Democracy in the former Eastern bloc
Avineri, Shlomo
DETERMINING WHEN one period gave way to another or in fact, naming a period is always a tricky matter. This is especially so when it comes to contemporary events. Processes are still going on...
...Eventually it became clear that most countries in Central and Eastern Europe harbored their own local Solzhenitsyns...
...Sometimes they win elections and form governments, and sometimes (as today) they are in the opposition...
...While Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs could look back and try to emulate a real (or imagined) precommunist legacy, Russians could not do likewise...
...Back Again To tackle nationalist movements, the Soviet system had a universalist ideology and repressive political centralism...
...Even if a more radical reformer like Boris Yeltsin finally trumped the more careful Gorbachev, it was always the former apparatchiks who eventually came to power...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...Some commentators may object to this observation as too historicist...
...Soviet communism, so different from the emancipatory spirit of Marxism (rooted in Enlightenment traditions) was another layer of oppression grafted upon a servile society...
...But overlooking this legacy would leave us without an explanation for the very different paths taken by Russia and Ukraine, despite an apparent common past, although it appears that neither will consolidate into democracy...
...Before the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, there were few elements of civil society...
...Yugoslavia descended into nationalist wars, reviving precommunist ethnic hostilities...
...Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic developed robust multiparty systems and transformed their economies successfully...
...They shared the belief that, absent communist totalitarianism, each "liberated" country would develop toward Western-style democracy with a multiparty system, free elections, a free press, and market capitalism...
...Historical patterns are not all-determinant...
...Backlash...
...Obviously, one size didn't fit all countries, and responsibility for disparities became the subject of political and theoretical argument...
...Analysts needed nuance...
...Without them, the future may very much resemble variations of the past...
...This was one reason for its enormous resonance in Polish society...
...Although Poland is different from Hungary, some obvious similarities appeared and suggest more than an electoral slippage of parties identified with democratization...
...The peasantry was extolled in contrast to soulless capitalism, sometimes identified with "foreign" forces...
...The Kaczynski experiment appears to have failed, mainly because so many younger Poles realized it would jeopardize Polish stability...
...The existence of a relatively large Jewish population in Budapest, and the prominent role of people of Jewish origin among the Hungarian liberals, gives the antiSemitic right-wing fringe a more visible target than in Poland, where the Jews were wiped out by the Nazis...
...Reformers" defeated "hard-liners...
...Solidarity's immense popularity derived partly from a deeply ingrained anti-Russian nationalism linked to Roman Catholicism...
...Then came a time of differentiation when views became nuanced...
...East and Central Europe will, in all probability, continue on two parallel tracks: further consolidation of democracy in the Visegrad countries, anchored to some degree in their traditions of civil society and past representative institutions, despite some setbacks and a sometimes angry internal discourse...
...The recent quasi-constitutional farce in which Putin outwardly respects the two-term ban on presidential power, yet virtually appoints his successor and then continues as prime minister—and all this without effective internal dissent or opposition—suggests how deeply ingrained historical traditions of autocratic rule continue to exist, sometimes accompanied by a sham formalism reminiscent of socialist legality...
...Two basic typologies emerged (with variations in between...
...Elected institutions did not exist (efforts to create them in 1905 ended in repression...
...transformed the State Duma from a corrupt debating club into an arm of the executive...
...There was an internal logic in Putin's use of former KGB people to staff key positions...
...Even the historical model of modernization associated with Peter the Great was authoritarian...
...Czechoslovakia, for instance, was a democratic, secular republic before the Second World War and for a short period after...
...These movements evoked the memories of 1956 or 1968, and their leaders, many of whom suffered persecution and prison under communism, negotiated the transition out of communism...
...In the Soviet era, the state bureaucracy was weak compared to the party bureaucracy...
...There were even some political veterans around who managed to survive Nazism and communism...
...Historical enmities revived, especially in Poland...
...After all, democracy in countries such as Britain and France took centuries, and the United States needed a civil war to abolish slavery and another century to enfranchise fully its black population...
...These populist-nationalist sentiments largely gave voice to losers in postcommunist political and economic developments...
...Few, at that time, thought that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a courageous anticommunist, was also a fierce Russian chauvinist of the old school...
...The only exception is the unreformed Communist Party, which managed to retain some of its membership...
...He gave an intellectual, quasi-Hegelian veneer to deterministic notions of what was happening and reversed Marxist determinism while sustaining some of its methodological assumptions...
...With its demise, the old nationalist issues reappeared, despite having been apparently successfully repressed or "solved" by communism...
...Despite obvious differences among the three countries, they could, after communism, claim to be "reviving" early institutions and traditions...
...In Poland, the issue of abortion was brought forth as a reason to fight atheism...
...Even though Polish and Hungarian politics were basically authoritarian before the Second World War, a remnant of parliamentary life survived...
