Generally speaking, Leninism attempted to encompass and filter through its ideological matrix all that had potential for public discourse, to mediate any self-defining narrative. It created a “new type of cultural hegemony” that aimed to carry out “an ‘anthropological revolution’ through the use of an essentially ritualistic and transformative politics.”69 The demise of Communism generated the space for alternative “semiotic sacralizations” (Roger Griffin), which determined a proliferation of what I previously called fantasies of salvation: ideological surrogates whose principal function was to unify the public discourse and provide citizens with an easily recognizable source of identity as a part of a vaguely defined ethnic (or political) community. These mythologies minimized individual rights and emphasized instead the need to maintain an organic supra-individual ethos, which in turn determined the boundaries between good and evil, true and false. Indeed, they were not ideologies, but they shared with ideology the appearance of a coherent narrative.
The evolution of democracy in post-Leninist Eastern Europe has shown that large social strata resented Communist ideology but not the state socialist guarantees of security and stability. Existing inventories of historical heritage and culture brought forth from under the Leninist debris provided the reservoir for the justification of the new/old political actors' intentions. In the past, for denizens of the Communist world, the myth of the classless society could serve such a purpose. In the post-Communist present, Communist nostalgia idealized “heroic mobilization,” seen as both the expression of a lost unity and disappeared community, and as disaffection with democratic pluralism and the market economy.70 In a period characterized by weakness of social capital, loss of solidarity among members of the political community, the disorientation, decline, or inertia of civil society, and rampant erosion of traditional authority, the checks and balances for myth-making inflation were seriously weakened. The history of the region's first two post-Communist decades is a story of the quest for cohesive citizenry in the face of the grievous fragmentation typical of the Leninist legacy (in Jowitt's sense).71
In the context of the routinization (and sometimes deradicalization) of Communist regimes and of the exhaustion of the Marxist revisionist alternative, a new type of political thought developed in East and Central Europe. It was both a reaction to the collectivistic, pseudo-egalitarian logic of Communist regimes and an inspiration for both moral reform and social change in this region from the 1970s on. The dissidents' writings, the stances of critical intellectuals, provided a composite oppositional complex that emphasized morals, tolerance, civility, and self-scrutiny. This body of thought reasserted the centrality of the individual. To paraphrase Jan Patočka, the locus of change was the soul of the individual—“the spiritual person.” Dissidence represented the return to what sociologist Alvin Gouldner called the “culture of critical discourse,” while also introducing the criterion of normative truth as the only valid one in a praxis meant to resist new forms of oppression. For example, for the signatories of Charter 77, the “hope for politics was that citizens could learn to act as free and responsible persons, and that government would recognize this orientation by respecting the moral dimension of political life.”72
As the regimes declined under the burden of their economic ineffectiveness and moral numbness, as the elites lost their sense of historical predestination and showed signs of incurable disarray, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for reconstitution of the public sphere. Moreover, critical intellectuals not only rejected regimentation but also signaled their disenchantment with Marxist theory and proclaimed the revolutionary nature of truth-telling. Leszek Kołakowski gave full expression to the newly acquired understanding of the intimate connection between the Marxist worldview and the practice of Communism in the twentieth century: “It would be absurd to maintain that Marxism was, so to speak, the efficient cause of the present-day communism; on the other hand, communism is not a mere “degeneration” of Marxism but a possible interpretation of it and even a well-founded one, though primitive and partial in some respects…. The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, had ended in the same way as all such attempts: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.”73 In 1968, as the Czechoslovak experiment of “socialism with a human face” was in its last days, Russian dissident and eminent scientist Andrei Sakharov published in samizdat his memorandum Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. In this document, the author abandoned and condemned the ideological Manicheanism that functioned as a cardinal principle to both Marxism and Leninism: “‘The division of mankind threatens it with disaster,’ he began, and ‘in the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime.’”74
REINVENTING POLITICS
The creation of civil society in East and Central Europe, or what I call the reinvention of politics in a non-Machiavellian way, was centrally premised upon a rebellion against the mortifying role of ideology: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”75 The moral anesthesia of the population was the most important ally of post-totalitarian Communist power, and one should hasten to add, it is the ally of any bureaucratic-alienating structure. The system worked as long as the prevailing lie was accepted and tolerated by the individual, as long as the average citizen—the greengrocer posting in the shop's window the meaningless sign “Workers of the World, Unite!”—continued to endorse the ideological nonsense, even though he was aware that all this verbiage was nothing but a collection of lies. When Solzhenitsyn asked his fellow Soviet writers to cease lying, that is, to abandon ideology, his point was that moral life starts at the moment we refuse to lie. The world may be full of injustice, but let me not add to it. The problem, therefore, was not simply to identify the source of oppression in the government but also to realize how each individual was tied to the power structure and that it was in his power to emancipate himself. Upon reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Russian intellectuals heard “a trumpet calling to the terrible court of history.”76 The pain of millions recounted in the book shook off the cynicism and the hypocrisy perpetuated by the post-totalitarian order in the East or by ideological folly in West.77 At the same time, Soviet leaders realized the potentially irreversible caesura generated by The Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, at a Politburo meeting, none other than Leonid Brezhnev straightforwardly asserted that “we have every basis to imprison Solzhenitsyn, for he has encroached on what is most sacred—on Lenin, on our Soviet system, on Soviet power, on everything that is dear to us.”78 Indeed, the revelations spelled doom; as one letter to the Soviet Politburo stated, “The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins.”79 Solzhenitsyn, along with those who followed his example, undermined, as one party hack put it in 1988, “the foundations on which our present life rests.”80