ABSTRACT
From 1969 until 1980, there was an illusion of stability in East Central Europe. This was the era in which Honecker, Gierek, Husak, Kádár, Ceauşescu, Zhivkov, Tito, and Hoxha seemed secure in their respective political saddles. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring had been crushed by Soviet tanks in August 1968 and, with it, hopes for change evaporated across the region – for the time being. From the standpoint of consumer commodities, Tito's Yugoslavia looked like the most successful country in the regìm but, even here, commodities on sale, such as televisions and clothing, were markedly inferior to what could be found in Paris, London, and Rome, among other cities in Western Europe or in New York and Los Angeles, for that matter. There was a certain drabness in the communist world, marked, for example, by the absence in East Berlin of any restaurants offering anything aside from the cuisines of fellow communist countries and, even here, Cuban cuisine was not available. Women were told that they were liberated, but the maternity leave, facilities for institutionalized childcare, abortion on demand (though not in Romania), and guarantees of equal pay for equal work were not intended to enhance the status, let alone equality, of women, but to maximize their participation in the work force; and, where equal pay for equal work was concerned, that principle was undermined by women's lack of access, in many cases, to equal work, with the presence of overqualified women in jobs requiring lesser skills being common. Communism was a drab experience, not just in terms of gray, colorless cities, but also in intellectual life, where creativity was, at best, tolerated, often punished, and rewards handed out for those who would produce the drab, pro-regime pablum demanded by the authorities. The system was sustainable in the short run, but not in the long term because its dysfunctions eroded the supports on which the system depended. Among these dysfunctions, one may mention the huge economic debts incurred by the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and Romanian dictator Ceauşescu's determination to pay off the Romanian debt by exporting most of what could be exported, reducing electricity to just 3 hours a day, and adopting a policy once called “squeezing the peasant.” Other dysfunctions included the ritualistic meetings of various state bodies as well as of the self-managing workers’ councils in Yugoslavia, which devoured endless hours without having much impact; the misguided effort to either channel or suppress religion, giving rise to discontent not far below the surface; the general suppression of creative talent (what counted was obedience); and the subordination of the bloc states (all of the above except for Yugoslavia and Albania) to the Soviet Union, even in matters that, on the face of it, would not seem terribly dramatic.
