by Marci Shore
Communism, as Americans had understood it, was over.
I knew very little about communism then.
“WORKERS OF THE world unite!” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concluded their Communist Manifesto in 1848. One day soon the exploited working classes around the world would together rise up and overthrow their oppressors, the bourgeoisie. Eventually private property would be abolished and the state would wither away. Everyone would work according to his ability and receive according to his need. Everyone would live in a just, peaceful, happy world.
The Communist Manifesto was not only a political program but also a philosophy of history, a prophecy: history was moving inexorably in this direction. Feudalism had given way to capitalism, and in turn capitalism would naturally yield to communism—as soon as the working class came to understand its predestined revolutionary role. And the working class would come to understand its role. “Being precedes consciousness,” Marxism insisted. This meant that a person’s objective position in the socioeconomic order—whether one was a factory worker or a factory owner, an exploited employee or an exploiting employer—was determinate. Consciousness—how a person thought—was derivative, following naturally from concrete existence. Decades passed, the nineteenth century neared its end, and in most parts of Europe the working class remained rather small. Moreover, the workers seemed to be taking some time to acquire class consciousness as Marx had understood it.
Then came the First World War. Suddenly the old Europe was going up in flames. It was very dark and very cold in March 1917, in the Russian Empire’s capital of Petrograd. In a city drained by two and a half years of war, bread shortages inspired strikes, demonstrations, and mutiny among Tsar Nicholas II’s troops. Unable to maintain order, Nicholas II abdicated his throne. The new provisional government convened a militia in the countryside; peasants revolted by seizing land and refusing to deliver grain. In the cities there were food shortages. A disenchanted population grew radical.
At this time the revolutionary Vladimir Il’ich Lenin was in Switzerland—perhaps the best place to be if one had to be in Europe during a European war. Lenin, though, wanted above all to get back to Russia. When in April 1917 he arrived in exhausted, hungry Petrograd, he and his fellow Bolsheviks—in Lenin’s own words—“found power lying in the streets and picked it up.” In the midst of anarchy, the Bolsheviks denounced compromise and insisted on acting at once. A child of backward Russia, Lenin had no desire to wait for feudalism to evolve into industrial capitalism, then for class consciousness to develop among the proletariat. This would take too long. Lenin was impatient.
When in November 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, they were carrying out a workers’ revolution in a country of peasants. The workers on whose behalf the Bolsheviks made the revolution were metaphysical ones, yet to come into being. In any case—Lenin believed when he made his separate peace with the Germans in March 1918—rushing History in slow-moving Russia would be anomalous only for a moment: any day now, the worldwide workers’ revolution would come.
It didn’t. Instead the First World War ended with the fall of four empires: the Ottoman, the Tsarist Russian, the Habsburg, and the German. At the negotiating table at Versailles, the victors—the French, the British, and the Americans—drew up a new map of Eastern Europe, creating nation-states and willing them to be democracies. Yet with the exception of Czechoslovakia, the new states remained democratic only for a moment. Liberalism soon fell out of fashion, victim to a spirit of polarization: the Right became ever more radical, the Left became ever more radical, and the center, in Marx’s phrase, “melted into air.”
In the meantime, in the former Russian Empire, a series of civil wars had ended with the Bolsheviks’ victory. Yet just as the Bolsheviks founded the Soviet Union in December 1922, Lenin fell ill. His premature death in 1924 led to a power struggle between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin won. He collectivized agriculture and built industry—at an extraordinary human cost. While Stalin violently requisitioned grain to fund industrialization, millions of peasants starved to death. People were driven mad by hunger; there was cannibalism in the countryside. Stalin was unfazed: the Soviet Union had to catch up to the West, to History.
Socialism, Stalin declared in the 1930s, was now victorious—or nearly so. Yet he warned that it was precisely now, when the achievement of socialism seemed so assured, that the enemy became all the more malignant. At this final moment before socialism’s ultimate triumph the class struggle intensified: the enemy, desperate, resorted to masking himself. He could be anywhere—including in the Communist Party’s own ranks, including in one’s own bed. Thus did the Soviet Union descend into terror. Arrests were made by night. False confessions were extracted by torture. Executions took place in prison chambers. Guilt spread like an epidemic. Everyone became infinitely powerful and infinitely vulnerable at once: anyone could inform on anyone else—and thus at any moment become his neighbor’s executioner.
