The History of Communism – Part 5

The final collapse of Soviet communism and the current state of communism.

Continuing this essay series on the history of communism using Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, this essay will explore the final collapse of Soviet communism and the current state of communism in the world.

As McMeekin writes:

For Americans and their Cold War allies, the Tiananmen Square massacre was a rare discordant note in an otherwise triumphant year. Gorbachev and the Soviets were giving in across the board. The USSR withdrew from Afghanistan on May 15, 1989. Hungary was allowed to punch a hole in the Iron Curtain in April, and that hole widened in September when Budapest announced that East Germans could cross the Hungarian border into Austria. Moreover, the Soviets refrained from interfering as Solidarity rode to electoral triumph in Poland in June, and in August a chastened Wojciech Jaruzelski allowed it to form the first non-Communist government in Poland since World War II. Gorbachev had signaled that the “Brezhnev doctrine” was obsolete, and on October 25, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, made this official in a television interview on Good Morning America, announcing the “Frank Sinatra doctrine,” by which he meant that Eastern Bloc countries were now free to go “My Way,” that is, their own way. Gorbachev himself, on the same day, said, in a press conference in Helsinki, “I think the Brezhnev doctrine is dead.” Absent Soviet backing, even the Stasi was weakening its grip, epitomized in the resignation of DDR strongman Erich Honecker on October 18 in the face of burgeoning protests, and in the promise of his successor, Egon Krenz, to open “dialogue with the citizens.” With no sign of Soviet military intervention after the Berlin Wall was breached and dismantled by Ossis alongside West German gawkers and tourists, it did not take long for the other satellites to fall, too. In Prague, a charismatic, chain-smoking dissident playwright named Václav Havel, who had first come to fame for opposing the Soviet invasion in 1968, formed a Solidarity-style opposition group called the Civic Forum to protest a government crackdown on student protesters on November 17. His group called a general strike on November 27 and began meeting underground in beer halls, then set up headquarters in a theater called the “Magic Lantern.” The unloved Communist government of Gustáv Husák announced it would relinquish power on November 28, Husák duly resigned on December 10, and Havel was elected president on December 29. Prague’s “Velvet” or “Gentle” Revolution, as Czechs and Slovaks called it, was perhaps the least violent, and certainly the most charming, political revolution of the twentieth century … Czechs and Slovaks certainly succeeded in throwing off the shackles of Communism, but they were able to do so only because the Afghan mujahideen, armed by the United States and Pakistan, had undermined Soviet military credibility, even while the strategic pressure applied by the Reagan administration had throttled the Soviet economy. These developments had left Gorbachev so desperate for Western approval of loans and aid that he had decided not to fight for the satellites after first Poland, then Hungary, and finally East Germany resisted Soviet domination … President George H. W. Bush and subsequent US administrations, walking through the door Gorbachev left wide open by withdrawing the Red Army, plowed ahead with NATO expansion into the old DDR, the other Warsaw Pact satellites, and ultimately the former USSR republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, with fateful consequences for US-Russian relations, and Ukraine in particular.5 Nor did Gorbachev seem to have much fight in him as the Soviet economy collapsed in upon itself, all but bankrupting the Kremlin as centrifugal forces in the constituent republics put a heavy strain on the overstretched Soviet military and security forces. First Lithuania, in March 1990, and then Latvia and Estonia (March 1991) and Georgia (April 1991), declared sovereign independence, with similar resolutions on the table in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and even Belarus and Ukraine. In just the first half of 1991, the Soviet GDP declined by 10 percent outright, even as inflation hit 2–3 percent per week and the government reached its expected annual deficit of 26.6 billion rubles by the end of January. Since 1989 the State Bank of the USSR had been forced to dump gold to prop up the ruble and cover the foreign trade deficit (state dollar reserves had likewise plummeted from $15 billion to $1 billion), shipping more than 1,000 metric tons of bullion abroad; Soviet gold reserves were all gone by November 1991. Whatever wealth the Soviet state still possessed was being spirited away into private hands, with more than $150 billion transferred to Western banks by Soviet individuals between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final collapse of the USSR. Soviet Communist Party insiders and KGB agents were cashing in, fleeing the sinking Soviet ship.

