Kati Marton

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A child in communist Hungary

Little girls, big story

Nov 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

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Capitalist rulers are so much nicer

Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America. By Kati Marton. Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $26. Buy from Amazon.com

COMMUNIST bullies had a nasty trick when dealing with opponents who had children: they took them away, sometimes to be adopted by childless party stalwarts, in nastier cases to be sent to orphanages and treated as the children of criminals, or even to be consigned to an asylum. In retrospect it seems astonishing that Endre and Ilona Marton, a married couple working for American news agencies in Hungary at the height of the Stalinist era, exposed their two small daughters to such risks, their greatest fear. But they did. Decades later the younger, Kati (pictured with Bill Clinton), has pieced together her family’s missing history, a series of torments that epitomises the human cost of the communist seizure of central Europe.

Ms Marton’s main source is the now declassified secret-police files compiled by the AVO, Hungary’s version of the KGB. They chronicled minutely her parents’ professional and social lives, which moved in ever-decreasing circles as the communist grip on Hungary tightened. Sometimes the result is welcome: an AVO snooper’s stolid note brings back long-forgotten memories of a summer picnic. More often it is grim: almost everyone, it turns out, was informing on the Martons, from neighbours to the nanny. Through it all, her father baffled his persecutors, who could not believe that the suave, stylish polyglot was just what he claimed to be: a hard-living, hard-playing newsman. His undoing came when a traitor in the American embassy reported that he had lent to officials there a copy of an official document, the state budget. Not exactly a secret, but pretext enough to send him to be broken in the AVO’s dungeons.

Few grown-ups come out well in this story. Hungarian officials were callous and uncomprehending. Friends proved unreliable. Mr Marton’s American employers dithered, while American diplomats doubted the Martons’ reliability. Mr Marton’s bravado remains incomprehensible, even to his adoring daughter 50 years later. In the midst of it all are two little girls, precociously aware of the dramas swirling around them, left crying on the pavement when their mother is snatched from their home to join their father in jail. A Utah couple, reading that the girls were being brought up by strangers, offered, in vain, to adopt them.

Ms Marton avoids being too self-centred or sentimental as she tells the story. She highlights uncomfortable discoveries—her parents’ infidelities, that her grandparents perished at Auschwitz—as well as noble ones. Her descriptions of Hungary, of communist history and of secret-police tactics are all sharply drawn. So is the portrayal of the family’s life in America: they managed to escape after the 1956 uprising. The happy ending comes as a great relief after so many nerve-racking pages.

Czechoslovakia and historical vinegar

Czechoslovakia

A chequered history

Nov 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Czechoslovakia was born out of trickery and died in failure. Only up to a point

Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed. By Mary Heimann. Yale University Press; 406 pages; $45 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OUTSIDERS tend to have a soft spot for Czechoslovakia. Poignant music by Leos Janacek, Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana recalls the struggle for nationhood that culminated in the creation in 1918 of a commendably decent country. Western perfidy at Munich brought its dismemberment at Nazi hands. Stories of courage and anguish leap out from the pages of novels by Milan Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), Josef Skvorecky (“The Engineer of Human Souls”) and Ivan Klima (“Judge on Trial”). Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned philosopher-president, exemplifies the magical triumph of the Velvet Revolution, 20 years ago this week.

Hooks for outside affection abound. Czechoslovaks were strongly Atlanticist. The country owed its existence to President Woodrow Wilson, and Tomas Masaryk, its first president, had an American wife. The combination of high culture and glorious architecture reminded Westerners that it was communist captivity that made “Eastern Europe” backward and miserable. Guilt chipped in too. The West betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938. It stood by as the Soviet-backed Communists seized power in 1948, and again when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. And Czech and Slovak dissidents were far more agreeable than their weird and prickly counterparts elsewhere.

