The 20th Century
International Relations since 1919
How secure was the USSR’s control
over Eastern Europe, c. 1948-1989?
Framing Questions
Why was there opposition and
resistance to Soviet control in Hungary in
1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and
how did the USSR react to this
opposition?
How similar were events in
Hungary in
1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968?
Why was the
Berlin Wall built in 1961?
What was the significance of
Solidarity
in Poland for the decline of Soviet
influence in Eastern Europe?
How
far was Gorbachev personally
responsible for the collapse of Soviet
control over Eastern Europe?
Map of the Eastern Block
Stalinism
The
Soviets called the political
economy that developed within the
USSR “really existing socialism,” an
ambiguous phrase implying there
might be other and better kinds of
socialism but, in practice, this was
the only kind actually functioning.
The Soviets referred to the USSR
and its Eastern European satellites
as the “socialist camp.”
the socialist
camp was to achieve technological
modernization and industrial
revolution through centralized
state economic planning aimed at
the ultra-rapid construction of the
basic industries and infrastructure
essential to a modern industrial
society. The socialist camp’s nonmonetary allocation of rationed
necessities to the people in kind—
bread, clothes, bus tickets—
embodied a spartan utopian ideal.
And it did improve the standard of
living of the lower class.
The primary goal of
“Let’s Carry Out the Five Year Plan in Four Years!”
The socialist camp economically
Very little information was
and politically formed a separate
and self-contained region of the
world. Two-thirds of the exports of
states within the socialist camp
went to other socialist camp states;
only 4 percent of the foreign trade
of non-socialist camp states
entered the socialist camp. The
socialist camp followed a course of
self-contained development, in
virtual isolation from the world
economy.
allowed to enter or to leave the
socialist camp. Only authorized or
permitted information was
available to the citizen. The
possession of any other kind was
punishable by law.
There was
little movement of
people: emigration and temporary
travel to non-socialist states were
strictly controlled, and at times
impossible. Even travel to other
socialist states was restricted.
Soviet Citizens Reading Pravda (“Truth”)
The reason
for the segregation of
the socialist camp was political.
The socialist camp pursued (in
theory) a global revolution. The
capitalist world sought to prevent
socialist subversion and to destroy
the socialist camp. The Cold War
froze economic and political
relations between East and West.
systems of Eastern
Europe, modeled on that of the
USSR were based on a strongly
hierarchical and authoritarian
single party, which monopolized
state power, operated a centrally
planned command economy, and
imposed a single mandatory
Stalinist ideology. The command
economy required command
politics based on power, terror, and
fear, the avoidance of risk, and a
firm commitment to achieving
communism in a distant future. A
byproduct of command politics
was paranoia.
The political
World Festival of Youth and Students
(East Berlin, 9 August 1951)
Josef
Stalin (the “man of steel”)
was an autocrat of exceptional
ferocity and ruthlessness. Stalin
manipulated terror on a universal
scale. Stalin coerced the middle
and working classes to sacrifice for
the sake of rapid modernization.
Stalin’s centralized command
economy was closer to a military
operation than to an economic
enterprise. The Stalinist system
turned farmers into serfs and relied
on a prison labor force of up to 13
million (the Gulags).
to impose
total control over all aspects of its
citizens’ lives and thoughts, all
their existence being, so far as
possible, subordinated to the
achievement of the system’s
objectives, as defined and specified
by the supreme authority.
Stalinism’s pragmatic intolerance
transformed socialism into a
secular religion, worshipping the
leaders of the Communist Party
and branding dissenters as heretics
to be eliminated. Stalinism turned
socialism into a non-hereditary
monarchism.
Stalinism attempted
Stalin Lying in State (1953)
At first,
Stalin prioritized basic heavy industries and energy production
—coal, iron and steel, electricity, and oil, but as the Cold War developed,
the arms race took precedence. Production targets were set without
consideration of costs or cost effectiveness. As urgent orders came from
above, a system of crisis management developed. Stalin “stormed”—
deliberately setting unrealistic targets to encourage superhuman efforts;
Nikita Khrushchev vainly sought a way of making the system work in
some other way than as a response to “shouting.” Decisions were
increasingly concentrated at the apex of the Soviet system. The drawback
of these procedures was inflexibility and an enormous bureaucratization
of the economic and political system.
