Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It was one thing to sneer knowingly at Stalin, now long dead and anyway condemned by his own heirs. It was quite another to acknowledge that the fault lay not in the man but the system.

At this point the traditional ‘progressive’ insistence on treating attacks on Communism as implicit threats to all socially-ameliorative goals—i.e. the claim that Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering were part of a common political project—began to work against itself. If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are all damaged. In the light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like the solution than the problem, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.

the impact of the retreat from the state was felt most immediately by intellectuals—appropriately enough, since it was intellectuals who had been most zealous in promoting social improvement from above in the first place.

The political implications of Furet’s thesis were momentous, as its author well understood. The failings of Marxism as a politics were one thing, which could always be excused

under the category of misfortune or circumstance. But if Marxism were discredited as a Grand Narrative—if neither reason nor necessity were at work in History—then all Stalin’s crimes, all the lives lost and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction, all the mistakes and failures of the twentieth century’s radical experiments in introducing Utopia by diktat, ceased to be ‘dialectically’ explicable as false moves along a true path. They became instead just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime. Furet and his younger contemporaries rejected the resort to History that had so coloured intellectual engagement in Europe since the beginning of the 1930s. There is, they insisted, no ‘Master Narrative’ governing the course of human actions, and thus no way to justify public policies or actions that cause real suffering today in the name of speculative benefits tomorrow. Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men. In retrospect this may appear a rather lame conclusion to decades of intense theoretical and political debate; but for just that reason it illustrates rather well the extent of the change.

The resort to History in defense of unpalatable political choices had begun to seem morally naïve and even callous. As Camus had noted many years before, ‘Responsibility towards History releases one from responsibility towards human beings’.

if there was no ‘great cause’ left; if the progressive legacy had run into the ground; if History, or necessity, could no longer be credibly invoked in defense of an act, a policy or a programme; then how should men decide the great dilemmas of the age?

It was the progressive Left, still the dominant presence in European political and cultural exchanges, which was urgently in need of a different script.

The victors of 1945, looking back on the dashed hopes of Versailles, concluded as we have seen that collective interests were better served by the painful but effective solution of territorial regrouping (ethnic cleansing as it would later be known).

Post-1945 rights talk thus concentrated on individuals. This too was a lesson of war. Even though men and women were persecuted in the name of their common identity (Jews, gypsies, Poles, etc) they suffered as individuals; and it was as individuals with individual rights that the new United Nations sought to protect them.

But their new openness to the vocabulary of rights and liberties did give Western European scholars and intellectuals access to the changing language of political opposition in Eastern Europe and a way of communicating across the divide—just in time, for it was east of the Iron Curtain that truly original and significant change was now under way.

Instead, abandoning Marxist vocabulary and the revisionist debates of earlier decades, they made a virtue of their circumstances and espoused deliberately ‘un-political’ themes. Of these, thanks to the Helsinki Accords, ‘rights’ were by far the most accessible. All Soviet bloc constitutions paid formal attention to the rights and duties of the citizen; the package of additional and quite specific rights agreed to at Helsinki thus furnished Communism’s domestic critics with a strategic opening. As the Czech historian Petr Pithart noted, the point was not to demand some rights as yet un-possessed—a sure invitation to further repression—but to claim those that the regime already acknowledged and that were enshrined in law, thus conferring upon the ‘opposition’ a

moderate, almost conservative air, while forcing the Party onto the defensive.

just a tactic, a device for embarrassing Communism’s rulers. In closed societies where everything was political—and politics as such were thus precluded—‘rights’ offered a way forward, a first breach in the curtain of pessimism shrouding Eastern Europe in the ‘silent Seventies’, an end to the regime’s monopoly on language-as-power. Moreover the constitutional rights of persons, by their very nature, bear formal witness to the existence of persons as such, with claims upon one another and upon the community. They describe a space between helpless individuals and the all-powerful state. The movement for rights (‘human rights’), as the young Hungarian theorist Miklós Haraszti conceded, w...

