of hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers, the building of wire obstacles dividing East and West Berlin began. Overnight, and with savage finality, families, lovers, friends and neighbourhoods were divided; subway lines, rail links, apartment buildings and phone lines were severed and sealed off. Sunday, 13 August, became known as ‘Stacheldrahtsonntag’ (Barbed Wire Sunday); for the Communists it marked the successful accomplishment of ‘Operation Rose’. Within a few weeks, improvised wire obstacles started to morph into a formidable, heavily fortified, closely guarded and booby-trapped cement barrier dividing the city and enclosing West Berlin. This was ‘the Wall’. Officially, there was little that the West could do, but several organisations were founded in West Berlin to help people from the other side of the Wall to find their way to freedom. With false documents or via secret tunnels, thousands of people reached West Berlin. The escapees proved that the Wall was not impregnable, thereby offering hope to the millions of citizens still trapped in the GDR.107 Many people were killed and even more arrested. During the second half of 1961 alone, 3,041 people were arrested as a result of failed escape attempts and altogether 18,000 individuals were sentenced for ‘political crimes’ in the GDR during that year. Throughout the duration of the Wall’s existence, at least 765 people met their death on the way to freedom, 202 of them in their attempt to get over the Berlin Wall.108 But this did not stop others. There were many innovative escape attempts; by hot-air balloon, hidden in cars, under water or by simply driving a scheduled passenger train into a barrier at full speed, as driver Harry Deterling did on 5 December 1961. Deterling had carefully recruited his 24 passengers for what he called the ‘last train to freedom’. All cowered on the floor of the wagon as the train powered through the final border defences and a hail of bullets swept over them.109
All this demonstrates again the basic failure of Communist thinking, which simply fails to understand that since a human being is created in the image of God, he has a right to make his own decisions. When people are not free to choose, they cannot be creative or innovative. Being able to make innovative decisions also means that they can make mistakes and learn from them. This is also part of being human. Absolute control robs people of the possibility of making such mistakes and this in itself is the greatest mistake of all. Because, without the right to decide, the right to try and the right to be right or wrong, human beings simply could not exist.
East and West compared
Just as the West had failed to understand what was going on in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War, it continuously ignored the realities behind the Iron Curtain in the decades thereafter. After the end of Stalinism, increasing numbers of Western scholars and politicians began to view Eastern bloc Communist countries as, basically, similar to other countries in the world. According to several Western scholars, the Soviet understanding of democracy and human rights was simply ‘different’ from the Western one. At the same time, the achievements of the Eastern European Communist countries were actively promoted and praised. To foreign observers, the Soviet economic system seemed to be stagnant but nonetheless stable, so much so that almost no one predicted its swift collapse. Former special adviser to Margaret Thatcher, John O’Sullivan, has remembered how the Prime Minister’s office was full of reports, all of which declared that the Soviet economy was in good shape. It was reported, for example, that living standards in East Germany were roughly the same as in the West. Actually, it was only necessary to talk to the first taxi driver in Berlin to find out that this was far from the truth.
Table 7
Source: Maddison, 2001: 186.
Table 8
a Reported in B. Balassa. “Growth Performance of Eastern European Economies and Comparable Western European Economies,“ American Economic Review, May 1970.
b Cement, pig iron, steel ingots, in thousands of tons.
c Steel, million metric tons; cement, million tons; electricity, million kilowatt-hours.
d Total exports are the sum of exports to the convertible currency area ($8.5 bl) and exports to the nonconvertible currency area ($4.3 bl). It is likely that the latter value overstates the market value of these exports if they were to be valued at world market prices.
Source: Economist (1990), World Bank (1990), national sources.
It was not actually difficult to reach such optimistic conclusions on the health of the Soviet economy from looking at the impressive figures in Soviet statistics. After the wobbles of the early 1960s, the Communist bloc countries’ five-year GDP growth targets for the years 1966-1975 were achieved, ranging from East Germany’s 5.4 % to Romania’s 11.3 %, annually. How are decades of such high growth figures to be reconciled with the low per capita living standards? Firstly, the Communist gross figures included the double counting of input materials as well as the finished products. The figures were also often deliberately massaged to disguise the embarrassing gap between the USSR and the West. Above all, much Communist growth went into the production of items like steel that were then used to make more of the same at the expense of consumption and personal income.110 Unfortunately, such factors were often not taken into account when assessing the Communist countries’ GDP.
Of course, it cannot be said that no development or achievements were made during the fifty years under Communism. With improved healthcare, the mortality rate dropped, then the fall in the birth rate reduced population growth to a modest 1 %, quite near to Western standards. Infant mortality fell, but was still too high compared to Western levels. While mass primary education had largely come about before 1939, mass secondary education only came under Communism. The levelling of differences, which was one of Communism’s declared aims, operated most clearly in income policy where pay differentials were narrowed, thus laying the basis for fuller social integration. At the same time, we might question whether all of this would not have happened anyway as part of overall modernisation. Several Central and Eastern European countries already demonstrated rapid development in the 1930s, might they not have been better off if they had been allowed to continue on their own path? To answer these questions, we must compare the development levels of European countries in the 1930s with their development levels in the 1970s and at the end of the 1980s, during the last years of Communism.
Shop door opens in Skaryszew, Poland, 1989
During the 19th century, the average income per capita in Central and Eastern Europe was half that of Western Europe. By 1913, it had fallen to 46 % and 32 % of the rest of the Western world (US, Canada). During the years of independence between 1920 and 1939, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe developed well and even after the massive destruction of the Second World War, by 1950, the difference between Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe had decreased. This trend continued into the 1960s and 1970s, but then a new decline began. By 1990, the per capita income in Central and Eastern Europe had fallen to 32 % of the level of the Western world. The failure to reach the economic levels that prevailed in Western Europe was especially painful as it was during this period that other less developed countries in the Mediterranean and on the Northern periphery of Europe broke free from backwardness. By the 1930s, most Central and Eastern European countries had achieved better living standards than Spain, Portugal, Greece or even Italy and competed with countries like Austria or Finland. Even in the 1950s, the average level of income in Spain, Portugal and Greece stood at only 39 % of West European levels, less than that in Central and Eastern Europe. But by 1973, the per capita income in Southern Europe soon slightly exceeded that of Central and Eastern Europe. By 1987, the difference had become very
Taylor 2007.
Handbook, p. 208.
Taylor 2007, p. 296.
Okey 2004, p. 35.
