Return of the Hanseatic League or How the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945-1991 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Blusiewicz, Tomasz. 2017. Return of the Hanseatic League or How the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945-1991. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41141532 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Return of the Hanseatic League or how the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945-1991 A dissertation presented by Tomasz Blusiewicz to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2017 © 2017 Tomasz Blusiewicz All rights reserved. Professor Alison Frank Johnson Tomasz Blusiewicz Return of the Hanseatic League or how the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945-1991 Abstract This dissertation develops a comparative perspective on the Baltic region, from Hamburg in the West to Leningrad in the East. Its transnational approach highlights the role played by medieval Hanseatic port cities such as Rostock (East Germany), Szczecin and Gdańsk (Poland), Kaliningrad, Klaipeda, Riga, and Tallinn (Soviet Union), as ‘windows to the world’ that helped the communist-controlled Europe to remain in touch with the West after 1945. The main innovation rests on linking particular developments in the Polish People’s Republic, the GDR, and the Soviet Union to global processes such as the post-Bretton Woods capital flows liberalization or the economic repercussions of the 1973 Oil Shock. The project’s comparative framework highlights how the three states diverged in their responses to the changing global environment, introducing even more disunity behind the Soviet Bloc’s monolithic façade. This approach emphasizes the significance and uniqueness of Baltic port cities, where global trends arrived earlier and played themselves out in a more pronounced way. This characteristic helped them to serve as inlets channeling what historians have identified as “the shock of the global 1970s” into the region. In the West, particular attention is paid to Hamburg as a foreign trade hub that projected its commercial dynamism eastwards, and as a Cold War intelligence headquarters. New insight is provided on the ways in which ‘really existing socialisms’ diverged from the original Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist blueprint and how they eventually metamorphosed into the laissez-faire free-market experiment after 1989. This work relies on recently declassified papers iii produced by the communist secret police and intelligence agencies, including thousands of hitherto unseen pages of KGB records from the Lithuanian Special Archives in Vilnius, Stasi files from the German BStU, as well as reports written by the chiefs of the Soviet Pribaltika customs administration, archived at the RGAE in Moscow. It offers a radically new interpretation of the origins of the Solidarity movement in Poland and transcends the still often nationally entrenched narratives of 1989. Ultimately, it sheds new light on the dynamics behind the eventual collapse of the Comecon trade system, the Soviet Bloc, and the Soviet Union itself. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements IX Dedication X List of Tables, Graphs and Maps XI Note on Translation XII Note on Editorial Notation XIII 1. Prologue 1 2. Introduction 12 - 2.0. The Hansa Across Time and Space - 2.1. Post-German Communism - 2.2. The Shock of the Global 1970s - 2.3. The Unsung Heroes - 2.4. A Eurasian Land Empire in the Baltic - 2.5. A Few More Words on Contemporary Relevance 3. Chapter I: The New Polish Baltic and the Opportunities of Socialist Life at Sea 65 - 3.0. Poland’s Marriage with the Sea - 3.1. Ziemia żywi, morze bogaci - 3.2. The Specter of a German Reconquista - 3.3. State-Sponsored Partnership in Crime - 3.4. The December 1970 Massacre v 4. Chapter II: Contraband, bribes, drugs and big bucks: The unknown backstory of Solidarność 120 - 4.0. Apocalypse at Solidarity's Carnival - 4.1. Historiographical Intervention - 4.2. The Joys of the One Percent: Conspicuous Consumption - 4.3. How to Spot a Burżuj - 4.4. Cars for Comrades - 4.5. Customs – the Weakest Link - 4.6. Back to the Shipyard Floor - 4.7. The Stimulus Package of Martial Law - 4.8. The Cold War Baltic 5. Chapter III: Treacherous Allures of the Soviet Maritime – An Institutional View 182 - 5.0. Calm before the Storm - 5.1. The Time of Troubles - 5.2. Sailor-Spies in the Far and Near Abroad - 5.3. Zastoi and Decadence at Home - 5.4. The Fatal Polish Link - 5.5. Valiutchiki 6. Chapter IV: The Baltic Connection: A Fragile Cold War Lifeline 240 - 6.0. Klaipeda: Unseemly Cosmopolitan in Soviet Lithuania - 