Soviet economy. In England, hardly an advertisement for capitalism, there was an institute at Birmingham University to study the workings of the Polish economy, directed by an Italian Keynesian, Mario Nuti; a great cemetery of information was installed, R. W. Davies the chief undertaker. At least with economic affairs, there were some facts to deal with; libraries to build up, and on the whole, in such institutions, the remarks of ‘Solzhenitsyn et al.’ were dismissed. The grandest of these Sovietologists was E. H. Carr, who had written a multivolume history of the Russian Revolution and stopped it in 1929, when collectivization of agriculture happened, and the information shut down. Poor Davies, a Welsh Communist and not a dishonest man, attached himself to the far grander Carr, who said that murdering peasants was one of the prices to pay for progress, to chronicle the advance of the Soviet Union beyond 1929, and even to call his volumes on the murderous collectivization, ‘The Socialist Offensive’. The next generation of students was brought up on such tomes, and was therefore caught gawping when the Soviet Union collapsed. (This writer will not plead innocent: as late as 1987, he was telling students that the USSR had ‘solved the nationality problem’, the worst mistake in academic life that he has ever made, and fortunately not preserved in print. At the time, minority nationalism was causing pointless mayhem in countries that he knew about — Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Spain.)
People who said that nationalism in the USSR was very much alive, and very angry, were of course right, but their evidence at the time consisted of trivialities and impressions — a girl at a Latvian boat-race wearing a T-shirt with a Latvian inscription; a Ukrainian Catholic imprisoned for decades, and emerging, incoherently, with a grand beard, to massacre English at a press conference. Vladimir Bukovsky, a long-term victim of the system, and utterly irrepressible, could not believe his ears and eyes when at last, in 1976, he came to the West and was asked to lecture at the Ford Foundation and suchlike: eyes of naive vacancy, peering through festoons of hair, to put stupefyingly silly questions. President Carter refused to meet him, and the Ford Foundation missed him off the Christmas card list; in revenge, he wrote a book, based on the Soviet archives, that demonstrated quite how misguided they had been, in the style of the ‘useful idiots’ whom Lenin had found such bores. When the founder of jogging dropped dead at the age of fifty-four, Bukovsky responded with glee.
As regards the Soviet economy of this period, Alain Besancon remarked, ‘It is a strange feature of the sovietological world that a certain economic approach to Soviet reality, however knowledgeable, honest and sophisticated, meets, in people with a different approach, a disbelief so vast that they do not even bother to criticize — not knowing where to begin, let alone to inform themselves further. It is much like the attitude of the dissidents to official statistics, or the figures at which the Western economists arrive: derision and shoulder- shrugging.’ These dissidents ‘et al.’ were of course closer to the truth than their Western critics, and their derision was even shared by the more astute elements in the KGB, such as (no doubt) Vladimir Putin. But for the moment the USSR functioned. Rockets fired off; disarmament discussions went on with Americans who could not quite reconcile the pot-holes in the Moscow roads with the satellites in space (New York, going bankrupt at the time?). And there was always the cultural argument. A concert by Svyatoslav Richter was unanswerable. There was something about Russia that produced musicians of a world class beyond compare. A certain conservatoire tradition, an intelligently critical public concentrating culturally because the political economy was so primitive, or just grown-up attitudes towards alcohol and cigarettes: who knows why?
In this perspective, Brezhnev becomes understandable, because the USSR worked, and the West did not. Leonid Brezhnev was now in charge of a vast system in which only the KGB really knew what was happening, through its huge network of informers, and under him that organization came to be all-important. Stalin had controlled it by the simplest of methods, a periodic cull. Now, and this was Khrushchev’s contribution, such culling was not possible: to that he himself owed his life, as he said. The system worked for a time, and quite well, because of an external factor, the rise in commodity prices, and especially oil and gold. In the early 1970s Western investment also went into pipelines to carry natural gas to Germany, the lines amounting to a length four times that of the globe’s circumference. By 1985 gas was almost fifteen times greater in volume than in 1965 and development might have been more had the road system been better developed (lorries, ubiquitous in the system, chugged along at less than the speed of a decent bicycle). With these sums in foreign currency, Moscow could still indulge some megalomania, and a Brezhnev could carry on in the old way: the ‘A’ system launched its space-shots and intervened all over the world. It even built an enormous navy, in the 1970s, and made itself felt in parts of the world that were new to it, such as the Middle East. The basis was being eaten away, but external help could be obtained, as had happened in any crisis of the system, from the Volga Famine of 1921-2 to Hitler’s attack in 1941. The Western world just needed to be reminded of the importance of Russia.
