The CPSU leader became a victim of his own policies because he underestimated the detachment between the will for revolutionary change in the Soviet bloc and the preservation of the organizational big picture in the area. He overlooked what I would call, employing Mark Kramer’s terminology, “the demonstration effects” of empowerment. Gorbachev undercut Marxist-Leninist ideology. He internalized the vulnerability of the Soviet regime. He diminished his leverage on curbing unrest within both the bloc and the federation. He misinterpreted the East European civil societies’ visions of regime-transformation and then was taken aback by the contagiousness of democratization—essentially an alternative to his vision. Following Michnik’s statement, “the perestroika virus” was indeed the last ingredient necessary to open the floodgates of dissent. But also, the virus of the East European reinvention of politics irreparably subverted “the Gorbachev phenomenon,” amounting to a permanent challenge that in the end pushed systemic change into collapse of the system. The transnational, intrabloc, cross-border “demonstration effect” of social movements, political platforms, and state policies accelerated the crystallization and articulation of nonviolent revolutionary consciousness, first among the intelligentsia and then in the population at large. In contrast to earlier crises in the socialist camp, during the 1989-1991 events, people both knew what was being demonstrated and understood the ideas diffused. Mark Kramer points to the fact that this situation fostered parallels, analogies, and conscientiousness among those mobilized in the revolutionary process. The “tightness” of the socialist camp, which was previously enforced by a Soviet interventionist regime (under the Brezhnev doctrine), now proved the catalyst for the lightning speed of change and for the flux of ideas about it:
Having begun as a largely unidirectional phenomenon in 1986–1988, the spillover became bidirectional in 1989 but then shifted back to a unidirectional pattern in 1990–1991. Unlike in 1986–1988, however, the direction of the spillover in 1990–1991 was mainly from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union…. The paradox of the changes that occurred under Gorbachev is that, from 1989 on, this same structure facilitated rather than impeded the spread of political unrest and democratizing influences from Eastern Europe into the USSR—the very sorts of influences that eventually undermined the Soviet regime and the Soviet state.113
Revisionist intellectuals who have done so much to subvert the ideological façade of Communist regimes ultimately abandoned their illusions about the reformability of the system from within the ruling party. Given the density of the Soviet-East European environment, their apostasy created the premises for seeing democracy beyond any arrangement that a revolution from above could bring. They turned instead toward rediscovering the virtues of dialogue and the advantages of civil discourse. According to Zubok, the formation of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a breakthrough caused by a shift of consciousness “from the idealization of the ‘golden age of Bolshevism’ and praise of ‘Leninist norms’ to the embrace of ‘universal moral principles.’”114 Members of the newborn democratic opposition advocated the need to create an alternative politics. Hungarian writer George Konrad spoke of the emergence of antipolitics as a challenge to the apocryphal version of politics embodied by the system: “The ideology of the democratic opposition shares with religion the belief that the dignity of the individual personality (in both oneself and the other person) is a fundamental value not requiring any further demonstration. The autonomy and solidarity of human beings are the two basic and mutually complementary values to which democratic movement relates other values.”115
Bitter experiences in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia convinced these critics that the crux of the matter was to go beyond the logic of the system. Revisionism’s crucial contribution to putting an end to Marxist-Leninist self-satisfaction was undeniable, but its main weakness was submission to the rules dictated by officialdom. The new radical opponents of totalitarianism saw revisionism as a half-hearted plea for change, though it was heretical to the regimes’ ideological zealots. These writings were esoteric, especially if contrasted with dissident literature, and they held little appeal to the large public. However, the most important fallacy of revisionism was that it generated a criticism that was still encoded in the language of power and the logic of Soviet-type dictatorships. There was no doubt, however, that the revisionist ideas of the 1960s catalyzed the emergence of the counterculture of dissent. Disenchantment with Marxism was an opportunity to rethink the radical legacy and reassess Jacobin ideals of total community.
In the struggle between the state and civil society, it was the latter’s task to invent a new principle of power that would respect the rights and aspirations of the individual. This counterprinciple was rooted in the independent life of society, in what Václav Havel aptly called the power of the powerless. A new epoch came of age. It was the inception of the all-out debunking of the duplicitous infrastructure of Communist power. First Solzhenitsyn, then East and Central European dissidents announced their decision to restore the normative value of truth. Refusing official lies and reinstating truth in its own right has turned out to be a more successful strategy than revisionist criticism from within. Dissent in East Central Europe subverted Leninism using two trajectories: “the self-conscious creation of a site of resistance,” also called “parallel polis,” “second society,” “antipolitics,” and so on, and “the twin strategies of new evolutionism and non-violence” (such as Jacek Kuroń’s “self-limitation” or János Kis’s “radical reformism”).116 For the first time in the twentieth century, dissidents rejected emergency revolutionary status (privilege) as a justification for (state) violence in societal transformation. In the process, they also forced Western intellectuals to face their own illusions rooted in the totalitarian fascination with armed utopia. Furthermore, the dissident movement irreversibly destroyed the self-constructed, self-blinding, and utterly obsolete veil of ignorance concerning the human cost of revolution. In the case of France, the land of seemingly unending engagement with revolutionary privilege, “in overwhelming, searing detail, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was the indictment that, in the words of Georges Nivat, ‘broke us.’”117
The ultimate goal of Communism, overcoming politics in a fully unified body social—the celebrated “leap into the kingdom of freedom”—was challenged by a moral imperative of political responsibility. Concepts such as central planning, the leading role of the party, the principle of class struggle on the world stage, and the pyramid of soviets were legitimated in historical terms, “a process that was greater than what they, as temporal forms of organization, represented.”118
In a sense, Gorbachev hoped the party would recapture its soul in the struggle for the modernization of Soviet political culture but found that the times made such endeavors futile. Only when it was too late, in July 1991, at a moment of devastating ideological disarray within the CPSU, did he urge “a decisive break with outmoded ideological dogmas and stereotypes.” He failed to look for solutions outside the party. He refused to adopt the roundtable strategy—the symbol of the 1989 Central European peaceful revolutions. He envisaged transition to democracy by means of socialism (yet incoherently articulated), but in a pluralistic society his vision was not the only one competing in the public square. It is now obvious that the main strength of Communist regimes was their ability to maintain a climate of fear and hopelessness; their main weakness was a failure to muzzle the human mind. I do not underestimate the intrinsic economic problems of these regimes, but their main vulnerability was the failure to generate confidence. Glasnost was an attempt to solve the insoluble, a desperate effort to create a less suffocating environment without changing the principle of party domination. The upheavals of 1989 and 1991 showed that the fabric was perhaps softer, but the straitjacket had remained unchanged, generating the ultimate stand—complete popular systemic rebuke.