The Red Flag: A History of Communism (78 page)

Even so, the reformers believed that they had finally found the philosopher’s stone: a way of uniting the whole people behind the Communist party. Dubček remembered his deep emotions as he watched the May Day parade from his democratically low tribune:

Most of the Soviet bloc’s leaders, though, were profoundly unhappy. Everything looked fine in May, but what would happen after September, when the Action Plan envisaged free elections? This looked like a recipe for the collapse of Communist rule. Gomułka asked: ‘Why not draw conclusions from what happened in Hungary? That all began in a similar way.’
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Brezhnev, ever the consensualist, was desperate to avoid Soviet action, and he reluctantly endorsed the Action Programme. But as time went on, it seemed to Moscow that Gomułka and the hard-liners were right. Dubček’s pluralism seemed to be unleashing a wave of criticism. Especially worrying for the Kremlin was the ‘Two Thousand Word’ manifesto signed by leading intellectuals, which implied that the party, full of immoral ‘power hungry individuals’, could never be transformed into a humane force.

Fears that the party would suddenly collapse as in Hungary in 1956 were exaggerated, but pressures for some kind of Soviet intervention became overwhelming when party bosses started to warn of cross-infection; Petro Shelest, the Ukrainian leader, told Brezhnev that the Prague Spring was destabilizing his own republic, and Brezhnev feared that he was facing a series of falling dominoes.
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He agonized, and the
crisis marked the beginning of his long battle with illness, insomnia and addiction to tranquillizers and sleeping pills. He finally took the fateful decision. In August the ‘fraternal’ forces of the USSR, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany ‘rescued’ their helpless sibling from the evils of counter-revolution. They were met with some demonstrations but no serious resistance. As in Hungary, brutal repression followed. The new Czech Communist leader, Gustáv Husák, who like Kádár had been imprisoned by Stalin, agreed to do the Soviets’ bidding. Thousands left for the West, were imprisoned or were given punitively menial jobs. Dubček himself became a forestry inspector in Slovakia. Unlike in Hungary, though, short-term repression was not followed by long-term relaxation. The Czechoslovak party kept a tight grip on society until the state’s demise in 1989.

In hindsight, we can see Prague 1968 as the writing on the wall for the whole Soviet bloc, and perhaps for old-style socialism throughout Europe. Hungary in 1956, like the Polish ‘Solidarity’ movement in 1980–1, threatened the Soviet system, but these were cases of anti-imperial rebellion. In both countries, society was largely united in a mixture of nationalist and ideological resentment. But workers could be bought off and opponents imprisoned or intimidated, as happened in Hungary. The Prague Spring, in contrast, exposed the real weaknesses of the Soviet bloc, for it was a movement that had grown up amongst elites
within
the party and its culture – unlike the more nationalistic Hungarian and Polish rebellions which had largely developed outside it. It was fuelled by Communist true believers who principally sought to use reform to restore the party’s moral right to rule. And whilst still Marxist, it was moving rapidly towards liberalism – unlike the more radical Western protests of 1968 with which it has so often been compared. As Kundera, one of the participants, has written, ‘Paris May ’68 was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary scepticism.’
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These Communists, unlike nationalists and dissidents, knew how to gain power and use it. And it was Communists like these, not nationalist rebels, who ultimately destroyed Soviet Communism.

There was also a more personal and direct relationship connecting the Czech crisis with the ultimate demise of the Communist system. One of Zdeněk Mlynář’s closest friends at Moscow University in the early 1950s was a fellow law student – Mikhail Gorbachev. Both were part of
a student generation committed to a non-Stalinist Marxism, and in 1967 Mlynář had stayed with Gorbachev, now a party official in Stavropol. Mlynář found his old friend broadly sympathetic to the Czechoslovaks’ right to reform, even though his ideas were by no means as radical as his. Gorbachev also visited Prague in 1969, and saw with his own eyes the Czech hatred of their Soviet occupiers. The Soviet authorities were highly sensitive to the potential dangers of Gorbachev’s Czech contacts. In 1968 the KGB questioned Gorbachev’s friends and fellow students about the friendship, but could not find any concrete evidence of heresy. Two years later he became party secretary of Stavropol region, unimpeded by the organs of state security.
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It is tempting to imagine what might have happened had they acted on their suspicions. Rather like the tsarist censors who failed to stop the publication of
Capital
, they let slip the person most responsible for destroying the system they were charged to defend.

