Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

For Turks, and great numbers of Kurds, the answer was assimilation in Turkey. This was very far from senseless, but the bad feeling that had developed since the 1960s was difficult to overcome. For Turkey there appeared to be two solutions — one, the assimilation of millions of Kurds in the more prosperous west and south; two, the advance of the GAP project, the bringing of water and hydro-electricity, on an enormous scale, to south-eastern Turkey, through a project of endless dams and hydro-electrical works, to bring prosperity and hope to an area beset by dry agriculture, a demographic nightmare, and endless throwing away of rubbish. A whole team of social engineers was attached to this project, to bring education to the children and enlightenment to the women, to remind them that polygamy and chadors (the word means ‘tent’) did not have to be their lot in life. Which would win: Kurdish nationalism, or a modern Turkey, following the European patterns? Özal’s success was to make Turkey prosperous enough for this problem to have a worldwide dimension. His failure was not to see it through, with a strategy. And that was the verdict on the eighties as a whole.

What was Moscow to make of 1983? Three things were clear enough. The economic crisis in the West had not proved deadly, for a start: quite to the contrary, the eighties boom was under way, and the most interesting Russian comment was a question, why, with an education system five times better, do we have an economy five times worse (a question still not answered: perhaps the answer is that real mathematicians are not interested in arithmetic). Then again, there was China, which, having made an enormous and murderous mess of her version of War Communism, was now flourishing mightily with her version of the New Economic Policy. Finally there was the Middle East and its oil. Blundering into a quagmire in Afghanistan, the USSR had lost all around, and her out-stations in the Third World were liabilities.

But so too were the satellites in eastern Europe. None of these countries was an asset, and the exports of Comecon, put together, amounted to about two thirds of Mexico’s. They took Soviet oil on cheap terms, and in public relations terms were headaches. The worst case was Poland’s. Historically, the relationship had been a poisonous one, of bullying and self-pity, a sort of permanent vierge folle and époux infernal. Rousseau had told the Poles: you cannot stop them from swallowing you; make sure they cannot digest you. Balzac had offered different advice: get on with practical life and make yourselves indispensable to the Russians. The Poles in a sense did both, because they did develop a first-rate intelligentsia, but instead of being loyal Communists, or even, like Czechs or Slovenes, just progressives of the sort that Communists could use, they marched off in a different direction altogether and produced the most vibrant political Catholicism in the world. Frenchmen, trained from earliest infancy in anti-clericalism, could not believe the crowds they saw in Poland welcoming the Pope. ‘Like the Ayatollah,’ sniffed one of those Frenchmen.

There were great differences between Poland and the other ‘bloc’ countries. In the first place she had a ‘mass of manoeuvre’, a population coming on for 40 million, and still, in the 1960s, expanding, and that because of a second considerable difference: a large peasant population, still set in the old days, with hay-carts trundling along on the roads. That in turn reflected another great difference, that the Western Allies had had some sort of formal rights as regards Poland, and even Stalin shrank from applying the full-scale Soviet formula there. Some version of due process had to be gone through, and collectivization of agriculture, the expropriation of private peasant plots, would have excited resistance. A consequence of all this was that the Catholic Church remained powerful — much more so than in Hungary, where there was a strong Protestant tradition, or Czechoslovakia, where anti-clericalism was also strong. Poland was different.

The Communists after the war had attempted ‘modernization’, the development of big industry, and, in the areas taken from Germany, that was not unpromising. There already was substantial enough mining, and a steel industry was built up. The old Kattowitz — Katowice — was a grim nineteenth-century barracks of a town, and it now acquired a Communist overlay. An enormous stadium was put up in the centre, as an open challenge to the Church that would otherwise have dominated the area. In Cracow, which was very Catholic and proper, a gigantic steelworks, Nowa Huta, went up, and the general idea was that with sport, women’s emancipation and a healthy proletarian work-day rather than mindless peasant agriculture, a new Polish version of ‘Soviet man’ would emerge. But the early, Stalinist, programme was carried through by a small group of mainly Jewish Communists, and they were broken when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956.

A ‘native Communism’ took their place, under Władysław Gomułka, himself to a limited extent their victim, and he was prepared to co-operate with the Church and the peasants, and the intelligentsia as well, on the understanding that, with ‘modernization’, matters would go his way. This did not happen: on the contrary, the intelligentsia resented the censorship, and encouraged student revolts. The regime fought back, identifying the Jewish origins of many of the people involved, and drove some of them out. A characteristic victim of that moment (1968) was Leszek Kołakowski. Interwar Poland had crashed, especially with the failure of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, and a good part of the intelligentsia, seeing the Red Army coming in, became, if not Communist, then at least sympathizers. It was a version of a fairly old Warsaw problem: Russia, whatever her appalling features, worked, and Poland, whatever her admirable ones, did not. Kołakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, went along, and even helped falsify electoral returns in 1946: why bother accurately recording the votes of the Polish peasantry, obstinate clowns (the original of ‘clown’ is a Dutch word meaning ‘peasant’) and boors (ditto). A sojourn in Moscow caused some shock; but he was an enthusiastic supporter of Gomułka and the promise of a new Poland. Then the 1960s brought disillusion. He wanted to answer the central question of why reform Communism was not working. This was not a subject that he could openly address. He therefore addressed it in ingenious disguise: in Religious Inspiration and Church Link he wrote what purported to be a work of history, about the Dutch Calvinist Church of the early seventeenth century, when the (Arminian) effort to humanize it had failed, against the Counter-Remonstrants, who were enthusiastic about damning people. He had learned Dutch more or less on the train in order to write this book, a long one, hardly penetrable by the censors or for that matter anyone else. But it was enough to predestine him to exile, the more so as his wife was Jewish, and there followed the sort of distinguished career that put Poland back on the world’s intellectual map for the first time, in effect, since Copernicus in the sixteenth century. The three-volume Main Currents in Marxism is a classic. But in his disillusionment Kołakowski was in good company. Student revolts saw Gomułka off.

In the seventies the opposition gradually built up. As elsewhere in the ‘bloc’, intellectuals were a main element, and in ordinary circumstances this could be a ticket to nowhere: ‘daring arguments, tame conclusions’, as A. J. P. Taylor had said of Vienna in 1900. Beards talked ‘civil society’, and Thomas Aquinas was much brandished in the wind. Among the intelligentsia of western Europe, and especially in Italy, there was a desperate desire for some connection with the real proletariat. This was generally a hopeless cause, and so it also proved in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Marx had said that ‘the conjunction of the proletariat and the intelligentsia’ would bring Communism; he had gone on, to the effect that ‘philosophy cannot become reality without the abolition of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot abolish itself unless philosophy becomes reality’. In Poland these words came to mean something; and of all revenges on Marx, through the medium of the Catholic Church. The French observer who dismissed the masses’ religious enthusiasms as Ayatollah-like had it entirely wrong: the Church, historically, had been adept at raising the cause of the poor, and besides, in Poland, it was the national institution. Workers could be mobilized by priests, and this was to happen again and again as the seventies went ahead. The intellectuals went along, and found themselves having to talk common language with priests in a way that had no counterpart elsewhere. But it mattered also that the workers were galvanized by other factors: an industrialization that worked out very badly. In that decade the Communist Party (it had a different name in Poland) had also embarked on a supposedly unifying and national strategy, economic growth.