Brown on Di Palma, Ed. Perestroika and the Party: National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform

Home , Achille Occhetto, Erich Honecker, Eurocommunism, Perestroika, Wojciech Jaruzelski

H-Diplo H-Diplo Review Essay 260- Brown on di Palma, ed. Perestroika and the Party: National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform

Discussion published by George Fujii on Thursday, July 23, 2020

H-Diplo Review Essay 260

23 July 2020

Francesco di Palma, ed. Perestroika and the Party: National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-78920-020-1 (hardback, $135.00/£99.00). https://hdiplo.org/to/E260 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Archie Brown, University of Oxford (St Antony’s College)

'Perestroika’ (reconstruction) is often used, as it is in the book edited by Francesco di Palma, to denote the period between 11 March 1985 and 25 December 1991 when the Soviet Union was led by Mikhail Gorbachev. But the concept of perestroika was elastic. Both in theory and in practice, it meant very different things at different times. It is important to distinguish the within-system reform of 1985-1986 (or even 1987) from the systemic change of the polity undertaken in 1988-1989. Very different again were the years, 1990-1991. The events of those years, both within and outside the Soviet Union, were, to a large extent, unintended consequences of the pluralization of Soviet politics, of the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, and of the closely interrelated achievement of independence of the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989.

This edited volume sets out to examine the impact of the Soviet perestroika, first, on Eastern Europe with its ruling Communist parties and then on the Communist parties of Western Europe which were generally of negligible significance in those polities. The main exceptions were France, Italy, and Spain where Communist parties were for a time forces to be reckoned with. Overviews of the book’s subject-matter are provided by di Palma in an introduction to the volume,[1] and by Peter Ruggenthaler (Chapter 1)[2] and Mark Kramer (Chapter 2)[3] as well as, more briefly, by Silvio Pons in an afterward.[4] The East European section of the book contains chapters devoted to the Communist parties of Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, the GDR (East Germany), and Romania. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria miss out (although they are each accorded three pages in Ruggenthaler’s overview) and there is no chapter on Albania either. In the second part of the book, examining the impact of the Soviet perestroika on the West European Communists, there are separate chapters on the Italian, French, British, Dutch, Greek, Austrian and Spanish parties.

What happened in Moscow could not fail to be of decisive importance for the ruling parties in

Communist Europe, though to a somewhat lesser extent for those not in the Warsaw Pact, Albania and Yugoslavia. Those two parties, which had seized power largely through their own efforts, had the potential, if their elites held together, to persist as authoritarian regimes for longer. With Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, East Germans and even the Bulgarians, it was another matter. Their countries only survived as Communist systems for as long as they did because their peoples had reason to believe that the might of the Soviet Union stood behind their rulers and that the Soviet leadership would not hesitate to use force to prevent the abandonment of Communist rule or defection from the Soviet bloc. The lesson the great majority of people in Eastern Europe drew from the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the more recent imposition of martial law in Poland, following sustained pressure from the Soviet Politburo on the Polish Communist leadership to adopt that measure, was that their people would pay a heavy price if they were to mount an overt challenge to Communist rule.

Because the developments within Eastern Europe and the ruling parties have been studied much more already than have the Communist parties of Western Europe, there is less that is strikingly new in the parts of the book about the former. They do, in several chapters, tap interesting archival sources which have hitherto been little used, but since these parties, even at the time, were often airing their differences in public, and there is a rich memoir literature, the archives more often than not confirm what was already known. Thus, as Ruggenthaler notes, and as the chapters devoted to East Germany by Hermann Wetker[5] and to Romania by Stefano Bottoni[6] document in greater detail, the most alarmed and hostile opponents of radical reform in Moscow, with its huge potential for contagion throughout Eastern Europe, were Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceauşescu. Poland’s Wojciech Jaruzelski was the East European leader for whom Gorbachev had the most respect, and Ceauşescu was the one he most despised. By August 1989 the Romanian dictator was openly attacking the Soviet leader and what perestroika had come to connote, even comparing Gorbachev’s policies to the concessions to the “class enemy” of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact (42).

Most of what Ruggenthaler has to say is well-informed, but, in common with some of the other contributors to this volume, he misses what was most new conceptually in the ideational change Gorbachev embraced. He writes about Gorbachev wishing to establish “a socialist democracy” (28 and 43). But many books and articles were published even in Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s time about the ‘socialist democracy’ that had supposedly been established in the Soviet Union. What was new was Gorbachev’s embrace (from 1989) of the notion of ‘democratic socialism’ which was the doctrine of the European Socialist parties committed to political democracy. The adjective implied that somewhere else ‘undemocratic’ socialism was to be found, and for socialists of a social democratic type that somewhere else was, above all, the Soviet Union and the other states ruled by Communist Parties. Gorbachev’s favorite foreign politician was the Spanish Socialist leader, Felipe González, and he also became close to West Germany’s Willy Brandt who, by the time Gorbachev was in power, presided over the Socialist International, the organization of democratic socialist parties which had over the decades been sharply opposed to Soviet Communism.

