Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Notes

  In this section, each work cited more than once appears in a full citation at its first mention in each chapter. Subsequent citations within a chapter are rendered in a short form. When a subsequent reference occurs more than ten note numbers after the last previous mention, reference is made to the note where the full citation appears, e.g.: “(note 3 above).”

  Chapter 1 Victims and Outsiders

  1 Adam Michnik, “The Presence of Liberal Values,” East European Reporter, 4, no. 4 (London: Spring-Summer 1991): 71.

  2 For a splendid account of the spiritual effervescence in Budapest before World War I, see John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988).

  3 Jean-François Revel, “Sortir du communisme, une tâche sans précédent dans l’histoire,” Est-Ouest, no. 90, (Paris, June 1991), p. 3.

  4 Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 3-24.

  5 Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 138.

  6 Rothschild, Return to Diversity, p. 70.

  7 Adam Michnik quoted in Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East-Central Europe (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 28.

  8 For a clear analysis of Romania’s interwar political life, see Vlad Georgescu, The Romanians: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 189-232.

  9 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984.

  10 Danilo Kis, “Variations on the Theme of Central Europe,” Crosscurrents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture, no. 6, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1987), p. 11.

  11 Alexander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 15.

  12 Helmut Gruber, International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 241-46.

  13 For the fate of foreign communists in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge, see Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 504-13.

  14 See Kenneth Jowitt’s discussion of this issue in his Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944-1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 175-77.

  15 In 1935, at the Comintern’s 7th (and last) Congress, Dimitrov delivered the keynote address; in it he formulated the orthodox Stalinist definition of fascism as “the dictatorship of the most reactionary forces of monopolistic capital.” After World War II Dimitrov went back to Bulgaria, where he became the country’s president until his sudden and still mysterious death while in the Soviet Union in 1948. In 1990, following the collapse of the communist regime in Bulgaria, Dimitrov’s embalmed body was removed from the Soviet-style Mausoleum in Sofia as part of a national campaign for the elimination of communist symbols and iconology. For fascinating details on the Comintern elite, see Branko Lazich in collaboration with Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised and Expanded Edition (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

  16 Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 426, and Anthony Read and David Fisher , The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-1941 (New York: Norton, 1988).

  17 See “What Is Central Europe: The Telltale Scar,” The New Republic, August 7 and 14, 1989, p. 28.

  18 For Tito and Titoism, the literature is enormous and very controversial. See Adam Ulam, Titoism and the Cominform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), and Vladimir Dedijer, The Battle Stalin Lost: Memoirs of Yugoslavia (New York: Viking, 1971).

  19 Arshi Pipa, “The Political Culture of Albanian Communism,” in Tariq Ali, The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on the Twentieth Century World Politics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 434-64.

  20 See Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist ldeology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (New York and London: Routledge, 1988).

  21 Gavriel D. Ra’anan, International Policy Formation in the USSR: Factional “Debates” During the Zhdanovshchina (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983), and William O. McCagg, Jr., Stalin Embattled 1943-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978).

  22 The statutes of the Union of Soviet Writers adopted in 1934, as quoted by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), p. 148.

  23 Quoted in McCagg, Stalin Embattled, pp. 250-51.

  24 Ibid., p. 264; the full text of the declaration appears in For a Lasting Peace, for People’s Democracy no. 1 (Belgrade, 1947), p. 1.

  25 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 3-151.

  26 Paul Ignotus, “The First Two Communist Takeovers of Hungary: 1919 and 1948,” in Thomas T. Hammond, The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 395.

  27 Nissan Oren, “A Revolution Administered: The Sovietization of Bulgaria,” in Hammond, Anatomy, pp. 321-38.

  28 Adam Bromke, Poland’s Politics: Idealism vs. Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 60-61.

  29 Kulturny Noviny, no. 7 (Prague, 1968), quoted by Pavel Tigrid, “The Prague Coup of 1948: The Elegant Takeover,” in Hammond, Anatomy, p. 400.

  30 Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc, p. 65.

  31 Kolakowski, Main Currents (note 20 above), 11:85.

  32 Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc, p. 52.

  33 Quoted by Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of the Soviet Man (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 6.

  34.Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 220.

  35 Jacek Trznadel, “An Interview with Zbigniew Herbert,” Partisan Review, no. 4 (1987), pp. 559-60.

  36 Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc, p. 67.

  37 Bertram Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 10.

  38 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (New York: Atheneum, 1974), pp. 249-50.

