22 See Stephen Engelberg, “As Jaruzelski Leaves Office: A Traitor or Hero to Poles,” New York Times, December 22, 1990.
23 Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 309-10.
24 Steven Lukes, “Introduction,” in Vaclav Havel et al, The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 12.
25 Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in ibid., p. 23.
26 Ibid., p. 28.
27 Ibid., pp. 28-29.
28 Ibid., pp. 30-31.
29 ibid., p. 32.
30 Ibid., p. 31.
31 Ibid., p. 40. Emphasis in original.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 43.
34 Havel’s contribution in Vaclav Benda, Milan Simecka, Ivan M. Jirous, Jiri Dienstbier, Vaclav Havel, Ladislav Hejdanek, and Jan Simsa , “Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry,” Social Research, 55, nos. 1-2 (Spring—Summer 1988): 235.
35 Ibid., p. 236.
36 Ibid., p. 237.
37 See Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” p. 48.
38 George Konrad, Antipolitics (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), pp. 230-31.
39 Ibid., p. 228,
40 Ibid., pp. 123-24.
41 Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” p. 57.
42 Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 10.
43 Ibid., pp. 142-43.
44 Ibid., p. 146.
45 Ibid., p. 150.
46 Ibid., p. 162.
47 Ibid., p. 156.
48 Ibid., p. 158.
49 Ibid., p. 162.
Chapter 5 The Ethos of Civil Society
1 Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Vaclav Havel et al, The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 65.
2 Ibid., p. 68.
3 ibidem, p. 69.
4 Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 28.
5 Ibid., pp. 86-87.
6 Ibid., p. 91.
7 Hans-Peter Riese, Since the Prague Spring: Charter ‘77 and the Struggle for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 13-14; for one of the most informative and authoritative analyses of the rise of democratic movements from below in Czechoslovakia, see H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).
8 Riese, Since the Prague Spring, p. 14.
9 Ibid.
10 Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” p. 80.
11 Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 145.
12 Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 138.
13 Ibid., p. 182.
14 Seweryn Bialer, Charles Gati, and Karen Dawisha all discussed, with remarkable sophistication, Gorbachev’s strategy for the removal of the anachronistic Brezhnev-style elites and the promotion of more imaginative, reform-oriented, and pragmatic, or even technocratic teams. It turned out, however, that a sea change in strategic rethinking took place in the Soviet leadership’s vision of the bloc. Not only was domesticism, the old heresy, encouraged, but, especially after 1988, Moscow renounced the Brezhnev doctrine of “limited sovereignty” and overhauled its decades-long definition of the outer empire. In this respect, Gorbachev seemed to recognize, in the other former communist countries, an imperative that he refused to admit for the Soviet Union itself: that the Leninist experiment had failed and the communist party’s privileged status had to come to an end. Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Knopf, 1986); Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990); Karen Dawisha , Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge, 2nd ed. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15 Havel, Disturbing the Peace, p. 182.
16 Ibid., p. 183.
17 Ibid., pp. 185-86.
18 Neues Deutschland, December 30, 1988.
19 Der Spiegel, September 1, 1986, quoted in B. V. Flow, “The Literary Avant-Garde Leaves the GDR,” Radio Free Europe Research, RAD Background Report 132, September 18, 1986.
20 Robert Havemann, Ein deutscher Kommunist: Rückblicke und Perspektive aus Isolation (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), pp. 98-103; excerpts from Havemann’s book are translated in Roger Woods, Opposition in the GDR Under Honecker: An Introduction and Documentation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 165-69.
21 After the breakdown of the communist regime in the fall of 1989, Eppelmann was active in the newly created political group called “Democratic Awakening” and served, until the reunification in Lothar de Maizière’s government as the GDR’s Minister of Defense and Disarmament.
22 Woods, Opposition in GDR, pp. 195-96.
23 A. Wynton Jackson, “Introduction” to “GDR: Appeal on the Occasion of the UN Peace Year,” East European Reporter, 2, no. 1 (Spring 1986), p. 61.
24 Vaclav Havel, “An Anatomy of Reticence,” in Crosscunents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), p. 18.
