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was not one of liberal values. East Germany, for example, had not experi–
enced democracy since the destruction of the Weimar Republic by the
Nazis in 1933. De-Nazification in that part of Germany amounted basi–
cally to the elimination of all political adversaries lumped together as
enemies of "the people's democracy." The myth of the Aryan nation was
simply replaced with the myth of the "first German state of the workers
and peasants." According to this myth, the German proletariat did not
cooperate in Hitler's genocidal policies and National Socialism was simply
the most extreme form of the bourgeois counter-revolution. During the
first years of the GDR, Walter Ulbricht and his associates deported to
Buchenwald not only former Nazis, but also Social Democrats, liberals of
all sorts, and other opponents of any political despotism.
Not much different were Bulgaria, Hungary, and even Poland, where
the democratic and pluralist moments were interludes rather than durable
political stages. One can thus extend Umberto Eco's analysis of fascism to
communism's inheritance: " ... even though political regimes can be over–
thrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime
and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of
cuI tural habi ts, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives." ("Ur–
Fasci sm," The
New York Review oj Books,
June 22, 1995). Even if
communism as an ideologically-inspired autocracy is dead, what remains is
a nostalgia for the pseudo-equality, solidarity, even fraternity that the
Bolshevik model simulated. This is the ground on which successor
mythologies can emerge.
Post-communist fascism is of course one of these. When people are
scared of the avalanche of risks, when they have all their icons crushed and
tradi tional boundaries (mental and social) explode, they turn toward their
past. This past is often idealized, romanticized, mythologized.
It
acquires a
unique consoling power. People listen to the mythographers who tell them
that their present agonies are abnormal, unnatural, that they are just the
result of "plots" fomented by aliens. They try to find a refuge in tradition,
in the cult of ancestry, and in the exaltation of primordial roots. Indeed,
the post-communist world is the optimal territory for the rise of new
varieties of fascism that would fuse leftovers of the Bolshevik model and
psychological features of fascist salvationism.
The buds of this fusion can be detected in most, if not all, post-com–
munist societies. These new mythologies are vindictive and compensatory:
they promise immediate gratification by offering uniforms, marches, uplift–
ing symbols, and easy targets for stigma and thus superiority. The new
mythologies inherit from Leninism its Manichean simplicity, its basic
allergy to any heretic temptation, while eliminating the systematic form.
They are deliberately vague, protean, easily revisable. Russian demagogue
