The Devil in History

icons. In the immediate aftermath of 1989, individuals seemed eager to abandon their newly acquired sense of autonomy on behalf of different forms of protective, pseudosalvationist groups and movements. This was emphasized by Havel: “In a situation when one system has collapsed and a new one does not yet exist, many people feel empty and frustrated. This condition is fertile ground for radicalism of all kinds, for the hunt for scapegoats, and for the need to hide behind the anonymity of a group, be it socially or ethnically based.”⁵⁷ Assumed responsibility for personal actions, risk-taking, and questioning of institutions on the base of legitimate claims for improvement are still developing.⁵⁸ All established ranks, statuses, traditions, hierarchies, and symbols have collapsed, and new ones are still tottering and quite problematic. Envy, rancor, and resentment have replaced the values of solidarity, civility, and compassion that once drove the East European revolutionaries. As Polish sociologist Jacek Kurczewski noted, “Poverty is accompanied by envy, a feeling that becomes dominant in times of economic change. The feeling expresses itself not so much in a striving for communism, but in a defense of socialist mechanisms of social security under conditions of a capitalist economy and suspicion of everyone who has achieved success in these new conditions.”⁵⁹ Instead of enjoying promises of emancipation and revolutionary change, many individuals are now sharing a psychology of helplessness, defeat, and dereliction.

There are immense problems in the continuity of both social and personal memory. Without a complete legal, political, and historical reckoning in relation to the totalitarian Communist experience, civic consensus and political trust can hardly mature. Despite the ever-widening rescue operation of and working through fragmented memories (both individual and collective), transparency about a guilty and traumatic past by means of “politics of knowledge” (to use Claus Offe’s term) has yet to be achieved. Few years ago, Timothy Garton Ash was struggling to find an explanation for this state of affairs: “Any explanation for the absence of wider truth commissions must be speculative. I would speculate that part of the explanation, at least, lies in this combination of the historically defensible but also comfortable conviction that the dictatorship was ultimately imposed from outside and, on the other hand, the uneasy knowledge that almost everyone had done something to sustain the dictatorial system.”⁶⁰ The externalization of responsibility (the delocalization of the history of the Communist regimes by blaming them on either the Soviets or alien groups) and the forgetting of “the millions of Lilliputian threads of everyday mendacity, conformity and compromise” (in the words of T. Garton Ash) can sustain only a vague recognition of the need for a shared vision of the public good—a point that has been emphasized by Vaclav Havel, George Konrad, and Adam Michnik. The willingness to assume responsibility for one’s actions, to take risks, and to question institutions on the basis of legitimate claims for improvement is still embryonic.⁶¹ This may explain the political turmoil and antigovernment demonstrations in Hungary in the fall of 2006 or the parliamentary putsch in April 2007 against Romanian president, Traian Basescu, in full disregard of the Constitutional Court’s decision.⁶²

It is thus tempting to assume that the major difficulties in the articulation of ideologically differentiated political platforms in Eastern Europe were connected not only to the absence or weakness of clear-cut interest groups and lobbies, but also to increasing atrophy of the Western sources of inspiration (“models”) for such endeavors. The famous law of political synchronization (of the East with the West) may this time play against the revival of ideological politics.⁶³ The difficulty of identifying clear divisions between left and right polarization in post-Communist regimes is linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of traditional taxonomies. As Adam Michnik and other former dissidents have often argued, the question after 1989 is not whether one is left or right of center, but whether one is “West of center.” Liberal values are sometimes seen as left-oriented simply because they emphasize secularism, tolerance, and individual rights. At the same time, as shown by the new radical-authoritarian trends (often disguised as pro-democratic) in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and elsewhere, lingering habits inherited from Leninist and pre-Leninist authoritarianism continue: intolerance, exclusiveness, rejection of all compromises, extreme personalization of political discourse, and the search for charismatic leadership. Karen Dawisha has identified a few of the features of the “surviving past” of what she called “communism as a lived system”: the respect for centralized power, a large sphere for private interactions, and horizontal networks of mutual cooperation and informal connections, and finally, fixation on a supposed “separateness” from the West.⁶⁴ We deal with the same impotent fury against the failure of the state to behave as a “good father,” part of a patrimonial legacy characteristic, to different degrees, of all these societies (less so perhaps in Bohemia). Peter Reddaway correctly labeled this a yearning for the state as a “nanny.”⁶⁵

