The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

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СКАЧАТЬ in living standards can also be found in the living conditions in the two countries. The average living space per person (the floor space of the dwelling divided by the number of household members) is a simple and frequently used indicator of housing conditions. In Finland, there were 31m² of housing space per inhabitant in 1988, while in Estonia this figure was only 21m². At the same time, the quality of housing in Estonia was much worse than in the Nordic countries.115

      It can, of course, be argued that none of this means anything. That the capitalist system might be able to offer higher standards of consumerism, but the free education and healthcare, full employment and equality among people offered by the Communists might, ultimately, make people happier. However, this is not so. Communism did not only fail economically, it also failed socially. International statistics on human development document the widening gap between social indicators for Estonia and Finland too: in the mid 1930s, the life expectancy of 56 years in Estonia was higher than the expected 53 years in Finland, yet by the end of the 1980s, the two countries had changed places, with life expectancy in Finland now 4 years longer than in Estonia. Consider also the next widely used figure – the infant mortality rate: before the Second World War, Estonian and Finnish infant mortality rates were broadly comparable, but they began to diverge after the war. The infant mortality rate in Finland fell by more than 50 % – from 13.2 per thousand births in 1970, to 6.4 in 1986 – and is currently among the lowest in the world. Immediately after the war, the infant mortality in Estonia also fell, but there has been little improvement since 1970. Infant mortality in Estonia reached its lowest level in 1988, but was still twice as high as the figure for Finland. Serious health problems in Estonia were at least partly caused by the high level of pollution. A comparison of sulphur emissions in Finland and Estonia reveals that levels were much higher in Estonia. For example, the annual mean concentration of sulphur dioxide in Tallinn was 5-6 times higher than it was in Helsinki. The quality of the water is also significantly better in Finland, where 80 % of investigated lakes are in good condition, compared to only 20 % in Estonia.

      We could continue to draw comparisons between Estonia and Finland, but the result is already clear: the level of development and the standard of living in Finland far exceeds that of Estonia despite the two countries having started from largely similar positions prior to the Second World War. The main reason for Finland’s success was its shift to a modern, export-oriented market economy and its swift integration into Europe. The same is true of many other countries: East and West Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. In sum, prosperity eluded the Soviet Union and its satellites. The economies and societies of the socialist camp stagnated, causing real hardships for their citizens. The socialist countries failed to respond to developing trends with the result that the technological revolution passed them by, while it brought the rest of the world closer together. In the age of modern mass media, the growing gulf in living conditions between the East and the West became increasingly evident. This created tensions in the Soviet bloc that could no longer be concealed. Having completely lost its legitimacy, the Soviet system was falling apart. Fear was the only factor keeping it together, and even this began gradually to fade away. And even this began gradually to fade away. When this happened, the time for Communism was over.

      Towards Freedom! The Fight against Communist Domination

      The fight begins: the start of the Cold War

      Had the West not awoken to the threat, the Soviet domination of Europe could have been even more pervasive. Arousing the West’s fears was not easy; many Westerners still wanted to believe that the Soviets’ intentions were noble and therefore tried to appease them. However, the Soviet’s pressure and demands on Iran and Turkey, and the civil war in Greece demonstrated that the Soviet Union intended to continue its aggressive, pre-war policy. One of the first political leaders to raise his voice against Soviet domination was Winston Churchill. In a speech on 5 March 1946, at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared, ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.’ This metaphor became synonymous with the looming Cold War and the division of Europe. According to Churchill, the people of Eastern Europe now found themselves ‘in the Soviet sphere and [were] all subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.’ Churchill called for ‘timely action’ of the sort that had been lacking ten years earlier against the growing power of Nazi Germany. Churchill’s Fulton speech has been praised largely in hindsight; when it was delivered, it received much criticism, even in the West. On the left, it was called catastrophic, with George Bernard Shaw saying it was ‘nothing short of a declaration of war on Russia.’ On the right, Churchill was accused of building military alliances that were both dangerous and counter-productive. In the East, in an interview which appeared in Pravda on 13 March 1946, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler and angrily denounced his speech as a ‘call to war’. Although initially Churchill’s was still a voice in the wilderness as far as Western policy towards the USSR was concerned, his next speech immediately had a major impact. Speaking at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, Churchill called for the creation of ‘a kind of United States of Europe,’ declaring that the first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. With these ideas, Churchill heralded a new way of thinking, one that actually led to the creation of modern Europe.116

      Indeed, within a year, the West was forced to concede that Churchill’s attitude towards the Soviets had been right. One by one, the illusions evaporated and the Western World began to understand that the Soviet Union was not very different from Nazi Germany. On 12 March 1947, President Truman delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress promising support for ‘free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.’ Truman declared that ‘we must keep hope alive’ and asked for the authority to give assistance to Greece and Turkey. Truman and George Marshall also launched the Marshall Plan, which aimed to help the Western democracies and start Western Europe along the road to prosperity.117 The Soviet Union responded by tightening its control over Central and Eastern Europe and provoking direct conflict in Germany. On 24 June 1948, Soviet troops completely sealed off West Berlin, thereby beginning the Berlin Blockade. Eastern power stations ceased to supply electricity to the Western sectors of Berlin, which left them without food, energy, raw materials and machinery for industry and new power stations. America responded by airlifting the necessary supplies to West Berlin, even though nobody believed that it could be done. Astonishingly, the Anglo-Americans pulled it off: with the help of 17,000 volunteers, a new airport was built in the American sector at Tegel, and by Easter 1949, planes fully laden with supplies were landing in West Berlin every 62 seconds. West Berlin would have been unable to resist the blockade without the decisiveness of the West Berliners who volunteered for all manner of tasks and tolerated the shortages and privations of the blockade with amazingly good grace. On 9 September 1948, 250,000 Berliners gathered in front of the Reichstag to support their leaders’ resistance to the blockade. When the demonstrations spilled over into the Soviet sector, the Communist police intervened, shooting several demonstrators. For the West Berliners, this was a clear illustration of the true nature of Communism. The Berlin blockade started as a potential catastrophe and ended as a political and moral triumph for the West. In May 1949, Stalin had to lift the blockade, boosting Western morale to new levels. When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Truman quickly decided to come to the South’s defence. The Cold War had begun in earnest. It seemed that the West had learned from the mistakes made in the past and understood that only by standing united and by being ready to use massive military force, while remaining beneath the ‘nuclear threshold’, could they resist Communism. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed and in 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was created. Without European integration and NATO, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, to win the Cold War.

      The Berlin blockade

      Military СКАЧАТЬ