The Devil in History

(which is the height of naturalness). That is how bad faith can pass for good conscience.

—Eugen Weber, My France

…shared hatreds make for strange bedfellowships.

—Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

—W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

The over two decades that have passed since the collapse of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe have proved that more than one possible future could be reasonably canvassed for the region. Even when many hastened to predict the worst, the likelihood of nightmarish scenarios, pace Jan Urban or G. M. Tamas, was somewhat dubious.¹ Bellum omnium contra omnes, a state of wild and protracted anarchy, and the loss of recently acquired civic rights in favor of Stalino-Fascist simulations of cohesion and collective will are not in the offing in most post-Leninist states. The Milosevic- style expansionist chauvinism has not been emulated outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia, although similar outbursts of hatred and intolerance have accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet Union, especially in the Caucasus. Human rights have been trampled in Belarus under the plebiscitary regime headed by Alexander Lukashenko, but this remains rather an exceptional case among European post-Communist states. Pluralism seems to have settled solidly, and democratic procedures are now widely recognized, accepted, and practiced. The general landscape after Communism’s demise, however, is one of disenchantment, dispirited political cultures, the rise of new collectivisms, marginalization of former heroes, and the return of the former Communists. Adam Michnik’s term for this trend was “the velvet restoration.”² I proposed the “velvet counterrevolution” to indicate the direction of this phenomenon, especially its strong anti-intellectual and illiberal tendencies.³ The conservative-populist turn in Hungarian politics under Prime Minister Viktor Orban after 2009 has resulted in bitter controversies regarding perceived limitations to freedom of the press and ethnocentric approaches to the nature of national identity.

Central and Eastern European societies have evolved from authoritarian, extremely centralized, and bureaucratic Leninist regimes toward democratic forms of political and economic organization.⁴ To focus exclusively on their difficulties during the transition period is to miss the drama of social and political experimentation in that region. More than twenty years after 1989, what remains at stake is the validity of the liberal democratic paradigm in traditionally authoritarian societies (“What can they look back to?” historian Tony Judt once asked, correctly). In other words, it is important to identify the building blocks on which open societies can be established in order to function properly. We must assess the trajectory of the great transformations unleashed by the extraordinary events of 1989: Are the newly awakened societies propitious to pluralism, or does the upper hand belong to illiberal, antimodern forces? In 2002, Judt stated that, in the context of the European Union accession, for purposes of European moral reconstruction, “the crucial reference point for Europe now will be the years immediately preceding the events of 1989.”⁵ As we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of that year’s revolutions, we have the possibility of contemplating the first two post-Communist decades’ illusions, expectations, and balance sheet and of speculating on the years to come.

ANNUS MIRABILIS 1989

The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges them, truly world-historical events, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after 1989.⁶ The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the idea of intrasystemic reforms, it had become clear that Communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, even against, the existing order.⁷ The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union, consummated before the incredulous eyes of the world in December 1991, was directly and intimately related to the earlier dissolution of the East European “outer empire,” provoked by the revolutions of 1989. It is now obvious that the historical cycle inaugurated by World War I, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, and the long European ideological warfare (or rather global civil war) that followed had come to an end.⁸

The road to 1989-91 was prepared by the less visible, often marginal, but in the long run critically significant workings of what we now call civil society (including Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, unofficial peace, environmental, and human rights groups in the GDR, Democratic Opposition in Hungary).⁹ In examining the wreckage of Leninism, we should thus avoid any one-dimensional, monistic approach. There is no single factor that explains the collapse: economics as much as politics and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. But these were not autocracies: they derived their only claim to legitimacy from the Marxist-Leninist “holy writ,” and once this ideological aura ceased to function, the whole edifice started to falter.¹⁰ They were, to use sociologist Daniel Chirot’s apt term, “tyrannies of certitude,” and it was precisely the gradual loss of ideological commitment among the ruling elites, once a truly messianic ardor, that accelerated the inner disintegration of Leninist regimes.¹¹ By 1989, three central myths of Leninism had collapsed: its infallibility, its invincibility, and its irreversibility.

Under the circumstances, any analysis of the year 1989 should be framed by two crucial theoretical hypotheses. The first, which constitutes the core of Stephen Kotkin’s argument in the much discussed volume The Uncivil Society, is that by 1980s, the political elites of the Communist states were in disarray, experiencing loss of self-confidence, rampant cynicism, and ideological decay. Eastern Europe was ruled by uncivil societies (Communist bureaucratic castes) beset with insecurity, anxiety, despondency, and demoralization. They had lost their self-confidence and were looking for alternative sources of legitimization. However, I would like to point to a second dimension that enabled the watershed of 1989. Communism in the region underwent the exhaustion of the utopian impulse. To use Ken Jowitt’s formulation, the charismatic impersonalism of Leninist parties fell into disrepute. In spite of Mikhail Gorbachev’s endless injunctions of “revisionist” ideological zeal, late socialism failed to reinvent the heroic mission of its central agent of progress in history: the Communist Party.

To return to Kotkin, I would contend that indeed “the collapse of Communism was a collapse of establishments”¹² Nevertheless, when talking about the establishment one should also understand the essential myth of a charismatic party mobilizing a revolutionary movement to radically transform society for the achievement of socialism. By 1989, across East-Central Europe one found a complex picture of waning faith in utopia (though by no means extinct—e.g., Nicolae Ceau?escu died singing the International) combined with routinization engineered by pragmatic elites (think of leaders such as