By the late 1930s, there was one
administrator for every two blue-collar
workers. Stalin’s Great Terror may have
been a desperate attempt to reduce the
bureaucracy. After Khrushchev was
removed from power in 1964, the
bureaucracy expanded unchecked,
contributing to economic stagnation.
Soviet Caricature of the Bureaucracy (c. 1986)
The socialist camp was
not
totalitarian. It did not exercise
“thought control.” It did not
attempt “thought conversion.”
Rather, it depoliticized its
population. Most citizens in the
socialist camp had no interest in
the official doctrines of the state,
which remained irrelevant to them.
Officially, the socialist camp was
“monolithic,” but dissent
dominated the arts, and it was
uncertainly tolerated in the politics
of communist reformers.
the economies of the
socialist camp grew considerably
faster than those of the capitalist
camp, so much so that both
Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan
believed that socialism would
outproduce capitalism within the
near future. It did not, however, as
the costs of the Cold War arms race
and an ossified bureaucracy were
to bankrupt the Soviet economy.
After WWII,
Macmillan and Khrushchev (23 February 1959)
The command economy of
the socialist camp worked, and, generally,
the socialist state commanded the loyalty of the people. The system kept
the consumption of the people at rock-bottom: in 1940, the economy
produced only a little over one pair of footwear in all for each inhabitant
of the USSR. While inefficient and wasteful, the system guaranteed the
people a social minimum above subsistence and it avoided the economic
depressions of the capitalist business cycle.
In the socialist camp,
people enjoyed work, food, clothes and housing at
controlled (subsidized) prices and rents, pensions, health care, and a
rough equality until the system of rewards by special privileges for the
nomenklatura—party administrators—got out of hand after Stalin’s
death. The people also had access to
education and social mobility. Farmers,
however, did not enjoy an increased
standard of living because Stalinism
based industrialization on the backs of
agricultural workers. Socialist collective
farming was highly inefficient, requiring
the socialist camp to import food.
A Soviet Medical Student Shopping (1963)
The
Soviet economy favored
capital goods over consumer goods.
The standard of living grew
strikingly in the socialist camp
from 1940 to 1970, but this was
because of a black market
economy. The population spent
much of its income in the black
market economy and as “tips” to
ensure service.
in 1953, the
leaders of the socialist camp
reached a tacit understanding to
put an end to the bloody purges
and to empty the Gulags. While the
USSR remained a society that
treated its citizens badly by
Western standards, it no longer
imprisoned or killed its citizens on
a massive scale. Crime and violence
became relatively rare occurrences,
making the socialist camp one of
the safer places to live. Still, the
socialist camp remained under the
control of police states governing
authoritarian and unfree societies,
in which arbitrary imprisonment
and internal exile continued.
After Stalin’s death
State Security Committee Building (22 August 1991)
Stalinism in Eastern Europe
The communist states, which
came into being after WWII, were
controlled by communist parties
formed or shaped in the Stalinist
mould. These states were
characterized by a one party
political system with highly
centralized authority structures;
officially promulgated cultural and
intellectual truth determined by
political authority; central stateplanned economies; and, strongly
profiled supreme leaders.
governments were
compelled to follow the Soviet
example, for instance, by
organizing show trials and purges
of local communists, a matter for
which native communist parties
showed no enthusiasm. Poland and
East Germany managed to avoid
the purges, neither killing nor
handing over to the USSR any local
communist leaders.
Local
Secretary of the Communist Party of East Germany
Walter Ulbricht (c. 1961)
In
Hungary, Poland, and
Romania, Stalinism was imposed
exclusively by force, but in the rest
of Eastern Europe, Stalinism came
into being through local
communist parties. For example, in
Czechoslovakia, the communist
party won 40 percent of the vote in
the 1947 election, reflecting its
genuine strength. But even in the
countries in which Stalinism was
forcibly imposed, it enjoyed
temporary legitimacy and support.
the idea of socialism
was popular among the young and
among intellectuals, not only
because the communists had stood
against the fascism of Germany
and Italy. The success of Stalinism
at rebuilding Eastern Europe
extended its appeal to other social
groups. The more agrarian
countries of Eastern Europe, such
as Bulgaria, advanced most rapidly.
