Central Europe's Total Legacy

Abstract

The new Central European democracies have in common that they face two legacies of dictatorship. Communism was long-lasting; its legacy is still present. For the centre-right, democratic values and achievements are redefined in light of the Communist legacy.

Introduction

The region from the Baltics in the north, falling between the former borders of Germany and Russia, continuing along the plains of the Danube River and extending south to the Balkans comprises countries whose recent histories have many similarities. One such similarity is particularly important: the intellectual, material, political, economic and civilisational legacy and mentality of totalitarian regimes. Because this legacy leaves its mark on everyday life and indeed defines its very essence, we may justifiably describe it as a ‘total legacy’. To understand the past, we must be familiar with this total legacy, which is inseparable from current conditions and must always be considered. In the following (necessarily incomplete) article, I seek to characterise this total legacy and to identify its impact on the region we call Central Europe based on the common themes of its history. What has been the impact of more than four decades of Communism on this region? ¹

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The reflections which follow draw in large measure upon the author's experiences in Hungary but can be generalised to apply to the entire region.

The history of totalitarianism in Central Europe

There are considerable differences in public mentality in those European countries whose recent history includes just one totalitarian regime compared to those that experienced both Fascist and Communist regimes. This relationship is much more complicated than a simple equation. For one thing, everyone agrees that Fascism was part of a historical era that is long past, while Communism endured fora much longer period and evolved along the way. For another, during the Cold War, Western countries had to coexist with the Soviet bloc countries and with Marxist parties and movements. This resulted in close and long-standing reciprocal relations throughout the world, having a unique history of their own. This, then, is the starting point in our attempt to characterise the total legacy.

Since its beginnings, Communist ideology has been unique in its connection to modernism–-that is, the Communists’ conviction that history is a synonym for progress. In this view, progress and development enable us to know the future, which will certainly be better than the present. The Fascists, too, believed in historical development. They, however, sought to block the forces of progressiv-ism and the victory of the Communist revolution. I will return to this issue later.

Communist principles became ingrained in the discourse about modernism, which helps to explain the success and long-term acceptance of Communist beliefs throughout the world. At the end of the Second World War, the victory over Fascism and the enormous human losses suffered by the Soviet Union provided a new foundation for the belief in Communism as progress and for the widespread acceptance of the Soviet regime as a historically superior social structure. But the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution galvanised large-scale, widespread opposition to these beliefs. Of course, the sympathy of progressive European leftists for Soviet-style regimes was not entirely swayed either by the 1956 Revolution or by the fact that it constituted just one of a series of brutally crushed revolts over the course of decades, from those in East Berlin and Poznan to Budapest, Prague and Gdansk. These tragic events represented the most obvious eruptions of a long-term, deeply ingrained crisis in the Soviet system.

Economic, social and political relationships between East and West were pursued through countless avenues over the course of decades. Economic and political interests, not to mention issues of prestige, supported the continuation of these relationships. Thus the West, despite qualms rooted in moral and other considerations, considered the Communist dictatorships as partners in a situation termed ‘peaceful coexistence’. Peaceful coexistence accepted the reality of the Soviet system within a deadlocked international security situation predicated on nuclear deterrence. The ensuing compromises with Communist elites prevailed at least until 1990. As a result, the West possessed only superficial and one-sided information about Communist societies, while Soviet rule prevented even the seeds of any democratic opposition from emerging as an alternative to their power.

Certainly, it would be worth tracing the history of Central Europe's total legacy; yet even without discussing this history and its country-specific variations, we can draw certain conclusions important to the future of democracy in the region.

Legacy consequences of the regime

One of the heaviest burdens of the total legacy is that owing to the nature of the Soviet-style regimes, these nations have not come to terms with the major traumatic events of the recent past. Society has not engaged in a thoroughgoing discussion of the Holocaust, worked through its trauma or found a way to memorialise it; the lessons of the Holocaust with respect to public discourse and behaviour have not been drawn.

