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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by | 13 February 2025 · 9:26 pm

Nonviolent Protest in Plauen, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 726-729:

Citizens of Leipzig also knew that in East Berlin and Dresden, small groups had taken to the streets two days earlier on the national holiday of the state’s founding; they had been beaten brutally. The exception to violence on that October 7 was Plauen, a manufacturing town on the border to Bavaria, where some 15,000 had marched for reforms and dispersed peacefully, thanks to the intervention of that city’s Protestant Superintendent. Like many citizens of southern East Germany, Plaueners had suffered poor air quality and provisioning, and they were still electrified, recalling the fourteen trainloads of fellow East German refugees from Prague that had rushed through their town on September 30, southward to freedom. But the October 7 demonstration in Plauen, the largest to that date in East Germany, would not have happened but for the act of one young man, the toolmaker Jörg Schneider. The previous week, he had distributed dozens of leaflets around town calling townspeople to a demonstration for reforms and basic rights. As a result, thousands descended on central Plauen that rainy Saturday afternoon. Authorities did nothing to stop them, because they too had called on citizens to come into town that day: for a celebration of the state’s founding. The crowds had no leader, but they morphed into a demonstration when police pummeled a man who had unfurled a banner reading simply “we want reforms!” The huge crowd then marched around the city center and finally gathered at Plauen’s city hall, the seat of power, where local party officials were sequestered, not knowing what to expect. Guarding them were police armed with enough ammunition to frustrate any attempt to storm the building.

Fortunately, the superintendent, Thomas Küttler, a man of peace, went through the cordon, spoke with the party secretary, a man he knew well, and elicited a pledge to receive a citizens’ delegation in the coming days. He assured the crowd over a megaphone that their demands had been heard, and it dispersed peacefully. Within a few weeks, Plauen had its own round table, as did virtually every East German town.

But before that point was reached, the regime had to be openly tested in its will to use violence to maintain power, and that test occurred on Monday, October 9 in Leipzig. For reasons that are still debated, the regime backed down and let the largest demonstration to date—an estimated 70,000 people—take place without incident. Honecker’s heir apparent, the “youth functionary” Egon Krenz (a man famous for a big smile), later took credit, but actually decisive were three other factors: an impromptu intervention of six prominent local figures, including the SED first party secretary as well as Maestro Kurt Masur, who drafted and read a call for peace on the radio; the fact that no commander in the huge assemblage of well-armed troops and police (with ambulances at the ready) was ready to take responsibility for a bloody showdown; and the fact that the demonstration started as a peace prayer. The October 9 demonstration commenced with thousands of East Germans departing a church holding lit candles as a sign of their commitment to nonviolence.

Thanks to cameras that Roland Jahn had smuggled into the GDR, audiences in the East and West could watch on television the tens of thousands who joined them the next day. They had chanted the authorless words, “We are the people!,” a phrase more daring and challenging than it sounds. For decades, authorities had claimed—in posters and other propaganda draped all over the country—to represent the people. For example, their social policies were “all for the good of the people!” Here on the streets of Leipzig, the people were in fact speaking, revealing the regime’s claim as a lie. You are not the people—we are.

Without the example of a Soviet leader who sanctioned thoughts of radical change, and circumstances that desperately needed change, the demonstrations in Plauen or Leipzig would not have happened. But they also would not have happened without the courage of thousands of anonymous citizens who wanted change and believed that it would come that day or never. They marched and chanted, knowing that the police and militia might fire. After this point, the police and military seemed defanged, their ability to intimidate broken, the regime’s claim to incorporate the will of a “socialist community of human beings” an obvious fiction. Within a week, more than 300,000 came for the Monday demonstration in Leipzig, and they were joined by hundreds of thousands in towns across the GDR, men, women, and children, hands often raised as a sign of peace. A little more than a week later, the leadership of mostly eighty-year-olds submitted its resignation.

