Document created: 31 December 03
Air University Review, January-February
1972
Communist-Watching
on a Global Scale
Dr. Kenneth R.
Whiting
In these days when so many books about the Soviet Union
and Communism in general are exercises in self-flagellation, it is a relief to
find two writers who regard the leaders in Peking and
Moscow
as still interested in making life uncomfortable for the “imperialists,”
especially the Americans. Foy D. Kohler, former U.S. Ambassador in Moscow,
concentrates on Soviet policy, while Brian Crozier takes on world Communism as
a whole.* Some reviewers will probably classify both books as too “hawkish” or
as outdated “cold warrior” stuff, but to this reviewer they are cool assessments
of the real world, not the world some would postulate on no other grounds than
it would be more pleasant if such a world existed.
* Foy D. Kohler, Understanding the Russians: A
Citizen’s Primer (New York: Harper and Row, 1970, $10.00), xix and 441
pages.
Brian Crozier, Since Stalin: An Assessment of
Communist Power (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970, $6.95), 247 pages.
Kohler’s credentials as a Kremlin-watcher are impeccable. He was Counsellor
in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for two years and Ambassador for four, and his
other qualifications, which he lists on page x of the Preface, are impressive
indeed. A professor at the University
of Miami for the last three years,
he had the opportunity to write this book in a scholarly environment; but
fortunately that environment has not spoiled his easy style of writing.
In his Introduction he lists some of the fundamental factors the citizen
needs to keep in mind while examining Soviet policies: first, the disparity
between the urban-industrial Soviet Union and the backward rural segment of the
nation; second, the influence of the past on current Soviet life and politics;
third, the monopoly of power in the hands of a minority (the Communist Party
apparatus); and, fourth, the enormous size of the U.S.S.R. He then devotes his
first five chapters, about 100 pages, to the historical development of Russia
from the founding of the Kievan state to the Khrushchevian period, or some 1200
years. Unfortunately the historical survey is so abbreviated that it is more
likely to bewilder than enlighten. For example, in a relatively short paragraph
on page 25, he manages to dispose of Herzen, Chernyshevsky, and the
revolutionary movement under Nikolas I and Alexander II. Since the libraries
are filled with excellent histories of Russia
and the Soviet Union, Kohler’s contribution is minimal
at best. There can be no argument that a knowledge of
Russian history is indispensable to an understanding of Soviet policies,
domestic and foreign; but such a fast gallop through a millennium is not the
way to get that knowledge. Kohler does point up the value of such a background
when, near the end of his historical survey, he scrutinizes the various “revisionist”
versions of the origins of the cold war and puts his finger on their main
weakness:
In the last analysis, they all share one basic and mortal defect. This is
their authors’ ignorance of the other half of the equation—the nature of the
Soviet system, and in particular the necessity of “legitimacy” for Communist
minority rule in the Soviet Union. These revisionist
writers have thus been unable to understand the inexorable compulsions that
caused Stalin to make the decisions he did make in the conduct not only of
foreign but also of domestic affairs. (p. 105)
Beginning with Chapter VI, however, he gets into the meat of the book, an
analysis of how the Soviet state is ruled and what its foreign policies have
been, are now, and will probably be in the immediate future. This segment of
the work, three-quarters of the total, is his real contribution. In Chapters VI
and VII he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Nikita Khrushchev’s reign
and then describes many of the leaders now charged with Soviet policy—these
appraisals often reflecting his personal meetings with Soviet leaders. The next
three chapters are devoted to the Sino-Soviet split and the fracturing of the
Communist monolith, i.e., polycentrism. Chapters XI through XVI deal with
Soviet foreign policy in recent years, a tour d’ horizon in which he
describes a series of U.S.-Soviet confrontations, the German problem, and
Soviet policies in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. In an
Epilogue he pulls the whole thing together and even indulges in a little mild
crystal-balling.
