Konrad’s statement carries to an extreme the widespread East European disgust with what can be called the imperialism of politics, or the politicization of all spheres of life. In his view, the practice of antipolitics, the art of democratic opposition, must be conducted to limit the government’s interference in the individual’s private affairs. So civil society is also a strategy for restoring the forms of human cooperation and communication that exist outside the state’s controls:
Because politics has flooded nearly every nook and cranny of our lives, I would like to see the flood recede. We ought to depoliticize our lives, free them from politics as from some contagious infection. We ought to free our simple everyday affairs from considerations of politics. I ask that the state do what it’s supposed to do, and do it well. But it should not do things that are society’s business, not the state’s. So I would describe the democratic opposition as not a political but an antipolitical opposition, since its essential activity is to work for destatification.39
Antipolitics becomes a galvanizing principle, a collective effort to limit the state’s grip on society and to restore the individual’s rights as the ultimate and absolutely nonnegotiable value:
The ideology of the democratic opposition shares with religion a belief that the dignity of the individual personality (in both oneself and the other person) is a fundamental value not requiring any further demonstration. The autonomy and solidarity of human beings are the two basic and mutually complementary values to which the democratic movement relates other values …. The culture of autonomy protests against making any human institution superior to the dignity of individual human beings. Whenever the state, or some power bloc, or the world market comes to be regarded as an absolute value, this opposition will appear, invoking the European tradition in order to demonstrate that this allegedly supreme value is really far from universal, and is in fact only the special interest of a certain group of people. It is precisely this critique of ideology that offers the Eastern European democratic opposition a way to contribute to the culture of self-determination for the individuals, for groups, for the nation, and for the continent as a whole.40
DISSENT IN POST-TOTALITARIAN SOCIETIES
If opposition to the state that has become the absolute value is inevitable, who are these dissidents who dare to challenge the system and propose a different set of values rooted in respect for truth and human dignity? The term dissident was coined by Western journalists, and many critics of the Soviet-bloc societies had expressed reservations about its relevance. If people like Vaclav Havel or Jan Patocka in Czechoslovakia, György Konrad or Miklos Haraszti in Hungary, Paul Goma or Dorin Tudoran in Romania, Robert Havemann or Wolf Biermann in the GDR, or somebody like Milovan Djilas in Yugoslavia, who anticipated the emergence of dissent as an international movement, are the paradigms, it is clear that more often than not dissidents are critical intellectuals who have reached the conclusion that silence means complicity with the system. According to Havel, dissidents can be identified in the light of the following criteria:
First, they voice their critical views in a consistent and systematic way, “within the very strict limits available to them, and because of this, they are known in the West.” Second, because of their moral stances and precisely because of being denied basic human rights, the dissidents enjoy a special form of public esteem. Although this respect is rarely manifested in spectacular gestures, the authorities are aware of the popularity of the dissidents and avoid to engage in savage repression against them (or, if they do this, they can expect political complications to follow, including in the international relations). And third, as we have seen dissidents are people inclined to articulate their ideas in a written form: They are people who lean toward intellectual pursuits, that is, they are “writing” people, people for whom the written word is the primary—and often the only—political medium they command, and that gains them attention, particularly from abroad.41
In his book The Velvet Prison, Miklos Haraszti, one of Hungary’s foremost dissident thinkers, explained the ways intellectuals can become dissidents. His book is particularly important in that it deals with the Kadar experiment of “benign dictatorship.” The essence of the Kadarist compromise was a silent pact between the power and the society. The regime offered material benefits and a limited range of autonomy so long as society did not dispute the paternalist privileges of the regime, including its right to confiscate memory, slander the 1956 Revolution, and consider any discussion on the nature of Soviet—Hungarian relations unacceptable. Ironically adopting the viewpoint of the co-opted artist, Haraszti’s book sounds extremely skeptical. He seems to say that only incurable romantics can engage in direct opposition to a regime that, because of its politics of soft repression, has almost completely annihilated the source of critical activism. Dissidents appear therefore as alien elements in a continuum dominated by conformity and resignation:
These rare birds are in fact the intellectual progeny of a vanquished civilization whose promise of democracy, individualism and critical thought has left a lingering, though fading, trace. Natives of the new culture, they can only have heard of the old one in a muted fashion. Their fealty to the old—and obstinacy in the face of the new—betrays their real origins …. These picturesque orphans herald nothing but their own demise; they are representatives of a dying species, unable to reproduce themselves in the new world that is rapidly rendering them extinct.42
Written before the rise of Solidarity, Haraszti’s book gave voice to the sense of isolation and even hopelessness experienced by the beleaguered dissident minorities in Eastern Europe. In its melancholy one can detect the author’s fear that simulated obedience to the all-embracing official ideology, with its hypocrisy and self-serving rhetoric, had managed to become second nature:
