These facts should be kept in mind especially when writers question the success of these revolutions by referring exclusively to their ambiguous legacies. The “reactionary rhetoric” brilliantly examined by Albert Hirschman uses arguments of futility, jeopardy, and perversity to delegitimize change per se or make it look impossible or undesirable.19 This line of reasoning, often encountered in the more sophisticated approaches, argues along the following logic: the postrevolutionary environment has unleashed long-dormant ugly features of national political cultures, including chauvinism, racism, residual Fascism, ethno-clerical fundamentalism, and militarism, and it is therefore more dangerous than the status quo ante; or, nothing really changed and the power-holders (party-state bureaucrats) have remained the same, simply affixing to themselves new masks; or, no matter what the women and men of the revolutions of 1989 had hoped, the results of their endeavors have been extremely disappointing, allowing political scoundrels, crooks, and demagogues to use the new opportunities to establish their domination. If there is a main moral of the great revolutionary drama that unfolded in Eastern Europe in 1989, it is that history is never a one-way avenue, and that the future is always pregnant with more than one alternative. In other words, there is no ironclad determinism governing mankind’s history. Indeed, as Jeffrey Isaac argues, the revolutions of 1989 had not only more than one cause but also more than one meaning, and they proposed a challenging agenda not only for the post-Communist societies but for Western democracies as well.20 Moreover, we should focus on their pluralist heritage and enduring impact on both Eastern Europe and the world. Isaac warned that the “we” who celebrate the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 ought to do so with circumspection and with a sense of self-l imitation because of the complexities behind the “normality” of post-Communist societies.21
The meaning of those events, the role of dissidents (critical, unregimented intellectuals) in the resurrection of long-paralyzed civic societies, the overall crisis of those regimes, and the decline of the Communist Parties’ hegemony have generated an enormous interpretative literature. The initial temptation was to acclaim the role of dissidents in the breakdown of Soviet-style regimes and the rise of civic initiatives from below.22 The dissident as a hero turned out to be a political myth in Central and Eastern Europe, but the myth raised these societies to a higher level of moral self-awareness. In my view, it is less relevant how large or numerous a dissident group or movement was. I remember an intervention by the former dissident and human rights activist, the late Mihai Botez, at a roundtable organized by Freedom House in 1988, in which he insisted that the deficit of visibility does not necessarily mean the absence of civil society, even in a country like Romania under Ceausescu. There were many informal networks of communication between Romanian intellectuals. The November 1987 anti-Communist Brașov workers’ protest movement was also an expression of deep-seated social unrest. In an insightful review of the historiography of the revolutions of 1989, Barbara Falk insisted that “there is no clear-cut line between resistance and dissent—it is more of a continuum or full spectrum.” The nature, impact, and role of this continuum of resistance in the demise of Communist regimes await more in-depth research and analysis. I consider her characterization of this spectrum a telling starting point:
At the pole of “resistance” lie activities such as absenteeism, alcoholism or drug abuse, and the preference for personal travel and sporting activities rather than trade-union- or workplace-sponsored events. Closer to the middle would be private or family discussions on alternative historiography, listening to a banned radio broadcast, writing an essay “for the drawer,” publicly telling jokes, or reading samizdat. Closer to the middle on the other side, toward the pole of dissent, would be activities taken in support or in the “gray zone”—agreeing with a petition, participating in a pilgrimage perhaps, or discussing with friends a particular broadcast or spreading news obtained there. Finally, at the “dissent” end of the continuum is the production and distribution of samizdat, public protest, active involvement in independent groups outside the control of the party-state—all of which risked regime persecution and/or imprisonment. One could also further differentiate between individual moral resistance or organized opposition—particularly by the late 1980s or in states such as Poland where the opposition was extremely well organized, expansive, and multidimensional.23
We must also not overlook that what mattered were the perceptions of the dissidents’ role among the elites (i.e., the so-called intelligentsia) and within sectors of the population, in the grey area (bystanders). It was no coincidence that as soon as the Ceaușescu regime fell apart in Romania, the new ruling group, the leaders of the National Salvation Front, made sure to convey the message to the population that its ruling council had incorporated the few dissident intellectuals in the country known to the people via the Radio Free Europe broadcasts. Dissidents could legitimize post-1989 rule; their presence and ideas gave the events significance. It was meaningful not only that Communism collapsed or that the elite imploded, but also how the story unfolded and which ideas and principles filled in the void after its demise. For example, in the Soviet Union, Ludmila Alexeyeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, declared at the height of perestroika that “we take no offence at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.” After the failed coup d’état of August 1991, one of its most ardent supporters, the nationalist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov, bitterly stated that “the conception of Elena Bonner has won.”24
The revolutions of 1989 were first and foremost revolutions of the mind, and critical intellectuals played the role of “revolutionary subjects.” Euphoric accounts of the revolutionary wave, often compared to the 1848 Spring of the Nations, abounded, and Timothy Garton Ash offered some of the most eloquent articles along this line in his gripping contributions to the New York Review of Books, later collected in the volume The Magic Lantern.25 Whether the term revolutions is the most appropriate to describe these changes is of course an open question. What is beyond dispute is the world-historical impact of the transformations inaugurated by the events of 1989 and the inauguration of a new vision of the political. In the twentieth century, many intellectuals engaged in a frantic search for utopia and frequently participated in the legitimation of ideology-driven despotisms: “It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffection of Europe’s intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche.”26 According to Garton Ash,
The year 1989 left realities. Yet there was something new; there was a big new idea, and that was the revolution itself—the idea of the non-revolutionary revolution, the evolutionary revolution. The motto of 1989 could come from Lenin’s great critic Eduard Bernstein: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.”… So this was a revolution that was not about the what but about the how. That particular motto of peaceful, sustained, marvelously inventive, massive civil disobedience channeled into an oppositional elite that was itself prepared to negotiate and to compromise with the existing powers, the powers that were (in short, the roundtable)—that was the historical novelty of 1989. Where the guillotine is a symbol of 1789, the roundtable is a symbol of 1989.27