by Tony Judt
Writers and scholars, reasonably enough, were preoccupied with censorship. The impediments to publication, or performance, varied considerably from one Communist country to another. In Czechoslovakia, since 1969, the authorities were unabashedly repressive: not only were thousands of men and women excluded from print or public appearance, but a very broad swathe of themes, persons and events could not even be mentioned. In Poland, by contrast, the Catholic Church and its institutions and newspapers provided a sort of semi-protected space in which a degree of literary and intellectual freedom could be practiced, albeit cautiously.
Here, as in Hungary, the problem was often one of self-censorship. In order to secure access to an audience, intellectuals, artists or scholars were always tempted to adapt their work, to trim or hedge an argument in anticipation of likely official objections. The professional and even material benefits of such adjustment were not to be neglected, in societies where culture and the arts were taken very seriously; but the moral cost in self-respect could be considerable. As Heine had written a hundred and fifty years before, in terms many Eastern European intellectuals would immediately have recognized, ‘these executioners of thought make criminals of us. For the author . . . frequently commits infanticide: he kills his own thought-child in insane terror of the censor’s mind.’
This was one kind of partial complicity. Silence—the internal emigration of the ‘Ketman’ in Czesław Miłosz’s Captive Mind—was another. But those who did speak out, circulating their work in illicit carbon copies, faced the gloomy prospect of near-invisibility, of having their ideas and their art confined to a tiny, closed audience—experiencing at best what one Czech intellectual morosely called the onanistic satisfaction of publishing samizdat for the same two thousand intellectuals, all of whom also write it.
Moreover, courage did not in itself ensure quality. The non-conformist, oppositional and frequently dangerous aspect of underground writing conferred on it (especially among its admirers in the West) an aura of romance and a sometimes overstated significance. Original and radical ideas could indeed blossom and thrive in the decaying compost-heap of the Soviet bloc—the writings of Havel and Michnik are the best but by no means the only instances of this, the Fleurs du Mal of Communism.263 But for many others, being unpublished was no guarantee of quality. There is no ‘muse of censorship’ (George Steiner). Just because the regime didn’t like you doesn’t mean you were talented.
Thus the reputation of even some of the best known opposition intellectuals was to shrivel and shrink when exposed to a free market in ideas. Hungary’s George Konrád—whose rather self-indulgent essays on ‘Antipolitics’ were widely admired in the Eighties—was one of many who would drop from sight after 1989. Others, like the East German novelist Christa Wolf, understood well that it was the very difficulties of being a writer under Communism that furnished her with both subject matter and a certain energy (and public standing). That is one reason why many intellectuals in Communist societies preferred to forego the opportunity of emigration and exile—better to be persecuted and significant than to be free but irrelevant.
The fear of irrelevance lay behind another consideration in these years, the widespread insistence upon the urgency of ‘getting back’ to Europe. Like censorship, this was a concern limited to intellectuals—indeed mostly to writers from the western provinces of the former Habsburg Empire, where the backwardness and under-development imposed by Soviet writ had been especially painful. The best-known spokesman for this sentiment was the Czech novelist and screenwriter Milan Kundera, writing from exile in Paris, for whom the tragedy of Central Europe (a geographical term revived explicitly to make Kundera’s point) was its takeover by an alien, Asian dictatorship.
Kundera himself was not much appreciated in his homeland, where both his exile and his success were resented by those of his peers who had chosen (in their own account) to forego both. But his general thesis was widely shared, particularly in so far as it was addressed to Western readers, accused of neglecting and ignoringthe ‘other’ West to their East—a theme already adumbrated by Miłosz back in the 1950s when he remarked that a ‘chapter in a hypothetical book on postwar Polish poetry should be dedicated to irony and even derision in the treatment of the Western European and particularly French intellectuals.’
