Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  THE BULGARIAN DOMINO: THE ANTI-ZHIVKOV COUP

  For decades the most obedient and trustworthy of Moscow’s allies was the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov. He desperately maneuvered to avoid opening the political system and to preserve his monopoly on power. On various occasions, especially after 1987, he engaged in rhetorical attacks on dogmatism and conservatism and promised to emulate the Soviet perestroika. In reality, Zhivkov used those demagogic devices to maintain his hold over the party apparatus and get rid of potential reformers within the leadership.

  As a concession to Moscow’s growing pressure for liberalization, in August 1987 the Bulgarian Politburo passed a resolution on state symbols that required, among other things, the removal of Zhivkov’s portrait from public display and the demolition of his statue in his home town, Pravets. In March 1988 most of the institutions (such as the People’s Palace of Culture, the Youth Theater, and the Institute of Balkan Studies) that had been named after Zhivkov’s late daughter Lyudmila, a former Minister of Culture and Politburo member, had their original names restored.55 In December 1988, in another hypocritical gesture designed to placate the Soviets and to deter his domestic opponents, Zhivkov told a Central Committee plenum that the time was ripe for a bottom-up revolution and a complete reform of the political system.

  On February 1, 1989, the reformist Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov was forced to resign, and it seemed that Zhivkov had managed to smash the mounting intraparty opposition. In the meantime, the increasingly sclerotic Zhivkov regime began to be challenged by a number of growing civic initiatives from below that called themselves discussion clubs. The emergence of those associations in direct defiance of the authorities signified the end of political passivity and the beginning of the opposition’s self-organization. Among those directly involved in the grassroots activism was Zhelyu Zhelev, a philosopher who had been expelled from the communist party in the 1960s because of his heretical ideas and outspoken criticism of totalitarianism. In 1988 Zhelev had been a founding member of the “Club for the Support of Glasnost and Perestroika,” an informal association dedicated to the struggle for democratization. Despite the appearance of civic activists, the prevailing feeling among Bulgarians was that the Zhivkov regime still had enough strength to disarm the opposition and to curb any genuine reformist efforts. The public’s fear resulted in an increased level of cynicism and “a sense among many Bulgarians that any changes sweeping other corners of the Eastern bloc would not be touching them soon.”56

  The impression of Bulgarian immobility, however, was not exactly accurate, because underneath the apparently cohesive party leadership strong tensions were smoldering. In early November about five thousand people marched on the National Assembly building in Sofia to protest environmental pollution, but the thrust of the demonstration was political. The marchers questioned the competence of the government to run the country’s economy. Then, suddenly, on November 10 a coalition of reform-minded apparatchiks led by Petar Mladenov and army generals headed by the veteran Politburo member and Minister of Defense Dobri Dzhurov forced Todor Zhivkov, the man who had run Bulgaria’s communist party since April 1954, to resign. What happpened in Bulgaria was very different from the revolutionary changes in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, where the communist elites had to relinquish their hold on power after more or less dramatic confrontations with the opposition. The Bulgarian communists tried to preempt such a denouement by ridding themselves of Zhivkov and taking the credit for the launching of radical reforms. Knowing General Dzhurov’s intimate ties with Moscow, one could assume that his critical role in the conspiracy had something to do with the Kremlin’s increasing dissatisfaction with Zhivkov’s sluggishness and ineptitude.

  Zhivkov’s short-lived successor as party leader was the fifty-three-year-old Petar Mladenov, who had served during the previous eighteen years as the country’s Foreign Minister. Because Mladenov did not come from the highest echelons of the party bureaucracy, it appeared that a traditional succession pattern was broken. Mladenov announced that sweeping reforms could be postponed no longer and pledged that under the new leadership Bulgaria would become “a modern, democratic and lawful country.”57 The new government abolished the law proscribing unauthorized political activity, and control over the media was relaxed. As for Zhivkov himself, he hoped to save face (and at least part of his privileges) by yielding to the Politburo’s verdict and formally admitting his own responsibility for the failure to revitalize the system.