Mary Heimann’s scalpel shreds this uplifting version of history. Inter-war Czechoslovakia was essentially a fraud, she argues, both in its composition and its reputation for liberalism. The wily duo of Masaryk and Eduard Benes (the dominant politicians of the years that followed) duped the victorious Western allies into agreeing to the creation of a new country. Named after only two of its ethnic groups, it ignored the interests of all the others: chiefly Germans, who outnumbered the Slovaks, and Hungarians. Its unjust treatment of the Sudeten Germans, stranded by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, ultimately caused the first Czechoslovak republic’s downfall.

After pointing out the intolerance, censorship and semi-authoritarianism of pre-war Czechoslovakia, Ms Heimann, an American-born historian at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, then highlights the anti-Semitism and autocracy that followed the Munich agreement. Sympathetic observers have tended to blame that on Czechoslovak disappointment with the West; she suggests that it was a culmination of existing tendencies. The Nazi occupation that came next met minimal resistance. Her vinegary attention then turns to the diplomatic manoeuvring of exiled Czechoslovak leaders such as Benes and Jan Masaryk, son of Tomas. History normally portrays them as exiled patriots engaged in a gallant struggle. Ms Heimann, however, sees a story of Czech guile and Western gullibility. How was it, exactly, that a bunch of failed émigré politicians were able to gain the status of a legitimate government-in-exile, she asks?

The three post-war years before the communist seizure of power in 1948 come across not as a blessed breathing space between two totalitarian regimes, but as a horrible period of racial revenge: rape, robbery and deportation inflicted on guilty and blameless Germans alike. The Communists then created what she rightly calls a “Stalinist hell”—but with the support of quite a large chunk of the population.

Nor is Ms Heimann fooled by the Prague Spring: not an exuberant experiment in creating “socialism with a human face” but the by-product of a factional fight in the Communist Party. Even the 1989 revolution, she argues, only accelerated the changes already being planned. Soon after, the invented country of Czechoslovakia fell to pieces; the reader can almost hear her applauding.

Myth-busting is fun but it can easily become tiresome.

Ms Heimann ably highlights the holes and contradictions in Czechoslovak history. Her archival research and attention to detail is exemplary. But she spoils her case by sounding spiteful. The story of the revival of the Czech language in the 19th century deserves more than mockery. Although she pays fleeting tribute to Mr Havel she cannot resist qualifying it by saying that he “appears to have had” moral courage in addition to “an idiosyncratic brand of ambition”; that, she argues, fooled the West into seeing post-communist Czechoslovakia more favourably. This approach shamefully underplays the gritty determination of the Communist-era dissidents and of their friends in the West, who often felt they were fighting a hopeless battle.

Ms Heimann is right to highlight the messy opportunism that surrounded the break-up of the Habsburg empire. Czechoslovakia was an artificial creation. But so, in the end, are all countries. Inter-war Czechoslovakia treated Germans badly. But it was still a far more attractive country in terms of civil rights (for example in the treatment of Jews) than any of its neighbours, especially Hitler’s Germany. The post-war punishment of the Germans was indeed deplorable—but the aftermath of wars is often horribly messy. Czechoslovak communists may have been exceptionally revolting; but the democrats were often magnificent. Clear-eyed historical reminders are always welcome. Like everyone, Czechs and Slovaks have plenty to be ashamed of. But they have plenty to be proud of too.

China is coming

Europe.view

Looking eastwards, even further

Nov 19th 2009
From Economist.com

Could China fill a power vacuum in eastern Europe?

AS THE countries of eastern Europe bump nervously between a near-neutralist Germany, a revisionist Russia and an absent-minded America, the search is on for a powerful outsider, with strong interests in the region, willing to put all kinds of clout behind the smaller countries’ sovereignty and independence.

Once, Britain filled that role. The Royal Navy helped the Baltic states win their independence after the first world war. Britain also ruled the southern part of Georgia as a protectorate from 1918 to 1920 and sent a daring expedition to Baku to push back the Bolshevik presence there. But Britain’s imperial star, with the shame and glory that it brought, has waned. Who can fill the gap?

