Revolution and Change in Central and Eastern Europe

Political, Economic and Social Challenges

Andrew Goldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563247576
• eBook ISBN: 9781315480756
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pace e sviluppo globale

A comprehensive introduction to the nations of Central and Eastern Europe over a half century of turbulent change - from post war subjugation by the Soviet Union to both shared and divergent experiences of post-Communist transition to free-market democracies.

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Roots and Causes of Communist Collapse

Communist political systems in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed at the end of the 1980s primarily because of long-standing internal weaknesses that denied them the popular legitimacy needed for long-term survival. They collapsed also as a result, paradoxically, of Soviet policy toward them in the late 1980s that encouraged their adoption of perestroika-style reformism but called for restraint when reform got out of hand and endangered their survival. The West also had a hand, though an oblique one, in the collapse by doing what it could when it could to undermine their credibility at home as well as abroad.

Internal Weaknesses

The major internal weaknesses of the communist systems in Central and Eastern Europe were political, economic, and environmental. Subservience to the Soviet Union, which had helped to get most of them started after World War II and subsequently had heavily influenced their domestic and foreign policies, also greatly weakened them by making them appear as little more than colonial-style dependencies of the Kremlin. By the late 1980s, despite efforts in some countries to reform communist rule, all the communist systems had lost whatever legitimacy they may have had, which at best was very little. They were ripe for overthrow.¹

1. Political Weaknesses

The Central and East European communist systems, which largely resembled the Soviet dictatorship, remained throughout most of their history repressive, rigid, and corrupt. They denied opportunities for public criticism and opposition. Their representation of the popular will was artificial, inadequate, and perverse, reflecting not what people thought but what Communist Party leaders wanted them to think. The communist systems inevitably became less instruments of the change and improvement promised in their ideology and more like a straitjacket that stunted growth by their coercive, intrusive, and frequently inept management of national life.

Repression

Like the Soviet Communist Party, the communist parties of Central and Eastern Europe monopolized politics and were undemocratic in their organization and behavior. Communist parties tolerated no critics, rivals, or opponents, refusing to share leadership with any other group except in a superficial and ineffectual way. They controlled the personnel and functioning of the government, the working of the economy, and the organization and behavior of society. They closely monitored the personnel and policy implementation of governmental agencies, using a complex and ubiquitous network of intrusive controls that pervaded all aspects of administrative life. Their authority extended to cultural areas of national life, including the church, the media, and artistic expression. While there were some exceptions to this broad scope of communist party power, by and large there was very little in the public or private life of all the Central and East European societies that escaped party influence.

Communist parties were always an elite whose membership was limited to a small percentage of the total population of a country, usually 6 percent or a little more. Communist party leaders usually were co-opted into power by a process of self-selection that excluded influence of the rank-and-file membership or of the voting public, which had little if anything to say about what the party did and how it was organized. Indeed, communist parties had a high degree of internal discipline preventing discussion or debate, not to mention criticism, of leadership policy. By the end of their rule, the communist parties had become highly bureaucratized and professionalized, with many members, including the leadership, more interested in protecting their power and perquisites than in developing socialism and achieving the communist ideal.

The communist governments, at all times subservient to the communist party, which micromanaged much of their administrative behavior, on the surface resembled Westem-style parliamentary systems. The working of the legislatures on many levels of administration and the holding of frequent elections for the membership of these seemingly popular government bodies were supposed to provide the political system with an aura of democracy, in which people were supposed to think they had some role to play in policy making. But these communist governments operated very differently than the Western democracies. For example, most national and local legislatures had little or no influence over policy making because their membership had neither the power nor the inclination to force prime ministers and cabinets to be responsive to them. Indeed, most members of the legislature belonged to the Communist Party and were obedient to its leadership; they lacked the time and information needed to learn enough about a policy to question it, much less reject it. Nor did the communist legislatures have the constitutional authority to terminate the life of a cabinet with a Westem-style no-confidence vote. Moreover, the Communist Party’s close control of every aspect of elections, in particular the nomination and election of legislative candidates, excluding persons who might be independent and critical of or opposed to national policy, guaranteed the discipline and docility of the members of legislative bodies. Thus, representation was more apparent than real, and the communist legislatures generally became ratifiers of, rather than challengers to, government policies, even those disliked by voters.

While the communist legislatures did provide Central and East European peoples with a vague understanding of the rudiments of self-government and a certain degree of political stability that increased the efficiency of party and government policy making, their authoritarian and largely unresponsive character encouraged popular ridicule of them. Communist societies learned that their legislatures could do little to influence party leaders, who made and implemented policy quite independently of them.

There were, of course, exceptions to these conditions, especially toward the end of communist rule. For example, from the 1970s onward, the Polish Parliament, called the Sejm, frequently criticized policies by Communist Party leaders and on a few occasions actually got a reversal of them. Moreover, the membership of the Sejm was diverse, with deputies representing Catholics and the intelligentsia, who were critical of the party’s repressive and grossly inept behavior in managing the economy. There was also an occasional streak of independence in a few other communist legislatures, notably Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia.

