by Norman Stone
But at least corruption was under some sort of control, and there was even a hope that information technology (meaning computers) would bring dramatic improvements as regards the mountains of paperwork. Economists anxious to keep up with the West suggested computerization to deal with the tidal wave of information coming in, and Vasily Nemchinov’s Central Mathematics-Economics Institute devised a new planning system called ‘Optimal Functioning’. OGAS, ‘a total informational processing system with an analytical function’, lumbered onto the stage in 1971, but computers were distinguished only by their weight, and managers resented young computer scientists telling them what to do. Print-outs sprawled their way across dirty factory floors, and the managers just got on with managing in the old ways, but such problems were not unknown in the West. In any case, and it is one of the extraordinary features of this period, Western economists of considerable reputation took the Soviet economy very seriously. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, thought that the full employment that the Soviet system ensured was admirable, and whole institutes were set up in Vienna and points west to examine the workings of the Soviet economy. In England, hardly an advertisement for capitalism, there was an institute at Birmingham University to study the workings of the Polish economy, directed by an Italian Keynesian, Mario Nuti; a great cemetery of information was installed, R. W. Davies the chief undertaker. At least with economic affairs, there were some facts to deal with; libraries to build up, and on the whole, in such institutions, the remarks of ‘Solzhenitsyn et al.’ were dismissed. The grandest of these Sovietologists was E. H. Carr, who had written a multivolume history of the Russian Revolution and stopped it in 1929, when collectivization of agriculture happened, and the information shut down. Poor Davies, a Welsh Communist and not a dishonest man, attached himself to the far grander Carr, who said that murdering peasants was one of the prices to pay for progress, to chronicle the advance of the Soviet Union beyond 1929, and even to call his volumes on the murderous collectivization, ‘The Socialist Offensive’. The next generation of students was brought up on such tomes, and was therefore caught gawping when the Soviet Union collapsed. (This writer will not plead innocent: as late as 1987, he was telling students that the USSR had ‘solved the nationality problem’, the worst mistake in academic life that he has ever made, and fortunately not preserved in print. At the time, minority nationalism was causing pointless mayhem in countries that he knew about — Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Spain.)
People who said that nationalism in the USSR was very much alive, and very angry, were of course right, but their evidence at the time consisted of trivialities and impressions — a girl at a Latvian boat-race wearing a T-shirt with a Latvian inscription; a Ukrainian Catholic imprisoned for decades, and emerging, incoherently, with a grand beard, to massacre English at a press conference. Vladimir Bukovsky, a long-term victim of the system, and utterly irrepressible, could not believe his ears and eyes when at last, in 1976, he came to the West and was asked to lecture at the Ford Foundation and suchlike: eyes of naïve vacancy, peering through festoons of hair, to put stupefyingly silly questions. President Carter refused to meet him, and the Ford Foundation missed him off the Christmas card list; in revenge, he wrote a book, based on the Soviet archives, that demonstrated quite how misguided they had been, in the style of the ‘useful idiots’ whom Lenin had found such bores. When the founder of jogging dropped dead at the age of fifty-four, Bukovsky responded with glee.
As regards the Soviet economy of this period, Alain Besançon remarked, ‘It is a strange feature of the sovietological world that a certain economic approach to Soviet reality, however knowledgeable, honest and sophisticated, meets, in people with a different approach, a disbelief so vast that they do not even bother to criticize — not knowing where to begin, let alone to inform themselves further. It is much like the attitude of the dissidents to official statistics, or the figures at which the Western economists arrive: derision and shoulder-shrugging.’ These dissidents ‘et al.’ were of course closer to the truth than their Western critics, and their derision was even shared by the more astute elements in the KGB, such as (no doubt) Vladimir Putin. But for the moment the USSR functioned. Rockets fired off; disarmament discussions went on with Americans who could not quite reconcile the pot-holes in the Moscow roads with the satellites in space (New York, going bankrupt at the time?). And there was always the cultural argument. A concert by Svyatoslav Richter was unanswerable. There was something about Russia that produced musicians of a world class beyond compare. A certain conservatoire tradition, an intelligently critical public concentrating culturally because the political economy was so primitive, or just grown-up attitudes towards alcohol and cigarettes: who knows why?
In this perspective, Brezhnev becomes understandable, because the USSR worked, and the West did not. Leonid Brezhnev was now in charge of a vast system in which only the KGB really knew what was happening, through its huge network of informers, and under him that organization came to be all-important. Stalin had controlled it by the simplest of methods, a periodic cull. Now, and this was Khrushchev’s contribution, such culling was not possible: to that he himself owed his life, as he said. The system worked for a time, and quite well, because of an external factor, the rise in commodity prices, and especially oil and gold. In the early 1970s Western investment also went into pipelines to carry natural gas to Germany, the lines amounting to a length four times that of the globe’s circumference. By 1985 gas was almost fifteen times greater in volume than in 1965 and development might have been more had the road system been better developed (lorries, ubiquitous in the system, chugged along at less than the speed of a decent bicycle). With these sums in foreign currency, Moscow could still indulge some megalomania, and a Brezhnev could carry on in the old way: the ‘A’ system launched its space-shots and intervened all over the world. It even built an enormous navy, in the 1970s, and made itself felt in parts of the world that were new to it, such as the Middle East. The basis was being eaten away, but external help could be obtained, as had happened in any crisis of the system, from the Volga Famine of 1921-2 to Hitler’s attack in 1941. The Western world just needed to be reminded of the importance of Russia.
