Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (61 page)

Poland’s problems were more generally shared. The rigid structure of command economies made it easier to use foreign credits for food and consumer goods than in acquiring foreign technology and making good use of it. Eastern-bloc exports did shift slowly away from the Soviet Union towards hard-currency partners, but not sufficiently: EC barriers to trade helped keep goods out, increasing the strain on foreign-exchange reserves. Hence these vast debts did not help to modernize the economic base; they simply bought unpopular regimes a breathing space. For a tyrant like Ceaušescu this was not such a problem: thanks to his security system, he could depress living standards still further in order to clear his accounts with Romania’s creditors. But for less repressive regimes—and few were as harsh as his—the costs of debt repayment, often now accompanied by supervision
from the IMF and World Bank, had to be borne by an increasingly alienated workforce. Thus foreign capital did not ease the plight of communism; it made it worse.

By the early 1980s the overall picture was grim. The once backward economies of southern Europe—Portugal, Spain and Greece—had escaped the shackles of dictatorship, gained access to EC markets and, as a result, were pulling ahead of the communist bloc. Inside eastern Europe, there was considerable variation in economic performance, with hardline East Germany and Czechoslovakia outperforming Hungary and Poland. Everywhere, though, living standards were falling, goods were scarce and the inadequacies of the system were evident. But did this necessarily point to its imminent demise? The GDR’s chief statistician has claimed that it was around 1982–3 that he realized “we were heading for economic collapse.” But in almost the next breath he goes on to admit that Western credits did help stabilize the short-run situation. The mere fact of economic slowdown did not threaten regimes which had perfected reliable ways of defending themselves. What it did was to undermine their claims to rule.
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THE ATROPHIED PARTY

By virtue of the care for a good supply of the people with all the necessary goods, for the improvement of trade, of public services, price stability, the population often meet Nicolae Ceaušescu in the town’s shopping centres, when opening new shops, when examining the supply of the market with goods. On these occasions, President Ceaušescu listens to what they say and what else should be done, and when possible, takes measures on the spot to improve things. These signs speak by themselves to the honest-minded man that the final scope of building a new society in Romania according to President Ceaušescu’s view is Man and his interests, the satisfaction of his spiritual and material demands, the realization of his ideals of progress and civilization.
¹³

This Stalinist propaganda puff from 1983 coincided with a period of austerity harsh even by Romanian standards: consumption was being squeezed to pay off the foreign debt, and daily life was ravaged by the
insanely destructive programme of “systemization” through which the regime demolished thousands of villages, scores of towns and eventually a large part of Bucharest itself. There and elsewhere, a growing gulf was opening up between an increasingly harsh reality and official ideology. Or rather, since that gulf had always been present in communism, what was fundamentally happening in the 1980s was the growing recognition by society generally—elite and base—that reality and ideology were parting company.
¹⁴

In Ceaušescu’s Romania such recognition counted for little, since it did not extend to the “Giant of the Carpathians” himself. Elsewhere, however, it permeated the echelons of power. The sense that reality had mastered socialist theory rather than been mastered by it fatally undermined the Party’s sense of its own governing mission. Here lay the chief political trend through much of the last two decades of communism—not the emergence of outright opposition, but rather this slow decline of a Party which believed in itself, and its replacement by other organs of government—civil servants in the state apparatus, the military, and the elderly “little Stalins.” The collapse of belief in socialist ideology, and the abandonment by the early 1980s of any convincing hope of surpassing the West economically, left the Party with little general purpose. It was degenerating into a privileged
nomenklatura
, and a decreasingly effective instrument of crisis management.

