The Devil in History

they derived their spurious legitimacy from the ideological (and teleological) claim that they represented the “vanguard” of the working class, and consequently, they were the carriers of a universal emancipatory mission.³⁷ Once ideology ceased to be an inspiring force and influential members of the ruling parties, the offspring and beneficiaries of the nomenklatura system, lost their emotional commitment to the Marxist radical behest, the Leninist castles were doomed to fall apart. Here enters the what is often called the Gorbachev effect.³⁸ It was indeed the international climate generated by the shockwaves of the glasnost and perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev after his election as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 that allowed for an incredible amount of open dissent and political mobilization in East and Central Europe. It was Gorbachev’s denunciation of the ideological perspective on international politics (de-ideologization) and the abandoning of the “class struggle” perspective that changed the rules of Soviet-East European relations.

Very few analysts insisted on the less visible but nonetheless persistent illiberal and neo-authoritarian components of the anti-Communist upheaval in the East. To quote Ralf Dahrendorf’s somber forecast: “The greatest risk is probably of another kind altogether. I hesitate to use the word, but it is hard to banish from one’s thoughts: fascism. By that I mean the combination of a nostalgic ideology of community which draws harsh boundaries between those who belong and those who do not, with a new political monopoly of a man or a ‘movement’ and a strong emphasis on organization and mobilization rather than freedom of choice.”³⁹ Swept away by the exhilarating revolutionary turmoil, most observers preferred to gloss over the heterogeneous nature of the anti-Communist movements: in fact, not all those who rejected Leninism did it because they were dreaming of an open society and liberal values. Among the revolutionaries were quite a few enrages, ill disposed towards the logic of compromise and negotiations. There were also populist fundamentalists, religious dogmatists, nostalgics of the pre-Communist regimes, including those who admired pro-Nazi dictators like Romania’s Marshal Ion Antonescu and Hungary’s Admiral Miklos Horthy. It was only after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the velvet divorce that led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia into two countries (the Czech Republic and Slovakia) that scholars and policy makers realized that the liberal promise of these revolutions should not be taken for granted and that the aftermath of Communism is not necessarily liberal democracy. In the early 1990s it became increasingly clear that the post-Communist era was fraught with all sorts of threats, including bloody ethnic conflicts, social unrest, and the infectious rise of old and new sorts of populisms and tribalisms.⁴⁰

Actually, the appeals of the civil society paradigm, as championed and articulated within the dissident subcultures of the post-totalitarian order, were to a great extent idealized during the first postrevolutionary stage. Many intellectuals shared these values, but there were many who found them too abstract and universalistic (among the latter, Vaclav Klaus, Havel’s rival, nemesis, and successor as president of the Czech republic). The majority of the populations in East-Central Europe had not been involved in the antisystemic activities and had not appropriated the values of moral resistance. Years ago, Hungarian philosopher and former dissident G. M. Tamas insisted on the relative marginality of the dissidents as an explanation for their lack of influence after 1989.⁴¹ The case of Solidarity was, of course, different, but even there the normative code of civic opposition failed to generate a positive concept of the “politics of truth.” In reality, dissent in most East-Central European societies was an isolated, risky, and not necessarily popular experience. Those belonging to the “gray area” between government and opposition tended to regard dissidents as moral challengers, neurotic outsiders, quixotic characters with little or no understanding of the real game. The appeals of the civil society vision, with its repudiation of hierarchical structures and skepticism of institutional authority, showed their limits in the inchoate, morally fractured, and ideologically fluid post-Communist order. Moreover, as Tony Judt noticed, “One of the reasons for the decline of the intellectuals was that their much remarked-upon emphasis on the ethics of anti-Communism, the need to construct a morally aware civil society to fill the anomic space between the individual and the state, had been overtaken by the practical business of constructing a market economy.”⁴²

