Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  What was actually at stake behind the smokescreen of political terminology (revolution, counter-revolution, socialism, imperialism, and so on, and so forth) was nothing less than a shift in the borders between two civilizations: the Russian Imperium had once and for all conquered a piece of the West, a piece of Europe, the better to watch it founder, together with the other countries of Central Europe, in its own civilization …. That is what Aragon called the “Biafra of the spirit.” Some day Russian mythographers will write about it as a new dawn in history. I see it (rightly or wrongly) as the beginning of Europe’s end.14

  Following the invasion, the Soviet propaganda machine went out of its way to justify the right of the Warsaw Pact to intervene whenever the Kremlin felt that the “socialist conquests” were jeopardized. On September 26, 1968, Pravda published an article under the signature of Sergei Kovalev, the paper’s expert on international affairs, where the doctrine of limited sovereignty was spelled out in full detail. According to Kovalev, “The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, which cannot look indifferently upon this. Each Communist party is responsible not only to its own people, but also to all the socialist countries, to the entire Communist movement.” Following this self-serving interpretation of the principles of national sovereignty and equality between socialist countries, Pravda was able to conclude that, far from aggression, the occupation of Czechoslovakia represented the fulfillment of the country’s self-determination. According to the Soviet official statement, the Warsaw Pact troops

  … did not interfere in the internal affairs of the country, were fighting for the principle of self-determination of the peoples of Czechoslovakia not in words but in deeds, were fighting for their inalienable right to think out profoundly and decide their fate themselves, without intimidation on the part of counterrevolutionaries, without revisionist and nationalist demagogy.15

  This Orwellian Newspeak—an outright semantic fraud—presented foreign occupation as internationalist help. For the Czechs and the Slovaks, the demagogic language used by the occupiers and the normalizers was a symbolic counterpart to the general repression and the restoration of the neo-Stalinist police state. It took them years to recover from the shock of the invasion and gradually to take up the struggle for the construction of a civil society outside the official institutions and values.

  Following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the ruthless suppression of the reform movement in that country, relations between Warsaw Pact countries were regulated according to Moscow’s definition of limited sovereignty. In November 1968 Brezhnev delivered a speech in Warsaw, where he reiterated the basic tenets of this doctrine. According to the Soviet General Secretary, all communist countries had to abide by the “general laws of Marxism-Leninism.” Any deviation from Moscow-defined orthodoxy was considered treason against the principles of socialist internationalism, and the Soviets retained the right to correct it—even by military force. Of course, the so-called normalization in Czechoslovakia offered a lesson to all those who may have been tempted to imitate the Dubcek experiment. Following the crushing of the Prague Spring, Moscow unleashed a forceful campaign to suppress any reformist attempts both in the Soviet Union and in the bloc. Corruption was all-pervasive, and the collective ethos lost any sense of optimism. A general state of malaise affected all the bloc countries. Diversity was again denounced, and a political and economic freeze became the hallmark of the neo-Stalinist political culture often described as Brezhnevism.

  Despite the widespread return to malaise, many critical intellectuals in Eastern Europe drew an important lesson from the Prague Spring: The idealistic belief, nourished by its initiators, that communism could be reformed from within was demolished. In their naïve conviction that the Kremlin would tolerate the rise of an alternative model of communism, rooted in the cult of the individual rather than worship of the apparatus, the Czechoslovak reformers discovered the real limits of such an approach. They were committed communists who thought that the Soviet leaders were still interested in the image of socialism. They forgot that Brezhnev and his acolytes were nothing but time-servers, whose careers had been secured by their participation in the Stalinist purges and to whom references to human freedom and the rights of the individual were simply anathema. Understanding that the Prague Spring started as a party-induced and party-controlled reform movement whose principle goal was the renewal, not the abolition of communism, helps to explain why many Czech and Slovak intellectuals had misgivings about the authenticity of the democratic beliefs professed by suddenly reconstructed apparatchiks like Dubcek and his comrades.

  The hard core of Prague reformers was not made up of people for whom the sovereignty of the people had to be regarded as the only source of political legitimacy. The very idea that the party could ensure the transition to pluralism and had to be accepted as the center of the emerging pluralist system made many people suspicious or hesitant. One of that core was the young playwright and essayist Vaclav Havel, who, unlike Milan Kundera, Ludvik Vaculik, and Pavel Kohout, had never belonged to the communist party and had never shared any illusions about the reformability of the existing system. Years later, Havel gave the following explanation for his reservations about the democratic credentials of the reform communists led by Alexander Dubcek:

  What caused these doubts and hesitations? In my case, it was primarily knowing how embarrassed the country’s leadership was in the face of all these developments. Suddenly these people were enjoying spontaneous support and sympathy, something none of them had ever experienced before, because the only kind of support they had ever known was organized from above. Naturally they were pleasantly surprised and even excited by all this. On the other hand, they were afraid of the elemental groundswell of popular good will. Again and again they were caught off guard, because things began to happen and demands began to be made which were sometimes incomprehensible, even terrifying, given how far they overstepped the limits of the “possible” and the “admissable.” Let’s not forget that these people were all normal party bureaucrats with the right pseudo-education from the party, with all the right illusions and habits and prejudices, with the right curricula vitae, the right social background, and the standard narrow horizon. The only difference was, they were a little more free-thinking and a little more decent than the people whose places they had taken.16

