Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski
Review by: G. Ginsburgs
Source: Soviet Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Apr., 1961), pp. 448-455
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Soviet Studies

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Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I960. 470 PP.

FEW books until now have attempted to analyse the Soviet camp as a
whole, to examine it from every angle, to isolate those internal and
external factors which help to make it a bloc apart or, conversely,
which impede the process of integration, and to subject these under-
lying forces to a detailed and searching scrutiny in order to ascertain
what really 'makes it tick'. True, there have been a number of studies,
some of them excellent, dealing with specialized problems of the
Communist community, its economics, its institutions or its national
patterns, but the item under review here represents the first effort to
pull all these approaches together and to accomplish an analysis in
depth of the fundamental elements and mainsprings of the Com-
munist world.
The stated aim of the author is a study of the relations between the
ruling Communist regimes restricted to an examination of the centri-
fugal and centripetal forces operating at the decision-making level
within the bloc. Given this framework of reference, the author dis-
tinguishes four periods in the evolution of the 'socialist community'
since 1945. The years 1945-1947 are treated as the first phase, which
witnessed the birth of the people's democracies in the context of what
is described as 'institutional and ideological diversity'; the second stage,
1947-1953, is labelled 'Stalinism', characterized briefly as institutional
and ideological uniformity; 1953 to i956, the third period, is seen as
that of political thaw degenerating into political deluge with attendant
institutional and ideological diversity, while the concluding section,
1957-1959, treats the re-emergence of a Communist 'Commonwealth'
based on a new pattern combining institutional diversity with ideo-
logical uniformity. Within each section, the author attempts to
determine the main currents of tension and reaction, dependence and
consensus, which contributed to the effective functioning of the
conglomeration of states and regimes known as the Soviet bloc qua
bloc or, vice versa, which hindered that operation.
As can be judged even from this all too brief summary, The Soviet
Bloc is indeed an ambitious undertaking and one on which the author
obviously expended a tremendous amount of time, effort, skill and
erudition. The end result is undoubtedly a superior product, one
which some may think the best overall attempt to date at defining the
essential differences and motivations of the Soviet 'Commonwealth',
its particular modi operandi, its special methods of internal communi-
cation and its own rationale. But, like all works striving towards

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 449

achieving a synthesis of all previous approaches and a definitive

evaluation of a highly controversial problem, the book will, in all
probability, raise just as many objections as it will attract plaudits.
For a large, complex and learned work such as this one is, there are
remarkably few factual errors, and these can be disposed of briefly. It
does not seem correct to speak of the satellite Communist parties as
having reached a numerical plateau in their memberships in 1948
(p. 85) when the table on the very next page indicates that the Czecho-
slovak party, for instance, lost more than half a million members, or
close to 25% of its total 1948 composition, between May 1948 and
August 1954; the pOst-1948 vicissitudes of the Hungarian Workers'
Party, granted that its history is somewhat unique, evidence the same
wild fluctuations; in Yugoslavia, too, the party grew by one-third
between July 1948 and June I956; in Rumania, on the other hand, the
party ranks were thinned out by half between September 1948 and
June i956, and in the G.D.R. the same situation obtained by April
'954.
Albania did not join CEMA in I950, as is stated on p. 127, but in
1949, and North Vietnam and North Korea have yet to adhere to
that organization. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research is not
headed by Topchiev (p. I73), but by Blokhintsev. There were two
commercial agreements between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
prior to the May I955 talks (p. 174), a limited barter agreement as
early as i October 1954, and a full-fledged commercial agreement on
S January i955.
These are only minor errors, however. More significant are the
serious objections in principle and substantive interpretation raised by
many of the assertions, conclusions and definitions advanced by
the author in the course of his study, objections to points of both
primary and subsidiary importance.
The discussion (pp. 22-24) of the ideological and political considera-
tions leading to the formulation of the doctrine of 'people's demo-
cracy', for instance, seems to be based on a number of false premises
and misconceptions. It is simply not true that 'no intermediate form'
other than the Soviet state 'was considered possible either in theory or
in practice' prior to 1945, an assertion which the author buttresses
with references to the Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, Bavarian and
Baltic coups of I9I8-I9I9. Is it the use of the term 'Soviet' in the
official title of these revolutionary regimes which convinces the
author of the existence of a single pattern? By the same token, why not
emphasize the absence of the word 'Socialist' from the names of some
of these early creations, as opposed to its use in the appellation of some
of the other Bolshevik governments, and, accordingly, to postulate

