Ten Years After 1989
Avineri, Shlomo
The fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc initiated a sweeping transformation of world politics. How should we think about these momentous events and their implicatons a decade...
...I greatly admired the Titoist effort to foster "brotherhood and unity" among nations that had recently been massacring each other...
...I thought, however, that neither the Soviet Union nor Yugoslavia actually created a postnationalist environment that would endure because the complex give-and-take of pluralist democracy was missing...
...Russia was an old historical enemy, not just a recent communist one...
...Grand designs are their own worst enemies—whether inspired by Marx or by Milton Friedman...
...Conventional wisdom had it that communism, either in its brutal Stalinist incarnation or the more benign Titoist version, at least succeeded in subduing extreme nationalism...
...Russia's political scene didn't develop in a way comparable to those of Poland, the Czech Republic, or Hungary...
...It is just that there is no predetermined course that all societies are destined to follow...
...If those memories remained vivid among scattered Soviet Jews, I thought, surely the same is so for other ethnic and religious groups who lived contiguously in their historical lands...
...pERHAPS ONE reason for my skepticism is the fact that as an Israeli I witnessed how immigrants coming from the Soviet Union to the Jewish state in the 1970s brought with them the sort of memories and sometimes a Jewish consciousness that we had assumed destroyed by decades of Soviet persecution...
...Anticommunism was wed to and sometimes manipulated by anti-Soviet feelings...
...There are such things as historical building blocks, and they cannot be overlooked just because they are contrary to the conventional wisdom of Marxism or liberalism...
...How should we think about these momentous events and their implicatons a decade later...
...And consider Yugoslavia...
...Its ideological subtext was simplistic Hayekian messianism...
...Communism was seen as a guarantee against vicious chauvinism...
...Anyone familiar with the internal nuances, if not tensions, among the "Praxis" group of dissident Marxist philosophers would have discerned ethnic lines—even among them...
...There were no Russian Havels or Walesas...
...H ow DID I understand the unraveling of communism...
...Likewise, countries with more coherent and longstanding traditions of civil society (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary) appear to be making much more headway today than those without them, like Russia or Ukraine...
...There were two dimensions...
...The idea that the end of the communist "idea" could be construed as an End of History was preposterous...
...I argued on several occasions that postcommunist developments would be far from uniform...
...It had roots within Poland's CatholicDISSENT / Fall 1999 5 oriented nationalism...
...It also meant that the nationalist fervors unleashed by the destruction of three multinational empires (the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman) were being "overcome" only through repression coupled with a universalist ideology of revolution and mass mobilization...
...it would not destroy it...
...As we struggle with the aftermath of the recent Kosovo war—which disrupted a self-contented and unprepared Europe —one wishes that the post-1989 triumphalists had listened a little more to these muffled voices...
...much more concrete aspects of collective human consciousness were at work...
...Of course many particular identities are "constructed," "imagined" (so too is the idea of the "individual"): but once constructed or imagined they become actual in the Hegelian sense of the term...
...So one lesson of 1989 is the need to respect and have some humility in front of particularity and to be cautious about imposing simplistically those universal ideas...
...Not that there is an obvious Russian Sonderweg...
...6 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...First, I thought the Soviet Union had finally proven to be the failure it was destined to be...
...After all, with some rare and noble exceptions like Andrei Sakharov and the small group of intellectuals around him, Russia did not bring forth any broadly based dissident group comparable to Solidarity or Charter 77...
...Solidarity" in Poland was, after all, not only an anticommunist movement...
...This was the context in which I observed Polish, Hungarian, and Czech resistance to Soviet-imposed rule over the years...
...The road toward democracy in Russia appears as problematic as ever...
...SHLOMO AVINERI is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author, among other books, of Moses Hess, Prophet of Communism and Zionism...
...But I also recognized how fragile this attempt was...
...The historical development of Eastern Europe was actually arrested under the guise of Marxist-Leninism...
...I had difficulties with some colleagues who viewed the events of 1956 and 1968 solely as resistance to communism...
...It may also be that my research on the early socialist (and later socialist-Zionist) Moses Hess suggested to me that he, not Marx, was right about the abiding power—and value—of history, memory, and culture...
...Particular histories always clash with universal ideas, and the outcome is never predetermined...
...Similarly, the strongest and most coherent anticommunist forces in the Baltics and the Caucasus during the Gorbachev era were centered around the national fronts...
...Practically all its leading politicians today are former communists, not dissidents...
...Second, I had grave doubts as to whether democratization would go comfortably hand in hand with the development of market capitalism...
...The great difficulties Russia faces in fostering a stable capitalism suggest that the Western market system is far from being a final goal of world history...
...Even if one is not a historical determinist, one can argue that what communism did to Russia in 1917, and to Central and Eastern Europe after 1945, was to thwart an eventual evolution toward Westernstyle societies...
...Oppression could drive nationalism underground...
...This was why I found the faux-Hegelian triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama so annoyingly wrong...
...ALL THIS leads me to the conclusion that it was not simply abstract noble ideas that carried the day against oppression in 1989...
...People act on them, and they have consequences...
...Dissent asked a group of European and American writers and thinkers for postcommunist reflections in response to three questions: ( 1) What did you think would happen in 1989?, (2) Were you right or wrong—and why?, and (3) What are the implications for your political thinking?—EDs...
...The most meaningful—and on a personal level, most courageous —icon of Russian anticommunism was not a liberal but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who still expresses some of the murkier depths of the vaunted "Russian soul...
...In my mind, they were also linked to national motives...
...We need to listen to people's own poetry, know their history, understand their traumas...
...This was one reason why many intellectuals applauded it, despite their criticisms of Stalinism...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
