How long did it take the workings of communism to die out in eastern Europe?

Factual Questions
1

I know the secret police and the authoritarian trappings of communism disappeared pretty much immediately, but I imagine that it took a while for people to figure out capitalism, and that a lot of the old socialist industry and social customs lasted well into the 1990s and maybe even the 2000s.

I was watching a documentary about the Baltic states from 1992 (just months after the USSR collapsed) and things still looked very bleak and old, like you would think it was 1932 and not 1992 if you didn’t know any better. But there were some signs of new businesses burgeoning already.

It was interesting seeing the new militaries of the Baltic republics - they literally were just a couple hundred men with guns training together in the dirt.

How long did it take before it really stopped feeling like the 80s in Eastern Europe and felt like the 21st century? Was it just a few years, or closer to a decade or more? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the posters here visited Eastern Europe during that time, I’d be thrilled to hear some anecdotes about what was new and what was “still old” in say the 1990-2004 timeframe.

2

I travelled through Eastern Europe during late 1989. I can contrast solidly communist Soviet Union under Gorbachev, with a few years of perestroika, Czechoslovakia which was always more western in feel and in mid-Velvet Revolution, Hungary, which had liberalised less than a year earlier, and Yugoslavia which was a non-aligned socialist state with a mixed controlled-DIY economy (weird to think three of these no longer exist).

The things I noticed as a tourist (consumer goods in shops, the quality of peoples’ clothing, levels of service etc) changed in a gradient that drops rapidly from western Europe to a point somewhere east of Moscow. No surprises there. What did stand out, in I guess political economic terms was just how nasty things were once you lost socialism. In Budapest the social support network in large part disappeared overnight. People without connections, access to western currency or marketable skills were pretty much fucked. There was much street prostitution, older people selling family heirlooms in the park, people living rough. I’m sure some people are channelling Margaret Thatcher right no and saying its all character building and teaching them the value of a zloty, but it wasn’t, it turned an uncaring state with at least claims to looking after its weakest into a jungle. People said that along with that, the sense of community and trust in each other and social order went as well.

So the answer to your question is a lot less than 12 months to make a significant and enduring change in the fabric of society.

3

I would say at least one generation. We had a friend who came here in 1990, just after the wall came down in Berlin. She had relatives on both sides of Germany and many people in the Ease (Ossies), who were initially jubilant, became disillusioned in a couple of years as the factories closed, but no entrepreneurs moved in to take up the slack.

This is a different case to whole countries like Checkoslovacia or Kazakstan because the old West Germany was there to give support - a lot of West Germans (Wessies) resented the huge amount of their taxes going East. I bet there are still old-timers today sitting in bars in Leipzig or Magdeburg talking about the ‘good old days’ of communism.

4

I’ve never visited Eastern Europe, but this agrees with what I’ve heard. I recall one West German saying she thought the East Germans should have been treated better than they were after Unification.

But of course, the East Germans did OK in democratic-socialist Germany. There’s been more suffering in countries like Russia, which adopted a Friedmanist kleptocratic caricature of capitalism, partly in response to the urgings of American businessmen and American political figures.

5

There are some aspects of the culture that live on to this day. I worked in Prague a couple of years ago and discovered one of them that I became fond of.

During the communist era there were often long waiting lists for things like plumbers or doctors. If you wanted to see one quicker you would offer them a token gift. A bottle of home made wine, or a jar of pickles say. Not quite a bribe, but it was always appreciated as there were shortages of most things.

That mindset still lives on today. I found that things happened quicker in a business setting if I kept a drawer full of treats and handed them out when requesting things. 5 days for a firewall rule change? Here’s a bar of english chocolate and the rule is changed in minutes.

This was something that was deeply ingrained in the culture. It was almost expected and a lot more common than just offering someone a favour or a beer to get the job done quicker.

Now I’m back working in the UK and I still keep a drawer full of bribes!

6

The 1990s were quite rough for a lot of people enduring the transition. For the most part, it seems that if you were poor then you had it better in the Soviet Union than afterwards. The USSR subsidized a lot of things, hence the bread lines and other shortages. It also made housing much more affordable, once you got your apartment. In Kiev anyway, rent was very cheap, and heat, gas, and water were free, while electricity was metered.

