The structure of the Soviet bloc would appear to be ideal for the maximization of Soviet domestic and foreign interests. The actual ledger of Soviet gains and losses from control over Eastern Europe, however, reveals a different picture. Over the postwar period Eastern European contributions to Soviet national security, economic growth, and domestic stability have declined. This decline in the value of empire to the Soviets is a function of three factors. The first is growing regime-society tensions in Eastern Europe as a result of East Europe's dependence on the Soviet Union and the derivative structures of its Stalinist political economies. The second is the Soviet role within the bloc as a political and economic monopoly and monopsony. And the third is the unexpected costs, both to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe, that attended the bloc's reunion in the early 1970s with a global capitalist system in crisis.

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The empire strikes back: the evolution of the Eastern bloc from a Soviet asset to a Soviet liability

When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the Soviet empire consisted of Cuba and six reliable satellites in Eastern Europe, the bloc was dominated politically and economically by the Soviet Union, and East–West interactions were kept to a minimum. Soviet military capabilities at this time, moreover, were clearly inferior to the military power of the West. And while East–West relations were testy, they had improved in the aftermath of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

The Political Economy of the Brezhnev Era: The Rise and Fall of Corporatism

o v e r the years a substantial literature has developed about the conventional military balance in Europe and the respective strategies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. A certain asymmetry exists in this literature. NATO strategy has always been controversial; students of the subject concur in its content but disagree as to its wisdom. Many critics contend that a Soviet conventional offensive would probably succeed in its objective, generally assumed to be the destruction of NATO forces behind the Rhine River line.’ Studies abound that propose a

The Soviet Offensive in Europe: The Schlieffen Plan Revisited?

The Soviet Union achieved its stability in the early stages of development not by institutionalizing participation but by forcing departicipation and substituting a functionally distinct form of political activity—involvement in co-production. These policies constitute essential complements in the Leninist developmental strategy. The ability of enlisted involvement to block the growth of participatory pressures tends to decline in later stages of development, however. The result is spontaneous withdrawal from the institutions of coproduction and the rise of participatory pressures. This pattern is documented with evidence from Soviet electoral and membership statistics, Soviet reports of opinion surveys, Western interviews of Soviet emigres, and cross-national estimates of political dissidence. The Leninist crisis of participation requires a policy response to close the participation-institution gap once again. The alternative policy responses of Soviet general secretaries are characterized as totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal, and socialist.

Modernization and Participation in the Leninist Developmental Strategy

T HE DRAMATIC NATURE of the shift in China's modernization strategy in the past three years has tended to obscure a number of equally notable developments in the related, though prosaic, areas of administrative and management reform. The resulting neglect while understandable, is unfortunate, given that many Chinese leaders regard administrative reform as inseparable from the economic and technical advances underway and, moreover, capable of independently yielding a significantly improved economic performance.' Further, since many of the contemplated changes have significant implications for the distribution of administrative and economic power in China and affect the political and bureaucratic interests of many leaders and institutions, they have also generated a wide-ranging debate as interesting as the reforms themselves. This debate has moved beyond the issues raised by Mao in his essay on the "Ten Great Relationships" to confront a number of fundamental questions about the role of the state in the economy, and the capacity of administrative structures to facilitate modernization. Committed to changing "all methods of management, actions and thinking" inconsistent with modernization,2 China's leaders have begun to look abroad for appropriate models-to Rumania, Yugoslavia, Japan, and even the United States. Their concerns have thus begun to converge with those of leaders in other socialist planned economies faced with the need to adapt the command economy to the complexities of modernization.'

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2756959.pdf

Paul M. Cocks

Papers

Political Development in Eastern Europe