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There Is No Freedom Without Bread!: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism

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Adherents to the conventional Western view of the Cold War will be surprised by Pleshakov's book. With fine research and a good command over relevant primary sources, he provides impressive accounts of the political bickering and, what he terms civil wars, over decades in all communist East European nations, except Yugoslavia. In so doing, he demolishes naive notions that have been relentlessly pounded into us for forty years. After reading the book, no one should believe the self-glorifying slogan that "we won the Cold War." Pleshakov, for this historian, provides a major contribution to what I believe is the correct conclusion, namely, everyone lost during the Cold War.

He starts, quite correctly, in World War II with Catholic Poland, the nation which suffered the most and with admirable objectivity and balance describes wartime and post-war events. He focuses in Karol Wojtyla who, later as the Polish Pope, makes a decisive contribution to the fall of communism. While weaving the dramatic tapestry of Poland, Pleshakov skillfully and appropriately selects relevant historical facts and literature and synthesizes them in ways that enhance the reader's understanding of complex events. He fulfills the profound task of the historian to connect seemingly unconnected events into a meaningful whole.

This is not a book that pays tribute to anyone. It is not a paean nor panegyric to anyone. It relentlessly describes realistically the personal characters and deeds of Gomulka, Walesa, Jaruzelski, Kadar, Gorbachev, Honecker, Zhivkov, Havel, Ceausescu, et al., the good and the bad, the ironies and the duplicities and the successes and failures.

What emerges is an eerie similarity and not its opposite to Western political machinations. Each of the East European nations was differentiated in its internal political-cultural and economic patterns. None were really dominated by Moscow to the extent to which Western views would have it. There was only one true dictatorship and that was Ceausescu's Romania, and he acted as a dynasticizing aristocrat mixed in with plenty of the habits of Wall Street bosses and current Western politicians. All were surprisingly nationalistic and, with the possible exception of Ulbricht's and Honecker's East Germany, each was bound more to its own nationalism than to ideological international communism, (an element too much neglected by U.S. politicians also during the Vietnam War).

Unable to control the discontented people, discord, contentiousness and bickering arose in all of them due to economic shortcomings and maltreatments. Pleshakov is brilliant as presenting the political and, at times, highly personal and intimate unfolding and evolving of the politicians gradually losing control more and more and desperately trying to retain it. New factions arose, new movements, poets, priests, students and opportunists, all called for reforms and promised solutions.

The Soviet Union under Gorbachev, suffering from enormous economic burden wrought by corruption and the military cost of Afghanistan, was indifferent to the domestic problems of its presumed satellites. Gorby told them it was their domestic problem and he would not interfere. That encouraged more pressures for internal reforms and the various civil wars eventually toppled communism.

Pleshakov's book is laced with fascinating anecdotes and minor events that succinctly add to the drama. Here we have Kissinger proposing to the Soviet Union in '89 a "U.S.-Soviet Condominium" over Europe to prevent European mischief and Ceausescu daringly criticizing Russia's invasion of Afghanistan among many elements that will intrigue the reader and keep him fascinated from the beginning to the end.

While Pleshakov is brilliant at presenting micro and macro political events at the personal and governmental levels and concludes that there is no freedom without bread, he does not explain sufficiently why there were catastrophic economic failures. That would require another book. In the epilogue, he describes the looting that materialized after the fall of communism and correctly relates it to the fact that democracy also involves social engineering and that free markets can impoverish a nation just as much as central planning. Though he doesn't say it, one is left with the implied conclusion that ethics is all important and needed.

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this November is sure to witness a multitude of new books, republications, retrospective news stories and countless replays of Ronald Reagan's stirring 1987 Berlin speech ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!").
But what we can be sure of is that there will be few in-depth news reports, and many of the same tired, superficial conclusions about Cold War winners and losers. (In the end, it was not Gorbachev who tore down the wall, but masses of young Germans, after a confused, weakened East German leader misspoke.)
And so a book like Pleshakov's is a breath of fresh air. Delving deep into the events leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire, Pleshakov portrays them in the context of domestic imperatives. Within each regime were those for and against the status quo, and most times events were the result of these two groupings clashing with one another in some guise, independent of larger, international forces. The 1989 revolutions were less battles of Germans or Romanians against occupying Russians, than Germans versus Germans, Romanians versus Romanians.
Chock full of revelatory details, There is No Freedom Without Bread! offers invaluable context for anyone interested in understanding how, and why, the world fundamentally changed two decades ago.As reviewed in Russian Life.

