Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe Gale Stokes

Source: Gale Stokes, review published in American Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 3, (2008): pp. 899-900.

KEVIN MCDERMOTT and MATTHEW STIBBE, editors. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule. Foreword by PAVEL SEIFTER. New York: Berg. 2006. Pp. xiv, 210. Cloth $94.95, paper $29.95. How much more do we know about historical events after some time has passed than was known at the time of the events themselves? On the surface it appears obvious that we should have a considerably more sophisticated understanding of events after documents that were closely held when the passions of the moment were running high are available for researchers. But is it really true? What do we actually mean by "knowing more?" Does the accumulation of an ever larger number of data points change our basic understanding, or do they simply provide fodder for the interpretive styles of a new era? The opening of Soviet and East European archives in the 1990s momentarily gave the promise of bright new understandings of the momentous events of the period 1989-1991, but as this collection put together by Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe suggests, any new understandings do not seem to come 900 Reviews of Books

from an increase in data but rather from the interpretive stance through which they are understood. Indeed, the only article in the collection that is "new" is James Krapfl's application of Lynn Hunt's typology of how the French Revolution has been interpreted to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Krapfl argues that interpretation of the Velvet Revolution began in a romantic vein in which human beings were thought capable of heroic deeds and the people were trusted to act for the general good. This was followed by the comic interpretation that criticized this quest for transcendence and sought legal continuity. The tragic moment, for Krapfl, was when Vaclav Klaus split the Civic Forum by creating his own political party, thus breaking both the heroic and continuity threads. Finally, we appear now to be in the satiric era in which human agency is increasingly deemed a delusion and the great events of 1989 are often referred to as the "socalled revolution." In other words, the new documents that have been uncovered since 1989, and there have been plenty, have not greatly changed the interpretation

of those events. Rather it is the dynamic of Czech and Slovak societies that has developed and changed, and along with it the interpretations into which whatever new data that emerges is placed. Even at a more positivist level, it does not appear from the brief studies in this collection that much has changed. The Yugoslav Communist Party's past assertions that it was always standing up to the Soviets was an exaggeration; Wladislav Gomulka was not as strong and decisive in his meeting with Soviet leaders in Warsaw on October 19, 1956, as many have assumed; Alexander Dubcek always strongly favored the Soviets, and was not so much a reformer as was once thought; Imre Pozsgay and the precursors to the Hungarian Democratic Forum were more important than earlier interpreters, including myself, may have written. It is nice to know these things with a bit more certainty, but, as Johanna Granville suggests in her useful effort to compare the Polish October of 1956 and the Hungarian Revolution of the same year in the light of new data, "the documents do not change previous interpretations fundamentally" (p. 57). This outcome is probably not what the editors had in mind when they put this volume together. I suspect they hoped that access to "recently accessible archival material and post-communist historiography" would produce something more exciting than the conclusion they suggest, namely that their collection "affirm[s] the diversity of East European responses to perceived Soviet hegemony." Unfortunately, their claim that the articles "represent the very latest research" can not be taken too seriously. Even Granville's good chapter is a shortened and revised version of an article that appeared in the Australian Journal of Politics and History four years before publication of this collection. Stibbe's article on the East German Uprising is not up to Jonathan Sperber's excellent review article of two years earlier, "17 June 1953: Revisiting a German Revolution," German History, Vol. 22 (2004), pp. 619-643. And much of Dennis Deletant's article on opposition in Romania simply consists of verbatim renderings from the chapter entitled "Dissent" in his book Ceaucescu and the Securitate (1995). Several of the pieces in this book have merit. Nevertheless, to keep up with the "latest research" in the "relationship between the USSR and its client states" (all quotes in the last two paragraphs from page 1), both factual and interpretive, I would recommend browsing the National Security Archive Cold War Readers, and the bulletins and other publications of the Cold War International History Project, all of which are referred to sparingly in this collection. GALE STOKES, Rice University

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

JUNE 2008

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bks, Csaba and Malcolm Byrne, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: a History in Documents. Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2002. Deletant, Dennis, Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948-1965. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999. Falk, Barbara J. The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals And Philosopher Kings (Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2003). Gibianskii, Leonid and Norman Naimark, The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997). Granville, Johanna. The First Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. http://www.scribd.com/doc/144894637/The-First-Domino-Int-lDecision-Making-During-Hungary-1956-Johanna-Granville Granville, Johanna, "Poland and Hungary, 1956: A Comparative Essay Based on New Archival Findings," in Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (New York, NY: Berg, 2006), pp. 57-77. http://www.scribd.com/doc/53533514/Johanna-Granville-Poland-andHungary-1956-a-Comparative-Essay-Based-on-New-Archival-Findings McDermott, Kevin and Matthew Stibbe. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule. Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006. Stokes, Gale. From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Stokes, Gale. The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968-1970. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.