by Tony Judt
The economic reforms of the fifties and sixties were from the start a fitful attempt to patch up a structurally dysfunctional system. To the extent that they implied a half-hearted willingness to decentralize economic decisions or authorize de facto private production, they were offensive to hardliners among the old guard. But otherwise the liberalizations undertaken by Khrushchev, and after him Brezhnev, presented no immediate threat to the network of power and patronage on which the Soviet system depended. Indeed, it was just because economic improvements in the Soviet bloc were always subordinate to political priorities that they achieved so very little.
Cultural reform was another matter. Lenin had always worried more about his critics than his principles; his heirs were no different. Intellectual opposition, whether or not it was likely to find a wider echo in the party or outside, was something to which Communist leaders, Khrushchev included, were intensely sensitive. Following his first denunciations of Stalin in 1956 there was widespread optimism, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, that censorship would relax and a space would open up for cautious dissent and criticism (that same year Boris Pasternak unsuccessfully submitted the manuscript of his novel Dr Zhivago to the literary periodical Novy Mir). But the Kremlin was soon worried by what it saw as the rise of cultural permissiveness; within three years of the Twentieth Party Congress Khrushchev was making aggressive public speeches defending official Socialist Realism in the arts and threatening its critics with serious consequences if they continued to disparage it, even in retrospect. At the same time, in 1959, the authorities clamped down on Orthodox priests and Baptists, a form of cultural dissidence that had been allowed a certain freedom since Stalin’s fall.
However, Khrushchev himself, if not his colleagues, was reliably unpredictable. The 22nd Congress of the CPSU, in October 1961, revealed the extent of the schism between China and the USSR (the following month the Soviets closed their embassy in Albania, Beijing’s European locum), and in the competition for global influence Moscow set out to present a new face to its confused and vacillating foreign constituency. In 1962 an obscure provincial schoolteacher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was allowed to publish his pessimistic and implicitly subversive novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in Novy Mir—the same journal that had rejected Pasternak not six years before.
The relative tolerance of Khrushchev’s last years did not extend to direct criticism of the Soviet leadership: Solzhenitsyn’s later work would certainly never have been allowed into print even at the height of the ‘thaw’. But in comparison with what had gone before, the early Sixties were a time of literary freedom and cautious cultural experimentation. With the Kremlin coup of October 1964, however, everything changed. The plotters against Khrushchev were irritated at his policy failures and his autocratic style; but above all it was his inconsistencies that made them uneasy. The First Secretary himself might know exactly what was permissible and what was not, but others could be tempted to misunderstand his apparent tolerance. Mistakes might be made.
Within months of taking control, the new Kremlin leadership began to press down upon the intelligentsia. In September 1965 two young writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were arrested. Under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolay Arzhak they had smuggled out for publication in the West various works of fiction. Tertz-Sinyavsky had also published—abroad—a short, critical essay on modern Soviet literature, On Socialist Realism. In February 1966 the two men were put on trial. Since no law in the Soviet Union prohibited the publication of works abroad, the authorities claimed that the content of their works was itself evidence of the crime of anti-Soviet activity. The two men were found guilty and sentenced to labor camps: Sinyavsky for seven years (though he was released after six) and Daniel for five.
The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial was held in camera, although a press campaign vilifying the two writers had drawn public attention to their fate. But the trial proceedings were secretly recorded and transcribed by several people admitted to the courtroom and they were published both in Russian and English a year later, generating international petitions and demands for the men’s release.175 The unusual aspect of the affair was that for all the brutality of the Stalin decades, no-one had hitherto been arrested and imprisoned solely on the basis of the content of their (fictional) writings. Even if material evidence had been freely invented for the purpose, intellectuals in the past had always been accused of deeds, not merely words.
Contrasting as it did with the comparative laxity of the Khrushchev years, the treatment of Sinyavsky and Daniel aroused unprecedented protests within the Soviet Union itself. The dissident movement of the last decades of the Soviet Union dates from this moment: underground ‘samizdat’ (‘self-publication’) began in the year of the arrests and because of them, and many of the most consequential figures in Soviet dissident circles of the seventies and eighties made their first appearance as protesters against the treatment of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Vladimir Bukovsky, then a 25-year-old student, was arrested in 1967 for organizing a demonstration in Pushkin Square in defense of civil rights and freedom of expression. Already in 1963 he had been arrested by the KGB, charged with possession of anti-Soviet literature and committed to a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment. Now he was sentenced to three years in labor camp for ‘anti-Soviet activities’.
The Sinyavsky-Daniel affair and the response it aroused seemed to mark out very clearly the situation in the Soviet Union: what had changed and what had not. By any standards save those of its own history, the regime was immovable, repressive and inflexible. The mirage of 1956 had faded. The prospects for truth telling about the past, and reform in the future, seemed to have receded. The illusions of the Khrushchev era were shattered. Whatever face it presented to the Western powers, the Soviet regime at home was settling in for an indefinite twilight of economic stagnation and moral decay.