After the fall of the USSR, the remaining utilities became metered, and rent went up precipitously as the buildings were bought out and subsidies disappeared. It is also my understanding that people had retirement accounts frozen during the transition periods in the early 90s, while those savings were basically wiped away by inflation. So while people tried to prepare for the future, many lost their nest eggs and older folk are lucky to get a pension of $100/month.

I suggest looking up the YouTube channels Ushanka Show and Bald and Bankrupt. Ushanka Show is someone who grew up in Kiev in the 1970s - 1980s and recounts a lot of the history and day-to-day life in the Soviet Union. Bald and Bankrupt tours former Soviet locations, including backwater villages and non-touristy towns, most of which are quite rough and depressing. He also tries to talk to the locals to see what life was like then compared to what it’s like now.

7

I attended a speech by a geologist who went to the former Soviet Union (specifically Russia) to explore mining ventures for some companies. He mentioned one of the basic problems (this was before the oligarchs solved the problems by simply taking everything).

Because they went straight from Tsarist times to communism, they never developed a land registry. Anyone trying to claim deeds for land or even acquire plots of land, the deeds said something like “From the big rock after the for in the road, for two hundred paces then turn left for five hundred paces”. Since the state owned all the land, there was no need to develop any systematic survey system and allocate control/ownership of land. lack of valid land title was an impediment to western investment.

The only mining company at the time making money off of Russian mining was a company with a contract to process the tailings from a copper mine. The orebody had included a moderate level of gold and silver, but because it was designated a copper mine by the central planning, nobody had set up means to recover precious metals - they went out into the tailings with the ground up rock. He said the tailings were a giant mound of fine-ground rock with a gold content better than most modern western gold orebodies.

He visited the Norilsk nickel mine, which he said was once the gulag location that inspired Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the middle of Siberia. North American smelters have to have massive pollution control systems. This mine was in the middle of nowhere. Instead of dust control measures, apparently they paid all the old retired workers and grandmothers to go out each day and sweep up the dust from the smokestacks that fell on the city; then trucks would come, scoop it up and feed it back into the process. One of the important ore conveyor systems had collapsed (crushing the building with the meeting rooms where he was supposed to meet the mine executives) and in the week he was there he saw no effort to fix it.

The new capitalism was taking hold - his interpreter’s son was sick, he offered to find some orange juice to feed him. They went into the sheltered areas under the buildings - built on pillars to avoid problems with permafrost - that had become lively black markets. You could buy anything - drugs, firearms, even women or children; but you couldn’t find orange juice.

In Moscow, inflation was ramping up - making most people’s savings and pensions worthless. At the height of inflation, people would be paid each day at noon, run out to find and buy *anything *they could while the money was worth something; then in the evenings they would hang around their suburban subway stops seeking to trade what they had bought for something they needed - tee shirts for potatoes, etc. (There’s the old joke from the Argentinian hyperinflation - Q: what’s cheaper, the bus or the taxi? A: the taxi, because you pay at the end of the ride when the money is worth a lot less.)

8

I visited Estonia and Latvia in 2001. Tallinn felt basically like a modern Scandinavian city - hypermodern in some cases, as it was very geared up for the internet and mobile phones even back then. Riga felt a bit less advanced but the only real sign you were in the former Soviet Union was the large numbers of бизнесмен with improbably blonde young lady friends in all the clubs.

9

Reported.
бизнесмен = “businessmen.”

10

I hope that was a joke. Yes, it’s a rule - but one where typically common-sense latitude is applied.

11

Geography nitpick:

Just because a country was part of the “eastern” block during the Cold War doesn’t mean it’s a true Eastern European country.

Eastern Europe: Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan.
Central Europe: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria
Northern Europe: The three Baltic States, Scandinavian countries including Finland and of course Iceland
Western Europe: Uk, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany (and those tiny city states).
Southern Europe: France (they get to play on two teams), Portugal, Spain, Italy (including Holy See and San Marino), Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Albania and all the countries resulting in the breakup of former Yugoslavia. They, along with Albania make the subdivision Balkans. Greece doesn’t belong in that group, in spite of the proximity.
Serbia might qualify for Central Europe, being landlocked and with it’s close ties to Austria during history.

