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

Communism in eastern central European national histories, by Attila Pók

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The place of Communism in history

In many serious discussions, intellectuals in post-Communist East Central Europe asked what place the Communist regime had in the continuity of their national histories. Was it really true that Communism had been imposed from outside in all countries of the region, or did it also have internal social and political roots in the countries themselves? Could the Communist era be seen as part of national history at all? Was it not instead, in spite of its many victims, only an unimportant temporary episode, historically speaking, even though it lasted a long time? Is it possible to speak of "organic” national histories which airbrush out the Communism period? One frequently posed question, which is closely linked to this problem is: was Communism an attempt to overcome the (economic and intellectual) backwardness of the respective region, or did it on the contrary help to make the gap between Eastern and Western Europe even wider and deeper than before?

A further part of this complex of problems is the responsibility (or rather, the credit) for the end of Communism. Was it the strong and unbreakable backbone of the nations, which had resisted all the maliciousness and demands of the Soviets? Were there true patriots whose unwavering and consistent anti-Communism finally led to success? Or was it not instead more the pragmatic and patriotic Communists who had recognised that the Communist model had no future, and had started to dismantle the system when the decline of the Soviet Union and the international political situation permitted this?

Nowhere in the former Soviet bloc countries was an appropriate legal framework found for the punishment of the crimes committed by the Communist system. No system functions without supporters, but it is difficult to formalise the extent of responsibility of officials at different levels within the hierarchy. As social-psychological research shows, this is hardly avoidable. If we view the trauma of system change as a mass-psychological phenomenon, then the regeneration of a society's capacities after such a trauma is essentially impossible without social cohesion.[1] Social-psychological experience teaches that such cohesion is best achieved with the help of scapegoats. [2] The scapegoat function can be transferred onto individuals, smaller or larger groups, but also onto whole countries or ideologies. A decisive part of post-Communist historical discourse was therefore devoted to making Communism in general fulfil this function. Communism as an ideology, and the personalities, groups and parties which represented it, were made responsible not only for the economic and social decline of the countries which it ruled, but also for national tragedies.

Besides the responsibilities of individual Communists and groups of Communists, the question of how to evaluate the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War was a further central theme for public discussion in all countries of the former Soviet camp. To what extent was the Soviet Union a liberator? Was it not just a new conqueror? Is Soviet guilt comparable to Nazi guilt? How can one compare the Gulag to the Nazi concentration camps? The themes of the historians' dispute in Germany in the 1980s surfaced, but nowhere in the former Soviet satellite countries did they lead to a cathartic discussion which would have facilitated the post-Communist cohesion of these societies. Instead, it led to new divisions.

Sociological appraisals and political science analyses agree that historical themes played an important role in post-Communist elections. Views about historical questions have helped to form the structure of post-Communist societies. Among these questions, the history of refugees, expulsion and forced emigration plays an important role. These events affected more than thirty million people [3] and their fate was hardly mentioned in the Communist times; social turbulence is therefore only too understandable. The potential for hatred between neighbours was deliberately suppressed for many years. Traditional conflicts over state citizenship in ethnically mixed border areas also resurfaced. The same questions became the main pillars of several different national master narratives. I would like to illustrate my own general thoughts on this with two case studies.

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