The Atlantic and Its Enemies

attempt was made at a consumer society to match that of West Berlin — little cars, washing machines, colour television and the rest. In the mid-sixties the working week was shortened (five days, nine hours) and the cult of Walter Ulbricht was reduced (Honecker taking over in May 1971 as first secretary of the central committee of the SED). The Alexander-Platz Funkturm (radio tower) started in October 1969, and in 1968 there was an educational reform supposed to bring modernity (in Leipzig the thirteenth-century Gothic university church was knocked down for the benefit of a gimcrack university building). In the mid-sixties there had even been talk of economic reform, with factory autonomy, a ‘New Economic System of Planning and Management’ (NOSPL). The period was known as the Systemzeit on account of the supposed spread of computers and a new emphasis in education on mathematics. East Berlin became a sort of parody copy of the West, Chicago rather than Moscow being the model. But as Stefan Wolle writes, without a proper service sector the imitation could not be managed: the regime could not provide for the levels of prosperity managed in the West. It staggered into a brief consideration of reform at the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ but then staged an ideological witch-hunt, rewarded careerists and informers, and stopped the reforms it had briefly considered. There was even, in the hard winter of 1969-70, an economic crisis such as western Europe had not seen since 1947. A hard freeze began early in the November, there were headlines as to the ‘self-sacrificial struggle of the miners in the lignite works’. Potatoes ran short, and Nasser sent some from Egypt, but in the canteens there was only macaroni to be had, and domestic fuel consisted of coal dust. The energy crisis was such that East Berlin’s electricity hardly sufficed for more than the floodlights of the Wall, and trains were generally hours late in arriving.

Under Communism, you could never be entirely sure if such things were not somehow being stage-managed in order to discredit the existing leadership of the Party, and in due course there was a change. It occurred in the context of the West Germans’ own Ostpolitik, and of course from the Soviet viewpoint it was easier to deal with some sort of flexible East German leader as distinct from Walter Ulbricht, an old Comintern man who had emerged from the Weimar Communist Party. In a meeting of the Politburo from which many members were absent ‘ill’ or ‘on leave’, and with many ‘candidate’ members present in a non-voting capacity, Willi Stoph presented a report highly critical of Ulbricht — badly prepared automatization of output, useless prestige buildings (hideous hotels and high-speed motorways through town centres, with no traffic). It all led to a humiliation for Ulbricht, when Neues Deutschland gave only a brief mention of his speech (which was not published) and some Politburo members formally wrote to Brezhnev to complain that Ulbricht was still thinking in a pan-German way, that there was a danger of upheavals in the manner of Poland in the later 1960s. In the interstices of the Soviet 24th Congress there was a decision to push Ulbricht aside (in April 1971). He died in 1973, still in theory the head of state, in a grand house in Wandlitz. His death occurred during a sporting festival, and he was made to write a letter saying that the Youth Celebrations’ organizers ‘should not allow their good humour to be affected by his unfortunately timed death’. His reward was that no flags were flown at half-mast. But with Ulbricht, the old DDR died as well: what remained was a hulk, disposable of by Moscow whenever circumstances suited.

19. The Kremlin Consolations

The troubles of the Atlantic West were compounded by foreign affairs. Moscow seemed to have in many ways the demand hand, with Americans and Germans coming back and forth, to offer this and that, in return for insubstantial concessions. Seen from Moscow, the later seventies were not a bad time; they ended with a classic piece of triumphalism, the Olympic Games of 1980, for which Moscow was cleaned up, acquiring some more huge buildings in the process — a hotel complex called ‘International One’ and ‘International Two’, otherwise known as the ‘Hammer Horror’, constructed for world trade exhibition purposes at the behest of the aged and, now, iguana- like go-between, Armand Hammer. Undesirables were cleared out of town, and the centre became a sort of Forbidden City. To the sky-scraper foreign ministry, the clients and satellites came and went; and there was a new, expanded Soviet navy going round the world, its crews coming back to port, gleefully bringing cheap jeans and ballpoint pens, at home in short supply. The chief preoccupation was China, no doubt, but she was in no splendid condition; Mao died in 1976, leaving a battle for succession in a country that had experienced a grotesque version of the War Communism that had nearly destroyed Russia in 1919. True, there was a Chinese-American understanding of sorts, but America was also in no happy state. President Carter, grinning and maladroit, did not inspire respect. Europe was also not a threat — very far from it. The main NATO element, Great Britain, was in steep decline; the Germans had run to Moscow, signed away thousands of millions in return for a few old-age pensioners’ trips to West Berlin, and the promise that the West Germans could pay some more millions to buy out political prisoners. Besides, matters in the West began to worsen again. The ‘stagflation’ period ended raggedly in 1975, and two years of relative stability followed. But then in 1978 things went sour again, with another twofold increase in oil prices, and another bout of inflation. England was in especially bad shape, and even appeared to be near collapse; another important NATO country, Turkey, was on the edge of civil war; Italy was in disrepair, her governments needing Communist support; and the Shah of Iran fled in January 1979, having been overthrown by a sort of bazaar-Islam revolution that Communists regarded with glee, not imagining that it would destroy them as well. When oil prices doubled, within a few weeks, the USSR profited.

