Category Archives: USSR

by | 3 May 2025 · 10:21 am

1950: Ho, Stalin, and Mao

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 295-301:

BY THE START OF 1950, THEN, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL NATION seemed poised to throw her full support behind the French war effort. No official action, however, had yet been taken, and there matters might have rested for some time but for dramatic news out of the east: On January 18, the People’s Republic of China extended formal recognition to Ho Chi Minh’s government, and on January 30 the Soviet Union did likewise. In the weeks thereafter, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites followed suit, as did North Korea. Viet Minh diplomacy, so dismally unsuccessful for so long, had scored a colossal victory (if one with a hefty price tag, as we shall see), one that Ho desperately needed even as he also feared its implications. His efforts had centered initially on the Soviet Union. But he had a tricky path to walk, given his determination (strongly held through much of 1949) to avoid spurring the Americans into full and open support of France and her counterrevolutionary Bao Dai–led state. In 1948, the ICP reminded party functionaries to refrain from criticizing Washington in their pronouncements and to adopt a neutral line:

…

Such a posture was unlikely to score points with a Soviet leadership already questioning Ho Chi Minh’s socialist bona fides. Nor was this declaration exceptional for the period—in his interviews in 1945–50, when asked about the broader international situation and the growing rift between East and West, Ho always took care to strike a neutral pose. Even as party leaders took great satisfaction in the successes of Mao’s Communist forces to the north, therefore, they rejoiced quietly; even as they sought to win recognition as well as assistance from Moscow, they also continued to meet with American diplomats in Bangkok, among them Lieutenant William H. Hunter, an assistant naval attaché who had traveled widely in Indochina and knew players on both sides personally. Stalin, at odds with independent-minded Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito since 1948, couldn’t abide Communists who showed anything less than complete fidelity to the Kremlin line.

When French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez tried to convince Stalin that he could trust Ho’s commitment to the cause, Stalin demurred. Ho had collaborated too much with the Americans in World War II, he replied, and failed to solicit advice from the Kremlin before making key decisions. Case in point: Ho’s decision to dissolve the ICP in 1945. Thorez tried to say that the dissolution had been merely tactical, but the Soviet dictator would not hear it. A Soviet Foreign Ministry memo dated January 14, 1950, spoke of “ambiguity” in Ho Chi Minh’s interviews. “Speaking about the Vietnam government’s attitude towards the U.S., Ho Chi Minh evades the issue of U.S. expansionist policy towards Vietnam.… Until now Ho Chi Minh abstained from the assessment of [the] Imperialist nature of the North Atlantic Pact and of the U.S. attempt to establish a Pacific bloc as a branch of this pact.”

And yet before that month was out, the USSR had taken the important step of extending diplomatic recognition to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Why? In large part because Stalin felt compelled to follow Mao’s lead. And for the Chinese, the decision was, by all accounts, a relatively easy one. Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to southern China to attack Guomindang units in collaboration with local CCP troops. To senior CCP leaders, never as bothered as Stalin had been by Ho’s dissolution of the party in 1945, it was a welcome sign of the Viet Minh’s internationalist commitment.

In mid-1949, as the Chinese Communists publicly proclaimed their determination to “lean to one side” in the Cold War and their rejection of Titoism, Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s second in command, traveled to Moscow for secret meetings with Kremlin leaders, including Stalin. A key item of discussion was the Vietnamese revolution and how to respond to it. Stalin, showing again his lack of interest in Southeast Asia, expressed his desire to see the CCP take primary responsibility for providing support for the Viet Minh. Liu Shaoqi agreed, and he promised a skeptical Stalin that Ho Chi Minh was a true internationalist at heart. Mao Zedong offered the same assurance when he held talks with Stalin in Moscow on Christmas Eve. That same day Liu Shaoqi, now back in Beijing, chaired a Politburo meeting to discuss Indochina policy. Any decision to assist the Viet Minh would exact a price, he told his colleagues, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing opt to recognize the DRV. Nevertheless the Politburo decided to invite a Viet Minh delegation to the Chinese capital for consultations, and to send a senior commander of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Guibo, to Vietnam as the CCP’s general representative.

The following week Ho Chi Minh set out on foot for the Chinese frontier, dressed in his now-familiar khaki suit. He traveled under the name Ding. For seventeen days he walked, arriving at Guangxi on about January 20, 1950. On January 30, he arrived in Beijing. Mao was still in Moscow, but Liu Shaoqi assured Ho that major assistance would be forthcoming, including diplomatic recognition.

From Beijing, Ho continued on to Moscow, arriving in the Soviet capital by train on February 10. Mao was still there, having himself gotten his fill of both the bitterly cold Russian winter and Stalin’s vast reservoir of distrust. The Kremlin leader had long thought Mao unreliable, an ersatz Communist whose motives were always to be questioned. As early as 1940, Stalin had complained that the CCP was largely a peasant organization that gave far too little role to the working class. He referred to Mao as that “cave-dweller-like Marxist,” whose ideas were primitive and who—like Ho Chi Minh—was probably, underneath it all, much more nationalist than internationalist. It mattered not that the CCP had supported Moscow in excluding Tito from the Cominform in 1948; Stalin still considered Mao and Ho both to be closet Titos. “He mistrusted us,” Mao later complained, speaking of Stalin’s view of the CCP. “He thought our revolution was a fake.”

