Europe: A History (226 page)

Environmental protection was not a serious possibility. Primitive industrial methods and the pressures of quantitative planning left no room for ecological considerations. Even where environmental laws were passed, there was little chance that lowly elements of the bureaucracy could enforce them against the interests of the Party’s main productive drive. In the totalitarian party-state, there was place neither for an independent environmental agency nor for grass-roots activism. As a result, the Soviet Union systematically created Europe’s most scandalous examples of neglect and of persistent pollution. Blighted cityscapes, dead rivers, toxic air, dying forests, unmonitored radiation hazards, and declining health indices were all suppressed in the fog of habitual secrecy. Only the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine in April 1986, which bathed half of Europe in fall-out, alerted the world to the dangers at a very late stage.

Soviet culture was rendered schizophrenic by state censorship, which unwittingly divided all activities into official and unofficial spheres. Artists could only perform or publish if they belonged to one of the party-run associations. Their work could be categorized as the blatantly conformist, the trimmed, and the courageously defiant. Official culture centred on the principles of so-called Socialist Realism, which were laid down in 1934 and reformulated in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, [
MOLDOVA
] This style presented Soviet life in an idealized, com-pulsorily joyful, and essentially mendacious fashion. Some important deviations were permitted in the decade after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev on the one hand permitted the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962)—a grim picture of the Gulag. On the other, he excoriated Moscow’s first exhibition of modern art, calling it ‘the lashings of a donkey’s tail’. Thaw soon passed into refreeze. A handful of talented artists preserved a margin -of independence on the fringe of toleration; but most of the great works of the era, from Boris Pasternak’s
Doktor Zhivago
(1957) or Alexander Zinoviev’s and Solzhenitsyn’s major novels, had to be published illegally abroad. Many masterpieces did not see the light of day for 20 or 30 years.

Paradoxically, Soviet repressions generated a genuine thirst for independent high culture, a hunger for spiritual and aesthetic values which most free countries do not know. The immorality of official policy generated its own moral antibodies. With time, the most determined opposition hardened in the most educated circles of an increasingly educated society. (By 1979,10 Per cent of Soviet citizens possessed higher education.) ‘Whether he wants it or not,’ Vladimir Bukovsky once said, ‘a Soviet citizen is in a state of permanent inner dialogue with the official propaganda.’
²²
One of the earliest rebels was Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet H-bomb; one of the most eloquent was the Christian poet and prisoner Irina Ratushinskaya (b. 1954):

And the sad tale of Russia
(Maybe we are only dreaming?)
Makes room for Mashka Mouse, and us and the radio set,
On the clean page, not yet begun,
Opening this long winter
On tomorrow.
²³

Religious life in the USSR was kept to a minimum by systematic persecution. The Soviet state was officially atheistic; Khrushchev in particular launched militantly anti-religious campaigns; the religious education of children constituted a criminal offence. The Muslims of Tatarstan and Central Asia were the least active, and the least troubled. But the Russian Orthodox Church was shackled hand and foot. Its clergy were state pensioners, its hierarchy supervised by the KGB. The Uniate Church in Ukraine, banned in 1946, survived only in the catacombs. The Roman Catholic Church survived only in Lithuania, its clergy decimated by assaults and deportations. With time, numerous Protestant and fundamentalist sects, especially Baptists and Adventists, came to be well represented. Judaism attracted
harassment as soon as it showed signs of revival in the 1970s. In the decay of the Soviet ethos, the religious factor cannot be overrated.
²⁴

There have been many attempts to characterize the essential qualities of Soviet communism. Many outsiders have stressed the gulf between theory and practice—as if the theory were genuine and the practice faulty. Yet there is a rich literature to show how intelligent communists came to realize that the theory itself was fraudulent. Leninist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist communism always paid tribute to Marx and Engels. But they bore the same relation to intellectual Marxism that South Sea ‘cargo cults’, which worshipped American presidents as gods, bore to American democracy. From a very early stage, communism had no more serious goal than keeping itself in existence. Its heart was mendacity.
²⁵

