin’s grave with the inscription: ‘To the greatest Marxist-Leninist,
J. Stalin’.12
In the public challenge to Moscow conveyed by Chou En-lai, a long-
fermenting resentment at the Soviet Union’s attitude to China had come to
the surface. Stalin, whom Peking now once again glorified, had hardly shown
himself to be a genuine friend of the Chinese revolution, or, in particular, of
Mao Tse-tung. He had treated him with superciliousness, never uttering a
word of appreciation for his achievements. When Soviet troops occupied
Manchuria after Japan’s surrender, they behaved as though they had con-
quered an enemy country, not part of China; the many factories and plants
which they dismantled were shipped as booty to the Soviet Union. Stalin had
been contemptuous of Mao Tse-tung’s partisans, sceptical of Communism’s
chances in China, and distrustful of a revolution asserting itself without his
advice or approval. He had based his policies on an anticipated victory by the
nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. He did not believe that Mao
Tse-tung would be able to crown the revolution by triumphantly unifying the
country. He had ‘categorically’ informed Harry L. Hopkins, when he was
sent to Moscow by President Truman in May 1945, that,
he would do everything he could to promote the unification of China under the
leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. He further stated that this leadership should
continue after the war, because no one else was strong enough. He specifically
stated that no Communist leader was strong enough to unify China. In spite of the

1. For the text of the 1957 declaration, see Gittings, Survey o f the Sirw-Soviet Dispute,
pp. 310-20; for the text of the 1960 declaration, see World M arxist Review, December 1960.
2. For Khrushchev’s criticism, see Dallin (ed.) Diversity in International Communism,
p. 29; for Mikoyan’s criticism, see ibid., pp. 60-3; for Chou En-lai’s rejection of their
criticism, see ibid., p. 51; for the complexity of the problem as it relates to Albania, see
William E. Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet R ift (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Disregard-
ing Chou En-lai’s demonstration of homage to Stalin, the congress agreed that his coffin
should be removed from Lenin’s mausoleum at the Kremlin.
 Peking's Break with Moscow A ll
reservations he expressed about him [Chiang Kai-shek], he proposed to back the
generalissimo.1
Stalin had certainly subordinated the interests of the Chinese revolution
to the Soviet Union’s power-political interests. As the price for recognizing
Chiang Kai-shek’s government after the war he had, at the Yalta Conference
in February 1945, secured Russia’s predominance in Outer Mongolia, the
lease of Port Arthur and ‘rights of precedence’ on the China-East Manchuria
railway, administered jointly with China. After Japan’s capitulation in
August 1945, he instructed Mao Tse-tung to call off his struggle with Chiang
Kai-shek, to enter into talks with him about the setting up of a coalition
government and to amalgamate the Red Army with the forces of the Kuomin-
tang. Mao Tse-tung revealed in a speech at the Tenth Plenum of the Chinese
Communist party in September 1962:
In 1945, Stalin refused to permit China to carry out a revolution, He said to us:
‘Do not have a civil war with Chiang Kai-shek, otherwise the republic of China will
collapse.’ However, we did not obey him and the revolution succeeded.*

Over the next three years the Red Army captured all of northern China
except for Peking and Tientsin.
In the summer of 1948 Mao Tse-tung was planning his ultimate offensive
against the Kuomintang forces. A defeat for the army of the Kuomintang did
not at that time, however, have any place in Stalin’s strategy for the Cold War.
He therefore tried to dissuade Mao Tse-tung from seeing the plan through.123
But Mao Tse-tung again rejected his advice, and when the Communist
offensive began in September it swept away the last Nationalist stronghold in
north China.
Mao Tse-tung’s refusal to submit to Stalin’s leadership had hardly
kindled the Russian leader’s sympathies for the Chinese revolution. After his
experience with Yugoslavia, he was also worried, with reason, that a Com-
munist China might not unquestioningly accept Moscow’s authority but
would pursue an independent policy. ‘Even after the success of the revolution,’
Mao Tse-tung recollected during a speech in March 1967 at the twelfth
plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist party, ‘Stalin feared that China

1. Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers o f Harry L. Hopkins, vol. U (London,
1948), pp. 891-2. Soon after Hopkins’s talk with Stalin, on 4 June 1945, Truman passed on
Stalin’s comments to T. V. Soong, Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law and prime minister.
See Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History o f Modern China (London, 1954), p. 190.
2. Mainichi, 9 March 1967, quoted in Gittings, Survey o f the Sino-Soviet Dispute, p. 12.
See also Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks (London, 1953).
3. ‘Stalin insisted through Lio Shao-ch’i [who had returned from talks with him in
Moscow] that the Chinese Communists should continue with the guerrilla war and not
commence the coup de grace. The Berlin crisis, he argued, which was then at its climax,
would not lead to world war; it was therefore important to continue to force America to
waste its forces through useless assistance to the Kuomintang.’ See C. P. Fitzgerald,
Revolution in China (London, 1954), p. 108.
478 The Mofctl Crisis o f Communism
would degenerate into another Yugoslavia and that I might become a second
Tito. I later went to Moscow and concluded the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alli-
ance. This was also the result of struggles. Stalin did not wish to sign the
treaty; he finally signed it after two months of negotiations.’1
This agreement was not in itself particularly generous. The Soviet Union
did no more than surrender to China its rights over the Manchurian railway
and promise to evacuate Russian troops from Port Arthur (they were only
withdrawn as late as May 1955), but retaining control of the strategically
important port of Dairen and of Manchuria’s lines of communication.
Although Russia did grant China a loan, this was for only $300 million over
five years—far less than United States aid to South Korea alone—and only in
the shape of Russian machines and technical advisers. China was to make
repayments in raw materials, tea, gold and American dollars.
It also seems possible that, in his talks with Stalin, Mao Tse-tung brought
up the question of the agreements signed under the Tsars by which a helpless
China had been forced to surrender to Russia vast areas north of the River
Amur and east of the Russian Ussuri as well as a part of Chinese Turkestan
(Sinkiang). In its first decree of 9 November 1917 the Soviet government had
‘denounced absolutely and immediately’ all treaties designed ‘to retain or
increase the territories of Greater Russia’.2 And, in its declaration to the
Chinese people of 25 July 1919, it had promised ‘to return to the Chinese
people everything that was taken from them by the Tsarist government’.3 It is
quite probable that Mao Tse-tung reminded Stalin of these promises, and so
provoked his refusal even to vacate Port Arthur.
Khrushchev, who followed Stalin to power, was equally unwilling to
return a single square mile of the areas annexed by the Tsarist government.
During his visit to Peking in July 1954, when Mao Tse-tung raised the
question of Outer Mongolia, he refused even to speak about it.4 Mao Tse-tung
was obviously not satisfied with this rejection. ‘We have yet to submit the
bill,’ he said.5

But it was not only the unresolved question of revising the Tsarist treaties but
1. Maiitiehi, 9 March 1967, quoted in Gittings, Survey o f the Sino-Soviet Dispute, p. 15.
Mao Tse-tung had arrived in Moscow at the beginning of December 1949. The agreement
was signed on 14 February 1950.
2. See Jane Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vol. i: 1917-1924
(London, 1951), p. 2.
3. ibid., p. 159. This promise was established in Article I of the draft agreement which
the Soviet government submitted to the Chinese government on 27 September 1920. This
read: ‘The government of the Russian Federated Soviet Republics declares as void all
treaties concluded by the former government of Russia with China, renounces all the
annexations of Chinese territory . . . and returns to China free of charge, and for ever, all
that was ravenously taken from her by the Tsarist government’—see ibid., p. 214.
4. Pravda, 2 September 1964: ‘Mao Tse-tung’s Discussions with Japanese Socialists’;
for the text, see Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der Vormacht, pp. 202-5.
5. ibid., p. 205.
 Peking's Break with Moscow 479
also the Soviet Union’s foreign policy which became a source of Chinese
resentment towards Moscow’s attitude. Afraid of the possible outbreak of a
new world war, Khrushchev sought an understanding with the United States.
Mao Tse-tung, however, saw in the United States the arch-enemy of Com-
munist China. It had armed the Kuomintang during the civil war and had
withheld its recognition of the government of the People’s Republic of China
after the victory of the revolution. It had blocked China’s nomination to the
United Nations while securing for Chiang Kai-shek’s government in the
island of Formosa, whither it had fled with the remnants of its army after its
defeat, a permanent seat on the Security Council. Moreover, by stationing the
Seventh Fleet in Chinese territorial waters, it had prevented the reincorpora-
tion of Formosa into the Chinese state.
Mao Tse-tung had attempted to solve the Formosan question peacefully
in talks with the United States held in the summer of 1955. He had appealed
to Chiang Kai-shek to return to his fatherland and to erase the memory of
past conflicts. But the talks, which dragged on until the end of 1957, were
frustrated by the conditions imposed by America. Mao Tse-tung was unable
to visualize the United States as being anything but an unrelenting enemy to
Communist China.
In the same year, 1957, the Soviet Union had launched the first satellite
into orbit round the earth and had exploded its first atomic bomb. Mao
Tse-tung believed that the Soviet Union had already overtaken the United
States in rearmament. ‘The East wind has gained the upper hand over the
West wind,’ he declared on his arrival in Moscow in November 1957.
And, at the conference of the representatives of the twelve ruling Com-
munist parties, he criticized the principle of peaceful co-existence, as was
later to become known from a report submitted by the secretary of the
Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail
Suslov.1
Khrushchev did not, however, allow himself to be pushed off course in his
foreign policy, which was aimed at an understanding with the United States.
The conference declaration reaffirmed the resolutions of the Twentieth Con-
gress, including the principle of peaceful co-existence between Communist
and capitalist states to form a ‘sound basis of the foreign policy of the
Socialist countries and the dependable pillar of peace and friendship among
the peoples’.
Only three years later, during the second Communist world conference in
Moscow in 1960, where Chou En-lai represented the Chinese party, did
Peking’s opposition to Moscow’s foreign policy emerge in a battle over the
conference’s principles, precipitated by a challenge through a resolution put
forward by the Chinese delegation. In his attempts to attain an easing of
1. Pravda, 3 April 1964. For the text of Suslov’s report, see Brahm, Pekings G riff m ch
der Vormacht, pp. 65-134.
480 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
international tensions, Khrushchev had visited the President of the United
States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in September 1959 at his farm at Camp David,
and had reached an understanding with him over paving the way to peaceful
international relations by a joint declaration rejecting war as a method for
settling conflict between nations.
Mao Tse-tung, on the other hand, did not wish to see any easing of
hostility between Communists and imperialists, or between the Soviet Union
and the United States. And so, at the conference, Chou En-lai asked that the
United States should be condemned as ‘the outstanding force of war and
aggression’, under whose leadership ‘the imperialists form their politics—
military-political alliances to fight in common against the Socialist camp and
to strangle the national liberation, working-class and Socialist movements’, as
the resolution stated in the final form adopted by the conference.
In fact the conference had wrangled over the draft of the resolution, which
threw doubt on the actual success of Khrushchev’s discussions with Eisen-
hower, for almost three weeks. The outcome was a compromise which sought
to screen Peking’s opposition to Moscow’s foreign policy.1 While the resolu-
tion certainly declared that the ‘aggressive nature of imperialism has not
changed’, it also stated that ‘a definite section of the bourgeoisie’ in
capitalist countries favoured the policy of peaceful co-existence, taking a
‘sober view’ of the dire consequences of a modem war. And the conference
finally gave sanction to the principle of peaceful co-existence. ‘Peaceful
co-existence of countries with different systems or destructive war—that
is the alternative today. There is no other choice . . . ,’ the resolution
declared.
The disputed question of the position which the Communist party of the
Soviet Union occupied in the Communist world movement, which Chou
En-lai had also evidently raised, was similarly solved by a compromise.
Hitherto Moscow had insisted on recognition for its party’s ‘leading role’.
The new formula read:

The Communist and Workers’ parties unanimously declare that the Communist
party of the Soviet Union has been, and remains, the universally recognized van-
guard of the world Communist movement.. . .

This compromise had been evolved because neither Khrushchev nor Mao
Tse-tung wished to disrupt Sino-Soviet relations further. These had been

1. That the formula for the 1960 declaration had been a compromise was confirmed by
a letter dated 28 July 1964 from the central committee of the Communist party of China to
the central committee of the Soviet Communist party. ‘You are perfectly well aware,’ it
stated, ‘that the Communist party of China has always been against this formulation. At the
two discussions between our fraternal parties, you repeatedly asked us to accept this
formulation unconditionally, since otherwise you would get into great difficulties. It was
only out of respect for your difficulties that we agreed to a compromise.’—see ibid.,
p. 187.
 Peking's Break with Moscow 481
disturbed since 1958 above all by the Soviet Union’s refusal, in contravention
of a secret agreement of 1957, to place the plans for the atomic bomb and the
technical details of its manufacture at China’s disposal. Moscow did not wish
to see China’s rise to become the Soviet Union’s equal in power. To Peking’s
criticism of Moscow’s attitude, Khrushchev reacted by recalling Russia’s
technical advisers in the summer of I960.1

The rift between Peking and Moscow did not, however, emerge publicly until
the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in
October 1961. The three-week debate over the drafting of the resolution at
the Communist world conference of 1960 had been conducted behind closed
doors. While it is true that various indications, such as the recall of the
Russian experts from China, had given rise to assumptions that the harmony
between the two great Communist powers was not undisturbed, the depths of
the conflicts which divided them and the animosity which these evoked had
remained concealed from the eyes of the world.
But, at its Twenty-Second Congress, the Communist party of the Soviet
Union received a public challenge from Peking. By the attitude Chou En-lai
showed in his speech to the congress—his condemnation of Khrushchev’s
criticism of the Communist party of Albania, his powerful attack on the
President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,12 with whom
Khrushchev was currently holding talks about the limitation of nuclear
armaments and, above all, by his homage to Stalin—he indicated that the
Communist party of China was no longer inclined to recognize the leading
role of the Communist party of the Soviet Union as the central authority
of the Communist world movement. China declared herself to be solidly
behind the Albanian party in its conflict with Moscow, and when on 25
November 1961 the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with
Albania, simultaneously expelling the Albanian party from the Communist
camp, Peking refused to sanction its decision and paid tribute to the

1. ‘You have cast overboard the standards of international relations,’ a letter of 29

February 1964 from the central committee of the Communist party of China to the central
committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union complained, ‘and within the short
period of one month have unscrupulously withdrawn 1,390 Soviet specialists working in
China, tom up 343 contracts as well as supplementary contracts for the employment of
specialists, and have cancelled 257 projects for scientific and technical co-operation.. . .
Thus many of our important projects and scientific research programmes have had to be
broken off half completed.. . . Your breaking of your word has disrupted our basic political
economy and inflicted heavy losses in the Socialist reconstruction of China. You have
taken advantage of the opportunity presented by China being inflicted with heavy natural
catastrophes to take these far-reaching steps’—Seven Letters. Correspondence between the
Central Committee o f the Communist Party o f China and the Central Committee o f the
Communist Party o f the Soviet Union (Peking, 1964). For the text, see Brahm, Pekings G riff
nach der Vormacht, pp. 144-55; for the quoted extracts, see ibid., pp. 147-8.
2. For Chou En-lai’s speech, see Dallin (ed.), Diversity in International Communism,
pp. 48-9.
482 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
Albanian party as ‘a militant Marxist-Leninist party, steeled in revolutionary
struggles’.1

One may well ask why Mao Tse-tung did not raise the question of the Soviet
Union’s leading role prior to the first Communist world conference of
November 1957. This conference had in fact been confronted by Moscow
with a fait accompli: Stalin’s degradation; the far-reaching changes in the
Communist ideology as announced by the Twentieth Congress of February
1956; the Soviet intervention in Poland; and the invasion of Hungary by
Soviet forces eight months later. These actions, which were of vital signific-
ance for the whole Communist movement, had been undertaken by the
Communist party of the Soviet Union as the leading party in the Communist
world movement from its own position of absolute power.
As we shall see, Mao Tse-tung had even then entertained strong funda-
mental doubts about the ideological changes undertaken by the Twentieth
Congress of the C.P.S.U. and the new foreign policy which it had initiated.
Moreover, he felt that his own self-esteem was hurt as a result of Moscow’s
autocratic method. In his own party he was regarded as the Lenin of China.
The Chinese Communists looked up to him as an outstanding innovator of
revolutionary strategy, the architect of China’s unity and as a leader and
theoretician of genius.2 He was indeed the leader of the greatest revolution in
Asia’s history. The revolutionary strategy which he had evolved in contra-
diction to Stalin’s had conquered a huge empire. His thoughts had enriched
Marxism-Leninism. He felt himself to be the heir to the Marxist-Leninist
heritage. He claimed the rank in the hierarchy of the world Communist
movement which, after Lenin’s death, Stalin had assumed for himself.
But the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were not
prepared to concede him any such rank; they did not even accept him as an
equal partner in the leadership of the world Communist movement. They did
not consult him about the far-reaching decisions which the Twentieth Con-
gress was going to take nor was he informed about the intention to degrade
Stalin’s reputation in the Communist world. In common with the leaders of
all the other Communist parties at the conference, Mao Tse-tung had been
taken by surprise by Khrushchev’s secret speech.
If Mao Tse-tung did not raise the whole question of the position of the
1. For the Soviet notes about the rupture of diplomatic relations with Albania, see ibid.,
pp. 145-50; for the message of tribute from the Chinese central committee to the Albanian
party, see ibid., pp. 202-3.
2. Liu Shao-ch’i, for example, writing with the authority of a leading theoretician, in his
report to the Seventh Congress of the Communist party of China in April 1945 had praised
Mao as ‘China’s greatest theoretician and scientist’, and described his thought as an ‘admir-
able example of the rationalization of Marxism’. In a later speech (1949), he claimed that
the thought of Mao was applicable not only to the Chinese revolution, but to the struggle for
emancipation throughout the world. Quoted in Stuart R. Schram, Mao Tse-tung (London,
1966), pp. 332-4.
 Peking's Break with Moscow 483
Communist party of the Soviet Union as the supreme authority in the Com-
munist world movement at the council of the leading Communist parties in
November 1957 (at all events, the 1957 declaration contains no reference to it)
this is most probably to be explained by China’s dependence on economic
support from the U.S.S.R.
In the three years between the first and second Communist world confer-
ences, however, relations between Peking and Moscow deteriorated and the
Soviet Union went back on its commitments of support for China by its
recall of Russian technical advisers in the summer of 1960. Only now did
Mao Tse-tung feel able to commence the fight against Moscow’s hegemony.
He did this by declaring his solidarity with the Albanian party, then in revolt
against Moscow.

Mao’s initial gesture of opposition to Moscow was followed by open

attacks revealing the depth of the ideological and strategic conflicts which had
developed between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties—conflicts
concerning both the prospects of Socialism and the methods and tactics to be
used in the fight against the forces of capitalism and imperialism as well as the
attitude to the overwhelming question of the actual danger of a third world
war.
In a number of declarations Mao Tse-tung condemned the new policy
inaugurated by the Twentieth Congress as a ‘revision’ of Marxism-Leninism,
and the course towards an international easing of tension and a detente with
the United States pursued by Khrushchev as a betrayal of the world revolu-
tion. He maintained that Khrushchev’s theory of the conquest of capitalism
by the example of the superiority of a Socialist economy, as he had developed
it at the Twentieth Congress, degraded the struggle between capitalism and
Socialism to economic competition between the capitalist and Socialist
camps. Rather than a policy of international class struggle, he was pursuing a
policy of international class-collaboration; and rather than an international
crusade against imperialism, he was promoting an understanding with the
United States about the division of world rule.
These accusations were based on the fact that the new policy inaugurated
by Moscow was indeed no longer inspired by Lenin’s concept of world
revolution. As far as possible, it sought to change the capitalist order into a
Socialist one by peaceful means, by the very methods of parliamentary demo-
cracy which Lenin had rejected. In 1947, by creating the Cominform, Stalin
had attempted to revive the revolutionary tradition in the Communist move-
ment, which had evaporated during the war in the period of the alliance
between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. But the revolutionary
strategy to which the Communist parties had switched in the spirit of the
Cominform manifesto had proved unavailing in both Europe and Asia.
Khrushchev had liquidated the Cominform, and with it the revolutionary
484 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
prospects of Socialist development. In contrast to Lenin’s interpretation
of parliamentary democracy as an instrument of bourgeois rule and his
strategy to seize power by the armed rising of the working class and the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an instrument of
Socialist revolution, the Twentieth Congress stated in its resolution that a ‘real
opportunity’ could arise for the ‘working class in a number of capitalist
countries’ to ‘win a stable majority in parliament and transform the latter
from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the
people’s will’. The declaration adopted by the conference of 1957 was even
more explicit:
Today in a number of capitalist countries the working class, headed by its
vanguard, has the opportunity, given a united working class and popular front or
other workable forms of agreement and political co-operation between the different
parties and public organizations, to unite a majority of the people, win state power
without civil war and ensure the transfer of the basic means of production to the
hands of the people.
This formulation of the possibility of a peaceful transition to Socialism
was reiterated in the statement issued by the conference in 1960.
And also in contradiction to Lenin’s theory that wars are inseparable
from imperialism and that therefore, as the Cominform manifesto declared,
the outbreak of a fresh world war between the ‘imperialist and Socialist
camps’ seemed inevitable,1 the Twentieth Congress firmly held the view that
wars are avoidable, that the dangers of a new world war could be avoided by
a policy aiming at a state of peaceful co-existence and the international
reduction of tension. Khrushchev even saw a ‘real possibility’ that the rapid
growth of the forces of Socialism and peace might create conditions which,
the 1960 declaration stated, ‘would eliminate world war from the life of society
even before Socialism achieves complete victory on earth with capitalism still
existing in a part of the world’.
The new policy which Khrushchev introduced at the Twentieth Congress
and its ideological justification—an adaptation of Leninism to modern
economic and social conditions—was based on the expectation of a peaceful
development of Socialism without world revolution.

As was later disclosed, Mao Tse-tung expressed his doubts on the changes to
ideology and policy decided upon by the Twentieth Congress2 to the conclave
of the leaders of the twelve ruling Communist parties when it assembled in
1. To the end of his days Stalin held the view that wars were inevitable so long as
imperialism existed. To refute the opinion of certain prominent Communists that wars
might be avoided, he wrote in 1952: ‘To eliminate the inevitability it is necessary to destroy
imperialism’—Economic Problems o f Socialism in the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1952), p. 30.
2. Mao Tse-tung’s objections, submitted in a memorandum to the central committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were later published by the Chinese in The Origin
and Development o f the Differences between the Leadership o f the C.P.S. U. and Ourselves
(Peking, 1963), pp. 58-62.
 Peking's Break with Moscow 485
November 1957. He did not, as he explained, believe in the possibility of a
peaceful Socialist transformation of capitalist society; history offered no
examples of a successful revolution without force. Forceful revolution, he
declared, was ‘a universal law of the proletarian revolution’.1
He also doubted the possibility of preserving peace so long as imperialism
was not completely destroyed. As against the theses of the Twentieth Con-
gress that a new world war was by no means inevitable and that international
peace and co-existence offered the most favourable conditions for the world
triumph of Socialism, he stood by Lenin’s thesis that war was inborn in
imperialism, and that a new world war, regardless of its cost in human lives,
would by no means be a catastrophe, as Khrushchev had said in justifying
the policy of co-existence. ‘Can one foresee,’ he explained, and as Suslov
recorded, ‘how many human sacrifices a future war might demand?’
Perhaps it will be one third of the world population o f 2-7 billion, or, in other
words, no m ore than 900 million people. . . . Even if half the hum an population was
destroyed, the other half would remain, but at this cost imperialism would be
completely destroyed and there would only be Socialism in the entire world, while
in half or one century the population would again increase, probably by m ore
than half.2

Mao Tse-tung did not demand that the Soviet Union should pursue a
foreign policy aimed at provoking world war. But he did insist that its policy
should be directed towards a world revolution, regardless of the dangers of a
new world war; that with its full weight it ought to promote the national and
social revolutions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, for, as a declaration of
the central committee of the Communist party of China stated on 14 June
1963: ‘the wide spaces of Asia, Africa and Latin America are the most
important areas of attack for the world revolution’.3 ‘The revolution for
national liberation in Asia, Africa and Latin America,’ Mao declared,
‘appears today to be the most important force aiming a blow directly against
imperialism.’4 But a policy which sought to lessen international tension by a
1. On 31 March 1964, the Communist party of China publicly declared its disagreement
with the view that a peaceful transition to Socialism was possible and demanded that the
1960 statement should be revised. See R. Palme Dutt, The International (London, 1964),
p. 339. As early as 1938, Mao Tse-tung had made plain his views on the role that force was
to play in the struggle for power. ‘Political power,’ he wrote, ‘grows from the barrel of a gun.
From the barrel of a gun anything can grow.. . . With the help of guns the Russian Com-
munists have produced Socialism. . . . The experience of class war in the age of imperialism
has taught us that the working class can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords only by
the force of the gun. In this sense, we may say that only by the gun can the entire world be
transformed’—Selected Works, vol. u: Problems o f War and Strategy (New York, 1954),
pp. 272 and 273.
2. Pravda, 3 April 1961; for the text, see Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der Vormachtt p. 79.
3. Quoted in Suslov’s report; for the text, see ibid., p. 70.
4. Jen-min Jih-pao, 22 October 1963, quoted in Suslov’s report; for the text, see ibid.,
pp. 70-1. Jen-min Jih-pao (The People’s Newspaper) is the daily paper of the central com-
mittee of the Communist party of China. The article also appeared in the party’s bi-monthly
theoretical journal Hung cKi, and was without doubt inspired by Mao Tse-tung.
486 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
detente with imperialist America was incompatible with the revolutionary
struggle against imperialism. The central committee of the Communist party
of China told the central committee of the Communist party of the Soviet
Union in a letter of 28 July 1964:

If you unilaterally reduce the foreign policy of the Socialist countries to ‘keeping
the peace’ and ‘peaceful co-existence’, it follows that they must forgo any advance
against imperialism or support for the revolution of the suppressed and enslaved
nations.1

Even after his overthrow in October 1964, Khrushchev continued to be

criticized in the Chinese press in the strongest terms for having pursued a
policy aimed at ‘co-operating with the reactionaries of all countries to con-
front the national liberation movements and revolutions of the masses of the
people’.2 And his successors to the Soviet Union’s leadership were told, ‘You
aim the points of your battle spears not against U.S. imperialism and its
lackeys, but against the revolutionary peoples of all countries who are
fighting imperialism and its lackeys.’8
The accusation that the Soviet Union was working for an alliance with the
United States in the struggle to dominate the world became the corner-stone
of Mao Tse-tung’s anti-Moscow propaganda. He supported it with a theory
that the world, as he remarked in a conversation with a group of Japanese
Socialists in September 1964, was divided into two ‘zones’: one zone em-
braced Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the other was the Soviet-
American zone. In other words: one zone contained the nations which were
suppressed by imperialism and were fighting for their freedom, and the other
was the zone of the imperialist United States, with which the Soviet Union
was striving to become allied. The Soviet Union, he continued, had ‘hatched a
plot with the United States of America in the struggle for world rule’.4 ‘With
every fragment of their being they [the leaders of the Soviet Union] strive for
an alliance with American imperialism.’5 ‘In the present-day world,’ said Mao
Tse-tung, ‘two great powers, namely the United States of America and the
Soviet Union, wish to dominate the whole world in a state of mutual accord’.*

Yet it was not only ideological conflicts such as those concerning the prospects
of Socialism and strategy in the world revolution which had brought about
1. For the text of the letter, see Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der Vormacht, p. 187.
2. Hung ch'i. 21 November 1964; for the text, see ibid., p. 229.
3. Jen-min Jih-pao, 23 March 1965; for the text, see ibid., p. 249.
4. Quoted in Pravda, 2 September 1964, in the report on Mao Tse-tung’s talk with the
Japanese Socialists; for the text, see Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der Vormacht, p. 206.
5. Quoted in a letter of 15 June 1964 from the central committee of the Communist
party of the Soviet Union to the central committee of the Communist party of China; for
the text of the letter, see ibid., p. 179.
6. Quoted in John Paasche, ‘Mao Tse-tungs Theorie von den Zwischenzonen', in Ost-
europa, Nos. 1-2, p. 35.
 Peking’s Break with Moscow 487
the rift between the two great Communist powers, but also conflicts o f
national interest between China and the Soviet Union.
Out of their own resources, with no help from Moscow and under
unimaginable difficulties, the Chinese Communists had after more than two
decades of civil war won the government of the world’s largest state. As one
of the most illustrious and strongest of the world’s Communist parties, they
had worked for and hoped to be granted a share of the leadership in the
Communist world movement, seeking in particular Moscow’s recognition of
Peking’s leading role among the Communist parties of Asia. But the Com-
munist party of the Soviet Union had not been prepared to abdicate its
position as the supreme authority in the world Communist movement, or
even to share it, for its predominance over the Communist parties in every
other country was a significant element in the power which the Soviet Union
wielded. Every diminution of its influence over the international Communist
movement would diminish its political power status in the world at large.
Now, however, the Soviet Union had to defend its position in the world,
not only in its conflict of interests with capitalist America, but also in a conflict
of interests with Communist China—a conflict between Russia’s policies as a
great power and the national aspirations of the Socialist People’s Republic of
China. Having endured a century of national humiliation, China now strove
to restore the former greatness of the Chinese Empire—to regain the terri-
tories snatched from China by the imperialist powers and to recover its sphere
of influence over those countries which had recognized the supreme overlord-
ship of the Chinese imperial state. But not all its endeavours matched the
interests of the Soviet Union. When, for example, following its conquest of
Tibet in 1950-1, China also tried in its expansionist drive to seize the Indian
border territory of Ladakh in the Himalayas during the Indo-Chinese war of
1962, it entered into conflict with the power political interests of the Soviet
Union, anxious to maintain its friendly relations with India. So as not to
place these in jeopardy, the Soviet Union denied its Communist allies any
diplomatic or moral support and demonstratively stressed its friendship for
India.
A conflict of far greater significance developed between Peking and
Moscow after Mao Tse-tung, as he had promised he would in his talks with
the Japanese Socialists, ‘presented the bill’ to the Soviet Union for the list of
Chinese territories annexed by the Tsarist government through ‘unequal
treaties’: he requested the return of over a million and a half square kilometres
of border territories and raised the question of China’s relation with Outer
Mongolia, which until a few decades ago had been a part of China until, Mao
said, it had been ‘subjected’ by Russia ‘to its rule’.
Moscow’s answer was not unexpected. ‘We have before us a bare-faced
expansionist programme of far-reaching demands,’ Pravda declared, rejecting
the request unconditionally. ‘The present Sino-Soviet border’, it explained,
488 The Moral Crisis o f Communism
had been ‘created historically’ and ‘firmly secured by life itself’; ‘the agree-
ments regarding the borders’ created a foundation ‘which certainly must be
taken into account’. Any revision of the agreements was therefore out of the
question. It would represent a breach in the right to self-determination for the
peoples of these territories, for, reasoned Pravda, ‘If the borders of Tsarist
Russia were established through the policies of imperialist conquerors, the
borders of the Soviet Union were created by the free expression of the will of
the people on the foundation of a free right to national self-determination.’
And, Pravda warned: ‘The peoples who belong to the Soviet Union will never
allow anybody to interfere with their right to decide their own destiny for
themselves.’1 This warning was followed by a concentration of Soviet troops
along the Sino-Soviet border.
Thus the conflicts between Peking and Moscow about the question of
Communist ideology and strategy came to be transformed into conflicts over
territorial rights, and the theoretical dispute, which had developed into a
struggle between rivals for the leadership of the Communist world movement,
was expressed in war-like actions. On the Ussuri River, Chinese and Russian
troops clashed in armed conflicts, and across the 7,000 kilometres of the
Sino-Soviet borders the armies of the two great Communist powers faced one
another in readiness for war.
That two states ruled by Communists could arm against one another in
preparation for a war would have seemed fantastic had the world not already
witnessed the military actions by the Soviet Union against other fraternal
parties. Whenever a Communist state had entered into conflict with the
great-power interests of the Soviet Union, its leaders had never hesitated to
crush it by military force. The moral justification which they had offered to an
alarmed Communist world for their actions was based on the notion that the
great-power interests of the Soviet Union and the interests of Socialism were
identical. Thus any encroachment upon the Soviet Union’s power status by
fraternal Communist parties could accordingly be defamed as counter-
revolutionary.
This was the concept which had been questioned by Yugoslavia, East
Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in their revolts against
Moscow’s hegemony. But now it was being fought out against the largest of
the Communist states—a state in the ascendant, becoming a great military
power. The Soviet Union does not see its security as being endangered by
China’s irrelevant territorial demands: it does, however, fear China’s rival
claim to a leading role in the ‘Socialist world system’ and its status as one
of the great powers. To defend its own position, the Soviet Union today
threatens China with its immensely superior armed might.
It is a symptom of the moral confusion in the leadership of the Com-
1. Pravda, 2 September 1964; see Brahm, Pekings G riff nach der Vormacht, pp. 209
and 211.
 Peking's Break with Moscow 489
munist movement that ideological and even territorial conflicts between
Peking and Moscow are able to degenerate into a deadly hostility where a war
by the Soviet Union against China seems actually on the horizon. But such a
situation, which ought to be morally inconceivable in Socialism, has occurred
repeatedly throughout the history of the Communist movement. Time and
again Soviet armoured divisions have invaded Communist countries. As a
result, a war by the Soviet Union against China seems by no means to be
beyond the grounds of possibility. Such an event would indeed represent
both the greatest moral catastrophe in the history of Communism and a
fateful tragedy for the world at large.
 PART FIVE

The First Hundred Years

25 • Destiny o f a Vision

The three books which comprise the History o f the International represent
an attempt to describe the history of the first century of the modern Socialist
movement at least in its outlines. If this has been a daring enough venture, an
assessment of the role which the movement has played in the processes of the
century’s social and intellectual history must be considered rash. This is a task
which must be left for future historians, who will have the advantage of a
viewpoint from which to place the phenomenon of Socialism in a total per-
spective of the century’s historical development. What the contemporary
historian can achieve at best is try to draw up some kind of interim statement
of the triumphs and tragedies in the mainstream of the Socialist movement, of
its successes and reversals, its expectations and disappointments—as they have
been described in the pages of the whole work—and to assess these against
the achievements which appear to him to be lasting and therefore of historical
significance.
The most amazing phenomenon in the history of the modern Socialist
movement has indeed been the unprecedented spread of Socialist ideas across
the world. The First International, which gave it its initial impetus, seemed to
the London Times to be ‘a great idea in a small body’. In the course of a single
century, this great idea in a small body has inspired a world movement, for
which no social movement in the history of mankind can offer a parallel, for
none of the social movements of the past possessed a universal character.
Neither does history offer any example of an intellectual or religious move-
ment that caught the imagination of all humanity, of all races and cultures.
There is no philosophy or ideology which ever became the common intellec-
tual property of all peoples, and none of the great religions ever became a
world religion, embracing all mankind.
The Socialist idea, however, has permeated all cultural fields, has inspired
the thinking of all races, has become the fundamental principle for nations
containing a third of humanity. It acts as the social dynamic in the process of
change of the highly developed capitalist social order of Europe as much as of
 492 The First Hundred Years
the pre-capitalist one of the peoples of Asia and Africa now freed from
colonial rule. With Socialism, for the first time in history, a spiritual and social
movement has come into being to embrace the whole world.
However, we immediately face the question of what it is that nations of
such a variety of cultures and representing so many stages of economic and
social development understand by Socialism, and what Socialism really
means.
For a definition of Socialism, there always have been and there are today a
number of theories. But each of these holds the basic concept in common: the
idea of a classless society, of equal and free men and women—a society
emancipated from every form of economic and political enslavement. This
concept had been the fundamental meaning of Socialism from its inception,
and it has remained so—a concept to guide the Socialist movement in every
country, whatever variations there may have been in ideology or methods of
realization. It remains the common goal of the British as much as of the
Russian Socialist movements, of the Chinese as much as of the Scandinavian,
of the Indian as much as of the German, however profound their theoretical
and political differences.
In the last resort, these are differences of ideology and method between
the old Socialist movements which developed under the economic, social and
political conditions of capitalist countries, and the young Socialist movements
which arose under entirely different conditions in the semi-feudal pre-capitalist
countries; differences between the European character of the Socialist move-
ment which evolved in an atmosphere of democratic tradition, and its Oriental
character, emerging from traditionally autocratic societies.

