Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

thanks to the break with Stalin, Tito’s own version of proletarian dictatorship was no longer under pressure to replicate in detail every error of the Soviet Union’s own path to industrial modernity.

‘Titoism’ was oppressive rather than repressive. At the time this distinction mattered.

Having played an accommodating role in the imprisonment and suppression of the Hungarian revolt, the Romanians secured the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Romanian territory in 1958 and took an increasingly independent path.

Simply by

distancing themselves from Moscow, the men in Bucharest gleaned a host of unlikely Western admirers.

Communism in Romania was peculiarly vicious and repressive: by distancing themselves from the Soviet Union after 1958 Dej and Ceauşescu were also freeing themselves of any need to echo the de-Stalinization and reforms associated with the Khrushchev era.

By the spring of 1967 the clumsy Polish leadership, enraged by criticism from its Left, had succeeded in forging a genuine intellectual opposition; and Warsaw University had become a center of

student revolt—in the name of free speech and in defense, among other things, of their persecuted professors.

Ever since Gomułka’s return to power in 1956, the conservative (neo-Stalinist) wing of the Polish Party had been seeking an occasion to undo even the limited liberalizations he had introduced. Under the direction of Mieczysław Moczar, the Interior Minister, this inner-party opposition had coalesced around the cause of anti-Semitism. From Stalin’s death until 1967, anti-Semitism—though endemic in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself—was kept out of official Communist rhetoric. After the war most of Eastern Europe’s surviving Jews had gone west, or to Israel. Of those who remained, many fled, if they could, in the course of the persecutions of Stalin’s last years. There were still substantial communities of Jews remaining, in Poland and (especially) Hungary; but most of these were not practicing Jews and typically did not think of themselves as Jewish at all. In the case of those born after the war, they often did not even know that they were—their parents had thought it prudent to keep quiet.8 In Poland especially, the still considerable numbers of Jewish Communists—some of them holding political office, others in universities and the professions—were mostly indifferent to their Jewish background, some of them naïve enough to suppose that their indifference was shared by Poles at large. But they offered an irresistible target for anyone seeking a route to power within the Party and demagogic popularity in the country at large.9 All that was lacking was the opportunity...

wish to announce that we shall not prevent Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from returning [sic] to Israel if they wish to do so. Our position is that every Polish citizen should have one country: the People’s Poland . . . Let those who feel that these words are addressed to them, irrespective of their nationality, draw the proper conclusion. We do not want a Fifth Column in our country.’ The reference to Jews as Poland’s Fifth Column was carried on radio and television and heard by millions of Poles. Its message was unambiguous. Whether Gomułka was expressing his own views; was seeking scapegoats for the policy failures of the past decade; or was merely anticipating Moczar’s efforts to unseat him and had decided to outflank his Stalinist opponents, was never clear. But the consequences of his decision were dramatic. The Polish authorities unleashed a flood of prejudice against Jews: throughout Poland, but especially in the Party and in academic institutions. Party apparatchiks spread suggestions that the economic shortages and other problems were the work of Jewish Communists. Distinctions were openly drawn between ‘good’ Communists, with national Polish interests at heart, and others (Jews) whose true affiliation lay elsewhere. In 1968, the parents and other relatives of Jewish students arrested or expelled were themselves sacked from official positions and academic posts. Prosecutors paid special attention to the names and origins of students and professors who app...

the most prominent roles in the protests and demonstrations, and their concerns were focused on issues of free speech and political rights above all. As their neo-Stalinist enemies were quick to point out, Warsaw’s dissident intelligentsia paid little attention to the bread and butter concerns of the working population. In return, the mass of the Polish people was studiously indifferent to the persecution of Jews and students alike, and Jewish students especially. Two years later, in 1970, when the government raised food prices by 30 percent and the shipyard workers of Gdansk struck in protest, the compliment was tragically if unintentionally returned: there was no one to take up the cause. But the l...

As their neo-Stalinist enemies were quick to point out, Warsaw’s dissident intelligentsia paid little attention to the bread and butter concerns of the working population. In return, the mass of the Polish people was studiously indifferent to the pers...