After 1945, the Communist regimes in the region assumed that building a new world necessitated a complete break from the old. As the Hungarian version of the ‘Internationale’ declares, the new world must ‘wipe out the past, once and for all!’ In this view, the Communists bear no responsibility for anything that happened in the past; responsibility lies with the old, defeated regime, indeed with the past itself. Accordingly, the new regimes accused the middle and upper classes of the old world of direct responsibility for the nation's tragedies: these classes, they maintained, had formed the mass social base of Fascism. In such an environment, it was pointless to propose any public discussion about the harsh consequences of the Jewish tragedy, the resulting need for a new way of thinking, the moral lessons of the Holocaust or even to learn about the fate of the victims. Similarly, society was not able (or was not allowed) to come to terms with other bitter traumas it had suffered on a mass scale. The West did not recognise or condemn this major failing of the Communist regimes.

Another related consequence of the Communist legacy has left its mark to this day. Its ideology of class warfare defined the middle class as the number one enemy. In Hungary, the nobility and the Christian middle class became the main target, together with the prosperous farmers from the villages and the entrepreneurs, industrialists and bureaucrats from the towns. Because these groups, termed ‘the ruling class’, were proclaimed collectively guilty for the anti-Jewish laws and deportations, class war became indistinguishable from anti-Fascism. Under Communism, anti-Fascism played a unique role: it was used to justify the superiority of Communist dictatorship over the Fascist regime, serving as a vehicle for self-exoneration and a justification of the class war and dictatorship itself. This circumstance continues to affect political discourse to this day. For example, throughout Europe, many have argued that there is a theoretical and qualitative difference between the victims of Communism and the victims of Fascism. It is also true that those who propound this view are those for whom Soviet Communism represents an ideal of sorts.

The total legacy evolved over the course of several decades. The process was accompanied by unanticipated social change. For example, in 1946–1949, no one would have predicted that 40 years later the Hungarian Communist Party would have 800,000 members (10% of the country's adult population). The countries of the Soviet sphere, permeated by the organisations of the party state and dominated by an apparently immutable dictatorship, had to develop new ways of behaviour. Two distinct yet symbiotic social worlds developed: one, the ‘insider’ world, was connected to power and therefore easier to oversee and control; the second sphere was composed of outsiders without power, subjected to extensive surveillance and limited to marginal roles in society.

Because of the decisive import of the total legacy, the changes of 1989–1990 and the collapse of the Soviet regimes in Central Europe resulted in a more complex situation than was expected at the time, especially by those carried away by the euphoria and the spectacular, transformative historic events. To a great extent, economic power accrued, through various channels, to the Communist elite–-now transformed from the political into the economic elite. A similar process occurred in the media and in intellectual life. A significant segment of the former regime's leaders continued, together with their organisations, to play key roles in the new democracies. During these years, new forms of audio-visual media began to wield ever-greater influence; paradoxically, the old elites occupied a significant share of these media, too. The continued role played by these ex-Communist elites caused a great deal of social tension, because they kept popping up in leadership positions of important institutions and in key places in the private sector.

Meanwhile, attempts to evaluate the Communist era led to dead ends, because the old elites continued to dominate in intellectual life, too. Moreover, it was precisely the members of this elite who had long nurtured excellent contacts with foreign politicians and businessmen and with the media. In contrast, those who had been active in the opposition to the Soviet-era regimes or who had newly materialised from the ranks of the second, ‘outsider’ sphere of society were all but unknown. On the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, a certain left-wing Hungarian ‘intellectual’, popular with members of the foreign press, declared on several occasions, unchallenged, that the conservative, Christian Democratic Prime Minister József Antall and his ilk were akin to the guillotine-happy, bloodthirsty Jacobins, while he and his cronies represented the revolutionaries of the Vendee.