In contrast, the USSR pillaged the
more advanced countries, such as
East Germany, making Stalinism
less appealing in these societies.
After WWII,
Czech Workers Demonstrate for Socialism
(October 1945)
Whether created
by the Red
Army or by homegrown
communist parties, the Stalinist
states of Eastern Europe formed a
single bloc led by the USSR. Stalin
believed he could rely on the
loyalty of local communist parties,
and he was surprised when the
Josip Broz Tito
(Life, 13 September 1948)
communist leaders of Yugoslavia
resisted Soviet directives to the
point of an open breach in 1948.
Stalin’s reaction was to extend
purges and show-trials to the
remaining Soviet satellites. The
loss of Yugoslavia did not affect the
rest of the socialist camp.
David Low’s “Problem Child” (The Evening Standard, 25 August 1948)
After the
1948 break between the
USSR and Yugoslavia, prominent
local leaders in Hungary (László
Rajk) and in Bulgaria (Traicho
Kostov) were executed in 1949.
Trial of László Rajk (1949)
In
1952, an implausible mass trial
of leading Czech communists, with
a markedly anti-Semitic undertone,
decimated the old leadership of the
local party.
Cartoon Satirizing Rudolf Slánský’s Execution (1952)
Challenges to Stalinism within
the socialist camp arose in East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary because these three states
were less agrarian and more
economically developed than the
other Soviet satellites.
These was resistance both to the
Russian counterparts were. Having
a long history of revolutionary and
democratic labor movements, they
were independently minded. On
the other hand, Stalin believed that
only he knew the way forward and
that only he was sufficiently
determined to pursue it.
replacement of private property
and management by public
property and management and to
the replacement of the market and
its price-mechanism by state
regulation and pricing.
Another reason why opposition
to the Soviet system arose in
Eastern Europe was that many
Eastern European socialists were
much more radical than their
Head Knocked off a Statue of Stalin
(Czechoslovakia, 1956)
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The socialist camp did
begin to
fall apart after Stalin’s death and in
particular after the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union in 1956, when
the Stalinist era was officially
criticized. Khrushchev’s secret
speech leaked, breaking the
“monolithic” socialist camp.
the Sovietdominated region of Europe were
immediate. Within a few months, a
new, reforming communist
leadership in Poland was peacefully
accepted by Moscow. In Poland,
agriculture was de-collectivized
but did not become more efficient.
Polish leaders recognized the
strength of the working class
created by industrialization. In
fact, an industrial movement in
Poznan had brought the new
leadership to power.
The effects within
Poznan Workers Demand Bread (1956)
From
1956 until the triumph of
Solidarity at the end of the 1980s,
Polish politics and economics were
dominated by the confrontation
between the regime and the
working class, which set out to
organize itself, ally itself with
intellectuals, and to form a political
movement. Rather than being anticapitalist, however, the workers of
Poland were anti-socialist.
Typically, the confrontations were
over government efforts to reduce
the heavy subsidies on basic living
costs by raising prices that were
met by strikes creating political
crises.
in Hungary, a
revolution broke out.
Hungarian communist reformer
Imre Nagy announced the end of
one-party rule, which the USSR
might have tolerated. Nagy also
announced that Hungary would
leave the Warsaw Pact and become
a neutral country, which the USSR
would not tolerate.
Meanwhile,
Imre Nagy
The revolution was suppressed
by the Red Army without Western
interference. By 1956, Cold War relations had stabilized, and the
capitalist camp did not exploit this major crisis within the Soviet
bloc (except for purposes of propaganda).
Newsreel Coverage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
The
leadership imposed by the
Soviets after the defeat of the 1956
revolution was genuinely reformist
and effective. In effect, János Kádár
achieved Nagy’s objectives within
the limits of what the USSR would
regard as acceptable. Kádár
systematically liberalized the
regime, successfully conciliating
the opposition until the 1980s.
Victor Weisz, “Bah! Counter-revolutionaries!”
(Daily Mirror, 1956)
János Kádár
The Berlin Wall
In
1958, a huge missile gap existed
between the USA and the USSR,
overwhelmingly favoring the USA.
