The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  From the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach to the last line of the Manifesto, Marx issued a persistent call to mobilize understanding and harness the forces of modernity, all in the name of a radical transformation of the world, a reconciliation of man with nature and history. Such a totalizing vision no doubt possesses great intellectual and moral appeal. But if we have learned anything from the past century, it is that the domain of morality and politics is a domain of finitude, difference, and limit. The riddles of history have no final solutions worth seeking. Like Germans after Hitler, like Italians after Mussolini, like Chileans after Pinochet, East Europeans have engaged in efforts to reckon with a traumatic past. This necessarily involves analyses of the ideological blueprints that galvanized murderous political passions, catalyzed mass resentment, and organized nihilistic social energies in disastrous forms of social engineering.109 When living for almost a century in the company of the Devil, one cannot anymore find refuge in angelic reverence. The reconciliation and healing of a nation besmirched by the bloody mire of evil depend on the recognition and non-negotiability of human dignity as a primordial moral truth of the new society.

  CHAPTER 6

  Malaise and Resentment

  Threats to Democracy in Post-Communist Societies

  Societies produce stereotypes (which are the height of artifice), and then consume them as commonplace (which is the height of naturalness). That is how bad faith can pass for good conscience.

  —Eugen Weber, My France

  … shared hatreds make for strange bedfellowships.

  —Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  —W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

  The over two decades that have passed since the collapse of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe have proved that more than one possible future could be reasonably canvassed for the region. Even when many hastened to predict the worst, the likelihood of nightmarish scenarios, pace Jan Urban or G. M. Tamás, was somewhat dubious.1 Bellum omnium contra omnes, a state of wild and protracted anarchy, and the loss of recently acquired civic rights in favor of Stalino-Fascist simulations of cohesion and collective will are not in the offing in most post-Leninist states. The Milosevic- style expansionist chauvinism has not been emulated outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia, although similar outbursts of hatred and intolerance have accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet Union, especially in the Caucasus. Human rights have been trampled in Belarus under the plebiscitary regime headed by Alexander Lukashenko, but this remains rather an exceptional case among European post-Communist states. Pluralism seems to have settled solidly, and democratic procedures are now widely recognized, accepted, and practiced. The general landscape after Communism's demise, however, is one of disenchantment, dispirited political cultures, the rise of new collectivisms, marginalization of former heroes, and the return of the former Communists. Adam Michnik's term for this trend was “the velvet restoration.”2 I proposed the “velvet counterrevolution” to indicate the direction of this phenomenon, especially its strong anti-intellectual and illiberal tendencies.3 The conservative-populist turn in Hungarian politics under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after 2009 has resulted in bitter controversies regarding perceived limitations to freedom of the press and ethnocentric approaches to the nature of national identity.

  Central and Eastern European societies have evolved from authoritarian, extremely centralized, and bureaucratic Leninist regimes toward democratic forms of political and economic organization.4 To focus exclusively on their difficulties during the transition period is to miss the drama of social and political experimentation in that region. More than twenty years after 1989, what remains at stake is the validity of the liberal democratic paradigm in traditionally authoritarian societies (“What can they look back to?” historian Tony Judt once asked, correctly). In other words, it is important to identify the building blocks on which open societies can be established in order to function properly. We must assess the trajectory of the great transformations unleashed by the extraordinary events of 1989: Are the newly awakened societies propitious to pluralism, or does the upper hand belong to illiberal, antimodern forces? In 2002, Judt stated that, in the context of the European Union accession, for purposes of European moral reconstruction, “the crucial reference point for Europe now will be the years immediately preceding the events of 1989.”5 As we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of that year's revolutions, we have the possibility of contemplating the first two post-Communist decades' illusions, expectations, and balance sheet and of speculating on the years to come.

  ANNUS MIRABILIS 1989

  The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges them, truly world-historical events, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after 1989.6 The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the idea of intrasystemic reforms, it had become clear that Communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, even against, the existing order.7 The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union, consummated before the incredulous eyes of the world in December 1991, was directly and intimately related to the earlier dissolution of the East European “outer empire,” provoked by the revolutions of 1989. It is now obvious that the historical cycle inaugurated by World War I, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, and the long European ideological warfare (or rather global civil war) that followed had come to an end.8

  The road to 1989-91 was prepared by the less visible, often marginal, but in the long run critically significant workings of what we now call civil society (including Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, unofficial peace, environmental, and human rights groups in the GDR, Democratic Opposition in Hungary).9 In examining the wreckage of Leninism, we should thus avoid any one-dimensional, monistic approach. There is no single factor that explains the collapse: economics as much as politics and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. But these were not autocracies: they derived their only claim to legitimacy from the Marxist-Leninist “holy writ,” and once this ideological aura ceased to function, the whole edifice started to falter.10 They were, to use sociologist Daniel Chirot's apt term, “tyrannies of certitude,” and it was precisely the gradual loss of ideological commitment among the ruling elites, once a truly messianic ardor, that accelerated the inner disintegration of Leninist regimes.11 By 1989, three central myths of Leninism had collapsed: its infallibility, its invincibility, and its irreversibility.

