Reinventing Politics
Page 17
The workers understood the students’ rebellion better once the economic situation worsened, and they started to realize that the leadership could not live up to its soothing populist promises. Gomulka’s autocratic behavior and his complete isolation from the party’s rank-and-file resulted in the adoption in December 1970 of a set of extremely unpopular measures, including a 15 to 30 percent increase in the price of food and fuels. Large-scale workers’ demonstrations took place in all the industrial cities, primarily in the coastal port of Gdansk. Simultaneously, the fragile balance at the party’s top fell apart. Gomulka described the workers’ unrest as “counterrevolutionary” and ordered the army and the police to shoot the demonstrators. The man who had come to power as the symbol of the workers’ dreams of a better life ended his political career as the cruel oppressor of Poland’s rebellious proletariat.
Profiting from Gomulka’s dramatic loss of authority, the technocratic faction managed to eliminate him and his supporters. Immediately after his election as First Secretary, Edward Gierek condemned the reprisals and made a solemn pledge to maintain a close bond with the Polish working class. Ironically, ten years later, when workers’ unrest broke out anew in Gdansk, Gierek himself ordered the police to fire against the strikers. But this time the party bureaucracy moved too late to stifle the movement from below. The workers and the intellectuals had established the organic links whose absence explains the success of previous repressive actions. Following the workers’ strikes in 1976, a Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) had been formed by civic activists and critical intellectuals, including many from the 1968 movement.22 When a strike started in Gdansk in the summer of 1980, the workers were not alone. They received the necessary political support from KOR activists, who went to Gdansk and became advisers to the Inter-Factory Strike Committee. Among those who played a prominent role in the negotiations between the government and workers were intellectuals like Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron, and Bronislaw Geremek.
The chief causes of the 1980 upheaval in Poland were the growing decline in authority of the communist pary; the worsening of the living standards of the population; the general social malaise; and the fast maturing of the Polish civil society. Long-dormant political aspirations stirred as the result of a conviction that the communist party’s pretense to monopolistic power had lost any support—even among professional bureaucrats. The loss of self-confidence on the part of the ruling elite was a precondition for the mounting activism among radicalized elements of the intelligentsia and the working class. Corrupt and inefficient, Gierek’s leadership was unable to cope with the country’s dramatic social and economic troubles. Disregard for the workers’ plight and indulgence in self-righteous professions of good faith offered no remedies for Poland’s growing difficulties.23
FOUR
A Glorious Resurrection
The Rise of Civil Society
It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.
—Frederick Douglass
After the crushing of the Prague Spring, few residents of the East European countries retained illusions that communism could be reformed through benign experiments initiated by a liberal wing of the party elite. It became clear that the Soviet Union would not permit any new experimentation with the subversive idea of socialism with a human face. The Soviet leaders maintained their monopoly of the interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and jealously weeded out any new form of “deviation” from their dogma, while the critical intellectuals throughout the East European countries understood that the real demands of society, of the genuine independent life of the people, could not be limited to the restrictive program formulated by the communist party’s liberals. In 1978 Adam Michnik characterized the principal weakness of intraparty reformism as the opposition’s identification with the linguistic and even metaphysical underpinnings of the established order. Although disgusted with bureaucratic excesses, critical intellectuals remained loyal to the ultimate values of socialism. Their belief system was not radically distinct from what the official ideology was preaching. For the dissatisfied masses, the obsessive revisionist reference to the pristine nature of socialism, adulterated by abominable Stalinist practices, sounded uninspiring and even suspicious. Michnik compared the experiences of the Polish October and the Prague Spring and concluded:
Although it was the absence of a stimulus from Moscow that made the Prague Spring different from the Polish October, one important similarity lay in the intraparty inspiration for the “movement of renewal.” In both cases the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement were determined by the character of this inspiration. Its strength was due to the system’s splitting from within—the plague was bred in the very heart of Grenada, so to speak, sparing neither the top layers of the party apparatus, the security apparatus, nor the army. But such a movement was unable to perceive its true historic identity or correctly to define its goals, and that was the source of its weakness. Its leaders used the general term democratization in such a manner that its connotations were almost purely negative; the term hardly had any positive meaning, and even then a different one for different people. The leaders themselves, in their call to the people for realism and moderation, failed to appreciate the geopolitical situation (Czechoslovakia) and the real aspirations of the people (Poland); they restored the monoparty system whose human face smiled only at party notables. In both cases, the result was confusion.1
The Prague Spring was a delayed offshoot of Khrushchevism, and as a trend within world communism Khrushchevism had quickly exhausted its magnetic appeal. A different approach, a strategy attuned to the times of Brezhnevite political conservatism, which did not represent merely a restoration of Stalinism but rather a new stage in the decomposition of the communist regimes, was needed. The new strategy had to take into account the growing obsolescence of the founding mythology of the existing system, the passing of the first generation of Stalinist crusaders, and the rise of political elites interested in the simple preservation of their advantages. The system had lost its initial absolutist drive: Stagnation and immobility were its main characteristics. The increasingly routinized mechanization of ideology laid open the cracks in the system’s edifice for easier exploitation by the opposition.
