Theories Of The New Class: Intellectuals And Power

5. The Fall of the Class Project of the Socialist Reform Intelligentsia

99 Five The Fall of the Class Project of the Socialist Reform Intelligentsia If there ever was a class project of intellectuals under East European state socialism, it certainly did not last very long, and by the time it was possible to identify this process, the transformation of the bureaucratic ruling estate into a dominant class was already in the process of disintegration. The Counteroffensive of the Bureaucratic Ruling Estate We associate the intellectual class project with the policies of Nikita Khrushchev. But Khrushchev was ousted from power as early as 1963; thus he lost power before the reforms he tried to implement could take off the ground in Eastern Europe. The 1960s, however, was a somewhat confusing decade in this respect. It was far from obvious, until the crackdown on the Prague Spring in August 1968, what the Brezhnev era would look like. With Leonid Brezhnev, it appeared that a group of cadres with technical training, many of them engineers, had moved into positions of power. Thus it appeared that Brezhnev’s rise to power was an indicator of the ascent of the technocracy . Also during the 1960s, East European party bosses were remarkably independent from Moscow, and until August 1968 they appeared to follow independent, and usually technocratically oriented , reforms, as appeared to be the case with János Kádár, Wladyslaw 100 The Fall of the Class Project Gomulka, Nicolae Ceauşescu, and even Walter Ulbricht and Todor Zhivkov. Kádár went so far that, upon his return from a meeting in Moscow at which the dismissal of Khrushchev was explained to the East European party bosses, he announced that, no matter what happened in the Soviet Union, the reform process would continue in Hungary (and to some extent it did). There is also evidence that Zhivkov (according to Ivan Berend) and even Ulbricht (according to a dissertation of a student of Dan Chirot) tried to experiment cautiously with technocratic reforms—and the initial liberalism of the Ceauşescu regime, especially its independence from Moscow, is wellknown and well documented. Thus it appeared that until 1968 the rapprochement of the bureaucratic estate and the intellectuals continued. The peak of this process undoubtedly was the so-called Prague Spring and Hungary’s adaptation of the New Economic Mechanism, the two big victories of the New Class project by reform intellectuals. These two events were so important that one almost failed to notice the first serious signs of backlash against this project, namely the confrontation between the bureaucratic ruling estate and the intellectuals and university students during the spring of 1968. Indeed, 1968 was undoubtedly the year of the turnaround, the year when it became rather obvious that the bureaucratic ruling estate was reluctant to go as far with power sharing as the socialist reform intelligentsia wanted. Prague Spring was an important test of how far the bureaucratic estate was willing to go. During the early months of 1968, the Czechoslovak reform intelligentsia defined reasonably clearly what sort of socialism was acceptable for it, and the response of the bureaucratic estate was August 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia . It was also important for the Soviets that all Warsaw Pact countries participated in this action. In large part, this participation was supposed to be a message to the world that the invasion came not from the Soviet Union acting on its own, but rather the whole alliance . But the invasion had a powerful message for domestic reformers in Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria; the Soviets clearly told them how far they could go and from what point onward they could expect military intervention. The signal was important to the bureaucratic estates in these countries, as these estates wanted reassurances that the reform would not threaten their political monopoly. In all the East European coun- The Fall of the Class Project 101 tries, a growing proportion of the bureaucratic estate had begun to watch the reform movement with concern. In Poland, the bureaucratic estate was anxious to crack down, itself, on reform intellectuals and students demanding an acceleration of reform in the spring of 1968. The Polish bureaucratic estate exploited the anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism of the Polish working class to mobilize workers to demonstrate against reformist students. The expulsion of thousands of Polish intellectuals of Jewish ancestry followed, which brought the socialist reform movement virtually to a halt. In Hungary, and to some extent in Bulgaria...