Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (33 page)

According to Spufford, during his visit to America Khrushchev was first of all astonished by their level of life and dreamt about a similar standard for his people. The famous temperament of the charismatic leader is of course best remembered from his speeches in the UN. “We have to try to be friends, a peaceful coexistence” – he says, despite waving sputniks and rockets behind him or the famous declaration “We’ll bury you!” or banging his shoe on the conference table to get some attention. In Spufford’s account Khrushchev loved hamburgers and the idea of a cheap, rich meal that was available to everybody.

There used to be a different model of modernity than that we know now – things were tried and then discarded. In this chapter I want to take the reader to this very specific moment of history, in which an alternative modernity to that of the West was not only possible, but started to be introduced in life. There existed a world of parallel, socialist-only economic systems, where technique and utopianism went together. The Soviet reality until the mid-50s experienced a tragic waste of life, mass murder rivalled only by Hitler, famines, horrific politically motivated purges and the spreading of the disease that was the Gulag Archipelago. With such amounts of blood on their hands, Soviet authorities were especially interested in redeeming the Soviet project. After decades of undernourishment, and terrible problems with supply of food and other products necessary just to live, Khrushchev’s idea was to finally bring to the Russian people the plenty they had sacrificed so much for.

5 A late communist parade in East Berlin 1987. Computers taken for a walk.

This was to be achieved through a revolution within the Soviet economy, which was until then centrally planned. Central planning was a command, ‘shouting’ economy: the orders were given from the top and had to be fulfilled no matter what. What mattered was the quantity, not quality. More of everything, regardless of demand, was the best, albeit primitive, form of accumulation. In this way you would have vast levels of production of steel, while there were not enough shoes. Without central planning it would
have been impossible to build a gigantic industrial base in the underdeveloped, post-Tsarist country, yet over the years, it started to be a burden to the communist economy and a chief problem in the ‘catching up’ or even ‘overtaking of the West’, which was the slogan of the post-Thaw era.

According to central planning, USSR could outproduce the US in raw industrial tonnage, yet often at the cost of poor quality. This is why it was the most basic goods and infrastructure that were always important for communist planning: railways, metro systems and other public transport, mass housing, these were all often of very good quality and sometimes better than in the West. It was the consumer goods that were the Achilles heel. That was the reality of constant shortages, queues and low quality goods. The new economy, which was to be introduced in the 1950s, bore resemblance to both the socialist and capitalist system. Instead of the centralization that resulted all-too-often in barter, bribery or inefficiency, it was supposed to be more like a network. It was striving for more quality stuff, more high technology and more available consumer goods, of ever-better quality. In order to do this, Soviet economists had to introduce some market mechanisms. In central planning, if the center committed mistakes, they were reproduced by the rest. Without the permission of the Party, you couldn’t rebuild or adapt any project, including the heavy pre-fab, system built mass housing, which was everywhere the same, from Vilnius to Vladivostok. The successes of the Soviet economy had been based on military discipline - under Stalin you had to meet those targets or you were shot – and this too was to be abandoned. The Soviet economy had accumulated; now it was time to redistribute.

The ideas of the Soviet economy had to be reformulated: instead of simplistic measurements of the rise in production, demand was to dictate prices, which should, as the most radical economists of the time insisted, be set by computer networks. Cybernetics, a very important branch of science in the Soviet Union, was developing, trying to marry economics and computerization. In this Soviet
science was potentially really overtaking the West by producing original computer systems, just like they were at this point well ahead in the space race.

And for a bit, in the 1950s and early 60s, the economy didn’t differ so much, or at all, from what the propaganda was saying. Not overtaking the West, it was nonetheless an advancing economy, the sweetest moment of socialism, closest to the idea of ‘red plenty’. Yet quickly the limitations of the Soviet state appeared. Expectedly, the price rises on sundries insisted on by the economists started to cause social dissent: riots and demonstrations, which ended tragically with the shooting of demonstrators in Novocherkassk. These limits revealed how the Soviet state couldn’t go on without the total support of its citizens and a total acknowledgment of its ideology. Any dissent would be a threat to the state integrity. Or so they thought: ideological purity turned out to be more important than the lives of the citizens. After that, Khrushchev was removed from power, and replaced with the much more conservative Brezhnev, who brought back the previous rules. From then on there was a policy of “no more revolutions”. No more experiments, no more attempts at democracy, no lifting of censorship. Some of the promised consumerism was realized during the Brezhnev 1970s, but on false premises. This was already the era of stagnation, the lack of any innovation, in the name of not taking risks, slowly descending into the eventual massive crisis in the 80s, which, accelerated by the turbo-capitalist transition, led the country to complete economic disaster in the 90s.

What was the American reaction to the competition? It was often outspoken ridicule. In one of the funniest, if incredibly heavy-handed Western comedies of that era, by a Polish Jew and resident of Vienna and Berlin in the 1930s, Billy Wilder’s
One Two Three
, we have the symbolic war between the two camps banalized as a romance. The misalliance of a rich, American girl – the daughter of the factory boss who James Cagney’s manager is working for, stationed in West Berlin – and an East German boy, a
completely ideological, anti-capitalist worker, who’d rather die than betray the ideals of the DDR’s Communist Party. The whole film is full of gags and jokes recalling the famous appearances and speeches of Khrushchev, from the “bury” speech to the ‘overtaking’. The crudeness and lack of lustre of Eastern life, its glamourless roughness, is key to the way the Cold War is presented here, and what we’re led to believe it
really
is: Easterners are of course a bunch of crassly dressed, dirty, styleless drunks, and the DDR police is of course the cruellest. So it’s a mere difference of style!

