Introduction to the Special Issue “Canonizing and Contesting Communist-Era Dissent in Eastern Europe: Actors,Representations,and Impacts since 1989”

Abstract

This special issue in historical and memory studies analyzes two interrelated processes. It explores how the dissident past has been negotiated, contested, or reclaimed since 1989 and how key post-dissident actors have employed their own pasts as a moral and political resource after 1989, with what consequences. The issue approaches post-dissident history and the memory of dissent after 1989 in a regional-comparative frame while paying ample attention to transnational dynamics, such as interactions between Western recognition and national contestation. The issue thus analyzes the varied meanings east Europeans have assigned to dissident pasts and post-dissident presents and how the contests over such meanings have come to shape their politics and culture. Individual contributions focus on post-dissident actors, their representations, or their impact. A focus on actors enables in-depth exploration of post-dissident politics across the Visegrád countries and how the dissident experience was translated, via a politics of consensus, into liberal politics during the early years of “transition.” This focus also yields studies that analyze how post-dissidents have drawn on the intellectual authority and moral credibility they derived from their dissident pasts. Other studies in the collection trace transformation in the representation of forms of dissent in the decades since 1989 and the changing political and cultural values such representations have conveyed. Still other studies explore and reflect on the reasons behind the backlash against the post-dissident canon and its leading representatives while also considering ways in which “dissident heroes” have been posthumously reclaimed.

The current special issue analyzes the preoccupation of the post-1989 era with dissident pasts and “the post-dissident present.” Authors contributing to this issue have been intrigued by the diverse interpretations central and eastern Europeans have developed regarding the dissident pasts of select groups and individuals, the varied ways they have assigned meaning to post-dissident actors and phenomena since 1989, and how the contests over such interpretations and meanings have come to shape their politics and culture. Offering in-depth scholarship on key examples from Poland to Bulgaria, from Romania to Hungary, and from the former Yugoslavia (especially Croatia) to Czechoslovakia (the Czech Republic and Slovakia from 1993), our collection makes an original scholarly contribution by approaching post-dissident history and the memory of dissent simultaneously while reflecting on their complex co-constitution.

Being interested in the co-constitution of the past and the present, we consciously position our special issue within both historical and memory studies and explore the intersections of these two broad fields—something that, it seems to us, is surprisingly rarely done in a self-conscious manner, despite the near universal recognition of just how inextricably intertwined history and memory are. More specifically, our agenda has been motivated by the realization that, despite much excellent new scholarship on the history of dissent, the post-dissident phenomenon—a key issue in the contemporary history of east European politics and culture—requires further historicization. ¹ In addition, the much-noted flourishing of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies notwithstanding, the memory of Communist-era dissent in Eastern Europe still needs to be substantially related to post-dissident histories. ² These are the areas where our special issue makes an original contribution. It suggests that approaches to political and cultural memory—in other words, to questions regarding how the present continuously reshapes the past—ought to be combined and integrated with a more traditional, historical-chronological approach to grasp how the past has helped produce those key moments and manifestations of retrospection.

As indicated by our issue’s subtitle, the collection consists of three main, interrelated parts: we focus on post-dissident actors after 1989, on the varied and evolving representations of dissent, and on the long-term impact that prominent post-dissidents and the interpretations of their activities—both before and after 1989—have had on the politics and culture of post-Communist eastern Europe. Individual contributions to the first part deal with key post-dissident political, intellectual, and religious actors, such as the rise of rather reluctant post-dissident liberals across the Visegrád countries and their ideal of a broad democratic consensus or Grundkonsens (see Michal Kopeček’s opening article), the public interventions and reception of the prominent Hungarian post-dissident writer and thinker György Konrád (as explored in Ferenc Laczó’s contribution), and former Catholic dissidents in Czechoslovakia and how they came to play crucial roles in etatization processes and to endorse an independent Slovakia in the early 1990s (Agáta Šústová Drelová’s study). Our interest in such post-dissident actors has been driven not least by our desire to understand how they have drawn on the moral credibility and intellectual authority they derived from their recent dissident pasts after 1989, and how they have employed their heightened credibility and authority for various, partly entirely new purposes under radically changed circumstances.

Studies in the second part explore the manifold and evolving ways dissent has been represented and the diverse political and cultural values such representations, often associated with increasingly powerful forms of “symbolic anti-Communism,” have conveyed over time. ³ The individual contributions by Caterina Preda, Muriel Blaive, and Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu—and the joint one by Daniela Koleva and Tea Sindbæk Andersen—all develop original angles to study such representations and thereby reflect on changing values. The third part explores and reflects on the reasons behind the national-level backlashes against a largely transnationally shaped post-dissident canon and its leading local representatives (as in the papers by Piotr Wciślik and Kacper Szulecki, both focused on the momentous case of Poland), while it also considers the manifold ways in which major “former dissident heroes” and prominent post-Communist political actors, such as Václav Havel, have been posthumously reclaimed in recent years (the subject of Barbara J. Falk and Daniela Bouvier-Valenta’s joint exploration).