Our ideological conformism does not, of course, prevent us from smiling when encountering the dogma. Often, bureaucrats and artists laugh together. Enlightened as we are, we consider the liturgy to be sign of narrow-mindedness—an idolatry, a childish extremism when compared with our natural, simple discipline imbibed since infancy. But our cynicism is a conceit that has no effect on our behavior. Marxism is still the foundation-myth of our notion of civic responsibility. It is the legend that legitimates our ideas of service to the people. It is a comfortable euphemism, like the ever-popular story of the stork told to the children.43
Haraszti’s state artist is the embodiment of the closed universe: There is no mobility there, no sense of transcendence. All is happening as if the party has established its domination forever and any opposition is a form of quixotic (or irresponsible) daydreaming. Kadar’s simulated tolerance did not affect the ultimate reality of the system. Power still lay with the communist nomenklatura, who, in this particular case, had learned to cajole the intellectuals and cultivate their narcissism. But, as the party ideologue György Aczel once put it: “The formulation of the rules of the game, of the essential conditions, and legal supervisory powers (use of the veto in certain matters) naturally continue to be within the competence of the socialist state.”44 In such circumstances of ostensible universal integration, when all opposition nuclei seem to be extinct, how can an individual maintain autonomy? According to Haraszti’s imaginary state artist, ready to justify his own compromises by denying the meaning of alternative forms of conduct: “In our civilization there are only two kinds of dissidents: Naive Heroes and Maverick Artists. Both are doomed to irrelevance.”45 Yet Haraszti’s sad comments are not a dismissal of dissident behavior. The author confessed several years after the book was written:
I hope that I don’t have to defend my treatment of dissent in this book. I intended the very existence of this book to be a denial of its deliberate exaggerations. I hope that its publication is a proof that refutes the despair that darkens its sentences. For this reason I chose to speak mostly in the third person, in the voice of a state artist, rather than joining the chorus of my own natural compatriots in the ghetto of rom
antic individualism.46
The fate of the dissidents is to be continuously mocked at by the self-satisfied state intellectuals, perfectly adjusted to the existing order and enjoying the benefits flowing from their subservience.
From the viewpoint of the institutional monolith represented by a state’s culture, dissidents are troublemakers sticking to anachronistic ideas of individual freedoms. They must exist at the margin of society, the state artist thinks, because the new civilization cannot, and does not wish to, incorporate them. Some of their ideas can be integrated in the official dogma, but certainly deprived of their explosive meaning. An example is the appropriation by the party ideology in the Soviet Union of the term glasnost, long the slogan of the samizdat democratic movement. Likewise, the Kadar-like reformist regimes knew how to appropriate and thereby emasculate terms like pluralism, dialogue, openness, and other lofty ideals championed by the dissidents.
According to one Hungarian saying, if Solzhenitsyn had lived in Hungary, he would have been appointed president of the Writer’s Union … given time. And then no one would have written The Gulag Archipelago; and if someone had, Solzhenitsyn would have voted for his expulsion. This is the climate of opinion in the culture of “progressive censorship.” We consider as unacceptable extremes both the state that is unable to reform and the artist that is unable to conform.47
Haraszti’s mordant irony deconstructs the rationalizations of the cultural bureaucrat, the intellectual turned into a servant of the state. For him, the nobility of the dissident’s refusal to accept humiliation is indicative of a fatal psychological deformity. But, as marginalized as they are by the cultural industry of state socialism, dissidents are still denied the right to be totally different. The state reserves for itself not only the right to punish them but also the right to “reconsider” them once a change in the “party line” has occurred and a new leader comes to power with a different set of promises. Haraszti’s character—whose thoughts are not the author’s—regards the dissidents as “necessary” for the completeness of the new look of post-totalitarian communism:
An era of greater generosity is about to dawn. Just as in ancient, long-enduring empires, renegade mandarins might establish taoist monasteries. Similarly, the modern socialist state regards its diehard dissidents as members of a monstrous, weird, misanthropic sect, disenchanted with educating the people … but nonetheless essentially innocent and, indeed, not without their uses …. Later, of course, some of them will be “rediscovered” and “rehabilitated.” Such decisions will be reached by the central authorities. Amnesties are issued when a new ruler is installed. Almost all dissidents can count on becoming part of the official curriculum when the time has come to denounce the failures of the previous dynasty.48