The Party’s decline was most visible in Poland. In the official Kubiak Report, which it commissioned in September 1981 to reflect upon the causes and origins of the Solidarity crisis, its author—on the liberal wing of the Party—noted that the origins of social conflict lay not only in the political opposition but more basically, “when the gap between the declared aims of socialism and the results achieved widened.” Solidarity proved that the workers of Gdansk took socialism seriously—they criticized the perks of Party bosses and showed no signs of interest in capitalism or the market; it was precisely because the Party was no longer a convincing guide to socialism that the assault it faced was so devastating.
¹⁵

Poland had offered a paradigm of the continuation of Stalinist economic priorities through the 1970s: growth of producer goods outstripped consumer goods for much of the period, and there was little
structural change or modernization. The priority given to investment in heavy industry continued even into the 1980s. Hence the shock generated by the shipyard workers’ strike movement, not to mention the astonishing expansion of the associated Free Trade Unions to some eight million members—more than double the PUWP’s own membership—in just a few months.

Solidarity’s legacy was a ruling Party stripped of purpose and legitimacy. The 1970s had already seen state officials and industrial managers assuming power at its expense. In a striking departure from all socialist political experience—a move which summoned up echoes of the inter-war years—the government was now handed over to a military man, General Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski claimed that his rule, and the imposition of martial law, were necessary in order to avoid Soviet invasion. This claim now appears to be false, though that was not widely known at the time. What was important was the common perception that the PUWP lacked the authority to continue.

“The principal reason for the December 13 coup [introduction of martial law],” wrote Adam Michnik, “was not the radicalism of Solidarity but the weakness of the base of the PUWP.” Party numbers fell from 3.1 million in 1980 to 2.1 million in 1984: worryingly, it was primarily the young who were leaving; more than half the Party membership by 1987 were over fifty years old. The true state of relations between populace and governing class was expressed in the martial law which Jaruzelski proclaimed, and which lasted for nearly two years. “For the first time,” writes the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, “the apparatus of communist power was compelled to wage war … against its own society.”
¹⁶

Nowhere else in the communist bloc was the Party’s situation or outlook as obviously desperate as in Poland; nevertheless, outside East Germany and Czechoslovakia, it could hardly be said to function as a cohesive administrative force. Mostly it had been displaced by the “little Stalins” at its head, and their coteries. Yet these elderly figures who clung to power across the region seemed by their very age to point to the dangers of predicting what might follow their demise: by 1985 the oldest in the bloc, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, was seventy-six, the youngest (apart from Jaruzelski), Ceaušescu, was sixty-seven; the seventy-four-year-old Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov had
come to power in 1954; Honecker, the newcomer, had succeeded to the East German leadership in 1971. This was an elite of arthritic geriatrics, bitterly resisting change. The succession crisis which followed the octogenarian Tito’s death in Yugoslavia in 1980 was a worrying portent.

The danger of personal rule was that, especially in the Balkans, it encouraged the creation of family dynasties. Romania was the most egregious instance—wags called it “Ceauschwitz”—turned virtually into a personal fiefdom. Even the most senior echelons of the
nomenklatura
were sidelined, as all decisions were taken, without prior discussion, by the Conducator and his powerful, sinister wife, Elena. Party officials were treated much like their Ottoman predecessors, moved from posting to posting, to prevent their building power bases which might threaten their master. After the Ceaušescus’ daughter Zoia, a mathematics student, tried to flee her parents, her angry father closed down the Bucharest Mathematical Institute, provoking a massive brain drain of some two hundred of the country’s leading mathematicians. Even in less flagrant abuses of power, accusations and rumours of nepotism were common, indicating the deep popular mistrust of an elite regarded as having betrayed its own principles.
¹⁷

Romania also exemplified another way in which communist elites tried to regain some popularity—through the cultivation of national aspirations. Ceaušescu pushed the use of nationalism further than any other leader, and achieved an apparent detachment from Moscow which brought rich rewards from the West. But national communism became part of a common strategy for clinging on to power. Older gods from the nationalist pantheon were introduced into the Marxist-Leninist liturgy: Marshal Pilsudski started to appear on Polish postage stamps; Luther and Frederick the Great were commemorated in East Germany. Compliant professors produced works like the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ fourteen-volume history of the country, or the infamous nationalist memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archaeology, history and ethnography all helpfully uncovered socialism’s deep roots in the nation. “Folk art has been a powerful active factor in the history of the people,” wrote an Albanian professor, “because for centuries on end it has transmitted the democratic, patriotic and revolutionary ideals of the working masses.”
¹⁸

