Dark Continent, page 34
Peasant rebellions were a traditional part of the political landscape in eastern Europe and the new state authorities suppressed them much as their predecessors had done, through the militia and army. At least 80,000 peasants were deported or tried in Romania alone, 30,000 in humiliating public show trials. Others had their homes ransacked by the militia, their produce and livestock requisitioned, their families beaten up or threatened. In Hungary, thousands of farmers languished in internment camps, further disrupting the rural economy.33
Although these rebellions—even when, as in Transylvania, they obtained the support of anti-communist partisans in the mountains—did not threaten the grip of the Party directly, they did reveal the extent of peasant dissatisfaction. Moreover, as one of the causes of food shortages, they constituted an indirect threat to communist power. Hardliners might try to blame the shortages on the surviving private smallholders, but Party critics increasingly realized that collectivization was a folly which threatened the entire industrialization effort. From as early as 1951 (in Romania) the policy was modified, to reduce the elements of coercion and compulsion. “The ideal collective farm is a socialistic form too far ahead of present conditions,” ran the new rationale, “A lower form should be used in this intermediate period.” Hardly a message likely to quieten peasant fears!34
Other “class enemies” were also being created by the industrialization drive. As millions of young peasants flocked into the cities, the regimes tried solving a looming housing shortage by clearing out “bourgeois” property-owners. These “unproductive people” were now to pay the price for the slow rate of housing construction (four times slower in East than in West Germany, for example). Operation “B” in Czech cities in the early 1950s led to mass evictions of “class enemies.” “As far back as last November,” ran a report from 1952, “rumours started circulating in Romania that a mass deportation of ‘unnecessary city dwellers’ was slated for the near future.” Thousands of residents were deported from Bucharest, Budapest and elsewhere. Bulgarian police took advantage of the 1948 “Measures against Socially Dangerous Persons.” Official permission was now required to reside in an increasing number of “workers’ cities.”35
The victims went to swell the armies of slave labourers used on such high-profile construction projects as the Danube-Black Sea canal (involving 40,000 prisoners). Kept behind barbed wire fences, they lived in the open until they succeeded in building reed shacks and digging wells for water. Food shortages and poor sanitary conditions led to high rates of suicide. This forced labour—sometimes institutionalized as in the Romanian Directorate of Labour Reserves, or the Bulgarian Labour Army—played an important part in helping the bureaucracy aim for the fantastic targets set under the Plan. In Bulgaria there were 100,000 slave labourers compared with an industrial workforce of 361,000.
Even ordinary workers—supposedly the favoured class of the new order—found themselves hemmed in, and urged on, by restrictions and pressures which they had not anticipated. “To fight mercilessly against the enemies of the working people”—as, say, the Romanian Party was committed to doing—meant attacking the workforce itself. The authorities not only banned strikes and work stoppages; they restricted labour mobility and tried to clamp down on “absenteeism.” In Bulgaria the “arbitrary quitting” of one’s job was punishable by “corrective labour.” Workers needed to register with the local police to obtain ID and work cards, and faced prosecution for “violations of labour discipline.” In the absence of wage rises or convincing incentives, the low living standards, shortages of food and other consumer goods, increasingly strict labour discipline and unmasking of “saboteurs” and “agents” alienated the workforce. Yet outright resistance was difficult as the unions were extensions of the state, while workers were encouraged to police themselves. “The tightening of labour discipline,” insisted a Hungarian paper, “must be achieved by pillorying [loafers and idlers] at production conferences, by reporting their nefarious activities … by visiting them in their homes, and if all else fails, by expelling them from the ranks of honest workers.”36
In the midst of this extraordinary turmoil came Stalin’s seventieth birthday. The end of 1949 saw roads, monuments, buildings and entire towns dedicated to the Soviet leader. New cities emerged—like Stalinstadt in East Germany, Sztalinvaros in Hungary—as symbols of “the great construction projects of Communism.” In Prague, the State Commission for Coordinating the Celebration of General Stalin’s Seventieth Birthday commissioned a monument thirteen metres high overlooking the city. These edifices were intended to mark “Man’s triumph over nature and the social forces that have fettered him.” Instead, they were soon to reveal the fragility of the Stalinist system itself.
