The once cohesive bloc, created as a result of Stalin’s imperialist occupation of Eastern Europe, showed unmistakable signs of ill health. Khrushchev’s successors tried to contain those chaotic trends by developing and institutionalizing new forms of interstate relations. Under Brezhnev the coordination of foreign policy initiatives between the Soviet Union and its allies became a prime objective for the Kremlin. The Kremlin tried to create the image of a new kind of relationship, where all countries enjoyed equal rights and had similar obligations. The theoretical base of the new concept of unity was called “socialist internationalism,” a notion according to which the Soviet and East European interests were necessarily convergent and any attempt to question the nature of those relations was by definition a form of deviation from the true Marxist-Leninist line. “Developed socialism” was the name for the existing order in all East European countries. It was described by communist propaganda as a stable political system based on a dynamic economy and social consensus. The truth of the matter is that the social contract of Brezhnevism was based on political immobility, widespread apathy, and mass resignation to a status quo perceived as marginally less horrible than the Stalinist period.
The social contract of post-Stalinist communist societies was based not on terror but rather on mutual guarantees exchanged between the rulers and the ruled: While the former were providing their subjects with a protective shield of social benefits, the latter were renouncing their right to rebel against an inherently unjust system. However, such a social contract, being rooted in an unviable convention, was precarious: The rulers had no genuine legitimacy, hence at the moment the economy ceased to offer enough supplies for the continuation of the agreement, the whole system would fall apart. Added to this were the questionable foundations of the regimes. First, with the exception of Yugoslavia, none could claim that it had emerged on a base of popular will; second, their self-serving ideology, Marxism-Leninism, had lost its aura of infallibility as a result of the anti-Stalin campaigns and the social upheaval of 1956; and third, unlike the seasoned Stalinists who had led the East European communist parties during the times of savage duress, the mounting elites treated Marxism as a compulsory ritualistic creed and did not feel any mystical identification with the Leninist universalistic pretense. The belief system of the Stalinist days was maintained as a hollow carcass, and very few members of the elites took its ideas seriously. They used Leninism only as a doctrinaire camouflage for the perpetuation of their monopoly of power.
THREE
From Thaw to Freeze
Eastern Europe Under “Real Socialism”
There is no such thing a nontotalitarian ruling communism. It either becomes totalitarian or it ceases to be communism.
—Adam Michnik
Nikita Khrushchev was ousted as Soviet First Secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers in October 1964 as a result of an intraparty coup organized by neo-Stalinist, bureaucratic forces dissatisfied with his leadership methods, branded as “harebrained schemes.” Among the charges raised against Khrushchev by his Politburo colleagues was that, as the champion of ill-conceived reforms, he had weakened the authority of the communist party and its ideology. Because the new leaders in the Kremlin sought to restore the unity of world communism, gravely damaged by the intensification of the polemic with China, Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin pronouncements were conveniently forgotten. The very name of the tempestuous former First Secretary disappeared for more than twenty years from official Soviet utterances. The de-Khrushchevization campaign launched by Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksandr Shelepin, Nikolai Podgorny, and Mikhail Suslov, who had engineered the October palace coup, amounted to a moderate but unmistakable effort to rehabilitate Stalin.1
The Soviet decision to restore ideological uniformity and intrabloc coordination did not go unnoticed in Eastern Europe. Initially, the East European local leaders feared that the change in the Kremlin would affect their own positions, but they soon realized that the Soviets would continue to support them. Like the Soviet apparatus, they resented the former First Secretary’s unpredictable gestures and preferred to deal with a more routinized and therefore more stable type of Soviet leadership. The new Soviet leaders tried to breathe life into the existing international consultative bodies and emphasized their commitment to an increased degree of solidarity between the ruling parties in the Soviet bloc. With the exception of Romania’s Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (who died in 1965) and his successor Nicolae Ceausescu, all the rulers in the other Warsaw Pact countries accepted the reassertion of Soviet hegemony as practiced by Khrushchev’s successors. Brezhnevism demanded that they ensure domestic stability and ideological conformity and refrain from personal initiatives in foreign policy. The rulers in those countries were very happy to see the end of Khrushchev’s improvisations. The intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict and the American intervention in Vietnam were used by Soviet propaganda as arguments for strengthening ties between the ruling parties in Eastern Europe.
THE PRAGUE SPRING AND THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE
The short interlude of apparent calm in Eastern Europe came to an end in 1968 with the Czechoslovak crisis, provoked by the efforts of the Prague reformers to offer a model of socialism radically different from the Soviet one. The new leaders in Czechoslovakia tried to broaden their mass base and to enlist large social strata in the political process. Their endeavors aroused suspicion on the part of dogmatics in Czechoslovakia and the allied Warsaw Pact states, particularly in the GDR, Poland, and the Soviet Union. The new crisis was predicated on the same lack of legitimacy of the ruling elites that explained the Hungarian and Polish upheavals of 1956. In spite of the continuous attempts by communist bureaucracies to create an image of national consensus, they were widely perceived as exponents of the anachronistic Stalinist model. In Czechoslovakia, President Antonin Novotny had been directly involved in the organization of the purges in the 1950s and had consistently opposed the political rehabilitation of those who suffered during the terror. Although Rudolf Slansky and the other defendants in the October 1952 show trial had been legally rehabilitated, Novotny refused to engage in a full-fledged condemnation of the purges and boycotted any movement to reform the hypercentralized and repressive political and economic structures. The country was plagued with economic stagnation, political immobility, and moral disaffection. Voices both within and outside the communist party were calling for a break with the Stalinist model.
