Postwar

heir and extension of Imperial Russia. Its disintegration was a source of deep humiliation to older Russians, many of whom shared the resentment of the Soviet military at NATO’s absorption of the Russian ‘near West’ and their country’s inability to prevent it. The wish to recover some international ‘respect’ drove much of Moscow’s post- Soviet foreign policy and accounts both for the nature of the presidency of Vladimir Putin and the broad support on which Putin could draw, despite (and because of) his increasingly illiberal domestic policies.

For obvious reasons the citizens of Russia’s former empire in central Europe were not disposed to nostalgia in this form. But the lost world of Communism held some appeal even in East Germany, where polls in the mid-’90s showed a widespread belief that, except for travel, the electronic media and freedom of expression, life had been better before 1989. In other countries even the old Communist-era media aroused a certain affection—in 2004 the most popular program on Czech television was re-runs of ‘Major Zeman’, an early Seventies detective series whose scripts were little more than propaganda exercises for post-’68 ‘normalization’.

Only in the Czech Republic (together with France and the states of the former USSR) did the Communist Party brazenly retain its name. But in every post-Communist country of central Europe roughly one voter in five could be found supporting comparable ‘anti-’ parties: anti-American, anti-EU, anti-Western, anti-privatization… or more commonly all the above. In the Balkans especially, ‘anti-Americanism’ or ‘anti-Europeanism’ was typically a code for anti-capitalism, a cover for ex-Communists who could not openly express nostalgia for the old days but traded on it just the same in their disguised public pronouncements.

This protest vote indirectly illustrated the unavoidable consensus which bound the political mainstream: there was only one possible future for the region, and that was in the West, in the European Union, and in the global market, whatever it took. On these goals there was little to distinguish the major competing parties, all of which would win elections by criticizing the ‘failed’ policies of their opponents and then proceed to implement a strikingly similar program. The result in Central and Eastern Europe was a new ‘wooden’ language of public policy—‘democracy’, ‘market’, ‘budget deficit’, ‘growth’, ‘competition’—of very little meaning or concern to many citizens.

Voters who wished to register their protest or express their pain were thus drawn to the margins. In the early Nineties observers saw in the rise in post-Communist Europe of national-populist fringe parties and their demagogic leaders a dangerously anti-democratic reaction, the atavistic retreat of a backward region imprisoned for half a century in a time-warp. In more recent years, however, the success of Jorg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and their close counterparts everywhere from Norway to Switzerland has tended to dilute the patronizing tone of Western European commentary. Atavism is no respecter of frontiers.

The success of political democracy in many former Communist countries had ambiguous consequences for the intellectuals who had done so much to bring it about. Some, like Adam Michnik in Poland, maintained an influential voice through journalism. Others, like Janos Kis in Hungary, passed from intellectual dissent into parliamentary politics (in Kis’s case as leader of the Free Democrats) only to move back into academic life after a few turbulent years in the public eye. But most of the opposition intellectuals of earlier years did not make a successful conversion into post-Communist politicians or public figures, except as transitional figureheads, and many who tried proved sadly inept. Vaclav Havel was unique—and even he was not particularly successful.

As Edmund Burke had dismissively observed of an earlier generation of revolutionary activists: ‘The best were only men of theory’. Most of them were quite unprepared for the messy political and technical issues of the coming decade. They were also quite unprepared for the dramatic fall in the public status of intellectuals in general, as reading habits changed and a younger generation turned away from traditional sources of guidance and opinion. By the mid-Nineties some of the once-influential periodicals of an older intellectual generation had become sadly marginal.

Barbara Torunczyck’s Zeszyty Literackie, a widely admired literary journal published from Paris by a ’68 generation Polish exile, had played a major role in sustaining Polish cultural debate before 1989. Now, after its triumphant establishment in the capital of its liberated homeland, it struggled to maintain a readership of 10,000. Literarni Novinyy, the oldest and most influential Czech cultural weekly, did barely better, with a circulation of less than 15,000 by 1994. These figures, pro-rated to population, would not have seemed so unworthy to the publishers of literary magazines and periodicals in most Western countries; but in Central Europe their increasingly marginal place represented a traumatic shift in cultural priorities.

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. Within a few short years ‘civil society’ in Central Europe had become an archaic notion, of interest only to a handful of foreign sociologists. Something rather similar had happened after World War Two in western Europe (see Chapter 3), when the high moral tone of the wartime Resistance had been dispelled and displaced first by the practical business of reconstruction and then by the Cold War. But whereas French or Italian writers in those years still had a sizeable audience—thanks in part to their loudly advertised political engagement—their Hungarian or Polish counterparts were not so fortunate.

The intellectuals who did make a successful leap into democratic public life were usually ‘technocrats’—lawyers or economists—who had played no conspicuous part in the dissenting community before 1989. Not having performed a hitherto heroic role they offered more reassuring models for their similarly un-heroic fellow citizens. Shortly after he succeeded Havel as Czech President in 2003, Vaclav Klaus put the point very bluntly in a presidential address: ‘I am a bit like all of you. Neither a former communist nor a former dissident; neither a henchman nor a moralist, whose very presence on the scene is a reminder of the courage you did not have: your bad conscience.’

Allusions to bad conscience raised the troubling question of retribution—of what people had done in the Communist past and what (if anything) should happen to them now. This was to prove a traumatic dilemma for almost every post-Communist regime. On the one hand there was broad agreement, and not just among moralizing intellectuals, that political crimes committed in the Soviet-era should be brought to light and their perpetrators punished. Unless the truth about the Communist past was publicly acknowledged the already difficult transition to freedom would be made harder still: apologists for the old regime would whitewash its sins and people would forget what 1989 had been about.

On the other hand, Communists had been in government for over forty years in all these countries—fifty years in the Baltic states, seventy in the Soviet Union itself. The party-state had exercised a monopoly of power. Its laws, its institutions and its police had been the only force in the land. Who was to say, in retrospect, that Communists had not been the legitimate rulers? They had certainly been recognized as such by foreign governments, and no international court or tribunal had ever declared Communism to be a criminal regime. How, then, could someone be punished retroactively for obeying Communist laws or working for the Communist state?

Moreover, some of those who were most prominent in early calls for vengeance against Communist tyranny were of doubtful provenance themselves—anti-Communism in the confused mood of the early ’90s often overlapped with a certain nostalgia for the regimes the Communists had replaced. Separating condemnation of Communism from rehabilitation of its Fascist predecessors was not always going to be easy. Many reasonable people conceded that it would be necessary to draw a line under the Stalinist era: it was too late to punish those who had collaborated in the coups and show trials and persecutions of the 1950s, and most of their victims were dead.

Such matters, it was felt, were best left for historians, who would now have access to archives and could get the story right for the benefit of future generations. Concerning the post-Stalinist decades, however, there was wide agreement that there ought to be some public reckoning with the most egregious crimes and criminals: Czech Communist leaders who had collaborated in the overthrow of the Prague Spring; Polish policemen responsible for the assassination of Father Popieluszko (see Chapter 19); East German authorities who ordered the shooting of anyone trying to scale the Berlin Wall, and so on.

But this still left unresolved two much harder dilemmas. What should be done with former Communist Party members and police officials? If they were not accused of specific crimes, then should they suffer any punishment at all for their past acts? Should they be allowed to participate in public life—as policemen, politicians, even prime