Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (45 page)

After liberation, the new vogue for planning and the repudiation of liberalism spread right across the continent. Enlarging the welfare state, greater intervention in the economy, control of heavy industry and banking all formed part of the accepted wisdom of the day. The key issue in the years 1944–7 was not whether or not to plan, but whether to follow the social democratic or the communist variant of planning.

In Poland and Czechoslovakia, there were powerful pre-war traditions of state planning, and in 1945–6, socialist planners seemed to be winning the ear of local communists in arguing for a mixed economy, private trade and non-collectivized farms. But after the formation of the Cominform and Stalin’s refusal to allow East European countries to participate in the Marshall Plan, Stalinist orthodoxy took over. Communists criticized the “so-called primacy of consumption.” Poland’s Central Board of Planning, which had called for a midcourse between the “heroic road” of forced savings and “middle-class” demands for an immediate gratification of consumer desire, was wound up. It was replaced in early 1949 by the Party-controlled State Commission of Economic Planning for whom “the struggle for the
planned economy is a class struggle waged on the political, economic and ideological fronts.”
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Between 1948 and 1951 every country behind the Iron Curtain introduced a Five- or Six-Year Plan. These were very different from the shorter reconstruction plans which had been introduced after liberation. By this point pre-war levels of output had been regained in most countries, while nationalization had delivered industry into the hands of the state. These new Plans set out highly ambitious targets for heavy industry and power generation. Far less attention was paid to consumer goods, and Party experts—ignoring the signs of social exhaustion—warned that in this “heroic” phase of development, living standards would remain depressed as resources were ploughed back into investment. Czech premier Zápotocký attacked “any fond illusions that a rise in the standard of living may be regarded as a necessary corollary, or even ought to precede the successful implementation of the Plan. The exact opposite is the truth: in order to make it possible that our material and cultural level might be raised, it will first be necessary to fulfil the Plan … so that we might henceforth live better, more contentedly and more joyfully!” Eastern Europe, observed the UN, was aiming at “an industrial revolution far more radical than anything seriously attempted in western European countries.”
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A vigorous propaganda drive hyped the results. The J. W. Stalin steelworks in East Germany, the Klement Gottwald steelworks in Ostrava, the V. I. Lenin iron and steelworks in Bulgaria were the cathedrals of the new era—their monumental entranceways, their very creation, a testimony to the power of man and science to conquer nature. Petru Dumitriu’s painting
The Light of Lenin in the Mountains of Romania
celebrated the building of the hydroelectric plant at Bicaz. The “light of Stalin shines on Albanian soil,” was Hoxha’s slogan in 1952.

But it was certainly not all propaganda. Growth rates in certain sectors, starting from a low base, were spectacular. Industrial production and employment both grew at least as quickly as in western Europe—perhaps faster—in the 1950s and early 1960s, despite the fact that there was no east European Marshall Plan; indeed the Soviet Union was actually
extracting
resources from the region, not putting them in.
“A revolutionary transformation of the industrial structure has been carried out,” noted the Economic Commission for Europe from Geneva. “East European governments have on the whole planned successfully.” Very high investment ratios—twice as high as in western Europe—delivered fast rates of growth in favoured sectors such as mining and iron and steel production.
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Yet this pattern of development was storing up innumerable problems for the future. The use of a labour-intensive Soviet model was not illogical in an area where capital was scarce and labour relatively abundant; but it did lead east European countries to favour industries reliant on outmoded technologies. While in the world economy the number of miners was falling during the 1950s, in Hungary, for example, it doubled. Large numbers of workers were being funnelled into problem areas of industry, making for economic and political turmoil in the future once the region became more exposed to international competition.