Khrushchev, however, tried to use
the successful launch of the world’s
first satellite, Sputnik, as a way to
bluff US President Eisenhower into
thinking that the USSR had a
massive strategic force.
With the USSR
losing the arms
race, Khrushchev feared that West
Germany would obtain nuclear
weapons and that the Soviets
would not be able to respond, so he
proposed that central Europe
should be designated a nuclear-
free zone. Eisenhower refused, so
Khrushchev issued an ultimatum.
Calling West Berlin a “malignant
tumor” inside the Communist
bloc, he demanded the Western
powers evacuate the city within six
months.
Eisenhower threatened to use
nuclear weapons to protect Berlin,
but he also invited Khrushchev to
visit the USA. Cold War relations
briefly thawed after Khrushchev’s
American tour, but on 1 May 1960,
an American U-2 spy plane was
shot down over the USSR,
reigniting Cold War tensions.
Berlin. In the 15 years following
WWII, over 3 million people had
emigrated to the Federal Republic
of Germany (West Germany) from
the German Democratic Republic
(East Germany) via Berlin.
Khrushchev
U-2 Pilot Gary Powers on Trial in Moscow (1960)
In
1961, Khrushchev renewed his
demands that the Allies turn West
Berlin over to the Communist East
German regime. Khrushchev was
concerned about ending the evergrowing exodus of better-educated
East Germans to the West via
met with US
President John F. Kennedy in
Vienna on 4 June 1961. Khrushchev
threatened to move on Berlin.
Kennedy warned that the USA
would tolerate no changes to the
balance of power in Europe.
Khrushchev resolved the crisis by
building the Berlin Wall on East
German territory, presenting
Kennedy with the choice of
accepting the wall or of invading
East Germany.
On
13 August 1961, Erich Honecker, the
Security Secretary of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, ordered East
Berlin to be blocked off from West Berlin
by means of barbed wire and antitank
obstacles. Streets were torn up, and
barricades of paving stones were erected.
Vienna Conference and Berlin Wall
People living in East Berlin and the
Newsreel Coverage (January 1962)
German Democratic Republic were no
longer allowed to enter West Berlin. This included the 60,000 East
Germans who had been working in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall closed
the last border between the East and West.
Over the
next few months, East German construction workers began
replacing the provisional barriers with a solid wall. When completed, the
Berlin Wall was 166 kilometers long and cut through 192 West Berlin
streets, 97 of them leading to East Berlin and 95 leading into East
Germany. The wall was rebuilt in 1965. This second wall consisted of
concrete slabs between steel girders and concrete posts with a concrete
sewage pipe on top of the wall.
The
Berlin Wall was heavily guarded, and around a hundred
people were killed and many more were seriously wounded trying to
cross the wall. The West Germans were furious with Kennedy for
allowing Khrushchev to build the Berlin Wall. Nevertheless,
Kennedy made a triumphant visit to West Berlin and delivered a
speech on 26 June 1963 in front of the Berlin Wall. Similarly, US
President Ronald Reagan delivered a passionate speech in front of
the Berlin Wall on 12 June 1987.
The Wall
(Hearst Metrotone News, 1962)
John F. Kennedy’s Berlin Speech
(26 June 1963)
Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Speech
(12 June 1987)
By
October 1989, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia had overthrown
their Communist rulers. East
Germans were again escaping to
West Germany in large numbers
through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Berlin Wall was no
longer serving its purpose. On 9
November 1989, the East German
government decided to recognize
the new reality by opening the
Berlin Wall. Within 72 hours, the
bloodstained symbol of the Cold
War was being battered down by
giant jackhammers, and by small
hammers wielded by aspiring
capitalists who sold small pieces of
the wall to American and European
buyers.
Berlin Wall Falls (BBC, 9 Nov 1989)
Berlin Wall Memorial (c. 2011)
The Prague Spring of 1968
Because of
the ruthless purges of 1952,
de-Stalinization proceeded cautiously
and tentatively in Czechoslovakia. In
the 1960s, the process suddenly
accelerated for two reasons. The first
was that the Slovaks were increasingly
dissatisfied in the bi-national state.
