Chapter Nineteen
For every person who has heard of Ladejinsky, there must be ten thousand who have worn a T-shirt bearing the image of his ideological opposite, Ernesto Che Guevara, the equally forceful prophet of land redistribution on behalf of Socialism. What made Che Guevara an icon was that he seemed to embody the ingredient that always threatened to be absent from individual ownership, the hunger for social justice. In the winter of 1958, when he and Fidel Castro with a few hundred guerillas finally burst out of the Sierra Maestra mountains that had been their fastness for two years and took control of the sugar plantations in the lowlands of Oriente Province, they came with a minimum of ideological baggage. They were not communist—Cuba’s Communist Party dismissed Castro as “a petty bourgeois putschist”—and so far as they had a political philosophy, it was expounded by Guevara.
Born into a middle-class Argentine family, he showed little interest in politics until in 1954 a motorbike journey landed him in Guatemala. In one of the nodal moments of the Cold War, he was present when the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz’s elected government after its land redistribution policy threatened the assets of the United Fruit Company. Not only did the coup mark the beginning of the United States’s abandonment of Ladejinsky’s policy, it radicalized Guevara. The question of land ownership would form his entire revolutionary outlook. His later experience in the Sierra Maestra, where the guerillas were helped by peasants in conflict with the large sugar plantations in Oriente, confirmed his Guatemalan baptism.
“The peasants fought because they wanted land for themselves and their children, to manage and sell it and to enrich themselves through their labor,” he explained in 1961. This motivation displayed their “petty-bourgeois spirit” but it also taught them that their interests clashed directly with those of “the imperialists, the large landholders and the sugar and cattle magnates” who could only be defeated with the help of the proletariat. Thus the happy ending was that “[t]he poor peasants, rewarded with ownership of land, loyally supported the revolutionary power.”
In speeches, articles, and indeed throughout the rest of his life, Guevara repeatedly tried to work out the next stage that would lead to Communism. This was the opposite of Ladejinsky’s efforts to realize peasant aspirations to own their land. Guevara wanted to replace their petty-bourgeois ideas with a sense of communal idealism. But however he worked the problem through, the solution always came out the same way: the leaders had to educate the people ruthlessly until “[t[he mass carries out with matchless enthusiasm and discipline the tasks set by the government.”
In January 1959, Castro’s guerillas marched into Havana, following the the withdrawal of U.S. support for former President Batista and the collapse of his corrupt regime. Days later, clad in military fatigues with a black beret crammed onto his tumbling hair, Guevara told a gigantic crowd what the revolution intended to do. Once the organized crime and gambling encouraged by Batista had been cleared out, he declared in his rasping, asthmatic voice, the immediate priority was to establish “the social justice that land redistribution brings about.”
The creation of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), the most powerful organ of government, headed by Castro himself, indicated the supreme importance that Guevara assigned to land ownership in the Cuban revolution. INRA not only organized agriculture, it built roads, harbors, and rural housing, oversaw the Department of Industry, and commanded a militia one hundred thousand strong that policed the countryside. At first it confiscated any estates measuring more than one thousand acres and redistributed the land to one hundred thousand peasants and to other owners loosely organized into cooperatives. But very soon, as American hostility increased and Soviet influence grew in response, the sugar plantations, tobacco farms, and cooperatives were collectivized into state farms, while private producers were required to sell their crops to INRA-regulated outlets at state-controlled prices.
The educational goal of INRA was to create a sense of “socialist emulation” and “fraternal competition” to take the place of “the possibilities of individual success,” as Guevara explained. The failure to achieve this aim was underlined by the increasing harshness of INRA’s policing of the farming community, and by Cuba’s bleak record of human rights abuse leading to about twenty thousand executions up to 2010. The exodus of more than one million people, some 10 percent of the population, served as a popular vote on the policy. The economic goal of INRA was more practical, to generate enough profit from sugar, coffee, and tobacco to invest in the development of the island’s mouthwatering deposits of nickel—as much as one fifth of the world’s reserves. Guevara intended mining profits to kick-start the process of industrialization allowing Cuba to become a modern, but socially owned, economy. The United States economic blockade played a large part in INRA’s failure to achieve this goal too. But falling sugar yields and Castro’s repeated attacks on corruption, inequality, and materialism within the ranks of his own dictatorial administration, notably in the “rectification campaign” he launched at the end of the Cold War, made it clear that Guevara’s system simply did not work.
