The Varieties of Communist Experience

"Look! A beautiful bourgeois apartment filled with ugly things produced during Communism."

Slavenka Drakulic's exploration of Eastern European communism, entitled A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, A Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven, examines the varieties of post-war Communism through the lens of fiction. Although Draukulic's analysis of Eastern European Communism isn't strikingly original, her fictive device of using animals to narrate important facets of each country's unique national experiences is highly original.

From the mouse, the readers gets a tour of the Czech Museum of Communism. The mouse jokingly suggests that the museum ought to display household items such as diapers, sanitary napkins, and toilet paper, since these things were often extraordinarily difficult to locate in Communist countries. The Parrot, a personal pet of the Yugoslavian dictator, Tito, tells the readers something about Tito's international celebrity and charisma. According to the pet, Tito possessed thirty-two residences and put thousands of his citizens into political prisons, and yet still deserves some recognition for founding the global nonaligned movement and steering his country away from unmitigated Stalinism.

The bear, part of a Roma circus act, is Bulgarian, and tells about more about Bulgaria's first secretary of its Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov. On the whole, Zhivkov's thirty-three year rule was a period of economic stagnation. The dictator was wise enough to allow his charismatic daughter, Lyudmila, to disguise this impoverishment of material conditions with bread and circuses.

In many ways Lydumila reminds one of Imelda Marcos. Like Imelda, Lydumila held many official governmental posts. Like Imelda, Lydumila strongly believed that symbolic and even spiritual remedies could serve as effective antidotes to poverty. If you view a recent documentary about Imelda Marcos, you see that her thousand-plus pairs of shoes were not exactly spontaneous purchases. Instead, Marcos has created a full ideological defense of aestheticism. Believing that the last thing her miserable people needed was a reflection of their poverty, Imelda Marcos went out of her way to project an image of beauty. On a personal level, Marcos always made a concerted effort to live up to her reputation for glamour. And at the level of state policy, Marcos tried to create large public projects related to culture that could deflect the public from focusing--too narrowly in her view--on bread and butter issues. No matter that one palace of culture actually collapsed, killing more than a few of Filipino citizens, in her haste to impress the world. Lydumila adopted a similar approach to politics with her "national program for aesthetic education." Beauty mixed with nationalism could surely prevent the counter-revolution.

Drakulic's other animals have similar tales to tell. The cat describes Poland's difficult path to freedom, and subsequent attempts to come to terms with a legacy of collaboration in the face of Soviet intimidation. The mole points to the absurdity of the Berlin Wall, which humans, strange organisms that they are, often tried to surmount or breech by way of air balloon, tunnel, secret car compartment, or other ingenious devices. The escapes, or attempted escapes, continued right up until the wall came down in 1989. Before that, East Germany employed some 189,000 "informal employees" to ensure the regime's continued existence in the face of its unpopularity and economic backwardness.

The pig discussed Hungary's "goulash" Communism, which was essentially a reversal of traditional Communism ideology. Whereas the Bolsheviks always claimed that "whoever was not with us, was against us," the Hungarian dictator rather generously decided that "whoever is not against us, is with us." In these circumstances, the Hungarian Communist Party could overlook individual opinion and indeed private enterprise, just so long as the state's monopoly of public power was preserved in tact. The Romanian situation is explained by a dog, one of many thousands who roamed the streets of Bucharest as a result of the dictator's brutal decision to raise the homes of their owners. As the dog explains, having made the decision to treat his citizens like dogs, Ceausescu and his wife couldn't quite stomach the idea of inflaming domestic or foreign opinion by killing off this enormous and quite rapid dog population. Such was the absurdity of Romanian Communism, which of course ended with the savage death of the married tyrants.

The book concludes the story of a raven in tiny Albania. The raven witnesses the murder of one of Albania's leading politicians at the hands of his more powerful rival, the first secretary of the Communist Party. According to Drakulic's bird, the man, who was murdered for no other reason than that his son had decided to marry an Albanian with relatives who lived in the suspect West, left the following note, which might serve as an epitaph for any Eastern European victimized by Communism: "Oh, you ravens devouring me, don't touch my black eyes."

Eastern Europe

Russian police corruption is out of hand. Latvia’s economy is recovering nicely. Poland’s economy is surprisingly strong. Bulgaria’s relationship with Turkey is gradually improving, despite the uncomfortable position of Bulgaria’s Turkish minority—10 percent of the country’s 7.6 citizens. Bulgaria’s president, Boyko Borisov is unpredictable. Eastern Europe doesn’t make sense as an economic or political description anymore, given the diversity of post-communist experience. Kyrgyzstan is unsafe for journalists. Kosovo is corrupt. Russia and Putin behave as American behaves in terms of throwing its international weight around but somehow doesn’t engender European anger. Russian is no longer capable of building first-class ships but is now buying from France. Tartarstan will continue to be ruled by strongman, Mintimer Shaimiev, despite Moscow’s technical ability to appoint a replacement. Moscow’s mayor was at war with a neighborhood called Rechnik, which was supported by the Kremlin. Croatia is the richest nation in the Western Balkans but its economic is victim to unemployment, stagnation, and widespread corruption; on the positive side, the new Croatian president is cooperating with its erstwhile enemy, Serbia. Russia is unable to stop terrorist attacks. Kazakhstan is attempting to become integrated with Europe but maintains a horrendous record with respect to voting, human rights, religious freedom, and freedom of the press. Russia and America have entered into a new age of arms control, with smaller numbers but new types of strategic complexity brought on by the advent of terrorism and Russia's problems with modernization. Russia is raising excise taxes on beer, but leaving vodka taxes alone; Russians drink twice the amount of other Europeans, and six times more hard liquor. The European Union's report on the Russian-Georgian war finds fault on both sides, with Georgia opening hostilities but Russia overreacting and supporting illegal succession movements. Medvedev, perhaps hypocritically, critiques Russia, citing over reliance on raw materials, a shrinking population, oil-dependence, weak democratic institutions, and a troubling situation in the Caucasus. Putin could theoretically return to power as president in 2012 and rule until 2024, at which time he would still be younger than Italy's Berlusconi. Chavez followed Russia's lead and almost immediately recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia's once burgeoning car market (and car industry) collapsed more rapidly than any other, with credit completely evaporing in the economic downturn. The Anna Politkovskaya trial ended with aquittals but was apparently as transparent and fair as Russian trials can be, according to the New Yorker's Keith Gessen.

