Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (46 page)

More crucially, the departure of the Stalinist leadership was accompanied—as in the Soviet Union—by the discrediting of their chief instrument of power, the secret police. Once the security forces had been above the party; now they were disorientated and uncertain. “The sad ones,” as they were known, were thrown on to the defensive. Never again would they be so sure of themselves, or so reliable an instrument of repression. It was the end of what one victim called “the dictatorship of the party within the party.” When Hungarian Party Secretary Mátyás Rákosi tried addressing a meeting of secret-police officers in June 1956 he was roundly booed.
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The victims of the purges were thus rehabilitated, their persecutors purged. The Party
managed to pin the blame for Stalinism’s excesses on agencies which had escaped its control: rehabilitating former party leaders like Rajk, Gomulka and Pauker became paradoxically a way of reasserting communist control of the state.

In this way, de-Stalinization made any future clampdown far more awkward for the authorities to contemplate and facilitated a new openness and debate. Police powers were restrained by new laws (or by a greater willingness to observe old ones), as the Party emphasized the need to “return to socialist legality.” Labour camps were shut down and tens of thousands of prisoners returned home. In Poland, for instance, some 30,000 prisoners benefited from an amnesty in April 1956 which coincided with a purge of the upper echelons of the security services.
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But what did liberalization within a communist system mean? To some it meant independence from Moscow; but as the examples of Romania (and to a lesser extent Yugoslavia) showed, “national communism” was compatible with one-man rule of the harshest sort. To others, among them many shocked and guilty Party cadres, it meant recapturing the “original purity” of the movement. Thus as the People’s Democracies emerged from the “heroic” phase of the immediate post-war years, uncertain cadres had to confront the question of how the Party itself should react to de-Stalinization. This debate was fought out between Stalinists and liberalizers in an atmosphere punctuated and to some extent shaped by explosions of popular protest in East Germany (1953), Poland and Hungary (1956). The liberalizers argued that such events demonstrated the need for a change of course; the Stalinists retorted that they were triggered off by rising expectations which had been stimulated by the signs of panic and division in the highest echelons of the Party after Stalin’s death. But powerful forces were behind the liberalizers: Khrushchev, in Moscow, for one, who publicly accepted the idea in 1955 of “several roads to socialism,” and tried to mend his fences with Tito. Even the occasional returns to a hard line—after 1956, for example, and again after 1968—never approached the paranoiac excesses of Stalinism, except perhaps in the Zhivkov, Hoxha and Ceausescu dynasties in the Balkans.

De-Stalinization raised in particular the question of the rule of law under communism, and the relationship between law and ideology (as
expressed by its watchdog, the Party). On the one hand, none other than Stalin himself had reasserted the significance of the law; and yet his most important theoretician, Andrei Vyshinsky, had insisted that “if the law lags behind life it needs to be changed.” According to the 1950 Polish Judiciary Act (a typical expression of the Stalin era) judges were instructed to behave as “revolutionary constructors of a socialist society.” Throughout the empire, in fact, post-war constitutions had followed Vyshinsky in explicitly rejecting the “bourgeois principle of a separation of powers.” Instead, all authority converged in the hands of the Party, even in those cases where the Party was not mentioned in so many words.
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So was the Party above the law? If it was, what was to prevent the re-emergence of a police state especially in a case where—as in Bulgaria, for instance—Party theorists insisted that “to speak about vested rights in socialism is the same as to favour counter-revolution”? The aftermath of the show trials saw Party bosses trying to square the circle. To the throng gathered before the grave of László Rajk—in a setting of multiple and tragic ironies—a senior Hungarian Party official proclaimed: “Many are asking themselves: what guarantee do we have that illegalities, offences against the law such as these, will never again take place in the future?—It is a justified question. It is a question to which we are obliged to give our people an answer. The guarantee is the Party. We communists are the guarantee.” An unsettling reassurance! Trying to distance himself from the old days, János Kádár insisted: “A whole nation cannot be suspect.” Or, in another pithy reversal of Stalinism: “He who is not against us is for us.” Yet even under Kádár, there was no real move towards judicial independence. The Party retained its control over the security apparatus; it was just that the Party became more moderate.
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At the heart of these debates was the question of the character of the Party itself. In his controversial “Anatomy of a Morality,” Tito’s fiery colleague Milovan Djilas charged that the ideological purists of the revolution had been replaced by a “new class” of self-aggrandizing time-servers. The “heroes” of the partisan war had turned into corrupt “practical men” married to grasping wives. But, if this was true—and even Tito’s spreading waistline gave support to Djilas’s criticism—what was to be done? Djilas himself talked about building
a genuine multi-party democracy and doing away with the Party’s monopoly on power. Later, but in like vein, Czech reformers argued for a separation of the Party and state.

Such a revival of the postulates of “pure bourgeois democracy” was anathema to most cadres. Perhaps there was another way. Tito’s favourite theorist, Edvard Kardelj, argued that between “classical bourgeois democracy” and Soviet “socialism of the apparatus” lay the “direct democracy” of workers’ self-government and the realization of Marx’s dream of the “withering away of the state.” Workers’ self-management sounded wonderful in theory, and attracted the attention of curious foreign economists (who showed less interest in the millions of Yugoslav workers who preferred employment as migrant workers in the capitalist West). But though brilliant as propaganda for foreign consumption, Kardelj’s theories—as modified by reality—turned out to involve little more than a very pragmatic response to calls for reform. Tito, after all, was hardly going to preside over the dismantling of the Party apparatus he had fought a war to bring to power. Nor, of course, would the Soviet Union acquiesce more generally in the Party’s demotion: liberalization would have to take place under its gaze.

