I’m curious about people in the West who were communists before the fall of the Soviet Union.
It was clear that communist states like the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany were essentially keeping their populations prisoners.
People were always trying to escape, and when caught were punished. And even when traveling abroad for business or sports, they always had minders to make sure they don’t defect.
Didn’t this look weird to the western communists? Why would a country forcibly try to keep people from leaving? Doesn’t that say something about the success or lack thereof of communism if people want to get out and are forcibly prevented?
Were the western communists aware of this? What were their thoughts on it? Did it change anyone’s views on communism?
There was a broad cognitive dissonance about the authoritarian nature of Warsaw Pact regimes among Western Marxist advocates up until the point of the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in response to the “Prague Spring”, after which it was essentially impossible to deny the repression and abuse of populations within the Soviet/East Bloc domain. North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia/Kampuchea, Laos, et cetera were widely regarded as being culturally (and in subtext, ethnically) inferior and therefore not capable of implementing their particular versions of Marxism. Ditto for numerous African nations which frankly just adopted the trappings of Marxism purely to court the beneficence of the Soviet Union or China but without actually implementing any broad socialist government programs.
Since the end of the Cold War and Communist regimes falling out of memory, there has been a revival in the enthusiasm for neo-Marxist ideals and policy platforms, bolstered by the increasingly evident failings of “late stage capitalism”, i.e. the corruption of ‘crony’ corporate capitalism to serve the interests and protect the general well-being of their populations, notwithstanding the quite obvious corruption, lack of civil protections, and political instabilities within historical Marxist regimes, or how nearly all self-identified Communist governments gravitated toward being cults of personality in which despotic leaders installed themselves essentially for life, or at least until they were overthrown in internecine coups.
The World Wide Web and communism don’t really overlap (ignoring that the current Chinese state is still, officially, communist) so I don’t have any personal experience of talking to any Western communists during this period. However, from the odd extremist lefty that I did encounter in the late 90s/early 00’s - and so it’s reasonably likely that their life did overlap with communism - their stance seemed to generally be that the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, varying Southern American countries, etc. simply never did it right.
It would be like if I say that I’m going to give everyone free pizza, round everyone up, and then force them to work making pizzas, of which I sell 90% for profit and give them the remaining 10% just to keep them fed enough to keep working. There’s a nominal argument that they got what was promised but, realistically, it was just a scam. That doesn’t mean that I had to scam them.
The Western socialist/commie would just argue that the non-scam variant was still on the table and that, one day, humanity will actually have an opportunity to do it.
For many years, western communists stuck their heads in the sand and denied the evils of the Soviet Union. I think in the late 1950s with the De-Stalinization of the Soviet Union you started to see some western communist finally recognize how bad things really were. But there are still leftist, communist not liberals, who idealize the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other communist regimes. A few years ago I had an intern from Kazahkstan who couldn’t sing the praises of Stalin high enough. Plenty of people on the extreme left are fans of Cuba, Che Guevara, and think it’d be a good idea to give communism a try.
For some of those people, I think they’re simply opposed to the United Sates and capitalism. Supporting any regime against capitalism and the United States is simply a reflexive action for them.
My grandfather was a communist. He believed in because he had lived in the Russian empire before the revolution and couldn’t imagine communism wouldn’t be better. After coming here to America he stuck by his beliefs through the Great Depression. I’m not sure when his mind changed but after WWII much more information about Stalinism was exposed and he no longer believed in the concept. Suddenly decided he wasn’t even an atheist anymore and he became a Zionist of a sort. He and my grandmother moved to Israel in 1948 where he passed away not long after. I think he and many US communists of the 20s and 30s believed more that the utopian communist dream was something that could best be achieved here in the US and weren’t all that interested in communism as an international movement that would take over the world.
Ditto this. Communism’s evils were excused even by those who admitted them as “but it’s necessary to fight the evil capitalists!”. If you’re convinced you’re fighting Satan and the legions of Hell in order to prepare the way for the Second Coming, you can excuse a lot.
I’d date the first break in the western communists with the infallibility of the party line emanating from Moscow to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. That the very heart of the Revolution had been hijacked by a cult of personality stunned many true believers- they had to accept either that Stalin had been a liar or Khrushchev was a liar. Before that, western communists who had visited the Soviet Union and brought back horror stories were denounced as traitors and slanderers. Reports that filtered back to the west about what was going on in the USSR were the original “Fake News”- of course the mainstream media were nothing but propagandists in the capitalists’ pay (though people like Hearst and Henry Luce made this more plausible).
Even in the west there were no doubt adherents who had all along accepted that communism necessarily required the unsentimental crushing of all the regressives, holdouts and obstructionists- they just didn’t usually say this out loud to spare peoples’ sensibilities.
This is the answer, I think.
I don’t have a cite, but I remember reading a newspaper article maybe 1988-ish that interviewed a politician from the French Communist Party. France,
Italy and other western countries had active Communist parties that of course never won a majority, but has a certain low level of success: they ran in every election and had a few representatives sitting in parliament.
The interviewer asked the obvious question (How can you be so stupid as to think that communism is a good thing) And the politician answered like a kid writing a composition in high school: Communism is a great theory-- total equality for everyone, no rich people exploiting the poor, etc, etc. What’s not to like? All those bad places like Russia, Cuba, etc aren’t communist, because they aren’t upholding the ideals…So don’t look at them as examples.
Instead, look at our wonderful party here in France! We believe in equality, freedom, etc, and we will achieve it through government ownership of the means of production, while the workers unite and throw off their chains, etc, etc.
