Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe

Jason Sharman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134400430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book explores the role of coercion in the relationship between the citizens and regimes of communist Eastern Europe. Looking in detail at Soviet collectivisation in 1928-34, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Polish Solidarity Movement of 1980-84, it shows how the system excluded channels to enable popular grievances to be translated into collective opposition; how this lessened the amount of popular protest, affected the nature of such protest as did occur and entrenched the dominance of state over society.

1 Introduction

This book springs from parallel interests in a class of puzzling historical events, and a particular form of large-scale social causation. The first refers to the ability of small minorities of people in control of a twentieth-century state apparatus to dominate large majorities. In the most general sense, this phenomenon of popular subordination can be seen as the type of dependent variable or class of outcomes to be addressed. The second interest is how historical, structural and institutional contexts influence the ways people engage in political contention. In the most general sense this form of causation can be seen as the independent variable.

The examples that illustrate this relationship of state dominance and societal subordination provide some of recent history’s most dramatic and deadly mass politics. From the millions of victims of Stalin’s time to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fortunes of Soviet-type systems, as the major ideological alternative to market democracy, indelibly marked the twentieth century. The huge outbreaks of popular protest and rebellion that periodically convulsed Communist systems, from their inception to their demise, are compelling as spectacle and as memorial, but also in the questions they prompt. For rarely has the struggle between people and power been so starkly etched as in the countries of the ‘other Europe’. While the democratic revolutions of 1989–1991 have meant the end of European Communist states, the length of their existence, in the face of general alienation and sporadic fierce resistance, provides forceful testimony to the need to re-examine our theories of dictatorial regimes. Along these lines, the argument presented here is that the particular structure of the Communist system denied intermediate resources necessary to translate collective grievances into action; these structural obstacles lessened the amount of popular protest but also moulded the forms of protest that did occur; and that the relative paucity and ineffectiveness of popular protest entrenched the dominance of the state over society. Answering many of the theoretical questions raised by the longevity of this state–society relationship necessitates a consideration of structural contexts.

Throughout history the general social and economic context has strongly influenced the ways in which groups of people have protested against unpopular policies and governments, by delimiting the range or repertoire of collective action. Such long-term historical developments as the rise of the modern state, the mass media and democracy, as well as industrialization and urbanization, have provided new circumstances and opportunities for groups seeking to contest political decisions outside conventional political institutions. Certain broad constellations of social practices, economic arrangements and political institutions tend to favour certain tactics or types of collective action (e.g. sit-ins), while militating against others (e.g. armed insurgencies). In Communist systems a specific combination of a centralized and unelected state apparatus, command economy, and scarcity or absence of independent civil associations tightly restricted the repertoire of action for those looking to defend their interests or press demands on the government. These features did not evolve into place, but rather were imposed over a relatively short span of time as part of unified vision. People’s choices of how best to resist or evade state policies were heavily influenced by the particular social, political and economic aspects of the system, which in turn were the result of state policies.

Thus combining this type of historical causation and the empirical puzzle of state dominance over society gives the central problem at issue: how did the peculiar structure of the Communist order shape the patterns of popular contention in Communist systems? The exceptional strength of Communist states relative to society, and the success political elites had in imposing their preferences over those of the population, stemmed from the degree to which those states were able to deny aggrieved populations the prerequisites for collective action. The structure of the system as imposed by the state tended to hinder greatly the formation of mobilized groups of dissidents that could effectively challenge the authorities, while favouring resistance at the level of the family or individual, that usually could not. For without certain prerequisites or resources for collective action, whatever the level of hatred for the regime, and however glaring its illegitimacy in the eyes of the population, no successful collective action will occur. An apposite literary analogy is provided by Karl Deutsch: ‘So long as the sailors on the Bounty could not coordinate their actions, Captain Bligh was irresistible. Once they managed to co-ordinate their efforts, Bligh was out of a job.’

Resources for contentious collective action commonly include the ability to win publicity through the media or other means, political allies or patrons in government, existing groups that can be recruited to the cause en bloc, some degree of functional specialization among dissidents, and so on. Subordination of society in Communist systems was not so much the result of recurrent state triumphs over rival groups, as of intermittent state triumphs combined with state-imposed structures that broke links and occupied social space necessary for those rival groups to form in the first place. Thus Communist societies were marked by the presence of pervasive social grievances and enduring social quiescence. On the rare occasions when organized opposition did arise, it bore the stamp of the restrictive circumstances in which it was formed.

