The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  81. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, p. 117.

  82. Bo Strath, “Ideology and History,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 1 (February 2006): 23-42.

  83. For the exact quotation, see V. Havel, “Šifra socialismus [Cipher Socialism]” (June 1988), DRS, pp. 202-4; Martin J. Matustik, “Havel and Habermas on Identity and Revolutions,” Praxis International 10, nos. 3-4 (October 1990-January 1991): 261-77.

  84. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 145.

  85. Matustik, “Havel and Habermas,” p. 269.

  86. Václav Havel, “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” p. 48.

  87. This statement belongs to L. Kołakowski and appears in his interview with G. Urban, in G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), p. 277.

  88. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 113-24.

  89. Václav Havel, “New Year Address,” East European Reporter 4, no.1 (Winter 1989-1990): 56-58.

  90. I chose a counterpart to Umberto Eco's category for the extreme Right based on the noticeable communality of features between what he brands ur-Fascism and what I regard as ur-Leninism. If one took each characteristic of ur-Fascism pointed out by Eco, one could find a corresponding characteristic of ur-Leninism: the cult of tradition based on syncretism and the rejection of capitalist modernity (one can easily point to late 1930s and early 1950s Stalinism, to Ceaușescu's national Stalinism, to Honecker's Prussianism, etc.); the cult of action for action's sake (Leninism is fundamentally a mobilization-centered ideology abhorrent of intellectualism and what it considers to be petit-bourgeois culture); monolithic unity (“the party of a new type”); hatred of difference (homogenization of the social, i.e., “the society of non-antagonistic classes” or anticosmopolitanism); reliance on the middle class (Leninism as a social system was sustained through both the creation of a New Class and the transformation of social categories via cultural revolution); “obsession with a plot” (suffice to mention here the “21 Conditions” for the Third International and the ban on factions); antipacifism and the mentality of permanent warfare (read “the deepening of class struggle” and “the continuous revolution”); “contempt for the weak” (the project of the New Man); “selective populism” (one has only to think of, among many other possible examples, Gomułka's anti-Semitic campaign in Poland in March 1968); newspeak (read langue de bois). See Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995; and Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2002).

  91. Bradatan, “Philosophy and Martyrdom,” in Marx's Shadow, ed. Bradatan and Oushakine, p. 120.

  92. Ulrich Klaus Preuss and Ferran Requejo Coll, eds., European Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the State (Baden Baden: Nomos, 1998), p. 127.

  93. Quoted in Paul Lawrence, Nationalism: History and Theory (New York: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 170.

  94. See Ghia Nodia, “Rethinking Nationalism and Democracy in the Light of the Post-Communist Experience,” in National Identity as an Issue of Knowledge and Morality: Georgian Philosophical Studies, ed. N. V. Chavchavadze, Ghia Nodia, and Paul Peachey (Washington, D.C.: Paideia Press and the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994), p. 54.

  95. For a discussion of Bourdieu's concept of habitus in the context of the analysis of nationalism, see Paul Warren James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 55-57.

  96. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of the Nation (London: Routledge, 1998).

  97. Roger Griffin, “Introduction: God's Counterfeiters? Investigating the Triad of Fascism, Totalitarianism and (Political) Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 305.

  98. See Norman Manea, “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” Partisan Review, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 573-74.

  99. For the politics of intolerance in Tudjman's Croatia, see Goran Vezic, “A Croatian Reichstag Trial: The Case of Dalmatian Action,” Uncaptive Minds 7, no. 3 (Fall-Winter 1994): 17-24.

  100. Furio Cerutti, “Can There Be a Supranational Identity?” Philosophy and Social Criticism 18, no. 2 (1992): 147-62.

  101. See Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  102. See S. Frederick Starr, ed., The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Roman Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

  103. Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 328.

  104. Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), p. 116.

  105. Jan Patoĉka quoted in Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 152.

  106. Horvath, The Legacy, p. 19.

  107. Applebaum, “Dead Souls.”

  108. For an informative approach to contemporary efforts to resurrect Marxism, including the disconcerting “theological turn” inspired by the writing of Jacob Taubes on Paulinian eschatology, see Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism (London: Verso, 2008).

  109. Norman Naimark, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Democracy and Memory: Romania Confronts Its Commmunist Past,” in “The Politics of History in Comparative Perspective,” ed. Martin O. Heisler, special issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 617 (May 2008): 166-80.

  6. MALAISE AND RESENTMENT

  1. See Jan Urban, “Europe's Darkest Scenario,” Washington Post, Outlook Section, October 11, 1992, pp. 1-2. See G. M. Tamás, “Post-Fascism,” in East European Constitutional Review (Summer 2000): 48-56.

  2. Adam Michnik, “The Velvet Restoration,” in Revolutions of 1989, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 244-51.

  3. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998, paperback 2009).

  4. For further interpretations of the implications of Jowitt's pioneering approach, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Howard, and Rudra Sil, eds., World Order after Leninism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

  5. For a thorough analysis of the uses of the past in post-Communist Europe, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), esp. “After the Fall: 1989-2005,” pp. 637-776; and Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 180.

  6. See William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

  7. In this chapter I elaborate upon and revisit the main ideas I put forward in my introduction to Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999); as well as Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; revised and expanded paperback, with new afterword, Free Press, 1993). A previous version of this chapter appeared in Contemporary European History 18, no. 3 (2009): 271-88. I developed these ideas in a volume published in Romanian, Despre 1989 (București: Humanitas, 2009). See also Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Demise of Leninism and the Future of Liberal Values,” in Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 221-42; and Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan Iacob, eds., The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History (New York and Budapest: CEU Press, 2012).