In the 1970s there were no charismatic leaders in East European communist countries, no ideological rhetorical devices capable of mobilizing large sectors of the population, and no real zealots ready to defend the system because they considered it morally superior to its capitalist opponents. Almost imperceptibly, the classic totalitarian system had been replaced by a combination of technocracy, bureaucracy, and inertial authoritarianism. More significant, the main psychological element that made Stalinism possible, the universalized sense of helplessness of the individual, had vanished almost completely. The regimes, of course, could still resort to violent means to suppress the opposition, and few in the opposition envisioned the development of alternative political parties. But it was clear that for the first time dissent was possible, and that it could have a real social impact. As the regimes declined under the burden of their own ineffectiveness, as the elites lost their sense of historical predestination and showed signs of nervousness, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for the reconstitution of the public sphere.
The main battlefield in the 1970s and 1980s was the restoration of hope for social change—people became convinced that the rules of the game were not eternal, that it was worth fighting for human dignity, and that success in fighting such a fight had a real chance. In all the East-Central European countries—East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—as well as Romania, social movements and groups emerged to challenge the powers-that-be and to announce their intention to cr
eate networks of informal grassroots initiatives. The degree of development of these actions of activists for social change was directly proportional to the erosion of the ruling apparatus and, as a corollary, the permissiveness of the existing regimes in their dealings with the opposition.
All five countries witnessed attempts to smash the social change initiatives, but they led to different results. In Poland, all the efforts of the Gierek regime to disband the civic initiatives were met by an increasingly radicalized response on the part of the emerging civil society. In the GDR, the huge police apparatus and the ruling SED weeded out any form of dissent; most of the critics were either imprisoned or forced to emigrate.
In Hungary, even the enlightened Kadar regime was far from ready to accept the rise of oppositional movements. The Kadarist politics of compromise granted the opposition more room to maneuver: Critics were not necessarily arrested, but they suffered other forms of harassment. For instance, the Budapest School philosophers (Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, György and Maria Markus, Janos Kis, Mihaly Vajda, György Bence) were stripped of their rights to teach and to publish in their own country. Some of them were forced to emigrate. Others, like Kis, remained in Hungary, where in the 1980s they founded the samizdat opposition. The term samizdat, a Russian abbreviation of the phrase samstvennoye izdatelstvo (self-publication), has become the symbolic designation of all clandestinely published materials in communist regimes. Similar interdictions to publishing were applied to other well-known Hungarian dissidents like Miklos Haraszti and the celebrated novelist Gyorgy Konrad.
In the scope of its antidissident reaction, Gustav Husak’s Czechoslovakia differed dramatically from Kadar’s Hungary. In Czechoslovakia members of the human rights underground movement Charter 77 were consistently interrogated by the police, prevented from practicing their professions, and even jailed.
The worst persecution of social critics took place in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. There the despotic regime criminalized any form of opposition. Criticism of Ceausescu by those under his Stalin-like rule was perceived as the undermining of the foundations of the system. Ceausescu resented and crushed not only intellectual dissent but also timid attempts by fellow party leaders to advocate a collective leadership. In such conditions, the very idea of a collective challenge to the regime was suicidal. The best-known case of intraparty dissent took place in 1979, when the veteran party leader Constantin Pirvulescu took the floor at the Eleventh RCP Congress and accused Ceausescu of having established a personal dictatorship. Pirvulescu was immediately silenced and assigned to forced residence. Two years earlier, the democratic movement initiated by the writer Paul Goma (a former political prisoner in Stalinist jails), in solidarity with Charter 77, had been violently smashed, and Goma had been forced to emigrate to France. In the summer of 1977 coal miners in the Jiu Valley had organized a strike demanding, among other things, the liberalization of the political system. The strike had been defeated and the miners’ leaders had disappeared without any trace.
Dissent in countries like Romania and Bulgaria had to confine itself to individual forms of protest. The case of the Romanian mathematician and human rights activist Mihai Botez is illustrative. Between 1977 and 1987 he engaged in unequivocal criticism of the Ceausescu regime. He granted interviews to the foreign press and addressed the government in countless memoranda showing that the country was moving toward a catastrophe. Botez did not challenge the existing social order but emphasized the regime’s failure to observe its own demagogical promises. In 1987, following numerous threats and the government’s decision assigning him to internal exile to a provincial town, Botez left Romania for the United States. Not long after Botez’s departure, even in Romania, under the impact of changes in the whole bloc and the visible deterioration of the structure of power represented by the Ceausescu clan, dissent developed in 1988 and 1989.
