Ulbricht embattled

The quest for socialist modernity in the light of new sources

Bibliographic Data

ID12299784
AuthorsJeffrey S Kopstein (0000-0002-4585-1920, University of Colorado System, corresponding author), Jeffrey Kopstein
Year1994
Volume46
Issue4
Pages597-615
Publication date1994-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEurope Asia Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0966-8136 • E-ISSN: 1465-3427
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09668139408412185
OpenAlexW2022335495
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited15

Two GENERATIONS OF SCHOLARS have focused on the relationship between communism and modernity. On one view, communism embodied the very essence of modernity because of its reliance on instrumental rationality-the willingness to use any means to attain its desired end.1 To others, communism may have been moder, but it was a grand failure as far as 'modernisation' cum sustained economic advancement is concerned.2 The gap between modernity and modernisation proved fatal. Moderisation, after all, is the one thing that renders modernity appealing or even tolerable. Caught between the devil of market-type reforms which threatened their core values and interests, and the deep blue sea of the receding, golden West, whose middle-class lifestyles shaped the expectations of their own populations, communist leaders found themselves powerless to shape an appealing 'socialist modernity'. Nowhere was this dilemma more acutely felt than in the GDR, a country whose very raison d'etre was its anti-capitalism but whose population lived in the shadow of the most prosperous and rapidly 'modernising' country in Europe-West Germany. In this respect, the East German 1960s remains one of the most interesting and enigmatic periods in the history of the Soviet bloc. In 1963 the SED chief, Walter Ulbricht, introduced and implemented an 'in-system' economic reform designed specifically to address the issue of socialist modernity.3 After the admitted failure of the reform in 1970, leaders throughout the bloc faced two alternatives: either to retreat to a conservative immobilism or to proceed down the road of gradual capitalist restoration. East Germany took the former route and Hungary took the latter. Both routes, however, led in their own way to the revolutions of 1989. Scholarship on the rise and demise of the East German reform falls into two schools of thought. One interpretation, put forward primarily by economists, holds that the reform succeeded in its first years but ultimately failed because of flaws in its design that led to severe shortages toward the end of the 1960s.4 A second line of interpretation argues that, by the end of the 1960s, the Soviet leaders were in a position to back the opponents of the New Economic System (NES), as the reform was called, and ultimately insist that the reform be brought to an end. On this view, the extraordinary degree of political dependence on the USSR explains the policies and behaviour of the East German elite.5 While both interpretations have merit, newly accessible sources allow us to paint

Art · Modernity · Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · German History and Society · Law

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