But the lesson of these years—that if Poland’s workers and intellectuals wanted to challenge the Party they would need to bridge their mutual indifference and forge a political alliance—would

The show trials and purges of the 1950s had come late to Prague and their impact had been both greater and more enduring than elsewhere. There was no rotation of the old Stalinist elite, no Czech Gomułka or

Kádár.

By then, as the leadership had feared all along, the combination of public rehabilitations, cautious acknowledgement of Stalin’s faults, and the prospect of even mild economic reforms had opened the way to much more serious questioning of the Party’s stranglehold on public life.

And thus the authorization to discuss Kafka appeared to presage a much broader liberalization of public debate: from the discussion of forbidden writers to the mention of murdered leaders was a small step.

If they did not clamp down firmly on the intellectual opposition emerging in 1967 it was not for want of trying. But they were held back by two constraints: the need to pursue the recently implemented economic reforms, which implied a degree of openness and tolerance of dissenting opinion along Hungarian lines; and the emerging difficulties in Slovakia.

The mood in the Slovak region of the country changed sharply after 1960, however. The new ‘Socialist’ Constitution made even fewer concessions to local initiative or opinion than its predecessor and such autonomy as had been accorded Slovakia in the post-war reconstruction of the country was now taken back. Of more immediate consequence for most Slovaks, however, was the stagnation of the economy (by 1964 Czechoslovakia’s rate of growth was the slowest in the bloc), which hit the heavy industry of central Slovakia harder than anywhere else.

This not only sabotaged the proposals of Sik and other Party economists; it further alienated Slovak opinion. Slovak Communists themselves now began to talk of the need for federalization and of the difficulties of collaborating with the aging Communist apparatchiks in Prague.

they seemed to suggest that a Communist state might not be immune to the student mood in the West.

Novotný’s colleagues seized the opportunity: on January 5th 1968 the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party elected a new First Secretary, Alexander Dubček.

The Party was now officially endorsing what the Program called ‘a unique experiment in democratic Communism’: ‘Socialism with a human face’ as it became colloquially known. Over a period of time (the document spoke of a ten-year transition) the Czechoslovak Communist Party would allow the emergence of other parties with whom it would compete in genuine elections. These were hardly original ideas, but

publicly pronounced from the official organs of a ruling Communist Party they triggered a political earthquake. The Prague Spring had begun. The events of the spring and summer of 1968 in Czechoslovakia hinged on three contemporary illusions. The first, widespread in the country after Dubček’s rise and especially following publication of the Action Program, was that the freedoms and reforms now being discussed could be folded into the ‘Socialist’ (i.e. Communist) project.

On the contrary: the idea that there existed a ‘third way’, a Democratic Socialism compatible with free institutions, respecting individual freedoms and collective goals, had captured the imagination of Czech students no less than Hungarian economists.

If the people believed the Party could save Socialism from its history, so the Party leadership came to suppose that they could manage this without losing control of the country.

But having relaxed all controls on opinion, the Communist leadership was now pressed from every side to pursue the logic of its actions. Why wait ten years for free and open elections? Now that censorship had been abolished, why retain formal control and ownership of the media?

For Dubček the Party itself was the only appropriate vehicle for radical change if the vital attributes of a Socialist system were to be preserved. The more popular the Party, the more changes it could safely institute. But as Vaculík’s manifesto made cruelly clear, the Party’s popularity and its credibility would increasingly rest upon its willingness to pursue changes that might ultimately drive it from power. The fault line between a Communist state and an open society was now fully exposed.

And this, in turn, directed national attention in the summer of 1968 to the third illusion, the most dangerous of all: Dubček’s conviction that he could keep Moscow at bay, that he would succeed in assuring his Soviet comrades that they had nothing to fear from events in Czechoslovakia—indeed, that they had everything to gain from the newfound popularity of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the renewed faith in a rejuvenated socialist project. If Dubček made this mortal miscalculation it was above all because the Czech reformers had crucially misinterpreted the lesson of 1956. Imre Nagy’s mistake, they thought, had been his departure from the Warsaw Pact and declaration of Hungarian neutrality. So long as Czechoslovakia stayed firmly in the Pact and unambiguously allied to Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues would surely leave them alone. But by 1968, the Soviet Union was worried less about military security than the Party’s loss of monopoly control.

