Russia

The Crimean Tatars, frustrated at their failure to recover the land of their birth, began to organize and eventually delivered a petition signed by most of them. It was rejected, but this did not end their efforts. Jews were also energized, but by Israel, which had developed into a far more attractive ‘national home’ than Birobijan, which Stalin had allotted for the purpose. Thanks to American representations, some 200,000 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel by 1981 ²⁴ — a fact which encouraged more Jews and half-Jews, and even non-Jews, to put in applications to migrate, and roused some interest, and resentment, among other sections of the population. The populations of the Baltic provinces were quiescent at this time, as were those of Belarus and Ukraine, though by the later 1960s the KGB had become concerned about underground activity by supporters of the Uniate Church, which had been suppressed after the Second World War but which was believed to be receiving support from Rome. The KGB infiltrated, or suborned, agents in order to monitor the situation. ²⁵ At this stage Soviet security was more concerned about religious than nationalist subversion, but, as events were in due course to demonstrate, the two were connected.

In the satellite countries of Eastern Europe improving living standards became more effective than secret-police activity and repression in maintaining stability through the 1960s and ‘70s. In Hungary the Kadar regime produced an apparent miracle in the early 1960s, transforming a population seething with resentment after the suppression of the 1956 rising with the offer of a social truce under the slogan ‘Whoever is not against us is with us.’ Collectivization was reintroduced, but more sensitively than on the first occasion, and in a practical rather than doctrinaire fashion. In time, many of the collectives became profitable, set up shops and restaurants in nearby cities, and began to resemble Western-type companies. Traditional industries like food-processing came into their own along with high-technology industries like the manufacture of optical instruments, which were favoured for investment. The ‘black economy’ was partly legalized, workers were encouraged to use factory equipment to make products outside working hours to sell for their personal profit, and moonlighting became common. The economy grew; so did people’s incomes. Television sets and washing machines, which had once been very scarce, became almost commonplace. In East Germany, where a Communist substitute for Hitler’s Volkswagen came into mass production, people were encouraged by the prospect of owning a Trabant car, or a boat to sail on the Baltic, or a cottage by the sea or in the country, the equivalent of the Russian dacha, which had remained its owner’s private property even under Stalin. This was a twentieth-century reflection of Russia’s chronic condition of plentiful space and relatively sparse population, and it applied in some measure to other parts of Eastern Europe too. Bulgarians were less consumer-oriented, but their long-standing reputation as market gardeners was reflected in large collectives specializing in grapes and growing roses for perfume, as well as in vegetables. In Romania the old oppressive peasant economy had disappeared, but the mentalities it had bred remained evident, and many Romanians were still disoriented by the novel experience of city or factory. The Hungarian and German minorities there had long provided the only modernizing leaven, and they suffered most from the transition, for in backward states like Romania the modernizing force of Communism adopted nationalism as its partner.

In Poland the sense of common purpose between the leadership and the masses was lowest of all. Poles had lost nothing of their nationalist pride and became the most demanding of the satellite populations. After an unsuccessful attempt to impose collectivization in 1948, the policy was abandoned. So deep an emotional issue had it become that even Stalin dared not insist on it. Shortages of consumer goods and meat, particularly pork, could provoke serious protests, and so Poland was eventually allowed to run up substantial foreign debts and thereafter the Soviet worker in effect subsidized Polish living standards. ²⁶ But though Moscow indulged the Poles, it could act harshly if others overstepped the line.