By the late 1970s, Eastern Europe presented a differentiated picture. The most repressive country in the region was Romania. A rare miners’ strike was sparked in the Jiu Valley by legislation ending disability payments for miners and raising the retirement age to fifty-five. Some 35,000 strikers attended a mass meeting on i August 1977. Their demands included a reduction of working hours, improved medical facilities and a return to the retirement age of fifty. They called on the party leader to come to the mines for direct talks.
Faced with this unprecedented stoppage, Ceau§escu arrived to face a hostile crowd. He purported to make concessions, including the promise that there would be no punishment of those who had organised the strike. Once the miners had returned to work, however, the army and secret police moved in. Several hundred activists were transferred to other mines and the longer working day was reinstated. There was no response from other social groups. In contrast to Poland, the lack of social solidarity in Romania was stark.
Although Romania remained neo-Stalinist at home, civil resistance became more common, and better co-ordinated, elsewhere in the bloc. A growing role was played by Protestant churches in East Germany. Though a Church-State Agreement (1978) appeared to give the political authorities greater scope to curtail its independence, the reverse occurred. Under church protection, a public sphere began to develop outside the official realm. Starting with discussion groups on economic and environmental issues, this gradually grew into an unofficial peace movement, including other groups defending human rights. Elsewhere, new forms of counter-culture proliferated, such as unofficial art shows, street theatre and popular musical concerts. Such 'happenings’ often arose from connections with the West.
When dissidents sent 'Open Letters’ to prominent intellectuals and political leaders in the West, they often received a positive and public response. This helped to remove the sense of international isolation behind which Communist governments sought to confine their citizens. At the intergovernmental level,
Eastern Europe’s 'return to Europe’ was legitimised by the biannual monitoring of the Helsinki Accords, starting at Belgrade in the summer of 1977.
Even at the height of the Cold War, East Europeans retained their sense of universal values. They did not respond to their imposed political isolation with passivity. Repression made resistance most difficult in Romania and Bulgaria, but even in those countries there was growing understanding of the need for independence. The founding father of 'Charter 77’, Jan Patocka, advised East Europeans in his valedictory statement to behave with civic dignity and courage, to live without fear and to speak the truth. As he put it: 'Let us be frank about this: in the past no conformity has ever led to any improvement in the situation.’22
22 Deathbed Statement (Prague, 8 March 1977).
World History
