‘All [that has happened]... is only a beginning. The system that impedes the liberation of man in our country can only be negated by actions, not words; a revolutionary disavowal – the only authentic sort – cannot be attained by a pure and simple substitution of persons. Otherwise the tottering thrones will remain thrones from which a new oligarchic bureaucracy will exercise control over us all.’
– K. Bartosek, Open letter to the Czechoslovak workers, 1968.
WHAT WAS commonly known as socialism came to the countries of Eastern Europe not from any action of the working people there, but on the back of an envelope.
While discussing the spoils for the victors of the Second World War, Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain, jotted down some suggestions for Stalin, dictator of Russia, as to what should happen in Eastern Europe. The basis of Churchill’s plan was that the Russians could do what they liked in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary provided they left Britain to ‘deal with’ the Communists in Greece.
Stalin was delighted with this plan, which he vigorously ticked, urging Churchill to keep the envelope as a memento of their grand diplomacy. Stalin already had control of East Germany and Poland, whose capital, Warsaw, had been almost totally destroyed by the Nazis while Russian troops stood by. He was soon to get control of Czechoslovakia too. Without further ado, he and his armies set about establishing ‘socialism’ in his six new satellites, whose combined population was about a hundred million. His method for bringing this ‘socialism’ about was exactly the same as it had been in Russia: brute force.
If there was any romantic among the Eastern European working class who imagined that the long night of Nazi occupation was now to end in a socialist dawn, he or she was soon to be disillusioned. In Bulgaria in 1944, for instance, the liberated workers set up their own councils, elected tribunals to arrest and try fascists, and disbanded the police force. All this horrified and incensed the Russian foreign secretary Molotov, who issued a declaration after meeting a Bulgarian government delegation:
If certain Communists continue their present conduct, we will bring them to reason. Bulgaria will remain with her democratic government and her present order... You must retain all valuable army officers from before the coup d’état. You should reinstate in service all officers who have been dismissed for various reasons.
The Bulgarian Army had been behaving with some jubilation in liberated areas such as Thrace and Macedonia, and had even elected workers’ councils and hoisted red flags instead of their regimental emblems. This was the subject of a stern rebuke from the new minister of war, who had strong support in Moscow. His order was: ‘to return at once to normal discipline, to abolish soldiers’ councils and to hoist no more red flags.’
Once these initial enthusiasms had been doused, the Russian authorities set about transforming the poverty-stricken and rural countries into industrial economies. They started by setting up their stooges in coalition governments which included politicians who had supported the Nazi occupations.
In Romania for instance the minister of culture in the March 1945 government, set up with Stalin’s support, was Mihail Raila, a fervent admirer of Hitler. At least four other ministers had been supporters of the fascist Iron Guard, which had welcomed the Nazi army of occupation. The man who had commanded the Romanian troops who fought against the Russians at Stalingrad was now promoted and made assistant chief of staff.
Even before they were able to get the Eastern European governments entirely under their thumb, the Russians made sure of their control of the army and the security services. In East Germany, they inherited Hitler’s intelligence service – and maintained it almost without changes. In Hungary, the Communist Party set up the State Security Authority and in the words of the hard-line Stalinist Hungarian leader Rakosi: ‘We kept this organisation in our hands from the first day of its establishment.’
After seizing and adopting the state machine which had persecuted the workers under the Nazis, the Stalinists set about seizing hold of the governments. There were two immediate problems.
First, the Communist parties were too small even to pretend to command mass support. The Romanian Communist Party in mid-1944 had only 1000 members. A year and a quarter later, this had grown to a fantastic 800,000. The Polish Communist Party had 30,000 members in January 1945 – and 300,000 in April. In Czechoslovakia, a party of 27,000 grew by the beginning of 1946 to a mass organisation of 1,159,164 members. Were these all workers voluntarily flocking to the red flags of the revolution? They were not. The new recruits (unlike the old members) were the elite of society, the upwardly mobile minority which yearned for advancement and for privilege, and who felt that the state-capitalist programme of the Communist Party was the only way to get their country – and themselves – out of the rut.