The world after Leninism is marred by broken dreams, shattered illusions, and often unfulfilled expectations. This explains the defeat of former Communists in Poland in September 2005: perceived as cynical operators, the former apparatchiks lost to center-right parties that advocated a “moral revolution.” In brief, the battle for the soul of man after Communism has not ended. In some countries, discomfiture and dismay have prevailed. In others, individuals seem to enjoy the new conditions, including the opportunity to live without utopian dreams. To quote Alexander Yakovlev, the former Bolshevik ideologue turned apostate: “Social utopias are not harmless. They deform practical life, they push an individual, society, state agencies, and social movements into imposing their approaches and concepts, including the use of extreme methods of force. Social utopias deprive a person of the ability to perceive the reality of actual features. They sharply reduce or sometimes even completely destroy people’s ability to withstand effectively the real difficulties, absurdities, and defects of private and public life.”⁴³ In contrast to Leninism’s social utopia, in 1989 civil society was a powerful metaphor of the revolt and revival of the independent mind that gained preeminence as party-states became increasingly decrepit and their elites disenchanted. Civil society was the symbol for the possibility of an alternative to decaying regimes plagued with the incurable maladies of clientelism, corruption, and cynicism. Sickness, however, can be an excruciatingly long process, and in the mid-1980s Timothy Garton Ash, an astute interpreter of Central European politics, used the predictive metaphor Ottomanization. Later, the phiiosopher Leszek Kolakowski insisted that while everyone (even the leaders) had known that Communist regimes could not last forever, hardly anyone foresaw when the debacle would occur. With no end in sight, what remained was that, by the 1980s, Eastern Europe had forged a political myth that provided both criticism and opposition to Communism, as well as a strategic vision for Communism’s aftermath. I agree with Stephen Kotkin, who stated that “1989 did not happen because of a broad freedom drive or an establishment self-enrichment drive.”⁴⁴ What Kotkin seems to disregard, however, is the debilitating and corrosive effect of the dissidents’ arguments for authenticity (“living within the truth”) and for a return to normalcy over a system that had lost its eschatological impetus. Simple but pervasive ideas continuously chipped at the foundation of the party-state monolith. It may not have been a broad drive for freedom, the triumphal march of civil society that was presented in earlier literature, but the role of ideas in the demise of Communism should not be underestimated. A secular religion brought to power and preserved by ideas, Communism perished as a result of ideas. Once Marxism and Leninism were discredited, both domestically and internationally, as Grand Narratives, Communism’s realities remained merely what they were: loss, waste, failure, and crime.⁴⁵ Only if we add this corrective to Kotkin’s interpretation can we understand the passion, idealism, and high expectations of 1989 together with the ensuing frustrations, malaise, and disappointments.

The recollection of the oppression under Communist regimes is used to bolster a sense of uniqueness. Suffering is often exploited to justify a strange competition for what I call the most victimized nation status. No less important, because Communism was seen by many as an alien imposition—a dictatorship of “foreigners”— contemporary radical nationalism is also intensely anti-Communist. The memory of trauma and guilt under Leninism, along with the duty of remembrance regarding the Fascist past of some of these countries can provide the historical and moral benchmarks necessary to sustain a constitutional patriotism that can challenge communitarian reductionism. Instead, we are witnessing an ethnicization of memory and an externalization of guilt. The evils of the Communist regimes are assigned to those perceived as aliens: the Jews, the national minorities, or other traitors and enemies of an organically defined nation. Or, we encounter the “mismemory of Communism” that creates “two moral vocabularies, two sorts of reasoning, two different pasts”: that of things done to “us” and that of things done by “us” to “others.” This is what Tony Judt called “voluntary amnesia.”⁴⁶

Former Communists did make sometimes spectacular comebacks. This was possible because after 1989 there were no tribunals and no recourses to state-endorsed vengeance. This shows that the refusal to organize collective political justice was after all the correct approach. Let me say that the controversies regarding the treatment of the former party and secret police activists and collaborators were among the most passionate and potentially disruptive in the new democracies. Some argued, together with Poland’s first post-Communist and anti-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, that one needed to draw a “thick line” with the past and fully engage in a consensual effort for building an open society. Others, for reasons that went from unconditional anti- Communism to cynical manipulation of an explosive issue, argued that without one form or another of “purification” the new democracies would be fundamentally perverted. The truth, in my view, resides somewhere