Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism

by Kristen R. Ghodsee

In Red Hangover Kristen Ghodsee examines the legacies of twentieth-century communism twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall fell. Ghodsee's essays and short stories reflect on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after 1989. Ghodsee shows how recent major crises—from the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Syrian Civil War to the rise of Islamic State and the influx of migrants in Europe—are linked to mistakes made after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc when fantasies about the triumph of free markets and liberal democracy blinded Western leaders to the human costs of "regime change." Just as the communist ideal has become permanently tainted by its association with the worst excesses of twentieth-century Eastern European regimes, today the democratic ideal is increasingly sullied by its links to the ravages of neoliberalism. An accessible introduction to the history of European state socialism and postcommunism, Red Hangover reveals how the events of 1989 continue to shape the world today.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Russia, European History, 20th Century

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 2017

About the author

Kristen R. Ghodsee an award-winning author and ethnographer. She is professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been translated into over twenty-five languages and has appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Jacobin, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, She is the author of 12 books, and she is the host of the podcast, A.K. 47, which discusses the works of the Russian Bolshevik, Alexandra Kollontai. Her latest book is Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, which appeared with Simon & Schuster in May 2023.

She loves popcorn, manual typewriters, and Bassett hounds.

Website: www.kristenghodsee.com
Podcast: ak47.buzzsprout.com

Reviews

[Viola Eade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cool collection of essays and short stories about the aftermath of the collapse of communism and what it means today. It's written for a general audience and might be of interest to high school students who want to learn more about why capitalism sucks.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author states that her overall mission, both in the book and in her career more generally, is to confuse people's ideas about communism. There were serious problems with secret police, labor camps, and consumer shortages. But the people who lived under it were neither mindless automatons or devious schemers. And they lived measurably better lives under communism than they did in the freakish capitalist nightmare that followed it. So I'd rate the book a success in her goal.

The essay on the CIA propping up Abstract Expressionism and the Iowa Writer's Workshop was very edifying. I'd heard that story before, of course, but it doesn't make sense until you realize it was to fight against socialist realism. 'Venerating Nazis to Vilify Commies" was very disheartening. The short fiction was hit or miss. The first short story was genuinely good, though. I'd read it as a full length novel, for sure.

A good Bulgarian joke: Question: What did Bulgarians use to light their houses before they started using candles?
Answer: Electricity.

[Keen Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

“By 2014 “democracy” was becoming a dirty word, an ideal used to justify American military interventions and the promotion of US economic interests abroad.”

I thought that this was an exceptional piece of work. I have never heard of Ghodsee before, but on the strength of this I would take her over Applebaum every day of the week. She writes with clarity, concision and pulls out one wise insight after another in a highly accessible way.

She makes a wonderful point in saying how communism is forever tied to the worst excesses and cruelties of Stalinism which were of course appalling, but then imagine if you only focused on the worst aspects of capitalism and the neo-liberal free market capitalist models?...After all this is the same system which was responsible for the First World War, the slave trade, global empires and multiple global financial meltdowns and compound interest.

Ghodsee sees the effects of corporate colonisation, where the trade barriers were eased, but decency and humanity rendered meaningless in the face of profit margins. Mass privatization, created a vacuum for greedy, opportunistic multi-nationals and other criminals to fill and exploit at the expense of the majority of the population, as seen in Russia, which is the most obvious and extreme example.

The article on Bulgaria with its vastly inflated utility bills from voracious monopolies leading to a spate of self-immolation throughout the country was horrifying yet really well-told. She talks about the annual L-L marches in Berlin, which celebrate the life and work of communist martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were both shot and killed in 1919 at the age of 47. I thought that the second essay “Cucumbers” was delightful, where she finds a random series of files in a public rubbish bin, she allows her imagination to grow legs and run free with the life and possibilities of the man she discovers within it. The essay on her love of typewriters was told with real warmth and affection and again raises some valid points.

“But no matter where they occurred, post 1989 privatizations were fraught with difficulties, and many ordinary people came to view the process as a form of theft, whereby new economic elites stole the once collectively owned assets of entire nations.”

We learn about Treuhandanstalt (trust agency), which was established by the GDR in order to privatize or reprivatize East German enterprises, but as Ghodsee points out, “In practice the Treuhand favoured large West German corporations, which snapped up the crown jewels of East German industry at bargain prices because they had the best investment plans. In some cases, factories became the workshops of West German companies like Rheinmetall, Krupp, or Siemens.” In other cases they simply bought up the competition and shut them down.

