by Tony Judt
But the war years had also seen what would prove an enduring semimilitarization of Soviet life. Centralised direction and a relentless focus upon the production of tanks, guns and planes had turned the wartime USSR into a surprisingly effective war machine, careless of human life and welfare but otherwise well-adapted to fighting a total war. The cohort of Party bureaucrats formed in the war—the Brezhnev generation—equated power and success with large-scale output in the defense industries, and they were to run the country for the next forty years with that model always in mind. Longstanding Leninist metaphors of class struggle and confrontation could now be linked with proud memories of a real war. The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.
Thanks to the Nazis’ treatment of the lands and people they overran, the war of 1941-45 in Russia was a great patriotic war. Stalin had encouraged autonomous expressions of Russian national and religious sentiment, allowing the Party and its goals to be temporarily displaced by an aura of common purpose in the titanic battle against the German invaders. And that same emphasis upon the Soviet Union’s roots in Russia’s imperial past served Stalin’s purposes in his post-war foray into central Europe.
What Stalin wanted in Europe above all, as we have seen, was security. But he was also interested in the economic benefits to be had from his victories in the West. The little states of central Europe, from Poland to Bulgaria, had lived under the shadow of German dominion long before World War Two: in the 1930s especially, Nazi Germany was their main trading partner and source of foreign capital. During the war this relationship had been simplified into one of master and slave, with Germany extracting for its war effort the maximum possible output from land and people. What happened after 1945 was that the Soviet Union took over, quite literally, where the Germans had left off, attaching eastern Europe to its own economy as a resource to be exploited at will.
The Soviet Union extracted reparations from Hungary and Romania, as former allies of Hitler. These reparations, like those taken in kind from the Soviet Zone in Germany, did relatively little to compensate for Russia’s losses but they represented substantial sacrifices for the donor countries: by 1948, Romanian reparations to the USSR represented 15 percent of that country’s national income; in Hungary the figure was 17 percent. From countries that had not fought against him Stalin was no less demanding, but on ‘fraternal’ rather than punitive terms.
It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery).
Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union. Just as he had done in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, and in the Baltic states in 1940 and again (following their re-conquest from the Nazis) in 1945, Stalin set out to re-mould eastern Europe in the Soviet image; to reproduce Soviet history, institutions and practices in each of the little states now controlled by Communist parties.
Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the German Democratic Republic were to become, in the felicitous words of one scholar, ‘geographically contiguous replica states’.45 Each was to have a constitution modeled on the Soviet one (the first of these was adopted in Bulgaria in December 1947, the last in Poland in July 1952). Each was to undergo economic ‘reforms’ and adopt Five Year Plans to bring its institutions and practices into line with those of the Soviet Union. Each was to become a police state on the Soviet template. And each was to be governed by the apparatus of a Communist Party subservient (in fact if not name) to the ruling Communist Party in Moscow.46
Stalin’s motives for reproducing Soviet society in the satellite states were once again very simple. The widespread desire in post-war Eastern Europe for peace, land, food and a new beginning might have eased the Communists’ path to power, but it was no guarantee of local support for Soviet policies. The preference for Communists over Fascists, or for some form of democratic Socialism, could not be counted upon to survive practical experience of Communist rule. Even the appeal of Soviet guarantees against German revanchism might wane in time.
Stalin needed to secure his satellite neighbours’ unswerving allegiance, and he knew only one way to do this. First, the Party had to secure a monopoly of power. In the words of the Hungarian Constitution of August 1949, it was to take and keep a ‘leading role’, extinguishing or absorbing all other political parties. The Party became the only medium of social mobility, the sole source of patronage and the dispenser—through its control of the courts—of justice. Inseparable from the state whose institutions it monopolized, and taking its instructions directly from Moscow, the local Party and its state security apparatus were the most direct lever of Soviet command.
Secondly, the Party-State was to exercise a monopoly over economic decisions. This was not a simple matter. The economies of the east European states varied considerably. Some were modern, urban and industrial, with a sizeable working-class; others (the majority) were rural and impoverished. Some, like Poland and Hungary, had quite sizeable state sectors, dating from pre-war strategies of protection against German economic penetration. In others, like Czechoslovakia, property and business had been mostly in private hands before the war. Some countries and regions had a thriving commercial sector; others resembled parts of the Soviet Union itself. Most of the region had suffered seriously from the effects of the Depression and the autarkic protectionist policies adopted to combat it; but, as we have seen, during the war certain industrial sectors—in Hungary and Slovakia especially—had actually benefited from German investment in war production.