  Chapter 2 Children in the Fog

  1 George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948-1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987), pp. 11-12.

  2 Ibid., p. xiii.

  3 “The Trial of Laszlo Rajk,” in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 69-70.

  4 See Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: The Free Press, 1990).

  5 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 137.

  6 Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East-Central Europe (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) p. 116; on Stalin versus Tito, see Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in Tariq Ali , The Stalinist Legacy (Harmondsworth, Middle-sex: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 256.

  7 See Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).

  8 See Oskar Gruenwald, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxist Humanism in Contemporary Yugoslavia (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin, 1982).

  9 See Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), and idem, Of Prisons and Ideas (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).

  10 Wolfgang Leonhard, Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism (New York: Paragon Books, 1979), p. 268.

  11 Ter
esa Toranska, “Them”: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 257.

  12 Ibid., p. 354. The reader will find an enormous amount of invaluable information in this book about the psychological and moral makeup of the Polish Stalinist elite.

  13 For these biographies, see the appropriate entries in Branko Lazich and Milorad M. Drachkovich, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised and Expanded Edition (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

  14 Brecht as quoted by William Echikson, Lighting the Night, (New York: Morrow, 1990), p. 63; Timothy Garton Ash, “Comrade Brecht,” in his book The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 28-46.

  15 Brzezinski, Soviet Bloc, p. 174.

  16 Celestine Bohlen, “Warsaw Pact Agrees to Dissolve Its Military Alliance,” New York Times, February 26, 1991.

  17 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), III: 451.

  18 Khrushchev’s “Secret Report,” in Ali, Stalinist Legacy (note 6 above), pp. 269-70.

  19 Isaac Deutscher, “The Tragedy of Polish Communism,” in Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades (London: Verso, 1984), p. 121.

  20 For the Polish political traditions, see Marcin Krol, “The Polish Syndrome of Incompetentness,” in Stanislaw Gomulka and Antony Polonsky, eds., Polish Paradoxes (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 63-75, and Jan Jozef Lipski, “Two Fatherlands, Two Patriotisms,” in Robert Kostrzewa, ed., Between East and West: Writings from Kultura (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), pp. 52-71.

  21 Paul Zinner, ed., National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe: A Selection of Documents on Events in Poland and Hungary February-November 1956 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 47-48.

  22 Stanislaw Baraczak, “Before the Thaw: The Beginning of Dissent in Postwar Polish Literature (The Case of Adam Wazyk’s ‘A Poem for Adults’),” East European Politics and Societies, 3, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 11.

  23 Quoted in Irving Howe, Beyond the New Left (New York: McCall Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 31-32.

  24 “Victor Orban’s Speech at the Reburial of Imre Nagy,” Uncaptive Minds, II, no, 4 (August-October 1989): 26.

  25 William E. Griffith, “The Origins and Significance of East European Revisionism,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays in the History of Marxist Ideas (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 223-38.

  26 Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 135.

  27 Ibid., p. 137.

  28 See György Aczel and Tibor Meray, The Revolt of the Mind (New York: Praeger, 1959).

  29 Leonhard, Three Faces of Marxism (note 10 above), pp. 282-83.

  30 Ibid., p. 283.

  31 Ibid., p. 284.

  32 Ibid.

  33 See “Christ and Commissar,” an interview with Milovan Djilas, in George Urban, ed., Stalinism: Its Impact on Russia and the World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 180-245.

  34 Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited: The Message of a Revolution—A Quarter of a Century After (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 150.

  35 Ibid., p. vii.

  36 Quoted by Albert Camus in his preface to The Truth about the Nagy Affair: Facts, Documents, Comments (New York: Praeger, 1959), p. vii.

  37 Quoted by Melvin Croan in his masterful essay “East German Revisionism: The Spectre and the Reality,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of the Marxist Ideas (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 254.

  38 The journal ceased to come out in 1990 as an effect of both the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and Gorbachev’s markedly diminished interest in what used to be called the “world communist movement.”

  39 See William E. Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963).

  40 J. F. Brown, The New Eastern Europe: The Khrushchev Era and After (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 206.

  Chapter 3 From Thaw to Freeze

  1 For excellent insights into the background of the conspiracy that eliminated Khrushchev, see Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1990).

  2 See the interview with Eduard Goldstücker in Antonin Liehm, Trois générations: Entretiens sur le phénomène culturel tchécoslovaque (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 212.

