Europe: A History (228 page)

Czechoslovak normalization was a sorry spectacle indeed. Husák used all the petty tyranny of the Party’s social controls to destroy the soul of the Prague Spring. There were no shootings or show trials, but the despair of the young student Jan Palách, who burned himself to death in public, caught the national mood.

Ex-ministers and academics were sent to work in the most menial jobs— Dubček worked as a forestry inspector. Police harassment was universal. Prague, Europe’s most beautiful city, was also the most depressed. A decade passed before a lonely band of dissidents around the playwright Václav Havel put their names to ‘Charter 77’—a declaration of human rights.

Compartmentalization was a central feature of the Soviet bloc in its later stages. Despite continuing lip-service to ‘socialist internationalism’, the bloc was divided up into a series of watertight compartments. National communism encouraged conditions where each country, whilst closely connected to Moscow, was effectively insulated from the others. The cordon separating Poland from Lithuania or Ukraine or, after 1968, from Czechoslovakia was every bit as severe as the Iron Curtain itself. The arrest of the
Taternicy
—a group of athletic dissidents backpacking with banned literature over the snowy ridges of the Tatra mountains— well illustrated the state of affairs. East Europeans were often more familiar with life in Western Europe or the USA than with their immediate neighbours.

The Polish People’s Republic (PRL) displayed an unusual number of idiosyncrasies. It was the largest of the Soviet satellites, with an army larger than that of Great Britain. Both structurally and psychologically it was the least sovietized. The Polish peasantry had successfully resisted collectivization; the Polish Bar had resisted the communist monopoly; the Polish intelligentsia had largely avoided Marxism. The pseudo-pluralism of the Front of National Unity permitted a margin of non-Party politics. Most importantly, the Roman Catholic Church under its formidable Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński (1901–81), never submitted, as elsewhere, to political control. By an agreement of December 1956 the Church hierarchy was granted full autonomy, so long as Party rule was not openly subverted. The calculation of the Party’s sociologists had presumably been that the rapid modernization which was turning Poland into an industrial power would rapidly undermine religion. In fact it was the Church which kept the loyalty of the new proletariat, which in turn undermined the Party.

Poland’s cycle of opposition and normalization occupied a quarter of a century.Gomułka passed rapidly from national hero to crabbed old boss. In the mid-1960s he repressed the Marxist intellectuals, in March 1968 the students, in 1970 bloody workers’ protests in the Baltic ports. In 1968 the challenge of an ultra-nationalist faction within the Party, whose bid for power had targeted the Jewish element in the Party apparatus, grew into a generalized and shameful ‘anti-Zionist campaign’, provoking the exodus of almost all of Poland’s remaining Jews. In the 1970s the ten-year reign of Edward Gierek adopted a strategy of
bigos
communism’ funded by excessive Western loans. A brief interval of prosperity preceded renewed austerity, mass protests, and, in the Workers Defence
Committee (KOR), the formation of a consolidated intellectual and workers’ opposition, the precursor of ‘Solidarity’. In June 1979 the visit of a Polish Pope created a moral climate pregnant for change.

The Solidarity trade union grew from a group of determined strikers in the Gdansk shipyards in August 1980. It was led by an unknown, unemployed electrician on his ‘wolf ’s ticket’, Lech Walesa. It swelled into a nation-wide social protest, millions strong. Dedicated to non-violence, it did not fight the communists; it simply organized itself without them. The only independent organization in the Soviet bloc, it won the formal right to strike and to recruit members. Party members defected in droves. Within a year, Solidarity threatened to topple the existing order without even trying. From Moscow’s viewpoint, it had to be suppressed. A non-communist workers’ movement was anathema. The ailing Brezhnev put the Soviet Army on alert, then left the job to the Polish army. On the night of 13 December 1981, aided by deep snow, General Wojciech Jaruzelski executed the most perfect military coup in modern European history. In a few hours, 40–50,000 Solidarity activists were arrested; all communications were cut and military commissars took over all major institutions. Martial law paralysed the country. In 1982, having imposed stability, Jaruzelski introduced the first stage of economic reform. The victory of communist ‘normalization’ appeared complete. In reality, it was the hollowest of victories. Within seven years, Jaruzelski would be at the end of his tether. History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