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450 BRZEZINSKI:
on these grounds a doctrinal heterogeneity among the early Communist
regimes? Furthermore, even from a strictly semantic point of view, the
author overlooks the fact that by I945 a variety of terminological
labels had been improvised, some of them direct doctrinal antecedents
of the 'people's democracies': Mongolia and Tannu Tuva were
named People's Republics; Bukhara was for a time a Soviet People's
Republic and the Kuusinen government of I939 was known as the
Finnish Democratic Republic. On the other hand, if the accent is not
on linguistic similarity predicated on the widespread use in the early
days of the word 'Soviet', but on the substantive content of the
pioneer Comimunist regimes in Eastern Europe, then the author is
equally in error in claiming the prevalence of a single pattern, since
there was in truth very little on that score between the Bavarian
experience and Bela Kun's dictatorship, and between those two and the
Soviet experiment itself, less identity, in fact, as to the practical nature
and effective tenipi of revolutionary transformation than there was to
be between the East European satellite regimes of post-I945 vintage
where the author professes to see no overall doctrinal pattern.
Indeed, the author's very attempt to represent the people's demo-
cracies as ideological and institutional novelties sui generis, drastic
departures from the allegedly radical precedent of all Communist bids
for power prior to World War II, is itself of doubtful validity. Thus,
would not the Russian experience with NEP be a direct forerunner
of the short-lived 'transitional stage' of the East European regimes in
1945-I947? If anything, it would seem that the people's democracies
were but highly imitative variants of the post-'war Communism'
record of the RSFSR itself, albeit under a different label, and that their
'gradualistic' approach was inspired precisely by the failures of the
initial radical experiments in Soviet Russia and therefore patterned
on the post-i922 developments within the Bolshevik sphere of
influence and the consequent adjustments in the political programme
known as Leninism-Stalinism.
To imply, moreover, that the practice of people's democracy
constitutes a substantive innovation of a particular, identifiable type,
is to ignore reality. Apart from the vague 'gradualistic' approach
associated with the label of 'people's democracy', the latter being the
only thing really common to all the satellite regimes, the connotation
'people's democracy' has no genuine material content, serving to cover
a multitude of sins and being indiscriminately applied to describe
socio-economic conditions as varied as those existing in Czecho-
slovakia and Poland, Albania and Mongolia, China and North Vietnam.
Can one really speak of a meaningful substantive similarity between
the socio-political fabrics of these far-flung members of the Soviet

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THE SOVIET BLOC 451
bloc, other than their common name? Yes, they are all bona fide
'dictatorships of the proletariat' (momentary Communist contentions
to the contrary notwithstanding), but then so is the Soviet Union, and
the attempt to make of the people's democracies an ideological creature
of a special kind thus fails in the face of their intrinsic identity on the
one point that really counts, namely, who wields public power and in
whose interests. In short, is it not probable that the very difficulty
experienced by Communist ideologists in formulating the 'people's
democracy' concept was due not to the lack of an underlying doctrinal
viewpoint, as the author claims, for such a 'transitional, go-slow
blueprint' does seem to have existed and was successfully implemented
in Eastern Europe, patterned on the early Soviet Russian record, but:
(i) precisely because there was so little in substance to distinguish the
satellite 'innovations' from the early Soviet model, particularly in
view of the over-riding role assigned to the local Communist party in
both instances; and, (2) because there was so little in common, except
for their ostensible programme of formal gradualism and, again, the
avant-garde role of the Communist element (factors which actually
vitiated the very notion of the 'people's democracies' novelty), be-
tween the satellite regimes themselves from the point of view of
socio-economic fundamentals.
Nor is it quite correct to assert, as is repeatedly done in the book,
that in the Soviet bloc the State apparatus as such was everywhere
weakened to the party's profit. Only some of the attributes and
functions of the State apparatus were emasculated in favour of the
more informal mechanism of party administration, but, on the other
hand, some of the sectors of State power were effectively strengthened
in this period, particularly the economic ministries, the security
police, etc. This Mr. Brzezinski himself concedes when noting that in
the post-Stalin move towards a semblance of collective leadership
some of the native leaders chose party posts and others opted in favour
of a position in the State machine, without any real loss of power in
the second instance. Indeed, it should be suggested instead that the real
significance of the power alignment behind the Iron Curtain lies not
in the machine itself, but in the personalities involved and that the
Nagy-Rakosi struggle for power in I953-I954, for instance, would
have had in all probability exactly the same outcome had Nagy held
the party and Rakosi the State machine.
There is no logical reason or factual proof for the far-reaching
conclusion reached (on p. II5) that without Stalin's support 'by I952,
it is doubtful that any regime (even including the Czech) could have
successfully maintained itself in power'. On the contrary, it could be
argued, and more convincingly, that opposition had been thoroughly