In the satellite states of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, however, the prospects for change seemed distinctly more propitious. On the face of it, this is a paradox. After all, if the citizens of the Soviet Union were powerless in the face of the post-Stalinist dictatorship, then the inhabitants of Hungary or Czechoslovakia and their neighbors were doubly helpless: not only did they live under a repressive regime, but their own rulers were themselves in thrall to the real authority in the imperial capital. The principles of the Soviet imperium had been handily illustrated in Budapest in November 1956. Moreover, in Czechoslovakia and Romania some of the surviving victims of the show trials of earlier years were still languishing in prison a decade later.
And yet, Eastern Europe was different—in part, of course, just because it was a recent colonial extension of Communist rule. By the 1960s, Communism was the only form of rule most inhabitants of the Soviet Union had ever known; in the shadow of the Great Patriotic War it had even acquired a certain legitimacy. But further West the memory of Soviet occupation and the enforced Soviet take-over was still fresh. The mere fact that they were Moscow’s puppets and thus lacked local credibility made the Party leaders of the satellite states more sensitive to the benefits of accommodating local sentiment.
This seemed the more possible because domestic critics of the Party regimes in Eastern Europe between 1956 and 1968 were by no means anti-Communist. Responding to Sartre’s assertion in 1956 that Hungary’s revolution had been marked by a ‘rightist spirit’, the Hungarian refugee scholar François Fejtö had replied that it was the Stalinists who stood on the Right. They were the ‘Versaillais’. ‘We remain men of the Left, faithful to our ideas, our ideals and our traditions.’ Fejtö’s insistence on the credibility of an anti-Stalinist Left catches the tone of east European intellectual opposition for the following twelve years. The point was not to condemn Communism, much less overthrow it; the goal, rather, was to think through what had gone so horribly wrong and propose an alternative within the terms of Communism itself.
This was ‘revisionism’: a term first used in this context by Poland’s leader Władislaw Gomu�
�ka at a May 1957 meeting of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, to describe his intellectual critics. These ‘revisionists’—in Poland the best known was the young Marxist philosopher Leszek Kołakowski—had in many cases been orthodox Marxists until 1956. They did not overnight foreswear this allegiance. Instead they spent the next twelve years, in the words of the Slovak writer Milan Šimečka, ‘trying to find the fault in the blueprint.’ Like most contemporary Western Marxists they were wedded to the notion that it was possible to distinguish clearly between the credibility of Marxism and the crimes of Stalin.
For many Eastern European Marxists, Stalinism was a tragic parody of Marxist doctrine and the Soviet Union a permanent challenge to the credibility of the project of Socialist transformation. But unlike the New Left in the West, the intellectual revisionists of the East continued to work with, and often within, the Communist Party. This was partly from necessity, of course; but partly too from sincere conviction. In the longer run this affiliation would isolate and even discredit the reform Communists of these years, notably in the eyes of a rising generation increasingly attuned to the mood of their Western peers and whose point of reference was not the Stalinist past but the capitalist present. But from 1956 to 1968, the revisionist moment in Eastern Europe afforded writers, filmmakers, economists, journalists and others a brief window of optimism about an alternative Socialist future.
In Poland the most important critical space was that afforded by the Catholic Church and the protection it could offer those working under its auspices—notably at the Catholic University of Lublin and on the journals Znak and Tygodnik Powszechny. It was a peculiarity of Poland in the Gomułka years that Marxist philosophers and Catholic theologians could find some common ground in their defense of free speech and civil liberties—an embryonic anticipation of the alliances that would be forged in the Seventies. Elsewhere, however, the Communist Party itself was the only forum in which such criticisms could safely be voiced. The most propitious terrain for ‘helpful’ criticism was the Communist management of the economy.
One reason for this was that conventional Marxism was purportedly grounded in political economy, so that economic policy (once liberated from the dead hand of Stalin) was a permissible arena of intellectual dissent. Another reason was that many east European intellectuals of the time still took Marxism very seriously and treated the problem of Communist economics as a vital theoretical starting point for serious reforms. But the main explanation was simply that, by the early Sixties, the economies of Europe’s Communist states were showing the first intimations of serious disrepair.
The failings of Communist economies were hardly a secret. They were only just able to furnish their citizens with sufficient food (in the Soviet Union they often failed to manage even this). They were committed to the mass production of redundant primary industrial goods. The commodities—consumer goods above all—for which there was a growing demand were not produced, or else not in sufficient quantity, or of the necessary quality. And the system of distribution and sale of such goods as were available was so badly managed that genuine shortages were exacerbated by artificially induced scarcity: bottlenecks, skimming, corruption, and—in the case of food and other perishables—high levels of wastage.
