In the shorter term too, the Czech invasion had momentous consequences for the Communist world – more so even than 1956. It marked the end of the thaw of the 1950s and 1960s as Moscow reversed its old tolerance of different national roads to socialism. In November 1968 Brezhnev first formally enunciated the principle that the USSR had the right to intervene militarily if national Communist parties deviated from the ‘principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism’ – the so-called ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.
Similarly, the Prague Spring signalled the end of economic reform and cultural liberalization throughout the Soviet bloc. Brezhnev presided over an increasingly conservative order. The ice was not as thick as before 1953, but the choppy water had been stilled. Nineteen fifty-six was, of course, damaging to the reputation of the Soviet bloc, but many Communists still believed that the system retained its dynamism and could be reformed. Between 1945 and 1968, three forms of Communism had been tried in the Soviet bloc: High Stalinism, Khrushchev’s mixture of Radical and Romantic mobilization, and the technocratic and market reforms of the 1960s. All had failed or been outlawed, except in Hungary, where goulash Communism remained. What, now, was left?
The system that emerged was described by Brezhnev as ‘developed socialism’, by Honecker as ‘real existing socialism’. Behind these bland phrases lurked a deeply conservative message: socialism was ‘developed’, not ‘developing’; it was ‘real’ and ‘existing’ and so did not need to be improved upon. Khrushchev’s talk of an egalitarian Communism arriving as early as 1980 had been quietly forgotten. Perhaps the best way to describe the system in this period is ‘paternalistic socialism’. This was a variation on High Stalinism, as it entrenched political hierarchies, even as it lessened economic inequalities. But the party was much less sectarian and violent than its Stalinist forebear. It had jettisoned its militancy and had given up on mobilizing the population for production. The Soviet Union still had major military ambitions, but the Communists were now more committed to satisfying demands for higher living standards.
V
In 1979 Leonid Brezhnev was awarded yet another medal: the most prestigious Soviet prize for literature – the Lenin Prize. Never had the world seen such a combination of statesman, war-leader and litterateur. The prize was given for the ghost-written three-volume memoir of his war exploits at the battle of Malaia Zemlia (‘Little Land’), near his home town of Novorossiisk. The incident was a minor one, and Brezhnev had been a rather unimportant political commissar. But his role and the battle’s were systematically exaggerated in histories, and they had now became a major part of the official story of the War. Children sang songs about the heroic encounter, and tours of party members trudged around a newly constructed Malaia Zemlia memorial complex.
Of course, the cult of Malaia Zemlia was greeted with general hilarity and occasioned a whole sub-genre of jokes. But it also tells us a great deal about the nature of late Soviet rule. The obsession with medals was typical of the hierarchical culture of the Brezhnev era, and, for the first time, the War became a central part of the regime’s propaganda. There was a flurry of memorial building, including the enormous Motherland sculpture in Kiev. War memorials spread throughout the Soviet bloc, and many are still there, despite the efforts of anti-Russian nationalists to remove them.
Brezhnev himself admired Stalin as a war leader, and though he did not rehabilitate him, criticisms stopped. The Terror was simply not mentioned. Brezhnev, though, did adopt aspects of Stalin’s style. He took Stalin’s title, ‘Secretary General’ of the party, and by the end of the 1970s was being described as Vozhd. His claims to great literary achievement also echoed Stalin’s pretensions to be a leading Marxist philosopher, linguistic theorist and ‘coryphaeus [chorus-master] of science’.
Brezhnev was perhaps closest to the late Stalin in his love of hierarchy. After Khrushchev’s chaotic attempts to ‘flatten’ society, Brezhnev was determined to restore the lines of command. Stalin’s ethnic hierarchy was also restored. Just as it had during and after World War II, the party now relied on a version of Russian nationalism to replace a Marxism-Leninism very much in abeyance. A vocal Russian nationalist intelligentsia was treated with indulgence, the Central Committee became more Russian, and anti-Semitism crept back into official practice.