Measured simply in terms of full bellies and happiness, Ladejinsky’s program unmistakably delivered more in the long run than Guevara’s, but before the full effects became obvious, it was abandoned. In 1954, at the height of the “Red scare” about Communist infiltration of the American government, Ladejinsky was denounced by the secretary of agriculture, Ezra Benson, as “a national security risk.” The indictment was motivated by his Ukrainian upbringing, endemic anti-Semitism—the report of the Agricultural Department’s security expert noted that “Jews who turned into Reds or fellow travelers were the worst kind of traitors”—and most damagingly by the charge in the Chicago Tribune, that Ladejinsky had pushed through a program “to take property from its owners and redistribute it in the name of social justice.”
No doubt to Benson’s surprise, his action provoked furious protests from an unexpected quarter, right-wing, anti-Communist Republicans, including the hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. A Congressional investigation excoriated Benson and his department’s unconstitutional security procedures, and Eisenhower himself complained, “Why doesn’t Benson just admit he made a mistake and apologize?”
Under pressure, the agriculture secretary withdrew the allegations, but they had exposed to public attention a contradiction at the heart of Ladejinky’s program—redistribution betrayed the principle that a basic purpose of government was to protect property. In the 1950s, as the tensions of the Cold War mounted, the ideologists who believed property to be the sacred, untouchable bulwark of capitalist society, regardless of the social justice that brought it into existence, began to win the argument against the pragmatists.
In 1966, shortly before departing to Bolivia, where he would be killed, Che Guevara wrote a last appeal for worldwide revolution. In calling for “two, three or many Vietnams” to be fought in order to crush imperialism and to forward the cause of collectivization, he was, inadvertently, pointing to the greatest failure of his ideological rival. In South Vietnam, Wolf Ladejinsky discovered for the first time the difficulty of putting into practice a policy of land redistribution without the backing of draconian powers to enforce it. The mandate from the State Department to introduce land reform in South Vietnam required him to work through the existing political system run by President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose main source of support came from country’s great landholding families.
Ladejinsky’s new role reflected the sea change that was beginning to affect Cold War attitudes within Washington. In 1950, Dean Acheson, as secretary of state, had explicitly committed the United States to a policy of supporting “world-wide land reform” as the best way of “strengthening the system of free enterprise by diffusion of private property and reinforcing the economic foundation of the State.” As late as 1961, the Kennedy administration’s call at Punta del Este for “an equitable system of property” in Latin America showed that the old strategy was not entirely dead. But in the intervening years, its thrust had changed.
Although Ladejinsky was personally rehabilitated in 1954, his policy remained suspect. Later that same year came the CIA-engineered overthrow of Guatemala’s freely elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, while he was undertaking a program of land redistribution in a country where 70 percent of the arable land was controlled by 2 percent of the population. The specific issue was Guatemala’s expropriation of four hundred thousand acres of unused land from the United Fruit Company, but it was a pointer to the future. Land reform was becoming less important as a Cold War strategy.
When Ladejinsky was appointed personal advisor to President Diem in 1955, a post he would hold for the next six years, it was on the clear understanding that he would have to act with the agreement of the regime. Nevertheless, in a country that was primarily divided between the basin of the Mekong River in the south, source of most of the region’s rice, and the immense rubber plantations and mountainous, untouched forest in the north, the disparity of ownership was so gross that even Diem had promised land reform when he took power in 1954 following the collapse of French colonial rule.
One in three of South Vietnam’s seven million peasants owned no land at all and most of the remainder worked plots of less than three acres that they did not own, while more than half the cultivated land belonged to an elite 3 percent of landlords with holdings that extended to thousands of acres containing several villages, each with twenty or thirty families paying as much as 60 percent of the value of their crops to rent the land. In the fertile Mekong delta, almost 75 percent of landlords, many owning fewer than twenty acres, were absentees choosing to live in cities, with Saigon the most popular residence. Yet, as Ladejinsky discovered from intensive research on the ground, a breathtaking opportunity for redistribution had opened up.