...It was accompanied by anti-European Union sentiments that echo oldfashioned nationalism and a xenophobia sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice (against the Roma, for instance...
...Authoritarian and totalitarian voices were on the ascendant in smaller nations in the 1930s, from the Baltic to the Black Sea...
...as well as a developed market economy...
...But anti-Semitism is clearly present, for example in Radio Marija...
...The first stage, roughly 1989-1995, was inspired by the astonishingly rapid collapse of the communist systems...
...Nor does it make sense to speak exclusively of cynical leaders exploiting pent-up anger...
...The KGB was the only Soviet-era institution that survived...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is submissions@dissentmagazine.org . Please include a postal address and phone number...
...In the opening phase there was nearmessianic enthusiasm and redemptive hope...
...The country was ruled from above—bureaucratically, autocratically, hierarchically...
...Yes, individuals in Moscow and St...
...It had an active multiparty system...
...There was a power vacuum when the Soviet state disintegrated and the Communist Party was dismantled...
...These elements were largely missing in Russia...
...Religion was occasionally hailed as a bastion against an immoral economic system...
...They draw on deeply rooted sentiments in parts of the populace...
...Many ideas associated with today's PiS draw on the tenets of the old National Democratic Party (Endecija) of Roman Dmowski, which identified Polish nationalism with Catholicism, anticapitalism, and anti-German and 20 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 anti-Russian attitudes...
...Mediating institutions of civil society were missing...
...These elements of continuity throughout East and Central Europe may appear at first to be discouraging and depressing: "History is destiny...
...It is different in Russia and Ukraine...
...First of all, 2008 is not 1939...
...Missing Diversity In the triumphalist, postcommunist mood—it sometimes resembled a Walpurgis Night in which all cats are gray—observers often overlooked how diverse anticommunist coalitions were...
...Being anticommunist did not automatically mean being a democrat...
...Initial developments gave sustenance to these beliefs: elections did bring to power leaders committed to Western democracy...
...The Baltic countries and also—up to a point—Georgia were different, however, because in them dissidents did take office...
...The ternDISSENT / Summer 2008 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD porary ascendance of the Kaczynski brothers in Poland and the violent demonstrations in Hungary at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolt exemplify the backlash...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...So, despite some courageous dissenters, Soviet reform started from above as we noted...
...Significantly, there has not been this sort of populistnationalist backlash in Prague where, before 1938, there was the only truly functional democracy in the region (it was far from perfect, but it did not slide into authoritarianism as did its neighbors...
...This is one reason why a centralized neoauthoritarian, Putin-like system is unlikely to evolve there...
...THE ROLE played by the European Union turned out to be essential...
...Russia is not in the throes of a Stalinist dictatorship...
...Enter Putin This is where Vladimir Putin enters the picture, seeking to salvage Russia from the chaos and mass impoverishment of the Yeltsin era...
...religious tolerance...
...Francis Fukuyama's 16 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 The End of History articulated an almost messianic belief in the march of history...
...Romania and Bulgaria hovered somewhere in-between...
...It was conceived as statebuilding from above, not democratization nor liberalization...
...Pre - 1917 Russia was an agrarian society and was not yet emancipated totally from the long legacy of serfdom...
...This was one reason for the failure to establish a liberal constitutional regime between February 1917 (when the tsar was overthrown) and October...
...His "Authoritarianism with a Human Face" has enjoyed great popularity, especially since "democracy" is equated with the mess of Yeltsin's rule...
...It is true that the postcommunist countries that joined the EU (and NATO...
...At this stage it became clear that the pre- 1939 histories of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic provided important keys to their post-1989 development...
...Similar sentiments, though probably less radical and with different colorations, played roles in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and were also evident in the Baltic republics (especially Lithuania) as well as in Georgia...
...yET DISSATISFACTION of the "losers" seems an inadequate explanation by itself, especially since some of it, notably the anti-German and anti-Russian animosities expressed by the PiS-led government headed by the Kaczynskis, had little to do with economic or social complaints...
...In Russia and Ukraine, those elements are lacking, and hence their developments progress along other trajectories...
...East and Central European countries were coerced into Soviet models after the Second World War, but they had different histories and traditions of their own that didn't vanish...
...Even though Gorbachev's reforms were at least partially inspired by the ideas of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, change was initiated from above, from within the Communist Party...
...The POLITICS ABROAD Soviet case was different...
...But now many of these old-style forces are back, and in some cases, they have family connections to pre1939 elites, parties, and ideologies...
...Putin's KGB origins should not be misconstrued...
...It does not emerge overnight, automatically, and it is not enough to have an elite committed to democracy and markets...
...SHLOMO AVINERI is Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Recurring Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest...
...No real political parties emerged for presidential or Duma elections—just lists centered on personalities...