The American sector, where the company and the factory of our friend are, is of course warm-hearted, even if not always that efficient. The joke is not completely lost on Cagney, as, awaiting the visit of his American missus and a little son, he’s eagerly ogling, or maybe more, the charms of an attractive blond German secretary. The scandal of his powerful boss’ daughter’s alliance unfolds exactly as he and his wife are to pay a visit to Berlin, where Cagney was supposed to “take care” of this crazy, irresponsible child. Yet, the up-to-now posh and vacuous girl all of a sudden, under the influence of her new love, decides to reject the earthly pleasures of capitalism and the American oil fortune, to defect to the East and join the CP with her fiancée, looking exactly as if he just left the Berliner Ensemble playing a courageous worker in one of Brecht’s plays. In order to save face and job, Cagney must now, within less than 24 hours, convince the now pregnant & married daughter to dismiss her husband or…do everything she can to get the boy to defect to
the West! The results of his mission are uncertain, and involve a lot of jokes played on the Eastern proletariat. Yet in the end, not only does the daughter realize just how stupid her idea of living in the rough East was, but also, by way of blackmail and a crude arrest by the DDR police, the boy himself is not so Marxist anymore, and successfully pretends to be a rich aristocrat in the eyes of the potential parents-in-law. Though the transformation happens due to an army of stylists and good-manners teachers, which uproot all the communist roughness out of our sweet boy, it’s all only a pretext to yet more gags at the communist regime’s expense.

5.1 One Two Three - the German Democratic Republic as American grotesque.

This dream, that we can ‘overtake the West’, existed for less than two decades, somewhere between late Stalinism and Brezhnev, somewhere between the secret speech of Khrushchev and the rise of Władysław Gomułka to power in Poland in 1956 and the anti-Semitic purge of March 1968; somewhere between the walk Jeanne Moreau took into the Parisian night in search of her lover in
Ascenseur Pour Echaffaud
and the sleepless night in Prague that a married couple of system beneficiaries endures in Karel Kachyna’s 1969
The Ear
, wiretapped and scared of a visit from the men in black suits. It starts somewhere during the Space Age era of Bikini costumes, Googie-style diners and Atomic TV sets. It shares the enthusiasm of the colorful designs presented at Brussels Expo ’58 and follows the splendid monument to Le Corbusier’s brutalism in Marseilles. It shyly explores new, previously nonexistent worlds in laboratories and sound studios across Europe: Pierre Schaeffer’s first experiments with musique concrete since 1948, and the Polish contemporary music festival Warsaw Autumn beginning in 1957. Karlheinz Stockhausen executes the first electroacoustic music experiments in Cologne, inspiring students Holger Czukay, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, later of Can and Kraftwerk fame. Modern Polish designs cause a furore at international festivals: they win the first Textile Biennale in Lausanne in 1962 for an innovatory, unconventional approach to textiles as a new kind of work of art. New Wave cinema flourishes everywhere,
Polish and Czech dramas films win prizes on international festivals, and so does the music, at Cannes, Donaueschingen, Darmstadt. It is this territory that this chapter will explore.

Khrushchev’s Thaw in ’56 marked a significant liberalization of this same high-up bureaucratic class, as he fought the new hierarchies within the party structures. He significantly cut the payments of the upper echelon (for which reason he became unpopular among them), as well as liberalizing the harsh Stalinist laws on divorce, abortion and women’s rights (but he kept the criminalization of homosexuality). Yet although he was a believer in equality, Khrushchev, the former butcher of Ukraine during the great famine and the great purge in the 1930s, still remained a conservative.

On a certain scale, the Polish Thaw looked similar, but Poland went further to become the most liberal country in the Bloc. It also had immense influence on its culture for over two decades. In Czechoslovakia, though it was brewing for several years, the Prague Spring lasted only about six months in 1968, and was crushed by Warsaw Pact invasion, and in films, the New Wave lasted at most about 4-5 years. Hungary after the crushing of the ’56 revolution had milder censorship and a much more advanced ‘market socialism’, but it drew very different conclusions from the triumph of the Polish October ’56. While Polish workers strikes in Poznań in ’56 led to the seizure of power by the more liberal part of the communist party, led by Gomułka, who successfully reassured Moscow that he could maintain socialist order; in Hungary, student-inspired protests were took place in the capital, with secret policemen strung up on lampposts, and with Imre Nagy’s cabinet containing non-communists and promising withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This ended in the bloody Moscow intervention in Budapest. The unsung revolution of ’56 in Poland is unpopular precisely because it was in a way successful – you cant romanticize it in the same way as the Budapest revolutionaries, who keep being immortalized in films and popular anti-communist sentiment in contemporary Hungary. Back then, in a sense, we both ended up with less harsh communist regimes, but in the Hungarian case, after a bloodily stifled revolution.