Gorbachev’s embrace of democratic socialism was a much bigger ideological break with the past than any remarks about ‘socialist democracy.’ Ruggenthaler sees great significance in supposedly new declarations that “the primary purpose of communist parties” was “to serve the needs of their own populations” (44). Few political parties in any country, whether authoritarian or democratic, would wish to dissociate themselves from that rather vacuous aspiration. In contrast, Gorbachev’s evolution

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 260- Brown on di Palma, ed. Perestroika and the Party: National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform. H-Diplo. 07-23-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/6259946/h-diplo-review-essay-260-brown-di-palma-ed-perestroika-and-party Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo into a socialist of a social democratic type meant that by 1989 he had come to embrace such far from vacuous policies as acceptance of political pluralism, including elections for a legislature with real power, freedom of speech and publication, progress toward a rule of law in which the Communist Party was no longer above the law and, more generally, a commitment to free intellectual inquiry. Espousing no less radical a transformation of Soviet foreign policy, he declared in his groundbreaking speech to the United Nations in December 1988 that “freedom of choice” was a “universal principle” and he called for a “deideologization of interstate relationships.”[7]

In this generally strong collection by diverse hands, the chapter on Yugoslavia by Petar Dragišić is among the best.[8] The Yugoslavs, perhaps not surprisingly in the light of their long-standing rift with the Soviet leadership, seem to have been less well-informed about the inner working of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) than were the leaders of the non-ruling Italian Communist Party (PCI). An interesting aspect of the Yugoslav League of Communists’ reaction to the changing Soviet scene in the second half of the 1980s, which is brought out by Dragišić, is that the inter-ethnic struggle led different republics to choose different Soviet allies. The leadership in Zagreb were highly sympathetic to Gorbachev and his radically reformist associates. In sharp contrast, Slobodan Milošević and Borisav Jović in Belgrade (as well as the Yugoslav Defense Minister, General Veljko Kadijević) shared the alarm of the Soviet military establishment about the direction in which Gorbachev was leading the USSR. The same people welcomed the August coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and came to believe that the breakup of the Soviet Union which occurred just a few months later accelerated the dissolution of Yugoslavia. For Dragišić the “profound impact of perestroika on the fate of Yugoslavia is an incontestable fact” (115).

Part 2 of the book, on the Communist parties of Western Europe, contains much of interest. That is true even of chapters such as that on the Communist Party of Great Britain which, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, did not succeed in getting a single MP elected to the House of Commons. In contrast, the Italian Communists mattered a great deal. Moreover, as noted earlier and as is made clear in Aldo Agosti’s excellent chapter on the Partito Communista Italiano, the PCI was especially well-informed about the intra-party struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). This was thanks not least to Giuseppe Boffa, Adriano Guerra and Giulietto Chiesa who were, at different times, Moscow correspondents of the party daily, L’Unitá. Already in 1986 Chiesa was drawing attention to resistance within the CPSU to Gorbachev’s radicalism and was publishing extracts from his speeches which Pravda preferred to ignore (186). Gorbachev and the PCI leader Achille Occhetto, when they had their last meeting in November 1990, agreed that what they were both striving for was ‘democratic socialism,’ though Occhetto wished to distinguish this from existing social democracy rather than merge with it (197). Gorbachev was less concerned with that distinction. He had travelled further ideologically and in a much shorter time.[9]

In each successive year in the second half of the 1980s the changes in Moscow became more radical. The decision, taken in 1988, to hold in the early months of 1989 contested elections for a legislature that would no longer rubber-stamp the party leadership’s every utterance, along with the flood of previously unthinkable publications, not only raised the expectations of the peoples of Eastern Europe and worried their rulers, it led also to growing apprehension on the part of some West European Communist leaders (although they generally approved the earlier, modest change in Moscow of 1985-86). That was particularly true of the relatively large French Communist Party (PCF). The General Secretary of the PCF, Georges Marchais, was more comfortable talking with

Gorbachev’s bête noire, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, than with Gorbachev and his foreign policy advisers. Andrei Grachev, a fluent French as well as English speaker in Gorbachev’s entourage, is reported by the author of the chapter on France, Dominique Andolfatto,[10] as saying that when he was speaking with Marchais, it was like talking to “a French Honecker” (202). The French party’s decline was undoubtedly accelerated by the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union, as it could hardly fail to be, given the extent to which they had portrayed the USSR as an exemplar. Andolfatto quotes his 2004 interview with a former editor of the party newspaper L’Humanité, Roland Leroy, who claimed (not implausibly) that the French Communist Party had been “more faithful to the Soviet model” than Gorbachev and his associates had been (209).