Since all this coverage is encompassed in some 300 pages, the pace is rapid
and the details sparse, but the value lies in Kohler’s acute evaluations of why
certain Soviet moves were made in the world arena. Firsthand acquaintance with
the Soviet leaders who were determining Russian policies in the 1960s gives his
account a credibility often lacking in academic works. After all, an ambassador
who in 1964 had over fifty microphones dug out of the walls of the U.S. Embassy
in Moscow is not likely to regard
Soviet-American relations as a contest governed by the diplomatic equivalent of
the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Time and time again in his analysis he points
out how hard-nosed the Soviet leaders really are, how the present members of
the Politburo were mostly trained under Stalin, and how convinced they are that
“History” is inevitably on their side in their rivalry with the United
States.
It is this last conviction, the messianic concept of victory in the world
revolution, that poses a real dilemma for the Soviet leaders, since the
pursuance of that objective tends to conflict with the promotion of Soviet
national objectives on many occasions. Furthermore, since Moscow
lost its monopoly of leadership within world Communism, there is probably a
lurking suspicion in the Kremlin that a Communist victory on a global scale
could easily present as many problems as does the present state of affairs. The
Moscow-Peking tensions are a vivid example of how the facts of nationalism have
obfuscated the rosy visions of Marx and Lenin about a conflict-free Communist
world. The frenetic efforts of the Kremlin leaders to reunite the Communist
movement under a single leadership (Moscow’s,
of course) seems destined to failure. All the Kremlin’s men cannot put that
Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Kohler sees little chance of a “liberalization” of the regime coming to
fruition in the Soviet Union. Since the Communist
apparatus needs the existence of a bogeyman on the outside to justify the
oppressive institutions on the inside, Moscow’s
anti-American propaganda will continue. Kohler puts it succinctly in the
following passage:
Thus, as long as Communism endures—and this is likely to be a long
time—free societies will be faced with the direct challenge of a relentlessly
hostile political system, established in the heartland of the great Eurasian
land mass and reaching out from there to spread its ideology and its power to
all parts of the earth. It behooves us to know and understand that system.
Indeed, such knowledge and understanding may be a matter of freedom or slavery,
or even of life and death. (p. 420)
Brian Crozier, author of eight books, former foreign correspondent, onetime
political affairs editor of the prestigious Economist, and now Director
of the Institute for the Study of Conflict in London,
is an old hand at the fine art of revolution-watching on a global scale. In one
of his early books he states that he “first became rebel-conscious in Indonesia,
Malaya, and Indochina in 1952.
Since then I have taken every opportunity of meeting rebel leaders and studying
rebellions, either by direct observation or by reading.”1 His “direct
observation” included interviews with Ho Chi Minh, Sihanouk, Souvanna Phouma,
Nasser, and many others. In 1963 he published a study on the emerging nations,
probing the problem of how the newly independent countries were faring
politically and economically and their future prospects.2 In 1965
came his little book on Southeast Asia, in which he
pointed out that an “American retreat from Vietnam
might bring peace—under Communist rule—to Vietnam
and its neighbors. But in strategic terms, it would be a defeat of the first
magnitude for the West as a whole.”3 In sum, Mr. Crozier is very
knowledgeable on the subject of revolution-making, Communist-controlled and
otherwise, and he has a most definite point of view.
Like Caesar’s Gaul, Crozier’s Since Stalin is
divided into three parts, entitled, with a singular lack of originality, “The
Past,” “The Present,” and “The Future.” The Crozier version of the past begins
with Khrushchev’s famous indictment of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress
on 25 February 1956, or as
our author puts it: “The Idol Toppled.” He sees tremendous repercussions
emanating from Nikita’s denigration of his former chief, who had been the
supreme authority in world Communism for over a quarter of a century. Mao
Tse-tung, not consulted or even forewarned about this supreme effort in washing
Communist dirty linen in public, was appalled, although it probably only
reconfirmed his low opinion of Nikita’s dialectical expertise.
