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have built their identity as part of the parliaments; they have become
what they are because they have been involved in the parliaments.
To answer your question quite simply, I think that a number ofEu–
ropean intellectuals who have spent a lot of time abroad and whose
works have been circulating in Eastern Europe are very active at this
moment in the region, such as Alex Alexiev, who is an advisor to the
Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and Aleksander Smolar in Poland. There are
many East European intellectuals who live abroad but who return quite
frequently to the region. Among the liberal intellectuals in Eastern
Europe, I think that there is great appreciation for the ideas of those in–
tellectuals who have spent time in the West.
Adam Michnik:
I agree with Vassily Aksyonov that there is no quiet
awaiting us, no order. I don't know if it's a good thing, but we will
have to live with it. I'll give only two examples. Serbia: Milosevic for
me is an example of a Communist with a xenophobe's face. The presi–
dent of Georgia is anti-Communism with a Bolshevik face. They both
want an ethnically pure state. My quarrel with Susan is not that she does
not like an ethnically pure state and I do like it - because I don't like it
either. I'm only saying that today we are witnesses of a great wave of
these kinds of utopias. When the Iranian revolution exploded and
Khomeini came to power, I thought it was total absurdity. Yet it turned
out that this was just the first scenario of what could happen in the
contemporary world. I promise you that Islamic fundamentalism is not
the only fundamentalism that we can witness today.
As far as the role of intellectuals who lived abroad is concerned, they
were very, very important in Poland. The principles, the democratic and
cultural ideas of the last decades were created by those who emigrated or
in the confrontation between the emigres and the people who stayed in
the country. As soon as the underground publications appeared, the first
authors to be printed were mostly those who lived in emigration, like
Czeslaw Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski, and Witold Gombrowicz. I'm
against the mystification of the role of an intellectual in the contempo–
rary society. I think we have to accept that we are facing a paradox
here. The intellectual, the writer - and here I agree with Susan that the
writer and the intellectual are not the same - the more repressed the so–
ciety is, the more significant the intellectual's and the writer's role be–
comes. To answer the question, I think in Russia the divisions between
the Slavophiles and the Occidentophiles, or in Hungary the quarrel be–
tween the urbanists and the ruralists, predates Jeffrey Sachs. All my life it
has seemed that someone always has to be found guilty. Once it was
Trotsky who was guilty of everything - and now it is Jeffrey Sachs.
