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Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library Chronicles)

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This is a useful short account of the collapse in 1989 of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Romania, and Poland.

In the 1980's many in the West hoped that the Communist system would be slowly undermined by the rise of an alternative "civil society", where organized progressive citizen groups would slowly establish support for a tolerant law based society. Kotkin argues that, with the great exception of Poland, this turned out to be a red herring. In countries like East Germany and Romania, he argues that there were only tiny numbers of active dissidents, no meaningful organized opposition and no significant "civil society". He argues that to understand the events of 1989 we need to instead focus on "uncivil society", the increasingly sclerotic and self-serving regimes. He argues that it was the regimes' failures, especially in failing to deliver acceptable living standards, which led to mass disaffection, withdrawal and ultimate regime collapse. Above all, the regimes seem to have suffered a paralyzing loss of faith in their own futures.

The Leipzig marches in East Germany are a fascinating example of a truly grass-roots movement. There was no organization for the Stasi to infiltrate, no leadership to be arrested, no leaflets to be confiscated. There was simply a widespread popular understanding that each Monday at 6:00pm a mass march would take place. So the regime's only potential coercive response was overt mass repression. But the high leadership was anxious to retain "plausible deniability" and thus avoided explicitly ordering the bloody repression they seem to have desired. Similarly the local commanders could see that they were being positioned as scapegoats, and were careful to avoid decisive action without explicit orders. And thus the apparently all-powerful regime became immobilized and impotent.

Some of the same dynamics seem to have played out in Romania, where the demonstrations in Timisoara and Bucharest seem to have been essentially leaderless events, driven by popular disaffection. In this case, Ceaucescu ordered explicit action, but local commanders prevaricated and foot dragged.

Poland is the main counter-example, where Solidarity provided an active well organized opposition, offering its own alternative world view. However, even in Poland the collapse came largely from within the regime. Kotkin argues that in 1988, no one in Solidarity expected to see free elections or a regime change anytime soon - these came about due to fumbled initiatives from within the regime itself.

The events of 1989 are a vast topic, on which much has been written, discovered, and argued. Each country followed its own unique course and no one formula can explain all that occurred. Kotkin is definitely not trying to provide a complete history of the period, but he does provide a useful focused study of his three target regimes and does make some good points around how their collapse was driven by internal failures, rather than by organized opposition.

This concise book is a well written and insightful analysis of the collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe. Kotkin and Gross adopt successfully a hybrid approach. They focus on 3 states where the dynamics of collapse were different - East Germany, Poland, and Romania - to convey the heterogeneity of events while also providing considerable analysis of the underlying structural flaws of Communist states that led to their demise. A distinctive feature of this analysis is that Kotkin and Gross focus on the features and behaviors of the governing elites rather than the dissident movements. Much of the writing on this topic tends to celebrate of the triumph of civil society against the oppressive regimes, but with the very important exception of Poland, dissident movements/civil society were not particularly powerful. In all other Eastern European states, membership in the Communist parties, for example, greatly outstripped participation in dissident movements. Kotkin and Gross emphasize the problems and decision making of the elites in the fall of Communist states, emphasizing the loss of confidence and willingness to abandon monopoly of power that characterized many of the elites. As Josef Skvorecky wrote in the Miracle Game, "the Party was like a church without believers but with an Inquisition."

How did these party-states, with their ability to mobilize large fractions of the population through party participation, monopoly of state power and economies, and potent security apparatuses, suddenly lose the capacity to use their weapons in the face of relatively modest opposition? The basic dynamic identified by Kotkin and Gross is the failure of Communist states to compete economically with the West. The leaderships of all Communist states were committed to economic modernization and raising standards of living. The poor economic performance of the Communist states, a particular problem for the East Germans who were constantly exposed to West German TV, undermined the legitimacy of the Communist governments. After about 1970, the relatively sluggish world economy and the reduction in Soviet economic subsidies exacerbated this chronic problem. In desperate efforts to escape economic stagnation, Eastern European governments turned to borrowing huge amounts from the West, and when borrowing failed to produce the desired effects, these governments were placed in intractable binds. Implicit in Kotkin and Gross's presentation is that some Communist achievements, notably the relative success of mass education in all states, and expansion of the working class that followed industrialization in Poland and Romania, created large social segments that were increasingly disenchanted with their regimes.