That the Socialist movement could spread throughout the pre-capitalist

countries, take power and effect what have been the most considerable social
and political changes in the history of our times is a paradox of Socialist
theory—at all events, as it was developed by Marx. As he demonstrated
clearly in his historical-philosophical writings, a Socialist society can only
emerge from a capitalist society, for only capitalism can bring about the
economic social and cultural conditions for the development of Socialism.1

1. ‘No social order ever disappears,’ he wrote in 1859 in his Preface to The Critique o f
Political Economy, ‘until all the productive powers for which there is room within it have
been developed; and new, higher relations of production never make their appearance
until the material conditions of their existence have been developed in the womb of the old
society.’ A society, he wrote a decade later in the Foreword to Capital, can ‘neither jump nor
decree away the natural phases of development’. Marx’s entire life’s work was directed at
justifying the idea of the natural evolution of Socialism out of capitalism—the proof ‘of the
developing of the formation of society as a natural historical process’.
 Destiny o f a Vision 493
The notion of the possible transition of a pre-capitalist into a Socialist society
would have been unthinkable to him. Socialism, according to his theory,
could evolve only from the ‘womb’ of capitalism, and force—an act of the
revolutionary seizure of power by the working class—in his view merely
performed the function of the ‘midwife of history’.
Under the impact of the February revolution in Russia in 1917, Lenin
revised Marx’s theory of the evolution of Socialism. According to Marx’s
view of history, a revolution in semi-feudal agricultural Russia could only be a
bourgeois revolution, a revolution to burst the chains of feudal autocracy so as
to develop productive forces on a capitalist basis. Economically and cultur-
ally backward, Russia was still only at the outset of its capitalist phase, and
not yet ripe for a Socialist revolution.
Yet, Lenin believed that it was possible to transform the bourgeois
revolution immediately into a Socialist revolution. The workers, he insisted,
had to seize power, set up a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in alliance
with the peasants and industrialize the country themselves.1 Thus could
Russia simultaneously ‘skip’ the bourgeois capitalist phase of develop-
ment and construct a Socialist order of society during the processes of
industrialization.
As he saw it, the instrument of Socialist revolution could only be the
Communist party: a hierarchical, strictly centralized party subject to military-
type discipline and led by an 61ite of professional revolutionaries.* His theory
governing its structure, its leading role in the state as the true organ of the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as well as the nature of the dictatorship
itself1234—defined by his successors as ‘Leninism’—was the cornerstone for his
concept of the proletarian revolution.
However, this theory was also a revision of the Marxist theory of the
Socialist revolution.1 Marx conceived the proletarian revolution as a con-
scious act by the working class—the ‘immense majority’, as he termed it—

1. ‘Let us workers,’ Lenin suggested, ‘ourselves organize large-scale production,

proceeding from what capitalism has created so far, on the basis of our experience as
workers and with the aid of the strictest iron discipline, maintained by the state power of the
armed workers’—V. I. Lenin, Ausgewahlte Werke, vol. n: Stoat tmd Revolution (Moscow,
1947), p. 159. This book, which Lenin wrote in the summer of 1917, a few weeks before he
seized power, outlines his theory of the proletarian revolution and its problems.
2. See Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943, pp. 74-9.
3. ‘Dictatorship,’ he explained, ‘means nothing other than power backed by direct
force and restricted by nothing—no laws or regulations’—V. I. Lenin, SSmtliche Werke,
vol. xxv: Geschichtliches zur Frage der Diktatur, p. 549.
4. Stalin agreed that there was a ‘grain of truth’ in the definition of Leninism as ‘the
application of Marxism to the particular conditions of the situation in Russia’; but, he went
on to say, this was inadequate, for it represented Leninism as a peculiarly Russian pheno-
menon. He asserted that Lenin had developed Marxism further ‘under the new conditions of
capitalism and of the struggle of the proletariat.. . . Leninism is the Marxism of file era of
imperialism and the proletarian revolution’—J. V. Stalin, Problems o f Leninism (Moscow,
1947), pp. 13-14.
494 The First Hundred Years
and not the work of a conspiratorial ‘advance guard of the proletariat’, as
Lenin called the Communist party. And he regarded the dictatorship of the
proletariat as the most highly developed form of direct democracy by the
whole working class, and not, like Lenin, as an instrument for the dictator-
ship of an exclusive party over the working class. Nor did Marx consider the
dictatorship of the proletariat to be the antithesis of democracy; democracy’s
antithesis was, for him, the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ which, while
concealed by formally democratic political institutions, dominated society as
the owners of the means of production.1
The tremendous experiment which Lenin attempted in contradiction to
Marxist theory triumphed. The Soviet Union, which was his creation, was the
first pre-capitalist state to be transferred into a modern industrial state not by
a bourgeois-capitalist revolution, but by a proletarian-Socialist revolution.
As it became one of the world’s largest industrial countries, it was the first
where the means of production had been developed not by the initiative of
private enterprise, but by national planning, and the first state committed to
building a classless society.

Even so, the experiment failed to fulfil its essential destiny. While it certainly
created the material conditions for the existence of Socialism, it did not
produce the Socialist order of society which Lenin had himself envisaged; a
‘higher type of democracy’, with no bureaucracy, no police, and no standing
army; a commonwealth of free men and equals where the state, as ‘the
organized and systematic use of force against human beings’, as he defined it,
had ‘withered away’.2
But what grew out of the process of this experiment to use the power of
1. Marx regarded the Paris Commune of 1871 as the model for the dictatorship of the
proletariat. ‘The Commune,’ he wrote, ‘has been formed by the deputies of the districts
of Paris, elected by universal suffrage.. . . It was not a parliamentary body, but a working
agency combining the legislative and executive functions.’ Thus the Commune was based
on the support of a majority of the people, expressing its will by universal suffrage and,
above all, by the right of each constituency to recall any representative it might have
chosen. ‘Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune,’ Marx wrote, ‘than
to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture’—Karl Marx, Der Biirgerkrieg in
Frankreich (1871) (Berlin, 1952), pp. 70-2.
2. ‘Democracy means equality,’ he wrote. ‘. . . It means the formal recognition of
equality between citizens, the equal rights of everyone to define the constitution and
administer the state.’ The essence of democracy—the principle of equality—would, he
explained, be realized only once ‘all were participating in the administration of the state’.
‘From that moment when all members of society, or at least the overwhelming majority,
have learned to govern the state themselves, to take the government of the state into their
own hands . . . , the necessity for any government whatsoever begins to fad e.. . . The more
democratic the “state” . . . the more quickly the state [as an organized systematic force to be
used against human beings] will begin to wither away.’ Lenin’s concept was based on the
assumption that ‘all citizens will become employee and worker in a state syndicate,
embracing the whole nation’; and ‘all will have learned independently to guide social
production, and they will, in fact, guide it’— Stoat und Revolution, pp. 234-7. The emphases
in the text are Lenin’s own.
 Destiny o f a Vision 495
the state to graft a Socialist society on to a pre-capitalistic one was not in fact
‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all’ as proclaimed by Marx and Engels in the Communist
Manifesto; nor was it even Lenin’s stateless society, without bureaucracy,
police or army. The state became a leviathan, a monster state, which by
means of an all-powerful bureaucratic apparatus of state and economy, the
police and, above all, the secret state police, the standing army and the
monopoly of power over thought and spirit, dominated the people. In the
Soviet Union, the state became indeed an ‘organized and systematic use of
force against humanity’, attaining unlimited power in the process of indus-
trialization and infiltrating every pore of society.
It was an inevitable development due to the inherent nature of dictator-
ship. Rosa Luxemburg, one of the foremost Marxists of her day, had warned
against the experiment of attempting to impose Socialism by force.

The Socialist system of society [she wrote] must be and can only be a historical
product, bom from its own school of experience at the critical hour and out of the
fact of living history.. . .Yet if this is so, then it becomes clear that Socialism cannot
by its own nature be imposed by decrees.. . . The entire mass of the people must
participate.. . . Otherwise Socialism will be commanded from the baize table of a
dozen intellectuals.1

Yet this is exactly how it happened. A ‘dozen intellectuals’ decreed the

pace for an industrialization calculated so as ‘to catch up and overtake’ the
highly industrialized countries of the West within a few years. Since the
bourgeois-capitalist phase still had to be reproduced in state capitalist form,
the capital to support such rapid industrialization had to be accumulated by
state coercion—by extracting the maximum amount of work for the minimum
consumption. Thus the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, originally set up by
Lenin as no more than an instrument to suppress the capitalist classes,
inevitably became a dictatorship over the proletariat by the bureaucracy of
the Communist party, since it was only by state coercion that the workers
and peasants could be forced to carry the immense burden which had been
laid on their shoulders by the process of industrialization. And in dealing
with the incalculable difficulties imposed by the development of the means
of production, the dictatorship became increasingly hardened and far-
reaching, degenerating under Stalin’s rule into a system of totalitarian
despotism.
It was a process which simultaneously transformed the classless character
of Soviet society. The propertied classes had been exterminated during the
Communist revolution. The Soviet Union became a country without a
capitalist class. But it did develop a new social stratum which had all the

1. ‘Die russische Revolution', in Rosa Luxemburg, Politische Schriften, edited by Ossip

Flechtheim, vol. m (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 135.
 496 The First Hundred Years
characteristics of a privileged elite. As Christian Rakovsky wrote as early as
1930:
We are developing from a proletarian state with bureaucratic distortions—
Lenin’s description of the political form of our state—into a bureaucratic state with
some surviving proletarian-Com m unist features. Before our eyes there has arisen—
and continues to arise—a high class of rulers, subdivided internally on an increasing
scale, spreading by means of self-interested co-option and by direct and indirect
appointm ent (bureaucratic prom otion, sham election). This new type o f class takes
its stand on a type o f private ownership which is also new—the possession o f the
power o f the state. Bureaucracy ‘possesses the state as its private property’, wrote
M arx in his critique of H egel.1

This process of economic and social differentiation began with the first
Five-Year Plan of 1928, when Stalin contemptuously rejected the principle of
equality of income and standard of living which Lenin had advocated2 as a
‘petit bourgeois’ illusion. But, as G. D. H. Cole observed in discussing some
of the problems raised by Socialism, ‘evidently a society does not become
Socialist merely by turning men and women into public employees, if they
continue to be paid and graded much as they would be under a capitalist
system. Such a society would be not Socialist, but only state capitalist—a
very different thing.’3
The Communist revolution, inspired by the shining vision of Socialism—
‘a realm of freedom’, in Engels’s words—had in fact by force of circumstance
created an empire of universal servitude.4 What has developed during the
first half-century of the Communist system of dictatorship is a complete
managerial state with the social superstructure of a welfare state, which since
Stalin’s death has admittedly shed some of the more barbaric features of its
terroristic character, but whose political system comes closer to the spirit of
‘enlightened absolutism’ in the Asiatic sense—a form of society still in every
1. Quoted in David Rousset, ‘The Class Nature of Stalinism*, in Saturn, vol. m, No. 1,
January-February 1957. ‘An anti-Leninist pseudosocialism,*observed A. D. Sakharov, ‘led
to the formation in the Soviet Union of a distinct class—a bureaucratic elite from which all
key positions are filled and which is rewarded for its work through open and concealed
privileges*—Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (London, 1968), p. 56. For the
emergence of the rule of bureaucracy, see L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York,
1937).
2. In his blueprint for the construction of a Communist society, Lenin had envisaged
the following development: ‘^//citizens will become paid employees of the state’ who ‘. . .
work in the same way, keep strictly to the norm of their work and receive equal pay. . . . The
whole of society will become one office and one factory, with equal work and equal pay’—
Staat und Revolution p. 236. The emphases in the text are Lenin’s own.
3. G. D. H. Cole, World Socialism Restated (London, 1956), p. 31.
4. What occurred in Russia was a harsh fulfilment of the ‘irony of history’ to which
Friedrich Engels pointed in a letter he wrote to Vera Zasulich on 23 April 1885 about the
future of revolutions. ‘The people who boasted that they had “made” a revolution have
always on the following day seen that they had no idea what they were doing, that the
revolution they have made does not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to
have made. This is what Hegel called the irony of history*—quoted in Gustav Mayer,
Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie (The Hague, 1934), vol. H, p. 424.
 Destiny o f a Vision 497
respect, ethically and spiritually, branded by the ‘birth-marks of the old
society’ out of whose ‘womb’ it came forth.1

One of the ‘birth-marks of the old society’ which continues to defile the Soviet
Union is anti-Semitism. Tsarist Russia was truly the classic country of
modem anti-Semitism, nursing a sense of hatred, which became deeply
ingrained in the emotions of the broad mass of the people and incited by
government and the hierarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The millions
of Jews in the Russian empire were denied equal rights, confined within
ghettos (the Pale of Settlement) and made victims of ever-recurrent and
bloody pogroms.
The Communist party of Russia, under Lenin’s leadership, naturally saw
the effacement of this ugly ‘birth-mark’ of Tsarist Russia—a phenomenon
which Socialists of every shade of opinion and in every country abhorred and
fought against as an ideological weapon of reaction and counter-revolution—
as one of the tasks of the construction of a Socialist society. Anti-Semitism
was made a criminal offence and all trace of discrimination against Jews in
public life was erased. Jews were numbered among the most devoted members
of the Communist party, attaining high positions in its leadership and, indeed,
in every sphere of political, economic and intellectual life of Soviet society,
out of all proportion to their numerical strength in the population.
Yet, within a few years of Lenin’s death, a number of symptoms indicating
a recurrence of anti-Semitism had become apparent. Stalin, as his daughter
Svetlana has testified,2 became violently anti-Semitic during the course of his
struggle for power in the party against his rival Trotsky and, later, against the
leaders of the internal opposition within the party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Radek, who were all of Jewish origin. At their trials in 1936-8, they were
defined as ‘people without a fatherland’, devoid of any Russian national
feeling. Jews were dismissed in great numbers from responsible positions in
the party organization, the state administration and scientific institutions.
In April 1942, during the Second World War, a Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee was formed with Stalin’s authority to mobilize the opinion of
world Jewry on behalf of the Soviet Union. But, at the same time, the Soviet
press kept silent about the massacres of Jews behind the enemy lines. The
death-camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek received hardly a mention, and
even after the war no monument was permitted to the 50,000 Jews who were
slaughtered by the Germans in the ravine of Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev.
When Yevgeni Yevtushenko published his famous poem, which begins with
1. Thus, in his Critique o f the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx had described certain
characteristics o f a society which had ‘not developed itself on its own basis, but the other
way round, just as it emerged from capitalist society’— in the case o f the Soviet Union, from
Tsarist society. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ausgewahlte Schriften , vol. u (Berlin,
1953), p. 13. The emphases in the text are Marx’s own.
2. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year (London, 1969), pp. 131-76.
498 The First Hundred Years
the line ‘There is no memorial at Babi Yar’, in 1961, he at once encountered
fierce official criticism; and when Shostakovitch took the poem as the theme
for his thirteenth symphony, he was forced to withdraw it after the first
performance in December 1962, though it was later reissued with the ‘contro-
versial’ parts revised.
The record of the Jews of the Soviet Union during the war had been
unimpeachable. More than fifty of them had served as generals, and not a few
Jewish soldiers were awarded the highest Soviet order. But, within hardly
three years of the war ending, a new anti-Semitic campaign was unleashed,
prompted by the enthusiastic response of the Jews in the Soviet Union to the
founding of the state of Israel in 1947. Before this, the Soviet Union had
pleaded in the United Nations for the recognition of Israel as a move against
Britain, but now the Soviet press began to denounce the state of Israel as ‘a
tool of Western imperialism’, while Soviet Jews who showed their sympathy
with Israel were treated as suspected ‘enemies’, as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’
and men of ‘uncertain loyalty’.1 The Jews were deprived of their rights as a
nationality, which they had hitherto enjoyed within the U.S.S.R.; Jewish
theatres, periodicals and publishing houses were closed down, their personnel
purged. All the leaders of the war-time Anti-Fascist Committee, with the
exception of Ilya Ehrenburg, were liquidated, among them Lozovsky, former
head of the International of Red Trade Unions and later vice-minister for
foreign affairs and the popular Yiddish writers and poets, David Bergelson,
Itzik Pfeffer and Peretz Markish. The co-founders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, leaders of the Bund and
members of the executive of the Socialist International, had been executed as
‘Nazi agents’ as early as 1942.1 2
The persecution of Russia’s Jews culminated in 1953 in the affair of the
‘doctors’ plot’. On 13 January, Pravda and Izvestia officially announced that
1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his novel The First Circle, describes the shock felt by one
of his characters, Adam Roitman, at the recrudescence of anti-Semitic propaganda in the
party press. Roitman, an old and devoted Bolshevik and a holder of the Stalin Prize, is yet
as a Jew denounced as a ‘cosmopolitan’. * ... This noble word [cosmopolitan] formerly used
to denote the unity of the whole world, this proud title given only to the most universal
geniuses, such as Goethe, Dante and Byron, suddenly became mean, crabbed and vicious,
and hissed from the pages of the newspapers in the sense of “Yid”___Perhaps his memory
deceived him, but hadn’t he been right in thinking that during the Revolution, and for a
long time afterwards, Jews were regarded as more reliable than Russians ? In those days, the
authorities always probed more deeply into the antecedents of a Russian, demanding to
know who his parents were and what the sources of his income were before 1917. No such
checks had to be made on Jews: they had all been on the side of the Revolution which
delivered them from pogroms and the Pale of the Settlement’—The First Circle (London,
1970), pp. 510-11.
2. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (London, 1966), pp. 589-93. For a detailed survey,
especially of the persecution of Jewish intellectuals in the Soviet Union, see Yehoshua
Gilboa, The Black Years o f Soviet Jewry (New York, 1971); for a general survey of the
Jewish question in the Soviet Union, see Lionel Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia
since 1917 (London, 1970).
 Destiny o f a Vision 499
nine Jewish doctors who attended the ruling group in the Kremlin had been
arrested as agents of the United States and British secret services. Acting
under orders, the official account asserted, they had murdered two party
leaders, Andrei A. Zhdanov and Alexander S. Scherbekov, and had con-
spired to poison a number of Soviet marshals.1Stalin, as Khrushchev revealed
in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the
Soviet Union, had personally ordered the use of torture in interrogating the
arrested doctors.12 Two of them, Professor M. B. Kogan and Professor Y. G.
Etinger, died under the interrogation.
After Stalin’s death, anti-Semitic propaganda in the Soviet press was
stopped, the survivors among the arrested doctors were released and indis-
crimate terror against the Jews ceased. But then, when the Soviet Union
endeavoured to incorporate the Arab countries of the Middle East into its
sphere of influence, anti-Semitism made its reappearance in the guise of anti-
Zionism. The destruction of Israel—a Socialist oasis in the Middle East—
would deprive the Socialist world of one of the most promising and, indeed,
fascinating experiments in Socialist reconstruction. Yet its destruction was
the well-publicized objective of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan at the time
when the Soviet Union began to provide these countries with a gigantic
arsenal of bombers and tanks as well as with thousands of military advisers in
preparation for the final battle. And when, in June 1967, the battle ended
after six days with an inglorious defeat for the Arab countries, the Soviet
Union condemned Israel as the ‘aggressor’, broke off diplomatic relations and
poured a vast quantity of new bombers and tanks into Egypt for a further
battle.3 Exactly as in the last months of Stalin’s life, anti-Semitic propaganda
in Russia reached a high pitch of fury. Zionism was to be identified with
Judaism, according to the official line, and Judaism with capitalism and

1. See Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 603-6.

2. ‘Stalin,’ Khrushchev recorded in his speech to the congress, ‘personally issued advice
on the conduct of the investigation___ He said that Academician Vinogradov should be
put in chains, that another one should be beaten. Present at this congress is the former
minister of state security, Comrade Ignatiev. Stalin told him curtly: “If you do not obtain
confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head.” Stalin personally called the
investigating judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods
should be used; these methods were simply—beat, beat, and once more beat’—The
Dethronement o f Stalin (London, 1956), p. 25.
3. Andrei Sakharov, the distinguished academician, considers that a ‘direct respon-
sibility’ for the tragic situation in the Middle East lies with the Soviet Union. ‘. . . There
was,’ he writes, ‘an irresponsible encouragement of so-called Arab unity, which in no way
had a Socialist character—look at Jordan—but which was purely nationalist and anti-
Israeli. . . . The preventive six-day war in face of threats of destruction by merciless,
numerically vastly superior forces of the Arab coalition, would have been justified.. . . The
breaking of relations with Israel appears a mistake, complicating a peaceful settlement in
this region and complicating a necessary diplomatic recognition of Israel by the Arab
governments’—Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, with an Introduction by
Harrison E. Salisbury (London, 1968), p. 39.
500 The First Hundred Years
imperialism, particularly with the capitalism and imperialism of the United
States. To take one example, Pravda stated:
Zionism encompasses 70 per cent of American lawyers, 60 per cent o f physicists
(including those who are concerned with the mass production o f secret weapons)
and m ore than 45 per cent of American industrialists.1

Thus anti-Semitism, which Lenin had sought to eradicate from Russia,

once more became a characteristic of Soviet society.

The paradoxical character of the Soviet Union—a state formed by a Socialist

revolution in the spirit of Socialist principles but which has developed an
ultimate form of absolutist government—is revealed dramatically in its
foreign policy. Lenin had called it into being as an outpost of the Socialist
world revolution. Under Stalin’s leadership, it became the cynical accomplice
of world Fascism. Stalin perpetuated and consolidated the schism in the
international workers’ movement, as the second volume of the present history
described. He frustrated its need for a common defence against the threat
posed by Hitler’s rise to power and sealed a pact of friendship with the hang-
man of thousands of Communists and Socialists. During the war, in the
struggle to death between democracy and Fascism in Europe, he had not
remained neutral but supported the Fascist powers. He had charged the
democracies of Britain and France with the responsibility for the war un-
leashed by Hitler; he congratulated Hitler on his victory over France; he
justified Hitler’s invasion of Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway; and,
by disseminating propaganda through the individual Communist parties, he
tried to wear down the forces of moral resistance in Britain and France in the
war against Hitler.12
Stalin’s foreign policy was guided by Machiavellianism on a world scale.
He paved Hitler’s road to power, since he hoped for the destruction of Social
Democracy, which he considered to be an invincible obstacle to the Com-
munist party’s rise to power in a democracy. The Nazi regime, he believed,
would ultimately collapse, and the Communist party would then inherit its
power. And faced with a decision for war, he believed he could reach agree-
ment with Hitler over a division of the world between Fascism and Com-
munism, as he had reached agreement with him over the division of Poland.
The Soviet Union, emerging from the war as one of the world’s two
great powers, had also become one of the strongest imperialist states. As
the present volume has witnessed, it incorporated the countries which it
captured during the war into the Russian orbit and afterwards kept them in

1. Pravda, 4 October 1967, quoted in Zev Katz, ‘After the Six-Day War’, in L. Kochan
(ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (London, 1970), p. 336.
2. For Stalin’s policy during the war, see Braunthal, History o f the International,
1914-1943, pp. 493-530.
 Destiny o f a Vision 501
vassalage, crushing by force their impulses towards national independence.1
Soviet imperialism stemmed from a dual impulse: first, obtaining strategic
security for the Soviet Union’s western frontiers by a buffer formed by its
satellite states and secondly, achieving the extension of Communism within
these countries. By exploiting its identification with the cause of Communism*
the Soviet Union morally sought to justify both facets of its imperialism.
But Moscow’s hegemony, established in the vassal states by the Stalinist
system of government, frustrated any development of the system of dictator-
ship into a system of Socialist democracy. The regime of the bureaucratic
hierarchy in the Soviet Union, threatened by the establishment of Socialist
democracy, and therefore suppressing any freedom movements in its own
country, was not prepared to tolerate the development of democracy in its
subject states; wherever a revolution pinned its colours to democracy, as it
did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it was put down in an armed counter-
revolution by the Soviet Union.2
The transmutation of the Soviet Union’s historical role in Eastern Europe
is a paradox: from having been the spearhead of the social revolution in these
countries, she became a force of reaction, suppressing their aspirations to
attain a social order at a higher level.3

The contradiction between ideal and reality in the Soviet Union, between its
1. Milovan Djilas, once the most prominent leader of the Yugoslavian Communist
party after Tito, discussed the whole question of the way in which Soviet imperialism
differed from capitalist imperialism. ‘All that is new here,’ he said, ‘is the fact that a state
which all, or nearly all, believed to be Socialist has, through its own internal state-capitalism
development, turned into an imperialist power of the first order. But as for the actual forms,
what characterizes this new state-capitalist imperialism is precisely that it has the old colonial-
conquest imperialist forms accompanied, albeit, in “Socialist” uniforms, by the old political
relations: the export of capital is accompanied by a semi-military occupation, by the rule of an
official caste and the police, by the strangling of any democratic tendencies, by the establish-
ment of obedient governments, by the most extensive corruption and by an unscrupulous
deception of the working people’—Borba, 26 November 1950, quoted in John Strachey,
Tasks and Achievements of British Labour*, in R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays
(London, 1952), p. 206. Borba is the central organ of the Yugoslav Communist party.
2. A historical parallel to the Soviet Union’s counter-revolutionary intervention in
Hungary and Czechoslovakia may be found in Tsarist Russia’s counter-revolutionary
intervention against the revolutions in Austria and Hungary in 1848. When they broke out,
Tsar Nicholas concentrated a strong force on the German frontier and informed Count
Thun, the Austrian emperor’s special emissary in St Petersburg, that the granting of
constitutions to Galicia and Hungary would be intolerable to Russia. ‘I could not allow a
centre of insurrection on my doorstep.. . . If constitutions are granted in those areas, or if
revolution begins in Galicia and is not vigorously suppressed, I shall be forced against my
will to cross the Austrian frontier and restore order in the name of Emperor Ferdinand’—
quoted in L. B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution o f the Intellectuals (London, 1946), p. 94. The
Russian army actually crossed into Austria and put down the revolution in Hungary.
3. For a Marxist criticism of Soviet Communism, see Roger Garaudy, Le Grand
Tournant du Socialisme (Paris, 1969). Garaudy, a professor of philosophy, was one of the
oldest members of the central committee of the French Communist party, its representative
in the presidium of parliament and head of its Institute for Marxist Studies. He was expelled
from the politbureau and the central committee at the party congress of February 1970.
502 The First Hundred Years
revolutionary origins and its counter-revolutionary function, and above all,
between its dynamic in the process of transforming its economic and social
basis and the rigidity of its political superstructure, must eventually demand a
solution, as the revolution in Czechoslovakia has shown. It was economic
stagnation, the stagnation of the standard of living of the working people,
which became the last straw in the revolution in Czechoslovakia. The domin-
ant system of dictatorship was seen to be shackling economic development
and a new model of Socialism was sought. As has been shown, the inspiration
for the revolution originated within the leadership of the Communist party;
its support came from an overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thou-
sands of Communist party members, and the whole nation rallied jubilantly
to their side.
The Soviet Union can scarcely evade the democratic phase of develop-
ment indefinitely. The system of dictatorship, as it has ossified under the
conditions of an industrial revolution achieved by the instrument of the power
of the state, must, as it fetters intellectual freedom and individual initiative,
become an increasing hindrance to development in the technological revolu-
tion which the industrial world is witnessing today. It can only become more
and more intolerable, and must, therefore, as in Czechoslovakia, engender
economic and political crises which will in the end enforce reforms. If the
history of the first fifty years of the Russian revolution has been a history of
experiments in the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrial
state based on Socialist principles, then a period of experiments during the
transformation of its political structure may be anticipated, which would
ultimately complete the revolution.2