In substantiating the basic claim made above of the dominance of Communist states relative to their subordinate societies, the specific thrust of this book will be to explain the structures and mechanisms that rendered the problem of collective action so difficult in Communist systems, despite widespread and keenly felt dissatisfaction on the part of broad sectors of the population. This emphasis reflects the fact that the contexts in which people choose to conform or rebel are often as important as, or more important than, the choices themselves. Features peculiar to Communist systems, or present in Communist systems to an extreme degree, combined to structure the social and political environment to raise the cost of open protest, often to a prohibitive level. This does not mean that resistance to state directives and priorities was absent; it was constant and almost ubiquitous, but it occurred mainly in the form of private, individual measures that were predicated on acceptance of the system as a whole, and paradoxically these acts often further atrophied the avenues of collective redress against the state. Workers who considered themselves wronged by draconian labour discipline or low pay usually decided as individuals to waste time on the job or steal inputs in response, rather than openly agitate as a group against the policies themselves. Such measures both cushioned the impact of adverse policies and harmed official interests, but nevertheless they very rarely reversed the basic conflict of interests against the state. Furthermore, such everyday, grass-roots means of resistance often made it even more difficult to coordinate and collectively oppose the state. When collective action did occur, the structure of Communist systems tended to impose a historical mismatch whereby local spontaneous and unorganized collective action, lacking a secure institutional base, was pitted against a highly centralized, hierarchical and bureaucratic state. Peasant villagers lynching local Party activists or townspeople burning down the local committee building proved no match for a bureaucratized state and unified political elite.

The state of the field: social contract, social movements, totalitarianism and hegemony

The book will thus explicate just how the state may hold and implement autonomously formed preferences opposed to those of society, by restructuring political and economic institutions and social space so as to deny resources for collective dissent and thus greatly retard or frustrate mass action. Avenues for articulating and collectively acting on popular discontent are ‘organized out’, and society is coercively demobilized when such action does occur. Thus the argument presented opposes those who have characterized Communist state power as resting on a ‘social contract’ or resulting from ‘informal social negotiation’ with the population, or those who maintain that Communist systems were in any meaningful way pluralistic. Relatedly, the idea that increasing social discontent can be simply translated into successful collective action once people have got ‘fed up’, relying on the assumption that society always has the means to press its demands on the state effectively, and must only be pushed beyond a certain point before it chooses to employ those means already in hand, is forcefully critiqued.

Instead, many of the concepts employed are drawn from theories of social movements and collective action, though by no means uncritically. Both forms of explanation emphasize decisions and strategies over context and structure. Social movements, from civil rights activists to armed insurgents, plan to employ their physical and organizational resources in an optimal manner to achieve their aims, while also ‘framing’ their public profile so as to identify themselves in a positive light with reference to prevailing values, symbols and cultural standards. Rational choice collective action models and social movement theory contain the central insight that collective action is difficult and costly, and that the difficulty and cost of the enterprise can be exploited and exacerbated by the political authorities. Although undoubtedly an advance on earlier deprivation theory, these actor-centred models suffer from theoretical weaknesses and ambiguities of their own, particularly an excessive voluntarism and a tendency to assume the universal relevance of democratic political experiences.

Which theory or theories are consistent with a situation whereby the orientation of the state to society is better described by relations of subordination and dominance rather than social contract, and in which this imbalance is better explained by the way the structure of the system biases choices and skews the availability of resources, rather than by examining which strategies are chosen by fundamentally similar actors? The two main contenders that both pay due attention to the power of the state, and emphasize the structural nature of this power, are the various conceptions of totalitarianism on the one hand, and those of hegemony or the dominant ideology thesis on the other. Despite the perspicacity of scholars subscribing to these theories in noting the structural nature of political dominance, neither provides as accurate or consistent explanation of the workings of the system as that advanced in this book. The literature on totalitarianism, and especially that on hegemony, is flawed by important shortcomings.

Scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski believed that totalitarian regimes were distinguished from earlier dictatorships by their efforts to exert total control, not just of the political sphere, but of the economic and social as well. Modern technology, an ideologically motivated party and the application of mass terror meant that such regimes could exercise their power unfettered by the wishes of the atomized and permanently terrorized population. While correctly identifying the suppression of civil society and fracturing of social associations and linkages as vital to the power of the rulers, the theory of totalitarianism failed to account for widespread grass-roots resistance and over-emphasized the importance of mass terror. Totalitarianism has nevertheless marked the best attempt so far to describe the workings of Communist polities, and captures many of the important distinctions between such polities and other dictatorships, but is unduly restricted in its scope and vague in its explanations.

