ANTHONY KEMP-WELCH
Suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956309 gave Eastern Europe a harsh reminder of the ground rules operating within the Soviet bloc.310 First, no member could leave the Warsaw Pact. Second, the states of Eastern Europe had to maintain a Communist monopoly at all times. These two principles were designed to prevent radical change within Eastern Europe. They secured Moscow’s geostrategic interests in the region by setting boundaries that could not be crossed. That did not prevent leaders from taking local initiatives should they so wish, but their willingness to do so differed markedly between countries.
The Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka had been brought back to power in October 1956. One of his first external acts was to renegotiate Poland’s relations with the Soviet Union. Though the relationship remained subservient, a degree of formal sovereignty was restored. At home, he preserved the main domestic changes made during 'October’: the return of agriculture to private hands and improved relations between Church and state. However, realising that the invasion ofHungary was a fate that Poland had missed perhaps by only a few days, he rejected any further reforms. Even modest proposals to reintroduce market elements into central planning were dismissed as attempts to 'undermine socialism’. Poland entered a decade of stagnation.
By contrast, the East German leader Walter Ulbricht became somewhat more flexible. Having gained the reputation of a dogmatist during the 1950s, he began to emerge as more open-minded. Building the Berlin Wall in 1961 helped to stabilise the domestic labour market. The new economic programme unveiled in 1963 introduced new criteria for efficiency. It used financial indicators, profits, sales and costs, rather than the Stalinist quantitative targets. Although under increasing attack from 1965, and quietly
Terminated at the end of the 1960s, its focus on consumerism and material improvements continued. Economic benefits for the population included modest wage rises and increased leisure, with the introduction of the five-day week, though these achievements were overshadowed by West Germany’s 'economic miracle’.
Similarly, the Hungarian leader Janos Kadar began to relax the regime that brought him to power in 1956. While anxious to avoid workers’ councils (a key feature of the Hungarian uprising), he tried to extend industrial democracy through extending trades union rights, including a right to veto management decisions. Greater openings to the West were permitted, particularly for credits and technology, leading 'New Left’ activists to criticise the increasing 'commercialisation’ of the Hungarian way of life.
The main barrier to change, both in Hungary and across the bloc, was party officials. Fearful of losing their power and privileges, apparatchiks fought fiercely to retain their role in managing the planned economy. Whenever radical reform was proposed, they would appeal to Moscow to support the status quo. The effectiveness of such lobbying depended on the prevailing climate in Soviet politics.
The early 1960s seemed a propitious time for change. Nikita Khrushchev’s second round of de-Stalinisation, launched in 1961, addressed systemic questions that his 'secret speech’ attacking Iosif Stalin in 1956 had evaded. A much fuller account of Stalinist crimes started to appear. Khrushchev agreed to publish Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first stories of Gulag life. As Soviet literature began to include Stalin’s collectivisation campaign and consequent mass famine (1932-34), the false optimism of socialist realism went into terminal decline. Stalinist orthodoxies were discarded, and there was a recovery of intellectual vitality unknown in Soviet life since the 1920s.
Khrushchev’s new party programme boldly declared that the Soviet Union was on the road to full Communism, which would see material abundance, equality and self-government. Completion dates were even provided: public transport and education were to be free by 1980. But meeting such ambitious targets required radical restructuring, starting with the economy.
Soviet economists began to question the ability of central planning to cope with the complexity and speed of change required by modernity. A seminal article by Professor Y. G. Liberman suggested that Soviet enterprises should be geared to profits earned, not merely to output targets. He suggested that state enterprises be opened to market forces; prices and other performance indicators should no longer be set by the centre. His publication in the party daily311 led East European reformers to believe that radical changes in economic management were becoming possible.
However, a fundamental question for both the friends and the foes of change was how far economic devolution could go without similar changes in the political sphere. Following Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964, grand reforms were shelved. Instead of his dramatic, if sometimes erratic, shifts of policy, the new leadership sought stability. Their first test in Eastern Europe was Czechoslovakia. The impulse for reform from above, which eventually grew into the Prague Spring, came from economic failure.
World History
