BERLIN 1989 . 2 tally anti-political, that is, anti-Machiavellian. They re-
On
Twenty years after
the fall: Lessons and legacies
From Budapest’s “Petofi Circle” to Ludvik Vakulik’s “Manifest of 2,000 Words,” members of
Eastern Europe’s fearless intelligentsia worked
to bring down the Soviet Communist monolith.
● by Vladimir Tismaneanu
he year 1989 was simultaneously a moment of
T grandeur and one of sublime finale for Central and
Eastern European intellectuals. For more than four
decades, they could be described as belonging in a par-
ticular sociological and political category. They shared
characteristics that made them distinct from their peers
in the West: affirming the existence of moral values, re-
luctant to endorse utopian chiliasm, skeptical redemp-
tive paradigms, and rejecting collectivism in any of its va-
rieties. In many cases, politics as such was regarded as a
degrading exercise in hypocrisy. I speak here, of course,
of those intellectuals who resisted and/or subverted the
region’s Leninist regimes. I am mainly thinking of those
who fuelled democratic anti-communist culture and re-
visionism, those individuals who ultimately created the
dissident movement. They were the critical intelli-
gentsia, the ‘armed forces’ of the 1989 quiet revolution.
Some of the most fateful events in East-Central Europe
were caused by critical intelligentsia’ intervention in
public debates: from the Petöfi Circle in Budapest to Lud-
vik Vaculik’s “Two Thousand Words” during the Prague
Spring, not to speak of the immense impact of Vaclav
Havel’s essay “Power of the Powerless” throughout the
whole region. The experiences of political awakening in
Eastern and Central Europe created a special status for in-
tellectuals. They were made to feel important and irre-
placeable. Their discourse enabled emancipation to the
extent that it debunked the prevailing lie and invited peo-
ple to live in truth. Their vision of politics was fundamen-
30 east . europe and asia strategies
societies in the light of postcommunist developments.
jected the logic of acquiescence and proposed instead the
logic of honor, sedition and liberation. While the system
tried to penetrate all aspects of life with its ideological
the one hand, we have Timothy Garton Ash’s argument
about the revolutions of 1989 as “moral resurrections”
that emphasized the crucial status of public intellectuals
tentacles, the critical intellectuals offered an alternative
vision, distrustful of any ultimate truth except that of free-
dom. They played a dangerous game; they paid with time
as paragons of a new political style. In his opinion, the
most important idea that they brought forward was the
re-assessment of the notion of citizenship. Even if their
in prison or exile; yet eventually their efforts were repaid ideal did not reign supreme, what is important is that
in support from the populace. most of the debates within the public sphere revolved
hat one must keep in mind, however, when ana-
W lyzing the critical intellectuals’ legacy after 1989,
is that seizing power was not the ultimate dissi-
dent dream: the antipolitical activists of the 1970s and
1980s were committed to the restoration of truth and
morality in the public sphere, the rehabilitation of civic
virtues, and the end of the totalitarian method of control,
intimidation, and coercion. Their intentions were indeed
bloodthirsty, but only regarding the institutions that kept
the Leninist party-state machine rolling and never when
it came to people.1 Their revolution was self-limiting.
They wished to implode communist regimes with the dy-
namite of democratic values. In this respect, they succeed-
ed. True, the new political order is not exactly a liberal
heaven, and all sorts of unsavory phenomena have come
to the fore: cynicism, corruption, the economic empower-
ment of the former nomenklaturas, chauvinist and nation-
alist outburst of intolerance and hatred, new forms of ex-
clusion and ethnic arrogance. But post-1989 East Central
Europe is a political and economic laboratory in which the
new institutional arrangements will be strongly influ-
enced by the legacies of forty years of Leninism. In 1989,
when the Communist regimes were collapsing, the pre-
vailing attitude in these countries towards the critical in-
telligentsia was one of sympathy and even admiration. T-
wo decades later, intellectuals seem to have lost much of
their moral aura and are often attacked as champions of fu-
Hulton Archive / Getty Images / S. Eason
tility, architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers.