Russia suffered some final humiliations:

As for the money he needed to pay the army to shore up his crumbling empire, Gorbachev’s plan was to beg the Americans to give it to him. Over breakfast in the US embassy in London that July, the president of the once-mighty Communist USSR asked the president of the country that the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal was directed against why, after he had “found 100 billion dollars to deal with one regional conflict,” meaning the Persian Gulf War fought earlier that year, the US president could not devote a similar sum to “change the Soviet Union, to allow it to reach a new state, to become an organic part of the world economy and world community not as an opposing force or threat.” After selling the Soviet position in Europe for deutsche marks, Gorbachev now wanted American dollars to surrender the Cold War. It was such a stunning and embarrassing request that President Bush, according to Chernyaev, who had already heard Gorbachev beg Bush in a similar manner three previous times that year, “turned crimson before my eyes.” Suppressing his shock and agitation, Bush quietly changed the subject. It was a no. Cleverly, Gorbachev’s main political rival, Boris Yeltsin, had attached a rider to the March referendum allowing for the direct election of a Russian president, who might soon rival Gorbachev’s authority as Soviet president. The dual referendum passed, and Yeltsin was elected with an impressive majority of 57 percent on the first ballot on June 12, 1991. On July 10, Yeltsin was sworn in as president in a traditional Kremlin ceremony presided over by the Orthodox patriarch. His inauguration speech, Gorbachev’s aide Chernyaev observed, “had something of Holy Vladimir the Baptizer,” with scarcely a nod to Soviet Communist themes, not even the “Great Patriotic War” with Nazi Germany … So dramatic were the scenes in Moscow in the thwarted August 1991 coup that they came to define, for most Americans and Europeans, the triumph of “freedom” over Communist dictatorship: a heroic mass protest, channeled by a popular elected president, had taken down the USSR. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the image of Yeltsin bellowing on the tank provides a neat bookend to the Cold War and the history of Communism, a kind of retort to the Tiananmen Square massacre that kept the CCP in power in China. In the early triumphalism of the Yeltsin era, the Russian Communist Party was even forced to defend itself in the courtroom in a trial conducted between August and October 1992, much of it televised. In an act of sublime symbolism, the Yeltsin government called in as expert witness on the legality (or criminality) of the Soviet Communist Party a famously anti-Communist American historian, Richard Pipes. Pipes had worked as an adviser to the Reagan administration during the years of Poland’s Solidarity crisis in the early 1980s, and his best-selling history of the Russian Revolution, published in 1990, had made him a household name. In part owing to this heady experience, Pipes later opened a short popular history by declaring that he was writing not only “an introduction to Communism” but, “at the same time, its obituary.” As the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it still more grandly in a 1992 bestseller, the Western victory in the Cold War marked “the end of history,” with the demise of Communism marking “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution,” as Western liberal democracy was revealed to be “the final form of human government.”

McMeekin summarizes the arc of communism over its relatively short history:

Communism had conquered Russia and its borderlands, after all, not by popular acclamation—the Bolsheviks lost the only genuine democratic poll contested in November 1917—but by the sword, and their regime vanished once the sword shattered. In China, the sword was still there, and so the CCP stayed in power after the supposed “end of history” in 1989, as it does to this day. So did Communist parties ruling by the sword in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos (though mercifully not in Cambodia, where the monarchy was reinstated in 1993). Although an outside observer, whether sympathetic or hostile, might object that private firms, both domestic and foreign, are active on the ground in China and Vietnam (less so in Cuba, Laos, and North Korea), thus violating the core Marxist premise of state control of “the means of production,” there was never a time in the history of Soviet Communism when this was not true—not even the high Stalinist years of the 1930s, when American investors and engineers dominated Soviet metallurgy and heavy industry. China and Cambodia, in the feverish years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, came closer to abolishing private economic activity and “bourgeois” family life altogether, but the civilizational collapse that resulted discredited these extreme literal-minded interpretations of Marxism. What made the USSR “Communist” is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba: rule by a single-party dictatorship that allows no legal opposition parties, that claims to direct and control the entire economy, that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail. Who are we to argue that we know better than they do? To be sure, there is considerable variation between Communist regimes today. North Korea remains the most Stalinist (or Maoist) dictatorship: public executions are common, and people can still be arrested for possessing forbidden “capitalist” items, such as American DVDs or video players, or for offenses such as butchering cows (owned by the state) without permission. Cuba, despite suffering a similar collapse in living standards as North Korea after Soviet subsidies amounting to some $4.5 billion a year dried up in the Gorbachev era, achieved modest improvements in living standards once tourism resumed, reaching $10,000 in per capita income today—but the country is still desperately poor. One of the saddest features of the post-Soviet Cuban Communist economy is the ubiquity of jiniterismo, or what is sometimes called “sex tourism,” although this does not always involve prostitution. As the Frommer’s travel website explained in 2023, “Travelers of both genders and any sexual persuasion will encounter constant offers for companionship, and usually more. In some cases, the terms are quite clear and a cash value is set. In others, the jinetera or jinetero is just looking for some restaurant meals, drinks, store-bought clothing, food, [and] daily necessities.” Communist Laos and Vietnam do not share Cuba’s reputation for bottom-feeding sex tourism, but on paper they are even poorer than Cuba, boasting per capita annual incomes of only $2,000 despite native reputations for industriousness—better than the Asian Communist hermit kingdom of North Korea ($1,300), but a fraction of that of neighboring “capitalist” Thailand ($5,640).