In December 1949 Frankfurter Allee in the Soviet sector of Berlin was renamed “Stalinallee.” “The first socialist street in Germany”—as it was hailed—was to be flanked by ambitious building projects. Just as the street was supposed to symbolize the achievements of the communist regime, the workers building it symbolized the “new men” who were making it possible. Otto Nagel’s painting of the Young Bricklayer of Stalinallee depicted one of these heroes against a backdrop of scaffolding and flags. Yet shortly after the completion of this picture, these very same building workers downed tools in the first serious internal challenge to communist rule.
The workers’ uprising in East Berlin in the spring of 1953, coming soon after Stalin’s death, marked the end of the initial industrialization drive across the Soviet bloc. Similar discontent—which quickly took on an anti-Russian character—was manifest in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Angered at wage cuts (masquerading as “higher work norms”) the “Heroes of socialist construction” were, in reality, alienated from the regime that glorified them. Eventually, the street placards on Stalinallee were quietly removed: part of the street reverted to its old name, while part was renamed “Karl-Marx-Allee.”
REFORMING COMMUNISM?
Stalin’s successors followed a rather hesitant “New Course” in the mid-1950s that was supposed to allay this discontent by slowing the pace of industrialization. Collectivization came under attack and where it was reversed—as in Poland and Yugoslavia—the “socialist sector” shrank with extraordinary speed. Taxes were lowered as were the compulsory crop deliveries demanded by the authorities. At the same time, it was announced that more consumer goods would be made available, and that the housing shortage would be tackled. The harsh labour discipline of the “heroic” phase of Stalinism was replaced by a more conciliatory approach.
Politically, too, there was a change of course. Just as Stalin’s death led to an emphasis on “collective leadership” in Moscow, so too in eastern Europe the “little Stalins” were challenged. In East Germany, from where nearly one million (mostly young people) had fled in the years after 1945, Ulbricht came under fire, and there was a row provoked by such Stalinist-type follies as the creation of a Commission for the Preparation of Comrade W. Ulbricht’s Sixtieth Birthday. One by one, the “little Stalins” were toppled; few foresaw that they would be succeeded by others.
More crucially, the departure of the Stalinist leadership was accompanied—as in the Soviet Union—by the discrediting of their chief instrument of power, the secret police. Once the security forces had been above the party; now they were disorientated and uncertain. “The sad ones,” as they were known, were thrown on to the defensive. Never again would they be so sure of themselves, or so reliable an instrument of repression. It was the end of what one victim called “the dictatorship of the party within the party.” When Hungarian Party Secretary Mátyás Rákosi tried addressing a meeting of secret-police officers in June 1956 he was roundly booed.37 The victims of the purges were thus rehabilitated, their persecutors purged. The Party managed to pin the blame for Stalinism’s excesses on agencies which had escaped its control: rehabilitating former party leaders like Rajk, Gomulka and Pauker became paradoxically a way of reasserting communist control of the state.