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452 BRZEZINSKI:
eliminated by then and that the regimes in question had built up a
sufficient control mechanism to be able to continue in power, assuming
no external disruptive forces were allowed to intervene. Indeed, those
satellite regimes which chose to exercise the full power of the apparatus
built up by them during these years never were successfully challenged,
and it is only those which hesitated and refrained from reacting
vigorously to internal unrest which finally were forced to ever greater
concessions culminating in direct revolt.
The treatment of mixed Soviet-satellite companies set up after
World War II (pp. I24-128) and their economic role is badly over-
simplified. Can one seriously accept the contention that the only
reason that joint companies with Soviet participation were not set up
in Poland (a claim which is not correct in any case since a uranium
joint Soviet-Polish stock company is known to exist) was because of
Polish opposition to the scheme? Presumably, then, in China, where
such companies were organized, local opposition to Soviet pressure
proved to no avail, while in Poland it succeeded, a dubious argument!
Rather, it would seenm that instead of treating the mixed companies as
a single problem based on a machiavellian Soviet design to exploit all
its satellites, tlle question should be differentiated into at least three
component aspects. In former Axis states, where the USSR acquired
German and Japanese assets, joint corporations were created as an
expedient solution offering the best economic alternative for the
profitable exploitation of local resources in the interests of the Soviet
Union, to furnish reparations at first and then to benefit Soviet in-
dustrial plans. A different approach was used in former Allied nations,
Czechoslovakia and Poland, where lack of inherited enemy assets
precluded easy investment in local enterprises and did not result in
Soviet participation in the satellite economies. Yugoslavia and China
stand apart, with joint companies in both countries probably created
at the initiative of the local regimes, in Yugoslavia for both economic
and ideological (over-zealous loyalty) reasons and in China because of
economic considerations, in addition to which there is some tentative
evidence that in China the arrangement initially worked in Peking's
favour for it allowed China a role in certain areas formerly devoted
exclusively to the satisfaction of Soviet needs (shipping works in
Dalni and Port Arthur, mineral exploitation in Sinkiang, etc.).
Another highly controversial theme is the author's thesis that the
Stalinist edifice in Eastern Europe was inevitably doomed to collapse
after Stalin's death. This subjectively arrived at leitmotif of the inevit-
ability of the established order's disintegration following the death of
its architect can hardly be accepted as convincing and to argue that
Stalinism carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction is to rely

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THE SOVIET BLOC 453
on facile wisdom of hiindsight and to read into a purely providential,
and voluntaristic, effort to revise Stalinism an element of determinism
which the process never had. Is it true that the main tenets of the
Stalinist programme of transforming Eastern Europe in the image of
the USSR had failed by I953 and automatically had to be revised by
Stalin's successors? Is it not more correct instead to come to the
conclusion that Stalin's heirs consciously undertook a controlled de-
Stalinization which in two instances (Poland and Hungary), and in
two instances only, got out of hand, indicating not the failure of
Stalin's legacy but the ineptitude of the de-Stalinization programme.
There are other, similar objections to various aspects of the author's
viewpoint, such, for instance, as the wisdom of treating the Hungarian
revolt as a case of suppression of 'national Communist' aspirations by
Soviet rulers, when in fact the Soviets moved only when all vestiges of
'national Communism' had already been repudiated by the Budapest
insurgents. Nevertheless, all the above criticisms are addressed solely
to individual points of the author's interpretation of his subject,
important points, no doubt, but which do not touch upon the more
basic conceptualization of the subject-matter. Yet, even that must be
questioned to some extent. Granted that the author has acquitted
himself well in the execution of his stated task, objection must none
the less be directed at the self-imposed limitations which in fact deter-
mined the end result of his labours.
In effect, time and again, the author's professed plan to confine him-
self to the study of inter-regime relations within the bloc proves too
constrictive and he is repeatedly forced to abandon his own restrictions
and proceed beyond them. Indeed, how meaningless is an attempt to
understand the Soviet world on the basis of only inter-ruling group
contacts, without descending to the lower levels of national pressures,
mass needs and hopes, even subordinate bureaucratic aspirations
among the State and party cadres below Politburo level! Can the
Soviet bloc be really understood without taking into account all the
centrifugal and centripetal forces operating within the community
other than possible differences of view and temperament or, conversely,
potential personal coincidence in taste and interest, which may exist
between Tito and Gomulka and Novotny and Xoxha? Obviously not,
as Mr. Brzezinski himself tacitly concedes every time, and such times
are not infrequent, that he abandons his own terms of reference to
delve deeper into the national fabric of the bloc members.
Another perplexing question is the consistent effort made to draw a
dichotomy between ideology and power within the bloc system, a
fruitless exercise in semantics which leads nowhere and only manages
to obscure the main thesis. Within the context of the work's topic the