For Kundera, who was skeptical of citizens’ initiatives like Charter 77, the Czech condition under Communism was an extension of the older problem of national identity and destiny in Europe’s heartland, where small nations and peoples were always at risk of disappearing. The point of intellectual opposition there and abroad, he felt, was to bring this concern to international attention, not waste time trying to change Moscow’s ‘Byzantine’ empire. Central Europe, moreover, was the ‘destiny of the West, in concentrated form’. Havel concurred: Communism was the dark mirror that history was holding up to the West.
Poles like Michnik did not use the term ‘Central Europe’, or speak so much of ‘returning to Europe’: partly because, unlike the Czechs, they were in a position to pursue closer, attainable objectives. This is not to suggest that Poles and others did not dream of one day sharing in the benefits of the new European Community—of exchanging the failed myth of Socialism for the successful fable of ‘Europe’. But they had more immediate priorities, as we shall see.
East Germans, too, had concerns of their own. One of the paradoxes of Ostpolitik , as practiced by Brandt and his successors, was that by transferring large sums of hard currency into East Germany and showering the GDR with recognition, attention, and support, West German officials unintentionally foreclosed any chance of internal change, including reform of Eastern Germany’s polluted, antiquated industrial economy. By ‘building bridges’, twinning towns, paying their respects, and distancing themselves from Western criticism of East bloc regimes, Bonn’s statesmen afforded the leadership of the GDR a false sense of stability and security.
Moreover, by ‘buying out’ political opponents and prisoners, West Germany deprived the East German opposition of some of its best known dissenters. No other Communist society had a Western doppelganger, speaking the same language. The temptation to leave was thus always there and the ‘right to movement’ typically headed the list of rights that preoccupied writers and artists in the GDR. But many ‘internal’ critics of the East German regime chose to abandon neither their country nor their old ideas. Indeed, by the end of the Seventies the GDR was the only European Communist state that could still boast an informal and even intra-Party Marxist opposition. Its best known dissidents all attacked Communist authority from the Left—a stance that rendered them both inaudible and irrelevant elsewhere in Eastern Europe, as the Czech writer Jiří Pelikán tartly observed.
Thus Rudolf Bahro, who after years of persecution was deported west in 1979, was best-known for his essay The Alternative, an explicitly Marxist critique of ‘real existing Socialism’. Robert Havemann, an older Communist who was prosecuted and fined in these years for his engagement on behalf of the folk singer Wolf Biermann (expelled West in 1976) castigated the ruling party not for abusing rights but for betraying its ideals and encouraging mass consumption and the private ownership of consumer goods. Wolfgang Harich, a leading figure in GDR philosophy circles and a longtime critic of the regime’s ‘bureaucratic’ deviation, was equally vociferous in his opposition to the ‘illusions of consumerism’, against which he saw it as the task of the ruling party to re-educate the populace.
What opposition there was in the GDR to Communism as such tended to coalesce, as in Poland, around the churches: in Germany the Protestant Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen. Here the new language of rights and liberties abutted that of the Christian faith, and (again, as in Poland) was reinforced by association with the only surviving pre-Socialist institution. The influence of the churches also accounts for the prominence of the ‘peace’ question in East German dissident circles.
Elsewhere in eastern Europe the Western ‘peaceniks’ and activists for nuclear dis
armament were regarded with considerable suspicion. They were seen at best as naïve innocents, more likely the mindless instruments of Soviet manipulation.264 Václav Havel, for one, regarded the growing west European anti-war movement of the early 1980s as the perfect vehicle for engaging, diverting and neutralizing the western intelligentsia. : ‘peace’, he insisted, is not an option in countries where the state is permanently at war with society. Peace and disarmament under prevailing conditions would leave western Europe free and independent, while maintaining eastern Europe under Soviet control. It was a mistake to separate the ‘peace’ question from the demand for rights and liberties. Or, as Adam Michnik put it, ‘the condition for reducing the danger of war is full respect of human rights’.
