Even in regimented eastern Europe the 1950s and 1960s saw a moderation of superpower hegemony. The main stimulus was the death of Stalin in March 1953. His worst excesses were curbed by his successors — particularly Nikita Khrushchev, party secretary from 1953 to 1964, who denounced Stalinism and its personality cult in a sensational speech to the party conference in 1956. At home Khrushchev made some efforts to reform agriculture, increase production of consumer goods, and promote rule by law instead of secret police. But the process of destalin-ization had more effect in eastern Europe. There the new course was expressed in the doctrine that there were now ‘many roads to socialism’.
The most spectacular example was Yugoslavia. A creation of Serbian imperialism in the First World War, this polyglot state was held together after 1945 by a federal constitution and (until his death in 1980) by the leadership of Josip Broz Tito (son of a Croatian father and Slovene mother). Tito’s revolution had owed little to the Red Army, and his communists were in complete control by the end of 1945. Tito’s imperialist ambitions in the Balkans led to ostracization by Moscow in 1948, whereupon he followed his own distinctive course. In foreign policy he was a pioneer of the so-called ‘non-aligned movement’, exploiting both sides in the Cold War. At home he repudiated Stalinism and went farthest of all the eastern bloc countries along the road of economic devolution and self-management.
Yugoslavia was unique, however. Other Balkan dictators adopted a more independent foreign policy while remaining grimly Stalinist at home. In Albania Enver Hoxha (1945-85) and his nepotistic party shunned the West but took Chinese aid after Beijing broke with Moscow in the late 1950s. Romania, particularly under Nikolai Ceausescu (1965-89), adroitly played the same game while also opening up trade with the West. For both leaders, Moscow’s attempt to keep them as Russian economic colonies was the main reason for breaking away from the USSR. But Ceausescu was careful to remain within the Warsaw Pact (as was Hoxha until 1968), and communist rule in both countries remained unchallenged and repressive. Moscow therefore did not feel threatened, particularly since the Balkans were of peripheral interest.
The heart of the Soviet bloc was east-central Europe—the axis of German aggression in the past and now the border with NATO’s Central Front. Here deviation in foreign policy was unacceptable, as the Hungarians found in October 1956 when they tried to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and their revolution was suppressed by Soviet troops. On the other hand, these were some of the most advanced industrial areas of the eastern bloc, particularly the GDR and the Czech lands, and pressures for economic liberalization were particularly strong. The pattern, in consequence, was domestic reform but diplomatic conformity (the complete opposite of Romania and Albania). Janos Kadar led Hungary farthest along the path blazed by Tito, sensitive to the causes of the rising of 1956. Kadarism allowed individual local enterprises freedom, within the overall economic plan, to set their own wage and price levels in response to profits. In Poland, where there was also unrest in 1956, Wladislaw Go-mulka stopped the process of agricultural collectivization, leaving some 80 per cent of the land in private hands.
Even the Soviet bloc, therefore, was no monolith but accommodated itself to local circumstances. In a deeper sense, too, an element of consent was involved in communist rule. Throughout eastern Europe the ideological fervour of the immediate postwar era had still not been entirely extinguished. Moreover, the general public were beneficiaries as well as victims of ‘people’s democracy’. Mass industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture entailed huge social and environmental costs, but they also wrought a social revolution. In twenty years after 1950 the majority of eastern Europeans (outside the Balkans) were transformed from peasant farmers into urban industrial workers. Housing remained poor and consumer goods scarce, but the provision of free education, basic health care, and (outside Yugoslavia) full employment were all signs that the lot of the average person had markedly improved under communism. This was an important source of political cohesion in the 1950s and 1960s.
That said, it remains true that communist rule rested ultimately on force. The most striking example was East Germany. It was the most industrialized country of the eastern bloc, with the highest living standards. The regime of Walter Ulbricht had worked hard to create a sense of East German national consciousness, using sport as one of its main weapons. Huge amounts of money (and steroids) were pumped into athletic stars and at the Munich Olympics of 1972 the GDR won twenty gold medals — trailing only the USSR and the United States. Yet this remained an artificial state, and the appeal of its neighbour was enhanced by the accessibility of West German TV in most of the GDR. Denied true democracy, East Germans voted with their feet. In the 1950s the GDR was the only Soviet bloc country to decline in population, from 19 million to 17 million, as people slipped through the unchecked exits into west Berlin and thence to the Federal Republic.
