Postwar

were the most one could expect.

The intellectuals were talking for the most part to one another rather than addressing the community at large: in some cases they were offering implicit amends for their earlier enthusiasms. Moreover, they were the heirs (in certain instances quite literally the children) of the ruling class of the first generation of Socialist power— education and privilege having passed reasonably efficiently down the generations, especially in Poland and Hungary. That did not always endear them to the mass of the population. As in the past, when they had spoken for the regimes they now opposed, they were a tiny minority of the population and represented only themselves.

Thus when George Konrad wrote somewhat sententiously that ‘no thinking person should want to drive others from positions of political power in order to occupy them for himself ’, he was acknowledging a simple truth—no ‘thinking person’ was in a position there and then to do any such thing. 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’.

The achievement of the new opposition lay elsewhere. In the East as in the West, the Seventies and Eighties were a time of cynicism. The energies of the Sixties had dissipated, their political ideals had lost moral credibility, and engagement in the public interest had given way to calculations of private advantage. 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.

One thing the dissident intellectuals did not talk about very much was economics. This, too, was a kind of realism. Ever since Stalin, economic—or, more precisely, industrial—growth had been both the goal of Socialism and the main measure of its success. Economics, as we saw in Chapter 13, had been the overriding concern of an earlier generation of reformist intellectuals: reflecting back at the Communist regime its own obsessions and echoing an assumption—shared by Marxists and many non-Marxists alike—that all politics are ultimately about economics. Critical discussion couched in the form of recommendations for economic reform had been the nearest thing to a licensed opposition in the revisionist decade between 1956 and 1968.

But by the middle of the 1970s it was hard for any well-informed observer of the Soviet bloc to take seriously the prospect of economic reform from within, and not only because the language of Marxist economics had collapsed after decades of unseemly abuse. From 1973 the economies of Eastern Europe were falling sharply behind even Western Europe’s reduced growth rates. Except for a brief blip in the finances of the oil-rich Soviet Union, brought on by the rise in energy prices, the inflation of the Seventies and the ‘globalizing’ of trade and services in the Eighties put the economies of the Soviet bloc at an insuperable disadvantage. In 1963 the international trade of Comecon countries had been 12 percent of the world total. By 1979 it was down to 9 percent and falling fast.[272]

The countries of the Soviet bloc could not compete on quality with the industrial economies of the West; nor did any of them except the USSR itself have a sustainable supply of raw materials to sell to the West, so they could not even compete with undeveloped countries. The closed Comecon system precluded participation in the new trading networks of Western Europe and GATT, and Communiststates could in any case not adapt their economies to world price levels without risking the fury of domestic consumers (which is what happened in Poland in 1976).

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.

Thus Czechoslovakia—a country with very limited resources in iron—was by 1981 the world’s third largest (per capita) exporter of steel. To the bitter end, the GDR was planning ever-expanded production of obsolete heavy industrial goods. No-one who had any choice actually wanted to buy Czech steel or East German machines, except at heavily subsidized prices: these goods were thus produced and sold at a loss. 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.

Even in areas of comparative advantage the Soviet economy took its toll. Just as Hungary was Comecon’s chosen manufacturer of trucks and buses, so the GDR in the 1980s was assigned the task of manufacturing computers. But not only were the machines produced in East Germany unreliable and outdated; the centralized system was simply unable to make enough of them. By 1989, East Germany (with a population of 16 million) was turning out just one-fiftieth the number of computers manufactured in Austria (population: 7.5 million)—and as a producer of computers Austria was a negligible competitor in the international market. ‘Comparative advantage’ in this case was thus strictly relative—the GDR was spending millions of marks producing unwanted goods that were available at lower cost and in better quality on the world market.

Much of the responsibility for all this lay with the inherent defects of centralized planning. By the late 1970s Gosplan, the Soviet central economic planning agency, had forty departments for different branches of the economy and twenty seven separate economic ministries. The obsession with numerical targets was notorious to the point of self-parody: Timothy Garton Ash cites the example of ‘The People’s Economy Plan for the Borough of Prenzlauer Berg’ (in East Berlin), where it was announced that ‘Book-holdings in the libraries are to be increased from 350,000 to 450,000 volumes. The number of borrowings is to be increased by 108.2 percent’.[273]

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. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives— medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities—people are required to bend the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways.

This accounts in large measure for the marked increase in cynicism in these years. One example can stand for many: Tractor plants, or truck manufacturers, did not bother to make sufficient spare parts because they could more easily meet their ‘norms’ by building large machines—with the result that when these large machines broke down, there were no replacement parts available. Official data published only the total number of machines of all sorts produced in a given sector; they did not say how many were still in working order. The workers, of course, knew better.

The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke:‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which—in return for political quiescence—offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’

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 importance of this second economy—whose very existence could not be officially acknowledged—was testimony to the sad state of the official one. In Hungary, by the early eighties, it is estimated that a mere 84,000 artisans—