Of course, Stalin’s own nationalism had something to do with his stance, as did his security priorities emerging out of World War II. For much of the Chinese civil war he adhered to a neutral position, calculating that a divided China served the USSR’s interests. As late as the beginning of 1949, he had urged Mao not to send his forces across the Yangtze but to be content with holding the northern half of the country. This was prudent, he said, to avoid provoking the United States. But as Communist troops continued to advance and victory became assured, Stalin shifted his rhetoric. He now praised Mao as a “true Marxist leader” and during Mao’s visit agreed—though only after a delay of several weeks, during which the Chinese leader was left to seethe, half prisoner, half pampered guest, in Stalin’s personal dacha—to rescind the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty that Stalin had concluded with Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a new one with the PRC.

At Mao’s urging, Stalin agreed to meet with Ho Chi Minh. Still focused on European concerns and still distrustful of Ho, the Soviet leader affirmed his government’s recognition of the DRV but ruled out direct Soviet involvement in the war against the French. “There must be a division of labor between China and the Soviet Union,” Stalin said. As his government had to meet its commitments in Eastern Europe, it would be up to China to give Vietnam what she needed. “China won’t lose in this deal,” the Soviet leader added, “because even if it provides Vietnam with second-hand articles, it will be given new ones by the Soviet Union.” Ho Chi Minh pressed the issue, urging Stalin to sign the same treaty of alliance with the DRV that he had just signed publicly with Mao. Impossible, came the reply; Ho, after all, was in Moscow on a secret mission. Ho responded—perhaps in jest—that he could be flown around Moscow in a helicopter and then land with suitable publicity, to which Stalin replied: “Oh, you orientals. You have such rich imaginations.”

It was hardly the reception Ho had hoped for, but Mao promised him (both there and in Beijing, to which the two leaders returned on March 3) that the PRC would do her best “to offer all the military assistance Vietnam needed in its struggle against France.” He soon set about making good on his word. For Mao, the Vietnamese struggle represented an opportunity to promote the Chinese model for revolution and also served his country’s national security interests. Like so many Chinese rulers before him, he sought to keep neighboring areas from being in hostile hands, and he worried in particular that the United States might become more involved—whether in Indochina, in the Taiwan strait, or in the increasingly tense Korean peninsula.

Personal ties between Ho and senior Chinese Communists may have made a difference too. Already in the early 1920s, while in Paris, Ho had met CCP leaders such as Zhou Enlai, Wang Ruofi, and Li Fuchun; later, it will be recalled, he spent time in Canton (Guangzhou) assisting Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern representative to the new Chinese revolutionary government led by the Nationalist Party. In Canton he had also engaged in various anticolonial activities, including teaching a political training class for Vietnamese youth. Among the guest speakers he invited in: Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Fluent in Chinese, Ho later translated Mao’s study “On Protracted War” from Chinese into French.

Now, a quarter of a century later, Ho could board the train for the trip home secure in the knowledge that he had Chinese backing for his cause. But he also must have had feelings of ambivalence as he looked out the window of his train car, contemplating what lay ahead. The Sino-Soviet recognition of his government, however necessary, was certain to alienate a lot of Vietnamese moderates, after all, and limit Vietnam’s room for maneuver with respect to non-Communist Asia. It also would isolate the DRV from the United States, Britain, and Japan and drastically increase the danger of a major American intervention on the side of Bao Dai and the French. A certain degree of independence had been lost. At various points in 1949, Ho had denied publicly that his government was about to identify itself with either the CCP or Stalin’s Russia. In a radio interview with American journalist Harold Isaacs, for example, he ridiculed the notion of the Viet Minh falling under Soviet or Chinese domination and vowed that independence would come through the DRV’s own efforts. For that matter, could the Chinese Communists really be trusted? Notwithstanding the toasts and vows of eternal friendship in Beijing, mutual suspicions remained, including on Ho’s part.

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Filed under China, France, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, Vietnam

by | 1 May 2025 · 9:12 am

1949: Vietnam War Goes International

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 290-293:

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.

Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”

There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

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Filed under Burma, China, democracy, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, military, nationalism, Philippines, Taiwan, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by | 24 April 2025 · 5:36 am

Vietnamese Uprising of 1930

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 42-43:

The Moscow interlude must have been a heady time for Ho, as he communed with what he called “the great Socialist family.” No longer did he have to fear that the French police were watching his every move, ready to arrest him and charge him with treason. He was seen in Red Square in the company of senior Soviet leaders Gregory Zinoviev and Kliment Voroshilov and became known as a specialist on colonial affairs and also on Asia. In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina. To that end, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity—virtues that, as biographer William J. Duiker notes, had more to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism.

In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.