Rigidity

Without peaceful means of achieving change in their structure and functioning, the Soviet-style dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe overall gradually became brittle and either unwilling or unable to introduce systemic change when circumstances warranted it, namely, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when societies began to chafe at the flaws and failings of communist rule. This was especially true in the political sphere where Communist Party leaders, with few exceptions, were fearful of liberalization, even a little of it, believing, and rightly so as matters turned out, that liberalization, if allowed, would be difficult to control and might eventually jeopardize their own power and that of the Communist Party. Moreover, if a communist leadership did contemplate political reform, no matter how modest in scope, the Soviet Union in most instances opposed and blocked it to discourage modification of the authoritarian status quo, which could weaken its influence in the region. The Kremlin remained adamantly opposed to political reforms that might allow the surfacing of popular criticism of communist rule and popular dislike of Russia, which was seen as the region’s historic enemy. Thus, in Hungary and Poland in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1980 and 1981, the Soviets moved aggressively to suppress movements that seemed to threaten the communist dictatorship and its intimacy with the Kremlin. Even Gorbachev, who endorsed political reform in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, initially did so with caution and caveats, warning that “liberalization” should not be at the expense of the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and should under no circumstances lead to a Westem-style pluralistic political order that would jeopardize the national commitment to communism and close political, economic, and military ties with the Soviet Union.

For all their claims to be “democratic,” these rigid and essentially static regimes in fact had lost touch with the people and remained either ignorant of or indifferent to the real depth of popular discontent. In many instances, they concealed or lied to themselves and to their citizens about severe and dangerous problems facing the society. Moreover, by the end of the communist era, these regimes were led by people who not only seemed more interested in their own careers than in promoting the well-being of society promised in the communist ideology to which they all swore allegiance, but also had little, if any, accountability to the public. Selfishness, arrogance, secrecy, deception, and “professionalism” had become the chief features of communist parties and governments. The characteristics of Communist rule helped to destroy whatever faith and credibility the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe may have ever had in it.

Corruption

The communist political systems in Central and Eastern Europe were also corrupt. East European bureaucrats frequently took bribes, lied, and concealed mistakes, with no obligation to be responsive to people’s needs. Especially aggravating to ordinary citizens was the privilege that allowed administrators to live in near-luxurious circumstances while the rest of society suffered from economic deprivation and misery. When the full extent of corrupt behavior by officials, including party leaders, who may have been the most corrupt because they had the largest opportunities to be so, became known in the fall of 1989, most peoples of Central and Eastern Europe were furious and sought retribution.

2. Economic Scarcity and Deprivation

All Central and East European economies developed some version of the highly centralized and autarchic economic model developed by Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Communist economies in many, though not all, Central and East European countries must be given credit for impressive achievements, such as redistribution of wealth, modernization of the infrastructure, and expansion of industrial capabilities, the so-called socialist prerequisites for the eventual achievement of communism.

But Soviet-style communist economies, even when modified substantially—as, for example, in the case of Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism, Yugoslavia’s Workers’ Councils, and Poland’s tolerance of private entrepreneurialism in agriculture—never achieved a level of individual well-being that was commensurate with each country’s resources and capabilities, that compared favorably with living standards in the West, and that at least implicitly, if not explicitly, was promised in communist ideology and pledged by Communist Party leaders. By the 1980s, despite their compulsive micromanagement of economic life, communist leaders had failed conspicuously to provide people with a level of material well-being nearly comparable to Western living standards. Everything that people needed in daily life, such as food, clothing, housing, and household and other amenities taken for granted in the West but considered luxuries in Central and Eastern Europe, was perennially in short supply or simply not available. And worse, for many people living conditions had not only not improved or even stayed the same under communist rule but had deteriorated from what they had been in the precommunist and pre–World War II era, when for many there was an abundance, or at least an adequacy, of everything that became scarce under communism.

The more people in Central and Eastern Europe learned about life in the West, the angrier they became about the inadequacies in their own countries, which had promised so much and delivered so little. Despite the strict censorship of news and the limits on travel to the West, as well as relentless propaganda about the superiority of the communist system, people in Central and Eastern Europe knew that they were poorer than people in Western Europe, including the less-affluent countries of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and worse off than some Third World countries, such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.²

The economic scarcity and deprivation that characterized communist economies can be attributed to misguided investment priorities, to managerial mediocrity and ineptitude, to limits on the kind of reform that could have expanded output, and to perverse behavior patterns of the vast majority of people, who, in seeking to cope with the harshness and austerity of daily life, made things worse for themselves.

Misguided Investment Priorities

Central and East European Communist Party leaders set the same misguided priorities as their Soviet counterparts. Full employment, the hallmark of the communist economic systems, required keeping unprofitable enterprises working . Also, East European governments spent heavily on defense and far too little on consumer-goods production. Communist leaders favored heavy industry at the expense of other sectors, such as agriculture, health and welfare, and housing. Communist governments also emphasized quantity over quality. Their economies produced shoddy goods, which in many instances no one wanted to buy, leaving enterprises with huge unsold inventories that eventually had to be disposed of below cost. The waste of resources in such situations was enormous. Furthermore, real costs and values of property and production were never precisely known, while enormous amounts of capital were absorbed to maintain the system’s operation. With no real incentives, individual productivity was extremely low by Western standards. And, in one of their worst miscalculations, Central and East European leaders virtually ignored technological development, perhaps because research and development did not yield immediate payoffs. Moreover, technology was scarce also because East European countries were isolated from the West and conducted their business primarily with one another and the Soviet Union, missing the latest advances in such important areas as computer information systems.

Managerial Mediocrity and Ineptitude

Communist Party emphasis on conformity, loyalty, and obedience to ideology in the recruitment of managerial leadership too often resulted in the elevation to positions of responsibility throughout the party and state structures of unimaginative and administratively inept peop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Map
• 1. Roots and Causes of Communist Collapse
• 2. Problems of Postcommunist Development
• 3. Albania
• 4. Bulgaria
• 5. From Czechoslovakia to the Czech and Slovak Republics
• 6. East Germany
• 7. Hungary
• 8. Poland
• 9. Romania
• 10. Yugoslavia—Collapse and Disintegration
• 11. Yugoslavia—The Bosnian Civil War
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index