Despite appearances, Jaruzelski’s emergence in Poland could later be seen as the first emanation of a reforming trend that was about to break surface in Moscow itself. This trend, which in due course would acquire the Russian name of
perestroika
or ‘restructuring’, was founded on the realization that the system was profoundly sick. Significantly, it came out of the KGB, the only body which had the means to know what was really happening. Jaruzelski had served for 25 years as head of the Polish army’s military-political department. He was necessarily a client of the man who ran the KGB throughout the 1970s. He was ‘playing John the Baptist’ to Andropov’s other protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev. With Gorbachev’s collusion, he was destined to turn Poland into ‘the laboratory of
perestroika
.

By the early 1980s the internal operations of the Soviet bloc were no longer achieving their goals. Forty years of corrosion had sapped their strength. On the surface, everything was in place; underneath, little was working well. In the age of the inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), the territory of the Warsaw Pact could no longer serve as an effective security buffer. In the age of high oil prices, the CMEA was draining more from the USSR than it was putting in. In the age of television, the gulf in living conditions between East and West was evident in every home. As Solidarity showed, the workers had no respect for the ‘workers’ state’. Important sectors of the Communist élite were losing the will to rule. One of Jaruzelski’s closest aides had chosen the patriotic course of feeding the CIA
over a decade with the biggest flood of operational documents from the Warsaw Pact in the history of espionage.
²⁷

It is the career of Yuri Andropov, however, which provides the key to the extraordinary change of direction which preceded and then precipitated the collapse of the Soviet system. As ambassador in Budapest, Andropov had been co-author of the strategy of substituting economic for political reform. As head of the international department of the CPSU he must have known that the costly revolts which had beset Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and now Poland could spread to the Soviet Union. As head of the KGB during the era of
détente
(see p. 1115), he was the person best placed to see the glaring contrast between external strength and internal decay. In the 1970s Andropov had waged a cunning and flexible campaign of persecution against Soviet dissenters. He had no need to use mass terror; instead, he curtailed their access to the population at large, whilst consigning the obdurate to psychiatric hospitals or to foreign exile. He countered the growing disaffection of Soviet Jewry by giving them preferential access to emigration. As the files passed over his desk, he could only have wondered why the finest talents in the land had no love for communism. The list was a long one: Solzhenitsyn the political novelist, Nureyev the dancer, Rostropovich the cellist, Sakharov the physicist, the indomitable Bukovsky, a biologist, Andrei Amalrik, the mathematician who had written, after Orwell,
Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
These people must necessarily have figured prominently in Andropov’s long talks with the bright young Party Secretary from Stavropol who attended him at the nearby spa where he stayed to treat his kidneys.

Andropov’s penchant for reform, however, was repeatedly baulked. The Soviet Politburo was packed with guardians of the
status quo
. Gorbachev was brought in from Stavropol in 1979 only to be given the thankless task of running Soviet agriculture. Andropov did not reach the top until his own terminal illness was upon him. His death gave the Brezhnevites a final lease of inaction. Despite Amalrik’s prediction, 1984 came and went; the Soviet Empire survived unreformed.

East-West Relations: The Cold War in Europe, 1948–1989

From start to finish, the Cold War was focused on Europe. Its dynamic developed from the collapse of the ‘Great Triangle’ of European Powers, which had left the victorious Western Allies face to face with a victorious Soviet Union (see p. 1312). It grew from the inability of the wartime allies to reach agreement on the independence of Poland, on the future of Germany, and on the division of Europe as a whole. There can be some debate as to when exactly it began; but it came to a head through the American commitment to Europe, as expressed in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of 1947, and through subsequent expressions of Soviet disapproval. It was clearly in progress during the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948–9 which led to the formation of NATO; and it did not end until the Iron Curtain in Europe was breached 40 years later. None the less, it is important to stress that the Cold War soon overreached its European focus. There was always
an Asian component; and there was a strong inner logic resulting from Soviet-American rivalry which turned it into a truly global confrontation.