It was of course true that the peoples of what the West called eastern Europe were ‘captive nations’. That problem was not, in Brezhnev’s eyes, enormously serious. The West had become disinterested in the subject at Teheran in 1943, when Churchill had in effect agreed to a displacement of Poland, bodily moved west into Pomerania and Silesia at the expense of Podolia and Volhynia. East Germans had rebelled in 1953, and had been widely ignored. Yugoslavia had been disaffected by Stalin, was not part of the Soviet empire, but co-operated with it, and as a Communist country worked, like the USSR, as a purported federation of nations devoted to the construction of socialism. Hungary had rebelled in 1956, and Moscow had adapted its dealings with Hungary accordingly: she had a certain room for manoeuvre, could make deals with the diaspora (like Armenia in the USSR) and even produce plans for economic reform of a sort that might at some stage have relevance for Moscow. Poland had also been allowed some headroom, and the Church was no longer persecuted. A small-farm peasantry obstinately persisted with its horses and carts, but heavy industry had been built up, and in the later seventies Western banks were anxious to invest in it, swallowing whole the propaganda that a new leader, Edward Gierek, was launching, to the effect that Poland would be the new Japan. Poles could travel to visit relatives in the West, and dissidents were picturesquely part of the scenery: the Party was a nuisance, not a tyranny. Communism, Brezhnev-vintage, was even quite a useful discipline for the Poles, whose intelligentsia, freed from romantic nationalism, became world-class.
There was a problem as regards Czechoslovakia. She was unique among the satellite states, in that her native Communists had been numerous and strong, based in a modern industry, in 1939 on much the same level as Belgium’s: true at any rate of the Czech two thirds, though not for the Slovak part. Czech Communists kept much of the investment for themselves, and Slovaks groused, as they did on cultural matters, since they counted as bumpkins, not unlike the Ukrainians over the border. A constitution of 1960 was strictly centralized, i.e. making no concessions to Slovak desires for autonomy, and collective farms were stronger than in Hungary, let alone Poland. President Antonin Novotny, visiting the Slovak cultural centre, was enraged by demands that Slovak culture should be promoted by the foreign machine; like most Czechs he did not think that there was any. There were little signs that matters were not going his way; very obscurely, key figures were moved in and out (this writer, spending a few months in prison in Bratislava at the time, had his own experience:
The Stalinist Novotny went on in office; as late as 1954, several months after the USSR had started to release Stalin’s victims, there was a minor purge trial, and a commission in 1957 even reaffirmed the guilt of the 1950-51 trial victims, though some were released. A huge Stalin statue even went up in 1955, demolished only when Khrushchev insisted, along with the removal of Klement Gottwald from his mausoleum. In an obscure place, much later, there was still a little ‘Stalin Square’. In Czechoslovakia there was nothing like the Polish peasantry, stubbornly stuck in subsistence agriculture; nor was there anything like the Polish Church, the Czechs having inherited a powerful anti-clerical tradition. Opposition to the Communists was enfeebled from the outset because it was itself largely Communist. It talked, and then talked again.
Still, there were signs of trouble in the woodwork, and a Party congress was postponed for several months in 1962. The 1951 purge trials continued to be a cause of unease, and there was a new commission to investigate them. In 1963 it pinned the blame on Gottwald, and by implication his close colleagues, some still in high places. A Slovak journalist — Miroslav Hysko — publicly denounced them, and was not himself arrested: the old trial verdicts were, instead, cancelled. All of this was evidence of much deeper currents. Further evidence came when a report late in 1963 stated that the campaign against Slovak nationalism in 1951 had been unjustified; and from prison there emerged Dr Husak, whom the Russians subsequently chose as their man in Prague. Novotny, an elderly figure recognizably in the Stalinist mode, was careful to dissociate himself from the old guard and only four of them remained; the warhorse Slovak secretary (Karol Bacilek, a Hungarian) was displaced in 1963 by a younger man, Dubcek. Slovakia, when he was a child, had been part of old Hungary, and in the capital, Bratislava, Hungarian was
