The poverty of utopia revisited

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

For decades, Marxism held Eastern Europe in its grip. Soviet tanks, Leninist parties and, allegedly, enthusiastic masses ensured there was no official politics or thought outside of the communist party dogma. Obviously there were niches, enclaves – oases in the desert, to use Hannah Arendt’s metaphor. Eventually Marxism in Eastern Europe miraculously collapsed. The dictatorships ended and were replaced by pluralistic societies and democratic governments. The triumph of common sense over utopia was possible for two reasons: elite disenchantment and dissident humanism that was often, but not always, linked to Marxist revisionism.

Transcending the paralysis

From 1944 to 1989, Marxist Eastern Europe was a strange combination of external imperialist imposition and genuine national decisions. Moscow was the capital of the Soviet Bloc but, bizarrely and disastrously, the majority of the bloc’s population passively acquiesced in the communist project. Dissidents were few, besmirched and isolated. Thus, only once the overbearing elites lost their hubris, and only once the artists, philosophers, writers, students, professors and activists could offer something different, could Marxist power be destroyed. Once the Marxist regimes were no longer willing to engage in total public massacre, like in China, and once the citizenry had an alternative to place their trust in, could the paralysis be transcended. This is the meaning of what we can call the “poverty of utopia” (and the title of a book published by Vladimir Tismăneanu, a co-author of this essay, with Routledge 30 years ago).

Ideological hubris and epistemic infallibility represented the cornerstone of the Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe. The elite, from generals to torturers to censors to bureaucrats, had the utter and irrevocable confidence that what they were doing was right. As crazy as it was, as blatantly false and destructive as their actions were, they genuinely believed what they were doing was just for humanity. Such an attitude enabled them to lie, torture, steal, murder, rape (think of Beria, though his actions were typical), humiliate and oppress at unprecedented levels. They were ideological. While they were neither scholars nor intellectuals (unlike Marx and, it must be admitted, Lenin and Trotsky), they nonetheless, to their own satisfaction, believed they truly were doing the right thing. Novotny, Zhivkov, Ulbricht, Honecker, Encer, Gomułka, Ceaușescu, were certain that history was on their side. They had no remorse, no pangs of conscience and no regrets. The same can be said about Ion Iliescu, a self-styled Gorbachevite, who never admitted the historical failure of his belief system.

Similar to Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe, they were actors, not doctrinaires. Yet however crude and simple they were, ideology is in the mind of the beholder, measured by an individual’s faith, not by his or her intellectual thoroughness. Their misdeeds were faithfully executed because they sincerely believed their actions were securing a classless and free society and that the human beings they trampled on were actually evil agents of the demonised West. Liberty and dignity outside the ideology and Party was always false, only totalitarian liberation could bring true justice.

Over the decades of Marxist domination in Eastern Europe, the equation changed. First, there was revolutionary fervour, the memories of the Second World War and the alibi of Eastern Europe’s laggard historic development. But after two or three decades, global revolution could not be hailed as imminent – Nazism was not a credible threat and, despite total intervention and restructuring, Eastern European production, innovation and living standards were falling exponentially behind the democratic West. All the while the elites remained brutal, privileged and pig-headed. To the populations of Eastern Europe, Marxism, at least in its current incarnation, was clearly a lie, or at least a failure.

Even the Marxist elite could not ignore the problem. They were having trouble maintaining their faith. Unlike in Stalin’s time, as Czesław Miłosz wrote, the lie had become too big for any “captive mind” to overcome. Increasingly, they became mere gangsters, oppressing for pure shameless power rather than a righteous mission. From Lenin and Stalin we arrived at Brezhnev, devoid of anything except the apparent will to rule. Utopia was abandoned; they settled for neo-totalitarianism, often called post-totalitarianism. These circumstances brought working class unrest and intellectual dissent, endorsed by the enlightened groups within the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, for a while terror and lies rolled on.

Elite transformation

The story of the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia did little to shake the elite’s faith; they believed it was a fascist counter-revolution engineered by the West. Their crushing only reasserted the delusional ideology rather than refuting it. Throughout the 1960s and 70s the elite transformed from ideological to routinized behaviour. As their failures became increasingly clear to observers – and painfully obvious to their subjects – the chance of a global revolution plainly slipped away.

Still genuinely believing that they were keeping out the evil capitalists, and at the same time abandoning all pretexts of being leftist, they became a police state violently dedicated to stability for the benefit of themselves. This became clear with the introduction of Martial Law in Poland in December 1981. Residually ideological as they were, they did not recognise their shameless transformation. Even so, it was not stable: in the 1980s they would lose all hubris. They would no longer have the skilful lies or wilful violence to preserve their system against a massive challenge coming from below. Because of their sclerosis, if that challenge came, they would not be able to meet it.

The year 1968 also affected another group: the intellectuals. With their distaste for the Leninist regimes, they turned from Leninism to Marxism, recognising the original distortion that Lenin had introduced. They went to Marx himself and then just to young Marx, and then to post-Marxism and eventually liberal humanism. This was the other key ingredient of the collapse of Marxist hegemony in Eastern Europe. Communism always needed the support of the intellectuals. Lenin was only able to get away with it because Russia was in anarchy and war, and all the Russian intellectuals had either fled, were irrelevant, or were exiled or killed by the Cheka. Even Stalin had to court the intellectuals, spending a significant amount of his time and planning to deploy propaganda and terror in order to keep Russia intellectuals broadly supporting him (and it worked, an embarrassing testament to the potential of leftist intellectuals for cruelty).

