Recovery in the East

To create a Soviet bloc according to Stalin’s vision, Communists revived the harsh methods that had transformed peasant economies earlier in the century. In eastern Europe, Stalin not only continued to collectivize agriculture but also brought about badly needed industrialization through the nationalization of private property. The process was brutal, and people later looked back on the 1950s as dreadful. But some workers in the countryside felt that ultimately their lives and their children’s lives had improved. “Before we peasants were dirty and poor, we worked like dogs. . . . Was that a good life? No sir, it wasn’t. . . . I was a miserable sharecropper and my son is an engineer,” said one Romanian peasant. Despite modernization, government investment in agriculture was never high enough to produce the bumper crops of western Europe, and even the USSR depended on produce from the small plots that enterprising farmers cultivated on the side.

Stalin admired American industrial know-how and prodded the Communist economies to match U.S. productivity. The Soviet Union formed regional organizations like those in the West, instituting the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1949 to coordinate economic relations among the satellite countries of the USSR and Moscow. The terms of the COMECON relationship worked against the satellite states, however, for the USSR was allowed to buy goods from its clients at bargain prices and sell goods to them at exorbitant ones. Nonetheless, these formerly peasant states became oriented toward technology and industrial economies directed by bureaucrats, who touted the virtues of steel plants and modern transport. The Roman Catholic church often protested the imposition of communism, but the government crushed it as much as possible or used agents to infiltrate it.

Culture, along with technology, was a building block of Stalinism in both the USSR and its satellite countries. State-instituted programs aimed to build loyalty to the modernizing regime; thus, citizens were obliged to attend adult education classes, women’s groups, and public ceremonies. An intense program of de-Christianization and Russification forced non-Russian students in eastern Europe to read histories of the war that ignored their own country’s resistance and gave the Red Army sole credit for fighting the Nazis. Rigid censorship resulted in what even one Communist writer in the USSR characterized as “a dreary torrent of colorless, mediocre literature.” Stalin also purged prominent wartime leaders to ensure obedience and conformity. Marshal Zhukov, a popular leader of the Soviet armed forces, was shipped to a distant command, while Anna Akhmatova, a widely admired poet who championed wartime resistance to the Nazis, was confined to a crowded hospital room because she refused to glorify Stalin in her postwar poetry.

In March 1953, amid growing repression, Stalin died, and it soon became clear that the old ways would not hold. Political prisoners in the labor camps rebelled, leading to the release of more than a million people from the Gulag. In June 1953, workers in East German cities, many of them socialists and antifascist activists from before the war, protested the rise of privileged Communists in a series of strikes that spread like wildfire. At the other end of the social order, Soviet officials, despite enjoying luxury goods and plentiful food, had come to distrust Stalinism and now favored change. To calm protests across the Soviet bloc, governments stepped up the production of consumer goods—a policy called goulash communism (after the Hungarian stew) because it resulted in more food for ordinary people.

In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), an illiterate coal miner before the Bolshevik Revolution, outmaneuvered other rivals to become the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union—but he did so without the Stalinist practice of executing his opponents. Khrushchev then made the surprising move of attacking Stalin. At a party congress in 1956, he denounced the “cult of personality” Stalin had built about himself and announced that Stalinism did not equal communism. Khrushchev thus cleverly attributed problems with communism to a single individual. The “secret speech” was a bombshell. Debates broke out in public, and books appeared championing the ordinary worker against the party bureaucracy. The climate of relative tolerance for free expression after Stalin’s death was called the thaw.

In early summer 1956, discontented Polish railroad workers struck for better wages, and angry Hungarians rebelled against forced collectivization in October 1956. As in Poland, economic issues (especially announcements of reduced wages) and reports of Stalin’s crimes contributed to the outbreak of violence in Hungary. Soon targeting the entire Communist system, tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Budapest and returned a popular hero, Imre Nagy, to power. When Nagy announced that Hungary might leave the Warsaw Pact, however, Soviet troops moved in, killing tens of thousands and causing hundreds of thousands more to flee to the West. Nagy was hanged. Despite a rhetoric of democracy, the United States refused to intervene in Hungary, choosing not to risk World War III by challenging the Soviet sphere of influence.

The failure of eastern European uprisings overshadowed the significant changes that had taken place since Stalin’s death. While defeating his rivals, Khrushchev ended the Stalinist purges, reformed the courts, and curbed the secret police. “It has become more interesting to visit and see people,” Boris Pasternak said of the changes. “It has become easier to work.” In 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik, and in 1961 they put the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, in orbit around the earth. The Soviets’ edge in space technology shocked the western bloc and motivated the creation of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For Soviet citizens, such successes indicated that the USSR had achieved Stalin’s goal of modernization and might inch further toward freedom.

Khrushchev, however, was inconsistent, showing himself open to changes in Soviet culture at one moment and then bullying honest writers at another. After assaulting Pasternak because of his novel Doctor Zhivago, in 1961 he allowed the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. This chilling account of life in the Gulag was useful, however, in underscoring Stalin’s crimes and excesses. Under the thaw, Khrushchev made several trips to the West and took steps to expand communism’s appeal in the new nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Despite the USSR’s more relaxed posture, however, the superpowers moved closer to the nuclear brink.