A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were watching a movie (or something) that was set during the Cold War. One of the characters was stridently, almost violently anti-Communist, which my boyfriend and I found a bit baffling. We’re both in our late 20s; our first awareness of Communism was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and later, the Soviet Union. Growing up after the cold war was over, it’s hard for us to understand what the big deal was. Neither of us ever felt threatened by Communism, and yet many people obviously did, in a way that seems to have gone beyond the fear of a nuclear war. Can some of you who lived during the height of the Cold War help me understand what was so threatening about Communism, and why some people were so strongly anti-Communist?
Imagine you grew up in the Great Depression. The entire world-wide economy is in crisis, the dust bowl has ruined a billion acres of crops, the American west is experiencing a human migration on a scale unseen since the Indian wars, and some assface over in Europe is rattling his saber.
Now imagine you’ve just spent four years of your life fighting a war on a scale never seen before (or since.) There is unprecedented destruction, hundreds of millions of people dead, the former British Empire dissolving, and the US and Soviet Union stand alone as the only remaining superpowers.
Now here’s the problem: while the US, Britain and France collaborate to rebuild western Europe into a group of economically stable democracies, the Soviet Union thrusts their ideology onto their occupied territories in Eastern Europe, kills or suppresses anybody working against them, refuses to leave (despite their earlier agreements to do so) and announces their intention to take over the world. Worse, it looks like they just might be able to do it.
Given your life experiences in this scenario, your memories of economic disaster and a somewhat unfavorable opinion of dictators, your desire to not want to fight another world war, the fact that at its height the Soviet sphere of influence engulfed nearly two billion people, they had lots nuclear weapons, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, and holy shit submarines all over the god damn place! You can see how people might succumb to a tad of paranoia.
The fact that Josef Stalin was one of the greatest mass murderers in history may have had something to do with it.
Regards,
Shodan
…
Because the Russians were going to bomb us to smithereens. We were a step away from someone pushing a button somewhere, the other side matching it, and the world as we know it gone.
Alternatively, they were a superpower who could go on the move and invade other nations, prompting a Big War that would include nuclear bombs.
I was just thinking recently what it was like to grow up like that, and I grew up in the 70s and 80s when it wasn’t even as bad.
The thing is, for most Americans, Communism was something from a textbook. Smart-sounding eccentrics (Coffee shop Communists) made it sound great. It was a theory. Asians and Europeans learned differently.
Everything the Nazis did, the Communists did in spades. But they tended to do it in far-away places behind guarded borders. It was not until the Soviets squished the Hungarians that the American Left really turned their back on Communism.
There were no newsreels dealing with the Gulag. “Reasonable” Americans can (and do) overlook the horror behind the Iron Curtain. Better-informed people were anti-Communists and have often been portrayed as nutjobs.
What — a few thousand nukes pointing at you isn’t enough?
Communism generally came bundled with authoritarianism, in practice. Not that that was a requirement of the purely economic system Marx and Engels had described. But, in the wild, the two were inevitably linked. Dictators used the rhetoric of communism, and the appeal it had to the poor and laboring classes, as leverage to overthrow governments of the day and get themselves into power. After achieving power, communist politicians generally didn’t act like they gave a damn about Marxist theory or economic fairness, and instead turned their attention to controlling anything and everything in their societies: economic output, prices, property, art, speech, thought, etc.
I remember maps of the world in my childhood (mid 1970s) that showed the communist countries and their satellites — all colored red, of course — and they certainly seemed like they might be the coming thing. If you’re a Westerner who values the economic and political freedoms we’ve grown accustomed to, then the general trend during the Cold War would certainly have been a little troubling.
Perhaps we overdid the fear thing just a bit. As it turns out, communism is a really crappy economic system that stifles creativity, growth, and incentives. It was pretty much doomed from Day One. But, we didn’t really know that at the time.
I don’t think that people feared Communism per se, it’s just that Communism is inextricably linked with brutal totalitarianism. So much so that many people think that Communism IS brutal totalitarianism.
Personally, I think Mao outdid Stalin in true numbers, but in terms of utterly insanely pointless horror I think that Pol Pot kicks both of them out of bed. Imagine being executed (after digging your own grave) for the crime of being nearsighted, or knowing how to read. Even the Nazi Final Solution had some type of sickly twisted racial improvement rationale, and The Great Leap Forward was based on a reasonable (but impossible) goal, but Year Zero was a campaign of bizarrely arbitrary mass murder.
Anyway, yeah, the Commies killed a lot of stiffs. They also built a big border–you heard a lot about the Berlin Wall, of course, but they actually built a more or less continuous border barrier across most of Central Europe–and put a hard smackdown on the Hungarians, and later the Czechs for even the most facile criticisms of COMINFORM and the Warsaw Pact. It would be equivalent to the United States having invaded France and deposed De Gaulle, replacing him with a puppet governor, for even suggesting distancing itself from NATO.
