The Road To Disillusion From Critical Marxism To Post Communism In Eastern Europe

The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.

The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.

This critical history of, and guide to, Soviet studies aims to take stock of the achievements and shortcomings in Western research on the region's politics and to serve as a "who's who" of Western Sovietologists, identifying many prominent political scientists from the former Communist states.

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. The essays offer a theoretical argument that emphasizes the importance of institutional adaptations as a foundation of communist resilience. In particular, the contributors focus on four adaptations: of the economy, of ideology, of the mechanisms for inclusion of potential rivals, and of the institutions of vertical and horizontal accountability. The volume argues that when regimes are no longer able to implement adaptive change, contingent leadership choices and contagion dynamics make collapse more likely.

Scholarly interpretations of the collapse of communism and developments thereafter have tended to be primarily concerned with people's need to rid themselves of the communist system, of their past. The expectations, dreams, and hopes that ordinary Eastern Europeans had when they took to the streets in 1989, and have had ever since, have therefore been overlooked - and our understanding of the changes in post-communist Europe has remained incomplete. Focusing primarily on five key areas, such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this book explores the expectations and goals that ordinary Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and also the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation. The analysis is based on extensive interviews with university students and young intellectuals in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Estonia in the 1990s, which in themselves have considerable value as historical documents.

The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.

Why has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.

As well as promoting debates about liberal democracy, the dramatic events of 1989 also bought forth a powerful revival in the interest of the notion of civil society. This revival was reflected mainly in two broad tracts of literature. The first was primarily focused on the events surrounding the Solidarity movement in Poland and the tumultuous events of 1980-81. The second was concerned with the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ more broadly. Following the events of 1989, there appeared a number of works sharing the common central argument that civil society played a key role in the overthrow of these Communist regimes in 1989