Russian students visiting Prague could now read and hear people and opinions long since banned at home. Prague was becoming a window into the West.

The Soviet leader was not merely unconvinced; he came away increasingly skeptical of Dubček’s prospects. The Warsaw Pact announced forthcoming maneuvers near the Czech border. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bratislava on August 3rd (which Romania’s Ceauşescu declined to attend), Brezhnev propounded the Doctrine that would

henceforth be associated with his name: ‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party . . . The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.’ This pronouncement, a lightly veiled assertion of the Kremlin’s right to act preventively to head off a threat to socialism in any socialist country, may well have given Dubček pause. But there was little he could do, and so he continued to insist that his domestic reforms posed no threat to the socialist system.

The Soviet leaders anticipated that the forthcoming 14th Czechoslovak Communist Party Congress might see a definitive take-over

over by the Party’s reformist wing, and they were by now truly frightened of the infectious impact of the Czech example upon its neighbors.

the Kremlin was now perforce obliged to accept that the reformers had the support of the Czech and Slovak people and allow them to retain formal charge of their country, at least for the moment. It was clearly imprudent to do otherwise. Nevertheless, the repression of the Prague reforms—‘normalization’, as it became known—began almost immediately.

The message went

out that the country had passed through a mass psychosis in 1968, that false prophets had exploited the ensuing ‘hysteria’, and that the nation needed to be directed firmly back to the correct path: induced by the carrot of consumer goods and the stick of omnipresent surveillance.

In Poland, as we have seen, the repression in Prague both stimulated student protests and strengthened the hand of the authorities in stamping them

down.

The attitude of Czechs and Slovaks themselves, hitherto among the most pro-Russian nations in the Soviet bloc, now shifted irrevocably to a stance of sullen acquiescence. But all this was easily contained. The Kremlin had made its point—that fraternal socialist states had only limited sovereignty and that any lapse in the Party’s monopoly of power might trigger military intervention. Unpopularity at home or abroad was a small price to pay for the stability that this would henceforth ensure.

never again would it be possible to maintain that Communism rested on popular consent, or the legitimacy of a reformed Party, or even the lessons of History.

Mlynář recalled that ‘at such a moment one’s concept of socialism moves to last place. But at the same time you know that it has a direct connection of some sort with the automatic weapon pointing at your back.’ It is that connection which marked the definitive turning point in the history of Communism, more even than the Hungarian tragedy of 1956.

Communism in Eastern Europe staggered on, sustained by an unlikely alliance of foreign loans and Russian bayonets: the rotting carcass was finally carried away only in 1989. But the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere. The closing of the long post-war cycle of growth and prosperity dispelled the rhetoric and the projects of the New Left; the optimistic emphasis on post-industrial alienation and the soulless quality of modern life would soon be displaced by a renewed attention to jobs and wages.17 In the East the message of the Sixties was that you could no longer work within ‘the system’; in the West there appeared no better choice. On both sides of the Iron Curtain illusions were swept aside. Only the truly radical stuck with their determination to remain outside the political consensus—a commitment which in Germany and Italy, as in the US and Latin America, led them into clandestinity, violence and crime.

The same movements that purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to parochial and even bodily obsessions—anticipating

Authority had either been withdrawn from most spheres of social life, or else was acknowledged only in the breach.

It was one of the self-delusions of the age that the Sixties were an era of heightened political consciousness.

But in certain important respects the Sixties were actually a vital decade for the opposite reason: they were the moment when Europeans in both halves of the continent began their definitive turn away from ideological politics.

In Eastern Europe, the ‘revisionist’ interlude and its tragic dénouement saw off the last illusions of Marxism as a practice. In the West, Marxist and para-Marxist theories soared clear of any relationship to local reality, disqualifying themselves from any future role in serious public debate. In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. By 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.

The impact of economic slowdown was only just beginning to be felt when two external shocks brought the Western European economy to a shuddering halt. On August 15th 1971, US President Richard Nixon unilaterally announced that his country was abandoning the system of fixed exchange rates. The US dollar, the anchor of the international monetary system since Bretton Woods, would henceforth float against other currencies. The background to this decision was the huge military burden of the