Then there was, of course, The Bomb. The US built it (albeit by borrowing a hell of a lot of talent from the UK, and a lot of that refugees from Europe) and maintained a monopoly until 1949 when the USSR displayed its own capability; as it turned out, a significant amount of information about the construction of the device was leaked from Los Alamos by two spies which contributed to the Russian atomic bomb effort (although the Russians would have built it eventually anyway). At this point, in the post-WWII environment, the Soviets were far more concerned about consolidating their position in Europe and creating a buffer zone to prevent invasion than expanding the worldwide Communist alliance, but public literature continued to espouse Marxist dogma and Communist International ideals (even though COMINTERN had been dissolved), and so the American and Western European public was looking for Reds under every bed. Evidence that the Commie menace was afoot–much of it exaggerated and often outright fabricated–was trumpeted by politically-minded people like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon who saw an opportunity to grab the public spotlight. The HUAC investigations and the Second Red Scare invoked memories of the first “scare” in the late 'Teens and early 'Twenties (Wobbly and union strikes, bomb threats, et cetera) that could destabilize the post-WWII economic boom and suburban stability.
Then came the H-Bomb (hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear fusion bomb) which had a destructive power vastly larger (and potentially unlimited) compared to mere atomic fission bombs. The United States detonated the first thermonuclear device in the “Ivy Mike” test in 1952, and then authorities claimed that it would take the Soviet Union a decade to catch up. These were painfully inedible words that had to be eaten as the Soviets then detonated a “layer cake” Sloika device (based on Andrei Sakharov’s “First Idea”) the next year, and a true multistage Teller-Ulam configuration (Sakharov’s “Third Idea”) in 1955, becoming a direct competitor to the United States in the field of Blowing Stuff Up In A Really Big Way. Fears that the Soviets would develop an ICBM delivery system–the Soviets, owing to their continued interest and development in post-WWII had a leg up in the early 'Fifties–John Kennedy rode to the Presidency on the strength of fears of a “Missile Gap”, even though as it later turned out, any advantage at the time would have been to the United States.
By the early 'Sixties, both nations had the ability to nuke each other into Third World status within the space of a few hours with little room for reflection, and continued to build arsenals and technologies (submarine launched retaliatory systems, nascent missile defense, fractional orbital bombardment delivery, satellite weapons, et cetera) that expanded the destructive capacity beyond any reasonable measure, and meanwhile funding proxy wars in Southeast Asia and Latin America as an alternative to direct face-off. It was, to Americans at least, all the fault of those dirty rat Commies (and they no doubt said the same about exploitative imperialist pigs); the lack of dialog or empathy between the two sides led to a new sort of animosity, replacing intellectual and ideological fueds and fears with one that the Commies would destroy us just because they were having a bad day. (“Your Commie has no regard for human life, not even his own.”) The Yellow Peril menace (i.e. the “fifth column” of Chinese Communists), feeding off of paranoia and racism that was still acceptable in the United States at that time, also exacerbated this from the fallacious believe that Soviet and Chinese Communists were in a strong international collusion (even though traditional cultural animosity and the Sino-Soviet Split made it more likely that they would nuke one another than cooperate in attacking Europe and America.)
By the early ‘Eightes, the ideological battle had been replaced by a bizarre competition of egos; the Russians weren’t yelling about the bourgeois and the proletariat any more, and the United States wasn’t making videos like “Make Mine Freedom!”’; instead, you had a collection of old men on the verge of senility and/or terminal illness running the US and USSR, and it seemed that they’d attack each other out of ignorant bombast (“We begin bombing in ten minutes!”) or to take everything with them. While nobody was really looking for Commies at that point (the CPUSA had pretty much imploded, Communism in Great Britain was pretty much a bad joke), the actual amount of effective espionage was as high or higher than ever before, and as it turns out the Soviets captured some pretty significant information about weapon and communications systems. So there were still a lot of reasons to fear Commies, even though the label was mostly nominal at that point.
Now that Communism has almost utterly collapsed, and with such an unanticipated rapidness that hardline Cold War hawks spent years looking for some kind of subterfuge, it all seems like a sophomoric prank; it is hard to believe anybody genuinely feared Communism, and the writings of Marx come off as a grade “C” freshman political philosophy essay. But back when the economy was really uncertain (I don’t mean the Dow losing a few hundred points but the entire economy collapsing into anarchy) and war seemed permanently imminent, Communism seemed like a genuine threat. And to the people whose countries were ruled by Communist governments, it really was.
Stranger
There was also the fact that they were officially atheist, which at least in America and other religious circles was and is regarded as the ultimate evil, justifying anything. It got fascism a great deal of support, for example.
Because it was decently likely that the USSR would destroy us and the entire planet. They were trying to sneak weapons in as close as they could get, take over our government and people, create communist states/allies throughout the world for the day that the US and them finally duked it out, etc.
We were at war, the odds of winning weren’t necessarily better than 50/50 and either outcome–having all life on the planet destroyed or the entire planet subverted by mass murdering communist regimes–wasn’t a joyous one.
What about it isn’t scary?