The Socialist movement in the industrially developed countries of the Euro-

pean tradition had rejected from the start the Communist version of Socialism
because it was based on the negation of a principle which, prior to the Com-
munist revolution in Russia in 1917, had been recognized by all Socialist
parties of the world—including Lenin’s Bolshevik party—as self-evident and
fundamental: the principle of political democracy as the expression of the
idea of universal equality, the right to self-determination of the people and,
above all, the idea of the freedom of the spirit as the well-spring of demo-
cracy.1 These were the achievements of many centuries of battle: for freedom
1. Otto Bauer, perhaps the most prominent figure of the left in the Labour and Socialist
International, regarded ‘individual and intellectual freedom as the most precious achievement
of the struggle of mankind for freedom through the centuries.. . . We are not willing,’ he
declared in his speech to the Fourth Congress of the International, ‘for the sake of Socialism,
to surrender the rights to freedom, the guarantees of individual and intellectual freedom, for
which the best of mankind have died at the stake of the Counter-reformation, in the
 Destiny o f a Vision 503
of religion and conscience in the era of the reformation, for freedom of
opinion in the era of enlightenment, for political freedom and democracy in
the era of the bourgeois revolution. By realizing these ideas, the European
peoples achieved their political emancipation. ‘While it is not admittedly
the ultimate stage of human emancipation,’ Marx had observed, ‘it is the
final stage of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world
order.’1
The objective which the Socialist movement had set itself from the very
beginning had been the political emancipation of the working class within the
‘present world order’, as well as its economic emancipation in a future world
order. The achievement of political democracy was seen as its immediate
task.
When the International was formed in 1864, the principle of political
equality for the working class on a democratic basis had by no means been
recognized in a majority of European states. The working classes had as yet
gained no measure of political emancipation. While it is true that, to a certain
extent, they had a share in the achievements of bourgeois democracy and its
hard-won area of freedom—freedom of thought, of conscience and civic
rights—they were allowed no participation in governmental power; excluded
from the franchise, they were subjected to the political regime of the property-
owning classes. The struggle for the universal right to vote as a means of
liberating the working classes from the political rule of the middle class
had been one of the leading objectives in the fight of the Socialist parties
during the period of the First and Second Internationals. Parliamentary
democracy, founded on universal suffrage and today accepted unquestion-
ingly as a standard requirement for any political system, indeed represents one
of the achievements of the Socialist movement.
The Russian system of dictatorship by the Communist party, as Lenin
established it, rejects democracy. It recognizes no rights to personal freedom
as these developed during the processes of ‘human emancipation’ in the
countries of Europe. It is founded on naked force. It is, as Lenin defined it,
‘a power, based immediately on force, unrestricted by any laws or regula-
tions.’2 For countries with a tradition of freedom, the Russian system may be
equated to a system of reaction.
The tradition of freedom as it grew in Europe in the struggle against
absolutism was, indeed, foreign to Russia. It had never known the pheno-
menon of human emancipation in European nations—an age neither of
reformation nor of enlightenment nor of bourgeois revolutions. The tradition
in Russia was one of autocracy, and Lenin in fact perpetuated this tradition
dungeons of absolutism, and on the barricades of countless revolutions’— Vierter Kongress
der Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Internationale, Wien, 1931 (Zurich, 1932), pp. 529-30.
1. Karl Marx, 'Zur Judenfrage', in Franz Mehring (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften von Karl
M arx und Friedrich Engels (Stuttgart, 1913), p. 409.
2. See page 493.
504 The First Hundred Years
when he replaced the fallen Tsarist autocracy with the autocracy of the
Communist party.
Under the conditions pertaining in Russia in the days of the Bolshevik
revolution, a system of dictatorship seemed to be the only conceivable
direct road to Socialism. But, Lenin believed, this system was likewise the
only conceivable road to Socialism in the democracies. Democracy, he
admitted, was ‘of immense importance’ in the freedom struggle of the work-
ing class, but it was only a ‘stage’ in the history of their struggles.1 In the
revolutionary situation, as it had developed in the backwash of the First
World War, democracy would be an obstacle on the road of the working class
to power and Socialism. He called on the workers of every country to emulate
the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and seize state power by armed uprising;
to destroy democracy, set up dictatorships of the proletariat and introduce
government by the working class for the period of transition to Socialism. He
founded the Communist International as an instrument for the Communist
world revolution.
Lenin’s doctrine had devastating consequences.* It wrecked the unity of
the international workers’ movement, dividing it into two mutually hostile
camps, paralysed its dynamism and, in Italy and Germany, paved the way for
Fascism. It retarded the development of the Socialist movement for decades.3

When, following the Second World War, the European Socialist movement
revived after its suppression by Fascism, the question facing it was no longer
the one of dictatorship versus democracy on which the international Socialist
movement had split after the First World War. The Communist parties of
Western Europe and the Americas swore their undying loyalty to the cause of
parliamentary democracy, while, in the countries of Eastern Europe, where,
as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the parties had de facto established
their dictatorships, the dictatorships were restyled as ‘people’s democracies’.
Lenin’s formulation of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ disappeared from
Communist vocabulary; even to mention it had become an embarrassment.
Similarly there was no further talk of Lenin’s doctrine of the armed
uprising among the European Communist parties; it remained valid only for
the underdeveloped countries of Asia. When revolutionary situations arose in
France and Italy immediately after the war, the Communist parties in no way
attempted to seize power, but on the contrary made every effort to restrain the
1. ‘Democracy,’ he had said, ‘is of immense importance in the freedom struggle of the
working class against the capitalists. Democracy is by no means, however, a boundary
which cannot be crossed, but only a stage on the road from feudalism to capitalism and
from capitalism to Communism’— Stoat und Revolution^ p.234.
2, These were described in Braunthal, History o f the International, 1914-1943.
 Destiny o f a Vision 505
workers from a struggle for power. They combined with the Socialist and
liberal parties of the middle classes to consolidate these two dislocated
capitalist parliamentary democracies.1 After being expelled from government
in 1947, they did, it was true, inspire mass strikes, partly in protest against
economic stringencies, partly as a tactical manoeuvre to force their readmit-
tance to government, but not as any prelude to a revolutionary uprising to
gain power.2 There was never any question of this.
It was also never in question for the Communist party; not even in the
revolutionary situation which developed in France under the shock of a
severe economic crisis in May 1968. Here was a genuine revolutionary
situation—a spontaneous outbreak of revolutionary ferment among the mass
of intellectuals and workers and even within the middle class. Students,
numbering tens of thousands, rose to occupy the universities, throwing up
barricades in the streets; ten million workers came out in a general strike—
the largest strike movement in the country’s history—occupying factories
throughout France and marching through Paris in mass demonstrations side
by side with the students. For the first time since the resistance movement
ended with the liberation, intellectuals and workers were joined in a common
cause. However varied their motives may have been, their common objective
was to overthrow the despised presidential regime of General de Gaulle and
to set up a new order of society. Power lay about them in the streets; they
had only to pick it up.
In this revolutionary situation, the attitude of the Communist party was
decisive. It was the largest party by far of the working class in France and it
controlled the strongest of the three trade union confederations, the Con-
federation Generale du Travail. But the party, surprised by the revolutionary
outbreak, faced it helplessly; it deflected any idea of a revolutionary struggle
for power. It scaled down the revolutionary movement into a wages move-
ment, and in discussions with the government of de Gaulle put an end to it.
Since the end of the war the Communist parties of Western Europe,
especially those of France and Italy, had become reformist. They no longer
sought to change the capitalist order of society through revolutionary
methods, but, like the Social Democrats, through parliamentary democracy.
They strove to take over the power of the state as an instrument for social
change, not through a revolutionary uprising, but through democratic
methods—to gain a majority of votes in parliamentary elections.3
1. See pp. 33,52. 2. See pp. 42,65.
3. ‘The working class and its advance guard—the Marxist-Leninist party,’ a conference
of sixty-four Communist parties declared in Moscow in 1957, ‘seek to achieve the Socialist
revolution by peaceful means.’ In a number of capitalist countries, it further stated, it was
today possible for the working class, by forming a proletarian united front or a people’s
front in co-ordination with various parties, ‘to unite a majority of the people, win state
power without civil war, and ensure the transfer of the basic means of production into the
hands of the people’. For the full text of the resolution, see Current Digest o f the Soviet
Press, 1 January 1958.
 506 The First Hundred Years
Here is no answer to the question whether Communist parties have
changed in their basic attitude to the problems of the struggle for Socialism, or
only in their tactics; whether their avowals of democracy are genuine or well-
planned deceptive manoeuvres; or whether, having once seized power by
democratic methods, they would in any way change democracy, based on the
right to freedom, into a system of dictatorship, based on a ‘people’s demo-
cracy’. It is only being established as a historical fact that since the end of the
war the Communist parties of Western Europe have advocated the principles
of parliamentary democracy and have, in co-operation with the left-wing
parties of the middle class as well as the Socialists, sought a share in govern-
mental power.
Their ideology has, however, remained undisturbed by any change in
political attitude. Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism has remained unchal-
lenged during the half-century since the founding of the Communist Inter-
national in 1919, regardless of the considerable changes that have occurred in
the structure of capitalism, in the social power relationships and the program-
matic basis of the Communist movement. Marxism-Leninism had ossified
into a dogma.

The democratic Socialist movement, on the other hand, has experienced a

total retreat from Marxism since the end of the Second World War. Marxism
had been the predominant ideology of the Second International. Practically
all its affiliated parties (the British Labour party was a notable exception)
programmatically acknowledged the Marxist theory of irreconcilable antag-
onism to the capitalist state, proclaiming the revolutionary change of the
capitalist order of society as their aim, and shared the millennial vision of the
Communist Manifesto—the vision of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist
world and of the triumph of Socialism as ‘an iron law of history’.
But every Socialist party contained its reformist wing, which, in contrast
with the concept of revolutionary Socialism, represented a concept of evolu-
tionary Socialism—a theory of the gradual evolution through social and
political reforms of the capitalist society into a Socialist form of society, of
capitalism ‘growing into’ Socialism.1 This theory, the reformists said, was
based on a recognition of the ability of capitalism to change, a recognition

1. Engels believed with Marx that, in countries which had fully developed parliament-
ary democracies, such a change was possible without a revolution by force. ‘One may
imagine,’ wrote Engels, ‘that the old society might peacefully develop into the new society in
countries where the representation of the people focuses power to itself, where, constitution-
ally, one may do what one pleases once a majority of the people has given its support—in
democratic republics such as France and America, or in monarchies such as England where
the dynasty is helpless against the will of the people’— ‘Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen
Programmentwurfs 1891’, in Die Neue Zeit, Year xx, vol. I (1901-2).
 Destiny o f a Vision 507
that, as Marx had written, ‘present society is not a solid crystal, but an alter-
able organism constantly in process of change’.1 And even as the main
emphasis in the struggle by the Socialist parties had been towards social,
political and economic reforms, so the reformists asked for a theoretical and,
above all, a tactical alignment of Socialist parties to a process of social change
by reform: a positive attitude towards the state, a readiness to enter into
alliances with the progressive groupings within the middle class and a readi-
ness to form coalitions with left-wing middle-class parties.12
The conflict between Marxism and reformism was hammered out in
vehement debate at the congresses of the Second International. A majority
emerged to support the Marxist version of the class struggle; of irreconcilable
conflicts between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as well as the bourgeois-
capitalist state; and they therefore declared themselves against the partici-
pation of Socialist parties in bourgeois governments. They did, however,
recognize a right to national defence, but pledged the parties, in the event of
their being unable to prevent the outbreak of war, ‘to utilize the economic and
political crisis created by war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the
downfall of capitalist class rule’3—in other words, to unleash a social
revolution.
However, as the crisis of the First World War unexpectedly revealed, the
Marxist ideology of the Socialist parties stood in marked contrast to the
basically reformist attitude of the vast proletarian masses. During the days of
peace they had been ready to fight the capitalist state, but as soon as a war
threatened its existence, they rallied to its side as their fatherland. In peace
they had cherished the international solidarity of the working class as a
fundamental tenet; but as soon as war broke out, they surrendered themselves
to a burst of patriotism and nationalism. In every belligerent nation—with
the exceptions of Russia and Serbia—they unhesitatingly declared themselves
in favour of their country’s defence in August 1914, granted their capitalist-
imperialist governments the credits needed to conduct the war and placed
themselves at their service.4
This tragic abandonment of the tradition of the Socialist International in
the conflict of interest between national survival and the concept of inter-
national proletarian solidarity was a moral defeat for the Socialist movement
1. Marx, in his Foreword to the first edition of Capital (1867).
2. For the conflict between Marxists and reformists in the Second International, see
Braunthal, History o f the International, 1864-1914, pp. 255-84. For a detailed description of
the currents within the parties, see G. D. H. Cole, A History o f Socialist Thought, vol. in:
The Second International 1889-1914 (London, 1956); for the theoretical basis of the discus-
sion, see George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study (London, 1961).
3. This final draft of the resolution on the attitude of the International towards war,
submitted by Lenin, Luxemburg and Martov, was voted upon at the Stuttgart congress of
1907. For the full text of the resolution, see Braunthal, History o f the International, 1864-
1914, pp. 361-3. For the congress debate over the war question, see ibid., pp. 320-56.
4. See ibid., pp. 1-35.
508 The First Hundred Years
from which it never recovered; it formed a traumatic experience for a whole
generation of Socialists. The crisis which it unleashed paralysed the Inter-
national. During the war, internal struggles divided the parties between their
patriotic, reformist wings and the left wings of internationalists and Marxists.
After the war, it grew into the most serious crisis in the history of Socialism
when Lenin, with his programme of world revolution, formed the Communist
International and split the international workers’ movement. Its internal
history during the period between the two world wars was one of internecine
strife over the problem of dictatorship versus democracy, which was only
ended with the common wreck of the Socialist and Communist movements
throughout almost the whole of Europe under the blows of Fascism.

After the Second World War, the ideal of freedom assumed first place in the
scale of values acknowledged in the ideology of the European Socialist
parties. The Socialist movement had, from the start, been a freedom move-
ment—indeed, the vanguard of the people’s struggle for civic rights, freedom
and democracy.1 In the light of the experience of totalitarian Communism—
ostensibly a Socialist system, yet lacking the elements of freedom—the
Socialist movement became increasingly aware of the problems posed by
freedom in the struggle for Socialism. In the programmes which the parties
formulated after the war, the emphasis was placed on freedom and democracy
as foundations for the Socialist form of society to which they aspired. Thus,
when the Socialist International was revived after the war, it gave these points
precedence in its programme:

1. Socialists w ork by dem ocratic m ethods to bring about a new society in

freedom.
2. There is no Socialism w ithout freedom. Socialism can only be realized
through democracy, democracy can only be fulfilled through Socialism.8

But the use of democratic methods, unless there is a period of social crisis,
precludes any dramatic, revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.
For ‘under the conditions of universal suffrage, electorates do not vote for
revolutions—unless the revolutions have already happened’, as G. D. H. Cole
remarked when considering the question of how it was that a Socialist govern-
ment in Britain—that of the British Labour party following its landslide
victory in 1945—while attempting to reform the capitalist system, had not
radically transformed its structure.123*In a democracy, the nature and extent of
Socialist reforms carried out by a Socialist government must depend on the
1. For a study of the role of freedom in the working-class struggle for power, see
Susanne Miller, Das Problem der Freiheit im Sozialismus (Frankfurt, 1964).
2. For the debate on the declaration made at the International’s inaugural congress, see
page 201; for the full text, see Appendix Two.
3. G. D. H. Cole, Is this Socialism? (London, 1954), p. 6. For a discussion of the
contemporary problems of Socialism, see Crossman, (ed.), New Fabian Essays.
 Destiny o f a Vision 509
level of development of a Socialist consciousness in the broad mass of the
people. Otherwise it would simply be overthrown in the next elections, should
its reform activities be seen by a majority of the electorate as an infringement
of their material interests. Socialism can develop in a democracy only if a
Socialist ethos exists within that society. It can become a living reality only in
an atmosphere of dedicated self-sacrifice, solidarity, social discipline and a
voluntary subordination of group interests to the common social interest for
the sake of the Socialist cause.
Such an idealism among the broad mass of workers and middle-class
intellectuals has not infrequently emerged in the history of Socialism. In the
count of its martyrs—those who have been executed, tortured, condemned to
imprisonment or the concentration camps—Socialism does not lag behind
any religious or social movement of the past. But idealism is not to be
awakened merely by an appeal to exclusively material interests. Socialism
originated as a workers’ protest movement, not only against the system of
capitalist exploitation to which they were subjected, but also against the social
injustice which the system embodied and the notorious spirit of ruthless
greed by which it was governed.1 It was the ethos of Socialism—its promise
of a world of social justice and human solidarity—which had aroused the
enthusiasm within the movement.

The achievements of the Socialist movement have, indeed, been considerable.

Its struggle for social justice has brought about a change in social conscience
regarding the social function of the state. At the time when the International
was formed, the state’s active role, as Lasalle characterized it, was seen as
confined to that of ‘night watchman’: it was only asked that it should protect
property, and administer law and order; it was not to interfere in ‘the free
play of economic forces’ or the relationship between capital and labour, and
certainly not to protect the workers against exploitation; the capitalist’s
freedom to exploit his labour was not to be hindered by law. Neither the state
nor society at large felt any responsibility for the fate of the workers, veget-
ating at that time in utter misery.2 The liberal-capitalist principle of laissez-
faire, which then governed the attitude of the state to social problems,
excluded any influence by the forces of the state over the living conditions of
the workers. Laissez-faire was breached for the first time in England by the
Ten Hours Act of 1847—a ‘great act’, as Marx hailed it in his Inaugural
1. ‘Socialists,’ the declaration of the founding congress of the International states,
‘oppose capitalism not only because it is economically wasteful and because it keeps the
masses from their material rights, but above all because it revolts their sense of justice’—see
page 203.
2. For a description of the situation of the English working class during the first half of
the nineteenth century, see the classic work by J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Bleak Age
(London, 1934). For their situation as it still was at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century, see E. Royston Pike, Human Documents o f the Age o f the
Forsytes (London, 1969).
 510 The First Hundred Years
Address to the founding congress of the First International, not only because
of the ‘immense physical, moral and intellectual benefits’ which greater
leisure brought to the factory workers, but also ‘as the victory of a principle;
it was for the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the
middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’.
During the eight decades after the founding of the International and up to
the end of the Second World War, the Socialist movement managed by hard
struggle to wring from the ruling classes one or another social reform. It was
only after the Second World War, when Socialist parties formed majority
governments, as in Britain and Sweden, or participated as leading parties in
coalition governments, as in other European countries, that they became a
predominant power and that ‘the political economy of the working class’
began to develop. It was only then that a basic process of change began from
a laissez-faire capitalist state to a Welfare State. This had become possible
through a change in social awareness: the responsibility of society and the
state for the social welfare of the broad mass of its people had now been
unquestioningly accepted.1 What the Socialist movement had in fact achieved
was the social recognition of the new rights of the working class: the rights to
health, housing, education, economic security in old age and during times of
unemployment, and, especially, the right to work. The state had been placed
under an obligation to secure through its economic and financial policies the
highest possible employment.2
Every measure taken to realize these rights represents an interference by
the state in capitalist rights: ‘a victory of the political economy of labour over
the political economy of capital’.
The ‘political economy of the working class’ has revolutionized the
function of the state. It has become a regulator with enormous power, con-
trolling the life of the economy at its roots. The destiny of the economy and
the living standards of the working class are no longer, as they were before the
war, at the mercy of an anarchic ‘free play of economic forces’. The calculated
intervention of the state represents a decisive control over the economic life of
a country.

While the Welfare State evidently realized certain basic Socialist ideas, it by
no means succeeded in changing the class structure of the capitalist state; it
still fell a long way short of an egalitarian classless society. While structural
1. The scale o f social welfare may be illustrated from the Budget estimate presented by
the British Labour government in year 1969-70. Out o f a total expenditure o f £20,067
million, over two fifths, or £8,771 million, was directed towards state welfare institutions,
i.e. £1,853 million to the National Health Service, £1,073 million to the construction o f
homes, £2,300 million to the education services and £3,545 million to old-age and unemploy-
ment welfare— G u a rd ia n , 5 December 1969.
2. During the period between the two world wars there was in Britain, for example, an
average o f 14 per cent o f workers unemployed; since the end o f the war, the average has
been 2 to 3 per cent.
 Destiny o f a Vision 511
changes within capitalism have often made the individual owner of the means
of production into a share-holder, and while the state as a regulator of the
political economy has broken the absolute control of capital over the produc-
tive processes, the class character of society has remained untouched, with
both economic and political power concentrated in the hands of large
capitalist combines.
The state’s welfare service and the policy of progressive taxation adopted
by Socialist governments have, it is true, brought about a new distribution of
the nation’s wealth. The proportion of the working-class participation in the
general well-being of society has, indeed, been enlarged, its living standard
increased. But the rich have not got poorer and their numbers have not been
reduced. And while poverty in terms of destitution, which had been a mass
phenomenon before the war, has virtually disappeared, there continues to
exist in the affluent society many considerable enclaves of harsh deprivation.1

The Welfare State is an achievement of the Socialist movement’s century-long

struggle for social justice. The question, however, remains of whether it is a
phase in the process of the development of a Socialist society, or only a phase
in the process of humanizing capitalism.
A Socialist order of society can only develop out of a Welfare State
provided it eliminates the economic foundations of the class structure of that
society. From the very outset it was a tenet of the Socialist movement that the
class structure of the capitalist society, and with it the associated dominance
of capital over labour and of the property-owning over the deprived classes,
could only be overcome by bringing the means of production into public
ownership. The nationalization of the means of production was, in fact, the
fundamental socio-economic objective which the Socialist parties set them-
selves.
In the post-war period, however, there were changes in the view of
Socialists on the priorities of Socialist reconstruction.2 Certainly, in several
countries, a considerable sector of the economy was nationalized by the
Socialist party in power. In Britain, for example, mines, railways and the steel
industry, gas and electricity, civil aviation and the key position in the British
national economy, the Bank of England, were all nationalized. Much the
same occurred in varying degrees in France, Italy and Austria. In Israel,
1. See Peter Townsend, Poverty, Socialism and Labour (London, 1966).
2. For an account of these changes, see Albert Lauterbach, Kapitalismus und Sozialis-
mus in rteuer Sicht (Reinbeck, 1963). See also Fritz Klenner, Das Unbehagen in der Demo-
kratie. Ein Beitrag zu Gegenwartsproblemen der Arbeiterbewegung (Vienna, 1956). See also
Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1960); Anthony Crosland, The Future
o f Socialism (London, 1956); and Douglas Jay, Socialism in the New Age (London, 1962).
 512 The First Hundred Years
where nearly two-thirds of the means of production are socialized, the sector
consisting of the co-operative and trade union collective ownership of the
means of production is larger than that owned by the state.
But the transfer of the means of production into public ownership as a
lever for transforming the class structure of capitalist society is no longer the
supreme objective of Socialist parties.1 Nationalization has, in their view at all
events, lost its former priority. What they now seek essentially is, as the
declaration of the Socialist International stated, ‘effective democratic control
of the economy’. The various forms of public ownership which might be
developed, the declaration stated, ‘should be regarded not as ends in them-
selves but as means of controlling basic industries and services on which the
economic life and welfare of the community depends, of rationalizing
inefficient industries or of preventing private monopolies and cartels from
exploiting the public’.
But not even the most effective democratic control over the economy
which remains essentially rooted in a capitalistic system of production will be
incapable of bringing forth a classless society and realizing the original and
genuine ideals of Socialism.
It was the experience of Russian Communism which raised the whole
question of the role played by the nationalization of the means of production,
the speed and extent necessary for the development of a Socialist form of
society. In Russia, the nationalization of the whole means of production has
transformed private capitalism into state capitalism, developing not a classless
society, but a totalitarian society with new classes and class privileges.
The need to submit to public control the basic industries on which the life
and well-being in a community depend is, of course, recognized as a principle
by every Socialist party. But, in considering the Russian experience, the
Socialist parties have been forced to ask themselves whether the collectivi-
zation of the whole means of production is, in fact, necessary to overturn the
capitalist economic order or whether state control over the ‘commanding
heights’ of the economy would be sufficient to ensure effective control of the
economy. Indeed, they had had to ask themselves whether a concentration of
1. One of the largest parties in the Socialist International, the Social Democratic Party
of Germany, has abandoned this objective completely. In their ‘Basic Programme’ decided
on at an extraordinary party conference in Godesberg in November 1959, it stated that ‘free
competition and free initiative for the employer’ were ‘important elements in Social Demo-
cratic economic policy’. The co-operative ownership of the productive means of production
is, however, recognized in their programme as ‘a legitimate form of public control’. The
programme, however, by no means strove to overcome the capitalist economic system. ‘The
private ownership of the means of production,’ it declared, ‘has a claim to be protected and
promoted, so long as it does not hinder the setting up of a just social order’—Programme der
deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Bonn), pp. 192 and 193. For a detailed analysis of the pro-
gramme, see Willi Eichler, ‘Die politische Rolle des Programms’, in Geist und Tat, Nr. iv
(1969) pp. 193-210. Eichler was chairman of the programme commission. See also Harold
Kent Schellenger, The S.P.D . in the Bonn Republic: A Socialist Party Modernizes (The
Hague, 1960).
 Destiny o f a Vision 513
the economic power in the hands of the state does not by itself imply a threat
to freedom.
In debating the whole question of nationalizing the means of production,
the Socialist parties have reduced it to a matter of economic and political
expediency, while the problem of humanizing the present social order has
been given precedence in Socialist objectives. Thus the declaration of the
Socialist International stated:

Socialism m eans far m ore than a new economic and social system. Econom ic
and social progress have m oral value to the extent th at they serve to liberate and
develop the hum an personality.1

But the advances which the Socialist parties have striven for in their
policies are nevertheless reforms only of the existing economic order: to raise
the material living standards and cultural levels of the workers and to allow
them to lead a dignified human existence within capitalism. The Socialist
policy of reform admittedly alleviates class conflicts in a capitalist society, but
it does not remove them. It tames the greedy impulses of capitalism but does
not eliminate them. As long as the economic basis of capitalism remains
intact, reforms cannot by themselves create a form of society which would
provide for all—and not merely for an Hite—the pre-conditions for ‘liberating
and developing the personality’.6

The promise held out by Socialism was the creation of a new world. The
movement inspired by this vision regarded itself as the standard-bearer of a
historic mission for humanity, as an instrument to bring about a new civiliza-
tion and to realize its humanistic ideals within the context of an industrial
society. And its unshakeable confidence in the ultimate triumph of the ‘iron
law of history’, as Marx perceived it, had fired the idealism of the movement.
This vision of a new world has gradually faded in the Socialist movement.
What it promises today is a continual growth of workers’ participation in
society’s wealth through a more equitable distribution of income and a more
rational and civilized ordering of the existing society.
But if idealism is to be reawakened, a vision of a new world is essential; for
without idealism, no new world can be created. All the great turning-points in
human history—the one of early Christianity, kindled by the Messianic hopes
of the Old Testament prophets, the age of the Reformation, the age of the
Enlightenment, of the English and French revolutions—were inspired by
visions of a new world. The capitalist world, governed by greed for material
values and quickly-won gratification, lacks any inspiring social ideal; the
1. See p. 203.
514 The First Hundred Years
drive to increase production and mass consumption engenders no impulse
towards a higher and nobler form of society. The more rapidly the material
wealth of the capitalist world accumulates, the more glaring appears its bank-
ruptcy of ideas and hopes for mankind’s regeneration. In Marx’s words, it
leaves man ‘depraved by the whole structure of our society, lost in himself,
alienated and dominated by inhuman conditions and forces’.1
The gulf between the material affluence of society created by highly
developed capitalism and its lack of social inspiration for a meaningful future
of mankind becomes intolerably wide. The revolt of students in the world’s
richest countries—in the United States as well as in France, Britain, Germany,
the Netherlands and Japan—is a symptom of a profound discontent with a
society satiated with material goods. Over and above the students’ concrete
demands for reforms of their academic institutions—however confused the
ideas behind their protest against the political and social status quo may have
been—these disturbances revealed a basic dissatisfaction with a society which
knows no higher aim than to achieve ever-increasing wealth; which wallows
in its riches while in vast areas of the world millions upon millions live out
their lives in the most extreme poverty and uncertainty; which, after two
world wars, feverishly rearms in preparation for a third world war that can
only end with the destruction of half the human race because it appears
incapable of creating the foundations for a lasting peace.
For Socialists, the development of Soviet Communism is more depressing
still. Like the capitalist society, the Soviet Communist society pursues as its
main objective an increase in production and military rearmament. Yet
democracy in capitalist society secures for its members at least no small
degree of political and intellectual freedom; the political power of the
property-owning class is balanced by the political power of the working class,
the power of capital by that of the trade unions, and there are no restrictions
on the freedom of thought. Further, in the democratic contest for govern-
mental power, the balance of strength between classes may well shift in favour
of the working class and capitalist governments be replaced by Socialist
governments.
Yet, in the Communist society, the people remain dumb grist for the mills
of the ruling bureaucracy; intellectual freedom is suppressed and spiritual
bleakness has become its trademark.
The contrast between this ‘crude Communism’, as Marx defined it in his
treatise Nationalokonomie und Philosophic in 1844,1 2 and Socialist ideals
becomes as intolerable as the contrast between the material wealth of the
capitalist world and its vacuum of social ideals. It was because ‘crude Com-
munism’ had become intolerable that the Czechoslovak Communists shook
1. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, p. 414.
2. S. Landshut and J. P. Mayer (eds.), Der Historische Materialismus. Die Friihschriften
(Leipzig, 1932), vol. i, pp. 292-4.
 Destiny o f a Vision 515
themselves free of it in their search for Socialism with a human face. Their
revolution of 1968 was of historical importance for having demonstrated the
possibility of reforming the existing political institutions in a Communist
society and, above all, of reforming it by an impulse from within. Thus the
victory of the Russian counter-revolution over the Czechoslovak revolution
seems, in a historical perspective, to be merely an episode in the struggle for
freedom. And however long the rule of the Russian reaction may last in
Czechoslovakia, it cannot exterminate the currents of freedom and must
eventually be overturned. This, at all events, has been the experience of
revolution and counter-revolution throughout the history of the European
peoples.

The conclusion of the history of the first century of the International, as

narrated in the three volumes that constitute this book, suggests some reflec-
tions on the future of Socialism. These would not, of course, be expected from
a historian; it is not his professional duty to project the future. Perhaps they
will, on the other hand, be expected from an author who has experienced six
of the ten decades of the history of the international Socialist movement as
one of its active members.
It has been an experience of tremendous political and social change: of the
overthrow of three monarchs in Europe and of an age-old empire in Asia; of
the Russian and Chinese revolutions; of the emancipation of the under-
developed nations of Asia and Africa from imperialist and colonial rule. And
it has been an experience of the elevation of the working class from being
politically oppressed, socially degraded, vegetating in poverty and culturally
deprived, to a human existence and the heights of political power.
It has been an experience of revolution and counter-revolution. The
impetus for revolution has come from the people’s impulse for emancipation
from political servitude and material poverty and, deep down, from the
ancient chiliastic yearning for a new world—a world of peace and freedom,
equality and brotherhood.1
The political and social changes of the past fifty years have realized
several ideas of the Socialist revolution: they have changed the face of the
world and raised humanity to a higher level of civilization. But despite the
wonders of its technology and science, which have theoretically provided the
means to end poverty, the human race has until now been unable to find a
social solution to the problem; the vast majority of mankind continues to
1. Thus, in the declaration made at its inaugural congress, the Socialist International
defined as the objectives of international Socialism: ‘Socialists work for a world of peace
and freedom, for a world in which the exploitation and enslavement of men by men and of
peoples by peoples is unknown, for a world in which the development of the individual
personality is the basis for the fruitful development of mankind’ (see page 203).
516 The First Hundred Years
experience the most desperate want. Two great powers, the United States
and the Soviet Union, have become determinant for the world; their only
answer to the danger of atomic war, however, consists in accumulating
more and more frightening nuclear weapons in a balance of terror; and, as
yet, the overwhelming majority of mankind remains subjected to despotic
regimes.
No particular prophetic gift is required to see that a world which is unable
to solve the basic problems of its human society is moving towards a most
serious crisis; or that, at all events, the era of political and social change which
began half a century ago is as yet unfinished.
No changes in a political system, whatever these may be, could have
greater importance for the future of Socialism and for mankind than the
transformation of the Soviet Union’s system of totalitarian dictatorship into
a system of Socialist democracy. But is such a change to be anticipated? And,
if so, in what forms and by what social forces? A rising among the masses
could only provoke a tragedy. It would without doubt be wrecked on the vast
apparatus of power on which the system of dictatorship in the Soviet Union
rests. The reaction against it would be terrible. A Stalinistic regime of terror
would be reconstituted, possibly under a military dictatorship.
Yet a non-violent change of the system is only conceivable by a ‘revolution
from above’, like that which took place in Czechoslovakia when a palace
revolution by leading freedom-conscious Communists overthrew the conser-
vative regime in search of a ‘new model of Socialism’. It was a revolution
which had developed spontaneously out of a ferment of protest against the
system of bureaucratic dictatorship which had held the Communist party
itself and, above all, the broad mass of the people in its clutches. The revolu-
tion had become inevitable because of the people’s urge for freedom. The
non-violent ‘revolution from above’ prevented the outbreak of a violent
‘revolution from below’. It was only under the pressure of ferment within
the party and among the mass of the people that it became feasible for the
ruling group voluntarily to embark on a process of reform which would
inevitably erode its power and privileges.
The Soviet Union, however, shows no perceptible signs of any fermenting
protest against the dictatorial system. The protests made by intellectuals have
aroused no response in the country at large. However, if the regime is
apathetically accepted by the mass of the people, no revolution, either from
‘above’ or ‘below’, is to be anticipated.
There are many Socialists who hold this view. They question whether the
urge to freedom is, in fact, inborn in mankind, whether the emancipation from
political servitude is an inexorable law and whether the peoples of the Soviet
Union’s Communist empire are necessarily subject, like those of Western
Europe, to the process of historical development towards a higher level of
civilization. The precious gift of freedom was won by a century of struggle
 Destiny o f a Vision 517
by the peoples of Western Europe, while an overwhelming majority of man-
kind has for millennia been subjected to slavery and despotism as if it were an
established law of nature. But if, as the experience of history seems to show,
the urge to freedom is not fundamental, then there seems to be no reason why
the masses in the Soviet Union should revolt against a system of government
which, while it admittedly denies them freedom, satisfies their material
requirements in life.
Apart from anything else, however, the theory which states that the urge
to freedom is an exclusive characteristic of the peoples of Western Europe and
not a universal human experience is, at any rate, in direct contradiction with
the history of the Russian people. Twice in our own century did the Russian
workers rise against the Tsarist absolutism, shaking its hold in their first
revolution and overthrowing it in their second; they then defended their
revolution through the years of unimaginable sacrifice and privation. The
Russian people have been the most revolutionary people of the twentieth
century. It does not therefore seem all too fantastic to anticipate that, in the
course of a future moral or political crisis—against which the Soviet Union
will be as little immune as the United States—the Russian people’s latent urge
to freedom might once again engender a movement powerful enough to
enforce fundamental changes of the system of dictatorship towards a Socialist
democracy.
Such an event would be of the utmost importance for the future of Social-
ism. It would offer the Socialist movement throughout the world a new
inspiration and would reunite the divided international labour movement.
Socialism has been discredited by the ugly face of Stalinism; a Socialism with
a human face in the Soviet Union, which such a revolution could set in
motion, would revive a spirit of enthusiasm and idealism within the world
Socialist movement.