By the late 80s, and with the Gorbachev led withdrawal of Soviet guarantees to back up Eastern European governments, economic deterioration, widespread alienation of their citizens, and loss of elite faith in socialist dogmas resulted in fragile regimes. In Hungary, the regime was actively looking for a way out, in Romania, the military assisted in the fall of the regime, and in East Germany, official indecision at the higher levels of the regime allowed lower level officials to make decisions that undercut the regime. These structural factors allowed the actions of a relatively small number of courageous individuals to trigger popular surges in Romania and East Germany that brought down these governments. Implicit in Kotkin's and Gross's narrative is that events in different Eastern European states tended to be reinforcing and events in one state tended to undermine governments in surrounding states.

Within the limits imposed by the concise account required of a Modern Library volume, this is an excellent book. The emphasis on the behavior of elites and the heterogeneity of events in different Eastern European states is a useful corrective to popular, triumphalist impressions. The book also emphasizes the importance of Gorbachev and his supporters as both initiators and sustainers of change in Eastern Europe.

Having enjoyed Stephen Kotkin's "Magnetic Mountain," I was rather disappointed in the glib post cold war triumphalism of this effort. The book's basic premise is sound - that "Communism imploded" more as an intra-elite power struggle than mass pressure from a "civil society yearning to breathe free." But of this he makes some rather broad and facile generalizations.

He describes the Communist elites as an "uncivil society," but however appropriate the term I don't see them as any more so than the capitalist elites who brought the US and global economy to its knees two years ago, by exactly the same Ponzi-like behavior. To his credit Kotkin does reference this in his introduction, but glibly bypasses it as irrelevant to his thesis, when in fact this parallel pretty well demolishes his core presumption.

"Civil society" he defines as those who associate to defend civil liberties and private property, which was impossible under Communism (p. 9). By this blinkered logic, the liberals, students, and trade unionists smashed by the military regimes in Latin America in the 60s and 70s must not count as "civil society," since their oppressors were protecting private property and the global marketplace. Similarly, he discounts 35,000 striking Romanian workers who in en masse shouted "Down With the Red bourgeoisie!" - in 1977, 12 years before the revolution, three years before Solidarity. Perhaps their identity as working class unionists disqualifies them as civil society members. If so, it shows the bankruptcy of civil society concepts more than the Soviet-bloc governments themselves.

Kotkin also waxes on the absence of "organized" opposition - that is, leaders and groups accessible to outside observers - and then describes the '89 revolution as a "spontaneous bank run." Those familiar with Michael Melancon's account of the February 1917 Russian Revolution will recall his "myth of spontaneity" - that someone somewhere IS organizing, but so deeply imbeeded in the "second society" as to be invisible to ruling class types above: bureaucrats, policemen, journalists, academics, etc. No "evidence" is made available for their tracks to be followed, which protects their anonymity but also gives rise to theories of "spontaneity." Such was the case in eastern Europe, too. As it relates to Poland, see Lawrence Goodwyn's massive study on Solidarity, "Breaking the Barrier." There was always a "hard core" of social opposition - not necessarily the media-courting "dissidents" - around whom the masses rallied in moments of crisis. What looks spontaneous from the outside was a gestating social movement, magnetically attracting "loose pieces" to the mountain as the avalanche gained momentum.

Kotkin's main point is that Communism died because "a number of party officials preferred to become an asset-owning bourgeoisie" (p.10). True that, and this one sentence pretty much summs the rest of the book. Kotkin goes on to give us detailed accounts of how the globally changing economic order affected the three Communist states under discussion, and how it bankrupted them. A couple problems here: the same structural problems facing this "Red bourgeoisie" were the same facing their capitalist counterparts. The latter solved the problem by dumping industrial investment and chasing after financial, marketing, and hi-tech investment. This was not possible with their Soviet-bloc counterparts except by scrapping their factory-based proletarian system altogether: which is why the revolutions finally occurred when they did, and not - in Poland - in 1981.

