ReflectionsontheEasternEuropeanRevolutions:TheGodthatFailed

ReflectionsontheEasternEuropeanRevolutions:TheGodthatFailed

byBruceMazlish

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3+4/1990,pages:237240,onwww.ceeol.com.
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REFLECTIONS ON THE EASTERN EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS: THE GOD THAT FAILED

Bruce Mazlish

The tumultuous events of 1989 in Eastern Europe leave us reeling, familiar landmarks gone, a sense of chaos gripping us. We need to make sense of what is happening, to see some sort of meaningful change in place of mere chance. Under the flux of happenings - where each day's stories seem to outdo the previous, with, for example, Hungary going beyond Poland, and then being leapfrogged by developments in Czechoslovakia, and so on in the dance of the headlines - we need to discern the deep structural transformations taking place. We must understand, I shall argue, that the demise of Marxism presents us with a unique macro event in history, the first birth and death of a god in the modern, material world. The essential causative context is Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. While it should always have been clear that the communist domination of Eastern Europe was unstable, flying in the face of nationalistic feelings, imposing, as some Eastern Europeans saw it, an "Asiatic" yoke on "Western" oriented countries, and so forth, there was nothing deterministic about the ultimate crumbling. A strong Soviet Union, determined to impose its will by military force on an inert Eastern Europe, in time, might have worn down even the possibilities of upheaval. While I shall have more to say about this later, I want simply to underline here the causal role of Gorbachev's Russia. When, during the summer of 1989, I spent a short time in Hungary. I had occasion to ask a wily old peasant, "What should America do?", his answer was, "Support Gorbachev." His peasant shrewdness shot straight to the historian's problem of causality. (More recently, Vaclav Havel, in his address to the American Congress, touched on the same point.) In the infinite regress that is historical explanation, an analysis of the past half decade in the Soviet Union would be essential to understanding the context in which 1989 in Eastern Europe took place. I want to go even further back, however, and to limit my analysis to two major structural features: the nature of Marxism as a belief system, which I shall identify as a secular religion; and the nature of Soviet dominion, as a form of imperialism. 1. Marxism as a belief system In a book, The Meaning of Karl Marx, which I published a few years ago, I tried to make the case for Marxism as a secular religion; this, of course, is not a
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particularly original idea, but I tried to develop It In a novel fashion, especially by emphasizing the religious, particularly Lutheran, roots in Marx's own life. To underline the importance of the subject, however, I began the book by pointing out that as a secular religion, Marxism "has come to hold sway over more hearts and minds, or at least to dominate the ideologies of those in power in proportionately more parts of the world than anyone of the major historical religions." One can readily see my present embarrassment. True, I had hedged my assertion with the qualification that "many of the 1.5 to 2 billion or so 'followers' may be unwilling ones. Many Poles, Hungarians, etc., and even Russians, detest the Communist system." Nevertheless, I added, "their children are brought up in the new 'faith,' the public ceremonies are Marxist, etc." It seemed to me then that, just as Christianity under Constantine was a belief system held by only about one tenth of the population of the Roman Empire and imposed on the rest, gradually triumphing, so communism too might gradually come to be accepted, in some form or other, by the majority of the people under its dominion. In the event, I was obviously off the mark. Not because I didn't foresee the events of 1989 - no one else did either - but because I didn't probe further into the nature of Marxism as a secular religion holding political power. Errors can oftentimes be fruitful; let us see what we can learn from what is involved in my commission, or rather omission, here. Tocqueville is a good starting point. Writing of the unexpected revolutions of 1848, he declared that "Usually revolutions brought about by the emotions of the mob have been desired, but not premediated ... They spring spontaneously from some general malady of men's mind suddenly brought to a crisis by an unforeseen chance incident." What, then, were the "desires" waiting to be expressed in action, what the "general malady" ready to rage into reality on the occasion of the unforeseen chance, in the Eastern European countries under communism's rule? Again, resort to Tocqueville is helpful. What he saw in mid-nineteenthcentury France was "not just a party that triumphed this time; men aimed at establishing a social science, a philosophy, and I might almost say a common religion to be taught to all men and followed by them. Therein lay the really new element ... " The triumph in 1848 was short-lived, with its final denouement in the Eighteenth Brummaire of Louis Napoleon. The man who wrote the classical analysis of that denouement was Karl Marx; and it was his social science and "common religion" that triumphed in 1917 in Russia and then spread out to the one to two billion Marxists of the late twentieth century. As a secular religion, we can now see in hindsight how Marxism has suffered from one fatal flaw: its millennial claims are to be measured by its earthly success, and not in a supranatural world. Its supranatural religious competitors claimed moral powers that were rarely tested by their exercise on this earth; thus Catholicism, aside from challenges by purists such as the thirteenth-century Cathars, claimed the validity of its sacraments irrespective of the morality of the priest administering the sacraments. Islam preaches

