The invasion of Czechoslovakia and the restoration there of the old political and economic system meant the end of the Soviet economic reform and also of hopes for a new wave of liberalization. Until 1968, to be sure, the new economists carried on a sort of ‘rearguard battle’ for economic modernization. Two articles in Novy Mir by N. Petrakov served as requiem for reform and warning for the future. He reminded readers that the country was living beyond its means, that having money did not ensure acquisition of goods and, finally, that it would be necessary, sooner or later, to pay for the protracted refusal to recognize the laws of the market. These warnings, though, were sounded either too soon or much too late. Reform had been frustrated, but the crisis of the economic mechanism had not as yet reached the point where it could stimulate a serious revolutionary ferment. ‘By the end of the 1960s at the latest,’ writes Rakovski,
the ideology of ‘market socialism’ had undergone a total defeat everywhere.
But the defeat of the ideology only moderated the amplitude of oscillations
round a general tendency, and has in no way changed the tendency itself.34
Market socialism had not suffered an economic defeat, only a political one. Where the economic experiments were continued for a fairly long time they produced, on the whole, some positive results — although new problems were also revealed. The classic examples of experiments more or less consistently pursued were Hungary and Yugoslavia. These countries achieved the biggest successes in Eastern Europe. Experiments in a number of factories in the USSR gave excellent results, but the ideology of ‘market socialism’, in its original form, was closely bound up with Communist reformism and a naïve belief in the pragmatism of the ruling statocracy and the socialist nature of the existing system. The hope that market socialism might be introduced from above proved illusory, and that predetermined its defeat.
It was significant that the greatest successes were achieved in Hungary and Yugoslavia, countries which had experienced popular revolutions. The reforming section of the ruling circles would never have realized their aims by themselves, without pressure from below. The exception here was Czechoslovakia, but ultimately this exception proved the rule: the reformers failed. Consequently the idea of market socialism underwent a crisis, to rise again later in the programme of forces which were not so much intrasystemic as openly oppositional, extrasystemic. The words ‘socialist market economy’ were banned from the official press. After 1971-74 it was possible to defend those ideas only in samizdat and foreign publications. True, in the legal press too, many economists wrote in favour of a market-socialist economy,35 but the actual expression had to be replaced by something else, and hints resorted to. One could be frank where partial questions were concerned, but no developed theoretical programme could be advanced, as Birman, Lisichkin and others had done in the sixties. The economists themselves began increasingly to feel that they were outsiders, and to compare themselves to a doctor whom a patient asks for prescriptions, only to throw them away in the nearest rubbish bin.
The defeat of market socialism was not final. It would be revived in a fresh political form: the future of the socialist opposition was bound up with the solving of the problems it posed. But before new democratic ideas began to spread there was disappointment at the fate of the reforms, loss of confidence in Leninism, Communism, socialism — everything one had so naively believed in during the sixties. As usually happens, the baby was chucked out with the bath water. Still, in history things never happen in any other way.
There was a pause in the social struggle. A great deal had to be thought about and understood. On the morning of 21 August 1968 the entire ideology of Soviet liberalism collapsed in a few minutes, and all the hopes aroused by the Twentieth Congress fell to the ground. Whereas previously liberal intellectuals had comforted themselves with the thought that, on the whole, our society has a sound foundation, that it has not lost its socialist character, that — as Yevtushenko wrote in his Autobiography — the revolution was sick but not dead, the events of 1968 scattered those illusions. It was not a matter of ‘the excesses of Stalinism’ but of the system itself. For many, recognition of this fact meant spiritual and ideological collapse. Understanding of the new truths did not, of course, come to everyone at once, but an obvious reexamination of values began. Rakovski wrote that ‘it would be unhistorical not to see the real heroism’ in the Communist liberals of the ‘thaw’ period,36 despite their naivety. But 1968 put an end to their hopes, and along with them their ideology, in the form it then bore. It had proved helpless to withstand the tank armies of the neo-Stalinist state upholding its monopoly of ‘Communism’.
It was almost like Mayakovsky’s verses:
Political experience affects social consciousness much more strongly than any theories, even the most sophisticated. If social experience does not favour them, ideas cannot be assimilated by a sufficiently large number of people. In 1969-78 the overall situation was unfavourable to the spreading of reformist-Communist theories. The illusions of the sixties had become patent. It was clear that if socialist ideology was to revive at all, it must be in some new — and certainly non-Communist — form. Even some prominent figures of the ‘Prague spring’ said so. J. Pelikan wrote, after 1968:
First and foremost it must be realized that the very term ‘Communism’ has been discredited among the peoples of Eastern Europe. They associate it with the ideas of one-party rule and dictatorship of the apparatus, relying on the hegemony of the Soviet Union in a particular geographical region.38
However, disappointment has its logic no less than hope, and it is the logic of inertia. Rejection of Communist reformism led many unofficial intellectuals into hostility towards Marxism and socialism — still further: to denial of progress, revolution, democracy even (for all these values were proclaimed by the left-wing ideologues, including the Communists). Pelikan wrote that the majority of active opponents of the regime in the USSR
identify socialism with Stalinism (they have seen nothing else), and so they reject socialism in general, as though it cannot be reformed or modified. Personally I do not agree with such views, although I can understand them as an emotional and moral reaction to the situation that exists in the USSR.39