Culture and Politics in Eastern Europe-Two Revising the Communist Establishment
GITELMAN, ZVI
Revising the Communist Establishment By Zvi Gitelman The current top-level changes in Czechoslovakia and the political unrest in Poland are diametrically opposed responses to a profound problem...
...Where the Czechs have relaxed censorship, the Pole have evenhandedly banned performances of Adam Mickie-wicz's 19th-century anti-Russian play, Dziady (Forefathers' Eve), Stanislaw Witkiewicz's inter-war protest play, Gyubal Wahazar, and Janusz Szpotanski's contemporary satire, Cisi i Gegacze (The Quiet and the Babblers...
...The failure of the Poles to follow the present Czech pattern, or their own pattern of 1956, is most easily understood in terms of the current configuration of social and political forces in Poland: The liberals of Po Postu (banned in 1957) and the Crooked Circle Club (shut down in 1962) among the intellectuals, and members of the Pulawy group (the Party's liberal faction) among the politicians, have been increasingly isolated, or removed from office, since the retrenchment of 1958...
...In the political arena, the Czechoslovaks have made personnel changes toward a more progressive leadership...
...Recent evidence also indicates an increase in the "reactionary" followers of Kazimierz Mijal?the quixotic Stalinist holed up in Albania who broadcasts propaganda attacks against the Polish Party...
...On the progressive side, Ota Sik, the chief architect of economic reform, has appeared especially frequently in a concerted effort to persuade workers that reform will be to their benefit...
...Even more depressing to the progressives was the willingness of the workers to support a Party that is morally bankrupt and has no compunctions about exploiting the latent anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism of the masses: In June 1967, Party leader Gomulka warned Polish Jews that a "Fifth Column" would not be tolerated...
...There is serious, wide-ranging, national deliberation under way on how best to democratize the country's social and political life...
...While the Czechoslovaks have been tolerating intellectual protests, the Poles have been jailing various writers, or expelling them from the Party...
...One Czechoslovak apparatchik, a Central Committee member, recently described the current situation to a Yugoslav journalist this way: "To us who belonged to the old generation, everything became clear once power was assumed...
...They constitute a large and powerful political class living parasitically off a system approaching institutionalized paralysis...
...What is more, intellectuals and students, even when allied with economists and progressive politicians in a potential leadership cadre, do not in themselves constitute a mass force in society...
...This attitude toward Polish students and intellectual protestors contrasts sharply with the progressive alliance in Czechoslovakia, where students, intellectuals, Slovak politicians, progressive Czech politicians, liberal political theorists ind influential economists have joined forces...
...The radio and the press, in the last few months practically free of censorship, have taken these discussions into living rooms across the country...
...Nor is there any overwhelming Soviet military or political presence in either country that might push the working masses into the ranks of the progressive reformers, as happened in 1956...
...Naturally, the Model poses a threat to those managers who hold jobs solely as a reward for Party loyalty, as well as to those bureaucrats in the central ministries whose tasks are being decentralized...
...More specifically, it can be attributed to the courage of those in the Party who were willing to accept the necessity for change, and to the theoretical discussions of the past few years about the need for a realistic reassessment of the nature of Socialist polities...
...The conservatives were further bolstered by the Church's refusal to openly support the demonstrators...
...This alliance pressed its demands against the Czech political leadership—itself internally split and alienated from many Czech intellectuals—and thus helped encourage the discontent that exploded at the Czechoslovak Writers Union Congress in June 1967...
...Autonomous centers of authority, such as the church, are more or less tolerated...
...Where the Czechoslovak Party has appointed a commission to formulate a New Political Model, the Polish Party has refused to entertain any notions of political reform, thereby driving dynamic young intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski into Utopian, radical schemes for political reform —or, more correctly, revolution...
...The pro-rector of Charles University, Eduard Gold-stiicker, candidly observed at the time: "One has to see the initiative of the students for what it is—an effort toward further democratization of our nation...
...was the cry at the first student demonstrations in Warsaw earlier this month...
