Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (47 page)

All in all, this constituted a social revolution. Living standards were slowly rising. From Yugoslavia was reported “the increased use of bicycles and motorcycles, and many people had even cause to hope that one day they would own an automobile.” Radio, TV and telephone ownership spread rapidly, posing all sorts of new challenges to Party control as village loudspeakers gave way to personal sets. Families shrank: torn between “baby or car,” an increasing number of couples were plumping for the car, or at least the hope of one.
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The changing pattern of daily life was mirrored in school textbooks: by the 1960s, these displayed an attention to consumption and leisure which had been unthinkable even a decade earlier. One illustration of the image of a little boy reading to his grandparents (parents presumably out at work), marked the change. A 1952 Serbian primer had shown them all sitting on low stools in a sparsely furnished simple home. The 1963 version showed them in comfortable chairs, in a room with a smart modern cabinet with a shelf of books and a carpet on the floor.
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Despite these achievements, however, there was real dissatisfaction within society. In particular, the constant shortages and scarcity of consumer goods undermined the Party’s proud boasts. At one level, scarcity, far from being a threat to the rule of the Party, was in fact basic to its power: one of the main reasons for joining or cooperating with the Party was to enjoy privileged access to scarce resources. Were goods suddenly to become plentiful, the Party would have lost one of its main sources of support. At another level, though, the shortages of consumer goods in particular did undermine the main justification the Party under Khrushchev offered for its leadership, namely its ability to outstrip the West in material terms.

Shortages focused popular discontent on corruption and favouritism among Party cadres themselves, as well as on national subservience to Soviet economic interests. Whereas western Europe received capital from its superpower, eastern Europe saw money and goods flow out instead through requisitions, rigged barter deals and Soviet-controlled joint companies. One estimate puts the total cost to eastern Europe up to Stalin’s death at roughly $14 billion, which is the equivalent of the US investment in western Europe through the Marshall Plan. The formation of Comecon as a rival to the Marshall Plan did not ease the discontent of countries like Romania and Bulgaria, which saw themselves destined to serve as agricultural producers in the new communist division of labour.
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By the 1960s the gap between East and West was widening. Czechs and Austrians had had roughly the same rate of car ownership before the war; by 1960 the Austrians had three times as many per capita. Most other east Europeans only reached the Czech level of 1960 in the 1970s, and traffic congestion—that symbol of modern consumerism—came
very late to the great cities of the region. The economic “miracle” in Japan overshadowed everything Moscow had to offer and as Moscow’s share of world GNP fell, so that of Japan rose. Growth in eastern Europe, despite the reforms, dropped in the 1960s. Unlike western Europe, agricultural production barely exceeded the pre-war level. More worrying in the long term, that growth which had taken place since the war was based not—as in the capitalist world—on improvements in productivity, but rather on huge injections of labour. What would happen as the reserves of labour dried up? Communist cadres in eastern Europe were like a runner who makes a huge effort to catch up with a rival, only to see the latter disappearing over the horizon.
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Looking to the future, the authorities could not fail to be alarmed by the disaffected attitudes to be found particularly among the offspring of this social revolution. The “Hero’s children” (as Hungarian émigré Paul Neuburg called them) had been in many ways the beneficiaries of the dramatic changes of the first decade of communism. Yet they did not appear to be grateful. A communist education, far from brainwashing them, had left them with a deep mistrust of ideology and critical of a political system which treated them “like babies” and deprived them of information. Unlike their elders, they did not compare their lives with the pre-war or war years but rather with their contemporaries in the West.
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They developed lifestyles which alarmed their parents and the Party—based around a private world of transistor radios, cassette players and the dream of Western affluence and autonomy. While some young idealists were attracted to the reform communism of the New Left or aimed a Maoist critique at the tired cadres around them, far more had “embraced materialism with a vengeance.” They tended to be both nationalistic (i.e. anti-Russian) and “cosmopolitan.” The Romanian politburo were not alone in criticizing their youth for their “servitude to the cultural and scientific achievements of the capitalist countries.” Parties across the region sponsored endless teams of sociologists to research the “youth problem.”
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Yet not even social science could save communists from the truth. It was the Party itself which had brought the West to these young people—through its insistent materialism, through urbanization, and
more directly and concretely through the tourists who were flocking to eastern Europe in the 1960s. Earlier generations had needed to migrate westwards to experience Western culture. Now the West came to them. One million seven hundred thousand tourists hit the Yugoslav beaches in 1963 (compared with a meagre 150,000 in 1926); two years later there were 2.6 million, by 1973 an incredible 6.2 million visitors formed a mainstay of the Yugoslav economy. Other communist states quickly entered the field. At the same time it became easier for people from central Europe to travel westwards. “The craze for foreign travel has swept our country like a summer storm,” observed a Czech journalist.
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They might have been bored of communist ideology; but in their worship (not too strong a word) of modernity and material progress, these young people showed that they were the Party’s children still: it was striking how completely the image of peasant life, which had captivated a previous generation of east Europeans before communism, had been relegated to the dustbin of history. (But then the cities had become the homes of the peasants and their children, less prone to romanticizing the rural life than the old urban bourgeoisie, which had been decimated by the war.)

This was the paradox of the Party: its great achievement was precisely what now cast doubt upon its own existence. “In proposing itself as the Ultimate Hero of History, Rationality Incarnate and the Sole Champion of Progress,” wrote Neuburg, “the Party created the situation by which it was now ensnared.” This would have been the moment for the Party to retire. But of course it could not: it was committed to the eastern centralism which had once worked so dramatically but was now leading to failure.
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THE END OF EMPIRE?