Some of the main beneficiaries of the Brezhnev system were the ‘cadres’ – the socialist service aristocracy. In 1965 János Kádár told Brezhnev that it was unacceptable to operate according to the old Soviet principle of ‘today a hero, tomorrow a bum’, but he was preaching to the converted.45 Brezhnev himself enunciated the principle ‘stability of cadres’, protecting them from Khrushchev’s threatening democracy campaigns, whilst in the GDR the technocratic challenge to their position was removed. The result was an entrenched, and increasingly senescent political elite; in the USSR the average age of full members of the Politburo rose from fifty-eight in 1966 to seventy in 1981.
In contrast with the early 1950s, however, political hierarchy was combined with greater economic equality, and a very un-Stalinist willingness to buy off worker discontent. The harsh father of the Stalinist era was replaced by a paternalistic state looking after the economic welfare of its citizens. Workers’ wages rose throughout the Soviet bloc, and the gap between blue-collar and white-collar wages declined – in the USSR, for instance, the differential between an engineer and a worker fell from 2.15 in 1940 to 1.11 in 1984. Worker protests in Poland in 1970 at rises in food prices – toppling Gomułka and forcing the new government under Edvard Gierek to give in – concentrated the minds of all leaders. In the GDR, subsidies on basic goods such as food and children’s clothes rose from 8 billion marks per year in 1970 to an enormous 56 billion in 1988.46 In the 1970s living standards rose in most countries in the bloc, which explains the continuing nostalgia for the era.
But how were these improvements to be financed when the productivity of the economies was declining? The answer lay in two rather unexpected places: beneath the ground, and in the banks of New York and London. The oil-price hike in 1973 gave the USSR, a major oil-producer, a massive windfall. It could therefore afford higher living standards and an ambitious foreign policy, even though, according to some estimates, in the second half of the 1970s its growth had slowed to a meagre 1 per cent. For oil-importing Eastern Europe, in contrast, the price increase was a disaster. The USSR found it was forgoing huge export earnings by sending subsidized raw materials, and especially oil, to Eastern Europe; it has been calculated that in 1980 the terms of trade within Comecon transferred a massive $42.8 billion (in 2007 prices) subsidy from the USSR to its East European satellites.47 But oil also provided salvation, for it flooded the world with Arab petrodollars, funnelled through Western commercial banks and looking for a home. With the petrodollar, the free global financial markets that dominate the world to this day were born, and the regulation of the 1930s was gradually dismantled.
Hayek and his followers argued that private bankers, free of state regulation, were the ideal people to decide on the rational allocation of capital, and were certainly much less inefficient than bureaucratic planners. Driven by profit, bankers would inevitably invest in the most productive projects around the world, rewarding the innovative and hard-working and shunning the stupid and lazy. However, the early behaviour of these new captains of global capital should have warned the world that Wall Street could be as careless with its capital as Gosplan: bankers’ time-scales can be short, and far from picking long-term winners, they invested in the ramshackle, over-planned economies of Soviet Eastern Europe.
The banks were encouraged by Western governments, eager to help their recession-stricken industries export goods to Eastern Europe. Communist leaders, for their part, abandoned any remaining ideological qualms and took the cash. It helped them to finance better living standards for their disgruntled populations whilst feeding the hungry states’ voracious appetite for industrial investment. Having exhausted domestic resources, they now found a new source of capi
tal abroad. Poland was one of the most ravenous states, and Gierek used loans to build steel mills and plants producing cars under Western licence – like the Fiat Polski – which he hoped to export throughout the Soviet bloc. By 1975 investment had reached a massive 29 per cent of GDP, largely because the party failed to control industry’s demand for the new foreign capital.48 Ceauşescu also hatched grandiose projects, conceived by crony economists and his own children. He borrowed in the hopes he could create a modern, though still planned, economy, exporting petrochemicals to the Western market. As one commentator has remarked, the ends were those of Adam Smith, the means those of Iosif Stalin. Like the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, even though operating an inefficient economic system, had ambitions to compete on the world market. By the end of the decade much of the Communist world – Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba and Communist Africa – was in hock to Western banks, joining much of the non-Communist developing world. East European debts were especially large, and between 1974 and 1979 the Polish debt tripled, whilst the Hungarian doubled. In the 1980s these debts were to cause a major crisis, but until then they helped to finance the paternalistic socialism of the mature Communist regimes.
