The Balkans: A Short History (21 page)

In Bulgaria and Romania, the war itself touched society less than did its aftermath. Both countries were aligned with the Axis, which allowed them to escape the harrowing experiences of their neighbors, but meant that Germany’s defeat brought about the collapse and discrediting of the old ruling elites. They suffered their own occupation by Soviet troops, who requisitioned grain from the peasants far more thoroughly than the Germans had and helped create a Communist movement capable of taking and retaining power. In Bulgaria, in particular, there was a violent purge of the old state administration in which wartime collaborators as well as potential enemies from the old prewar political class were killed, imprisoned or exiled; in Romania, the government also settled scores with old ethnic enemies, notably the Germans. Both saw Communist Party memberships rise sharply from a tiny base—14,000 to 422,000 in Bulgaria, for instance, between September 1944 and 1946—for in these countries the form of party expansion that had come about elsewhere through wartime resistance to Nazi occupation had, for obvious reasons, not taken place.

By 1950, the fighting was over and the Balkans turned into a laboratory for the competition between the Free World and Soviet communism to lead traditional agrarian societies toward modernity. All the Balkan states had to industrialize to create jobs for their rapidly growing populations; all, in the longer term, needed to catch up with the standard of living in the rest of Europe. The contrast between the two sides of the Iron Curtain fascinated contemporary observers. “Will the ordinary man or woman, not as a political or economic animal, but as a human being, find life more worth living on the Eastern or the Western side of the border?” asked Elisabeth Barker, an experienced British observer in 1948. Barker herself noted the contrast between the anarchy of policy in Greece and rigid control to the north, between “a sure if hard minimum of social security at the price of a big sacrifice in human freedom, and social insecurity which puts the individual at the mercy of social parasites.”
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Many Western intellectuals felt the Communists had the right economic strategy for the region. They did not necessarily admire the roughness of Communist methods, but they were inclined to see the policies themselves as not only a vast improvement on interwar stagnation, but likely to lead to permanent structural changes in the Balkan economy. “These far-reaching plans strike the imagination,” wrote the historian Hugh Seton-Watson in 1954. “Even a foreign observer cannot fail to be affected by the enthusiasm and optimism of the planners. Moreover it is certain that large-scale industrialization, public works and mechanization of agriculture are the right remedies for the rural overpopulation and poverty, and the lack of manufactured goods, which were so striking in the old Eastern Europe.”
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“Greece more than any East European country,” he went on, “needs a program of planned industrialization,” and he warned that it would be reliant on foreign aid for years to come. Although the former never materialized, the forecast was accurate: after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Greece turned into the largest beneficiary per capita of American largesse in the world, receiving more than $3 billion in military and economic assistance by 1963. Thereafter, an association agreement with the Common Market gave the country privileged access to Western European markets. Considering the huge extent of foreign capital inflows, growth rates were high but not exceptional, based on exports of textiles, on the remittances of thousands of laborers in West Germany, and increasingly upon the rise of mass tourism—2 million visitors a year by 1974, 6 million by 1980. Inside the country, capital was invested less in industry than in real estate, consumption goods and the service sector. The Greek state played a huge role in the economy, building roads and improving communications but doing little to foster manufacturing or other industries.

Growth on the other side of the Iron Curtain was initially much higher than in Greece. Communist governments made forced investment in heavy industry the cornerstone of their economic policies. They controlled consumption and, with none of Greece’s access to American aid, channeled domestic funds into capital goods. Following the Soviet model, but in a less extreme form, they tried to collectivize the farms—with limited success—and conscripted civilian labor in various forms. Their efforts to declare “class war in the countryside” encountered determined peasant resistance in the early 1950s. Nevertheless, rapid electrification, new machine-tool industries, as well as the extension of road and rail systems, all signaled the Communists’ determination to succeed where their predecessors had failed, and to make Balkan nation-states economically viable and modern. In 1939, 24 percent of Bulgarian national income was from industry and 56 percent from agriculture; by 1952 these figures were 47 percent and 34 percent. In Romania 76 percent of the prewar labor force had worked the land, and only 11 percent were in industry; by 1986 these figures were 28 percent and 45 percent, respectively. Had the Communist states not been forced to trade with the USSR but with Western Europe, as Greece was, their growth would have been faster still.
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Within a couple of decades, the revolutionary scale of social transformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain was unmistakable. Growth rates were unprecedentedly high, and the stagnation of the interwar years seemed to have been left behind. In a single remarkable generation, peasant village societies had made the leap to modern urban life. “It is all changing—and changing fast,” noted
The Balkans,
a 1966 Time-Life book.

The old Balkans—that world of passionate, near-mystical nationalism and deeply felt clan loyalties—will not last out the century, not even in the remote mountain enclaves of Albania and Montenegro. Like some hungry plant, Western technology puts down its tendrils everywhere. Tireless work brigades dynamite the mountain passes. . . . Tractors and disc harrows churn up the collective fields. . . . The shepherds are driven each morning to the pastures in trucks. On the Black Sea coast, the state tourist trusts build glass and pre-stressed concrete resort hotels.

