The Devil in History

Karoly Grosz in Hungary, Mieczyslaw Rakowski in Poland, Petar Mladenov in Bulgaria, or Hans Modrow in the GDR). All Communist regimes seemed to undergo a process of indefinite corrosion. But once a new type of leadership emerged at the Moscow center, one that gradually grew disenchanted with the radically transformative logic of the Soviet past, systemic collapse accelerated at a formidable pace. Tony Judt cogently pointed out that “Lenin’s distinctive contribution to European history had been to kidnap the centrifugal political heritage of European radicalism and channel it into power through an innovative system of monopolized control: unhesitatingly gathered and forcefully retained in one place.”¹³ When the influence of this heritage in the arithmetic of power within the Soviet bloc waned, erosion gave way to the crumbling of apparently unshakable establishments.

Precisely because they ended an historical cycle and ushered in a new one, the importance of these revolutions cannot be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism, and policed dictatorship.¹⁴ Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically skeptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least in their first stage, liberal and nonutopian.¹⁵ Unlike traditional revolutions, they did not originate in a millenialist vision of the perfect society, and they rejected the role of any self-appointed vanguard in directing the activities of the masses. They spoke a new political vernacular: “the ‘rights talk’ as a way of thinking about politics.”¹⁶ Moreover, no political party directed their spontaneous momentum, and in their early stages they even insisted on the need to create new political forms, different from ideologically defined, traditional party differentiations. At the same time, as one observer of the events between 1989 and 1991 remarked, “Dissidents did not take up their cudgels against former revolutionaries or their organizations like the CPSU—they demanded an end to the state of revolution.”¹⁷

HOPES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

The fact that the aftermath of these revolutions has been plagued by ethnic rivalries, unsavory political bickering, rampant political and economic corruption, and the rise of illiberal parties and movements, including strong authoritarian, collectivistic trends, does not diminish their generous message and colossal impact. And, it should be noted, it was precisely in the countries where the revolutions did not occur (Yugoslavia) or were derailed (Romania) that the exit from state socialism was particularly problematic. The revolutions of 1989 did indeed create a fundamentally new and dangerous situation in which the absence of norms and predictable rational behavior on the part of the actors created the potential for global chaos. This observation was made not to deplore the end of the pre-1989 arrangements, but simply to point to the fact that this threshold year and the end of Leninism placed all of us in a radically novel situation. Understanding the revolutions of 1989 helps us grasp the meaning of the ongoing debates about liberalism, socialism, nationalism, civic society, and the very notion of human freedom at the end of a most atrocious century.¹⁸

These facts should be kept in mind especially when writers question the success of these revolutions by referring exclusively to their ambiguous legacies. The “reactionary rhetoric” brilliantly examined by Albert Hirschman uses arguments of futility, jeopardy, and perversity to delegitimize change per se or make it look impossible or undesirable.¹⁹ This line of reasoning, often encountered in the more sophisticated approaches, argues along the following logic: the postrevolutionary environment has unleashed long-dormant ugly features of national political cultures, including chauvinism, racism, residual Fascism, ethno-clerical fundamentalism, and militarism, and it is therefore more dangerous than the status quo ante; or, nothing really changed and the power-holders (party-state bureaucrats) have remained the same, simply affixing to themselves new masks; or, no matter what the women and men of the revolutions of 1989 had hoped, the results of their endeavors have been extremely disappointing, allowing political scoundrels, crooks, and demagogues to use the new opportunities to establish their domination. If there is a main moral of the great revolutionary drama that unfolded in Eastern Europe in 1989, it is that history is never a one-way avenue, and that the future is always pregnant with more than one alternative. In other words, there is no ironclad determinism governing mankind’s history. Indeed, as Jeffrey Isaac argues, the revolutions of 1989 had not only more than one cause but also more than one meaning, and they proposed a challenging agenda not only for the post-Communist societies but for Western democracies as well.²⁰ Moreover, we should focus on their pluralist heritage and enduring impact on both Eastern Europe and the world. Isaac warned that the “we” who celebrate the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 ought to do so with circumspection and with a sense of self-l imitation because of the complexities behind the “normality” of post-Communist societies.²¹

The meaning of those events, the role of dissidents (critical, unregimented intellectuals) in the resurrection of long-paralyzed civic societies, the overall crisis of those regimes, and the decline of the Communist Parties’ hegemony have generated an enormous interpretative literature. The initial temptation was to acclaim the role of dissidents in the breakdown of Soviet-style regimes and the rise of civic initiatives from below.²² The dissident as a hero turned out to be a political myth in Central and Eastern Europe, but the myth raised these societies to a higher level of moral self-awareness. In my view, it is less relevant how large or numerous a dissident group or movement was. I remember an intervention by the former dissident and human rights activist, the late Mihai Botez, at a roundtable organized by Freedom House in 1988, in which he insisted that the deficit of visibility does not necessarily mean the absence of civil society, even in a country like Romania under Ceausescu. There were many informal networks of communication between Romanian intellectuals. The November 1987 anti-Communist Bra?ov workers’ protest movement was also an expression of deep-seated social unrest. In an insightful review of the historiography of the revolutions of 1989, Barbara Falk insisted that “there is no clear-cut line between resistance and dissent—it is more of a continuum or full spectrum.” The nature, impact, and role of this continuum of resistance in the demise of Communist regimes await more in-depth research and analysis. I consider her characterization of this spectrum a telling starting point:

At the pole of “resistance” lie activities such as absenteeism, alcoholism or drug abuse, and the preference for personal travel and sporting activities rather than trade-union- or workplace-sponsored events. Closer to the middle would be private or family discussions on alternative historiography, listening to a banned radio broadcast, writing an essay “for the drawer,” publicly telling jokes, or reading samizdat. Closer to the middle on the other side, toward the pole of dissent, would be activities taken in support or in the “gray zone”—agreeing with a petition, participating in a pilgrimage perhaps, or discussing with friends a particular broadcast or spreading news obtained there. Finally, at the “dissent” end of the continuum is the production and distribution of samizdat, public protest, active involvement in independent groups outside the control of the party-state—all of which risked regime persecution and/or imprisonment. One could also further differentiate between individual moral resistance or organized opposition—particularly by the late 1980s or in states such as Poland where the opposition was extremely well organized, expansive, and multidimensional.²³

We must also not overlook that what mattered were the perceptions of the dissidents’ role among the elites (i.e., the so-called intelligentsia) and within sectors of the population, in the grey area (bystanders). It was no coincidence that as soon as the Ceau?escu regime fell apart in Romania, the new ruling group, the leaders of the National Salvation Front, made sure to convey the message to the population that its ruling council had incorporated the few dissident intellectuals in the country known to the people via the Radio Free Europe broadcasts. Dissidents could legitimize post-1989 rule; their presence and ideas gave the events significance. It was meaningful not only that Communism collapsed or that the elite imploded, but also how the story unfolded and which ideas and principles filled in the void after its demise. For example, in the Soviet Union, Ludmila Alexeyeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, declared at the height of perestroika that “we take no offence at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.” After the failed coup d’etat of August 1991, one of its most ardent supporters, the nationalist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov, bitterly stated that “the conception of Elena Bonner has won.”²⁴

The revolutions of 1989 were first and foremost revolutions of the mind, and critical intellectuals played the