  3 See the extensive passages of Ludvik Vaculik’s speech in Harry Schwartz, Prague’s 200 Days: The Struggle for Democracy in Czechoslovakia (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 47-48.

  4 For Dubcek’s political background, see William Showcross, Dubcek: Revised and Updated Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1990).

  5 Vojtech Mastny, Czechoslovakia: Crisis in World Communism (New York: Facts on File, 1972), pp. 21-25.

  6 For thoughtful contributions to the discussion on Eurocommunism, see George Schwab, ed., Eurocommunism: The Ideological and Political-Theoretical Foundations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).

  7 For the full text of the manifesto, see Mastny, Czechoslovakia, pp. 28-34.

  8 Ibid., p. 38.

  9 Ibid., p. 44.

  10 Antonin J. Liehm, “It Was You Who Did It!” in Jiri Pehe, ed., The Prague Spring: A Mixed Legacy (New York: Freedom House, 1988), p. 172.

  11 Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East- Central Europe (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), pp. 256-57.

  12 Ivan Svitak, “The Premature Perestroika,” in Pehe, Prague Spring, p. 179. Svitak was the author of an even more radical manifesto for democratization that the Czechoslovak communist leadership chose to suppress in the summer of 1968. After the Soviet invasion he was singled out by the collaborationist media as one of the ideologues of the alleged counterrevolution that the Warsaw Pact intervention succeeded in preventing. After two decades of exile in the United States, professor Svitak returned to Czechoslovakia in 1990, after the collapse of the communist regime.

  13 Mastny, Czechoslovakia, p. 59.

  14 Milan Kundera, The Joke (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), “Author’s Preface,” p. xiv.

  15 Mastny, Czechoslovakia, pp. 144-45.

  16 Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 95.

  17 Robert Conquest, Russia After Khrushchev (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 6. Conquest was not the only one to emphasize the institutional continuity between mature Stalinism and Brezhnevism. Other scholars who shared this view were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Leonard Shapiro, who showed that as long as the Soviet-style regimes maintained their inherent contempt for the rule of law there was little reason to consider that Stalinism had been really abolished. See especially Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pp. 628-29.

  18 See Jakub Karpinski, Countdown: The Polish Upheavals of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980 … (New York: Karz-Cohl, 1982), pp. 105-55.

  19 Jerzy Holzer quoted in Tadeusz Szafar, “Anti-Semitism: A Trusty Weapon,” in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Poland: The Genesis of a Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 120.

  20 Jan de Weydenthal, The Communists of Poland: An Historical Outline (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), p. 121; Ray Taras, Poland: Socialist State, Rebellious Nation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1986), pp. 103-17.

  21 “The Kuron-Modzelewski Open Letter to the Party,” in Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 108-14.

  22 Jan Josef Lipski, KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland 1976- 1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  23 For the birth of Solidarity, see Neal Ascherson, The Polish August (New York: Viking Press, 1982).

  Chapter 4 A Glorious Resurrection

  1 Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califo
rnia Press, 1985), p. 157.

  2 See Robert Kostrzewa, ed., Between East and West: Writings from Kultura (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990).

  3 In an illuminating essay on Gorbachev, Kenneth Jowitt used this Weberian term to explain the rise of Solidarity as a resurgence of Poland’s long-repressed civic culture. See Daniel Chirot, ed., The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), pp. 74-99.

  4 Abraham Brumberg, ed., Poland: The Genesis of a Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 10.

  5 J. F. Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 197.

  6 For an excellent analysis of this organization, see Jan Josef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  7 Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism in East- Central Europe (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 258-59.

  8 William Echikson, Lighting the Night: Revolution in Eastern Europe (New York: Morrow, 1990), p. 161.

  9 Lipski, KOR, p. 68.

  10 Echikson, Lighting the Night, p. 160.

  11 Leszek Kolakowski, “The Intelligentsia,” in Brumberg, Poland, p. 65.

  12 Ibid., p. 66.

  13 Michnik, Letters from Prison (note 1 above), p. 136.

  14 Ibid., p. 137.

  15 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, vol. III, The Breakdown, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 526, 530.

  16 Michnik, Letters from Prison, p. 142.

  17 Ibid., p. 144.

  18 Ibid., p. 147.

  19 Michnik, “A Year Has Passed—1981,” in Letters From Prison, p. 124.

  20 Adam Michnik quoted in Lech Walesa, A Way of Hope: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987).

  21 Ibid., p. 2.