The Devil in History

In the aftermath of 1956, but especially after 1968, the post-totalitarian phase of state socialism brought about a system of power based on conformity, co-optation, cynicism, and inclusive, privilege-based regimentation. Reflecting on the hollow-ritualistic nature of the ideological reproduction of state socialism, Vaclav Havel provides an excellent description of the internalization mechanisms that replaced the terrorist methods:

Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so that they may realize themselves as human beings, but so that they may surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so that they may become agents of the system’s general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust into Mephistopheles…. What we understand by the [post-totalitarian] system is not a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it.⁶³

Mental co-optation was a crucial systemic goal; its achievement meant the perpetuation of endless ideological symbolic performances. The main purpose of this policy was to cauterize any sense of historical transcendence, to preclude any independent nuclei of thought and action. The very concept of truth had long since been distorted (and negated) by Lenin with his Manichean view of philosophical partisanship: for the Leninists, truth is what serves the interests of the proletariat, themselves defined by a self-appointed elite made up of revolutionary zealots. After 1956, however, the dogmatic core started to crumble. Full-fledged totalitarianism never reached perfection, but it was the main ambition during the revolutionary stages of both Nazism and Stalinism. In the Soviet case, the Secret Speech led to disillusionment and ushered in detotalitarianization.⁶⁴ Ideological lip-service was all-pervasive, but true believers had long since vanished. In fact, with very few exceptions, nobody believed in the bombastic rhetoric of the existing socialism. Still, although everybody knew that it was the incarnation of a huge lie, the system continued to operate, pathetically stifling (or stiflingly pathetic). The Solidarity movement was a major breakthrough, but the real beginning of the end came, as I have shown, when Gorbachev decided in 1987-88 to jettison ideology in favor of frankness and truth.

The ideological camouflage of serfdom was the main underpinning of the post-totalitarian order. In this sense one can argue for the continuous totalitarian ethos of these regimes, despite their reformist vagaries: “When we speak of totalitarian regimes we have in mind not systems that have reached perfection, but rather those which are driven by a never-ending effort to reach it, to swallow all channels of human communication, and to eradicate all spontaneous social life forms [emphasis in the original].”⁶⁵ The profile of the regimes in former Eastern Europe was determined by the specificities of the ideological content (one might even say hubris) filling the gap between their self-representation and their practice.⁶⁶ Therefore, following Lefort, their nature was determined by their “self-understanding as a ‘distinctive’ project,”⁶⁷ in the context of a neotraditionalist degeneration of the socialist system, where “the party’s combat ethos was ritualized,” its agents were transformed into “Party principals,” and the issue of political equality was consistently sidestepped and displaced.⁶⁸ In Arendtian terms, Communism as a regime was permanently beset by a resilient conflict between power and reality.

Generally speaking, Leninism attempted to encompass and filter through its ideological matrix all that had potential for public discourse, to mediate any self-defining narrative. It created a “new type of cultural hegemony” that aimed to carry out “an ‘anthropological revolution’ through the use of an essentially ritualistic and transformative politics.”⁶⁹ The demise of Communism generated the space for alternative “semiotic sacralizations” (Roger Griffin), which determined a proliferation of what I previously called fantasies of salvation: ideological surrogates whose principal function was to unify the public discourse and provide citizens with an easily recognizable source of identity as a part of a vaguely defined ethnic (or political) community. These mythologies minimized individual rights and emphasized instead the need to maintain an organic supra-individual ethos, which in turn determined the boundaries between good and evil, true and false. Indeed, they were not ideologies, but they shared with ideology the appearance of a coherent narrative.

The evolution of democracy in post-Leninist Eastern Europe has shown that large social strata resented Communist ideology but not the state socialist guarantees of security and stability. Existing inventories of historical heritage and culture brought forth from under the Leninist debris provided the reservoir for the justification of the new/old political actors’ intentions. In the past, for denizens of the Communist world, the myth of the classless society could serve such a purpose. In the post-Communist present, Communist nostalgia idealized “heroic mobilization,” seen as both the expression of a lost unity and disappeared community, and as disaffection with democratic pluralism and the market economy.⁷⁰ In a period characterized by weakness of social capital, loss of solidarity among members of the political community, the disorientation, decline, or inertia of civil society, and rampant erosion of traditional authority, the checks and balances for myth-making inflation were seriously weakened. The history of the region’s first two post-Communist decades is a story of the quest for cohesive citizenry in the face of the grievous fragmentation typical of the Leninist legacy (in Jowitt’s sense).⁷¹

In the context of the routinization (and sometimes deradicalization) of Communist regimes and of the exhaustion of the Marxist revisionist alternative, a new type of political thought developed in East and Central Europe. It was both a reaction to the collectivistic, pseudo-egalitarian logic of Communist regimes and an inspiration for both moral reform and social change in this region from the 1970s on. The dissidents’ writings, the stances of critical intellectuals, provided a composite oppositional complex that emphasized morals, tolerance, civility, and self-scrutiny. This body of thought reasserted the centrality of the individual. To paraphrase Jan Patocka, the locus of change was the soul of the individual—“the spiritual person.” Dissidence represented the return to what sociologist Alvin Gouldner called the “culture of critical discourse,” while also introducing the criterion of normative truth as the only valid one in a praxis meant to resist new forms of oppression. For example, for the signatories of Charter 77, the “hope for politics was that citizens could learn to act as free and responsible persons, and that government would recognize this orientation by respecting the moral dimension of political life.”⁷²

As the regimes declined under the burden of their economic ineffectiveness and moral numbness, as the elites lost their sense of historical predestination and showed signs of incurable disarray, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for reconstitution of the public sphere. Moreover, critical intellectuals not only rejected regimentation but also signaled their disenchantment with Marxist theory and proclaimed the revolutionary nature of truth-telling. Leszek Kolakowski gave full expression to the newly acquired understanding of the intimate connection between the Marxist worldview and the practice of Communism in the twentieth century: “It would be absurd to maintain that Marxism was, so to speak, the efficient cause of the present-day communism; on the other hand, communism is not a mere “degeneration” of Marxism but a possible interpretation of it and even a well-founded one, though primitive and partial in some respects…. The self- deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, had ended in the same way as all such attempts: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.”⁷³ In 1968, as the Czechoslovak experiment of “socialism with a human face” was in its last days, Russian dissident and eminent scientist Andrei Sakharov published in samizdat his memorandum Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. In this document, the author abandoned and condemned the ideological Manicheanism that functioned as a cardinal principle to both Marxism and Leninism: “‘The division of mankind threatens it with disaster,’ he began, and ‘in the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime.’”⁷⁴

REINVENTING POLITICS

The creation of civil society in East and Central Europe, or what I call the reinvention of politics in a non- Machiavellian way, was centrally premised upon a rebellion against the mortifying role of ideology: “Because the