  That was indeed the paradox of communist reformation: Those who started the struggle for the overhaul of the status quo were themselves the product, the offspring, of the existing conditions. Their revolt against the irrationality and the injustice of Stalinism was not a rebellion against the Marxist pretense to establish “the best society” but rather an effort to correct what they diagnosed as distortions of an initially humanist and rational program. They were the faithful children of the system. Their opposition to the previous leadership did not challenge the moral and theoretical legitimacy of Soviet-style socialism. Even a radical reformer like Ota Sik, the chief economist of the Prague Spring, could not cross the boundaries of the dominant logic and envision the need for a complete renunciation of the central plan.

  Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav heretic, has often pointed to the dangers contained in the communist conviction that the system could be adjusted and made to work if only some of the parts were fixed and corruption eliminated. The truth was that in all the Soviet-bloc countries the population was deeply hostile to the existing model and resented the idea of perpetuating it. Unlike Dubcek and his idealistic friends, the corrupt manipulators in the Kremlin knew better: They realized that any concession made to the mounting social forces from below would eventually result in more and more radical demands that in turn would force upon the reformers the need to accept new concessions. As a matter of fact, it was Brezhnev who was right. Revising the concept of socialism and depriving it of the Stalinist veneer necessarily results in the complete breakdown of the existing system.

  The preservat
ion of the established institutions and power relations were predicated on the impregnability and unquestionability of the official dogma. Any weakening of the communist party’s claim to infallibility, even if that claim was simply a forcible repetition of a hollow ritual stripped of its once mystical overtones, would immediately bring about catastrophic side effects. To keep the system in place and going, the authority of the ruling class, the nomenklatura, could not be the subject of negotiation. Individuals had to be treated as subjects, not as citizens endowed with human rights. They had to be kept in a perpetual state of insecurity, anguish, and fear, so that there would be no way for them to organize collective forms of protest and civic disobedience. Thus, the secret police had to watch over the maintenance of dictatorial controls and consistently marginalize any form of dissent both inside and outside the ruling party. Although Brezhnevism certainly attenuated the harshness of Stalin’s methodology of terror, it continued to rely upon the same institutions and techniques that prevented any form of coagulation of popular discontent into genuine political movements. Analyzing the nature of the Soviet political culture under Brezhnev, Robert Conquest reached the following conclusion:

  Power is in the hands of a self-appointed bureaucracy, and all institutional arrangements are designed with one of two purposes—to perpetuate and to conceal this fact. There are therefore two sets of institutions in the country: those through which power is genuinely transmitted, and those which provide the shadow, though never the substance, of popular sovereignty. Both systems were fully developed in Stalin’s times. Both operate essentially the same way to this day.17

  REVOLTS AND CRACKDOWNS IN POLAND

  Brezhnev’s updated version of mature Stalinism became the characteristic pattern of the Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe. Again, because of its special relationship with the Kremlin and the margin of autonomy acquired during the conflict with the Cominform, Tito’s Yugoslavia was the exception. In the other East European countries, however, the rejection of reforms and the hardening of ideological and political controls led to widespread popular diasarray, demoralization of the critical intellectuals, and a general feeling of powerlessness among the opponents of the regimes. It seemed that Eastern Europe would vegetate indefinitely in this state of semiparalysis, with corrupt and blatantly incompetent elites imposing conformity on increasingly disaffected societies. The 1970s were years of apparent slumber in the region, when the rulers enjoyed their monopoly of power without serious challenges from below. The “pacification” of Eastern Europe, which was one of the principal objectives of Brezhnev’s foreign policy, seemed to have been accomplished. But by the end of the 1970s Poland again became the troublemaker in the bloc. True, the Poles had never been completely tamed. In 1968 major clashes had taken place between radical students and the repressive apparatus. Although the Polish communists went out of their way to prevent the development of initiatives from below and the construction of a coalition between workers and intellectuals, the rise of an independent, self-governing trade union could not be prevented. Despite extensive police efforts to disband any movement toward such a coalition, Polish civic activists managed to break through the official repression and inaugurate a new antitotalitarian wave that eventually would sweep away the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