The short stories were real quality too, particularly “Pieces” which was especially dark and haunting. “Post-Zavyarism” may have lacked subtlety, but it certainly got its point across, and I thought “Democratic Party of the United States” was absolutely brilliant on in its exposing and ridiculing of the lies and hypocrisies at the heart the US Democrat party.

Ultimately the downfall of communism and the falling of the Berlin wall were never about bringing liberty to those in Eastern Europe, but more about expanding new markets for Western companies. She illustrates the many ways that democracy is becoming increasingly incompatible with capitalism, as capitalism seemingly does everything within its power to undermine and corrupt it at every opportunity.

We see how German reunification was far closer to a takeover. The dominant Western narrative greatly oversimplified the reality, editing out and forgetting all about those who were left behind. The arrogant triumphalism of the capitalist countries which spent so long patting themselves on the back, that they were oblivious to the millions who got left behind and became worse off. The likes of the video uberwacht (CCTV) which recorded more footage than the Stasi, and then there’s all the information gathered by banks and other financial institutions and of course the private and intimate details taken by Facebook and Google, all tools of American corporate imperialism.

There are some superb insights in here, I’ve read a bit about East Germany, including “Stasiland”, Appelbaum etc, but this really made me take a long, hard think and look at the other side of things, and I am always impressed when a writer can do that. This is a book that deserves a far wider readership than it is likely to get. This is such a well-written piece of work and I recommend it to anyone who regards themselves as left of centre or even with an open mind.

[drea · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Very readable and approachable. Several of the essays and fiction pieces would be great and instructive for political education. As the author says, you can read a million books about the failures of 20th century communism, why not read one about the good things? Especially in this political moment when the left seems doomed to repeat so many predictable errors and continues to invest in false solutions.

I heard about Ghodsee's work on the Upstream podcast episode about her new book Everyday Utopia. I like her playful and accessible style, and look forward to reading more of her books.

[Viola Eade · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cool collection of essays and short stories about the aftermath of the collapse of communism and what it means today. It's written for a general audience and might be of interest to high school students who want to learn more about why capitalism sucks.

[Ben Spill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sooooooo good

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good, very fair book that will complicate your understanding of Communism in eastern Europe. Ghodsee writes about some things that will probably be familiar to Western readers, like the brutality of Stalin, but even in those sections she unearths things that are likely new to most readers, like how Stalin's xenophobia often expressed itself in vicious unmerited attacks on his supposed Communist allies. She explores the aftermath of the end of communism in Bulgaria. I believe that with the renewed attention that Vladimir Putin has gotten in the last few years, many Americans are probably more aware than they were previously of how painful and impoverishing the end of the USSR and the collapse of communism was for ordinary people, but it's still deeply useful to get the kind of mundane on-the-ground reporting that Ghodsee does here. The section on how far-right forces have twisted the idea of the "abuses of communism" into, essentially, Nazi propaganda is chilling and extremely important. It seems to me that those "Black Book of Communism"-type criticisms have diffused very thoroughly through Western culture and that most people have no idea how rotten their sources are--I've heard people quote the warped "Communism killed 100 million people" figure in the wild. Of course, this works to obscure the extremely bloody history of anti-Communism (documented, for example, in Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method). Anyway, lots of really good stuff here!

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

1.

Much of the first half centers on post-socialist Bulgaria, and post-socialist reunified Germany.
For a more thorough understanding of the context of the former, I would urge a reading of Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain. For the latter, The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the Usa's Cold War Victory and/or Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It. Much of Ghodsee's discussion of the German 'transition' (rightly described as more akin to annexation of the former DDR) focuses on the role of the Treuhand, a German shakedown agency designed for a clearance sale of DDR assets and futures. You'll get the gist of it here, but the aforementioned sources are lengthier and so more in-depth on the extent of the process's corruption. There are the occasional annoying, obligatory Western Marxist (Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn) rhetorical reflexes in reference to "regimes", "freedom", "Stalinism", etc. leading up to: 'If only the left as a whole could just get along [but damn those MLs!]'.

