James Mark,The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe;Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe,eds,The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe: From Communism to Pluralism

Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds, The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe: From Communism to Pluralism, Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2013; xx + 296 pp.; 9780719085277, £70.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Mircea Platon, University of Toronto, Canada

The rise to power of the Eastern European Communist parties at the end of World War II was articulated in newspaper headlines and punctuated by radio broadcasts. Their fall occurred on live TV. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the Romanian revolution of December 1989 furnished a global television public with iconic images of suffering, joy and victory, functioning, as icons do, as a window on an elusive reality. From this point of view, the false transparency and fake immediacy of the first live TV revolutions are the perfect symbol for the complex and often poisonous legacies of the communist past in Central-Eastern Europe.

These two shrewd and sophisticated books attempt to elucidate the nature of these legacies. If the editors and some of the authors of The 1989 Revolutions in Central in Eastern Europe feel confident that in exploring the ‘origins, processes and outcomes’ of the fall of the Eastern European communist regimes they are charting the evolution of the region ‘from communism to pluralism’, James Mark is somehow less celebratory, noting that the collapse of communism did not ‘see a sudden emergence of previously unacceptable “truthful” narratives, but rather a new set of political and cultural values determining what could and could not be said’ (xxvii). Mark notes that ‘victim’, ‘collaborator’ and ‘resister’ are the conceptual vectors of the post-communist discursive orthodoxy, a language that moulds and reconstructs the memory of communism into a usable past in conformity with the new, neoliberal and liberal democratic imperatives forced into Eastern European circulation by Western elites.

Mark’s book focuses on Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His command of primary and secondary sources in Romanian, Hungarian and Polish, as well as his extensive network of interviewees in all these countries add depth, rigour and a dash of anthropological flavour to his project. The Unfinished Revolution analyses both the private management of memory by individuals trying to cope with the communist past and the post-communist present as well as the public institutionalization of certain versions of the communist past in the period between 1998 and 2009. The first chapter is dedicated to charting the way in which the idea of the ‘unfinished’ anti-communist revolution contributed to the rise of the political Right in the countries under study. As Mark shows, 1989 has been celebrated as a complete break with the communist past not by the anti-communist forces, but mainly by the ex-communists who presented the fall of the communist regimes as the ‘heroic story of their own ideological defeat’ (26).

The second and third chapters of Unfinished Revolution discuss the role played by history commissions and institutes of national memory, and by museums in shaping, institutionalizing and effectively enshrining a state sponsored, top-down, criminalized version of the communist past. Mark also looks at the way in which museums tried to accommodate both domestic and Western demands to incorporate the fascist past and the Holocaust into the national memory and finds that, forced to function at the crossroads of ‘competing traditions of memory’, almost all the museums discussed by him chose to fashion themselves as defenders of the dominant, national memory of suffering under communism, unable to offer more than a supporting role to minority anti-fascist memories. The fifth and sixth chapters are mirror chapters, discussing the way in which Communist Party members refashioned, valorized or explained away their communist past after the fall from power of the Communist Parties to which they belonged, and the manner in which certain members of the social classes persecuted by the communist regimes fine-tuned their discourse of victimhood so as to explain in the post-communist context their reconciliation with the modernizing aspects of a regime that, after a certain period of discrimination, gave social and financial recognition to their skills. The seventh and last chapter discusses the remembrance of Red Army rape after 1989.

Mark seizes upon one of the most important tensions at the heart of the post-communist debate between the ex-communist reformists or dissidents claiming that 1989 marked a complete and final break with the communist past and the anti-communist Right arguing that the ‘refolutions’ (Timothy Garton-Ash) of that year simply opened or derailed the national anti-communist movements. That tension derives from the insertion at this point of the Western elites trying to shape and instrumentalize the memory of the communist past for the purposes of the euro-Atlantic integration of the Central and Eastern European countries. Whereas the Western elites argued with the national anti-communists that the break with the communist past had yet to be achieved, the neoliberal socio-economic program (the ‘shock therapy’ explored in Janine Wedel’s books, for example) exported by the same elites was favourable to the ex-Communists turned entrepreneurs and ‘local barons’ (as they were called in Romania) who insisted that Communism was dead and made a lot of money burying it.

