The result of imposing an accelerated version of the Soviet Union’s own dismal economic history upon the more developed lands to its west has already been noted. The only resource upon which Communist managers could consistently rely was labor-intensive production pressed to the breaking point. That is why the Stalinist terror of 1948-53 in Eastern Europe so closely resembled its Soviet counterpart of twenty years before: both were tied to a policy of coercive industrialization. The centrally planned economies were actually quite effective at extracting surplus-value from miners and factory workers by force; but this was all they could do. Soviet-bloc agriculture slipped further and further backwards, its occasionally surreal inefficiencies exemplified in the USSR by the bureaucrats in Frunze (now Bizkek, in Kirghizstan) who in 1960 encouraged local peasants to meet their (arbitrary and unattainable) butter delivery quotas by buying up stocks from local shops . . .
The trials and purges, and the accompanying chorus of mendacious commentary, helped degrade whatever remained in eastern Europe of the public sphere. Politics and government became synonymous with corruption and arbitrary repression, practiced by and for the benefit of a venal clique, itself rent by suspicion and fear. This was hardly a new experience in the region, of course. But there was a distinctively cynical quality to
Communist
misrule: old-fashioned abuses were now laboriously embedded in a rhetorical cant of equality and social progress, a hypocrisy for which neither the inter-war oligarchs nor the Nazi occupiers had felt the need. And, once again, it was a form of misrule adapted for the near-exclusive benefit of a foreign power, which was what made Soviet rule so resented outside the Soviet Union’s own borders.
The effect of the Sovietization of eastern Europe was to draw it steadily away from the western half of the continent. Just as Western Europe was about to enter an era of dramatic transformation and unprecedented prosperity, eastern Europe was slipping into a coma: a winter of inertia and resignation, punctured by cycles of protest and subjugation, that would last for nearly four decades. It is symptomatic and somehow appropriate that during the very years when the Marshall Plan injected some $14 billion
into
Western Europe’s recovering economy, Stalin—through reparations, forced deliveries and the imposition of grossly disadvantageous trading distortions—extracted approximately the same amount
from
eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe had always been different from western Europe. But the distinction between eastern and western Europe had not been the only one by which the continent understood itself, nor even the most important. Mediterranean Europe was markedly different from North-West Europe; religion had far greater salience than politics in the historic boundaries within and between states. In Europe before World War Two, the differences between North and South, rich and poor, urban and rural, counted for more than those between East and West.
The impact of Soviet rule upon the lands east of Vienna was thus in certain respects even more marked than it had been upon Russia itself. The Russian Empire, after all, had only ever been part-European; and the European identity of post-Petrine Russia was itself much contested in the course of the century preceding Lenin’s coup. In brutally cutting the Soviet Union adrift from its ties to European history and culture the Bolsheviks did great and lasting violence to Russia. But their suspicion of the West and their fear of Western influence was not unprecedented; it had deep roots in self-consciously Slavophil writings and practices long before 1917.
There were no such precedents in central and eastern Europe. It was, indeed, part of the insecure small-state nationalism of Poles, Romanians, Croats and others that they saw themselves not as some far-flung outriders at the edge of European civilization; but rather as the under-appreciated defenders of Europe’s core heritage—just as Czechs and Hungarians understood themselves, reasonably enough, as dwelling at the very heart of the continent. Romanian and Polish intellectuals looked to Paris for fashions in thought and art, much as the German-speaking intelligentsia of the late Habsburg Empire, from Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia to Trieste, had always looked to Vienna.
That
integrated, cosmopolitan Europe had of course only ever existed for a minority—and it died in 1918. But the new states hatched at Versailles were fragile and somehow impermanent from the very start. The inter-war decades had thus been a sort of interregnum, neither peace nor war, in which the fate of post-imperial central and eastern Europe remained somehow undecided. The likeliest outcome—that a renascent Germany would be the
de facto
heir to the old empires in the territories stretching from Stettin to Istanbul—was narrowly averted only by Hitler’s own errors.