In their banners and chants, the demonstrators used an eloquent German word to tell what they had come to detest in the state socialist welfare state: having been treated like children. But they were “mündig,” adults (literally, “people with mouths,” that is, voices). One banner mocked Honecker’s successor Egon Krenz, the man of the irrepressible grin, placing him in a crib above the inscription: “What big teeth you have, Grandma.”

Four of my classmates in advanced Romanian language classes at the University of Bucharest in 1983-84 were German girls from Leipzig University. They were adding Romanian to their translator/interpreter skills repertoire; they already knew Russian. Two of them seemed strict party-liners but the other two seemed more open to exploring new ideas and I ran into one of them (a fellow redhead) at a West German embassy art exhibit in Bucharest. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone. Of course, I kept silent about it. I ran into the redhead again just before leaving Romania when I went to their dorms to give away my shortwave radio/cassette recorder to one of the two Chinese classmates who became a friend. (They worked for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service.) The daring redhead insisted on giving her capitalist classmate a good-bye kiss. I’ve lost track of my German classmates’ names but wonder what happened to them in 1989 and where they ended up.

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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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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 | 7 February 2025 · 6:24 am

Indian Slavery in California

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 248-250:

Foreign visitors who ventured out of Don Guadalupe’s home and onto his nearby Rancho Petaluma were able to gain a great deal more insight. At its peak in the early 1840s, this 66,000-acre ranch was tended by seven hundred workers. An entire encampment of Indians, “badly clothed” and “pretty nearly in a state of nature,” lived in and around the property and did all the work. As Salvador Vallejo recalled, “They tilled our soil, pastured our cattle, sheared our sheep, cut our lumber, built our houses, paddled our boats, made tiles for our houses, ground our grain, killed our cattle, dressed their hides for the market, and made our unburned bricks; while the women made excellent servants, took good care of our children and made every one of our meals.” The Vallejos were quick to paint a picture of benevolent patriarchy. “Those people we considered as members of our families,” Salvador Vallejo remembered. “We loved them and they loved us. Our intercourse was always pleasant: the Indians knew that our superior education gave us a right to command and rule over them.”

But what seemed pleasant and natural to the Vallejos was decidedly less so to the Indians. Some workers at Rancho Petaluma were former mission Indians. As administrator of the mission of San Francisco de Solano, Don Guadalupe had ample opportunity not only to dispose of mission lands and resources (in fact, his Sonoma home, the military barracks, and the entire plaza lay on former mission lands) but also to bind ex-neophytes to his properties through indebtedness. Faced with dwindling resources and loss of land, former mission Indians had little choice but to put themselves under the protection of overlords like the Vallejos. Other Indian laborers had been captured in military campaigns north of Sonoma. As comandante (commander) of the northern California frontier, Don Guadalupe had a guard of about fifty men to keep order in the region and prevent Indians from stealing cattle. He also used his guardsmen to procure servants. He was not alone in doing so. Especially after the secularization of the missions in 1833, Mexican ranchers sent out armed expeditions to seize Indians practically every year—and as many as six times in 1837, four in 1838, and four in 1839.

Mexican ranchers pioneered the other slavery in California, but American colonists readily adapted to it. They acquired properties of their own and faced the age-old problem of finding laborers. Their options were limited. No black slaves existed in California, at least not in the open, as Mexico’s national government had abolished African slavery in 1829. Asian workers were still rare. In the early 1840s, Don Guadalupe kept four Native Hawaiians at Rancho Petaluma, as did a neighboring American rancher named John Sinclair and some others. The “coolie” (Asian) trade began after the gold discoveries of 1848 and would reach significant numbers only years later. Indian labor was the only viable option. Although the indigenous population of Alta California had been cut by half during the Spanish and Mexican periods—roughly from 300,000 to 150,000—Indians still comprised the most abundant pool of laborers. Short of working the land themselves, white owners had to rely on them.

