Was there an Iron Curtain in Economic History?
A small book that challenges the 'Iron Curtain' in scientific cooperation between socialist scientists and their international counterparts during the Cold War, and tells much more.
Browsing through the publishers’ stands at one of the economics conferences earlier this year, I picked up a book with a catchy title Behind the Iron Curtain: Economic Historians During the Cold War, 1945–1989 edited by Antonie Doležalová and Catherine Albrecht.
The book’s topic is closely related to my own work on the post-socialist transition economies. And the book also engages with my other interest, that of economic history. But once I took the book it remained on my ‘to be read’ bookshelf for few months (at that time, I was busy reading and working on a review of Sebouh Aslanian’s magisterial Early Modernity and Mobility).
Eventually, I caught up on reading the Behind the Iron Curtain (BIC) and it was not a disappointment. Behind the title of a specialized text, the BIC is making an important and significant contribution to our broader knowledge and understanding of the process of scientific work under 20th century socialism and openness to cooperation between socialist scientists and their Western counterparts during the Cold War. The book’s emphasis, as an example of a general trend, is on the field of economic history. In other words, the book challenges the established view of no cooperation and persuasively articulates the varying formats and modalities of the East-West engagement in science at one of the most divisive periods in the global history. With that, there are three points that I would like to highlight about the book here.
First, the book’s focus on the problems of economic history scholarship (including details surrounding involved scholars’ personal situations) during the socialist period is somewhat of a unique subject to tackle. These days when the socialist past seems to be often painted in abrupt strokes (with the ‘color’ varying depending on a pundit’s personal preferences), attempting an informed objective analysis into that time is not the most popular research effort.
It is especially rare if that analysis dives deep into the numerous idiosyncrasies of the economic history scholars—their scholarly activity in the socialist countries they lived in and their connections with peers in the capitalist West, which they made every effort to visit. For example, through the book we learn about the work and often difficult fates of socialist scholars like Alice Teichova and Miroslav Hroch (in Czechoslovakia) or Andrei Otetea and Gheorghe Zane in Romania and many others.
So, centering the project on such unusual topic is an achievement in itself (and on a related point, I would like to mention the incredible work of colleagues on the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Post-Socialist Economies, which I am editing with OUP and where we try to describe the dialectical complexity of the socialist and now post-socialist economic history). The BIC, I think, accomplishes its task quite well. Importantly, there is an evident connection with contemporary context, filled with contradictory attitudes towards the socialist past.
Organized in nine chapters, including Introduction and Epilogue., the BIC book draws from a diverse group of expert contributors. The book’s main intellectual punch comes at the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), covering East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. There is also a chapter on the USSR. But the latter, however, is given a somewhat selective treatment discussing mainly the case of Ukraine, itself characterized by its peculiar scholarship in economic history that was split between the ideological pressures consistent with the general scholarly environment of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the nationalistic fervor of its diaspora spread across the West.
That brings us to the second point about the book. There is an evident omission from the study of the remaining wide geography of the late Soviet Union. There is not much that we can learn here about the work or attempts to engage with foreign scholarship by Soviet economic historians from Armenia or Georgia, or from the then republics of Central Asia. Incidentally, for Armenia the factor of diaspora-led academic research in broadly defined economic history, among others, played a critical and in some cases foundational role in informing and molding modern scholarship. Back to the BIC, understandably, a short book can carry only as much content. So, this by no means is a criticism but rather a wishful observation for such work to appear, perhaps, soon as a logical continuation of this study.
But what the BIC does cover is still sufficient to explain my third impression from the book. This is best summed by one of the book’s editors themselves, saying that it is the book’s aim “to revise the Iron Curtain.” Not a fan of historical revisions myself, but in this case we are dealing with something else—an attempt to bravely inject into our collective understanding an impartial and well-researched analysis of the CEE’s economic historians engagement with the West. As Antonie Doležalová mentions in her introduction, this engagement manifested itself in various modalities, “ranging from correspondence, quotations, and books reviews, through publishing on the other side of the Iron Curtain, to participation in international conferences or joint projects.”