Personally, I think all of Turkey belongs in Europe, since Armenia e.g. counts as European, even though it’s east of Turkey.

12

The term [what he said, which I’m too law-abiding to repeat] was widely used in Eastern-Central-Southern Europe in this period, with heavy verbal air-quotes, to describe anyone exploiting the collapse of Communism for a generally skeezy embrace of self-interest disguised as entrepreneurial spirit. Some probably now own national football teams, while others may have had part of their torso fished out of the Danube.

13

Did it rectify itself? My understanding is the eastern european nations underwent pretty rapid economic growth starting in the late 90s and many are now on the bottom end of being high income nations.

Did the sense of trust and stability ever come back?

14

There was the joke about Russian mentality - don’t know how true it is… God appears to Ivan and tells him “Ivan, you’ve been one of my loyal servants all your life, so to reward you, I’m going to grant you one wish for whatever you want. But Gregor down the road has also been my loyal servant, so whatever you ask for, I will give him twice as much.” Ivan thinks for a moment then says “Oh Lord, take one of my testicles.”

I saw this in an article explaining one of the reasons why the Russian economy was so lacklustre while the Chinese economy was going like gangbusters; this dog-in-manger attitude that the Russians hate to see anyone doing better. The suggestion was that this mentality, as much as any problems associated with the end of communism, probably explains why some economic problems persist.

15

I haven’t been back to most of those countries to offer a proper opinion. There seems in all these countries a very strong general sense that anyone in government is only in it for themselves, so at least a continuing cynicism about the operation of power and self-interest. That’s why you get these strong nationalist movements alternating with supposed clean-skin outsiders who will drain the marsh. So different to us.

16

I visited Hungary in 1990 and lived there 1991-2003.

Of course, the changes came gradually. But here’s what it was like my first year there.

In eastern Hungary I visited a village where there were 4000 inhabitants and only 20 telephones. A distant relative of mine lived there, and I had to send her a telegram [!] from the post office to let her know I was coming.

Even in Budapest, the capital, there were plenty of people without phones. My girlfriend was one. To get in touch with her, I had to go to her apartment in person and, if she wasn’t in, leave a note on her door asking her to call me from a pay phone.

Major landmark buildings were covered in decades of soot, or had decades-old scaffolding around them. Major buildings had shrapnel damage from World War II, or bullet holes from the 1956 revolution.

The local currency, the forint, was not convertible, and locals were permitted to purchase only a very limited amount of convertible currency (dollars, deutschemarks, etc.) So there was a black market. For one dollar you could get 62 forints officially, or 90 forints in a furtive transaction in the back of someone’s shop.

There was already a McDonalds in 1990, but Burger King arrived later, around 1992, and was treated like the Second Coming. KFC and Pizza Hut came around the same time.

Some goods were hard to find (like shoelaces) and some goods impossible to find (like peanut butter). Budapest was like a ghost town on Sundays, as not only shops but most restaurants were closed.

I remember one corner grocery store selling shoes side-by-side with eggs.

I remember paying about 8 cents for a photocopy of one sheet of paper and getting a carefully handwritten invoice for the transaction.

Compared to the economic changes, the political changes were far advanced by 1990. But early on, it wasn’t clear if democracy would survive, or if the communists would come back into power, or some form of right-wing authoritarianism would come back [spoiler alert: it did]. The Jewish community worried about a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, there were still Soviet soldiers marching around the train stations.

To answer your question, I’d say that most of these quirks were gone by the mid-1990s (in Hungary, at least! As Banksiaman notes, each country was different).

17

Concur - I first visited Budapest in 1998, on an Interrail trip (along with other former communist countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia). By that time it felt much like any other capitalist central European capital city. Of course, as a tourist you are not exposed to a lot of the complexities of everyday life so I daresay some annoying socialist-era hangovers were still giving the residents headaches.

My sister, who is a few years older, was on a school coach trip of Eastern Europe in 1991 and, with perfect timing, was in the Soviet Union during the August coup. Ukraine, to be precise, which I seem to recall led to some difficulties when they tried to leave, because as far as the Ukrainian officials were concerned, Ukraine was now independent and their Soviet visas were no longer valid. (I was only 14 at the time so I don’t remember the details, but I do remember my parents being quite relieved when they got home!)