The assault on the party’s claim to a monopoly of power began with cultural discussions that started in the early 1960s. The ideological hegemony of the party was challenged during a colloquium dedicated to the writings of Franz Kafka that took place in Liblice in 1963. On that occasion the dogma of socialist realism, according to which art was subordinated to the political values championed by the communist party, was directly questioned by Czechoslovak intellectuals. Kafka’s parables of the individual threatened by the anonymous powers of an overwhelming bureaucratic Leviathan were interpreted as premonitions of modern totalitarian dictatorships. In the words of Eduard Goldstücker, chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union during the Prague Spring and an authority on Kafka, the author of The Penal Colony had become a central factor in the struggle against the isolation provoked by Stalinism and the Cold War.2 Concerned over this wave of potential dissent, Novotny denounced the rise of revisionism as a serious danger for Czechoslovak socialism. In the summer of 1967, during the Congress of the Writers’ Union, censorship and party interference in cultural creation were directly attacked. Among those who expressed their opposition to the Novotny regime were a number of former communist writers who had grown increasingly disenchanted with the official lies. The writer Ludvik Vaculik delivered a passionate speech to protest the limitations imposed by the regime upon the exercise of basic human rights:
Just as I do not feel very secure in a cultural-political situation which the regime apparently can drive to a state of conflict, neither do I feel safe as a citizen outside this room,
outside this playground. Nothing happens to me, and nothing has happened. That sort of thing is not done any more. Should I be grateful? Not so, I am afraid. I see no firm guarantee. It is true that I see better work in the courts, but the judges themselves do not see any hard and fast guarantee. I see that better work is done by the public prosecutor’s office, but do the public prosecutors have guarantees and do they feel safe? If you would like it, I should be glad to interview some of them for the newspapers. Do you think it would be published? I would not be afraid to interview even the Prosecutor General and ask him why unjustly sentenced and rehabilitated people do not regain their original rights as a matter of course, why the national committees are reluctant to return them to their apartments or houses—but it will not be published. Why has no one properly apologized to these people, why do they not have the advantages of the politically persecuted, why do we haggle with them about money? Why can we not live where we want to? Why cannot the tailors go for three years to Vienna and the printers for thirty years to Paris and be able to return without being considered criminals?
Vaculik followed that unequivocal condemnation of the Novotny regime’s procrastination over a resolute abandonment of Stalinist practices with a rejection of the party’s claim to having ensured Czechoslovakia’s progress during the twenty years of socialism. According to him, in the course of twenty years no human problem had been solved in Czechoslovakia—starting with such elementary needs as housing, schools, and economic prosperity and ending with the finer requirements of life, which cannot be provided by the undemocratic systems of the world, for instance the feeling of full value in the society, the subordination of political decisions to ethical criteria, belief in the value of even less important work, the need for confidence among men, and development of the education of the entire people:
By this I do not wish to say that we have lived in vain, that none of this has any value. It has value. But the question is whether it is only the value of forewarning. Even in this case the total knowledge of mankind would progress. But was it necessary to make a country which knew precisely the dangers for its culture into an instrument for this kind of knowledge?3
After that speech, the war between the party apparatus and the rebellious intellectuals could not be postponed. Vaculik and a number of likeminded writers were expelled from the communist party. Slander campaigns were organized against the critical intellectuals, and the regime tried to mobilize the workers in its struggle to stifle dissenting views. But the ferment only gathered momentum, and it soon contaminated the universities, inspiring unrest among the students.
Another cause of the crisis was the regime’s condescending and often humiliating treatment of the Slovaks. There was a growing movement among both intellectuals and members of the party bureaucracy in Slovakia for more autonomy in their relations with the government in Prague. Among those involved in the movement were the first secretary of the Slovak communist party, Alexander Dubcek, who had graduated from the High Party School in Moscow and whose Khrushchevite propensities were well known.4 Another prominent supporter of increased Slovak rights within the federative republic was Gustav Husak. A professional lawyer and a communist veteran, Husak had been one of the leaders of the Slovak anti-Nazi insurrection of 1944. Convicted for alleged nationalism in one the Stalinist frame-ups in the early 1950s, Husak appeared to many to be a convinced partisan of reform.
