Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery).

First, in keeping with the Leninist redefinition of ‘socialism’ as a matter of ownership rather than social relations, the state expropriated large-scale firms in service, commerce and industry, where these were not already in public hands. Next, the state took over, taxed or squeezed out of business all firms employing more than fifty people.

One of the means at hand for eliminating the property-owning middle class in eastern Europe was currency reform. This was an effective device for destroying the cash savings of peasants and businessmen alike, an updating of older exactions like the forced capital levy.

As in the Soviet Union, so in Soviet-run eastern Europe, the peasantry were doomed.

And as in the case of non-European colonies, so in eastern Europe: the indigenous economies suffered deformation and under-development. Some countries were prevented from manufacturing finished goods, others were instructed to make certain products in abundance (shoes in Czechoslovakia, trucks in Hungary) and sell them to the USSR. No attention was paid to the economics of comparative advantage.

The scale of the punishment meted out to the citizens of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the decade following World War Two was monumental—and, outside the Soviet Union itself, utterly unprecedented. Trials were but the visible tip of an archipelago of repression: prison, exile, forced labor battalions. In 1952, at the height of the second Stalinist terror, 1.7 million prisoners were held in Soviet labor camps, a further 800,000 in labor colonies, and 2,753,000 in ‘special settlements’. The ‘normal’ Gulag sentence was 25 years, typically followed (in the case of survivors) by exile to Siberia or Soviet Central Asia.

Just as Western Europe was about to enter an era of dramatic transformation and unprecedented prosperity, eastern Europe was slipping into a coma:

for the first time since the 1840s, when Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Adam Mickiewicz, Giuseppe Mazzini and Alexander Herzen all lived in Parisian exile, France was once again the natural European home of the disinherited intellectual, a clearing house for modern European thought and politics.

But above all the Catholic Church could offer its members something that was very much missing at the time: a sense of continuity, of security and reassurance in a world that had altered violently in the past decade and was about to be transformed even more dramatically in the years to come.

Like everyone else, the new workers not only made things; they bought them. This was something quite new. Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe—as elsewhere in the world—had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew.

The overwhelming majority of mid-twentieth-century European Social Democrats, even if they kept their distance from Marx and his avowed heirs, maintained as an article of faith that capitalism was inherently dysfunctional and that socialism was both morally and economically superior. Where they differed from Communists was in their unwillingness to commit to the inevitability of capitalism’s imminent demise or to the wisdom of hastening that demise by their own political actions. Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.

Scandinavian societies inherited certain advantages. Small and socially homogenous, with no overseas colonies or imperial ambitions, they had been constitutional states for many years.

But Scandinavia was historically poor—a

After World War One the Scandinavian socialist parties largely abandoned the radical dogma and revolutionary ambitions they had shared with the German and other Socialist movements of the Second International; and in the course of the 1930s they moved towards a historic compromise between capital and labour.

The embittered and destitute peasants of inter-war central and southern Europe formed a ready constituency for Nazis, Fascists or single-issue Agrarian populists.

This alliance of labour and farming—facilitated by the unusual independence of Scandinavian peasants, conjoined in fervently Protestant communities unconstrained by traditional rural subservience to priest or landlord—was to form the long-term platform on which Europe’s most successful social democracies were built.

The Social Democratic parties were the vehicle through which traditional rural society and industrial labour together entered the urban age:

The social services and other public provisions that came to characterize the Scandinavian ‘model’ reflected these origins, emphasizing universality and equality—universal social rights, equalized incomes, flat-rate benefits paid from steeply progressive taxation. They thus stood in marked contrast to the typical continental European version in which the state transferred or returned income to families and individuals, enabling them to pay in cash for what were, in essence, subsidized private services (insurance and medicine in particular).

what the state did do was ruthlessly and progressively tax and redistribute private profits for public ends.

To many foreign observers and most Scandinavians the results appeared to speak for themselves. By 1970 Sweden (along with Finland) was one of the world’s four leading economies, measured by purchasing power per head of the population (the other two were the USA and Switzerland). Scandinavians lived longer, healthier lives than most other people in the world (something that would have amazed the isolated, impoverished Nordic peasantry of three generations before). The provision of educational, welfare, medical, insurance, retirement and leisure services and facilities was unequalled (not least in the US and indeed Switzerland), as were the economic and physical security in which the citizens of Nordic Europe pursued their contented lives.

As more and more children entered and passed through the secondary school systems, a breach opened up between their world and the one their parents had known.

The failings of Communist economies were hardly a secret. They were only just able to furnish their citizens with sufficient food (in the Soviet Union they often failed to manage even this). They were committed to the mass production of redundant primary industrial goods. The commodities—consumer goods above all—for which there was a growing demand were not produced, or else not in sufficient quantity, or of the necessary quality. And the system of distribution and sale of such goods as were available was so badly managed that genuine shortages were exacerbated by artificially induced scarcity: bottlenecks, skimming, corruption, and—in the case of food and other perishables—high levels of wastage.

The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected, that the core ideals of democratic pluralism might somehow still be compatible with the structures of Marxist collectivism: that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered.

In the life of the mind, the nineteen seventies were the most dispiriting decade of the twentieth century.

Public spaces fell into neglect. Petty crime and delinquency rose in line with the growing share of the population caught in permanent poverty. Private affluence was accompanied, as so often, by public squalor.[*]

For most people living under Communism in the Brezhnev era, from the late Sixties through the early Eighties, life was no longer shaped by terror or repression. But it was grey and drab. Adults had fewer and fewer children; they drank more—the per capita annual consumption of alcoholic spirits in the Soviet Union quadrupled in these years—and they died young.

To the occasional discomfort of his own bishops he began explicitly discouraging Catholics in Poland and everywhere else in Eastern Europe from any compromise with Marxism, and offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority.

The predictable response of the authorities was to arrest intellectual activists and sack the offending workers—among them the then-unknown electrician Lech Wałesa and fourteen other employees at Elektromontaz in Gdansk.

The ‘counter-society’ theorized by Michnik and others a decade earlier was emerging as a de facto source of authority and initiative.