  The prelude to the historic piercing of the totalitarian carcass in Poland was the intellectual revolt that took place in that country at the end of the 1960s. Wladyslaw Gomulka, the leader who came to power in October 1956 as an exponent of a liberal trend within Polish communism, had slowly abandoned his initial anti-Stalinist program. Instead of furthering the long-promised reforms, Gomulka started to champion a Brezhnev-Style conservatism, organizing the persecution of critical intellectuals. The communist leadership was divided between Gomulka’s supporters and a mounting radical-nationalist faction headed by General Mieczyslaw Moczar, Minister of the Interior and chairman of the union of former communist partisans during World War II. In his bid for power, Moczar made use of xenophobic arguments, charging Gomulka with leniency in his dealings with an alleged “imperialist-Zionist conspiracy.” At the same time the Moczarites were targeting proponents of political and economic reforms, whom they accused of trying to rock the boat of socialism. Moczar’s ideology consisted of rabid anti-Semitism combined with intense hatred of liberalism and democracy. Those themes borrowed heavily from the traditional anti-Semitic literature produced during the interwar period by supporters of Endecjia, the ultra-nationalist, extremely chauvinistic National Democratic Party. As critical intellectuals symbolized the nation’s search for an open society, no slander was spared in Moczar’s campaign against the Polish liberal intelligentsia. 18 Professor Jerzy Holzer, a liberal Catholic intellectual, noted that the intent of the anti-Semitic campaign was to manipulate public opinion by exploiting widespread xenophobic superstitions:

  March [1968] represented a powerful manipulation of the consciousness of large segments of the population. Anti-Semitism played an essential role in this manipulation. From time immemorial the hidden Zionist enemy of Poland’s welfare was allegedly responsible for all Polish misfortunes. Attempts to ascribe to ourselves all our successes and to people of Jewish origin all the possible offenses were an outrage not [only] against the Jews but against the entire Polish nation.19

  Another faction within the communist elite tried to advocate technocratic adjustments aimed at a managerial improvement of the existing system. One of the leaders of that group was Edward Gierek, then the party leader in the industrial region of Silesia. Caught in the middle among the dwindling liberal faction, the technocratic group, and the increasingly strident nationalist elements, Gomulka tried to maintain a centrist approach and relied more and more on his personal contacts with the Soviet leaders. The same man who had so strongly denounced the “personality cult” in 1956 was now resorting to a decision-making pattern directly inspired by Stalin: extremely personalist, abusive and contemptous of others’ opinions. The result was a spreading malaise, which further accelerated political disintegration and decay.20

  The worsening of economic conditions and the lack of popular confidence in the rulers were conducive to the outbreak of a new crisis in Poland. The social turmoil in 1968 expedited the collapse of Gomulka’s strategy of stabilization. Inspired by changes in Czechoslovakia and by the general European wave of civic activism characteristic of the period, a powerful student movement had taken shape in Poland after 1967. Among the moral sources of the movement were the critical writings of a number of Catholic and neo-Marxist intellectuals who had long highlighted the insuperable contradictions of the prevailing order. For instance, in early 1965 two young critical Marxists, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, addressed an open letter to the United Polish Workers’ Party—-the communist party—calling for a revolutionary overthrow of the existing bureaucratic dictatorship. Reminiscent of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalinism, the letter provoked Gomulka’s anger and led to the imprisonment of the two intellectuals.21 As part of the same repressive campaign, Poland’s most celebrated Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, was expelled from the party and denied the right to teach at the University of Warsaw. As a result of this harassment, he left Poland to teach philosophy in England and the United States.

  In the spring of 1968 the conflict between the party and the intellectuals came to be a climax. In March the government decided to ban the performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s classic patriotic play The Forebears’ Eve, claiming that such a presentation could lead to heightened anti-Sovietism. The Writers’ Union protested the government’s censorship and accused the rulers of ignorance and moral idiocy. Students at the University of Warsaw organized a protest demonstration, but the regime decided to strike back with terrorist methods. Secret police thugs and armed vigilantes violated the autonomy of the university with a raid that resulted in hundreds of students wounded and arrested. Following that action, the whole educational system went on strike. Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the Primate o
f Poland, expressed apprehension over the government’s brutality in dealing with the legitimate grievances of the youth. The youth rebellion was the first large-scale social movement since October 1956. Among its inspirers and supporters were those intellectuals who had once hoped that the communist party would be able to effect genuine reforms. The March 1968 movement was the end of lyrical hopes about the party’s capacity for self-transformation. It was the insurrection of a generation who could not identify itself with the corrupt and corruptive values of the ruling class. Although the students took care to proclaim their commitment to humane socialism, they announced their intention to form an organization free from party control and supervision.

  Both Gierek and Moczar accused Gomulka of “complacency with revisionism” and asked for an exemplary repression of the democratic movement. The fight between Gomulka and Moczar continued for the next year: The former tried to mobilize the workers on his behalf, while the latter intensified his vicious anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic activities. Those conflicts at the top prevented the formulation of a coherent strategy. A new specter was invented by the chauvinist neo-Stalinists, always obsessed with the “internal enemy.” Instead of recognizing the political causes of the students’ protest, they preferred to blame a mythological “Zionist-revisionist plot” for having fomented the unrest. Rampant nationalism overflowed the offical media, which did not refrain from using Nazi-like clichés in their attacks on critical intellectuals and students. For all its heroism, the 1968 protest movement had little chance to succeed. Its main weakness arose from its exclusively intellectual nature. There were almost no ties between the leaders of the student protest and the workers, who did not understand that the new repressive campaign would eventually affect them as well.