Between October 1967 and January 1968 the political struggle at the top continued to sharpen. Deprived of genuine support among the members of the Central Committee, who saw him as the principal culprit in the country’s crisis, Novotny appealed to Brezhnev and asked for direct Soviet support. After a short trip to Prague, however, the Soviet General Secretary came to the conclusion that Novotny’s position was so weak and indefensible that the only solution to the crisis would be his immediate ouster. In January the plenum of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Central Committee released Novotny from his position as first secretary and replaced him with Alexander Dubcek, the Slovak leader who had dared to challenge Novotny’s authority on previous occasions. In a few weeks it became clear that the new leader’s program was going beyond the expected simple tinkering with the system. In March Novotny was forced to resign as President of Czechoslovakia. His successor was Ludvik Svoboda, a respected army general marginalized by the Stalinists. Another victim of the Stalinist show trials, Josef Smrkovsky, was elected Chairman of the National Assembly. The hard-liners on the Central Committee’s Presidium were replaced by party apparatchiks close to Dubcek. The party’s objective was not to abolish the existing system but rather to modernize it and make it work.
The basic illusions about the reformability of the socialist system, as well as Dubcek’s conviction that a centrally planned system could be made operational, appeared in the text of the most important document produced by the communist reformers: the “Action Program” adopted by the Central Committee in April 1968. Although it maintained the commitment of the Czechoslovak communists to Marxism-Leninism, the program emphasized their decision to embark on a democratization of the existing system. The party professed its determination to renounce dictatorial command methods and pledged to favor persuasion over coercion. Legality was declared to be the fundamental principle needed for the existence of a healthy body politic. Thus, the main points of the document, entitled “Czechoslovakia’s Road to Socialism,” included (1) new guarantees of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religious observance; (2) electoral laws to provide a broader choice of candidates and real freedom for the four noncommunist parties integrated in the communist-controlled National Front; (3) a limitation on the communist party’s prerogatives in its dealings with the parliament and the government; (4) broad economic reforms to strengthen the autonomy of the enterprises, to revive a limited number of private enterprises, to achieve a convertible currency, and to increase trade with the West; (5) an independent judiciary; (6) federal status for Slovakia; and (7) a new constitution to be drafted by the end of 1969. The program was the outcome of a compromise between the radical reformers and the conservative faction within the party’s leadership. Some of the ideas sounded very promising, and others were mere repetitions of the hackneyed Leninist slogans about the party’s leading role. In its general orientation the program could be invoked by the exponents of the democratic wing to pursue their search for a new model of socialism. Actually, it was an attempt to keep the party at the rudder and make it the generator of the society’s reawakening:
We are not taking the outlined measures to make any concessions from our ideals—let alone to our opponents. On the contrary: we are convinced that they will help us get rid of the burden which for years provided many advantages for the opponent by restricting, reducing and paralyzing the efficiency of the socialist idea, the attractiveness of the socialist example. We want to set new penetrating forces of socialist life in motion in this country to give them the possibility of a much more efficient confrontation of the social systems and world outlooks and allowing a fuller application of the advantages of socialism.
With its wholehearted commitment to socialist ideals, the program stopped short of a clear-cut affirmation of the new leadership’s decision to engage in a sweeping break with the Soviet model of socialism.5 Massive political rehabilitations took place, and the victims of the Stalinist repressions were allowed to organize their own associations and clubs. It was precisely at that moment of relaxation that the ambivalent nature of the Prague Spring became clear: On the one hand, it was a reform movement initiated from above by a group of communists dissatisfied with the poor economic performance and the social malaise characteristic of Novotny’s rule. On the other hand, as the movement advanced and large social groups were energized by reformist ideas, the limits of the official strategy of renewal were denounced by the exponents of the emerging Czech and Slovak civil society.
Because Dubcek and his associates concluded that true socialism is inconceivable in the absence of democracy,
they opened the gates for the flow of independent intiatives from below, including the formation of noncommunist or even anticommunist groups and associations. The lightning speed of the democratization inebriated the Czechoslovak intellectuals, who sided without reservation with the more radical wing of the communist leadership. At the same time, the leading nucleus of the Czechoslovak communist party failed to articulate a coherent approach to the country’s basic dilemmas. Some in the Presidium were inclined to move faster toward comprehensive and unabashed reforms. Others, definitely scared by the risk of losing political power in a pluralist system, complained about the rise of right-wing forces and urged Dubcek to harden his policies. The majority of the party, however, was strongly supportive of the ideals championed by Dubcek. For them, the only choice was between socialism with a human face and a return to the suffocating Stalinist system.
The concern of domestic orthodox forces that the party-initiated reforms could unleash a spontaneous civic movement against communism was shared (and even encouraged) by the Soviet leaders and their allies. In March 1968 a summit took place in Dresden, East Germany, where all the Warsaw Pact communist leaders (minus Romania’s President Ceausescu) expressed their worries about the course of events in Czechoslovakia. In the following months, during meetings between Dubcek and Brezhnev, the Czechoslovak leader tried to allay Soviet apprehensions regarding the danger of a “counterrevolution” in his country. In his criticism of Dubcek’s reforms, Brezhnev voiced the irritation of communist bureaucracies not only in the Soviet Union but also in the other countries of the bloc. What they could not tolerate was the Czechoslovak ambition to build up an alternative model of socialism, a society where the individual would be treated humanely and not simply as an instrument for the fulfillment of the party’s plans.
Reinventing Politics Page 14