Violence in Late Socialist Public Spheres

The contributors to this special issue explore violent public action by workers, peasants, students and youth, in conjunction with the role of the police, the legal system and political functionaries in maintaining and restoring public order in late state socialist societies. The authors base their analyses on original research relating to cases in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Romania and East Germany.

Violence in the public sphere becomes politically charged. This truth is not limited to the autocratic, control-seeking state socialist regimes. In all societies, regardless of the political system, attempts at social control offer valuable keys to an understanding of violence, conflict and issues surrounding the formation and acceptance of social norms. As Pieter Spierenburg has pointed out, control is always a ‘sensitizing concept’, it draws attention to the relationships between various mechanisms designed to make people act in a way that is desirable according to a certain standard or ideal. ¹ When control fails and violence erupts into public view, the ‘seismograph of social change’ registers a considerable tremor, ² and it does so more vigorously in authoritarian societies than in pluralistic ones, for in the former the authorities attempt to keep the lid much more firmly shut. Public violence is thus useful both for studying the socio-political mechanisms that aim to subdue and contain violence and for examining the intentional exertion of violence to maintain or restore public order. Assessment of public incidents of violence in late socialism thus leads to questions involving the repertoires of social action as well as the legitimacy of state-sponsored violence to curb the violence of non-state actors – all this against the backdrop of Stalinism. ³

The public spheres of state socialist societies – mostly the Soviet and the Yugoslav ones – have been the object of academic studies that touch upon various layers of inquiry, and questions of legitimacy have been prominent among them. Several of these studies have focused upon the ambivalence of the Soviet-type public sphere, which is characterized by a rigorous control of society on the one hand, and by no less rigorously controlled mass public stagings on the other hand, fuelled by mass agitation and propaganda as part and parcel of the fostering of the ‘new socialist man’. ⁴ The emergence of fragmented or segmented public spheres between these two poles is another issue that has been explored. ⁵

Politics in these societies was ‘a field withdrawn from public view’, ⁶ and publicly visible violence by non-state actors was at odds with this state design. Beyond Thomas Lindenberger’s seminal study on the Volkspolizei in the GDR, ⁷ much remains to be explored when it comes to the dynamics between those non-state actors who committed violence in the post-Stalinist socialist public sphere and the state guardians of this sphere. The authors of this special issue examine how these guardians sought to come to terms with violence, how they represented, prevented, contextualized and instrumentalized it, and how they employed it as a threat and as a practice. The renunciation of overt, Stalinist-style violent practices brought a need for redefinition and for the development of different legitimating strategies. At the very least, such violent practices had to be rescaled, put into place, kept under control and employed with more subtlety. The contributors to this special issue show how public physical violence, whether experienced, imagined or threatened, both in the midst of society and as employed by state actors, serves as a prism for the socio-political patterns underlying the various state socialist societies under discussion.

A discursive disconnectedness persists between the research on the explicitly violent years of Stalin’s dictatorship; the more obvious violent events of post-Stalin state socialism, such as 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1971 and 1981 in Yugoslavia and 1980/1 in Poland; the violence-ridden 1970s in Western Europe, most notably in West Germany and Italy; and the peaceful, ‘velvety’ quality of the events of 1989. ⁸ Michel Wieviorka singled out the 1960s as, in many respects:

a new era characterized at the international level by the US’s war in Vietnam and, in many societies, by the various political, social and counter-cultural movements whose fallout would lead to the temptations of terrorism, by the importance of guerrilla movements and by the continuous increase in delinquency in Western societies … This era was characterized by significant experiences of political violence, by certain intellectuals’ commitment to that violence, and by the importance of revolutionary ideologies. ⁹

Writing in the aftermath of 9/11, he continued: ‘That era is well and truly over: we have entered a different period, some elements of which were already being outlined at the end of the 1960s’. ¹⁰ Wieviorka, like most other authors, did not consider the socialist states; yet, he provided a frame that could easily have included them.

Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth have made an impressive effort to narrate the history of the political violence of the twentieth century, and to revise the conventional depiction of the first half of the era as very violent and the second half as largely peaceful. ¹¹ For the post-1945 period, they refer to political violence in Italy, Germany, Greece, Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and Corsica, as well as Czechoslovakia and Hungary. But apart from mentioning the most obvious state-sponsored violence, Bloxham and Gerwarth largely omit Eastern Europe. They do point to ‘the conflicts in the territories of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s’, emphasizing that these events, too, only fostered ‘an undue neglect of the many forms of political violence which characterized European history in the Cold War decades’. ¹² But they do not go further by including Eastern Europe in the post-1945 portion of their history of political violence in the twentieth century.

This special issue aims to serve as a corrective and to increase knowledge about politically relevant violence in socialist states. Following the end of the Second World War, some previously notable sources of violence did indeed disappear from the European political scene. In the West, the nation-state wars of previous decades were replaced by a determination to create intra-European institutions of arbitration and economic, and later political, cooperation. ¹³ At this time, many of the border and nationality conflicts that scarred Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards had been solved in the most brutal way, by forced population movements. ¹⁴ The increasing state powers of surveillance and coercion that were so useful during the Second World War also proved effective in leading peoples towards peace – or at least certain ideologically inflected versions thereof – on both sides of the Iron Curtain. ¹⁵

In the state socialist countries, where Stalinist-type power establishments were far more overtly violent than their western counterparts, the post-Stalinist late 1950s and 1960s were periods of relative stability and intense social mobility. In the 1970s and 1980s, mobility was halted as the elites were increasingly formed from within, and this change was an integral part of emerging social conflicts. The development of dissidence, opposition, unrest and social movements, phenomena that contravened the wished-for and prescribed patterns of behaviour in the individual countries, was strongly influenced by the different strategies or policies adopted by the regimes to cope with post-Stalinist premises and attempts at socioeconomic modernization. ¹⁶

The contributors to this special issue assess the states’ strategies for coping with their renunciation of violence of the Stalinist type. The authors take violent incidents as focal points for prevailing state–society relationships and related social and legitimating practices. Such relationships should not be reduced to a dichotomy between state and society. The public incidents that are scrutinized offer a mirror for the social relationships of which they were an expression. ¹⁷

Gleb Tsipursky explores the implications of a campaign launched by the Soviet authorities against violent youth behaviour, especially by working-class youngsters, after Stalin’s death in 1953. The campaign was part of a broader endeavour during the Thaw era to reinvigorate the attempt to construct a socialist version of modernity, specifically by reforming the population’s everyday way of life in order to create model citizens, ‘New Soviet People’. What does this undertaking reveal about everyday working-class youth violence in the post-Stalin Soviet Union? Tsipursky’s findings strengthen the recent re-evaluation of the Thaw as a time when not only liberalizing reforms, but also new coercive elements were introduced. He also demonstrates that working-class violence reveals the extent of class differences in the supposedly classless Soviet Union, with working-class youth behaviour departing from the official model of normative conduct, which reflected middle-class standards. The author focuses on male violence in particular and provides a glimpse of a working-class masculinity that is at variance with the officially prescribed model of socialist masculinity. He does not, however, equate labour violence with conscious opposition to the authorities. Instead, he locates such behaviour within a wider context of traditional working-class male youth milieus.

Focusing on the years 1969 to 1975, Rasa Baločkaitė reflects on how militia forces in Lithuania sought to deal with the post-Stalinist new approach to violence as a means of exercising power. She devotes particular attention to the state authorities’ attempts to make the militia more legitimate and acceptable to the general population, to reduce the antagonism between the militia and society, to decrease the amount of direct physical violence and to find new, more consensual methods of policing Soviet society. In framing these efforts, she relies on Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarian ideals put into practice and emphasizes the structural mechanisms of violence that became operative in post-Stalinist Lithuania.

Călin Morar-Vulcu examines everyday violence in industrial milieus in Romania as a matter of public order in the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the assumption that public order is an integral part of a monopoly on the use of physical force, he analyses everyday violence as a phenomenon with both public and private aspects. Given this quality, everyday violence, defined to mean unexceptional violence with non-lethal consequences, illuminates our understanding of the implementation of legitimating practices in late socialism. Focusing mainly on cases of violence among male workers in the 1970s in the industrial town of Călan, Morar-Vulcu explores how everyday violence was dealt with by the law enforcement system – the police, prosecutors and courts – and by the metallurgical plant’s administrative personnel and the various levels of party functionaries. He shows how efforts to confine everyday violence, along with alcohol consumption, to the private sphere and to stereotypical male normalcy started to change progressively in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when, after the labour unrest in the mining towns of Lupeni (1977) and Motru (1981), authorities began to infer a causal link between everyday violence and protest, thereby transforming everyday violence into a matter of public order and, consequently, state legitimacy.