Through these ten articles, we study actors, representations, and impacts in a regional-comparative frame while also paying close attention to wider transnational dynamics and contestations where relevant—a trend that may be especially evident in Szulecki’s and Laczó’s contributions but that clearly factors into Šústová Drelová’s study of Catholics, Preda’s and Blaive’s contextual interpretations of facets of a new, transnational anti-Communism as well as into Falk and Bouvier-Valenta’s case study of the national reclamation of a widely reputed and even admired person.

In other words, our issue approaches the legacies of Communist-era dissent through a focus on four main pillars: the prominence of certain post-dissident actors after 1989, which, we argue, was largely based on the capital they could derive from their “dissident pasts”; the influence of certain dissident ideas, attitudes, and values amounting to a gradually evolving “dissident canon”; repeated and partially successful attempts to broaden the dissident canon that followed from the desirability of the “post-dissident status” after 1989; and the discourses of critique or even denunciation targeting the past of Communist-era dissidents and their present-day influence as “post-dissidents”—discourses whose origins may be traced back to the years prior to 1989, though they became articulated in a new key as part of recent and current illiberal political projects that explicitly oppose and aim to delegitimize a whole variety of dissident activities.

While contributors to this special issue consider these four pillars to be crucial to any encompassing understanding of the legacies of dissent in post-Communist eastern Europe, their ten studies do not devote equal attention to all four of them. Several of them clearly prioritize some while gesturing toward the others—for instance, Blaive focuses on the first, second, and third pillars; Kopeček and Laczó on the first and the second; Szulecki on the first and the fourth; Preda primarily on the third.

What are some of the key arguments in the individual studies and what would a sketch of their relationship look like? In his “Post-Dissident Politics and the ‘Liberal Consensus’ in East-Central Europe after 1989,” Michal Kopeček provides a regional-comparative coverage of political identities and political self-identification in the early years of the “democratic transition.” More concretely, Kopeček is interested in how the dissident experience was translated into liberal politics in those years. The author argues that the legacies of dissent were manifested in a specific democratic imaginary and, even more importantly, in certain social-political practices that amounted to a post-dissident form of liberalism across the four Visegrád countries. While post-dissidents tended to be hesitant or even reluctant liberals, their post-dissident liberalism was manifested in efforts to transfer the dissident “politics of consensus” into the democratic era and to transform that type of politics into a democratic basic consensus (or Grundkonsens) to be driven not least by an ethos of anti-politics. In a curious reversal of attitudes and roles from before 1989, post-dissident liberals could thus be among those most eager to assert that the basic features of the new system were not to be subjected to encompassing critiques and open contestation.

If Kopeček’s is a nuanced comparative exercise with surprising conclusions, Ferenc Laczó’s “György Konrád as a Post-Dissident Public Intellectual. Biography, Interventions, Reception” offers a detailed case study of how a leading post-dissident from Hungary wielded his moral and political authority, and with what effects. Laczó’s contribution is distinguished by its combination of a national case study with a transnational approach and exploration of both Konrád’s interventions and reception after 1989. He interprets Konrád’s major contributions as a public intellectual in post-Communist Hungary, his high-profile involvement in discussions on various continents, and the transnational scholarly reception of his key ideas. Connecting the main interest of Part One in post-dissident actors with an exploration of impact, Laczó’s study shows how Konrád’s public pronouncements oscillated between universalistic and civilizational discourses, and between a generous spirit of openness and expressions of his profound fears. The study concludes that Konrád thereby aimed simultaneously to employ and deflect the political and moral authority he came to possess as a highly reputed, even widely canonized post-dissident.

In her “An Arrested Dialectic: The National Past and (Post-)Dissident Catholic Moral Reasoning in Slovakia,” Agáta Šústová Drelová explores the paths of dissenting Catholics in Communist-ruled Slovakia who became prominent in politics and the Church hierarchy after 1989. Her article reveals how their respective emphases on universal Catholic morality versus nationalized ethics increasingly divided these former dissidents, and how this difference largely determined the way they related to and pursued Slovak cultural and political sovereignty; as Šústová Drelová shows, an influential branch among such clergy members first nationalized and then etatized its religious authority and became actively involved in the drive for Slovak independence during the early 1990s. Kopeček’s, Laczó’s, and Šústová Drelová’s contributions thus all trace remarkable lines of continuity across the break 1989 while also exploring subtle reversals.

