The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

All media were subjected to such a high level of censorship that they were reduced to a position from which they could only reinforce the power of the Communist Party.

      Following the Soviet example, enforced collectivisation of agriculture was introduced across Central and Eastern Europe, with the sole exception of Yugoslavia. As free peasants resisted collectivisation, open terror was needed to ‘convince’ the farmers to join collective farms. In 1949, collectivsation was enforced in the Baltic countries in the wake of major deportations. The results for agriculture were disastrous. In Estonia, for example, agricultural production decreased by 9.3 % between 1951 and 1955, in comparison with the relatively modest results of 1946–1950. By 1955, the average grain yield had fallen to nearly half the pre-war level.76 Productivity in agriculture actually decreased in all of the countries that had fallen under the shadow of forced collectivisation. Here, Stalin had to learn from his own sad experience. The forced collectivisation of agriculture had had catastrophic results for the Soviet Union, turning Russia from an exporter into one of largest importers of food. As a result of forced collectivisation over the decade between 1928 and 1938, the productivity of Soviet agriculture fell by 25 % in comparison with the ‘inertia scenario’ in which nothing had changed. The grain harvest did not reach 1925-1929 levels again until 1950-1954. Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of modern economic growth77 (Table 2).

      But Stalin did not want to learn. For him, collectivisation was needed not for the economy but for politics – private property was one of the archenemies of the Soviet system. Thus, collectivisation had to be carried out regardless of the costs. In Romania, resistance to collectivisation ended in 1949 with the arrest of some 80,000 peasants, 30,000 of whom were tried in public.78 In Hungary, the first serious attempt at collectivisation was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants into joining cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. In the early 1950s, only a quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives. By 1953, between 3 and 3.5 million hectares of arable land were uncultivated and 400,000 peasants had been fined. In Czechoslovakia, farms started to be collectivised more intensively after the Communist takeover in 1948, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated again. Their productivity was low because they failed to provide adequate compensation for the work, moreover, they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common and food became scarce. Poland too saw active resistance to collectivisation, where it developed very slowly.79 In 1952, a collectivisation campaign was launched in East Germany, leading to the collapse of agriculture and a massive exodus of farmers to West Germany. From January 1951 to April 1953, almost half a million people left East Germany. The farmers who remained were disinclined to do more than produce for their own needs because fixed procurement prices meant little profit. Thus, by the summer of 1953, East German agriculture had entered a real crisis necessitating extraordinary help from the Soviet Union (Table 3).

      The situation was no better in other sectors of the economy that were first nationalised and then mismanaged. Under Soviet influence, totally unrealistic goals were set – among them ‘catching up and overtaking’ the developed capitalist states in per capita performance in all of the major production lines over a short period of time. The Soviet leadership demanded that the Central and Eastern European countries shift the orientation and structure of their production and export trade toward the East; a rapid increase in the output of heavy industry and massive deliveries of its products to other socialist countries, the USSR in particular. The result was that these countries started to build up certain industries, even when they lacked the necessary resources and materials to do so. For example, an aluminium smelting plant at Zvornik in Yugoslavia was proudly displayed as the largest in Europe, yet it never made a cent of profit. The expansion of heavy industry was pushed at the expense of the development of all other productive and non-productive sectors of the economy, such as agriculture or light industry. The result was the growing inefficiency of production, the failure to modernise production technology and a drop in the effectiveness of foreign trade. People were subjected to a depressed rate of growth in the standard of living, mounting shortages of goods and insufficient service facilities. ‘We have really screwed up, everybody hates us,’ the young Budapest police chief, Kopacsi, was told by an older Communist comrade on his return to his home town in the early 1950s.80

      Table 2

      Source: Calculations based on data in B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: Europe 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: The Americas 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); B. R. Mitchell, International History Statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania 1750–1993 (London: Macmillian Reference 1998); UN Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT data, 2004.

      Table 3

      Sources: Wädekin 1982. 85-86; Sanders 1958, 72, 81, 99, 105, 145, 147; Hoffmak and Neal 1962, 273.

      In sum, we can conclude that Stalinism in Central and Eastern Europe was a complete failure. Robin Okey argues that Stalinism bequeathed Communist regimes a kind of original sin that might be overlooked, even forgotten in subsequent periods, but which told powerfully against the Communists in the events of 1989. It was not so much the Communists’ monopolisation of power that shocked the captive nations – they had seen this before – but the magnitude and brutality of the terror and the destruction of the previous way of life – and all this for the benefit of another state, the Soviet Union. There is much evidence that contemporaries considered their opposition to Stalinism fundamentally to be a moral one. The violent contrast between words and deeds shocked even those who had supported Communism at the outset. Through its flagrant violation of the basic norms of humanity, Stalinism not only reinforced negative assumptions about Communism but scuppered indefinitely the Communists’ chances of eventually turning a system based on force into one based on conviction.81

      Usual Communism

      After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the ‘thaw’ that began thereafter, open terror in the Soviet Union and its satellite states subsided. Within the USSR, most of the people who had been imprisoned in the GULAG were released, while those who had been deported received permission to return home. In Central and Eastern Europe too, many political prisoners were released. These changes in the Communist system were, however, cosmetic at best as the essence of the Communist dictatorship remained unchanged. The open terror and purges had created a pervasive fear that lasted for decades even though mass terror ceased. It had been very effective: the arrests and other types of repression served as a permanent reminder of who was actually in charge. The Communist system relied on a powerful security apparatus whose role expanded rather than diminished with the end of open terror. To keep the situation under control, even the slightest symptoms of resistance had to be suppressed; in order to exercise control over ever-increasing areas of life, the number of functionaries in the Communist security services grew constantly, with the network of agents expanding simultaneously. The network of agents grew by an annual average of 30 % during the last decade of Communist power in Poland alone, reaching its record level of around 98,000 in 1988. The largest security service was created in Eastern Germany, where the ‘Stasi’ (Staatssicherheitdienst) had 91,015 full-time employees by 1989: one employee for every 180 East German citizens, a proportion that far outnumbered the ratio achieved by the state security service of any other Communist country. At the same time, the Stasi had 174,000 ‘unofficial informers’ on its payroll.82 Eventually, increasingly advanced technical means were introduced. The attempt to exert absolute control over every aspect of human life is excellently portrayed by the Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck film, The Lives of Others.

      In this way, then, arrests and repression also

76

Misiunas, Taagepera 1993, pp. 156-170.

77

Gaidar 2007, p. 83.

78

Handbook, p. 305.

79

Janos 2000, pp. 248-249.

80

Kopácsi 1989, pp. 112-113.

81

Okey 2004, pp. 11-23.

82

Handbook, p.198.