Iron Curtain (83 page)

Over time, the nations of Eastern Europe began to have much less in common. By the 1980s, East Germany had the largest police state, Poland the highest church attendance, Romania the most dramatic food shortages, Hungary the highest living standards, and Yugoslavia the most relaxed relationship with the West. Yet in one narrow sense they remained very similar: none of the regimes ever seemed to realize that they were unstable by definition. They lurched from crisis to crisis, not because they were unable to fine-tune their policies but because the communist project itself was flawed. By trying to control every aspect of society, the regimes had turned every aspect of society into a potential form of protest. The state had dictated high daily
quotas for the workers—and so the East German workers’ strike against high daily quotas mushroomed quickly into a protest against the state. The state had dictated what artists could paint or writers could write—and so an artist or writer who painted or wrote something different became a political dissident too. The state had dictated that no one could form independent organizations—and so anybody who founded one, however anodyne, became an opponent of the regime. And when large numbers of people joined an independent organization—when some 10 million Poles joined the Solidarity trade union, for example—the regime’s very existence was suddenly at stake.

Communist ideology and Marxist-Leninist economic theory contained the seeds of their own destruction in a different sense too. Eastern European governments’ claims to legitimacy were based on promises of future prosperity and high living standards, which were supposedly guaranteed by “scientific” Marxism. All of the banners and posters, the solemn speeches, the newspaper editorials, and eventually the television programs spoke of ever faster growth. And although there was some growth, it was never as high as the propaganda made it out to be. Living standards never rose as quickly and dramatically as they did in Western Europe either, a fact that could not be hidden for long. In 1950, Poland and Spain had very similar GDPs. By 1988, Poland’s had risen about two and half times—but Spain’s had risen thirteen times.
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Radio Free Europe, travel, and tourism all brought home this gap, which only grew larger as technological change in Western Europe accelerated. Cynicism and disillusion grew along with it, even among those who had originally placed their faith in the system. The smiling communist youth cadres of the 1950s gave way to the sullen, apathetic workers of the 1970s, to the cynical students and intellectuals of the 1980s, to waves of emigration and discontent. The system always had its supporters, of course, particularly after some Eastern European governments began to borrow large sums from Western banks in order to maintain higher levels of consumption. Its beneficiaries went on paying it lip service, and those who had benefited from communist social promotion policies continued to advance through the bureaucracy. Although some Eastern Europeans were later nostalgic for communist ideas and idealism, it is noteworthy that no post-1989 political party has ever tried to restore communist economics.

In the end, the gap between reality and ideology meant that the communist parties wound up spouting meaningless slogans they themselves knew made no sense. As the philosopher Roger Scruton argues, Marxism became so cocooned in what Orwell once called “Newspeak” that it could not be
refuted: “Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like a theological system. The point was not to believe the theory, but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that both belief and doubt became irrelevant … In this way the concept of truth disappeared from the intellectual landscape, and was replaced by that of power.”
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Once people were unable to distinguish truth from ideological fiction, however, they were also unable to solve or even describe the worsening social and economic problems of the societies they ruled.

Over time, some political opponents of the communist regimes came to understand these inherent weaknesses of Soviet-style totalitarianism. In his brilliant 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” the Czech dissident Václav Havel called upon his countrymen to take advantage of their rulers’ obsession with total control. If the state wanted to monopolize every sphere of human activity, he wrote, then every thinking citizen should work to create alternatives. He called upon his countrymen to preserve the “independent life of society,” which he defined as including “everything from self-education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied, free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organization.”
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He also urged them to discard false and meaningless jargon and to “live in truth”—to speak and act, in other words, as if the regime did not exist.

In due course, some version of this “independent life of society”—“civil society”—began to flourish in many unusual ways. The Czechs formed jazz bands, the Hungarians joined academic discussion clubs, the East Germans created an “unofficial” peace movement. The Poles organized underground Scout troops and, eventually, independent trade unions. Everywhere, people played rock music, organized poetry readings, set up clandestine businesses, held underground philosophy seminars, sold black market meat, and went to church. In a different kind of society, these activities would have been considered apolitical, and even in Eastern Europe they did not necessarily constitute “opposition,” or even passive opposition. But they did pose a fundamental—and unanswerable—challenge to regimes that strove, in Mussolini’s words, to be “all-embracing.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
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That grim motto, sometimes incorrectly attributed to Stalin, sums up the worldview of the men and
women who built communism and who believed that their high-minded goals justified human sacrifice. But once the omelet finally begins to fall apart—or, more accurately, once it becomes clear that the omelet was never cooked in the first place—how do you put the eggs back together again? How do you privatize hundreds of state companies? How do you re-create religious and social organizations disbanded long ago? How do you get a society made passive by years of dictatorship to become active again? How do you get people to stop using jargon and speak clearly? Though often used as shorthand, the word “democratization” doesn’t really do justice to the changes that took place—unevenly and unsteadily, faster in some places and much slower in others—in post-communist Europe and the former USSR after 1989.

