A Soviet joke from the 1970s: a man saves for years to buy a car and is told it will be delivered in ten years. Morning or afternoon, he asks. Does it matter? Yes, he says, the plumber is coming in the morning. Humor like this was a way of living with a system that promised abundance and delivered queues. Yet many people who lived under it also remember security, community and real achievements. Understanding the Cold War means understanding daily life on both sides.

Promises and shortages

Soviet style economies were centrally planned: officials set prices, quotas and targets instead of markets. The system turned peasant societies into industrial ones, wiped out mass illiteracy and trained millions of engineers and scientists. The Soviet system guaranteed jobs, cheap housing and free education and health care, but suffered chronic shortages of consumer goods, from shoes to fresh fruit. People waited for years for apartments and stood in long lines, and personal connections often mattered more than money. Women entered paid work in huge numbers, though they also did most of the housework and queuing.

Terror, thaw and limits

Under Stalin, millions passed through the Gulag labor camps, and many died there. After Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev surprised the Communist Party. Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denounced Stalin's crimes and the cult around him, and many prisoners were released. This period became known as the thaw. But the system's limits held: the speech blamed Stalin personally rather than the one party state, and the thaw did not stop Soviet tanks from crushing Hungary later that year or troops from firing on striking workers in the city of Novocherkassk in 1962.

Dissent

Censorship was strict, so critics found other routes. Samizdat was the secret copying and passing on of banned writing, usually typed with carbon paper, so readers became publishers. The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, himself a former prisoner, described the camps in a short novel published with Khrushchev's approval in 1962, but his later work could not appear at home. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the Soviet camp system, was first published in Paris in 1973, and he was expelled from the country the next year.

Andrei Sakharov, a physicist who helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb, became a leading human rights campaigner and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. He was later exiled to the closed city of Gorky. That same year, 35 states signed the Helsinki Final Act. Moscow wanted Western recognition of postwar borders, and in return accepted language on human rights. Dissidents used the Helsinki Final Act's human rights commitments to hold their own governments to account, forming monitoring groups in Moscow and elsewhere and, in Czechoslovakia, the Charter 77 movement. In Poland, striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk won the right to organize in 1980. Solidarity was the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, and it soon claimed about ten million members before martial law drove it underground in December 1981. The secret police networks that watched such people are examined in PRIV 101.

Fear in the West

Democracies had their own Cold War fevers. Real Soviet spy rings had stolen atomic secrets, and that fed a wider panic. In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists in the State Department. McCarthyism means reckless accusations of disloyalty made with little evidence, and in the United States it cost thousands of people their jobs, including teachers, civil servants and Hollywood writers placed on blacklists. The Senate censured McCarthy in 1954. The Cold War also put a spotlight on American racial segregation, which Soviet propaganda used constantly. The Justice Department told the Supreme Court in a brief for the Brown v. Board of Education case that segregation damaged the country's standing abroad, one reason civil rights gained urgency in Washington.

Worked example: the greengrocer's sign

In 1978 the Czech playwright Václav Havel, a founder of Charter 77, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He imagined a greengrocer who puts a sign in his shop window among the onions and carrots reading, Workers of the world, unite! The greengrocer does not care about the slogan. He displays it because everyone does, and because refusing would bring trouble. Havel's point was that such regimes rested less on belief than on countless small acts of going along. If the greengrocer one day stopped putting up the sign and began to say what he actually thought, he would be punished, but he would also show others that the whole performance was optional. Apply this to the dissidents above. Samizdat, Helsinki monitoring and Solidarity were all forms of refusing the sign. None had tanks, yet each made it harder for the system to pretend that everyone agreed. That idea, that ordinary people living truthfully can weaken a powerful state, helps explain how the bloc fell so quickly in 1989.