The historian William McNeill, who visited Greece at intervals between 1947 and 1974, was even more forthright: “If satisfaction of human wants and aspirations is taken as the criterion,” he wrote, “then the development of Greece across the last thirty years must be viewed as an extraordinary success story. Things that seemed impossible in 1945 have in fact come true for millions of individual Greeks.”
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Cities expanded at an astonishing rate: between 1960 and 1991, Athens grew from 1.9 to 3 million, Bucharest from 1.4 to 2.2 million, Belgrade from 585,000 to 1.1 million: smaller cities such as Thessaloniki, Skopje and Sarajevo more than doubled the number of their inhabitants. High-rise apartment blocks encircled the old nineteenth-century town centers from Bucharest to Larissa; even in the countryside, small market towns turned into concrete jungles with steel and glass office blocks, as well as asphalt streets with growing traffic problems. The countryside began to empty and ghost villages emerged in the hills. By the 1980s, it was rare to find peasants wearing traditional costume outside the most remote and deprived areas. Peasants moved away from the countryside and brought up children who went to school, developed new conceptions of consumption and leisure and earned enough money to take vacations by the Black Sea, the Adriatic or the Aegean.

On the other hand, peasants retained their attachment to the village and soil even after moving into towns and changing their pattern of life. Religious sentiment was often stronger than Communist atheism; more important, perhaps, villages still supplied fresh food, pigs and fruit more reliably and cheaply than the officially rationed distribution and retail system. Social networks were transplanted from the village or family into government, the army and the economy. In other words, urbanization often meant the village being brought into the city. And perhaps in some ways taking it over too: the personalized interactions, gifts and favors which lubricated dealings with state officialdom could be misinterpreted by the unaware as forms of “corruption” rather than a natural response to the impersonal mechanisms of modern government.

In some respects, the contrast between communism and capitalism turned out to matter less than might have been thought. Patterns of growth were different but overall rates of growth were similar. Income inequality was greater in Greece than in Communist states, but then average incomes were also higher. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, income gaps widened between rural and urban workers. Across the Balkans, the social institutions of the modern welfare state were put in place—mass schooling and university education, hospitals and agricultural cooperatives. There were 26,500 students in higher education in prewar Romania, 157,000 by 1957. Across the region, meanwhile, the rural economy was replaced by the city, illiteracy disappeared, new roads eradicated peasant isolation, and villages ceased to reproduce themselves.

There were, needless to say, substantial political differences. Only in Nicolae Ceausescu’s police state in Romania was the shift to urban life taken to the extreme of the deliberate destruction of peasant life and the creation of new “systematized” concrete agro-towns. Between the systematic surveillance of leftists in post-civil-war Greece and the spread of the secret police in Romania was a difference of kind, not degree—even if the former had more corrosive effects upon the country’s life than many outsiders realized. The conformist anticommunism of Greek officialdom limited intellectual and cultural freedom but not to the extent of Marxist-Leninism to the north.
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Much discussion behind the Iron Curtain centered around the possibilities of effecting economic reform within a one-party state. In Yugoslavia, Communist reformists tried to reconcile centralized planning with the law of supply and demand in order, in their words, to create “a modern, highly productive, stable and rational market economy.” But this was like trying to square the circle. Prices rose sharply, as did unemployment, and growth rates dropped. Private enterprise was permitted only on a limited scale and the lack of management experience with competitive business hindered all efforts to modernize and streamline state firms. Worker discontent was more serious under communism than capitalism: workers responded to economic decentralization and the relaxation of controls in Yugoslavia in particular with resentment at Party fat cats and a surge of nationalism. In Bulgaria and Romania, in contrast, there was less reform and greater police repression prevented overt opposition.
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From the mid-1970s onward, the contrast between capitalist Greece and the socialist north became much more marked. Oil shocks and a slowdown in the global economy forced change everywhere. But Communist regimes, which had devoted such energy to building up heavy industry in a bid for national self-sufficiency, found now that having successfully answered the economic problems of the 1930s, the questions had changed. In the late twentieth century, heavy, labor-intensive industry protected by a national state was unable to compete with capitalist rivals overseas. Not even heavy borrowing from Western banks—the replay in the 1980s under communism of a strategy pursued sixty years earlier by their detested bourgeois predecessors—could save them. Only through extreme repression could growing foreign debt burdens be repaid. Using a secret police whose size and agent networks dwarfed the Gestapo, Ceausescu repaid Romania’s creditors at the expense of the living standards of his own population. However, elsewhere—and especially in Yugoslavia—the central state was simply too weak to do this. The Bulgarian state was stronger than the Yugoslav, with experience in the concentration of resources that stretched back to before the war, and its resort to foreign borrowing was far less, in part due to generous Soviet assistance.
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In Greece, the chronic weakness of the state was offset by the flexibility of the private sector, by the savings of individuals with long experience in keeping their money out of the hands of the state, and by transfers of resources from the European Community, of which Greece had become a member—and a beneficiary—in 1981. But democracy—reintroduced after the fall of the colonels’ junta (1967–1974)—also allowed space for popular dissatisfaction without threatening the political system as a whole. After 1974 Greece enjoyed a stable two-party democratic system, in which socialist and conservative parties alternated in power. In Communist states, by contrast, the economic crisis meant a challenge to the legitimacy of the political system itself.

The consequences would be gravest in Yugoslavia, where Tito’s death in 1980 had already weakened the federation. The Party’s slogan (“After Tito, Tito!”) was a confession of ideological bankruptcy. The International Monetary Fund came to the government’s aid but only temporarily: “stabilization” required hard political choices. Freezing wages alienated workers; Serbian and Slovene political elites in particular resisted the squeeze. Thus the economic crisis eroded the strength of the federal government and opened the way for nationalist struggles at the regional and republic level over economic resources and political power.

“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism,” Lenin had once claimed. “In place of all forms of nationalism, Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity.” But in fact postwar Communist regimes soon found that, whether they liked it or not, they had to come to terms with the power of popular nationalism in the Balkans. Communist rule had not led to nation-states being subsumed within a broader federation, as some interwar theorists had hoped. The post-1918 order of states remained largely intact.
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