The Asian component developed over disagreements parallel to those that occurred in Europe. In this case the Soviet Union entered the scene in August 1945, when the Soviet army was thrown into the final campaign of the Pacific War against Japan. The Yalta Agreement had made provision for the Soviets to occupy the Kurile Islands as the price for Stalin’s participation. But no one at Yalta had foreseen the sudden and total collapse of Japan, brought about by the US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the event, the Soviets were given an altogether unexpected bonus. They rapidly occupied Manchuria, whence they carried off 600,000 men of the Kwantung army into the Siberian camps. In addition to the main Kurile chain, they seized four northern Japanese islands, hitherto regarded as part of Hokkaido, renamed them the ‘Lesser Kuriles’, and turned the Sea of Okhotsk into a strategic Soviet lake. What is more, they openly championed the cause of communist revolutionaries in China and Korea, to which they now had direct access. In China, they were taking sides against America’s longstanding client, Chiang Kai-shek, who had been part of the Grand Alliance throughout the war with Japan. By the time that Mao Zedong entered Beijing in 1949, a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ was rising in the Far East to match the Iron Curtain in Europe.

The globalization of the Cold War took place in the course of the 1950s. In its geopolitical aspect, this was the natural outcome of a confrontation that pitted one power which dominated the land mass of Eurasia against another which could project land, sea, and air forces to all parts of the world. In its political, economic, and ideological aspects it reflected the rivalry of one bloc with pretensions to the worldwide patronage of communist-led revolution and another wedded to democracy, capitalism, and free trade. It was fuelled by the contemporary process of decolonization, which left a string of unstable, ex-colonial countries open to wars by proxy, and where, as in the oil-rich Middle East, valuable resources presented irresistible temptations. It was finalized in the late 1950s by the invention of ICBMs, which put the whole earth within the range of constant surveillance and instant nuclear attack. Henceforth, the cities of the Russian and American heartlands found themselves in the front line no less than Taiwan or Berlin.

In the military field, the Cold War passed through several distinct phases. In the 1950s, when the USA held a decisive lead both in its nuclear arsenal and in the means of airborne delivery, the Soviets could not risk a major clash. At the Moscow meeting in January 1951, whilst the Americans were tied down in Korea, the leaders of the Soviet bloc were apparently given orders by Stalin to prepare for the Third World War. But the plans were never put into effect.
²⁸
First Britain (1952) then France (1960) developed independent nuclear capacity; and NATO professed a doctrine of ‘overwhelming retaliation’. Two communist proxy wars were fought—one against an American-led UN force in Korea in 1950–1, the other in Indo-China, where defeated French troops gave way to the Americans in 1954. Europe, though bristling with weapons in two armed camps, did not erupt.

In the late 1950s the game changed. Thanks to the Sputnik (1958) and the U2 incident (1960),the Kremlin was able to demonstrate that its rocketry had more than closed the technological gap. The superpowers poured vast resources into the ‘Space Race’ and into the deployment of earth satellites and ICBMs. Although the USA won the competition to put a man on the moon, there was no certainty where the true military advantage lay. The USSR seemed to be building a remorseless superiority in nuclear, conventional, and naval forces. But the advent of ‘tactical’ and later of ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons, coupled with NATO’s new doctrine of ‘flexible response’, rendered any purely quantitative calculations redundant. Pressure on the European theatre was somewhat relieved by the knowledge that the main exchange of ICBMs, if it happened, would be directed over the North Pole. Stalemate was reached at maximal levels of military spending. The offensive doctrines adopted by the Warsaw Pact were not put into practice; the vastly expanded Soviet Fleet was not put to the test; massive rearmament proceeded alongside repeated and much feebler attempts at disarmament. But once again the European conflict stayed cold.

In the 1980s another turn of the screw was reached with the deployment of a more deadly generation of weapons, notably Soviet SS-20S, and American Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles. In 1983 President Reagan’s announcement of the multi-billion-dollar Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), commonly known as ‘Star Wars’—a space-based anti-ICBM defence system—openly challenged Moscow to a race that simply could not be run. Each side possessed the kilotonnes to destroy the planet many times over; neither side could possibly use them. Advocates of the nuclear deterrent believed strongly that their point was being made. Their opponents—who could only speak fieely in the West—believed with equal passion that the military planners, like Dr Strangelove, had gone mad. But the
Pax
atomica
held.