...Urging progressives to educate the public, he has ordered a slow pace of personnel and institutional changes...
...For the new First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek, has declared that "The chief method of Party guidance is, and must be, persuasion...
...by 1966 the figure was down to 5 per cent...
...Revising the Communist Establishment By Zvi Gitelman The current top-level changes in Czechoslovakia and the political unrest in Poland are diametrically opposed responses to a profound problem plaguing the Communist states of Eastern Europe...
...Prague's New Economic Model, introduced on January 1, 1967, relies heavily on the decentralization of decision-making and the concept of profitability, thereby placing a premium on managerial expertise and production efficiency alien to the Stalinist era...
...Collectivized argriculture continues to coexist with a thriving private sector...
...This removed from the political struggle one of the vital elements of the 1956 "Polish October...
...The latter generally see the New Economic Model as the critical issue determining the future of Socialism...
...But Zvi Gitelman is a member of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia University...
...Ethnic affiliations, far from diminishing, have in some countries grown so strong as to become once again a fundamental component of domestic politics...
...These people, irrelevant survivors of a bygone era, quite naturally refuse to recognize their own obsolescence...
...Simultaneous changes in Prague and Warsaw would also increase the pressure for change in Hungary, where the populace has remained passive since the searing experience of 1956, and in Walter Ulbricht's conservative East Germany...
...A head-on clash, though, is unlikely...
...Now, the Polish intelligentsia and students are being spurred on by the "cautious" Czechs: "Long live Czechoslovakia...
...those goals remain visionary...
...Only Rumania has sustained a high-powered economic drive through the '60s, and successfully mobilized public opinion for an independent foreign policy...
...It is this question of direction which the Czechoslovak Communist party is now confronting openly, and which the Polish Party is desperately trying to avoid...
...Today, however, the younger generation demands many answers to a single question: What kind of Socialism should we have...
...What a contrast to Poland...
...In 1968 the Czechoslovaks are acting somewhat like the Poles did in 1956...
...In fact the unrest may in the end prove a blessing not for progressive Poles but for the Partisans, who are undoubtedly arguing that the half-measures of the Gomulka regime are insufficient and that the coalition of "Zionists," dissident intellectuals and irresponsible students must be suppressed once and for all...
...Since 1963, when the Czechoslovak economy, once the most modern and stable in East-Central Europe, showed a negative rate of growth, the Party has been forced to accept economic reform, with its explosive political and social implications...
...Where once the Communist leaders were revolutionaries dedicated in theory to unravelling and reweaving the social, political, economic, cultural and ideological fabrics of the East European societies, today they are eager above all to preserve an uneasy status quo...
...Conservatives and liberals alike have been on the air waves in an effort to sway public opinion...
...In short, the Communist societies of Eastern Europe are now in a state of uneasy equilibrium—maintained by increasingly conservative politicians...
...The polish student demonstrations revealed the existence of a strong alliance between the various factions in the Party, the police, and pax, the pro-regime Catholic organization headed by Bo-leslaw Piasecki (a most unsavory character in an unimpressive gallery of politicians, who led a prewar Fascist organization...
...In October and November 1967 students at the Prague Technical College vocalized their feelings in dramatic demonstrations for light and heat in their dormitories...
...Zdenek Mlynar, for example, the head of the Central Committee commission to formulate a New Political Model—itself testimony to the realism and courage of some elements in the Party—had argued that a decentralized economy creates economic interest groups which should enjoy a legitimate voice in a competitive political process...
...Ironically, the Polish people have traditionally regarded the Czechs as cautious opportunists, guided by the survival-above-all psychology of the "good soldier Schweik," and have always seen themselves as brave romantics fighting for change against all odds...
...There has even been much serious discussion in Yugoslavia concerning the possibility of instituting a two-party or a "no-party" system...
...this month, counter-demonstrating workers waved signs reading "Down with the new Fifth Column...
...In both Czechoslovakia and Poland, the workers hold the balance of power...
...Today it consists of "Partisans," anti-Partisan authoritarians, and Gomulkaite conservatives...