There are two schools of thought in what concerns the
Getty Images / T. Stoddart
evaluation of the intellectuals’ weight on their respective
1. A. Michnik, We Can talk Without Hatred. A Conversation with Woj-
ciech Jaruzelski in “Letters from Freedom. Post-Cold War Realities and
Perspectives,” foreword Ken Jowitt, edited by I. Grudzinska Gross, with
new translations from Polish by J. Crane (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Uni- Youthful intellectuals in Russia and Eastern Europe
November 1989: The Berlin Wall comes down. versity of California Press, 1999), p. 273. rarely stopping pressing for an end to authoritarianism.
number 26 . october 2009 31
 around the idea of civility, of what defines one’s belong-
ing to a society and polity.2 In a sense, one might say that
the success of critical intelligentsia lies in the reality of
an active, self-conscious, empowered social body. On the
other hand, Tony Judt provides us with a mirror-image
for Ash’s explanation. Judt considers that liberal dissi-
dents never had a strong impact on their societies and that
the region’s procommunist illiberal traditions, enhanced
by the lingering effects of Leninism are a major obstacle
for liberal democracy to thrive in the region. In this per-
spective, there is little usable past for exponents of plu-
ralism to hearken back to. Instead, there is a strong and
unprocessed memory of real or perceived victimization,
a lot of self-idealization and very little readiness for em-
pathy and commiseration.
2. T. Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ‘89 witnessed
in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage Books,
1993), pp. 131-156.
32 east . europe and asia strategies
In my opinion, if one looks closer into the two argu-
ments, s/he might surprisingly find that they are not as
far part from each other as they seem. In Postwar, Tony
Judt argues that:
“As Edmund Burke had dismissively observed of an ear-
lier generation of revolutionary activists: ‘The best were
only men of theory.’ Most of them [critical intellectuals]
were quite unprepared for the messy political and techni-
cal issues of the coming decade […] One of the reasons for
the decline of the intellectuals was that their much re-
marked-upon emphasis on the ethics of anti-Commu-
nism, the need to construct a morally aware civil society
to fill the anomic space between the individual and the s-
tate, had been overtaken by the practical business of con-
structing a market economy.” 3
Dissident Vaclav Havel, who would later become Czech president,
surveys approving crowds in Wenceslas Square
following the Velvet Revolution in December 1989.
Afp Photo / Grazia Neri / L. Kotek
ndeed the fragmented and disenchanted societies
I of the former Soviet bloc became a sort of quick-
sand for the ideas and discourse of those who ear-
lier had produced the delegitimization of the communist
system. It seems that, in the void that was created after the
demise of Sovietism, in the equally atavistic and brittle-
ly postmodern milieus of postocommunism, the dissi-
dent message of accountability, civility, and of the good
society as the anti-Machiavellian polis got lost along the
way. But these statements do not suffice if another ele-
ment is not taken into account. I am thinking here to the
specific profile of postcommunist societies. Large sec-
tions of the population were born under communism and
lived at least half of their life (or the formative years) dur-
ing ‘really existing socialism’. In other words, one con-
stant in these communities are “the millions of Lilliput-
3. T. Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Bo-
oks, 2005), p. 695.
ian threads of everyday mendacity, conformity and com-
promise” (T. Gordon Ash). The majority of the people liv-
ing in Eastern Europe have distinct personal histories be-
fore 1989 essentially altered by the (post)totalitarian ex-
perience. As Vaclav Klaus once put it in a presidential ad-
dress: “neither a former communist nor a former dissi-
dent; neither a henchman nor a moralist, whose very p-
resence on the scene is a reminder of the courage you did
not have: your bad conscience.” 4
If we are to put together the two ideas, the magnetic at-
traction of the lightness of unattached postmodern being
and the burden of potential guilt and conformity in rela-
tion to the past, we can get a more complete answer to
why the role of critical intellectuals significantly de-
clined. The former dissidents, the heroes, are both a thorn
4. Op. cit., pp. 695-696.
Liaison / S. Ferry
number 26 . october 2009 33
 on the back of their fellow citizens’ minds (i.e., memory)
and, apparently, an antiquated model for the younger
generation whose potential of empathy is rather low for
it still claims the “privilege of late birth.” This compos-
ite form of oblivion is in fact one of the most important
dangers to the entrenchment of democratic values in the
region. With hardly any extensive liberal tradition to fall
back to, these societies must treasure the lessons of the
dissident movement in order to retain the ethical lever-
age against collectivist and egalitarian temptations that
lurk under the surface of present politics.