Faced with this haemorrhage of personnel (much of it skilled), Ulbricht finally persuaded Moscow to seal off the city and begin the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. Eleven days later Gunter Litfin, aged 24, scaled the wall and swam the River Spree, only to be shot down as he climbed on to the West Berlin bank. A simple stone memorial was erected to ‘the first victim of the Wall’. It was a stark reminder that ‘freedom’, though a cliche of the Cold War, was not an empty slogan.
Coexistence and Stagnation, 1968-1981
By 1968, some two decades after Europe was divided, the Cold War had lost much of its ideological intensity. The post-war generation in East and West had seen in their own lifetimes how communism or capitalism had provided undreamt-of prosperity. Their children, however, had no such experience. For them the - isms were systems, and increasingly depressing ones at that. In the East the hallmark of dissent was growing political cynicism at the corruption of the party establishments. In the West students protested openly at the conformism and consumerism of their elders, adopting populist forms of Marxism and heroes such as Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung in repudiation of both
American capitalism and Soviet communism. Most of these protests were short lived yet they spawned small but notorious terrorist groups, notably the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, who were responsible for a spate of robberies and kidnappings before their suppression in the late 1970s. Although degenerating into nihilism, these terrorists, like the student movements from which they sprang, were reacting against the Americanized capitalism of 1960s Europe.
Nothing did more to tarnish America’s international reputation than the war in Vietnam. The spectacle of endless bombings of the North, played out nightly on TV screens, was a propaganda disaster for the United States. Vietnam served as a shorthand for all the iniquities of military-industrial capitalism, no more so than in Paris in May 1968, where the student uprising set off protests that nearly toppled de Gaulle. The analogue of Vietnam in the East was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Communism there had remained highly centralized, provoking growing opposition both from liberals and from the Slovak minority. The reformist government of Alexander Dubcek (a Slovak) ushered in the so-called ‘Prague spring’ — a source of alarm throughout the Soviet bloc. Dubcek allowed other political parties to organize and launched inquiries into the past record of Stalinism. There was talk that Czechoslovakia would leave the Warsaw Pact. On 20 August the Soviet tanks rolled in, though it took Moscow months to construct a pliant alternative government. The Soviet right to intervene as guardian of ‘socialist internationalism’ was stated in what became known in the West as ‘the Brezhnev Doctrine’.
By the late 1960s the two blocs seemed to be facts of life. The Cold War no longer threatened to become hot war but had frozen solid. The shorthand for this process was detente, meaning a relaxation of tension. The superpowers’ main motive for detente was to control the arms race, which not only consumed a substantial portion of their budgets but had also brought the world close to nuclear disaster over Cuba in 1962. In May 1972 President Richard M. Nixon flew to Moscow—the first visit there by an American leader—and signed the SALT i arms limitation treaty. Although only a limited, temporary measure, it appeared to herald a new attitude on both sides.
Detente also had a German dimension. Adenauer and the Christian Democrats had worked for ultimate reunification, but the socialists, led by Willy Brandt, a former mayor of West Berlin, believed it was time to face the reality of division and reach a modus vivendi with the East. Brandt, Chancellor from 1969 to 1974, never abandoned the goal of reunification—his motto was ‘two states, one nation’ — but his period in office saw the de facto recognition of the GDR and acceptance of the postwar border with Poland. A four-power treaty on Berlin regularized Allied access to this former flashpoint and allowed greater opportunities for visits to and fro by Berliners. The corner-stone of detente was the Helsinki agreement of 1975. In return for Soviet bloc commitments on human rights, the West acknowledged the post-war frontiers of Europe as ‘inviolable’ and not to be changed by force. Thirty years after Hitler the division of Europe seemed immutable.
Unlike NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the EEC became more dynamic after the demise of de Gaulle. Its relaunch at the Hague summit of December 1969 led to closer foreign policy co-ordination and a commitment to monetary union by 1980. This further integration was part of the agenda for deepening the Community. The other great aim was widening. Britain’s long-delayed entry became possible once de Gaulle had left the stage. Together with Denmark and Ireland, she joined the Community in January 1973, turning the Six into the Nine. By 1977 serious negotiations were under way with Greece, Spain, and Portugal.
