1. See Jan Urban, “Europe's Darkest Scenario,” Washington Post, Outlook Section, October 11, 1992, pp. 1-2. See G. M. Tamás, “Post-Fascism,” in East European Constitutional Review (Summer 2000): 48-56.
2. Adam Michnik, “The Velvet Restoration,” in Revolutions of 1989, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 244-51.
3. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998, paperback 2009).
4. For further interpretations of the implications of Jowitt's pioneering approach, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Howard, and Rudra Sil, eds., World Order after Leninism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
5. For a thorough analysis of the uses of the past in post-Communist Europe, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), esp. “After the Fall: 1989-2005,” pp. 637-776; and Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 180.
6. See William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
7. In this chapter I elaborate upon and revisit the main ideas I put forward in my introduction to Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999); as well as Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; revised and expanded paperback, with new afterword, Free Press, 1993). A previous version of this chapter appeared in Contemporary European History 18, no. 3 (2009): 271-88. I developed these ideas in a volume published in Romanian, Despre 1989 (București: Humanitas, 2009). See also Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Demise of Leninism and the Future of Liberal Values,” in Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 221-42; and Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan Iacob, eds., The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History (New York and Budapest: CEU Press, 2012).
8. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-91 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 461-99; see also George Lichtheim, “The European Civil War,” in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37; Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 666-704.
9. See John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
10. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 1994).
11. Daniel Chirot, “What Happened in Eastern Europe in 1989,” in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 19-50; see also Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).
12. Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), p. 143.
13. Judt, Postwar, p. 584.
14. See Václav Havel's reflections on post-1989 politics in Summer Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) and To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007).
15. For the exhaustion of ideological-style secular religions, see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991); and S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes,” in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 89-107.
16. Judt, Postwar, p. 564.
17. Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky quoted by Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 41.
18. Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
19. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
20. Jeffrey Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). Also by the same author, “Rethinking the Legacy of Central European Dissidence,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 119-30.
21. Jeffrey Isaac, “Shades of Gray: Revisiting the Meanings of 1989,” in The Beginning and the End, ed. Tismaneanu and Iacob, pp. 555-74.
22. William Echikcson, Lighting the Night (New York: William Morrow, 1990); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; Andrew Nagorski, The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Ivo Banac, ed. Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).
23. Barbara J. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe: An Emerging Historiography,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 321-22.
24. Horvath, The Legacy, pp. 1-2. Elena Bonner was a major human rights activist, widow of the celebrated dissident and physicist Andrei Sakharov.
25. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
26. Judt, Postwar, p. 563.
27. Timothy Garton Ash, “Conclusions,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, ed. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 398.
28. Tony Judt, Postwar, p. 695.
29. Anne Applebaum, “1989 and All That,” Slate, November 9, 2009, http://www.anneapplebaum.com/, accessed August 6, 2011.
30. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent,” p. 349.
31. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).
32. Judt, Postwar, p. 630.
33. Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution.
34. Jarausch further stated that “in contrast to all the earlier failures, the success of 1989 might be interpreted as a result of mounting civil resistance which initially sought to democratize socialism but ultimately dared to abolish it altogether.” See Konrad Jarausch, “People Power? Towards a Historical Explanation of 1989,” in The End and the Beginning, ed. Tismaneanu and Iacob, p. 123.
35. See Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), esp. pp. 29-105.
36. See Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Markus, Dictatorship over Needs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).
37. Giuseppe di Palma, “Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe,” World Politics 44, no. 1 (October 1991): 49-80. In the same issue, see Timur Kuran, “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European of 1989,” pp. 7-48. Kuran identifies Václav Havel and this author as among the very few commentators who “came close to predicting a major change” (p. 12).
38. Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
39. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 111.
40. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation. For post-Communist politics, see Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2006).
41. G. M. Tamás, “The Legacy of Dissent,” in Tismaneanu, The Revolutions of 1989, pp. 181-97.
42. Judt, Postwar, p. 695.
43. Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 165.
44. Kotkin, Uncivil Society, p. xvii.
45. Judt, Postwar, p. 563.
46. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” pp. 163-66.