The exodus of French colonial owners following defeat by the Communist Viet Minh and the retreat to the cities of a large number of Vietnamese landlords left more than three million acres of farmland without clear ownership. The chief obstacle came understandably from the landlords, who also provided most forms of local government. “We have been robbed by the Viet Minh,” one provincial administrator told Ladejinsky, “and we resent similar treatment from the national government.” But Ladejinsky also discovered throughout South Vietnam an intense desire for the security that only ownership could create. “The village needs peace,” one peasant told him, “and the landlord-tenant conflicts will never cease until the tenants own the land.”
In North Vietnam, the Communists under Ho Chi Minh had embarked on a brutal program of land reform of their own that confiscated almost two million acres and redistributed them to collectivized peasant communes. The policy was carried out with such murderous violence, resulting in the execution of more than 170,000 supposed landlords, that it was condemned even by official histories that euphemistically ascribed its brutality to “leftist errors.” Given that alternative, opposition to Ladejinsky might have been less than anticipated.
However, few of his proposals for creating a new generation of owner occupiers appeared in the plan of land reform that Diem announced in 1956. The maximum holding was to be capped at 100 hectares or 240 acres affecting barely two thousand landlords, and the excess land would only be available for rent. Nevertheless, as Ladejinsky reported to the U.S. State Department, by purchasing the excess and taking over other abandoned estates, the government could make available approximately 1.5 million acres for sale at low cost. Potentially, more than one third of South Vietnam’s seven million peasants could become owner occupiers. The war that was eventually fought with North Vietnam for the hearts and minds of those peasants might have been won before it started.
Land reform, however, was no longer State Department policy.
Che Guevara’s death in 1967 left his reputation untainted by the dire consequences of his ideology. And the fact that he was killed while attempting to bring about revolution in Bolivia only enhanced his standing. Everyone, Communist and capitalist, agreed that social justice demanded a leveling of the vast inequalities of Latin America society, founded on sprawling estates, or latifundias, containing tens of thousands of acres, and sustained by the political oligarchies that served their interests. Of Latin America’s 1.7 billion acres of farmland in the 1950s, almost two-thirds were owned by just over 1 percent of the population.
The owners of these gigantic haciendas rivaled the Russian aristocracy in their Oblomovan neglect not just of the peasants but of the land itself—their reluctance to invest in animal-drawn ploughs rather than human-held hoes was, one amazed observer claimed, “more primitive, less efficient, and more wasteful of human energy than those the Egyptians were using at the dawn of history.” The T-shirts told the story—Guevara represented the raw appeal of social justice, while property rights were allied to inequality, corruption, and the grinding poverty of the campesino.
Fearful of seeing the Cuban revolution spread further, however, the United States gave a last declaration of its commitment to Ladejjinsky’s vision of social reform through land redistribution. At a meeting of Latin American states at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 1961, it called for latifundias to be replaced by “an equitable system of property” and for the introduction of a system of “integral agrarian reform leading to the effective transformation, where required, of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use.” This declaration not only exhibited the core values of the United States, it incorporated the sense of justice and ownership that, as Guevara himself had recognized, really motivated Latin America’s campesinos. But its implementation faced a crucial obstacle.
Land reform could be said to have been the one constant in all the political convulsions of Latin American politics. Whether elected or not, almost every new government repeatedly promised to bring it about. In Mexico, reform was integral to the program of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) that governed from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, and more than fifty million hectares were nominally redistributed between 1934 and 1964. Yet control of the land, especially over the communally owned ejidos that had been reserved for Indian occupation, remained largely undisturbed in the hands of its traditional ruling families. In Brazil, reform had been advocated by both left and right throughout the twentieth century, but the north continued to be made up of gigantic ranches, while the large commercial farms in the dynamic south were mostly run by foreign owners.
Similar attempts to bring about land reform in the Middle East and India during the 1950s encountered the same problem. No government that represented the beneficiaries of an unfair distribution of land could be expected to push through measures for greater fairness. The dilemma forced the growing academic discipline of land reform to reconsider its principles. No one doubted the need for change—it was essential both to increase agricultural efficiency and to bring about social reform—and where it did take place there were clear gains. In Latin America, three countries—Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile—had gradually instituted a few genuine reforms in land holding, and overall their populations enjoyed better education, longer life expectancy, and more stable political systems. But the old Jeffersonian certainties, put into practice by Ladejinsky, that the wide dispersal of property gave rise to liberty and prosperity were dwindling.