25 Ibid.
26 For the full text of the statement, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Dissent in the Gorbachev Era—A Documentation,” ORBIS, Summer 1987, pp. 234-43.
27 Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 147.
28 Ibid., p. 80.
29 See Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and György Markus , Dictatorship Over Needs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
30 Karl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 27.
31 Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 172-214.
32 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 478.
33 “Kadarism as the Model State of ‘Khrushchevism’,” in Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, From Yalta to Glasnost: The Dismantling of Stalin’s Empire (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 129-45.
34 Miklos Haraszti, “The Beginnings of Civil Society: The Independent Peace Movements and the Danube Movement in Hungary,” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 85-86.
35 Ibid., p. 86.
Chapter 6 The Triumph of the Powerless
1 Thomas W. Simons, Jr., The End of the Cold War? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 150-51.
2 Sovetskaya Kultura, April 9, 1988.
3 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), p. 48.
4 Adam Michnik, “The Great Counter-Reformer,” Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 9, no. 2, (London, July-October 1987): 23.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Brzezinski, Grand Failure, p. 64.
8 Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, internal Decline (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 206.
9 Baruch Hazan, Gorbachev’s Gamble: The 19th All-Union Party Conference (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989), p. 156.
10 “Gorbachev’s View of Changing World,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 11, 1988.
11 “Russia’s Surly Empire,” The Economist (London), November 26, 1988, p. 13.
12 “The Soviet Perspective,” Problems of Communism, May-August 1988, p. 62.
13 Ibid., p. 63.
14 Pravda, July 7, 1989.
15 Henry Kamm, “Gorbachev Said to Reject Soviet Right to Intervene,” New York Times, April 2, 1989.
16 Vladimir F. Kusin, “Mikhail Gorbachev’s Evolving Attitude to Eastern Europe,” Radio Free Europe Research, RAD Backgr
ound Report 128 (Eastern Europe), July 20, 1989, p. 4.
17 Nina Andreyeva, “I Cannot Waive Principles,” Sovetskaya Rossiya, March 13, 1988, translated in FBIS—Soviet Union, March 16, 1988, p. 51.
18 New York Times, October 24, 1989.
19 Reuters, October 16, 1989.
20 Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet—East European Relations in Transition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 167.
21 Radio Free Europe, Daily Report, May 8, 1989.
22 Gati, The Bloc That Failed, p. 168.
23 Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 321-22.
24 Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 296.
25 Mihaly Vajda, “The Collapse of Socialism: A Theoretical Explanation,” East European Reporter, 4, no. 3 (Autumn—Winter 1990): 51.
26 Ibid.
27 “The Social Contract: Prerequisites for Resolving the Political Crisis,” special issue of samizdat journal Beszelö, June 10, 1987 (English translation), p. 2. Beszelö was run by an editorial staff that included some of the most famous names of the Hungarian Democratic Opposition: Miklos Haraszti, Janos Kis, Ferenc Koszeg, György Petri and Sandor Szilagyi.
28 Ibid., pp. 7-8.
29 “Pozsgay Inteviewed by Radio Free Europe 24 May,” Magyar Nemzet (Budapest), May 29, 1989, translated in FBIS—Eastern Europe, June 7, 1989, p. 26.
30 Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform, p. 179.
31 “The Struggle for Political Pluralism: The First Congress of the Association of Young Democrats,” East European Reporter, 3, no. 4 (Spring-Summer 1989): 17-18.
32 “Democracy Within the Warsaw Pact: An Interview with Ferenc Köszeg,” EER, 3:12-14.
33 Vladimir Tismaneanu, “From Prague Spring to Moscow’s ‘Glasnost’,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 17, 1988.
34 Interview with Alexander Dubcek, former General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, broadcast by Hungarian television on April 26, 1989, in FBIS—Eastern Europe, April 28, 1989, p. 23, and Vladimir V. Kusin, “Hungarian Television Interviews Alexander Dubcek,” Radio Free Europe Research, Czechoslovak SR/10, May 5, 1989, pp. 9-15.