Maybe China. It has plenty of reasons to develop a presence in eastern Europe, ranging from trade to geopolitics. It has expressed interest in buying Estonian Air (currently up for sale by SAS, its owner). That would give China a “domestic” European Union airline and access to a low-cost airport. Or imagine that China lends Ukraine some money to pay next year’s gas bill; perhaps in exchange for a favourable privatisation of some asset long-coveted by the Kremlin.

The result of such moves would be to place a conspicuous foot in Russia’s front yard. From a Chinese point of view, that is potentially provocative, but also perhaps quite satisfying. It would also have other benefits. Beijing would be glad to have some more allies inside the EU or in its waiting room, in addition to the ones it already has, such as Cyprus. A NATO country would be a bonus. Eastern Europe could also be an attractive low-cost manufacturing base to increase market share inside the EU, dodging protectionist pressures, higher transport costs and other impediments to feeding the European desire for cheap goods directly from China itself.

A rising Chinese presence would put eastern Europe back on the map. But flirting always brings the risk of seduction. Russia may be a nuisance now, but it is declining. Fending it off by giving a rising China a big bridgehead in Europe could look a dangerous mistake in 20 years time.

Another problem is values. Some ex-captive nations (Czechs and Lithuanians particularly) feel sincere outrage about the plight of occupied Tibet. The Dalai Lama (pictured above) is an honoured visitor, not a pariah as he seems to be in Washington, DC under Barack Obama’s administration. Reluctance to cosy up to communists of any stripe is still a reflex in most of the region. When slave labour camps are part of your family history, you may feel a bit queasy about seeking friendship with a country whose system of prison labour looks unpleasantly similar to the Soviet gulag. Two countries—Latvia and Macedonia—came close to establishing full diplomatic relations with Taiwan (“Free China” in cold-war terms) in the 1990s. “Red China” wants to dominate the world. Why help?

On the other hand, worries about principles prove no barrier to economic and security ties where countries like Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan are concerned. If warmer relations with China enable the ex-communist countries of Europe to brace themselves better against a Russo-German squeeze, many may argue that this is a price worth paying.

A final argument is the idea that eastern Europe could help China change. Russia’s chaos and missed opportunities over the past 20 years are seen as a warning by Chinese policymakers and opinion-formers. They have paid less attention to the success stories. Demonstrating that a multi-party system and the rule of law can take root after decades of one-party dictatorship is a potentially powerful message.

Libel latest

Reforming libel law

A city named sue

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It is time to reform England’s archaic libel laws

ONE kind of foreigner loves English libel law. Anyone anywhere in the world who can prove that someone in England has bought, read or downloaded potentially defamatory material about them can start a court case. Merely initiating a defence generally costs the author or publisher at least £50,000 ($84,000). If the case ever comes to court, the costs are much higher. In 2007 Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian tycoon, went to a London court to sue a Ukraine-based website about an article published only in Ukrainian—though read in Britain—and won. In a similar case a wealthy Saudi sued an American author for claims made in a book published in America which sold a handful of copies in Britain. He won too. Neither defendant was represented in court.

But foreigners who mind about free speech do not like English libel laws. Several American states have now passed laws entitling victims of “libel tourism” to counter-sue their persecutors for harassment. Big American news organisations have spent millions defending themselves against libel suits brought in London. As their budgets shrivel, so does their willingness to fork out. Some are threatening to stop selling in Britain, and to block access to their websites from British internet users. Their concern has pricked the House of Commons media committee to look at whether the law needs changing: it is due to report shortly.

Feebler than the sword

Libel law in England is not just expensive and wide-ranging (Scotland, with its own legal system, is a bit different); it also one of the most claimant-friendly systems in the world (Ireland comes a close second). That is because the law requires the defendant to prove that what he said is true, fair or legally privileged; it does not offer the strong free-speech defence that America’s first amendment provides. This hefty burden of proof, coupled with high costs, chills debate and hampers investigation into everything from consumer affairs to genocide.