In 1956, an influential paper entitled “The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth” by Walt W. Rostow, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later adviser on national security to President Lyndon B. Johnson, suggested another solution. A country with a traditional agricultural structure might quickly break through into industrialized growth, Rostow argued, in cases where there was a sudden shock to the existing system and an elite group of industrialists with “the will and the authority to install and diffuse new production techniques” exploited the opportunity to reap the economic rewards of innovation. “Take-off” was achieved when a self-sustaining industry was in place, representing “a definitive social, political, and cultural victory of those who would modernize the economy over those who would . . . cling to the traditional society.” In short, a small industrializing group could quickly achieve what land reform only hoped to do with difficulty over time. Jefferson’s democratic distribution of land was irrelevant.
As would later become obvious, Rostow’s thesis suffered from two debilitating flaws: it assumed that a modernized economy would, as he put it, “require movement towards democratic government,” and its conclusions were narrowly based on the mechanics of “the take-off” at the expense of the preexisting state of society. Since he never had the opportunity to see how Russia and China could operate modern economies without democracy, Rostow might be forgiven the first mistake, but the second was his own choice and led to a deliberate distortion of the evidence from one part of the world in particular.
The rapid industrialization of Sweden in the late nineteenth century served as one of Rostow’s chief examples, not least because the process appeared to be kick-started by the rapid growth of the timber industry in the 1890s, followed by the creation of a pulp and paper industry and the diffusion of its production techniques into other capitalist enterprises. To make his point, however, Rostow neglected to mention that at the beginning of the nineteenth century a surge of land enclosures had transformed Swedish agriculture in the populous south and central regions from peasant to capitalist production, that this was followed in the 1850s by the rapid spread of joint-stock banks with multiple branches issuing paper money, that compulsory education from the 1830s had made literacy virtually universal, and that from 1866 an elected parliament had represented farming, timber, and mining interests in government.
By choosing to omit these highly relevant events from his reading of Swedish history, Rostow managed to imply that Sweden was modernized purely as a result of its industrialization. This was not a solitary aberration. Rostow’s reading of economic history consistently overlooked the role of land distribution and democratic government, enabling him to show that industry was always the central force in economic development.
In fact, nineteenth-century Scandinavia as a whole exhibited the classic sequence of a land market leading to banks and financial institutions, and eventually to representative government. The change was driven by a population explosion—the result “of peace, vaccination, and potatoes,” in the mordant words of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér—that virtually doubled the number of inhabitants by 1850.
In Denmark, a comprehensive program of land distribution by the country’s most influential aristocrat, Count Christian Reventlow, sped up the process so that by the 1820s a once feudal regime was transformed into one in which two-thirds of all Danish farmers had become owner occupiers. Unlike seventeenth-century England, Denmark’s smaller farms and unproductive sandy soil, especially in the Jutland peninsula, forced the new rural capitalists to cooperate rather than compete. Working through farming associations, they marketed their grain in Britain, raised capital from Danish banks, and from the 1840s lobbied for their interests through the Friends of the Peasant political party. Although it played no part in Rostow’s thesis, these circumstances gave Danish agriculture a unique character, at once capitalist and cooperative, committed to free trade even when flooded by cheap American cereals in the 1890s, yet taking communal action to switch to dairy farming with newly created pig farms at hand to consume waste milk products.
The rural poverty of Sweden, Norway, and, after independence in 1917, Finland ensured that their land revolutions took on a similar tendency toward cooperative capitalism. But, as in private property societies, they also enjoyed the incalculable advantage of developing a set of rights around rural ownership prior to industrialization. The modernization of Scandinavia was a long, slow process, with prosperity delayed until the last half of the twentieth century. The highly individual nature of the society that emerged owed little to industrialization but a great deal to the particular shape of its nineteenth-century agriculture.
Despite its flaws, Rostow’s theory about modernization became economic and social orthodoxy in the 1960s. Consequently, it undermined the campaign for land reform at the very moment when the shortcomings of communism’s collective ownership of the earth could no longer be concealed.
The most tragic failure was China’s Great Leap Forward. For a decade following the nationalization of the land in 1949 and its redistribution from landlord to peasant, individual holdings had increasingly been brought into cooperative enterprises with as many as two or three hundred families farming in centrally directed units. But mechanization was slow, quotas were often not filled, especially in the hungry years of the early 1950s, and surplus income to the government was too small to allow the state to industrialize and thus match Russia’s spectacular growth.
