Book: The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
Author: Tina Rosenberg
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (19 March 1996)
Language: English
Paperback: 464 pages
Item Weight: 340 g
Dimensions: 13.21 x 2.54 x 20.32 cm
Country of Origin: USA
Price: 1276/-
Since 1991, historians have been to the highest degree challenged to elucidate the cave in of the Soviet Union and Communist rule in Russia. But a deeper predicament, less often addressed, is the existent nature of the Soviet system that was to finish swept away.
Understanding the paroxysms of the recent past in Russia is impractical without an answer to this question, which in turn demands reassessment of a century of turbulent history.
The astonishing events of 1991 implanted an almost universal typecast about the fallen regime.
It is considered, in Russia as well as abroad, to have been a seventy-four-year experiment that failed, or some variation on that theme. This verdict flows from a literal, one-dimensional reading of Communist ideology as the main determinant of the Soviet experience.
It differs from official Stalinist and neo-Stalinist propaganda only in putting a negative sign on that record.
The entire Soviet era is thus presumed to have had a straightforward historical unity as the direct, everlasting pursuit of a catastrophic revolutionary “utopia.”
Today’s common but intensely unhistorical comprehension of the Soviet experience orbits around three basic problems:
1) The character of the Russian Revolution as a long-term process and its implication as the framework for the general development of Russian society.
2) The dare of modernization that Russia faced all during its revolutionary experience along with the indistinct relationship between Russia and the West in this respect.
3) The character of postrevolutionary society in Russia and its association to modern social trends around the globe. The difficulty of reconstruction and social change leads in turn to the third focus of misconstruction, the relation between ideology and reality and the confusion that Communist doctrine has created about the nature of the Soviet system.
Out of an investigation of these foundations of Soviet reality some conclusions can perhaps be derived about the alleged successes and failures of the revolution and about the assumptions that have shaped understanding of the post-Soviet regime.
In 1989 the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union began to fall and popularly elected governments took their place.
This book is about the endeavours of the people and governments of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia to face their Communist pasts.
The author of this book began her visits in 1991 and, during dozens of trips over the next two and a half years, watched as these nations debated the fates of their Communist Party leaders, border guards who shot fleeing citizens, secret police informers, and spies.
Some countries put their former repressors on trial.
Some passed laws prohibiting them from holding government posts.
Some sponsored truth commissions to write the official story of the dictatorship.
One opened its secret police archive and invited its victims to penetrate the mysteries of the invisible hydra that had been deployed against them.
Individual citizens carried out investigations, wrote novels and made films, and sat down to cry with their own prison interrogators and secret police informers.
These debates took place in chorus at the level of government policy and in the most private chambers of the soul, as people struggled to find their own definitions for connivance and culpability.
The author shows that there is absolutely nothing unique about distorting history to serve political ends. No one did this more methodically than the Communists. History was rewritten as a parade with the workers and peasants and their vanguard, the Communist Party, as protagonist.
All progress was the result of the effort of the valiant proletariat against subjugation by the dominant classes. Twenty-nine centuries of Russian history became twenty-nine centuries of the unalterable and splendid march toward socialism.
Communist orthodoxy remolded the history of the Second World War, erasing the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the contributions of the Western Allies. The war’s laudable uprisings were recast to star Communists. Communism rewrote communism as well. As each new party secretary ascended, his adversaries were airbrushed from photos, their posters removed from rallies and their names from history books.
With a new leader these imperceptible men were rehabilitated, their pictures and names reappeared, and a new set of class enemies vanished.
This was accomplished not by deliberation and reinterpretation but by the official replacement of new instructions for old on how to remember the past. The new guidelines were pronounced accurate and enduring, just as the old ones had been.
And since the very continuation of previous instructions undermined the new ones’ correctness and permanence, the most important new guideline was to forget that there had ever been an old one. Under communism, writes Jacques Rupnik, the future was certain; it was the past no one could be sure of.
Communist totalitarianism cast its citizens in the great moral dramas of our time, and it is now up to democratic political and legal systems to write the endings: A soldier follows his orders and kills a man trying to cross the Berlin Wall. A man agrees to inform for the secret police so his dying father will be released from prison. A master spy runs agents who penetrated the most sensitive posts of then-enemy Western governments. A leader cracks down on dissent, claiming his act of repression is preventing a Soviet invasion. A lifelong secret police official assigned to arrest political activists begins to feed these dissidents information.
Which of these people is guilty?
How should they be punished?
Who may sit in judgment?
In her book, Tina Rosenberg has chosen to focus on three of the more opportune countries, Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Along with Hungary, these are the places where former dissidents (in the case of Germany, Westerners) took power early, albeit briefly. Here change has been the most dramatic and expectations the highest.
During her research Slovakia gained its independence, and she has written about it in the Czech section, where it provides a useful contrast.
The three-part book has been divided into the following nine chapters:
Part One: Czechoslovakia
1. Enemy of the People
2. Bureaucracy of Spies
3. We are not like them
Part Two: Poland
4. The Dark Glasses
5. The Lesser Evil
6. The Prisoner
Part Three: Germany
7. Watchful and Decisive in the Struggle
8. Official Exorcism
9. The Conversarion
Each section is droopily constructed around a different type of person: a Czech dissident, a Polish Communist leader, and the ordinary Berlin Wall border guards and secret police informers who made the German system hum. Opponents, leaders, and cogs in the system—each life a different rejoinder to communism.
Their stories explore two main issues:
1) The response of human beings to a totalitarian system, and
2) The moral, political, practical, and legal dilemmas of now-democratic societies’ attempts to deal with that response.
The pages of the book pose an assortment of serious questions to the reader:
a) Who is guilty in societies where almost everyone collaborated with the system in some way?
b) Who is qualified to judge?
c) Should democratic freedoms also apply to those bent on subverting democracy?
d) How can a society cleanse the guilty from power without falling into repression itself?
e) What does building a democratic culture really mean?
Hundreds of different people have lived these ambiguities. Several appear in this book.
“Men make their own history,” Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
Marx was incorrect about a great many things, and a number of books have been written, both before 1989 and after, analyzing the disastrous collision of his errors. But he was overwhelmingly correct about the weight of tradition.
The gifts of memory and tradition are among humankind’s greatest blessings.
Many oppressed peoples can thank the weight of tradition for their very survival. But they can also thank it for their continued oppression.
For too many governments, dealing with past injustice has been not a way to break free of it, but the first step in its recurrence.
This book is about breaking that link, which promises most of those who survived communism’s heartrending past a tragic future as well.
You can grab a copy if you choose.