364 Chapter Tenwithin British and American society in the postwar years. Con
sequently Soviet reconstruction had to compete from the beginning
with continuing military expenditures. In particular, Russia’s efforts to
develop atomic bombs like those the Americans had used against
Japan in 1945 must have had the highest priority at a time when
civilian levels of consumption within the USSR were still at a very low
ebb indeed. Stalin also maintained such large forces in eastern Europe
that American and other observers believed the Red Army was able
and might be tempted to overrun the entire European continent.
Between 1946 and 1949 American countermoves consolidated a
rival transnational economic and military power structure, somewhat
disingenuously dubbed the “Free World.” In many senses it was freer
than the lands dominated by the USSR. Public expression of dissent
was not systematically repressed; and labor, food, fuel, and raw mate
rials were not allocated by governmental fiat on anything like the scale
that prevailed within Communist-ruled lands. Individual choices
about work, consumption, and leisure activities remained corre
spondingly broader than anything available within the Communist
camp. Yet individual and small group choices operated in a society
dominated by a new symbiosis of public and private administrators.
Managed economies became normal in all industrially advanced
countries; and as long as public consensus about the general goals of
such management could be maintained, no one objected very vigor
ously. In other words, among the great majority of Americans, west
Europeans, and Japanese, freedom collapsed into obedience and con
formity to bureaucratically channeled behavior. The springs of obe
dience and conformity within the Communist lands were similar
inasmuch as most Russians and east Europeans, together with the
enormous Chinese population, also willingly accepted goals defined by
their bureaucratic superiors and behaved accordingly. Their rewards
were smaller than in the West and Japan, where living standards rose
rapidly and soon surpassed prewar levels. But standards of consump
tion rose in Communist lands too, so the difference was only one of
degree.
Diminished allocation of resources through direct governmental
action and the enhanced scope for fluctuating prices as regulators of
economic behavior presumably improved the general efficiency of
Free World as compared to Communist society. American corporate
managers, though able to allocate resources by simple command
within their corporations, were constantly brought up against the
necessity of buying and selling goods and services to others who were