Pressure groups dealing with issues such as war crimes are campaigning for reform. Scientists have got involved too. A prominent British science writer, Simon Singh, is facing a potentially ruinous libel action brought by a body representing chiropractors (who offer a form of alternative medicine with quasi-religious roots and maintain, among other things, that spine massage can improve the body’s “innate intelligence”). Mr Singh called chiropractice “bogus”. England’s senior libel judge, Mr Justice Eady, ruled that to defend this description, Mr Singh must prove that the chiropractors were not just deluded, but knowingly peddling false remedies. Mr Singh is appealing.

Like other media organisations, this newspaper has a vested interest in changing English libel law (it regularly spends large amounts of money defending itself, usually successfully, in libel actions). It is therefore important to note that there are arguments on both sides. Defamation can ruin lives; it is right that the law should offer redress to the wronged. Being a foreigner should not disqualify someone from defending a reputation in England; in some cases, English courts may be the only hope for the righteous.

But England’s libel law has become a playground for lawyers, sparring on behalf of the powerful. That needs to change. A good initial reform would be to rule that libel cases may be heard in English courts only when the material concerned has been deliberately published in England. That would stop the most absurd instances of libel tourism. Other sensible ideas under discussion include capping damages and strengthening the existing public-interest and fair-comment defences—in effect shifting the burden of proof.

Another sensible reform would be to allow cases to come to court only after an attempt to settle them amicably outside it—the current emphasis in family-law disputes too. That would offer a cheap and quick way of resolving those arguments that arose out of mistakes, where a prompt apology or a correction matters much more than damages. It would also make life easier for humble claimants with genuine grievances but without access to expensive lawyers. And it might make English law less appealing to those who use it to intimidate anyone investigating their guilty secrets.

Those were the days, my friends

Europe.view

The beginning of the end

Nov 12th 2009
From Economist.com

Looking back at the era of a cold warrior

“MR GORBACHEV, tear down this wall”. Ronald Reagan’s stirring speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12th 1987 was not the death blow to communism, but it did highlight the West’s renewed confidence in demanding what had previously been impossible. Though the president’s advisers egged him on, American diplomats were horrified at what they felt was provocative behaviour: they saw their job as managing relations with communism, not trying to overturn it.

Those glory days were the subject of a day-long conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California on November 6th. A motley collection of heroes from east and west (with your columnist tagging along as a moderator) gathered to discuss the great communicator’s role in the collapse of communism and what his approach could still offer today. Nancy Reagan, frail but immaculate, presided. Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev sent messages of congratulation. Freedom fighters such as Mart Laar from Estonia, Leszek Balcerowicz from Poland and Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic recalled how Reagan’s approach had inspired them and demoralised their captors.

Many of the surviving members of the Reagan foreign-policy team turned up too, including John Lehman (navy secretary), Dick Allen (chief foreign policy adviser) Richard Pipes (Russia expert) and the towering figure of George Shultz (secretary of state).

It is easy to forget what a daunting task these men had faced when they came to office in 1980. America was traumatised by Vietnam, intimidated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, humiliated by the Iranian hostage crisis, and near-bankrupted by the economic downturn (will an incoming administration in three years’ time face something similar, wondered some people gloomily). The best option in foreign policy seemed to be presiding over inexorable Western decline as peacefully as possible.

Admittedly, whatever was happening in the West, communism would have been in trouble. Discontent among the public, divisions in the elite and economic failure would have all been gnawing away at the regimes’ stability and legitimacy. The confidence that Reagan exuded and inspired made the western star burn brightly, lifting captives’ spirits and dazzling their jailers. The America of Jimmy Carter or the Britain of the mid-1970s hardly provided a compelling alternative to communism.

In retrospect, the efficiency and decisiveness of the Reagan administration is striking. It arrived in office promptly and en masse, filling all important posts within weeks (nowadays getting the team straight within the first year is regarded as smart work). It knew exactly what it wanted to do and did it (not something that could be said so easily of the current administration). John Lehman recounted with gusto how he sent a big naval force to the north coast of Norway, against the howls of protest from officials who thought it would be provocative. Far from it: it put a direct stop to the de facto Soviet naval takeover of the region.