Nor does democratization really define the kind of changes that need to take place in other postrevolutionary societies around the world. Many of the twentieth century’s worst dictators held power using the methods described in this book, and consciously so. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya directly adopted elements of the Soviet system, including a Soviet-style secret police force, with direct Soviet and East German assistance. Chinese, Egyptian, Syrian, Angolan, Cuban, and North Korean regimes, among others, have all received Soviet advice and training at different times too.
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But many didn’t need explicit advice in order to imitate the Soviet Union’s drive to control economic, social, cultural, legal, and educational institutions as well as political opposition. Until 1989, the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern Europe seemed an excellent model for would-be dictators. But totalitarianism never worked as it was supposed to in Eastern Europe, and it never worked anywhere else either. None of the Stalinist regimes ever managed to brainwash everybody and thus eliminate all dissent forever, and neither did Stalin’s pupils nor Brezhnev’s friends in Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

Yet such regimes can and did do an enormous amount of damage. In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks, their Eastern European acolytes, and their imitators farther afield attacked not only their political opponents but also peasants, priests, schoolteachers, traders, journalists, writers, small businessmen, students, and artists, along with the institutions such people had built and maintained over centuries. They damaged, undermined, and sometimes eliminated churches, newspapers, literary and educational socie-ties, companies and retail shops, stock markets, banks, sports clubs, and universities.
Their success reveals an unpleasant truth about human nature: if enough people are sufficiently determined, and if they are backed by adequate resources and force, then they can destroy ancient and apparently permanent legal, political, educational, and religious institutions, sometimes for good. And if civil society could be so deeply damaged in nations as disparate, as historic, and as culturally rich as those of Eastern Europe, then it can be similarly damaged anywhere. If nothing else, the history of postwar Stalinization proves just how fragile civilization can turn out to be.

As a result of this civilizational damage, postcommunist countries required far more than the bare institutions of “democracy”—elections, political campaigns, and political parties—to become functioning liberal societies again. They also had to create or re-create independent media, private enterprise and a legal system to support it, an educational system free of propaganda, and a civil service where promotions are given for talent, not for ideological correctness. The most successful postcommunist states are those that managed to preserve some elements of civil society throughout the communist period. This is not an accident.

Here, once again, the history of the Polish Women’s League is worth retelling. By 1989 the organization was utterly moribund at the national level. In the early 1990s it more or less collapsed altogether: no one needed a women’s group that provided propaganda for a communist party that no longer existed. But in the late 1990s, once again in the city of Łódź, a group of local women decided that some of the functions that the league had originally been designed to perform were still necessary. And so the league regrouped, reorganized, and refounded itself—now for the third time—as an independent organization. As in 1945, its leaders identified a set of problems no one else seemed able to solve, and they set about addressing them. Initially, the league offered free legal clinics for women who could not afford legal advice. Later it branched into assistance for unemployed women; job training, advice, and services for single women with children; help for alcoholics and drug addicts. At Christmas, the league began to organize parties for the homeless in Łódź. Its website now carries a straightforward motto: “If you have a problem, come to us, we’ll help you or we’ll point you in the right direction.”
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It is a much smaller organization, but its character is charitable, just as it was in the past.

In part, the new Women’s League succeeded because its leaders, like others
in Poland, were so eager to copy Western European models. Though they themselves had never worked for a charity or a nonprofit organization, the league’s leaders certainly knew what these legal entities were. Polish law by then accommodated their existence, and the Polish political class welcomed them, just as they welcomed independent schools, private businesses, and political parties. This made Poland different from Russia, where hostility to independent organizations remains strong, even a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and where the legal environment is still not conducive to their formation or their funding. The Russian political elite still considers independent charities, advocacy groups, and nongovernmental organizations of all kinds suspicious, by definition, and uses both legal and extralegal means to restrain them.
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In Poland the legal framework not only accommodated the existence of independent organizations but also permitted them to raise funds. At first, the Women’s League had petitioned the government for money to support their projects because that was how they had been supported in the past. In an era of economic restructuring, they had only minimal success. But Łódź is a city of textile mills, and textile mills employ women. The Women’s League approached the new mill owners and convinced a few of them to help. Donations began to come in, the organization stayed alive. In 2006, seventeen years after the fall of communism, the Łódź Women’s League became a registered private charity. As it turned out, the modern Polish Women’s League needed not only energetic and patriotic volunteers but also an intact legal system, a functioning economic system, and a democratic political system in order to thrive.

Some of the energy and the initiative to start these projects also came from a sharp consciousness of the organization’s communist and pre-communist history. One of the new leaders, Janina Miziołek, had spent time as a very small child in one of the shelters set up by the Women’s League in train stations. Others who had been active in the league in the communist period sought to retrieve something useful from the organization’s wreckage: if they could remove the politics, some of them told me, perhaps they could really do something useful. They remembered what had gone wrong, and they were anxious to fix it.

The women of Łódź were clearly motivated by history, though not by history as it is sometimes used or abused by politicians. They were inspired
not by state-sponsored celebrations of past tragedies or national programs of patriotic reeducation but rather by stories they remembered, or stories they knew from someone else who had experienced them. They were motivated by the history of a particular institution in a particular place at a particular time.

What was true in Łódź is true everywhere else in the postcommunist and the post-totalitarian world. Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated. They need to know particular details, not general theories, and they need to hear individual stories, not generalizations about the masses. They need a better grasp of what motivated their predecessors, to see them as real people and not as black-and-white caricatures, victims, or villains. Only then is it possible, slowly, to rebuild.