But in East Germany the peace movement found a deep local resonance. No doubt this was in part thanks to links with West Germany. But there was something else. The GDR—an accidental state with neither history nor identity—could with some shard of plausibility describe peace, or at least ‘peaceful coexistence’, as its true raison d’être. Yet at the same time it was by far the most militarized and militaristic of the socialist states: from 1977 ‘Defense Studies’ were introduced into East German schools, and the state Youth Movement was unusually para-military even by Soviet standards. The tension generated by this glaring paradox found its outlet in an opposition movement which derived a large part of its support from its concentration on the issue of peace and disarmament.
In 1962 the East German regime had introduced a compulsory military service of eighteen months for all men aged 18-50. But two years later it added an escape clause: those who wished to be excused military service on moral grounds could join the Bausoldaten, an alternative labor unit. Although membership of the latter could prove a handicap in later life, its mere existence meant the GDR acknowledged the fact and the legitimacy of conscientious objection. By 1980 thousands of East German men had passed through the Bausoldaten and represented a substantial potential network for peace activists.
Thus when Lutheran pastors began in 1980 to offer support and protection to the early peace activists, they were able to do so to a considerable extent without incurring state disapproval. The nascent peace movement then spread from the churches to the universities, inevitably raising not only calls for disarmament, but also the demand for the right to articulate these calls without hindrance. In this indirect way dissenting East Germans belatedly found a way to communicate (and catch up) with the opposition elsewhere in the bloc.
Romanians had no such luck. The appearance of Charter 77 prompted a courageous letter of support from the writer Paul Goma and seven other Romanian intellectuals, all of whom were promptly suppressed. But otherwise Romania remained as silent as it had been for three decades. Goma was forced into exile: no-one took his place. For this the West bore a measure of responsibility—even if a Romanian Charter 77 or a local version of Poland’s Solidarity (see Chapter 19) had arisen, it is unlikely that it would have received much Western support. No US President ever demanded that the dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu ‘let Romania be Romania’.
Even the Soviet Union allowed a tightly restricted liberty of action to certain intellectuals—mostly prominent scientists, always a privileged category. The biologist Zhores Medvedev, whose 1960s exposure of Lysenko had long circulated in samizdat, was first harrassed and then deprived of his citizenship. He settled in the UK in 1973. But Andrei Sakharov, the country’s best-known nuclear physicist and a longstanding critic of the regime, remained at liberty—until his public opposition to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan rendered his presence intolerable. Sakharov was too embarrassing to ignore (he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975) but too important to send abroad. He and his wife Yelena Bonner were forced instead into (internal) exile in the closed city of Gorky.
But Sakharov always insisted he was calling the Soviet Union to account for its shortcomings and its persecution of critics, rather than seeking its overthrow—a stance that put him somewhere between an older generation of reform Communists and the new Central European dissidents. Others, less prominent and avowedly anti-Soviet, were treated much more harshly. The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya spent three years in a prison psychiatric hospital, diagnosed along with hundreds of others with ‘sluggish schizophrenia’. Vladimir Bukovsky, the best known of the younger radicals, spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiatric wards before international outcry at his treatment led to his exchange for Luis Corvalán, a Chilean Communist, in 1976.
Except for such occasional protests on behalf of individuals, and a concerted campaign on behalf of the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the West paid remarkably little attention to the domestic affairs of the USSR—much less than was, by the early 1980s, being directed towards internal opposition in Poland or even Czechoslovakia, for example. It was not until 1983 that the Soviet Union withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association, when the latter—with shameful tardiness—finally began to criticize its abuses.
But with or without external prompting, the overwhelming majority of the Soviet intelligentsia was never going to follow the example being set, however tentatively, elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The fear inspired by Stalin’s repression hung like a pall across the moral landscape three decades after his death, even if no-one actually spoke of it, and all but the most outspoken and courageous critics took care to stay within the bounds of legitimate Soviet themes and language. They assumed, reasonably enough, that the Soviet Union was here to stay. Writers like Andrei Amalrik, whose essay ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?’ first appeared in the West in 1970, and was re-published in expanded form ten years later, were prophetic but atypical. In contrast to the puppet regimes it had installed at its boundaries, the Soviet Union by 1983 had been in place for longer than most of its citizens could remember and appeared fundamentally stable.
