Abstract
As the Cold War developed, it drew attention away from its place of origin. The Soviet invasion of Hungary was overshadowed in the West by the debacle at Suez, and the East-West tension of the years after 1956 was no longer focused in Europe. For the West, Eastern Europe continued to symbolize what Soviets would do if they were not contained but was no longer considered to be a prime arena of active competition. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, opening the age of the intercontinental ballistic missile, ending American invulnerability, and bringing the Cold War home to Americans. Meanwhile, decolonization was creating new opportunities for the Soviet Union to expand its influence in the Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the West felt compelled to respond. Berlin in 1961 was the last great East-West crisis in Europe, Cuba in 1962, the first of a series of confrontations in the Third World that were politically recognized as such (for Korea had been considered a confrontation at the core).
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Notes
For convenient data on the economic buoyancy of the late 1950s, see Maurice Ernst, “Postwar Economic Growth in Eastern Europe” and Josef Goldmann, “Fluctuations and Trends in the Rate of Economic Growth in Some Socialist Countries,” in George R. Feiwel, ed., New Currents in Soviet-Type Economies: A Reader (Scranton, Pa.: International Textbook Co., 1968), 75–121.
For some recent appreciations, see George W. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982),
and Ferenc Fehér, “The Social Character of Khrushchev’s Regime,” in Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left. Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), 77–103.
As an antidote, William Hyland’s very harsh judgment: The Cold War Is Over (New York: Times Books, 1990), 102–103. Even harsher, and brilliantly and poignantly argued from the longer perspective of after the fall, is Ken Jowitt’s judgment that Khrushchev’s alterations— and especially his renunciation of class war against society as a whole—were the beginning of the end for Leninism in general: New World Disorder. The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley-Los Angeles, Calif, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), 249–283. In other words, whereas for Kolakowski (see note 24 to Chapter Five) the spring broke when Stalin’s immediate successors gave up mass terror, for Jowitt c’est la faute à Khrouschtchev. I still think the processes were more specific (and open-ended); but Jowitt is a political scientist.
The approach had already begun to emerge before 1957: Brzezinski, “Khrushchev’s Conception of the Communist Camp,” in his Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. ed. (New York, Praeger, 1961), 168–176; but it was really put in place thereafter. For intelligent meditation on regime problems in the post-revolutionary period, see Richard Lowenthal, “The Ruling Party in a Mature Society,” in Mark G. Field, ed., Social Consequences of Modernization in Communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 81–120. Contemporary scholars tended to feel that as time went on it would get easier to achieve value consensus, but that this would make it harder to justify the Party’s political monopoly.
There is good contemporary material on revisionism to be found in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism. Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), 215–280.
In the aftermath, there are now two books on Marxist revisionism from egg to earth: Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992),
and James H. Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist Humanism. Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). One question about such studies is whether they are Hegel’s owl of Minerva, which takes wing only when night has fallen, or simply validate “Gałeski’s rule” (see note 5 to Chapter 1) that academic interest in a given subject prospers best in the countries where there is the least of it (he was referring to peasant studies in the U.S. and the U.K.). Perhaps it is both.
For retrospective appreciations by veterans, see Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 46–48 and 137,
and Bronislaw Geremek, “Between Hope and Despair,” Daedalus, 119, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 100–101.
On the Warsaw Pact, see the brief recent history by Malcolm Mackintosh, “The Warsaw Treaty Organization: A History,” in David Holloway and Jane M.O. Sharp, The Warsaw Pact. Alliance in Transition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 41–58,
and especially Dale A. Herspring’s survey, “The Soviets, the Warsaw Pact, and the Eastern European Militaries,” in William E. Griffith, ed., Central and Eastern Europe: The Opening Curtain? (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 130–155.
On Comecon, the classic early work is Michael Kaser, Comecon, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)
and there is interesting material on the lean years between its founding and the mid-1950s in Iván Berend, “The Problem of Eastern European Economic Integration in a Historical Perspective,” in Imre Vajda and Mihály Simai, eds., Foreign Trade in a Planned Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 14–23,
and Jozef M. Van Brabant, Socialist Economic Integration. Aspects of Contemporary Economic Problems in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16–54.
For a summary of the Khrushchev-era reforms in industry, see Jan Marczewski, Crisis in Socialist Planning: Eastern Europe and the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58–120, which includes a convenient chart (omitting Czechoslovakia, however) at 58–59. On the Czechoslovak reforms, see “The 1958–69 Reform and its Aftermath,” in George R. Feiwel, New Economic Patterns in Czechoslovakia. Impact of Growth, Planning, and the Market (New York: Praeger, 1968), 103–128, and “Emergence of an Economic Reform Movement in Czechoslovakia: 1958–1963,” in John N. Stevens, Czechoslovakia at the Crossroad. The Economic Dilemmas of Communism in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 58–97.
On the Polish reforms of 1956 to 1960, see Teresa M. Piotrowicz, “The Polish Economic Pendulum,” in her Communist Economy Under Change (London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 1963), 83–124.
