Civilization: The West and the Rest (44 page)

Going through the Iron Curtain in 1968 was like going through the looking glass. The visitor from Western Europe found much that was familiar. The urban planners in both halves of Europe had made the same mistake, decanting people from city centres and marooning them in repulsive, shoddy apartment blocks in the brutally functional Bauhaus style that had entranced post-war architects. But some familiar things could have diametrically different meanings. In Prague, long hair and jeans were also favoured by the country’s youth over the Communist Party’s ideal of short back and sides, polyester suits and red ties. But they were favoured precisely because they were redolent of the capitalist West. The Czechs even called jeans
Texas-skis
– Texan trousers.
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With the planners reluctant to manufacture such garments, the only way to get them was through smuggling. The pop singer Petr Janda, whose group Olympic aspired to be the Czech Beatles,
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acquired his first pair of Levi 501s that way; they were too short, but his friends were still consumed with envy.
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As in Paris, so in Prague: universities became flashpoints for a clash of the generations. The beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg visited the Charles University in the spring of 1965; he was expelled in early May for the ‘lewd and morally dangerous’ nature of his writings. In November 1967 students at the Charles University gathered during a blackout and marched into the centre of Prague holding candles. One of the students involved in the protest was Ivan Touška. As he recalled:

There were so many power cuts at the time – and the candles were a practical symbol during the first protest – we had candles but we wanted electric light. However ‘We want light’ obviously had a wider general meaning: ‘light’ against the ‘darkness’ of the highest political body of that time – the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
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In April 1968 Alexander Dubcˇek launched his ‘Action Programme’ of economic and political liberalization. Significantly, his economic policy shifted the emphasis from heavy industry to consumer goods. But the Soviet leadership in Moscow saw the Prague Spring as an unacceptable threat. At 4 a.m. on 21 August 1968, Soviet tanks and troops surrounded the building that housed the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Threatened by an angry crowd, the tanks opened fire, killing one young man. At around 9 a.m. troops stormed the building. Dubcˇek was flown to the Soviet Union, whence he was lucky to return alive. A focal point of resistance was Wenceslas Square, where Czechs gathered daily around the equestrian statue of Wenceslas, the beatified tenth-century Duke of Bohemia. In Paris the students had thrown flaming Molotov cocktails at the riot police. In Prague, on 19 January 1969, a Czech student named Jan Palach doused his clothes in kerosene and set himself alight. He died three days later. In the West students indulged themselves with Marxist rhetoric, but what they were really after was free love. On the other side of the Iron Curtain the stakes were higher. What was at stake was freedom itself.

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism-Leninism. An idiosyncratic avant-garde band called the Plastic People of the Universe, formed just a month after the Soviet invasion, hit back with songs like ‘100 Points’ (‘They are afraid of freedom. / They are afraid of democracy. / They are afraid of the [United Nations] Human Rights’ Charter. / They are afraid of socialism. / So why the hell are we afraid of them?’).
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It soon became clear. In January 1970 their professional musicians’ licence was revoked. Two years later they were banned from playing in Prague, forcing them to play at private parties in the Bohemian countryside. It was after one of these underground events – the Second Music Festival of the Second Culture at Bojanovice in February 1976 – that all of the band’s members, including their Canadian lead singer Paul Wilson, were arrested. Two of them, Vratislav Brabenec and Ivan Jirous, were put on trial charged with ‘extreme vulgarity … anti-socialism … nihilism … and decadence’ and sentenced to terms of eighteen and eight months in jail. It was their trial that inspired the founding of Charter 77, the dissident group spearheaded
by Václav Havel, the playwright and future President of Czechoslovakia. Never in its history was rock music more political than it was in Prague in the 1970s.
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So why not just let Czechoslovakian students have all the jeans and rock ’n’ roll they wanted? The answer is that the consumer society posed a lethal threat to the Soviet system itself. It was market-based. It responded to signals from consumers themselves – their preference for jeans over flannel trousers, or for Mick Jagger over Burt Bacharach. And it devoted an increasing share of resources to satisfying those preferences. This the Soviet system simply could not do. The Party knew what everyone needed – brown polyester suits – and placed its orders with the state-owned factories accordingly. The alternative was inherently subversive. Significantly, the East German authorities blamed the 1953 workers’ revolt on Western provocateurs ‘with cowboy pants and Texas shirts’.
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Khrushchev may have yearned to copy the colour television; he most certainly did not want the Beatles. ‘The youth of the Soviet Union do not need this cacophonous rubbish,’ he declared. ‘It’s just a small step from saxophones [
sic
] to switchblades.’
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In any case, for the Soviets to keep pace with the much richer Americans in the Cold War arms race, tanks had to take precedence over tank-tops, strategic bombers over Stratocasters. One Soviet critic observed, revealingly, that ‘every ounce of energy used on the dance floor was energy which could and should have been invested in building a hydroelectric plant’.
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It did not stop jeans being smuggled into Russia itself by black-market dealers known as
fartsovshchiki
, who specialized in bartering denim for fur hats and caviar, the only souvenirs that Western visitors to Moscow ever wanted to buy. A pair of black-market jeans could fetch between 150 and 250 roubles, at a time when the average monthly salary was under 200 roubles and an ordinary pair of state-manufactured trousers sold for 10 or 20 roubles.

