The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The year 1989 left realities. Yet there was something new; there was a big new idea, and that was the revolution itself—the idea of the non-revolutionary revolution, the evolutionary revolution. The motto of 1989 could come from Lenin's great critic Eduard Bernstein: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” … So this was a revolution that was not about the what but about the how. That particular motto of peaceful, sustained, marvelously inventive, massive civil disobedience channeled into an oppositional elite that was itself prepared to negotiate and to compromise with the existing powers, the powers that were (in short, the roundtable)—that was the historical novelty of 1989. Where the guillotine is a symbol of 1789, the roundtable is a symbol of 1989.27

  One needs to keep in mind that the critical intellectuals of Eastern Europe, the agents of civil society in 1970s and 1980s, did not wish to seize power. The essence of their actions and writings, and implicitly of their influence over the subjects of Communist rule, was their commitment to the restoration of truth, civility, and morality in the public sphere, the rehabilitation of civic virtues, and the end of the totalitarian method of control, intimidation, and coercion. Stephen Kotkin accurately pointed out that the most vulnerable aspect of Communist systems was their endemic lying. In this context, I contend that the dissidents' discourse of an active, self-conscious, empowered social body amounted to a formidable challenge to the party's Big Lie. The rehabilitation of notions such as freedom, dignity, citizenship, sovereignty of the people, and pluralism provided a radical symbolic and practical-political challenge to the totalitarian world. Moreover, for the first time in the history of Communism in the region, there appeared a group of thinkers who by action and word tried “to fill the anomic space between the individual and the state.”28 In other words, a different future for societies under Communism could be glimpsed once intellectuals and sectors of the population were no longer silent. Civil society did matter in the context of 1989. Anne Applebaum stessed, in a review of Stephen Kotkin's Uncivil Society, that alternative forms of organization “helped form the crowds and then helped the crowds create change (impelling Václav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic, for example). Maybe more importantly, they affected the midlevel bureaucrats, the people who had been following orders all along but, with the threat of a Soviet invasion withdrawn, no longer wanted to do so. People like the policeman who spontaneously opened the barrier at the Berlin Wall, just to take one famous example, were moved to switch sides by, yes, the civil society that had been growing around them.”29 Even if the civil society was not as coherent, numerous, influential, or visible as the uncivil one, it provided a mobilization ideal in an environment dominated by coercion, cynicism, and paralysis. I would go as far as to say that the importance of civil society lay not particularly in its political weight, but in the fact that it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The dominant trend, however, was to regard the revolutions of 1989 as part of the universal democratic wave: a confirmation of the ultimate triumph of liberal democratic values over collectivist-Jacobin attempts to control human minds. It is thus clear that dissent was an expression not only of resistance to the dominant ideology of power, a repudiation of the power of ideology, but also an affirmation of a political community based on dialogue and open-mindedness: “Samizdat, and the creation of alternative cultures of resistance and dissent that were made possible by it, can be understood as the result of long-range historical processes and part and parcel of the trans-European project of modernity. After all, free expression made possible the creation and nurturing of the very idea of ‘the public’ and ‘public opinion,’ as Jürgen Habermas reminds us in his early masterpiece, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”30 Earlier, similar interpretations of the 1989 upheaval inspired the reflections on the future of liberal revolution by political philosopher Bruce Ackerman, for whom the dramatic changes in East and Central Europe were part of a global revival of liberalism. In other words, their success or failure would condition the future of liberalism in the West as well, because we live in a world of political, economic, and cultural-symbolic interconnectedness and interdependence.31

  After decades of state aggression against the public sphere, these revolutions reinstituted the distinction between what belongs to the government and what is the territory of the individual. Emphasizing the importance of political and civic rights, they created space for the exercise of liberal democratic values. In some countries these values have become the constitutional foundation on which the institutions of an open society can be safely built. In others, the reference to pluralism remained somewhat perfunctory. But even in the less successful cases of democratic transition (Western Balkans), the old order, based on suspicion, fear, and mass hopelessness, is irrevocably defunct. In other words, while the ultimate result of these transitions is not clear, the revolutions have succeeded in their most important task: disbanding the Leninist regimes and permitting the citizens of these countries to fully engage in shaping their own destinies. In the end, “the return to Europe” heralded in 1989 stood for “normalcy and the modern way of life.” Echoing Judt, the vital step was made—Communism became the past.32