Sabine Rutar focuses on the escalating violent unrest among dockers in the port of Koper (It. Capodistria) in the Slovenian part of the Istrian peninsula in 1970. The port was built in the second half of the 1950s as a genuine Yugoslav (Slovene) socialist modernization project. She places the only aggressive labour demonstration in the port’s socialist history in the context of the historical moment in Yugoslavia between the student protests of 1968 and the ‘Croatian spring’ of 1971. The episode of public violence in the Yugoslav border city Koper offers proof of the multilayered nature of explanatory tropes: the border perspective from Koper is interwoven with the perspective of Yugoslavia’s centre. In addition, a comparison with Italian workers’ violence in neighbouring Trieste during the same period adds another dimension to the quality of the public sphere and public order, suggesting the need to reassess the Cold War framework in examining public labour violence.

Radina Vučetić contextualizes street violence and riots during demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the second half of the 1960s in Yugoslavia. She interprets these protests as representative of Yugoslavia’s political balancing between East and West. Whilst the Titoist state sponsored and organized demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, events at which strong anti-American sentiments were expressed, the state also used violence to stop these demonstrations in order to maintain its good relations with the United States. Displaying sympathy with the Vietnamese people while playing the role of America’s communist ally was part of Yugoslavia’s political double game, in which the country had engaged since its break-up with the Soviet Union in 1948. The escalation of violence was, not least, a consequence of the political contradictions that frustrated the younger Yugoslav generation in particular.

Taking a micro-historical approach to a largely forgotten political affair in the western Macedonian village of Vevčani (1987–1989), Keith Brown illuminates some neglected modalities of violence during the waning years of Communist Party rule in Yugoslavia. He shows in particular how the physical violence that was employed by security forces against residents of Vevčani in August 1987 (and in an earlier confrontation in May 1987) was part of a larger framework of forces, which included three other modalities of violence that he defines as existential, reputational and narratival. Brown examines the extent to which this particular dispute in the Republic of Macedonia became part of broader political battles in Yugoslavia, and how the existence of differentiated ‘publics’ within an increasingly tenuous federation accelerated the dramatic changes under way in all the Yugoslav republics.

Jeff Hayton explores how the small dissident movement in the GDR was able to take advantage of public violence to spread its message of discontent to a growing audience. The author considers the October 1987 incident known as the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ (riot in the Church of Zion) as a case in point. In that instance, an East Berlin punk concert was disrupted by several dozen skinheads. The political opposition transformed the sustained public outrage over skinhead violence into a broader critique of ‘actually existing socialism’, especially by using the Western media to circumvent the state’s information monopoly. In this way, extreme right-wing public violence paradoxically opened up channels through which the East German public could express discontent. Seeing political hegemony challenged publicly, East German party functionaries felt compelled to redirect the state’s youth policy. But this step merely fostered the newfound public outlets for discontent. The East German authorities ended up weakening their political hegemony further.

Although the findings of the studies in this issue concern different geographical and socio-political settings, they display considerable analogies. All include illustrations of how violence by non-state actors that became a public matter helped to transform social conflicts into larger matters of state legitimacy, even if the original intent was different, and often, not even political. State actors, on the other hand, had to come to terms with redefinitions of violence in the exertion of power after the end of the violent practices legitimated by Stalin.