Alexander Dubček,
elected General
Secretary in a party coup, was a Slovak
opposition leader within the local
communist party.
reason was that the youth
of Czechoslovakia were part of a worldwide 1968 movement transcending the
capitalist and socialist camps, desiring
neither capitalism nor “really existing
socialism” but utopian socialism.
Alexander Dubček (1968)
The second
“The Year the World Caught Fire” (2008)
The communist party in
Czechoslovakia had enjoyed
genuine mass support before the
Nazi occupation, during which it
was the heart of the resistance to
Nazi Germany. As such, the
communist party attracted young
idealists committed to selflessness,
and it retained its popular support
after WWII. The communists of
Czechoslovakia risked torture and
death in 1968 because their hopes
for utopian socialism forced them
to rebel against the profoundly
shocking realities of Stalinism.
for economic reform, for
economic decentralization, for
rationality and for flexibility in the
economy, when coupled with
demands for intellectual and
political liberalization became
explosive. Stalinism had been
harsh and long lasting in
Czechoslovakia, accounting for
why the demands for change were
so strong.
The call
Czech Students Demonstrate
(Goethe Institute, 21 August 1968)
Preceded
and accompanied by
politico-cultural ferment and
agitation, the Czech Communist
Party initiated reform from above
in an “Action Program” that moved
the one-party dictatorship towards
a pluralist democracy. Dubček
repeatedly made clear Czechoslovakia’s intent to remain within
the Warsaw Pact, hoping to avoid
the fate of Hungary’s Nagy. But the
reform in Prague threatened the
entire socialist camp.
Czech Students Argue with Soldiers (1968)
The regimes of
East Germany and
Poland, having no mass support,
feared internal destabilization
from the Czech example. These
regimes bitterly criticized Dubček.
The Prague Spring (1968)
Throughout
Eastern Europe,
however, local communist parties
enthusiastically supported Dubček.
Within the Soviet bloc, the
Hungarians (who were successfully
reforming their society) and the
Romanians (who were increasingly
nationalistic) backed Czechoslovakia. From outside, the Yugoslavians extended their assistance.
It seemed as if Moscow would lose
its control of the socialist camp.
Moscow, the Soviet leadership
debated and hesitated to act, but
ultimately the Soviets decided to
overthrow the Prague regime by
force.
The Prague Spring
(British Pathé, 1968)
In
“Wake up Lenin. Brezhnev has gone mad.”
The re-imposition of
Stalinism in Czechoslovakia marked the end of
the socialist camp. The USSR was able to hold onto its Eastern European
satellites for another 20 years but only by exercising force and by
threatening military intervention. Moscow had given up whatever
leadership it had retained in the international communist movement.
After the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet leadership and the
leadership of the local communist parties appeared to have lost any real
belief in what they were doing. No one really believed anymore that the
socialist camp would overtake and surpass the capitalist camp, or even
keep pace. The developed, non-socialist economies grew and flourished
in sharp contrast to the socialist economies. This was most apparent in
the differences between stagnant East Germany and prosperous West
Germany. The Soviet GNP, which had grown at an annual rate of 5.7
percent in the 1950s, fell to 3.7 percent in 1970, 2.6 percent in 1975, and 2
percent in 1980.
The
Prague Spring must be understood within the context of the global
uprising of the youth in 1968. Around the world, not just in Czechoslovakia and not just in the socialist camp but in capitalist states as well,
governments were repressing demands for utopia.
Economic and Political Crises in the Soviet Bloc
In the
1970s, the structural
economic problems of “really
existing socialism” became clear:
productivity of labor, real income
per head, industrial and farming
output, capital investment, and
GDP advanced slightly or fell.
The
nomenklatura of the Leonid
Brezhnev era (1964 to 1982)
represented the weaknesses of the
self-serving party bureaucracy:
incompetence and corruption.
During
the growth years, the
socialist camp had exported
machinery; during the decline, it
exported primarily oil and gas,
while importing machinery.
Socially,
life expectancy was not
increasing, as it was in the West,
and, at times, it was falling,
contributing to disillusionment.
“Let’s Carry Out the Five Year Plan in Four Years!”
The
Soviet system operated as a
system of patronage, nepotism,
and bribery. Reform, except in
Hungary, was abandoned after the
defeat of the Prague Spring.