  As I mentioned before, the crucial question to be addressed is: Were the events of 1989 genuine revolutions? If the answer is positive, then how do we assess their novelty in contrast to other similar events (the French Revolution of 1789 or the Hungarian one in 1956)? If the answer is negative (as some today like to argue), then it is legitimate to ask ourselves: What were they? Simply mirages, results of obscure intrigues of the beleaguered bureaucracies that mesmerized the world but did not fundamentally change the rules of the game? These last words, the rules of the game, are crucial for interpreting what happened in 1989; focusing on them, we can reach a positive assessment of those revolutions and their heritage. In my view, the upheaval in the East, and primarily in the Central European core countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. Instead of autocratic, one-party systems, the revolutions created emerging pluralist polities. They allowed the citizens of ideologically driven tyrannies (closed societies) to recover their main human and civic rights and to engage in the building of open societies.33 Historian Konrad Jarausch argues that the emphasis on people power typical of these revolutions substantiated their novelty: their peaceful path toward regime change against all odds.34 Moreover, instead of centrally planned command economies, after 1989, all these societies have embarked on creating market economies. In these efforts to meet the triple challenge (creating political pluralism, a market economy, and a public sphere, i.e., a civil society) some succeeded better and faster than others. But it cannot be denied that in all the countries that used to be referred to as the Soviet bloc, the once monolithic order was replaced by political and cultural diversity.35 While we still do not know whether all these societies have become properly functioning liberal democracies, it is nevertheless important to emphasize that in all of them, Leninist systems based on ideological uniformity, political coercion, dictatorship over human needs, and the suppression of civic rights have been dismantled.36

  POLITICS AND MORALITY

  In a way, the revolutions of 1989 were an ironic vindication of Lenin's famous definition of a revolutionary situation: those at the top cannot rule in the old ways, and those at the bottom do not want to accept these ways any more. They were more than simple revolts because they attacked the very foundations of the existing systems and proposed a complete reorganization of society. It is perhaps worth remembering that Communist Parties were not in power as a result of legal rational procedures. No free elections brought them to the ruling positions; rather they derived their spurious legitimacy from the ideological (and teleological) claim that they represented the “vanguard” of the working class, and consequently, they were the carriers of a universal emancipatory mission.37 Once ideology ceased to be an inspiring force an
d influential members of the ruling parties, the offspring and beneficiaries of the nomenklatura system, lost their emotional commitment to the Marxist radical behest, the Leninist castles were doomed to fall apart. Here enters the what is often called the Gorbachev effect.38 It was indeed the international climate generated by the shockwaves of the glasnost and perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev after his election as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 that allowed for an incredible amount of open dissent and political mobilization in East and Central Europe. It was Gorbachev's denunciation of the ideological perspective on international politics (de-ideologization) and the abandoning of the “class struggle” perspective that changed the rules of Soviet-East European relations.

  Very few analysts insisted on the less visible but nonetheless persistent illiberal and neo-authoritarian components of the anti-Communist upheaval in the East. To quote Ralf Dahrendorf's somber forecast: “The greatest risk is probably of another kind altogether. I hesitate to use the word, but it is hard to banish from one's thoughts: fascism. By that I mean the combination of a nostalgic ideology of community which draws harsh boundaries between those who belong and those who do not, with a new political monopoly of a man or a ‘movement’ and a strong emphasis on organization and mobilization rather than freedom of choice.”39 Swept away by the exhilarating revolutionary turmoil, most observers preferred to gloss over the heterogeneous nature of the anti-Communist movements: in fact, not all those who rejected Leninism did it because they were dreaming of an open society and liberal values. Among the revolutionaries were quite a few enragés, ill disposed towards the logic of compromise and negotiations. There were also populist fundamentalists, religious dogmatists, nostalgics of the pre-Communist regimes, including those who admired pro-Nazi dictators like Romania's Marshal Ion Antonescu and Hungary's Admiral Miklós Horthy. It was only after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the velvet divorce that led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia into two countries (the Czech Republic and Slovakia) that scholars and policy makers realized that the liberal promise of these revolutions should not be taken for granted and that the aftermath of Communism is not necessarily liberal democracy. In the early 1990s it became increasingly clear that the post-Communist era was fraught with all sorts of threats, including bloody ethnic conflicts, social unrest, and the infectious rise of old and new sorts of populisms and tribalisms.40

  Actually, the appeals of the civil society paradigm, as championed and articulated within the dissident subcultures of the post-totalitarian order, were to a great extent idealized during the first postrevolutionary stage. Many intellectuals shared these values, but there were many who found them too abstract and universalistic (among the latter, Václav Klaus, Havel's rival, nemesis, and successor as president of the Czech republic). The majority of the populations in East-Central Europe had not been involved in the antisystemic activities and had not appropriated the values of moral resistance. Years ago, Hungarian philosopher and former dissident G. M. Tamás insisted on the relative marginality of the dissidents as an explanation for their lack of influence after 1989.41 The case of Solidarity was, of course, different, but even there the normative code of civic opposition failed to generate a positive concept of the “politics of truth.” In reality, dissent in most East-Central European societies was an isolated, risky, and not necessarily popular experience. Those belonging to the “gray area” between government and opposition tended to regard dissidents as moral challengers, neurotic outsiders, quixotic characters with little or no understanding of the real game. The appeals of the civil society vision, with its repudiation of hierarchical structures and skepticism of institutional authority, showed their limits in the inchoate, morally fractured, and ideologically fluid post-Communist order. Moreover, as Tony Judt noticed, “One of the reasons for the decline of the intellectuals was that their much remarked-upon emphasis on the ethics of anti-Communism, the need to construct a morally aware civil society to fill the anomic space between the individual and the state, had been overtaken by the practical business of constructing a market economy.”42