In most essential respects, the eight East European countries that were incorporated into the Soviet bloc (but not into the Soviet Union) followed a similar pattern of development to the USSR itself. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania all passed through phases characterized by stalinization (after 1948), and de-stalinization (at various points after 1953). Most of them were subsequently subjected to ‘normalization’, that is, the reimposition of Brezhnevian norms after an episode of open defiance. Most of them belonged to the Soviet Union’s military ‘alliance’, the Warsaw Pact, or to the Soviet Union’s parallel economic organization, CMEA or Comecon. All of them were ruled by communist dictatorships which had learned their trade under Soviet tutelage, which justified their existence by reference to the same Leninist ideology, and which, with two exceptions, continued to owe allegiance to Moscow.

Of course, there were important variations and important synchronie dissonances. In the mid-1960s, for example, there were some countries like Czechoslovakia which had not yet reached de-stalinization, whilst others, like Hungary, had already passed through both de-stalinization and normalization. Generally speaking, since their exposure to Soviet methods was shorter—40 years in Eastern Europe as opposed to 70 years within the Soviet Union—the degree of ‘sovietization’ was much lower. Historians disagree over whether to emphasize the differences or the similarities. The fact remains, however, that the historical experience of those eight countries in the four post-war decades was tied to that of the Soviet Union and was fundamentally different from that of Western Europe. They were all subsumed in the category of‘People’s Democracies’, which by no stretch of the imagination could be described either as popular or as democratic.

In the first, Stalinist phase (1945–53), all the countries of Eastern Europe were forced to accept the type of system then prevalent in the USSR. In the immediate post-war years Stalin had insisted on close control only in the Soviet zone of Germany, in Poland, and in Romania. Elsewhere, whilst building communist influence, he had not insisted on rigid conformity. But from 1948 discipline was tightened: all chinks in the Iron Curtain were to be sealed in response to the
Truman Doctrine. All the main features of late Stalinism were to be ruthlessly enforced wherever they did not already exist. Cohorts of Soviet ‘advisers’ and specialists were integrated into the local apparatus to ensure standardization and obedience.

In this new galaxy, Stalin remained ‘the sun of unsurpassed radiance’. But in each of the countries a string of lesser suns, of little local Stalins, was put into orbit. Bierut, Gottwald, Rákosi, Ulbricht, Georghiu Dej, Zhivkov, Tito, and Enver Hoxha were all Moscow-trained Stalinist clones. To call them ‘puppets’ was to flatter.

Yugoslavia was the only country where obedience to Moscow was rejected at an early stage. Josip Broz, or Tito (1892–1980), a Croat, was in the unique position of having spent the war in his own country, of possessing ties with the Western Powers, and of setting up his regime without Soviet assistance. He was a Stalinist, with a nasty record of repressions. His multinational federation, dominated by Serbia, was closely modelled on the Soviet Union dominated by Russia, with all nationality problems effectively suppressed. The Federated People’s Republic of Yugoslavia had come into being in 1945. Its Constitution, defining the powers of the ruling League of Yugoslav Communists and of the six constituent republics, had been functioning since January 1946. But Tito had built an independent base, and was not inclined to take orders. He did not favour collectivized agriculture, and he was interested in workers’ self-management. So, when criticized by Cominform, he made no effort to mend his ways. In June 1948 he and his party were expelled; for several years they lived under the threat of Soviet punishment. They remained what many believed impossible, both communist and independent—proof that there was life after defying Stalin. Belgrade made its peace with Moscow during Khrushchev’s visit in 1955. But it never joined either the CMEA or the Warsaw Pact. Having left the Soviet bloc, it was free to take a prominent lead in the movement of non-aligned states.