Traces of the earliest Euro-American settlers are still visible in northern California. John Sutter was the proprietor of a large fort by the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers that is now a major tourist attraction in midtown Sacramento. George C. Yount was the first Euro-American to settle permanently in the Napa Valley; the wine-sipping town of Yountville is named after him. Pierson B. Reading was the recipient of a huge land grant that would give rise to the city of Redding. And Andrew Kelsey, a ruthless entrepreneur, built a ranching operation just south of Clear Lake that is now the town of Kelseyville. These foreigners were acquisitive, possessed good business sense, and were quick to appreciate the advantages of coerced Indian labor.

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by | 6 February 2025 · 1:59 am

Rise of Debt Peonage in Mexico

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 238-240:

The trappings of debt peonage were in place in Mexico as early as 1587, when an Indian from Michoacán recounted how some Spaniards had advanced him money “at a far higher price than it was worth and then seized my possessions and took me and my wife and children, and they have kept us locked up for twelve years, moving us from one textile factory to another.” The Indian did not know the amount he still owed or how much money he and his family had earned during their twelve years of forced servitude. But he was certain that peonage was worse than slavery because unlike the Africans with whom he toiled, he was not allowed to wander the streets freely even on Sundays. Over the centuries, debt peonage spread. As the Spanish crown abolished Indian slavery in 1542, prohibited the granting of new encomiendas in 1673, and phased out repartimientos after 1777, debt peonage gained ground.

After Mexico declared its independence from Spain, the process gained momentum. States throughout the country enacted servitude and vagrancy laws. The state of Yucatán, for example, regulated the movement of servants through a certificate system. No servant could abandon his master without having fulfilled the terms of his contract and could not be hired by another employer without first presenting a certificate showing that he owed “absolutely nothing” to his previous employer. In Chiapas the state legislature introduced a servitude code in 1827 allowing owners to retain their workers by force if necessary until they had fulfilled the terms of their contracts. Lashes, lockdowns, and shackles were commonly used. The same was true in Coahuila. In 1851 the state legislature there allowed owners to flog their peons. Interestingly, the governor opposed the measure because it would affect more than one-third of all the people of Coahuila, according to his calculations. Peonage in neighboring Nuevo León may have been just as common and was especially galling because it was customary to transfer debts from fathers to sons, thus perpetuating a system of inherited bondage. In these ways, servitude for the liquidation of debts spread all over Mexico. Although Mexico’s faltering economy kept the demand for workers in check in the early decades after independence, once economic growth resumed later in the century, employers went to great lengths to procure and retain coerced laborers.

A muckraking American journalist named John Kenneth Turner had unique access to this expanding world of servitude and provided the most detailed portrait of its workings. Posing as a millionaire investor, Turner traveled to Yucatán in 1908. He made his way to Mérida, a town that boasted extravagant mansions and was surrounded by about 150 henequen haciendas. The planters there received the American warmly. These “little Rockefellers,” as Turner called them, had grown rich by selling rope and twine made from the henequen plant. In the early years of the century, Yucatán’s total exports of henequen had reached nearly 250 million pounds a year. But a panic in 1907 had cut severely into their profits, “so they needed ready cash, and they were willing to take it from anyone who came,” Turner explained. “Hence my imaginary money was the open sesame to their club, and to their farms.”

Turner’s disguise as a prospective investor also allowed him to ask freely about how workers were hired. “Slavery is against the law; we do not call it slavery,” the planters told him again and again. They generally referred to the Mayas, Yaquis, and even Koreans working at their haciendas as “people” or “laborers,” never as slaves. The “henequen kings” were quite forthcoming about how debt served as a tool of coercion. “We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider they are in debt to us,” the president of the Agricultural Chamber of Yucatán told Turner. “And we do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt.” In spite of this verbal obfuscation, the fact was that an Indian worker could be acquired for $400 (400 pesos) in Yucatán. “If you buy now, you buy at a very good time,” Turner was told. “The panic has put the price down. One year ago the price of each man was $1,000.” Obviously, the reason the going rate was uniform was not that all peons were equally in debt, but that there was a market for them irrespective of their debt. “We don’t keep much account of the debt,” clarified one planter, “because it doesn’t matter after you’ve got possession of the man.” After paying the price, Turner was told, he would get the worker along with a photograph and identification papers. “And if your man runs away,” another planter added reassuringly, “the papers are all the authorities require for you to get him back again.”

