The December revolution generated a number of questions, particularly about the circumstances of the death of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and the provenance of the NSF. An observer far removed from the events might have fathomed a good bit regarding the intentions of the NSF by exploring the circumstances surrounding the reported trial and execution of the former leading couple. Although an NSF spokesman had promised a public trial when the Ceausescus were captured on the morning of December 22, three days later it was announced that a secret military tribunal had sentenced the two Ceausescus to death and that they had been executed immediately. The rapid trial and the execution by firing squad of the Ceausescus, the NSF argument went, saved many lives by causing Securitate “terrorists” loyal to Ceausescu to stop fighting for a lost cause and surrender. In hindsight, however, one can see that such resistance was much more sporadic and less intense than had been suggested in some spectacular footage shown on television, which concentrated on the burning of the central university library in Bucharest and extensive damage to the art museum housed on the second floor of the old Royal Palace. When no “terrorists” were brought to justice or otherwise heard of, the public began to doubt their very existence. For many in Romania, it seemed that the hard-core communist nucleus of the NSF had deliberately exaggerated the “terrorist” threat in order to contain the anticommunist revolution from below. In a sense, the good news of the tyrant’s death was clouded by the circumstances surrounding it. Instead of a pure revolutionary tyrannicide, the people of Romania were witness to what appears to have been a case of pseudojudicial murder, with the defense lawyers as vehement and sarcastic as the prosecutor in their attempt to humiliate the deposed leader and his wife. Ceausescu had to be liquidated as soon as possible in order to silence him and ensure a smooth transition from an unreconstructed Stalinist autocracy to a Romanian version of reformed communism. The new leaders took great care to stigmatize the former dictator and his coterie as chiefly responsible for all the country’s disasters. Instead of a genuine trial of Romanian communism, the population was provided with a simulacrum of justice intended to demonize the former leader and exonerate the huge apparatus that had made possible the aberrations of Ceausescu’s rule.
A mystery as profound as that attending the Ceausescu trial surrounds the origins of the NSF itself. If in Czechoslovakia the Civic Forum originated in the long-banned and systematically harassed Charter 77, the new ruling formation in Romania had no domestic dissident or opposition movement with which to identify. Who appointed the original members of the Front or selected Ion Iliescu, a former Central Committee Secretary, as President and the young Polytechnical School Professor Petre Roman as Prime Minister? What criteria were used to select the leadership? Initially, the NSF Council included a number of genuine noncommunist dissidents ready to endorse its original platform promising free elections, the establishment of a democratic system, and, more broadly, the development of a civil society in Romania. But as the chasm between the Front’s rhetoric and its Leninist practices became evident, celebrated dissidents such as the human rights activist Doina Cornea and the poet Ana Blandiana resigned. Romanians began to realize that the new structure of power was in many ways a continuation of the old. From that moment on, the rapidly emerging civic groups and associations, as well as the resurrected democratic parties that had been suppressed by the communists, engaged in direct criticism of what they called the NSF’s “neo-communism.” The conflict between power and society in Romania intensified further when the Front announced its intention to field candidates for the forthcoming elections, thereby renouncing its promise to be only a transitional government. When the opposition protested the resurgence of authoritarian methods, the Front mobilized workers to protect their rule through intimidation. But the intimidation did not work, and the opposition continued to gather momentum. The traditional Romanian parties—the National Peasants, the National Liberals, and the Social Democrats—formed their own structures and participated in the provisional parliament. Extraparliamentary opposition developed primarily among the increasingly radicalized student population and the intelligentsia. The Hungarian minority, long subjected to outrageous discrimination, formed its own political party, called the Hungarian Democratic Union. In turn, Romanian nationalists organized their own political movement named Vatra Romaneasca (the Romanian Hearth), whose statements were reminiscent of the worst excesses of the interwar chauvinist groups.74 Although the NSF used its immense state machine to discourage and neutralize the opposition, there was a widespread sense that the clock of history could not be reversed and that Romania would join the other East European countries in the difficult but inevitable transition to democracy.
