The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

In Czechoslovakia, historian Karel Kaplan estimates that a total of ‘about two million Czechoslovak citizens, or half a million families,’ were affected by political persecution under the Communist regime; most often in the form of political purges, exclusion from public life, exclusion from certain professional activities or studies, surveillance by the secret police, review of pensions or forced removal to another place. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Czechoslovakian courts rehabilitated 257,902 people who had been convicted of offences of a political nature.83 The East German state security services conducted 88,718 preliminary proceedings between 1950 and 1989, with most of these resulting in convictions and subsequent imprisonment. The East German courts were responsible for at least 52 death sentences for political offences between 1945 and 1989.84 In 1961, the number of political prisoners in Bulgaria totalled 1,38385, while the number of people imprisoned in Bulgarian labour camps between 1944 and 1962, was 23,531. As was often demonstrated, the Communist authorities did not hesitate to use the army against the people, executing political enemies at home or abroad. In 1978, agents of the Bulgarian Secret Service, with ‘technical help’ from the KGB, killed the well-known dissident and writer Georgi Markov in London.86

      The situation was even worse in the Soviet Union where people did not have the small liberties possessed by the inhabitants of the satellite states. The Soviet Union tried to shut itself off completely from the rest of the world. The powerful KGB, with its huge security apparatus and network of informers, controlled all aspects of society. According to Western estimates, the KGB had 720,000 agents on its payroll, the KGB and the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) together had 570,000 officers and men in military formations under their command, including several divisions of border and internal security troops.87 Even though the number of people convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda – 3,488 between 1958 and 1966 – was not comparable with the figures reached during Stalin’s times, this was only as a result of ‘prophylactic work’; the secret police let potential dissidents know that they were aware of their activities and that they faced a choice of either going to prison or staying silent. Sixty-three thousand, one hundred people received such warnings between 1971 and 1974 alone. There were occasions too when the Soviet leaders demonstrated that they were capable of using their military might against demonstrators at any time. In 1956, Red Army soldiers were authorised to open fire on demonstrations and in Georgia, soldiers who refused to do so were brought before a tribunal. In Novocherkassk in 1962, riots broke out because of price hikes. Soldiers from the Novocherkassk garrison refused to fire on unarmed strikers. The army troops were therefore deemed unreliable and troops from the Ministry of the Interior who were willing to shoot to kill were sent to replace them. More than 20 people were killed and 116 convicted of involvement in the demonstrations. As a result of these events, however, the Soviet leaders began to fear that other soldiers might refuse to fire on protestors and this led them to issue new orders to the armed forces aimed at limiting the use of firearms in confrontations with demonstrators.88

      The use of violence against demonstrators served to remind people that the Communist leaders, although not currently using mass terror against the population, were willing to use it without hesitation if they deemed it necessary. This policy was highly effective. People felt in their bones that mass terror could once again become a reality. Fear in society was absolute, killing attempts to resist and stifling initiative. Richard Pipes was right when he wrote that the terror made it clear to the population that under a regime that had no hesitation in executing innocents, innocence was no guarantee of survival. The best hope of this lay in making oneself as inconspicuous as possible, which meant abandoning any thoughts of independent public activity, indeed, any involvement in public affairs and withdrawing into one’s private world. Once society disintegrated into an agglomeration of human atoms, each fearful of being noticed and concerned exclusively with physical survival, then it ceased to matter what society thought, for the government had the entire sphere of public activity to itself.89

      At the same time, it was clear that the end of open terror and some liberalisation was a relief for the captive nations. Some economic and social experiments were tolerated, especially in the satellite countries, resulting in a limited degree of economic recovery and improved standards of living. As a result of this increase in social and economic freedoms, some economies in Central and Eastern Europe demonstrated quite impressive growth after the end of Stalinism. It is interesting to note that during the 1950s, greater freedom was given and more reforms allowed in the countries that had been more active in their resistance to the Communist system. The Hungarians did not achieve freedom in 1956. However, in order to pacify the country, they not only received significant material aid from the Soviet Union but also license to launch a set of reforms that paved the way for so-called ‘Goulash Communism’.90 Inside the Soviet Union itself, the Baltic countries were known as the most negative towards the Soviet system and this was most probably one reason for their special treatment. The Soviet leaders tried to turn the Baltics into a shop window to the West, tolerating more economic reforms in these countries than in other places in the Soviet Union. This economic development was not, however, attributable so much to economic reforms as to cheap energy and raw materials imported from the Soviet Union. The discovery of oil deposits in Western Siberia in the 1960s helped the Soviet Union to support the satellite countries more effectively and at the same time earn the hard currency needed to pay for food imports through oil exports to the West. The need for hard currency prompted the use of methods that produced quick results but which risked creating lower yields in subsequent years.91

      A shopping trip yields some valuable booty – toilet paper. Poland, 1971

      In fact, maintaining the empire became increasingly costly for the Soviet Union with each passing decade. The Soviet economy simply could not afford to retain the satellite states, but the Soviet leaders ignored all the warning signs. Central and Eastern Europe did not help to increase Soviet security; in fact, it created more problems than it solved. In order to preserve internal cohesion and the stability of the Communist bloc, the Soviet Union had to keep 585,000 troops stationed in the Central and Eastern European countries and 1.4 million along its Western borders. To sustain the Communists’ hold on power, the Soviet Union had to subsidise the Central and Eastern European economies, particularly important in view of the regular insurrections against Communism. The Soviet Union had to pay to keep its allies quiet, writing off Polish debt in 1956 and again in 1981, as well as making economic concessions to Czechoslovakia after 1968. According to estimates, Soviet aid to socialist countries had reached $20 billion a year by the 1980s.92

      Development was still uneven. It mainly affected countries, such as Bulgaria or Romania, that had been less well-developed in comparison with the European average before the Communist takeover. But even there, local leaders were more than aware that the price of this development was absolute dependence upon the Soviet Union and that they were, in fact, already bankrupt. When Moscow asked for its money by the end of the 1950s, the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, secretly handed over the national gold reserve to the Kremlin. In July 1963, Zhivkov decided to cut the country’s losses by dissolving Bulgaria and integrating it into the USSR as the sixteenth republic. When the Soviet leadership declined, fearing that to do so might incur geopolitical problems, Zhivkov raised the question again in 1973, hoping in this way to pay its debts to Moscow. In order to keep its satellite afloat, the Kremlin decided to subsidise Bulgaria’s economy with up to $600 million annually for agricultural produce and the provision of subsidised oil.93

      In real terms, the Central and Eastern European economies could not compete with those of the Western European countries. Productivity was still poor and most of the goods produced were not competitive on world markets, with the result that they could only be traded on the closed socialist markets. Czechoslovakia, for example, which earlier

83

Handbook 2005, p 133.

84

Handbook 2005, p 208.

85

Handbook 2005, p. 74.

86

Andrew and Mitrokhin 1999, pp. 388–389.

87

Adomeit 1998, p. 151.

88

Beissinger 2002, pp. 330-334.

89

Shattan 1999, p. 226.

90

Janos 2000, pp. 264-328.

91

Gaidar 2007, pp. 102-103.

92

Gaidar 2007, p. 285.

93

The Reunification of Europe 2009, p. 20.