  The world after Leninism is marred by broken dreams, shattered illusions, and often unfulfilled expectations. This explains the defeat of former Communists in Poland in September 2005: perceived as cynical operators, the former apparatchiks lost to center-right parties that advocated a “moral revolution.” In brief, the battle for the soul of man after Communism has not ended. In some countries, discomfiture and dismay have prevailed. In others, individuals seem to enjoy the new conditions, including the opportunity to live without utopian dreams. To quote Alexander Yakovlev, the former Bolshevik ideologue turned apostate: “Social utopias are not harmless. They deform practical life, they push an individual, society, state agencies, and social movements into imposing their approaches and concepts, including the use of extreme methods of force. Social utopias deprive a person of the ability to perceive the reality of actual features. They sharply reduce or sometimes even completely destroy people's ability to withstand effectively the real difficulties, absurdities, and defects of private and public life.”43 In contrast to Leninism's social utopia, in 1989 civil society was a powerful metaphor of the revolt and revival of the independent mind that gained preeminence as party-states became increasingly decrepit and their elites disenchanted. Civil society was the symbol for the possibility of an alternative to decaying regimes plagued with the incurable maladies of clientelism, corruption, and cynicism. Sickness, however, can be an excruciatingly long process, and in the mid-1980s Timothy Garton Ash, an astute interpreter of Central European politics, used the predictive metaphor Ottomanization. Later, the phiiosopher Leszek Kołakowski insisted that while everyone (even the leaders) had known that Communist regimes could not last forever, hardly anyone foresaw when the debacle would occur. With no end in sight, what remained was that, by the 1980s, Eastern Europe had forged a political myth that provided both criticism and opposition to Communism, as well as a strategic vision for Communism's aftermath. I agree with Stephen Kotkin, who stated that “1989 did not happen because of a broad freedom drive or an establishment self-enrichment drive.”44 What Kotkin seems to disregard, however, is the debilitating and corrosive effect of the dissidents' arguments for authenticity (“living within the truth”) and for a return to normalcy over a system that had lost its eschatological impetus. Simple but pervasive ideas continuously chipped at the foundation of the party-state monolith. It may not have been a broad drive for freedom, the triumphal march of civil society that was presented in earlier literature, but the role of ideas in the demise of Communism should not be underestimated. A secular religion brought to power and preserved by ideas, Communism perished as a result of ideas. Once Marxism and Leninism were discredited, both domestically and internationally, as Grand Narratives, Communism's realities remained merely what they were: loss, waste, failure, and crime.45 Only if we add this corrective to Kotkin's interpretation can we understand the passion, idealism, and high expectations of 1989 together with the ensuing frustrations, malaise, and disappointments.

  The recollection of the oppression under Communist regimes is used to bolster a sense of uniqueness. Suffering is often exploited to justify a strange competition for what I call the most victimized nation status. No less important, because Communism was seen by many as an alien imposition—a dictatorship of “foreigners”—contemporary radical nationalism is also intensely anti-Communist. The memory of trauma and guilt under Leninism, along with the duty of remembrance regarding the Fascist past of some of these countries can provide the historical and moral benchmarks necessary to sustain a constitutional patriotism that can challenge communitarian reductionism. Instead, we are witnessing an ethnicization of memory and an externalization of guilt. The evils of the Communist regimes are assigned to those perceived as aliens: the Jews, the national minorities, or other traitors and enemies of an organically defined nation. Or, we encounter the “mismemory of Communism” tha
t creates “two moral vocabularies, two sorts of reasoning, two different pasts”: that of things done to “us” and that of things done by “us” to “others.” This is what Tony Judt called “voluntary amnesia.”46

  Former Communists did make sometimes spectacular comebacks. This was possible because after 1989 there were no tribunals and no recourses to state-endorsed vengeance. This shows that the refusal to organize collective political justice was after all the correct approach. Let me say that the controversies regarding the treatment of the former party and secret police activists and collaborators were among the most passionate and potentially disruptive in the new democracies. Some argued, together with Poland's first post-Communist and anti-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, that one needed to draw a “thick line” with the past and fully engage in a consensual effort for building an open society. Others, for reasons that went from unconditional anti-Communism to cynical manipulation of an explosive issue, argued that without one form or another of “purification” the new democracies would be fundamentally perverted. The truth, in my view, resides somewhere in between: the past cannot and should not be denied, covered with a blanket of shameful oblivion. Confronting the traumatic past, primarily via remembrance and knowledge, results in achieving moral justice.47 Real crimes did take place in those countries, and the culprits should be identified and brought to justice. But legal procedures and any other form of legal retribution for past misdeeds should always take place on an individual basis, and preserving the presumption of innocence is a fundamental right for any human being, including former Communist apparatchiks. In this respect, with all its shortcomings, the lustration law in the Czech Republic offered a legal framework that prevented mob justice. In Romania, where no such law was passed and access to personal secret police files was systematically denied to citizens (while these files were used and abused by those in power), the political climate continued to be plagued by suspicion, murky intrigues, and dark conspiratorial visions.48