With the crushing of the Prague Spring, the communist system in Eastern Europe seemed unassailable. In Berlin the division of the city into East and West looked like a permanent fact. But while the communists
were good at crushing political opposition, their resistance to the West’s consumer society was altogether weaker. The influence of Western fashion proved impossible to keep out, especially once East Germans were able to watch West German television (they had long had access to Western radio). Designers like Ann Katrin Hendel started making their own Western-style clothes, selling them from car boots. Hendel even made her own jeans:

We tried to sew them, from tarpaulin or from bed sheets or from fabric that wasn’t jeans fabric. We also tried to dye them but it was also very difficult to get your hands on dye … They were so popular that people snatched them from our hands.
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The critical point was that the success of Western consumer industries was now matched, mirror-like, by the miserable underperformance of their Soviet counterparts. Not only was growth now vanishingly low after 1973 (below 1 per cent); total factor productivity was declining. Some state enterprises were actually subtracting value from the raw materials they processed. Just as Hayek had warned, in the absence of meaningful prices, resources were misallocated; corrupt officials restricted output to maximize their own illicit gains; workers pretended to work and, in return, managers pretended to pay them. Not only the industrial capital stock but also the human capital stock was not being maintained; nuclear power stations crumbled; alcoholism soared. Far from challenging the United States for economic supremacy, as Khrushchev had threatened, the Soviet Union had achieved per-capita consumption of around 24 per cent of the American level – a challenge to Turkey, at best.
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At the same time, the shift in superpower relations towards détente and disarmament made the Soviets’ ability to mass-produce missiles a good deal less valuable. High oil prices in the 1970s had given the system a stay of execution; as oil fell in the 1980s the Soviet bloc was left with nothing but hard-currency debts – money borrowed from the very system Khrushchev had promised to ‘bury’. Mikhail Gorbachev, appointed general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, felt there was now no alternative but to reform both the economic and the political system, including the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. With
perestroika
and
glasnost
the new watchwords in Moscow, hard-liners
in East Berlin were left high and dry – forced into censoring publications and reports not only from the West but from the Soviet Union as well.

As in 1848, as in 1918, the revolutions of 1989 spread contagiously. In Warsaw in February 1989 the Polish government agreed to talks with the free trade union Solidarity; soon the country was preparing for free elections. In Budapest in May the Hungarian communists decided to open their border with Austria. The Iron Curtain began to rust away. Around 15,000 East Germans set off via Czechoslovakia to ‘holiday’ in Hungary on what was in reality a one-way trip to the West. In June Solidarity won the Polish elections and set about forming a democratic government. In September the Hungarian communists followed the Polish example by agreeing to free elections. The following month, as Erich Honecker honed his plans to celebrate the GDR’s fortieth anniversary, hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people poured on to the streets in Leipzig, first chanting ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (We are the People), later amending that to ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (We are One People). This time, unlike in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 – not forgetting Gdánsk in December 1981 and Beijing in June 1989 – the troops remained in their barracks. Within the East German Party, where the extent of the GDR’s bankruptcy was becoming clear, Honecker was forced aside by younger ‘reformers’. But it was all much too late for reform. Other, nimbler apparatchiks, notably in Romania, were already switching sides, calculating the likely benefits to themselves of market reforms.

On 9 November 1989 a bemused East Berlin press corps were informed that ‘the decision [had been] taken to make it possible for all citizens to leave the country through the official border crossing points … to take effect at once’, news that prompted a flood of East Berliners to the border checkpoints. Unprepared, guards opted not to resist. By midnight all the checkpoints had been forced to open and one of the greatest parties of the century was under way, closely followed by one of its biggest shopping sprees. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was essentially over, though it was not until the failed Moscow coup of August 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Baltic states, Ukraine and Belarus, along
with the three big Caucasian republics and the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, became independent states.

Few had seen it coming.
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For some it was ‘the end of history’, the definitive victory of the liberal capitalist model.
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For others it was the ‘triumph of the West’, the political achievement of three charismatic leaders: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.
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A third view gave the credit to nationalism. But the analyst who was closest to the mark was the Italian apparel executive who started marketing a line in skintight ‘perestroika jeans’. It was above all as consumer societies that the Soviet Union and its satellites had failed. It was no accident that the popular protests of 2006 against the incorrigibly authoritarian regime in Belarus took the form of wearing jeans – though Minsk still awaits its Denim Revolution.
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In the wake of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution in 1949 China became the drabbest society on earth. Gone were the last vestiges of Qing-era silk. Gone were the Western outfits favoured by the nationalists between the wars. In the pursuit of strict equality everyone was issued with what looked very much like pyjamas. Grey ones. Yet today when you walk down a typical Chinese street what you see is a kaleidoscope of Western styles of clothing. Advertising hoardings in all the major cities extol the virtues of Western brands from Armani to Ermenegildo Zegna. Like every other industrial revolution, China’s began with textile production. Until recently, most of the garments manufactured in the coastal Special Economic Zones were intended for export to the West. Now, with demand down in depressed Western economies, the principal challenge facing policy-makers in Beijing is
how to make the Chinese worker save less and consume more; in other words, buy more clothes. It seems as if the triumph of the West’s consumer society is close to being complete. Or is it?

Istanbul is a cosmopolitan city, where the outward trappings of Western civilization have long been commonplace in the streets. Stroll down the main shopping thoroughfare of İstiklâl Caddesi and you could be almost anywhere in the Mediterranean world. But go elsewhere in the same city – in the Fatih area near Sultan Ahmet, for example – and things look very different. For devout Muslims, Western norms of female attire are unacceptable because they reveal far more than is prescribed by their religion.
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And that is why, in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim, the headscarf, the veil (
niq
ā
b
or
khimār
) and the loose black body covering (
abaya
) have been making a comeback.