Also, the main reason these countries and their "system" "imploded?" There was no "Fed" to bail them out! The supposed "civil society" from which Professor Kotkin writes was economically in the same predicament as the countries he studies, while he was writing about them. And the only thing saving it was the outside intervention of the state in subsiding another "failed system." There is more than just irony here, but the typical blindness of an academia still obsessed with cold war triumphalism. Only by regime change, as in the case of Poland, could these countries hope to come out from under their debts to Western governments and commercial banks. One uncivil society merely replaced another.

Kotkin also raises the question of Tiananmen Square's crackdown and influence on 1989. Without doubt it accelerated the final confrontation in Europe, for under glasnost no east European party leader could afford to imitate China without bankrupting his regime. When Ceasescu tried, his whole apparatus revolted on him. And ironically (as Kotkin does note) it's China that's copped the best of both worlds - proving again that the market and democracy are not necessary bedfellows.

In the west, we are often regaled with unquestioned stories of the fall of communism, most often the one in which the triad of Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, and Reagan collectively conjure the World-Spirit of neoliberalism and capitalism to defeat the Reds. It's an account that speaks to our need for heroism. Stephen Kotkin's account, however, is a revisionist one in that he claims the downfall of the Soviet Union (especially the bloc states in Eastern Europe) was much less exciting than we've been led to believe. It ended, he tells us, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Kotkin's approach is interesting in that it doesn't focus nearly as much on western intervention or containment strategies, but simply on the inner dynamics of the countries themselves, of their "civil" (that body of extra-governmental institutions including unions, churches, and universities) and "uncivil" societies (the bloated communist states). The core of the argument is that in each of the three states with which is he concerned - East Germany, Romania, and Poland - the leadership was so decadent, so blissfully unaware, and so inept that they didn't need much outside intervention to fall. They brought themselves down without much help.

The establishment of communism promised a better life for everyone, yet it was obvious how much they economically lagged behind the capitalist countries. In an effort to jumpstart technological innovation, they borrowed money from western countries, but soon realized that there was no market for the cheap, shoddy products that they were making. In no time, they were barely even able to make the interest payments on their loans. Debt skyrocketed, and most of the time, the answer was to put austerity measures into place - for people whose lives, they would tell you, were already quite austere already. To aggravate matters, hardliners were completely unreceptive to change. To admit that reform was needed was to admit that the ideological tenets of the state religion were somehow flawed. The extreme myopia and utter denial of the party heads only further catalyzed the downfall of the eastern bloc states.

The one egregious exception to the inefficacy of civil society is the case of Poland's Solidarity movement. Marx's reference to Poland as "indigestible" should have been a clue that it would be an outlier: it had an economy that had many heavily privatized parts (compared to other bloc states), which very well may have made way for union opposition and Solidarity ascendancy. John Paul I's timely death, to be followed by the election of John Paul II, was also fortuitous. Included in the section on East Germany, Kotkin's coverage of the St. Nicholas protests in Leipzig are especially good.

In a little-known piece called "On the Freedom of the Press" written in 1842, Marx said that often "government hears only its own voice ... It knows it hears only its own voice and yet it deceives itself that it hears the people's voice." That, in a phase, is the story of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, and the story which Kotkin renders so well here.

This book has a lot of information, but I found the writing style dry and dull. However, I did learn a lot about revolutions in Eastern Europe.

I will go out on a limb and say Kotkin is the best historian of the "why did the Soviet collapse" genre. This book and Armageddon Averted are great, concise and very well written.

I've read books on this topic, and we've had a great movie abotu it called "Goodbye Lenin." But this book is a strain to read. It drones on and on, with few interviews or case studies. It would've been better if there were more first-person accounts on how Soviet industry was rusting and how the government was mired in corruption.