One thing the dissident intellectuals did
not
talk about very much was economics. This, too, was a kind of realism. Ever since Stalin, economic—or, more precisely, industrial—growth had been both the goal of Socialism and the main measure of its success. Economics, as we saw in Chapter 13, had been the overriding concern of an earlier generation of reformist intellectuals: reflecting back at the Communist regime its own obsessions and echoing an assumption—shared by Marxists and many non-Marxists alike—that all politics are ultimately
about
economics. Critical discussion couched in the form of recommendations for economic reform had been the nearest thing to a licensed opposition in the revisionist decade between 1956 and 1968.
But by the middle of the 1970s it was hard for any well-informed observer of the Soviet bloc to take seriously the prospect of economic reform from within, and not only because the language of Marxist economics had collapsed after decades of unseemly abuse. From 1973 the economies of Eastern Europe were falling sharply behind even Western Europe’s reduced growth rates. Except for a brief blip in the finances of the oil-rich Soviet Union, brought on by the rise in energy prices, the inflation of the Seventies and the ‘globalizing’ of trade and services in the Eighties put the economies of the Soviet bloc at an insuperable disadvantage. In 1963 the international trade of Comecon countries had been 12 percent of the world total. By 1979 it was down to 9 percent and falling fast.
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The countries of the Soviet bloc could not compete on quality with the industrial economies of the West; nor did any of them except the USSR itself have a sustainable supply of raw materials to sell to the West, so they could not even compete with undeveloped countries. The closed Comecon system precluded participation in the new trading networks of Western Europe and GATT, and Communiststates could in any case not adapt their economies to world price levels without risking the fury of domestic consumers (which is what happened in Poland in 1976).
The crippling defect of Communist economies by this time was endemic, ideologically-induced inefficiency. Because of an unbending insistence upon the importance of primary industrial output for the ‘construction of socialism’, the Soviet bloc missed the switch from extensive to intensive, high-value production that transformed Western economies in the course of the Sixties and Seventies. Instead it remained reliant upon a much earlier model of economic activity, redolent of Detroit or the Ruhr in the 1920s, or late nineteenth-century Manchester.
Thus Czechoslovakia—a country with very limited resources in iron—was by 1981 the world’s third largest (per capita) exporter of steel. To the bitter end, the GDR was planning ever-expanded production of obsolete heavy industrial goods. No-one who had any choice actually wanted to buy Czech steel or East German machines, except at heavily subsidized prices: these goods were thus produced and sold at a loss. In effect, Soviet-style economies were now
subtracting
value—the raw materials they imported or dug out of the ground were worth more than the finished goods into which they were transformed.
Even in areas of comparative advantage the Soviet economy took its toll. Just as Hungary was Comecon’s chosen manufacturer of trucks and buses, so the GDR in the 1980s was assigned the task of manufacturing computers. But not only were the machines produced in East Germany unreliable and outdated; the centralized system was simply unable to make enough of them. By 1989, East Germany (with a population of 16 million) was turning out just one-fiftieth the number of computers manufactured in Austria (population: 7.5 million)—and as a producer of computers Austria was a negligible competitor in the international market. ‘Comparative advantage’ in this case was thus strictly relative—the GDR was spending millions of marks producing unwanted goods that were available at lower cost and in better quality on the world market.
Much of the responsibility for all this lay with the inherent defects of centralized planning. By the late 1970s Gosplan, the Soviet central economic planning agency, had forty departments for different branches of the economy and twenty seven separate economic ministries. The obsession with numerical targets was notorious to the point of self-parody: Timothy Garton Ash cites the example of ‘The People’s Economy Plan for the Borough of Prenzlauer Berg’ (in East Berlin), where it was announced that ‘Book-holdings in the libraries are to be increased from 350,000 to 450,000 volumes. The number of borrowings is to be increased by 108.2 percent’.
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Fixed price systems made it impossible to ascertain real costs, to respond to needs or to adapt to resource constraints. Administrators at every level were frightened of taking risks and innovating
,
lest they reduce aggregate output in the short term. In any case, they had no incentive: they were secure in their posts no matter how incompetent, thanks to Brezhnev’s well-known preference for the ‘stability of cadres’ (the watchword from 1971 onwards). Meanwhile, in order to make sure that they would meet targets set from above, factory foremen and managers took great pains to
hide
reserves of material and labour from the authorities. Waste and shortage were thus mutually self-sustaining.
The predictable effect of such a system was to encourage not just stagnation and inefficiency but a permanent cycle of corruption. It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives—medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities—people are required to bend the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways.
This accounts in large measure for the marked increase in cynicism in these years. One example can stand for many: Tractor plants, or truck manufacturers, did not bother to make sufficient spare parts because they could more easily meet their ‘norms’ by building large machines—with the result that when these large machines broke down, there were no replacement parts available. Official data published only the total number of machines of all sorts produced in a given sector; they did not say how many were still in working order. The workers, of course, knew better.
The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke:‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which—in return for political quiescence—offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official
Small Political Dictionary
put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’
The only parts of a typical Communist economy that worked relatively efficiently by 1980 were the high-technology defense industries and the so-called ‘second economy’—the black market in goods and services. The importance of this second economy—whose very existence could not be officially acknowledged—was testimony to the sad state of the official one. In Hungary, by the early eighties, it is estimated that a mere 84,000 artisans—operating exclusively in the private sector—were meeting nearly 60 percent of local demand for services, from plumbing to prostitution.
Add to this private peasant production, along with public resources (bricks, copper wire, typefaces) ‘diverted’ for use by workers in private enterprise, and it can be seen that Soviet-style Communism—much like Italian capitalism—relied for its survival on a parallel economy.