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October 1917, and its
subsequent experiments in economic and social reorganization in the spirit of
Marxist theories, gave the world-wide expansion of Socialist concepts a
powerful impetus. Until that moment the Anglo-American world, for
example, had taken hardly any note of either Socialism or Marxism. The
phenomenon of a European great power which acknowledged Marxism as the
ideology of the state, and which was attempting to construct a Socialist order
of society, enthralled workers throughout the world—in 1918 the British
Labour party, founded in 1905, declared itself in its programme to be a
Socialist party—and a rapid growth of literature discussing the problems of
Marxism and Socialism revolutionized the traditions of social thought. Above
all, the revolution imparted a powerful inspiration to the workers’ movements
of the democracies of Western Europe and America.
Yet of even greater importance was the impact of the Russian Revolution
518 The First Hundred Years
on Asia. During the period between the two world wars, it stimulated the
formation of Communist and Socialist parties in China, Japan, India and
Indonesia—catalysts for a Socialist ethos in the society which developed in
southern Asia after the Second World War and which, in the Far East,
produced the People’s Republic of China.
The Russian revolution did in fact set in motion a Socialist world revolu-
tion—not, however, quite in the way that Lenin had imagined. The system of
a Communist dictatorship was of relevance for the social revolution only in
pre-industrialized, semi-feudal countries with their traditions of autocracy. In
the industrially developed countries, with their traditions of parliamentary
democracy, the social revolution could only take place through a process of
infiltrating Socialist elements into the institutions and economic structure of
the capitalist society.
The transition of an old to a new form of society is a crucial process taking
up a complete era in human history and continuously interrupted by severe
setbacks. The change in Europe from a feudal-aristocratic to a capitalist-
bourgeois social order was the history of several centuries. The course of the
Socialist world revolution is probably being subjected to a similar measure of
time since it began with the Russian revolution half a century ago. Its achieve-
ments up to date still fall far short of realizing the ideal by which it was
inspired. The Communist revolution remains incomplete since the essentials
of Socialism remain unfulfilled. And the Social Democratic revolution in the
Western nations—the gradual transformation of capitalist into social welfare
states—is no more than a preliminary phase in the development of a Socialist
society.
But the forms of society which have emerged from this revolution—the
Communist society as much as capitalist society transformed by reformist
social democracy—are not set forever like hard crystals. Through the dynamic
of the idea from which the revolution stemmed, they are undergoing a con-
tinuous process of social change to bring about its realization.
Such an optimistic perspective of Socialist development may, however,
seem bold in the light of the crisis which grips Socialism at present, the
spiritual lack of direction in which mankind now seems imprisoned and the
prevailing pessimism of a world living under the threat of nuclear war. And,
indeed, the impetus to exorcize man’s currently prevalent spiritual depression
cannot be expected to emerge until the danger of the destruction of civiliza-
tion in a third world war has been averted.
However, reflections on the future of Socialism can only be based on the
optimistic assumption that humanity has a future, that it can escape the
threatened catastrophe of self-destruction in a new world war and that, freed
from this nightmare, it can set itself a new purpose. But this new purpose can
be none other than a restructuring of human society into a Socialist world
community—the realization of the Socialist vision.
 Destiny o f a Vision 519
The prognosis may seem daring. But, for Marxist Socialists, it is the
logical consequence of their view of the world historical process.

Socialism is an optimistic faith, a faith in mankind’s ability to attain self-

regeneration, in its capacity to reach even higher levels of civilization; and
it is in Marxism that this belief has found its theoretical foundation.
But the Socialist vision is not utopian. It grew out of social and economic
necessities. And, for half a century, it has been in process of materialization;
in one third of the world under the Communist system of government; in a
further third under the system of Social Democracy. Socialism is the pre-
dominant trend in the development of a new age of mankind.
Appendices

APPENDIX ONE
S O C IA L IS M AS A W O R L D M O V E M E N T
An Attempt at a Numerical Assessment
Socialism as a world movement in the years 1968-1969 comprised—as shown
in the tables—an estimated number of 207 parties with a total of more than
60 million members and 369 million voters.
An exact survey of the members and voters of democratic socialist parties
can, however, be given only for the member parties of the Socialist Inter-
national, as shown in Table I. The survey for the strength of Communist
parties in Table II is incomplete. The number of Communist votes in several
countries, such as China, Cuba, North Korea, was not available or in other
countries under Communist rule officially announced as almost 100 per cent.
Even less complete is the list in Table III showing the membership of the
parties which are neither affiliated to the Socialist International nor consider
themselves as Communist parties. They are left-wing Socialist parties or
Maoist or Trotskyist parties, as well as those which claim to be Socialist but
which are not rooted in the Socialist tradition; finally there are democratic,
revolutionary, nationalistic parties with Socialist tendencies whose Socialist
character is questionable. An example of this is the Indian National Congress,
a democratic party with Socialist aims whose leadership is however dominated
by representatives of bourgeois-capitalist interests; or the ‘Arab Socialist’
parties of Egypt, Syria and Iraq under the rule of a nationalistic, militaristic-
Fascist dictatorship which, however, like the left wing of the Indian National
Congress, attempt to win the support of the masses by using Socialist rhetoric.
These parties figure on the list not as genuine Socialist parties but as parties of
a potentially Socialist movement.
For none of these parties was it possible to discover its membership, but
for several, the number of votes they obtained in elections before December
1969 was available.
522 Appendix One
The figures in Tables I, II and III show approximately the comparative survey
of tendencies in the world Socialist movement at the end of 1969:
Number o f Votes last
parties Members election
Socialist International 54 15,360,977 76,206,588
Communist parties 87 45,568,607 246,889,482
Parties with Socialist tendencies 66 — 45,461,848
207 60,929,604 368,557,918

Ta bl e I

THE PARTIES OF THE SOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL

(Source: Socialist International Information, vol. xx, No. 1, January 1970)

This table shows the strength of the parties affiliated to the Socialist Inter-
national. In December 1969 it comprised a total of approximately 15,360,000
members and more than 76 million voters. In 1969, Socialist parties were in
government in the following countries:
Belgium Madagascar
Federal Republic of Germany Mauritius
West Berlin Norway (since March 1971)
Finland San Marino
Great Britain Singapore
Iceland Sweden
Israel Switzerland
Italy
Votes last Per
Parties Members election cent

fAden—People’s Socialist Party 30,000 — —

Argentine Socialist Party 21,000 179,8551 1-9

Australian Labor Party 2,000,000 2,750,0002 47-0
Austrian Socialist Party 702,926 1,928,922 42-5
Belgian Socialist Partyff 216,500 1,449,315 28-0
fBermuda—Progressive Labor Party 1,000 12,930 34-3
•Bulgarian Socialist Party in exile — — —
Canadian New Democratic Party 325,000 1,360,330 17-3
fChile—Radical Party 27,500 307,126 13-4
fCosta Rica—National Liberation Party 75,000 225,530 49-5
•Czech Social Democratic Party in exile — — —
Danish Social Democratic Party 225,046 975,058 34-2
 Appendix One 523

Votes last Per

Parties Members election cent
♦Esthonian Social Democratic Party in exile — — —

Finnish Social Democratic Partyff 100,000 664,919 27-7

French Socialist Party 100,000 3,654,003 16*5
German Social Democratic Partyff 749,632 14,074,455 42-7
Berlin, West—Social Democratic Partyff — 829,955® 56-9
Great Britain—Labour Partyff 6,086,625 13,064,951 47-9
♦Hungarian Socialist Party in exile — —
Icelandic Social Democratic Partyff 3,000 15,06115-7
♦All-India Praja Socialist Party 213,001 4,456,487 3-1
International Jewish Labor Bund 21,000 — —
Ireland—Labour Party 10,000 223,282 17-0
Israel Labour Partyff 286,000 632,0354 46-2
World Union of Socialist Zionists 150,000 — —
Italian Socialist Party (P.S.I.) 350,000) A fOd t?95 14-S
Italian Unitarian Socialist Party (P.S.U.) 135,000/
Jamaica—People’s National Party 125,000 217,173 49-2
Japan Socialist Party 46,202 10,074,099 21-4
Japan Democratic Socialist Party 51,500 3,636,891 7-7
Korea (South)—United Socialist Party 17,500 104,975 0-9
♦Latvian Social Democratic Party in exile — —. —

♦Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in exile — — —

Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party 4,000 46,733 32-3
Madagascar Social Democratic Partyff 1,110,000 1,943,623 93-6
Malaysian Democratic Action Party 10,000 259,000 12-5
Malta Labour Party 7,600 61,774 42-7
Mauritius—Labour Partyff 30,000 220,000 56-0
Netherlands—Labour Party 116,922 1,619,694 23-6
New Zealand Labour Party 40,000 534,327 44-3
Norwegian Labour Party 200,000 992,524 46-7
tParaguay—Revolutionary Febrerisita Party 3,500 16,741 2-6
tPeru—Aprista Party 55,000 623,501 34-3
♦Polish Socialist Party in exile — — —
♦Romanian Social Democratic Party in exile — — —
San Marino—Social Democratic Partyff 816 2,328 17-9
Singapore—People’s Action Partyff 10,000 65,812* 84-4
Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in exile 9,000 — —
Swedish Social Democratic Labour Partyff 940,000 2,420,242 50-1
Swiss Social Democratic Partyft 55,728 233,873 23-5
United States Socialist Party 3,000 — —
tVenezuela—Democratic Action (A.D.) 450,000 939,935 25-6
524 Appendix One

Votes last Per

Parties Members election cent
^Venezuela—Popular Electoral Movement
(M.E.P.) 250,000 475,909 13-0
•Vietnam (South)—Socialist Party 7,000 — —
•Yugoslav Socialist Party in exile — — —
Totals 15,370,998 76,997,197 —
* Consultative Member 1. last election, July 7,1963 4. cast for Labour Alignment
t Observer Member 2. estimate o f first votes 5. parties united at election
t t Party in government 3. SPD votes in West Berlin 6. only 7 seats contested
elections

Ta bl e II
THE COMMUNIST PARTIES
(Source: World strength o f the Communist Party Organizations,
Department of State, Washington, 1969)
The Communist world movement, which since the dissolution of the Com-
munist International in 1943 has no central organization, is split into two
groups: the parties recognized by the Soviet Communist party and the parties
gathered around the Communist party of China. The table lists the parties of
both groups. Communist parties rule the following countries (situation
March 1971):
Albania Mongolia
Bulgaria North Korea
China North Vietnam
Cuba Poland
Czechoslovakia Romania
German Democratic Republic Soviet Union
Hungary Yugoslavia
In 1968, the parties of the Communist world movement grouped approxi-
mately 45,500,000 members, as follows:
Percentage o f
Communist world
Members movement
In countries under Communist
governments 42,500,000 94-5
Of which in the Soviet Union
and China 30,500,000 71-6
Total in Western Europe 1,959,000 3-1
Total in all other countries 1,100,000 2-1
 Appendix One 525

Of the combined total of 1,959,000 members of Communist parties in

Western Europe, the Italian Communist party had about 1,500,000 and the
French Communist party about 275,000 members. The total for the Com-
munist parties in the other countries of Western Europe came to 184,000.
Votes last
election before Per
Countries Parties Members Dec. 1968 cent

Afghanistan Communist Party 400 — —

Albania Workers’ Party 66,327 978,114 1000

Algeria Communist Party — — —

Argentina Communist Party 60,000 — —

Australia Communist Party 4,750 23,056 01

Austria Communist Party 27,500 18,638 0-4
Belgium Communist Party 12,500 170,686 3-3
Bolivia National Liberation
Front 6,000 33,075 30
Brazil Communist Party 15,750 — —

Bulgaria Communist Party 613,393 5,744,072 99-8

Burma Communist Party 5,000 — —

Cambodia Revolutionary People’s

Party 100
Canada Communist Party 2,500 4,344 01
Ceylon Communist Party 2,300 109,684 2-4
Chile Communist Party 45,000 286,367 122
China Communist Party 17,000,000 —

Colombia Communist Party 9,000 51,000 210

Costa Rica Popular Leading Party 600 — —

Cuba United Socialist

Revolutionary Party 60,000
Cyprus Reform Party of the
Working People 13,000
Czechoslovakia Communist Party 1,700,000 9,412,309 99-9
Denmark Communist Party 6,600 29,824 10
Dominican Republic Communist Party 1,100 4,829 0-4
Ecuador Communist Party 1,650 16,990 20
El Salvador Communist Party 200 — ____

Finland Communist Party 49,000 502,812 21-2

France Communist Party 275,000 4,435,357 200
German Democratic
Republic Socialist Unity Party 1,769,912 11,196,961 99-9
German Federal
Republic Communist Party 13,000 222,504 0-6
Great Britain Communist Party 32,562 62,112 0-2
Greece Communist Party 37,000 540,687 120
Guatemala Workers’ Party 750 — ____

Guyana Leading Party of the

Working People 100
Honduras Communist Party 11,000 — ____

Hungary Communist Party 600,000 7,105,709 99-7

526 Appendix One

Votes last
election before Per
Countries Parties M embers Dec. 1968 cent

Iceland Workers’ Alliance 1,000 16,923 17-6

India Communist Party
(pro-Moscow) 55,000 7,564,180 5-2
Communist Party
(Marxist) 70,000 6,140,738 4-2
Indonesia Communist Party 5,000 — —

Iran Mass Party 1,000 — —

Iraq Communist Party 2,000 — —

Ireland Communist Party 125 183 001

Israel MAKI (pro-Israel) 1,000 15,712 1-6
RAKACH (pro-Arab) 1,000 38,827 2-8
Italy Communist Party 1,500,000 8,555,477 26-9
Japan Communist Party 250,000 2,190,563 4-8
Jordan Communist Party 700 — —

Korea (North) Communist Party 1,600,000 — —

Laos People’s Party 50,000 — —

Lebanon Communist Party 6,000 — —

Luxembourg Communist Party 500 25,000 15-5
Malaysia Communist Party 2,000 — —

Mexico Communist Party 5,250 225,000 2*3

Mongolia Revolutionary People’s
Party 48,570
Morocco Party of Freedom and
Socialism 600
Nepal Communist Party 8,000 — —

Netherlands Communist Party 11,500 248,808 3-6

New Zealand Communist Party 400 1,207 01
Nicaragua Socialist Party 200 — —

Nigeria Communist Party 1,000 — —

Norway Communist Party 2,500 22,270 1-0
Pakistan Communist Party 1,450 — —

Panama People’s Party 250 — —

Paraguay Communist Party 5,000 — —

Peru Communist Party 5,000 — —

Philippines Communist Party 2,000 — —

Poland United Workers’ Party 2,030,068 18,982,316 98-7

Portugal Communist Party 2,000 — —

Romania Communist Party 1,800,000 12,388,786 99-8

Singapore Communist Party 200 — - —

South Africa Communist Party 500 — —

Spain Communist Party 5,000 — —

Sudan Communist Party 7,500 — —

Sweden Communist Party 29,000 145,172 30

Switzerland Workers’ Party 4,000 28,723 2-9
Syria Communist Party 3,000 —
—

Thailand Communist Party 2,500 — —

Tunisia Communist Party 100 — —

 Appendix One 527

Votes last
election before Per
Countries Parties Members Dec. 1968 cent
Turkey Communist Party 1,500 — —

Uruguay Communist Party 21,000 69,750 5-7

USA Communist Party 14,000 — —

USSR Communist Party 13,500,000 143,570,976 99*8

Venezuela Communist Party 5,000 103,368 2-8
Vietnam (North) Workers’ Party 766,000 — —

Vietnam (South) Communist Party 284,000 — —

Yugoslavia Communist League 1,013,500 5,606,373 891

45,568,907 246,889,482

Ta bl e III

PARTIES WITH SOCIALIST TENDENCIES

(compiled by Alan Day, staff member of the Socialist International)

1. Left-wing Socialist parties in Europe

The following list comprises left-wing Socialist groups which have split off
from social-democratic parties and have constituted independent parties. They
are not affiliated to the Socialist International.
Votes in last
elections before
Countries Parties Dec. 1969 Per cent
Denmark Socialist People’s Party 174,506 61
Left Socialists 57,182 2-0
Finland League of Workers and Small
Farmers 61,830 2-6
France Unified Socialist Party (PSU) 874,212 40
Greece Social Democratic Union in exile — —

Italy Socialist Party and Proletarian

Union 1,414,043 4-5
Netherlands Pacifistic Socialist Party 197,051 2-9
Norway Socialist People’s Party 121,900 3-5
2,900,724
2. Socialist tendencies in Asia
A number of parties listed below were members of the Asian Socialist Confer-
ence, namely the Anti-Fascist Freedom League of Burma, the Sri Lanka
528 Appendix One
Freedom Party in Ceylon and the National Congress Party in Nepal (see also
pp. 256, 270,278). The Samyukta Socialist Party in India is a splinter party of
the Praja Socialist Party; the other two Indian parties listed are left-wing
Socialist parties.
The party of the Indian National Congress, which in 1955 at its Congress
in Avadi had proclaimed the construction of a Socialistic type of society as its
aim (see p. 238), despite the fact that it also comprised a strong anti-Socialist
wing consisting of representatives of capitalistic landowners, merchants and
industrialists, split in 1970 into the Ruling Congress Party, supported by
the Praja Socialist Party, and the anti-Socialist Opposition Congress Party.
In the last election before the split, in 1967, the Party obtained more than
59,000,000 votes (40 per cent of the votes cast). It has to be assumed that
the Ruling Congress Party, which is listed among the parties with Socialist
tendencies, represented approximately half of those who voted for the party
in 1967.1
The Lanka Sama Samaj Party in Ceylon is a Trotskyist party, the only
existing mass party of that tendency. The Socialist Party of Indonesia, a
founding member organization of the Socialist Asian Conference was dis-
solved by President Sukarno in 1960 (see p. 306). The Socialist Community
Party of Cambodia was founded by Prince Norodom Sihanouk who became
its President and ruled the country in its name.

Votes in last
election before
Countries Parties Dec. 1969 Per cent

Burma Anti-Fascist Freedom League — —

Cambodia Socialist Community Party — —

Ceylon Sri Lanka Freedom Party 1,216,526 30-0
Lanka Sama Samaj Party 317,006 7-8
Sri Lanka Socialist Party 130,874 3-2
India Samyukta Socialist Party 7,171,627 4-9
Peasants’ and Workers’ Party 1,028,755 0-7
Forward Bloc 627,910 0-4
National Congress Party (ruling) 28,500,000 20-0
Indonesia Socialist Party (1955 election) 753,191 2-0
Korea Mass Party 249,561 2-3
(South)
Malaysia Workers’ Party 330,898 160
Nepal National Congress Party (1959 election) 660,000 38-0
40,986,348
1. In the 1971 election, it won, however, two thirds of the seats in Parliament instead of
the 20 per cent given in the table.
 Appendix One 529
3. Parties in the Middle East
This list includes two questionable Socialist parties, the Al Baath Socialist
parties in Iraq and Syria, which by their name ‘All-Arab Socialist Renais-
sance’ and by their slogan ‘Unity, Freedom, Socialism’ proclaim themselves
as Socialist. At present they are, however, nationalistic parties of army officers
without mass support which in the two countries took power by coup d'etat,
established a military dictatorship and have struck down all opposition, in
Iraq by a terrible massacre, especially of the Communists.*1 In Israel, the left-
wing Socialist Marxist party M.A.P.A.M. (see p. 357) has been allied since
1969 with the Labour Party M.A.P.A.I. In the 1969 election it presented its
candidates jointly with the Labour Party on the same lists and became a
member of the governmental coalition. It is not affiliated to the Socialist
International. The Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon was founded by
Kemal Jumblatt, chief of a mountain clan, and joined the Lebanon coalition
government.
Votes in the
Countries Parties last election Per cent
Iraq Al Baath Socialist Party — —

Israel M.A.P.A.M. (1965 election) 79,985 6-7

Lebanon Progressive Socialist Party — —

Syria Al Baath Socialist Party — —

Turkey Labour Party 276,101 3*0

356,086
4. Parties in Africa
Most parties in this list are ruling parties which proclaim Socialism as their
programme. They range from ‘Arab Socialism’ in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia,
to ‘African Socialism’ in Guinea, Kenya, Zambia, Senegal and Tanzania, and
include ‘Islamic Socialism’ in feudal Morocco. They are nationalistic parties
consisting of embryonic left-wing as well as right-wing reformist tendencies,
some, as the Arab Socialist Union in Egypt, with Fascist tendencies. In nearly
all these countries, they are the only party admitted by law.

Countries Parties
Algeria Front de Liberation Nationale (F.L.N.)
Angola Movimento Popular de Libertagao de Angola
(M.P.L.A.)
Chad Parti Progressiste Tchadien (P.P.T.)
1. ‘The oppression of thousands of Communists and democrats in Iraq,’ stated a protest
in the official Communist publication World Marxist View, vol. xiu, of August 1970,
\ . . continues unabated. . . . In the last two years since the present regime came to power
many Communists, democrats and left-wing nationalists have been killed, including Sattar
Khadair, member of the central committee of the Iraqi Communist party.*
530 Appendix One
Countries Parties
Cameroun Union Nationale
Congo-Brazzaville Parti des Ouvriers Congolais
Egypt Arab Socialist Union
Gambia People’s Progressive Party (P.P.P.)
Gabon Parti Democratique
Ghana Progress Party
National Alliance of Liberals
Guinea Parti Democratique
Kenya African National Union (KANU)
Mali Comite National de Defense de la Revolution
(C.N.D.R.)
Morocco Union Nationale des Forces Populates (U.N.F.P.)
Mauritius Parti du Peuple Mauricien (P.P.M.)
Mozambique Frente de Liberta?ao de Mocambique (FRELIMO)
Niger Parti Progressiste Nigerien
Senegal Union Progressiste Senegalaise (U.P.S.)
Sierra Leone All People’s Congress Party
South Africa Coloured Labour Party
Tanzania African National Union (TANU)
Tunisia Parti Socialiste Destourien
Uganda People’s Congress
Zambia United National Independence Party
Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)
African National Union (ZANU)

5. Parties in Central and South America

Some of the parties mentioned in this list, such as the Social Democratic
party of Argentina and the Socialist parties of Chile and Uruguay, are parties
with Socialist traditions but not affiliated to the Socialist International. The
other parties are democratic revolutionary parties with Socialist tendencies.

Votes in the
last elections Per
Countries Parties before Dec. 1969 cent
Argentina Partido Socialista Democratico
Movimiento Nacionalista 88,171 8-0
Revolucionario (M.N.R.)
Bolivia Movimiento Revolucionario 61,309 5-5
Pazestenssorista
Chile Partido Socialista 240,069 12-8
 Appendix Two 531
Votes in the
last elections Per
Countries Parties before Dec. 1969 cent
Dominican Partido Revolucionario Dominicano 494,570 36-8
Republic (P.R.D.)
Ecuador Partido Socialista (P.S.E.) — —
Movimiento Democratico — —

Revolucionario
El Salvador Movimiento Nacionalista 17,462 4-0
Revolucionario
Guatemala Partido Revolucionario 192,523 37-0
Guyana People’s Progressive Party 113,027 36-9
Mexico Partido Revolucionario Independente — —
Puerto Rico Partido Popular — —

Uruguay Partido Socialista 11,559 0-9

Battlista 515
1,218,690

APPENDIX TWO

A IM S A N D TA SK S O F D E M O C R A T IC S O C IA L IS M
Declaration o f the Socialist International adopted at its First Congress held in
Frankfurt-am-Main on 30 June—3 July 1951
PREAMBLE
1. From the nineteenth century onwards, capitalism has developed im-
mense productive forces. It has done so at the cost of excluding the great
majority of citizens from influence over production. It put the rights of owner-
ship before the rights of man. It created a new class of wage-earners without
property or social rights. It sharpened the struggle between the classes.
Although the world contains resources which could be made to provide a
decent life for everyone, capitalism has been incapable of satisfying the
elementary needs of the world’s population. It proved unable to function
without devastating crises and mass unemployment. It produced social
insecurity and glaring contrasts between rich and poor. It resorted to imperial-
ist expansion and colonial exploitation, thus making conflicts between nations
and races more bitter. In some countries powerful capitalist groups helped the
barbarism of the past to raise its head again in the form of Fascism and
Nazism.
2. Socialism was born in Europe as a movement of protest against the
diseases inherent in capitalist society. Because the wage-earners suffered most
532 Appendix Two
from capitalism, Socialism first developed as a movement of the wage-earners.
Since then more and more citizens—professional and clerical workers,
farmers and fishermen, craftsmen and retailers, artists and scientists are
coming to understand that Socialism holds the key to their future. Socialism
appeals to all men who believe that the exploitation of man by man must be
abolished.
3. Socialism aims to liberate the peoples from dependence on a minority
which owns or controls the means of production. It aims to put economic
power in the hands of the people as a whole, and to create a community in
which free men work together as equals.
4. Socialism has become a major force in world affairs. It has passed from
propaganda into practice. In some countries the foundations of a Socialist
society have already been laid. Here the evils of capitalism are disappearing
and the community has developed new vigour. The principles of Socialism are
proving their worth in action.
5. In many countries uncontrolled capitalism is giving place to an econ-
omy in which state intervention and collective ownership limit the scope of
private capitalists. More people are coming to recognize the need for plan-
ning. Social security, free trade unionism and industrial democracy are
winning ground. This development is largely a result of long years of struggle
by Socialists and trade unionists. Wherever Socialism is strong, important
steps have been taken towards the creation of a new social order.
6. In recent years the peoples in the underdeveloped areas of the world
have been finding Socialism a valuable aid in the struggle for national freedom
and higher standards of life. Here different forms of democratic Socialism are
evolving under the pressure of different circumstances. The main enemies of
Socialism in these areas are parasitical exploitation by indigenous financial
oligarchies and colonial exploitation by foreign capitalists. The Socialists fight
for political economic democracy, they seek to raise the standard of living for
the masses through land reform and industrialization, the extension of public
ownership and the development of producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives.
7. Meanwhile, as Socialism advances throughout the world, new forces
have arisen to threaten the movement towards freedom and social justice.
Since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Communism has split the inter-
national labour movement and has set back the realization of Socialism in
many countries for decades.
8. Communism falsely claims a share in the Socialist tradition. In fact it
has distorted that tradition beyond recognition. It has built up a rigid theology
which is incompatible with the critical spirit of Marxism.
9. Where Socialists aim to achieve freedom and justice by removing the
exploitation which divides men under capitalism, Communists seek to sharpen
those class divisions only in order to establish the dictatorship of a single
party.
 Appendix Two 533
10. International Communism is the instrument of a new imperialism.
Wherever it has achieved power it has destroyed freedom or the chance of
gaining freedom. It is based on a militarist bureaucracy and a terrorist police.
By producing glaring contrasts of wealth and privilege it has created a new
class society. Forced labour plays an important part in its economic organiz-
ation.
11. Socialism is an international movement which does not demand a
rigid uniformity of approach. Whether Socialists build their faith on Marxist
or other methods of analysing society, whether they are inspired by religious
or humanitarian principles, they all strive for the same goal—a system of
social justice, better living, freedom and world peace.
12. The progress of science and technical skill has given man increased
power either to improve his lot or to destroy himself. For this reason produc-
tion cannot be left to the play of economic liberalism but must be planned
systematically for human needs. Such planning must respect the rights of the
individual personality. Socialism stands for freedom and planning in both
national and international affairs.
13. The achievement of Socialism is not inevitable. It demands a personal
contribution from all its followers. Unlike the totalitarian way it does not
impose on the people a passive role. On the contrary, it cannot succeed with-
out thorough-going and active participation by the people. It is democracy in
its highest form.I.

I. POLITICAL DEMOCRACY
1. Socialists strive to build a new society in freedom and by democratic
means.
2. Without freedom there can be no Socialism. Socialism can be achieved
only through democracy. Democracy can be fully realized only through
Socialism.
3. Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
It must secure:
a. The right of every human being to a private life, protected from arbit-
rary invasion by the state.
b. Political liberties, like freedom of thought, expression, education,
organization and religion.
c. The representation of the people through free elections, under
universal, equal and secret franchise.
d. Government by the majority and respect for the rights of the minority.
e. The equality before the law of all citizens, whatever their birth, sex,
language, creed and colour.
f. Right to cultural autonomy for groups with their own language.
g. An independent judiciary system: every man must have the right to a
public trial before an impartial tribunal by due process of law.
534 Appendix Two
4. Socialists have always fought for the rights of man. The Universal
Declaration of the Rights of Man which has been adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations must be made effective in every country.
5. Democracy requires the right of more than one party to exist and the
right of opposition. But democracy has the right and duty to protect itself
against those who exploit its opportunities only in order to destroy it. The
defence of political democracy is a vital interest of the people. Its preservation
is a condition of realizing economic and social democracy.
6. Policies based on the protection of capitalist interests cannot develop
the strength and unity needed to defend democracy from totalitarian attack.
Democracy can only be defended with the active help of the workers, whose
fate depends on its survival.
7. Socialists express their solidarity with all peoples suffering under
dictatorship, whether Fascist or Communist, in their efforts to win
freedom.
8. Every dictatorship, wherever it may be, is a danger to the freedom of all
nations and thereby to the peace of the world. Wherever there is unrestrained
exploitation of forced labour, whether under private profit or under political
dictatorship, there is a danger to the living and moral standards of all the
peoples.I.

II. ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

1. Socialism seeks to replace capitalism by a system in which the public
interest takes precedence over the interest of private profit. The immediate
economic aims of Socialist policy are full employment, higher production, a
rising standard of life, social security and a fair distribution of incomes and
property.
2. In order to achieve these ends production must be planned in the
interest of the people as a whole.
Such planning is incompatible with the concentration of economic power
in the hands of a few. It requires effective democratic control of the economy.
Democratic Socialism therefore stands in sharp contradiction both to
capitalist planning and to every form of totalitarian planning; these exclude
public control of production and a fair distribution of its results.
3. Socialist planning can be achieved by various means. The structure of
the country concerned must decide the extent of public ownership and the
forms of planning to apply.
4. Public ownership can take the form of the nationalization of existing
private concerns or the creation of new public concerns, municipal or regional
enterprise, consumers’ or producers’ co-operatives.
These various forms of public ownership should be regarded not as ends in
themselves but as means of controlling basic industries and services on which
the economic life and welfare of the community depend, of rationalizing
 Appendix Two 535
inefficient industries or of preventing private monopolies and cartels from
exploiting the public.
5. Socialist planning does not presuppose public ownership of all the
means of production. It is compatible with the existence of private ownership
in important fields, for instance in agriculture, handicraft, retail trade and
small and middle-sized industries. The state must prevent private owners from
abusing their powers. It can and should assist them to contribute towards
increased production and well-being within the framework of a planned
economy.
6. Trade unions and organizations of producers and consumers are neces-
sary elements in a democratic society; they should never be allowed to
degenerate into the tools of a central bureaucracy or into a rigid corporative
system. Such economic organizations should participate in shaping general
economic policy without usurping the constitutional prerogatives of parlia-
ment.
7. Specialist planning does not mean that all economic decisions are
placed in the hands of the Government or central authorities. Economic
power should be decentralized wherever this is compatible with the aims of
planning.
8. All citizens should prevent the development of bureaucracy in public
and private industry by taking part in the process of production through their
organizations or by individual initiative. The workers must be associated
democratically with the direction of their industry.
9. Democratic Socialism aims at extending individual freedom on the
basis of economic and social security and an increasing prosperity.

III. SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND CULTURAL PROGRESS

1. While the guiding principle of capitalism is private profit the guiding
principle of Socialism is the satisfaction of human needs.
2. Basic human needs must make the first claim on the distribution of the
fruits of production: this need not deprive the individual of the incentive
to work according to his capacity. Socialists accept as self-evident the
individual’s right to be rewarded according to his efforts. But they believe
that there are other incentives, like pride in work well done, solidarity and
team spirit which can be strengthened when men work for the common
interest.
3. Socialism stands not only for basic political rights but also for eco-
nomic and social rights. Among these rights are:
the right to work;
the right to medical and maternity benefits;
the right to leisure;
the right to economic security for citizens unable to work because o f old age,
incapacity or unemployment;
536 Appendix Two
the right o f children to welfare and o f the youth to education in accordance with
their abilities;
the right to adequate housing.
4. Socialists strive to abolish all legal, economic and political discrimina-
tions between the sexes, between social groups, between town and country-
side, between regional and between racial groups.
5. Socialism means far more than a new economic and social system.
Economic and social progress have moral value to the extent that they serve to
liberate and develop the human personality.
6. Socialists oppose capitalism not only because it is economically waste-
ful and because it keeps the masses from their material rights, but above all
because it revolts their sense of justice. They oppose totalitarianism in every
form because it outrages human dignity.
7. Socialism fights to liberate men from the fears and anxieties from which
all forms of political and economic insecurity are inseparable. This liberation
will open the way to the spiritual development of men conscious of their
responsibilities and to the cultural evolution of complete personalities.
Socialism is a powerful factor in promoting this cultural development.
8. Socialism seeks to give men all the means to raise their cultural
standards and foster the creative aspirations of the human spirit. The
treasures of art and science must be made available to all men.IV .

IV. INTERNATIONAL DEMOCRACY

1. The Socialist movement has been an international movement from the
beginning.
2. Democratic Socialism is international because it aims at liberating all
men from every form of economic, spiritual and political bondage.
3. Democratic Socialism is international because it recognizes that no
nation can solve all its economic and social problems in isolation.
4. Absolute national sovereignty must be transcended.
5. The new world society for which Socialists strive can develop fruitfully
in peace only if it is based on voluntary co-operation between nations.
Democracy must, therefore, be established on an international scale under an
international rule of law which guarantees national freedom and the rights
of man.
6. Democratic Socialism regards the establishment of the United Nations
as an important step towards an international community; it demands the
strict implementation of the principles of its Charter.
7. Democratic Socialism rejects every form of imperialism. It fights the
oppression or exploitation of any people.
8. A negative anti-imperialism is not enough. Vast areas of the world
suffer from extreme poverty, illiteracy and disease. Poverty in one part of the
world is a threat to prosperity in other parts. Poverty is an obstacle to the
 Appendix Three 537
development of democracy. Democracy, prosperity and peace require a redis-
tribution of the world’s wealth and an increase in the productivity of the
underdeveloped areas. All people have an interest in raising the material and
cultural standards in those areas. Democratic Socialism must inspire the
economic, social and cultural development of those areas unless they are to
fall victim to new forms of oppression.
9. Democratic Socialists recognize the maintenance of world peace as the
supreme task in our time. Peace can be secured only by a system of collective
security. This will create the conditions for international disarmament.
10. The struggle for the preservation of peace is inseparably bound up
with the struggle for freedom. It is the threat to the independence of free
peoples which is directly responsible for the danger of war in our time.1

Socialists work for a world of peace and freedom, for a world in which the
exploitation and enslavement of men by men and peoples by peoples is
unknown, for a world in which the development of the individual personality
is the basis for the fruitful development of mankind. They appeal to the
solidarity of all working men in the struggle for this great aim.

APPENDIX THREE

S T A T E M E N T O N S O C IA L IS M A N D R E L IG IO N
Resolution o f a Special Conference o f the Socialist International
Bentveld, 9-11 March 1953

1. Socialism is a moral protest against the debasement of man in modern

society. It proclaims human dignity and the right of every man and woman
to equality of opportunity, to spiritual, intellectual, political and economic
freedom, and to the exercise of responsibility in decisions affecting work
and life.
2. Socialism seeks to create a new social order, based on these principles, by
transforming property and social relations. Socialist policy, therefore, is
the practical working-out of an ethic which may be derived either from
religious or from non-religious sources.
3. The ethical principles on which Socialist ideals and policies are based are
associated with the finest traditions of creative culture. Socialism, which
uplifts those who have been deprived of their human rights, is becoming a
world-wide force for the enriching of life.
4. Socialism recognizes the part played both by religion and by humanism
in the shaping of the civilizations and ethical systems of the world. It
538 Appendix Four
especially recognizes that in Europe the Christian Gospel is one of the
spiritual and ethical sources of Socialist thought. It welcomes the growing
awareness among Christians of the social implications of that Gospel.
5. Socialism is in itself neither religious nor anti-religious; it is a political
movement for the transformation of society. There should be no denomin-
ational political parties.

APPENDIX FOUR

S O C IA L IS T P O L IC Y F O R T H E U N D E R D E V E L O P E D
T E R R IT O R IE S
A Declaration o f Principles adopted by the Second Congress o f the
Socialist International
Milan, 17-22 October 1952
PREAMBLE
1. The Socialist International aims at the liberation of all men from econo-
mic, spiritual and political bondage and the creation of a world society
based on the rule of law and voluntary co-operation between free peoples.
2. To this end it seeks to establish in every country equal citizenship and
democratic institutions through which to maintain and expand the
political freedom and economic well-being of all the people. It rejects
every form of racial discrimination.
3. It seeks to create between countries relationships which express the
fundamental unity of all mankind and which recognize the just aspira-
tions of all peoples to a full and free life. It recognizes the value of
different cultures and seeks to promote human dignity in all lands.
4. The Socialist International therefore rejects without reservation capitalist
imperialism which binds peoples in the chains of political domination and
economic exploitation and which creates the disastrous myth of racial
superiority.
5. It rejects too the international tyranny which Communist imperialism
seeks to impose upon the peoples of the world. The oppression and
exploitation of any people, whatever ideological justification may be
sought for it, is diametrically opposed to the principles of democratic
Socialism.
6. The Socialist International recognizes the upsurge of national conscious-
ness as a stage in the emancipation of nations. Communist propaganda
attempts to divide the free world by exploiting nationalist fervour for its
own ends. Socialists condemn chauvinistic nationalism which denies
international solidarity. They are convinced that genuine national aspira-
tions can only be realized through democratic Socialism.
 Appendix Four 539
7. The Socialist International strives for equality as a guiding principle in
the relations between individuals and between communities. Vast areas of
the world still suffer from extreme poverty, illiteracy and disease. The
people eke out a meagre existence at the margin of subsistence and lack
the material basis for a full and free life. Socialists work to end misery
which saps the energy of men, destroys their hopes, breaks their spirits,
and makes impossible the attainment of full human dignity.
8. Such inhuman conditions are grave obstacles to the development of
democracy and to the evolution of a free world society in which all
peoples have equal opportunity and equal respect. They are a moral and
economic danger to advanced countries. They are a threat to peace. They
are a challenge to Socialists.
9. Where peoples are unable immediately to sustain modern systems of
democratic government and are politically dependent on another country,
democratic Socialists support the creation as rapidly as possible of the
conditions in which full self-government can be achieved. The interests of
the people of the dependent territory are for Socialists the paramount
interests: they seek to eradicate economic backwardness, not to exploit
it; to remove all forms of subjection and not to profit by dependent status.
10. Socialists endeavour to create between sovereign states and dependent
territories a vital partnership, the objects of which are to make possible
the peaceful and rapid transition to genuine democratic self-government
and to expand the area of international co-operation between free
peoples.
11. Democracy, prosperity and peace require the fullest utilization of natural
resources, an increase in the productivity of the underdeveloped areas
and the redistribution of the world’s income in order to close the gap
between living standards in the different parts of the world. All peoples
have a vital interest in raising material and cultural levels in the under-
developed areas. Democratic Socialism must inspire the economic, social
and cultural development of these territories.
12. The Socialist International works therefore for the acceptance by the free
peoples of the world of a World Plan for Mutual Aid which would make
an all-out attack on poverty everywhere and which would express in
action the international solidarity of working people the world over.

I. SOCIALIST TASKS IN THE UNDERDEVELOPED REGIONS

1. The peoples of the underdeveloped regions are becoming increasingly

conscious of their poverty, yet too many of the inhabitants of most of
these territories still have an attitude of resignation towards it and, in
ignorance, sometimes resist the new ideas and techniques which would
raise their living standards. Socialists seek to create the psychological
atmosphere in which economic development can go forward and to win
540 Appendix Four
the confidence of the masses for the new attitudes, relationships and
techniques which are necessary to this end.
2. Progress occurs only where people are inspired by the confidence that
man can by conscious effort enlarge his possibilities. Without such an
attitude the necessary changes in material techniques and social institu-
tions will not be freely accepted. Socialists therefore demand the spread
of education which encourages such an attitude.
3. For economic development to go forward people must not only desire
progress; their social, economic, legal and political institutions must be
favourable to it. Fundamental adjustments will be necessary. Old ideas
have to be scrapped to make way for universally accepted new. Customs
and traditions which hamper production have to be replaced. Economic
relationships which rob the individual of the fruits of his labour have to
be broken. Bonds of caste have to be burst. Legal and political systems
which concentrate power in the hands of a small class intent on maintain-
ing its own wealth and privileges have to be reformed. Under reactionary,
selfish or corrupt leaders, the masses will remain apathetic and dispirited
or their misery may become fertile ground for any ideology which will
hold out to them promise, however false, of means towards a better life.
Given vigorous and honest leadership, the masses can be inspired with an
enthusiasm for human progress. Socialists in the underdeveloped terri-
tories aim at providing that creative leadership.
4. Full economic development which will raise the living standards of the
depressed masses cannot be achieved by the development of any form of
capitalism, indigenous or other, but only by Socialist planning. Policies
based on the principles of Socialism are of the essence of the task.
5. Socialists in the underdeveloped territories strive to establish governments
which will grant to the toilers on the soil land reforms which will abolish
agrarian feudalism and which will assure a sufficient share of the increased
yield of his labour to induce him to invest in new ventures, to adopt
improved techniques, to put forth intensive effort to increase production,
and so to raise his standard of living.
6. They seek action which will provide the cultivator with facilities for
borrowing the funds necessary to enable him to start operations with
adequate equipment and without a heavy debt burden, to organize the
agricultural unit which will maximize output and to establish co-operative
organizations wherever suitable.
7. They work for development programmes which will bring to domestic
industry in peasant economies better appliances and improved techniques
both of production and of organization, and which will build up, where
appropriate, secondary industries under planned direction. They support
action which will assist the necessary flow of capital to their countries,
provided there is full protection against imperialism in any form.
 Appendix Four 541
8. Socialists seek to create efficient and reliable administrations, capable of
undertaking effective economic planning and to strengthen Socialist
parties, free trade unions and peasant organizations, essential in a society
inspired by the principles of democratic Socialism.
9. They aim at a balanced economy adjusted to the needs of their own
peoples and to the demands of an expanding world economy, which will
gradually produce prosperity for the working people everywhere.

n. THE TASK OF SOCIALISTS IN THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

1. Socialists in the developed countries recognize that the eradication of
extreme poverty throughout the world is as much the moral responsibility
of the peoples of the technically advanced countries as it is of those who
live in underdeveloped areas.
2. They recognize that it is vital to the cause of freedom and humanity
throughout the world that the vast economic and social changes which
are necessary to create decent living standards for the depressed millions
should be undertaken in co-operation with the more advanced nations of
the free world. Financial assistance from these countries is needed
because the rate of capital accumulation in the underdeveloped territories
is quite insufficient to support rapid economic development and social
progress.
3. The underdeveloped territories require investment to raise the level of
health and education and to improve the administrative techniques of
their governments. They need schools, technical colleges and vocational
training centres. They need hospitals, dispensaries and improved housing.
Investment is necessary, too, in scientific research and to provide the
statistical and other services without which planned development cannot
take place. Investment of this kind will earn no direct return and will
have to be met either from the general revenues of the countries concerned
or from external assistance in the form of grants.
4. They require investment in basic equipment—for transport and com-
munications, to develop electric power, for irrigation schemes, for soil
conservation and a multitude of similar public works. Quite often the
return on such investment would be sufficient not only to cover running
costs but to amortize the initial outlay. It is the easiest type of invest-
ment to finance by means of loans, but long amortization periods
and low interest rates are necessary. In special circumstances there
will not be enough return to amortize the loans, and grants may be
necessary.
5. They require investment in the productive sector: in agriculture and
fisheries, in mineral resources and in new prime and manufacturing
industries. In these fields investment both from public and private
sources will be needed.
542 Appendix Four
6. Such development cannot be achieved without a great increase in com-
petent administrators, devoted to the public interest, of managerial staffs
and of technicians at all levels.
7. Socialists in the advanced countries seek to promote governmental action
to help meet these pressing needs of the underdeveloped territories by
extending to them technical aid and financial assistance. They press for
international co-operation in any field where international action is
desirable.
8. Socialists reject plans which serve only the narrow short-term interests of
industrial nations and which conflict with the fundamental principle of
equality in relations between different peoples. They reject attitudes of
superiority towards less fortunate peoples and seek to build up a wholly
new relationship based on mutual respect and co-operation to meet
common economic needs. That is why they promote the transformation
of existing colonial economic systems.
9. Aid should be given immediately to meet recurring problems like famines.
Long-term aid for investment should be supported to secure for the under-
developed countries a steady increase in the average standard of living, a
fairer distribution of national income, greater security for the poorest
inhabitants, the greatest possible stabilization of the economy, an increase
in productivity and progress in political emancipation.
10. It is the primary task of Socialists in the more advanced nations to create
a public opinion favourable to active participation in a programme of
assistance to underdeveloped countries and a willingness on the part of
the more fortunate peoples to play their vital role in this world effort,
even if it should entail temporary sacrifices.I.

III. THE WORLD PLAN FOR MUTUAL AID

1. The Socialist International appeals to democratic Socialists the world
over to unite in whole-hearted support for a World Plan for Mutual Aid.
2. The world development plan should provide for programmes at three
levels—a general world programme, regional programmes and bi-lateral
programmes.
3. Bi-lateral programmes would cover assistance from metropolitan coun-
tries to their associated overseas territories. Where political relations are
good and partnership in economic and political advancement is accepted,
both giving and receiving countries will doubtless continue with this sort
of programme.
4. Regional programmes would be used to provide funds for investment
both in social development and production where a number of supplying
countries co-operate in assisting an area consisting of several receiving
countries. The main participants would be the countries being developed
and the supplying countries with political associations with them.
 Appendix Five 543
5. The general world programme would be a co-operative effort for supply-
ing relief and assistance out of a general pool, and for creating a general
development fund. First aid supplies of food, medicine and other equip-
ment should be organized in this general programme, since it is only by
estimating supplies and requirements for many countries that supplies
can be shared more fairly and the most urgent needs met first. Social
development, such as health and educational services, and assistance in
technical matters should be organized in the general programme as far as
possible, in order to economize the efforts of the available experts, and
to make the most use of the results of research of all kinds. All countries
should be invited to join in this programme of relief, assistance and
development. The contributions from the developed countries should be
assessed on an agreed basis which takes into account their resources and
their contributions to other programmes.
6. To make the plans as efficient as possible, to avoid overlapping and to fix
the right priorities in respect to the urgency of each item, the three types
of programme will have to be co-ordinated within the framework of the
World Plan for Mutual Aid.
7. To devise and to carry out these programmes, executive agencies will be
required. Existing Agencies like the International Bank for Reconstruc-
tion and Development, the Technical Assistance Administration, the
International Labour Organization and other Specialized Agencies of the
United Nations, will render useful services and new agencies may have to
be created.
8. By an all-out effort at all three levels freedom from want can be achieved
for peoples now living in grim poverty in the underdeveloped regions of
the world. A new era of international co-operation and good will can be
initiated. Democracy will be strengthened and expanded throughout the
world and mankind will be brought a stage nearer the co-operative
commonwealth of free and equal peoples which is the goal of Socialist
endeavour.

APPENDIX FIVE

P R IN C IP L E S A N D O B JE C T IV E S O F S O C IA L IS M IN A S IA
Declaration o f the Founding Congress o f the Asian Socialist Conference
Rangoon, 6-15 January 1953

1. Modem Socialism and the Socialist movement arose in Western

Europe as a reaction to the evils of capitalism. The capitalist order broke
down feudalism, dissolved its hierarchy and abolished serfdom. It ushered in
the machine age and quickened the pace of life and progress. It also brought
 544 Appendix Five
in its wake insecurity of livelihood, unemployment and periodic economic
crises. The wage labourer became an immediate victim of capitalism. He
conceived capitalist society as a class society in which the capitalists subjugate
and exploit the workers as a class. A labour movement came into being which
developed into a movement against capitalism and eventually into a move-
ment for the establishment of a new social order, the Socialist society.
2. The growth of capitalism was accompanied by the expansion of its
orbit of power and of its impact upon human society. Each national capitalist
class was no longer content with profits within its own country or from its own
people. There developed an urge towards ever-widening spheres of activity
and power. The process led to the spread of colonial imperialism, i.e. the sub-
jugation of backward and underdeveloped countries and their economic
dependency through the imposition of foreign control upon important
sources of their existence.
At the same time, capitalism brought about a speedy progress of the tech-
nology of production. It resulted in the creation of great material wealth and
stimulated the progress of science and the expansion of the abilities and skills
of man. The wealth created, however, was distributed with gross inequality
among the men and countries which participated in its creation. In each
country the capitalists appropriated the larger part, leaving the smaller to
other groups, including the working class. Moreover, although directly or
indirectly colonies made a major contribution to this development, they
received a much smaller share of the world’s produce for distribution
among their own people than was acquired by countries on a high level of
capitalistic development in industry and commerce.
This process led to the existence side by side of super-developed and under-
developed countries in the world. It created a situation which was felt by the
colonies to be one of exploitation of one people by another. Antagonism and
tensions between these categories of peoples ensued.
3. The growth of the labour and Socialist movements proceeded con-
currently with the development of capitalism. Within the highly industrialized
capitalist countries, the organized workers and the Socialist parties gained an
increasing influence in the affairs of the State. This influence was used to
expand and defend the democratic, political and social rights of the workers
and of the common people in general. The legal and economic position of the
workers consequently improved. The progressive intervention of the State in
economic life was used to secure a more equitable distribution of the national
income. Political democracy hence became more meaningful and precious for
the broad masses of the people and for the workers in particular. For these
reasons, class antagonism in some countries decreased in sharpness. In other
countries, under the impact of war and economic depression, capitalist
democracy degenerated into Fascism which led to the violent suppression of
the working class.
 Appendix Five 545
While such were the trends in the capitalist states of the West, evolution
in the colonies and the underdeveloped countries proceeded along entirely
different lines. Here capitalism stood out as a system of naked exploitation of
man by man, i.e. the native worker by the foreign and indigenous capitalist.
The revulsion of feeling against foreign rule was further exacerbated by the
consciousness of the entire colony being exploited by the metropolis. Class
antagonism was aggravated by racial animosity.
4. The reaction against capitalism and capitalist society assumed different
forms. The Socialist movement split in two—Communism and democratic
Socialism. At the same time, national freedom movements took up the
struggle against imperialism and the colonial regime.
The essence of democratic Socialism is the striving to attain greater hap-
piness, justice and dignity, and the fullest possible chance of self-expression
for the human being. In seeking to abolish exploitation of class by class and
of man by man, Socialism recognizes man both as an integral part of a class
or group and as a human individual. It therefore avoids totalitarian forms of
government and methods of mass coercion.
Communism, on the other hand, as practised today in its totalitarian
form in the Soviet Union and its satellites, has degenerated into a regime of
the complete subordination of the individual and the group to the centralized
power of the leadership of the ruling party. Under the Soviet system state
power imposes absolute domination and exacts blind obedience; man is
expected to give up his freedom and individuality, obliterating himself as an
abstract part of an all-powerful state in which only one will prevails. Com-
munism, therefore, stands for the negation of all concepts of freedom, indivi-
dual self-expression and genuine mass responsibility which are the very
breath of democratic Socialism.
Nationalism in the colonial and the so-called backward countries shares
with Socialism a sense of passionate dedication to freedom and justice. While
after the advent of independence the paths of these two movements may
diverge, as long as the struggle for independence continues, Socialists and
Nationalists are comrades in arms; they also often uphold the same apprecia-
tion of the democratic rights of man.
In view of these convictions, we, the Socialist parties in Asia, declare our
rejection of Communism and express our determination to continue our
struggle to supersede capitalism and feudalism by democratic Socialism.
5. To this end, we, the Socialist parties of Asia, in this first Asian Socialist
Conference assembled, have agreed upon and do hereby proclaim the follow-
ing aims and principles:
(a) Socialism strives for the creation of a social order free from the exploita-
tion of man by his fellow man. It envisages a society of free and equal
people co-operating together for common happiness and common
progress.
546 Appendix Five
(b) The economic aim of Socialism is to provide security for everyone’s
livelihood, to eliminate unemployment, to increase wealth, to expand
production, and to bring about an equitable distribution of national
income and national wealth.
(c) To achieve this objective, production must be directed towards the
satisfaction of the needs of society as a whole and not to the profit and
advantage of a few. This is only possible if production is properly
planned.
(d) The purpose of Socialist planning is to raise productivity, to abolish
methods of production which are unsuitable because of their obsolete,
irrational and inefficient character, to improve the technique of produc-
tion in all fields, and to secure a rational utilization of natural resources.
(e) Socialist planning and the attainment of the high aims of Socialism
require that the whole people should actively and responsibly participate
in the process of production, as far as possible according to each pro-
ducer’s own volition and initiative, so as to prevent an excessive growth
of bureaucracy, either official or non-official. The participation of labour,
skilled and unskilled, as well as of the consuming public, in guiding
production without diminishing its efficiency is an essential condition of
ensuring a democratic control of economic and social life.
(f) The exact forms of planning to be applied and the extent of public owner-
ship should depend on the economic and social structure of the country
concerned, but the central aim should be to foster a continued expansion
of the nationalized and co-operative sectors of the country’s economy.
(g) Socialism in Asia and in other underdeveloped countries must concen-
trate its special attention on the lot and future of the peasant, whose
urge towards improvement and progress is just as powerful as that of the
worker, if not more so. The fact that most Asian countries are predomin-
antly agricultural and that the peasant class forms an overwhelming
proportion of their population must affect the entire character and trend
of Asian Socialism.
(h) It is the fundamental principle of Socialism that land should be distri-
buted among those who till it. Socialism considers the peasant entitled to
public and State support. The improvement of the methods and tools of
production and the general raising of the levels of village life call for
active attention and have a special bearing on the development of the
technology of the small enterprise.
(i) Socialism can only flourish in freedom; in a democratic society it can
only be realized in a democratic way, including peaceful methods of mass
struggle. On the other hand, full and creative democracy is only possible
in a Socialist society. Socialism, therefore, upholds the democratic rights
of the people, namely freedom of speech, of organization, of assembly,
of faith and conscience, of election of representative bodies. These rights
 Appendix Five 547
must be granted to all. They imply the right of opposition parties to exist
and operate. But the Socialist state, as well as Socialist parties, have also
the right, in fact are duty-bound, to defend democracy. Socialism upholds
full equality of rights of all men and women regardless of race or creed.
It is pledged to remove any inferiority of caste. It has to be the vehicle of
ensuring to women full equality of rights and dignity of position.
(j) Socialism does not rest content with a guarantee of political rights. It
seeks to safeguard basic economic and social rights which include: the
right to work; the right to leisure, including leave with full pay; the right
to free medical care in case of illness or pregnancy; the right to economic
security, including state support for the aged, sick and unemployed; the
right to family allowances; the right of children and the young to good
care, education and training according to their abilities; the right to
decent housing.
(k) Whilst striving to build a new society based on high economic produc-
tivity and social justice, Socialism is dedicated to the creation of a new
and richer culture and the shaping of a new and better form of life. Social
and economic progress have a significance only to the extent that they
make for greater human happiness. Hence it is the ambition of Socialism
to provide a higher satisfaction of man’s spiritual needs. Socialism
opposes feudalism and capitalism, whether conservative or liberal,
because they are contrary to human justice; it opposes totalitarianism,
whether Fascist or Communist, because it is degrading. Socialism strives
to secure the sharing of each individual in the cultural heritage and
spiritual progress of mankind.
(l) Socialism believes in international collaboration and in the reign of
peace. It considers the attainment of both to be based on the equality of
rights between individuals and states alike, and on the right of each
people to national self-determination.
(m) The world Socialist movement has a common goal. Yet in different
countries Socialism develops in different forms and in different ways,
because of different national and historic conditions. In view of this
diversity, as well as in the light of the common ultimate objective,
equality of status and mutual collaboration between the Socialist move-
ments of various countries are indispensable.
(n) Socialism envisages the world safe, prosperous, free and peaceful—a
world where man enjoys all material and spiritual benefits as provided by
a full life and by highly developed science and technique, free from fear
of unemployment and starvation, of illness and old age, of insecurity and
persecution. It believes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It believes in the unity of mankind.
548 Appendix S ix

APPENDIX SIX

D E C L A R A T IO N ON C O L O N IA L IS M

Joint Declaration, adopted by the Fourth Congress o f the Socialist

International and the Asian Socialist Conference
London, 12-16 July 1955
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be respected by all
peoples in the world, recognizes the dignity of man and his inalienable
right to choose his own way of life provided that he does not infringe this
right for his fellow men.
2. The right of peoples to self-determination, again provided that it does not
infringe the same right for other peoples, and that it does not prejudice
their freedom or the peace of the world, is a basic principle of the demo-
cratic system of society. The Charter of the United Nations recognizes
this right.
3. Self-determination, hitherto regarded by imperialist nations as a privilege,
must be exercised as a right by colonial and dependent peoples and satel-
lite countries.
4. Colonial and dependent peoples aim towards the realization of this right
to self-determination and of their own dignity.
5. The colonial rulers and imperialist powers still cling to their ‘sacred
mission’, whether in its old or new interpretations, only to justify their
self-interest and for safeguarding their domination as long as possible.
6. As long as there are colonial powers and dependent peoples there will
always be a continuous and persistent struggle for freedom and against
economic enslavement.
7. The struggle against colonial rule is in essence the human protest against
poverty, misery, degradation and indignity, which any form of imperial-
ism necessarily entails for the peoples under it.
8. But national freedom is only a means to human freedom. The struggle
against colonialism should aim at the emancipation from any form of
exploitation of man by man and at social and economic equality of the
suffering masses and the establishment of a democratic Socialist society.
9. The continuation of colonialism and imperialism, besides economic dis-
equilibrium and the politics of spheres of influence, is one of the main
sources of international unrest and serves as a constant threat to the
peace of the world.
10. All genuine democrats fully share with these fighters their passionate
desire for human rights and freedom, and therefore associate themselves
with the struggle against colonial and any other form of oppression
 Appendix Seven 549
and for a world order free from slavery, hunger, political terror and
war.
11. We solemnly resolve that all nations and peoples of the world shall be
free and dedicate ourselves to that endeavour with all the strength that
we command.
12. The Asian Socialist Conference and the Socialist International appeal to
the Socialist parties all over the world to observe Dependent Peoples’
Freedom Day in the spirit of this declaration.

APPENDIX SEVEN

M A N IF E S T O O F T H E C O M I N F O R M

Adopted at the Founding Conference

Szklaraska Poreba, 21-27 September 1947
During the war the states allied against Germany and Japan marched together
and constituted one camp. Differences, however, existed in the Allied camp
both in the determination of war aims and in the tasks of the post-war peace
settlement. The Soviet Union and the democratic countries considered as the
basic war aims: the restoration and consolidation of the democratic order in
Europe; the elimination of Fascism and the prevention of the possibility of a
new aggression by Germany; and the establishment of close and durable co-
operation among the European nations. The United States, and in agreement
with her Britain, had other war aims: the getting rid of market competitors
—Germany and Japan—and the consolidation of their dominant position.
As a result of the second world war and the post-war period, substantial
changes have occurred in the international situation. These changes are
characterized by a new distribution of the basic political forces in the inter-
national arena, by changed relations between the victor states, and by their
regrouping. Two opposite political lines took shape. At one extreme the
policy of the U.S.S.R. and the democratic countries, aimed at the disruption
of imperialism and the consolidation of democracy; at the other, the policy of
the U.S.A. and Britain, aimed at strengthening imperialism and strangling
democracy.
Since the U.S.S.R. and the countries of the new democracy have become
a hindrance to the realization of the imperialist plans of world domination, a
campaign was proclaimed against those countries, reinforced by threats of
a new war on the part of the most zealous imperialist politicians in the
U.S.A. and Britain. Thus two camps came into being: the imperialist anti-
democratic camp with the basic aim of establishing the world domination of
American imperialism and the routing of democracy, and the anti-imperialist
550 Appendix Seven
democratic camp with the basic aim of disrupting imperialism, strengthening
democracy, and eliminating the remnants of Fascism. The struggle between
the two camps is taking place in an atmosphere of the intensification of the
general crisis of capitalism, the weakening of the forces of capitalism, and the
strengthening of the forces of Socialism and democracy.
The Marshall plan is only the European part of a general plan of world
expansion being carried out by the U.S.A. The plan for the economic and
political enslavement of Europe is being complemented by plans for the
enslavement of China, Indonesia, and the South American countries. Yester-
day’s aggressors, the capitalist magnates of Germany and Japan, are being
prepared by the U.S.A. for a new role—that of becoming a weapon of U.S.
imperialist policy in Europe and Asia. The tactical methods used by the
imperialistic camp are most varied: we find a combination of threats of force,
blackmail, extortion, various political and economic pressures, bribery, and
the utilization of internal strife for strengthening its position.
A special feature in the tactical methods of the imperialists is the utiliza-
tion of the treacherous policy of right-wing Socialists of the type of Rama-
dier and Blum in France, Attlee and Bevin in England, Schumacher in
Germany, Renner and Scharf in Austria, and Saragat in Italy, who strive to
conceal the true predatory essence of the imperialistic policy under the mask
of democracy and Socialist phraseology, but who in fact remain in all respects
loyal supporters of the imperialists, bringing disintegration into the ranks of
the working class and poisoning their outlook. It is no accident that the
foreign policy of British imperialism found in the person of Bevin its most
consistent and zealous executor.
Under these conditions it is essential for the anti-imperialist democratic
camp to unite, work out a co-ordinated programme of action, and evolve its
own tactics against American imperialism and its British and French allies,
and against right-wing Socialists, in the first place those of Britain and
France. To counter this front of imperialists and nationalists there is an
imperative necessity for all democratic countries to oppose to them a united
front. There is a great task awaiting the Communist parties, that of preserving
freedom and peace. The new American policy, supported by the British, is
nothing but the policy of the pre-Munich days of 1938.
There must be the closest collaboration by Communist parties in the
official policy of the nations, in their economic and social policy, and in all
other spheres of social fife. The chief danger for the working class at the
present moment is that of under-estimating its own forces and over-estimating
the forces of the imperalist front. Every concession to the U.S. line makes the
backers of that line more aggressive. That is why the Communists will form
the spearhead of the resistance against plans for imperialist expansion in the
political, economic, and ideological fields, and will rally all the democratic
and patriotic forces of the nations to which they belong. The forces for peace
 Appendix Eight 551
are so important and so great that, if only they will be strong in the defence of
peace, the plans of the aggressors will suffer a complete collapse.1

APPENDIX EIGHT

DECLARATION OF THE EX TRAORDINARY

F O U R T E E N T H CONGRESS OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK
COMMUNIST PARTY

Adopted in Prague on 22 August 1968, one day after the invasion, and
addressed to the Citizens o f the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Comrades, citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic:
Czechoslovakia is a sovereign and free Socialist state founded on the free
will and support of its people. Its sovereignty, however, was violated on
August 21,1968, when it was occupied by troops of the Soviet Union, Poland,
the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
This action is being justified on the grounds that Socialism was endangered
and that the intervention was requested by some leading Czechoslovak
officials. However, yesterday’s Central Committee proclamation, the second
radio broadcast of the President of the Republic, the proclamations of the
National Assembly and the Government of the Republic, and the statement of
the Presidium of the Central Committee of the National Front make it clear
that no competent Party or constitutional authority has requested such an
intervention.
There was no counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia, and Socialist develop-
ment was not endangered. As was demonstrated by the tremendous confidence
shown in the new leadership of the Party by Comrade Dubcek, the people and
the Party were fully capable of solving by themselves the problems that have
arisen. Indeed, action was being taken that was leading toward the realization
of the fundamental ideas of Marx and Lenin on the development of Socialist
democracy. At the same time, Czechoslovakia has not breached its treaty
commitments and obligations; it has not shown the slightest interest in living
in future enmity with the other Socialist states and their peoples. These
obligations, however, were violated by the troops of the occupying countries.
Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, the bonds of alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and
the agreements of Ciema and Bratislava were trampled underfoot. Several
leaders of the state and Party were unlawfully arrested, isolated from the
people, and deprived of the opportunity to carry out their functions. A
number of establishments of the central authorities have been occupied.
Grave injustices have thus been committed.
1. Keesing's Contemporary Archives, 4-11 October 1947.
 552 Appendix Nine
The Congress resolutely demands that normal conditions for the function-
ing of all constitutional and political authority be immediately created and
that all detained officials be released forthwith so that they can assume their
posts.
The situation that was created in our country on August 21 cannot be
permanent. Socialist Czechoslovakia will never accept either a military
occupation administration or a domestic collaborationist regime dependent
on the forces of the occupiers.
Our basic demand is, of course, the departure of foreign troops. If the
stated demands are not complied with, particularly if, within twenty-four
hours, negotiations are not begun with our free constitutional and Party
leaders for the departure of foreign troops and if Comrade DubCek does not
make a timely statement to the nation on this matter, the Congress requests
all working people to stage a one-hour protest strike on Friday, August 23 at
12 noon. The Congress has also decided that, if its demands are not accepted,
it will undertake further necessary measures.1

APPENDIX NINE

TH E W ORLD TODAY: THE SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Declaration o f the Socialist International endorsed at the Council

Conference held in Oslo on 2-4 June, 1962
The Socialist International reaffirms the principles of the Frankfurt Declara-
tion of 1951 on the ‘Aims and Tasks of Democratic Socialism’.
In the ’fifties, it became apparent that the many new scientific discoveries,
if applied for peaceful purposes, made possible for the first time in history the
elimination of hunger and poverty from the face of the earth. The same dis-
coveries, used for military purposes, could cause the end of our civilization.
There are few decades in history which have produced such vast and
varied changes. The work which Socialist governments began of responding
to the urge for independence among colonial peoples was carried forward. By
1960, most countries of Asia and Africa had won their independence and
joined the concert of free nations. Thus, for the first time in history, peoples of
all continents meet together freed from alien domination. The Socialist Inter-
national greets the thousand million people of the new states and welcomes
their participation in the common quest for justice, equality and peace for all
mankind.
Nevertheless, colonization still survives. It is significantly entrenched in
countries where no Socialist movement has been allowed to exist and where
1. From Rude Pravo, 22 August 1968, quoted in The Czech Black Book, pp. 80-1.
 Appendix Nine 553
democracy itself has been suppressed. The Socialist International finds no
moral justification for the continued existence of colonialism and condemns it
in all its forms.
In many democratic countries in the past decade, economic expansion
enabled striking progress to be made towards the welfare society, and con-
sequently the age-old insecurities of their citizens were substantially reduced.
Yet at the same time, the gap in the standard of living between rich and poor
nations has widened still further. Hundreds of millions still suffer from hunger
and poverty.
In the ’fifties, the will of the human spirit for freedom and dignity was
repeatedly asserted. In many countries of Latin America, dictatorships were
overthrown. In some parts of the Communist world, the iron grip of Stalinism
was weakened. Stalin himself was condemned. The proclamation of destalin-
ization was prompted by popular pressure to break with the detested past and
to initiate new policies. But the brutal repression of freedom in the Com-
munist world and the ceaseless efforts of Communism to extend its sphere of
influence continue.
In the decade that is over, the world faced many crises. In some parts of
the world, armed conflict broke out. However, the deep-seated hostility to war
that characterizes peoples everywhere helped to avert world war.