When Haraszti wrote his book in the early 1980s, Hungary appeared to be the most advanced country in the Soviet bloc in terms of domestic liberalization. Compared with Romania, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, dissidents were treated with kid gloves, although the state machine did not spare efforts to thwart their efforts to get out of the political ghetto and establish contacts with the larger society. The underground presses were systematically ransacked by the police, dissidents were interrogated and even beaten up. The regime avoided, however, massive organized crackdowns. As the economic situation deteriorated and the changes in the USSR spurred higher political expectations, Kadar’s Hungary ceased to be “the most joyful barrack in the socialist camp.” Its youth were radicalized, and the democratic opposition became a national political force. Far from being assigned to eternal marginality, dissidents, Haraszti included, became the architects of the transition to postcommunism. Actually, in the postscript to his book, written in 1987, Haraszti admitted that the changes introduced by Gorbachev in the functioning of the Soviet system and the new wave of de-Stalinization made some of his gloomy predictions invalid. But, at the same time, he insisted that Gorbachevism represented an adoption by the Soviet elite of the same techniques that had ensured the partial success of the “velvet prison” experiment undertaken by Hungary under Kadar:
I have called this model the “post-Stalinist” or “soft” or “civilian” version of Communist rule, in contradistinction to the “Stalinist” or “hard” or “military” style …. Indeed, the Hungarian model might well represent a more rational, more normative, and more enduring version of directed culture. Mr. Gorbachev understands that in order to have a truly successful society with a modern economy he must boost the intelligentsia’s sagging morale by giving it a stake in administering the future.49
FIVE
The Ethos of Civil Society
Antipolitics strives to put politics in its place and make sure that it stays there, never overstepping its proper office of defending and refining the rules of the game of civil society. Antipolitics is the ethos of civil society, and civil society is the antithesis of military society.
—Gyorgy Konrad
The development of civil societies in the states of the Soviet bloc cannot be separated from the existence of autonomous centers of independent thought. Living within the truth, although often seen as a gesture of moral idealism with little social significance, has turned out to be the driving force behind the creation of alternative ways of thinking and acting. It is thus clear that the foundation stone of the countersociety is the individual’s decision to proclaim his or her mental independence. In Havel’s words: “What is this independent life of society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self-education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied free, civic initiatives, including instances of independent social self-organization.”1 The new politics, which relies on informal citizens’ initiatives as an antidote to the paralyzing pressure of the bureaucratic Leviathan, which encourages the emergence of multifaceted experiments in grassroots activism, and which maintains that change comes from spontaneous movements from below rather than from munificent concessions from above, resulted in the development of civil societies in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
Initially, it seemed that there was no reason to believe that the governing colossus could be removed or forced to change, but as the situation evolved and more people embarked on such independent initiatives, it appeared that society had become a legitimate actor on the political stage. To the surprise of the communist bureaucrats, societies had found their spokesmen in precisely those long-harassed dissidents who had turned down the system’s offer to cooperate. Because the whole strategy of the civil society is rooted in the belief that only the restoration of the independent life of society can guarantee the peaceful transition to a democratic order, such a strategy goes beyond the simplistic pragmatism of those who advocate the supremacy of traditional politics.
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight. It seems to me that today, this “provisional,” “minimal,” and “negative” programme—the “simple” defense of people—is in a particular sense (and not only in the circumstances in which we live) an optimal and most positive programme because it forces politics to return to its only proper starting point, proper that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people.2
In countries like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even the more repressive GDR, dissident nuclei started as tiny communities of like-minded individuals. They included people who resented and decided to resist the system’s encroachment on a citizen’s inner life and protest any form of infringement on the universally recognized human rights. In Havel’s words:
In the “dissident movements” of the Soviet bloc, the defense of human beings usually takes the form of a defense of human and civil rights as they are entrenched in various official documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights, the Final Act of t
he Helsinki Conference, and the constitutions of individual states. These movements set out to defend anyone who is being prosecuted for acting in the spirit of those rights, and they in turn act in the same spirit in their work, by insisting over and over again that the regime recognize and respect human and civil rights, and by drawing attention to the areas of life where this is not the case.3
The dissident movements made a clear point of their opposition to violence. They realized that the reconstruction of the independent life could not take place in the name of resentment and revenge, but precisely by emphasizing the values of human solidarity the system held in deep contempt. As Adam Michnik pointed out in an essay he wrote while in jail in 1982: “The essence of the programs put forward by the opposition groups … lay in the attempt to reconstruct society, to restore social bonds outside official institutions.”4 The ethos of the dissident movements rejected the cult of violence as counterproductive and morally incompatible with the idealistic goals of those initiatives from below.
While the system contained violence in its own structure and in all its modalities of functioning, the opposition argued that its own moral superiority stemmed precisely from its refusal to share the same exclusive, militaristic logic with the rulers. Michnik luminously explained this concept in an essay he wrote in the Gdansk prison in 1985:
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