Perhaps politically most serious of all was the problem of agriculture. After nearly two decades in which farmers had enjoyed an advantage over urban dwellers, the late 1940s ushered in a period in which the city took its revenge. In the Baltic states, where collectivization was introduced several years ahead of the rest of eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of “kulaks” were deported, just as they had been in the Ukraine in the 1930s: a staggering 3 per cent of the total population went in a mere ten days in March 1949. Because communism had little support among the peasantry, the Party elsewhere had initially denied any interest in collectivization and tried to win favour through land reform. Now this policy was thrown into reverse throughout the region. Stalinism placed the burdens of development on to the agrarian sector by introducing collectivization drives, raising taxes, and cutting back loans and credits for farmers. Like a sort of internal colony, the countryside was to provide both food and labour for the growing cities. But state control of the land turned out to be a disaster, just as it had earlier in the Soviet Union. While industrial output soared, agricultural production barely attained pre-war levels. Indeed, as late as the early 1960s, per capita output remained depressed and “meatless days” testified to the depletion of livestock herds.
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As the authorities tried to secure the harvest by force, farmers resisted with every means—arson, deliveries of damaged grain, sabotaging machinery—at their disposal. In Romanian Transylvania, peasants burned the new cooperative farms; after one incident in July 1949, security forces only restored order by shooting twelve peasants on the spot and making mass arrests. Party efforts to terrorize the peasantry into submission led to widespread unrest and the inevitable accusations of “sabotage” by “well-off peasants.” These “bitter enemies of the new order” were “capable of any crime to ruin Socialist construction.” The typical “kulak” “fails to deliver his quotas, sabotages agricultural production and even resorts to murder.” In fact, the resistance was on an enormous scale, as was even indirectly admitted occasionally by the official press. “How can one talk about the proper ideological attitude of such members as Mikula from Mosina in Człuchów?” demanded the
Green Banner
, the official journal of the Polish United Peasant Party in November 1951. “He has said that he will not sell grain or potatoes to the State, and that if the surplus is taken from him by force, he will hang himself and let the Western radio know about it.”
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Peasant rebellions were a traditional part of the political landscape in eastern Europe and the new state authorities suppressed them much as their predecessors had done, through the militia and army. At least 80,000 peasants were deported or tried in Romania alone, 30,000 in humiliating public show trials. Others had their homes ransacked by the militia, their produce and livestock requisitioned, their families beaten up or threatened. In Hungary, thousands of farmers languished in internment camps, further disrupting the rural economy.
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Although these rebellions—even when, as in Transylvania, they obtained the support of anti-communist partisans in the mountains—did not threaten the grip of the Party directly, they did reveal the extent of peasant dissatisfaction. Moreover, as one of the causes of food shortages, they constituted an indirect threat to communist power. Hardliners might try to blame the shortages on the surviving private smallholders, but Party critics increasingly realized that collectivization was a folly which threatened the entire industrialization effort. From as early as 1951 (in Romania) the policy was modified, to reduce the elements of coercion and compulsion. “The ideal collective
farm is a socialistic form too far ahead of present conditions,” ran the new rationale, “A lower form should be used in this intermediate period.” Hardly a message likely to quieten peasant fears!
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Other “class enemies” were also being created by the industrialization drive. As millions of young peasants flocked into the cities, the regimes tried solving a looming housing shortage by clearing out “bourgeois” property-owners. These “unproductive people” were now to pay the price for the slow rate of housing construction (four times slower in East than in West Germany, for example). Operation “B” in Czech cities in the early 1950s led to mass evictions of “class enemies.” “As far back as last November,” ran a report from 1952, “rumours started circulating in Romania that a mass deportation of ‘unnecessary city dwellers’ was slated for the near future.” Thousands of residents were deported from Bucharest, Budapest and elsewhere. Bulgarian police took advantage of the 1948 “Measures against Socially Dangerous Persons.” Official permission was now required to reside in an increasing number of “workers’ cities.”
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The victims went to swell the armies of slave labourers used on such high-profile construction projects as the Danube-Black Sea canal (involving 40,000 prisoners). Kept behind barbed wire fences, they lived in the open until they succeeded in building reed shacks and digging wells for water. Food shortages and poor sanitary conditions led to high rates of suicide. This forced labour—sometimes institutionalized as in the Romanian Directorate of Labour Reserves, or the Bulgarian Labour Army—played an important part in helping the bureaucracy aim for the fantastic targets set under the Plan. In Bulgaria there were 100,000 slave labourers compared with an industrial workforce of 361,000.