...None of the former Soviet Central Asian republics showed signs of real democratic transDISSENT / Summer 2008 n 1 7 POLITICS ABROAD formation, and the picture was mixed in the three Transcaucasian republics...
...Voices of desperation and deep disenchantment were heard...
...the Orthodox church was subservient to the state...
...In contrast, Ukraine lacked a coherent state tradition but its political culture contains voluntaristic, if not anarchic, elements in its Cossack legacy...
...In Romania and Bulgaria, as well as in Georgia, the jury still seems to be out...
...The "velvet" divorce between Czechs and Slovaks also shows the salience of precommunist forces, albeit in more pacific terrain...
...What appeared to be a bold attempt at reform embodied in Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika turned into a tsunami of change...
...There would be ups and downs, surely, and not all countries would develop at the same speed and with equal success...
...Farreaching reforms did privatize, in different ways, state-run economies...
...Hungary's contemporary divisions also continue aspects of the country's historical tug of war between urbanists and populists...
...the university system was subservient to the state...
...The first is that three periods or stages have unfolded...
...German reunification symbolized, perhaps more than anything else, the demise of the Soviet ideological and strategic hold on postwar politics...
...By the 1990s, it became clear that directions in postcommunist change depended significantly on elements of civil society, pluralism, independent institutions, market economy, and tolerance deriving from precommunist times...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a cover letter and stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...But they also had indigenous dissident movements that fought for change from below and had mobilized public opinion, creating a political counterculture that eventually triumphed: Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in Poland, the Democratic Forum and the SDS Liberals in Hungary, and Charter-77 and "People against Violence" in Czechoslovakia...
...Putin re-established central authority...
...didn't live up to all the entrance criteria...
...There are problems today but not the sort of crises that gave fascism to Italy and Germany...
...But they don't disappear easily and strong countervailing forces are needed to transform and act against them...
...Irredentist slogans were resuscitated in Hungary...
...put a halt to the thievery of economic oligarchs...
...Another factor was the legacy of upheavals in 1956 and 1968...
...It is obvious that the very possibility of democratization in the latter countries depended on what happened in Moscow...
...The rise of oil prices helped him to reestablish Russia's role in the international arena...
...Eastern or Central European anticommunism was also coupled with—if not dominated by—strong nationalist anti-Russian sentiments...
...AT THIS STAGE, historical legacies seemed to lend coherence to postcommunist changes...
...Now, only the KGB remained (more or less) intact together with the symbolic memory of Peter the Great...
...Privatization was wild and corrupt, giving rise to robber-baron oligarchs who, with the Kremlin's blessing, arrogated to themselves and to their cronies the commanding heights of the Russian economy...
...Nonetheless, it is already possible to look at postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe with some perspective, and to reach some tentative conclusions...
...Immediately after the events of 1989, it appeared that the anticommunist coalitions would overcome more problematic historical legacies and establish a more open and "normal" political discourse...
...The Soviet Union had no Lech Walesas or Vaclav Havels...
...Processes are still going on and it is not yet evident what conclusive outcome, if any, is going to take shape...
...His latest book (in Hebrew) is Herzl: An Intellectual Biography...
...a free press...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...politicians and academic observers began wondering if the post-1989 experiment was failing...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Instead, there was an internal bureaucratic shift in the Kremlin...
...Secularism" was declared the enemy, and a noxious (and obviously false) link was suggested between the new democrats and the old communists...
...Petersburg could talk of modPOLITICS ABROAD eling the New Russia on Locke and the Federalist Papers or retrieve the writings of Herzen and Belinsky, but there were no institutions or popular institutional memories to serve as legitimizing tools...
...They were not democracies, but they did create traditions of elections, representation, and limited government...
...They resurfaced after his death ; this resurfacing was authentic, if brutal...
...Still, their membership provided both an implicit guarantee against any Russian neo-imperial encroachment and something of an insurance policy against slippage back into pre-1939 semiauthoritarianism...
...In short, there were historical models on which a postcommunist edifice could be established and legitimized, sometimes with exaggerated pride...
...Within a few years, the Soviet party-state was disestablished...
...No former dissidents or prisoners became ministers or presidents in Moscow, in contrast to Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague...
...Polish and Hungarian histories were more complicated, but both countries enjoyed forms of representative systems for centuries...
...Basic differences between developments in the Soviet Union and such countries as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were often ignored...
...History, Destiny, Hope In short: with the disappearance of both communism and the threat of Moscow's intervention, the 1989 coalitions fractured and old populist-nationalist forces re-emerged...
...Although a call to revise Trianon (the treaty that settled Hungary's post-1918 borders) would obviously be dangerous, anti-urbanist Hungarians speak loudly about the Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania...
...In contrast, Russia had serious problems with political as well as economic change...
...The Baltic states proceeded slowly toward the Visegrad model...