It was of course true that the peoples of what the West called eastern Europe were ‘captive nations’. That problem was not, in Brezhnev’s eyes, enormously serious. The West had become disinterested in the subject at Teheran in 1943, when Churchill had in effect agreed to a displacement of Poland, bodily moved west into Pomerania and Silesia at the expense of Podolia and Volhynia. East Germans had rebelled in 1953, and had been widely ignored. Yugoslavia had been disaffected by Stalin, was not part of the Soviet empire, but co-operated with it, and as a Communist country worked, like the USSR, as a purported federation of nations devoted to the construction of socialism. Hungary had rebelled in 1956, and Moscow had adapted its dealings with Hungary accordingly: she had a certain room for manoeuvre, could make deals with the diaspora (like Armenia in the USSR) and even produce plans for economic reform of a sort that might at some stage have relevance for Moscow. Poland had also been allowed some headroom, and the Church was no longer persecuted. A small-farm peasantry obstinately persisted with its horses and carts, but heavy industry had been built up, and in the later seventies Western banks were anxious to invest in it, swallowing whole the propaganda that a new leader, Edward Gierek, was launching, to the effect that Poland would be the new Japan. Poles could travel to visit relatives in the West, and dissidents were picturesquely part of the scenery: the Party was a nuisance, not a tyranny. Communism, Brezhnev-vintage, was even quite a useful discipline for the Poles, whose intelligentsia, freed from romantic nationalism, became world-class.
There was a problem as regards Czechoslovakia. She was unique among the satellite states, in that her native Communists had been numerous and strong, based in a modern industry, in 1939 on much the same level as Belgium’s: true at any rate of the Czech two thirds, though not for the Slovak part. Czech Comm
unists kept much of the investment for themselves, and Slovaks groused, as they did on cultural matters, since they counted as bumpkins, not unlike the Ukrainians over the border. A constitution of 1960 was strictly centralized, i.e. making no concessions to Slovak desires for autonomy, and collective farms were stronger than in Hungary, let alone Poland. President Antonín Novotný, visiting the Slovak cultural centre, was enraged by demands that Slovak culture should be promoted by the foreign machine; like most Czechs he did not think that there was any. There were little signs that matters were not going his way; very obscurely, key figures were moved in and out (this writer, spending a few months in prison in Bratislava at the time, had his own experience: v. Note, pp. 371-81). In 1964 Gustáv Husák made a secret speech, in the course of criticisms by the Bratislava municipal government, which led to demands from Prague for his expulsion, and Alexandr Dubček, who had a key role in matters economic, spoke up for the intelligentsia. But it was all very small-scale.
The Stalinist Novotný went on in office; as late as 1954, several months after the USSR had started to release Stalin’s victims, there was a minor purge trial, and a commission in 1957 even reaffirmed the guilt of the 1950-51 trial victims, though some were released. A huge Stalin statue even went up in 1955, demolished only when Khrushchev insisted, along with the removal of Klement Gottwald from his mausoleum. In an obscure place, much later, there was still a little ‘Stalin Square’. In Czechoslovakia there was nothing like the Polish peasantry, stubbornly stuck in subsistence agriculture; nor was there anything like the Polish Church, the Czechs having inherited a powerful anti-clerical tradition. Opposition to the Communists was enfeebled from the outset because it was itself largely Communist. It talked, and then talked again.
