East Central Europe 40 (2013) 150–155 brill.com/eceu

Understanding 1989: Civil Society, Ideological Erosion, and Elite Disenchantment

Vladimir Tismăneanu University of Maryland, College Park, USA

What happened in the annus mirabilis 1989 was a . And like any revolution, it should not be taken en bloc. There are two fundamental premises to any explanation of the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe: multi- causality and history’s precedents. One cannot grasp the meanings and dynamics of 1989 without taking into account the major crises of the Soviet Bloc (June 1953, 1956, 1968, 1980). The collapse of communist regimes was inextricably conditioned by the dialectics of de-Stalinization (“liberaliza- tion” or rather de-radicalization, to use Tucker’s classic, 1967 formulation) in various countries from the region. The trajectory of de-radicalization of these Marxist-Leninist regimes prepared for their demise. Without arguing for a deterministic inevitability of ’s fall, I consider that by 1989, communist societies experienced a sharp structural decline (eco- nomic, social, political, ideological, and moral). This phenomenon marred both the bloc’s “periphery” and its center. Under the circumstances, any analysis of the year 1989 should be framed by two crucial theoretical hypotheses. The first, which constitutes the core of Stephen Kotkin’s argument, is that by 1980s, the political elites of the -states were in disarray, experiencing loss of self- confidence, rampant cynicism, and ideological decay. Eastern Europe was ruled by uncivil societies (communist bureaucratic castes) beset with insecurity, anxiety, despondency, demoralization. They had lost their self- confidence and subsequently were looking for alternative sources of legiti- mization. However, I would like to point to a second dimension that functioned as a premise for the watershed of 1989. Communism in the region underwent the exhaustion of the utopian impulse. I developed this interpretive line in my book The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (1988) and in many of my interventions on

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/18763308-04001009 V. Tismăneanu / East Central Europe 40 (2013) 150–155 151 the meanings of 1989. To use Ken Jowitt’s coinage, the charismatic imper- sonalism of Leninist parties fell into disrepute (1992). In spite of ’s endless injunctions of “revisionist” ideological zeal, late social- ism failed to reinvent the heroic mission of its central agent of progress in History: the Communist Party. To return to Kotkin, I would contend that indeed “the collapse of communism was a collapse of establishments” (143). However, when talking about the establishment one should also understand the essential myth of a charismatic Party mobilizing a revolu- tionary movement toward radically transforming society for the achieve- ment of . By 1989, across East-Central Europe, one could observe a complex picture of waning faith in Utopia (e.g., by no means Nicolae Ceaușescu who died while singing ) combined with rou- tinization engineered by pragmatic elites (think of Károly Grósz in Hungary, Mieczysław Rakowski in Poland, Petar Mladenov in , or Hans Modrow in the GDR). All of the above factors considered, it is beyond doubt that by 1989 com- munist regimes were caught in a deep crisis of legitimacy. These “tyrannies of certitude,” as Daniel Chirot called them, lost their messianic ardor and an element that catalyzed the process of their inner disintegration. By 1989, three central myths of had collapsed: its infallibility, invincibility, and its irreversibility. In my opinion, and this is where I distance myself from Kotkin’s general interpretation of the context of 1989, the upheaval in Eastern Europe was the ironical vindication of Lenin’s famous definition of a revolutionary situation: those at the top cannot rule in the old ways, and those at the bottom do not want to accept these ways anymore. It is here where the salience of civil society comes into play. In my view, it is less rel- evant how large and/or numerous a dissident group/movement was. I remember the former dissident and human rights activist, the late Mihai Botez’s intervention at a roundtable organized by Freedom House in 1988 in which he insisted that the deficit of visibility does not necessarily mean the absence of civil society even in a country like Romania under Ceaușescu. There were many informal networks of communication between Romanian intellectuals. The November 1987 anticommunist Brasov workers’ protest movement was also an expression of deep-seated, yet real social unrest. What mattered were the perceptions of the dissidents’ role among the elites (i.e., the so-called intelligentsia) and within sectors of the population, in the grey area (bystanders). It was no coincidence that as soon as the Ceaușescu regime fell apart in Romania, the new ruling group, the leaders of the National Salvation Front, made sure to convey the message to the