Uncivil society 1989 and the implosion of the communist establishment

Why did Communism fail in Eastern Europe? Because the establishment ran out of steam. WHEN the Berlin Wall unexpectedly fell 20 years ago, a German friend of mine made a sage observation: The Communists opened the wall for the same reason they had raised it 28 years earlier - to keep East Germans from fleeing west. The fact is that the "Ossies" had been streaming out of East Germany throughout that fall of 1989 through cracks in the Iron Curtain opened by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. Unable any longer to halt this hemorrhage by force, the desperate German leaders gambled that if they let their people visit the West from time to time, they might not wish to flee East Germany at every opportunity. The Politburo official assigned to announce the new rules on Nov. 9, 1989, botched it, giving the impression that the wall had been thrown open. East Berliners rushed to the crossings, a bewildered officer opened the gate, and the rest is - literally - history. I was there that night, and it was a moment of such intense exhilaration that it takes an effort today to recall how spontaneous and startling it really was - and how mundane the motives. The people who charged the checkpoints were not led by brave freedom fighters, and the apparatchiks who changed the rules were not visionary reformers. It was more that the hard-bitten old Communists had run out of steam. That, in brief, is the thesis of this splendid and compact study of the demise of Communist systems across the Soviet empire in 1989: these were not grand victories of what we now call "civil society" - organizations and movements outside the structures of the state - but rather the implosion of what Stephen Kotkin terms the "uncivil society" - the bureaucrats, ideologues, political police, managers and other members of the Communist elite who ran the states of the Soviet bloc in partnership with the Kremlin. "It was the establishment - the 'uncivil society' - that brought down its own system," Kotkin explains. "Each establishment did so by misruling and then, when Mikhail Gorbachev's Kremlin radically shifted the geopolitical rules, by capitulating - or by refusing to capitulate and thus making themselves susceptible to political bank runs." Kotkin is certainly equipped to pass judgment on the events of 1989, as he is well known for his magisterial study of the Soviet iron-mining city of Magnitogorsk and for his concise history of the fall of the Soviet Union, "Armageddon Averted." "Uncivil Society" grew out of a graduate seminar Kotkin taught at Princeton with Jan T. Gross, a Polish-American historian known for his studies of anti-Semitism in Poland, who is listed as a contributor. The phrase "uncivil society" may be a bit awkward as coinages go, but that is a minor nit in this refreshingly lively analysis of how Communist regimes collapsed in three East European states - East Germany, Poland and Romania. Each had its unique circumstances and history: East Germany was the most successful Soviet bloc economy, but it "achieved second-rate citizenship in a world that already had a first-rate Germany." Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu was hailed in the West because he managed to push back the Soviets, but he built such a brutal cult of personality and such a foreign debt that he ended up the only leader to be executed. And Poland - well, it was the grand exception, the nation Marx called "indigestible" and the only one in East Europe that acted, in a formula Kotkin borrows from the writer Jonathan Schell, "as if" it "were already a free country." But it is Kotkin's analysis of what was common in the collapse of all the Communist rulers - including the Russians - that makes for the most interesting reading. Ultimately, he writes, the system was crushed by the "double whammy" of Gorbachev, who lifted the threat of military intervention, and a political class that proved unable to compete with capitalism. Still, the reader shouldn't get too smug on revisiting that victory. Kotkin suggests a sobering parallel between the bankruptcy of the Eastern elites and the ruinous excesses of Western elites as revealed in the financial meltdown of 2008. Serge Schmemann, a former Times bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem, is the editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune.