McMeekin concludes by singling out China, which may not have surpassed America’s economic strength, but has started to strategically sap its influence around the world:

China is the most interesting case of all. In terms of raw GDP, after three decades of near double-digit or higher annual growth rates it now boasts the second-largest (or by some estimates the largest) economy in the world, with output of $18 trillion reported for 2022. This growth has been fueled both by Western investment and by the “outsourcing” of much of the American manufacturing base to China—from plastic toys and trinkets to household appliances, consumer electronics, and other high-end products. Even so, Chinese per capita incomes, even by official figures, are still five times lower than in the United States (c. $12,000 vs. $70,000, as of 2021 World Bank estimates, although the ratio is improving). So much of the data is opaque that there is really no way of knowing for sure how Chinese output and efficiency compares to American or Western counterparts, but the trend line of Chinese economic growth is impossible to ignore.14 More ominously for westerners, Chinese Communism has proved to be nearly as influential in the West as the Soviet version was at its various peaks, albeit with a critical difference: the Chinese model has been less successful than the Soviet one in the purely political sense of public relations. Not only has the tacit (if not official) abandonment of the “classless society” ideal since Deng’s market reforms been illustrated by the conspicuous consumption of Chinese elites, but Chinese human rights abuses have been accorded greater publicity. Those who have been targeted include religious groups, such as Falun Gong; the Uighur population; and, more recently, dissidents in Hong Kong, who have been CCP subjects since 1997. Few hard-core Western Communists, and fewer still progressive reformers and women’s rights activists, look to Beijing today for inspiration in the way so many did to Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, or again in the 1970s and 1980s … Still, in terms of raw economic power and the institutional and often personal leverage that comes with it, the CCP has been more successful than the Soviets ever were. Whether in buying up Western politicians, firms, and real estate; inviting Western aerospace companies, such as Boeing, to outsource sensitive manufacturing processes to China; sending students to top science programs in the United States and Europe and investing in research laboratories and “Confucian Institutes” in American universities; or simply poaching Western talent with generous salary offers, CCP leaders have relentlessly leveraged their economic power. From Hollywood studios to higher ed, from the American retail behemoth Walmart to the 5G telecommunications giant Huawei, from the search engine Google to the National Basketball Association (NBA), entities controlled by or kowtowing to the CCP, owing to the strategic stakes it holds in Western firms, or simply its control over access to the giant Chinese market, now dominate much of Western economic and social life. However striking its apparent success, the China model is not entirely new. We should not forget that the original Soviet Five-Year Plans, aimed at facilitating Stalin’s hypertrophic arms buildup to prepare for war with the capitalist world, depended heavily on importing Western technology and hiring “capitalist” engineers, managers, and even agronomists (such as the “Wheat King” of Montana, who helped design the first kolkhoz). Even the most famous “Soviet” weapon of the Second World War, the T-34 tank, rode on a suspension designed by the US engineer J. Walter Christie (Stalin purchased the patent for it in 1930). Stalin’s master aviation spy Stanislav Shumovsky placed agents in all the leading US aviation firms in the 1930s, from Douglas to Bell Aircraft to Wright Aeronautical, and these agents copied, stole, or reverse-engineered the designs on which most of the Soviet air force was based. In view of the horrendous human rights abuses in this era of high Stalinism, from the mass arrests of nepmen to the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and the Gulag, the US government might have blocked some or all of this industrial espionage and technology transfer, but owing to a mixture of naïveté and Soviet influence operations in the State Department, Treasury, and White House, it did not. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Roosevelt administration let the Soviets “requisition” whatever they needed from US war industries free of charge—including enriched uranium, deuterium oxide (“heavy water”), and the other materials used to jump-start Stalin’s atomic bomb program. The Soviet Communist superpower that contested the Cold War and brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 could not have emerged without the contributions, both voluntary and involuntary, of American capitalists.