In this way, de-Stalinization made any future clampdown far more awkward for the authorities to contemplate and facilitated a new openness and debate. Police powers were restrained by new laws (or by a greater willingness to observe old ones), as the Party emphasized the need to “return to socialist legality.” Labour camps were shut down and tens of thousands of prisoners returned home. In Poland, for instance, some 30,000 prisoners benefited from an amnesty in April 1956 which coincided with a purge of the upper echelons of the security services.38
But what did liberalization within a communist system mean? To some it meant independence from Moscow; but as the examples of Romania (and to a lesser extent Yugoslavia) showed, “national communism” was compatible with one-man rule of the harshest sort. To others, among them many shocked and guilty Party cadres, it meant recapturing the “original purity” of the movement. Thus as the People’s Democracies emerged from the “heroic” phase of the immediate post-war years, uncertain cadres had to confront the question of how the Party itself should react to de-Stalinization. This debate was fought out between Stalinists and liberalizers in an atmosphere punctuated and to some extent shaped by explosions of popular protest in East Germany (1953), Poland and Hungary (1956). The liberalizers argued that such events demonstrated the need for a change of course; the Stalinists retorted that they were triggered off by rising expectations which had been stimulated by the signs of panic and division in the highest echelons of the Party after Stalin’s death. But powerful forces were behind the liberalizers: Khrushchev, in Moscow, for one, who publicly accepted the idea in 1955 of “several roads to socialism,” and tried to mend his fences with Tito. Even the occasional returns to a hard line—after 1956, for example, and again after 1968—never approached the paranoiac excesses of Stalinism, except perhaps in the Zhivkov, Hoxha and Ceausescu dynasties in the Balkans.
De-Stalinization raised in particular the question of the rule of law under communism, and the relationship between law and ideology (as expressed by its watchdog, the Party). On the one hand, none other than Stalin himself had reasserted the significance of the law; and yet his most important theoretician, Andrei Vyshinsky, had insisted that “if the law lags behind life it needs to be changed.” According to the 1950 Polish Judiciary Act (a typical expression of the Stalin era) judges were instructed to behave as “revolutionary constructors of a socialist society.” Throughout the empire, in fact, post-war constitutions had followed Vyshinsky in explicitly rejecting the “bourgeois principle of a separation of powers.” Instead, all authority converged in the hands of the Party, even in those cases where the Party was not mentioned in so many words.39
So was the Party above the law? If it was, what was to prevent the re-emergence of a police state especially in a case where—as in Bulgaria, for instance—Party theorists insisted that “to speak about vested rights in socialism is the same as to favour counter-revolution”? The aftermath of the show trials saw Party bosses trying to square the circle. To the throng gathered before the grave of László Rajk—in a setting of multiple and tragic ironies—a senior Hungarian Party official proclaimed: “Many are asking themselves: what guarantee do we have that illegalities, offences against the law such as these, will never again take place in the future?—It is a justified question. It is a question to which we are obliged to give our people an answer. The guarantee is the Party. We communists are the guarantee.” An unsettling reassurance! Trying to distance himself from the old days, János Kádár insisted: “A whole nation cannot be suspect.” Or, in another pithy reversal of Stalinism: “He who is not against us is for us.” Yet even under Kádár, there was no real move towards judicial independence. The Party retained its control over the security apparatus; it was just that the Party became more moderate.40
At the heart of these debates was the question of the character of the Party itself. In his controversial “Anatomy of a Morality,” Tito’s fiery colleague Milovan Djilas charged that the ideological purists of the revolution had been replaced by a “new class” of self-aggrandizing time-servers. The “heroes” of the partisan war had turned into corrupt “practical men” married to grasping wives. But, if this was true—and even Tito’s spreading waistline gave support to Djilas’s criticism—what was to be done? Djilas himself talked about building a genuine multi-party democracy and doing away with the Party’s monopoly on power. Later, but in like vein, Czech reformers argued for a separation of the Party and state.
Such a revival of the postulates of “pure bourgeois democracy” was anathema to most cadres. Perhaps there was another way. Tito’s favourite theorist, Edvard Kardelj, argued that between “classical bourgeois democracy” and Soviet “socialism of the apparatus” lay the “direct democracy” of workers’ self-government and the realization of Marx’s dream of the “withering away of the state.” Workers’ self-management sounded wonderful in theory, and attracted the attention of curious foreign economists (who showed less interest in the millions of Yugoslav workers who preferred employment as migrant workers in the capitalist West). But though brilliant as propaganda for foreign consumption, Kardelj’s theories—as modified by reality—turned out to involve little more than a very pragmatic response to calls for reform. Tito, after all, was hardly going to preside over the dismantling of the Party apparatus he had fought a war to bring to power. Nor, of course, would the Soviet Union acquiesce more generally in the Party’s demotion: liberalization would have to take place under its gaze.