Throughout Europe, the 1930s were a dark decade. After coming to rule Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler consolidated his power during the years of the Stalinist terror. When at the end of the decade the Third Reich began the Second World War, Eastern Europe was caught between Hitler and Stalin—the worst possible place to be. First Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together. Then the Nazis betrayed their ally and invaded the Soviet Union. It was then, following their June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, that the Germans murdered the Jews of Eastern Europe. Later German fortunes turned, and the Soviets returned to Eastern Europe. For the most part, they stayed. The years between 1945 and 1948 were years of unstable coalitions and encroaching totalitarianism. In the end, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia became communist states—as did the northeastern part of Germany that had found itself under Soviet occupation at the war’s end. To many East Europeans, it was unclear whether they had won or lost the war. For after the war came Stalinism: in the Soviet Union’s new satellite states East European communist parties imported the communist economic system and replayed the Stalinist terror of the 1930s—mass arrests, torture, show trials, executions.
Stalin’s life was long. In Warsaw, in the 1990s, there lived still an elderly Trotskyite named Ludwik Haas, who had spent seventeen years in Stalin’s gulag—for believing in the wrong kind of socialism. Unlike so many others, Ludwik Haas had endured—and survived. A deformed finger was a memento of his time there.
“I knew Stalin could not live forever,” he said.
And this was true: even Stalin could not live forever. He died in March 1953. Three years passed after Stalin’s death before Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, openly criticized his predecessor. In his “secret speech” of February 1956, Khrushchev conceded that under Stalin there had been “excesses.”
With this very limited acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes, Stalinism came to an end. This meant the fall of some communists and the rise—or rehabilitation—of others. In Poland, the nationally minded communist Władysław Gomułka was quietly released from house arrest and appointed the new Communist Party leader. In Hungary de-Stalinization proceeded more vigorously. Hungarian premier Imre Nagy wanted socialism—only a more democratic version. But he went too far. After he proclaimed a multiparty system and an independent foreign policy, Soviet tanks put a stop to Hungary’s revolution. Houses were burned and gutted; thousands of Hungarians were killed or imprisoned. In the years that followed the bloodshed, the new Soviet-approved government knew that it was unwanted. And so compromises were made: the Party would retain its monopoly on power, but terror would relent. The people would not challenge the authority of the state, which in return would allow them some private space. The Party would deem sufficiently loyal anyone not ostentatiously rebellious. A bit of prudent economic reform would raise standards of living. This was “goulash communism,” and in time Hungary became known as “the most cheerful barrack in the Soviet camp.”
The disillusionments of 1968 were the beginning of the end of European Marxism.
In 1975, inspired by a détente in the cold war, governments in the East and West met in Finland to sign the Helsinki Accords. Now the Soviet Union and its satellite states traded Western acceptance of the “inviolability of frontiers” for guarantees of human rights. Participating states promised to respect freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Many believed that the communist governments’ signatures on the Helsinki Accords were of merely symbolic value. This was true. Yet that did not prevent the Helsinki Accords from providing Western and Eastern Europeans with a new language of human rights—a language to replace Marxism. And in the years to come this would matter quite a lot.
IN 1968, WHEN Polish students demonstrated against censorship, most workers, especially those older than the students, did not support them. Two years later, when Polish workers went on strike to protest price increases, the students paid them back—they did not join the workers’ protests. It was only in 1976 that intellectuals reached out to the workers and formed the Workers’ Defense Committee. Not long afterward, Krakow’s Archbishop Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II. In 1979, he made his first papal visit to Poland. A million people came to hear him.
“I must ask myself, as all of you must ask yourselves,” Pope John Paul II said to his fellow Poles, “why it was that in the year 1978 … a son of the Polish nation, a son of Poland, should be called to the Chair of St. Peter. Christ required Peter, like the other apostles, to be his ‘witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, yes, even to the ends of the earth.’ With these words of Christ in mind, are we not perhaps justified in thinking that Poland in our time has become a land called to give an especially important witness?”
A year later, in the summer of 1980, Polish workers—first those in the Baltic shipyards, then others throughout the country—went on strike. When members of the communist regime headed to the Baltic port city of Gdańsk, intellectuals from Warsaw traveled there as well and offered to help the workers negotiate with the government. Only in Poland, among all the communist bloc countries, did intellectuals and workers come together to form a mass movement. This was how—in the wake of Pope John Paul II’s visit and in the spirit of the Workers’ Defense Committee—Solidarity was born. Solidarity was something special. It was not only a trade union but also a national experience of civil society. It was a name with real content: people of the right and left, Marxists and Catholics, intellectuals and workers—together some 10 million people—united against an oppressive regime. “History has taught us,” Solidarity’s program declared, “that there is no bread without freedom.”