Turner asked candidly about how to treat his workers. “It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary,” opined Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Agricultural Chamber, “for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing.” The American journalist witnessed a formal beating, with all the workers assembled, during one of his hacienda visits. The young man received fifteen lashes across his back with a heavy, wet rope. All henequen plantations had capataces, or foremen, who carried canes to prod and whack the Indians. Turner wrote, “I do not remember visiting a single field in which I did not see some of this punching and prodding and whacking going on.”

Slavery in Mexico in the twentieth century? “Yes, I found it,” wrote Turner in his extraordinary exposé, published on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. “I found it first in Yucatan.” According to him, the slave population of Yucatán consisted of 8,000 Yaqui Indians forcibly transported from Sonora; 3,000 Koreans, who had departed from the port of Inchon and were on four- or five-year labor contracts; and between 100,000 and 125,000 Mayas, “who formerly owned the lands that the henequen kings now own.” Turner estimated that in all of Mexico, there may have been 750,000 slaves, a figure that is almost certainly exaggerated but that underscores the expansion of the other slavery during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

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by | 5 February 2025 · 5:49 am

Comanches in Mexico, early 1800s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 219-222:

The Comanche expansion into Mexico started suddenly and coincided with the initial turmoil of independence. Few testimonies are as eloquent as that of landowner and politician Miguel Ramos Arizpe, who had grown up in the state of Coahuila (just south of Texas) during the halcyon days of the Spanish silver boom. A line of presidios running along the Rio Grande had afforded his home state a measure of security that had made it wealthier and better populated than Texas. Though not impassable, these garrisons presented a real obstacle to Indian raiding. As Ramos Arizpe explained, “The various tribes of the Comanchería lived in the enormous plains and sierras between Texas and New Mexico north of the line of presidios . . . and they knew very well that the principal access into the interior provinces of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas was closed off to them.”

…

Yet the struggle for independence opened the floodgates. “We observed that the heathen Indians who during entire centuries had taken just a handful of children as captives,” Ramos Arizpe recounted, “in the short years between 1816 and 1821 took more than two thousand captives of all kinds, genders, and ages, and killed as many people or more in Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas.” He was personally affected by the upsurge in Comanche activity. Ramos Arizpe owned eight hundred square leagues (more than four million acres) of well-irrigated land on the Rio Grande. But he could neither protect nor develop his vast domain because it lay in the path of Comanche expansion. His property included the ruins of the old presidio of Agua Verde, a poignant reminder of Mexico’s military retreat.

The Comanches would go on to wage a ruinous war in northern Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s, as historian Brian DeLay has shown. They mounted more than forty raids into Mexico during this period—more than two per year on average. Half of them were actually large-scale military operations involving up to a thousand warriors. Considering that the total Comanche population may have been between ten and twelve thousand, and assuming that there was one warrior for every five Comanches, a “raid” of one thousand men amounted to half the Comanche fighting force, as DeLay notes. Just as impressive was their geographic scope. They came to engulf much of Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila, and Nuevo León, as well as half of Tamaulipas, reaching as far south as Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro, not far from Mexico City.

These raiding campaigns were not intended solely or even primarily to take captives. Later interviews with Comanches make clear that the acquisition of horses was the principal objective. Warriors competed with one another over the number of mounts they possessed and sought to procure as many horses as they could by any means. Chief Esakeep expressed great pride in his four sons because they could steal more horses than the other young men in the tribe. In fact, horses were an absolute necessity for any long-distance raid. To conduct these campaigns, Comanches needed to travel hundreds of miles. And once deep in Mexico, they needed to retreat swiftly, carrying captives and loot. Having sufficient animals and the ability to change to fresh mounts was critical.