“Bulgaria will not be a Soviet republic, it will be a people’s republic,” Georgy Dimitrov had insisted in December 1947. Yet Dimitrov would not have made this pronouncement without Moscow’s permission. With the exception of the Baltic states, Stalin had decided not to incorporate eastern Europe into the Soviet Union, preferring a form of indirect rule through national communist elites. In their external as
well as their domestic relations, the People’s Democracies were an experiment under constant review. The tensions generated by such a form of imperialism remained a challenge to Moscow throughout the post-war era. But was Soviet hegemony ever really in jeopardy?
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If the years from 1945 to 1953 were a phase of increasing Soviet control over their European empire, the decades after 1953 saw a gradual decentralization whose rhythms and extent were the subject of continual trial and error. In 1955 the Red Army actually withdrew from the Soviet occupation zone in Austria in exchange for a pledge of Austrian neutrality, a move which caught the West by surprise and was almost certainly inspired by the desire to settle the German question in the same way.

Only rarely did the widespread anti-Soviet feelings which existed across the region manifest themselves publicly (as in the flowers placed on T. G. Masaryk’s grave each year, which led it to be guarded in 1953 by more than one hundred policemen), but Party officials were always aware of their existence. So, too, of course was Moscow, which was prepared to allow, indeed to an extent even encourage, the drift towards “national communism” as the price to be paid for maintaining power. This was Khrushchev’s line, which prevailed over that of the more hardline Molotov and which led directly to the dissolution of the Cominform in 1956.

Occasionally popular anti-Soviet sentiment spilled out into the streets. When it did, as in Hungary in 1956, it tended to be in periods of relaxation, by those groups—workers, students—who far from being the chief victims of communism, were (in theory at least) among the elect. “No more compulsory Russian” was one of the slogans chanted in Budapest during the uprising, “Russians go back to Russia” another. Workers’ uprisings tended to alarm the authorities much more than students’—but neither group could resist for long when armed force was deployed against them. Moreover, astute and flexible handling by the political elite—as in Poland in 1956, or Yugoslavia in 1971–2—usually served to drive unrest underground again. Moscow disliked having to intervene directly, but was prepared to do so where it felt it was necessary.

Djilas talked about a state of virtual civil war existing between the Party and the rest of the population. But Djilas was as given to exaggeration
in opposition as he had been when in power. Popular dislike, even contempt, for “democratic socialism” was always mixed with fear. Communism was highly successful in breaking up possible centres of resistance. Secret police, with the help of vast networks of hundreds of thousands of informers, penetrated the workplace and the home. If the queue could be turned (by Konwicki in his
The Polish Complex
) into a symbol of social relations under communist rule it was because it was organized around the principles of scarcity, rumour and the satisfaction of individual desires. Sullen acquiescence and withdrawal from politics were increasingly in evidence except among a small minority. Indeed a sullen populace was to be preferred to one that took communism seriously, for that only produced idealists and critics of socialist reality. Popular dissatisfaction, in other words, was not the most serious of threats to Soviet rule.

Far more serious for Moscow was the threat posed by communist cadres themselves. The key to Soviet control lay in the obedience of the satraps. After Stalin’s death this was never assured. In 1956, for example, Soviet will prevailed in Hungary against the crowds on the streets but was powerless against the Polish Party’s defiant insistence on bringing Gomulka back into power. Battles in Moscow itself between hardliners and reformists confused the East European leadership, who increasingly kept their distance from both the verbose but unpredictable Khrushchev and the more laconic and cautious Brezhnev. Moscow tried to reimpose discipline through the Warsaw Pact but although it gave NATO planners nightmares (and work) the Pact was basically little more than an instrument for legalizing the presence of Soviet troops in Hungary and Romania after the Austria Peace Treaty was signed in 1955. Neither it nor Comecon could bring back the discipline of the late 1940s.

The Sino-Soviet split harmed Moscow’s prestige still further. Not only did it open up another front to worry Soviet policy-makers, but Chinese influence among east European hardliners was a threat from the late 1950s, and as Albania showed, could open up the opportunity for disobedient satellites to play Moscow off against Peking. From the early 1960s onwards, the “Mother of realized socialism” was fighting a rearguard action in eastern Europe. What made the Prague Spring so much
more
threatening to Moscow in some ways than Hungary in
1956 was the fact that this time the impetus for revolt was coming from within the Party itself. Of course, neo-Stalinist nationalists like Ceauşescu caused Brezhnev as many headaches as idealistic reformers like Dubček; wily long-term players like János Kádár in Hungary perhaps caused even more.

And yet in retrospect it must be confessed that this rearguard action from Moscow was on the whole strikingly successful. Observers, after all, spent decades predicting the break-up of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe. Ionescu, in 1965, argued that “the internal history of the Soviet bloc since the death of Stalin is the story of its progressive disintegration and the unchecked decline of Russian authority within it.” According to Pierre Hassner, “the Balkanization of Communism has prevailed over the Communization of the Balkans.”
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More percipient observers, however, were cautious. The machinery of Soviet control had proved its durability; despite the increasing senility of the Party leadership and its loss of ideological appeal, there were few signs of where a political challenge might come from. Gyorgy argued that the failure of the rebellions of 1956 “cannot augur well for future revolutionary success from below.” Paul Kecskemeti concluded his masterly analysis of the Hungarian uprising with the caveat that eastern Europe was unlikely to be the main centre of political upheaval in the Soviet bloc; instability was more likely to occur in the Soviet Union itself—the heart of the empire—than in its satellites. Most remarkably of all, François Fejtö saw in the Prague Spring not only the revival of Soviet obscurantism, but at the same time, the revelation that communism contained the seeds of reform within itself. “One may hope,” he wrote presciently in 1969, “that the next Dubček will appear in the nerve centre of the system: Moscow.”
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