Solidarity’s leaders considered theirs a “self-limiting” revolution: one that would not go too far. They would respect socialist ownership over the means of production; they would not challenge the Party’s leading role in the state; they would not provoke a Soviet intervention. Yet like Imre Nagy in Hungary and Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia, now, too, Solidarity in Poland miscalculated: it overestimated how much independent initiative the communist government—and the Soviet Union—would tolerate. This time, though, Soviet tanks did not come. Rather, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev demanded that the Polish government itself resolve the problem. On 13 December 1981 the Polish communist prime minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law. Solidarity was driven underground; its leading activists were arrested.
After 1968, opposition to the regimes existed in other, more modest forms throughout the communist bloc. In Czechoslovakia the human rights petition Charter 77 became its own movement, relying, like Solidarity, on samizdat—underground self-publishing. One Charter signatory, the Catholic dissident Václav Benda, described Charter 77 as a “parallel polis,” a second society shadowing the official one, a nascent civil society forced underground.
Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, to varying degrees and in various ways, developed this parallel polis after 1968—Romania did not. There communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu broke away from Soviet domination only to lead Romania back to Stalinism, now in nationalist, dynastic form. Eager for more Romanians, Ceauşescu mandated gynecological testing and enacted draconian antiabortion laws. He demanded industrialization at any price, incurring foreign debt and then repaying it at the cost of his people. There were power shortages and food shortages; bread was rationed. In the winter people froze. Hospitals were unheated and infant mortality rates were high. Ceauşescu’s secret police, the Securitate, were ubiquitous; living conditions more dire and repression more brutal than elsewhere in the communist bloc contributed to the absence of anything comparable to Solidarity or Charter 77. Ceauşescu’s neo-Stalinism was no less a tragedy for being a farce: extravagant, crazed, and megalomaniacal, Ceauşescu had an insatiable appetite for praise. The Genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of Thought, the Shepherd and Savior of the Nation, and the Conscience of the World built a vast palace for himself and his wife, Elena, in Bucharest as the Romanian people starved.
“We are 22 million people living in the imagination of a madman,” the Romanian novelist Alexandru Ivasiuc wrote.
On the day in December 1989 that the paratroopers captured the Ceauşescus, Nicolae was dressed in a dark three-piece suit that accentuated his lively white hair. Elena wore a long yellow coat and a satin scarf tied peasant-style under her chin. Loose strands of hair fell from a bun around her long nose. Sitting on small chairs designed for schoolchildren, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu held hands during their summary trial.
“You had palaces,” the prosecutor said.
“No, we had no palaces, the palaces belong to the people,” Nicolae Ceauşescu answered.
It was a very short trial. Afterward paratroopers tied the Ceauşescus’ hands behind their backs and led them outside.
THE HUNGARIAN AND Polish communist regimes fell in 1989 after peaceful, if tense, negotiations. The new Hungarian government opened its border to Austria. Suddenly East Germans rushed through Hungary to Austria, and from Austria to West Germany. Disconcerted, East German authorities then made the decision to open the border in Berlin. Since 1961 the Berlin Wall had symbolized a Europe divided by an “Iron Curtain.” Over the years East Germans had crawled through tunnels in the earth, desperate to get to the other side. Above ground East German border guards had shot to death those they caught trying to cross. Then one day—9 November 1989—the wall came down.
Two years later the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.
The revolutions of 1989 spread from Poland to Romania via Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.
They were like a wrinkle in time: time, seemingly halted for so long, suddenly leapt forward. To tens of millions of East Europeans the end of communism brought countless good things—above all a freedom the vast majority of people never imagined they would live long enough to see. Yet the end of communism also vindicated Freud’s warning that the repressed would return. For Freud the unconscious was a dark psychic closet into which everything too disturbing for the conscious mind was thrown. During the decades of communist rule, the communist archives served a similar function. Freud, for his part, had no illusions that coaxing the contents of that psychic closet into consciousness would prove painless. And so it was with the opening of the communist archives as well. “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” wrote Marx and Engels in 1848. A century and a half later, communism, no longer a specter to come, remained no less haunting as a specter from the past.
Truth
In February 1990, as the new president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel came to Washington, D.C., to give his first speech there.
“Consciousness precedes Being,” Havel told the American congressmen. “And not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.”
No one knew what this meant, but it sounded very beautiful.
“If I could talk like that,” said one journalist, “I would run for God.”
In June 1993, I arrived in Prague to do research for my undergraduate thesis. In the city women carried small dogs in large handbags, and in the metro the escalators moved unsettlingly quickly. Next to the Hradčany metro station, over the speakers at the outdoor café, I heard Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing “Islands in the Stream,” then B. J. Thomas singing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Just a few feet away cobblestone stairs led up toward the castle.