I didn't pick this one up expecting fictionalized accounts of the impact of human (child) trafficking in postsocialist Bulgaria or the intergenerational impact of wars that broke up Yugoslavia, but those stories had some basis in real accounts and added notes of poignancy.

2.

The second half of the book starts out strong. It reminds me to eventually get around to Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, admittedly on the back-burner for some time now.

Agnieszka Kościańska...examined sex education and the treatment of sexual dysfunctions in Poland before and after communism and found that, despite the influence of the Catholic Church, progressive sex education was widely available in schools and abortion remained legal. (Note: For an examination of the Polish socialist state's fraught relationship with the Catholic Church, see Class Struggle in Socialist Poland: With Comparisons to Yugoslavia)

Kościańska contrasted the biomedical and physiological understanding of sexuality in the United States with the more holistic view supported by communist sexologists...She argued that American researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson focused exclusively on physical aspects, claiming that good sex was the result of proper stimulation for both men and women, who moved through a four-stage sexual response cycle. This view, based on laboratory experiments, came to dominate the international field of sexology and led to the medicalization of sexuality, ultimately benefiting the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which developed drugs targeting physiological problems.

In Poland , by contrast, sexologists complemented their medical knowledge with psychology, history, and philosophy. They viewed human sexuality as embedded in the wider context of human interactions. Polish sexologists explored individual desires for love, intimacy, and meaning, and listened carefully to the dreams and frustrations of their patients. The communist government paid salaries and provided research budgets, a stark contrast with the prevalence of private and corporate funding in the West.

Ghodsee notes some bizarre capitalist cope (/mental gymnastics), in particular in the claims of historian Josie McLellan that

the East German sexual revolution reflected popular frustrations with state policies. As East Germans grew more pessimistic about their political and economic situation, they embraced nudism and sensual enjoyments as a salve for their existential woes. The regime responded by decriminalizing homosexuality, encouraging premarital coitus, and destigmatizing single motherhood as a way to placate the restless population.

Sure, unleashing the libido is a time-tested strategy for the ruling class...Yet, reducing decriminalization of homosexuality and support for single mothers to a cynical mass-manipulation game would so obviously be a reduction to the absurd (reflected in Ghodsee's account of giving a lecture on this topic, to the incredulity of some audience members of West German background).

On the flip side, amidst attempts to address the double-burden facing working women,

Patriarchy remained strong in Bulgarian families, proving that the centralized authority of a communist state was not as all-powerful as many in the West imagine it.

(again, I'd recommend Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain for more on this, as well as the relevant sections on Elena Lagadinova in Ghodsee's Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe).

3.

The outline of socialist realism was fascinating. Described elsewhere as "the ruins of an advanced civilization", the chapter on this is sprinkled with photos of monuments to workers and soldiers. Of course, in contrast:

Working through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA sponsored major international exhibitions of American painting and published reviews in influential art magazines, promoting the American aesthetic as part of an ideological strategy to win the Cold War. Unbeknownst to certain artists, the CIA served as a secret patron, ensuring that their works came to dominate the art world in Europe. Tom Braden, the first head of the CIA's International Organizations Division, served as the executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art in 1949.

...and all of that was just the subtler flip-side to overt targeting of both "old" and "new" left artists for persecution (i.e. blacklisting).

3. After exploring examples of socialist realism and its place in a cultural Cold War, Ghodsee turns next to the Historikerstreit, the German controversy over Nazi Germany's position in its historiography (incommensurability vs. the "two totalitarianisms" thesis). For more depth on this, Domenico Losurdo's War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century introduces many of the figures discussed here (particularly Ernst Nolte).

The outline of controversy over the French publication of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 was especially enlightening. That book's definitely moved up my list.

The following quoted exchange with Michael Ignatieff (when you finally think you've forgotten he exists...sigh) alone is enough to recommend Hobsbawm:

IGNATIEFF: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?

HOBSBAWM: ...Probably not.

IGNATIEFF: Why?

HOBSBAWM: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing...The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I'm looking back at it now and I'm saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure.

IGNATIEFF: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

HOBSBAWM: Yes.

From Alex Massle, Eric Hobsbawm and the Fatal Appeal of Revolution, October 2012.

