In a way, the revolutions of 1989 were an ironic vindication of Lenin's famous definition of a revolutionary situation: those at the top cannot rule in the old ways, and those at the bottom do not want to accept these ways any more. They were more than simple revolts because they attacked the very foundations of the existing systems and proposed a complete reorganization of society. It is perhaps worth remembering that Communist Parties were not in power as a result of legal rational procedures. No free elections brought them to the ruling positions; rather 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 enragés, 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 Miklós 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, Václav 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. Tamás 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 Kołakowski 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 in between: the past cannot and should not be denied, covered with a blanket of shameful oblivion. Confronting the traumatic past, primarily via remembrance and knowledge, results in achieving moral justice.47 Real crimes did take place in those countries, and the culprits should be identified and brought to justice. But legal procedures and any other form of legal retribution for past misdeeds should always take place on an individual basis, and preserving the presumption of innocence is a fundamental right for any human being, including former Communist apparatchiks. In this respect, with all its shortcomings, the lustration law in the Czech Republic offered a legal framework that prevented mob justice. In Romania, where no such law was passed and access to personal secret police files was systematically denied to citizens (while these files were used and abused by those in power), the political climate continued to be plagued by suspicion, murky intrigues, and dark conspiratorial visions.48
Even after NATO's eastward enlargement and the entry of most East European countries into the European Union (with the notable exception of the Western Balkans), there is a striking tension between pluralist-democratic and ethnocratic or radical parties and groups in these societies. Often during post-Communism, it seemed as if there was a yearning for new figures for the future, an expectation of the materialization of what Walter Benjamin called the “Messianic time.” The search for new eschatologies was more visible in the East, where all social contrasts are exacerbated by the breakdown of old identities. But the return of myth was part of the universal uneasiness with the cold, calculated, zweckmassig rationality of the iron cage: prophets and demagogues (often the same persons) did have audiences in the East as well as in the West. The latter is, however, better protected: institutions function impersonally, procedures are deeply embedded in civic cultures. In the post-Communist world they are still under construction or yet to entirely meet requirements of a fully functioning liberal democracy. Things are of course extremely complex: there is a feeling of exhaustion, of too much rhetoric, a sentiment that politicians are there simply to cheat. On the other hand, it is precisely this exhaustion of traditional worldviews, this postmodern syndrome of repudiating grandiose teleological constructs in favor of minidiscourses that is conducive to ennui and yearning for alternative visions that would not reject boldness and inventiveness. Yes, this is a secularized world, but the profane substitutes for traditional mythologies still have a future.
After the extinct period of “legitimation from the top” (through ideological rituals of simulated participation, mobilization, and regimentation), in most of these countries nascent legal-procedural legitimation was paralleled (or countered) by something that, echoing Eric Hobsbawm's insightful analysis of the new discourses of hatred, could be called legitimation from the past.49 The more inchoate and nebulous this past, the more aggressive, feverish, and intolerant were the proponents of the neoromantic mythologies. The rise of nationalism as a compensation for perceived failure and externally imposed marginality, as flight from the complexities of modernity into the politics of collective salvation, was linked to this ambiguous Leninist legacy of distorted modernity and dictated human needs, and to the pre-Leninist ethnicoriented cultural forms in the region. In other words, the discomfiture with democratic challenges and the prevailing constitutional pluralist model was linked not only to the transition from Leninism but to the larger problem of legitimation and the existence of competing visions of the common good, as well as the coalescence of movements and parties around different and frequently rival symbols of collective identity. To put it simply, the post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeal of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. This point was correctly raised by S. N. Eisenstadt in a path-breaking analysis of the revolutions of 1989: “These problems, however, do not simply arise out of the breakdown of ‘traditional’ empires, the transition from some ‘premodern’ to fully modern, democratic society, or from a distorted modernity to a relatively tranquil stage which may well signal some kind of ‘end of history.’ The turbulence evident in Eastern Europe today bears witness to some of the problems and tensions inherent in modernity itself, attesting to the potential fragility of the whole project of modernity.”50