If a certain decline in the Party’s ideological influence did take place it was due to pressures less easily evaded than Djilas’s broadsides. A new technical intelligentsia was indeed coming to dominate the Party machinery, ousting the pre-war “heroes.” These cadres were economic pragmatists not ideologues, and they recognized the need for scientists, managers and specialists to spearhead the reforms without which the Party must eventually be doomed. Their ideology was that of technocrats everywhere in the late fifties and sixties—a belief that science, technological progress and a state run by experts held the answers to modern life. They sought a depoliticization of the system on the grounds that the modernization of the economy now required not ideologues but administrators.
What made such arguments plausible was the Soviet insistence in the 1950s that capitalism and communism were competitors in a race towards a material utopia. Khrushchev, in particular, liked to boast that communism would soon demonstrate its superiority to the West by overtaking it in the production of consumer goods: “Within a period of, say, five years following 1965, the level of US production per capita should be equalled and overtaken. Thus by that time, perhaps even sooner, the USSR will have captured first place in the world both in absolute volume of production and per capita production, which will ensure the world’s highest standard of living.” His Master’s Voice, Ulbricht, talked of “overtaking and surpassing” West Germany. Strange and implausible as such boasts may sound today, they were not dismissed by the West. This was, after all, the Sputnik era. “Can Moscow match us industrially?” asked one leading American commentator in 1955. His conclusion: the possibility could not be ruled out.41
THE NEW SOCIETY
If such boasts were taken seriously, it was because people were struck by the dramatic social changes which communism had brought to eastern Europe. In less than two decades the region became a predominantly urban society. More than twenty million people moved into the war-ravaged towns and their abandoned apartments. New cities emerged; old ones were ringed by estates of high-rise apartment blocks; even villages acquired industrial workforces. In the late 1940s the urban population of the region stood at 37.5 million—some 36 per cent of the total workforce—figures which had remained unchanged for a decade. Twenty years later, the urban population had grown to some 58 million and nearly half the labour force now lived in the towns. In the recession-bound 1980s, places like Hoyeswerda, Nowa Huta and Dimitrovgrad were shabby, decaying reminders of communism’s failure; in the 1950s they evoked its glorious future.42
Of course, even in the 1950s, the careful observer could discern the priorities of the new order in the ideological elephantiasis which seemed to be afflicting the region. The centre of Warsaw was dwarfed by a new Palace of Culture, described by one analyst as “an architectural three-stage rocket”—a Stalinist skyscraper “donated” by the Soviet Union; central Sofia was dominated by the neo-Byzantine Ministry for Heavy Industry. In Bucharest the mammoth Casa Scinteii housed a printing and publishing complex which produced newspapers, school books and brochures and symbolized “man’s triumph over nature and the social forces that have fettered him.” These “great construction projects of communism” took precedence over private housing. Even after the “New Course” increased the emphasis on housing, the shortage of living space remained acute.43
Yet while homes remained scarce, there were dramatic improvements in the provision of other social goods. The creation, for instance, of a nationalized health service offered vast improvements in care. In Bulgaria, where the government had passed the “Free and Universal Medical Care” Bill in 1951, the number of beds per 1,000 inhabitants was soon more than double the pre-war level. In Czechoslovakia, where the entire health sector was nationalized, child mortality dropped dramatically from a pre-war rate of nearly 50 per 1,000 to under 15 by the 1960s. Life expectancy converged equally rapidly on west European norms.
Family allowances (often linked progressively to income), the provision of childcare and the liberalization of abortion were all presented as “part of the emancipation of women” and were not unrelated to the needs of an economy desperate for female labour. It should of course be remembered that although large numbers of married and unmarried women did enter the workforce, they were still paid less than men. And what allowed them to do this were not only official childcare facilities but also the plentiful and indispensable supply of grandmothers, often cooped up in tiny flats with their grandchildren.44