  Under the circumstances, any analysis of the year 1989 should be framed by two crucial theoretical hypotheses. The first, which constitutes the core of Stephen Kotkin's argument in the much discussed volume The Uncivil Society, is that by 1980s, the political elites of the Communist states were in disarray, experiencing loss of self-confidence, rampant cynicism, and ideological decay. Eastern Europe was ruled by uncivil societies (Communist bureaucratic castes) beset with insecurity, anxiety, despondency, and demoralization. They had lost their self-confidence and were looking for alternative sources of legitimization. However, I would like to point to a second dimension that enabled the watershed of 1989. Communism in the region underwent the exhaustion of the utopian impulse. To use Ken Jowitt's formulation, the charismatic impersonalism of Leninist parties fell into disrepute. In spite of Mikhail Gorbachev's endless injunctions of “revisionist” ideological zeal, late sociali
sm failed to reinvent the heroic mission of its central agent of progress in history: the Communist Party.

  To return to Kotkin, I would contend that indeed “the collapse of Communism was a collapse of establishments”12 Nevertheless, when talking about the establishment one should also understand the essential myth of a charismatic party mobilizing a revolutionary movement to radically transform society for the achievement of socialism. By 1989, across East-Central Europe one found a complex picture of waning faith in utopia (though by no means extinct—e.g., Nicolae Ceaușescu died singing the International) combined with routinization engineered by pragmatic elites (think of leaders such as Károly Grósz in Hungary, Mieczysław Rakowski in Poland, Petar Mladenov in Bulgaria, or Hans Modrow in the GDR). All Communist regimes seemed to undergo a process of indefinite corrosion. But once a new type of leadership emerged at the Moscow center, one that gradually grew disenchanted with the radically transformative logic of the Soviet past, systemic collapse accelerated at a formidable pace. Tony Judt cogently pointed out that “Lenin's distinctive contribution to European history had been to kidnap the centrifugal political heritage of European radicalism and channel it into power through an innovative system of monopolized control: unhesitatingly gathered and forcefully retained in one place.”13 When the influence of this heritage in the arithmetic of power within the Soviet bloc waned, erosion gave way to the crumbling of apparently unshakable establishments.

  Precisely because they ended an historical cycle and ushered in a new one, the importance of these revolutions cannot be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism, and policed dictatorship.14 Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically skeptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least in their first stage, liberal and nonutopian.15 Unlike traditional revolutions, they did not originate in a millenialist vision of the perfect society, and they rejected the role of any self-appointed vanguard in directing the activities of the masses. They spoke a new political vernacular: “the ‘rights talk’ as a way of thinking about politics.”16 Moreover, no political party directed their spontaneous momentum, and in their early stages they even insisted on the need to create new political forms, different from ideologically defined, traditional party differentiations. At the same time, as one observer of the events between 1989 and 1991 remarked, “Dissidents did not take up their cudgels against former revolutionaries or their organizations like the CPSU—they demanded an end to the state of revolution.”17

  HOPES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

  The fact that the aftermath of these revolutions has been plagued by ethnic rivalries, unsavory political bickering, rampant political and economic corruption, and the rise of illiberal parties and movements, including strong authoritarian, collectivistic trends, does not diminish their generous message and colossal impact. And, it should be noted, it was precisely in the countries where the revolutions did not occur (Yugoslavia) or were derailed (Romania) that the exit from state socialism was particularly problematic. The revolutions of 1989 did indeed create a fundamentally new and dangerous situation in which the absence of norms and predictable rational behavior on the part of the actors created the potential for global chaos. This observation was made not to deplore the end of the pre-1989 arrangements, but simply to point to the fact that this threshold year and the end of Leninism placed all of us in a radically novel situation. Understanding the revolutions of 1989 helps us grasp the meaning of the ongoing debates about liberalism, socialism, nationalism, civic society, and the very notion of human freedom at the end of a most atrocious century.18