In 1989, all East European Soviet "satellites" abruptly broke free, triggering a similar breakup inside the U.S.S.R. In this addition to the Modern Library Chronicles series, Princeton history professors Kotkin (Armageddon Averted) and Gross (Neighbors) deliver a perceptive account of how this happened. They deny that freedom-loving citizens ("civil society") led the transformation, pointing out that, except in Poland, no organized opposition existed. The only true establishment was the "incompetent, blinkered, and ultimately bankrupt" Communist system-an uncivil society. Even in private, all awaited the collapse of capitalism and increasingly focused on the moral superiority of socialism in the face of the unnerving economic superiority of the West. In 1989 the bottom fell out. Polish leaders agreed to a quasi-free election, which unexpectedly voted them out; faced with peaceful demonstrations and a mass exodus of citizens, East German leaders resigned. Except for a bloody attempt to stave off the inevitable in Romania, all satellite governments peacefully dissolved, often with comic-opera ineptness. Combining scholarship with sparkling prose, the authors recount a thoroughly satisfying historical struggle in which the good guys won. 16 pages of b&w photos; maps. (Oct. 13) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kotkin (modern & contemporary history, Princeton; Armageddon Averted) and Gross (war & society, Princeton; Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz) hone in on the uprisings in East Germany, Poland, and Romania after the end of communism. They assert that it was "uncivil society" (i.e., Communist Party officials) that caused Soviet-style socialism to fall apart rather than the unorganized opposition ("civil society," i.e., those following the rule of law), although it's the opposition that's often the center of attention in studying 1989. Uncivil society's many missteps caused a "political bank run" and ultimately introduced democracy and capitalism to the Eastern bloc nations, a largely peaceful revolution. This is a scholarly work, yet it willÅsurely attract a wide variety of readers, from university students to general readers interested in this topic.-Beth Johns, Saginaw Valley State Univ., University Center, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Chapter One Bank Run  "How did you go bankrupt? " "Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly." --Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises The wry Romanian film A fost sau n- a fost? (2006), known in En - glish as 12:08 East of Bucharest, poses a seemingly passe question: Was there or was there not--"A fost sau n- a fost?"--a revolution in 1989? Most of the film takes place at a desk, as an on- air discussion inside a television studio. (It is often said that Romania's 1989 events took place mostly on TV.) The pompous host (who is given to quoting Herodotus) is called Virgil Jderescu, a provincial TV station owner whose talk show is called Issue of the Day. This particular day is December 22, 2005, and the issue is what happened on the same date sixteen years earlier. After some potential panelists bow out, Jderescu goes live with a debt- ridden, alcoholic history teacher named Tiberiu M∫nescu and a grumpy, lonely pensioner named Emanoil Piscoci who dresses up as Santa Claus for children. The telecast backdrop shows the live image of a drab, unnamed Stalinist- style wide town square (thought to be Vaslui, the eastern Romanian hometown of the film's director, Corneliu Porumboiu). The film's nonaction is riveting: three men sitting in chairs. Jderescu keeps asking "Was there, or was there not, a revolution in our town?" M∫nescu recounts how on December 22, 1989, he had gone to their town square with three other teachers--conveniently, two are now dead and one departed for Canada--before 12:08 p.m., as part of a protesting vanguard. The timing is crucial because Nicolae Ceauoescu, the Romanian dictator, fled Bucharest by helicopter precisely at that time. The Santa Claus impersonator claims that he, too, went to the square, albeit after 12:08. Jderescu takes a call to the show: it's the sentry on duty in the town square sixteen years ago, who denounces as a lie M∫nescu's claim to have been on the square before 12:08. Another caller places M∫nescu at the corner bar drinking the whole day and night. As callers along with the host impugn M∫nescu's story, the latter interjects, "Why split hairs over such stupidity?" The broadcast winds down by depicting--live on the studio backdrop--forlorn gray buildings, a darkening sky, streetlights turning on, and beautiful snow falling. The last phone- in caller says, "I'm just calling to let you know it's snowing outside. It's snowing big white flakes. Enjoy it now, tomorrow it will be mud . . . Merry Christmas, everybody!" The woman reveals that she lost her son on December 23, 1989, the day after the revolution.  The film seems to examine whether a revolution can take place if no one risks anything, at least in this town, and it seems to reinforce a general impression that Romania in 1989 was the grand exception. Romania, it is often said, was the only Eastern European country whose experience in 1989 was supposedly a coup, not a revolution. Or it is said that Romania did have a revolution, but it was stolen.1 Adding to this sense of exceptionalism, Romania turned out to be the only country besides Yugoslavia where socialism's end was bloody. That carnage notwithstanding--officially Romania suffered 1,104 dead, mostly after December 22--it will be our argument that Romania in 1989 was not an exception but part of a continuum that includes East Germany as well as most other cases. Communist Romania had a minuscule opposition. It was a country of Tiberiu M∫nescus and Emanoil Piscocis, as well as Vir Excerpted from Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.