The second problem was that in some countries there were vibrant social-democratic parties which had a far better claim to represent the workers than had the Communist parties. In Poland and in Hungary, the Socialist Party was stronger than the Communist Party. In both cases this was dealt with by a forcible merger. In Poland 82,000 members of the Socialist Party were expelled for objecting. One of them, the secretary of the Polish trade unions, Adam Kurylowicz, wrote a pamphlet accusing the Polish Communist Party of conducting a reign of terror in the factories:
They fire and hire workers without taking into account the opinion of the workers of the plant, scorning the laws, conquests and social rights of the workers. A clique of self-seeking politicians is being formed. These new dignitaries have discovered that a party book is more important than technical qualifications.
Adam Kurylowicz had discovered early what the entire working class of Eastern Europe were to find to their cost over the next 44 years: that the Russian government was creating in all six countries a bureaucracy after its own image: a bureaucracy which was to play the part of a ruling class.
Exactly the same methods which had been used by Stalin and his henchmen in Russia were used by his satellite bureaucracies in Eastern Europe. Every breath of democracy was squeezed out. Workers’ committees which had been set up after the war in some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, were quickly disbanded and replaced by one-man management. The most ruthless discipline was imposed on the workers. At least half a million ‘troublesome’ East European workers were consigned to slave labour camps.
No politician, especially if he had become a Communist under the influence of the Russian revolution, was safe from Stalin’s periodic purges. In the most savage of these, the general secretary of the Czech party, Slansky, and several leading party figures were condemned to death after confessing to anti-party crimes in exactly the same hideous and inquisitorial ceremony laid down by the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. The Communist veterans who had fought in the underground were effectively wiped out. By 1953, only 1.5 per cent of the members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had held party cards before the war. It had been, per head of the population, by far the largest in Eastern Europe.
The internationalism that had inspired the revolutionary Communists after 1917 was replaced by a wild and hysterical nationalism. All the superstitions and vendettas which had cut swathes of blood through Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages were revived. The Germans in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, a peaceful and essentially social-democratic people, were rounded up in a series of pogroms organised by the new Communist government. The Communist minister for education, whose party took its name from the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (both of them German), declared on 29 March 1945: ‘We do not know any progressive Germans, nor are there any.’
In the same way, Czech was set against Hungarian, and Hungarian against Romanian. No chauvinist or racist claptrap was out of bounds for these new ‘communist’ rulers.
All sorts of obstacles stood in the way of economic growth for the state-capitalist satellites of Russia. Russia had looted them all: 84 per cent of one year’s entire production in Romania was seized in ‘war reparations’. Looting by ‘reparation’ was followed by looting by trade. The terms of trade were fixed across the board so that the satellites sold cheap to Russia, and bought dear.
Nevertheless, roughly the same pattern of state-capitalist development in Russia was followed in its satellites. The economies, run by force and fear, grew. Backward peasant countries became industrial powers. Poland, for instance, an overwhelmingly agricultural country before the war, became by the 1970s the world’s tenth industrial power (with the eighth highest military budget). In all six countries, only 14 per cent of the working population had been wage earners before the war. By 1980, this had jumped to 60 per cent. In the early years of the East European state capitalisms, growth rates were faster or as fast as anywhere in Western Europe.
As with Russia, however, after the initial burst of economic growth, state capitalism started to lose its dynamism. Wild fluctuations in the growth rates sometimes even of different industries led to a growing wrath among the workers – who now added economic discontent to their anger at disenfranchisement and bullying. Even more than in Russia, and much quicker, this resentment gave way to open revolt.
In East Germany in June 1953 a demonstration of building workers against impossible new norms flared into a mass working-class revolt. The revolt was suppressed by the bullets of 25,000 hastily convened Russian troops. Only after the revolt did the propagandists of Western capitalism suggest that it had been inspired by pro-Western aims. During the revolt the West German government kept its distance and warned its people against taking part in any ‘dangerous actions’. The East German rising was led by old Communists, people who had fought against Hitler’s fascism. After the revolt, tens of thousands of them were purged from the ruling East German Communist Party.