Soviet Implosion

Do we know why the Soviet Union collapsed? We have more causes than we can process, don’t we? How important was the resurgence of nationalism or religion, especially Muslim fundamentalism? How important was the arms race with the United States and NATO? Did the bad decision to invade Afghanistan play an important part? Was the Soviet state stained by some original sin, and if so, was that sin geographical over extension or moral turpitude?

Did a drop in oil prices undermine Soviet stability or an over dependence on oil in the first place? Did the fatally flawed socialist economic system finally give out? How important were historical actors such as Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev? Did events in Eastern Europe, including Polish labor unrest, cause the collapse? Did the infiltration of Western popular culture matter a great deal? Did decrepit Soviet leadership in the 1970s weaken the Soviet state? How important was the Soviet dissident movement or Soviet underground literature?

Did Chernobyl put the final seal on Soviet power by revealing its incompetence or criminality? Did the Soviet elite lose the will to power or did ordinary Soviets bring down the state? How important was agricultural failure? Could the Soviets have lasted longer if they had produced more consumer goods in order to satisfy domestic demands? Was the Soviet collapse precipitated by the failure to use violent means to coerce opposition?

Could the Soviet experience have been prolonged by more flexibility about Marx’s message, or more faithfulness to it? Did Stalin’s legacy consolidate or undermine Soviet strength over the years? Would people have suffered more or less from a prolonged process of disintegration as opposed to the relatively rapid pace of events surrounding the collapse?

What’s interesting about revolutions—and probably we can count the collapse of the Soviet Union as a quasi-revolution—is that they are not easily explained. If they had been predicted, elites would no doubt have taken dramatic actions to appease revolutionary pressures or quash them with force. In retrospect, every event preceding the great explosion of popular feeling seems to have a portent of the end. Another obstacle to historical understanding is the fact that so many disparate forces are at work.

It’s difficult to dissever the many strands of influence at work. Is it enough to identify a few primary causes? Can we accept all of them? The best single explanation for Soviet collapse is probably nationalism. We know that nationalism never really disappeared in the Soviet Union; we know that nationalism has brought down a number of other empires, including the British, French, Austrian, and Ottoman; we know that every single major state within the Soviet Union opted to secede from the U.S.S.R. when given the option.

Ironically, Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted argues against this widely accepted thesis about Soviet decay. According to the book, the Soviet state had successfully resisted nationalist ideologies for seven decades and did not need to submit to them now. It had military might, nuclear weapons, economic leverage, a centralized economy, and large ethnic Russian colonies in many of these potentially rebellions border states.

In fact, by releasing client states from control in Eastern Europe, the Russian center was better positioned than ever to retain control over its periphery. Moreover, the client states did not become bastions of popular democracy: self-serving bureaucrats ruled these states before and after political rupture with the Russian heartland. The people, as such, were not the decision-makers, except perhaps in the Baltic republics or the Ukraine, which had close linguistic and cultural ties to Russia proper. These successor state bureaucrats chose to leave Soviet Russia only after they determined that they could retain their status more effectively through rupture than unity.

And this, of course, leads us back into an examination of the myriad other forces at work in the decimation of Soviet power.

Mom and the Warsaw Pact

I’m interested in people’s memories of communism, even, or especially, if they never lived in a communist state. One poignant memory I have is arguing with a friend in the eighth grade about Communist Poland. I remember my friend saying that if NATO forces attacked the Eastern Bloc, Polish forces could not possibly resist them. They hated communism, and hated their former enemies, the Russians. My position was the opposite: Poland was a member of the Warsaw Pact and would help the Russians to resist the invasion. The issue was clear-cut to me: the Polish were communists, just like the Russians. They would defend one another from what they perceived to be Western imperialism.

As the argument dragged on, I asked my mother to resolve it for us. Wasn’t it true, I said, that Polish armed forced would defend their Warsaw Pact friends? She agreed, as I knew she would, putting the argument to an end. She settled the matter by telling us that the Polish loved their country and their system, communism, as much as we loved our country and political system, democracy.

This certitude on her part and mine stays with me. It was inspired by the moral relativism of Margaret Meade, liberalism, and the 1960s. When Poland defected from the Warsaw Pact, when its citizens fled the country and condemned their former rules, I was dumbfounded.

As it turned out, the Polish hated Communist Russia. Now perhaps Polish troops would have fought an invasion out of blind military obedience. Even so, they didn’t love Communism and never had. I don’t say that conservatives understood the world better than liberals did. I do say that the memory of this discussion leaves me humble: the world is unknowable.