Theories asserting the importance of ideological hegemony in subordinating the many to the few have more often been applied to ostensibly democratic Western countries than to those of the Communist East. Such theorists argue that the oppressive nature of the system is disguised by symbols, values and beliefs propagated by the elite. The majority are persuaded that the oppressive features of the system (e.g. capitalism or a caste society) are in their own best interests, or at least inevitable. The political or class dominance of the government is based on the false consciousness of the populace, this consciousness being inculcated in schools and civic associations, and through art, religion, social mores and discourse. The masses do not resist the predations of the state because they cannot recognize them as such. The obvious drawback of such theories is the assumption that social scientists and historians recognize people’s ‘real’ interests better than the groups in question themselves. Closer investigation has often revealed that compliance by those at the bottom of the pyramid, whether slaves, peasants or those living under tyrannical government, has been motivated by the realization that dissident behaviour would not succeed, and that those involved would be heavily punished for their actions. Lastly, the dominant ideology or hegemony thesis fails to account for everyday resistance by the ruled directed at the rulers.

The methodology: historical–sociological comparison

The evidence to bear out the central claims of the book will come from detailed historical research on the three cases, mainly from the use of secondary sources. In dealing with a small number of cases a qualitative, historical-comparative approach has a number of advantages that recommend it in investigating patterns of popular contention. First, such an approach is best suited to grasping complex notions of causation and tracing the impact of causal mechanisms. Second, the small number of cases allows for ‘most likely’ and ‘least likely’ case strategies, explained below, for testing the relative explanatory power of rival theories. Lastly, the detailed consideration of a small number of cases provides the opportunity to examine a relatively large number of competing theories.

Such an approach stands in contrast to the experimental model used to test for causal relationships in the hard sciences, centred on controlling all variables except one, and repetition of the process under consideration. Lacking the ability to hold all else constant and manipulate variables when studying social phenomena such as elections, recessions and wars, social scientists often attempt to approximate the logic of this procedure in ‘quasi-experiments’, using statistical techniques to control for the impact of extraneous factors and isolate the particular variable of interest. This strategy generally depends on having a large number of observations or cases, both in absolute terms to make certain statistical procedures feasible, but, even more importantly, relative to the number of potential causal or independent variables. Thus according to this logic, for the purposes of studying protest and rebellion in Communist political systems it would be preferable to have hundreds of Communist states and thousands of instances of large-scale public opposition to work with. The situation of having a small number of cases, in this study just three, and a great many potential causes at work and competing theories has been referred to as the problem of many variables and a small N, where N is the number of cases to be studied.¹

In the past decade in particular, however, political scientists, sociologists and economists have come to an awareness that the causation of social events is more complex than previously had often been assumed, and that this necessitated more modest aims on the part of social scientists. Briefly, causal complexity is due to three main factors: different causes may lead to the same result; the effect of one particular causal factor may depend its coincidence or conjuncture with others; and the impact of a causal factor may depend on when it occurs in a sequence of events. The importance of shifting clusters of causal factors in each case, the dependence on the preceding stream of events and case or cases, together with the development of the Communist system itself, thus favour the study of events in context, rather than a more analytic separation and testing of hypothesized independent variables.

Multiple and conjunctural causation in particular rule out the use of ‘most similar’ and ‘most dissimilar’ quasi-experimental designs, inspired by the writing of John Stuart Mill, both of which rely on a much simpler and more deterministic view of historical causation. These methods aim to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular class of outcomes. The most similar design aims to identify a crucial dissimilarity across otherwise similar cases that differ on the dependent variable. The most dissimilar design is devoted to finding a crucial similarity across otherwise disparate cases that have the same value on the dependent variable.

One of the most famous applications of these methods in the social sciences is Theda Skocpol’s classic States and Social Revolutions, an explanation of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions.² Skocpol discounts the importance of worker revolts in bringing about social revolutions in general because this factor was missing in the Chinese case – or, in other words, because worker revolts were not common to all three instances of social revolutions, they are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of such and can thus be eliminated from the explanatory schema. Because relative deprivation (general discontent) was present across both revolutionary and non-revolutionary cases, such as Britain and Germany, relative deprivation is also eliminated as a cause of social revolution.

Neither the most similar nor the most dissimilar method, however, can cope with multiple causation or conjunctural causation, let alone the combination of multiple-conjunctural causation. These terms refer to situations where there may be no one crucial similarity present in all cases of X and absent in all cases of non-X because different combinations of conditions can produce the same result, or because one factor may depend on the co-occurrence of another to have an impact. Thus, for example, there are several separate potential causes of inflation that all lead to the same result: inflation may the result of too much money chasing too few goods, a rise in the price of the factors of production, a currency devaluation, or some combination of the three. Relating to conjunctural causation, autonomous village councils, a supply of guns and ammunition and links with sympathetic urban workers may all be important in helping to start and sustain a peasant revolt without any of them individually being necessary or sufficient. It is rare that a particular type of event can ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theories of State–Society Relations
• 3. Soviet Collectivization
• 4. The Hungarian Uprising
• 5. Poland and Solidarity
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography