In agriculture, much of the Soviet Union, Hungary and Romania once again resembled the great nineteenth-century landed estates: poorly-paid, under-performing, inadequately-equipped agricultural labourers did the minimum for their absent employers while saving their energy for the real labour they put into family plots.
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I am grateful to Dr Paulina Bren for this reference.
276
In the Brezhnev years a pound of beef cost three and a half rubles to produce but was sold in shops for two rubles. The European Community subsidized its farmers too, and in approximately the same proportions. The difference, of course, was that Western Europe could afford a Common Agricultural Policy and the Soviet Union could not.
277
Hungary joined the IMF in May 1982, to mutual self-congratulation. Only in 1989 did it emerge that its government had seriously understated its internal and external debt for the previous decade.
278
Moreover, like Brezhnev himself, they were among the leading consumers of the age. In a Soviet joke from the time, the Soviet leader is showing his mother his
279
It is of course the business of the Catholic Church to inveigh against material idols and the sin of pride. But Karol Wojtyla went much further. In his 1975 Lenten Exercises at the Vatican, three years before becoming Pope, he explicitly announced that of the two threats to the Church, consumerism and persecution, the former was by far the graver danger and thus the greater enemy.
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Witness his initial support for a projected Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, later withdrawn in the face of international protest. His thoughtless description of Poland under martial law as a ‘vast concentration camp’ reflects a similar limitation.
281
With the encouragement of the Vatican, the US would provide significant financial support for Solidarity in its clandestine years—by some estimates as much as $50 million.
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Though early in his presidency, in November 1981, Reagan did let slip the thought that a nuclear war in Europe need not lead to a strategic exchange. Washington’s West European allies were at least as alarmed as Moscow and both protested vociferously.
283
There was, of course, never any question of Pershings or Cruises being deployed in France itself…
284
It emerged after 1990 that at least 25 Bundestag members in these years were paid agents of the GDR.
285
On December 13th 1981, the day martial law was declared in Poland, Schmidt was in the GDR holding ‘summit talks’ with his counterpart Erich Honecker and was somewhat put out, less by the imprisonment of hundreds of Polish dissidents than by the potentially ‘destabilizing’ impact of Polish developments on improving inter-German relations.
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Thanks to an ever-larger GDP, the defense element in American public expenditure had fallen steadily in relative terms from the mid-Fifties through 1979, even during the Vietnam years. It then increased dramatically: as a percentage of Federal outlay, defense spending in 1987 was up by 24 percent on 1980 levels.