On the Bulgarian Great Leap Forward, see John R. Lampe, The Bulgarian Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 149–154. Bruce McFarlane has advanced the interesting idea that the cycle centralism-decentralization-turmoil-recentralization was practically a law of life in Stalinist economies, and defined their political cycles: “Political Crisis and East European Economic Reforms,” in Paul G. Lewis, ed., Eastern Europe: Political Crisis and Legitimation (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 176–199. But of course it took life some time to teach the law.
For vivid data on 1955 to 1965 increases in Soviet oil and gas production and exports to Eastern Europe, see Robert W. Campbell, The Economics of Soviet Oil and Gas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 225–249;
on the impact in Eastern Europe, see Alfred Zauberman, Industrial Progress in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 128–170. For a recent retrospective view, see Paul Marer, “The Economics and Trade of Eastern Europe,” in Griffith, Central and Eastern Europe, 37–73.
On the role of foreign trade, see Franklyn D. Holzman, “Foreign Trade Behavior of Centrally Planned Economies,” in Henry Rosovsky, ed., Industrialization in Two Systems. Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron (New York: John Wiley, 1966), 237–265, and at more length, his Foreign Trade Under Central Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).
For prescient analysis dating from 1944, see Jacob Viner’s classic “International Relations between State-Controlled National Economies,” in his International Economics Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), 216–231.
And they were still doing it when the “velvet revolution” came: Craig R. Whitney, “A Casualty of Amnesty: A Plant Using Convicts,” New York Times, 1 April 1990 (the Skoda plant at Mláda Bolesláv), and Tony R. Judt, “Metamorphosis: The Democratic Revolution in Czechoslovakia,” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 114.
The locus classicus on how this worked is still John Michael Montias, Economic Development in Communist Rumania (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), and especially its summing up, 231–247.
“I am tempted to conclude, then, that [Czechoslovakia and the GDR] are exploited by all the others”: Peter J.D. Wiles, Communist International Economics (Oxford: Black-well, 1968), 247. The classic account of the 1953–1957 crisis for Czechoslovakia is
John Michael Montias, “Economic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Forty Years of Continuity and Change,” Journal of International Affairs, 20, no. 1 (1966): 45–71. The comparison is to the beggar-my-neighbor policies of the 1930s: Montias shows that between 1953 and 1957 Czechoslovakia’s exports to Romania dropped by two-thirds, compared to one-third between 1928 and 1933, and that between 1953 and 1956 its machinery exports to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland dropped by over half.
The reverse effect, on Romania, is described by Montias in his “Background and Origins of the Rumanian Dispute with Comecon,” Soviet Studies, 16, no. 2 (October 1964): 125–151.
And for a short, sharp retrospective on these years (in response to Montias), see Wiles, “Foreign Trade of Eastern Europe: A Summary Appraisal,” in Alan A. Brown and Egon Neuberger, eds., International Trade and Central Planning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 166–176.
Frederic C. Pryor, The Communist Foreign Trade System (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), 33n.
The classic early account is William E. Griffith, The Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964);
more recently, see Alfred D. Low, The Sino-Soviet Dispute. An Analysis of the Polemics (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1976), which takes the story through 1969.
For a summary, see “Collectivization in Eastern Europe,” in Karl-Eugen Wädekin, Agrarian Policies in Communist Europe. A Critical Introduction (The Hague: Allenheld/Osmun/Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 63–82 and 141; for the effects on Romania, see Montias, Economic Development, 87–134; for the Bulgarian Great Leap Forward, see J.F. Brown, Bulgaria Under Communist Rule (New York: Praeger, 1970), 83–95;
and for the Polish exception, see Andrzej Korbonski, The Politics of Socialist Agriculture in Poland: 1945–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) and his “Peasant Agriculture in Poland Since 1956: An Alternative to Collectivization,” in Jerzy F. Karcz, ed., Soviet and East European Agriculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 411–431, which takes the story through 1965.
Paul Neuberg, The Hero’s Children. The Post-War Generation in Eastern Europe (New York: William Morrow, 1973) is still full of insights on elite generational change in general during the 1960s,
and Zdeněk Mlynář, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism (New York: Karz, 1980), passim, conveys the smell and feel of it in Czechoslovakia.
For the GDR’s situation as it later looked, beginning in the 1970s, see Werner Klein, “The Role of the GDR in Comecon: Some Economic Aspects,” in Ian Jeffries and Manfred Melzer, The East German Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 261–279.
On Romanian help over Hungary, see Robert R. King, Minorities Under Communism. Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 82–85. J.F. Brown also points out that after 1956 there was a serious crackdown in Romania itself, mainly against the Hungarian minority which had sympathized with the Hungarian revolution, and which began an erosion (that continued until 1989) of the distinct Hungarian minority institutions granted in the early postwar period: Surge to Freedom. The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 14.
Just as Montias remains good on the economic side, Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development. The Case of Romania, 1944–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 135–231, is still very good on Romanian politics in this period.