  Following Zhivkov’s downfall, large street demonstrations took place in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities. Vigils were organized to protest the preservation of the communists’ dictatorship, and demands were made for the immediate establishment of a multiparty system. On December 13 the communist party’s Central Committee decided to expel Todor Zhivkov from its ranks. According to Andrei Lukanov, a Politburo member who was the head of a commission investigating the power abuses perpetrated by Zhivkov and his cronies, Zhivkov’s expulsion from the party meant a resolute break with the corrupt practices of the past. “[W]e are not only saying goodbye to a person, we are saying goodbye to a policy,” Lukanov declared. As in the GDR, exposés about Zhivkov’s luxurious life-style enraged the already discontented masses, who increasingly demanded his immediate arrest for gross violations of laws and abuse of power.58 At the same meeting, the Central Committee gave in to popular pressure and supported Mladenov’s call for the communist party to renounce its guaranteed monopoly on political power. In early December the opposition formed its own umbrella organization, called the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), and Zhelyu Zhelev was elected the president of its Coordinating Committee. On December 29, 1989, following mass demonstrations by ethnic Turks, the new government and the Bulgarian communist party’s Central Committee pledged to renounce Zhivkov’s assimilationist policies. But the seeds of nationalism had been implanted deeply over preceding decades, and immediately after the Turks demonstrated thousands of ethnic Bulgars took to the streets in the southern town of Kurdjali calling for a referendum on the assimilation issue. After the passage of decrees to allow members of the Turkish minority to recover their original names and to reopen mosques, Bulgarian nationalists formed the “Committee for the Defense of National Interests,” which championed opposition to Turkish representation in the parliament.

  Following Zhivkov’s ouster, the communist party was dominated by a triumvirate made up of the General Secretary Petar Mladenov and the Politburo members Andrei Lukanov and Alexander Lilov. In January 1990 Zhivkov was placed under house arrest on charges of having incited ethnic hostilities between Bulgarians and the country’s Turkish minority and having misused government property and money.59 The Bulgarian communist party held a stormy Congress from January 30 to February 2, 1990. On that occasion, Alexander Lilov succeeded Petar Mladenov as the party’s leader. Lilov’s election to the top of the communist party’s hierachy meant that the old nomenklatura was not ready to accept defeat passively. Although marginalized by Zhivkov after 1983, Lilov had made his career as a faithful party ideologue and had enjoyed a close relationship with Zhivkov’s daughter Lyudmila.60 As for Zhivkov’s personal fate, in July he addressed a letter to the parliament in which he refused to face the legislative body, arguing that he did not want to be used as an instrument for the political ambitions of certain groups and personalities. Furthermore, Zhivkov insisted, there was no judicial base for charging him with criminal offenses: “I have made many mistakes, but I haven’t committed any crime against my nation. So I assume only political responsibility for the mistakes.”61 In disarray and frustration, the Bulgarian communists tried to dissociate themselves from the excesses of the Zhivkov regime and to reassert their party’s precommunist traditions. In 1990 the party changed its name into the Bulgarian Socialist Party as a symbolic departure from the Leninist dogmas.

  THE SIEGE OF THE ROMANIAN FORTRESS

  In the case of Romania, the situation was the most dramatic and enigmatic. Nicolae Ceausescu’s po
licy had amounted to the unrestricted monopolization of political power in his hands. When he was elected General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in March 1965, Ceausescu embodied the promise of liberalization. He loosened party controls over cultural life and developed further the independent foreign policy inaugurated by his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. During the first stage of his rule, between 1965 and 1971, Ceausescu advocated collective leadership, criticized the repression of the Stalinist years, and opposed the Soviet integrationist policy within the CMEA. He appeared to be a supporter of the national communist line as formulated by Tito in Yugoslavia. As a member of the Warsaw Pact, Ceausescu resisted Soviet demands for joint military maneuvers and insisted that each national army be subordinated to the domestic leadership. He challenged the Soviet interpretation of socialist internationalism and refused to walk in Moscow’s footsteps during the 1967 Middle East crisis—Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country to maintain diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. In 1967 and 1968 Ceausescu publicly criticized the abuses of the Securitate (the secret police) during the Stalinist years and pledged that such atrocities would never be repeated. In April 1968 a plenum of the Romanian Central Committee rehabilitated Lucretiu Patrascanu, the former Minister of Justice and Politburo member who had been executed on trumped-up charges in April 1954. Meanwhile, Romania continued to maintain a neutral stance in the conflict between China and the Soviet Union. In August 1968 Ceausescu reached the apex of his domestic popularity when he publicly and vehemently condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But it was precisely at that moment that he decided to convert his popular support for launching an autonomous course into a personal asset for the expansion of his personal power and the construction of a despotism second to none in the post-Stalin Soviet bloc.

