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National Communism

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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National Communism, policies based on the principle that in each country the means of attaining ultimate communist goals must be dictated by national conditions rather than by a pattern set in another country. The term, popular from the late 1940s to the 1980s, was particularly identified with assertions by eastern European communists regarding independence from Soviet leadership or example.

The Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito first brought National Communism into direct confrontation with Soviet aims when he attempted to pursue an independent foreign policy. Soviet-Yugoslav tensions mounted until, in 1948, Tito’s party was expelled from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau). After that, purges and executions reminiscent of those that Joseph Stalin had conducted in the Soviet Union in the 1930s took place throughout eastern Europe with the goal of eradicating “Titoism” in party ranks. Tito himself, a popular national leader, however, managed to defy Stalin and remain in power despite a Soviet military and economic blockade of his country.

The slight domestic liberalization of the Soviet regime that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 raised hopes for a parallel liberalization in eastern Europe. That year the liberal communist Imre Nagy took power in Hungary and instituted reforms that constituted a marked retreat from socialism. His National Communist program returned retail trade and craft industries to private enterprise, made possible the dissolution of collective farms, de-emphasized industrial investments while increasing agricultural investments, and instituted an official policy of religious tolerance. In 1955 the Soviets restored cordial relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the mid-1950s the Soviets began to seek eastern European support in their growing struggle with China to maintain a preeminent position in the communist world. Nations alienated by any Soviet stifling of National Communism could shift their support to China.

Nevertheless, when in 1956 Nagy, who had lost his party and state posts in 1955 and regained them after a popular uprising, attempted in Hungary to restore his anti-Soviet regime in a coalition with noncommunists, Soviet troops occupied Hungary. The National Communist János Kádár, who was prepared to be less hostile to the Soviets than Nagy had been, assumed party and state control. Soviet-Yugoslav relations cooled once more when Tito failed to support Soviet actions in Hungary; he did not attend a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow in 1957. In the years after 1956 the idea of a polycentric communist world won the support of the Italian Communist Party. In Spain, too, after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the resurgent Spanish Communists turned to what they called “Eurocommunism,” a variety of National Communism.