The City of Truth

In his account of the events of 1989, Timothy Garton Ash explains his role as a historian who was observing historic happenings, had some appreciation for the magnitude of the situation, and realized that his privileged access to chief players and organizations put him in a unique position to take advantage of a perfect storm of sorts. His narrative is appropriately discerning to acknowledge that future readers will have information that he does not, and that a major contribution from his perspective is the mood of the participants and the spirit of the moment, because that is something that fades inevitably as time marches on, which always seems to happen.

Ash goes through a geographic progression, as have others in our previous readings, starting in Poland with his speech to miners before the June elections, and providing clarifications about candidates to new voters at the polls (p.28). His straddling of the line between observation and political incitement is not lost on him (p. 12), and this self awareness informs the rest of the book. He moves then from Budapest at the time of the reburial of Imre Nagy, and next to the German Democratic Republic. His treatment of the German case contains sketches of the scene of Ossies wandering into the newly open Berlin, and using the gift of 100 Deutschmarks in “Greeting Money” from the other Germany, to explore the other part of their city (p. 62). His descriptions of the street view, and the frenzied considerations of what reform might make of a new East Germany alludes to an uncertain future, and the complex transition we now know came during German unification.

The author then moves to Prague, where he has the most access, and details his intimate access to The Civic Forum and the hero Václav Havel. His proximity makes for a more realistic and balanced portrayal of Havel, as the charismatic figure in a more democratic movement than Lech Wałęsa, but a leader nonetheless. The broad movement of students, suddenly active workplace councils, and artists were a collection of voices, and Havel, as much as he wanted to be a writer and not a politician (p. 103), successfully found a way to genuinely give one voice to Prague.

He concludes with some explanation the realignments that accompany the transition of Eastern Europe, with a capital E for Eastern (p. 131), and the return of the region to more specific distinctions of location (east central, south-eastern, eastern). There is also reflection on the essential elements of the collapse, “which might be labelled as ‘Gorbachev’ ‘Helsinki’ and ‘Tocqueville (p. 140).’ ” A further revisitation from ten years later offers new insights about the significance of 1989, with 1789 used as a point of comparison, and how this period hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His sources seem to consist of his personal interactions and his contemporary attention to the news media. Some interesting anecdotes – such as his creation of the 10 years, 10 months, 10 days trope – provide colorful additions to his already vivid record.

Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of  ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. 1st Vintage books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

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Rudolf Battek was among the notable dissidents who had been a Party member, and in 1968 founded the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN) after his exit from his position in the ruling order. Another party expelled him in 1990, the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) after he had been a member of the Civic Forum and A Chartist. His was a winding path through Czech party politics. He also joined the Association of Social Democrats, and sociologist Jirina Siklova called him “the only [genuine] social democrat in [his] country.” His career brought him 10 years of prison time during normalization, but also brought him to acquaintance with heavyweights of European social democratic politics like Chancellor Willy Brandt (Germany) and Prime Minister Olaf Palme (Sweden).  He passed away at age 88 on March 17, 2013.

“Former dissident, post-1989 politician Battěk dies,” http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/zpravy/former-czech-dissident-post-1989-politician-battek-dies-aged-88/915045 (Accesed: March 6, 2014)

“Former dissident, post-1989 politician Battěk dies,” Czech News Agency (ČTK), March 2014. Prague Daily Monitor, March 17, 2014, http://praguemonitor.com/2013/03/18/former-dissident-post-1989-politician-batt%C4%9Bk-dies-aged-88 (Accesed March 18, 2014, 9:45 AM)

The author, Padraic Kenney, argues that social and political movements changed the relationships between communist states and their populations in the years before 1989 in such a way that made possible the seemingly sudden revolution. He uses the term carnival to highlight the plural and joyful nature of many of the phenomena that constitute his subject matter. This argument differs somewhat from that presented by Gale Stokes in The Walls Came Tumbling Down in that his focus is narrower, on the 1980s and particularly the years between the 1986 incident at Chernobyl and 1989. It also highlights much more the role of grassroots dissent and its variety of political flavors and younger/smaller characters (Ludwig Melhorn in the GDR, Czechs like Jan Svoboda, Petr Placák , and Ruth Šomorová, and Hungarians like Tomás Fellegi and István Stumpf) rather than the well known opposition leaders (like Lech Wałęsa, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, etc.) or party leaders (Károly Grósz, Imre Pozsgay, Gen. Jaruzelski, Erich Honecker, etc.) that dominated the narrative in our first reading.