If a certain decline in the Party’s ideological influence did take place it was due to pressures less easily evaded than Djilas’s broadsides. A new technical intelligentsia was indeed coming to dominate the Party machinery, ousting the pre-war “heroes.” These cadres were economic pragmatists not ideologues, and they recognized the need for scientists, managers and specialists to spearhead the reforms without which the Party must eventually be doomed. Their ideology was that of technocrats everywhere in the late fifties and sixties—a belief that science, technological progress and a state run by experts held the answers to modern life. They sought a depoliticization of the system on the grounds that the modernization of the economy now required not ideologues but administrators.

What made such arguments plausible was the Soviet insistence in the 1950s that capitalism and communism were competitors in a race towards a material utopia. Khrushchev, in particular, liked to boast that communism would soon demonstrate its superiority to the West by overtaking it in the production of consumer goods: “Within a
period of, say, five years following 1965, the level of US production per capita should be equalled and overtaken. Thus by that time, perhaps even sooner, the USSR will have captured first place in the world both in absolute volume of production and per capita production, which will ensure the world’s highest standard of living.” His Master’s Voice, Ulbricht, talked of “overtaking and surpassing” West Germany. Strange and implausible as such boasts may sound today, they were not dismissed by the West. This was, after all, the Sputnik era. “Can Moscow match us industrially?” asked one leading American commentator in 1955. His conclusion: the possibility could not be ruled out.
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THE NEW SOCIETY

If such boasts were taken seriously, it was because people were struck by the dramatic social changes which communism had brought to eastern Europe. In less than two decades the region became a predominantly urban society. More than twenty million people moved into the war-ravaged towns and their abandoned apartments. New cities emerged; old ones were ringed by estates of high-rise apartment blocks; even villages acquired industrial workforces. In the late 1940s the urban population of the region stood at 37.5 million—some 36 per cent of the total workforce—figures which had remained unchanged for a decade. Twenty years later, the urban population had grown to some 58 million and nearly half the labour force now lived in the towns. In the recession-bound 1980s, places like Hoyeswerda, Nowa Huta and Dimitrovgrad were shabby, decaying reminders of communism’s failure; in the 1950s they evoked its glorious future.
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Of course, even in the 1950s, the careful observer could discern the priorities of the new order in the ideological elephantiasis which seemed to be afflicting the region. The centre of Warsaw was dwarfed by a new Palace of Culture, described by one analyst as “an architectural three-stage rocket”—a Stalinist skyscraper “donated” by the Soviet Union; central Sofia was dominated by the neo-Byzantine Ministry for Heavy Industry. In Bucharest the mammoth Casa Scinteii housed a printing and publishing complex which produced newspapers, school books and brochures and symbolized “man’s triumph
over nature and the social forces that have fettered him.” These “great construction projects of communism” took precedence over private housing. Even after the “New Course” increased the emphasis on housing, the shortage of living space remained acute.
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Yet while homes remained scarce, there were dramatic improvements in the provision of other social goods. The creation, for instance, of a nationalized health service offered vast improvements in care. In Bulgaria, where the government had passed the “Free and Universal Medical Care” Bill in 1951, the number of beds per 1,000 inhabitants was soon more than double the pre-war level. In Czechoslovakia, where the entire health sector was nationalized, child mortality dropped dramatically from a pre-war rate of nearly 50 per 1,000 to under 15 by the 1960s. Life expectancy converged equally rapidly on west European norms.

Family allowances (often linked progressively to income), the provision of childcare and the liberalization of abortion were all presented as “part of the emancipation of women” and were not unrelated to the needs of an economy desperate for female labour. It should of course be remembered that although large numbers of married and unmarried women did enter the workforce, they were still paid less than men. And what allowed them to do this were not only official childcare facilities but also the plentiful and indispensable supply of grandmothers, often cooped up in tiny flats with their grandchildren.
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This example should alert us to the particular character of the east European welfare state; if (to simplify matters) the Nazi equivalent had been geared to the needs of the race, and the post-war west European model to the rights of the individual citizen, the communist model was designed to respond, above all, to the needs of economic production. Hence not only the incentives to female labour, but also the relative lack of concern with the elderly, or with the rural as opposed to the urban population. Lenin had warned that “he who does not work shall not eat.” In accordance with this precept social insurance was used as a weapon; not only “persons with fascist activities” (as in Bulgaria) but also peasants and others outside the socialist sector were often excluded from proper coverage.

Yet under the “enlightened despotism” of communism some truly dramatic changes were afoot. Education became available to a much wider range of social groups than it had been before the war: the number of primary schools built in Yugoslavia nearly doubled; so did the universities, and the student population leapt from a pre-war 17,000 to 97,000. Schooling was vital to create the cadres for the new order: in Poland there were 250,000 students in higher education compared with 50,000 before the war; in Hungary some 67,000 by the early 1960s compared with a pre-war 11,000. Technical studies in particular enjoyed rapid increases in enrolments, partly because they offered the best job prospects and partly because they were often preferred to the more ideologically charged humanities.
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All these changes formed part of a social philosophy which aimed to break down the traditional hierarchies of the past. Communism may have created its own governing class, but there can be little doubt that it was a lot less elitist than any previous kind of ruling system eastern Europe had known. In purely economic terms, there was a striking flattening of income differentials across the board: differentials between manual and non-manual were greatly reduced, despite the persistence of traditional respect for “the trousered ones.” Upward mobility from the working class into the new administrative elite was deliberately encouraged by quotas for jobs and university admissions. “Poverty as a social phenomenon had disappeared,” wrote Mlynar. “People going about in rags, beggars in the streets, slums in the urban periphery … had disappeared for good and were known to the younger generation only from movies.” By the 1960s Czechoslovakia was—in terms of income distribution—the most egalitarian country in Europe; Poland and East Germany were not far behind.
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