The regimes kept discontent in
the 1970s in check by subsidizing
consumer goods, which did give
the working class a higher standard
of living but was only a short-term
solution that contributed to longterm problems. For example,
instead of reforming the collapsing
agricultural system, the socialist
camp turned to buying wheat on
the world market.
booms and slumps, such as that
caused by the 1973 oil crisis: oil
prices rose from $2.53 per barrel in
1970 to $41.00 per barrel in 1980. As
an oil exporter, the USSR benefited
greatly from rising prices, but the
Soviets used oil revenues to avoid
rather than to solve underlying
economic problems.
As the socialist camp integrated
more into the world market, it
became vulnerable to capitalist
Nicholas Garland, “Vote Brezhnev…Or Else”
(Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1981)
Poland and
Hungary accepted huge loans from the OPEC states to
improve their standards of living, falling into insurmountable debt that
would create financial crises in the 1980s.
Even as Romania’s oil
fields dried up, the socialist camp did not
economize despite rising oil prices. While oil consumption in the West
fell by 40 percent, it fell by only 20 percent in the Soviet bloc. Production
costs in the socialist camp’s inefficient industries rose with the price of
oil. An acute energy crisis in the early 1980s caused shortages of food and
consumer goods (except in Hungary where continued borrowing resulted
in inflation and rising wages).
At the same time,
Brezhnev
decided to close the missile
gap with the USA and actually
to compete with the USA,
breaking the tacit agreement of
the Cold War that the superpowers would not directly
confront one another.
Empty Grocery Store (Warsaw, 31 July 1981)
The
Stalinist regimes responded
to the economic crisis by issuing
strict orders and restrictions,
which brought temporary relief,
but in Poland and Hungary, the
party was no longer in complete
control and could not impose its
policies. The communist parties of
the Soviet bloc held onto illusory
hopes of a return to economic
growth, which only brought a
return to economic crisis.
problems of “really
existing socialism” were even more
difficult to overcome, leading to
the collapse of the socialist camp in
1989-1991. After the Prague Spring,
the communist regimes lost
popular support (more so in
Poland and Hungary and less so in
Bulgaria). Hungary continued to go
deeper into economic debt to buy
the loyalty of the people. The other
states relied on coercion and the
threat of a Red Army invasion to
maintain control.
The political
Queue for Cooking Oil
(Bucharest, Romania, 1 May 1986)
Solidarity in Poland
In
Poland, strong anti-Stalinist,
anti-Jewish, and pro-Catholic
nationalism threatened the regime,
where Polish workers organized
and used strikes as a weapon to
control the policies of the Polish
regime. In 1978, Karol Wojtyla
became the first Polish pope (John
Paul II), adding popular pressure
on the Polish regime.
Pope John Paul 1 and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla
(4 September 1978)
In the summer of
1980, the
communist regime reduced food
subsidies, leading to labor unrest.
On 13 August, electrician Lech
Wałęsa led a strike of the workers
of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk,
demanding not only better
working conditions but also
government reforms.
Lech Wałęsa (c. 1980)
Management met the working
The workers followed
and pay demands of the strikers
within 3 days, but the strikers
continued their strike, pressuring
the government to commit to 21
reforms. The government agreed to
the demands of the striking
workers on 31 August (the Gdańsk
Agreement).
up their
victory with a trade union congress
in September at which they created
the national, independent and selfgoverning trade union Solidarność
(“Solidarity”). One-third of the
Polish workforce—10 million
workers—joined Solidarity, and
elected Wałęsa president of the
organization.
Signing the Gdańsk Agreement (31 August 1980)
Polish Workers Sit on a Wall (c. 1980)
On
13 December 1981, General
Wojciech Jaruzelski declared
martial law in Poland,
arrestingWałęsa and other
Solidarity leaders. Solidarity was
driven underground when it was
outlawed on 8 October 1982,
although Wałęsa was released from
prison the following month.
Solidarity’s underground
activities forced the ruling Polish
General Wojciech Jaruzelski
United Workers’ Party to hold
semi-free elections in June 1989, in
which Solidarity won all seats not
reserved for the communists.