Constantine Pleshakov's little volume is an excellent summary of what socialism and the "New Order" of 1944 meant to those who lived it between Berlin and the Black Sea. As such it is an excellent companion to Jules Grandin's "The Last Colonial Massacre" on the cold war in Latin America. Like Grandin, Pleshakov writes in an anecdotal, rambling style that can frustrate those not as familiar with the subject as himself; and similarly focuses on one country in the region as exemplary of the whole, in this case Poland.

The book is like a tour of an overdug archaological field. Pleshakov goes out expecting to make fresh digs and extract new bones and surprisingly manages to do so, exploring little-traveled corners that provide new perspectives of the whole ground. He overturns the notion that "Ronald Reagan won the cold war," a mentality that attributes victory only to generals and statesmen, slighting the common soldier and civilian. One point I'd make: seeing Solidarity Poland as the beginning point of 1989, he slights the continuous tensions from 1944 that were as much buildup to 1989 as Lech Walesa scaling the gates at the Lenin Shipyard. Like Fidel Castro's assaulting the Moncada Barracks, it became a worldwide symbol of insurrection, but this process did not begin with either. If Walesa's act planted the seed of the mass movements of a decade later, it was Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" a decade before that inspiring perestroika and glasnost, without which there could have been no mass movements from below.

Interesting also is the relatively "benign" character of this repression, compared to not only the Soviet system as it evolved within the USSR, but - revealingly - to the US response to dissent in its own sphere in Latin America, as shown by Jules Grandin. In cold war eastern Europe there was violence, repression, even an occasional small massacre; but nothing like the prolonged "states of emergency" that settled over Central and South America like pigeons from hell, feeding off the US military budget as well as the flesh of their own citizens. This is not explained by the difference between Europe and the Third World: eastern Europe saw two world wars at their worst there, culminating in the Holocaust. I cannot envision Nixon or Kissinger sitting in the National Security Council and plotting responses like Andropov, Gromyko and Co. did re: Afghanistan (p. 98): "We will look like aggressors, and we cannot permit that to occur." Unthinkable!

Two final criticisms: the "thaw" of '56 did not actually begin with Khrushchev's badly-misnamed "secret speech" of that year, but rather with Beria at Stalin's death. This overturns the conventional wisdom, derived from Khrushchev's self-serving account, but it seems true that, like Stalin, Khrushchev executed his rival just to steal his ideas and make them his own. Also, on p. 238, Pleshakov writes of "a spontaneous, pro-free market movement in Poland." I don't know to what he refers - certainly not Solidarity led by Lech Walesa, whom he describes elsewhere as not impressed with capitalist Europe in its treatment of workers. Surviving Solidarity activists from 1989 have been similarly dismayed by the course of things in post-'89 Poland.

This book is a good overview of mediocre leaders overcome from below, lacking the creative insight that could have met these challenges and saved their system, responding with too little too late. Only by drowning eastern Europe in blood, as US allies did Latin America, could they have otherwise survived. Perhaps Marxism's greatest legacy in this region is that, in the end, they were too "humanist" to do so.

After reading this month's Foreign Affairs and seeing the glowing review that this book garnered in a crowded field of books addressing this topic, I immediately bought myself a copy. Then, I saw what else he wrote and I groaned. The Tsar's Last Armada might have been the most poorly written work of history I've ever read - never has it been more apparent that English was not the author's first language than it was there.

Sadly, this is also apparent in this work. The book itself is rather sound; well-researched, concise, lively, and compelling. His depiction of Pope John Paul II's life and role in the demise of Communism was strong, and his ability to synthesize the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as a whole as quickly and clearly as he did is a commendable achievement.

Yet, this is a freshman English comp's professor's worst nightmare. He peppers the narrative with trite terms such as "All and all," "the dark side," and "rolling the dice." At times, I half-expected him to rhetorically inquire as to "where's the beef?" The use of literary metaphors such as Kafka's "Metamorphosis" are equally useless in driving the prose. As with the "Tsar's Last Armada" I really wanted to enjoy the book more than I did, but I couldn't get past the how the lack of literary polish took away from an otherwise quality effort.