18

Especially how the transliteration is “buznyesmyen”

19 
  You got the tense wrong, the correct question is "how long it will take the workings of communism to die out?":rolleyes: 
 I mean, how long it took for the workings of slavery to die out in the US? Sure, the Civil War was over in 1865, but segregation lasted for another 100 years, and the removal of some Confederate generals statues' was a hot topic only a couple of years ago, wasn't it?  

 As someone alluded to in an previous post, you'd need to define "Eastern Europe" more precisely. There's the "almost western eastern Europe" (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary), the "Central Eastern Europe" (Romania, Bulgaria, Albania) and the "former Soviet Eastern Europe" (Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, etc) - my own classification, vaguely based on geography, and partly based on my perception of how alike the communist regimes in these countries were.
 Because that's the other catch: you'd also have to define what you mean by "communism". Mind you, I'm not trying to play the stupid game of "but  communism was never implemented correctly, so none of these countries were actually communist!".  But the thing is, in Eastern Europe there was one common form communism only from the end of WW2 (when basically the Red Army installed puppet governments in all occupied countries - maybe with the exception of Czechoslovakia,  IIRC that's the only place where the communist party won the post-war elections fair and square) until the death of Stalin in 1953. After that, once Moscow relaxed a little its grip on local governments, each country "developed" its own "strand" of communism, of which the '56 Hungarian and '68 Prague revolts were the most visible symptoms (partly because Moscow thought the locals were ...ehm, deviating too much from the "real" communism and intervened in force). So in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, each Eastern European country had to find its own way out of the economic, social and political hole that its own form of communism put it in.    

 Some countries already had party-approved rudiments of private markets and a strong civil society even during communist times (Hungary, Poland); they had the easiest transition towards democracy (though my impression is that the popularity of the current authoritarian governments in both countries is at least partly due to the nationalist propaganda from communist times - strange how a supposedly universal ideology like communism lead to some of the most rabidly nationalistic and xenophobic regimes that ever existed). 

Some other countries were heading towards an oppressive, personality-cult type of dictatorship (Albania, Romania and, to a lesser degree, Bulgaria). After 1989 they oscillated between Neo-communists and democracy for a decade, until finally heading (hesitantly) towards democracy and EU (with the exception of Albania).

Then there's the former Soviet republics. That's a very diverse bunch: there's the Baltics (probably the most successful at transitioning from communism to democracy), the smaller countries that tried, but couldn't escape Moscow (Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan - there's still frozen wars within their borders that Moscow could reignite anytime) and those where a bunch of oligarchs basically took over the entire country, usually with Moscow's blessing (Belarus, Kazakhstan). 

And of course there's Ukraine; it featured quite heavily in the US news lately, so I assume you're more familiar with it. :)  

 As for the former Yugoslavia, after the huge mess from the '90s some parts did better (Croatia and Slovenia are now in EU), while others did quite poorly (Serbia). 
There's a documentary called "30 years of democracy" about Romania's path from '89 until today (it came out last month). [It's freely available on youtube](https://youtu.be/uUbN6DXJwFg), just make sure to select the English subtitles. I'm one hour into it and I can say it's a really good overview of how peoples' mindset slowly shifted over time and the whole society "mutated". It includes interviews with a lot of journalists, politicians and "bussinesmen (including former prime-ministers"). Some of them served time for corruption .  I think it shows well how the second-rank communists managed to stay in power.  (Bonus: my hometown is also in ... the part with the Eiffel tower imitation and the Ewing family's house. Yes, the one from "Dallas" :) ).

Romania is probably the best study case for your question, since it came close to becoming a failed oligarchic state before ending up in NATO and EU, so likely it covers the widest spectrum between the happier cases (e.g. Czechoslovakia) and the ones that are still frozen is some kind of post-communist dictatorship (Belarus).

20

Yugoslavia came by its troubles quite honestly. A fellow I knew who was a tradesman (air conditioning) said he would do work there when he went back for family visits. As a result, he’d rent a car and drive around Yugoslavia. After the fall, he said it was not unusual to come back to where you parked and find dents kicked in the doors of the car. Locals could tell by the license plate which area of the former “republic” a car was from - the inter-ethnic rivalries were pretty intense even back then, the communist regime barely suppressed them. No wonder all hell broke out.