CSABA BEKES
During the period following Iosif Stalin’s death, the fate of the East Central European region was determined by, on the one hand, the political status quo worked out at Yalta in 1945, and on the other hand, by the unstable and undefined New Course in Soviet policy under the dictator’s successors.
The framework for ensuing developments in Eastern Europe was established at the end of World War II. Both superpowers attributed a pivotal importance to the tacit agreements reached by the Allies at the end of the war to recognize each other’s spheres of interest. This mutual consent came to function as an automatic rule of thumb even in the chilliest years of the Cold War era, and in the coming decades it was to be demonstrated by the West’s continuous inaction whenever the Soviets suppressed sporadic internal conflicts within their bloc. After Stalin’s death, preserving the status quo remained a top priority for Moscow. Even though the incoming administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a propaganda campaign for the "liberation of the captive nations," the new Soviet leaders never contemplated the surrender of the East Central European Communist states.
The two main elements of the post-Stalin New Course were a strategy of peaceful coexistence and some modification of the Soviet model. The former meant a more flexible foreign policy and the deepening of political and, especially, economic cooperation with the West, with the aim of improving the Soviet Union’s chances of surviving the intensifying competition between the two blocs. At the same time, in addition to fostering East-West rapprochement, Moscow made efforts to penetrate the Third World and to restore the unity of the Soviet bloc by working toward a reconciliation with Yugoslavia. Within this post-Stalinist vision of a new international order, Moscow endeavored to create a special role for its European allies in which they would act as emancipated and sovereign actors that the West - especially Western Europe - and the Third World could accept as legitimate partners.
Modification of the Soviet model reflected specific local historical and economic factors as well as the geopolitical location of the East Central European region. The crises that occurred soon after Stalin’s death in some of these countries reinforced the new leadership’s belief that significant changes ought to be introduced in both the domestic life and the foreign policy of the empire. Remarkably, crises or semi-crisis situations occurred in the relatively more developed countries of the bloc - the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Czechoslovakia, and Hungary - which demonstrates that these societies, and particularly the working class and the intelligentsia, were far less tolerant of the experience of Sovietization than peoples in the other parts of the Soviet empire with significantly different economic, political, social, and cultural traditions. In Bulgaria, for instance, significant problems for the regime were seen only in the most developed branches of industry, as evidenced by the strikes in tobacco plants in 1953. Thus, boosting the political stability ofEast Central Europe by introducing economic and political reforms and by transforming the nature of cooperation with its allies became a top priority for Moscow.
There was a remarkable difference between the first uprisings that took place just after Stalin’s death and the revolts of 1956 in Poland and Hungary. The first crises in 1953 stemmed from the Stalinist experience; that is, the people taking part in mass movements were motivated by essentially economic concerns. The revolts of October 1956, however, were the product of the de-Stalinization process directed from Moscow, and they can be regarded as predominantly political actions. The events in Poland and Hungary also clearly demonstrated the limits of the Soviet new course. The radically different means of handling the two crises illustrated the real boundaries of Soviet tolerance: Polish reforms preserving Communist rule and the unity of the Soviet alliance system were still tolerable, but the Hungarian revolution, which was rightly seen as the transformation of the regime into a Western-type democracy, had to be crushed. This pattern shows clearly that Moscow deemed the orderly political and economic functioning of these frontier states as vital to the Soviet empire.
World History
