Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008

Communism in eastern central European national histories

"Proletariats of all countries – unite! – Class and international solidarity should be more important in Communist countries than the national affiliations. In political practice, however, this solution often did not accord with theory.

Communist politics and Communist ideology make a claim to "internationalism”.[1] According to the Communist conception and political rhetoric, the international class solidarity of workers is far more important than their respective national affiliation. For decades, the slogan "Proletarians of all countries, unite!” appeared on the front pages of Communist Party dailies.

Photo: photocase.de

In the "fraternal community” of the countries of the Soviet bloc in East Central Europe, any serious attempts at closer "internationalist” cooperation were unwelcome. Symbolic "friendship meetings”, journeys in "trains of friendship”, spectacular events like for instance the "World Youth Meeting,” or international meetings of "progressive” intellectuals, had little to do with true internationalism.

In political practice, by contrast, especially in Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), the national card was often played emphatically. Imperialists and capitalists of all kinds were portrayed as enemies of the nation. This led to a very selective view of history: the Germans, for instance, counted in many official and semi-official Communist narratives as the traditional and, since the Middle Ages, the most dangerous enemy of the East Central European nations – with the exception, of course, of the citizens of the German Democratic Republic, the first democratic and peace-loving state on German soil. In the same propaganda, Russian imperialism was a characteristic of the Tsarist Empire, while the Soviet Union appeared as the guarantor of the freedom of the socialist countries and nations. The Soviet Union was the most important supporter (in word and deed) of the freedom struggles of all suppressed peoples on all continents. Communist propaganda in national colours seemed more credible than the abstract internationalism of the globally exploited workers. "The same socialist content in different national forms” was a common way of putting it.


Struggles over history since 1988-1991

The relentless insistence on the historical necessity of the worldwide victory of Communism under the leadership of the Soviet Union was an essential component of Communist propaganda. After many decades under the influence of this propaganda, how to interpretation the collapse of the Soviet Union presented an immense challenge for the intellectuals in East Central Europe. Conflicts over how to evaluate historical events played a key role in the transition to democracy. At the level of daily life, this often led to the post-war period being provisionally removed from the school curriculum. In the Soviet Union, history examinations were temporarily suspended as early as May 1988.[2]

In all countries of the former Soviet bloc, questions of national history and questions about how to situate the completely unexpected events in history took over a prominent place in daily political disputes. Everywhere there were complaints that the Soviet-backed Communists and their ideology had destroyed the most beautiful and heroic national traditions. In parallel to this, light was shed on Soviet atrocities committed against the peoples of East Central Europe, for instance the murder of Polish officers in Katyn in April-May 1940 or the terror (the mass murder and deportation of civilians) in those territories which the Soviets occupied during the last phase of the Second World War. In this sense, too, Communism appeared as the destroyer of the most valuable national traditions. Many politicians demanded the rediscovery and the reconstruction of national histories which had for so long been disowned.

In the course of this development, some spectacular events were organised which were supposed to emphasise the post-Communist view of national history: symbolic (re-) burials, the removal of old monuments and the erection of new ones, the choice of new national days. In Yugoslavia, the commemorations of the 600th anniversary of the death of Prince Lazar in 1989 meant a return to the founding myths of the Serbian kingdom, which soon took replaced the cult of the "Yugoslav” partisans of the Second World War. The return to his homeland of the heart of the Bulgarian Tsar Boris, who died in 1941 in circumstances which remain unclear to this day, was a symbolic break with the Communist legacy in Bulgaria. The reburial of the Hungarian admiral Miklós Horthy, regent of the country from 1920 to 1944, was supposed to indicate the continuity between pre- and post-Communist times. The ceremonial burial of two Polish generals of the "Homeland Army”, Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski and Władisław Sikorski, symbolised the questioning of the legitimacy of the Communist regime in Poland. Many of the monuments put up to the Soviet "liberators” disappeared; new ones were put up which commemorated anti-Communist national heroes like Józef Piłsudski in Poland, Jozef Tiso in Slovakia, Ion Antonescu in Romania, Pál Teleki in Hungary, or acts of violence committed by Soviet foreign policy (in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968).

All these measures were strong reactions against the Communists' attempt to engineer a complete break with the traditions of the so-called reactionary past of those peoples now ruled by the Soviet Union, and against the attempt to construct the new "fraternal community” of socialist countries on the basis of their shared "progressive” traditions of class struggle. In the official Communist master-narratives of national history, expressed in political speeches and in schoolbooks which were all the same, the struggle against the ethnically and nationally foreign exploiter was always the focal point. According to this rhetoric, the best patriots were those personalities who had pursued goals of national and class struggle in parallel and combined with one another.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet empire, as a result of the lessening of Soviet ideological pressure, there appeared – if not so much in scholarship, then all the more so in journalism and everyday speech – long banished visions of the historical achievements and tragic sacrifices of the East Central European elites in the inter-war period. After the changes of 1989-1990, this process accelerated. To put it sharply, one can say that the chances of a person, a movement, an institution or a political party of winning a prominent place in the new national pantheon were greater, the more anti-Communist they were deemed to have been. This was also a reaction to the Communist ideological practice, which had been to brand all anti-Communists equally as "fascists”.[3] The great danger now lay in the fact that occasionally representatives of the extreme right were shown in a positive light because of their anti-Communist attitude.

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