The Devil in History

potential to be an anti-Leninist revolution? His plans do seem to have maintained the features of a movement- regime defined by an encompassing socialist spirit. He attempted to formulate a new social contract based on mutual trust and respect between leaders and citizens. The party as a collective intellectual in the Gramscian sense, its relegitimation through intellectual competence and moral authority, never succeeded, however, in becoming a viable alternative to the political and national pluralism or fragmentation of the Leninist twilight.

Following Archie Brown, one can identify three main causes for the failure of the Gorbachev experiment: first, he did not champion economic reforms in the direction of a market economy; second, he reacted late and often in self-defeating ways to the rise of centrifugal nationalist and separatist movements; third, he underestimated the nomenklatura’s capacity for retrenchment and delayed an alliance with genuine democratic forces. It was Boris Yeltsin who knew how to capitalize politically on the tempestuous rise of civil society in Russia. Nonetheless, it was thanks to Gorbachev and the Gorbachevites that the USSR moved from a state based on contempt for the individual and the rule of law to one in which human and civil rights were taken seriously. Whatever one thinks of Gorbachev’s post-Leninist political philosophy, it is certain that he dissociated himself from the obnoxiously despotic features of the old regime. Gorbachev’s problem was that he and his followers advocated what Jacques Levesque called “an ideology of transition” permeated by “a Promethean ambition to change the existing world order, based on new, universal values.” It provided the justificatory basis for Soviet foreign policy and created the legitimacy that held in check and ultimately defeated the conservative forces within the CPSU.¹⁰⁹ It also fueled a twofold illusion: the capacity to control change in the context of a society ravaged by the workings of the Marxist-Leninist political religion and a belief in the society’s will for socialist transformation despite doctrinal competition and political pluralism. In other words, Gorbachevism did not realize at the time that no phoenix could be reborn from the ashes of “the first workers’ state.”

The dissolution of civil society and the preservation of an atomized social space, the sine qua non features of Soviet-type totalitarianism, engendered widespread moral indifference and intellectual corruption. In the words of Archie Brown, “there were almost certainly more true believers in a radiant future during the worst years of mass terror than forty years later.”¹¹⁰ The official language was second nature, a protective shield against outbursts of spontaneity. People simulated loyalty to the system, generating a flourish of ritualistic behavior rather than of sentimental attachment. As Vaclav Havel put it, “Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power…. The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system.”¹¹¹

WHAT REMAINS

Citizens of socialist countries were master practitioners of double-talk and double-think. The life of the mind was split, and the result of this excruciating process was that not even the Soviet general secretary was entirely convinced of what the party proclaimed. Ideology functioned more as a residual institution than as a source of mystical identification with the powers that be. After the CPSU’s Twentieth Congress and the Hungarian Revolution, official slogans sounded like a succession of senseless sentences. The only effect of ideological sermonizing was an all-pervasive ennui. Ironically, ideological imperialism resulted in simulacra of faith that were merely camouflage for an ideological vacuum. At the moment this imposture was exposed, the whole castle fell apart. In Havel’s words, “Ideology, as the instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is, in the post-totalitarian system, something that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system’s external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”¹¹² In every society citizens need a set of guiding values whose observance ensures tranquility and worldly achievements. Soviet-type regimes ignored this and forced the individual to divide his or her soul between the public and the private person. Person and citizen were different entities in these societies. The outcome was apathy, disgust with politics, drug addiction, interest in exotic cults, or even fascination with Nazism, as in the case of certain Soviet youth groups. One can therefore regard the extinction of mystical ardor as the major liability of Communist political systems. These systems experienced a perpetual ideological crisis, as their promises had long ago lost any credibility. Gorbachev’s injunctions received lukewarm support from those he wished to mobilize. It was no surprise that it was the liberals and the radical Westernizers who ousted Gorbachev from power.

The CPSU leader became a victim of his own policies because he underestimated the detachment between the will for revolutionary change in the Soviet bloc and the preservation of the organizational big picture in the area. He overlooked what I would call, employing Mark Kramer’s terminology, “the demonstration effects” of empowerment. Gorbachev undercut Marxist-Leninist ideology. He internalized the vulnerability of the Soviet regime. He diminished his leverage on curbing unrest within both the bloc and the federation. He misinterpreted the East European civil societies’ visions of regime-transformation and then was taken aback by the contagiousness of democratization—essentially an alternative to his vision. Following Michnik’s statement, “the perestroika virus” was indeed the last ingredient necessary to open the floodgates of dissent. But also, the virus of the East European reinvention of politics irreparably subverted “the Gorbachev phenomenon,” amounting to a permanent challenge that in the end pushed systemic change into collapse of the system. The transnational, intrabloc, cross-border “demonstration effect” of social movements, political platforms, and state policies accelerated the crystallization and articulation of nonviolent revolutionary consciousness, first among the intelligentsia and then in the population at large. In contrast to earlier crises in the socialist camp, during the 1989-1991 events, people both knew what was being demonstrated and understood the ideas diffused. Mark Kramer points to the fact that this situation fostered parallels, analogies, and conscientiousness among those mobilized in the revolutionary process. The “tightness” of the socialist camp, which was previously enforced by a Soviet interventionist regime (under the Brezhnev doctrine), now proved the catalyst for the lightning speed of change and for the flux of ideas about it:

Having begun as a largely unidirectional phenomenon in 1986–1988, the spillover became bidirectional in 1989 but then shifted back to a unidirectional pattern in 1990–1991. Unlike in 1986–1988, however, the direction of the spillover in 1990–1991 was mainly from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union…. The paradox of the changes that occurred under Gorbachev is that, from 1989 on, this same structure facilitated rather than impeded the spread of political unrest and democratizing influences from Eastern Europe into the USSR—the very sorts of influences that eventually undermined the Soviet regime and the Soviet state.¹¹³

Revisionist intellectuals who have done so much to subvert the ideological facade of Communist regimes ultimately abandoned their illusions about the reformability of the system from within the ruling party. Given the density of the Soviet-East European environment, their apostasy created the premises for seeing democracy beyond any arrangement that a revolution from above could bring. They turned instead toward rediscovering the virtues of dialogue and the advantages of civil discourse. According to Zubok, the formation of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a breakthrough caused by a shift of consciousness “from the idealization of the ‘golden age of Bolshevism’ and praise of ‘Leninist norms’ to the embrace of ‘universal moral principles.’”¹¹⁴ Members of the newborn democratic opposition advocated the need to create an alternative politics. Hungarian writer George Konrad spoke of the emergence of antipolitics as a challenge to the apocryphal version of politics embodied by the system: “The ideology of the democratic opposition shares with religion the belief that the dignity of the individual personality (in both oneself and the other person) is a fundamental value not requiring any further demonstration. The autonomy and solidarity of human beings are the two basic and mutually complementary values to which democratic movement relates other values.”¹¹⁵

Bitter experiences in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia convinced these critics that the crux of the matter was to go beyond the logic of the system. Revisionism’s crucial contribution to putting an end to Marxist-