Instead, the imposition of a Russian rather than a German solution cut Europe’s vulnerable eastern half away from the body of the continent. At the time this was not a matter of great concern to western Europeans themselves. With the exception of the Germans, the nation most directly affected by the division of Europe but also ill-placed to voice displeasure at it, western Europeans were largely indifferent to the disappearance of eastern Europe. Indeed, they soon became so accustomed to it, and were anyway so preoccupied with the remarkable changes taking place in their own countries, that it seemed quite natural that there should be an impermeable armed barrier running from the Baltic to the Adriatic. But for the peoples to the
east
of that barrier, thrust back as it seemed into a grimy, forgotten corner of their own continent, at the mercy of a semi-alien Great Power no better off than they and parasitic upon their shrinking resources, history itself ground slowly to a halt.
VII
Culture Wars
‘We all rejected the preceding era. I knew it chiefly through literature, and
it seemed to me to have been an era of stupidity and barbarity’.
Milan Šimečka
‘Every action, in the middle of the twentieth century, presupposes and
involves the adoption of an attitude with regard to the Soviet enterprise’.
Raymond Aron
‘I was right to be wrong, while you and your kind were wrong to be right’.
Pierre Courtade (to Edgar Morin)
‘Like it or not, the construction of socialism is privileged in that to
understand it one must espouse its movement and adopt its goals’.
Jean-Paul Sartre
‘You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons . . . This fear of
finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it
is an expression of a lack of self-confidence’.
Arthur Koestler
With an alacrity that would perplex future generations, the struggle in Europe between Fascism and Democracy was hardly over before it was displaced by a new breach: that separating Communists from anti-Communists. The staking out of political and intellectual positions for and against the Soviet Union did not begin with the post-World War Two division of Europe. But it was in these post-war years, between 1947 and 1953, that the line dividing East from West, Left from Right, was carved deep into European cultural and intellectual life.
The circumstances were unusually propitious. Between the wars the far Right had been better supported than it suited most people to recall. From Brussels to Bucharest the polemical journalism and literature of the 1930s abounded in racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism, clericalism and political reaction. Intellectuals, journalists and teachers who before and during the war had espoused Fascist or ultra-reactionary sentiments had good reason after 1945 vociferously to affirm their new-found credentials as progressives or radicals (or else retreat into temporary or lasting obscurity). Since most parties and journals of a Fascist or even ultra-conservative persuasion were in any case now banned (except in the Iberian Peninsula, where the opposite was true), public expressions of political allegiance were confined to the center and left of the spectrum. Right-wing thought and opinion in Europe had been eclipsed.
But although the
content
of public writing and performance was spectacularly metamorphosed by the fall of Hitler, Mussolini and their followers, the
tone
stayed much the same. The apocalyptic urgency of the Fascists; their call for violent, ‘definitive’ solutions, as though genuine change
necessarily
led through root-and-branch destruction; the distaste for the compromise and ‘hypocrisy’ of liberal democracy and the enthusiasm for Manichean choices (all or nothing, revolution or decadence): these impulses could serve the far Left equally well and after 1945 they did so.
In their preoccupation with nation, degeneration, sacrifice and death, inter-war Fascist writers had looked to the First World War. The intellectual Left after 1945 was also shaped by the experience of war, but this time as a clash of incompatible moral alternatives, excluding all possibility of compromise: Good versus Evil, Freedom against Enslavement, Resistance against Collaboration. Liberation from Nazi or Fascist occupation was widely welcomed as an occasion for radical political and social change; an opportunity to turn wartime devastation to revolutionary effect and make a new beginning. And when, as we have seen, that opportunity was seemingly thwarted and ‘normal’ life was summarily restored, frustrated expectations turned readily enough to cynicism—or else to the far Left, in a world once more polarized into irreconcilable political camps.