In Hungary in 1956, a students’ demonstration called in solidarity with striking workers and dissident intellectuals in Poland quickly blossomed into a full-scale revolution. Almost at once a new form of power rose again, apparently from nothing, to haunt the Hungarian rulers and their Russian masters. Workers’ councils were set up in workplaces and revolutionary councils were elected by area. These became the administrative power, far stronger, fairer and more representative than the government. Peter Fryer was the correspondent in Hungary for the British Communist Party paper, The Daily Worker. He reported on the revolutionary council at Györ:
In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and civil order, in the restraint they exercised on the wild elements among the youth, in the wisdom with which so many of them handled the problem of Soviet troops, and, not least, in their striking resemblance to the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 revolution and in February 1917, these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were remarkably uniform. They were at once organs of insurrection – the coming together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and army units – and organs of popular self-government which the armed people trusted... The revolution thrust them forward, aroused their civic pride and latent genius for organisation, set them to work to build democracy out of the ruins of democracy.
Here was the spectre of ‘socialism from below’ of 1905 and 1917, which scared the ‘reformist’ Russian leaders under Khrushchev every bit as much as it had scared Stalin in the old days. The Russian government acted in the only way it knew. The Hungarian revolution was crushed by an enormous expeditionary force led by Russian tanks. The revolutionary councils were able to resist the troops for several days with a magnificent and utterly solid general strike.
For a moment socialism lived and breathed – and demonstrated to the world that the power and capacity of the working class was something wholly different and implacably opposed to the state-capitalist tyranny which, in the name of socialism, took socialism by the throat and throttled it.
The next country to revolt was the jewel in the crown of Russia’s empire: Czechoslovakia. A small country, with its relatively large working class and developed industries, it had prospered during the first years of state-capitalist rule. By the early 1960s, however, the growth suddenly and unexpectedly staggered to a halt. In 1963 production actually went down. The economic crisis led to a collapse of confidence in the ruling Communist Party. Journalists and intellectuals began to say what they thought, and to challenge the Stalinist orthodoxy. Some were locked up and persecuted, but the pressure continued. In 1967 the Stalinist dinosaur Novotny was replaced as general secretary of the Czech Communist Party by a little-known Slovak called Alexander Dubcek.
There followed the ‘Prague spring’ in which for a brief moment the hopes of the whole Czech people fluttered. A group of intellectuals wrote a manifesto for a new dawn: 2000 Words. Commentators believed then and believe now that Dubcek put himself at the head of this movement, and represented its aspirations. In fact Dubcek, like Khrushchev before him and Gorbachev after him, was a party man, bred in the party machine. He swam with the tide because it was unstoppable – except, once again, by Russian troops.
After the huge Russian invasion of August 1968, the middle-class opposition dwindled, to be replaced by a series of mass strikes in the factories, and the election of workers’ councils. These councils did not take power, as they had done in Hungary. They acted rather as expressions of the people’s demands against government, which, for nearly a year after the invasion, still included Dubcek. There were some who recognised the weakness of the councils, and of the protest movement generally. Writing in the dissident weekly Reporter, K. Bartosek was one:
The act which can begin to change your condition is the election and activity of organs of workers’ self-management, in which together, by yourselves, you administer what belongs to you ... Without democracy in the factories, one cannot speak of a democratic society.
Though councils were elected, and though for months they remained the only real opposition to the new Russian stooge government, they were not organs of power, and they withered away in the reaction which followed Dubcek’s removal and the gradual return to state-capitalist rule.
The workers’ councils were to appear again, in a different form, in the last of the great explosions which racked state-capitalist Eastern Europe before the storm of 1989. In Poland, the authorities were in almost continual trouble with a hungry and angry people. In 1956 and 1970 there had been widespread food riots, demonstrations and strikes in protest against the price of food. It was the price of meat in particular which set off the strike, in 1980, that led to the formation of the mass trade union Solidarity.