In “From Dissidence to Heroism: Constructing an Ideal Post-Communist Identity in the Czech Republic,” Muriel Blaive dissects the construction of a heroic anti-Communist identity by focusing on the changing narratives and status of the Velvet Revolution’s student leaders. Through memory politics, Blaive’s paper studies the rewriting of biographies in combination with the evolution of the societal relationship to the Communist past and redefinitions of “ideal past conduct” to show how, in the Czech Republic after 1989, the associative link between “dissent” and “heroism” was extended to include ever wider circles, while the category of “dissent” was ever more frequently supplanted by the notion of “heroism.” In a clear instance of memory’s adaption to the needs of the present, new, sharper forms of anti-Communism thus managed to overwrite memories of the messy compromises of the 1970s and 1980s.

Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu’s contribution, “‘Me? I’m no revolution. I’m no heroine.’ Reconfiguring the Dissident in Contemporary Polish Theater,” explores the ways in which culture (understood as institutions and discursive space) has been a field of struggle over meanings and values related to the evaluation of the post-1989 order. By looking at the figure of the dissident, one of the founding myths of Polish civic identity, Nguyen Vu highlights the importance of the cultural sector and artistic production in capturing and shaping its evolving meaning. More specifically, her article analyzes how recent theater performances in Poland have interwoven political content, intentions, and aesthetic form in intriguing ways to engage with the highly polarized political landscape in the country. The plays Nguyen Vu dissects do so via problematizing the complex and gendered experience of dissidence. As the author argues, by framing the figure of the dissident as a valuable entry point into reflecting on the making and unmaking of the foundational myths of post-1989 Poland, these remarkable plays make visible how this figure has become an important tool in remaking a Communist and post-socialist past as well as the polarized present.

In her “Representations of Dissent against Communism in Romania: Anti-Communist Heroes, ‘Prison Saints’ and (Extra)ordinary Citizens,” Caterina Preda studies visual representations in Romania in order to articulate a more comprehensive memory of dissent against the Communist regime, explores how artistic renditions of the past differ from institutional discourses on dissent, and dissects how those representations themselves become politicized. Developing a useful typology of portraits, the article maps the variety of artistic representations and shows how—while accentuating individuals’ agency in the past—they contribute to the legitimacy of the post-1989 regime, not least by aligning it with certain international expectations and national status claims.

The above-mentioned studies complement each other in intriguing ways and allow us to suggest some points of comparison. After all, Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic have all seen attempts to widen definitions of dissent. When read in combination, these studies also reveal how the specific subjects and functions of these representations markedly differ. In Romania, according to a previously hegemonic interpretation, dissidents were supposedly practically absent until the fall of the Ceauşescu regime at the end of 1989. In Poland dissidents have been widely understood to have acted as a sort of vanguard of the 1989 revolutions ever since the contemporary penning of popular interpretations of the revolutionary days in the West. ⁴ In the Czech Republic, where important segments of society have identified with traditions of dissent both before and after 1989, they interpret the meaning of those traditions in significantly different ways. We may perhaps capture the difference in the function of these representations in the three national environments through the labels “cultural-symbolic compensation” (in Romania), “the making of shared and nonetheless divisive political myths” (in Poland), and “symbolic over-investment in political triumph” (in the Czech Republic).

In their comparative paper on Belene in Bulgaria and Goli Otok in Croatia (“Communist Prison Camps as Sites of Memory and Legacies of Dissent: Belene and Goli Otok in Bulgarian and Croatian Cultural Memory”), which belongs to the same section of this issue, dealing with questions of representations, Daniela Koleva and Tea Sindbæk Andersen analyze an intriguing and rather ambiguous phenomenon: core sites of political repression and state-organized violence that may both be assigned, though for somewhat different reasons, to the category of difficult or even unwanted heritage. The authors first show how literary traditions of memory have helped establish these two camps as sites of memory of political repression and dissent, and then they explore how their (re)construction as heritage sites and tourist attractions have triggered new debates. As the article concludes, these debates may have invested Belene and Goli Otok with new meanings; however, attempts to institutionalize them as sites of memory have met with only limited success, leaving their status uncertain. The authors thus show what key ambiguities surround core sites of difficult and unwanted heritage in the two countries and substantiate their claim regarding the fragility of dissident memory.

Piotr Wciślik’s contribution, titled “Homo Sovieticus and the Neoliberal Legacy of Polish Dissent,” belongs to the third main part of our issue, which is devoted to a reconsideration of impacts. It starts from the striking claim that the figure of homo sovieticus has owed much of its continued allure to its dissident pedigree, but that the recurrent deployment of this figure by post-dissident liberals should rather be analyzed as part of what Albert Hirschman labeled the “rhetoric of reaction.” The recurrent deployment of this figure has in fact helped the former dissident vanguard in Poland enact its overriding desire to short-circuit the revolution, which amounted to nothing less than a pre-emptive form of Thermidorianism, Wciślik argues. This form of politics differs from moderate politics also through the kind of unintended consequences it produces and has proven self-defeating in Poland after 1989, the author emphasizes. After all, such a pre-emptive form of Thermidorianism has not only hurt the political passions of the freedom fighters, who were thereby brought under practically constant suspicion, and frustrated the great expectations that the events of 1989 aroused; the inability to think beyond the political imaginary of a democracy in jeopardy in fact made post-dissident liberals and conservative revolutionaries into complicit adversaries.