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454 BRZEZINSKI:
two cannot be meaningfully separated, and in the end the author
really seems to be concerned not with power and ideology at all but
with the relative importance of the role offically assigned to physical
force and mental persuasion in the strengthening of the bloc as an
effective power centre. The same remarks apply to the attempt to
draw a distinction between power and authority, a differentiation
without practical value, which ultimately rests on the setting-up of
extreme and consequently very vulnerable conceptual straw-men-
naked force with no justification and pure persuasiveness without co-
ercive intent-and the discussion of their unreal inter-relationship.
However, the most serious criticism of the item under review is
directed at something else. By restricting his study to inter-regime
relations and more specifically to the power-versus-ideology aspects
of those relations, the author is automatically forced to concentrate on
the more declaratory forms of intra-bloc contacts which seem to
indicate the areas of doctrinal consensus or disagreement. Practice is
thus largely overlooked in favour of examining who said what, when
and how. Granted that generally there is a correlation between what
is said and the conditions which prompted the verbal sally, but not
everything that is stated is equally significant, especially in the intra-
bloc dialogues where so many adjustments and manoeuvres often
hopelessly obscure the real intent of the eommunication. Dozens of
pages are expended on tracing the devious ways of Titoism only to
come to the conclusion that in actuality it had no practical effect on the
policies of the Soviet satellite regimes, little, if any, actual appeal to the
masses in Eastern Europe, and no significant direct impact on the
intellectual groups seeking internal changes generally going farther
than what is practised by Tito domestically. The same preoccupation
with verbal pyrotechnics must be credited for the inordinate space
allotted to the Polish question at the expense of the rest of the bloc. In
short, since verbal differences of emphases are viewed per se as evidence
of underlying practical forces, much of the time is spent on tracing these
supposed differences most of which ultimately remain in the sphere of
pure talk with no practical consequence.
Finally, so much space and energy is spent on finding proof of
imminent disruption and ideological conflict that the author all too
often forgets that there is a bloc, that it is a going concern and that there
is in fact more unity than disunity at the practical level, not all of
which, not even a major part of which, is due directly to the threat of
Soviet military intervention.
Given the existing situation within the 'socialist Commonwealth',
there seem to be two areas for the internal interplay of unity-disunity
forces. The first rests in the relations between the ruling groups (the

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THE SOVIET BLOC 455
topic of this study) where personal and ideological frictions and
tensions can lead to bloc disruption or, vice versa, the absence thereof
to greater integration. Under rigid Stalinism, giveln a conflict of
personalities or viewpoints such friction could lead to serious fissures
in the bloc, a consequence which is much less likely to occur in a more
flexible system, like the one presently operating. Even under Stalin it
should be remembered that this type of centrifugal tendency led to
only one practical manifestation, Tito's defection, and that even then
it was less the result of a conscious difference of views than of errors,
miscalculations and providential fortuity. The second, by far the more
important, sphere of potential disruption, and the real area of integra-
tion efforts, lies in the degree of identification and alienation between
the masses and the established order, the local one and, in a larger
sense, world Communism, and it is in this field (disregarded by Mr.
Brzezinzki) that operate the currents of action and reaction for and
against the Soviet plans which have on the one hand contributed to
the maintenance of the bloc and which, on the other hand, have so
violently shaken it during the Berlin riots, the Poznan affair and the
Budapest uprising, and which, ultima ratio, have also assured the
success of the Tito rebellion.

G. GINSBURGS
University of California

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