The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History

Bradley Abrams: Buying Time: Consumption and Political Legitimization in Late Communist Czechoslovakia

Bradley aBrams Buying Time: Consumption and Political Legitimization in Late Communist Czechoslovakia I would like to start by offering a statement that might seem selfevident : both consumption and consumerism were terribly weak in Eastern Europe under Communism. Of course, I do not think that this is completely true. I believe that it is somewhat, although not totally, a misreading of Eastern European history. It is true that the levels of consumption and the modes of consumerism differed in the East and the West, and any facile equation of developments in this regard on the two sides of the Iron Curtain is doomed to oversimplification . Nonetheless, I would argue that the Eastern European experience of consumption after 1968 is valuable, not least because it helps us to think about European developments as a whole. In particular, looking at communist East-Central Europe—the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia—through the prism of consumption and consumerism allows us to add a new and valuable dimension to understanding the end of the communist experiment, one that helps us grasp why hundreds of thousands of formerly complacent members of the “silent majority” or the “gray zone”1 filled the streets in 1989. Additionally, it might help us to understand why the “return to Europe,” so widely touted in Eastern Europe in the years immediately 1 This term is used to refer to the vast majority of citizens of East-Central Europe, those who were neither highly placed within the regime nor actively participated in dissident or oppositional movements, and were “for the most part consumption-oriented and politically uninterested.” See Jiřina Šiková, “The ‘Grey Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia,” in Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, ed., Good-Bye Samizdat (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 183. 400 THE END AND THE BEGINNING after the fall of communism, has proven in many ways easier than most thought it would be, a point to which I will return in my conclusion. To see why looking at consumption and consumerism helps us to see larger, pan-European patterns, I need to say a few words about the lifecycle of communism.2 Under the Stalinist regimes of the late-1940s and early 1950s, communism relied primarily on ideology for both legitimization and self-legitimization. This changed over the decade and a half following Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech.” The speech condemned Stalin’s excesses and opened the door for a revisionist Marxism that contributed to the revolts in Hungary and Poland later that year. However, it was not until 1968, and the failure of the Prague Spring’s hope to create a liberal Marxism often called “socialism with a human face,” that it became evident to many that Marxism could no longer serve as a means either for legitimizing Communist rule to the public or as a way for the regimes to legitimize their own rule to themselves.3 What emerged in Marxism’s wake was an attempt by the regimes to rely on a primarily economic mode of legitimization, couched in what has been called by many observers a “tacit social contract.” In this, the regimes offered a reasonable and steadily rising standard of living and a social safety net in return for political quiescence. For our purposes, two elements of this contract are important. First, in the 1970s the governments of East-Central Europe greatly expanded the production of consumer goods and encouraged consumerism. Living standards rose perceptibly and considerably through the first half of the decade. For example, in Poland average real wages rose by a total of 41 percent, and the average annual growth rate of personal and social consumption reached almost 9 percent from 1971–1975.4 2 Here I am following the lines of argument expressed by Katharine Verdery, “What Was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall?” in her What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), 19–38, and in George Schöpflin’s Politics in Eastern Europe (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), among others. 3 On this, see my “From Revisionism to Dissent: The Creation of PostMarxism in Central Europe in the Wake of 1968,” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia (Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 179–96. 4 Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Polish Economy in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 316. See the comment 401 Buying Time Similarly...