Communism was indeed a fantastic scenario of human self-aggrandizement, an exercise in unbounded magic and self-delusion, an attempt to escape from the constraints of alleged bourgeois pettiness and an offer for millions to vicariously live in “another country.” If one maintains a number of ethical criteria in interpreting the main traumatic experiences of the last century, it is hard not to agree with Anne Applebaum:
Now, at the end of the twentieth century, it finally makes sense to look back at the evolution of communism as a single phenomenon. While we have not perhaps reached the end of the end of the history of communism, the story already has a clear beginning and a clear middle: it is now possible to trace the direct lines of influence, ideological and financial, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chih Minh to Pol Pot, from Castro to the MPLA in Angola. It is also possible to trace the links between their remarkably similar systems of repression…. Communism now looks bad enough by itself.107
Undoubtedly, for long decades Karl Marx’s ideas were distorted almost beyond recognition. But it is impossible to completely separate the Bolshevik praxis from these ideas. There is a temptation to present the Soviet experiment as an aberration in the history of the revolutionary, socialist left, and to exempt the basic Marxist schema from any culpability for this experiment. Those so tempted (from French Socialist politician Jacques Attali to influential American historian Geoff Eley) often invoke the role of modern social democratic movements and parties in advancing the causes of both political democracy and social justice. Yet the undeniably profound achievements of social democracy in the West have more to do with the legacies of Ferdinand Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein, Léon Blum and Willy Brandt, Olaf Palme and Michael Harrington—all committed democrats—than with the revolutionary chiliasm and dialectical critique of law and morality that are deeply rooted within Marxism and can be found in the Communist Manifesto.
Marxism failed in the twentieth century because it underestimated the existential quandaries of human existence, the needs of many for deep spiritual or cultural sources of meaning, and thus the profound importance of the human right to privacy. It aimed to create a perfect society whose materialization in the Communist experiments, from Moscow to Phnom Penh, came closer to Kafka’s penal colony than to the paradisiacal visions of traditional utopians.108 The myth of a singular world proletarian revolution has long since been dispelled. It was not this myth, however, that made Communism such a poignantly seductive ideology. More important was the promise of universal transformation, the promise that this miserable Vale of Tears will be replaced by an Arcadian world in which all individuals will be happy and free.
From the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach to the last line of the Manifesto, Marx issued a persistent call to mobilize understanding and harness the forces of modernity, all in the name of a radical transformation of the world, a reconciliation of man with nature and history. Such a totalizing vision no doubt possesses great intellectual and moral appeal. But if we have learned anything from the past century, it is that the domain of morality and politics is a domain of finitude, difference, and limit. The riddles of history have no final solutions worth seeking. Like Germans after Hitler, like Italians after Mussolini, like Chileans after Pinochet, East Europeans have engaged in efforts to reckon with a traumatic past. This necessarily involves analyses of the ideological blueprints that galvanized murderous political passions, catalyzed mass resentment, and organized nihilistic social energies in disastrous forms of social engineering.109 When living for almost a century in the company of the Devil, one cannot anymore find refuge in angelic reverence. The reconciliation and healing of a nation besmirched by the bloody mire of evil depend on the recognition and non-negotiability of human dignity as a primordial moral truth of the new society.
CHAPTER 6
Malaise and Resentment
Threats to Democracy in Post-Communist Societies
Societies produce stereotypes (which are the height of artifice), and then consume them as commonplace (which is the height of naturalness). That is how bad faith can pass for good conscience.
…shared hatreds make for strange bedfellowships.
The over two decades that have passed since the collapse of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe have proved that more than one possible future could be reasonably canvassed for the region. Even when many hastened to predict the worst, the likelihood of nightmarish scenarios, pace Jan Urban or G. M. Tamás, was somewhat dubious.1 Bellum omnium contra omnes, a state of wild and protracted anarchy, and the loss of recently acquired civic rights in favor of Stalino-Fascist simulations of cohesion and collective will are not in the offing in most post-Leninist states. The Milosevic- style expansionist chauvinism has not been emulated outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia, although similar outbursts of hatred and intolerance have accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet Union, especially in the Caucasus. Human rights have been trampled in Belarus under the plebiscitary regime headed by Alexander Lukashenko, but this remains rather an exceptional case among European post-Communist states. Pluralism seems to have settled solidly, and democratic procedures are now widely recognized, accepted, and practiced. The general landscape after Communism’s demise, however, is one of disenchantment, dispirited political cultures, the rise of new collectivisms, marginalization of former heroes, and the return of the former Communists. Adam Michnik’s term for this trend was “the velvet restoration.”2 I proposed the “velvet counterrevolution” to indicate the direction of this phenomenon, especially its strong anti-intellectual and illiberal tendencies.3 The conservative-populist turn in Hungarian politics under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after 2009 has resulted in bitter controversies regarding perceived limitations to freedom of the press and ethnocentric approaches to the nature of national identity.
Central and Eastern European societies have evolved from authoritarian, extremely centralized, and bureaucratic Leninist regimes toward democratic forms of political and economic organization.4 To focus exclusively on their difficulties during the transition period is to miss the drama of social and political experimentation in that region. More than twenty years after 1989, what remains at stake is the validity of the liberal democratic paradigm in traditionally authoritarian societies (“What can they look back to?” historian Tony Judt once asked, correctly). In other words, it is important to identify the building blocks on which open societies can be established in order to function properly. We must assess the trajectory of the great transformations unleashed by the extraordinary events of 1989: Are the newly awakened societies propitious to pluralism, or does the upper hand belong to illiberal, antimodern forces? In 2002, Judt stated that, in the context of the European Union accession, for purposes of European moral reconstruction, “the crucial reference point for Europe now will be the years immediately preceding the events of 1989.”5 As we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of that year’s revolutions, we have the possibility of contemplating the first two post-Communist decades’ illusions, expectations, and balance sheet and of speculating on the years to come.