POPULISM AND REFORMS IN YUGOSLAVIA
In Yugoslavia, after Tito’s death, a process of continuous diversification and fragmentation contributed to growing discrepancies between the more civic-oriented republics of Slovenia and Croatia and the ethnically dominated cultures of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia. The rise to prominence of the strongman party leader Slobodan Milosevic, a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist in Serbia, threatened the prospects for keeping the country together, because the Croatians and Slovenes resented Milosevic’s populist and radically antireformist stances. At the same time, many Serbs, including some intellectuals long known for their opposition to nationalism, placed their bets on the likelihood of Milosevic’s becoming a true champion of what they perceived as their republic’s threatened existence. For instance, many thought that “Slobo,” as the Serbian leader was popularly called, had repaired many of the wrongs inflicted on their nation since Yugoslavia’s creation in the wake of World War I. Professor Kosta Mihailovic, an economist and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in Belgrade, gave voice to this widespread sentiment of wounded national pride: “Serbia was politically and economically dominated in Yugoslavia. An anti-Serbian coalition existed for a long time. We occupied a vassal position in Yugoslavia. This was totally changed by the appearance of Slobodan Milosevic.”75 Milosevic’s swift ascent was indicative of the emerging mixture of nationalism, authoritarianism, and egalitarian populism, an ideological hybrid that seemed appealing to large social strata in the post-totalitarian cultures. Born in 1941, Milosevic, the rising star of Serbian political life, was an active communist at the University of Belgrade, where he graduated with a law degree in 1964. After having worked in the economic bureaucracy, he joined the Serbian party apparatus in 1984 as head of the Belgrade organization. Three years later he was elected Chairman of the Serbian Communist Politburo, and in May 1989 he became the President of Serbia. The secret of his rise to prominence lay in his skillful use of populist and nationalist slogans. To those who were afraid of marketization, Milosevic promised the preservation of government control over economic resources. To Serbs irritated by the rise of nationalist movements in the other republics, he promised that he would defend what he called Serbian dignity. Convinced that he had to perform a mission equal to Tito’s pioneering effort to found a viable federation, Milosevic pushed hard for the restoration of a permanent presidential office that would replace the existing system, in which the presidency was rotated among the leaders of the country’s six republics.
The conflict between Belgrade and the economically more advanced republics of Croatia and Slovenia has deep historical and cultural roots. Milosevic’s passionate identification of Serbian interests with pan-Yugoslav ones was deeply resented by the mounting autonomist and even separatist movements in the other republics. Added to that was the further deterioration of the situation in the explosive Kosovo region, where the Serbs resorted to violence to smash the increasingly radical Albanian nationalists. The uneasy Yugoslav state construct, a legacy of Tito’s attempt to blur national antagonisms and unify the country on a basis of communist ideology, could not resist the rise of ethnic passions. As we have seen, the ideology was dead in all the East European communist states, but its collapse was perhaps most obvious in Yugoslavia, because of the realization
that Marxism-Leninism, instead of diminishing ethnic conflicts, had suppressed them only temporarily. As soon as the police pressure and the myth of Titoism ceased to be compelling, the breakup of Yugoslavia became, if not imminent, at least a realistic possibility. The Yugoslav League of Communists, once cohesive thanks to Tito’s charismatic presence, became a powerless umbrella that included six diverging republic parties, each championing local interests and defying the central authority. By the end of 1989 the army remained the only national institution, although the overwhelming Serbian component (about 70 percent) made it a potential instrument for the fulfillment of Milosevic’s hegemonic plans. Understandably, the danger of a military crackdown on the centrifugal republics made them nervous and accelerated the disintegrative trends.