Communist propaganda depicted Ronald Reagan as a brainless gunslinger. In fact he was well read and wrote reams. And as George Shultz pointed out in his lunchtime speech, he used American armed force sparingly, on only three occasions—in forestalling a Marxist coup in Grenada, in bombing a terrorist headquarters in Tripoli, and in an operation against an Iranian ship that was planting mines. “Reality, strength, diplomacy” were his watchwords. “And no empty threats”. He also underlined Mr Reagan’s desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons—something on which Mr Shultz continues to work. The thousand-plus assorted Reaganites in the audience clapped that too.

It was hard not to feel a bit nostalgic for the days when grown-ups were in charge.

discussing 1989 with my then boss

Here (from the Economist website)

europe view no 157--VVF for president!

Europe.view

An easterner to the front

Nov 5th 2009
From Economist.com

Could a former president of Latvia make it as the European Union president?

OPTIMISTIC Latvians are thin on the ground these days. The combination of fractious politics and a dismal economic outlook blunts the enthusiasm of even the most cheerfully patriotic soul. All the more reason, therefore, to applaud the announcement that the country’s former president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is running for the job of president of the European Union.

At first sight, Ms Vike-Freiberga’s chances seem vanishingly slim. And at a second glance they don’t look much fatter. On the plus side, she speaks perfect French. She is a woman. And she has no big enemies. Observers of Latvian politics in the years 1999-2007 (admittedly, not exactly a mainstream hobby in Brussels) remember her as an uncommonly effective president of that country. She proved a powerful bulwark against over-mighty tycoons bent on suborning Latvia’s independent institutions and a strong defender of probity in public office.

If big European countries cannot agree on a big personality from a big country, perhaps they might like a big personality from a small one (Ms Vike-Freiberga’s protocol-heavy grandeur is the stuff of legends among outsiders used to the laid-back style of other Baltic politicians). Her backers recall that she emerged from nowhere in 1999 after a deadlock between Latvia’s powerbrokers. Perhaps she could pull off the same trick in Brussels. Her life story—a refugee who fled the Soviet occupation in 1944, became a professor in Canada and then returned to usher her homeland into the EU and NATO—is captivating. She would bridge the gap between the eastern and western halves of the continent and talk to Barack Obama as one North American to another.Unlike some Baltic politicians, she is not detested in Russia (which matters, apparently). During celebrations in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war she went to Moscow, while her Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts stayed away in protest at what they saw as Soviet triumphalism.

But anyone who overlooks the seemingly insuperable obstacles to her candidacy has probably been over-indulging in Black Balsam, Latvia’s hallucinogenic national drink (it tastes of burnt orange peelings). She has no serious backers, is all but unknown, and comes from a country that is widely regarded as an ill-governed basket case. Indeed, some fear that her candidacy may detract from the chances of Latvia’s real EU star, the energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs, gaining a serious portfolio in the new commission.

But Ms Vike-Freiberga’s Quixotic bid for high office does have two virtues. One is to show that Latvia has impressive public figures as well as the eccentric, inadequate and questionable ones that have tended to be on public display since she left office. That may be something of a morale-booster. Not many east European countries could boast a candidate of her calibre. The other is to highlight the continuing under-representation of people from the ex-communist countries in top jobs in international organisations. Whether in the higher ranks of NATO, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Central Bank, or the European Union, the easterners are conspicuous by their rarity or invisibility.

That is partly a matter of time (the post-communist generation will be better candidates than their parents), and partly the result of disunity, bad tactics and outright sabotage from the home side when an east European candidate does have a chance. But at least in part it also reflects an informal cartel among the countries of “old Europe” in dividing the spoils of office. If Ms Vike-Freiberga’s candidacy does nothing more than to shake that up, then it will have been well worth it.

CEE economics

Eastern Europe's economic woes

Down in the dumps

Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The ex-communist economies have not collapsed. But finding new ways to catch up with the West will be hard

Illustration by Peter Schrank

EVEN at the height of the ex-communist countries’ boom in 2006, almost half their citizens felt they lived worse than in 1989. Yet that glum verdict on 17 years of liberalisation, privatisation and stabilisation was tempered by another finding. Most of those polled by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said they were optimistic about their children’s prospects.

