VlADIMIR TISMANEANU
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imminent collapse was the economic bankrupcy of state socialism and the
awareness that only a free market could guarantee economic recovery.
The command economies had failed to provide the goods that would
have justified the sacrifices ceaselessly -imposed on the population.
The external factors cannot be underestimated: without the major
changes in the Kremlin and the redefinition by the Gorbachev-Yakovlev–
Shevardnadze team of the Soviet international strategy, including the
new doctrine of the de-ideologization of international relations, the
changes in East and Central Europe would have been much slower and
certainly more disruptive and violent. The threat of a foreign interven–
tion had ceased to function as a deterrent, especially after the Soviet
withdrawal from Mghanistan. It appeared clear to civic activists in East
and Central Europe that the Soviet Union would not be interested in
any adventure that would jeopardize its new image and the relations es–
tablished by Gorbachev with the West. The opposition of the "Gang of
Four" (Nicolae Ceausescu, Milos Jakes, Erich Honecker, and Todor
Zhivkov) to Soviet-inspired reforms was actually counterproductive from
the viewpoint of local communist elites, who completely lost any chance
to play a significant role in a post-totalitarian transition period.
The nature of the upheaval requires a special analysis because it also
explains the difficulties encountered by these countries during their
transition periods. First, one must note that the 1989 revolutions chal–
lenged a false principle of authority, based upon universally execrated lies
and pseudolegitimacy. The changes were revolutionary because they re–
placed one form of political power through another one: all these
regimes were mythocratic dictatorships whose only reason to stay in
power was the ideologically-defined predestined role of the working class
and its avant-garde party. Once this ideological fallacy was debunked as a
mere rationalization for the usurpation of power by an incompetent and
corrupt bureaucracy, there was no foundation for its survival (with the
exception of fear, apathy, and inertia). The upheaval was a synthesis of
two trends: on the one hand the anticommunist surge and on the other
the search for alternative institutional and axiological solutions. What has
happened in East and Central Europe since 1989 has been therefore the
simultaneous self-destruction of the communist political culture (with its
traditions, habits, attitudes, mentalities, values, behavioral patterns) and,
on the "positive" side, the reconstitution of civil societies (atomized and
almost destroyed by communism) and the structuring of genuinely
political forms.
Communist regimes had appropriated the rhetoric of the left, al–
though in reality they were authoritarian dictatorships based on the ma–
nipulation of both nationalism and internationalism. Hungary's Kadar
was somewhat different, with his old-fashioned indifference to national
