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 Brașov 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 Ceaușescu 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'état 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 role of “revolutionary subjects.” Euphoric accounts of the revolutionary wave, often compared to the 1848 Spring of the Nations, abounded, and Timothy Garton Ash offered some of the most eloquent articles along this line in his gripping contributions to the New York Review of Books, later collected in the volume The Magic Lantern.25 Whether the term revolutions is the most appropriate to describe these changes is of course an open question. What is beyond dispute is the world-historical impact of the transformations inaugurated by the events of 1989 and the inauguration of a new vision of the political. In the twentieth century, many intellectuals engaged in a frantic search for utopia and frequently participated in the legitimation of ideology-driven despotisms: “It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffection of Europe's intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche.”26 According to Garton Ash,
The year 1989 left realities. Yet there was something new; there was a big new idea, and that was the revolution itself—the idea of the non-revolutionary revolution, the evolutionary revolution. The motto of 1989 could come from Lenin's great critic Eduard Bernstein: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” … So this was a revolution that was not about the what but about thehow. That particular motto of peaceful, sustained, marvelously inventive, massive civil disobedience channeled into an oppositional elite that was itself prepared to negotiate and to compromise with the existing powers, the powers that were (in short, the roundtable)—that was the historical novelty of 1989. Where the guillotine is a symbol of 1789, the roundtable is a symbol of 1989.27
One needs to keep in mind that the critical intellectuals of Eastern Europe, the agents of civil society in 1970s and 1980s, did not wish to seize power. The essence of their actions and writings, and implicitly of their influence over the subjects of Communist rule, was their commitment to the restoration of truth, civility, and morality in the public sphere, the rehabilitation of civic virtues, and the end of the totalitarian method of control, intimidation, and coercion. Stephen Kotkin accurately pointed out that the most vulnerable aspect of Communist systems was their endemic lying. In this context, I contend that the dissidents' discourse of an active, self-conscious, empowered social body amounted to a formidable challenge to the party's Big Lie. The rehabilitation of notions such as freedom, dignity, citizenship, sovereignty of the people, and pluralism provided a radical symbolic and practical-political challenge to the totalitarian world. Moreover, for the first time in the history of Communism in the region, there appeared a group of thinkers who by action and word tried “to fill the anomic space between the individual and the state.”28 In other words, a different future for societies under Communism could be glimpsed once intellectuals and sectors of the population were no longer silent. Civil society did matter in the context of 1989. Anne Applebaum stessed, in a review of Stephen Kotkin's Uncivil Society, that alternative forms of organization “helped form the crowds and then helped the crowds create change (impelling Václav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic, for example). Maybe more importantly, they affected the midlevel bureaucrats, the people who had been following orders all along but, with the threat of a Soviet invasion withdrawn, no longer wanted to do so. People like the policeman who spontaneously opened the barrier at the Berlin Wall, just to take one famous example, were moved to switch sides by, yes, the civil society that had been growing around them.”29 Even if the civil society was not as coherent, numerous, influential, or visible as the uncivil one, it provided a mobilization ideal in an environment dominated by coercion, cynicism, and paralysis. I would go as far as to say that the importance of civil society lay not particularly in its political weight, but in the fact that it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The dominant trend, however, was to regard the revolutions of 1989 as part of the universal democratic wave: a confirmation of the ultimate triumph of liberal democratic values over collectivist-Jacobin attempts to control human minds. It is thus clear that dissent was an expression not only of resistance to the dominant ideology of power, a repudiation of the power of ideology, but also an affirmation of a political community based on dialogue and open-mindedness: “Samizdat, and the creation of alternative cultures of resistance and dissent that were made possible by it, can be understood as the result of long-range historical processes and part and parcel of the trans-European project of modernity. After all, free expression made possible the creation and nurturing of the very idea of ‘the public’ and ‘public opinion,’ as Jürgen Habermas reminds us in his early masterpiece, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”30 Earlier, similar interpretations of the 1989 upheaval inspired the reflections on the future of liberal revolution by political philosopher Bruce Ackerman, for whom the dramatic changes in East and Central Europe were part of a global revival of liberalism. In other words, their success or failure would condition the future of liberalism in the West as well, because we live in a world of political, economic, and cultural-symbolic interconnectedness and interdependence.31
After decades of state aggression against the public sphere, these revolutions reinstituted the distinction between what belongs to the government and what is the territory of the individual. Emphasizing the importance of political and civic rights, they created space for the exercise of liberal democratic values. In some countries these values have become the constitutional foundation on which the institutions of an open society can be safely built. In others, the reference to pluralism remained somewhat perfunctory. But even in the less successful cases of democratic transition (Western Balkans), the old order, based on suspicion, fear, and mass hopelessness, is irrevocably defunct. In other words, while the ultimate result of these transitions is not clear, the revolutions have succeeded in their most important task: disbanding the Leninist regimes and permitting the citizens of these countries to fully engage in shaping their own destinies. In the end, “the return to Europe” heralded in 1989 stood for “normalcy and the modern way of life.” Echoing Judt, the vital step was made—Communism became the past.32
As I mentioned before, the crucial question to be addressed is: Were the events of 1989 genuine revolutions? If the answer is positive, then how do we assess their novelty in contrast to other similar events (the French Revolution of 1789 or the Hungarian one in 1956)? If the answer is negative (as some today like to argue), then it is legitimate to ask ourselves: What were they? Simply mirages, results of obscure intrigues of the beleaguered bureaucracies that mesmerized the world but did not fundamentally change the rules of the game? These last words, the rules of the game, are crucial for interpreting what happened in 1989; focusing on them, we can reach a positive assessment of those revolutions and their heritage. In my view, the upheaval in the East, and primarily in the Central European core countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. Instead of autocratic, one-party systems, the revolutions created emerging pluralist polities. They allowed the citizens of ideologically driven tyrannies (closed societies) to recover their main human and civic rights and to engage in the building of open societies.33 Historian Konrad Jarausch argues that the emphasis on people power typical of these revolutions substantiated their novelty: their peaceful path toward regime change against all odds.34 Moreover, instead of centrally planned command economies, after 1989, all these societies have embarked on creating market economies. In these efforts to meet the triple challenge (creating political pluralism, a market economy, and a public sphere, i.e., a civil society) some succeeded better and faster than others. But it cannot be denied that in all the countries that used to be referred to as the Soviet bloc, the once monolithic order was replaced by political and cultural diversity.35 While we still do not know whether all these societies have become properly functioning liberal democracies, it is nevertheless important to emphasize that in all of them, Leninist systems based on ideological uniformity, political coercion, dictatorship over human needs, and the suppression of civic rights have been dismantled.36