The most immediate result of the idol toppling, however, was the explosion
nine months later in the Soviet satellites, first in Poland and then in
Hungary. The nonruling Communist parties, especially those of Italy
and France,
were still straining to swallow the denigration of Stalin when they had to
explain the ruthless use of Soviet tanks in Budapest.
Togliatti, head of the better than
two-million-strong Italian party, however, used the Khrushchev speech to
further his own political fortunes. On 17
June 1956 he declared that the Soviet model was no longer
obligatory for Communist parties outside the Soviet Union
and that world Communism was becoming polycentric, his euphemism for
Khrushchev’s “different roads to socialism.”
Crozier does well to use 1956 as the key date, since it was in that year
that Moscow called into question
the desirability of emulating a system that had spawned a Stalin and tacitly
capitulated to the nemesis of a unified Communist world: plain, old-fashioned
nationalism. (The attempt to cover the nakedness of the capitulation by the use
of the term “polycentrism” was a scanty fig leaf that fooled few.) Indeed,
Moscow’s realization of the attractiveness of nationalism led in 1960 to a new
criterion for nations in the Third World to be eligible for Soviet support and
largesse: any state that was defending its political and economic independence
against imperialism and guaranteeing “democratic rights,” i.e., permitting the
organization of Communist parties, could now call upon Moscow for help inasmuch
as it was automatically designated a “national democracy.” This development was
nothing more than a reversion to Lenin’s old concept, enunciated in 1920, that
a two-stage revolution was necessary in colonial and semi colonial areas: first
the “war of national liberation,” largely conducted by the national
bourgeoisie; then, at some later date, the socialist revolution.
Having set the stage, Crozier then goes into the major section of his book, “The
Present,” some sixty percent of the whole. He begins with a brief rundown on
the Soviet economic performance over the last decade, pointing up its strong
position in heavy industry and its inglorious exploits in the areas of consumer
goods and agriculture. He has great fun with Khrushchev’s 1961 boast that the Soviet
Union would surpass the United
States in per capita industrial output by
1970—a prediction that now shares its author’s oblivion in the U.S.S.R.
Communist China is then analyzed in a similar fashion. The absurdities of
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its denouement, the use of the
PLA as a governing force, are described succinctly. China’s
economic and technological progress over the last two decades leaves Crozier
unimpressed; but the comparison between China
and Japan is a
little unfair, considering the stage of industrial development of each in 1949.
In a rather long section on the European satellites, Yugoslavia,
Cuba, and North
Vietnam, he sees all the economic, social,
and bureaucratic weaknesses of Communism magnified in these smaller versions of
the model, the Soviet Union.
The rest of “The Present”
is devoted to the problems now bedeviling the various revolutionary movements
throughout the world. For example, there is what Crozier calls “competitive
subversion,” or the struggle going on amongst the Muscovite-inclined
Communists, the Maoist-inclined Communists, the Fidelistas, and the New Left.
This phenomenon is especially evident in the struggles to control various “front
organizations” such as the World Council of Peace, youth organizations,
Communist-controlled labor movements, etc. As Crozier points out:
The spectacle of Chinese delegates thumping the table, grabbing the
microphone, shouting to drown the Soviet spokesmen’s voices, had a
high-audience value against the grey background of monotonous anti-Western
resolutions and speeches. (p. 120)
Soviet control of front organizations was not helped by the invasion of Czechoslovakia
and the ensuing “Brezhnev doctrine” in 1968. The inability of the Kremlin to
control world Communism is also evident in the recent conflicts within the
powerful French and Italian Communist Parties (CP’s). Waldeck-Rochet has tried
hard to paper over the splits emerging as an aftermath of Czechoslovakia,
even to the point of expelling Roger Garaudy from the Politburo in February
1970, but the discontents are still seething beneath the surface. Luigi Longo,
in very un-Communist fashion, is allowing dissident voices within the Italian
CP, but Crozier feels that the changes in that party are only tactical,
not doctrinal, i.e., not real, only apparent.