To speak of rights in theory was precisely to illustrate their absence in practice, to remind observers at home and abroad of just how un-free these societies actually were. Instead of engaging the Communist authorities, the new opposition was deliberately talking past them.

By the time Michnik or Havel were espousing similar arguments, circumstances had changed. The point was no longer to advise the government how to govern, but to suggest to the nation—by example—how it might live.

The intelligentsia in Hungary and Poland especially was largely ignorant of conditions and opinion in the industrial centers, and even more cut off from the world of the peasantry.

Under Socialism it was the state that polluted. But it was society that suffered, and pollution was thus a subject about which everyone cared. It was also implicitly political: the reason that it was so hard to protect the environment was that no-one had an interest in taking preventive measures. Only effective and consistently applied official sanctions could have enforced improvements, and these would have had to come from the same authority which was encouraging the wastage in the first place.

Writers and scholars, reasonably enough, were preoccupied with censorship. The impediments to publication, or

performance, varied considerably from one Communist country to another.

Original and radical ideas could indeed blossom and thrive in the decaying compost-heap of the Soviet bloc—the writings of Havel and Michnik are the best but by no means the only instances of this, the Fleurs du Mal of Communism.

Elsewhere in eastern Europe the Western ‘peaceniks’ and activists for nuclear disarmament were regarded with considerable suspicion. They were seen at best as naïve innocents, more likely the mindless instruments of Soviet manipulation.10 Václav Havel, for one, regarded the growing west European anti-war movement of the early 1980s as the perfect vehicle for engaging, diverting and neutralizing the western intelligentsia. : ‘peace’, he insisted, is not an option in countries where the state is permanently at war with society. Peace and disarmament under prevailing conditions would leave western Europe free and independent, while maintaining eastern Europe under Soviet control. It was a mistake to separate the ‘peace’ question from the demand for rights and liberties. Or, as Adam Michnik put it, ‘the condition for reducing the danger of war is full respect of human rights’.

This same appreciation of the grim facts of life also forms a backdrop to the opposition’s insistence on non-violence: not only in Czechoslovakia, where passivity in the face of authority had a long history; or in the GDR, where the Lutheran Church was increasingly influential in opposition circles; but even in Poland, where it represented for Michnik and others both a pragmatic and an ethical bar to dangerous and pointless ‘adventures’.

By forging a conversation about rights, by focusing attention on the rather woolly concept of ‘civil society’, by insistently talking about the silences of Central Europe’s present and its past—by moralizing shamelessly

in public, as it were—Havel and others were building a sort of ‘virtual’ public space to replace the one destroyed by Communism.

The crippling defect of Communist economies by this time was endemic, ideologically-induced inefficiency. Because of an unbending insistence upon the importance of primary industrial output for the ‘construction of socialism’, the Soviet bloc missed the switch from extensive to intensive, high-value production that transformed Western economies in the course of the Sixties and Seventies. Instead it remained reliant upon a much earlier model of economic activity, redolent of Detroit or the Ruhr in the 1920s, or late nineteenth-century Manchester.

In effect, Soviet-style economies were

now subtracting value—the raw materials they imported or dug out of the ground were worth more than the finished goods into which they were transformed.

Much of the responsibility for all this lay with the inherent defects of centralized planning.

Fixed price systems made it impossible to ascertain real costs, to respond to needs or to adapt to resource constraints. Administrators at every level were frightened of taking risks and innovating, lest they reduce aggregate output in the short term. In any case, they had no incentive: they were secure in their posts no matter how incompetent, thanks to Brezhnev’s well-known preference for the ‘stability of cadres’ (the watchword from 1971 onwards). Meanwhile, in order to make sure that they would meet targets set from above, factory foremen and managers took great pains to hide reserves of material and labour from the authorities. Waste and shortage were thus mutually self-sustaining. The predictable effect of such a system was to encourage not just stagnation and inefficiency but a permanent cycle of corruption. It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism.

The only parts of a typical Communist economy that worked relatively efficiently by 1980 were the high-technology defense industries and the so-called ‘second economy’—the black market in goods and services.