For instance, Romanians felt regret not for Nicolae Ceau?escu but rather for the age of predictability and frozen stability, when the party-state took care of everything. For many, the leap into freedom has turned out to be excruciatingly painful. What disappeared was the certainty about the limits of the permissible, the petrified social ceremonies that defined an individual’s life itinerary: former prisoners are now free to choose between alternative futures, and this choice is insufferably difficult for many of them. The Leninist psychological leftovers can be detected at both ends of the political spectrum, and this explains the rise of new alliances between traditionally incompatible formations and movements. In Russia, we see a Stalinist-nationalist coalition, with its own national- Bolshevik traditions. In Romania it t00k the form of a rapprochement between Romania’s allegedly pro-Western Social Democratic Party (whose honorary chairman is a former ideological apparatchik, ex-president Ion Iliescu) and the Greater Romania Party headed by former Ceau?escu court poet, the rabid xenophobic demagogue Corneliu Vadim Tudor. In the Czech Republic, the ideology of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia merged nostalgia for dogmatic Leninism with chauvinistic stances. Simply put, the old Marxist internationalist dream has long since been abandoned.

It would be a serious fallacy to view these trends as marking the rise of neo-Communism. For such a development to take place, ideological zeal and utopian-eschatological motivation are needed. Neither former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski nor former Hungarian primeminister Ferenc Gyurcsanyi, both linked to the post-Communist Left, can be described as ideologically driven. Instead, the successors to the Leninist parties have to cope with widespread sentiments of disaffection from socialist rhetoric. The Serbian socialists, East Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialism (now part of die Linke), and Romania’s Social Democratic Party are emblematic of the ongoing trend toward cooperation between radical nationalist forces and those who yearn for bureaucratic collectivism. Another indication of the weak institutionalization and shallow social insertion of post-Communist parties is the phenomenon of “electoral volatility.”⁶⁶ The mainstream political parties are still challenged periodically by “unorthodox political formations” (e.g., Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania). The status quo remains fragile because of its unpopularity among sections of the population still attracted by ever-resurgent fantasies of salvation.

This tendency is a result of the ideological chaos created by the collapse of state socialism, which left populism as the most convenient and frequently the most appealing ersatz ideology. It was relatively easy to get rid of the old regime with its spurious claim to cognitive infallibility, but much more daunting to install a pluralist, multiparty order, a civil society, rule of law, and a market economy. Freedom, it turned out, was easier to gain than to guarantee. Uprootedness, loss of status, and uncertainties about identity provide fertile ground for paranoid visions of conspiracy and treason; hence the widespread attraction of nationalist salvationism. Leszek Kolakowski points to a paradoxical attitude toward prophetic stances in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: the intellectuals’ disillusionment with redemptive-apocalyptical teleologies led them to retreat from political matters, which generated an ethical pauperization of politics, as there remain fewer intellectual teachers. The door is wide open to pseudodoctrines and negative political eclectisms.⁶⁷ Marching with Stalin’s (or Ceau?escu’s) portrait is an expression not of Stalinism (or Ceau?escuism) but rather of disaffection with the status quo, perceived as traumatic, anarchic, corrupt, politically decadent, and morally decrepit. Especially in Russia, where this disaffection is linked to the sentiment of imperial loss, cultural despair can lead to dictatorial trends. Exaggerated though they may be, references to “Weimar Russia” capture the psychology of large human groups whose traditional collectivistic values have disappeared and who cannot recognize themselves in the new values of individual action, risk, and intense competition. Recent developments in Russia strengthen the impression that the experiment of open politics in Russia lost out to the push for the reaffirmation of imperial status.⁶⁸ Following Martin Krygier, I consider that, twenty years after the demise of Communism, in the former Soviet bloc we are experiencing a new ideosphere, which is by definition comprehensive, inclusive, and provisional. Moreover, the postmodern political condition renders transitory even organicist, syncretic, and redemptive radicalisms (as political movements).⁶⁹ For instance, the last Romanian general elections (in 2009) produced encouraging results: the xenophobic, chauvinistic Romania Mare Party did not amass enough votes to get into