ABSTRACT

The 1960s began as a period of rising expectations and relative optimism in Eastern Europe. At the start of the decade the ruling parties and many of their political opponents seemed to share the belief that it would be possible to work towards a modus vivendi. This feeling was reinforced by the optimistic assumption that (other than in recessionstricken Czechoslovakia) rapid economic development would allow the East European economies simply to grow their way out of political, social and economic difficulties. It appeared that the harsh austerity, privation, terror and coercion of the 1940s and 1950s had gone for good, allowing East Europeans to reap the fruits of an expanded infrastructural and industrial base, albeit one that had been constructed at exorbitant social and economic cost. It was now hoped that, with appropriate streamlining or reform, the centrally planned economies could be made more efficient and responsive. At the same time the rapidly increasing Soviet output of oil, coal, natural gas, iron ore and electric power enabled the Soviet Union to satisfy a growing proportion of the rapidly expanding energy and raw material requirements of Eastern Europe’s increasingly mineral-intensive industries. In effect, the Soviet Union became willing to underwrite and prop up the expansion of these relatively fragile, mineral-deficient and internationally uncompetitive economies (and thus bind them more closely to itself) by forgoing payment in hard currency for its ‘hard’ commodity exports and by providing markets for Eastern European manufactured exports, many of which were of poor quality and/or design and could not easily have been sold elsewhere. In addition, in an endeavour to make the new economic systems less rigid and more palatable, the Soviet regime allowed the East European states greater leeway to chart their own courses towards ‘socialism’ and to humour and conciliate their citizens, although Moscow still laid down the overall political and economic parameters and insisted upon unswerving adherence to the Warsaw Pact and the so-called ‘leading role’ of the communist parties. Officially, ‘national roads to socialism’ were deemed necessary and permissible, but Western-style political pluralism was not. On the whole, however, the increased room for manoeuvre granted to the East European regimes enhanced public confidence in their capacity to deliver advances in social and economic welfare. So-called ‘national communism’ was also an attempt to cultivate specifically ‘national’ support and allegiances in order to remedy the general lack of legitimacy of several (some would say all) of the communist regimes, especially those that owed their existence mainly to Soviet political or military intervention and hegemony in Eastern Europe.