Post-war European intellectuals were in a hurry and impatient with compromise. They were young. In World War One a generation of young men was killed. But after the Second World War it was largely an older, discredited cohort that disappeared from the scene. In its place emerged writers, artists, journalists and political activists who were too young to have known the war of 1914-18, but who were impatient to make up the years lost in its successor.
Their
political education had come in the era of the Popular Fronts and anti-Fascist movements; and when they achieved public acclaim and influence, often as a result of their wartime activities, it was at an unusually early age by traditional European standards.
In France, Jean-Paul Sartre was 40 when the war ended; Simone de Beauvoir was 37; Albert Camus, the most influential of them all, just 32. Of the older generation only Francois Mauriac (born in 1885) could match them in influence, precisely because he was not tainted by any Vichyite past. In Italy only the Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce (born in 1866) remained from an earlier generation of Italian public figures. In post-Fascist Italy Ignazio Silone, born in 1900, was among the more senior of the influential intellectual figures; the novelist and political commentator Alberto Moravia was 38, the Communist editor and writer Elio Vittorini a year younger. In Germany, where Nazi sympathies and the war had taken the heaviest toll on public intellectuals and writers, Heinrich Böll—the most talented of a self-consciously new generation of writers who came together two years after Hitler’s defeat to form the ‘Group 47’—was only 28 when the war ended.
In eastern Europe, where the intellectual elites of the pre-war years were tainted with ultra-conservatism, mystical nationalism or worse, the social promotion of youth was even more marked. Czesław Miłosz, whose influential essay
The Captive Mind
was published in 1951 when he was just 40 and already in political exile, was not at all atypical. Jerzy Andrzejewski (who appears in Miłosz’s book in a less than flattering light) published
Ashes and Diamonds,
his acclaimed novel of postwar Poland, while in his thirties. Tadeusz Borowski, born in 1922, was still in his mid-twenties when he published his memoir of Auschwitz:
This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
The leaders of the East European Communist parties were, typically, slightly older men who had survived the inter-war years as political prisoners or else in Moscow exile, or both. But just below them was a cohort of very young men and women whose idealistic commitment to the Soviet-backed takeovers played an important part in their success. In Hungary, Géza Losonczy, who would fall victim to the Soviet repression after the 1956 Hungarian revolt, was still in his twenties when he and hundreds like him schemed to bring the Hungarian Communist Party to power. Heda Kovaly’s husband, Rudolf Margolius, one of the defendants at the Slánský trial in December 1952, was 35 when he was appointed minister in the Communist government of Czechoslovakia; Artur London, another of the accused at that trial, was younger still, 33 years old when the Communists seized power. London had received his political education in the French resistance; like many in the Communist underground, he learned how to exercise political and military responsibilities at a very young age.
Youthful enthusiasm for a Communist future was widespread among middle-class intellectuals, in East and West alike. And it was accompanied by a distinctive complex of inferiority towards the proletariat, the blue-collar working class. In the immediate post-war years, skilled manual workers were at a premium—a marked contrast with the Depression years still fresh in collective memory. There was coal to be mined; roads, railways, buildings, power lines to be rebuilt or replaced; tools to be manufactured and then applied to the manufacture of other goods. For all these jobs there was a shortage of trained labor; as we have seen, young, able-bodied men in the Displaced Persons camps had little difficulty finding work and asylum, in contrast to women with families—or ‘intellectuals’ of any sort.
One consequence of this was the universal exaltation of industrial work and workers—a distinct political asset for parties claiming to represent them. Left-leaning, educated, middle-class men and women embarrassed by their social origin could assuage their discomfort by abandoning themselves to Communism. But even if they didn’t go so far as to join the Party, many artists and writers in France and Italy especially ‘prostrated themselves before the proletariat’ (Arthur Koestler) and elevated the ‘revolutionary working class’ (typically imagined in a rather Socialist-Realist/Fascist light as stern, male and muscular) to near iconic status.