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able to impose his authority upon both-at the cost, it is true, of
terrorizing them into submission. Now that the remnants of his
prestige are being shared out among political bosses and military
leaders, each group may try to win the allegiance of an increasingly
homogeneous privileged stratum. And this struggle must be waged
in terms appropriate to a society which after almost forty years of
Communist rule has become deeply committed to institutions whose
real function is wholly at variance with the official ideology. Because
the new integration appears to call for a renewed concentration of
authority at the very topmost level of the hierarchy, even Communists
who admire Lenin must feel that their trials are not yet over.
If
these problems are urgent and difficult for the Soviet leaders,
they are positively dramatic for the East European satellites, as the
Poznan revolt showed. The obvious parallel to Poznan is the East
Berlin rising of June 1953; the not so obvious but equally relevant
comparison is with Kronstadt in 1921. After Kronstadt, Lenin intro–
duced economic concessions, but tightened the apparatus of political
control and thus opened the way to Stalin. This is the orthodox
Communist reaction to any challenge which has genuine mass sup–
port.
It
is difficult to see how the Polish Communists, and the rest
of the satellites, can escape the logic of their single-party tyranny,
even were they to make economic concessions big enough to satisfy
the workers. Comparisons with Russia in 1956 are deceptive. The
Soviet economy is a going concern, and the Soviet party is a power–
ful, well-established stratum which can afford to "liberalize" without
losing control: Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin was a sign
of self-confidence. The East European regimes are a thin crust over
molten lava-a crust which itself consists of lava only a little less fiery
than the underlying substance. Any crack on the surface threatens to
release the accumulated pressures. That is why, paradoxically, the
"thaw" is less dangerous in Russia, where it is absorbed by the privi–
leged Soviet elite, than in the European satellites, with their recent
memories of relative freedom. In Moscow, the end of terrorism is
gratefully acknowledged. In Warsaw, Budapest and Prague it stimu–
lates demands for genuine liberty, or at the very least for a degree of
self-government and decentralization that makes nonsense of single–
party control and the planned economy as understood by Commu–
nists. Are the workers to have the right to strike? Is the price mecha-