Notwithstanding this variety, the Communist seizures of power were followed in short order by the imposition of economic uniformity across the region. First, in keeping with the Leninist redefinition of ‘socialism’ as a matter of ownership rather than social relations, the state expropriated large-scale firms in service, commerce and industry, where these were not already in public hands. Next, the state took over, taxed or squeezed out of business all firms employing more than fifty people. In Czechoslovakia, by December 1948, there were hardly any private businesses left with more than 20 employees. By that same date 83 percent of Hungarian industry was in state hands, 84 percent of Polish industry, 85 percent of Romanian industry and fully 98 percent of Bulgarian industry.
One of the means at hand for eliminating the property-owning middle class in eastern Europe was currency reform. This was an effective device for destroying the cash savings of peasants and businessmen alike, an updating of older exactions like the forced capital levy. In Romania it was undertaken twice, in August 1947 (when it had the legitimate objective of ending hyperinflation) and in January 1952, when peasants who had built up savings over the previous four years (there was little for them to spend their money on) saw them wiped out.
As in the Soviet Union, so in Soviet-run eastern Europe, the peasantry were doomed. The initial post-war reforms in the countryside had distributed small parcels of land to large numbers of farmers. But however politically popular, these reforms simply exacerbated the longstanding agrarian crisis of the region: too little investment in machinery and fertilizer, too many underemployed laborers and five decades of steadily falling prices for farm produce. Until they were firmly ensconced in power, the Communist parties of eastern Europe actively encouraged inefficient land redistribution. But from 1949 they move
d, with increasing urgency and aggression, to destroy the ‘nepmen’ and ‘kulaks’.
In the early stages of rural collectivization, small peasant landowners—few large landholders remained by this time—were penalized by punitive taxation (often exceeding their money income), differential prices and quotas that favored the new collective and state farms, the withholding of ration books, and discrimination against their children, who were denied access to post-primary education. Even under such conditions a surprising number of independent peasants held on, though mostly on economically insignificant ‘microfundia’ of two hectares or less.
In Romania, where tens of thousands of peasants were forcibly registered on collective farms in the autumn of 1950 and where the regime was uninhibited in its resort to force, it was not until 1962 that future President Nicolae Ceauşescu could proudly announce the completion of rural collectivization ‘three years ahead of schedule’. In Bulgaria, in the course of the first two Five-Year Plans beginning in 1949, viable agricultural land had been completely removed from private hands. In the Czech lands, where collectivization began quite late (in 1956 most arable land was still privately farmed), 95 percent of agricultural land would be taken over in the next ten years, rather less (85 percent) in backward and inaccessible regions of Slovakia. But here, as in Hungary and throughout the region, independent farmers survived only in name. The measures taken against them and the destruction of markets and distribution networks ensured their impoverishment and ruin.
The irrational, occasionally surreal quality of Soviet economic practice was faithfully reproduced throughout the bloc. On September 30th 1948, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej of the Romanian Communist Party announced that ‘We want to achieve a socialist accumulation at the expense of the capitalist elements in the countryside’—in a country where ‘capitalist elements’ in the rural economy were conspicuously absent. In Slovakia, in the course of 1951, there were even efforts to send urban clerks and government functionaries out into the fields. ‘Operation 70,000 Must Be Productive’, as it was called, proved disastrous and was quickly abandoned; but this exercise in Maoism avant l’heure, just fifty miles east of Vienna, says much about the mood of the times. Meanwhile, as in the newly Sovietized Baltic lands, the consequence of Communist land reform was long-term institutionalized scarcity, in countries where food had hitherto been abundant and cheap.47
To address this palpable policy failure, the authorities introduced Soviet-style laws criminalizing ‘parasitism’, ‘speculation’ and ‘sabotage’. In the words of Dr Zdenka Patschová, judge and member of the Czechoslovak National Assembly, addressing her fellow legislators on March 27th 1952: ‘The unmasking of the true face of the village rich is the foremost task of criminal proceedings . . . Non-deliveries and non-fulfillment of the [agricultural] production plan must be severely punished as sabotage.’ As this faithful echo of Soviet rhetoric from the 1930s suggests, antipathy towards the peasant, and successful implementation of rural collectivization, were one of the chief tests of Stalinist orthodoxy.
In the short run, implementation of Soviet-inspired plans for industry was not so obviously a disaster: there are some things that command economies can manage quite well. Collectivisation of land and the destruction of small businesses released an abundant supply of men and women for work in mines and factories; the single-minded Communist emphasis upon investment in heavy goods production at the expense of consumer products and services ensured unprecedented increases in output. Five Year Plans were everywhere adopted, with wildly ambitious targets. In terms of gross production figures the growth rates in this first generation of industrialization were impressive, notably in countries like Bulgaria or Romania which started from virtually nothing.