Initially, the ICP was but one of a plethora of entities within the Vietnamese nationalist movement. The more Francophile reformist groups advocated nonviolent reformism and were centered in Cochin China. Most sought to change colonial policy without alienating France and vowed to keep Vietnam firmly within the French Union. Of greater lasting significance, however, were more revolutionary approaches, especially in Annam and Tonkin. In the cities of Hanoi and Hue, and in provincial and district capitals scattered throughout Vietnam, anticolonial elements began to form clandestine political organizations dedicated to the eviction of the French and the restoration of national independence. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party—or VNQDD, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang—was the most important of these groups, and by 1929 it had some fifteen hundred members, most of them organized into small groups in the Red River Delta in Tonkin. Formed on the model of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the VNQDD saw armed revolution as the lone means of gaining freedom for Vietnam, and in early 1930, it tried to foment a general uprising by Vietnamese serving in the French Army. On February 9, Vietnamese infantrymen massacred their French officers in Yen Bai. The French swiftly crushed the revolt, and the VNQDD’s leaders were executed, were jailed, or fled to China. The party ceased to be a threat to colonial control.

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Filed under France, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Thailand, USSR, Vietnam

by | 16 February 2025 · 6:21 am

Comparing 1989 With 1848

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 738-740:

People speak of the revolutions of 1989, but the process of transformation preceded that year and extended far beyond it, to our present time. The earliest revolutionary event occurred in August 1980, when Poles launched a 10-million-strong protest movement that authorities outlawed but never crushed. When strikes broke out in Poland toward the end of the decade, reform Communists called on Solidarity’s leaders to negotiate the “solution” of (partly) free elections. The resonance of that event traveled beyond Poland, however, because the trade union’s continued strength showed people across the Soviet Bloc that state socialism was in need of repairs that went beyond and indeed contradicted Leninism.

That is one strand of the story: how some East Europeans showed others the character of their common predicament and how to escape it. Another strand was within the Communist parties themselves, when liberals—most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev but also Hungarian and Polish socialists—discussed and prepared for change, for example, through reforms of legal codes. Without Gorbachev, the Communist system could have continued, and perhaps transformed into something different. Reformers were absent in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which is why the events of 1989 appeared more explosive (and revolutionary) in these places than in Hungary and Poland. One author described the transition in Hungary as a “negotiated revolution.”

The “structural” argument that favored Gorbachev’s reform program was economic; all the East European states registered deepening debt and thus growing dependence on banks, with no end in sight. In the 1980s, Poland was struggling simply to pay interest on its debt. The one state that opposed the reliance on Western credit, Romania, which decided in 1982 to pay all foreign debt, maneuvered itself into a position that was reminiscent of Russia in 1917: the question was not whether there would be an explosion but when. The chain-reaction character of the revolutions of 1989 ensured that when the explosion ignited in Timișoara, the subsequent denouement took place within a “discourse” of democracy, though in fact only Communists had changed places with each other. An actual transition to democratic rule had to wait until later in the following decade.

Thus, when writing about chain reactions, or “avalanches” of revolution that crossed borders in 1988 and 1989, from small to huge (more like icebergs falling into the sea than a collapse of part of a glacier), historians do well to keep in mind that no one knew about the extent of change at the time. Perhaps that is because actors—the Polish dissidents and the Hungarian socialist reformers—could not discern what we now see clearly: the international dimensions of the phenomenon. The first people to make out the larger dynamic were the Czechs. After the East German trains left in early October, and the Berlin Wall fell in early November, Prague, with foreign camera crews on the scene, itself became the set for revolution, a very sudden one, where the major questions were posed and seemed to be answered in a week and a half.

There is a third level to the transnational agitation and ferment: the role of the West in the East, beginning with the work of US consular officials promoting dissenters as well as reform Communists in the 1980s, but continuing in the careful monitoring of political change in the 1990s. Next to Poland, Hungary was the front-runner. The émigré philanthropist George Soros had legally moved his Open Society Foundation to Hungary in the early 1980s, cooperating with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and offered technical equipment (such as copiers), stipends, and contacts with Western civil society organizations. Even before Communism’s collapse, Hungary was thus “networked” with pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The later fall of authoritarian leaders in Slovakia and Bulgaria would be directly tied to the work of NGOs active in those countries, as well as officials of the European Union.

The region’s response to a growing debt crisis, and the pressures of Western creditors, also had echoes of a deeper past. The last time peoples had mobilized en masse for freedom across Europe’s borders was the spring of 1848. That crisis had been preceded by a European-wide series of bad harvests, economic downturn, democratic agitation, and thus a political and intellectual ferment that went across the map. Events in France gave a signal that an opportunity had come for common aspirations to be fulfilled; and as soon as word could travel to Naples, Mannheim, or Bucharest, students, workers, and other urban revolutionaries responded. The enthusiasm was relatively short lived, as the old regime in fact was not vanquished but began reasserting itself from the summer of 1848 in northern Italy and Prague, and the revolution was crushed during the following year.

If 1848 was an attempt of urban classes to throw off the shackles of feudalism, 1989 was the effort of entire societies to shake off a modernization that came to seem counterproductive and inappropriate; from the late 1970s, the region was falling behind economically, as we know now inexorably, and outside of East Germany and the Soviet Union, even the party bureaucracy had long since abandoned commitment based on belief.