As Mark shows, the parliamentary commissions, history institutes and museums served in most cases to perpetuate the power of state-sponsored elites to manage the national memory by marginalizing and delegitimizing many alternative, popular strains of memory. Most notable among these suppressed popular memories were those regarding the communist regimes as creators of education systems allowing increased social mobility. Potent, but politically unpalatable, remained the memory of certain versions or periods of national communism perceived by many strata of the population as embodying legitimate modernization projects. As Mark points out, based on his research on the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Crimes of the Communist Regime in Romania, the Final Report delivered by this commission failed to generate any popular or elite consensus regarding the way in which Romania should address its communist past, but instead functioned as a state-sponsored instrument for criminalizing the whole communist experience in order to argue that capitalism and liberalism are the only modernization paths for Romania. Mark argues that this type of presentist historiography served mainly to bolster the claims of the neoliberal West regarding the ‘inevitability of liberal democracy’s eventual victory over totalitarian regimes everywhere’ (xi), and to celebrate American-style democracy, free market and consumer culture by contrasting them with the generic suffering of the ‘one hundred million victims of Communism’ (xii).

Mark’s point is well argued, and it becomes even more salient when taking into consideration that parts of the Final Report generated by the Romanian Presidential Commission in 2006 were recycled tacitly from another report on Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime prepared by the future head of the Romanian Presidential Commission in the summer of 1989 for the American neoconservative think tank that employed him at the time. Given these connections, one cannot neglect the importance of the former anti-communist exile in the management of the communist past. Mark writes very persuasively about the way in which Nazi propaganda might have inflected or fostered certain memories of the behaviour of advancing Soviet troops in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, but he fails to mention the way in which Western propaganda outlets such as the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe shaped the Eastern European popular perception, and thus the memory, of the communist regimes. During and after the Cold War there were very important debates about the so-called ‘memory in exile’ and the repatriation of that ‘memory’ after the fall of communism. The anti-communist exile spanned the whole political spectrum from liberal democracy to fascism, but common to most of the expatriates was a rejection of the communist modernity as embodied, more or less felicitously, in the rise of new apartment buildings, new factories and new or ‘recent’ people. After 1989, this ‘memory in exile’ played its part in the criminalization of the communist regime by being pitted against politically unacceptable ‘nostalgia’ or the pining after the ‘good old days of communism’ prevalent among many layers of the working and middle classes longing for the sense of security that, after the first shock of Stalinism, communist regimes offered and neoliberal ‘transitions’ denied.

Some of these questions are raised and persuasively answered by the studies collected in McDermott and Stibbe’s tightly edited volume on The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. In the introduction the editors point out the limits of the democratization in Eastern Europe, where the ‘collapse of central authority and one-party rule did not lead to a transfer of power to the people or “consumers”, but left it in the hands of corrupt managers and individual entrepreneurs (often former communists) looking to make a killing from the sale or manipulation of state assets’ (17). Refusing, like Mark, to reify the Eastern European nations in order to fit them as geostrategic pawns into a grand narrative about how ‘“the freedom-loving” USA “defeated” the “totalitarian” Soviet Union’ (4), the editors and the authors of this volume wisely chose to highlight what Jack Goldstone would call the role played by ‘stress zones’ in the revolutionary implosions of societies.

Thus, Tom Junes addresses generational conflicts in Poland and Michal Pullmann and Elena Simeonova discuss the socio-economic factors that led to the demise of the communist regimes in, respectively, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, while Holger Nehring presents a stimulating revisionist take on the 1980s peace movements in East and West Germany which goes beyond the rather tired clichés about the role played by the civil society in the fall of the communist regimes. Robin Okey makes a brilliant case against the way in which Eastern Europe has been seen ‘as [a] proxy in western arguments rather than in its own terms’, pointing out that, in the 1990s, Eastern European nations became ‘fodder for western discourses of free market economics’ and other ‘civic “constructivist” concepts’ that overlooked ‘the ethnic aspects of any political community’ and sought to fit these nations into the ‘global framework’ of the ‘New World Order proclaimed by President Bush’ (46–7).

The role of political elites and ‘superpower’ arrangements is explored in the second section of the book, on the ‘Gorbachev factor’, containing articles by Mary Buckley (on Soviet foreign policy in the 1980s) and Peter Grieder (on the role played by the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ in the collapse of the German Democratic Republic), as well as in László Borhi’s archive-driven article on the international context of the ‘Hungarian transition’ in 1989. Kevin Adamson and Sergiu Florean’s study of the way in which the FSN mythologized and appropriated the Romanian revolution cannot make up for the absence of a chapter dedicated to an analysis of the decline and fall of the Romanian communist regime from this otherwise highly insightful and coherent volume.