In most developed countries of the West, trade unions had become what they were after a long, careful and cautious development. After the mass strike of the summer of 1980 in Poland, a single trade union, unfettered by craft or demarcation, was joined by ten million workers: 80 per cent of the entire Polish workforce. This was a higher level of trade union organisation than in any other country in the world.
The secret of this astonishing success was the form of organisation developed by the workers in their struggle. It was called, clumsily, the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee. It was yet another manifestation of the soviet, the workers’ council, the workers’ committee which had been so prominent in Russia in 1917, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and for that matter in Portugal in 1974 and 1975, when its fascist regime, forty years old, was finally cast aside.
The same characteristics were immediately in evidence; the courage in fighting for economic and political demands; the responsibility and discipline in their own ranks (booze was confiscated outside the gates of the striking factories and the bottles destroyed); above all the seeds of the new society blossoming in the struggle against the old one. Solidarity represented exactly what it called itself: cooperation, equality, concern for the disadvantaged, contempt for the exploiters. It created again, as part of its struggle to come into existence, the institutions which could run a quite different society – a socialist society. It too was inspired by the spirit of socialism, self-emancipation and workers’ democracy.
Ranged against it was a regime which was socialist only in name, and anti-socialist in everything else. One of the two opposing forces had to smash the other – or be broken. Because Solidarity never saw itself as more than a trade union, an organisation bargaining with the powers-that-be, it never struck the decisive blow. When the axe did fall, it was wielded by the Polish regime, with the full force of Moscow’s support behind it. Just before Christmas 1981, in a series of carefully-planned raids by the secret police, Solidarity was broken, its leaders arrested, its committees disbanded. All the hopes which it had held out for the oppressed people of Poland seemed to be drowned forever.
With the Polish revolt crushed, the regimes of Eastern Europe settled down for a brief moment into the old groove. They were still described by loyal, if weary, Communists all over the world as ‘socialist countries’.
Other more sophisticated socialists sought other descriptions. They called them ‘degenerated workers’ states’ or simply ‘bureaucratic regimes’ which defied any definition by class. In truth, however, the central characteristic of those at the top of these societies was that they were ruling classes, exploiting the workers and the peasants, and sliding into greater and greater chaos and corruption.
In Romania, the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu was briefly feted in the West because, allegedly, it challenged its Russian masters. Yet the Ceausescu regime had become a caricature of an exploiting tyranny. Ceausescu bent all his energies to storing up more wealth for himself, his family and his associates out of the surplus his government and secret police wrenched from the already impoverished Romanian workers and peasants. On his command, 80,000 people were forcibly moved from their homes to make way for the most grotesque and luxurious palace in all Europe. And this was merely the dictator’s second home! He selected from orphanages the cream of his secret police so that they could regard him and his wife as their Father and Mother. He sprayed them with privileges of every kind – the secret police were even better fed and clothed than the captains of industry. He published phoney statistics suggesting the economy was permanently growing and even rigged the weather reports. Workers’ resistance – such as the miners’ strikes in the early 1980s – was put down with the most appalling repression.
What Ceausescu did in Romania was only a more monstrous replica of what Honecker was doing in East Germany, Husak in Czechoslovakia or Zhikov in Bulgaria. Yet somehow socialists everywhere, duped by the old formulas of public ownership and ‘planning’, continued to pretend that these regimes were in some way ‘better’ or ‘more working-class’ than the regimes of the West.
The argument cut little ice with the oppressed people of Eastern Europe. On the contrary, as the repression and corruption grew, so the very notion of socialism, so repeatedly ascribed to the regimes themselves, became anathema.
At the top of society the ruling classes, forced more and more to trade and compete with Western capitalist countries, developed a theory of ‘market socialism’. They talked about a ‘socialist’ society where economic decisions were made by the market. As the absurdity of a socialist system directed by the market became more and more obvious, the word ‘socialism’ was discreetly dropped from the formula. ‘Market socialism’ became ‘market’. The ruling classes of the East yearned for the ‘simple disciplines’ of market capitalism. They longed for the day when the restrictions of state capitalism could be shuffled off, and replaced by untramelled free enterprise.
