The Devil in History

Leninist self-satisfaction was undeniable, but its main weakness was submission to the rules dictated by officialdom. The new radical opponents of totalitarianism saw revisionism as a half-hearted plea for change, though it was heretical to the regimes’ ideological zealots. These writings were esoteric, especially if contrasted with dissident literature, and they held little appeal to the large public. However, the most important fallacy of revisionism was that it generated a criticism that was still encoded in the language of power and the logic of Soviet-type dictatorships. There was no doubt, however, that the revisionist ideas of the 1960s catalyzed the emergence of the counterculture of dissent. Disenchantment with Marxism was an opportunity to rethink the radical legacy and reassess Jacobin ideals of total community.

In the struggle between the state and civil society, it was the latter’s task to invent a new principle of power that would respect the rights and aspirations of the individual. This counterprinciple was rooted in the independent life of society, in what Vaclav Havel aptly called the power of the powerless. A new epoch came of age. It was the inception of the all-out debunking of the duplicitous infrastructure of Communist power. First Solzhenitsyn, then East and Central European dissidents announced their decision to restore the normative value of truth. Refusing official lies and reinstating truth in its own right has turned out to be a more successful strategy than revisionist criticism from within. Dissent in East Central Europe subverted Leninism using two trajectories: “the self-conscious creation of a site of resistance,” also called “parallel polis,” “second society,” “antipolitics,” and so on, and “the twin strategies of new evolutionism and non-violence” (such as Jacek Kuron’s “self-limitation” or Janos Kis’s “radical reformism”).¹¹⁶ For the first time in the twentieth century, dissidents rejected emergency revolutionary status (privilege) as a justification for (state) violence in societal transformation. In the process, they also forced Western intellectuals to face their own illusions rooted in the totalitarian fascination with armed utopia. Furthermore, the dissident movement irreversibly destroyed the self- constructed, self-blinding, and utterly obsolete veil of ignorance concerning the human cost of revolution. In the case of France, the land of seemingly unending engagement with revolutionary privilege, “in overwhelming, searing detail, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was the indictment that, in the words of Georges Nivat, ‘broke us.’”¹¹⁷

The ultimate goal of Communism, overcoming politics in a fully unified body social—the celebrated “leap into the kingdom of freedom”—was challenged by a moral imperative of political responsibility. Concepts such as central planning, the leading role of the party, the principle of class struggle on the world stage, and the pyramid of soviets were legitimated in historical terms, “a process that was greater than what they, as temporal forms of organization, represented.”¹¹⁸

In a sense, Gorbachev hoped the party would recapture its soul in the struggle for the modernization of Soviet political culture but found that the times made such endeavors futile. Only when it was too late, in July 1991, at a moment of devastating ideological disarray within the CPSU, did he urge “a decisive break with outmoded ideological dogmas and stereotypes.” He failed to look for solutions outside the party. He refused to adopt the roundtable strategy—the symbol of the 1989 Central European peaceful revolutions. He envisaged transition to democracy by means of socialism (yet incoherently articulated), but in a pluralistic society his vision was not the only one competing in the public square. It is now obvious that the main strength of Communist regimes was their ability to maintain a climate of fear and hopelessness; their main weakness was a failure to muzzle the human mind. I do not underestimate the intrinsic economic problems of these regimes, but their main vulnerability was the failure to generate confidence. Glasnost was an attempt to solve the insoluble, a desperate effort to create a less suffocating environment without changing the principle of party domination. The upheavals of 1989 and 1991 showed that the fabric was perhaps softer, but the straitjacket had remained unchanged, generating the ultimate stand—complete popular systemic rebuke.

The Hungarian dissident philosopher G. M. Tamas expressed a widespread feeling among East European independents when he refused to consider Gorbachevism as heaven-sent: “I don’t agree… with the complacency of most Western observers, especially now with the advent of Gorbachev, who would confine us within the limits of a mildly reformed communist system where power still lies with the Party, but where some other people can also shout a bit. If people don’t have to suffer for their views but nevertheless have no real influence over what happens, the longer such a situation continues the greater the difference develops between words and deeds. We cannot develop a normal life for the future on such a basis.”¹¹⁹ Or, as political thinker and dissident Miklos Haraszti put it in the afterword to the American edition of his book on artists under socialism: “For decades Hungary has been a textbook model of a pacified post-Stalinist neo-colony. This fact has not been lost on Mr. Gorbachev as he attempts to wrap more velvet on the bars of his prison in order to create a less primitive and more manageable order in the heart of his empire.”¹²⁰

The disruptive effects of this ideological relaxation were felt not only in the Soviet Union but also in East Central Europe. It did allow for a redistribution of the constellation of power as a consequence of social self- organization. The experience of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in Poland demonstrated that a tiny nucleus of committed intellectuals could fundamentally change the post-totalitarian political equation.¹²¹ KOR contributed to the climate of cooperation between the radical core of the intelligentsia and the militant activists of the working class. Neither a political party nor a traditional trade union, Solidarnosc prefigured a synthesis of nonutopian language for a rational polis and an emancipated community. The pace of reform in the Soviet Union held a vital importance for the fate of East European nations. The intensification of dissent activities in 1987–89 in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR anticipated the daring, all-out challenge to the Communist regimes in these countries. The October 1986 statement signed by dissidents from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR inaugurated a new chapter in the history of antitotalitarian struggles. It showed that international actions could and should be undertaken to emphasize the values and the goals of the opposition. It was the historical calling of critical intellectuals to counter the strategy of cooptation and assert the primacy of those values the system stifles.

At the moment when genuine independent social movements coalesced, intellectuals did provide an articulate program for political change, the exact alternative that revisionism failed to create. In their seminal volume Dictatorship over Needs, Heller, Feher, and Markus offer a thoughtful explanation of the demise of Marxism-Leninism: “A social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and biding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied.”¹²² In his turn, Archie Brown, rather than advocating a vantage point from above, argues that the collapse of Communism can be explained by a combination of “new ideas, institutional power (the commanding heights of the political system having fallen into the hands of radical reformers), and political choices (when other options could have been chosen).”¹²³

So, why did Communist regimes collapse? The answer is multicausal and requires grasping the many origins and implications of the world-shattering events of 1989–91. If I were to start the list of causes, however, I would say that Communist regimes disappeared because they lost their ideological self-confidence, their hierocratic credentials. Their ritualized hegemony was successfully challenged by the reinvention of politics brought about by dissent. The existence of an alternative in a space previously imbued with myth and ideology triggered a process of individual and collective self-determination. The logic of consent, of emancipation within “ideocratic” limits, was replaced by the grammar of revolt, self-affirmation, and freedom. The Communist project of modernity oriented toward “an integrated accumulation of wealth, power, and knowledge” while relying on the “embedded phantasm of a shortcut to affluence through total social mobilization”¹²⁴ was rejected on moral grounds. The crystallization of a critical theory focusing on subjectivity and negativity reasserted the central position of the human being in the symbolic economy of Central and East European politics. Ironically, the Soviet warning, “Either we destroy revisionism or it will destroy us!” seems now stunningly prescient. Thanks to critical intellectuals relying upon the tradition and grounds established by revisionist Marxism, revolts ultimately morphed into revolutions.

CHAPTER 5 Ideology, Utopia, and Truth