  8. Eric
Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-91 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 461-99; see also George Lichtheim, “The European Civil War,” in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 225-37; Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 666-704.

  9. See John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  10. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 1994).

  11. Daniel Chirot, “What Happened in Eastern Europe in 1989,” in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 19-50; see also Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).

  12. Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), p. 143.

  13. Judt, Postwar, p. 584.

  14. See Václav Havel's reflections on post-1989 politics in Summer Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) and To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007).

  15. For the exhaustion of ideological-style secular religions, see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991); and S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes,” in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 89-107.

  16. Judt, Postwar, p. 564.

  17. Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky quoted by Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 41.

  18. Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

  19. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).

  20. Jeffrey Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). Also by the same author, “Rethinking the Legacy of Central European Dissidence,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 119-30.

  21. Jeffrey Isaac, “Shades of Gray: Revisiting the Meanings of 1989,” in The Beginning and the End, ed. Tismaneanu and Iacob, pp. 555-74.

  22. William Echikcson, Lighting the Night (New York: William Morrow, 1990); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; Andrew Nagorski, The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Ivo Banac, ed. Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  23. Barbara J. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe: An Emerging Historiography,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 321-22.

  24. Horvath, The Legacy, pp. 1-2. Elena Bonner was a major human rights activist, widow of the celebrated dissident and physicist Andrei Sakharov.

  25. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

  26. Judt, Postwar, p. 563.

  27. Timothy Garton Ash, “Conclusions,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, ed. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 398.

  28. Tony Judt, Postwar, p. 695.

  29. Anne Applebaum, “1989 and All That,” Slate, November 9, 2009, http://www.anneapplebaum.com/, accessed August 6, 2011.

  30. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent,” p. 349.

  31. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

  32. Judt, Postwar, p. 630.

  33. Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution.

  34. Jarausch further stated that “in contrast to all the earlier failures, the success of 1989 might be interpreted as a result of mounting civil resistance which initially sought to democratize socialism but ultimately dared to abolish it altogether.” See Konrad Jarausch, “People Power? Towards a Historical Explanation of 1989,” in The End and the Beginning, ed. Tismaneanu and Iacob, p. 123.

  35. See Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), esp. pp. 29-105.

  36. See Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Markus, Dictatorship over Needs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).

  37. Giuseppe di Palma, “Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe,” World Politics 44, no. 1 (October 1991): 49-80. In the same issue, see Timur Kuran, “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European of 1989,” pp. 7-48. Kuran identifies Václav Havel and this author as among the very few commentators who “came close to predicting a major change” (p. 12).

  38. Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  39. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Times Books, 1990), p. 111.

  40. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation. For post-Communist politics, see Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2006).

  41. G. M. Tamás, “The Legacy of Dissent,” in Tismaneanu, The Revolutions of 1989, pp. 181-97.

  42. Judt, Postwar, p. 695.

  43. Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 165.

  44. Kotkin, Uncivil Society, p. xvii.

  45. Judt, Postwar, p. 563.

  46. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” pp. 163-66.

  47. See A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  48. For the turbulent experiences with decommunization, see Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghost after Communism (New York: Random House, 1995); Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe's Democratic Transitions (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Brian Grodsky, The Costs of Justice: How New Leaders Respond to Previous Rights Abuses (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University, 2010).

  49. See Palma, “Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society,” 49-80; Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books, December 16, 1993, pp. 62-64.

  50. S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 35, included in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1999.

  51. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000).

  52. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 51-65. For the other two terms mentioned, see Guillermo O'Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5 (January 1994): 55-69; and Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November-December 1997): 22-41. Milada Anna Vachudova discusses the relevance of the three concepts for the process of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe in Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  53. Karen Dawisha, “Electocracies and the Hobbesian Fishbowl of Postcommunist Politics,” in Between Past and Future, ed. Antohi and Tismaneanu, pp. 291-305. Also see the special issue of East European Politics and Societies 13, no. 2 (Spring 1999), especially pieces by Valerie Bunce, Daniel Chirot, Grzegorz Ekiert, Gail Kligman, and Katherine Verdery.

  54. See Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Postmodern Political Condition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism; Kołakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). These philosophers have long since noticed the dissolution of the “redemptive paradigms” and the rise of the alternative, parallel disc
ourses, although they did not anticipate the ongoing rise of the narratives of hatred and revenge.

  55. See Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 68-69.

  56. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Recent contributions on the legacy approach focusing upon role of the burden of the past in post-Communist development: Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Anna Grzymała-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  57. See Václav Havel, “Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 1993, p. 8.

  58. See John Rawls' discussion of criteria for assessing civic freedom and the idea of a well-ordered society in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 30-40.

  59. Quoted in Michal Cichy, “Requiem for the Moderate Revolutionist,” East European Politics and Societies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 145.

  60. Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, ed. Müller, p. 277. The activity of a Truth Commission represents “nonjudicial truth-seeking as a transitional justice tool” (Priscilla Hayner). It can therefore set the stage for future prospects for justice. See Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  61. For seminal contributions to this discussion, see Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995); Ronald Dworkin et al., From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of János Kis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004); János Kis, Politics as a Moral Problem (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).