Even ordinary workers—supposedly the favoured class of the new order—found themselves hemmed in, and urged on, by restrictions and pressures which they had not anticipated. “To fight mercilessly against the enemies of the working people”—as, say, the Romanian Party was committed to doing—meant attacking the workforce itself. The authorities not only banned strikes and work stoppages; they restricted labour mobility and tried to clamp down on “absenteeism.” In Bulgaria the “arbitrary quitting” of one’s job was punishable by “corrective labour.” Workers needed to register with the local police
to obtain ID and work cards, and faced prosecution for “violations of labour discipline.” In the absence of wage rises or convincing incentives, the low living standards, shortages of food and other consumer goods, increasingly strict labour discipline and unmasking of “saboteurs” and “agents” alienated the workforce. Yet outright resistance was difficult as the unions were extensions of the state, while workers were encouraged to police themselves. “The tightening of labour discipline,” insisted a Hungarian paper, “must be achieved by pillorying [loafers and idlers] at production conferences, by reporting their nefarious activities … by visiting them in their homes, and if all else fails, by expelling them from the ranks of honest workers.”
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In the midst of this extraordinary turmoil came Stalin’s seventieth birthday. The end of 1949 saw roads, monuments, buildings and entire towns dedicated to the Soviet leader. New cities emerged—like Stalinstadt in East Germany, Sztalinvaros in Hungary—as symbols of “the great construction projects of Communism.” In Prague, the State Commission for Coordinating the Celebration of General Stalin’s Seventieth Birthday commissioned a monument thirteen metres high overlooking the city. These edifices were intended to mark “Man’s triumph over nature and the social forces that have fettered him.” Instead, they were soon to reveal the fragility of the Stalinist system itself.

In December 1949 Frankfurter Allee in the Soviet sector of Berlin was renamed “Stalinallee.” “The first socialist street in Germany”—as it was hailed—was to be flanked by ambitious building projects. Just as the street was supposed to symbolize the achievements of the communist regime, the workers building it symbolized the “new men” who were making it possible. Otto Nagel’s painting of the
Young Bricklayer of Stalinallee
depicted one of these heroes against a backdrop of scaffolding and flags. Yet shortly after the completion of this picture, these very same building workers downed tools in the first serious internal challenge to communist rule.

The workers’ uprising in East Berlin in the spring of 1953, coming soon after Stalin’s death, marked the end of the initial industrialization drive across the Soviet bloc. Similar discontent—which quickly took on an anti-Russian character—was manifest in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Angered at wage cuts (masquerading as “higher work
norms”) the “Heroes of socialist construction” were, in reality, alienated from the regime that glorified them. Eventually, the street placards on Stalinallee were quietly removed: part of the street reverted to its old name, while part was renamed “Karl-Marx-Allee.”

REFORMING COMMUNISM?

Stalin’s successors followed a rather hesitant “New Course” in the mid-1950s that was supposed to allay this discontent by slowing the pace of industrialization. Collectivization came under attack and where it was reversed—as in Poland and Yugoslavia—the “socialist sector” shrank with extraordinary speed. Taxes were lowered as were the compulsory crop deliveries demanded by the authorities. At the same time, it was announced that more consumer goods would be made available, and that the housing shortage would be tackled. The harsh labour discipline of the “heroic” phase of Stalinism was replaced by a more conciliatory approach.

Politically, too, there was a change of course. Just as Stalin’s death led to an emphasis on “collective leadership” in Moscow, so too in eastern Europe the “little Stalins” were challenged. In East Germany, from where nearly one million (mostly young people) had fled in the years after 1945, Ulbricht came under fire, and there was a row provoked by such Stalinist-type follies as the creation of a Commission for the Preparation of Comrade W. Ulbricht’s Sixtieth Birthday. One by one, the “little Stalins” were toppled; few foresaw that they would be succeeded by others.