Contenu du sommaire : Spécial : Le bloc de l'Est en question

Imagining the People's Democracy: The Institute of World Economics and the Soviet Mental Map of Eastern Europe (1944-1948)`/titrebThis article explores the Soviet development of a conceptual framework in the article referred to as a “mental map” to describe the Communist-dominated and eventually Communist-ruled states of East Central Europe in the second half of the 1940s. It is based on the example of the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the end of World War II, there was no coherent language within the Soviet Union to describe the countries of East Central Europe. Eventually, a common political definition emerged, that of “People's Democracy”. The content of this definition was shaped by the political demands and constraints of late Stalinism. In particular, it was influenced by the need to delimit people's democracies from both the West and the Soviet Union, and to justify Soviet political dominance in East Central Europe.

Are The Communist Parties of the Eastern Bloc A Transnational Subject? The Case of the Party's Schools of Higher Education`/titrebIt is widely assumed that Communist parties were the most uniform institutions of the socialist bloc. This paper shows that besides the asymmetrical and bilateral relations organized around the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there were also horizontal relations among Socialist bloc parties, as evidenced by documents found in the higher education schools' archives of the GDR and Czechoslovakia. I examine the mutual relations of the party schools as well as their relations with their Soviet Union Communist party colleagues and other parties within the bloc, from 1945 to 1971. This leads to the conclusion that organizational diversity and horizontal exchanges were always part of the picture, including in the communist parties. The exchanges were nevertheless used for diplomatic or ideological purposes, primarily national ones. In this sense, such exchanges only marginally led to the emergence of transnational practices.

Shaping the Eastern Bloc through the Economy: The Difficult Genesis of a Socialist International Solidarity in Comecon`/titrebFor a long time, political and military cooperation of the People's Democracies and the USSR was the only focus of historical research on communist international organizations. Yet economy was central in Marx's philosophy, which was the theoretical basis of the political and social models in Eastern Europe. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance's (Comecon) history helps to deconstruct the idea of an Eastern bloc through the analysis of the construction of a transnational space of economic expertise, the only one in which the People's Democracies had a strong possibility to challenge the Soviet model. It established a real horizontal circulation of economic issues and models. Comecon itself continually asserted its autonomy and promoted the idea of a common interest, which was more than the addition of the national interests of the member states. As a permanent discussion forum it led to a progressive, limited but real, transnational acculturation of the experts who were assigned to work with it.

The Writers' Union: An Institutional Model and its Limits. The aim of the communist states' cultural policies was to unify and homogenise the writers' communities in order to control and easily assign them precise ideological functions. The USSR thus created the Writers' Union, a monopolistic literary institution. After the Second World War this model was reproduced in East European countries that adopted communist rule. Individual countries' strategies as well as intense cooperation with similar institutions in the Soviet space followed the Soviet institutional model during all of the communist period. Nevertheless, documents suggest changes that showed the limits of the Writers' Union. In some cases, doubts were expressed about the model, and some unions even became protest platforms against the political power, which violated their initial agreement. Internal tensions in the unions and tensions in the literary exchanges contradict the existence of a perfect harmony within the Soviet bloc. These institutions thus provide a suitable ground for analyzing the meanings and relevance of the notion of Soviet bloc.

Socialist Realism and its International Models. This article explores the question of the artistic models circulating in socialist countries, focusing on the plastic arts in the GDR. The only declared model was the art of the Soviet Union, but East German artists, who were involved in the creation of socialist realism, showed little interest in Soviet art. Realist forms set up as models actually came from the peripheries of the bloc, from Italy, France and Mexico. From the 1960s on, the marginalisation of socialist realism in the socialist art world did not mean the end of these models nor the end of an international search for an art that manifested political solidarity.

The Hungarian Military Industry: From Sovietization to Westernization. This article, based on formerly top-secret military and Comecon sources, presents some new evidence concerning the long-term history of the Hungarian military industry, from the early 1950s to the 1980s. The first part shows the consequences of the massive Sovietization in this sector – the radical change in technologies, the adaptation of the Soviet GOST-standards, and the skyrocketing war production. The next part shows how the military industry was put back into the civil economy between 1953 and 1961. The war plants developed a dual production structure that helped them deal with the lengthy transitional period. The third part analyses Socialist economic cooperation and division of labour within the CMEA/Comecon, emphasizing the high level of integration in military production. It also highlights some important failures of the cooperation that forced Hungary to seek new ties outside the Soviet bloc. The last part examines the main technological and economic questions of the 1970s and 1980s: how could a socialist state legally or illegally acquire state-of-the-art technologies? How did Hungary procure Western licences, and how was it possible to sell the new developments of the military industry in the Third World?

“We Cannot Give Up Our History”: When the Macedonian Question puts in the Notion of Communist Bloc to the Test. The article deals with the development of communist Bulgaria's policy on the Macedonian question and with the polemics between this country and Titoist Yugoslavia over the same question. Between 1944 and 1948, the two states negotiated, under Stalin's auspices, the establishment of a big South-Slavic federation, including Bulgaria. The Bulgarian communist regime attempted to impose Macedonian national identity in the only part of geographical Macedonia that belonged to it, the region of Pirin. The Tito-Stalin break in 1948 stopped this policy and led to the progressive restoration of traditional Bulgarian nationalism by Sofia authorities. As of the 1960s, Todor Živkov's regime launched a nationalist policy negating the existence of a Macedonian nation and claiming the Bulgarian historical character of Macedonia. This policy brought about a series of controversies with Yugoslavia about Macedonia's history, the local Slavic language as well as the human rights of people in Bulgaria regarding themselves as Macedonians.