47. See A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
48. For the turbulent experiences with decommunization, see Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghost after Communism (New York: Random House, 1995); Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe's Democratic Transitions (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Brian Grodsky, The Costs of Justice: How New Leaders Respond to Previous Rights Abuses (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University, 2010).
49. See Palma, “Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society,” 49-80; Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books, December 16, 1993, pp. 62-64.
50. S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 35, included in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1999.
51. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000).
52. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 51-65. For the other two terms mentioned, see Guillermo O'Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5 (January 1994): 55-69; and Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November-December 1997): 22-41. Milada Anna Vachudova discusses the relevance of the three concepts for the process of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe in Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
53. Karen Dawisha, “Electocracies and the Hobbesian Fishbowl of Postcommunist Politics,” in Between Past and Future, ed. Antohi and Tismaneanu, pp. 291-305. Also see the special issue of East European Politics and Societies 13, no. 2 (Spring 1999), especially pieces by Valerie Bunce, Daniel Chirot, Grzegorz Ekiert, Gail Kligman, and Katherine Verdery.
54. See Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Postmodern Political Condition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism; Kołakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). These philosophers have long since noticed the dissolution of the “redemptive paradigms” and the rise of the alternative, parallel discourses, although they did not anticipate the ongoing rise of the narratives of hatred and revenge.
55. See Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 68-69.
56. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Recent contributions on the legacy approach focusing upon role of the burden of the past in post-Communist development: Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Anna Grzymała-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
57. See Václav Havel, “Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 1993, p. 8.
58. See John Rawls' discussion of criteria for assessing civic freedom and the idea of a well-ordered society in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 30-40.
59. Quoted in Michal Cichy, “Requiem for the Moderate Revolutionist,” East European Politics and Societies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 145.
60. Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, ed. Müller, p. 277. The activity of a Truth Commission represents “nonjudicial truth-seeking as a transitional justice tool” (Priscilla Hayner). It can therefore set the stage for future prospects for justice. See Priscilla B. Hayner,Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002).
61. For seminal contributions to this discussion, see Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995); Ronald Dworkin et al., From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of János Kis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004); János Kis, Politics as a Moral Problem (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).
62. See the commentary by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Paul-Dragoș Aligică, “Romania's Parliamentary Putsch,” Wall Street Journal (Europe), April 20, 2007. On May 19, 2007, Băsescu overwhelmingly won in a national referendum (74.5 percent voted against his impeachment).
63. This “synchronization” was the thrust of interwar Romanian liberal theorist Eugen Lovinescu's approach to the country's modernization.
64. Karen Dawisha, “Communism as a Lived System of Ideas in Contemporary Russia,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 3 (2005): 46393. Directly related to Dawisha's insight is the problem of nostalgia for the Communist past. For example, Alexei Yurchak details the mechanisms of socialization in the late years of the Soviet Union, emphasizing the depth of integration in the socialist milieu despite the latter's outwardly seemingly incremental nature. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
65. See Michael McFaul, Nikolai Petrov, and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Reform (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); Peter Reddaway, “Russia on the Brink,” New York Review of Books, January 28, 1993, pp. 30-35. Reddaway notices a multilayered feeling of moral and spiritual injury related to loss of empire and damaged identity: “Emotional wounds as deep as these tend to breed anger, hatred, self-disgust and aggressiveness. Such emotions can only improve the political prospects for the nationalists and neo-communists, at any rate for a time.” Recently Reddaway has become even more pessimistic: Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001).
66. Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Transition to What? Legacies and Reform Trajectories after Communism,” in World Order after Leninism, ed. Tismaneanu, Howard, and Sil.
67. Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 41. A few years ago I discussed the role of eclectism in the ideological milieu of Central and Eastern Europe: Vladimir Tismaneanu, “In Praise of Eclectism,” The Good Society 11, no. 1 (2002).
68. Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “The Weimar/Russia Comparison,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 3 (July-September 1997): 252-81. On the failed democratization process in Russia, see M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
69. See Martin Krygier, “Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited” The Good Society, 11, no. 1 (2002): 6-15.
70. Judt, Postwar, p. 692.
71. Martin Palouš, “Post-Totalitarian Politics and European Philosophy,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1993): 162-63.