The year 1989 seemed to offer a similar script to 1848 but had a happier outcome. There was also a parallel to the Habsburg dilemma of a decade later, of the early 1860s, when perennial financial woes had forced constitutional reform on the monarchy, so that it could satisfy lenders in London and Paris. In a similar way, Polish and Hungarian governments ascended to freedom in 1990 with the immediate challenge of putting their countries back on sound financial footings to prevent their falling out of the international system of exchange. But the hyperinflation that Poland witnessed in early 1990 was a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, beyond anything Habsburg officials could have imagined or dealt with.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, migration, nationalism, NGOs, U.S., USSR

by | 15 February 2025 · 5:57 am

Romania’s Bizarre Revolution, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 733-736:

Like its East German counterpart, the Czechoslovak regime had discovered it lacked the will and conviction to escalate beyond truncheon and tear gas to live ammunition. Remarkably, these two well-armed hardline regimes had accepted oblivion with little protest. Except for the beatings and arrests in the early Leipzig demonstrations, those that followed in East Berlin and Dresden in early October, and the “massacre” (in which no one actually died in Prague) on November 17, the neo-Stalinist dictators departed the scene peacefully if not always gracefully. The transfer of power in Czechoslovakia became known as the Velvet Revolution.

Yet a little to the south, also in former Habsburg lands, this time in Romania, an inflexible dictator was sending militia to quell protest, and the violence he unleashed cost hundreds of lives. The situation there differed from the countries to the north in the absolute separation of the nepotistic regime from society; the extraordinary sacrifices that had been demanded for years—electricity and gas were limited to a few hours a day—and the outrage that resulted, along with revulsion and active hatred. Ceaușescu sought no understanding with groups in the party, let alone beyond the party, and, in contrast to the lands farther north, virtually no opposition groups emerged in Romania’s civil society to articulate interests separate from those of the state. The dictator had regularly cleared the terrain of contenders and destroyed all loci of opposition, producing a “remarkable atomization of Romanian society, in which fear and distrust became the currency of human relations.” The regime and its supporters had no doubt that they would be held responsible for the injustice and misery when the inevitable accounting came, and they fought with corresponding desperation. By 1989 alienation was countrywide, and when demonstrations erupted in one place, they spread quickly, despite—but then because of—knowledge of the numbers of victims.

Protest flared in former Habsburg Transylvania because it had suffered not only privation but also the destruction of local Hungarian culture, including the bulldozing of villages and the deportation of their inhabitants to Eastern Romania. Anger crystalized in mid-December, when authorities scheduled the ejection of the popular Hungarian Reformed Pastor László Tőkés from the city of Timișoara. His memoirs make clear that the Reformed church’s hierarchy was colluding with the state’s plans to help erase his independent voice; Tőkés had routinely acted without bothering to get approval from his superiors, for example, in organizing inter-denominational services at his church.

On December 15, protesters who had been camping near his residence marched toward the city center, where they took control of public offices and looted the well-stocked stores reserved for the Securitate. The following day, security forces fired on the protesters, but instead of extinguishing the embers of revolution, they caused them to spread, and even more citizens of Timișoara converged on the city center. Many were Hungarian-speakers with access to informative media broadcasts from Hungary and Yugoslavia, and word of their demonstrations was carried eastward by railway workers, troops who had rotated out of the city, and the international media. On December 18, Nicolae Ceaușescu left Romania to visit some of his last supporters, the theocratic rulers of Iran. Kept apprised of the growing unrest though his embassy in Bucharest, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze said he would welcome Ceaușescu’s fall.

On returning on the afternoon of December 20, Ceaușescu declared a state of emergency in Timișoara, claiming that the demonstrators were terrorists who were serving foreign espionage agencies. He then attempted to organize mass rallies in his own favor in Bucharest. Until recently, individuals summoned by the party for mass spectacles could be counted on for abject expressions of adulation; now they demanded Ceaușescu’s resignation. On the evening of December 21, the dictator sent in security forces to disperse the crowd and hundreds were injured. The following day, the armed forces defected to the people, and Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest by helicopter. Under still unexplained circumstances, they touched down in the countryside and were apprehended, placed on trial before a military tribunal, and then executed before television cameras on Christmas Eve. But the fighting between security forces and crowds, now supported by the army, lasted until December 27, spreading to other cities. In all, 1,104 Romanians lost their lives in the revolution.

One explanation that has emerged for the haste in doing away with the rulers was concern that they might lead a counterrevolution against an emerging challenger, the “Front of National Salvation” that suddenly announced its existence over state radio on December 22, just as crowds were seizing the Communist Central Committee building and television station in Bucharest. The Front consisted not of leaders of civil society, let alone dissident groups—none existed—but of formerly high-placed Communists, some of whom had been disgraced by Ceaușescu. Prominent was the onetime apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who enjoyed support among top officials of the police and army. In his first speech, Iliescu called Ceaușescu a “man without a heart or soul or common sense, a feudal fanatic, who destroyed the country” and “perpetrated the worst crimes upon the people.”

