Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century Read Online Free Page B

clay feet. The intimidating might of the Warsaw Pact came at a crippling cost. Peacetime Soviet defense expenditures reached their peak in the 1970s. By some estimates, Moscow was spending up to a quarter of its gross domestic product on the military—a burden that no country, however well endowed with natural resources, can sustain indefinitely. The USSR and its satellites, committed to an economics of secretive autarchy, largely walled themselves off from the rest of the world, and it was hard to know precisely what was going on behind that wall. But many planners and economists inside the East bloc were well aware that their system was falling behind.
    Central planning had functioned relatively well at the stage when managers needed big factories to produce goods identified as crucial to further industrialization. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviets had astounded the world by leapfrogging their way into the smokestack era, studding their enormous empire with steel plants and giant dams. For a few decades into the postwar period, they kept up the pace, rapidly rebuilding the European territories that had been leveled by the Nazi invaders. But by the early 1970s, the boom in investment was petering out. Productivity stalled. Consumer goods and many basic foodstuffs, especially meat and fruit, had never been plentiful in a system where planners gave priority to heavy industry, but now the scarcities became critical. Some historians argue that the West and the East were facing different forms of the same “post-Fordist” crisis: what was to be done with the coal mines and the giant factories that had outlived their usefulness in the new global environment? 11 The countries of the West, to varying degrees, ultimately opted to let market forces sort it all out. But the Russians, wedded to an ideological vision of the primacy of heavy industry, had a much harder time coming up with a workable solution. At a time when the pace of innovation was picking up in the rest of the global economy, the tight control over information practiced by communist governments was becoming a critical handicap. The shift to a computerized, knowledge-driven economy was hard enough for the West. For the communist world, it proved almost insurmountable.
    Nor was this merely an economic problem. Just as central planning failed to keep up with the volatile demands of globalization, so, too, the ideological hegemony of Marxism-Leninism stifled the moral and spiritual development of East-bloc populations. Every citizen of the Soviet empire lived the daily contradiction between the triumphant pronouncements of official propaganda—tirelessly and uniformly repeated in schools, workplaces, and the official media—and the shortages,bottlenecks, and petty corruption of real life. In Stalin’s day, the discrepancies had been overlaid by the exercise of state terror and the demands of everyday survival. By the time of Brezhnev’s dotage in the 1970s, these more immediate constraints had given way to apathy, cynicism, and squalor. Those who lived through the period dubbed it the “time of stagnation.” It was a label that evoked a psychological crisis as well as an economic one. Some responded to the void with drink; alcoholism soared. A select few questioned the rationale behind the party’s monopoly over history, culture, and the search for meaning. It is no accident that the 1970s were the decade of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. They may have spoken only for a minority—just as did the sixties counterculture radicals or the civil rights activists in the United States. But what they had to say resonated for society as a whole.
    This contradiction between public orthodoxy and private skepsis was at its strongest, perhaps, in Poland. Communist rule in Poland, since its establishment in 1944, had a rocky history. Some Poles had managed to continue armed resistance to the Soviet-installed government well into the 1950s. Every few years, it