In the shorter term too, the Czech invasion had momentous consequences for the Communist world – more so even than 1956. It marked the end of the thaw of the 1950s and 1960s as Moscow reversed its old tolerance of different national roads to socialism. In November 1968 Brezhnev first formally enunciated the principle that the USSR had the right to intervene militarily if national Communist parties deviated from the ‘principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism’ – the so-called ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.

Similarly, the Prague Spring signalled the end of economic reform and cultural liberalization throughout the Soviet bloc. Brezhnev presided over an increasingly conservative order. The ice was not as thick as before 1953, but the choppy water had been stilled. Nineteen fifty-six was, of course, damaging to the reputation of the Soviet bloc, but many Communists still believed that the system retained its dynamism and could be reformed. Between 1945 and 1968, three forms of Communism had been tried in the Soviet bloc: High Stalinism, Khrushchev’s mixture of Radical and Romantic mobilization, and the technocratic and market reforms of the 1960s. All had failed or been outlawed, except in Hungary, where goulash Communism remained. What, now, was left?

The system that emerged was described by Brezhnev as ‘developed socialism’, by Honecker as ‘real existing socialism’. Behind these bland phrases lurked a deeply conservative message: socialism was ‘developed’,
not ‘develop
ing
’; it was ‘real’ and ‘existing’ and so did not need to be improved upon. Khrushchev’s talk of an egalitarian Communism arriving as early as 1980 had been quietly forgotten. Perhaps the best way to describe the system in this period is ‘paternalistic socialism’. This was a variation on High Stalinism, as it entrenched political hierarchies, even as it lessened economic inequalities. But the party was much less sectarian and violent than its Stalinist forebear. It had jettisoned its militancy and had given up on mobilizing the population for production. The Soviet Union still had major military ambitions, but the Communists were now more committed to satisfying demands for higher living standards.

In 1979 Leonid Brezhnev was awarded yet another medal: the most prestigious Soviet prize for literature – the Lenin Prize. Never had the world seen such a combination of statesman, war-leader and litterateur. The prize was given for the ghost-written three-volume memoir of his war exploits at the battle of Malaia Zemlia (‘Little Land’), near his home town of Novorossiisk. The incident was a minor one, and Brezhnev had been a rather unimportant political commissar. But his role and the battle’s were systematically exaggerated in histories, and they had now became a major part of the official story of the War. Children sang songs about the heroic encounter, and tours of party members trudged around a newly constructed Malaia Zemlia memorial complex.

Of course, the cult of Malaia Zemlia was greeted with general hilarity and occasioned a whole sub-genre of jokes. But it also tells us a great deal about the nature of late Soviet rule. The obsession with medals was typical of the hierarchical culture of the Brezhnev era, and, for the first time, the War became a central part of the regime’s propaganda. There was a flurry of memorial building, including the enormous Motherland sculpture in Kiev. War memorials spread throughout the Soviet bloc, and many are still there, despite the efforts of anti-Russian nationalists to remove them.

Brezhnev himself admired Stalin as a war leader, and though he did not rehabilitate him, criticisms stopped. The Terror was simply not mentioned. Brezhnev, though, did adopt aspects of Stalin’s style. He took
Stalin’s title, ‘Secretary General’ of the party, and by the end of the 1970s was being described as
Vozhd
. His claims to great literary achievement also echoed Stalin’s pretensions to be a leading Marxist philosopher, linguistic theorist and ‘coryphaeus [chorus-master] of science’.

Brezhnev was perhaps closest to the late Stalin in his love of hierarchy. After Khrushchev’s chaotic attempts to ‘flatten’ society, Brezhnev was determined to restore the lines of command. Stalin’s ethnic hierarchy was also restored. Just as it had during and after World War II, the party now relied on a version of Russian nationalism to replace a Marxism-Leninism very much in abeyance. A vocal Russian nationalist intelligentsia was treated with indulgence, the Central Committee became more Russian, and anti-Semitism crept back into official practice.