The book’s analysis of the various country cases leads the authors to an interesting and, perhaps, for today’s reader, unexpected conclusion. Specifically, it appears that between 1945 and 1989 there was no blanket linear restriction for the socialist scholars to engage with their counterparts in the West. In fact, if anything, as we learn from chapters on Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia such engagement was accepted and sometimes encouraged, albeit with some annoyingly persistent ideological oversight and specific country’s institutional framework.
Such contacts among the CEE scholars and their colleagues either in Western Europe, Great Britain, United States, or elsewhere were common varying with flexibility and leniency from country to country. The driving force for the scholars who risked such international engagement was advancement of their research, maintaining scholarly rigor and gaining international recognition. The typical limitations imposed on any CEE economic historian, according to the BIC authors, traveling abroad to a capitalist country for a scientific conference would include a restriction on meeting or communicating with any dissidents and providing a copy of their lecture notes or speech to the secret police in advance.
As restrictive as those conditions were at the time and as unacceptable as they might appear to today’s academics, causing much stress for the involved scholars and their families, we should recall that further east, in the Soviet Union, such permissions to travel to the capitalist West even for research were far more restrictive and limited to only a few.
In contrast, scholars from some of the CEE countries not only managed to travel for conferences, but as mentioned in couple of the BIC chapters were able to pursue their advanced studies or independent research abroad. In fact, I am reminded here of a recent talk by Leszek Balcerowicz (former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in Poland) delivered at my own St. John’s University where in 1975 Balcerowicz received his MBA and then safely returned to Poland to continue his academic and eventually public career.
As it comes to the Soviet Union, I may not be familiar with individual cases as much but it is possible to hypothesize that similar situations may have occurred. However, there can be no doubt those would have been extremely rare and more of an exception than established practice. Moreover, across each chapter there comes a realization that scholars from CEE participating in foreign conferences and engaging in some type of international cooperation was on far greater scale and frequency than it was between the former Soviet Union and the West.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the numbers of the CEE economic history scholars in international conferences and in other research efforts with Western colleagues dropped. Instead, there was an increase in scholars from the former Soviet Union in the international academic platforms but the interest towards mutual East-West rapprochement faded with the market transitions and rapidly declining state support for sciences in the post-socialist economies. Here one might recall Branko Milanovic’s ‘For Whom the Wall Fell? A Balance Sheet of the Transition to Capitalism’…
Importantly, the dichotomy of the two socialisms, one in the CEE and that of the USSR, is clearly visible in the Behind the Iron Curtain. In my opinion, in addition to teaching us about the socialist scholarship realities and diversity of international engagement modes at the time, the distinction between the flexibility of the CEE academic systems and the rigidity of the Soviet is one of the most apparent and important contributions that Behind the Iron Curtain makes to our understanding of that complicated period in social, economic, and political history.
Incidentally, this difference in macroeconomic environments between some in the CEE and all of the Soviet Union is one of the essential arguments I bring up in my Transition Economies. While the latter maintained tight controls over economic activity, the CEE (with varying success) sustained flexibility, operating in what might be termed as mixed economic systems.
Yes, they were all socialist but they were very different socialist economies, which in many ways explains the outcomes of the early 1990s transformations and more recent socio-economic and political trends.
Alas, that dichotomy, is often blurred in haste popular simplified critiques of the past economic systems, by which today’s ardent critics of the socialist system, in fact, become more socialist in their standardizations than socialists were themselves. Ultimately, in the Behind the Iron Curtain the infamous Iron Curtain as both physical and ideological separating line reveals itself as not so much made of iron after all...
History is annoying in how it uncovers inconvenient realities of the past. But the informed lessons we derive from that knowledge and analysis shape our present.