From National Communism to Romanian-State Communism: Reactions to Romanian Sovietization in the 1960s. This paper examines the resurgence of nationalism in the 1960s in Romania as a reaction to Sovietization. At that time, Romanian leaders skilfully exploited the populations' anti-Russian feelings through their internal and external legitimation strategy. At the beginning, there was a national Communist policy of economic development which led, in the middle of the decade, to a State nationalism, both political and cultural, wielding a patently anti-Soviet discourse and tending towards a definition of the nation in ethnic terms. The analysis of this development of Romanian state-communism makes it possible to see that the Romanian case is by no means an exception in the Eastern bloc. This work also shows that the nationalistic ferment of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's and Nicolae Ceauşescu's policy in the 1960s was not radically innovative. On the contrary, it used identity-construction and unifying procesess that had already been used in 19th century Romanian nationalism and the interwar period.

A National or Ideological Frontier? Ceské Velenice, A Czech City on the Austrian Border`/titrebAfter setting the historical context, this paper shows that the very existence of Ceské Velenice, a Czech city at the edge of the Iron Curtain on the Austrian border, was the result of anti-Austrian Czech nationalism. The author then deconstructs the Czechoslovak communist regime's strategy to build its legitimacy on the borders of the Eastern bloc, a strategy which created, and benefited from, a historical misunderstanding: communist ideology justified keeping the border primarily for ideological reasons (i.e. to prevent people from running away), but managed to gain widespread support among the locals by playing on the fact that they also saw it as a patriotic mission (to prevent the Austrian enemy from entering the country.) The article thus concludes that the Warsaw Pact membership was not the trigger of an intra-socialist bloc solidarity among the inhabitants of Ceské Velenice but the provisional outfit of an anti-Austrian patriotism consubstantial to Czech national identity, which transcended all 20th century regimes.

Beyond the Cold War: International Organizations and East-West Circulations (1947-1973). The article questions the overall Cold War discourse by studying the circulation of knowledge and experts between both blocs. For this purpose, International Organizations (International Labor Organization and European commission for Europe by the United Nations) are used as laboratories and transnational social venues where Cold War discourses are produced but in the meantime where exchanges between both blocs are made possible and even encouraged. These exchanges are grounded in continuing relations between expert networks which have consolidated in the inter war period. But they also emerge from the necessity of facing common questions first in the period of reconstruction and then in a time of modernization.

Inspired by the South ? Transnational East-West Mobilizations during the Cold War. In the early decades after the Second World War, Western European social reaction to the political situation behind the Iron Curtain remained relatively weak. Despite the efforts of Eastern European exiles, large-scale protests and acts of solidarity only manifested themselves after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Even in that case, the Cold War constellation of power set limitations on Western idealism and made sure the movement was short-lived. After the Helsinki Accords of 1975, however, the issues of human rights and democracy in Eastern Europe were slowly gaining ground. In the 1980s, the struggle of Solidarność in Poland ignited a massive wave of solidarity across Western Europe. The heterogeneous and sustained character of this movement is explained with reference to a “Southern inspiration”. The forms of action, networks and ideologies of East-West movements East-west were indeed inspired by North-South activists and anti-colonial movements.

Social Democratic Transnationalism and Soviet Bloc Dissidents During the Cold War. Dissidence in Soviet-bloc countries posed Western Social-democratic parties with a dilemma: how to demonstrate their solidarity with those living behind the Iron Curtain while maintaining their commitment to a policy of Détente? Some observers have highlighted social-democratic indifference; others have argued that a dual strategy was at work, the leadership focusing on relations with governments while lower levels provided support for the dissidents. A “realist” approach to international relations certainly induced most social democrats to prioritize relations with governments, but some circles – including top officials – concretely assisted Eastern European oppositionists, whether exiled in the West or still active in Poland, Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic.

Youth, the West and the Czechoslovak Secrete Police: Immaturity or Ideological Diversion? In the late 1950s, youth become a social and political problem in most European countries, especially because of its attraction to American culture (jazz, rock, the beatniks, etc.). In Czechoslovakia, as in most communist countries, this American influence was called “ideological diversion” and treated as an anti-State crime. The regime's secret police, the StB, was called in to deal with this youth criminality. But police activity towards the youth constantly went from repression to educational measures, and even when crimes were committed, the youth was considered as an immature group that first had to be protected from bad influences. In fact, the Czechoslovak regime was unable to draw a clear line of action toward youngsters, and the secret police was more and more unable to deal with the increasing student turmoil in the 1960s.

East-West Scholar Exchanges, Bloc Confrontation and the Spirit of the Cold War: Interview of Katherine Verdery. Katherine Verdery, an American anthropologist specialized in the study of Socialist Romania, enlightens in this interview some important steps of her career during the Cold War. She first points out how Cold War was influent on her intellectual and professional development. She also stresses how fieldworks behind the “Iron Curtain” changed her analysis of Socialism and helped her to dissipate the effect of the spirit of the Cold War. Finally, she analyses why the circulation of anthropological knowledge between Romania and the United States was difficult: it was not only because of the constraints of the Cold War but mostly because of the differences between two original intellectual traditions.