  Ceausescu’s displeasure with Brezhnev’s interventionist policy in Eastern Europe was not motivated by reformist proclivities. On the contrary, when the Romanian leader realized that domestic relaxation had contributed to the awakening of limited but increasingly vocal critical orientations, he decided to put an end to the liberal interlude. In June 1971 he visited China and North Korea and was fascinated with the mobilization techniques of the personality cults surrounding Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung. During that trip he was accompanied by his wife Elena, whose influence on her husband and on Romanian political life was to grow in direct proportion to the deterioration of the social climate and the development of a uniquely extravagant cult of personality. In 1974 Elena became a full member of the Communist Party’s ruling body, the Political Executive Committee.

  During the 1970s Romania also continued to pursue a foreign policy slightly different from Moscow’s, which made Ceausescu look like an opponent of Soviet imperialism and earned him praise from Western media and chancelleries. At the same time, Ceausescu restored the power of the secret police and transformed the communist party bureaucracy into an instrument for the implementation of his increasingly erratic decisions. He lost touch with the political group within the party apparatus that had helped him to consolidate his power during the early stage of his rule. Any form of criticism within the top elite was considered seditious, and those who dared to question Ceausescu’s authority were immediately eliminated from the leadership. One of those who expressed reservations regarding the wisdom of the neo-Stalinist offensive launched by Ceausescu in the summer of 1971, when he returned from his Asian trip, was Ion Iliescu, then a Central Committee Secretary in charge of ideology and widely regarded as the President’s protégé and even heir-apparent. During a Central Committee plenum, Iliescu was singled out by Ceausescu and censured for alleged liberalism and intellectualism. After that Iliescu served as a secretary in charge of propaganda in the Timis County party committee and then as first secretary of the Iasi County party committee. In the early 1980s he became Chairman of the State Committee for Water, and later, until the December 1989 revolt, he held the directorship of the Technical Publishing House in Bucharest.

  From the 1970s onward Ceausescu seemed increasingly intent upon establishing a dynastic version of socialism. Elena’s role grew to incredible proportions, as she became the de facto number two person in the party hierarchy. As a chairperson of the Central Committee Commission in charge of personnel appointments and a First Deputy Prime Minister who effectively controlled all government operations, Elena came to dominate the Romanian political scene. She controlled all her husband’s interviews and managed his schedule. It was she who encouraged the President’s morbid vanity and surrounded him with a wall of adulation and pseudo-mystical devotion. That is not to say that without Elena Nicolae Ceausescu would have been a liberal. He had grown up in the underground Romanian communist party, which never resolved its legitimacy complex and thus had a strong sense of fanaticism characteristic of tiny conspiratorial sects. Besides, Ceausescu had been directly involved in the repression against the peasants and intellectuals in the 1950s. With Elena as the second-in-command and other members of the Ceausescu clan, including the couple’s youngest son Nicu as first as leader of the Communist Youth Union and then as head of the Sibiu County party committee and an alternate Political Executive Committee member, the success of the dynastic design seemed to be ensured.