The worry is that the global economic crisis has dented confidence in the future and intensified gloom about the present. Fast growth eased dissatisfaction with corrupt politicians and bossy bureaucrats. It offered at least the chance of better health care and education, which lag far behind western standards. But the average decline in GDP this year is a whopping 6.2%; recovery is expected to be slow. So east Europeans face higher taxes, bigger debts, less public spending, lower pay and fewer jobs. They do not have the same shock-absorbers as in the west—which is where, in the eyes of many, the crisis originated.

That could prove a toxic mix, yet so far the fallout has been limited. Support from the European Union, the IMF and other lenders, after initial hesitation, was unprecedented in size, scope and speed. Tens of billions of dollars of outsiders’ money staved off a catastrophe. So far, no currencies have collapsed; no country has defaulted; no banks have faced runs, or been cut adrift by foreign owners. Politicians preaching protection, state control or other charlatanism have remained on the fringes. In its latest annual transition report, the EBRD says reform has largely stalled, but not reversed. In countries such as Latvia and Hungary, governments have shown a masochistic delight in following IMF prescriptions for fiscal tightening, even at the cost of likely electoral oblivion.

It makes little sense to talk of the ex-communist countries as a single region. Resource-dependent economies such as Russia and Kazakhstan have one set of problems (such as diversifying and spending export revenues wisely). Open manufacturing economies such as Hungary and Estonia have another (chiefly, maintaining competitiveness). Poland, bolstered by strong domestic demand, will be the only economy in the EU to grow this year (though its rising public debt is a worry). Two ex-communist countries, Slovenia and Slovakia, have already adopted the euro. Estonia may be next. Countries to the east and south tend to be poorer, glummer and worse-run.

For those in or close to the EU, growth came from strong exports of goods and services and big inflows of capital. The net effect was beneficial but the disadvantages are now apparent: heavy dependence on single industries (eg, cars in Slovakia) and on west European demand. Foreign capital inflows may have been too big or too quick, leading to a consumption and construction splurge, fuelled by reckless lending to firms and households, often in foreign currencies. Inflows of money from abroad have fallen dramatically, or in some cases even reversed. The volume of syndicated loans going to the region, for example, has fallen to roughly a sixth of the pre-crisis level. Restarting these capital flows is a high priority—preferably with more prudent rules for the credit market.

Alongside this problem is another: finding a way to share the pain of restructuring private-sector debts among governments, borrowers and bankers. Dealing with this product of past excesses causes much headscratching for policymakers. Debt overhangs—of over 100% of GDP in some countries—will curb growth in future years, hurting everyone.

Outside support has headed off a vicious circle of falling exchange rates, lower investor confidence and failing banks (though that may still loom in Ukraine, where vote-hungry politicians have just shredded a deal with the IMF). But many states face another grim outcome: years of low growth caused by uncompetitive exchange rates and sluggish productivity. That is what happened to Portugal after it joined the euro in 1999. For ex-communist countries in the euro, pegged to it or hoping to adopt it soon, the Portuguese example merits careful study.

The ex-communist economies’ competitive advantage may have shrunk, but it is still a big asset. Cost-cutting in western Europe may produce more outsourcing to the east. Some also hope to find new niches, based on brainpower and creativity. But they must also make their countries work better. According to the EBRD, four areas stand out. One is improving the legal system. Slow and unpredictable justice is a turn-off for foreign investors worried about contracts and property rights (see article). Second is better regulation. Despite improvements from EU membership, businesses still battle with profit-choking red tape. Third is a better social safety-net. A feeling that life is unfair and precarious sharpens the divide between winners and losers and risks political upsets. Fourth is competition. Informal barriers to entry and old networks of communist-era pals keep bits of the economy off limits to outsiders, at huge cost to efficiency.