By the end of the 1960s it was clear that Communism was no longer a radically transformative force, at least in Europe. Many Communists and even ordinary citizens in some countries were still convinced that their system was superior to capitalism, but they no longer expected it to forge radically egalitarian social relations, or to create a dynamic new economy to compete with capitalism: both radical equality and economic dynamism were simply too difficult to reconcile with party dictatorship and the command economy. Ambitions therefore became more realistic: Communism’s objective was to be a stable system of economic welfare and justice. Similar trends can be seen in China. Although China remained much more egalitarian than the Soviet bloc until Mao’s death in 1976, as early as 1968 it was becoming clear to Mao that the Radicalism of the Cultural Revolution was unsustainable. And as the leadership turned away from its earlier Radicalism, China itself moved towards its own version of socialist paternalism. In many parts of the Communist world, the system found some sort of equilibrium, as Communist regimes learnt how to live in peace with at least most of their people.
VI
In the autumn of 1988, a pair of Hungarian sociologists, Ágnes Horváth and Árpád Szakolczai, both deeply unsympathetic towards the ruling Communists, were finally given permission to embark on a project most thought impossible: an independent academic analysis of party officials in the district organizations of Budapest – the way they worked, their values, and their psychological profile.49 But traditional Communist secrecy almost aborted the research even before it began. How, the anxious Communists asked, could non-party people be trusted to study the comrades? Eventually, however, a tiny window of opportunity opened: liberalization had reached the point where the party was willing to be scrutinized from outside – though it was in fact only a matter of months before the party’s monopoly ended. Even so, a wary Horváth and Szakolczai sent their results for safekeeping to a number of well-known Hungarian academics as soon as they had a first draft, terrified lest their work be confiscated and suppressed.
The results of their research surprised them. When a group of party ‘instructors’ – middle- to low-ranking full-time officials – was asked what made them especially well-suited to politics, the replies were remarkably similar. One answered: ‘I can make personal connections easily in all areas. I love to deal with people’s problems’; another: ‘I planned this job as a temporary service. I felt I could easily make contacts with people; I have empathy’ (italics added). Though, of course, these answers should not be taken at face value, they are remarkably consistent with the results of questionnaires they completed on their personalities and values. The researchers had expected the officials to be typical political leaders: decisive, independent and self-consciously rational problem-solvers. Instead, they saw themselves as particularly flexible, emotional and sympathetic. Moreover, when asked about their values, they were much more likely than other educated people to value individual responsibility, hard work, tolerance and imagination. On the other hand, they were less likely than others to see rules and constraints, whether internal (such as self-control and honesty) or external (such as obedience and politeness) as virtues.