6.1. Kaliningrad, the Faithful Outpost or a Basket Case? - 6.2. The Germans - 6.3. Why not Odessa? vi 7. Chapter V: The East German Kommerzielle Koordinierung: An Undercover Engine of Capitalism in the Model Socialist Society 295 - 7.0. Schalck - 7.1. The Public Should Know! Staatliche Finanzrevision Valutakontrollgruppe - 7.2. The Blueprint: Schalck’s Dissertation of 1970 - 7.3. KoKo and the Hanseatic Connection - 7.4. The Credit Crunch - 7.5. The Final Verdict on the KoKo 8. Chapter VI: "A Small Country with a Large Fleet": The Stasi and East German Merchant Adventures, 1961-1989 353 - 8.0. Hapag in the Soviet Union - 8.1. The Wall on the Baltic Sands - 8.2. Rostock: The East German Window to the World under Stasi Watch - 8.3. The Neptun Hotel - 8.4. The Magnet of Neighborly Hanseatic Connections - 8.5. Hamster - 8.6. Freedom of the Seas vii 9. Conclusion 409 - 9.0. The Kronstadt Syndrome - 9.1. The Advantages of the Comparative View - 9.2. Uncivil Societies: A Transnational Learning Process - 9.3. Geopolitics - 9.4. August 31, 1980. Polish Independence Day 10. Epilogue 458 Bibliography 460 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the numerous individuals without whose assistance and support this dissertation would have never been writer. At this early stage of a project that will eventually be transformed into a book in a few years, I would like to thank, first and foremost, my advisor and mentor, Alison Frank Johnson, Professor of History at Harvard University. Without her encouragement, help, guidance, and advice, I would have been able neither to begin, nor to continue and complete, this dissertation. I would also like to thank my other advisors, readers and mentors at Harvard, including Professors: Niall Ferguson, Terry Martin, Emma Rothschild, Charles Maier, Maya Jasanoff, Serhii Plokhii and Kelly O’Neill, to mention just a few from the long list of curious minds that I had the honor of learning from during my six years at this unique institution of higher education. I owe an inexpressibly large intellectual and personal debt to them. Their influence and knowledge are reflected in every single page of this dissertation. Another person whose support was inestimably helpful was Professor Padraic Kenney of Indiana University, nominally the ‘external’ reader on my dissertation committee, but certainly an ‘insider’ in terms of expertise on communist history. Due to time constrains, such as pressing submission and graduation deadlines, but more importantly - due to the fact that their contribution should become public knowledge in a more widely-accessible place, such as the monograph that will eventually arise out of the work in progress presented here, everyone else who has helped me along the way will have to wait for proper recognition, in a less hasty format, for a year or two. If you are still curious enough to engage with this early draft, despite my advice to the contrary, please accept my apologies for neglecting to mention your contribution here. Rest assured, I will not forget about it. ix DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents. Thank you for everything you have done to help me reach this stage. Mam nadzieję, że lektura mych twórczych wysiłków będzie znośna, a może i lekka i przyjemna przy sprzyjających wiatrach, even if you might have to wait a bit for a Polish translation to appear. x LIST OF TABLES, GRAPHS AND MAPS 1. Graph No 1. Total value of foreign goods declared individually by merchant seamen at the Gdańsk Customs Bureau in 1982 172 2. Table No 2. Structure of Genex and Intershop Profits, Combined, VM Million 330 3. Table No 3. Number of Intershop Outlets in the GDR, 1977 369 4. Map No 4. East Germany: Administrative Divisions 370 xi NOTE ON TRANSLATION This dissertation relies primarily on archival material in German, Polish and Russian. The secondary material includes English-language scholarship as well. All the necessary translations into English, both direct and paraphrased, have been done by the author, to the best of his knowledge and ability. Occasionally, the original source in its vernacular form is also provided, in the main body or in the footnotes, to facilitate a more precise conveyance of meaning. When available, the anglicized version of a location (or other proper name) is used (Warsaw/Warszawa), unless the vernacular was used in the quoted source or due to any other contextual circumstances. When two names (or more) of a location exist (Gdańsk/Danzig, Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg), one of them is used depending on which one was prevalent at the time (e.g., before WWI or after WWII) or which one was used by the source examined at a given point.