East Germany joined the Soviet bloc as Yugoslavia was leaving it. Political affairs in the Soviet zone had been conducted on the hopeful assumption that foundations were being laid for a united communist Germany. The failure of the Berlin blockade and the declaration of the Federal Republic showed that such hopes were false. The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was formally constituted on 7 October 1949, five months after the FRG. As in Poland, the DDR’s constitution arranged for the ruling communist party (SED) to work in conjunction with a number of satellite parties operating within the communists’ Front of National Unity. The first elections gave the Front a vote of 99 per cent. The Soviet occupation forces reserved important powers for themselves. The collectivization of agriculture was delayed until 1953, since the SED had only just implemented a massive land reform in favour of peasant ownership. The principal problem lay in the constant haemorrhage of escapees: for a dozen years, anyone could reach West Berlin by taking the U-bahn train from Friedrichstrasse to the Tiergarten. Over those dozen years, 1949–61, thousands of people availed themselves of the opportunity. The DDR was the only state in Europe with a declining population.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), better known as Comecon, was founded on 8 January 1949 in Moscow, where its Secretariat remained. The founding members were joined by Albania (1949), the DDR (1950), Mongolia (1962), and Cuba (1972). At this stage, its main function was to assist in the theory and practice of ‘building socialism’ by Soviet methods.

It is an open question how far the People’s Democracies were formally integrated into Soviet structures. But it would have been uncharacteristic if their dependence had been left to chance. The main clues must be found in the inimitable mechanisms of inter-party controls. If ‘socialist internationalism’ meant anything, it meant that the CPSU could control the affairs of the fraternal parties, who in turn controlled the republics for which they were responsible. The International Department of the CPSU’s central Secretariat was specially entrusted with this vital task; and each of its ‘bureaux’ were charged with overseeing the internal affairs of a particular country. Through its channels, all the leading posts in the fraternal parties could be subordinated to the
nomenklatura
system of the ‘higher organs’ in Moscow; and Soviet agents could be placed at will into key positions throughout the bloc. In effect, the Soviet Politburo could appoint all the other politburos. The KGB could run all the other communist security services, and
Glavpolit
all the General Staffs of the emerging People’s Armies. For several years after 1945 Stalin did not wish his clients to have large military forces of their own; and expansion did not begin until after 1948. Soviet military advisers exercised such direct control that the need for a formal military alliance to match NATO did not yet arise.

The most obvious sign of Stalinism taking hold was seen in the series of purges and show trials that smote the leadership of the fraternal parties after June 1948. Stalin put the East European comrades through the same ‘meat-grinder’ that he had once used on the CPSU. In Warsaw, the founding congress of the PZPR in December 1948 saw the grovelling self-criticism of Władysław Gomułka, before charges of ‘national deviation’. In Sofia, Traichov Kostov, the Deputy Prime Minister, was tried and executed on charges of Titoism. In Tirana, Koci Dzodze was sentenced to death for allegedly plotting to give Albania to Yugoslavia. In Budapest, the Foreign Minister, László Rajk, was tried and executed. In Prague, after years of slurs and test trials, the finger was pointed directly at General Secretary Rudolf Slánský. At Slánský’s trial in November 1952, in which 11 of 14 defendants were Jewish, charges of Zionism were added to the more usual ones of Titoism, Trotskyism, anti-Sovietism and foreign espionage.

In the second, post-Stalinist phase (1953–68), the Soviet satellites worked their way towards a stage that has been variously labelled as ‘national communism’ or ‘polycentrism’. Each of the fraternal parties was to claim the right to fix its own separate ‘road to socialism’. The CPSU reserved the right to intervene by force if the gains of socialism were in danger. ‘Gains of socialism’ was a codeword for communist monopoly power and for loyalty to the Kremlin.

In the climate of uncertainty fostered by the in-fighting of Moscow’s collective
leadership, the more courageous elements took matters into their own hands. On 17 June 1953 workers in East Berlin staged demonstrations that threatened open rebellion. They were mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks. A similar outburst occurred in Plsen in Czechoslovakia. Popular protest still lay beyond the pale of the tolerable. In Poland, the Party quietly dropped several keystone policies. Forcible collectivization was halted; the hated Soviet-run Ministry of Security was replaced; jailed Party leaders, and the jailed Primate, were released. A communist poet was allowed to publish a
Poem for Adults
which daringly stated that life was less than perfect:

They ran to us shouting
‘Under Socialism
A cut finger doesn’t hurt.’
But they felt pain.
They lost faith.