Eastern Europe was much more liberal, intellectual and bourgeois than Russia. As crucial as intellectuals were for Soviet communism, they were more vital for the regimes in the Eastern European Soviet Empire. The regimes knew that if they lost the support of the intellectuals, they would eventually face a hostile public. At such a point, when the lies were no longer enough, all that was left was violence – not the kind that is hidden in prisons and concentration camps, but immense, public massacre, like in China. Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the intellectuals in Eastern Europe gradually abandoned Marxism and eventually arrived at diverse but unified theories of human rights. Once this happened, within a few years the populations of the region lost their faith in Marxism and then their fear of the regimes. Coming onto the streets as individuals – in the tens, hundreds, thousands and by 1989 the millions – they presented a challenge to the system that it could not really face.

Abandonment

How did Eastern Europe arrive at such a place? For the first decade after the war, intellectuals in Eastern Europe, fully and enthusiastically, supported Marxism. So strong was their support they not only supported communism, but Stalin and Stalinism. They were truly ideological: they believed the ends justified the means, that a revolution, a transformation and final completion of human history was being performed. All the violence was, to them, defensive and justified; they believed that all things democratic and liberal were feudal and bourgeois, tyrannical and alienating, while communism would, regardless of its evident flaws and sins, bring freedom, happiness and justice forever. Lies were acceptable, in fact morally necessary, because it hacked through the web of distortion that the bourgeois system of democratic exploitation had constructed. Propaganda was bringing education and truth to the masses, mobilisation was building a positive community and a worthwhile life, and terror was the legitimate alternative to total war and eternal slavery.

By the 1960s no serious intellectuals were communist – they were only Marxist. They left behind Soviet communism, Stalin, and even Lenin. They were hardly considering any other Marxists beyond Marx himself. And, even then, increasingly throughout the 1960s they only considered young Marx. The older Marx had focused on scientific determinism and “the dictatorship of the proletariat” – two themes which easily, inevitably, Leszek Kołakowski said, led to Leninism and Stalinism. But young Marx wrote about the human spirit, alienation, rights, freedom and a society of tolerance and equality for all. Studying the supposed foundational texts of the Marxist regimes was immensely dangerous; they were discovering the outright treason being committed against Marx’s humanist ideals. Austrian revisionist Marxist Ernst Fischer even published a book titled What Marx Really Said.

After the crushing of the Prague Spring, no one remained any sort of Marxist at all. They were now either post-Marxist liberals (such as Leszek Kołakowski, Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, János Kis, Karol Modzelewski, Jacek Kuroń, and Adam Michnik) or pure liberals (never having been Marxist at all, like Václav Havel). Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev could offer little to keep the intellectuals supportive of their oppressive missions. These intellectuals, after the Prague Spring, even abandoned the young Marx. They realised that the young Marx offered no antidote to the Soviet colossus because the regimes were able to co-opt him into their ideological concoctions. Through the 1970s they searched for a new philosophy and cause and found it in human rights. 

Losing credibility

The Helsinki Accords of 1975 meant that a commitment of western democracies to uphold human rights was combined with the Eastern European intellectuals’ own search for a new moral philosophy and political programme. From the mid-1970s onward – with Havel’s The Power of the Powerless and Michnik’s The New Evolutionism – Eastern European intellectuals were decidedly rebelling against the Marxist regimes, and were advocating for universal human rights and for a society based on tolerance rather than war-like mobilisation and conservative peace.

The Soviet project was so coercively asphyxiating for human societies and unnatural for human beings that only totalitarianism could hold it together. Propaganda and terror had to be ubiquitous or the entire project would quickly unravel. Over the 1970s and 80s, the project lost all credibility – the lies could no longer cover up, excuse, or justify the oppression and deprivation. Congruently, the elite lost their revolutionary fervour and hubris. They were just as unrepentant but no longer had the will to respond to any disturbance of their fragile monolith. Meanwhile, the intellectuals were heroically and relentlessly espousing the idea of human rights. Eventually, especially once Moscow itself lost its self-assurance to use tanks against crowds, it reached its conclusion.

In 1989 massive protests erupted from an increasingly restive population. The language of the intellectuals had finally reached through and inspired the public. The regimes found themselves unable to use tanks and bullets to maintain their utopian blueprints. Disenchantment with Marxism was a cathartic experience for Eastern Europe: the elite turned to naked, shameless corruption and the intellectuals turned back to the human subject. Eventually the people were able to take advantage of the new situation. They demanded liberty and the regimes soon melted away, leaving Eastern Europeans to finally build democracy.

This project, of course, is currently in peril. The question now is: will Eastern Europeans stand for tolerance and diversity, or will they fall for new hatreds and myths? After so long and heroic a struggle, over the past 30 years, will they change their minds and decide they cannot bear the costs of universal freedom? Increasingly, from Poland to Hungary to Romania (just as in the US, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria), Central and Eastern Europeans seem to be saying they would prefer projects which reject the human spirit, human nature and human rights for a system of proto-totalitarian euphoria, delusions and glory. The honesty and humility of the intellectuals and the people are as critically necessary today as they were during the Leninist ordeal. The idea of human rights, with all the inevitable costs a free and pluralist society imposes upon each other, remains the only thing that is just, decent and good.

Vladimir Tismaneanu is a political scientist, sociologist and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jordan Luber is finishing his studies as an Erasmus Mundus scholar in the European Politics and Society: Václav Havel Joint Master Programme at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is also an editorial intern at New Eastern Europe.