THE WARSAW PACT’S REACTION TO GORBACHEV
Gorbachev’s opening of the Soviet system contributed to the polarization and disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Two trends coalesced in response to the changes coming from Moscow. Polish and Hungarian communists were apparently prompted by Gorbachev’s thaw to pursue their own reforms in a more systematic way, while their fellow bloc members chose to resist reform. In Poland, although General Jaruzelski was associated with the proclamation of Martial Law in December 1981, the communists found in Gorbachev’s reforms an opportunity for domestic relaxation and more experimentation in the economy. The catchword used by Jaruzelski and his successor at the helm of the Polish Communist Party, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, was “socialist pluralism.” The Hungarian communists evolved in the same direction, first under the leadership of the veteran General Secretary Janos Kadar, then, after Kadar’s forced retirement in 1988, under the increasingly disputed guidance of Kadar’s former protégé, Karoly Grosz. In both countries, strong factions emerged within the ruling elite and contributed to the growing fragmentation of the once cohesive ruling bodies.
Stimulated by the changes in the USSR, where Gorbachev showed increasing patience with and even encouraged criticism from below, the civil societies in Poland and Hungary too renewed their activities with growing courage and imagination. Contacts were established between radical reformers in Hungary and exponents of the democratic opposition. For instance, the Minister of State, Central Committee member Imre Pozsgay, participated in a meeting with representatives of the unofficial democratic forces in 1987. In 1988 the reformers managed to rid the top leadership of the Hungarian communist party of Janos Kadar. A whole era came to an end once this man, who had presided over the post-1956 “normalization,” lost his power. The taboo on historical reassessments imposed by Kadar was lifted, and society engaged in a frantic rediscovery of its own past.
But while Poland’s and Hungary’s trend toward liberalization proceeded quite rapidly and with apparently little resistance from the ruling bureaucracies, the new wave of de-Stalinization encountered staunch resistance in Romania, Bulgaria, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia. At the level of the Warsaw Pact, the rapid pace of democratization in Hungary and Poland, as well as Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, alarmed the entrenched Stalinist groups in the other countries. For Ceausescu, Zhivkov, Honecker, and Jakes, the Soviet pressure to engage in overall reforms amounted to an invitation to subvert their own power base. Each of those communist potentates had run his country with an iron fist for a long time. They had ruthlessly stamped out political dissent and opposition. They had eliminated all rivals who could have championed a reformist line.
The degree of resistance to Soviet-encouraged and even Soviet-suggested reforms varied from country to country. For instance, it was simpler for Ceausescu, with his experience of autonomy from Moscow, to mobilize the party elite’s support for a hard political line, including staunch anti-Soviet elements. An unambiguous challenge to Moscow was more problematic for the Czechoslovak leadership headed by President Gustav Husak and General Secretary Milos Jakes. For those two, cutting the umbilical cord with the Soviet Union was practically impossible. Their unique political credentials for staying in power consisted in their active support for the repression that followed the invasion in August 1968. In Bulgaria, Zhivkov’s whole political career had been based on slavish subservience to orders coming from Moscow, so now he could not defy the center. As for the East German leaders, they knew that it was the Red Army umbrella that made possible the very existence of their regime. By opposing radical reforms, they would only delay the natural historical process that would lead to German reunification and the disbandment of what many considered the artificial state construct called the GDR. Those nonliberalizing leaders tried to play for time, to simulate support for Gorbachev while secretly hoping that the hawks in the Soviet Politburo would soon get rid of the turbulent General Secretary and restore the only version of socialism they were able to identify with: the Brezhnevite model based on militarism, expansionism, corruption, and social apathy. Jacques Rupnik correctly termed the attitudes of the East European communist leaderships toward Gorbachev’s reforms as “a function of the relationships that they had with their respective societies, the degree of acceptance or coolness being correlated with the priority they gave either to social control or to the tacit search for consensus in society.”76
SEVEN
The Birth Pangs of Democracy
We can return to the beasts. But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society.
—Karl R. Popper
I pray that we do not change from prisoners into prison guards.