While the total legacy's existence and consequences remain unavoidable even today, those in Central Europe who gained power while seeking to break from the Communist past fell prey to two major misconceptions, leading in some cases to fateful consequences. For one, they believed that once they came into power, they would be able to investigate the elites of the old system. For another, they believed that the political transformation of 1990 was complete, irrevocable and irreversible; after all, they pointed out, the Soviet regime and the state party system had been destroyed for good.

But one bitter consequence of the total legacy is that the enactment of ‘lustration laws’ is everywhere accompanied by disappointment and anger. In a nutshell, the problem is that the system has been defeated, but its perpetrators are still among us. As a rule, the lustration process comes to a halt under left-wing governments, then restarts under right-wing governments. Those trying to achieve a break from the past dictatorship demand an accounting because they keep seeing the same old faces everywhere, from the mass media to the secret police. For example, if it becomes known that an official collaborated with the dictatorship, yet today he dismisses the issue of moral responsibility as irrelevant, there is no official consequence. This ambiguity is also reflected in the so-called field of current history, which engages in very little analysis of the Communist era, even as many of the experts in this field are active in political and public affairs, in roles where it is hard to distinguish the scholar from the left-wing agitator. This kind of role confusion indicates that one consequence of the total legacy is a loosening of moral points of reference.

In addition to the above, one of the most significant elements of the total legacy is the emergence of a civil society. In the Central European countries of the Soviet bloc, civic movements began to crop up in the 1970s, whose existence and political significance soon became a rallying cry among opposition figures. The most visible forms of these movements, which succeeded in drawing the attention of the wider, ‘first’ public sphere, included new groups within the churches, conscientious objection to military service, ‘green’ environmental movements and peace movements. By the 1970s, the two symbiotic ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds described above were engaged in a distinct face-off: there was talk of a ‘second’ public, a second culture, an alternative democracy. This face-off was particularly well reflected in the area of civic movements: the first public sphere–-that is, the system built around the state party–-recognised only the organisations created within the official vertical hierarchy while attempting to block, outlaw or use legal means to abolish the spontaneously created organisations, or else to integrate them to such an extent that they could no longer function. In contrast, the groups organised by the civil society were loosely structured, because they prized their autonomy above all as the way to stand out among other organisations and especially against the official system.

The emergence of civil society

Beginning in the 1980s, the civic movements focused on, defended and fought for all those things that the Communist dictatorships neglected, persecuted or oppressed. The emergency of Solidarity in 1981 represented a turning point: now there was a new example to follow. The groups independent of the state party system and the official sphere began to grow more rapidly; their networks were able to affect public affairs while remaining underground. They sought not so much to achieve an accommodation within the regime as to increase their own power and delineate their own profile. The emergence and strengthening of civic organisations had many consequences; two of them should be emphasised here.

The first: at the time of the collapse of the Soviet regimes, civic organisations played a unique role among the opposition groups formed to oppose the state party. Many later political parties began their activities as such civic organisations.

The second: paradoxically, the dilemmas surrounding the concepts of ‘public good’ and ‘public property’ are connected both to the total legacy and to the distinctive civil society that emerged in Central Europe. The idea of the public good, for example, did not exist in the Hungarian constitution that was in effect from 1949 until 2012. The Communist regime had no concept of the public good, since that regime represented not a democratic community of citizens but rather the power of the peasant or working class. Civic organisations did not invoke the public good, either, because although they represented important causes within the ‘second’ sphere or fought for particular rights, the existence and power of the ‘first’ sphere made it impossible for them to stand up for the public good.

The popular concept of public property developed in a related fashion. Most property was in the hands of the Communist power, in conformity with the unrealistic, Marxist concept of property. The emergence of civil society further underscored the very widespread conviction that state-owned property doesn't really belong to anyone. That is, everyone is free to damage, steal or, at the least, take advantage of public property. As for the question of who should be the guardian of public property: this was framed not in terms of a community-based moral impulse, but instead took the form of a decrepit, discredited regime. These attitudes became so widespread during the last years of Communist rule that they are still evident today as one of the effects of the total legacy, and its manifestations–-ranging from the use of public space to willingness to pay taxes–-have major economic consequences.

