Glasnost in Eastern Europe
Morton, Brian
Lech Walesa says that glasnost makes him uneasy. "In my twenty-five years as an electrician I've had to tighten and loosen many screws. When tightening them I've broken only one, but I must have...
...T]hey are no farce...
...The restructuring of public institutions in the USSR," writes Janusz Bialolecki of Poland, "enables us to exert more effective pressure to go one or two steps further here...
...According to Michnik, Gorbachev can best be seen as the pope of a communist counterreformation...
...Hope...
...A more cautious case for hope is put by the Polish historian Adam Michnik, who also offers the most interesting explanation of the rationale behind glasnost...
...A]s the initial cruelty of wars and revolutions recedes further into the past, civilizing influences stand a greater chance, and there is an increased possibility of greater freedom and tolerance...
...Whatever their differences, all democratic oppositionists seek the reconstruction of what they call civil society—what we might call pluralism...
...But how can you live without hope...
...The term "democratic opposition" covers a wide range of political tendencies...
...ime6ka is one of the few oppositionists whose outlook could be described as sunny...
...Gorbachev shares with his predecessors the tendency to believe that there is one best way," and that the party, of course, is "the keeper of the best way...
...A form, you might say, of repressive tolerance...
...No one in the opposition regrets Gorbachev's changes, but many of them are uneasy even so...
...There are three good magazines devoted exclusively to coverage of the democratic opposition in Eastern Europe...
...It is based on the assumption that there should be no alternatives to party policy...
...Jacek Kur6n of Poland comments that people in the West keep asking whether Gorbachev can be trusted—as if he were about to marry their children...
...In contrast to people like Lamentowicz, who stress the continuities between Gorbachev and his predecessors, ime6ka says that "when we look at the Soviet Union we should never forget that in Stalin's day it was a horrifying place...
...Michnik writes that the Polish opposition is divided between two views of Gorbachev...
...Only through criticism and a self-critical attitude...
...During the last few years, democratic oppositionists in Eastern Europe have been debating glasnost: what it means and how they should respond to it...
...In this context, the limitations of glasnost can seem like something to be thankful for...
...Michnik has little patience with those dissidents who "feel compelled to stress over and over again that the transformations in progress in the Soviet Union are a propagandist farce...
...I see this process as something to be fought for, not as something that will inevitably happen of its own accord...
...If in the past you've had your repression served neat, repressive tolerance doesn't seem like such a bad thing...
...It's something more subtle: it's an attempt to absorb and domesticate these ideas, blunting their "unequivocally anti-totalitarian edge...
...A former political prisoner, ime6ka is still threatened with arrest from time to time—a fact he finds encouraging...
...We shouldn't exaggerate their optimism...
...Question: What will we have after perestroika...
...Some of Gorbachev's harsher critics, it may be, are locked in sterile postures of negation...
...A counterreformation isn't merely an effort to crush the ideas of the reformation...
...He points to an increasing number of political prisoners, the suppression of the Jazz Section, and the arrest of an activist who tried to run for parliament as an independent candidate on an "essentially reformist, Gorbachev-like program...
...How can we keep ourselves under control...
...The Czech satirist Ludy& Vaculfk comments that resisting glasnost is the boldest thing his government has ever done: "And those of us who have always wanted a government that doesn't lick another government's arse—well, we finally have it...
...In a speech to Soviet writers he seemed to say that glasnost is precisely an attempt to soften the effects of the one-party system without putting an end to it: "We have no opposition...
...9 per year) leans more toward analysis of Eastern Europe by Western leftists...
...Fear...
...The term counterreformation, in Michnik's hands, involves a certain complexity...
...Michnik speaks of the spread of the philosophy of compromise...
...When he criticizes Soviet-type societies, it's because they fall so far short of socialist principles...
...Because of this, the Polish historian Wotjek Lamentowicz argues that "the so-called new style of thinking is not so very different from that of Lenin or Stalin...
...25 per year...
...All of them take it for granted that his ends are not their own...
