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PARTISAN REVIEW
symbols that played into the hands of the mounting opposition. With
the exception of Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia, they were all ready
to toe the Soviet international line. It was therefore logical that their
repudiation had to be
antitotalitarian
(or, in the East European political
language, anticommunist) . Since communism had turned ideology into a
state religion and since Leninist ideology appeared to the people as the
name of their oppression, the revolts were also
anti-ideological.
Most of
these rebellions originated in the widespread frustration with the political
cynicism of the ruling elites and acquired therefore
antipolitical
dimensions.
That distrust of anything smacking of behind-the-scenes,
Machiavellian arrangements explains the current reluctance of people to
engage in political activism: politics is perceived as the marketplace of
social climbers, opportunists, imposters, and adventurers. In all these
countries, there was a general suspicion of governmental attempts to or–
ganize personal life and invade any domain of privacy. This explains the
antistatist
and
antihierarchical
dimensions of the upheaval as well as the
ongoing difficulties in building up new principles of authority. Although
it is not mentioned frequently, there is a current anarchist temptation in
Eastern and Central Europe that runs parallel to the search for statist
protection that can be called the
paternalistic temptation.
In countries like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the long–
beleaguered underground groups and movements spearheaded the spon–
taneous outbursts of discontent and provoked the nonviolent collapse of
communist autocracies. The roundtable negotiations and the peaceful
transitions
to
protopluralist forms of government in these countries were
guaranteed by the relative maturity of the civil societies and the disinte–
gration of communist elites, symbolized by the inevitable split between
the "hawks" (Stalinist conservatives) and the reform-minded
(Gorbachevite) liberals. At the same time, it is the tension between moral
apprehensions (the antipolitical viewpoint) and institutional obligations
that explains certain hesitations and reservations among former opposi–
tion groups.
Because civil society was underdeveloped or frail in Romania and
Bulgaria and because the communist elites were unable to offer any al–
ternative to their disastrous policies, the transitions were significantly dif–
ferent there. In Romania, the euphoria of the first days of the post–
Ceausescu period was followed by the bitter realization that the Na–
tional Salvation Front, instead of identifying itself with antitotalitarian
ideals, had only self-servingly and pragmatically appropriated them. In his
speech at a conference in Timisoara this spring, "Power and Opposition
in Post-Communist Societies," Nicolae Manolescu, one of Romania's
prominent intellectuals and currently the chairman of the Civic Alliance
