The Crisis of Socialist Modernity. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s. Edited by Marie-Janine Calic / Dietmar Neutatz / Julia Obertreis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. 230 S. = Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History, 3. ISBN: 978-3-525-31042-7

The Crisis of Socialist Modernity. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s. Edited by Marie-Janine Calic / Dietmar Neutatz / Julia Obertreis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. 230 S. = Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History, 3. ISBN: 978-3-525-31042-7.

Under the rather broad title The Crisis of Socialist Modernity, this collective book presents a very thorough, accurate and comparative analysis revealed in its subtitle The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s. In my opinion, a significant feature of this book is its focused analysis of an historical phase of real socialism that is rather too often overlooked by experts, perhaps because less spectacular than others such as the revolutionary period in Stalinist Soviet Union or the partisan warfare and the first dramatic years of the Titoist regime in postwar Yugoslavia. The period chosen by the authors may be characterized by what social psychologists would describe as a situation of lower collective temperature.

Moreover, thanks to this perspective, the book is highly original, thus also interesting, precisely because the authors have purposely avoided a perspective based upon grand events, i. e. those regarded as epoch-making. In fact, by centering their analysis on the 1970s, the authors explore a period of socioeconomic and cultural stagnation that can rightly be viewed as a critical point for socialist modernity, as aptly recalled in the book’s title. Yet, contrary to likely expectations in such cases, this crisis is anything but spectacular.

In point of fact, as all the authors of this book clearly reveal, the crisis of socialist modernity in the 1970s does not appear to be characterized by critical socioeconomic failings or political instability. The overall living conditions in both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia showed an improvement that the population perceived as a change for the better compared to former times. In the Soviet Union, for example, everyday life was thus less characterized by the widespread shortage of essential commodities and housing that had marked the previous epochs. Moreover, the Soviet model’s influence spread to Southeast Asia after the US military defeat in Indochina and to Africa after the liquidation of the Portuguese colonial empire. Thus, the Western world seemed to be on the defensive.

Yet, as this book’s authors underscore, appearances can be deceptive because the people’s identification with the socialist society’s project, despite a lack of awareness of an ideological or cultural crisis, became increasingly less significant in everyday life both in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia.

Accordingly, the crisis of socialist modernity runs underground, hence is barely perceivable via a superficial perspective. As the authors put forth, the 1970s may be defined as a period on the brink of a major change; therefore, the crisis did not appear to be a crisis at first.

Thanks to monograph contributions, this volume seeks and for the most part manages to convincingly shed light on some fundamental aspects of this economic, social and cultural change that would have a major influence on the following two decades especially.

Following the introduction by the volume’s three editors, the first two contributions by Stephan Merl and Marie-Janine Calic show why the 1970s may be regarded as the dawn of the crisis, i. e. as the beginning of the end of socialist modernity in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

In his contribution The Soviet Economy in the 1970s – Reflections on the Relationship Between Socialist Modernity, Crisis and the Administrative Command Economy (pp. 28–65), Stephan Merl shows how the 1970s in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union were a decade of disenchantment. Khrushchev’s dream of reaching the United States’ level of socioeconomic development and attaining the long-sought stage of communism was fading away. From 1971 on, Brezhnev’s establishment no longer sought to optimistically reach a new goal but rather, given planned economy’s limitations, strove to ensure the survival of the system and the country. Eventually, this survival strategy, by now without an accompanying modernizing strategy, could only lead to the system’s collapse.

In her chapter The beginning of the End – The 1970s as a Historical Turning Point in Yugoslavia, Marie-Janine Calic shows how the socialist market economy strategy, probably due to its hybrid nature, triggered the emergence of new conflicts between winners and losers precisely when the economy stopped growing. The most relevant consequence was the deepening of interregional disparities, thus also inter-ethnic ones. This in turn drastically curtailed the willingness to compromise (including financial compensation between rich and poor regions) on which Yugoslavia’s specific socialist consociationalism was based.

While the two above-mentioned articles tackle issues that are rather macro-sociological and specifically socioeconomic, the subsequent ones, via a monographic approach, analyze realities that are less general, though not less important from a social point of view.

In the chapter The “Closed” Soviet Society and the West – The Consumption of the Western Cultural Products, Youth and Identity in Soviet Ukraine During the 1970s, Sergei Zhuk observes the new generations of Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s and their relationship with the various Western youth subcultures, a cultural entanglement which was often repressed by political authorities and viewed suspiciously by the KGB, yet also tolerated at times. In fact, from the 1970s on even the Soviet Union experienced phenomena such as “Beatlemania”, “heavy metal hysteria” or “disco madness” that the regime could not or did not want to simply repress. This gave rise to a fundamental inconsistency, visible also in the fact that the Komsomol organized discotheques as a propaganda tool.

As Predrag Marković highlights in the chapter Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Yugoslav Culture in the 1970s Between Liberalization/Westernization and Dogmatization, this ambivalence was even more marked in Yugoslavia where the influence of Western cultural fads was stronger since Yugoslavians could travel freely or even emigrate to the West and come into direct contact with Western tourists on vacation in renowned sites along the coast of Dalmatia. In this context of relative economic prosperity, cultural life tended to increasingly conform to Western standards, whereas substantive ideological debates were avoided to prevent internal conflicts. As Marković notes, the 1970s were a “decade of silence” that, contrary to appearances, cannot be neglected.

The article The Economy Trigger – The Status of ‘Nationality’ in a ‘Self-Managed’ Economy During the 1960s and 1970s in Socialist Yugoslavia by Aleksandar Jakir examines the consequences of economic reforms based on the principle of self-management economy that were implemented from the mid-1960s onward. Though at first these reforms seemed highly innovative and were considered exemplary even by some intellectual circles in the non-socialist Western world, they eventually intensified the reciprocal rivalry and distrust among the various republics of the Yugoslav Federation especially during the 1970s. These reforms ultimately strengthened already existing inter-ethnic divides and tensions that would so dramatically characterize the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s.

The chapter by Jörn Happel In the Streets of Kazan – Nationality Problems in the Soviet Union During the 1970s, likewise highlights the thorny issue of nationalities during the 1970s. This specific case features a marked ambivalence with reference to the recognition of nationalities. Along with a relative cultural autonomy in the individual republics, there was also a policy of “Russification” especially in terms of language policy. However, the center’s policy aimed at promoting “unity” and “fellowship” amongst peoples was in sharp contrast with local ethnic requests.

The book’s final chapter by Ragna Boden, Soviet World Politics in 1970s – A Three Level Game, focuses on the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. Under this aspect, the author rightly contends that the 1970s cannot be regarded as a period of stagnation. In fact, this decade was extremely turbulent and packed with events. There were the habitual tensions with Yugoslavia and especially with China. Yet, as already mentioned at the beginning of this review, the Soviet Union’s influence spread to the “Third World” in particular. At the time, a superficial outlook might have led to believe that the Soviet Union was about to achieve its final triumph and that stagnation was affecting the so-called “First World” instead.

Aside from each chapter’s unquestionable brilliance, this volume, though not covering all aspects of the so-called Soviet stagnation in the 1970s, tackles the most important questions and issues of those times. Consequently, it is an essential book also because it sheds light on a little-known, yet extremely important period to gauge the present. Centered on an epoch that at first may seem unexceptional and almost dull, this volume proves to be very useful, instead, also for non-historians and for those, as the author of this review, who hail from “presentist” social sciences, in particular from sociology, anthropology and political science.

Christian Giordano, Fribourg