35 Karel Horak, “In the Role of the ‘Savior’ of Socialism: Annotations on Some of A. Dubcek’s Statements to Foreign Information Media,” Rude Pravo, March 29, 1989, translated in FBIS—Eastern Europe, March 31, 1989, p. 21
36 Krenz quoted in Serge Schmemann, “East Germany Removes Honecker and His Protégé Takes His Place,” in Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism: By the Correspondents of the New York Times (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 159.
37 Patricia Clough, “Unreal Country Where Reform Depends on the Grim Reaper,” The Independent (London), August 22, 1989.
38 Barbara Donovan, “Reform and the Existence of the GDR,” RFER, RAD Background Report/158 (GDR), August 25, 1989, p. 2.
39 Barbara Donovan, “The SED Becoming More Outspoken on Reform,” RFER, RAD Background Report/6 (GDR), January 12, 1989.
40 Pamela Shemid, “East Germany and the Marxist Malaise,” U.S. News & World Report, November 14, 1988, pp. 40-41.
41 “Hager Delivers Address at Historians Meeting,” Neues Deutschland (East Berlin), April 8-9, 1989, translated in FBIS—Eastern Europe, April 11, 1989, pp. 30-32.
42 “Margot Honecker: ‘Defend Socialism With Weapons’,” Neues Deutschland, June 14, 1989, translated in FBIS—Eastern Europe, June 20, 1989, pp. 41-42.
43 Josef Joffe, “Who’s Egon Krenz? He’s No Gorbachev,” New York Times, October 19, 1989 (op-ed page).
44 Serge Schmemann, “The Border Is Open—Joyous East Germans Pour Through Wall—Party Pledges Freedoms and City Exults,” in Gwertzman and Kaufman , Collapse of Communism, pp. 175-80.
45 Barbara Donovan, “The Tenth SED CC Plenum: Moving Toward Reform,” RFER, RAD Background Report (GDR), November 20, 1989, pp. 6-9.
46 David Binder, “Reports of Corruption in East Berlin Shock Even the Party Rank and File,” New York Times, November 25, 1989.
47 Craig R. Whitney, “East German Communists Confront Party’s Collapse,” New York Times, December 17, 1989.
48 Barbara Donovan, “The Extraordinary SED Congress: A New Beginning or the Beginning of the End?” RFE, Report on Eastern Europe, January 19, 1990, pp. 5-8.
49 R. W Apple, “Prague Opposition Mounts Huge Protest, Denouncing New Leadership as ‘a Trick,’;” in Gwertzman and Kaufman , Collapse of Communism, p. 238.
50 “What We Want: The Programme Principles Issued by the Czechoslovak Civic Forum,” East European Reporter, 4, no. 1 (Winter 1989-90): 50-51.
51 “Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel’s New Year’s Day Address,” East European Reporter, 4, no. 1 (Winter 1989-90): 56.
52 Ibid., p. 57.
53 Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 45.
54 “Havel’s New Year’s Day Address,” p. 58.
55 Stephen Ashley, “Can Todor Zhivkov Survive as Bulgaria’s Leader?” RFER, Bulgarian SR/6, July 14, 1988, p. 4.
56 Clyde Haberman, “Bulgarian Change Barely Plods Along,” New York Times, October 7, 1989.
57 Clyde Haberman, “Bulgarian Chief Quits After 35 Years of Rigid Rule,” New York Times, Novemberll, 1989.
58 Clyde Haberman, “Communists in Bulgarian Expel Zhivkov,” New York Times, December 14, 1989.
59 “Report on ‘Deformations’ of the Zhivkov Era,” Rabotnichesko Delo (Sofia), January 16, 1990, translated in FBIS—Eastern Europe, January 19, 1990, pp. 11-13.
60 For biographical sketches on Bulgaria’s new (and not so new) political personalities, see Pavlina Poppisakova, “Who’s Who in Bulgarian Politics,” East European Reporter, 4, no. 3 (Autumn-Winter 1990): 32-33.