And it wasn’t just politicians: Jean Paul Sartre was a deeply respected philosopher who basically said the same thing. He proudly believed in communism as a theory, but disagreed with the politicians who had failed to implement it properly. Eventually, he openly criticized Russia, but still said that he believed in the ideals of Marxism.
Which just proves that people are weird. Even an intellectual giant like Sartre can be as blind as Trump’s supporters. And for the same reason: if you really, really, really want to believe that something is good, you convince yourself to ignore all the facts , and just talk about the theory.
I’d date it a good bit earlier. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (between Russia and Nazi Germany) was too much for quite a few.
Not, unfortunately, problems limited to communists.
The politician’s not wrong, exactly.
They’re just missing something; but it’s something major. They’re missing that actual communism apparently only works in fairly small human groups. It’s how any well functioning family works. Some communes have pulled it off for a while. But it doesn’t work on a national scale; even for small nations. It always turns into something nasty.
Neither, of course, does unrestrained capitalism. People having problems with that sometimes think communism must be the answer. But we appear to actually need something that isn’t either of them, but includes components of both.
Yes, you have to ask, “Which historical period are we discussing?” The Iron Curtain as we knew it was a post-WWII thing. That’s the big thing that really showed how bad the USSR was.
Prior to that, you had the Great Depression, and there was a lot of propaganda being broadcast, with little opportunity to refute it. I recall an interview with someone who flirted with communism in the 30s, and they made the point that US news was full of breadlines and dust bowls, while the Soviet news showed factories going full-blast. That this was just for show wasn’t immediately apparent to the viewers. People were still learning their way around mass media and mass propaganda, and so didn’t see it for what it was.
So you could see how some people would decide that the communists were better.
Yep, that is exactly what I heard from left-over commies. Those 'really were not true communism"= hmm substitute “scotsman”.
They pointed out small communist communities that seemed to work well- until the charismatic leader died.
I think a lot of it was a version of the “both-sideism” you see with MAGAts nowadays.
Sure the Soviet Union sent 100,000s of dissidents (or you know just random people who were just trying to keep their heads down and survive) to their deaths. But have you seen how the US treats labor activists, or civil rights campaigners? Both sides are just as bad as each other.
When people are suffering under the current system then anything else starts to look good by comparison. We also had a brush with facism in the 1930s both here and in Great Britain. There are a growing number of young people here in the United States who say they’re willing to give communism a shot and I think it’s because they don’t see their prospects as being all that positive under the current system.
When I was a student William Buckley gave a talk and I went out of curiosity. He made a point that has stuck with me. Once you elect a communist government you cannot unelect them That was certainly true for any communist government at that time (although were any of them actually elected?) What he failed to point out was that the same was true of any fascist government of the sort he would have been happy with. He died before Trump was elected, but I would be curious to know his reaction to that.
Anyway, I knew a couple of “communists” (socialists, really) who felt that a sufficiently democratic form of communism would have been fine. The best example might have been the original Israeli Kibbutzim, but they eventually broke up. So maybe it is impossible in practice.
A communist would say that someone who defected from communism had given in to the shallow materialist temptations of the capitalist world and would end up becoming either an exploiter or exploited. A communist would say that the communist state had invested so much into its citizens, in terms of education and so on, and that defecting was a kind of betrayal.
I think that’s the difference. It’s one thing to be a socialist or a even a small “c” communist. But there were people who were actually Communist in the sense of being affiliated with the communist party and supporter of Soviet Communism. They had to morally justify that at a time when the horrors of the Stalin regime and other communist leaders were well known.
Thanks for all the responses so far, some great points.
One question I have is: Lots of regimes in history have jailed, tortured, and killed dissidents, so that aspect of Communism is not novel. What I think is novel was the act of not letting people leave the country. Were there any regimes before the Soviet Union who tried to keep people from leaving the country, or was it the first one in history to do so? (and why does this seem like a feature of Communist regimes so far: USSR, North Korea, Cuba, and not other dictatorial regimes?)
It would be easy for a dedicated communist to rationalize that the “holding their citizens prisoner” idea was Western propaganda since there were examples of people who were allowed to leave. After the death of Stalin, dissenting writers and other “malcontents” were allowed (or persuaded) to leave just to lower internal opposition. Exit visas for Jewish emigres to Israel and the US were also relatively easy to come by. There was a saying in the USSR, “A Jewish wife is not a luxury but a means of transportation.”
No I don’t think that is unique to the Soviet Union or other communist regimes. The Nazis definitely controlled who could leave, a lot of the emigre Jewish scientists who fled the Nazis had to wrangle exit visas by nefarious means (as did Fermi from fascist Italy IIRC though he was not Jewish)
Even nowadays it’s somewhat like birthright citizenship I think. In that it’s something that western nations disagree on. IIRC Italy still requires citizens to apply for permission to leave ? Though it’s not not particularly strictly enforced?
I went to college with a young woman from a country in Africa (I’ve forgotten which one) who told me the purpose of the Berlin Wall was to keep out all the West Germans who would flood over the border if they could, because they knew how great things were in East Germany. I didn’t argue with her, because she was certain she was right.
I did wonder what she thought when the Berlin Wall fell…
Yes, for Jews, but there was no blanket “no one can leave Germany” law AFAIK
BTW, this question came about after I recently finished watching the Gentleman in Moscow TV series
The lengths people went through to orchestrate the escape of the Count’s daughter to the US via a complex plan when she was performing in Paris. The fact that they had to orchestrate an “escape” from their own country and were in danger of being caught and jailed/killed made me think, do these people realize how crazy it is to be prisoner in your own country and needing to escape at the risk of death? And this was no “Western propaganda”, these people were living it