Several authors show how Western public media influenced state socialist ones, as in the use of Western media by GDR dissidents (Hayton); the influence of foreign policy ties on Yugoslav demonstrations against the Vietnam War (Vučetić); the observation of Italian labour riots across the Cold War borders (Rutar); and the emergence of diaspora solidarity with respect to a tiny Macedonian village (Brown). These findings suggest the need to reassess the dichotomous perspective on civil society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whilst Stephen Kotkin is correct to suggest that civil society in Eastern Europe was more a consequence than a cause of 1989, ¹⁸ it seems that much remains to be explored in terms of cross-border communication and social interconnectedness between Eastern and Western Europe. This may be particularly true of those societies bordering on the West, like the GDR, or opening their borders to the West, like the ‘special case’ of Yugoslavia. But if the public emergence of violence signified the politicization of violence in all the societies under examination, leading state actors to react either in (counter-)violent or accommodating ways to safeguard their legitimacy, as is shown also in the case studies involving the Soviet Union (Tsipursky, Baločkaitė) and Romania (Morar-Vulcu), the question of whether Western influences were ‘needed’ to make a socialist society a ‘civil’ one becomes a compelling one. ¹⁹

Gleb Tsipursky’s and Călin Morar-Vulcu’s notion of everyday violence, meaning violent modes of behaviour accepted as a ‘normal’ part of masculine youth culture or as part of male-dominated labour milieus, also modifies the image of a passively subdued population that is to be turned into the ‘new socialist man’. In both cases, habitual violence prompted state functionaries to react when the behaviour was connected to larger socio-political issues and became politically virulent. Indeed, violence serves to reveal the repertoires of social action in authoritarian societies. This violence was not always carried out originally to dismantle the state’s monopoly on violence or control of the very discussion of violence. ²⁰ Moreover, the generational factor, a focus of the three authors who explore youth (Hayton, Tsipursky, Vučetić), should not be underestimated in these processes of social change crystallizing in violence, as is evident in state socialist societies and elsewhere. ²¹

Several of the authors take the view that micro-historical approaches augment our understanding of how sweeping societal change is experienced and enacted (Morar-Vulcu, Brown, Rutar) and illuminate the borderlines between the public and the private, what is ‘visible’ and what is ‘hidden from public view’: whilst public violence is the remit of the state, the realm of grassroots violence moves in and out of state control. Especially with respect to the Yugoslav state, the question is how the existence of differentiated ‘publics’ within an increasingly tenuous federation accelerated the dramatic changes under way in the different republics, from Belgrade at the centre (Vučetić) to the Macedonian-Albanian and Slovenian-Italian fringes of the country (Brown, Rutar). Further research will help to fill in the remaining gaps in this picture, and not only with regard to Yugoslavia.

Both Jeff Hayton and Keith Brown point to the subsequent discursive engineering of the events they discuss, one drawing attention to the unintended widening of discursive potentialities, the other to the lack of clarity produced by deliberate misinformation and obfuscation. Several authors refer to the political double games encouraged by authoritarian structures, whether to serve Yugoslav foreign policy (Vučetić), to broaden political destabilization by instrumentalizing the rage of ordinary citizens (Brown) or to engage in power struggles within enterprises (Rutar).

Industrial labour, which is substantially related to the very existence of a working class, was an important reference in state socialist regimes, and thus is an important area of scrutiny when it comes to questions of legitimacy. The ‘working class’ was a source of legitimacy for the party, which was in turn the sole organizer of the state, and thus the owner of the monopoly on physical coercion. As violence had surfaced in definitions of the working class since the early Bolsheviks, who saw the working class as a potential revolutionary agent, a field of interference appears. Especially significant in this context is the ‘spontaneity vs. consciousness’ debate, a feature of the discourse on labour’s repertoires of action since the emergence of the working class and socialist emancipation movements in the nineteenth century. ²² Three authors represented in this issue explore the intersections of ideologized labour, social bonds (or the lack thereof) and politics (Morar-Vulcu, Rutar, Tsipursky). Their findings illustrate the huge potential of a renewed social history of state socialist labour relations. ²³

The use of physical force by state actors like the police and/or militia forces had an effect on political cultures, and, sometimes, as the contributions to this issue show, the effect exceeded expectations or took an unintended direction. In late socialism, a range of actors adopted different forms of violence in their continuing efforts to establish definitive meaning. A comparison of the Soviet Union, Romania, Yugoslavia and the GDR makes it clear that those efforts, in the end, resulted in very diverse ways to achieve social change between ‘velvet revolution’ and disruptive forms of violence, including fully-fledged wars.