61 Chuck Sudetic, “Bulgaria’s Ex-Dictator Refuses to Face Parliament,” New York Times, July 31, 1990.
62 For an analysis of political decay in Romania during the 1980s, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Personal Power and Political Crisis in Romania,” Government and Opposition (London), 24, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 179-98.
63 J. F. Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 276.
64 Michael Shafir, “Xenophobic Communism: The Case of Bulgaria and Romania,” RFER, RAD Background Report/112 (Eastern Europe), June 27, 1989, p. 3.
65 “Letter to President Nicolae Ceausescu” and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Rebellion of the Old Guard,” both in East European Reporter, 3, no. 4 (Spring-Summer 1989): 23-24.
66 Mircea Dinescu, “Where Policemen Outnumber the Pigeons,” Uncaptive Minds (New York), II, no. 3 (May-July 1989): 34.
67 Michael Shafir, “Eastern Europe’s ‘Rejectionists’,” RFER, RAD Background Report/ 121 (Eastern Europe), July 3, 1989, p. 2.
68 “Building a New Social System with the People and For the People,” Scinteia, October 18, 1989, translated in FBIS, Eastern Europe, October 27, 1989, p. 69.
69 Alan Riding, “In Romania, the Old Order Won’t Budge,” New York Times, November 25, 1989.
70 Kevin Devlin, “Ceausescu’s Isolated Internationalism,” RFER, RAD Background Report/212 (Romania), December 1, 1989.
71 Thomas P. Barnett, “Romania Domino Stays Upright,” Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 1989.
72 “Speech by President Nicolae Ceausescu on Romanian Radio and Television Stations in Bucharest on 20 December,” FBIS Daily Report: East Europe (FBIS—EEU), December 21, 1989, p. 66.
73 For a detailed analysis of the collapse of Romanian communism, see Matei Calinescu and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The 1989 Revolution and Romania’s Future,” Problems of Communism, January-April 1991, pp. 42-59.
74 Trond Gilberg, “Romania: Will History Repeat Itself?” Current History (Philadelphia), December 1990, p. 432.
75 Henry Kamm, “Yugoslavs Astir over
Serbian Rise,” New York Times, August 6, 1989. For Milosevic’s career and ideological preferences, see Paul Yankovitch, “Slobodan Milosevic: l’homme fort de la Serbie,” Le Monde (Paris), October 18, 1988.
76 Jacques Rupnik, “Perestroika and the Empire,” European Journal of International Affairs, l,no. 1 (1988): 117.
Chapter 7 The Birth Pangs of Democracy
1 Kenneth Jowitt, “The Leninist Legacy,” in Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in the 1990’s (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). I am particularly indebted to Kenneth Jowitt who agreed to share with me his exceptionally insightful ideas on the extinction of Leninism and the authoritarian-tribalistic temptation in Eastern Europe.
2 Timothy Garton Ash, “Eastern Europe: Après le Déluge, Nous,” New York Review of Books, August 16, 1990, p. 52.
3 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 105.
4 Celestine Bohlen, “Double-Headed Eagle Cries to Serbs for Revenge,” New York Times, September 12, 1990.
5 Alexis de Tocqueville, On Democracy, Revolution, and Society, ed. John Stone and Stephen Mennell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 98.
6 Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 595.
7 Ash, “Eastern Europe,” pp. 53, 54.
8 See Stephen Engelberg, “Walesa’s Victory Now Complicates Poland’s Unease,” New York Times, December 30, 1990.
9 Dan Ionescu, “The Communist Party Re-Emerges Under a New Name,” Report on Eastern Europe, 1, no. 51 (December 21, 1990): 22-27.
10 Ash, “Eastern Europe,” p. 51.
11 See “Reorienting the Security Services,” an inteview with Petruska Sustrova, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and a longtime opposition activist, in Uncaptive Minds, November-December 1990, pp. 38-40.
12 Karol Modzelewski, “Who and What Makes a Leader,” Uncaptive Minds, November-December 1990, p. 32.
13 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 115-16.
14 See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and the German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988).
15 Christopher Husbands, “Haunted by the Ghost of Nazism,” The Independent (London), January 10, 1990.
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