But national communism also involved a tenser and more antagonistic relationship towards the surviving remnants of the region’s ethnic minorities: anti-Semitism, for instance, surfaced briefly in Poland in 1968, despite the almost total disappearance of what had once been the largest Jewish community in Europe. Tito’s legacy was abandoned in Yugoslavia as Milošević used the issue of Kosovo to play to reawakening Serb nationalism. In Bulgaria, decades of a centralizing assimilationist policy towards the minorities culminated in the 1984–5 drive to rename the Turkish population, or rather, to “restore” their original Bulgarian names. When Romania similarly sanctioned the official persecution of its Hungarian minority, it enflamed a grievance with Hungary which, as we shall see, would play an important part in the events of 1989.

Nationalism was anyway an unpredictable card for the elite to play, since the communists’ subservience to Moscow was always in the back of people’s minds. Other groups, more independent of Moscow, could pose as more convincing voices for national aspirations. But did such groups exist in the 1980s? This raises the question of the state of the political opposition, its goals and limits. A quick survey reveals two things: first, that the opposition was no longer primarily interested in national independence—the lessons of 1956 and 1968 had been well learned; and second, that apart from Poland its ability to force change was very limited indeed. The revival of nationalism, in other words, was far more a consequence than a cause of 1989.

There were, however, various ways in which opposition manifested itself beyond outright, public confrontation, a very rare event indeed. There was widespread withdrawal from the system—most directly expressed by the millions who fled to the West (a net flow of some 3.5 million East Germans, hundreds of thousands of Poles and others). A Polish opinion poll taken in 1987 showed that 70 per cent of young people wanted to leave the country either temporarily or for good. Their motivation could certainly not be reduced to consumer envy, or to a desire to have the freedom to travel, strong though both these elements were; the Stasi noted that it also implied “a rejection of the social system.” In 1989 this form of opposition would be crucial in triggering off change across the region.
¹⁹

Leaving the country, though, was not merely discouraged by the rulers of eastern Europe; it was also frowned upon by many of their opponents, by the Church, by reformers inside the Party and outside who had elected to stay and fight for change at home. This was the path followed by Church leaders and many intellectuals, but it did not—outside Poland—seriously threaten the regimes themselves. Intellectuals as an opposition varied from complete irrelevance—as in Romania and Bulgaria—to outspoken sources of irritation and hope in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Political opposition outside Marxism had been crushed in the Stalin years; within it, it remained hesitant and sectarian. Where the Marxist tradition remained strong, as among the most prominent dissidents in East Germany, one heard voices calling for improvements to socialism, not its abandonment. The greater emphasis on ethics, human and civil rights which came across with Charter 77 in Prague, or the KOR group in Poland, made opposition a broader and less sectarian issue; yet it also meant sidestepping the question of a political alternative to communism.

A further problem for the intellectual opposition—especially that situated outside the Party—was that by itself it was powerless. The desire to retain some ability to shape events was precisely what made many opponents of the existing order hang on to their Party membership. For the rest, their influence depended crucially upon whether they could build alliances with other powerful social forces such as the Church or the workers. Yet a gulf divided the three groups for most of this period. The shadow of anti-Semitism, for instance, separated Church leaders and key intellectuals in Poland through the 1970s; even where this was not a factor, anti-clerical intellectuals often found it hard to reach an understanding with Church leaders. The divide between intellectuals and workers was exploited by the Party in Czechoslovakia, which made sure after 1968 to keep the workers loyal; in Poland, it weakened the opposition in 1970. Bridging it was part of the secret of Solidarity’s strength in the 1980s.