The motives for this second enlargement remind us again of the Cold War context of European integration. These three poor, Mediterranean countries were very different from the industrialized core of the EEC and posed huge problems of assimilation. The pressures for their inclusion were frankly political. Spain and Portugal had been stagnant backwaters of authoritarian dictatorship since before the war. But the Portuguese revolution of April 1974 and the death of General Francisco Franco in November 1975 ushered in new democracies. Greece had been semi-democratic until 1967 but thereafter a repressive military junta held power until November 1974. In the mid-1970s, therefore, all three countries were struggling to establish democracies, and their admission to the EEC was intended to consolidate that process. Greece joined in 1981, but French fears about agricultural competition delayed the admission of Spain and Portugal until 1986.
By the 1980s the European Community rivalled the superpowers in population and resources. Yet the two aims of deepening and widening seemed increasingly incompatible. Except for southern Italy, the original Six had much in common, with long-standing economic and cultural links. The assimilation of Britain, with her small agricultural sector and continued interest in global trade, proved extremely hard, and much of the Community’s energy in the decade after 1973 was taken up with arguments about the size of the British budget contribution. Absorbing the backward Mediterranean states was also problematic, requiring a substantial transfer of resources to bring their levels of development closer to that of northern Europe. With enlargement so difficult, the deeper integration of the Community, envisaged at The Hague in 1969, took second place. There was greater co-operation in foreign policy but a limited attempt at monetary co-ordination collapsed in the mid-1970s.
At the root of the EEC’s problems was the end of the long post-war boom. For two decades from the late 1940s western Europe’s economies had grown steadily and almost without interruption, in a quite unprecedented period of prosperity. The Cold War had contributed to this, through the American security umbrella and also the profitability of what became known as the military-industrial complex. Europeans had become used to growth: indeed social stability was predicated on the expectation of rising living standards and generous welfare and medical provision. Similarly, the success of the EEC in its first decade or so had owed much to the post-war boom, and the absence of growth greatly complicated the process of enlargement. Just as such lengthy growth was unprecedented, so too was the bizarre mix of economic stagnation and soaring inflation (‘stagflation’) that followed. Underlying the confusion were fundamental changes in the world economy, notably the huge rise in oil prices after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the new industrial challenge from Asia, led by Japan.
Economic crisis therefore threatened the foundations of political stability. This threat was even more apparent in the eastern bloc. By the 1960s the gains of forced modernization had been achieved, and its problems were all too apparent. Soviet-style communism, in historian Charles Maier’s phrase, was a ‘heavy-metal’ ideology. Its core was smokestack industries under state direction. Production was geared to central planning targets, with little attention to profitability and efficiency, even in more westernized economies such as Yugoslavia. By the 1970s these industries were grossly uncompetitive in world terms and their unrestricted growth had created appalling pollution. Economic reform in the wake of the Prague spring was mere tinkering, and the corrupt neo-Stalinist leaderships ruled over increasingly sullen populations. What helped keep the Soviet bloc going, ironically, was detente. Its great attraction, not least for the Soviets, was the possibility of western trade and credits. West Germany’s loans and markets became vital to the economies of her eastern neighbours. But detente proved a virus as much as a blood transfusion. The West’s price at Helsinki in 1975 was a Soviet bloc commitment to human rights and to procedures for their monitoring. In order to maintain the economic benefits of detente, communist regimes had to accept the political price of small-scale dissidence. Despite police harassment, groups like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the Evangelical Church in the GDR chipped away at the legitimacy of their respective regimes. They were to prove the nuclei of eventual political opposition.
Nowhere was the double-edged character of detente more evident than in Poland. Under Eduard Gierek, Poland was one of the world’s fastest growing economies in the early 1970s. But its ‘little economic miracle’ was the result of massive imports of industrial equipment from the West, financed not by Polish exports but western credits. The result was the largest foreign debt in eastern Europe, which could only be serviced through raising prices and squeezing living standards.
Mounting Polish resentment found powerful institutional expression in what was about the least Stalinized country of eastern Europe. Most of the population was Catholic and the Church drew additional strength from its championship of Polish nationalism against Russia and from the election of a Polish cardinal as Pope John Paul II in 1978. Also distinctive was the organized militancy of the Baltic shipyard workers. In August 1980 they secured the right to an independent trade union, Solidarity. Under the leadership of Lech Walesa this became a potent political force. The retirement of Gierek failed to defuse the crisis and in December 1981, with communist monopoly of power threatened and fears of Soviet military intervention, the Polish leadership imposed martial law. Solidarity was suppressed, the party purged, and a tenuous order restored. The year 1981, like 1956 and 1968, was a reminder that Soviet power was what ultimately held the eastern bloc together.