The intellectual opposition in Central Europe had little immediate impact. This surprised no-one: the new realism of the Seventies-era dissidents encompassed not just a disabused grasp of Socialism’s failure but also a clear-sighted appreciation of the facts of power. There were limits, moreover, on what could be asked of people: in his ‘Essay on Bravery’ the Czechoslovak writer Ludvík Vaculík argued persuasively that one can ask only so much of ordinary people struggling to get through their daily lives. Most people lived in a sort of moral ‘grey zone’, a safe if stifling space in which enthusiasm was replaced by acceptance. Active, risk-laden resistance to authority was hard to justify because—again, for most ordinary people—it appeared unnecessary. ‘Un-heroic, realistic deeds’ were the most one could expect.
The intellectuals were talking for the most part to one another rather than addressing the community at large: in some cases they were offering implicit amends for their earlier enthusiasms. Moreover, they were the heirs (in certain instances quite literally the children) of the ruling class of the first generation of Socialist power—education and privilege having passed reasonably efficiently down the generations, especially in Poland and Hungary. That did not always endear them to the mass of the population. As in the past, when they had spoken for the regimes they now opposed, they were a tiny minority of the population and represented only themselves.
Thus when George Konrád wrote somewhat sententiously that ‘no thinking person should want to drive others from positions of political power in order to occupy them for himself ’, he was acknowledging a simple truth—no ‘thinking person’ was in a position there and then to do any such thing. This same appreciation of the grim facts of life also forms a backdrop to the opposition’s insistence on non-violence: not only in Czechoslovakia, where passivity in the face of authority had a long history; or in the GDR, where the Lutheran Church was increasingly influential in opposition circles; but even in Poland, where it represented for Michnik and others both a pragmatic and an ethical bar to dangerous and pointless ‘adventures’.
The achievement of the new opposition lay elsewhere. In the Ea
st as in the West, the Seventies and Eighties were a time of cynicism. The energies of the Sixties had dissipated, their political ideals had lost moral credibility, and engagement in the public interest had given way to calculations of private advantage. By forging a conversation about rights, by focusing attention on the rather woolly concept of ‘civil society’, by insistently talking about the silences of Central Europe’s present and its past—by moralizing shamelessly in public, as it were—Havel and others were building a sort of ‘virtual’ public space to replace the one destroyed by Communism.
One thing the dissident intellectuals did not talk about very much was economics. This, too, was a kind of realism. Ever since Stalin, economic—or, more precisely, industrial—growth had been both the goal of Socialism and the main measure of its success. Economics, as we saw in Chapter 13, had been the overriding concern of an earlier generation of reformist intellectuals: reflecting back at the Communist regime its own obsessions and echoing an assumption—shared by Marxists and many non-Marxists alike—that all politics are ultimately about economics. Critical discussion couched in the form of recommendations for economic reform had been the nearest thing to a licensed opposition in the revisionist decade between 1956 and 1968.
But by the middle of the 1970s it was hard for any well-informed observer of the Soviet bloc to take seriously the prospect of economic reform from within, and not only because the language of Marxist economics had collapsed after decades of unseemly abuse. From 1973 the economies of Eastern Europe were falling sharply behind even Western Europe’s reduced growth rates. Except for a brief blip in the finances of the oil-rich Soviet Union, brought on by the rise in energy prices, the inflation of the Seventies and the ‘globalizing’ of trade and services in the Eighties put the economies of the Soviet bloc at an insuperable disadvantage. In 1963 the international trade of Comecon countries had been 12 percent of the world total. By 1979 it was down to 9 percent and falling fast.265