On the other hand, the Communists could capitalize on the pervasive discontent with poverty and oppression, on the peasants’ resentful alienation from the bureaucratic state apparatus, and on the related failure of the peasantist parties and leaders. Here their appeals to social justice and revolution, while eliciting no immediate response, nevertheless sustained an awareness of them as representing a political alternative. Under Nazi occupation the Communists finally enjoyed the advantage of long experience at underground organization, survival, and action. Ultimately, however, their conquest of power was determined less by local factors than by the decisive intervention of the Soviet Union. The one exception was in Yugoslavia, where they fought independently and won a revolutionary national and civil war.
7
Trends and styles of governmental activity passed through several similar sequences in the interwar East Central European countries. Yet throughout these changes and phases the bureaucratic “political class,” to which allusion has been made above as coopting peasantist leaders, formed the effective and, except in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the virtually autonomous ruling class of interwar East Central Europe. Both its civilian and military components were recruited from the so-called intelligentsia which, in turn, was simply identified by its possession of academic diplomas. The intelligentsia and, through it, the bureaucracy might be descended from the gentry, the middle class, or the peasantry; in the last-mentioned case, it tended to sever its cultural and political ties with the village despite sentimental and propagandistic professions of attachment. It might rule in association with the landed and entrepreneurial classes, but it was never a mere tool of the aristocracy or bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage did not protect the peasant masses from the intimidation or manipulation of this political class of bureaucrats and intelligentsia, and election results generally reflected its overall priorities, if not always its particular preferences. Indeed, in the area’s more primitive regions, universal suffrage functioned as the bureaucracy’s tool for breaking the traditional power of “feudal” notables over their dependent peasant clientèles.
Given the high prestige of formal academic education in the “new” interwar states of East Central Europe, the investment in higher education tended to be disproportionately large relative both to their investments in primary education as well as to the absorptive capacities of their still basically agrarian, or at most transitional, societies. The failure of industrialization to develop with sufficient rapidity and depth to absorb the surplus peasant population was paralleled by its analogous failure to absorb the surplus academic proletariat into economically or socially functional employment. Politics and state-service remained the only career-lines for these university alumni, who were heavily biased in their studies toward law or humanities and away from science and technology. Thus, land-hunger among the peasantry was matched by office-hunger among the intelligentsia. The result was a proliferation of political parties more concerned with patronage than with policy (“program” parties fared badly), and a swollen, nepotistic, underpaid, callous, routine-ridden bureaucracy that was open to corruption. All this deepened the peasant’s alienation from, and contempt for, the state, the city, and politics, which consistently confronted him as an impenetrable and hostile maze of linked fiefdoms and privileged connections.
The tenacious but essentially stagnant power of this bureaucratic class largely accounts for the peculiar syndrome of immobility and instability in interwar East Central European politics—a syndrome to which, as has been indicated, Great Power pressures and ethnic tensions also contributed. Changes in cabinets were frequent, in constitutions occasional, but the fundamental political reflections of social transitions were suffocated by these bureaucracies, and the social transitions themselves were often deliberately braked and slowed. When the resulting tensions, aggravated by the depression, became so acute as to erode the reliability of the parliamentary regimes of the 1920s as shields for the bureaucracy’s ongoing power, it initiated or endorsed coups d’état that replaced the old regimes with royal, military, or political dictatorships or semidictatorships. The exception to this trend was Czechoslovakia, the area’s economically most mature society.
This East Central European shift from parliamentary to authoritarian institutions was also facilitated and supposedly vindicated by the impressive performance of the Great Power dictatorships, especially of Nazi Germany, in energizing their economies and consolidating their societies. Over the great esteem in which German culture had traditionally been held in East Central Europe was now superimposed a new fascination, which was grudging or enthusiastic as the case might be, but always respectful, with the Nazi political model. The imposing domestic and diplomatic successes of the Nazis, which contrasted vividly with the apparent stagnation and decadence of France, projected the impression that authoritarian dictatorship was the wave of the future. States of lesser power, especially new or restored states, generally take as their model the political institutions and values of the seemingly strongest and most successful Great Power of the day. On the morrow of World War I, this appeared to be France; after the depression, it became Germany. Furthermore, and with specific reference to East Central Europe, Nazi Germany’s policies rendered territorial revisionism realistically “thinkable” and ethnic xenophobia, especially anti-Semitism, psychologically “respectable.”
But the East Central European dictatorships would not or could not emulate the totalitarian dynamism of Hitler’s example. Their commitments were essentially bureaucratic and conservative, at most technocratic and oligarchical. Projecting no mass ideology, they either failed or refused to elicit mass support. Despite their sonorous rhetoric of “the strong hand,” they proved petty, brittle, often irresolute, and generally demoralizing.
Various Right-Radical movements, drawing their political elan even more emphatically from the Nazi example, atavistic in their ideology but modern in their methods, claimed to supply the dynamism, the commitment to radical change, and the capacity to mobilize the masses, that these authoritarian regimes lacked or spurned. Noisiest in the countries with prominent and vulnerable Jewish minorities, the Right-Radical leaders, while themselves usually educated and urbanized, appealed to the supposedly primitive, instinctive, and healthy revulsion of the peasant and proletarian “folk-masses” against the allegedly decadent, “judaized,” secular culture of their bureaucratic and bourgeois exploiters. Indeed, the appeal and the appeals of Right-Radicalism nicely reflected the contemporary condition of interwar East Central Europe as an agricultural society in a crisis of transition and fragmentation: though not yet sufficiently developed and integrated to have moved beyond this demagoguery, it no longer was adequately stable and patriarchal to remain immune to it. The local Right-Radical movements were, however, inhibited in their political offensives by the very fact that the authoritarian regimes which they sought to challenge already embodied a number of their professed ideological values, i.e., were already undemocratic, ultranationalistic, and militaristic, and often mouthed Right-Radical rhetoric even while repelling Right-Radical bids for power. An even greater irony was the fact that Hitler’s regime, eager to extract maximal economic resources from East Central Europe for its own projected war effort, eventually endorsed the local forces of order and rationality, i.e., the authoritarian governments, against the counterproductive, albeit ideologically closer, enthusiasts of turmoil and upheaval, i.e., the Right-Radicals.
8
To the extent that the area’s dictatorships scored any permanent successes, it was in the limited, albeit important, area of etatist economic investment, which did not, however, extend into radical social change or political mobilization. In all cases, excepting Poland and Czechoslovakia, this was achieved through Nazi German assistance in the form of bilateral exchange of local agricultural surpluses and raw materials for industrial equipment, investments, and technical support. While such German economic aid was scarcely altruistic and was clearly designed to achieve