These Hungarian instructors sound like a group of social workers or psychotherapists, rather than the leather-jacketed militants of old. However, these results are less remarkable given how radically Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc had changed since the early 1950s (and in China from the mid-1970s). The party – unlike the more technocratic state organizations – had always prized emotional skills, and the ability to connect with ‘the masses’. These were, after all, essential qualities if one was to persuade and mobilize others. But now the heroic era was past, the party increasingly saw itself as an organization committed to looking after the welfare of its citizens, although, of course, it propounded a very particular vision of welfare – moralistic, paternalistic, economically egalitarian and socially conservative. The values endorsed by these Hungarian officials were useful in this type of organization. They wanted to help people, prized personal relationships, eschewed abstract, impersonal rules, and were happy to discriminate, seeing some as more deserving than others. Unlike previous party officials, those of the 1980s were generally highly educated, and Communist parties increasingly presented themselves as scientifically trained professionals. They were not, however, Max Weber’s rational bureaucrats; indeed, they strongly disapproved of formal or routinized methods. As one said, ‘I consider the most important thing to do… is to talk. [Information] from paper – that information smells of paper.’50
Therefore, outside the Stalinist periphery, Communist parties no longer treated their populations as guerrilla armies; citizens were not expected to be ‘labour heroes’; nor were egalitarian social and gender relations enforced. They were also no longer so concerned with transforming their citizens’ internal beliefs, though some regimes, such as the Chinese and the East German, were more concerned with ideological belief than others, such as the Hungarian and Soviet. Rather, the paternalistic party-state looked after the population and used coercion to make sure they stayed in line – they were ‘welfare dictatorships’, as one scholar has put it.51 They also gave privileges according to people’s ‘service’ to the state and society – a non-military version of the tsarist and Stalinist ‘service aristocracy’, which had now been extended from the elite to society as a whole. In some states they were also reminiscent of the ‘well-ordered police state’ imported into Russia from Central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which the ‘police’ (now the party) were not just responsible for law and order, but also for making sure that the citizenry were both moral and productive.52
But this paternalistic structure had its weaknesses. It was very difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that rewards were given in a way that was seen as just. The officials in charge of distributing goods often acted corruptly, helping friends and family. And even if they had been more altruistic (and some parties, such as the East German one, were less corrupt than others), a system founded explicitly on official decisions about who is and who is not virtuous is bound to be vulnerable to criticism. Capitalism, paradoxically, is less vulnerable, because its inequalities can be justified as, in some way, a ‘natural’ impersonal phenomenon – the product of the iron laws of the market.
The style and degree of paternalism varied from place to place, depending on local political cultures and social conditions. Some of the most intrusive examples were to be found in China. The enormous reservoir of rural Chinese labour gave the regime much more power over the workforce than in the Soviet bloc, where managers found it difficult to stop workers leaving for other jobs. Old Guomindang practices and a Confucian paternalistic culture also had an influence. Neighbourhood committees played a much greater role in all aspects of people’
s lives than municipal bodies did in the Soviet bloc, and more closely resembled the Japanese neighbourhood police (with its acute personal knowledge of local inhabitants) than Soviet local councils. The lowest rung on the political hierarchy was the residents’ small group unit, which looked after between fifteen and forty families, and communicated orders from on high whilst organizing welfare and policing citizens. In the workplace, the danwei (‘work unit’), like the Soviet kollektiv, provided housing, clinics, childcare and canteens for workers, but it had even greater sway, and even relatively low-level factory officials had powers to allocate apartments, bicycle coupons and other rations.53 To receive these ‘favours’, workers had to behave in an approved way. Even their private lives were carefully scrutinized. As one worker, interviewed by the political scientist Andrew Walder, explained:
Workers are usually punished for stealing, bad work attitudes and showing up late, absenteeism without leave, and having sex [outside marriage]. There are no set punishments for different things. Having sex is usually treated very seriously, at least a formal warning…54
Interestingly, poor performance in the job attracted less strict punishment, although much depended on the attitude and class origin of the worker. As one explained, ‘if the person admits guilt and makes a self-criticism, usually the group will recommend leniency, and give the person “help” or education. Usually this is enough, because this is embarrassing for a person.’55
In the Soviet bloc, by contrast, such an intrusive approach to private life only extended to party members. Local councils were too remote to have very close contact with their inhabitants, and factories had less control over their workforces. Even so, the post-1964 Soviet system was strongly paternalistic, though socialist paternalism was not the same as the eighteenth-century paternalism of the well-ordered police state. In principle, citizens were not merely expected to be loyal to the party boss, factory manager or collective farm chairman, but had also to behave in a socialist way, that is, to work hard, be virtuous, and participate in collective activities or ‘social work’ as it was called. For workers, this would involve doing an unpaid shift for some worthy cause or serving on a trade union committee. For academics and professionals, it might include giving evening lectures to workers: the ‘social work’ given to Alexander Zinoviev, an academic philosopher and dissident commentator on Soviet society in the 1970s, involved drawing cartoons for public ‘wall-newspapers’ and travelling with an agitprop brigade around the countryside giving lectures.56
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