For most of the 1980s, however, the ruling classes of Eastern Europe played ball with state capitalism. Down below, however, where people were more prepared to make personal sacrifices, the revolt simmered, then boiled over.
But here too there was now an important change. In every previous uprising in Eastern Europe since the war – East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Poland in 1956, 1970 and 1980 – the intellectuals, students and workers who took part had demanded some form of socialism. No one ever suggested that they wanted to return to the capitalist society which existed in the West. As the repression and corruption dragged on, however, and as the state capitalist societies found it more and more difficult to fulfil even the most basic workers’ needs, the demands and aspirations changed. People in East Germany looked across the border to West Germany and saw a more prosperous society. They envied free elections, a free press, freedom to demonstrate and challenge governments – all of which seemed to exist in the West.
Socialism fell off the agenda. Even the most committed socialists in the eastern bloc, many of them exhausted by long prison sentences, dropped their vision of a new sort of socialism and settled instead for a change from state capitalism to multinational capitalism. They were content for their detested regimes to be replaced by elected parliaments, which would preside over free-enterprise capitalism as they did in the West. All talk of revolution, and therefore of workers’ councils, soviets, revolutionary committees, seemed at best out of date, at worst representative of a long and wearisome struggle against forces which seemed invincible.
When the storm broke, it broke suddenly and overwhelmingly. In a matter of months the rulers of Eastern Europe followed each other into oblivion, just as the kings, emperors and kaisers had done in the months which followed the First World War.
The collapse started in Poland, where, under pressure of more strikes and an intractable economic crisis, the same General Jaruzelski who had led the repression of Solidarity in 1981 now summoned Solidarity to join the government of Poland. Half-free elections returned a Solidarity government under the presidency of ... General Jaruzelski.
But the signal had gone out and it stirred the masses all over Eastern Europe into action. Mass demonstrations, occasionally supported by strikes, toppled the rulers one by one: Honecker in East Germany; Husak in Czechoslovakia. Kadar in Hungary and Zhikov in Bulgaria were removed more discreetly. These regimes contemplated resisting the masses by brute force, but this time there were no Russian troops on hand to prop them up. All these governments were toppled with hardly a struggle. Only in Romania did the dictator Ceausescu lash out in the only way he knew. His secret police rallied to his call to put down demonstrations and fired into crowds at Timosoara. But before long the Romanian army had sized up the balance of forces, and turned against him. Like so many dictators before him, he suddenly found that no one, not even his bodyguard, was on his side.
The governments had gone, and elections were held, often returning conservative or liberal administrations. The heads of industrial enterprises, the generals, the judges, the senior civil servants, even most of the police and intelligence chiefs remained in office. The politicians, too, who now sought votes from the people, were by and large the old bureaucrats who now declared that they had ‘reformed’. One East German party leader had hastily to resign in the middle of the elections when he was exposed as a former leader of the hated Stasi – the secret police. Others, with equally delicate pasts, managed to cover up history with bold declarations of their faith in the ‘new democracy’.
The actions of the people, the mass demonstrations and where necessary the strikes, had toppled the old rulers. That was the first important lesson of the astonishing events of 1989. But the demonstrators would soon have cause to remember Bartosek’s prophetic warning way back in 1968: that real change could not come about just by ‘the substitution of persons’. The ‘tottering thrones,’ he had warned, ‘would remain thrones from which a new oligarchic bureaucracy will exercise control over us all.’ A host of advisers, entrepreneurs, capitalists, media proprietors and economists flooded into Eastern Europe to vindicate this prophecy. They brought a new message from the West. State capitalism, they insisted (correctly), was a failure. Private-enterprise capitalism, good old market multinational capitalism, works.
But does it?
Last updated on 5.2.2005