Procuring goods was another major goal of these incursions. The Comanchería was a trading center that absorbed a variety of commodities that were consumed internally or traded to other groups. Clothes and textiles were excellent forms of plunder—lightweight, easy to transport, and always in high demand. Raiders went through the trouble of removing the clothes of their prisoners before killing them and taking shirts and pants from corpses during a raid. They also paid special attention to metal objects. Knives, lances, and firearms were obviously important. But Comanche raiders also took latches, nails, bolts, and other metal objects that could be transformed into valuable tools with a forge.

Even though taking captives was not the primary purpose of these raids, Comanches took hundreds of them in the 1830s–1850s. Each could fetch anywhere between 50 and as much as 1,000 pesos (or dollars, for in that golden era, there was parity between the two currencies). In other words, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a captive was far more valuable than a horse or a mare.

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by | 4 February 2025 · 3:48 am

Indigenous Slavers in North America

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 172-177:

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE involved in the slaving enterprise from the beginning of European colonization. At first they offered captives to the newcomers and helped them develop new networks of enslavement, serving as guides, guards, intermediaries, and local providers. But with the passage of time, as Indians acquired European weapons and horses, they increased their power and came to control an ever larger share of the traffic in slaves.

Their rising influence was evident throughout North America. In the Carolinas, for instance, English colonists took tens of thousands of Indian slaves and shipped many of them to the Caribbean. In the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it. As this traffic developed, the colonists increasingly procured their indigenous captives from the Westo Indians, an extraordinarily expansive group that conducted raids all over the region. Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has coined the term “militaristic slaving societies” to refer to groups like the Westos that became major suppliers of Native captives to Europeans and other Indians. The French in eastern Canada had a similar experience. They procured thousands of Indian slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as they moved away from Quebec and Montreal and into the Great Lakes region and upper Mississippi basin, they encountered a world of bondage they could scarcely comprehend, let alone control. Indians preyed on one another to get captives whom they offered to the French in exchange for guns and ammunition and to forge alliances. Throughout North America, Natives adapted to the sprawling slave trade and sought ways to profit from it.

…

The most dramatic instances of Indian reinvention occurred in what is now the American Southwest. Multiple factors propelled Indians of this region to become prominent traffickers. The royal antislavery activism of the Spanish crown and the legal prohibitions against Indian slavery dissuaded some Spanish slavers of northern Mexico, leaving a void that others filled. Moreover, the Indian rebellions of the seventeenth century that culminated in the Great Northern Rebellion [of the 1680s and 1690s] restricted the flow of Indian slaves from some regions and led to the opening of new slaving grounds, creating new opportunities. Most important, the diffusion of horses and firearms accelerated at this time, giving some Indians the means to enslave other people. Thus new traffickers, new victims, and new slaving routes emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some Native communities experienced a process of “deterritorialization,” as Cecilia Sheridan has called it, becoming unmoored from their traditional homelands, fusing with other groups, and reinventing themselves as mobile bands capable of operating over vast distances. They made a living by trading the spoils of war, including horses and captives.

…

Comanche captive taking introduced Apaches from the east, Navajos from the west, and Pawnees from the north into New Mexico. The Comanches’ radius of action was astonishing. In 1731 a New Mexican friar asked one of the Comanches’ captives to which nation he belonged and how far it was to his country of origin. The slave responded that he was a “Ponna” (quite possibly a Pawnee, whose traditional homeland was along the North Platte and Loup Rivers in present-day Nebraska). The Indian also said that he had traveled with his captors for “one hundred suns,” moving at a rate of about ten leagues (thirty miles) for each one. The friar estimated that in the course of a year, Comanches might travel “more than one thousand leagues [three thousand miles] from New Mexico,” a distance that may have been entirely possible, considering that Pawnee country was eight hundred miles away from northern New Mexico and that the Comanches traveled to and from these lands, making various detours along the way.

The Comanches sold their first slaves in New Mexico sometime in the first decade of the eighteenth century. By the 1720s, they had become well-established traders. And by the 1760s, they were acknowledged as the preeminent suppliers of captives in the region.

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