The Eyes of the Pineapple

Nice, a reheated dish of forever-gone “Communism.”

Back in the month of June, soon after I had arrived back from my last trip to Moscow, I received a copy of the first issue of 20th Century Communism, a new history journal, the title of which explains quite clearly the content. I like it. The opening of the editorial foreword: “Communism was one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century. Viewed from different perspectives, it was at once a utopia, an ideology, a system of government, an apparatus of terror and an international political movement stretching to almost every corner of the globe. ‘All roads’ led there, it’s advocates proclaimed; ‘history’ was on its side. While enduring traces remain, and these include significant states and parties, as an international movement of unparalleled scope and cohesiveness, it is communism itself which has now passed into history.”

The theme for this particular issue is the phenomenon of the leader cult, to avoid the language of 1956. Across nations, Communist Parties whether in power or not, and with local differences, practising a kind of behaviour originating in the Soviet experience before Stalin’s ascension was complete.

A man who sometimes referred to himself as “Little Pinya,” and who had expended an enormous amount of energy in slagging off Boris Pasternak for the crime of writing Doctor Zhivago (despite having never read it), made a long-winded speech in which through a partial appraisal of the Soviet experience, he and his colleagues were officially let off the hook. The terms glasnost and perestroika were not new to Communist’s vocabularies in the 1980s, the former term used during the Khrushchevskaya ottepel. What came about in the 1980s perhaps wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way if Pinya, the ambiguous little fat man, hadn’t got the ball rolling. Maybe some greatly needed restructuring, but with little openness. The remains of a huge and repressive command and control apparatus, its connected bureaucracy having some pretensions to socialism, or with a capital S if you want to keep things within context. Although, aside from some very good and sort-of honest motion pictures created during this period (mid-1950s – 60s), outward expressions of openness could never supplant the Party’s ingrained practices; of offering some nice new flavours of socialist chocolate, but carrying a public health warning of not to get ideas above one’s station.

Well, back on topic for the purposes of this blog (what they are, I haven’t quite figured out yet) … The Communist Party (or pseudo-party) of Kampuchea , which neither sought nor received recognition from the Russians after 1975, of course was among the last of the Communist Parties to have gotten into power in the 20th century. The lines were never clearly marked, with their incongruent, toxic, mutant mishmash of the Maoist-inspired store placed in the reform of the individual; along with a Stalinist quality of viewing suspicious people as non-redeemable and thus lost to the building of “socialism,” after which, when conditions ripen (subject to Party postponement of course) a new type of person will emerge. If you chop wood the chips will fly … To make an omelette you’ve got to break some eggs … With the Khmer Communist’s habit for secrecy, their late revealing of themselves, at least partially to an outside world after the prompting of the Chinese government, and the short time the regime was actually around for, meant a leader cult didn’t develop thoroughly along a familiar pattern in Kampuchea. It was still in embryonic form, and despite portraits and busts drawn, painted and sculpted for this sort of purpose, it might be fair to say that Pol would have felt uneasy about the whole thing, given his preference for self-effacement. Mind you, at some point during the four-year comprehensive development plan, his mild face was looking down upon peasants and quasi-peasants in the communal dining halls of the country’s cooperatives; places where, in the spirit of Babeauf, everyone was exactly five feet six inches tall while eating their rice gruel. A situation which revealed for the first time to one of his brothers, living and working in the countryside, that the quiet, affable and softly-spoken mediocrity many had previously known was heading the new government.

Pointing to the bête noire of the Khmer Communists, the Vietnamese, in reading about Ho Chi Minh elsewhere, at one time in a state of apparent awe, he personally asked Stalin to autograph a copy of Soviet Union magazine. Having done so and with characteristic paranoia, the Vozhd later succeeded in having the signed publication on the Land of Socialism confiscated. Having picked my copy of the journal up again, and although not directly in relation to Cambodian Communism, there is a small mention of it in Sophie Quinn Judge’s article on Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Communism: and in relation to that, China. I’ve probably got my facts and geography wrong, but nevertheless I’ve been interested in the acts of popular violence carried out by a confident peasantry in the first quarter of the twentieth century, surrounding a ‘Nanyang’ committee in southern China (of which there was a Cochinchina-Cambodia branch). There were some other violent episodes against landlords in this region orchestrated by a secretive group of Communists, only known among peasants as the zuzhi, or the “organisation” or something. Has a faint echo in the later Khmer Rouge (or Khmer Krahom for you smart arses) and their hiding behind their own revolutionary organisation, or angkar padevat. To explain a little more on the former, an apparent influence on Vietnamese Communism were traditions of peasant rebellion, both anarchist and Communist in southern China spreading outwards, and of which had Vietnamese involvement in the late 1920s and early 30s. There was this Nanyang committee attached to the Chinese Communist Party, which accepted the Comintern class against class strategy of militancy and gave an organisational face to the rebelliousness. Such militancy flourished once again in the region during the 1960s whirlwind of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, although under different circumstances and for different ends.

The short-lived Hai-Lu-Feng soviet movement is in reference to the latter. It followed the Autumn Harvest Uprising led by a certain Mao Tse-tung in September 1927. Apparently a period of violent militancy, with Communists acting behind popular peasant associations such as the zuzhi, already mentioned. Advised the peasants to kill as many landlords as they could get their hands on. Says the soviets were broken up by February 1928 but with regard to this, it doesn’t say much about specific places in Southeast Asia radicals fled to when their movement was destroyed, they themselves pursued by the Kuomintang. People who had been involved in them fled to places beyond China, including Vietnamese students who had attended a school named the Huangpu Military Academy. Chinese cadres also fled southward too, taking their politics with them. There is a clever cloggist named Fernando Galbiati who has written a study on the Hai-Lu-Feng soviet movement. I’ll seek his work out.