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closed doors, ‘it will give a great boost to the Americans, English, French—the imperialists. They will perceive it as a weakness on our part and go on the offensive’. 11 Despite the crackdown, Hungary was eventually allowed to legalize some private enterprise, while Poland halted the collectivization of agriculture and conceded a prominent role for the Catholic Church, opening fissures in the Soviet model of socialism.
    In 1968, Moscow again felt compelled to invade an ostensible ally, to crush the efforts to ‘reform’ socialism in Czechoslovakia, which became particularly embittered and damaged the USSR’s international prestige. Two years later, and again in 1976, mass strikes rocked Poland. In 1978, the first non-Italian since 1523, Karol Woityla, archbishop of Krakow, was chosen pope. The next year, on his first pilgrimage home, more than ten million Poles attended outdoor celebrations of the mass, often weeping with joy. In 1980, Polish workers, inspired by the pope and provoked by price increases, rose en masse, forming a countrywide independent trade union and bringing the socialist system to the point of liquidation. A crackdown by Polish leaders in December 1981 saved the regime, for the time being. To pacify workers the Polish regime had been borrowing from the West to import consumer goods, a 22
    history’s cruel tricks
    dependency that became common across the Soviet bloc.
    East Germany, which abutted a far richer West Germany, eventually accumulated a $26.5 billion foreign debt, whose servicing absorbed 60 per cent of annual export earnings. But to buy off its walled-in people, the party leadership saw no alternative to increasing consumer imports and thus Western dependence. 12
    In Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the only force holding back the long-term tidal pull of the West appeared to be Soviet resolve. The acquisition of an outer empire in Eastern Europe—what, again, looked like a Soviet strength—had proved to be a dangerous vul-nerability. Of course, in the late 1940s, when Soviet-style socialism first spread to Eastern Europe, it had seemed the leading edge of a possible world takeover, especially after the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communists in the world’s most populous country. Few people understood that a major shift had indeed occurred—but in the opposite direction, to the grave detriment of Soviet socialism.
    Simply put, socialism was utterly dependent on the fortunes of capitalism, and the differences between capitalism in the Great Depression and capitalism in the post-war world were nothing short of earth shattering. No less momentous, the United States, which during the period of the Soviet Union’s rise prior to the Second World War had remained somewhat aloof from European and Asian affairs, now assumed a vigorous role as ‘leader of the free world’, uniting previously fractious capitalist powers under its leadership to counter the Soviet threat.
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    history’s cruel tricks
    Imagine a geopolitical contest in which one side says, I will take West Germany and France, you get East Germany and Romania; I will take Britain and Italy, you get Bulgaria and Hungary; I will take Japan and Saudi Arabia, you get Cuba and Angola. Even Communist China became a threat to the Soviet Union after the Chinese split with Moscow and put themselves forward as an alternative model for the Third World. And what a burden Third World entanglements could be! In the 1970s Somalia– Ethiopia conflict, the Soviet Union decided to airlift heavy tanks to Ethiopia, but because long-distance supply planes could carry only a single tank, transport exceeded the cost of the expensive tanks by five times—never mind what a superpower was doing seeking influence chiefly in countries whose main industry was civil war. The US, which had its own ambitions, opposed Soviet influence by arming proxies. And in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the US
    exchanged formal recognition of post-war