Kacper Szulecki’s “Expelled from the Fairytale. The Impact of the Dissident Legacy on Post-1989 Central European Politics” offers a similarly original argument that connects transnational recognition and local-national contestation—and what the author fittingly calls a clash of representations that has developed between the two levels. Like Wciślik’s paper, Szulecki’s contribution aims primarily to explain the causes and character of the swift negative backlash against a temporarily empowered post-dissident liberal elite. He shows that this backlash had much to do with a rather ironic rewriting of the Cold War narrative: the new narrative the author identifies, in ways closely comparable to Blaive’s interpretation, drew on dissident concepts and radicalized them further in the framework of a new “politics of the past.” The backlash, as Szulecki adds, was also powerfully fueled by a more general strengthening of anti-elite and anti-intellectual trends.

If Szulecki focused his reflections on points that add a major transnational dimension to Wciślik’s critique and complement Kopeček’s study of post-dissident liberalism in a sort of dialectical fashion, the final article in the collection, by Barbara J. Falk and Daniela Bouvier-Valenta, titled “Václav Havel: Posthumous Reclamation of a National Hero?” arguably picks up the story where Szulecki ended his: Falk and Bouvier-Valenta study the national “reclamation” of Havel as a great Czech statesperson and hero since his passing in 2011. The co-authors show which parts of Havel’s life and ideas have been made parts of “usable pasts” in recent years while also probing the fraught question of why this prominent post-dissident politician has apparently proven useful through the lens of memory politics in the Czech Republic. Falk and Bouvier-Valenta thereby diagnose a certain posthumous “catching up” in Havel’s home country to the reputation he long enjoyed in international political and scholarly circles while still alive. Contrary to the article by Szulecki on Poland, this one points to a process of posthumous transnational alignment in the Czech Republic rather than polarization. At the same time, this process of alignment is comparable to the case of Romanian artists who are eager to reconstruct dissident pasts not least due to the international status such pasts have come to enjoy—a case that Caterina Preda depicts.

What these examples also show is that dissent and its memory, although studied primarily through national lenses, remain inseparable from transnational trends and frameworks of interpretation—more particularly, from European and Western expectations. We ought to add in a self-reflexive manner that the very research group that developed this special issue is no exception to these larger trends. Our studies were written in the framework of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action “New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent,” funded by the European Union—something we feel we ought to mention even as we remain critically disposed toward the kind of clashes of representation Szulecki has perceptively identified and are dedicated to trying to moderate such clashes, not least through multiple, simultaneous acts of contextualization.

Our collection begins with the post-dissident liberal politics of the early democratic transition period and closes with the contemporary reclamation of dissident ideas and post-dissident politics. The narrative arc the issue develops is far from straightforward, however; our story proceeds through several ambiguous continuities and some clear cases of rupture with the years before 1989, the ensuing pluralization and radicalization of interpretations, and some notable backlashes. By studying post-dissidents as historical actors in the contemporary era, the representations of the memory of dissent, and the contested impacts of Communist-era dissent and post-dissident politics as one large complex, our special issue consciously aims to complicate ideas regarding an easily detectable narrative arc. Instead of reproducing the currently fashionable narrative concerning the rise and fall of a “liberal consensus” in eastern Europe (a consensus that, it is often asserted, was crucially shaped by post-dissidents, for better or worse), we hope to provide new impulses at the intersection of historical and memory studies that may allow our readers to grasp an intricate co-constitution. ⁵ Our basic theoretical premise is indeed that impact derives from how past actors have come to shape the present and from how present actors have come to represent those pasts. ⁶

As should be clear from the above, we are fully cognizant that multilayered legacies, such as those of dissent in post-Communist eastern Europe, constantly evolve. We are also acutely aware that the shape the legacies of Communist-era dissent will take in the future are far from certain—a basic uncertainty that evidently applies to the kind of legacies that were canonized shortly after 1989 through a focus on select, and almost exclusively male, actors and their supposedly almost impeccable liberal democratic pedigrees. Such legacies are under attack in eastern Europe these days by a right-wing populist politics that explicitly pursues an anti-dissident agenda of securitization. Such legacies are also being challenged by new-old forms of critique that point to democratic blind spots in the liberal canon—and are often dedicated to recovering alternative, primarily left-leaning traditions of dissent. Some of the latter critiques amount to intellectually serious and at times imaginative forms of contestation. Their recent and current manifestations may be worth historicizing as well as probed for their own blind spots—potentially in a sequel to this issue.