—Adam Michnik
The upheavals of 1989 and the collapse of the communist parties demonstrated the precariousness of the governing institutions in Eastern Europe. Actually, long before those revolutions the erosion of the authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes had become evident. The prolongation of the communist regimes depended on the use of force and the perception of a foreign threat that would demolish any attempt to get rid of the existing order. The memory of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 functioned as a powerful deterrent for those who saw the vital need for reforms. Later, as Soviet pressure loosened and the local elites found themselves deprived of foreign support, a new wave of rebellious experimentation could gather momentum.
In 1988 and 1989 the impossible seemed to have come true. With lightning speed, all the previous taboos were abolished; the opposition realized that for the first time it was reasonable to think about the radical overcoming of the power structure that had existed since the satellization of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. No barrier was solid enough to withstand the mounting revolutionary turmoil. The apparatchiks were confused, unable to take the measure of the new challenges. From Honecker to Ceausescu, from Zhivkov to Jakes, they were all dismayed and helpless. The only expedient they could envision to arrest the popular upheaval would have involved violence. But that tactic was definitely the opposite of what Moscow was interested in endorsing. The smiling face of socialism that Gorbachev and his team tried to project in international relations meant a renunciation of traditional repressive methods. Persuasion rather than coercion was the slogan of the day.
Initially, the prevailing feeling in all the former communist countries was that detotalitarianization—that is, the disintegration of the communist institutions and structures—would occur without large-scale conflicts. The mood was euphoric, especially because, with the exception of Romania, the revolutionary changes that had taken place did so in a nonviolent way. Expectations were high regarding how the birth of democratic institutions, including parliaments and political parties, would proceed without convulsions, almost as a natural process. But those were illusions encouraged by the speed of the 1989 events. One of the principal illusions was that communism would necessarily be followed by democratic forms of political and social organization.
Because of the widespread disenchantment with Leninist ideology and practice, it was taken for granted, by political actors in the region and by many foreign analysts, that the long exposure of those nations to the hardships of dictatorship
had made them immune to new authoritarian temptations. But, as Kenneth Jowitt has shown, that belief was founded on wishful thinking. Leninism had left its imprint on the collective psyche, generating behavior patterns that, even if only in a residual way, would continue to affect the public sphere. This “old rule” residue has been the main obstacle confronted by all the postcommunist societies. The articulation between public and private interests characteristic of procedural democracy has been lacking: The “Leninist legacy understood as the impact of party organizations, practice, and ethos and the initial charismatic ethical opposition to it favors an authoritarian not a liberal capitalist way of life, the obstacles to which are not simply how to privatize and marketize the economy, or organize an electoral campaign, but rather how to institutionalize public virtues.”1 Communism had not run those countries in an orderly and benign way. In all of them the secret police had kept the population under strict surveillance, intellectuals were muzzled, students were indoctrinated, workers were overworked and underpaid. All those societies had been plagued by corruption, cultural despair, economic decay, and, more than anything else, an abysmal decline in the sense of social solidarity. Suspicion was rampant. With its compulsive drive toward conformity and uniformity, communism went out of its way to destroy all intermediate institutions and associations that could become the pillars of a revived civil society. Timothy Garton Ash’s insight is thus noteworthy: “Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that what communism has left behind is an extraordinary mish-mash, a freagmentation and cacophony of interests, attitudes, views, ideals, traditions.”2 Think of Czechoslovakia, where in March 1991 ten members of the parliament were indicted for their previous links with the secret police. The issue was not their individual guilt, but rather the absence of a procedural framework for dealing with those charges in a dispassionate way. In all those countries, recriminations and settling of accounts tended to obfuscate the in-depth analysis of the real causes of the communist disaster. The politics of hysteria often competed with the clear-minded search for democratic reconstruction. The big losers in the 1989 showdown, the communists, took special pleasure in poisoning the public atmosphere and engaging in social demagogy.
Reinventing Politics Page 34