For a useful brief review of Romanian party history as background to Ceauşescu’s rule (which omits the politics of consolidation in the late 1960s, however), see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Ceauşescu’s Socialism,” Problems of Communism, 34, no. 1 (January–February 1985): 50–66, and, at greater length, his “The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism,” Eastern European Politics and Societies, 3, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 329–376. For historical background on the soporific effect of state-sponsored nationalism on the Romanian intelligentsia,
see Michael Shafir, Romania Politics, Economics and Society. Political Stagnation and Simulated Change (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1985), 144–150, with citations to further readings.
For a longer treatment of this critical period that includes some sense of the argument within the leadership over economic strategy, see Mary Ellen Fischer, Nicolae Ceausescu. A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), 83–159. But J.F. Brown also usefully recalls that Romanian obstinacy checked a streak of supranationalist millenarianism in Khrushchev, or at least kept it at bay in practical terms, and thereby saved the rest of us a lot of potential trouble: in the work cited above, 17–21. A former senior Polish communist, very much of the post-1956 generation, reminded me in a private conversation in early 1993 just how passionately he and others like him believed in heavy industry as the key to Poland’s modern future; if it was true in Poland, it was true in spades in Romania; and the resulting economic structures are a problem for them all, now that communists like him are gone.
Bill Lomax has recently developed and documented the theory that the germs of later liberalism were all present in the tough early days of the Kádár regime, although Kádár was then an impotent and inexperienced figurehead: “The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Origins of the Kádár Regime,” Studies in Comparative Commumsm, 18, nos. 2 & 3 (Summer/Autumn 1985): 87–114. For a balanced assessment, see Charles Gati, “Moscow and János Kádár since 1956: An Overview,” in his Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 156–178.
On the struggles over economic reform after 1956, see Janusz G. Zieliński, Economic Reforms in Polish Industry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1–14 and passim;
Włodzimierz Brus, “The Political Economy of Reform,” in Paul Marer and Włodzimierz Śliwiński, eds., Creditworthiness and Reform in Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 67–70; and the chapter titled “The Economic Reform Deadlock in Poland,” in Paul M. Johnson, Redesigning the Communist Economy: The Politics of Economic Reform in Eastern Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 121–138.
The insider account is Zdeněk Mlynář, Nightfrost in Prague, but Galia Golan’s reconstructions, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis, 1962–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) and Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia: The Dubček Era, 1968–1969 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), are still useful,
and Judy Batt’s Economic Reform and Political Change in Eastern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 171–232, should now be consulted. In the wake of the regime’s collapse, 1968 in Czechoslovakia is getting some urgent reconsideration:
see Jan Moravec, “Could the Prague Spring Have Been Saved? The Ultimatum of Cierna nad Tisou,” Orbis, 35, no. 4 (Fall 1991), 587–595; Jíří Valenta, “The Search for a Political Solution,” ibid., 581–587, and Valenta, “The Last Chance,” ibid., 595–601. And for a preview of the extensive new documentation now becoming available, see Mark Kramer, “New Sources on the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), no. 2 (Fall, 1992), 4–13, which includes the text of the hardliners’ August “request” to Brezhnev for intervention, and promises to review interpretations in a future issue.
Ibid, 101–104, 120–124; but his whole chapter on the Prague Spring, 77–145, is well worth reading. For wrenching evidence of personalism at leadership level during the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, see the memoirs of Gomułka’s interpreter, Erwin Weit, At the Red Summit: Interpreter behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 193–217. On divided counsels within the Soviet leadership, see Jiří Valenta, Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968. Anatomy of a Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). For how it felt watching it as a Western correspondent in Moscow, see
Anatole Shub, An Empire Loses Hope (New York: Norton, 1970), 369–442.
Peter Wiles characterizes the effect as a shift from “the once half-accepted theocracy to a ‘Logocracy’”; the latter “still makes enormous moral claims, but they have become totally invalid”: in Jan Drewnowski, ed., Crisis in the East European Economy. The Spread of the Polish Disease (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 11. For the same testimony in different words from someone who helped with the shifting, see Adam Michnik, “The Prague Spring Ten Years Later (August 1978),” reprinted in his Letters from Prison, 155–159. For a sensitive short account of the whole 1956 to 1970 period and its 1968 culmination in Poland,
see Neal Ascherson, The Polish August. The Self-Limiting Revolution (New York: Viking, 1982), 81–105.
Leszek Kołakowski, while clear about Poland (Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. 3: The Breakdown [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 466–468), is somewhat more sanguine about socialism’s staying power in Czechoslovakia, incorrectly as it turned out: 69–70. On the critical role of 1968 for the East European intelligentsia and the opening up of the split with Western leftists, see the introduction to Fehér and Heller, Eastern Left. Western Left, 1–47, and
Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Márkus, Dictatorship Over Needs (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 290ff. This work also includes some pertinent meditation on the “anti-Bolshevik Bolshevism,” which they see as one plausible historical alternative.
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© 1993 Thomas W. Simons, Jr.
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Simons, T.W. (1993). The Iron Ring, 1956–1968. In: Eastern Europe in the Postwar World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10884-5_6
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