Spain is an interesting case and the Spanish Communist Party is the subject of an excellent chapter by Walter L. Bernecker.[11] That Party, however, played its most important role of the post-Second World War era in the 1970s – well before the arrival of the Soviet perestroika. They were of significance both domestically and internationally. Negotiations between Adolfo Suárez, the post- Franco Prime Minister who played an especially significant role in Spain’s transition to democracy, and Santiago Carrillo, the General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, took place in a surprisingly give-and-take atmosphere, with Carrillo even accepting that democratic Spain would have a constitutional monarchy. Internationally, along with the Italians, the Spanish Communists were the flag-carriers in the seventies of ‘Eurocommunism,’ which included a commitment to accept the rules of the game of political democracy. This implied giving up on Leninism, but when, as Bernecker notes, Carrillo declared while on a visit to the United States in 1977 that at its next Party congress the party would renounce Leninism, such explicit apostasy was a step too far for many longstanding members, and from that point on, “the unity of the party was broken” (301).

‘Eurocommunism’, while it lasted, attracted attention and caused concern to the Kremlin. It was attractive to many party intellectuals in the Soviet Union and even had some influence on them. Precisely because of the risk of contagion both within the CPSU and within the International Communist Movement, it attracted severe criticism from orthodox Soviet ideologists. By the time of perestroika, however, the ‘Eurocommunist’ fashion had waned. Insofar as there was some influence from Spain on Gorbachev and some of his advisers, it came from the Spanish Socialists, especially Prime Minister González, not the Communists, in whom, as Bernecker observes, Gorbachev showed “scant interest” (317).

In his afterword to the book, Silvio Pons rightly notes that “the domain of transnational communist relations was not a priority” for Gorbachev (323). And the most common reaction, Pons observes, of the non-ruling parties to the liberalization of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy was to see these developments as “a threat to their own existence,” even though “until the end they were unable to understand that Gorbachev intended to drop the ’Brezhnev doctrine’” (325-326). As Pons sees it, Gorbachev “took the legacy of reform communism to its extreme consequences.” He acknowledged the “hopeless marginality” of the international Communist movement and “the need to abandon the very notion of such a movement” (328). That is a fair summary of the findings and judgements to be found in this substantial collective contribution to the historiography of Communism.

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991 and he has been an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003. He taught at Glasgow University between 1964 and 1971 and at Oxford, where he was Professor of Politics, from 1971 to 2005. He has been a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale, Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book,The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War is newly published in Spring 2020 by Oxford University Press. The book prior to that, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (Bodley Head, London, and Basic Books, New York, 2014), was named by Bill Gates as one of the four best books he read in 2016. Two of Archie Brown’s earlier works,The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback, 1997) andThe Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, and Ecco, New York, 2009; Ecco paperback, 2011) won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for best politics book of the year.

Notes

[1] Francesco di Palma “Introduction. Perestroika: The Demise of the Communist World?”, in di Palma, ed., Perestroika and the Party: National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019) [hereafter Perestroika and the Party], 1-23.

[2] Peter Ruggenthaler, “The Impact of Perestroika and Glasnost on the CPSU’s Stance toward the ‘Fraternal Parties’ in the Eastern Bloc,” Perestroika and the Party, 27-54.

[3] Mark Kramer, “Soviet Society, Perestroika, and he End of the USSR,” Perestroika and the Party, 55-87.

[4] Silvio Pons, “Afterword. Gorbachev and the End of International Communism,”Perestroika and the Party, 323-329.

[5] Hermann Wetker, “SED and Perestroika: Perceptions and Reactions,” Perestroika and the Party, 132-152.

[6] Stefano Bottoni, “Between External Constraint and Internal Crackdown: Romania’s Non-Reaction to Perestroika,” Perestroika and the Party, 153-175.

[7] “Vystoplenie v organizatsii ob”edinennykh natsiy, 7 dekabrya 1988 goda,” in M.S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 184-202, here 188-189.

[8] Petar Dragišić, “Yugoslavia and Perestroika, 1985-91: Between Hope and Disappointment,” Perestroika and the Party, 105-117.

[9] Archie Brown, “Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?”Europe-Asia Studies 65:2 (2013): 198-220.

[10] Dominique Andolfatto, “‘I Felt as If I Were Faced with a French Honecker’: The French Communist Party Confronted with a World Falling Apart (1985-1991),”Perestroika and the Party, 202-215.

[11] Walter L. Bernecker, “The Spanish Communist Party and Perestroika,”Perestroika and the Party, 298-322.