  These facts should be kept in mind especially when writers question the success of these revolutions by referring exclusively to their ambiguous legacies. The “reactionary rhetoric” brilliantly examined by Albert Hirschman uses arguments of futility, jeopardy, and perversity to delegitimize change per se or make it look impossible or undesirable.19 This line of reasoning, often encountered in the more sophisticated approaches, argues along the following logic: the postrevolutionary environment has unleashed long-dormant ugly features of national political cultures, including chauvinism, racism, residual Fascism, ethno-clerical fundamentalism, and militarism, and it is therefore more dangerous than the status quo ante; or, nothing really changed and the power-holders (party-state bureaucrats) have remained the same, simply affixing to themselves new masks; or, no matter what the women and men of the revolutions of 1989 had hoped, the results of their endeavors have been extremely disappointing, allowing political scoundrels, crooks, and demagogues to use the new opportunities to establish their domination. If there is a main moral of the great revolutionary drama that unfolded in Eastern Europe in 1989, it is that history is never a one-way avenue, and that the future is always pregnant with more than one alternative. In other words, there is no ironclad determinism governing mankind's history. Indeed, as Jeffrey Isaac argues, the revolutions of 1989 had not only more than one cause but also more than one meaning, and they proposed a challenging agenda not only for the post-Communist societies but for Western democracies as well.20 Moreover, we should focus on their pluralist heritage and enduring impact on both Eastern Europe and the world. Isaac warned that the “we” who celebrate the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 ought to do so with circumspection and with a sense of self-l imitation because of the complexities behind the “normality” of post-Communist societies.21

  The meaning of those events, the role of dissidents (critical, unregimented intellectuals) in the resurrection of long-paralyzed civic societies, the overall crisis of those regimes, and the decline of the Communist Parties' hegemony have generated an enormous interpretative literature. The initial temptation was to acclaim the role of dissidents in the breakdown of Soviet-style regimes and the rise of civic initiatives from below.22 The dissident as a hero turned out to be a political myth in Central and Eastern Europe, but the myth raised these societies to a higher level of moral self-awareness. In my view, it is less relevant how large or numerous a dissident group or movement was. I remember an intervention by the former dissident and human rights activist, the late Mihai Botez, at a roundtable organized by Freedom House in 1988, in which he insisted that the deficit of visibility does not necessarily mean the absence of civil society, even in a country like Romania under Ceausescu. There were many informal networks of communication between Romanian intellectuals. The November 1987 anti-Communist Brașov workers' protest movement was also an expression of deep-seated social unrest. In an insightful review of the historiography of the revolutions of 1989, Barbara Falk insisted that “there is no clear-cut line between resistance and dissent—it is more of a continuum or full spectrum.” The nature, impact, and role of this continuum of resistance in the demise of Communist regimes await more in-depth research and analysis. I consider her characterization of this spectrum a telling starting point:

  At the pole of “resistance” lie activities such as absenteeism, alcoholism or drug abuse, and the preference for personal travel and sporting activities rather than trade-union- or workplace-sponsored events. Closer to the middle would be private or family discussions on alternative historiography, listening to a banned radio broadcast, writing an essay “for the drawer,” publicly telling jokes, or reading samizdat. Closer to the middle on the other side, toward the pole of dissent, would be activities taken in support or in the “gray zone”—agreeing with a petition, participating in a pilgrimage perhaps, or discussing with friends a particular broadcast or spreading news obtained there. Finally, at the “dissent” end of the continuum is the production and distribution of samizdat, public protest, active involvement in independent groups outside the control of the party-state—all of which risked regime persecution and/or imprisonment. One could also further differentiate between individual moral resistance or organized opposition—particularly by the late 1980s or in states such as Poland where the opposition was ex
tremely well organized, expansive, and multidimensional.23

  We must also not overlook that what mattered were the perceptions of the dissidents' role among the elites (i.e., the so-called intelligentsia) and within sectors of the population, in the grey area (bystanders). It was no coincidence that as soon as the Ceaușescu regime fell apart in Romania, the new ruling group, the leaders of the National Salvation Front, made sure to convey the message to the population that its ruling council had incorporated the few dissident intellectuals in the country known to the people via the Radio Free Europe broadcasts. Dissidents could legitimize post-1989 rule; their presence and ideas gave the events significance. It was meaningful not only that Communism collapsed or that the elite imploded, but also how the story unfolded and which ideas and principles filled in the void after its demise. For example, in the Soviet Union, Ludmila Alexeyeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, declared at the height of perestroika that “we take no offence at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.” After the failed coup d'état of August 1991, one of its most ardent supporters, the nationalist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov, bitterly stated that “the conception of Elena Bonner has won.”24

  The revolutions of 1989 were first and foremost revolutions of the mind, and critical intellectuals played the role of “revolutionary subjects.” Euphoric accounts of the revolutionary wave, often compared to the 1848 Spring of the Nations, abounded, and Timothy Garton Ash offered some of the most eloquent articles along this line in his gripping contributions to the New York Review of Books, later collected in the volume The Magic Lantern.25 Whether the term revolutions is the most appropriate to describe these changes is of course an open question. What is beyond dispute is the world-historical impact of the transformations inaugurated by the events of 1989 and the inauguration of a new vision of the political. In the twentieth century, many intellectuals engaged in a frantic search for utopia and frequently participated in the legitimation of ideology-driven despotisms: “It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffection of Europe's intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche.”26 According to Garton Ash,