Page 54 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

communism and socialism 403

The Kremlin in the
1880s. In the twentieth
century it became a
primary symbol of
the Soviet Union.

more peacefully, though there
too an enormous famine broke
out in the late 1950s, when
Mao Zedong pushed for even
larger collective farms, known
as communes, and for a more
complete social equality. In
both countries, the agricultural
sector grew only slowly as it
served to subsidize massive
industrialization programs.
Communists everywhere
were modernizers, intent on
creating industrial societies.
Furthermore, they argued that they had found a superior collectivized and industry nationalized, virtually everyone
path to industrialization that would avoid the exploita- was employed by state. Furthermore, the leaders of the
tion, instability, and inequalities of capitalism.The key to Communist Party established the policies that the state
Communist industrialization was state ownership and bureaucracy was supposed to implement. Education
planning. Under a series of five year plans, Communist served as a major vehicle for inculcating the party doc-
planners decided where factories and mines would be trines and Marxist thinking into the population. Organi-
located, what they would produce and in what quantities, zations catering to the interests of students, women,
where they would find their supplies, to whom they workers, and various professional groups were all con-
would sell their products, and at what price.After a fash- trolled by the party. The multitude of private voluntary
ion, it worked! Industrial growth rates in both the Soviet organizations that characterize democratic capitalist soci-
Union (1930s) and China (1950s) were extremely rapid. eties had no counterpart in Communist countries.
The U.S.S.R. in particular became a fully industrialized
society in little more than a decade, strong enough to out- The Search for Enemies
produce and defeat the Nazis in World War II. But the Communist societies of the Soviet Union and
But Communist industrialization also created a new China were laced with conflict. Under both Stalin and
elite of managers, bureaucrats, and technical experts Mao, those conflicts erupted into a search for enemies
who gained privileged positions in society, thus under- that disfigured both societies. In the Soviet Union that
cutting the supposed egalitarianism of socialist societies. process culminated in the “Terror” of the late 1930s in
While Stalin largely accepted these inequalities as tem- which tens of thousands of prominent Communists,
porarily necessary for modern development, Mao including virtually all of Lenin’s top associates, and mil-
Zedong was increasingly troubled by them and launched lions of more ordinary people were caught up in this
repeated campaigns to root out materialism, self-seeking, wave of terror. Based on suspicious associations in the
and feelings of superiority in China’s official elites. past, denunciations by colleagues, connections to foreign
Among the unique features of Communist societies countries, or simply bad luck, these people were arrested,
was the extent to which party and state authorities pen- usually in the dead of night, then tried and sentenced
etrated and controlled the society. Since agriculture was either to death or to long years in harsh and remote labor