The relationship was symbiotic: the Communist state could sustain its public monopoly only by channeling into the private sphere all activities and needs that it could neither deny nor meet; while the second economy depended upon the official one for resources, but above all for the very inefficiency of the public sector which guaranteed it a market and artificially elevated its value and thereby its profits.

Ever since it had become clear by the end of the Sixties that the future promise of ‘Socialism’ could no longer be counted upon to bind citizens to the regime, Communist rulers had opted instead to treat their subjects as consumers and replace (socialist) utopia tomorrow with material abundance today.

Consumerism, then, was to be encouraged as the measure of Socialism’s success.

Economic reform in the Soviet bloc had not merely been postponed. It was out of the question.

Economic reforms of even the most localized and micro-efficient kind would have immediate political ramifications. The economic arrangements of socialism were not an autonomous zone; they were thoroughly integrated into the political regime itself.

The Communist system might corrode indefinitely at the periphery; but the initiative for its final collapse could only come from the centre. In the story of Communism’s demise, the remarkable flowering in Prague or Warsaw of a new kind of opposition was only the end of the beginning. The emergence of a new kind of leadership in Moscow itself, however, was to be the beginning of the end.

From the outset, the pope broke with his predecessors’ cosmopolitan Roman acquiescence in modernity, secularism, and compromise.

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.

Whether the semi-clandestine movement for workers’ rights would have continued to grow is not clear. Its spokesmen were certainly emboldened by the Pope’s recent visit and their sense that the regime would be reluctant to strike back violently for fear of international disapproval. But theirs was still a tiny and haphazard network of activists. What triggered mass backing was the Communist Party’s attempt—for the third time in a decade—to resolve its economic difficulties by announcing, on July 1st 1980, an immediate increase in the price of meat.

In post-’89 retrospect the rise of Solidarity appears as the opening fusillade in the final struggle against Communism. But the Polish ‘revolution’ of 1980–81 is better understood as the last in a rising crescendo of workers’ protests that began in 1970 and were directed against the Party’s repressive and incompetent management of the economy. Cynical incompetence, careerism and wasted lives; price increases, protest strikes and repression; the spontaneous emergence of local unions and the active engagement of dissident intellectuals; the sympathy and support of the Catholic Church: these were familiar staging posts in the re-birth of a civil society,

But Communism was about power, and power lay not in Warsaw but in Moscow. The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow.

Indeed, the situation in Europe suited both great powers, with the US now comporting itself rather like czarist Russia in the decades following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815: i.e. as a sort of continental policeman whose presence guaranteed that there would be no further disruption of the status quo by an unruly revolutionary power.

There was, in any case, no other way to defend Western Europe against a Warsaw Pact that by the early 1980s boasted more than fifty infantry and armored divisions, 16,000 tanks, 26,000 fighting vehicles and 4,000 combat aircraft.

Although NATO’s decision to deploy new missiles had been accompanied by the offer of negotiations to reduce such weapons (the so-called ‘twin track’ approach), it seemed increasingly obvious that the US under its new president had adopted a new and aggressive strategy.

The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system.

But in the short run at least, foreign tensions probably helped shore up the regime.

Reagan’s hard line, and in particular his Strategic Defense Initiative, made the old Soviet leadership even less disposed to compromise.

Had the occupation of Afghanistan succeeded in installing a secure, friendly regime in Kabul, the Soviet leaders could have chalked up a double success. They would have re-affirmed Moscow’s faltering presence in the Middle East while sending a ‘clear message’ to a new generation of Soviet Muslims tempted by dreams of independence.

But the disaster in Afghanistan, like the cost of the accelerating arms race of the early ‘80s, would not in itself have induced the collapse of the system. Sustained by, fear, inertia and the self-interest of the old men who ran it, Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’ might have lasted indefinitely. Certainly there was no countervailing authority, no dissident movement—whether in the Soviet Union or its client states—that could have brought it low. Only a Communist could do that. And it was a Communist who did.