...Besides the workers' passivity, the Czechoslovak tradition of compromise and bargaining in part explains the comparative calm surrounding the changes in Prague...
...Simultaneously with the initial discussions of economic reform in Prague, there came a recrudescence of national sentiment in Slovakia...
...In 1956, the Polish Party was split into Stalinists, liberals and Go-mulkaite reformers...
...There can be little doubt that the January removal of Antonin Novotny from Prague's Party leadership was seen as the culmination of one stage of Communism...
...Neither the family structure nor ethical and moral value systems have been radically altered...
...If the progressives in Czechoslovakia succeed in winning over, or at least neutralizing, the workers, their apparent victory will be consolidated...
...The basic task was to construct Socialism...
...The changes in Prague, therefore, were not merely the result of infighting among ambitious leaders at the top, as the popular image would have it...
...Had the initial goals of "revolutionary Communism" been achieved, the East Europeans would now be left merely with technical tasks...
...Students, too, had long been manifesting a profound disaffection with political and cultural conservatism (in 1964, 8.4 per cent of the students were affiliated with the Party...
...And there has been a tacit, if reluctant, recognition of the fact that popular cultural preferences run strongly to Western music, art and films...
...A crucial contest is now taking place in which the bureaucrats and the "Red" managers are ranged against the professional economists, the technicians, the younger, better-trained managers, and the political progressives...
...Unable to resume the difficult journey toward Utopia, these men are nevertheless unwilling to abandon the vision...
...Should the Polish workers be induced to switch sides, changes in a progressive direction would become possible...
...Only Yugoslavia has faced the challenges of the new era and drastically restructured its economy, its government and, to a lesser degree, its Party...
...unable to perceive any alternative to the present system, they are unwilling to risk new departures...
...Policy debates in Czechoslovakia are taking place against a background of contending social, ethnic, intellectual and economic groups...
...Their task has become the management of an established system rather than the transformation of society...
...The Poles have made some important second-echelon shifts—such as replacing Warsaw Party Secretary Stanislaw Kociolek with Jozef Kepa —but these have effectively strengthened the authoritarian, anti-intellectual, nationalistic and anti-Semitic "Partisan" faction within the Party...
...If the elan of "revolutionary Communism" is gone, though, many of its institutions and functionaries remain: the secret police, the managers who are more "Red" than "expert," the hack ideologues and the Party apparatchiki who have learned little and forgotten less...
...As in Hungary and Poland in 1956, the combination of a badly split Party leadership, intellectual disaffection, and student demonstrations provoked significant political change—the important difference in Czechoslovakia being the passive role of the working class...
...Where the Czechoslovaks face up to Slovak grievances, the Polish Party violates the professed principles of Communist "internationalism" by cynically exploiting anti-Semitism as a political expedient...
...Slovak intellectuals have demonstrated in the past that they would sooner cooperate with conservative Slovak apparatchiki than with Czech progressives when they feel their national identity threatened...
...Significantly, though, theirs may not be the most enduring alliance either, because of the nationalist factor...
...This marked the first significant stirrings there since 1960, when Slovak autonomy was reduced in an administrative reorganization...
...And the most important social class, the industrial workers, is by and large as conservative in Czechoslovakia as in Poland...
...Moreover, because the best way to achieve profitability quickly is to cut labor costs, many industrial workers also oppose the reforms, fearing they too may lose their jobs when overemployment gets to be a luxury that can no longer be afforded...
...Indeed, the nations of Eastern Europe are watching closely as the Czechoslovaks and the Poles seek opposite solutions to a problem they all share: How to legitimatize Communist rule and institutions in the "post-revolutionary" epoch...
...It was at this point that bitter disputes broke out between Novotny and Dubcek in the Party Central Committee...
...The Slovaks' deep-rooted cultural, economic, and political grievances offered a firm base for an effective alliance between Slovak intellectuals and politicians...
...Clearly, the Communist governments are no longer able, by coercion or persuasion, to direct the energies of their millions of citizens into gigantic industrialization and collectivization programs...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