Even in its time, this revolution seemed bizarre. Beyond the chilling spectacle of the execution of the dictator and his wife before running cameras, still dressed in heavy winter clothing and looking more like ragged senior citizens than all-powerful rulers, were the sudden change of heart of the crowd facing Ceaușescu in Bucharest; the inexplicably sudden defection of the military; and the sudden rise out of nowhere of a de facto countergovernment. Even in Timișoara, pastor Tőkés had registered an uncanny shift in mood, beyond his control or anyone else’s, perhaps the work of provocateurs from within the police. Was the revolution orchestrated by Ceaușescu’s rivals in the party? Was it in fact staged with demonstrators acting as unwitting actors in someone else’s drama? Afterward rumors spread that the secret services of the United States and the Soviet Union were informed about the activities of anti-Ceaușescu forces.

In the years since, no evidence has emerged to support claims of a wider or deeper conspiracy; what seems clear is that formerly highly placed officials wanted Ceaușescu out of the way. But they themselves were surprised and overwhelmed by the revolutionary events of those late fall days and adapted well to the events as they unfolded, posing as saviors to a deeply traumatized society. The revolution had resulted from a mix of planning and spontaneity. Opposition leaders emerged who, inspired by the example of Timișoara, had hoped to turn the Bucharest demonstration against the dictator. Their hopes proved justified. Many thousands arrived on December 21 in central Bucharest because they had been instructed to do so; they had no plans to oppose, much less topple the dictator. Yet once others, especially young people, began demanding the dictator’s fall, they joined in, suddenly and decisively, at great personal risk, propelled by years of humiliating privation.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, religion, Romania, USSR

by | 12 February 2025 · 11:13 pm

GDR Illusions in 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 704-705:

Gorbachev was not alone in admiring the apparent East German economic strength. In 1987, Western economists, looking primarily at numerical data, placed East Germany ahead of the United Kingdom in per capita income, a major index of development. As late as 1988, even sober Western newspapers were describing the GDR as a powerhouse. Its deep debt, similar to that of other countries (in per capita terms) was known but was not considered an impediment to growth and continued “success.” The times when East Germany’s economy was lame were “long past,” wrote journalist Peter Merseburger in 1987. He imagined the GDR lasting far into the unspecified future, thriving as a state that had solved the problem of unemployment and social insecurity, and he praised it for low rents, ignoring the fact that they reflected low investment in housing. The data existed to draw more sobering conclusions, but few did so. The GDR was so much wealthier than Poland that no one believed it, too, might have deep problems. Per capita East German gross national product was 40 percent higher than that of the Soviet Union.

The success of the GDR’s economy was an illusion. The state carried an unsustainable debt and tore down centuries-old buildings in world-class architectural gems (like Greifswald, Weimar, and Brandenburg), because it was too poor renovate them. The GDR could not compete even in areas where the state made its heaviest investments, like microelectronic technology, a major focus from the late 1970s. By September 1988, some 250,000 workers at seventeen Kombinate and 14 billion marks of investment had yielded the production of the GDR’s own 1-megabyte microchip, much celebrated in the party press, but already years behind the standard in the West. Toshiba had been mass-producing a 1-megabyte chip for two years at that point and was at work on a 4-megabyte chip.

The relatively high living standards were made possible by fortuitous circumstances: a strong preexisting industrial base; heavy investments in the 1950s; rational organizational reforms in the 1970s and 1980s (Kombinate); and the fact that West Germany considered the GDR a part of united Germany and gave it full access to the markets of the European Union, as well as several massive loans. Still, East Germany’s leaders felt that no reform was needed. Kurt Hager, East German ideology chief, said his land did not need Gorbachev’s plans for greater openness and restructuring. Simply because your neighbor puts up new wallpaper does not mean that you should do the same. The GDR leader Erich Honecker even mocked Gorbachev. “The young man has been making policy for only a year, and already he wants to take on more than he can chew.”

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Filed under economics, Germany, industry, philosophy, publishing, USSR

by | 11 February 2025 · 5:43 am

Collapse of Eastern Europe, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 685-686:

The East European revolutions of 1989 brought an end to complex ways of organizing and experiencing virtually everything, and even the most basic activities were suddenly new: students learned western languages instead of Russian and read books previously called “poisonous.” No one cared who went to church or what was said there. Spaces opened for entrepreneurship, and within months, advertising and small shops proliferated, transforming even villages. Newsstands featured glossy entertainment, even pornography, and restaurants served “exotic” dishes like pizza or Thai noodles. Scaffolding went up around apartment buildings unpainted for decades, while below high-powered German and Italian sedans raced over streets still paved in cobblestone. In the summers, cities emptied as populations fled for the beaches, often in the west, and the divide through Europe began to fade. I remember a mother telling her child as they changed trains at Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin two days after the Wall opened: “At school you can tell everyone that you went to a different country [ein anderes Land] this weekend.” That was an understatement. In West Berlin, the child had visited not a different country but a different world. Yet soon, downsides of the new reality also became evident: East Europeans could become unemployed. Violence, too, returned to the streets, often directed against ethnic others.

How did this radical shift occur? Television footage shows crowds filling the streets in 1989. Perhaps they were seizing power like revolutionaries of the distant past. But appearances deceived, a fact with a long tradition. “The people” did not take the reins of government in France in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, or Manila in 1986. Similarly, the crowds that formed around the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 did not break Communism. The party elite had lost its grip on power weeks earlier, and the border point opening—due to a misstatement on television about travel regulations by SED spokesman Günter Schabowski—confirmed, and hastened, a transfer of power that was already under way. Some two weeks later, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators began pouring into the streets of Czechoslovakia, but a few weeks after that, power traded hands behind closed doors. By the summer of 1990, a new elite was forming that revolutionaries never imagined, favoring neoliberalism and national exclusivism. In Romania, revolutionaries fought and died for their cause, but when the air cleared, the “victors” saw that one set of Communist leaders had traded places with another. Still, state socialism everywhere gave way to some form of pluralism.