The last roots

Today, even within a democratic framework, the countries of Central Europe must coexist with the total legacy. The institutions of democracy are unique, but they are incapable of wiping out the past, the words of the ‘Internationale’ notwithstanding. How to cope with and compensate for the crimes and injustices committed during the Fascist and Communist regimes is another question. So is the dilemma of how far individuals wish, or are able, to coexist with those responsible for Communist-era transgressions, who today, with their adherents, continue to be active in public affairs. In this respect, there are major variations among the different countries of the region.

Finally, we should point out a common characteristic of the two types of totalitarianism that has had a critical impact. Even in a democratic society, the defence of democratic values always has to confront the effects of political nihilism.

The nihilism of the Nazis and of the Communists has something in common: it seeks to destroy what we call the moral basis of modern civilisation. These two forms of nihilism do not accept that modernism is manifested in democracy, expressed in such ideals as respect for human dignity and sovereignty, defence of human and community rights and that it guarantees the well-being and happiness of the greatest possible number of people. Political nihilism, in contrast, rejects all of these moral ideals of democratic civilisation–-the ideals that enable responsible, patient governance and transparent, flexible political mechanisms.

In the Communist world view, such systems, which they term ‘bourgeois democracy’, contain social contradictions that lead to revolution, to the total destruction of existing structures and thence to a class-free society, the elimination of social injustice and peace. The Nazis, who believed in the same theory of development, considered the victory of Communism to be a fatal catastrophe, believing that the new Communist world would result in hedonism and the utter degeneration of the human character–-a development they found unbearable even to contemplate.

The political nihilism of the Nazis stems from the same root as the Communists’ nihilist vision. The Nazi form of nihilism, though, differs in theory inasmuch as the wish to destroy is one of its expressed objectives: it rejects the principles of democratic civilisation because, according to the Nazis’ theory of progress, that will inexorably result in Communism. In contrast, Communism is nihilist not because of its objectives but rather because of its goals: in the Communist view, progress leads like a deus ex machina to the destruction of democratic civilisation, including the annihilation of the legacy of the past to the maximum extent possible.

The philosophical similarities between the two forms of nihilism point to an interesting fact: in a democratic environment, we still find ourselves coexisting with the consequences of totalitarianism. The debates now underway concern how to manage or even defeat, within a democratic framework, the poisonous effects of this total legacy.

Conclusion

The effects of the total legacy have weakened democratic values in a different way than, for example, the effects of Nazi brutality. In the wake of the total legacy, we can draw new lessons. One such lesson is that the continued survival and renewal of autonomous communities are vitally important to a democracy. The total legacy alienates the population from all forms of community; in this light, it becomes clear that autonomy within a democracy means not the independence of the individual, but rather the willingness to shoulder tasks on behalf of the community.

The middle class is one of democracy's great values; defending and strengthening this class also take on new importance in light of the total legacy, because the middle class is the first target of every dictatorship. The defence of democracy will not endure unless the middle class is strengthened. Since 1990, every Central European country has faced enormous difficulties that stem from the fact that the Communist system methodically destroyed the networks, autonomous structures and the very conditions for survival of small property owners. One lesson of the total legacy is that rebuilding the middle class is not just an economic policy question, but a crucial factor in the mindset that must develop in order to improve democracy.

The political nihilism of the Communist systems destroyed everything that, to a democrat, represented human dignity and sovereignty. The defence of these values cannot be limited to denouncing concentration camps, political persecution and show trials. Defence of democracy entails a tenacious battle against the immediate effects of the total legacy. Such effects include a fear of expressing opinions, reluctance to take on personal responsibility, alienation from public life. The defence of democratic values also entails the effort to have society recognise once more the importance of the common good and shared values. In sum: for the centre-right forces of Europe, all of this amounts to a re-evaluation of democratic values based on the lessons of the total legacy.