McMeekin also describes the sort of influence China has over the rest of the world in virtue of its command — for good or ill — over such large portions of the world economy:

Bill Clinton, ushered through the US-China Relation Act of 2000 granting Communist China permanent normal trade relations status, which made China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) possible under President George W. Bush in 2001. In the détente years, the Jackson-Vanik amendment had required at least some policy concessions, and brought scrutiny of Soviet psychiatric and human rights abuses in exchange for loans. By contrast, in exchange for the United States granting China unprecedented access to its market and easing the legal path for US multinational corporations to outsource manufacturing to China, the CCP conceded—nothing. To promote Beijing’s entry into the WTO at the turn of the millennium, Washington politicians promised Americans that opening China for trade would moderate Communism. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it, “By entering the WTO, China committed to free itself from the ‘House that Mao Built,’ including state-run enterprises [and] central planning institutes,” leading to “more institutions and associations free from Communist party control.” Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead of Communist China converging on Western liberal norms, Western technology has allowed the Chinese government to ratchet up surveillance of its citizens. It uses data mining made possible by US internet search engines, tracking features on smartphones, and the like to keep tabs on people’s movements and activities in the most invasive “social credit system” in the world. Dissidents are denied access to jobs, travel, and credit cards. With “Zero COVID” contact tracing and forcible house quarantining, the CCP under China’s increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, carried out population controls the KGB could only have dreamed of. Rather than recoiling in horror from the souped-up Communist surveillance state that US trade policy has helped facilitate, the United States and its allies have instead been “Sino-formed” themselves.

The COVID pandemic even scared many Western countries into adopting Chinese models of repression. As McMeekin writes:

With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020–2022, the China model of Communist statist surveillance crashed into Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as once inviolable Western freedoms—of movement, travel, and association, of speech and robust debate over controversial public policies—were abandoned one by one. Even “social distancing,” the now much-mocked craze of 2020—which, by making it illegal for humans to sit or congregate closer than six feet (in the United States) or one meter (most of Europe), shut down public schools and all but destroyed social industries, from cinemas, concert halls, and theaters to churches, gyms, restaurants, and nightclubs—was a CCP import. Contrary to the reassuring, though bizarre, story fed to us by a New York Times cover story in April 2020 and popularized by the Michael Lewis 2021 bestseller Premonition that “social distancing” was invented by a fourteen-year-old girl in a 2005 science fair project, “social distancing lockdown” (封锁 or Fēngsuô, originally a military term meaning “blockade” or “sealing off”) was a Chinese Communist policy imposed in 2002–2003 in response to outbreaks of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). It was quietly, owing to CCP influence, incorporated into pandemic guidelines by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, reversing decades of progressively more humane—and scientifically sound—policies on mitigating disease outbreaks.

