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The Soviets and European Integration from Stalin to Gorbatchev 91
i.e. the isolation of West Berlin from Western Europe and NATO in 1958-1961 that
revealed for the first time the Soviet inability to compete with the growing Western
market economy for the souls of the Europeans. Later Khrushchev recalled that
“unfortunately, at a certain stage, ideological issues [i.e. the outcome of the peaceful
competition between capitalism and communism] are decided by the stomach,
that is, by seeing who can provide the most for people’s daily needs. Therefore, the
attraction of one or the other system is literally decided by shop windows, by the
price of goods, and by wages. In these areas, of course, we had no chance of competing
with the West, especially in West Berlin.” 18 In August 1961 Khrushchev and
East German leader Walter Ulbricht had to close the border in Berlin to put an end
to the gigantic drain of people to the West.
However, it took much longer for the Soviet leaders to realize that the historic
tide had turned, and the “inevitability of the triumph of socialism” of the Soviet
type had been replaced by the inevitability of capitalist integration and the rise of
world consumerism. Most of the Kremlin leaders, particularly Khrushchev,
believed that it was just a question of uneven starting conditions for “socialist”
countries, in particular since they were those who had suffered the most during
World War II. The Soviets under Khrushchev and, after his ousting, under Brezhnev,
began to compete with Western consumerism by patching together, piecemeal,
the consumerism of a “socialist” kind. Inside the USSR it was very truncated and
confined to the elite and the dwellers of main cities. The leaders of most East European
countries went much further in this direction by taking vast Western loans and
moving to a market-oriented economy (see “Kadarization” of Hungary, Poland
under Edward Gierek). The Soviets never gave their consent to this, but had no will
to thwart this movement either. As a veteran of the International Department of the
Central Committee of CPSU recalls, “at first people at the helm [in Moscow] were
angry, particularly with regard to the economic experiments of the Hungarians. But
eventually they gave up: after all, one could not invade this country a second time.
The people are too hot-tempered there. Let them have their own way.” 19
The problem of Soviet subsidies for both selective internal and East European
“consumerism” continued to aggravate. The Kremlin leadership attempted to solve
it by increasing the traction of raw materials and through underpaid labor. But this
solution became problematic, while huge Soviet resources were sucked into the
continuing arms race with the United States. The structural impossibility of producing
both “guns and butter” (Soviet agriculture suffered from the ruin of the Stalinist
years) led to the gradual turn of the Brezhnev leadership to the idea of
“imported consumerism” and of state-controlled reintegration with the world economy.
Officially, this process was straitjacketed from the beginning to fit the existing
foreign policy strategy. The ideologues used the references to Lenin’s ideas of con-
18. Khrushchev Remembers. The Glasnost Tapes, eds., J. SCHECTER and V. LUCHKOV, Boston
1990, p.165.
19. SHAKHNAZAROV, Tsena svobodi. Reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami iego pomochnika. [The
Price of freedom. Gorbachev’s reformation through the eyes of his assistant], Moscow 1993, p.111.