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absolute submission to the ways of God, even though his hand usually dispenses poverty. And so on. Only Marxism claimed that its "common religion" would improve both the moral and the material conditions of its adherents, leading the proletariat out of alienation and into affluence. In doing so, it would finally realize true morality and its attendant human equality. No one would ever again exploit anyone else. The human species would finally have reached its true destiny of freedom. The utopian nature of this dream became devastatingly clearer with each passing year. Utopia means "no place." But communism had promised its religious fulfilment in "this place." Instead, whether in the Soviet Union or its satellites, this place turned out to be filled with placemen, a nomenclatura, who not only were unable to deliver the material goods, but were morally illegitimate in their grasp of undemocratic power and their self-indulgent corruption. Corruption in the Christian religion could lead to a reformation and a counter-reformation; the goal was to restore the purity of a supranatural religion and to free it from the cloying earthly imperfections of an as yet unredeemed man. The removal of corruption in the communist world entails as well the removal of the belief system that is held responsible for its existence. What I mean by this is that corruption is seen as endemic to the system, and not merely a matter of personal errancy. The signs of the collapse in belief were, in fact, there to be seen. In 1941, as a "sign of the times," a number of ex-communists published a book called The God that Failed, detailing their earlier belief and now their apostasy. Edited by Richard Crossman, the book included accounts by such men as Ignacio Silone, Arthur Koestler, and Richard Wright. What was then the loss of faith by a few intellectuals has now become the massive hemorrhaging of "religious" belief by the masses upon whom Marx sought to build his "church. " In the 1950s, in the West, it was fashionable to discuss the idea that "God is Dead." Resurrection of the supranatural religions has, clearly, occurred today just as an earlier account two thousand years ago described a return to life then. Amos Elon, in 1989 Czechoslovakia, tells how one of the posters in Prague announced MARX IS DEAD. His resurrection is rather more problematic, for the reasons I have hinted at above. It is a foolish person who trumpets "The End of History," or brags about the triumph of capitalism, for such simplicities overlook the mote in the West's own eye and the resultant problems of vision with which it will have to deal. Nor is the moral aspiration of Marxism, its millennial inspiration, entirely without continuing attraction. As capitalism, in its ascendant mode, reveals more of its own flaws, communism may perhaps experience a minor nostalgic resurrection as a counterweight. More of the lustre lost by capitalism is likely, however, to fall upon socialism or some other-"ism" yet unknown. Nevertheless, it does appear that as an overall belief system communism has lost its power. We are witnessing, it seems, one of those silent revolutions in the human spirit, as Hegel put it, which flared up only a hundred or more years ago and is now dying out. It is not the end of history,

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but one more sign of the increasingly rapid pace of change that marks our epoch. To conclude this section with one last quotation from Tocqueville: "Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turns of mind and the state of mores are the materials from which chance composes those impromptu events that surprise and terrify us;" these, he said, are what constitute the process of history. I have tried to hint at the turns of mind and state of mores in what I have said about Marxism as a secular religion, whose hold on its past believers is now gone. Its demise presents us, as I remarked at the beginning of this article, with a unique macro event in history, the first such birth and death of a god in the modern, material world. 2. The nature of Soviet domination Antecedent facts and the nature of institutions: these are also what need to be analyzed now and by future historians, in great detail. Any attempt at a fuller explanation of 1989 will certainly have to ground itself in the contingent nature of the events that have so rapidly unrolled, and are continuing to do so. Assuming that this will be done, I want to turn now to the second of the two long-range factors that I mentioned earlier: the collapse of an empire. It is easy to forget that ours is an age of massive decolonization. The first World War started the process for the West, and the second World War turned it into a landslide. Outstandingly, Britain was forced to give up India, and France to surrender Algeria and Vietnam, after protracted armed struggle (in the latter case, inherited by the United States). It is in this context, though it is taking a largely non-violent form, that we must envision the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. What obscures our vision is that 1) the Soviet Union acquired its empire after 1945, when the Western nations were losing theirs; and 2) the Soviet empire was a continental one, imposed on close neighbours, ethnically and linguistically as well as geographically. We have already seen that the cement meant to hold the empire together, along with arms, was the communist belief system. With the complete failure of the latter, Soviet hegemony was based only on force; and with Gorbachev's removal of the latter, the hold of empire dissolved (or is dissolving). In short, by different paths, and perhaps with different outcomes, the Soviet Union and the West have experienced the massive shock of decolonization. Without minimizing the differences between the two experiences, it is important to understand what has happened in 1989 as a variant on a common experience. In itself, the loss of Soviet empire would have only limited effect. What makes it so much more painful than the Western experience is that the Soviet Union within its own boundaries is itself an empire, some of whose people feel "subject" in the same way as the Eastern Europeans. Britain has its Ulster; one needs to imagine it as riven by powerful Welsh, Scottish and, yes, Birmingham Moslem separatists to achieve the true comparison with Gorbachev's Russia. In this case, therefore, the analogy must go beyond the

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Western experience of decolonization in the post War years, and perhaps the comparison be made with the Ottoman (or Hapsburg) Empire. Will the Soviet Union, or internal empire, dissolve along with the regime of communism? Will we witness the emergence of a Russian state, similar to the Turkish one of Ataturk Kemal Pasha, out of the ruins of its present boundaries? A state that is no longer a world power (although still possessing nuclear arms)? Predictions today are risky; still, I am prepared to say that I doubt the "Turkish" outcome for the Soviet Union. Its path, I suspect, will be its own, original one, though yet to be traced. But this is prediction; the historian's main task is retrodiction; and I have attempted to carry out that task by highlighting two of the fundamental structural features underlying the revolutions in Eastern Europe: the failure of a secular religion and the downfall of a colonial empire. Together with the contingent events in each of the countries involved, and along with further analysis of other structural features than those I have featured, the explanation offered here may help give meaning to the chaos of events.