Communism Confronts Its Children

By Richard Hornik

Attempts at economic and political reform in China, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries often seem to consist of two steps forward and one or even two steps back. In China the recent rash of student-led mass demonstrations is just the latest manifestation of deep public discontent over the price of economic reform. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev's position has been similarly threatened as the benefits of perestroika have thus far failed to match the short-term costs.

Although selfish resistance by entrenched bureaucrats is usually cited by reformers as their biggest obstacle, the lack of popular understanding of and support for the needed changes is equally important. Contrary to what Westerners think, the majority of citizens in these countries have found their lives tolerable, at least until recently. While it is true that they grumble about long lines and shortages, workers also appreciate guaranteed employment and low prices for life's necessities -- housing, medical care, basic foods. Their education and everything they have heard from the media have led them to expect that they could enjoy economic benefits equal to those of capitalism with none of the risks or pain.

The rulers of the Communist world are reaping the results of decades of propaganda aimed at ensuring control in backward peasant societies. During the early days of the cold war, when it seemed that nothing could contain the virus of Communist expansion, pundits attempted to assure the West that most Marxist regimes took power only with the force of outside arms. On its own, Communism took root only in benighted countries like czarist Russia and feudal China. The more advanced countries of Eastern Europe -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland -- had the Marxist-Leninist system thrust upon them on the point of a Soviet Red Army bayonet.

Although much was made by Western observers of the original vulnerability of backward, predominantly peasant societies to a Marxist takeover, little attention has been paid to the effect of that characteristic on their subsequent development. The Marxist-Leninist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, as well as their variants in Cuba, Albania and North Korea, relied on the peasant mentality of the majority of their populations. Beyond making it possible for well-organized, small revolutionary groups to take power, this attribute also enabled them to consolidate power after the revolution and maintain control as the regime matured.

Unlike America's yeoman farmers, the East European, Russian and Asian peasants were unlikely to own full title to their land or to produce more than their family and feudal overlord consumed. Their impoverished rural existence fostered these attributes of peasant societies: a leveling egalitarianism that prefers to see a neighbor fail in any efforts at improving his lot; envy that a neighbor may be better off, coupled with a belief that he must have cheated; suspicion of anything new, since most changes were for the worst; rampant superstition; and, finally, an unquestioning acceptance of a higher, distant authority, like the "Good Czar" in Russia or his Chinese counterpart, the "Good Emperor."

In the 1920s the Soviet leadership talked of engaging in social engineering through education and propaganda to transform its feudal subjects into enlightened socialists -- a "Homo sovieticus" who would be compassionate and informed. Instead, these regimes found it easier to control their citizens by reinforcing their worst instincts, most of which derived from peasant attitudes.

Citizens have been encouraged to report any suspicious behavior by neighbors, particularly if it involved contact with foreigners. Former Chinese Red Guards say most of the targets of the Cultural Revolution were actually victims of petty local vendettas. In the Soviet Union informing on one's fellow man was taken so far that Pavlik Morozov became a national hero for ratting on his father. And all across the socialist world workers were repeatedly assured that they need not fear -- that no matter how little they worked, no one would live better than they.

These regimes have succeeded only in transplanting the peasant mentality to an industrial economy, creating a retarded form of industrial feudalism. It is that system that Gorbachev's perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" seek to reform. But in China factory workers have shunned colleagues who earned incentive bonuses, or gone on strike to prevent introduction of such bonuses. Their proletarian comrades in the Soviet Union have reportedly downed tools for higher pay, while others burned a prosperous collective that raised pigs because it was too successful. In Poland the economic program of Solidarity runs directly counter to any efforts at reform. It demands higher wages, stable prices and job security. In China efforts to decentralize decision making have resulted in economic anarchy as local authorities assumed the power to tax or even create money that citizens had earlier unquestioningly granted to the Emperor or Mao. And in all three countries housewives, unable to make the connection between higher prices and availability, complain about paying several times the old official prices for food that was never available at the government-set level.

The challenge is to change gradually the prejudices that these regimes have cynically cultivated since taking power. Ways must be found to teach people that a gain for one is not necessarily a loss for another, that long-term improvements may require short-term sacrifices, that some changes are for the good, that it is their responsibility to keep local authorities in line. Only that sociological change will make possible the economic and political reforms that Gorbachev, Deng and other reformers insist are necessary. Thus far, no Communist regime has found a way out of this dilemma. Lenin once said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." His political heirs are finding that it is a difficult task indeed.