SOCIALISM AND INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES

The most dynamic impulse towards social change has come in countries where
democratic Socialist parties have been able to exert effective influence. History
has not confirmed the doctrine of the increasing misery of the proletariat.
The worst excesses of capitalism have been corrected through the constant
activity of the Socialist parties, the trade unions, and the co-operative
societies. New forms of ownership and control of production have emerged.
Mass unemployment has been eliminated, social security extended, working
hours have been reduced and educational and vocational opportunities
widened.
Even where democratic Socialists have been in opposition, their opponents
have often been obliged by public opinion to adopt essentially Socialist solu-
tions for the problems of full employment and social welfare. Likewise, in the
United States of America, pressures of trade unions and other progressive
social forces have made their influence felt.
Despite these improvements, serious problems continue to plague indus-
trialized societies. We believe that they cannot be solved without the applica-
tion of the principles of democratic Socialism.
Permanent control by the state and public institutions over the economy
undoubtedly diminishes the danger of the recurrence of economic crises.
Nevertheless, recessions, which interrupt steady economic expansion, still
continue.
554 Appendix Nine
The increasing concentration of economic power and the growth of mono-
poly when not controlled also create serious problems. The increasing size of
industrial undertakings has brought into being a new class of managers, who
enjoy great power without being responsible to the community for the manner
in which they exercise it. A task facing Socialism is to make this group aware
of its social responsibilities.
In many countries, the level of investment, though higher than it was, is
still far below what could be achieved in a properly planned economy. Invest-
ment is, moreover, frequently wasteful. Too often, it is directed towards
immediate capitalist profit, instead of strengthening in a planned fashion the
basis of the economy or meeting urgent social and cultural needs.
Notwithstanding the considerable improvement in the standard of living
of the mass of the people, gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth and
income remain. The greater part of the privately-owned wealth is still in the
hands of very few. Tax evasion and the immense appreciation of capital
values perpetuate this evil. Society is still divided into social classes with differ-
ences in status and living standards, based on the accident of birth and inherit-
ance, and resulting in differences in opportunities for education and training.
Exaggerated emphasis on purely materialist aims is increased by modern
business advertising and by the commercialization of cultural activity,
imposing a trend towards drab conformity.
Democratic Socialism has achieved much, but greater tasks still lie ahead.
There is no single method to remedy the evils of present-day society. To
achieve a fair distribution of wealth, we require an extension of public owner-
ship and control and other legislation to curb private monopolies, to effect a
radical reform of the tax system and to protect consumers.
State action, authorized by democratic decisions, is essential to provide for
a rapid rate of economic expansion, a sufficiently high level of investment and
the swift application of modern scientific techniques. This involves economic
and social planning as a central government responsibility.
In democracy, a framework must be created within which the workers can
effectively influence decisions and conditions in industry and the economy
generally.
The democracies must improve and extend the techniques which will
enable them to direct their economic resources so as to serve the long-term
interests of the people and to facilitate a more substantial contribution to
world economic development. They have yet to establish sufficiently close co-
operation with one another to assist the steady development of international
trade, unimpeded by high tariff1barriers and undisturbed by exchange and
currency crises. Economic planning outgrows the borders of national states.
The establishment of regional economic organizations is a recognition of this
fact.
The free development of the human personality can be ensured only by a
 Appendix Nine 555
reform of the existing social and economic structure. For those still living in
poverty, improvement of conditions must be realized by a system of fair wages
and of effective social security and family allowances and individual care and
help. A basic requirement is the provision of a general system of education
with a truly democratic character and ensuring genuine equality of oppor-
tunity for all. Education in citizenship, vital to democracy, should be
promoted both by the state, and by voluntary organizations, such as political
parties, trade unions, co-operatives and educational associations.
Democracy can hope for survival only if it can base itself on the keen
interest and active participation of citizens in its functioning. The democratic
process can be extended and deepened through territorial decentralization and
industrial democracy. Press, radio and television, free from undemocratic
controls and pressures, should provide ample opportunities for free, respon-
sible debates on political issues.
The challenge of the generation that inherited the changed society of the
’sixties is to find the ways and means of completing the task begun. To meet
this challenge, this generation must direct its ingenuity and energy to the
world as a whole.

SOCIALISM AND EMERGENT NATIONS

The emergent nations, with their hundreds of millions of people, have a heavy
burden of poverty to overcome. Their difficult task is an exciting one because
independence has released great reservoirs of vitality. There should be avail-
able to the new states the whole stock of science, technology and political
experience that has been accumulated by the developed countries.
These new states have the opportunity of escaping the evils of capitalism
and Communism alike. The capitalist methods of ruthless exploitation of the
workers, involving the uprooting of the peasants and driving them into urban
slums, are not only obnoxious, but also unnecessary. The Communist method
is equally obsolete, consisting as it does of abstracting surplus value through
terror and undertaking break-neck industrialization by the sacrifice of the
needs of the people and more particularly at the cost of agricultural develop-
ment.
The future belongs no more to Communism than to capitalism. Com-
munism and capitalism point back to an age where human beings were
treated as raw materials and not as the source and objective of all efforts. The
Socialist International greets with satisfaction the fact that so many of the new
states, striving to plan their economic future, are inspired by the ideas of
democracy and Socialism.
The new states have the opportunity to plan their economy, combining
agriculture with industry, reviving agriculture through improved peasant
farming and co-operative organization. Better distribution of industries and
decentralization of the productive process can obviate the growth of new
556 Appendix Nine
urban conglomerations. The new states, which began their industrial journey
not with steam power but with electricity, have greater freedom to plan their
development.
The emergent nations, with the co-operation of the developed countries,
can avoid many conflicts such as those between urban and rural populations.
The new nations suffer from stagnant economic conditions and an ossified
social structure. Balanced development depends on releasing and co-
ordinating the forces of individual and economic initiative, without allowing
private enterprise to reap the profits for the enrichment of a small minority.
Fair play and fair shares must now become the basis of their policy.
These possibilities can be fully realized only if the new states pay due
attention to the spread of education, for children as well as adults, to the
diffusion of skills and general knowledge among the people and to helping
families to plan their growth.
The future of emergent nations in this age of transition depends on the
efforts of Socialists and other democratic progressive forces in new nations
and on aid from the developed countries. The need is greatest in training, in
the provision of skilled technicians and in the accumulation of investment
capital. Industrialized countries should provide at least 1 per cent of their
national income for grant aid programmes. It should be the consistent policy
of the Socialist International to unite the Socialist forces of all countries in the
great endeavour of accelerating the progress of the new states.
The Socialist International recognizes the right of all nations to self-
determination. Nationalism has often been a liberating and uplifting force,
but when it is taken to extremes, it can threaten human freedom and progress.
The dangers of nationalistic excesses, where the welfare of the people is
sacrificed to the claims of the state, can be averted if, on the one hand, the
Socialists in the richer countries succeed in raising the sights of their people
above their national needs, and, on the other hand, Socialists in the new
countries develop their economy in such a way that the yardstick is human
welfare and not national prestige.
There is the danger that the people of new states will be lured by the false
perspectives of authoritarianism. Recent experiences in Europe, in Asia, in
Africa, in Latin America show how barren this repudiation of democracy
can be.
The countries of Latin America, although long free from colonial rule,
share some of the problems of emergent nations. Here, scores of millions of
people also present democratic Socialism with the insistent problems of
hunger, illiteracy and disease.
The developing countries face a tremendous task of transformation involv-
ing basic reorientation of the rhythms of life and work of their people. The
Socialist International recognizes that these far-ranging changes in patterns of
thought and behaviour among hundreds of millions of people cannot be
 Appendix Nine 557
brought about unless the developed countries also undertake some funda-
mental adjustments in their patterns of thought and action. To that pioneering
task of social innovation and adjustment, the Socialist International will
dedicate its main efforts.

SOCIALISM AND THE COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

Substantial economic expansion in the Soviet Union has led to improved
living standards but, above all, to greater military potential. In China,
industrialization is advancing. The fact that the formidable power of a state
containing 600 million people is subject to totalitarian rule and severe disci-
pline cannot be ignored. It presents a threat to other Asian countries. Indus-
trialization and modernization at the tempo at which they are realized in the
Communist sphere are maintained only at the cost either of preventing the
essential freedoms from developing or destroying them where they are already
in existence.
In the case of Russia this was accompanied, especially in the earlier part of
the decade, by ruthless exploitation of the countries of Eastern Europe. The
risings of the people in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, who showed such
dauntless courage against overwhelming odds, were in part provoked by these
policies. Although the revolts were suppressed, they forced the Soviet leaders
to make concessions. However, the Soviet Union strives to retain political
control over the countries of Eastern Europe. The ban on the activities of the
Socialist parties in these countries has continued, though their ideals and
traditions have been kept alive in the minds and hearts of countless sup-
porters.
The Communist world is no longer led from one centre of power. The
Russian and Chinese leaders differ on essential issues of policy. Their diver-
gent interests lead to a clash of ideology. This is the most important open
breach so far in the structure of the Communist bloc.
Despite opposition from the Chinese Communists, the Soviet leaders
abandoned the theory of an inevitable war between capitalism and Com-
munism. As a consequence, they now claim to base their foreign policy on the
principle of peaceful co-existence. In practice, however, this is only a change
of tactics, and the struggle against the non-Communist world is continued in
a different form. The Communists admit that the conflict is not diminished,
but the emphasis merely shifted from the purely political to the economic,
social and ideological fields.
Communism is not merely a social, political and economic system, but a
set of doctrines which its advocates claim to be infallible and which they
strive to extend all over the world.
Rivalries in the Communist sphere between different centres of Commu-
nist power and currents of opinion concerning Communism, make it manifest
that Communist pretensions to totalitarian control over the individual, the
558 Appendix Nine
nation and the development of society, are incompatible with the nature of
man, the role of the nation and the evolution of human society.
For Communists, the end justifies the means, and there is a permanent
contradiction between what they say and do.
Although the Communist countries claim to be peace-loving, the way in
which they have used their military power has aggravated tension in the world.
Although they encourage the non-aligned countries when they can exploit the
attitude of the latter in their own favour, they condemn them when they
cannot.
Although the Communist countries use the strongest anti-colonial langu-
age, they have enslaved scores of millions of people.
Misusing the word Socialism, their one-party dictatorships represent in
fact tyranny, denying those freedoms of speech, religion, criticism, voluntary
organization and contacts with the outside world which are the essence of a
democratic society.

SOCIALISM AND WORLD PEACE

The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing
less than world government. As a first step towards it, they seek to strengthen
the United Nations so that it may become more and more effective as an
instrument for maintaining peace. Nations should settle their disputes peace-
fully, without resort to force. The Charter of the United Nations and the
decisions based on it should be respected by all. Its constitution and structure
must reflect the increasingly important role which the new countries play on
the world scene. Membership of the United Nations must be made universal,
so that all nations, including China, may be represented by their governments
in power.
We deny that the world is forever destined to be polarized into blocs. Our
constant endeavour is to put an end to the Cold War. East-West rivalry has
largely been imposed upon an unwilling world by the Communist leaders. In
Asia tensions have been aggravated by Chinese actions in North India and
elsewhere, but also by some aspects of American policy. This rivalry is
dangerous. It diverts energies from constructive tasks. To democratic Social-
ists co-existence is not enough. International co-operation is the need for our
time.
The Socialist International stands for complete disarmament both in
nuclear and conventional weapons, including all countries and subject to
truly effective controls. We shall never give up the patient search for practical
solutions to outstanding disputes between nations.
Democratic Socialists seek nothing but lasting peace, but they will firmly
defend their liberties. They therefore reject the idea that democracies should
disarm unilaterally. The power of defence in the event of attack must therefore
be preserved as a deterrent to aggression.
 Appendix Nine 559

The United Nations has often helped to resolve disputes between nations.
However, it is, in its present form, not in the position to grant protection to
a country which is the victim of aggression and to guarantee the security of
every country. In these circumstances, each nation must accept responsibility
for its own security. Some consider that a non-alignment foreign policy serves
the security and the political stability in their own area in the best way. The
International respects the desire of nations to be free to pursue their destiny
without commitment in power relations of the world. Most of the Western
democracies have joined to form the NATO Alliance. The democratic
Socialist parties in the countries of the Alliance consider this a powerful
bulwark of peace and declare their firm determination to uphold it.
While it is vital that the uncommitted countries should not fall under
Communist control, no attempt should be made to draw them against their
will into the Western alliance. Nor must the opposition to Communism be
allowed to develop into support for Fascist, reactionary and feudal regimes.
On the contrary, pressure should be continually maintained for the restoration
of liberties and for social and economic reforms.

FUTURE PROSPECTS
In 1951, we declared in Frankfurt:
‘Socialists work for a world peace and freedom, for a world in which the
exploitation and enslavement o f men by men and peoples by peoples is unknown,
for a world in which the development o f the individual personality is the basis
for the fruitful development o f mankind.'
These words sum up our faith.
We now stand at a great divide in history. Man, through his mastery over
nature and the maturing of feeling for justice and equality, is struggling to
shed the old moulds of work and thought.
We democratic Socialists proclaim our conviction that the ultimate aim of
political activity is the fullest development of every human personality, that
liberty and democratic self-government are precious rights which must not be
surrendered; that every individual is entitled to equal status, consideration
and opportunity; that discrimination on grounds of race, colour, nation-
ality, creed or sex must be opposed; that the community must ensure that
material resources are used for the common good rather than the enrichment
of the few; above all, that freedom and equality and prosperity are not alter-
natives between which the people must choose but ideals which can be
achieved and enjoyed together.
We are determined to build peace not by conquest but by understanding.
We repudiate alike the soulless tyranny of Communism and the wasteful
injustice of capitalism.
To us, both freedom and equality are precious and essential to human
 560 Appendix Ten
happiness. They are the twin pillars upon which the ideal of human brother-
hood rests.
In proclaiming once again our faith in that ideal, we know that we speak
for humanity everywhere.
The Socialist International calls upon the people of the world, and youth
in particular, to seize the opportunities that the efforts of earlier generations
have at long last opened up for all, and to continue the struggle for a better
world.

APPENDIX TEN

A. T A B L E O F P R E S ID E N T S A N D S E C R E T A R IE S
1864-1964

First International
p r e s id e n t : George Odger
t r ea sur er : George W. Wheeler
SECRETARY FOR GERMANY: Karl Marx
SECRETARY FOR FRANCE: Victor Le Lubez
SECRETARY FOR ITALY: Giuseppe P. Fontana
SECRETARY FOR POLAND: J. E. Holtorp
SECRETARY FOR SWITZERLAND: Hermann F. Jung
GENERAL SECRETARIES: Johann Georg Eccarius
William R. Cremer
Second International
p r e s id e n t : 1900-1923 Emile Vandervelde
s e c r e t a r ie s : 1900-1905 Victor Serwy
1905-1920 Camille Huysmans
Vienna International
secr et a r y : 1921-1923 Friedrich Adler

Labour and Socialist International

p r e s id e n t s : 1923-1924 Arthur Henderson
1924-1925 T. C. Cramp
1925-1929 Arthur Henderson
1929-1936 Emile Vandervelde
1936-1939 Louis de Brouckere
1939 J. W. Albarda
1940 Camille Huysmans
s e c r e t a r ie s : 1923-1940 Friedrich Adler
1923-1925 Tom Shaw
 Appendix Ten 561
Socialist International (precursor: COMISCO)
p r e s id e n t s : 1948-1957 Morgan Phillips
1957-1963 Alsing Andersen
1963 Erich Ollenhauer
1964- Bruno Pittermann
v ic e - p r e s i d e n t s : 1951-1952 Louis Levy
1951-1963 Erich Ollenhauer
1952-1969 Guy Mollet
1957-1963 Hugh Gaitskell
1963- Tage Erlander
1963- Harold Wilson
1966- Willy Brandt
1969- Pietro Nenni
s e c r e t a r ie s : 1949-1956 Julius Braunthal
1956-1957 Bjarne Braatoy
1957-1969 Albert E. Carthy
1969- Hans Janitschek
Communist International
p r e s id e n t s : 1919-1926 Grigori Zinoviev
1926-1929 Nicolai Bukharin
1929-1931 V. M. Molotov
s e c r e t a r ie s : 1919 Angelica Balabanoff
1919-1920 Karl Radek
1921-1922 M. Kobiecky
1922-1931 Otto Kuusinen
Ossip Piatnitski
Walter Stocker
Maty as Rakosi
1931-1939 Dimitri Manuilsky
1939-1943 Georgy Dimitrov

B. TA BLE OF C O N G R E S S E S A N D C O N F E R E N C E S
1864-1964
First International
Foundation meeting: London 28 September 1864
Conference: London 25-29 September 18(
First Congress: Geneva 3-8 September 1866
Second Congress: Lausanne 2-8 September 1867
562 Appendix Ten
Third Congress: Brussels 6-13 September 1868
Fourth Congress: Basle 5-6 September 1869
Conference: London 17-23 September 1870
Fifth Congress: The Hague 2-7 September 1872
Sixth Congress: Geneva 4-8 September 1873
Conference: Philadelphia 15 July 1876

Anti-authoritarian International
First Congress: Geneva 1873
Second Congress: Brussels 1874
Third Congress: Berne 1876
Fourth Congress: Verviers 1877

World Socialist Congress

First Congress: Gent 1877
Second Congress: Chur 1881

Anarchist International
First Congress: London 1881
Conference: Paris 1889
Conference: Chicago 1893
Conference: Zurich 1896
Second Congress: Amsterdam 1907

Second International
First Congress: Paris 14-19 July 1889
Second Congress: Brussels 3-7 August 1891
Third Congress: Zurich 9-13 August 1893
Fourth Congress: London 26-31 July 1896
Fifth Congress: Paris 23-27 September 1900
Sixth Congress: Amsterdam 14-20 August 1904
Seventh Congress: Stuttgart 18-24 August 1907
Eighth Congress: Copenhagen 28 August-3 Sept. 1910
Ninth Congress: Basle 24-25 November 1912
Extraordinary
session of the Bureau: Brussels 29-30 July 1914
Tenth Congress: Berne 3-8 February 1919
Conference: Lucerne 1-9 August 1919
Eleventh Congress: Geneva 31 July-4 August 1920

Socialist Parties o f Neutral Countries

Conference: Copenhagen 17-18 January 1915
 Appendix Ten 563
Zimmerwald Movement
First Conference: Zimmerwald 5-8 September 1915
Second Conference: Kienthal 24-30 April 1916
Third Conference: Stockholm 5-12 September 1917

Inter-Allied Socialist Parties

First Conference: London 14 February 1915
Second Conference: London 28-29 August 1917
Third Conference: London 20-24 February 1918
Fourth Conference: London 15 September 1918

Central European Socialist Parties

Conference: Vienna 12-13 April 1915

Vienna International
Conference: Vienna 22-27 February 1921

Executive Committee o f the Three Internationals

First Conference: Berlin 2-5 April 1922
Second Conference: Berlin 23 May 1922

Labour and Socialist International

First Congress: Hamburg 21-25 May 1923
Second Congress: Marseilles 22-27 August 1925
Third Congress: Brussels 5-11 August 1928
Fourth Congress: Vienna 25 July-1 August 1931
Conference: Paris 21-25 August 1933

Socialist International (precursor: COMISCO)

Preparatory Conference: London 5 March 1945
First Conference: Clacton 2-5 May 1946
Second Conference: Bournemouth 3-8 November 1946
Third Conference: Zurich 6-9 June 1947
Fourth Conference: Antwerp 29-30 November 1947
Fifth Conference : London 20-23 March 1948
Sixth Conference: Vienna 4-7 June 1948
Seventh Conference: Baarn 14-17 May 1949
Eighth Conference: Paris 10-11 December 1949
Ninth Conference: Hastings 18-19 May 1950
Tenth Conference: Copenhagen 1-3 June 1950
First Congress: Frankfurt 30 June-3 July 1951
564 Appendix Ten
Second Congress: Milan 17-21 October 1952
Third Congress: Stockholm 15-18 July 1953
Fourth Congress: London 12-16 July 1955
Fifth Congress: Vienna 2-6 July 1957
Sixth Congress: Hamburg 14-17 July 1959
Seventh Congress: Rome 23-27 October 1961
Eighth Congress: Amsterdam 9-12 September 1963
Ninth Congress: Brussels 5-6 September 1964

Communist International
First Congress: Moscow 2-6 March 1919
Second Congress: Moscow-
Petrograd 19 July-7 August 1920
Third Congress: Moscow 22 June-12 Aug. 1921
Fourth Congress: Moscow 5 Nov.-5 Dec. 1922
Fifth Congress: Moscow 17 June-8 July 1924
Sixth Congress: Moscow 17 July-1 Sept. 1928
Seventh Congress: Moscow 25 June-20 Aug. 1935

Communist Information Bureau (Cominform)

Founding Conference: Szklaraska
Poreba 21-27 September 1947
Second Conference: Bucharest June 1948
Third Conference: Budapest November 1949

World Conferences o f Communist Parties

First Conference: Moscow 16-19 November 1957
Second Conference: Moscow 30 Nov.-4 Dec. 1960
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PREFACE
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Socialist International Information.

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PART ONE: THE DESTINY OF SOCIALISM

INTRODUCTION
Literature:
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Drachkovitch, Milorad M., ed., The Revolutionary Internationals 1864-1943 (Stan-
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1 THE BRITISH LABOUR INITIATIVE

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Sherwood, R obert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York, 1948).

2 SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS IN FRANCE

Original sources:
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C.G.T. Congres, 1946.

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Williams, Philip, Politics in Post-W ar France. Parties and the Constitution in the
Fourth Republic (2nd edition, London, 1958).
Wright, Gordon, The Reshaping o f French Democracy (London, 1950).

3 UNITY AND DIVISION IN THE ITALIAN

SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
Original sources:
S.I.L.O. Bulletin III, February 1947, Socialist Information and Liaison Office.

Literature:
Balabanoff, Angelica, Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse (Berlin, 1927).
Battaglia, Roberto, The Story o f the Italian Resistance (London, 1957).
Blackmer, Donald L. M., Unity in Diversity. Italian Communism and the Communist
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Borkenau, Franz, Der europaische Kommunismus. Seine Geschichte von 1917 bis zur
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1950).
Crossman, R. H. S., ed. The God that Failed (London, 1950).
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Drachkovitch, Milorad M. and Branko Lazitch, eds., The Comintern: Historical
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Einaudi, Mario, ed., Communism in Western Europe (Ithaca, 1951).
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Garosci, Aldo, ‘The Italian Communist Party’, in: Communism in Western Europe,
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Hilton-Young, W., The Italian Left. A Short History o f Political Socialism in Italy
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Hinterhauser, Hans, Italiener zwischen Schwarz und R ot (Stuttgart, 1956).
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568 Bibliography

4 THE PROBLEM OF UNIFICATION IN THE

GERMAN LABOUR MOVEMENT
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A bendroth, Wolfgang, Aufstieg undKrise der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Frankfurt-
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5 THE ORIGINS OF THE ‘COLD WAR’

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PART TWO: THE REOPENING OF THE SPLIT

6 THE REVIVAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL

Original sources:
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7 THE FOUNDING OF THE COMINFORM

Original sources:
Cahiers du Communisme, October 1947
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8 THE RECONSTITUTION OF THE SOCIALIST

INTERNATIONAL
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PART THREE: SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

IN ASIA
9 ORIENTAL KEY POSITIONS IN THE WORLD
REVOLUTION
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10 BOLSHEVISM AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN

INDIA
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11 HINDU AND BUDDHIST SOCIALISM

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12 SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST MOVEMENTS IN

BUDDHIST COUNTRIES
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13 ISLAMIC SOCIALISM AND MARXISM IN

INDONESIA
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14 SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM IN JAPAN

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Kublin, Hyman, Asian Revolutionary: The Life o f Sen Katayama (Princeton, 1964).
Levine, Solomon B., Industrial Relations in Post-war Japan (Urbana, 1958).
Morris, Ivan, ed., Japan 1931-1945: M ilitarism, Fascism, Nationalism (Boston,
1963).
Scalapino, Robert A., The Japanese Communist M ovement, 1920-1966 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1967).
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Political Party and its Foreign Policy (London-New York, 1968).
Storry, Richard, The Double Patriots: A Study o f Japanese Nationalism (London,
1957).
Swearingen, A. Rodger, and Paul F. Langer, Red Flag in Japan: International
Communism in Action, 1919-1951 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
Tokuda, Kyuichi, Naigai josei to Nippon kyosanto no nimmu (Tokyo, 1949).
Totten, George Oakley, The Social Democratic M ovement in Pre-war Japan (New
Haven, 1966).

15 THE CHINESE REVOLUTION

Original sources:
Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works (New York, 1954).

Literature:
Brandt, Conrad, John K. Fairbank and Benjamin Schwartz, A Documentary History
o f Chinese Communism (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1952).
Braunthal, Julius, History o f the International 1914-1943 (London, 1967).
Clubb, O. Edmund, Twentieth-Century China (New York-London, 1964).
Creel, H. G., Chinese Thought from Confucius to M ao Tse-tung (London, 1954).
Fitzgerald, C. P., China. A Short Cultural H istory (London, 1935).
Revolution in China (London, 1954).
Isaacs, Harold K., The Tragedy o f the Chinese Revolution (Stanford, 1951).
Kennedy, Malcolm D., A Short History o f Communism in Asia (London, 1957).
Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A H istory o f Modern China (London, 1954).
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(New York, 1945).
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1948).
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vol. i (Tubingen, 1922).
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16 SOCIALISM IN ISRAEL
Original sources:
Facts about Israel 1968. Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Jerusalem, 1968).
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Abramovitch, Raphael, ‘Zionismus, Judeufrage und Sozialism us\ in: Der K a m p f
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(London, 1951).
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17 THE ASIAN SOCIALIST CONFERENCE

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 Bibliography 581
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Braunthal, Julius, Report on Activities (1952-1953), submitted to the Third Congress
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Sjahrir, Soetan, Nationalism and Internationalism (Rangoon, 1953).

PART FOUR: THE MORAL CRISIS OF

COMMUNISM
18 YUGOSLAVIA’S REVOLT AGAINST MOSCOW’S
HEGEMONY
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Auty, Phyllis, Tito: A Biography (London, 1970).
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19 THE INSURRECTION IN EAST BERLIN

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Brant, Stefan, Der Aufstand. Geschichte und Deutung des 17. Juni 1953 (Stuttgart,
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20 THE DETHRONEMENT OF STALIN

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H istory o f the C.P.S.U. (Moscow, 1959).
Nuovi argomenti Nr. 20 (May-June 1956).
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Banning, W., Der Kommunismus als politisch-soziale Weltreligion (Berlin, 1953).
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21 POLAND’S OCTOBER
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Ciolkosz, Adam, ‘“Anti-Zionism” in Polish Party Politics’, in: Vienna Library
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Literature:
Bethell, Nicolas, Gomulka: H is Poland and H is Communism (London, 1969).
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1956 (New Y ork, 1956).

22 THE TRAGEDY OF THE HUNGARIAN

REVOLUTION
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Zinner, Paul E., ed., National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe. A
Selection o f Documents on Events in Poland and Hungary February-November 1956
(New Y ork, 1956).

Literature:
Aptheker, H erbert, The Truth about Hungary (New Y ork, 1957).
Blackmer, D onald L. M., Unity in Diversity. Italian Communism and the Communist
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Fryer, Peter, Hungarian Tragedy (London, 1956).
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Zinner, Paul E., Revolution in Hungary (New Y ork-L ondon, 1962).

23 ‘THE SPRING OF PRAGUE’

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Bernard, Vilem, Report to the Eleventh Congress o f the Socialist International in
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Pelikan, Jifi, ed., The Secret Vyscocany Congress— M inutes and Documents o f the
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Socialist International Information, 21 September 1968.
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The Times Literary Supplement, 18 July 1968.
 584 Bibliography

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Brahm , Heinz, Der Kreml und die C .S .S .R . 1968-1969 (Stuttgart, 1970).
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24 PEKING’S BREAK WITH MOSCOW

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Dedijer, Vladimir, Tito Speaks (London, 1953).
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PART FIVE: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

25 DESTINY OF A VISION
Original sources:
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The Current Digest o f the Soviet Press, 1 January 1958.