The critical intellectuals assumed that by detecting the
pitfalls of Marxist historicism and its totalitarian poten-
tial, they had annulled the seductive factors in all ideolo-
gies. This, it turns out, was an illusion. After 1989, many
people were attracted by inchoate and often authoritari-
an creeds. We witnessed the emergence of doctrines
linked to racism, rabid nationalism, and social corpo-
ratism. But, do intellectuals still matter in the post-Com-
munist political world? Or is Leszek Kolakowski correct
when he observed that the intelligentsia’s disillusion-
ment with redemptive-apocalyptical teleologies has led
it to retreat from taking prophetic stands? Kolakowski
notes the decline of the oracular temptation and a waning
of that disease that can be called the idolatry of politics:
“There is much less willingness to offer unconditional
support to extinct ideologies and more inclination to keep
a distance from political matters, with a consequent ten-
dency to withdraw into more secured and specialized ar-
eas. As a result we probably now have fewer influential
lunatic and swindlers, but also fewer intellectual teach-
ers.” 5 [my italics].
s far as I am concerned, I believe that critical in-
A tellectuals preserved their opportunity to be di-
rectly involved in the reshaping of the public
sphere in postcommunist Europe. The current debates,
primarily the attempts at historical revisionism and eth-
nic scapegoating, offer to intellectuals a vital role as civic
pedagogues. They approach today’s disquieting situa-
tions armed with their own four decades’ experience of
humiliations, self-flagellations, and moral resurrections.
They come as propagators of the unconventional wis-
5. L. Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1990), p. 41.
34 east . europe and asia strategies
dom, as taboo-breakers and practitioners of a different po- f we are to highlight the crucial legacies of 1989, el called ‘post-democracy’: “nothing more, and nothing
litical art. For as long as there is no credible political class,
as long as political parties remain unable to formulate dis-
tinct interests reflective of coherent and consistent ideo-
I I would argue that they fall into two categories:
those which are related to the rebirth of citizen-
ship (a concept obliterated under both communism and
other, than a democracy that has once again been given
human content.”7 But it would naïve to paint an all too
rosy picture. The ideas of the 1989 liberating moment are
logical commitments, intellectuals will still be needed to fascism) and the reaffirmation of the truth (as against the in power, but not necessarily and not always the people
continue the democratic transition. Ralf Dahrendorf su- mirage of social Utopia). This is the legacy of the critical who brought it about. In other words, the normal and de-
perbly formulated this principle: “were intellectuals are intelligentsia in the former Soviet bloc, the counterpart served sense of fulfillment is accompanied by uneasiness,
silent, societies have no future.” He argued correctly that
in a chronically divisive community and public space
constantly under pressure from globalization, the nexus
to the Leninist debris that has plagued the region in the
past twenty years. The contribution of critical intelli-
gentsia was the first step taken to the return to Europe.
malaise, and disenchantment with a necessarily imper-
fect present. .
of idea and action has not lost it potential for revitalizing The Europeanization of former communist countries, VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
politics, of representing the most important source of without being the illusory end of politics, can be envi- is professor of politics at the University of Maryland and author
freedom.” 6 sioned as the first clear break with the last century’s of numerous books including Reinventing Politics: Eastern Eu-
dreadful cycle of ideological phantasms. The process can rope from Stalin to Havel and Fantasies of Salvation: Democra-
It is therefore vitally important that intellectuals be crit- turn out to come much closer than expected to what Hav- cy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-communist Europe.
ical of the moral derailments jeopardizing the fledgling
democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. They are the An observation tower in former East Berlin. AT RIGHT Czech 7. V. Havel, To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 328.
ones who suffered dramatically the consequences of lim- students in a pre-1989 protest against the Communist regime.
itations of basic freedoms and there is no reason to think
that they will forget so easily the price they paid for these
deprivations. Avoiding the temptations of self-gratifica-
tion, intellectuals will also have to avoid indulging in
self-induced sentiments of historical impotence. While
not all-powerful, liberal intellectuals in postcommunist
regimes remain the repository of democratic hope. They
are the ones who can prevent the slide into tribalistic ex-
cesses and remind their fellow citizens that the revolu-
tions of 1989 were not made in order to create new peni-
tentiaries for non-conformist thinkers. Neither complete-
ly winners nor losers, intellectuals can help prevent the
degeneration of the democratic revolutions into a mas-
sive struggle for settling old scores, for the lynching and
grotesque masquerading of mob enthusiasm. It is too ear-
ly to write the obituary of Easter Europe’s critical intelli-
gentsia. Without its contributions, the great upheaval of
1989 would have been significantly less glorious.
Some have stated that the dissident movement brought
about a non-revolutionary revolution. Indeed, its civic
project was in no way a form of social engineering, and
Afp / Getty Images / J. MacDougall
from this point of 1989 is radically different from 1789
and 1917. The critical intellectuals argued for authentic-
Getty Images / Imagno
ity and for the return to normalcy.
6. R. Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution, and Civil Society (New
York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1997).
number 26 . october 2009 35