Eastern Europe Regrets
A little known fact about the post soviet eastern Europe: When folk in various countries there had their first chance at free and open elections for about 50 years a large amount of them voted for, guess what: communists!
Or, to be exact, the various rebranded socialist parties that grew out of the previous communist parties.
For example in Bulgaria the communist party rebranded itself as ‘Bulgarian Socialist Party’ and won the election on 47% of the vote in 1990. They went on to win again in 1994 and 2005.
In Albania the result of the 1991 election was, you guessed it - a huge left wing victory. The ‘Party of Labour’ got 56% of the vote, which is more than the UK Labour party has ever got. Of course the conservatives cried foul play, it was fixed, etc, but: “International observers, however, generally regarded the election as fair and that fraud and manipulation were minimal .”
The Romanian election of summer 1990 was won by an astonishing 85% by the ‘National Salvation Front ‘ - a new party with a mixed ideology but made up of “mostly former Communist officials”. It later grew into the left wing Social Democracy Party which went on to be 2nd in the 1996 election and win the 2000 election.
Lithuania - in the 1992 elections the Democratic Labour Party, which had its roots in the Communist Party of Lithuania, won on around 44% of the vote (which is more than the winning Conservatives got in the last UK election).
In Russia itself the 1993 elections saw the Communist party get the 3rd largest share of the vote. And then, rather than falling away into obscurity which is what most people in the west think happened, they actually INCREASED their share and went on to win the 1995 elections to the State Duma assembly, getting 15 million votes - a large margin above the Liberal Democratic Party.
Poland 1991 election - ‘Democratic Left Alliance’ narrowly missed getting the most votes by a tiny 0.3%.
Hungry - the previous ruling Hungarian Socialist Party was defeated by still came 4th (out of more than 20 parties) and got more than half a million votes.
Of course when the US and conservatives within those countries realised that left wing parties were getting a large degree of support they decided, in various of those places, to launch big campaigns to outlaw left wing parties, strip them of their assets, abuse and hound them. And in the case of Yeltsin in 1993 even to the extent of supporting a military attack on the parliament that killed hundreds of people. Easy solution huh! (yet when the same kind of thing happens in Venezuela against right wing parties and opponents its suddenly a terrible crime).
What this shows is that far from the common idea that folk in central and eastern Europe were crying out for a western free market system many of them simply wanted a more democratically organised form of socialism than had been the case under the authoritarian soviet system.
Then, when people from the east found out what the capitalist free market system was really like they were often very surprised and disappointed. From Michael Parenti’s interesting and contentious book 'Blackshirts and Reds':
“Emigrés from Communist states are astonished by the amount of bureaucracy they find in the West. Two Soviet immigrants to Canada complained, independently of each other, that "bureaucracy here was even worse than at home" {Monthly Review, 5/88). East Germans living in the West were staggered by the flood of complicated forms they had to fill out for taxes, health insurance, life insurance, unemployment compensation, job retraining, rent subsidies, and bank accounts. Furthermore, "because of the kind of personal information they had to give, they felt more observed and spied on than they were by the Stasi [the GDR security police]" ( p103).
“Since going private, ZiL, llie huge Moscow plant, saw its production of trucks slump from 150000 to 13000 a year, with almost 40 percent of the workforce laid off. In April 1996, the remaining workers petitioned the Russian government to lake back control of ZiL, In the past, ZiL workers and their relatives "had unshakeably safe jobs" at the factory. They lived in apartments and attended schools provided by ZiL As babies they spent their days at the ZiL day care center, and when ill they were attended to by ZiL doctors, "I was raised in a country that cared about its workers" said one machinist, who now was sorry he had opposed that system …” (p101).
"Street crime also has increased sharply (New York Times, 5/7/96). In the former Soviet Union, women and elderly who once felt free to sit in parks late at night now dare not venture out after dark. Since the overthrow of communism in Hungary, thefts and other felonies have nearly tripled and there has been a 50 percent increase in homicides (NPR, 2/24/92). The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when "relatively few police were needed" (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise." (p112)
"We didn't realize what we had" has become a common refrain. "The latest public opinion surveys show that many Russians consider Brezhnev's era and even Stalin's era to have been better than the pre- sent-day period, at least as far as economic conditions and personal safety are concerned" (New York Times, 10/15/95). A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this:
Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years?
A. Make communism look good."
Nice joke there on page 116!