I almost started a thread asking the same thing a while back. I understand why people were afraid and suspicious of Russia - I mean, they had lots of nukes pointed at us, as has been stated, but that’s not really my point. Why was (and is) America so opposed to the principle of communism? I mean, in its purest and most basic “everyone works together and everyone shares everything” sense, is it really such an evil idea? True, in practice it hasn’t been implemented that way, but I do wonder why it provokes such a strong reaction, even today.
Because every single Communist regime ever includes mass murder on scales that’s right up there with the Nazis. Because they were funding Communist revolutionaries in any country that had them, and slowly increasing the number of Communist states around the planet. Because they’d go in and simply conquer more territories whenever they could.
I understand being afraid of nuclear war, but were “nuclear war” and “Communism” synonymous? Iran’s making me a bit nervous at the moment, but I’m nervous about Ahmadinejad starting a nuclear war, not taking over the world.
I didn’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t have been afraid, I’m really just trying to better understand why they were. I definitely “get it” better than I did when I started this thread. friedo, that was especially helpful in grasping where people were coming from. All those events were always treated as separate incidents in our history books, and I always thought of them that way.
And it wasn’t until the repressive Soviet response to the “Prague Spring” and the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the West that European far-left political thought abandoned Marxist dogma. After that, even the European nations that were Communist but not aligned with the Warsaw Pact tended to distance themselves from the dogma.
Stranger
Because the principle of Communism was totally unrealistic, and the practice led to some animals being more equal than others.
Something not mentioned was the stated purpose of the Communists to spread the revolution to other countries, and their funding of revolutionary movements to do it.
The wall that Stranger mentioned was a big factor. I knew a guy at work who defected from a Czech soccer team in Germany, and who could never go home. A neighbor from Hungary, I think, got divorced. His wife took his kid back, which meant that he could never see her (until the wall fell.) We went to Austria in 1980 and explored visiting Prague, but the visa and currency requirements were so absurd we soon gave up. Lots of people died trying to get out.
I often got reprint requests for papers from Eastern Europe - because they weren’t allowed free access to copiers, which made it much easier to ask the author for a copy than to get it from a friend. (This was way pre-Internet.)
It’s no accident that as soon as there was a chink in the wall, the entire thing collapsed.
WW II was a nuclear war. There is a big difference between one or two nukes, bad as that is, and every city in the country being bombed. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is the closest we ever came to war, 11 year old me was scared. Damn scared. End of the world movie todays involve ice ages and zombies - end of the world movies back then involved stuff that could easily happen, and which many people expected to happen.
What you describe is collectivism, essentially an idealization of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, i.e. that workers and doers should own their own means and be paid a dividend of profits rather than live at the pleasure of land owners and capital holders; indeed, Industrial and post-Industrial society has allowed us to naturally move away from serfdom and into a quasi-egalitarianism in which anyone can own a share of a company (stock), purchase real estate, or move residences and jobs without undue legal strictures. Few people would disagree with this in principle (though many still staunchly advocate individual profit motive and unregulated laissez faire capitalism as an economic ideal), but the ideals of Communism philosophy, as outlined by Marx, involve a common ownership of all production and real estate without choice; initially (in transitional stages) by an authoritarian State (run, of course, by benevolent-but-firm dictators and technocrats) and eventually a Stateless but self-regulating Communist anarchy in which each does what he should and takes only his own needs, like cogs in a big machine.
If the last doesn’t strike you as absurd–even natural self-organizing systems have internal conflicts and mechanisms for regulation and resolution–then you need to put down the bong and step back for a while. As for Communism, it tends to get stuck at the initial post-revolutionary steps, where the dictators tend to be no so much benevolent and the technocrats, free from success metrics (you write your own production reports with whatever the numbers ought to be plus ten percent) and peer reviews (anybody who thinks that vernalization is pseudoscientific nonsense is stripped of degrees and sent to the GULAG), are incompetent to a laughable degree. Nobody knows what “real Communism” would actually look like, because human nature and fallibility render it nothing more than a dormroom bull session fantasy.
And the average Soviet-era Russian or Ukrainian would say the same thing about the United States. And they’d have been right. The tragedy of the Cold War is how utterly unnecessary and unproductive it was for everyone involved; a wastage of human lives and talent that could have been much better utilized. But it’s like that somewhere in nearly any period of history you choose.
Stranger
The Weird One - The phrase at the time was the “Domino Effect”. As each new country fell to communism, it came one step closer to our shores. Europe may not like an American military presence now, but right after WWII, when half of Europe was divided almost overnight, the Communist menace was very real and having Americans there to keep what was left was appreciated. And Americans saw communism overtaking Asia and Europe. It was like watching the tsunami reaching your shores, and you feel like you’re the only wall for it to break on. Add to that politicians building careers on rhetoric and fear, you’ve got a national, government-sanctioned paranoia.
StG
I was under the impression that it took some time for the truth about the mass murders and starvation that occurred under Stalin and Mao to come out, such that Americans in the 60’s and 70’s wouldn’t have known much about them. Am I mistaken?
Stranger, that was an excellent and informative read.