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PARTISAN REVIEW
day from under communism not exactly intact - but somewhat stronger
than before. In areas like the Czech lands of Czechoslovakia, the liberal,
secular tradition of Bohemia comes again to the fore; on the other hand
in the case of Rumania, the lack of democratic traditions before the
communist takeover makes the transition to democracy problematic, and
the historical ethnic conflict with Hungary over Transylvania - sub–
merged for almost fifty years - reappears with
all
its force and violence. It
all appears as if nothing has been lost and nothing has been forgotten.
The German case brings this out most strongly: once the Berlin
wall disappeared, there disappeared with it the
raison d'etre
of a separate
East German state. Forty-five years of totalitarian control and a power
monopoly by a party that preached the uniqueness of the "first workers'
and peasants' state on German soil" just evaporated into thin air.
This appears to apply,
a forteriori,
to the Soviet Union itself It be–
comes clearer daily that the Soviet Union is disintegrating into its ethnic
and national components. Russian nationalism, with its orientation to
the Orthodox Church, its xenophobia and anti-Semitism, appears,
phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the discredited communist regime.
Ukrainian nationalism, with its adherence to the Greek Catholic
(Uniate) Church, especially in Western Ukraine, reappears as if seventy
years of communism never existed. And in the Transcaucasian and Central
Asian republics historical enmities (such as the Armenian-Azeri conflict
over Nagorno-Karabakh and so on) become the salient feature of
political life. The Jewish reawakening in the Soviet Union has also to be
seen in the context of this reemergence of a historical form of self-con–
sciousness which seventy years of virulent atheistic propaganda and some–
times vicious anti-Jewish measures did not succeed in obliterating.
In short, it appears that in reality totalitarianism is much less total
in its control than its own propaganda - and its enemies - alike have as–
sumed. For most Western observers, Soviet reality was what was written
in
Pravda
-
though there were, of course, sophisticated ways to decode
the obvious lies and blatant falsehoods propagated in its pages. What was
not always decried by Western observers was that beyond the
pays legal
depicted by the official organs of the party in power there always exists a
pays reel,
where people continue to live and act in almost complete inde–
pendence from official ideology and structures, even if they occasionally
pay lip service to them. Anyone reading Vaclav Havel's
Distllrbing the
Peace
must realize how strong this parallel civil society was even during
the height of communist repression . Western observers appear
to
have
been as surprised as the wielders of power in Eastern Europe by the brit–
tleness and superficiality of the official layers of these societies.
It
appears
that totalitarianism as a concept is much less helpful as an analytical tool
in explicating these societies than many observers imagined. Perhaps talk-
