Post-Stalin “Normalization:” A “Precarious Stalemate”

1. Post-Stalin “Normalization:” A “Precarious Stalemate” Lecture on April 20

2. Lecture Overview • General characteristics of ‘mature’ communism in Eastern Europe • Specific trajectories • Significant legacy effects? Have the decades of communist rule left a measurable imprint on post-communist political development?

3. I. General Characteristics: What changes after Stalin across the region? • The interlocking system of control, discipline and punishment breaks down as punishment is minimized: -- purges, mass deportations and imprisonment called off -- secret police is curtailed -- terror replaced by regime harassment of dissidents -- rule of law somewhat restored; greater predictability, less arbitrary abuse of the justice system * Pervasive cynicism, corruption and opportunism follow even as the communist regimes attempt to undertake persistent reform/modernization efforts. Why do post-Stalin reform efforts fail to produce more positive results?

4. Shift to ‘modernization’ Jowitt suggests that after Stalin’s death, the communist regimes attempted to move to a more conciliatory stance of ‘modernization’ i.e., “the regime’s attempt to develop more empirical and less dogmatic definitions of problems and policy, a formal, procedural approach rather than a substantive, arbitrary approach to the solution of problems, and an understanding of the executive function that stresses leadership rather than command competences.” (p.57)

5. This, in turn, required …”a rather significant redefinition of the relationship between regime and society from mutual hostility and avoidance to the regime’s selective recognition and managed acceptance of society.” In this process, however, the Party lost its sense of purpose and transformatory mission; its “combat ethos,” as Jowitt puts it. The sense of “charismatic correctness” maintained under Lenin and Stalin (albeit through terror) has been lost and political corruption increases as austere Stalinists like Rajk and sincere reform communists like Nagy and Dubcek are replaced by “traditional-type patrons and ‘big men.’” (p.127)

6. A hybrid system evolves with modern features consistently constrained by traditional characteristics This system…”recognizes methodical economic action but favors ‘heroic’ storming; values professionals but subordinates them to tribute-demanding apparatchik ‘notables’; attempts to upgrade contract as a mode of economic predictability but debilitates its institutional integrity with blat; strives for a scientific industrial economy but approaches it ‘arithmatically’; emphasizes the mass scope of its democracy but operates it secretively; asserts it has substantively freed the individual but captures him in the kollectiv.” (p. 139)

7. The result: Neo-traditionalism Like traditional peasant/noble societies, tribute, bribery and blat now constitute the principal modes of interaction between regime and society: “Money is rubbish. Power gives the right to everything. Now women come to me.” A party commissar to a worker. (p. 129) Blat typically refers to ties of reciprocity, not to impersonal, strictly accountable, exchanges of standardized value. In this respect, Soviet social organization broadly resembles primitive economies where ‘reciprocity demands adequacy of response not mathematical equality,’ and traditional peasant communities where “reciprocal favors are so dissimilar in quality that accountancy is difficult.” (p. 131)

8. The Party cadres are thereby transformed Into a “closed political status group” reinforced by the adoption of corrupt practices …“that on balance sustain the politically superior and economically privileged position of the elite cadre”…(p. 149) Potentially destabilizing this privileged group’s hold on political power are a number of key risks (p. 151): • Social anger of those excluded from the privileged access structure of Party patronage; • The political anger of ‘citizens’ who resent its very existence; • Mobility demands of lower-level cadres • Alienating cadres that wish to restore the Party’s organizational integrity

9. Political Culture Legacies of Stalinism Why does corruption become so pervasive, so quickly once punishment is removed from the system and modernizing reforms initiated? Jowitt argues that the political culture of the Stalinist years reinforced traditional cultural orientations to produce “the reinforcement of a status ordering of regime and society” (p. 63) and a “dichotomous structure of privileged versus unprivileged” (p. 64) maintained through the “regime’s explicit and persistent use of coercion in relations with society and within the regime itself.” (p. 69)

10. Accordingly, “It is significant that the tendency to dichotomize elite and non-elite membership during the dictatorship of the proletariat has reinforced the political culture that existed prior to the rule of the Communist Party, a political culture in which the elite sector was distinct in character and prerogative, not simply in role.”(p. 65)

11. Social Responses to dichotomization and coercion • Some degree of stability accorded to the communist regime not through legitimacy but through familiarity – social acceptance of patterns of authority and privilege consistent with the past • Fostering of ‘pull’ or ‘connections’ as “a means of decreasing the uncertainty and anxiety” of encounters with those in authority (p. 66)

12. Social Responses, cont. • Adopting a “split posture” of public compliance v. private skepticism or rejection – a “ghetto political culture” (p. 70) • Estrangement and alienation from authority • Instrumental use of public offices and state resources • Withholding of critical information from superiors • Dissimulation – deceptive manipulation, the conscious adoption of false appearances • Responsibility defined “as the avoidance of public initiative.” (p. 76)

13. Rothschild also stresses continuities with the past It is therefore important to take note of “…the survival and resurgence of political continuities from the interwar period in such dimensions as the styles and degrees of political participation, the operational codes and cultures of political elites, the processes of recruiting these political elites, their definitions of economic priorities, and so forth.” (p. 178) …”political patterns in the 1980’s looked more continuous with those of the 1930’s than seemed conceivable in the midst of the revolutionary decades of the 1940’s and 1950’s.”

14. Key continuities with the 1930’s • Ritualistic political behavior – ritualistic, symbolic overt even pretended gestures of ratification sufficient; pervasive “depoliticization of public life” • New ruling class consolidated (“socially closed nature of this self-protecting and self-replicating elite” maintained by “patterns of access to higher education”) but took on the “styles, traits and values of the interwar elites” • Economic policy similar = development via heavy industry at the expense of agriculture and consumption and with the help of foreign credits • Pervasive nationalism • Political contestation = “the communist apparatchiks inherited…a deplorable tradition of conducting domestic politics not as an exercise in compromise and consensus building among fellow citizens but as a mode of warfare against enemies.” (p. 180)

15. II. Differentiation: Specific trajectories • Most obviously, East European countries diverged in their experiences of ‘mature’ communism with the GDR, the CSSR and Bulgaria remaining hard-line; Hungary and Poland moving to ‘soft’ authoritarianism; Romania developing a ‘clan’ based dictatorship under Ceausescu. • Less obvious, but important to note are differences within society. As Jowitt notes, internally societies could be differentiated into three zones (p. 81): • Poor rural communities –characterized by the persistence of traditional peasant culture • Urban industrial settings – characterized by a greater degree of modernization • Mixed sectors (services and commercial sectors) – characterized by extensive corruption but also some entrepreneurship as individuals took risks by engaging in the second economy

16. III. Legacy Effects Clearly, analysts are now seeing more continuities than revolutionary ‘breaks’ in the political development of Eastern Europe. Based on this summary of Jowitt + Rothschild, what kind of continuities or legacy effects from the pre-communist and communist past would you expect to find in contemporary East European politics?