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Adler-Karlsson, G., Functional Socialism: a Swedish Theory fo r Democratic
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APPENDICES
Original sources:
Table I: Socialist International Information, vol. xx, No. 1. January 1970.
Table II: World Strength o f the Communist Party Organizations, Department of
State, Washington, 1969.
Keesing's Contemporary Archives, 4-11 October 1947.
The Czech Black Book (London, 1969).
List o f Abbreviations

A.B.T.U.C. All-Burma Trades Union Congress

A.F.P.F.L. Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (Burma)
A.I.T.U.C. All-Indian Trade Union Congress
A.S.C. Asian Socialist Conference
A. V.N.O.J. Antifasisticko Vjece Narodnog Oslobodjenja Jugoslavije
(Antifascist National Liberation Council of Yugoslavia)
B. I.A. Burma Independence Army
B.I.S. Bureau International Socialiste
Bund Jewish workers’ organization in Russia, Lithuania and Poland
B. W.P.P. Burma Workers’ and Peasants’ Party
C. A.S. Comite d'Action Socialiste
C.D.U. Christlich-Demokratische Union
C.F.T.C. Confederation Frangaise des Travailleurs Chretiens
C.G.L. Confederazione Generale del Lavoro
C.G.T. Confederation Genirale du Travail
Cheka Tschreswytschajnaja Kommissija
(Special Committee to fight the Counter-revolution)
C.I.A. Central Intelligence Agency (United States)
C.I.O. Congress of Industrial Organizations
C.N .L. Comite National de Liberation
C.N.R. Conseil National de la Resistance
Cominform Communist Information Office
Comintern Communist International
COMISCO Committee of International Socialist Conferences
C.P.I. Communist Party of India
C.P.S.U. Communist Party of the Soviet Union
C.S.D. Ceskoslovenska Socialni Demokracie
C.S.P. Congress Socialist Party (India)
C.S.R. Republic of Czechoslovakia
E.A.M. Ellenikos Apelevtherotikon Metopon
(National Liberation Front)
E.D.E.S. Ellenikos Dimikratikos Ethnikos Syndesmos
E. L.A.S. Ellenikos Laikon Apelevtherotikon Straton
(National Liberation Army)
F. D.R. Front Demokrasi Rakjat
(People’s Democratic Front, Indonesia)
F.I.L. Federazione Italiana del Lavoro
F.N. Front National (France)
F.N.D. National Democratic Front (Romania)
F.O. Force Ouvriere— Confederation Generale du Travail
588 L ist o f A bbreviations

F.T .P.F. Francs-Tireurs Partisans-Frangais

G estapo Secret State Police (Germany)
G .T.I. Gerankan Tani Indonesia (Indonesian Farm ers’ League)
H .M .S. H ind M azdoor Sabha (India)
I.C .F.T .U . International Confederation o f Free Trade Unions
I.F .T .U . International Federation o f Trade Unions
I.N .T .U .C . Indian N ational T rade U nion Congress
I.S.D.V. Indies Sociaal Democratic Vereeniging
K .M .P.P. Kisan M azdoor Praja Party (India)
K .P.D . Com munist Party o f G erm any
K .P.O . Com munist Party o f Austria
K .S.C. Komunisticka Strana Ceskoslovenska
L.C .G .I.L. Libera Confederazione Generate Italiana del Lavoro
L.S.I. L abour and Socialist International
L.S.S.P. Lanka Sama Samaya Party (Ceylon)
M .A.P.A .I. M ifleget Poale Eretz Israel (Jewish L abour Party o f Israel)
M .A.P.A .M . M ifleget Hapoalim Mameuhedet (U nited L abour Party)
M .A.Q.I. M ifleget Qimunistit Isre'elit (Communist Party o f Israel)
M .A .S.J.U .M .I. M adjelis Sjaro M oslimin Indonesia
M .E.P. Mahajama Eksath Peramuna (United People’s F ro n t o f Ceylon)
M .R.P. M ouvement Republicain Populaire
M .V.D. M inisterij Vnutrennix Djel
N A TO N o rth A tlantic Treaty Organization
N .E.P. New Econom ic Policy
N .K .V .D . Narodni Kommissariat Vnutrennix Djel
N .U .F . N ational U nited F ro n t (Burma)
O .F. Otechestven Front (Rum ania)
O .G .P.U . N am e for form er Cheka
P.C.F. Parti Communiste Frangais
P.C.R. Partidul Comunist din Romania
Pesindo Permuda Socialis Indonesia
P.K .I. Partai Komunis Indonesia
P.N .I. Partai Nasional Indonesia
P.P.R . Polska Portia Robotnicza (Polish W orkers’ Party)
P.P.S. Polska Portia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party)
P.S.D .I.R . Partidul Social Democrat Independent din Romania
P.S.I. Partito Socialista Italiano
P.S.I. Partai Socialis Indonesia
P.S.I.U .P. Partito Socialista Italiano di Unita Proletaria
P.S.L. Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe
P.S.L.I. Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani
P.S.P. Praja Socialist Party (India)
P.V.O. People’s Volunteer Organization (Burma)
P.Z.P.R . Polska Zjednoczona Portia Robotnicza
(Polish U nited W orkers’ Party)
R .A .F.I. Reshimat Poale Israel
R .P.F. Rassemblement du Peuple Frangais
R.P.P.S. Robotnicza Partia Polskich Socjalistow
(W orkers’ Party o f Polish Socialists)
Sanbetsu Z en Nihon Sangyobetsu Rodo Kumiai Kaigi
(N ational Congress o f Industrial Organizations)
S.C.A.P. Supreme Com m ander o f the Allied Powers
S.E.D. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands
S.F.I.O. Section Frangaise de VInternationale Ouvriere— Parti Socialiste
S.I. Serakat Islam (Indonesia)
S.I. Socialist International
S.I.L.O. Socialist Inform ation and Liaison Office
 List o f Abbreviations 589
S.L.F.P. Sri Lanka Freedom Party (Ceylon)
S.O.B.S.I. S e n t r a l O r g a n i s a s i B u r u h S e lu r u h I n d o n e s ia
(Indonesian trade union Council)
Sodomei N ih o n R o d o K u m i a i S o d o m e i
(Japanese G eneral Federation o f W orkers)
Sohyo N ih o n R o d o K u m i a i S o h y o g i k a i
(General Council of Japanese Trade Unions)
S.P.D. Social D em ocratic Party of Germany
S.P.O. Socialist Party of A ustria
S. S.P. Sam yukta Socialist Party (India)
T. U.C. Trades U nion Congress
U. N. U nited N ations
U .N .P. U nited N ational Party (Ceylon)
U. S.S.R. U nion o f Soviet Socialist Republics
V. L.S.S.P. V i p la v a k a r i L . S . S . P . (Ceylon)
W . F.T.U . W orld Federation o f T rade U nions
W.P.P. W orkers’ and Peasants’ Party (India)
Indexes
by Michael Gordon

NAM E INDEX

Newspapers, etc., are entered under countries.

Abbreviations: C.P. = Communist party
S.D. = Social Democrats
S.P. = Socialist party
Soc. Int. = Socialist International
20th Congress C.P.S.U. refers to Krushchev’s exposure of Stalin

Abduh, Mohammed, 285 Bandaranaike, Solomon W. R. D., 275

Abe, Professor Isoo, 313, 322n, 323, 324 Barankovics, Stephan, 164
Ackermann, Anton, 388n, 394 Baratz, Joseph, 355-6
Adhikary, Monmohan, 280 Barkatt, Reuven, 367
Ahmed, Muzaffar, 220 Basso, Lelio, 61, 63-4
Aidit, Dipa Nurantara, 292, 301 & n-2, 303, Bauer, Otto, 213n, 470; on freedom, 502n
307, 310 Beauvoir, Simone de, 183n
Akamatsu, Katsumaro, 321-3 Bechyne, Zdenek, 441
Alimin, 288, 296, 301, 302 Behler, Ales, 367
Alter, Victor, 103n, 498 Belin, Rene, 17
Andropov, Ambassador Y. V., 421-2 BeneS, Eduard, 168-71, 176n-8, 180
Antonescu, General Ion, 112 Bene§, Jan, 435
Asanuma, Inejiro, 318, 339, 341 Ben-Gurion, David, 353, 356, 357
Ashida, Hitoshi, 332, 341 Benjamin, Dr Hilde, 393
Ashoka, King, 252 Bergelson, David, 498
Aso, Hisashi, 323 Bergsma, P., 286, 287
Ataturk Kemal, 217 Berman, Jakub, 404
Attlee, Clement, 151, 155; a n d : A.S.C., 367; Bernard, Vilem, 141, 192
Burma, 261 Bethlen, Count Stephan, 164
Auersperg, Pavel, 437 Bevan, Aneurin, and Greece, 109
Aung Sang, Bogyoke, 258, 259, 260, 261 Bevin, Ernest, 125, 128, 151, 155; and Greece,
Auriol, Vincent, 16; arrested, 17; in coalition 109n; and Marshall Plan, 146-7; and
government, 34; President, 36 ‘Western Union’, 184
Averback, Wolf, 357 Bhakta, Satya, 220
Averescu, General, 115n Bhasin, Prem, 374
Bhave, Vinoba, 246
Ba Hein, 256-7 Bidault, Georges, 36, 147
Ba Maw, 258 Bierut, Boleslaw, 95n, 97 & n, 100,404; death,
Ba Swe, U, 250-1, 252, 256-7, 259, 264, 267, 405
268-9; and A.S.C., 367-74 Bilak, Vasil, 455
‘Ba Tin* (alias for H. N. Goshal), 262 Billoux, Francois, 18
Ba Yin, U, 250 Bjork, Kay, 367
Bacilek, Karol, 432 Blum, Leon, 151, 152; and resistance, 16;
Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, P. M., 50-2 arrested, 17; Riom trial, 7-8, 26; return
Bakaric, Vladimir, 372 from Germany, 22-3; forms government
Balabanoff, Angelica, 60, 61, 206 (1946), 36, 40, 42; and unity, 25-8, 72;
B£n, Antal, 160, 165, 167 on Marxism, 23-4, 205-6; A r £ c h e lle
Bandaranaike, Sirima, 277 H um aine by, 26
 Name Index 591
Bohm, Wilhelm, 165 Djilas, Milovan, 11 In, 152, 385; and A.S.C.,
Bonomi, Ivanoe, 54 367; on Soviet imperialism, 389n, 501n
Bor-Komorowski, General Tadeuz, 96 Draghici, Alexandru, 115n
Borochov, Ber, 350n, 351-3 Drtina, Prokop, 148n
Bose, Subhas Chandra, 222, 230n Dubcek, Alexander, 460,472; gen. sec. C.P. of
Bracke, Alexandre, 206 Slovakia, 432, 435-6; gen. sec. C.P. of
Bradley, Benjamin F., 220 Czechoslovakia, 436-7, 442, 445; called
Bratianu, Ion, 113 to Moscow, 446-7; and Warsaw Pact,
Braunthal, Julius, ed. In tern ational S o cia list 450-1; and ‘Action Programme’, 452-3;
F orum , 133n Cierna meeting, peace of Bratislava, 454-
Brezhnev, Leonid: and Czechs (‘Brezhnev 5; arrested, 456; re-elected, 458
Doctrine’), 450, 462-4, 466, 469 Duclos, Jacques, 39
Brill, Hermann, 70
Brouckere, Louis de, 133n, 141 Eberlein, Hugo, 199n
Buchinger, Emanuel, 136—7 Eden, Anthony, 108, 109n, 114
Bukharin, Nicolai L., 289n, 314n; trial, 471 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 139n, 498
Bulganin, N. A., 405 Eichler, Willi, 203, 207
Buozzi, Bruno, 57, 58 Eisenhower, President Dwight, Krushchev
Byrnes, James Francis, U.S. Sec. of State, 114, visits, 480
123, 125, 127 Engels, Friedrich, 468; and parliamentary
democracy, 506n; ‘a realm of freedom*,
Cabet, Etienne, 355 496; on revolutions, 496
Camus, Albert (ed. C o m b a t ), 33 Erban, E., 178
Canevari, Emilio, 58 Erlander, Tage, 184, 205
Cernik, Oldrich, 455, 458, 459; arrested, 456 Erlich, Heinrich, 103n, 498
Chang, Hsueh-liang, 346 Etinger, Professor Y. G., 499
Chatterji, Bhola, 279
Chelmsford, Lord (Viceroy of India), 224, 227 Fagerholm, Karl Augustus, 186-7n
Ch’en Tu-hsiu, 344 Fajner, Leon, 350
Cheshmedziev, Grigor, 117 Farkas, General Mihaly, 167n, 412, 416
Chiang Kai-shek, 144, 343-7, 348n; and Faure, Paul, pacifism, 16, 17, 18
Formosa and Mao, 479; and Stalin and Fechner, Max, 73, 81, 86, 393, 394
Mao, 476-8 Fierlinger, Zdenek, 170, 173-5, 178-9
Chou En-lai and: 20th Congress, C.P.S.U., Fischer, Ernst, 464
and Albania, 476; Krushchev detente Fischer, Jozsef, 421
policy and Albania, 480-2 Fontaine, Andre (ed. L e M on de), 147n
Chu Teh, 344, 345 Fourier, Charles, 355
Churchill, Winston, a n d : ‘spheres of influence’, Frachon, Benoit, 37, 39, 44
120-1; German partition, 126; Greece, Fryer, Peter, H ungarian T ra g ed y , 418n, 424n,
107-10, 109n; Poland, 93 & n-100;
Romania, 114; Potsdam Conference, 76;
and Stalin, 92; and Tito, 380, 381-2; Ful- Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 221, 222,
ton speech, 123-5 225, 229; on Hinduism and Socialism,
Citrine, Walter, 12 244-7, 249, 245n
Clay, General Lucius, 183, 184-5 Garaudy, Roger, 464, 467
dementis, Vladimir, 180; executed, 431-2 Gasperi, Alcide de, 51, 65-6, 152
Cole, G. D. H., 496, 508 Geogescu, Teohari, 115n
Confucius, 342 George II, King of Greece, 105, 111
Coutts, Charles, 418 Georgiev, Colonel Kimon, 117, 119
Croce, Benedetto, 51 Gero, Erno, 412, 413, 416, 418; overthrown,
Croizat, Ambroise, 30 419
Cyrankiewicz, J6zef, 102, 405, 410 Ghate, S. V., 233n
Czervonenko, Ambassador Stepan, 436 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 113
Gibb, H. A. R., 285
Dahlem, Franz, 77-8 Glading, Percy E., 220
Dahrendorf, Gustav, 73-4, 81-2, 89 Gokhale, Madhav, 369
Daladier, Edouard, 18 Goldstiicker, Eduard, 430-1, 446, 458
Dalton, Hugh, 6, 99n, 125, 129 Gomulka, Wladislaw, 95n, lOOn, 103; im-
Dange, S. A., 220, 233 & n, 240 prisoned, 158n, 388,401,404 &n; recalled,
Darsono, 287 rise to power, 406-11; on Stalin, 375
Deakin, Arthur, 13 Goonesiaha, A. E., 271
Decker, H. W., 286 Goonewardene, Leslie, 271
De Gaulle, General Charles, 25, 31; ‘Head of Goray, N. G., 222
State’ and constitution, 34-5; and C.G.T., Gosh, Ajoy, 233 & n; death, 240
505; launches R.P.F., 39, 42 Goshal, H. N. (alias Ba Tin), 262
Desai, D., 235 Gottwald, Klement, 170-8, 430, 431; and
de Silva, Colvin R., 271 Marshall Plan, 148 & n; ‘Gottwald Plan*
de Silva, William, 277 and Indonesia, 296
Deutscher, Isaac, on .Stalin and Marshall Plan, Gouin, Felix, 34; Prime Minister, 35
148n Gramsci, Antonio, 51
Deva, Archarya Narenda, 222-3, 225 Grandi, Achille, 57, 58-9; death, 66
Dimitrov, Georgi, 119, 375; and founding of Gregoroyannis, A., I ll
Cominform, 145, 150 Gromyko, Andrei, and Israel, 362
Djie Tan Ling, 292, 301, 302 Grosser, Bronislav, 350
592 Name Index
Grotewohl, Otto, 73-81 p a ssim , 86-8, 395 Kogan, Professor M. B., 499
Groza, Petru, 114-15, 119 Kohout, Pavel, 434, 452-3
Grumback, Salomon, 17, 200 Koirala, Bishewar Prasad, 278-80, 282
Guesde, Jules, 22, 205 Kolarov, Vassil, 119
Gunawardene, Philip, 277 Kollontai, Alexandra, 314n
Komar, General Waclav, 408
Habibi, Emil, 362 Koniev, Marshal Ivan, 169, 407
Hakamada, Satomi, 320 & n Konoe, Prince Fumimaro, 324
Hammarskjold, Dag, and Hungary, 422 Korekiyo, Tolka, 321
Hannak, Jacques, 83 Kostov, Traichko, 117; executed, 388, 401
Harsh, Joseph, 129 Kostrzewa, Wera, 95n
Hatta, Mohammed, 290, 293, 299 & n-300 Kotoku, Denjiro, 313-14
Havel, Vaclav, 441 Kovacs, Bela, 164
Healey, Denis, 138 Kovalev, S., 460-2
Hegediis, Andreas, 412, 416 Krassin, L. B., 216n
Heine, Fritz, 82 Kremer, Alexander, 350
Henderson, Arthur, 208n Kripalani, Acharja, 247
Hermanson, Carl-Hendrik, 464 Kripalani, J. B., on Israel and India, 354
Herrnstadt, Rudolf, 394 Krushchev, Nikita, and Mao’s territory
Hilferding, Rudolf, 69 demand, 478; visit to Eisenhower, 480;
Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 31 In, 312 detente policy and Mao, 479, 483, 485;
Hitler, Adolf, and Israel, 361; Stalin congratu- recalls technical advisers from China, 481;
lates, 500; and Yugoslavia, 377, 378, 379 20th Congress speech against Stalin, 336,
Hla Aung, U, 368, 371 396-402, 399n. S ee also referen ces in
Hopkins, Harry L., 92, 99, 476 S u b ject In d e x ; 20th Congress attack on
Horthy de Nagyb&nya, Nikolaus, 161, 164 Albania, 476,481-2; on Stalin and doctors*
Hoxha, Enver, 476 purge, 499n; and Poland, 407; deposes
Hronek, Jifi, 172 Rakosi, 415 & n; and Tito, 391, 415-16n;
Husaini, Haji Amin al- (Grand Mufti), 359-60 ‘liberalization’ by, 444; overthrown, 486
Hus&k, Gustav, 442, 458; imprisoned, 431-2; Kun, Bela, 160
gen. sec. C.P., 472 & n; on invasion, 474 Kundara, Milan, 433
Huysmans, Camille, 139 Kunfi, Siegmund, 165
Kuron, Jacek, 41 In
Indra, Alois, 455, 456 Kuznetsov, Pavel, 14n
Inukai, Tsuyoshi, murdered, 321 Kyaw Nyein, 256, 258, 259, 264, 268-9, 367,
Ivengar, K. S., 220
Jacometti, A. Z., 64 Lacoste, Robert, 154
Janko, General Vladimir, suicide, 445-6 Larock, Victor, 195
Jaurfcs, Jean, 22, 202, 204, 205 Laski, Harold, 1, 5, 6, 133n, 135-6, 188n
Jonas, Franz, 141 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 509
Jorga, 115n Lausman, Bohumil, 171, 175, 178-80
Joshi, Puran Chand, 230n, 231, 232 & n Lawther, Will, 10
Joshi, S. M., 222 Lebas, Jean, 17; arrested, 17n
Jouhaux, Leon, 20, 43 Lebrun, Albert, 16
Jumblatt, Kemal, 529 Leeper, Sir Reginald, 108
Jusuf, Mohammed, 291 Lefranc, Georges, 153
Lenart, J., 456
Kadar, Jdnds, 167n, 413 & n; gen. sec. C.P., Lenin, V. I., 236; on: anti-semitism, 497, 500;
419-28 & n colonialism, 214,219, 225; ‘dictatorship
Kaganovitch, L. M., 407 of the proletariat’, 429, 436, 495, 503-4;
Kahin, 292 freedom, 469; national freedom, 425;
Kalinin, M. I., funeral of, 145 freedom of opinion, 439 & n; interrela-
Kallai, Gyula, 413 & n tion of Marxism, 506; leftist deviation,
Kamaladevi, Shrimati, 367 287-8; parliamentary democracy, 484;
Kamenev, L. B., 497 party democracy, 199n; peasants, 345;
Kardelj, 11 In, 152 Poland, 95n; separate roads to socialism,
Karik, Sari, 165 467; socialism in pre-capitalist countries,
Katayama, Sen, 312-15, 314n 493 & n; wars and imperialism, 484,485;
Katayama, Tetsu, 322,323,324,325,331-2 Zionism, 358
Kato, Kanju, 328, 330 Lenski, Julian, 95n
Kato, Takaakira, 318 Leon, Daniel de, 314
Kautsky, Benedikt, 70 Leonhard, Wolfgang, 73 & n-5, 85n
Kawakemi, Jotaro, 341 Le Trouquer, Andre, 20
Kelemen, Gyula, 165, 421 Levy, Louis, 199
Kennan, George F., 146n Li Ta-chao, 344
Kennedy, President John F., Chou En-lai Limaye, Madhu, 225
attacks, 481 Litvinov, Maxim, 216n
Kethly, Anna, 165, 167, 421 Lizzadri, Oreste, 58 9
Khadair, Sattar, 529n Lohia, Ram Manohar, 223, 227, 239-40, 367
King, Mackenzie, 110 Lohr, Colonel-General Alexander von, 383n
Kingsbury-Smith, 185 Lombardi, Riccardo, 64
Kita, Ikki, 320, 321 Lombardo, Ivan Matteo, 60, 61, 63
Klingelhofer, Gustav, 85n Longo, Luigi, 56, 59-60
 Name Index 593
Losonczy, Geza, 413, 413n, 421 Mollet, Guy, 38; and A.S.C., 367; and Soc.
Lozovsky, Arnold, 498 Int., 196, 200, 204, 205
Lukacs, Gyorgy, 414, 420, 422, 424n, 427 Molotov, V. M., 121-3, 126-7; and: Comin-
Lukman, H. M., 301-2, 307 form, 149n; Marshall Plan, 146-7;
Lulchev, Kosta, 118 & n Poland, 407
Luxemburg, Rosa, 495 Mondolfe, Ugo, 194n
Lwin, Thakin, 264, 267 Monmousseau, Gaston, 14n, 29
Montagu, Edwin, 224
Moore-Brabazon, J. T. C., 12n
Mao Tse-tung, 241, 269, 344-8, 345n; and: Morrison, Herbert, 10-11
Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek, 476—8; Musso, 288, 293, 296, 299; death, 298
Chiang and Formosa, 479; demands Mussolini, Benito: dismissed, 50—1; and
territories from Soviet, 478, 487-8; Soviet Lateran Treaty, 53; and Yugoslavia, 377,
‘leading role’, 482; Korean war, 266 & n; 379
and Japan, 334; and 20th Congress Mya, Thakin, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261
C.P.S.U., 475; and Kruschev’s detente ‘Myint’ (alias for Thein Pe), 256, 260, 26In
policy with U.S.A., 479, 483, 485-6;
‘power from the barrel of a gun’, 485n Nagy, Ferenc, 161, 162n, 164
MacArthur, General Douglas, 5n, 325 Nagy, Imre, 161-2; P.M., 412-13; deposed ,
Macmillan, Harold, and Greece, 109 413-14; P.M., 418-24,427,428,465; flees,
Mahendra, King of Nepal, 280-2
Maisky, Ivan, 103n Namboodiripad, E. M. S., 239, 241
Majer, Vaclav, 174 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 222, 223, 224 & n,
Malaka, Tan, 288 227, 228, 232, 234, 235; and A.S.C., 367;
Malenkov, Georgi, 149, 150, 387n on Hinduism and Buddhism, 243-4,
Maleter, Pal, 418-19, 421, 422; executed, 424 246-7
Malinovsky, Marshal Rodion, 112, 383 Nasin, Fuad, 360
Mamula, Miroslav, 436 Nasser, President Gamel Abdel, 364; and
Maniu, Juliu, 113, 115n ‘Suez War*, 372
Markham, Jim, 371 Ne Win, General, 269
Markish, Peretz, 498 Nedic, General, 385
Marosan, Gyorgy, 165n, 167 & n Nedved, Jaroslav, 179
Marshall, General George, 146, see also su bject Nehru, Jawaharlal, 222, 229, 230, 237
in d ex , Marshall Plan Neikov, Dimiter, 118-19
Marty, Andre, 30, 33n, 39 Nenni, Pietro, 45; and unity, 47-8, 51, 53-64
Marx, Karl, on: Asian revolution, 214, 215; p a s s im ; ed. A v a n ti! , later N u o vo A v a n ti!, 48,
Buddhism, 250; democracy and equality, 49 & n-50; and: NATO, 194n; ‘people’s
494n; ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, democracies’, 190, 191n; ‘exposure’ of
494 & n; evolution of socialism, 506-7; Stalin, 398
freedom of opinion, 503, 514-15; freedom Neumann, Heinz, 343
of the press, 469; ‘iron law of history’, Nieuwenhuis, F. Domela, 208n
513; parliamentary democracy, 506n; Nishio, Suehiro, 325, 328, 332, 340-1
socialism in pre-capitalist countries, 492 & Nosek, Vaclav, 176-7
n-5; see also su b jec t in d ex , Marxism Novomcsky, Ladislav, imprisoned, 431-2
Masani, M. R., 222, 227 Novotny, Antonin, 430-2, 434-6; resignation,
Masaryk, Jan, 148n 436-7, 445, 446
Masaryk, Thomas, 168, 204 Nozaka, Sanzo, 320n, 326-7; and Cominform,
Matsuoka, Komakichi, 328 334-5
Matteoti, Matteo, 60, 63 Nu, Thakin U, 242, 251-2, 258, 259, 261, 262,
Maung, Dr E., 242 263, 268, 269
Maxwell, Sir Reginald, 229
Mayer, Daniel, 17, 18, 38, 43, 154; and unity, Obbov, Alexander, 118
25-6 Ochab, Edward, 404, 405, 408n
Mazumdar, Charu, 241 Ollenhauer, Erich, 82, 90; and Soc. Int., 197,
Mehta, Asoka, 222, 227, 235, 367 199
Meir, Golda, 365 Onofri, Fabrizio, 398
Meirson, Yitzchak, 357 Oren, M., 357
Mercier, Andre, 20 Osobka-Morawski, Edward, 97, 101, 102,
Mettemich, Prince Clemens, ‘Karlsbad Decis- 119; deposed, 158n
ions’, 468 Osugi, Sakee, 317
Michael, King of Romania, 112-13, 115n, 116 Owen, Robert, 355
Middleton, J. S., 7-8
Mihailovid, Colonel Draia, 377-8, 380-2 Paasikivi, Juho Kusti, 186-7 & n
Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 94n, 99, 103 Paasio, Rafael, 186-7n
Mikoyan, Anastas T., 407, 476; and Hungary, Palffy, Gyorgy, 416
415, 419, 421 Papandreou, 108
Mill, John Stuart, 204 Parri, Ferrucio, 46, 51
Miqunis, Shmu’el, 362, 364 Pastore, Guilio, 66
Miyamoto, Kenji, 334 Patel, Sardar, 222
Mizutani, Chozuburo, 325 Patrascu, Nicolae, 115n
Mnacko, 435 Pauker, Anna, 114-15 & n
Moch, Jules, 28, 38, 155, 206 Pavelic, Ante, 377, 378
Modigliani, 45 Pavlovsky, General I., 456
Modzelewski, Karol, 411 Pekkala, Mauno, 186n
 594 Name Index
Perera, N. M., 271, 277 Sapir, Pinhas, 365
Peres, Shimon, 365 Saragat, Giuseppe, 45, 55, 60-1, 62-3, 66,
Petain, Marshal Philippe, 16-22 p a ssim , 32 194n; Cominform on, 206
Peter II, King of Yugoslavia, 377, 381-2 Scherbekov, Alexander S., 499
Petkov, Nikola, 117-19 Schmidt, Elli, 394
Petoffi, Sandor A., poet, 417; ‘circle’, 414 Schumacher, Kurt and: unity, 70-2, 75n, 77,
Petrescu, Constantin Titel, 113, 116 82, 89-90; Cominform, 206; German
Peyer, Karolyi, 164, 165, 166n entry to International, 140-1; Soc. Int.,
Pfeffer, Itzik, 498 196
Philip, Andre, 37 Scobie, General, 108-9
Phillips, Morgan, 141, 191, 195, 199, 204-5, Secchia, Pietro, 56, 59, 62
368; Cominform on, 206 Sein Win (ed. The G uardian , Rangoon), 268
Piatnitsky, Ossip, 220 Sejna, Major-General, 436, 445-6
Pieck, Wilhelm, 74, 80 Semaon, 287
Pineau, Christian, 17 Serov, General Ivan, 422
Pius XII, Pope, 190n Serrati, Giacinto, 47, 60
Poliak, Oscar, 206 Sforza, Count Carlo, 51
Pollitt, Harry, 7-8, 156; and India, 229 Shamsher, Mohan, 280
Portnoy, Noah, 350 Shamsher, Subarna, 279, 282
Prasad, Profesor Tanka, 242-3, 280 Sharett, Moshe, 356, 367, 372-3
Prchlik, General Vaclav, 436, 445 Shaw, George Bernard, 204
Prochazka, 435 Shazar, Zalman, 356
Puric, Bozidar, 382 Shehu, Mehmet, 476
Puzak, Kazimierz, 102 & n Shiga, Yoshio, 334
Shinwell, Emanuel, 109
Radaceanu, Lotar, 116 Shusui, Kotoko, 313
Radek, Karl, 359, 497 Shvernik, N. M., 12
R&descu, General Nicolas, 113 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom, 528
Rajk, Laszlo, 162 & n, 163; executed, 388,401, Sik, Ota, 432-3, 435, 437, 446, 458
413, 415, 416 Sikorski, General Wladyslaw, 94; death, 99
Rakosi, Matyas, 147, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, Silone, Ignazio, 60, 63
167n, 412—15, 419, 424, 427; resigns, 416 Siroky, Villiam, 432
Rakovsky, Christian, 496 Sjahrir, Soetan, 290, 291, 293, 297, 300, 304;
Ramadier, Paul, 36, 38-42, 152, 154 and A.S.C., 367; on nationalism, 370—1
Rana family of Nepal, 279-82 Sjarifuddin, Amir, 291, 292, 293, 296; death,
Ranadive, B. T., 221, 231, 232, 240 298-9 & n
Rancer, Sir Hubert, 260 Slansky, Rudolf, 180; executed, 388, 401, 431-
Rankovic, Alexander, 145 2, 434
Ratwatte (Bandaranaike), Sirima, 277 Smrkovsky, Josef, 457, 458; arrested, 456,459
Reeves, Joe, 141 Sneevliet, Hendricus M., 286 & n
Renault, Louis, 34 Sneh, Moshe, 357, 364
Renner, Karl, 83-4 Soe, Thakin, 256, 259, 260
Revai, Joszef, 165, 166n, 167 Sokolovsky, Marshal Vassily, 184
Reynaud, Paul, 16 Solomon, Barber, 116
Reza Khan, Shah of Persia, 122 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The F irst C ircle and
Rhee, Sygman, 264n anti-semitism, 498n
Ribiere, H„ 17 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 182, 185-6; Cominform
Richta, Radovan, 437 on, 206
Ridley, George, 10 Spinasse, 17
Ries, Stephan, 165n Spinelli, Carlo, 64
Rokossovsky, Marshal Constantin, 96, 408, Spratt, Philip, 220, 221
409 Sprinzak, Joseph, 353, 356
Rola-Zymierski, General, 97 Stalin, Joseph, first Five-Year Plan, 496;
Romita, Giuseppe, 63-4 interview with Laski, 6; pact with Hitler,
Ronai, Zoltan, 165 & n 1, 49; see also su bject in d ex , Nazi-Soviet
Roosevelt, President F. D., and: German parti- pact; congratulates Hitler, 500; recognises
tion, 128; spheres of influence, 120-1; Badoglio, 52; and: German partition, 126-
Poland, 93-8; Greece, 109; Stalin, 93; 8, 127n; post-1944 anti-fascism, 147 & n;
death, 98 post-war purges, 387-8, 439-40, 471n;
Rosselli, Carlo and Nello, 46 Roosevelt, 92; spheres of influence, 93,
Roy, Manabendra Nath, 219, 220n, 227 120-1; Austria, 83; Bulgaria, 117;
Russell, Bertrand, 182-3 & n Czechoslovakia, 173— 4; Germany, 80;
Ruygers, Geert, 207-8 Greece, 105, llOn, 11 In; Hungary, 162;
Poland, 94-7; Romania, 112 & n ; demands
Sagher, Mobarak, 372 Dardanelles base, 122; Finland, 186-7n;
Saillant, Louis, 13, 14n, 20 Japan, 334, 336; Tito, 377, 380— 9; Chiang
Saito, Admiral, 321 Kai-shek and Mao, 476-8; Korean war,
Sakai, Toshihiko, 313, 316 266 & n; Fulton speech, 125; Marshall
Sakharov, Andrei D., 397n; on: ‘Class Nature Plan, 146; founding of Cominform, 145
of Stalinism’, 496n; Czechs, 444; Soviet & n, 157, 183; Berlin blockade, 185; 20th
and Middle East, 499n Congress ‘exposure’, 396-403, se e also
Sanatescu, Constantin, 112-13 su b jec t in dex e n trie s ; Chou En-lai lays
Sannes, John, 141 wreath on grave of, 476; doctors* purge,
Sanyal, Kanu, 241 499n; anti-semitism, 357, 497; on:
 Name Index 595
Stalin, Joseph—cont. ania, 114, 120; stops Lend Lease, 128;
deviations, 467; Leninism and imperial- NATO, 185; Persia, 123; ‘Western Union’,
ism, 493n; wars and imperialism, 484n 184; see also su bject in dex ‘Truman
Stalin, Svetlana, 497 Doctrine’
Stettinius, Edward R., 109-10 Tsirimokos, Elias, 110
Stilwell, General Joseph, 347; on Chiang and Tubi, Taufio, 362, 364
Communists, 348n Tun Pe, U, 242
Stirbey (Romanian P.M.), 115n Turati, Filippo, 45, 46, 47, 60, 63, 202
Subasic, Ivan, 382 Tymes, Frantisek, 175
Subhi, Mustafa, 217
Sugiyama, Motojiro, 318 U Ba Swe, U Nu, etc., see Ba Swe, Nu
Suharto, General, 310 ’Uda, Nimrz, 360
Sukarno, Achmed, 289 & n-90, 299 & n-300, Ulbricht, Walter, 73-4, 79, 388n, 395; and
528; ‘guided democracy’, 302, 305-10; Czechs, 448
fall from power, 310 Umberto, Crown Prince, of Italy: Regent, 51,
Sumartojo, 293 52, 54
Sun Yat-sen, 343 Unden, Oesten, 194n
Suslov, M. A., 387n; and Hungary, 413, 419, Untung, Lt. Col., 308
421 Urvalek, Josef, 432
Suzuki, Mosaburo, 315, 318, 328, 330, 339
Svoboda, General Ludvik, 171,456 Vaculik, Ludvik, 433-4; ‘Two Thousand
Svolos, Alexander, 109, 110 Words’ written by, 449-50
Szakasits, Arpad, 161, 162, 167, 413n; ed. Valiani, Leo, 56n
N e p sza va , 165 Vandervelde, Emile, 202, 322
Szalai, Andreas, 416 Vassart, Albert, 49n
Szanto, Zoltan, 422, 427 Victor Emanuel III, King of Italy, 50, 51, 52
Szelig, 167 Vilim, Blazej, 175
Szonyi, Tibor, 416 Vilner, Meir, 362, 364
Szwabbe, Stanislaw, 101 Vinogradov, Academician, 499
Vittorio, Giuseppe di, 58-9
Voinea, Serben, 116
Tagore, Rabindranath, 245n Voitec, Stefan, 116
Tagore, S., 220 Voitinsky, Gregory, 317
Tai Li, 348n Voroshilov, Marshal Klementi, 159-60
Takabatake, Motoyuki, 320 Vorrink, Koos, 205
Takano, Minoru, 336 Vos, Hein, 210
Tanner, Jack, 10-11, 156
Texler, Jean, 17 Waldbrunner, Karl, 210
Than Tun, Thakin, 256, 258, 259, 260, 262 Walecki, Henryk, 95n
Thein Pe (alias Myint), 256, 260, 261n Wallace, Henry A., 185
Thomassen, W., 141 Wang Ming, 226n
Thomson, J. S., 242 Warski, Adolf, 95n
Thorez, Maurice, 15, 27-33; in coalition Watanabe, Roo, 369
government, 34-6; and Cominform, 151— Webb, Sydney, 204
3; and NATO, 186n Werth, Alexander, 126, 154
Tigrid, Pavel, 435 Wickremasinghe, Dr S. A., 274
Tildy, Zoltan, 161 Wijono, Soerjokoesoemo, 369
Tillon, Charles, 30 Windsor, Philip, C zech oslovakia 1968 by, 442
Tiso, Father Joseph, 176 Wurmser, Andre, 466n
Tito, Josip Broz, a n d : partisans, 376-84;
founding of Cominform, 145, 149, 384-9, Xote, Koci, executed, 388
401; Krushchev, 391,415-16 & n; Greece,
110; on: Cominform, 206-7; Gottwald, Yamakawa, Hitoshi, 316n, 317
172n Yevtushenko, Yevgeni, 497-8
Togliatti, Palmiro, 45; returns, 51; ‘elastic Yoshida, Shigeru, 330
tactics’, 52-64 p a s s im ; supports strikes, Yudin, Pavel, 149n
attempted assassination, 65; and: Comin-
form, 151-2; divorce, 53n; ‘exposure* of Zagari, Mario, 60
Stalin, 396, 398-400 & n Zaisser, Wilhelm, 394
Tokuda, Kyuichi, 315, 317, 326, 328, 334-5 Zambrowski, Roman, 101
Tolbuchin, Marshal F., 83-4 Zaremba, Zygmunt, 192
Treves, Claudio, 45; ed. L ib e rta , 46 Zawadzki, Aleksander, 407, 410
Tribhuyan, King of Nepal, 279-80 Zhdanov, Andrei, 149-51, 333, 387n, 499
Trotsky, Leon, 199n, 314n, 497; on Asian Zhukov, Georgi K., 405
revolution, 215n; ‘trial’ of, 471 Zhukov, Marshal Grigori, 74
Troyanovsky, K., 219 Zinoviev, Grigori, 216, 316, 497
Truman, President Harry, and: Potsdam Con- Zulawski, Zygmunt, 102-3, 104n
ference, 76; Poland, 99, 104, 121; Rom- Zwi, Isaac Ben, 351, 353
596 Subject Index

