ANALYSIS: A decade of disappointments (12/26/99)

ANALYSIS

A decade of disappointments

by Paul Goble
RFE/RL Newsline

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 unleashed great expectations that the world was entering a new period of democracy, free markets, peace and stability. But despite the undeniable progress almost everyone has made, the decade since that time has brought even greater disappointments, both in the countries that languished under Communist domination as well as in those that had actively fought that political system.

Such a sequence, of course, is typical of periods of massive change. As the Polish writer Adam Michnik points out in the current issue of the American journal Dissent, "any great social change unleashes great expectations. And therefore, of course, it leads to great disappointments."

This particular decade of disappointed expectations has had the unintended consequence of focusing attention on three aspects of the Communist experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that many participants in and analysts of these developments have until now been largely unwilling to confront.

First, communism was far more insidious, pervasive and evil than even many of its sharpest critics have been prepared to acknowledge. As a result, overcoming its consequences requires a far greater effort over a longer period than many had earlier assumed.

The Communist regimes of the region killed millions of people and destroyed their physical environment in the name of a supposedly higher good - something even former Communists now acknowledge. But these regimes also deformed the mental and moral make-up of the people living under them.

The Communist authorities were ultimately unsuccessful in reducing everyone to the status of "homo Sovieticus." Had they been able to achieve that objective, these regimes might have survived far longer than they did. Nonetheless they did have a major impact on those over whom they exercised their power, as any comparison of pre-Communist and post-Communist periods in these countries shows.

Many of the most committed anti-Communists, however, had assumed that formally replacing communism as the ruling ideological system with democracy and free market economics would be sufficient to overcome up to seven decades of Communist indoctrination.

Second, Soviet domination of this region was never only about communism, and resistance to that domination was never only about communism. Instead, it was about nationalism and patriotism - values that the Soviet system sometimes actively exploited and at other times even more actively opposed.

There remain enormous differences between those countries where indigenous groups imposed communism and those where a foreign occupying power did so. In the former, many people viewed the Communist government as somehow their own, even if they hated it for what it did. In the latter, far more people viewed it as what it was, an occupying force that they would ultimately overthrow.

During the Communist period this difference helped explain the pride many Russians took in the achievements of the Soviet state, even if they were suffering as much as anyone else from its rule. And it explains some of the impetus behind East European resistance to Communist occupation, not only in 1956 and 1968, but in the struggle to overthrow communism a decade ago.

But as important as these differences were in Soviet times, they have become even more significant in the post- Communist period. It has proved far less difficult for those societies that always viewed communism as something foreign to turn away from it than it has been for those that saw communism as part of their own national patrimony.

To a large extent, this national dimension of communism and its collapse has been either ignored or downplayed by all involved. Any mention of it inevitably reopens the question of just what the Cold War was about. And, any discussion of this dimension of that conflict opens a variety of broader historical issues that political leaders in both the East and the West believe are best resolved by being ignored.

Third, the struggle between those who did the oppressing and those who were oppressed did not end just because the Berlin Wall fell and those who had called themselves Communists now call themselves something else.

Largely because neither the international community nor the people in many post-Communist countries were prepared to acknowledge the impact of communism on the minds and behavior of people living under it, there has been no genuine de-communization either of personnel or of ideas in the governing stratum.

In many post-Communist countries, especially those in which communism was viewed as something indigenous rather than imposed, the same people are in office today as under communism. They now style themselves as "democrats," but in many cases they behave in ways little or no different from the days when they called themselves something else.

And, equally important, the people living under their rule continue to suffer from many of the things they suffered from in the past, even if those responsible now use different words. In some countries, like Uzbekistan, a new gulag is being constructed; in others, the continuities with the past are less striking but equally significant.

As a result, those concerned about human freedom are increasingly being forced to recognize that the defeat of communism did not mark the final victory in that struggle.

Not surprisingly, some of them have grown discouraged and even opted out. But a growing number of people now understand that they must continue the fight, lest the victory of a decade ago be undermined by their own inaction or the actions of others.

Paul Goble is the publisher of RFE/RL Newsline.

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