Still, there were signs of trouble in the woodwork, and a Party congress was postponed for several months in 1962. The 1951 purge trials continued to be a cause of unease, and there was a new commission to investigate them. In 1963 it pinned the blame on Gottwald, and by implication his close colleagues, some still in high places. A Slovak journalist — Miroslav Hysko — publicly denounced them, and was not himself arrested: the old trial verdicts were, instead, cancelled. All of this was evidence of much deeper currents. Further evidence came when a report late in 1963 stated that the campaign against Slovak nationalism in 1951 had been unjustified; and from prison there emerged Dr Husák, whom the Russians subsequently chose as their man in Prague. Novotný, an elderly figure recognizably in the Stalinist mode, was careful to dissociate himself from the old guard and only four of them remained; the warhorse Slovak secretary (Karol Bacílek, a Hungarian) was displaced in 1963 by a younger man, Dubček. Slovakia, when he was a child, had been part of old Hungary, and in the capital, Bratislava, Hungarian was still the second language. Anti-Catholicism in the later nineteenth century translated there, as in Hungary, into Communism in the twentieth, and Dubček somewhat resembled Imre Nagy in that he had spent time in the USSR, his parents having gone there; from the age of four until he was seventeen (in 1938) he had lived in Russia, and he attended the Moscow Higher Political School from 1955 to 1958. However, Imre Nagy had been galvanized by Hungarian nationalism, the original sense of the word coming from Luigi Galvani of Verona, who had noticed how a scalpel that had accidentally received an electric charge made the corpse of a frog twitch. Dubček remained something of a dead frog, and even resembled one. His speeches amounted to wooden language, with at most some sense that he opposed bureaucracy. The reformers’ candidate for president was also a veteran of the USSR, Ludvík Svoboda, who had had a role in the Communist takeover in 1948, as ostensibly non-Party defence minister. There was also trouble in the Czech lands. They had been highly industrialized, but were languishing: in 1961-3, economic growth had stopped, even been reversed. A Five Year Plan was abandoned, and in 1963 a team of experts under Ota Šik, who had been in the Politburo since 1958, argued for serious change, such that concerns’ profits should not go to the State, and management should be properly rewarded, with prices that reflected costs. A congress in 1966 approved a new system without parallel elsewhere in that world.
The backdrop was serious movement among the writers — not of course the 630 members of their union, the usual parade of elks, but in various journals, particularly Slovak, which were uncensored. The overall appeal was to the Soviet example, with denunciations of the ‘cult of personality’, and even Novotný tried to come to terms, inviting the writers to the Prague castle. But by the summer of 1967 there was deadlock at a ‘congress of the Czechoslovak writers’, and one was even imprisoned for giving details to an exile in France. Foreign Communists — Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fischer — became involved, as campaigns went ahead against the censorship, or against Czechoslovakia’s policy towards Israel. At the same time there was a burst of creativity, as Czechoslovak film made the rounds, and Milan Kundera surfaced; solemn socialism-with-a-human-face economists appeared, and Youth took a hand, protesting that repairs were not carried out in the dormitories at Strahov or that there had been a power failure. Talk went ahead, and beards nodded; the police behaved absurdly, censoring people for writing that ‘science ends where its freedom ends’ or, as in 1963, dismissing the entire editorship of an historical journal for publishing a review that indicated the gaps in a particular collection of orthodox texts. By the autumn of 1967 there was an atmosphere of crisis within the Party — itself greatly dominated by the proletariat — and there was a secret meeting, at which Dubček spoke, not for repression of the writers and students, but for a more suitable policy as regards Slovak industry. Novotný was pushed out, and the ‘Prague Spring’ burst. There was a May Day demonstration containing the banner headline ‘WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NOT A DAY LONGER’.
Much of this was froth. The Slovak Communists wanted federalization, and had used the Prague intellectuals to force the issue, but they warned in veiled language about any repeat of Budapest in 1956, and a Soviet general appeared to say that ‘international duty’ would be done if need be. Courts reopened cases, and there was much foreign applause, but reality lay with Husák, not Dubček. The background was manoeuvres by the Warsaw Pact, though Brezhnev in June still had ‘tears in his eyes’ to the effect that he would not intervene. The fact was that the Party still functioned; though many of the central committee delegates did not appear, in mid-July Soviet language in letters was more harsh. The French Communist Waldeck Rochet appeared to suggest an answer, and on 1 August Dubček met Brezhnev at Cierna nad Tisou, in sub-Carpathian territory on the Ukrainian border (the Soviet delegation steamed back every night to Csap, to the railwaymen’s club). Brezhnev simply did not want to see Czechoslovakia leave the Soviet zone, and did not trust her; the East Germans were adamant that Czechoslovakia must not become an Austria. Dubček was expected to restore the censorship, but the real problem lay with the Slovaks, who pressed for federalism, and would deal with Moscow rather than with a Prague intelligentsia full of its own words. The trick was then to find some old Czech proletarian characters who would collaborate, and that was quite easy. In mid-August the Russians started to use threatening, inquisitorial language. In the night of 20/21 August they moved in, an ‘appeal’ having been got together by the team that would then in effect run the country. Its furniture consisted of old trade union warhorses on the Czech side, and Slovak federalizing Communists on the other, and it was the latter who ran the regime. Gustáv Husák was installed in the presidential villa at Smichov, and Czechoslovakia then hardly disturbed the headlines for the next twenty years.
At any rate, Brezhnev in the 1970s could look on the world with a certain confidence. The West had done nothing about the Prague events, and the Germans especially were now running to Moscow, offering considerable amounts of money; they had in effect recognized East Germany and given it money, too. China was always a question mark, but Mao had left her in a very enfeebled condition, and she was even lured into a war with Vietnam. Now, events in the Middle East did call for action, and at Chr
istmas 1979 came a clumsy lurch, one that was to prove fateful.