It was true that the USSR was not itself in brilliant health, but its leaders were comparing the Moscow of 1975 with the Moscow they had known in Stalin’s time, and there was no likeness. Later on, the years between Khrushchev and Brezhnev were called ‘the period of stagnation’, but the term is not entirely accurate: some parts of the system worked well enough, and the men who succeeded Khrushchev had had quite enough of reform schemes that went awry. His fall was arranged by men of much cautiousness who were already not young; Leonid Brezhnev had seen the Second World War, had been a minor lion in the occupation of Hungary, and was not far off sixty. The others were much the same. Khrushchev had terrified them with the Cuban gamble, and they had been much dismayed at the internal turmoil associated with his campaign against Stalinism: intellectuals such as Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn had broken free and there had even been an ugly riot-cum-strike or two in the south. Khrushchev’s schemes to divide the Party between industrial and agrarian wings had been particularly convulsive, and he was overthrown in 1964, when he was seventy, for gambling. After the usual year or two of obscure manoeuvrings, Leonid Brezhnev emerged as successor, and his overall line was simple: ‘Reform, reform: people ought to work better, that’s the problem.’ He was right; the whole system was, as an East German critic said, a permanent Bummelstreik, what the French called a greve de zele, the only English equivalent of which is ‘bloody-mindedness’. Brezhnev stopped the assaults on Stalin, and even installed a small work on the Kremlin Wall in commemoration of him. Khrushchev’s reforms were reversed, and a re-reform, given the name of Brezhnev’s (for a time) head of government associate, Kosygin, restored the powers of the central ministries, twenty-seven of them by 1975, with two dozen ‘main administrations’ covering assorted products. Khrushchev’s regional economic councils were scrapped, because there was a danger that these councils would be taken over by some republican — in effect nationalist — coterie. The authority of Gosplan — the State Planning Committee — was reinforced. Of course, the centralization of things meant preposterous inefficiencies and delays. The Rosa Luxemburg knitwear factory in Kiev complained that it had to report on the fulfilment of fifteen different indicators, and authorization from above was needed even for small sums of money. An idea of the Kosygin reforms was for pretend firms to be set up, giving out a bonus to managers, as distinct from ‘main administrations’, but of course this led to abuse, hence demands for more central control, hence larger monopolies.

But at least corruption was under some sort of control, and there was even a hope that information technology (meaning computers) would bring dramatic improvements as regards the mountains of paperwork. Economists anxious to keep up with the West suggested computerization to deal with the tidal wave of information coming in, and Vasily Nemchinov’s Central Mathematics-Economics Institute devised a new planning system called ‘Optimal Functioning’. OGAS, ‘a total informational processing system with an analytical function’, lumbered onto the stage in 1971, but computers were distinguished only by their weight, and managers resented young computer scientists telling them what to do. Print-outs sprawled their way across dirty factory floors, and the managers just got on with managing in the old ways, but such problems were not unknown in the West. In any case, and it is one of the extraordinary features of this period, Western economists of considerable reputation took the Soviet economy very seriously. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, thought that the full employment that the Soviet system ensured was admirable, and whole institutes were set up in Vienna and points west to examine the workings of the