No one had expected the old regimes to collapse, and no single act was calculated to bring about their end. In early 1989, it seemed that change would be limited to tinkering with the planned economy, still based on single-party rule. As late as February, an East German died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. The democratic opposition of 1989 had initially wanted to infuse the regimes with “greater momentum,” advocating respect for human rights, political pluralism, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly. It did not expect a transition to democracy.2 Even the seasoned revolutionaries of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, permitted to field candidates in the elections of June 1989, anticipated at first an advisory role in a liberalized Communist regime allied with the Soviet Union. East German protesters of October 1989 wanted a democratic socialism that did not exist in the West—and did not imagine their country leaving the Warsaw Pact to become part of the European Community, allied to NATO. (That happened just a year later.)

The collapse of 1989 grew out of a social and economic crisis that had been building for decades, yielding a malaise that reached deep into the Communist Party. For Communist regimes, faith was crucial. If Western modernity approximated a business model of rationality, where the state acts as caretaker of economic growth and social stability, the Eastern variant was ultimately a religion with legitimacy tied to claims about ultimate truths. State publishing houses printed pamphlets answering basic questions like: why am I alive? Yet by the 1980s, Communism had become a church where people not only forgot their prayers but also scoffed at basic teachings—finding them hypocritical, fictitious, damaging, and irrelevant. In the final years, neither functionaries nor citizens thought the party had a clear right to rule, because any such right was vested in a vision of history that few continued to accept. In the late 1980s, believers among the leadership were considered naïve or worse. According to an East German joke, three attributes never went together in a party functionary: belief, intelligence, and honesty. Those who were honest and intelligent did not believe; those who believed and were intelligent could not be honest. Those who believed and were honest could not be intelligent.

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by | 10 February 2025 · 6:18 am

Communist Bloc Consumerism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 652-656:

When Nikita Khrushchev made his “hare-brained” predictions of the imminent victory of Communism in 1961, he directly invited competition with the West, blithely telling delegates of the twenty-second Party Congress that their country would attain a living standard within two decades that would be higher than that of any capitalist country. Part of his optimism stemmed from the belief that the command economy’s problems lay not in planning but in the crude methods of plan calculation; in the view of party experts, the increased use of mathematical methods and computerization would generate improvements in quantity and quality of production.

But the nature of the competition depended on what was meant by “living standard.” Capitalism featured an endless array of consumer goods: dozens of types of automobiles (in new styles every year); countless varieties of cheese, or bread, or sweets, or consumer durables; fashions of clothing for every imaginable taste—as well as tastes that advertising had made imaginable. Socialism would not replicate this dazzling variety, in part because the provision of luxury goods seemed to contradict the higher proletarian morality. East German Communists called the Western race to buy goods in the latest style “consumption terror.” But once the distortions of suppressing the consumer sector disappeared, what exactly was the right balance between the frugal self-sacrificing ethos of Stalinism and the boundless decadence of capitalist culture? How much living space did socialist citizens require: would families have their own houses, or would they share communal apartments? Did socialist citizens drive cars or ride together in buses? Would they share meals at large common tables in cafeterias or occasionally dine in restaurants? What would those restaurants serve?

These questions were new if not revolutionary. The founders of state socialism had not considered the regime’s purpose to be individual consumption of goods and services; they did not disregard consumption entirely but subordinated it to the building of Communism. State socialism was a society based on productive labor. Once it had transformed the workplace and created a set of modern industries producing wealth, distribution would take care of itself. Communism would be the bounty from which all other goods would flow. But now that Communism was fading to an ever-more distant future, functionaries found themselves focusing on distribution more than ever before. Social scientists have depicted the regimes not as “Communist” but as “centers for redistribution,” and dictatorships “over needs.” Yet the functionaries who dictated needs through the state plan still wanted to know what people desired.

In Hungary, state functionaries began their research during the Stalinist period, when employees in the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Commerce had quietly surveyed the preferences of consumers, asking questions about specific goods whose quality they hoped to improve. East Germany’s Communists studied consumption from within the Ministry of Trade and Supply, but also created an Institute for the Study of Demand in 1961, renamed the Institute for the Study of the Market in 1966.

Beginning in the late 1950s, state planners throughout the bloc conceived of their populations as “shoppers,” and small specialty stores gave way to supermarkets and department stores, with expanded assortments of “nonessential” goods, not only responding to, but in a sense, provoking demand. In 1963 the Luxus department store opened in downtown Budapest. It sold goods of exceptional quality, beautifully presented—often at exorbitant prices. After years of privation, window shopping was again an urban experience, and East Europeans began to differentiate products by quality, reflecting the “growing importance of consumer choice in constituting one’s social identity.” The state provided abundant information on how and what to consume, through advertising as well as advice magazines, whether the topic was home decoration, fashion, cooking, or cars. By 1973, advertising represented 3 percent of national expenditure.

