ANNUS MIRABILIS 1989
The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges them, truly world-historical events, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after 1989.6 The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the idea of intrasystemic reforms, it had become clear that Communism did not have resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, even against, the existing order.7 The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union, consummated before the incredulous eyes of the world in December 1991, was directly and intimately related to the earlier dissolution of the East European “outer empire,” provoked by the revolutions of 1989. It is now obvious that the historical cycle inaugurated by World War I, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, and the long European ideological warfare (or rather global civil war) that followed had come to an end.8
The road to 1989-91 was prepared by the less visible, often marginal, but in the long run critically significant workings of what we now call civil society (including Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, unofficial peace, environmental, and human rights groups in the GDR, Democratic Opposition in Hungary).9 In examining the wreckage of Leninism, we should thus avoid any one-dimensional, monistic approach. There is no single factor that explains the collapse: economics as much as politics and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. But these were not autocracies: they derived their only claim to legitimacy from the Marxist-Leninist “holy writ,” and once this ideological aura ceased to function, the whole edifice started to falter.10 They were, to use sociologist Daniel Chirot’s apt term, “tyrannies of certitude,” and it was precisely the gradual loss of ideological commitment among the ruling elites, once a truly messianic ardor, that accelerated the inner disintegration of Leninist regimes.11 By 1989, three central myths of Leninism had collapsed: its infallibility, its invincibility, and its irreversibility.
Under the circumstances, any analysis of the year 1989 should be framed by two crucial theoretical hypotheses. The first, which constitutes the core of Stephen Kotkin’s argument in the much discussed volume The Uncivil Society, is that by 1980s, the political elites of the Communist states were in disarray, experiencing loss of self-confidence, rampant cynicism, and ideological decay. Eastern Europe was ruled by uncivil societies (Communist bureaucratic castes) beset with insecurity, anxiety, despondency, and demoralization. They had lost their self-confidence and were looking for alternative sources of legitimization. However, I would like to point to a second dimension that enabled the watershed of 1989. Communism in the region underwent the exhaustion of the utopian impulse. To use Ken Jowitt’s formulation, the charismatic impersonalism of Leninist parties fell into disrepute. In spite of Mikhail Gorbachev’s endless injunctions of “revisionist” ideological zeal, late socialism failed to reinvent the heroic mission of its central agent of progress in history: the Communist Party.
To return to Kotkin, I would contend that indeed “the collapse of Communism was a collapse of establishments”12 Nevertheless, when talking about the establishment one should also understand the essential myth of a charismatic party mobilizing a revolutionary movement to radically transform society for the achievement of socialism. By 1989, across East-Central Europe one found a complex picture of waning faith in utopia (though by no means extinct—e.g., Nicolae Ceaușescu died singing the International) combined with routinization engineered by pragmatic elites (think of leaders such as Károly Grósz in Hungary, Mieczysław Rakowski in Poland, Petar Mladenov in Bulgaria, or Hans Modrow in the GDR). All Communist regimes seemed to undergo a process of indefinite corrosion. But once a new type of leadership emerged at the Moscow center, one that gradually grew disenchanted with the radically transformative logic of the Soviet past, systemic collapse accelerated at a formidable pace. Tony Judt cogently pointed out that “Lenin’s distinctive contribution to European history had been to kidnap the centrifugal political heritage of European radicalism and channel it into power through an innovative system of monopolized controclass="underline" unhesitatingly gathered and forcefully retained in one place.”13 When the influence of this heritage in the arithmetic of power within the Soviet bloc waned, erosion gave way to the crumbling of apparently unshakable establishments.
Precisely because they ended an historical cycle and ushered in a new one, the importance of these revolutions cannot be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism, and policed dictatorship.14 Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically skeptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least in their first stage, liberal and nonutopian.15 Unlike traditional revolutions, they did not originate in a millenialist vision of the perfect society, and they rejected the role of any self-appointed vanguard in directing the activities of the masses. They spoke a new political vernacular: “the ‘rights talk’ as a way of thinking about politics.”16 Moreover, no political party directed their spontaneous momentum, and in their early stages they even insisted on the need to create new political forms, different from ideologically defined, traditional party differentiations. At the same time, as one observer of the events between 1989 and 1991 remarked, “Dissidents did not take up their cudgels against former revolutionaries or their organizations like the CPSU—they demanded an end to the state of revolution.”17
HOPES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS
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