Despite the rise of individual and collective forms of dissent in Romania and all the Warsaw Pact countries, although corruption, demoralization, and even despair were endemic, the nomenklaturas, or ruling groups, were determined to hang on to power at all costs. The leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries tried to marginalize the nascent forms of political activism. In those circumstances, the birth of Solidarity in Poland represented a real watershed. Its creation, preceded by the activities of the KOR, showed that even under the Brezhnevite regimes stalemate and paralysis were not inevitable, that there were still ways of lessening the system’s hold on society’s life. For an understanding of the development of civil society initiatives, one should be aware of the role of the lingering independent institutions in Poland, primarily the Catholic Church and the circles of lay Catholic intellectuals. Other elements that mattered were the increased links between Polish civic activists and West European and American sources of support and information, including the Paris-based magazine Kultura, which ensured the bridge between critical intellectuals inside and outside Poland.2
PREMISES FOR A CIVIL SOCIETY
Solidarity opened a new chapter in the history of Eastern Europe by showing that possibilities existed for waking the long-dormant social trends and that the cracks in the apparently monolithic totalitarian edifice could be exploited in an imaginative way to restore the civil society. In Poland, the precondition for the resurrection of the civil society was the decline, or rather the loss, of the ruling party’s authority combined with a growing decrease in self-confidence among the elites. Add to that an international factor that played a prominent role in the development of citizens’ movements in East-Central Europe: the signing of the Helsinki Agreements in 1975 by representatives of the the Warsaw Pact, including their recognition of the international covenants on human rights.
It did not matter whether or not Brezhnev, Gierek, Husak, or Kadar really believed in human rights or even whether they were prepared to live up to their international pledges. What really mattered for the civic activists was that those leaders had officially recognized principles that transcended the frozen party dogmas and acknowledged—even if only hypocritically—the readiness of their governments to behave in accordance with international documents regarding the rights of humans and citizens. From that moment on, when those regimes had recognized the principles, it was possible for informal groups to form in the communist countries in defense of individuals unjustly prosecuted. In their eagerness to be considered respectable members of the international community, the communist leaders provided their domestic critics with unprecedented ammunition: the opportunity to question their policies in reference to their own promises. The applying of the leaders’ own words to their regimes* practices was the new strategy adopted by the mounting civil society groups in Eastern Europe. Solidarity with victims of human rights abuses became one of the chief rallying points for the opposition.
POLAND: THE REBIRTH OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY
By the late 1970s Polish society was torn by social and political tensions. Instead of confronting them, recognizing the failure of the command economy, and initiating bold reforms, the communist bureaucracy resorted to demagogy and used corruption as the last resort for preserving the status quo. The emergence of the independent, self-governed union Solidarity as an alternative organization able to articulate social demands for rapid political and economic change altered the whole equation of the political game in East-Central Europe, which had held that all change would start from the center in Moscow. Peaceful and self-contained, the Polish revolution of 1980-81 questioned the dogma of the communist party’s power monopoly and advanced a program for the pluralization of a Soviet-bloc society. The thrust of Solidarity’s search for renewal was to release citizens from the suffocating burden of bureaucratic institutions through the rehabilitation of the civil society. The efforts of the new social movement created an autonomous counterpart to governmental power and eventually ensured the development of what Max Weber called a national citizen class.3 The development of such a movement, with its combination of spontaneous and institutional dimensions
, would have been unthinkable under mature Stalinism. The birth and then the recognition of Solidarity was predicated on the public’s awareness of the dominant power’s loss of authority. Both ideologically and politically, the Gierek regime had ceased to be a traditional form of totalitarianism. Although the repressive institutions were still there, their functions had been curtailed seriously. As for the communist party, its claim to legitimacy was widely questioned by the majority of the population, who felt that “35 years of political misrule had brought the nation to the point of economic, as well as political and social bankruptcy, and that any real solution to Poland’s problems would require not merely changes in economic policy, but a change in the relationship between the political authority and the civil community as well.”4
Within Poland, the Solidarity revolutionary movement of 1980-81 revealed that the party’s domination was illegitimate and discovered in the nation’s popular will a genuine principle of political legitimation. Although the Polish government contemplated the full use of military force to thwart the new protest movement in August 1980, the communist party found itself powerless in the face of an irresistible social movement. The agreement signed on August 31, 1980, by representatives of the government and the strike committee stipulated the party’s leading role as the ultimate limit of the negotiable issues, but the communist leadership resigned itself to an increasingly defensive position. Solidarity legally registered itself as an independent trade union several months later, in November: The very fact that the communist government was compelled to admit the right of an independent union to exist showed that its whole ideological pretense to rule was a hoax. Far from holding a historical mandate to rule society, the communists stayed in power by virtue of mere inertia and force. That the communist party itself could not avoid the impact of the societal resurrection became clear at a party congress in July 1981, when the struggle intensified between partisans of democratization and the traditionalists who deplored the concessions made to Solidarity.