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The relationship was symbiotic: the Communist state could sustain its public monopoly only by channeling into the private sphere all activities and needs that it could neither deny nor meet; while the second economy depended upon the official one for resources, but above all for the very inefficiency of the public sector which guaranteed it a market and artificially elevated its value and thereby its profits.
Economic stagnation was in itself a standing rebuke to Communism’s claims to superiority over capitalism. And if not a stimulus to opposition, it was certainly a source of disaffection. For most people living under Communism in the Brezhnev era, from the late Sixties through the early Eighties, life was no longer shaped by terror or repression. But it was grey and drab. Adults had fewer and fewer children; they drank more—the per capita annual consumption of alcoholic spirits in the Soviet Union quadrupled in these years—and they died young. Public architecture in Communist societies was not only aesthetically unappealing, it was shoddy and uncomfortable, a faithful mirror of the shabby authoritarianism of the system itself. As a Budapest taxi-driver once remarked to the present author, pointing to the serried ranks of dank, grimy apartment blocks that disfigure the city’s outer suburbs: ‘We live in those. Typical Communist building—summer is hot, winter very cold.’
Apartments, like much else in the Soviet bloc, were cheap (rent averaged 4 percent of a typical household budget in the USSR), because the economy was regulated not by price but by scarcity. This had its advantages for the authorities—the arbitrary allocation of scarce commodities helped maintain loyalty—but it carried with it a serious risk, which most Communist leaders understood very well. Ever since it had become clear by the end of the Sixties that the future promise of ‘Socialism’ could no longer be counted upon to bind citizens to the regime, Communist rulers had opted instead to treat their subjects as consumers and replace (socialist) utopia tomorrow with material abundance today.
This choice was made quite consciously. As Vasil Bil’ák, the Czech hardliner who was instrumental in inviting the Soviets to invade his country in 1968, put it to his party’s Ideological Commission in October 1970: ‘[In 1948] we had posters in the shop windows about how socialism is going to look, and people were receptive to it. That was a different kind of excitement and a different historical time, and today we can’t put up posters about how socialism is going to look, but today shop windows have to be full of goods so that we can document that we are moving to socialism and that we have socialism here’.
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Consumerism, then, was to be encouraged as the measure of Socialism’s success. This was not the same as Khrushchev’s famous 1959 ‘kitchen debate’ with Nixon, when he assured the American Vice-President that Communism would outperform capitalism in the foreseeable future. Bil’ák—like Kádár in Hungary—had no such illusions. He was content for Communism to be a pale imitation of capitalism, so long as the goods on offer kept consumers happy. East Germany’s Erich Honecker, who replaced the unmourned Walter Ulbricht as party leader in 1971, likewise set out to offer the citizens of the GDR a modest adaptation of West Germany’s 1950’s ‘miracle’.
This strategy was moderately successful for a while. The standard of living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland improved through the 1970s, at least when measured by retail consumption. The number of cars and televisions—the iconic consumer durables of the age—rose steadily: in Poland the number of privately-owned cars per head of the population increased fourfold between 1975 and 1989. By the end of the eighties there were four televisions for every ten people in Hungary; the figures for Czechoslovakia were similar. If buyers were willing to accept poor quality, indifferent styling and little choice, they could usually find what they wanted, in official shops or through the ‘private’ sector. In the Soviet Union, however, such ‘optional’ goods were harder to find—and relatively more expensive.
The same was true of basic necessities. In March 1979 a shopper in Washington DC would have had to work 12.5 hours to afford a generic ‘basket’ of basic foods (sausages, milk, eggs, potatoes, vegetables, tea, beer, etc). A similar basket would ‘cost’ 21.4 work-hours in London, but 42.3 work-hours in Moscow, despite high levels of subsidy.
15
Moreover the Soviet or East European consumer had to spend many more hours finding and purchasing foods and other goods. Measured in time and effort, if not in rubles or crowns or forints, life under Communism was expensive as well as exhausting.
The problem with defining Communism by its success in satisfying private consumers was that the whole economy was geared, as noted above, to the high-volume manufacture of industrial machinery and raw materials. Except for food, Communist economies did not produce the things that consumers wanted (and they were not very efficient at producing food, either—the Soviet Union had long since become a net
importer
of grain, tripling its food imports between 1970 and 1982 alone). The only way around this impediment was to import consumer goods from abroad, but these had to be paid for with hard currency. The latter could only be acquired by exports: but except for Soviet oil the world market had little use for Socialist output unless sold at a sharp discount and in many cases not even then. In practice, the only way to stock the shelves in the East was to borrow money from the West.
The West was certainly keen to oblige. The IMF, the World Bank and private bankers were all happy to lend to Soviet bloc countries: the Red Army was a reassuring guarantee of stability, and Communist officials misrepresented their countries’ output and resources to convincing effect.
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In the course of the 1970s alone Czechoslovakia’s hard currency debt rose twelve-fold. Poland’s hard currency debt increased some 3,000 percent, as First Secretary Gierek and his colleagues sucked in subsidized Western goods, introduced expensive new social insurance programs for peasants and froze food prices at 1965 levels.
Once borrowing at these levels took off it was hard to contain. Gierek’s food price increases of 1976 triggered angry riots and were quickly repealed, the regime choosing instead to keep borrowing: between 1977 and 1980 one-third of Poland’s external line of credit was used to subsidize domestic consumption. Communist economists in Prague recommended phasing out subsidies and introducing ‘real’ prices, but their political masters feared the social consequences of such a retreat and preferred to increase their debts instead. As in the inter-war years, the fragile little states of eastern Europe were once again borrowing capital from the West to finance their autarkic economies and avoid hard choices.