Abstract
Reviewed by: Kevin McDermott, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
This timely, detailed and authoritative volume comprises 13 chapters by leading experts on the East German (6), Soviet (4), Polish (2) and Czechoslovak (1) ruling communist parties and three comparative essays, including the editors’ Introduction, on the region as a whole. The guiding approach of the contributors is to ‘develop new interpretations of both the inner workings of the parties as well as their political practices’ (1) by focusing not only on elite actors, but also on rank-and-file members and lower- and mid-level functionaries and their reciprocal relationships with local communities and institutions. This ‘from below’ perspective, common to many chapters, particularly those on the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) though less so on the Soviet party, is to be very much welcomed as an antidote to the conventional ‘from above’ framework, which has tended to over-emphasize the privileged and controlling ‘totalitarian’ nature of communist parties. Another fundamental premise, shared by all the authors, is that communist parties were not ‘closed organizations’ concerned solely with power and repression (even if they never lost this overarching capacity), but were ‘multifunctional’ integral components of their societies, reacting to economic, cultural and social change on a daily basis. Hence, Sabine Pannen’s and Andrea Bahr’s pieces on party life in the Brandenburg district in East Germany depict local functionaries as ‘ideological facilitators’ and ‘social agents’ attempting to ameliorate the socio-economic burdens of their communities, albeit a task which had become nigh-on impossible by the mid-to-late 1980s.
Several contributions offer a wealth of statistical data on the social, generational and gender composition of party membership and on secret police popular opinion reports, some of which reveal important insights. For example, Michel Christian’s essay on Czechoslovak party recruitment in the 1970s and 1980s argues that for many younger people family traditions of party membership were more salient than careerism and opportunism for joining the party, and Jens Gieseke’s chapter on the SED casts doubt on Stephen Kotkin’s influential concept of communist parties as essentially monolithic sites of ‘uncivil society’ by demonstrating that increasingly in the 1980s East German party members harboured a non-uniform ‘hybridity’ in their ideological and social beliefs and relationships with co-citizens. Thus, the party in its entirety ‘was certainly not the “uncivil society” of the GDR, but proved to be a relatively heterogeneous unit in regards to the attitudes of its members’ (117). Other papers, including Alexander Titov’s on the Department of Party Organs under Khrushchev, Mark Kramer’s on foreign policy-making in the Brezhnev era, Jan C. Behrend’s on Mikhail Gorbachev’s Komanda (Team) and Martin Sabrow’s generational perspective on Erich Honecker’s leadership style, adopt a more overt ‘top-down’ methodology, but all admirably elucidate the complexities of the bureaucratic in-fighting and the more or less secretive personal and impersonal inner-sanctum codes that epitomized elite norms of behaviour in ruling communist parties.
Three or four chapters, including Frédéric Zalewski’s on ‘party pluralism’ in Poland, reflect in some detail on the reasons for the collapse of the seemingly impregnable communist regimes in the autumn of 1989. The overall consensus appears to be that the ruling parties were fractured by the late 1980s between ‘reformers’ and ‘conservatives’; local party secretaries and officials were unable to respond to citizens’ demands and complaints in the increasingly harsh socio-economic climate; and hence the parties fatally lost their internal sense of cohesion, activism and purpose. By 1989, in short, too many functionaries, not to mention rank-and-file members, simply gave up the ghost. To this extent, the authors confirm that it was more a case of implosion ‘from within’ than ‘people power’ or the dissident movements that lay at the heart of the demise of Soviet-style communism. Padraic Kenney concludes the volume by suggesting several crucial avenues of future research, not the least of which are ‘the party’s moral code’, its paternalistic relationship to society and the abiding difficulties of party–state interactions and mutual dependencies (354–6).
There are one or two drawbacks to the volume. The lack of coverage of the Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian parties is to be regretted, though it is perhaps explainable by space constraints. Another flaw is the occasionally imprecise and stilted nature of the English – it is not clear if some of the chapters are translated, but in any case, tighter copy-editing is necessary. Regardless, this is an impressive, thought-provoking and innovative anthology that should become compulsory reading for specialists and higher-level students alike.