A little known fact about the post soviet eastern Europe: When folk in various countries there had their first chance at free and open elections for about 50 years a large amount of them voted for, guess what: communists!
Or, to be exact, the various rebranded socialist parties that grew out of the previous communist parties.
For example in Bulgaria the communist party rebranded itself as ‘Bulgarian Socialist Party’ and won the election on 47% of the vote in 1990. They went on to win again in 1994 and 2005.
In Albania the result of the 1991 election was, you guessed it - a huge left wing victory. The ‘Party of Labour’ got 56% of the vote, which is more than the UK Labour party has ever got. Of course the conservatives cried foul play, it was fixed, etc, but: “International observers, however, generally regarded the election as fair and that fraud and manipulation were minimal .”
The Romanian election of summer 1990 was won by an astonishing 85% by the ‘National Salvation Front ‘ - a new party with a mixed ideology but made up of “mostly former Communist officials”. It later grew into the left wing Social Democracy Party which went on to be 2nd in the 1996 election and win the 2000 election.
Lithuania - in the 1992 elections the Democratic Labour Party, which had its roots in the Communist Party of Lithuania, won on around 44% of the vote (which is more than the winning Conservatives got in the last UK election).
In Russia itself the 1993 elections saw the Communist party get the 3rd largest share of the vote. And then, rather than falling away into obscurity which is what most people in the west think happened, they actually INCREASED their share and went on to win the 1995 elections to the State Duma assembly, getting 15 million votes - a large margin above the Liberal Democratic Party.
Poland 1991 election - ‘Democratic Left Alliance’ narrowly missed getting the most votes by a tiny 0.3%.
Hungry - the previous ruling Hungarian Socialist Party was defeated by still came 4th (out of more than 20 parties) and got more than half a million votes.
Of course when the US and conservatives within those countries realised that left wing parties were getting a large degree of support they decided, in various of those places, to launch big campaigns to outlaw left wing parties, strip them of their assets, abuse and hound them. And in the case of Yeltsin in 1993 even to the extent of supporting a military attack on the parliament that killed hundreds of people. Easy solution huh! (yet when the same kind of thing happens in Venezuela against right wing parties and opponents its suddenly a terrible crime).
What this shows is that far from the common idea that folk in central and eastern Europe were crying out for a western free market system many of them simply wanted a more democratically organised form of socialism than had been the case under the authoritarian soviet system.
Then, when people from the east found out what the capitalist free market system was really like they were often very surprised and disappointed. From Michael Parenti’s interesting and contentious book 'Blackshirts and Reds':
“Emigrés from Communist states are astonished by the amount of bureaucracy they find in the West. Two Soviet immigrants to Canada complained, independently of each other, that "bureaucracy here was even worse than at home" {Monthly Review, 5/88). East Germans living in the West were staggered by the flood of complicated forms they had to fill out for taxes, health insurance, life insurance, unemployment compensation, job retraining, rent subsidies, and bank accounts. Furthermore, "because of the kind of personal information they had to give, they felt more observed and spied on than they were by the Stasi [the GDR security police]" ( p103).
“Since going private, ZiL, llie huge Moscow plant, saw its production of trucks slump from 150000 to 13000 a year, with almost 40 percent of the workforce laid off. In April 1996, the remaining workers petitioned the Russian government to lake back control of ZiL, In the past, ZiL workers and their relatives "had unshakeably safe jobs" at the factory. They lived in apartments and attended schools provided by ZiL As babies they spent their days at the ZiL day care center, and when ill they were attended to by ZiL doctors, "I was raised in a country that cared about its workers" said one machinist, who now was sorry he had opposed that system …” (p101).
"Street crime also has increased sharply (New York Times, 5/7/96). In the former Soviet Union, women and elderly who once felt free to sit in parks late at night now dare not venture out after dark. Since the overthrow of communism in Hungary, thefts and other felonies have nearly tripled and there has been a 50 percent increase in homicides (NPR, 2/24/92). The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when "relatively few police were needed" (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise." (p112)
"We didn't realize what we had" has become a common refrain. "The latest public opinion surveys show that many Russians consider Brezhnev's era and even Stalin's era to have been better than the pre- sent-day period, at least as far as economic conditions and personal safety are concerned" (New York Times, 10/15/95). A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this:
Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years?
A. Make communism look good."
Nice joke there on page 116!