In 1958, Mao Zedong launched a new policy that abolished private property in farm produce and forced all farms into communes owned by the state. Within twelve months, as many as twenty-five thousand communes had been created, each the size of a small town containing about five thousand families. To bypass the slow accumulation of capital required to industrialize an economy, the communes were also given the responsibility of creating their own factories, symbolized by the construction of local furnaces where scrap metal was supposed to be smelted into high-grade steel. In the next two years, disastrous experiments in planting rice and wheat were compounded by drought and the diversion of labor into inefficient industrial production. Restricted by lack of fuel and the necessary technology, the backyard smelters produced nothing more valuable than pig iron before they were abandoned.
By 1962 the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward had exacted a death toll, now estimated at about forty-two million, or 7 percent of the population. In the attempt to reconcile the reality of falling grain production with the inflated requirements from Beijing, local party activists resorted to frenzied violence—as many as five million farmers were either driven to suicide by their demands or, according to one authority, “buried alive, clubbed to death or otherwise killed by party members and their militia.”
Mao himself chose to ban the distribution of twenty-two million tons of wheat to starving peasants seemingly as a punishment for underproduction. “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death,” he said in 1959. “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” But, deprived of grain to sell, government revenues slumped by 82 percent in just three years, crippling any hopes of proper industrialization. Not until Deng Xiaopeng’s introduction of individual family holdings under the chengbao scheme did agricultural production reach a scale sufficient to feed the cities and allow the accumulation of capital needed to unlock the country’s industrial potential.
The failure of Soviet collectivization followed a decade later. It came with little warning. In 1969, the Soviet Union exported more than three million tons of wheat, but in 1971 it began to import American grain, forty million tons between 1970 and 1975, and more than one hundred million tons in the first five years of the 1980s. The reasons were complex—although the virgin lands were rapidly exhausted, overall wheat production actually increased from 180 million tons to more than two hundred million tons a year—but the system was unable to meet the demands of Soviet consumers for a wider range of foods, for beef, chicken, fresh milk, and cheese. A structure geared toward increasing wheat production proved incapable of adjusting to meet the need for more fodder for livestock and poultry, or to produce anything other than basic foodstuffs. For visitors to the Soviet Union in its last years, the characteristic sight of long queues outside food shops and empty shelves inside was evidence of a systemic failure.
For thirty years, the collectives had been getting bigger, rising to an average of fifteen thousand acres. At the urging of both Khruschev and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, the most powerful general secretary of the Communist Party since Stalin, almost 40 percent of collective farms had been converted to become state organizations, known as sovkhozi. Yet despite taking direct control of Soviet farming, the government found itself faced by an insuperable problem of wasteful, inefficient, and inflexible use of the land.
The failure of the collectives was underlined by the extraordinary productivity of the tiny privately owned plots, measuring less than two acres each, that every farming family was allowed to possess. Altogether they amounted to about 4 percent of Soviet farmland, but provided 30 percent of national agricultural production, and the quality of their poultry, vegetables, and fruit was far superior to that of the collectives. The contrast made it evident that the problems of Soviet agriculture were fundamentally a matter of ownership, a reality implicitly recognized by one of the beetle-browed Brezhnev’s last decrees. In 1981, he ordered the maximum size of private plots to be increased by almost a quarter.
The failure of collective farming hamstrung the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War. The costs of the huge sovkhozi in terms of wages, machinery, and fertilizer absorbed more than a quarter of all government expenditure, equivalent to thirty-three billion dollars in 1981, and the purchase of American, Canadian, and Argentine wheat drained the Soviet treasury of almost eight hundred million dollars in 1972 and more than two billion in 1980. It was the reverse of the usual formula for economic development. Instead of rural revenues financing industrialization, the Soviet Union was using its industrial surplus to subsidize its agriculture. The result was what Mikhail Gorbachev would call “the era of stagnation” when the headlong growth of the socialist economy ground to a halt.
It was clear that the Marxist-Leninist solution had failed. Yet in the battle for the allegiance of the world’s two billion peasants, the alternative was no longer Ladejinsky’s redistribution of property to the tiller of the soil. The first quarter of the twenty-first century would be irredeemably marked by a shift in American policy in the 1950s away from the Jeffersonian impulse to spread ownership of the soil to as many people as possible.