As markets plunged [in the 2008 financial crisis] and the Eurozone economies teetered on the edge of collapse, the European Parliament passed the resolution establishing the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. As neoliberal capitalism faltered, European leaders...gravitated toward an intellectual paradigm that linked leftist politics with the worst crimes of Stalinism and equated those crimes with the Final Solution. Not surprisingly, the renewed focus on the victims of communism allowed Eastern European governments to exonerate or rehabilitate known fascists, a process that led directly to the 2015 Ukrainian laws [and more recent Czech laws?] making it a crime to criticize any national figure who fought for Ukrainian independence, even if these men collaborated in the slaughter of Poles or Jews.

4.

Despite its strengths, Ghodsee's analysis suffers from its liberal idealism:

Both communism and democracy must be understood as political systems embedded in particular historical contexts, but which can be detached from those contexts to offer different ideals to guide us toward alternative futures...Political theories must be allowed to exist as ideal types even after the have become tainted by the histories of their failed applications

(Emphasis added)

Isn't detaching the democratic ideal from the horrors and abuses of global neoliberalism the same intellectual project as detaching the communist ideal from the crimes of past communist regimes?

Short answer: No. One obscures the exclusivity of supposed democracy (Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy) in the liberal West, conceding its claims to the descriptor "democratic". It has all the ideological baggage of the term "democratic socialism". The other places historical political experiments in the grit of real practice, refusing to moralize while admitting excesses (see above Hobsbawm interview). In lieu of this, a more constructive approach would be to take political experiments as they were/are, made "not in conditions of their choosing"...and understand what that reveals not about the 'tainting' of 'purity', but about the exigencies of practical implementation.

Ghodsee makes beautiful overtures to the need for a soberly balanced assessment of actually existing socialism, and---to her credit---admits to past naivete about the post-Cold War promises of then triumphant liberalism. This would be even more laudable if she followed through and stuck to the same balance when looking at less romantic figures who led the exercise of state power.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I requested a copy of this book from Queens Public Library, which wiki describes as "one of the largest library systems in the world by circulation, having loaned 13.5 million items in the 2015 fiscal year, and one of the largest in the country in terms of the size of its collection", I was told they didn't own a copy. They did arrange an interlibrary loan and I received a copy from the Kingsborough Community College library, for which I am very grateful. Still though, it does not bode well that such an important message, delivered expertly and wonderfully accessibly by Ghodsee, was not in wider circulation. This book fills an important niche that I wish more people wished to gain a better understanding of. Some of the answers to some of the world's big problems could very well be here, or at least pointers to them. Ghodsee did the dumpster diving for us to appreciate these ideas. Where else except in a public trash can in Bulgaria should we look?

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Bulgarian joke:
Q: What was the worst thing about communism?
A: The thing that came after it.

As with all essay collections, some were better than others but overall this was an excellent collection. Some essays examine the legacies of the massive social and economic upheavals that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall and U.S.S.R; specifically it focused on its impact on ordinary people in Bulgaria and East Germany. Others examine the Western liberal triumphalism "end of history" mindset that refuses to acknowledge the human cost of forced privatization or the flaws and inequities of capitalism and continues to demonize any whiff of socialism, to the detriment of democracy.

[Comrade Zupa Ogórkowa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably Kristen Ghodsee’s best work as it sticks to what her academic speciality is which is post-Soviet collapse, covering topics such as the conditions of post-Soviet Bulgaria and East Germany to talking about proletarian art and the CIA funded effort to delegitimize this art through promoting modern art. Her anti-communist statements are more toned down than in her other books.

[Naum · Rating 5 out of 5]

A look at Eastern Europe, post 1989. Where populations exchanged one demon for another. Sections of essays, with some interspersed fiction chapters, for which I initially met with deep chagrin, but these were well done. Ghodsee is a gifted writer and applies a deft touch with her words.

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Het boek leest goed weg en er is een goede afwisseling tussen onderzoek, fictie en eigen ervaringen. De boodschap is nogal heftig. Ik snap dat sommige punten gemaakt moeten worden, maar soms gaat de schrijfster net een stap te ver. Vandaar de 3 sterren.

[Amy Bush · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written. I won't lie and say some of the stuff didn't feel very heavy handed. But overall, a really intriguing insight into new forms of ethnography and understanding the complex systems that have shaped and challenged politics.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those eye-opening books that gives you a new perspective on a whole bunch of stuff.

[Fidel Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s for beginners but that’s cool and she says as much at the beginning