…

Thanks to the reorientation toward consumerism, socialist industries produced wealth that transformed people’s lives. The number of Czechoslovaks with automobiles rose from 19 percent in 1970 to 47 percent in 1985; with refrigerators, from 70.1 percent in 1970 to 96.7 percent in 1985; with color TVs, from 0.8 percent in 1976 to 26.8 percent in 1985.22 In Hungary, the trend was similar: television subscriptions went up twenty-fold from 1956 to 1962, car ownership multiplied by eleven times from 1960 to 1970; and from 1960 to 1980, the number of apartments went up by 50 percent. In the 1960s, Hungary’s population as a whole “enjoyed abundant, nutritious meals for the first time in history.” The rising affluence was reflected in ever higher salaries, which in turn stimulated increasing consumption. The Hungarian government boosted incomes by 20 percent after the 1956 revolution, and then 3–4 percent every year until the late 1970s. In Poland, wages increased by 41 percent between 1971 and 1975; in Czechoslovakia, they went up by almost 20 percent.

Excepting some highly rewarded experts and a few “shock workers” held up as models, Stalinism had aimed at reducing everyone to a common standard. That time of “distortion” was over, but what would follow was not clear. People were rewarded not according to need (though basic needs were guaranteed) but according to the value of what they contributed. But how would a socialist state measure value? Under capitalism, physicians might earn twenty times as much as unskilled laborers; how much higher should their salaries be under socialism? If physicians’ salaries were too low, students might not endure the years of tedium and hard work required for a medical degree. But if the income the state plan budgeted for white collar workers was high, they might come to seem a leading class in a society where class distinctions were supposedly fading.

…

Ultimately, the regimes in question opted against significant differentials in income. The Gini coefficients (statistical measures of social inequality) of state socialist societies were the lowest on earth (the Czechoslovak figure was the lowest measured anywhere). The cream of the intelligentsia and members of the upper party bureaucracy had privileged access to goods and services, but, as we shall see in greater detail, this was modest in comparison with the advantages in consumption enjoyed by Western elites. In the 1980s, physicians and engineers in the Soviet Bloc had salaries not much higher than those of skilled workers, and sometimes lower. Still, gradations emerged, more strongly in Poland with its widespread unofficial or “gray” economy. The power of society to produce and reproduce differentiations by status—if not class—was something the regime did not fully control.

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by | 9 February 2025 · 4:54 am

De-Stalinizing Czechoslovakia, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 623-625:

The Czechoslovak party leadership had a special fear of questions about Stalinism because they knew questions about that period’s crimes pointed directly to them. Antonín Novotný, Antonín Zápotocký, and Václav Kopecký all supported the purges and judicial murders of their comrades, and a few leaders had personally enriched themselves by taking things from the households of the comrades whom they had sent to the gallows. On festive occasions, some set their tables with the best silverware and linens of their murdered comrades. Yet the Czech Communist Party apparatus over which they presided was well rooted in factories and working-class neighborhoods, and it was able to draw on the deepest, most confident, and disciplined cadre reservoirs in Central Europe. It was not easily shaken.

The party had easily dealt with challenges from within Czechoslovak society. In 1956, after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, writers had demanded the lifting of censorship and freedom for authors who had been arrested. University campuses and some state ministries and party organizations were briefly transformed into hotbeds of critical discussion. The regime’s response was to focus criticism on Interior Minister Alexej Čepička for fostering a cult of personality, while resisting suggestions that former leader Klement Gottwald or anyone else was guilty of misdeeds. There was no mention of Rudolf Slánský. More importantly, within days of Khrushchev’s speech, party leaders took steps to improve people’s living standards, especially those with low incomes. The advanced Czechoslovak industrial base continued to churn out high-quality products, and so the population lived in relative affluence thanks to the sacrifices and investments made by earlier generations.

By the early 1960s, Czechoslovak industry began to wobble. Between 1949 and 1964, less than 2 percent of the value of the stock of machinery was retired, and its productivity had declined. For the first time, the Czechoslovak economy registered negative growth. Though the entire Soviet Bloc was confronted with problems of growth in the early 1960s, this was the most extreme case. Some radical rethinking was necessary. In a sense, the sluggish economy combined with impatient calls for destalinization from Moscow to send Czechoslovakia on the path toward serious and wide-ranging reform. Teams of Czech and Slovak economists led by former Mauthausen inmate Ota Šik urgently recommended taking decision making away from party bureaucrats—who calculated success in tons produced and not in terms of efficiency—and placing it in the hands of scientists, engineers, and trained managers. In line with ideas coming out of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Šik commission stipulated that decisions on production, pricing, and wages should not be handed down from an anonymous bureaucracy, comprising about 8,500 functionaries of the national party apparatus, who were out of touch with local needs. Instead, decisions should be made locally, at the plant and community levels.

They urged that market mechanisms (above all, prices) be employed, so that enterprises would gain incentives to produce things that people wanted. They would do so by retaining profit (which in the command economy went to the center), and by rewarding employees according to their contributions. Basic changes like this were meant to have far-reaching consequences, for example, creating incentives to apply modern technologies to production. They would be a way of returning Czech lands to earlier prominence. But making plants more productive would also mean letting less-productive—indeed, unneeded—workers go.