The cast of characters and sampling of organizations presented a broader view of the people who participated in the carnival from 86-89. Kenney made the accounts much more vivid for having so much detailed personal recollection; and perhaps dealing with personalities of students and artists, among others, made it easier to flesh out the stories than those of the big names. Environmentalists, church activists, teenaged students, and varied musical devotees (of punk or John Lennon) changed the nature of dissent; by embracing causes that were not explicitly political to break the stranglehold of the communist party on various facets of life, they made things like music and school into political spheres and their resistance thus became political. Surrealist performers and artists, bringing the public on the street into their spectacular “happenings” found innovative ways to combat communist orthodoxy; not by “refusing to ape official ideology,” but instead they found it “more effective to ape it grotesquely” (1). Confronting party  rhetoric in public gave another view of the hollow promise of communism which was publicly visible in an empty Warsaw butcher shop (2), but had not previously been open for public discussion.

Though some of the important groupings that provoked public action were supplanted by the older dissident leaders (as in Poland when Solidarity took the lead at the Roundtable negotiations), their efforts built momentum for a civil society that laid foundations for revolution and later political pluralism. Kenney uses extensive personal interviews, ranging from 1996 until 2000, while acknowledging that he accounts for personal biases by claiming to filter out obvious accounts of personal self-glorification or blame. He also lists a great number of samizdat publications as sources of direct evidence. Kenney concludes that the end of the carnival came suddenly in each case, but that the training needed to make it possible came over years; 10-13 in Poland, followed by progressively shorter courses in Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech lands, East Germany, and Western Ukraine. He mentions that many of the younger leaders were marginalized in favor of the Havels and Wałęsas once the negotiations began for new governments. Where Stokes moved from cautious optimism to a more circumspect reflection between his first and second edition, Kenney writes in between and seems to present the carnival as having ended firmly when the revolution came. His reflection is more about the memory of participants, and in the end how the lack of public catharsis manifests in a lack of public remembrance, than on the legacies that are observable in the societies of contemporary Central Europe.

The Polish Voting Rights poster (3) seems a good representation of the way the old guard (of dissenters) harnessed public energy, preserved during the period of martial law by a flowering of different aboveground and underground groups, for new electoral possibilities. An electoral strategy to compel change in a new government (with a Senate as a new feature) relied on an empowered populace that had come to believe in change as a realistic prospect.

1 Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. p.159

2 Chris Niedenthal, “The Butcher Shop, Warsaw,” Making the History of 1989, Item #23, http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/23 (accessed February 18 2014, 1:27 pm)

3 “Polish Voting Rights,” Making the History of 1989, Item #93, http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/93 (accessed February 18 2014, 1:27 pm)

This article from The Atlantic reminded me of the GDP statistics listed among our primary sources. It seems notable that the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia have different results from the rest of the areas in the area of our concern. Also, East Germany is now part of the “rich” Germany, however East Germany shows results of “poor” (consistent with the pattern) followed by “so racist” in a separate search. Would these search results have been the same in the late 1990’s and up to the crisis of 2008?

UPDATE: The recession of the 1980’s does seem to have had caused disruption to the fragile Eastern European economies. The persistently lower GDP threshold must have also played a role in intensifying the discontent during such a recession. However, there is some variation within the Eastern Bloc; according to these GDP figures, the Czechoslovak and Hungarian economies did not take such a hard hit as Yugoslavia, and recovered more quickly than Poland. Perhaps the Polish case provides a reason for the acceleration of the collapse of the regime in Poland, which preceded the revolutions in Berlin, Prague and Sofia, the bloody coup in Bucharest, as well as the somewhat less dramatic transition in Hungary.