anything remotely resembling it: except in Russia, where considerable sums in grants and loans flowed in from Washington to help shore up the Yeltsin regime—and flowed out again into the pockets of Yeltsin’s friends and backers.
Instead, foreign investment resembled not the sustained post-World War Two effort that helped reconstruct Western Europe but rather the piecemeal private-sector involvement that had followed the Versailles settlement: invested in good times and withdrawn when the going got tough.[350] As in the past, therefore, eastern Europeans have had to compete with the West on a markedly uneven playing field, lacking local capital and foreign markets and able to export only low-margin foods and raw materials or else industrial and consumer goods kept cheap thanks to low wages and public subsidy.
Unsurprisingly, many new post-Communist governments were tempted, like their inter-war predecessors, to shield themselves against the political costs of this situation by instituting protections—in this case, laws restricting foreign ownership of land and companies. Somewhat unreasonably castigated by foreign critics as ‘nationalist’, these echoes of earlier efforts at autarky predictably achieved little: by inhibiting outside investment and distorting the local market they merely tweaked the privatization process still further towards corruption.[351]
Thus for every crooked Russian oligarch with a second home in London or Cannes, or enthusiastic young Polish businessman with a BMW and a cell phone, there were millions of disgruntled pensioners and laid-off workers for whom the transition to capitalism was at best an ambiguous benefit—not to speak of the millions of peasants who could neither be redeployed nor rendered economically self-sustaining: in Poland by the end of the twentieth century agriculture generated only 3 percent of GDP—but still occupied one-fifth of the working population. Unemployment remained endemic in many places—and with the loss of a job went the cheap facilities and other benefits that had traditionally accompanied work in these countries. With prices rising steadily, whether from inflation[352] or in anticipation of European entry, anyone on a fixed income or a state pension (which meant most of the teachers, doctors and engineers who had once been the pride of Socialism) had good cause to wax nostalgic for the past.
Many people in Eastern Europe—above all those over forty—complained bitterly of what they had lost in material security and cheap board, lodging and services; but this did not mean that they were necessarily longing to return to Communism. As one fifty-year-old retired Russian military engineer living with her pensioner husband on $448 a month explained to foreign journalists in 2003: ‘What we want is for our life to be as easy as it was in the Soviet Union, with the guarantee of a good, stable future and low prices—and at the same time this freedom that did not exist before’.
Opinion polls of Latvians, who would be horrified to imagine a return to Russian rule, nevertheless suggest that peasants especially are convinced they were better off in Soviet times. And they may be right, and not only if they are peasants. In the late Eighties, before the revolutions, East Europeans were avid cinemagoers. By 1997 cinema attendance in Latvia had fallen by 90 percent. The same was true everywhere—in Bulgaria it was down 93 percent, in Romania it was down by 94 percent, in Russia it had fallen 96 percent. Interestingly, cinema attendance in Poland in the same years was only down by 77 percent, in the Czech Republic by 71 percent, in Hungary by 51 percent. In Slovenia it had hardly fallen at all. These data suggest a direct relationship between prosperity and film-going and confirm the explanation offered in one Bulgarian poll for the decline in local cinema attendance:since the fall of Communism there was a better choice of films… but people could no longer afford the tickets.
In the circumstances, the difficult and incomplete economic transformation of Eastern Europe prompts the Johnsonian observation that though it was not done well, one is surprised to find it done at all. Much the same might be said of the transition to democracy. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, none of the formerly Communist societies between Vienna and Vladivostok had any living memory of genuine political freedom and many local commentators were pessimistic about the chances for pluralist politics. If capitalism without legal restraints descends readily into theft, then—in the absence of agreed and understood boundaries to public rhetoric and political competition—democracy, it was feared, risks slipping into competitive demagogy.
This was not an unreasonable fear. By concentrating power, information, initiative and responsibility into the hands of the party-state, Communism had given rise to a society of individuals not merely suspicious of one another and skeptical of any official claims or promises, but with no experience of individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices. It was not by chance that the most important journalistic initiative in post-Soviet states was the appearance of newspapers devoted to providing hard information:
It was older people who were least equipped to negotiate the transition to an open society. The younger generation had better access to information—from foreign television and radio and, increasingly, from the internet. But while this made many young voters in these countries more cosmopolitan and even sophisticated, it also opened a breach with their parents and grandparents. A survey of young Slovaks taken a decade after their country’s independence revealed a clear generation gap. Young people were utterly disconnected from the pre- 1989 past, of which they had little knowledge; conversely they complained that in the brave new world of post- Communist Slovakia their parents were adrift and helpless: they could offer neither help nor advice to their children.
This generation gap would have political consequences everywhere, with older and poorer voters proving periodically susceptible to the appeal of parties offering nostalgic or ultra-nationalist alternatives to the new liberal consensus. Predictably, this problem was worst in parts of the former Soviet Union, where the disruption and dislocation was worst and democracy hitherto unknown. Grindingly poor, insecure, and resentful at the conspicuous new wealth of a tiny minority, elderly—and not-so-elderly—voters in Russia and Ukraine especially were easily attracted to authoritarian politicians. Thus while it proved easy enough in post-Communist lands to invent model constitutions and democratic parties it was another matter altogether to forge a discriminating electorate. Initial elections everywhere tended to favour the liberal or right-of-center alliances that had brokered the overthrow of the old regime; but the backlash brought on by economic hardships and inevitable disappointments frequently worked to the advantage of the former Communists, now recycled in nationalist guise.
This transformation of the old
There was thus nothing especially incongruous about the rise of Corneliu Vadim Tudor, for example: a well-known literary sycophant at the court of Nicolae Ceausescu who devoted himself to writing odes to the glory of the
Even when nationalist politicians began as critics of Communism—as in the case of the Russian ‘national- patriotic’ movement
Although recycled Communists made alliances everywhere with genuine nationalists,[354] the appeal of outright nationalism proved strongest and most enduring in Russia. This was not surprising: in the words of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a fiery new public figure who built his electoral appeal on unapologetic old-Russian xenophobia, ‘The Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the planet’. Whatever its limitations, the Soviet Union had been a world power: a territorial and cultural giant, the legitimate
