It is thus tempting to assume that the major difficulties in the articulation of ideologically differentiated political platforms in Eastern Europe were connected not only to the absence or weakness of clear-cut interest groups and lobbies, but also to increasing atrophy of the Western sources of inspiration (“models”) for such endeavors. The famous law of political synchronization (of the East with the West) may this time play against the revival of ideological politics.63 The difficulty of identifying clear divisions between left and right polarization in post-Communist regimes is linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of traditional taxonomies. As Adam Michnik and other former dissidents have often argued, the question after 1989 is not whether one is left or right of center, but whether one is “West of center.” Liberal values are sometimes seen as left-oriented simply because they emphasize secularism, tolerance, and individual rights. At the same time, as shown by the new radical-authoritarian trends (often disguised as pro-democratic) in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and elsewhere, lingering habits inherited from Leninist and pre-Leninist authoritarianism continue: intolerance, exclusiveness, rejection of all compromises, extreme personalization of political discourse, and the search for charismatic leadership. Karen Dawisha has identified a few of the features of the “surviving past” of what she called “communism as a lived system”: the respect for centralized power, a large sphere for private interactions, and horizontal networks of mutual cooperation and informal connections, and finally, fixation on a supposed “separateness” from the West.64 We deal with the same impotent fury against the failure of the state to behave as a “good father,” part of a patrimonial legacy characteristic, to different degrees, of all these societies (less so perhaps in Bohemia). Peter Reddaway correctly labeled this a yearning for the state as a “nanny.”65
For instance, Romanians felt regret not for Nicolae Ceaușescu but rather for the age of predictability and frozen stability, when the party-state took care of everything. For many, the leap into freedom has turned out to be excruciatingly painful. What disappeared was the certainty about the limits of the permissible, the petrified social ceremonies that defined an individual’s life itinerary: former prisoners are now free to choose between alternative futures, and this choice is insufferably difficult for many of them. The Leninist psychological leftovers can be detected at both ends of the political spectrum, and this explains the rise of new alliances between traditionally incompatible formations and movements. In Russia, we see a Stalinist-nationalist coalition, with its own national-Bolshevik traditions. In Romania it t00k the form of a rapprochement between Romania’s allegedly pro-Western Social Democratic Party (whose honorary chairman is a former ideological apparatchik, ex-president Ion Iliescu) and the Greater Romania Party headed by former Ceaușescu court poet, the rabid xenophobic demagogue Corneliu Vadim Tudor. In the Czech Republic, the ideology of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia merged nostalgia for dogmatic Leninism with chauvinistic stances. Simply put, the old Marxist internationalist dream has long since been abandoned.
It would be a serious fallacy to view these trends as marking the rise of neo-Communism. For such a development to take place, ideological zeal and utopian-eschatological motivation are needed. Neither former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski nor former Hungarian primeminister Ferenc Gyurcsányi, both linked to the post-Communist Left, can be described as ideologically driven. Instead, the successors to the Leninist parties have to cope with widespread sentiments of disaffection from socialist rhetoric. The Serbian socialists, East Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialism (now part of die Linke), and Romania’s Social Democratic Party are emblematic of the ongoing trend toward cooperation between radical nationalist forces and those who yearn for bureaucratic collectivism. Another indication of the weak institutionalization and shallow social insertion of post-Communist parties is the phenomenon of “electoral volatility.”66 The mainstream political parties are still challenged periodically by “unorthodox political formations” (e.g., Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania). The status quo remains fragile because of its unpopularity among sections of the population still attracted by ever-resurgent fantasies of salvation.
This tendency is a result of the ideological chaos created by the collapse of state socialism, which left populism as the most convenient and frequently the most appealing ersatz ideology. It was relatively easy to get rid of the old regime with its spurious claim to cognitive infallibility, but much more daunting to install a pluralist, multiparty order, a civil society, rule of law, and a market economy. Freedom, it turned out, was easier to gain than to guarantee. Uprootedness, loss of status, and uncertainties about identity provide fertile ground for paranoid visions of conspiracy and treason; hence the widespread attraction of nationalist salvationism. Leszek Kołakowski points to a paradoxical attitude toward prophetic stances in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: the intellectuals’ disillusionment with redemptive-apocalyptical teleologies led them to retreat from political matters, which generated an ethical pauperization of politics, as there remain fewer intellectual teachers. The door is wide open to pseudodoctrines and negative political eclectisms.67 Marching with Stalin’s (or Ceaușescu’s) portrait is an expression not of Stalinism (or Ceaușescuism) but rather of disaffection with the status quo, perceived as traumatic, anarchic, corrupt, politically decadent, and morally decrepit. Especially in Russia, where this disaffection is linked to the sentiment of imperial loss, cultural despair can lead to dictatorial trends. Exaggerated though they may be, references to “Weimar Russia” capture the psychology of large human groups whose traditional collectivistic values have disappeared and who cannot recognize themselves in the new values of individual action, risk, and intense competition. Recent developments in Russia strengthen the impression that the experiment of open politics in Russia lost out to the push for the reaffirmation of imperial status.68 Following Martin Krygier, I consider that, twenty years after the demise of Communism, in the former Soviet bloc we are experiencing a new ideosphere, which is by definition comprehensive, inclusive, and provisional. Moreover, the postmodern political condition renders transitory even organicist, syncretic, and redemptive radicalisms (as political movements).69 For instance, the last Romanian general elections (in 2009) produced encouraging results: the xenophobic, chauvinistic Romania Mare Party did not amass enough votes to get into parliament. However, this hardly means that the ideas that sustained it for so many years have disappeared from the public sphere.
Leninist regimes kept their subjects ignorant of the real functioning of the political system. Tony Judt observed that “by concentrating power, information, initiative and responsibility into the hands of the party-state, Communism had given rise to a society of individuals not merely suspicious of one another and skeptical of any official claims or promises, but with no experience of individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices.”70 Furthermore, the chasm between official rhetoric and everyday reality, the camouflaging of the way decisions were reached, the anti-elective pseudo-elections, and other rituals of conformity neutralized critical faculties and generated a widespread wariness toward the validity of politics as such. Furthermore, anti-Communism tended to be just another supra-individual, nondifferentiated form of identity. The problem now is that the aggregation of social interests needs a clarification of the political choices, including an awareness of the main values that people advocate. As Martin Palouš put it, “The most important and most dynamic factor in post-totalitarian politics has to do with the way people in post-communist societies perceive and conceptualize the social reality and political processes they are a part of.”71 The difficulties and ambiguities of the left-right polarization in post-Communist regimes are linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of the traditional taxonomies.