The Penguin History of the World

This huge change in international relations cannot be disentangled from its many consequences for other nations. They have to be artificially separated to be narrated, but one could not have occurred without the other. At the end of 1980 there was little reason to believe that the peoples of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were about to see changes unmatched since the 1940s. What was already clear, though, was that the European Communist countries were finding it harder and harder to keep up even the modest growth rates they had attained. Comparison with the market economies of the non-Communist world had become more and more unfavourable to them, although this did not appear to suggest any challenge to the verdicts of 1953, 1956 and 1968, or to Soviet power in eastern Europe. The carapace provided by the Warsaw Pact seemed still to be capable of containing the social and political change crystallized over thirty years (and more, if one counts the great unwilled changes of the Second World War and its aftermath).

At first sight, Communist Europe had a striking uniformity. In each country the Party was supreme; careerists built their lives around it as, in earlier centuries, men on the make clustered about courts and patrons, or the Church. In each (and above all in the USSR itself) there was also an unspeakable and unexaminable past, which could not be mourned or deplored, whose weight hung over intellectual life and political discussion – so far as there was any – corrupting them. In the east European economies, investment in heavy industrial and capital goods had produced a surge of early growth (more vigorous in some states than in others) and then an international system of trading arrangements with other Communist countries, dominated by the USSR and rigidified by aspirations to central planning. It had also given rise to appalling environmental and public health problems, hidden as matters of state security. Increasingly and obviously, a growing thirst for consumer goods could not be met; commodities taken for granted in western Europe remained luxuries in the east European countries, cut off as they were from the advantages of international economic specialization.

On the land, private ownership had been much reduced by the middle of the 1950s, usually to be replaced by a mixture of co-operatives and state farms, although within this broadly uniform picture different patterns had later emerged. In Poland, for instance, something like four-fifths of Polish farmland was eventually to return to private exploitation even under Communist government. Output remained low, however; most east European countries could achieve agricultural yields only half to three-quarters those of the European Community. By the 1980s all of them, in varying degree, were economic invalids, with the possible exception only of East Germany. Even there, per capita GDP stood at only $9,300 a year in 1988, against $19,500 in West Germany. Other problems, too, were arising. Investment in infrastructure was falling and so was their share of world trade. Debts in hard currency were piling up. In Poland alone, real wages fell by a fifth in the 1980s.

What had come to be called the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ (after a speech that Soviet leader had made in Warsaw in 1968) said that developments within eastern bloc countries might require – as in Czechoslovakia that year – direct Soviet intervention to safeguard the interests of the USSR and its allies against any attempts to turn socialist economies back towards capitalism. Yet Brezhnev had also been interested in pursuing détente and his doctrine reflected realism about possible dangers to international stability by breakaway developments in Communist Europe. Such dangers could be limited by drawing clearer lines. Since then, internal change in western Europe, steadily growing more prosperous, and with memories of the late 1940s and the seeming possibility of subversion far behind them, had removed some grounds for East–West tension. By 1980, after revolutionary changes in Spain and Portugal, not a dictatorship survived west of the Trieste–Stettin line and democracy was everywhere triumphant. For thirty years, the only risings by industrial workers against their political masters had been in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – all Communist countries.