Eastern Bloc Politics - Political and Civil Restrictions

Political and Civil Restrictions

Further information: Political repression in the Soviet Union, Human rights in the Soviet Union, Soviet democracy, Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Gulag, Telephone tapping in the Eastern Bloc, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union, Samizdat, and Sharashka

While the initial institution of communism destroyed most of the prior institutional and organizational diversity of the Eastern Bloc countries, communist structures existed in different manifestations of strength that also varied over time. In such Communist systems, centralized and unelected state apparatuses, command economies, and scarcity or absence of independent civil associations specifically combined to tightly restrict the repertoire of action for those looking to defend their interests or press demands on the government. These features did not evolve, but rather were intentionally imposed over a relatively short span of time.

As in the Soviet Union, culture was subordinated to political needs and creativity was secondary to socialist realism. The legal system and education were redesigned on Soviet lines. In addition to emigration restrictions, civil society, defined as a domain of political action outside the party's state control, was not allowed to firmly take root, with the possible exception of Poland in the 1980s. While the institutional designs of the communist systems were based on the rejection of rule of law, the legal infrastructure was not immune to change reflecting decaying ideology and the substitution of autonomous law.

While institutional changes creating some freedoms occurred, a change toward effective constitutionalism could not occur without the collapse of the communist political regimes. Market-oriented reforms could not work without functioning markets. Such systems' subordination of society was not so much the result of recurrent state triumphs over rival groups as it was intermittent state triumphs combined with state-imposed structures that broke requisite links and occupied the social space necessary for rival groups to initially form.