In the Communist Mirror: Journeys in Eastern Europe

by Lesley Chamberlain

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why, you might ask, would you want to read a book published in 1990 about visiting countries which, in some cases, no longer exist and which in the intervening time have undergone dramatic transformations? If we judge by the level of interest here on Gr., we might conclude that this book's time has passed. One person began the book a year ago and, presumably, never finished it while, by amazing coincidence, another person has been reading the book at the same time as me and rated it with five stars. But that is the extent of the interest, which is a great pity because for anyone with an interest in recent European history, and more specifically, an interest in the social and political history of Eastern Europe under Communism, this is a fascinating and insightful book which mixes first hand accounts of encounters and conversations with people on trains, in the sea, on the street as well as vivid descriptions of hotel rooms and meals, with philosophical and psychological analysis of the nature of those societies.

What makes the book especially interesting is a tension that is present throughout between her feeling of being at odds with the West's superficialities, despite embracing the freedoms it offers, and admiring the depth of reflection and reasoning she finds in countries which do all they can to suppress independent thought. Of course it is evident throughout the book that hers is the perspective of a Western intellectual liberal who is drawn to like-minded people; those, in each country she visits, who yearn to experience and study the full realm of intellectual thought. So this is not a comprehensive survey of the societies she encounters. There is little sense of the socio-economic changes that the Communist countries went through , nor any attempt to judge how different the lives of the poorest were under this system as opposed to how the same strata of people would have been in similar, but capitalist, countries.

There are disparate elements to her experiences of each country, with Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia appearing, in various ways, to be less oppressive than Romania and East Germany. It is her time in East Germany which seems to infuriate her more than any other because she is especially aware - due to previous visits to the country and her studies of the language and history of that country - that it could be so much better as well as being very aware of the damage being done to the psyche of the country by the lies, evasions and distortions which are stitched into the fabric of the Communist system. It is infuriating to remember how distorted, grotesque and oppressive the political system became in those countries, against every promise and hope that they would allow for an unprecedented flourishing of the human spirit. The reality was a system of government which was akin to the worse form of parenting, with a level of intrusiveness which ruined all initiative, paranoid levels of suspicion, an insistence on total obedience and an ever-present willingness to administer punishment. It could all have been so much better. One of the best quotes in the book comes right at the end when Chamberlain refers to Nicholas Berdyaev's 'The Fate of Man in the Modern World'. Berdyaev finds the "enslavement of labour arising in the modern authoritarian states, based upon a dictated world view" and states that:

"Instead of the living personality of the worker, his welfare, his rights of labour, we see proclaimed as the supreme value the power and well-being of the state. The means of production, instead of being given to the producers, as Marx demanded, are turned over to the fascist or communist state. the state is recognized as the subject, while man becomes the object. This is an extreme form of the objectivization of human existence, man is emptied of every inner value. The process of socializing economic life, a process not only just but necessary, now becomes a process of socializing integral humanity, that is, the subjection of man to society, in the most secret and intimate spheres of his being."

So the key question is, did the attempt to create an equitable society through economic means have to be coupled with a system which also tried to limit the thought process of those it sought to benefit? Surely not, because if it can only be achieved by suppressing the human capacity for thought and imagination it is doomed to fail "under its own contradictions", as proved to be the case.

Another very interesting thought which Chamberlain muses on comes from Roland Barthes who "speculated how pleasing it would be to look upon our world with the appreciative/critical foreign eyes we bring to the communist Bloc, to be a little divorced from ourselves in order to appreciate our 'exotic' qualities." This raises another potentially troubling aspect of the book because there is no doubt but that in visiting any country one can find what one is looking for. If I was to go to England today, for example, I could set out to find a country dominated by small-minded, unbearably conservative and culturally illiterate dim-wits. There are plenty of them there. I could also find a racially and culturally diverse, open-minded and socially concerned society. Both versions of the country exist. Chamberlain found what she expected to find when she went to each of the countries she wrote about back then, just before everything changed. What she could not have anticipated was the ways in which, through that change, things could get even worse. She finds tensions between ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, but who could have anticipated what would happen when a unified country ceased to be? Nor could she have known how quickly and how unyieldingly new forms of corruption would take hold in those countries, with assets sold off to make millions for, in some cases, former party enforcers, leaving many free to think, but materially no better off.

So, is it worth reading this book? Definitely. Through reading Lesley Chamberlain's thoughts we become unavoidably lured into forming our own thoughts on issues which may have been transformed, but which haven't lost their relevance. It is also a very enjoyable and well written book. Chamberlain was open to all kinds of experiences as she traveled and her poetic, inquisitive, sensual nature contributed hugely to the worth of this, apparently, forgotten book.