Crozier’s discussion of the groups of revolutionaries he calls “Fundamentalists”
is especially interesting. These groups vary from the old Trotskyites to the
vague collection of movements coming under the general rubric of “New Left.” On
the whole, all give at least lip service to what they consider the fundamental
truths of Marxism-Leninism, but most of them add new “truths,” such as Maoism
or Guevarism, or follow the teachings of Marcuse. Needless to say, these
accretions to Marxism-Leninism disturb the Russians no end. One example may
suffice to point up how these new doctrines can conflict with traditional
Communist teachings. According to the late Che Guevara and his semiofficial
philosopher Regis Debray, it is not necessary to wait until all the conditions
for making revolution exist; a guerrilla insurrection can create them. Both
Moscow
and Peking regard this concept as heretical. Marcuse, by
his advocacy of student-led anarchistic violence and his lumping of
industrialized Communist nations in with the capitalist ones, hardly gladdens
the hearts of the elite in Moscow
and Peking. They see the New Left philosophers as
weakening the appeal of Marxism-Leninism. But, as Crozier points out, the
resiliency of Communism is amazing. He describes it thus:
But the Communists have always shown capacity to weather such challenges and
continue, by sheer persistence and organizational cohesion. The patience of
organization men is their ultimate asset—one which ensures that in the long
run Lenin and Stalin are more dangerous than Bakunin. (p. 168)
In his third section, “The Future,” Crozier deals first with the Soviet
power base, which he finds rather awesome, while a similar survey of the
Chinese military posture does not impress him. He looks into the question of
whether radical changes might occur in the Soviet Union
or China and
sees no chance of “liberalization”; but he does see an outside chance of change
engendered by military take-overs. He also sees every reason for the repair of
the present Sino-Soviet rift. As he puts it, “. . . China
should avoid having enemies both on the landward and seaward sides. . . . One
of the untrumpeted achievements of Mao Tse-tung is that he made enemies of both
the super-Powers: America
to the East and Russia
to the West.” (p. 183) Since Crozier firmly believes Mao to be mad, he has no
trouble visualizing a more rational regime following the Great Helmsman’s
death.
Most of this section is devoted to Moscow’s
strategy for the 1970s inasmuch as the author regards Russia
as the most important power center of Communism: “For if communism is ever to
spread over all or most of the world, the chances, overwhelmingly, are that the
prevailing variety of communism will be the Soviet kind.” (p. 192)
The Kohler and Crozier books together provide the reader with a broadly
sketched picture of Communism on a global scale but with the emphasis on the
main power base, the Soviet Union. Both authors strive
to keep the more misty elements of Marxian dialectics out of their works and
concentrate on the elements of power available to the various Communist regimes
and their clients in the Third World. Both books are
well worth reading.
If the authors seem to be overstating the Communist danger, remember that
over a billion and a quarter people on the globe today have no chance to voice
their opinion of their Communist overlords—a rather awesome record for a
movement that first came to power just over a half-century ago.
Finally, both Kohler and Crozier write lively prose—no small boon for the
readers of books on Communism.
Air University Institute for
Professional Development
Notes
1. The Rebels: A Study of Post-War Insurrections (Boston: Beacon
Press. 1960), p. 7.
2. The Morning After: A Study of Independence
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
3. South-East Asia in Turmoil (New
York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 198.
Contributor
Dr. Kenneth R. Whiting (Ph.D., Harvard
University) is Director of the
Documentary Research Directorate, Air University Institute for Professional
Development, Air University.
A frequent contributor to Air University Review, he is the author of The
Soviet Union Today: A Concise Handbook (1962) and
of numerous monographs on Russian subjects. Dr. Whiting formerly taught Russian
history at Tufts College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions
expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of
expression, academic environment of
Air
University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S.
Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the
Air
University.
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