72. Ralf Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution, and Civil Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). For an update on Dahrendorfs predictions and evaluation about Europe after the revolution, see his new introduction and postscript in the second edition of his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Transaction Books, 2005).
73. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), p. 84.
74. Joachim Gauck, “Dealing with the STASI Past,” in “Germany in Transition,” special issue, Daedalus (Winter 1994): 277-284.
75. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader, eds., Pieces of the Puzzle: Keywords on Reconciliation and Transitional Justice (Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2005), pp. 34-38.
76. Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patrotism (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 97-119.
77. Gesine Schwan, Politics and Guilt: The Destructive Power of Silence, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 54-134.
78. Herman Lübbe argued in 1983 that this communicative silence has allowed federal Germany to make a successful transition to democracy after 1945. See Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme im Reichstagsgebäude zu Berlin: Referate und Diskussionen. Ein Protokoll, ed. Martin Broszat et al. (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), p. 329-49.
79. Judt, Postwar, p. 830.
80. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 234.
81. The full English version of the speech by Romania's president Traian Băsescu before the joint session of the Romanian parliament on December 18, 2006, can be found on www.presidency.ro (section “Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania”—CPADCR). The most vocal critics of this condemnation have been Vadim Tudor's Greater Romania Party (and its viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Western weekly) and the Social Democratic Party chaired by Mircea Geoană, former ambassador to Washington and foreign minister (2001-2004). Iliescu is the honorary chairman of this party.
82. Leon Aron analyzed the manner in which the Putin administration is sponsoring and imposing the creation of a “new Russian history” that relativizes or altogether ignores the exterminist experience of Sovietism. See Leon Aron, “The Problematic Pages: To Understand Putin, We Must Understand His View of Russian History,” New Republic, September 24, 2008. Also see Orlando Figes, “Putin vs. the Truth,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April, 30, 2009); and Masha Lipman, “Russia, Again Evading History,” Washington Post, June 20, 2009. Also see David Brandenberger, “A New Short Course? A. V. Filippov and the Russian State's Search for a ‘Usable Past,'” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 4 (2009): 825-33. See also the responses to this essay in the same journal: Vladimir Solonari, “Normalizing Russia, Legitimizing Putin,” pp. 83546; Boris N. Mironov, “The Fruits of a Bourgeois Education,” pp. 847-60; and Elena Zubkova, “The Filippov Syndrome,” pp. 861-68.
83. Frederick C. Corney, “What Is to Be Done with Soviet Russia? The Politics of Proscription and Possibility,” Journal of Policy History 21, no. 3 (2009): 276.
84. Dominick LaCapra called this phenomenon “fetishized anti-Semitism, that is, anti-Semitism in the absence of minimal presence of Jews.” See Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians' Debate—Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Winter 1997): 80-112.
85. Charles Simic, “The Spider's Web,” New Republic, October 25, 1993, p. 19.
86. Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 14.
87. Yael Tamir, The Enigma of Nationalism: Essays in the Psychological (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 430.
88. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 133.
89. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in Memory and Power, ed. Müller, p. 172.
90. Judt, Postwar, p. 768
91. Amos Funkenstein, “History, Counterhistory and Narrative,” in Probing the Limits of Representation—Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 66-81.
92. I refer here to Georges Mink's distinction among “partis consensuelists, tribunitiens et querelleurs” in “Les partis politiques de l'Europe centrale postcommuniste: Etat des lieux et essai de typologie,” L'Europe Centrale et Orientale en 1992, Documentation française, pp. 21-23.
93. In his seminal Postwar, Tony Judt assessed that “seventy years of energetic claims to the contrary notwithstanding—that there was indeed no Communist society as such: only a wilting state and its anxious citizens” (p. 658).
94. For Jowitt's first statement, see New World Disorder. The last were made during his keynote address, “Stalinist Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Eastern Europe,” at the conference “Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe and the Dynamics of the Soviet Bloc” (November 29-30, 2007, Washington, D.C.), included in Stalinism Revisited, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu.
95. Kotkin, Uncivil Society, p. xvii.