The number of people employed in agriculture even in Czechoslovakia, the most urbanized state in the region, dropped by 18 percent between 1948 and 1952. In the Soviet Zone of Germany raw steel output rose from 120,000 tons in 1946 to over 2 million tons by 1953. Parts of Eastern Europe (south-west Poland, the industrial belt north-west of Bucharest) were transformed almost overnight: whole new cities were built, like Nowa Huta near Crakow, to house the thousands of workers turning out iron, steel and machine tools. On an appropriately smaller scale the semi-militarized, monolithic, first-generation industrialization of the interwar Soviet Union was being re-run throughout the Soviet bloc. Much as they had set out to do in Russia, the Communists in eastern Europe were reproducing a foreshortened and accelerated version of western Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution.
Seen in this light, the economic history of eastern Europe after 1945 bears a passing resemblance to the pattern of West European recovery in the same years. In western Europe, too, investment in productivity and growth was given priority over the provision of consumer goods and services, though the Marshall Plan softenedthe pain of this strategy. In Western Europe, too, certain industrial sectors and regions took off from low starting points, and a dramatic transition from countryside to town took place in the course of the 1950s in Italy and France in particular. But there the similarity ends. The distinctive feature of the economic history of Communist eastern Europe is that, in addition to coal, steel, factories and apartment blocks, first-generation Soviet industrialization produced grotesque distortions and contradictions, more so even than in the USSR itself.
Following the establishment in January 1949 of Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance48), the rules for inter-state Communist trade were laid down. Each country was to trade bilaterally with the Soviet Union (another echo of Nazi-era requirements, with Moscow once again substituting for Berlin) and was assigned a non-negotiable role in the international Communist economy. Thus East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would supply finished industrial products to the USSR (at prices set by Moscow), while Poland and Romania were to specialize in producing and exporting food and primary industrial products. In return the Soviet Union would trade raw materials and fuel.
Except for the curious inversion we have already noted—with the imperial power furnishing raw materials and the colonies exporting finished goods—this structure is reminiscent of European overseas colonization. And as in the case of non-European colonies, so in eastern Europe: the indigenous economies suffered deformation and under-development. Some countries were prevented from manufacturing finished goods, others were instructed to make certain products in abundance (shoes in Czechoslovakia, trucks in Hungary) and sell them to the USSR. No attention was paid to the economics of comparative advantage.
The Soviet model of the thirties, improvised to address uniquely Soviet circumstances of vast distance, abundant raw materials and endless, cheap, unskilled labor, made no sense at all for tiny countries like Hungary or Czechoslovakia, lacking raw materials but with a skilled industrial labor force and long-established international markets for high-value-added products. The Czech case is a particularly striking one. Before World War Two, the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia (already the industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914) had a higher per capita output than France, specializing in leather goods, motor vehicles, high-tech arms manufacture and a broad range of luxury goods. Measured by industrial skill levels, productivity, standard of living and share of foreign markets, pre-1938 Czechoslovakia was comparable to Belgium and well ahead of Austria and Italy.
By 1956, Communist Czechoslovakia had not only fallen behind Austria, Belgiumand the rest of Western Europe, but was far less efficient and much poorer than it had been twenty years earlier. In 1938, per capita car ownership in Czechoslovakia and Austria was at similar levels; by 1960 the ratio was 1:3. Even the products in which the country still had a competitive edge—notably small arms manufacture—no longer afforded Czechs any benefit, since they were constrained to direct their exports exclusively to their Soviet masters. As for the establishment of manufacturing mammoths like the Gottwald Steelworks in Ostrava, identical to steelworks in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulg
aria and the USSR, these represented for the Czechs not rapid industrialization but enforced backwardness (crash programs of industrialization based on the manufacture of steel were pursued in spite of Czechoslovakia’s very limited resources in iron ore). Following the one-time start-up benefits from unprecedented growth in primary industries, the same was true for every other satellite state. By the mid-fifties, Soviet Eastern Europe was already beginning its steady decline into ‘planned’ obsolescence.
There are two partial exceptions to this brief account of the economies of the Soviet bloc. While primitive industrialization was undertaken just as enthusiastically in Poland as elsewhere, land collectivization was not. Stalin seems to have grasped the impracticality of forcing Polish peasants onto collective farms, but this consideration alone would hardly have caused him to hesitate. Soviet caution when dealing with Poland (we shall have occasion to meet it again) was strictly instrumental. In marked contrast to the other subject peoples of eastern Europe, there were a lot of Poles, their capacity and propensity to rebel against Russian servitude was familiar to generations of Russian officers and bureaucrats, and Soviet rule was more obviously resented in Poland than anywhere else.