SUBJECT IN D E X
Africa, socialist parties in, 529-30 (A.B.T.U.C.), 257; affiliation to W.F.T.U.
Albania, Soviet denunciation of, and China opposed, 264
481-2, 483 Cairo Conference (1943), 264
anti-semitism: Czech, 434-5; Soviet, 497-500 Ceylon: Independence (1948), 270
Asian National Congress, Nepali Congress elections: (1947), 272; (1952), 274, 275;
affiliates to, 280 (1956), 275; (1960, 1965, 1970), 276
Asian Socialist Conference (A.S.C.) language issues, 276-7
1st Congress (Rangoon, 1953), 366-7; C.P., 271, 273; promotes strikes, 273;
Declaration, Appendix 5, 543-7; rejection reformism, 274-5
of Communism, 370; question of nation- L.S.S.P. (Marxist), 271; M.E.P. (United
alism, 370-1 People’s Front), 276; Sinhala M a h a Sabha
Declaration on colonialism (London 1955), group, 275; Sri Lanka Freedom party
Appendix 6, 548-9 (S.L.F.P.—Socialists), 270, 271, 274, 275;
2nd Congress (Bombay, 1956), 371-4; and United National party (U.N.P.), 275;
Israeli war, 372-3 V.L.S.S.P. (Trotskyist), 274, 275, 276;
activities cease (1960), 374 Trotskyists, 271-3
atom bomb, U.S.A. monopoly of, 125 China: C.P. founded (1921), 343; risings
Austria: elections (1945), defeat of C.P., 82, suppressed (1925, 1927), 343-4; Soviet
84; Renner appointed President, 83-4; Republic in Kiangsi, 345; the ‘Long
communist uprising attempts (1947,1950), March’, 345-6
84n; C.P. and Czech invasion, 464; S.P. Japanese invasion, 346; C.P. united front
and Marxism, 206 with Chiang, 347; Stalin’s opposition to
revolution (1945-9), 477; C.P. takes power
Belgium: Labour party proposes reconstitution (1949), 347-8
of Soc. Int., (1950), 195 C.P. not invited to Cominform inauguration,
Berlin blockade, 184—5 144; Sino-Soviet Treaty and border, 478-
Buddhism and Socialism/Marxism, 243, 249- 9, 487-8; border clashes, 488-9; conquest
54 of Tibet (1950-1), 487; Soviet recalls
Bulgaria: Soviet declares war on, 117; coup technical advisers (I960), 481; war with
d 'e ta t, 117; purge of National Front, 118; India (1962), 487; and 20th Congress
elections (1946), 118-19; purge of S.D. C.P.S.U., 475, 482-3, 484-5; and 22nd
parties, 157-8; Zveno group, 117; other Congress C.P.S.U., 476, 481
political parties, 117 and: Albania, 481-2, 483; 3rd World libera-
Bund, the (Jewish S.D.), 103n, 350-1 tion movements, 485-6; Soviet ‘leading
Bureau International Socialiste (B.I.S.), 192 role’, 480; Soviet ‘co-existence’ policy,
Burma: Buddhism and Socialism/Marxism, 479-80, 486
249-54; freedom movement, 248; ‘Interim ‘co-existence’ policy: Stalin on (1949), 185; and
Programme’ (democratic), 252-3; Thakin China, 479-80, 486
party (1930s), 256; rising in Rangoon Cominform (Communist Information Bureau),
(1938), 256-7 67, 116, 144-81, 483, 484; founding Mani-
Japanese occupation, 257-9; and C.P., 257; festo (1947), Appendix 7, 549-51; effect on
and socialists, 257; and ‘independence’, West, 183; Belgrade first HQ, 150; on
258 right wing Socialists, 151; change of line
Provisional government (1946), 260; Con- from coalitions, 151, see also individual
stituent Assembly and Independence, 252, C.P.s; and Yugoslavia, 150, 375, 385-7;
261 ceases activities (1956), 391,483-4
elections: (1951), 267; (1956), 242, 268; F or a L a stin g P ea ce an d f o r a P eo p le's D e m o -
(1960), 269 cra cy (periodical), 149n; on Soc. Int.,
eaves British Commonwealth, 265; Marxist 206-7
parties predominate, 242; All-Burma Comintern (Communist International), 48;
Peasants’ Organization formed, 257; attacks Social Democracy (1920s), 46, 47;
merged into B.W.P.P., 267; Burma and colonies, 214-18; and World War II,
Workers’ and Peasants’ party (B.W.P.P.), 8; Stalin’s dislike of, 149; dissolved (1943),
267; National United Front (N.U.F.), 1,9, 10, 149
268 COMISCO see under Socialist Internationals
Communists: and British power, 260; split C om m unist M a n ife sto , 495, 506
(Red Flags and White Flags), 260; Comin- Communist parties, membership of, Appendix
form line change, rebellion, 262-3 1, 522, 524-7; see also individual C.P.s
Socialists: and British power, 260; resign Czechoslovakia: history, 168; (1948-63), 430-
from government (1949), 263, 268; split 7; Red Army ‘liberators’, 169; withdrawn
over Korean War, 267; united front with (1945), 173
C.P. (A.F.P.F.L.), 259 elections: (1946), 170, 174; (1948), 180
Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League National Front coalition government, 170-7
(A.F.P.F.L.—united front), 259; expels KoSice Programme for social reform, 171-3;
B.W.P.P., 267; split, 268-9 and Marshall Aid, 148, 173-4; Slovakian
Burma Socialist Programme (Ne Win party), separatism, 176
270; The B urm ese W a y to S o cia lism (Ne coup d 'e ta t (1948), 177-80; effect on West
Win manifesto), 269 182-4
All-Burma Trade ' Union Congress Catholic People’s party, 168
 Subject Index 597
Czechoslovakia—cont. C onfederation Frangaise d es T ravailleurs
Communist party (K.S.C.): and pre-war C h retien s (C.F.T.C.), 31-2
elections, 168; growth, 170; in coalition, F orce O uvriere (F.O.), 43, 154
170-7 war in Indo-China, 40; uprising in Madagas-
National Socialist party, 168 car, 40; students’ revolt (1968) and
S.D. party (C.S.D.): and pre-war elections, C.G.T., 505 ^
169; and fusion with C.P., 174—80; Soc. C o m b a t , 33; L a C ro ix , 32; V E p o q u e , 30;
Ink withdraws recognition, 188 V H o m m e L ib r e , 17; V H u m a n ite , 26, 31;
‘Prague Spring’, 514-15; writers’ protest L e P opu laire , 17, 27; S ocialism e e t
(1967), 433-5; anti-zionism and anti- L ib e rte , 17
semitism, 434-5; plans for army insurrec- Fulton speech of Churchill, 123-5
tion, 436, 445-6; Novotny replaced by
Dubcek, 436-7, 445; ‘Action Programme Germany: (1933-45), 68-9; ‘Prague Manifesto
of the Party’ (C.P.), 429-30, 437-44, 452; of 1934’ (S.D.), 69, 72; ‘Buchenwald
and pluralism, 441; Social Democrats’ Manifesto’ (S.D.), 70; ‘conference of the
position, 441-2; K ulturny Z iv o t on demo- sixty’ (1945), 85; parties not permitted at
cracy, 442; hate of Germans, 448, 451; national level (1946), 81-2; ballot on
friendship with Soviet, 448; Soviet inter- unification (1946), 86-7
vention, 446-55; manifesto, ‘Two Thous- peace treaty negotiations (partition, repara-
and Words’, 449-50; Cierna Conference, tions), 126—8
453-4; ‘peace of Bratislava’, 454; Soviet elections, Berlin Municipal (1946), 88-9
invasion (1968), 455-60; proclamation Berlin Blockade, 184-5
against invasion, 456-9; C.P. secret workers’ uprising in G.D.R., 392-5
Extraordinary 14th Congress, 458-9, Communist party: ‘Block of Fighting
Appendix 8, 551-2; Trades Unions and Democracy’, 74; democratic policies, 74-
invasion, 459; ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, 463-4, 6; against unification, 77-8; change of
466; purge of ‘revisionists’, 472-4 line, for unification, 80; not invited to
Denmark and rearmament (1948), 184 Cominform inauguration, 144
Social Democratic party (S.P.D.): and
Egypt: Suez War (1956), 372-3 ‘Unity party’, 68-90; and S.E.D., 393-4;
membership in Soviet Zone, 88; admission
Finland, 186-7n to Soc. Int. (1945-7), 134, 138-42; and
France: anti-fascist united front (1934), 49; Frankfurt Congress (1951), 196-7; Godes-
co m ite d'en ten te (C.P. and Socialists), 28, berg Conference (1959), 512n
37; C o m ite d 'A c tio n S o c ia liste (C.A.S.), Socialist Unity party (S.E.D.): in Soviet
17- 18; C onseil N a tio n a l de la R esistan ce Zone, 88-9; in Western Zones, 89-90
(C.N.R.), Charter of, 20, 27, 31; F edera- Great Britain: ‘Ten Hours Act’ (1847), 509-10
tion L ib e ra tio n N o r d (Socialists), 17; Labour party: and Soc. Int., 133— 43; and
F rancs-Tireurs P a rtisa n s Frangais reunification of socialists, 2, 5-6; unity
(F.T.P.F.), 19; M a q u is , 19; m ilices p a trio - talks with communists, 5-10; and Marx-
tiques dissolved, 30-1; F ront N a tio n a l
(F.N.), 19; trade unions and World War ism, 204-5; protest at Greece interven-
tion, 109
II, 20 Labour government (1945-51), 10,157, 508;
elections: (1945), 25, 31, 38; (1945 local), and Marshall Plan, 146-7; liberation of
33n; (1946), 35,37,38; Presidential (1947), colonies, 157
36 Communist party: election failure (1945),
new constitution, 34-6; Tripartism (coali- 10; and unity talks with Labour Party,
tion governments), 25— 41 6—10; and Cominform line change, 156
Communist party: and World War II, 15-16, Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.): declares
18- 20; in coalition governments, 25-41; solidarity with Soviet Union (1941), 11-
and amalgamation with Socialists, 26-9, 12; and formation of W.F.T.U., 11-13
37; reformism (after 1945), 505; against M a n ch ester G uardian on Greece, 110; The
strikes (1945-6), 30, 39-40, 42-4; and T im es, 35; on 1st International, 491; on
C.G.T., 20-1; initial acceptance of Mar- Greece, 110; criticizes Fulton speech, 125
shall Plan, 148; Cominform line change Greece: British intervention, 106—11; pro-
(1947), 43-4, 153-5; strikes (1947-8), visional government (1944), 106-7; army
153— 4, 184; and Czech invasion, 466n anti-royalist mutiny, 106; King George’s
M o u vem en t R epublicain P opulaire (M.R.P.),
21, 31, 36, 39 return, 106-7, 108, 111; civil war, 109-10;
P a rti S o cia liste: S ectio n Frangaise de V Inter-
Treaty of Varkiza (1945), 110; election
nationale o u v ritre (S.F.I.O.) formed (1946), 111; socialist party dissolved, 111-
(1905), 22-3 12; British withdrawal, 129
P a rti S o cia liste: and World War II, 15-20;
E.A.M. (National Liberation Front), 106—
and Marxism, 19-24, 38, 205-6; in coali- 11; E.L.A.S. (National People’s Army of
tion governments, 25-44; on C.P. Liberation), 106-10; C.P. not invited to
amalgamation, 26-9, 37; anti-clericalism, Cominform inauguration, 144; and ‘Tru-
21-2 man Doctrine’, 129
Radical Socialists, 33
R assem blem en t du P euple F rangais (R.P.F.— Hinduism and Socialism, 242-8
Gaullists), 39 Holland: Labour party (P a rtij van der A r b e id ),
C onfederation G enerale du T ra va il (C.G.T.): 205; and churches, 208-9
and C.P., 20-1, 32; and strikes (1946), 37; Hungary: Soviet occupation, 159-67; Peace
(1947-8), 39-40, 43; split over strikes, Treaty (1947), 163; elections: (1944), 160;
154- 5 (1945), 161; (1947) rigged, 166; provisonal
598 Subject Index
Hungary—cont. by Sukarno, and M arh aen ism , 289; banned
government (1944), 159-60; coalition (1929), 290
governments, 160^-7 People’s Democratic Front (F.D.R.—com-
Communist party: history, 160-1; destruc- munist dominated), 293; Cominform
tion of other parties, 161-8; and 20th switch, Madiun rebellion, 294-6, 299
Congress C.P.S.U., 412-14 P esindo (armed youth organizations), 291,
S.D.P. (Socialists), 161-4; destroyed, 164-7 292, 293, 294; S e ra k a t Islam (S.I.), 286-7
Soviet dismissal of Rakosi, 415-16; revolu- Socialist party, 291, 301; infiltration by C.P.,
tion, 416-27; Nagy declares for demo- 292; split to P.S.I., 293; restructured
cracy, 420 (1950), 297, 303-4; declaration of prin-
N e p sza va (Socialist journal), 165 ciples, 298
S za b a d N ep on revolt, 426-7 other parties and trade unions, 300, 304
International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions (I.C.F.T.U.) formed (1949), 14
India: Hinduism and Socialism, 242-8 International General Council of Socialist
Independence (1947), 230; elections: (1951), Women, 198
237-8; (1957), 239; (1967), 240 International Socialist Conference (COMISCO)
war with China (1962), 487 see under Socialist Internationals
Communist party: founded, 220-1; opposi- In tern ational S o c ia list Forum (ed. Braunthal),
tion to Congress, 225-6; switch to support, 133n
227; and World War II policy switch, International Union of Socialist Youth, 197,
229-30; Cominform switch, revolutionary 198
activities, 231-3; re-switch to parliamen- Internationals, see Cominform, Comintern a n d
tary activity, 233-4; numbers (1948-54), Socialist Internationals
233n; and elections, 237-9; split, 240-1; Islam and Marxism in Indonesia, 289
Vanguard o f Indian Independence (later Israel: Zionism, 349-54; elections (1961), 358,
M a sse s o f India , periodical), 219-20; The 363; ‘Suez War’ (1956), Soc. Int. disap-
P eo p le's W ar , 230 proval of, 372-3
Indian National Congress, 221; and World the ‘Bund’ 103n, 350; rejection of Zionism,
War II (‘Quit India’ movement), 228, 230; 351
move to socialist policies, 238 Communist party: banned till 1941, 358;
first socialist groups, 221-2 anti-Zionist, 359; supports Soviet Arab
Congress Socialist party (C.S.P.), founded policy, 359-65; and Arab revolt (1936-9),
1934, 223; Bolshevik Marxist, 223-5; 359-61
opposed by C.P., 226; and united front, H istra d u t , 352-63 p a s s im ; economic enter-
227-8; and World War II, 228; banned, prises, 354 & n
230; C ongress S o cia list (weekly), 223 M.A.P.A.I., 356-8; and partition, 362-3;
Socialist party: Kanpur Conference (1947), united with M.A.P.A.M. in Labour party,
break with Congress, growth of party, 365
234-5; opts for democratic socialism, 236; M.A.P.A.M., 357-8, 365
merged to Praja Socialist party, 236 P o a le Z ion (Socialist Zionists), 351-3
Praja Socialist party (K.M.P.P.): and demo- Italy: (1920-43), 45-50, 55; (1943-4), 50, 56;
cratic socialism, 236-7; membership, 237; (1946), 55, 62, 190; (1948), 63
in elections, split, 237-9; Gandhi’s influ- Lateran Treaty continued, 53-4
ence on, 247— 8; Marxism, 247; and Committee of National Liberation (C.N.L.),
bhoodan movement, 246-8 50, 51, 54
trade unions split, 235 Communist party: leadership of under-
Indo-Chinese war with France, 40 ground, 50-2; change of line after
Indonesia: village collectivist society, 284; Mussolini’s fall, ‘elastic tactics’, 51-9; con-
Dutch colonial rule, 283, 296-7; Japanese trol of C.G.L., 57; of C.G.I.L., 58-9;
occupation, 300; Independence in Dutch- leaves coalition government (1947), 65;
Indonesian Union, 300-1; full indepen- unwilling to adopt Cominform line
dence (1949), 292, 296-7; constitution, change, 152-3; and 20th Congress
285-6; elections: (1952, 1955), 304-5&n; C.P.S.U., 398-401; and Czech invasion,
(Java 1957), 307; army coup d 'e ta t (1956), 466n
307-10 C oncentrazione A n tifa sc ista , 46; C ritica
B udi U tom o (Marxist cultural movement), S o cia le group, 60, 61, 62
284 D em o cra zia C ristian a (Christian Demo-
Communist party (P.K.I.), 286-7; ‘leftist crats, 51, 53
deviation’ and insurrection (1926), party F ronte D em o cra tico P opolare (Democratic
banned, 287-9; reconstituted (1945), 291; People’s Front), 55, 64
infiltrates socialists, 292-3; forms People’s In izia tiva S o cia lista (Young Turks), 60, 61,
Democratic Front (F.D.R.), 293; Madiun 62
rebellion, 294-6; reconstructed (1950), Maximalists (P a rtito S o cia lista M assim a -
298-9; growth and influence, 300-2; lista ), 46, 47, 48
nationalism, 302-3; coalition with ‘guided M o vim en to S ociale Italian o (Fascists), 65
democracy* of Sukarno, 306-7; army P a rtito d 'A zio n e , 51
opposition to, 307-8; army coup d 'e ta t P a rtito S ocialista dei L a v o ra to ri Italian i
and mass murder of communists, 308-10; (P.S.L.I.), 47, 63-4
H arian R a k ja t (journal), 309 P a rtito S o cia lista Italian o(P.S.I.), 48, 63, 64;
Islamic ‘Modernist* movement, 284-5; Isla- Congress (1945), 60-2; and pact with C.P.,
mic party (M a sju m i ), 285, 293; I.S.D.V. 190; expelled from Soc. Int., 190-1; and
(Marxist) becomes C.P., 286-7 anti-clericalism, 190-1
Nationalist party (P.N.I.—Socialist): formed P a rtito S o cia lista U nitario, 46, 47, 48
 Subject Index 599
Italy—cont. Nazi-Soviet pact, 1,49, 500; and C.P.s, 15; and
P opulari (Catholic People’s party), 51 British C.P., 7-8
C onfederazione G enerale d e l L a vo ro (C.G.L.), Nepal: first strike, 278-9; Democratic Con-
46; C.P. domination of, 57; and Pact of gress, armed revolution with King, 279-
Rome, 58 80; Delhi Pact, 280, 282; elections (1959),
C onfederazione G enerale Ita lia n a d e l L a vo ro 280, 282; democratic socialist government
(C.G.I.L.), 58, 66; and strikes (1948), (1959-60), 282; King’s coup d 'e ta t , 282
65-6; Catholics leave, 66 Communist party, 280, 281; Chinese
C onfederazione Italian a d ei L a vo ra to ri influence on, 281
(C.I.L.—Catholics), 57; and Pact of Nepali Congress (socialist), 278-82; affilia-
Rome, 58 tion to Asian Socialist Congress, 280;
F ederazione Italian a d e l L a vo ro (F.I.L.), 66 Birjang Conference Manifesto, 280-1
L ib e ra C onfederazione Italian a d e l L a vo ro other parties, 280
(L.C.G.I.L.—Catholic), 66 Norway and rearmament (1948), 184
Avanti!, 48, 61, 64; C o m p iti N u ovi (periodi-
cal) and ‘Fusionists’, 60-1; G iu stizia e Outer Mongolia, Sino-Soviet quarrel over, 478
L ib e rta , 46, 51; L ib e rta , 46; N uovo
A va n ti /, 48-50; Q u arto S ta to , 61; U nit a, Persia: insurrection in Azerbaijan, 122; Soviet
59 activities in, 122-3; Tudeh party (C.P.),
122
Japan: history (1868-1945), 311-23 Poland: and Yalta, 93-5, 97, 103-4; ‘Lublin’
elections: (1928), 318; (1937), 324; (1946), government, 94; ‘London’ government,
329; (1949), 332; (1950, 1952, 1955, 1958), 94; hatred of Russia, 95; Katyn massacre,
336, 337, 338; (1960), 341 94n; Warsaw Rising, 96-7; and Catholics,
Fascism, 320-4; army conspiracy, P.M. 98, 100; and Potsdam Conference, 100,
murdered, 321 104, 120-1
Chinese war (1937), Pearl Harbor (1941), ‘Provisional government of National Unity’
surrender (1945), 324-5 (1945), 99; elections (1947), 103; initial
occupation by S.C.A.P. (Supreme Com- acceptance of Marshall Plan, 148; and
mander of the Allied Powers), 325, 327, 20th Congress C.P.S.U., 404-5; insurrec-
328, 332-3; peace treaty and security pact tion (1956), 405-6; recall of Gomulka
(1951) , 337-8 (1956), 405-11
Communist party: promoted by Comintern, the ‘Bund’ (Jewish S.D.s), 103n; Polish
315-16; suppressed, 316-17, 318, 319-20; People’s party (P.S.L.), 100-1
reconstituted, 325; anti-S.D., 326; co- Polish Socialist party (P.P.S.), 101-2;
operation with S.D. (‘peaceful revolu- COMISCO recognition of, 102; Soc. Int.
tion’), 326-7; Cominform switch delayed, appeal to, 148; purged and merged with
327, 333—5; and United Front, 329—31; C.P., 157-8
20th Congress switch, 336-7 Polish Workers’ party (P.P.R—Communist),
Social Democratic party: early Socialist lOOn, 101
parties, anarcho-syndicalism, 313—14; United Polish Workers’ party (P.Z.P.R.),
suppressed, 317; split over support for 103
Fascism, 321; new S.D. party formed, Workers’ party of Polish Socialists
325; relations with trade unions, 328; and (R.P.P.S.), 101-2
united front, 330-1; in coalition govern- Potsdam Conference, 100, 104, 119
ment, 331-2; split over peace treaty and Foreign Ministers’ Peace Treaty Confer-
rearmament, 337-8, 340—1; ‘Congress of ences: (London 1945), 121-2; (Moscow
Reunification’ (1955), 338-9 1945), 123; (Paris 1946), 127-8
Democratic Socialist party (1960), 340-1 and: Germany, 81; Japan, 325; Korea, 264-
Socialist Mass party (1932), 323-4 5; Poland (Oder-Neisse line), 100, 104,
trade unions: early, 318; (1945), 328; S.D. 120-1
and C.P. federations, 329; and S.D.
(1952) , 338 Red International of Labour Unions
(R.I.L.U.), 11
Korean war, 264-7 ‘revisionism’ and ‘Prague Spring’, 466-74
Romania: R&descu overthrown, 112-13;
Labour and Socialist International see Socialist King Michael forms new government,
Internationals 112- 13; Soviet orders new government,
Leninism and social movements, 493-5 113- 14; elections (1946), 114-15, 116
National Democratic Front (F.N.D.), 113—
Madagascar, uprising in, 40 16; Romanian Labour party, 116; Social
Manchuria, Soviet occupation of, 476-7 Democratic party infiltrated, split by C.P.,
Marshall Plan: and founding of Cominform, 115-16; other political parties, 113-14
145, 150-1; and Czechs, 173-4
Marxism: Socialist movements, 492-5, 506; Socialism: definitions, 492; influence in 20th
Austrian S.P., 206; British Labour party, century, 515-19
204-5; and Buddhism, 243, 249-54; Socialist Internationals:
French Socialists, 19-24, 38, 205-6; and Congresses (1864-1964), 561-4
Hinduism, 242-8; Indian Socialist party, 1st International, 503, 506, 509-10
247; Indonesia and Islam, 289; Soc. Int., 2nd International (Labour and Socialist
194, 199, 202-6; Sweden, 205 International): and World War I, 506-8;
international questions ‘binding’, 195;
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and Asia, 213-14, 366, 368; and Italian
185-6 Socialists (1930), 48-9; and Japanese
 600 Subject Index
Socialist Internationals—com . battle of Stalingrad, 5, 51; occupation of
2nd International—corn. Manchuria, 476-7; socialist unity talks
Socialists, 322n; support for Soviet Union (1942-6), 5-6; occupation of East Ger-
(1923), 193-4; acceptance of Zionists, many, 78-90; demands colony, 121-2;
352-3; ended by World War II (1940), 1, demands Dardanelles base, 123; and
133 Fulton speech, 124-5; and Marshall Plan,
Socialist International Conferences: 147-8; annexations, 157; co-existence
(London 1945), 133-5; (Clacton 1946), policy, 479-80, 486; and Albania, 481-2,
135-8; (Bournemouth 1946), 138-40; 483
(Zurich 1947), 140-2; (Antwerp 1947), 20th Congress C.P.S.U., exposure of Stalin,
142-3, 188n; (London 1948), 187, 188-9, 396-403; and China, 475, 482-3; and
190; (Vienna 1948), 189, 190; (Clacton united front with S.D.s, 401-2
1948), 191; (Baarn, Holland 1949), 191-2; 22nd Congress C.P.S.U., and China, 476,
(Copenhagen 1950), 204; (London 1951), 481
196; (Vienna 1951), 210 friendship with India, 487; ‘leading role’,
Socialist Information and Liaison Office 480; ‘hegemony’, 501-2
(S.I.L.O.) formed, 138; becomes Izvestia : on Greece, 110; on colonies, 215;
COMISCO, 142 N ew T im es on atom bomb, 125; P ra vd a
COMISCO (Committee of International on: co-existence, 185; Greece, 110;
Socialist Conferences) formed (1947), 142 Hungarian revolt, 426; ‘Prague Spring’,
B ureau In tern a tio n a l S o cia liste (B.I.S.), 453, 460-2; Sino-Soviet border, 487—8;
192 TASS on Czech invasion, 457; T ru d on
and: British Labour party, 133-43; friend- W.F.T.U., 13-14
ship with Soviet Union (1945), 135-6; students’ revolts, 514; in France, 505
German S.P.D. (1946-7), 139-42; emigre Sweden: rearmament (1948), 184; C.P. and
Socialists (1946— 9), 191-2; East European Czech invasion, 464; S.D. against NATO,
parties, 158-9; East-West differences over 194n; Socialists and Marxism, 205
democracy, 136-8, 508; Poland, 102; Switzerland: S.D. against NATO, 194n
Cominform, 187-9; resolution on
‘people’s democracies’, 189-90, 202; sus- ‘Truman Doctrine’ (1946), 1, 123, 129-36, 187;
pends, expels Italian P.S.I. (1948— 9), 64, and founding of Cominform, 145,150,159
190-1; Western Union (1948), 192-4; Turkey: Communist party (1920-5), 216—18
NATO (1948), 194; Marxism (1950), 204;
supports U.N. in Korea (1950), 266; U.S.A.: protests at British intervention in
resolution, co-operation ‘not binding’, Greece, 109-10; Truman memorandum
based on consent (1951), 196; religion and on Soviet Union (1946), 123, see also
churches (Bentveld 1953), 207-9, Appen- ‘Truman Doctrine’; and peace treaty with
dix 3, 537-8
3rd International (Socialist International) Germany, 127-8; ending of Lend-Lease,
Frankfurt Congress (1951), 196-204; 128, 155; and Prague coup d 'e ta t , 183-4
Declaration, 199-208, Appendix 2, 532-7;
and: Marxism, 199, 202-6; democracy, Welfare State, 510
201; capitalism, 200-1 ‘Western Union’, Treaty of Brussels (1948),
2nd Congress (Milan 1952), declaration on 184, 192-4
underdeveloped territories, 210-11, App- World Federation of Trade Unions (W.F.T.U.):
endix 4, 538-43; colonialism, 211-12 formation and C.P. dominance, 11-14
3rd Congress (Stockholm 1953) on: ‘World Plan for Mutual Aid’, 211
colonialism, 211-12; uprising in East World Trades Union Conference (1945), 12-14
Germany, 395
4th Congress (London 1955), declaration Yalta Conference decisions, 92
on colonialism, Appendix 6, 548-9 on: zones of influence, 104-5 & n, 119,158;
Declaration (Oslo 1962), Appendix 9, Bulgaria, 118; democracy in East Europe,
552— 60 159, 186; Germany, 120; Greece, 105;
Japanese membership, 341; relations with Poland, 93-5, 97, 103-4
Yugoslavia, 390-1; and nationalization, Yugoslavia: German invasion and partisans,
511-13; turns down Soviet proposals for 377- 83; Serbo-Croat religious differences,
unity (1956), 401-3; and Hungarian revolt 378- 9; A.V.N.O.J. founded by Tito, 379;
(1956), 425; and Czech invasion, 464; Tito forms provisional government, 381;
membership (1970), Appendix 1, 521-4 and Cominform, 145, 375, 385-7; quarrels
Socialist parties, Appendix 1, 521—31 with Stalin, 3, 381-3, 386—8; elections to
Socialist Union of Central-Eastern Europe, 192 constituent assembly, 383; new constitu-
Socialist Zionist World Federation, refusal and tion (1953), 389; Krushchev visit (1955),
acceptance by 2nd International, 352-3 391; relations with Soc. Int., 390-1
Soviet Union: Bolshevik revolution (1917):
influence of, 517-18; recognition by Zionism: and: 2nd International, 352-3;
Socialists, 502-3; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1, 49, Czechs, 434-5; Israel C.P., 359-65; Soviet
500; change of line to anti-fasdsm, 49; Union, 499-500