...And Gorbachev is loosening and loosening...
...This is the note struck again and again in these discussions: the hope that glasnost will give the opposition community a bit of room to press for changes that go beyond glasnost...
...Others are hoping that the counterreformation will "open at least some channels for the articulation of the principles of political pluralism...
...We just can't imagine how vile it was, anymore...
...Gorbachev has introduced a measure of pluralism in the arts, in journalism, etc., but of course he's never proposed to do away with the party's monopoly on political power...
...Box 2382, Berkeley, CA 94702...
...He has spent nine of the last twenty years in Czech prisons...
...No one can say this of Uhl...
...Solidarity was the reformation: a workers' revolution in a workers' state, it stripped Sovietstyle socialism of its pretensions to legitimacy...
...Khrushchev's thaw was followed by Brezhnevism, in which the dissident community in the Soviet Union (with the exception of the movement for Jewish emigration) was systematically crushed...
...Two consist mainly of reprints from the samizdat press in Eastern Europe and the USSR: Across Frontiers (P.O...
...Dienstbier sees prospects for the "dissipation of the Stalinist smog" and the revival of the "fundamental Marxian definition of socialism," according to which "the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all...
...SPRING • 1988 • 235 In the Magazines regimes in Eastern Europe...
...Charter 77 signatory Petr Uhl says flatly that he holds little hope for improvement in the human rights situation in his country...
...Our hope grapples with our despair," he writes...
...But unlimited democracy can only turn into anarchy...
...As the Czech philosopher Milan ime6ka puts it, "I've got the feeling that the new Soviet leadership is not all that keen on dramatic moments...
...Our greatest hopes are not bound up with what Gorbachev intends to do, but with a process that his policies might inspire...
...But after they finish debunking him, almost all admit that they find it the most promising moment in decades...
...Box 222, London WC2H 9RP England...
...If the East-bloc oppositionists aren't jumping for joy about glasnost, it is also because it's touched their own countries unevenly...
...ime6ka credits Gorbachev for bringing about important changes—but he also gives some of the credit to time...
...Labor Focus on Eastern Europe (c/o Crystal Management, 46 Theobalds Road, London WC1 8NW England...
...Some people are waiting for his downfall, "so that they can reiterate that communism is a system which is incapable of being reformed...
...Reform policies, as Charter 77 signatory Jiff Dienstbier writes, are often followed by "the rule of the iron fist...
...Socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia was succeeded by one of the most repressive * A slight thaw has begun in Czechoslovakia since this article was written...
...Michnik is among the second group...
...q 236 • DISSENT...
...Police rule is being replaced by politics, while a political dialogue is really getting the upper hand over repression...
...Michnik sums up the prevailing mood...
...According to historian Lamentowicz, this joke has been making the rounds in the Soviet Union...
...and Europe let us listen in on these debates...
...Skepticism...
...Most of the oppositionists who write about glasnost begin by listing the ways in which Gorbachev's changes are no changes at all...
...Janos Kis of Hungary speaks of the "decomposition of power" and the "emergence of new social movements...
...When East-bloc oppositionists discuss Gorbachev, the question of whether he can be trusted never comes up...
...He reminds us that the "present-day French Republic is the historical continuation of a system created by a revolution in the course of which people's heads were cut off...
...In Czechoslovakia, for instance, political repression has grown more severe in the last few years...
...These have had a way of not always turning out for the best...
...East-bloc oppositionists are uneasy about glasnost because they have memories...
...Answer: Perestrelka"— which is Russian for gunfire...
...yet he still defines himself as a Marxist...
...Hope comes in different forms...
...Several magazines published in the U.S...
...10 per year) and the East European Reporter (P.O...
...My memory tells me that it was not so long ago that dozens of totally innocent people were strangled on the gallows in our country, and nobody in those days chased up their friends to sign an angry protest...
...When tightening them I've broken only one, but I must have broken several hundred in my attempts to loosen them...
...Three main currents run through them: skepticism, fear, hope...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