The peculiar inefficiencies of Communism had been partly camouflaged in the first post-war decade by the demands of post-war reconstruction. But by the early Sixties, following Khrushchev’s boast that Communism would ‘overtake’ the West and official proclamations about the now completed transition to Socialism, the gap between Party rhetoric and daily penury could no longer be bridged by exhortations to repair war damage or produce more. And the charge that it was saboteurs—kulaks, capitalists, Jews, spies or Western ‘interests’—who were responsible for impeding Communism’s forward march, though still heard in certain quarters, was now associated with the time of terror: a time that most Communist leaders, following Khrushchev, were anxious to put behind them. The problems, it was increasingly conceded, must lie in the Communist economic system itself.
Self-styled ‘reform economists’ (‘revisionist’ carried pejorative connotations) were thickest on the ground in Hungary. In 1961 János Kádár had let it be known that the Party-State would assume henceforth that anyone not actively opposing it was for it; and it was thus under the auspices of the Kádárist regime that critics of Communist economic practice first felt safe to speak.176 Reform economists acknowledged that the land collectivization of the forties and fifties had been a mistake. They also recognized, though more cautiously, that the Soviet obsession with the large-scale extraction and production of primary industrial goods was an impediment to growth. In short, they conceded—though not in so many words—that the blanket application to eastern Europe of the Soviet Union’s own forced industrialization and destruction of private property had been a disaster. And even more radically, they began to seek ways in which Communist economies might incorporate price signals and other market incentives into a collectivist system of property and production.
The Sixties debates on economic reform in eastern Europe had to walk a fine line. Some Party leaders were sufficiently pragmatic (or worried) to acknowledge the technical mistakes of the past—even the neo-Stalinist Czech leadership abandoned the emphasis on heavy industry in 1961, halfway through its disastrous Third Five-Year Plan. But admitting the failure of central planning or collective property was another matter. Reform economists like Ota Sik or the Hungarian János Kornai sought instead to define a ‘third way’: a mixed economy in which the non-negotiable fact of common ownership and central planning would be mitigated by increased local autonomy, some price signals and the relaxation of controls. The economic arguments, after all, were incontrovertible: without such reforms, the Communist system would degenerate into stagnation and poverty—‘reproducing shortage’, as Kornai put it in a famous paper.
In Hungary alone, Kádár did respond to his critics by allowing a measure of genuine reform: the New Economic Mechanism inaugurated in 1968. Collective farms were granted substantial autonomy and not just permitted but actively encouraged to support private plots on the side. Some monopolies were broken up. Certain commodity prices were tied to the world market and allowed to fluctuate via multiple exchange rates. Private retail outlets were authorized. The point of the exercise was not so much to construct a working middle way between two incompatible economic systems, but rather to introduce the maximum of market activity (and thus, it was hoped, contentment-inducing consumer prosperity) compatible with undiluted political control of the commanding heights of the economy.
In retrospect it is clear that the reformers were deluding themselves if they supposed that a ‘third way’ between Communism and capitalism was ever realistic. But this was not because of any formal shortcoming in their economic analysis. Their true error lay in a curiously naïve misreading of the system under which they lived. What mattered to the Communist leadership was not economics but politics. The ineluctable implication of the economic reformers’ theories was that the central authority of the Party-State would need to be weakened if normal economic life was to be resumed. But faced with that choice the Communist Party-States would always opt for economic abnormality.
In the meantime, however, the regimes were interested above all in stability. For this there were three emerging models. The first, ‘Kádárism’, was not readily exportable—and it was very much part of the Hungarian leader’s own strategy to assure the Kremlin authorities that there was no Hungarian ‘model’, merely a limited practical solution to local difficulties. Hungary’s situation was indeed unique, with Kádár cynically dangling access to the prosperous West before his travel-starved fellow Hungarians as a sort of reward for good behaviour—a tacit confession of Communism’s own failure. The country was now run by and for the ‘New Class’, as the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas had called it in an influential 1957 book: an educated technocracy of bureaucrats and professionals, pragmatically conc
erned above all with feathering its nest and ensuring its own survival. Genuine liberation was unthinkable, but a reversion to repression highly unlikely.
Kádár’s Hungary—‘the best barracks in the laager’—was much envied, though only fitfully emulated. The second model, Tito’s Yugoslavia, was even more obviously sui generis. This was not because Yugoslavia had managed to avoid the problems of its neighbors. Many of the economic dysfunctions of the Soviet satellites were just as familiar to Yugoslavs, a reminder that their country’s suspended animation between East and West was a product of historical chance rather than ideological choice. But in the course of the Fifties and Sixties Tito had introduced some decentralization in decision-making and allowed experiments with factory and worker ‘autonomy’.
These innovations were born of ethnic and geographical divisions as well as economic necessity. In a federal state whose constituent republics and peoples shared little beyond unhappy and mutually antagonistic memories, the imposition of uniform instructions from Belgrade looked a lot like a return to pre-war practices. The difficult topography of the region favored local initiative; and thanks to the break with Stalin, Tito’s own version of proletarian dictatorship was no longer under pressure to replicate in detail every error of the Soviet Union’s own path to industrial modernity. It was these considerations—rather than the creative, alternative Socialist blueprint with which his Western admirers wishfully credited Tito in these years—that shaped the Yugoslav model.