On this point, as Michael Senger writes:

In April 2020, while most of the world was in strict lockdown, the New York Times published The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing, reassuring readers that this concept of “social distancing” had a scientific history … Of course, this was nonsense. Western nations hadn’t merely implemented voluntary social distancing, they’d imposed lockdowns: Shutting businesses and community spaces with the force of law. These lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan. They failed meaningfully to slow the spread of Covid and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried … But according to the Times, the science of “social distancing” all began in 2005, when Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher were enlisted by the Bush administration to think of ways to combat a pandemic. Hatchett and Mecher were then inspired by a 2006 science fair project by the 14-year-old daughter of their friend Robert Glass on closing schools to prevent contagion … In 2021, celebrity author Michael Lewis wrote The Premonition, a 240-page book that was essentially an extended version of the New York Times article, lionizing Hatchett and Mecher as heroes and going into meticulous detail on how a 14-year-old’s science project became a federal policy affecting hundreds of millions of lives. This effectively became the official story of the birth of social distancing … As it turns out, “community-wide measures to increase social distance” had already been promulgated into policy by both the CDC and the World Health Organization in early 2004. Thus, the official story of the birth of social distancing based on a 14-year-old’s science fair project falls apart entirely and appears to be nothing more than an elaborate cover story. In fact, these 2004 “community-wide measures to increase social distance” had been lifted straight from the closures imposed in China in response to SARS in 2003, in accordance with the ancient Chinese policy of lockdown …The concept of “lockdown,” or the mandatory closure of private and public spaces to limit potential human contact during a perceived outbreak, dates back to ancient times in China. This policy of lockdown is distinct from “quarantine,” which is the confinement of those who are ill … [I]n January 2004, this concept of mass closures suddenly appeared in great detail as official US CDC policy for the response to SARS, with the official name of “Community-Wide Measures to Increase Social Distance.” By mid-2004, the WHO had also picked up the use of the term “social distance” for community-wide closures, without really endorsing them. The 2004 CDC guidance on “Community-Wide Measures to Increase Social Distance” contains no citations, so it’s unclear where exactly it came from; in response to inquiries, a CDC representative responded only with a link containing a lot of info on events in China … Everything about this timeline utterly belies the story of the “birth of social distancing” as told by the New York Times and Michael Lewis … The term “Community-Wide Measures to Increase Social Distance” in its first use by the CDC appears to have simply been lifted from China’s lockdown measures during SARS. Thus, “social distancing” is simply a western name for the ancient Chinese concept of lockdown (封锁).

As McMeekin continues:

“Lockdown” had absolutely no basis in the Western tradition, not even in the more credulous times of the Black Death, when sick people might have been quarantined against their will, but never the entire healthy population.21 Social distancing lockdown, however, was a logical outgrowth of the statist population controls embraced by twentieth-century Communist regimes, such as the one in China where it first emerged. The Western adoption of CCP repression was perhaps best described by the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, whose frightening, wildly exaggerated COVID “death projections” helped scare westerners into surrendering their freedoms in March 2020. Ferguson told the London Times that, after learning about China’s draconian lockdown in Wuhan, he and his colleagues in London and Washington first told themselves, “It’s a Communist one-party state.… [W]e couldn’t get away with it in Europe [or the United States], we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.” They could, and they did. The world has never been the same since.

And China’s policies have seeped into America in other ways as well. As McMeekin writes:

The CCP’s social credit system, which sees those who fall afoul of the government or social media consensus denied access to schooling, travel, banking, or credit, has already been applied en masse to the “COVID unvaccinated” across the Western world, along with other dissidents. Such restrictions have now begun to extend into the banking system in the West … It is not hard to imagine “debanking” or other types of persecution being applied in the near future to people whose views dissent from the approved consensus of Western social and governing elites on a wider range of topics, such as “climate change,” immigration, race, sexual orientation, or gender identification. It might once have sufficed for intellectual orthodoxy-enforcers that dissenters had trouble finding employment in government, in academe, or at white shoe corporate and law firms, but social access can now be restricted to many other areas of public life: not only the closure of bank accounts or refusal of service, but also social media bans, the seizure of funds collected via online platforms such as GoFundMe, the denial of passport or travel rights, or even, in some cases, interrogation and arrest. Americans have thus far been spared the cruder Communist injustice of “expropriation” of their assets, and the horrors of Stalin- or Mao-style Gulag camps and state-induced famines. In the social and intellectual sphere, however, the echoes of Cultural Revolution–style Communist totalitarianism have become too powerful—and painful—to ignore … [T]hese new Western forms of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence deployed by the NKVD, the Stasi, and Mao’s Red Guards: many victims deprived of their jobs, funds, reputations, or basic civil rights may not even know who their accusers are. Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.

That concludes this essay series on the history of communism.