These ideas for reform represented a growing consensus among leading economists throughout the bloc, extending to the Soviet Union. The ultimate problem, everywhere, was that workers as well as large production facilities were protected from market pressures and could not be fired or closed even if radically inefficient. In the post-Stalin period, outright terror was no longer an option. But for the time being, there was optimism. In the mid-1960s, economists felt that central planning would be qualitatively improved by employment of advanced mathematical models and computerization. They thought the deeper problem lay in the crude methods used in plan calculations.

As Stalinists were edged out of the leadership, younger, more enlightened figures entered the cultural bureaucracy, some of whom felt remorse and shame for the recent period of Stalinist extremism. A harbinger of new openness was an international Franz Kafka conference in Prague in 1963 under the aegis of Eduard Goldstücker, a professor of literature and former diplomat who had been condemned to death under Stalinism but had his sentence commuted for work in uranium mines. Now he was now minister of culture. Kafka (1883–1924) had spent his short life almost entirely in the city’s center, working in a law office during the day and writing all night after a nap. His stories evoked the disorienting anonymity of modern life, and by depicting human ciphers caught in webs of inscrutable and merciless bureaucracies, his writings seemed to foretell the fate of the region. Up to this time, Kafka had been a nonperson in Czech cultural life, and to discuss his work seemed to be a move toward waking up from the nightmares he had foreseen. Some of the hardline East German Communists invited to Goldstücker’s conference registered discomfort because they sensed that once unleashed, Kafka’s challenge would act like acid on the power of the state socialist bureaucracy.

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by | 14 December 2024 · 2:27 pm

Rising Nationalist Communism, 1960s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 619-621:

Romania asserted itself more boldly in the international sphere. From late 1958, its trade expanded with the West and contracted with the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Bloc’s equivalent to West Europe’s Common Market, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (or COMECON), Romania opposed the plans of its allies to make it the agricultural base for their more developed economies. In the eyes of Romania’s leaders, such a scheme would have condemned the country to backwardness; yet it also aggravated long-festering inferiority complexes among them toward other, better established Communist parties, but also toward their own population. The Six-Year Plan that commenced in 1960 provided for sharp increases in Romania’s rate of industrialization, and Marxism-Leninism became a tool for Romanian national development. In 1963 Ceaușescu accompanied Foreign Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer on a trip to China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, meeting with Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Khrushchev.

Ceaușescu became the party leader after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death in 1965 and built his popularity on defiance of Moscow. Neither legitimation through Marxian utopianism nor recourse to crude violence was enough to stabilize rule in an intensely anticommunist population, and Ceaușescu evolved into a nationalist extremist, whose personal power increased as did his personal identification with the nation. Romania was surrounded by hostile countries, Ceaușescu claimed, and he was the only force that could protect the people. A younger generation joined him in the Romanian Communist Party leadership, and together they promoted a collective identity based on cults of Romanian historical heroes as well as anti-Russian and anti-Semitic insinuations. They eschewed violent strategies of maintaining power. In the post-Stalinist period, these were not only inappropriate, they were no longer necessary. Earlier mass repression had smashed hostile social groups.

Marxism-Leninism tinged with nationalism thus permitted Romania’s Communists to develop a sense of their political legitimacy for the first time in their history, and also to make appeals to the population and tap “dormant social energies,” among workers and among intellectuals. While firming his grip on power, Ceaușescu permitted the publication of works of previously forbidden authors and fostered collusion with intellectuals that was not entirely new but was greatly intensified. The turn against the Soviet Union was a rupture with previous practice, however, and endeared Ceaușescu to the West. The French leader Charles De Gaulle visited Romania in May 1968, just as workers and students were testing his own regime. He found much to admire in a country that maintained independence against the superpowers and seemed so orderly. “For you such a regime is useful because it gets people moving and gets things done,” he told the Romanian dictator. In 1969, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Romania, and nine years later, Ceaușescu touched down in Washington, DC, as neither the first nor last repressive dictator to be accorded full state honors. What seems unusual in retrospect is that Jimmy Carter would celebrate Ceaușescu as a champion of human rights.

Such was the topsy-turvy world of East Central Europe after Stalin, where strategies of national legitimation brought Hungary toward economic reform but took Poland to the center of a very old and toxic nationalism, on a backdrop of slow economic disintegration. Bulgaria as well as Romania retained important facets of Stalinist control under strong party leaders and pervasive security apparatuses, yet one was inseparable in foreign policy from the Soviet Union, while the other treated Moscow almost as a hostile power. East Germany behind the Berlin Wall was modeling itself as Moscow’s most loyal student, but also building pride as the strongest economy in the East Bloc, pride that would evolve into a kind of minor nationalism, “socialist in the colors of the GDR,” black, red, and gold. In 1962 the Soviet Union would force Czechoslovakia to destalinize, and after that, this country also went on its own path, toward something called “socialism with a human face,” which, as it turned out, was initially a detour back to the 1930s, connecting with native traditions of democracy and Masaryk’s idea that truth will prevail.

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