...A comparison with fascism is perhaps far-fetched, but these backlash sentiments as well as the social composition of the forces articulating them do raise some ominous memories...
...In both cases, there was populist outcry against the costs of economic liberalization...
...The political histories of Germany, Italy, and Spain show how complex, tortuous, and sometimes murderous the transformation toward democracy can be...
...There had to be an infrastructure of nationalist sentiments, deeply embedded in people's minds, for nationalists like these to exploit...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Even if anti-EU sentiments can be heard in the mainstream right in Poland and Hungary, EU membership locks countries into democracy, liberalism, and market economics...
...Democratic ideas remain dominant today...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...parliamentary life...
...All this was achieved with hardly any violence (Romanian and Yugoslav developments apart...
...Democracy seemed bankrupt and was even being challenged in France and Britain...
...But there was hardly any doubt about the outcome...
...In Moscow, it was a new cadre of bureaucrats that oversaw reforms...
...But there is reasonable scope for POLITICS ABROAD hope...
...Liberal universalism is sometimes not strong enough to withstand nationalist memories...
...Moscow-supported puppet regimes in Eastern and Central Europe were replaced by reformist and democratically elected governments headed by former dissidents...
...It is a mistake to attribute the re-emergence of ferocious nationalism solely to populist manipulations by demagogic leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milo's'evic or Croatia's Franjo Tudjman...
...and a centuries-old tradition of representative institutions, albeit of feudal character, linked to municipal autonomy and academic freedom...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 21...
...Of course, this was misleading, and the most drastic result was in the former Yugoslavia, where the relative liberalism and multi-ethnic structure of the Tito regime did not dissolve the pre-1939 legacies...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate page...
...The victorious anticommunist camps of 1989 were made up of democrats and liberals, social democrats and conservatives, nationalists and religious fundamentalists, anti-Russian chauvinists and—yes, frankly—semi-fascists and anti-Semites who sought to expiate (somewhat) their sordid pasts by posing as freedom lovers...
...Not everyone was a winner in the postcommunist paradise...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...At the same time, less sophisticated views of a universal march of democracy were articulated by political actors, scholars, and journalists in both the West and in former communist countries...
...Even if the starting point was similar (a party-state dictatorship with a command economy) countries soon took on diverse characteristics...
...Was there a "usable past," both institutionally as well as symbolically...
...Tito sometimes manipulated Serbian, Croatian, and Albanian nationalisms and occasionally suppressed them—always with care...
...It became clear too that mere quantitative criteria (degrees of industrialization, comparative levels of urbanization, or GNP per capita) could not alone explain the differences...
...religious and national minorities faced constant oppression...
...Communist hegemons bowed out of power, sometimes even elegantly, promoting the belief that a world historical development was under way, heralding the ultimate victory of democracy and the free market over anachronistic totalitarianism...
...Enthusiasm for rapid marketization obscured the impact of reforms on social strata that would suffer from the abolition of some of the safety nets provided by communism: retirees, workers in rust-belt, Soviet-style industries, provincial residents...
...In the Polish case, the church's relative autonomy under communism helped create the infrastructure of a civil society...
...It was initiated by what appears to be a backlash against democratization and liberalization in countries that seemed to be success stories, as vigorous populist-nationalist parties have emerged in Poland and Hungary...
...This brings us to the present, third stage...
...When the system collapsed, Russia found itself in a vacuum...
...Yet few people paid sufficient attention to signs of troubles ahead...
...Boris Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet system, but produced something close to anarchy...
...The Endecija's antiSemitism has been somewhat muted, due to the Holocaust and out of prudential considerations, because the PiS is pro-American...
...Finally, the chiliastic atmosphere immediately after 1989 often blinded analysts to the fact that there are no shortcuts to democracy...
...State power seemed to have dissolved into quasi-feudal regional fiefdoms, presided over by an incompetent central government...
...Ukraine also sank into a corrupt morass...
...and used various repressive tactics, some of them reminiscent of tsarist and Soviet times (for example, limiting press freedom...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...reined in regional leaders...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...A New Phase When the dust settled on the Soviet debris, it was clear that postcommunist developments were quite varied...
...That is what creates fundamental change...
...The third period is characterized by introspection mixed with disenchantment...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Even if they were not as industrialized as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary did undergo significant economic modernization, did possess a fiercely independent, politically organized peasantry, and boasted academic traditions on a West 18 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 European model...
...After the rebellions were repressed harshly, the regimes later relaxed and allowed a modicum of free space, economically as well as intellectually...
...Poland's political map today resembles in various ways the country's prewar configurations, including weak coalition governments built on uneasy alliances that try to bridge a deep left-right divide (and which in the interwar period caused the collapse of Polish parliamentary democracy and the emergence of Jozef Pilsudski's semiauthoritarian rule...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