  The type of personalist leadership that developed in Romania after 1971 made impossible even minimal constraints upon the ruler’s behavior by his close entourage. There was no opposition either within the higher ranks of the nomenklatura. An atmosphere of unequaled servility stifled the slightest critical initiative.62 Ceausescu’s psychology also played a large part in the unfolding disaster. Writing in 1988, a perceptive observer of Romanian communism noted:

  The greatest single factor in Romania’s internal debacle has been Ceausescu’s capriciousness. No European leader in the second half of the twentieth century has personified the debilitating effects of power more than he has. An intelligent man; an extraordinarily hard worker; a patriot; not personally cruel (in the sense that, say, Matyas Rakosi of Hungary or Stalin was); once well intentioned—he has probably remained so in a perverted way—his name has yet become synonymous with historic tyranny.63

  After Gorbachev came to power, Ceausescu found himself extremely isolated. Once the Soviet Union changed and the Warsaw Pact lost its bellicosity, the long-praised Romanian domesticism ceased to excite the West. Ceausescu’s anti-Sovietism was finally recognized as rooted in his unreconstructed Stalinism rather than in any reformist temptation. Unlike Yugoslavia under Tito, where external autonomy had been accompanied by limited domestic liberalization, Ceausescu had used the international recognition of his semi-independent course in foreign policy to foster a Draconian authoritarian regime based on the unabashed exaltation of nationalism and the preservation of the basic Stalinist institutions, including the ubiquitous secret police. All forms of opposition had been smashed. For instance, in the summer of 1977 the Jiu Valley coal miners went on strike, but they were disbanded and their strike leaders were jailed or simply disappeared. Dissidents like the writer Paul Goma, the historian Vlad Georgescu, and the poet Dorin Tudoran were forced to leave the country after countless harassments. The same happened to the mathematician Mihai Botez, who had criticized the regime from the viewpoint of its own pledges to respect human rights. Others, like the poet Mircea Dinescu, the literary critic Dan Petrescu, and the university lecturer Doina Cornea, were kept under strict police surveillance. There was little hope that anything could come out of the higher echelons of the communist party, where Ceausescu’s domination was totally undisputed.

  Frightened by any form of potential external pressure, Ceausescu engaged in a breakneck effort to pay his country’s foreign debt of more than $12 billion. That resulted in an almost complete ban on imports, including vitally important spare parts for Romania’s industry. At the same time agricultural output was used for exports in order to expand the country’s reserves of foreign exchange. The hardships imposed on the population, especially after the winter of 1984, were be
yond the imagination. People were forced to freeze in their apartments because of the government’s decision to cut off energy supplies for domestic consumption. With their bitter sense of gallows humor, Romanians used to say that the difference between Hitler and Ceausescu was that the former killed people by turning on gas, and the latter did the same by turning it off. Romania, the country that gave birth to Eugène Ionesco, the French author of absurd plays, looked like a land where absurdity ruled supreme.

  As if all those measures were not enough to excite anger and outrage among an increasingly humiliated population, Ceausescu ordered the razing of the historical center of the country’s capital city, Bucharest. In its place, construction started on a megalomaniacal new administrative center, including a “House of the Republic” bigger than the Versailles Palace in France. The communist monarchy needed symbols to eternalize itself, and Ceausescu did not hesitate to spend huge amounts of money and to use forced labor in building monuments to his own glory. Since the regime continued to play the nationalist card in its propaganda, ethnic minorities were seen as dangerous carriers of alien values. Among Romania’s minorities, the 2 million Hungarians were Ceausescu’s particular obsession. He saw them as dangerous foreigners, a Trojan horse that threatened the cohesion of the Romanian nation. The conducator (leader) delivered harangues against those who did not understand the imperative of creating a totally homogeneous nation. Eventually thousands of Hungarians decided to leave their homes and illegally cross the border into Hungary. Ironically, they were joined by numerous Romanians, who chose to leave their homeland rather than suffer the effects of Ceausescu’s ruling delirium. Ceausescu also initiated the forced resettlement of populations from villages to urban shanty towns to demonstrate the country’s rapid progression to communism. With his primitive Stalinist mind, the conducator wanted to erase all differences between urban and rural areas by simply bulldozing more than seven thousand villages. That action, which Romanian propaganda tried to present as a “civilizing” step, aroused enormous international outrage. All over the country, Romanians were quietly seething.