Some of the main beneficiaries of the Brezhnev system were the ‘cadres’ – the socialist service aristocracy. In 1965 János Kádár told Brezhnev that it was unacceptable to operate according to the old Soviet principle of ‘today a hero, tomorrow a bum’, but he was preaching to the converted.
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Brezhnev himself enunciated the principle ‘stability of cadres’, protecting them from Khrushchev’s threatening democracy campaigns, whilst in the GDR the technocratic challenge to their position was removed. The result was an entrenched, and increasingly senescent political elite; in the USSR the average age of full members of the Politburo rose from fifty-eight in 1966 to seventy in 1981.

In contrast with the early 1950s, however, political hierarchy was combined with greater economic equality, and a very un-Stalinist willingness to buy off worker discontent. The harsh father of the Stalinist era was replaced by a paternalistic state looking after the economic welfare of its citizens. Workers’ wages rose throughout the Soviet bloc, and the gap between blue-collar and white-collar wages declined – in the USSR, for instance, the differential between an engineer and a worker fell from 2.15 in 1940 to 1.11 in 1984. Worker protests in Poland in 1970 at rises in food prices – toppling Gomułka and forcing the new government under Edvard Gierek to give in – concentrated the minds of all leaders. In the GDR, subsidies on basic goods such as food and children’s clothes rose from 8 billion marks per year in 1970 to an enormous 56 billion in 1988.
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In the 1970s living standards rose in most countries in the bloc, which explains the continuing nostalgia for the era.

But how were these improvements to be financed when the productivity of the economies was declining? The answer lay in two rather
unexpected places: beneath the ground, and in the banks of New York and London. The oil-price hike in 1973 gave the USSR, a major oil-producer, a massive windfall. It could therefore afford higher living standards and an ambitious foreign policy, even though, according to some estimates, in the second half of the 1970s its growth had slowed to a meagre 1 per cent. For oil-importing Eastern Europe, in contrast, the price increase was a disaster. The USSR found it was forgoing huge export earnings by sending subsidized raw materials, and especially oil, to Eastern Europe; it has been calculated that in 1980 the terms of trade within Comecon transferred a massive $42.8 billion (in 2007 prices) subsidy from the USSR to its East European satellites.
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But oil also provided salvation, for it flooded the world with Arab petrodollars, funnelled through Western commercial banks and looking for a home. With the petrodollar, the free global financial markets that dominate the world to this day were born, and the regulation of the 1930s was gradually dismantled.

Hayek and his followers argued that private bankers, free of state regulation, were the ideal people to decide on the rational allocation of capital, and were certainly much less inefficient than bureaucratic planners. Driven by profit, bankers would inevitably invest in the most productive projects around the world, rewarding the innovative and hard-working and shunning the stupid and lazy. However, the early behaviour of these new captains of global capital should have warned the world that Wall Street could be as careless with its capital as Gosplan: bankers’ time-scales can be short, and far from picking long-term winners, they invested in the ramshackle, over-planned economies of Soviet Eastern Europe.

The banks were encouraged by Western governments, eager to help their recession-stricken industries export goods to Eastern Europe. Communist leaders, for their part, abandoned any remaining ideological qualms and took the cash. It helped them to finance better living standards for their disgruntled populations whilst feeding the hungry states’ voracious appetite for industrial investment. Having exhausted domestic resources, they now found a new source of capital abroad. Poland was one of the most ravenous states, and Gierek used loans to build steel mills and plants producing cars under Western licence – like the Fiat Polski – which he hoped to export throughout the Soviet bloc. By 1975 investment had reached a massive 29 per cent of GDP, largely because the party failed to control industry’s demand for the new foreign
capital.
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Ceauşescu also hatched grandiose projects, conceived by crony economists and his own children. He borrowed in the hopes he could create a modern, though still planned, economy, exporting petrochemicals to the Western market. As one commentator has remarked, the ends were those of Adam Smith, the means those of Iosif Stalin. Like the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, even though operating an inefficient economic system, had ambitions to compete on the world market. By the end of the decade much of the Communist world – Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba and Communist Africa – was in hock to Western banks, joining much of the non-Communist developing world. East European debts were especially large, and between 1974 and 1979 the Polish debt tripled, whilst the Hungarian doubled. In the 1980s these debts were to cause a major crisis, but until then they helped to finance the paternalistic socialism of the mature Communist regimes.