Wałęsa, opposed to cooperating
with the communists, ran on an
anti-communist platform in the
presidential elections of 1990. He
won the 9 December election,
becoming Poland’s first president
to win a multi-party election.
Lech Wałęsa (c. 1990)
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
The
1980 triumph of Solidarity
demonstrated two realities: the
Communist Party in Poland faced a
terminal crisis but mass agitation
could not overthrow it. Fearing a
Red Army invasion, the Church
and the Communist Party agreed
to allow the Polish Army to impose
martial law to crack down on
Solidarity. The police temporary reestablished order in Poland. The
Communists in Poland, however,
realized that without a Red Army
invasion, the Party would
eventually have to abdicate.
in Poland, slowly and reluctantly
understanding that the USSR
under Mikhail Gorbachev (19851991) would no longer intervene as
it had in Prague in 1968.
The other regimes in the socialist
camp fearfully watched events
Mikhail Gorbachev
An
idealist, Gorbachev was still
committed to communism. He
opposed the corruption of the
Communist Party. Gorbachev
wished to preserve the USSR, but
he realized that not only structural
inefficiency and inflexibility but
also military spending would doom
the USSR. Simply, the USSR could
no longer afford to maintain the
socialist camp through military
interventions. War in Afghanistan
(prolonged by unlimited US
assistance to the Mujahideen) was
draining the USSR’s economy.
Afghanistan became the USSR’s
Vietnam, as the USA had intended.
“You look very ‘tired,’ Comrade Gorbachev. Take a rest.”
(Charles Griffin, 20 August 1991)
Afghan Government and Soviet Troops
(Afghan-Soviet War, 1 January 1988)
Under the surface of
the
stagnation of the Brezhnev era, a
few hundred self-co-opted upper
class party leaders joined by
educated and technically trained
middle class managers (academics,
intelligentsia, experts, and
executives) had begun a process of
criticism and self-criticism of the
Stalinist party, state, and security
and foreign services. The debates
of the 1980s within the Soviet
leadership were retrospective
searches for an historical socialist
alternative to Stalinism. This tiny
group of dissenters responded
immediately to Gorbachev’s call for
glasnost (“openness, transparency,
freedom of information”), a term
first used by exiled Soviet dissident
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1967.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Glasnost Editorial Cartoon
Gorbachev radically changed
Soviet policy. First, he decided unilaterally
to withdraw from the Cold War. This made Gorbachev exceedingly
popular in the West but increasingly unpopular in the East. Second, he
informed the regimes of Eastern Europe that they would have to depend
on their own resources (not the Red Army) to maintain their authority.
Gorbachev’s perestroika
(“restructuring”) was an attempt to introduce
market pricing and calculations of profit and loss into the command
economy, which would then make it easier to liberalize and democratize
the political system. Gorbachev’s intention was to achieve a socialism
better than “really existing socialism.” But, at the end of the 1980s, the
communist system, which had held the USSR together, effectively
abdicated and pre-Soviet tensions re-emerged. The political regimes of
Eastern Europe as well as their
social and economic systems
collapsed. The self-segregation of
the socialist camp crumbled, and
the economies of the socialist
camp began to integrate into the
“There’s not much in the store, but it’s worth it to wait!”
world economy.
(Le Monde, January 1989)
Reforming
the political system
was easier than improving the
economic system. A new
constitution separated the
Communist Party from the state.
Permanently loss-making state
enterprises were permitted to go
bankrupt. Black market operations
were legalized. But the economy
visibly worsened. The people were
more interested in the day-to-day
functioning of the economy than in
who made political decisions (a
Stalinist regime or a government of
politicians periodically elected).
The national economy
disappeared, as local economies
sought self-protection, selfsufficiency, or bilateral exchanges.
Bartering replaced much of the
cash economy. The declining
economy created a dangerous
situation. No one knew how to gain
the advantages of capitalism
without losing the advantages of
socialism.
Life after Communism
(David Horsey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1996)
Three contradictions undermined
Gorbachev’s reforms. First, only the
Communist Party could change the
system, but the Communist Party
was the main obstacle to change.
Second, political transparency
limited the authority of the
Communist Party to act, and
democratizing the militarily
oriented Communist Party did not
make it more efficient, particularly
when there was no alternative
civilian system to take its place.