From the ‘New Cold War’ to the End of the Soviet Empire, 1981-1989
The Polish crisis signalled the end of detente. Already under strain for other reasons, notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, it was now repudiated by the West. Loans ended, debts soared, and the socio-economic pressures in eastern Europe mounted. The Soviet Union was forced to increase economic aid to Poland and her neighbours, further increasing the pressures on its own ossified economy.
Equally alarming for the Soviets was the ‘new Cold War’ with the United States. Modernization of Warsaw Pact nuclear weapons in the 1970s had prompted a new NATO deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles in western Europe. In the short run this led to a revival of anti-American peace movements in Britain, West Germany, and The Netherlands, while the Soviets broke off all arms control negotiations in 1983. Nevertheless, NATO successfully deployed the missiles and the Soviets were further alarmed by President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The USSR had only been able to hold its own to date by devoting perhaps one-fifth of GDP to defence, but the cost of its military-industrial complex was backwardness in every other sector of the economy. ‘Star Wars’ (as SDI became known) threatened Moscow with a new, high-technology twist to the arms race, already spiralling out of control.
By the mid-1980s the Soviet Union faced a major crisis. The increasingly senile Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor from 1964, had presided over what became known as the ‘era of stagnation’. With typical Russian black humour, one joke imagined recent Soviet leaders in a train that had broken down out in the steppes. ‘Flog the driver,’ Stalin ordered. But nothing happened. ‘Rehabilitate the driver,’ cried Khrushchev, to no avail. Then pudgy Brezhnev drew the curtains of the compartment, smiled his hooded smile, and said: ‘Let’s just pretend the train is moving.’
After Brezhnev died in 1982, the Soviet communist party chose two more ailing septuagenarians (Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko) who expired in quick succession. It then made a generational leap and appointed the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev as party secretary in March 1985. Under his dynamic leadership the Soviet Union reopened dialogue with the United States and totally changed its nuclear policy. In December 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan signed a historic agreement to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles, not only in Europe but world-wide. This was the first time the superpowers had actually agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals. ‘Gorby’ became a folk hero in the West.
But Gorbachev wanted reform, not revolution. He was a communist functionary trying to make the system work by more radical means. The economy was his priority. He wished to control the arms race so as to reduce its crushing financial burden and facilitate economic modernization through western help. But he was persuaded that political liberalization (glasnost or openness) was essential to the process of reconstruction (perestroika). In the event, the former succeeded while the latter failed. As the economy collapsed, freedom to protest grew. Reconstruction became deconstruction.
In eastern Europe the result was revolution. Gorbachev had hoped that liberalization throughout the Soviet bloc would create a new framework for economic co-operation, thereby strengthening Russian influence. But his public backing for perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet satellites only served to shake their neo-Stalinist regimes to the foundations. When Gorbachev visited Prague in April 1987, one of his aides, Gennadi Gerasimov, was asked what was the difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek. ‘Nineteen years,’ was the reply. Even the political elites privately acknowledged the need for reform. Certainly they were not ready to use brute force to maintain the old order.
By 1989 the situation had become critical. In Poland and Hungary the combination of economic crisis and political opposition was most advanced. In the former, Solidarity was relegalized and it swept the board in elections in June. In Hungary, too, a multiparty system was authorized and border controls abandoned. This permitted a new haemorrhage of citizens from the GDR, exiting via Hungary to Austria and West Germany. When Gorbachev visited Berlin in October 1989 for the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, he was openly critical of the Honecker government’s failure to reform. It was also made clear that, unlike 1968, the USSR would not intervene with force. Gerasimov said that the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ had been replaced by the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’. ‘You know the Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way”?’ he asked. ‘Well, Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.’
By November 1989 powerful opposition groups had emerged in the GDR and Czechoslovakia-New Forum and Civic Forum. A new government in the GDR tried belated liberalization but its decision to end border controls only led to a massive flood of East Berliners into the western part of the city on the night of 9 November. Within days the Wall-the most forbidding symbol of Europe’s division-was being pulled down. By the end of the year communist rule had collapsed in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. The flood-tide swept on, even into the Balkans, where Stalinism had been more deeply rooted. In November Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov resigned after forty-five years in power. Romania’s Christmas present was the summary trial and execution of Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife.
From start to finish, the whole drama of liberation had been played out on the television screens of Europe and the world.
Indeed, TV images had been a revolutionary force in themselves, inspiring acts of emulation. largely to Gorbachev the Cold War was over, but so was the Soviet bloc. The thaw had become an avalanche.
World History