Third the working class was asked
to sacrifice without immediate
benefit. Why, Soviet workers
argued, should they raise their
productivity to earn higher wages
unless the economy produced the
consumer goods to buy with these
higher wages? But how would these
goods be produced unless Soviet
workers raised their productivity?
These contradictions led not to
reconstruction, but to collapse.
Soviet Hand-Painted Poster (c. 1985)
The people of
the USSR did not support Gorbachev’s reforms. For them,
unlike the people of Eastern Europe, the Soviet regime was their regime.
It provided them with a guaranteed livelihood and comprehensive social
security at a modest but real level, a socially and economically egalitarian
society, and the “right of idleness.” For the Russians, the Brezhnev era had
not been one of stagnation but the best era ever known. This meant that
the separatist movements in the socialist camp began in territories the
USSR had acquired after WWI and WWII (the Baltic States, the Ukraine,
and Bessarabia). There had been no Russian youth movement in 1968,
and Gorbachev’s 1985 reform movement did not come from below.
Fast Food in the USSR (1989)
Passengers on Board of an Aeroflot IL-62 (1981)
The collapse of
the USSR and of its Eastern Europe satellites came as a
surprise. Glasnost replaced the authority of the Communist Party with
pluralist electoral politics, while perestroika destroyed the economy
without providing an alternative. Standards of living fell dramatically.
The USSR had been held together by the party, the army, the security
forces, and the command economy. Without these, there was political
chaos. Local nationalist movements fractured the USSR.
At first,
nationalism was directed not against Moscow but against
conservative local leaders. As communist reformers turned to nationalist
groups for support, nationalist movements
gained strength. Boris Yeltsen, an old party
boss adept at manipulating the media,
transformed the Russian Federation into a
republic, bypassing Gorbachev’s Union,
leading to the disintegration of the USSR
in 1991. Within Russia, Gorbachev was
seen as a failure, who destroyed what he
wanted to reform and was destroyed in the
process.
Boris Yeltsen Dancing (1996)
The Collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe
Between August and
December
1989, communist power abdicated
or ceased to exist in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, and the
German Democratic Republic
(soon to be annexed by West
Germany). Only in Romania did
this involve violence. None of these
communist regimes was
overthrown. Except in Poland,
there were no threatening internal
forces, and in Poland, a negotiated
process of compromise and reform
brought about regime change.
threat to the Eastern
European communist regimes
came from Moscow, where
Gorbachev said the Soviets would
not intervene as in 1956 and in 1968
to rescue them. Gorbachev did not
impose reform on hardliners, such
as those in Czechoslovakia and the
GDR, but he did praise reformers
in Poland and Hungary.
The real
Hungary Opens Its Borders to the West (1989)
In
Eastern Europe, the middle
and lower classes had accepted
Stalinism, preferring to live quiet
lives and showing outward loyalty
to a system that did not believe in
because they saw no alternative.
The withdrawal of the USSR
provided the people with an
opportunity.
21 December 1989, Romanian
President Nicolae Ceaușescu was
publicly booed, and a spontaneous
rebellion began. The Romanian
regime resisted briefly, resulting in
the 25 December execution of
Ceaușescu. All the other East
European regimes decided to
abdicate quietly without resorting
to military force to maintain their
authority. Not believing in the
system either, the leaders of the
communist regimes were not
willing to risk death to defend it.
Young
Europeans had forgotten
the communist resistance to
fascism in WWII and the hope for
a better life that communism
represented.
On
Execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu (25 December 1989)
In
Eastern Europe, communist
regimes could no longer provide a
guaranteed livelihood or a real
level of social security. Eastern
Europeans decided to join the
capitalist camp, which provided
some with a higher standard of
living but denied many any
livelihood at all and provided no
real level of social security.
collapse of communism
in the Soviet Bloc demonstrated
how superficial its imposition had
been. Party members had been
loyal communists, but the majority
of the people were not. The loyalty
of the people to the communist
regimes depended on standards of
living. So long as standards of
living improved, the regimes
remained popular; conversely, once
standards of living started to
decline, leaders lost faith in the
ability of communism to provide a
better life in the future. “Really
existing socialism” ended.
The rapid
Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution
(Czechoslovakia, November 1989)