Getting state institutions to function better is easier to discuss than to accomplish. It has long been clear that intangible factors to do with national culture and levels of social trust play a bigger role than explicit rules in ex-communist countries’ fortunes. The EBRD highlights “values, attitudes and practices” in determining what constitutes “acceptable behaviour within a firm…or by government officials”. Economics offers little guide to that.

1989 books

The fall of Communism

Wall stories

Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

How communism in eastern Europe collapsed, and what came next. Scholars and journalists give their account

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. By Stephen Kotkin. Modern Library; 197 pages; $24. Buy from Amazon.com

1989: The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall. By Peter Millar. Arcadia; 220 pages; £11.99. To be published in America by Arcadia in April 2010; $16.95. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

The Year that Changed the World. By Michael Meyer. Scribner; 254 pages; $26. Simon and Schuster; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. By Victor Sebestyen. Pantheon; 451 pages; $30. Weidenfeld and Nicolson; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

'89: The Unfinished Revolution: Power and Powerlessness in Eastern Europe. By Nick Thorpe. Reportage Press; 320 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. By Mary Elise Sarotte. Princeton University Press; 307 pages; $29.95 and £24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHY all the fuss about 1989? Twenty years on, the idea of millions of people yearning for the humdrum joys of daily life in welfare capitalism no longer seems so startling or moving. Familiarity has dimmed the excitement of the freedoms won: to travel, to shop, to exchange currency, to change jobs, to move house, to think, to speak. Experience has scarred the belief that “Western” life is a self-correcting nirvana, where officials are efficient, politicians public-spirited and justice incorruptible. For about a third of the world’s population, the fall of the wall is probably history, not real life.

The best way to appreciate the significance of 1989 is to remember what it was a revolution against. The new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic novel, “In the First Circle” (Harper Perennial, $18), captures better than any other work of fiction the quintessence of communist rule at its Stalinist peak: all-pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal.

By 1989 that system had become more rotten and less frightening, especially in the east European satellites of the evil empire. But the climate of fear and lies was still there, with political prisoners, murders, beatings and blackmail, especially in the grimmer places such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Eight hectic months in 1989 turned the winter so starkly described by Solzhenitsyn into spring.

The new edition of the novel differs subtly but importantly from the version published in English in 1968. That was based on a self-censored text that the author had prepared in the hope of getting it published in the Soviet Union. It left out the hero’s espionage for America, the Christian faith of his friend and other details that the Soviet authorities would have found utterly intolerable. The longer text is deeper and darker.

For all its malevolence, the Soviet empire was like a Ponzi scheme, dependent on ever-increasing amounts of money. When that ran out, its regimes imploded. That is the story told in Stephen Kotkin’s slender but snappy book, which concentrates on demoralisation and divisions in what he calls “uncivil society”, the circles of power. This side of life, he argues, was more important than the dissidents, who were lionised in the West as “civil society”, but ignored and unknown at home.

Mr Kotkin is right that bankruptcy forced some regimes to make concessions, but he greatly overstates his case. Czechoslovakia was under little immediate economic pressure to change. As the grim examples of Romania then and North Korea now both show, a sufficiently determined communist leadership can survive economic failure through repression. Moreover, 1989 is the story of people as well as processes. Although the reformers and ship-jumpers inside the regimes were important, in most countries it was the dissidents who forced the pace of change.

The real point, though, is that fitting a dozen complex stories into a single analytical straitjacket is a nonsense. Communism collapsed differently in every country, as the journalists who reported the story could see. Their accounts published for this anniversary are necessarily episodic: too much was happening for one person to witness it all. But each book carries the vital touch of personal experience.

The best read is the irreverent and engaging account by Peter Millar, who writes for the Sunday Times among other papers. Fastidious readers who expect reporters to be a mere lens on events will be shocked at the amount of personal detail, including the sexual antics and drinking habits of his colleagues in what now seems a Juvenalian age of dissolute British journalism. He mentions his long-suffering wife and children rather too often, but the result is full of insights and on occasion delightfully funny. The author has a knack for befriending interesting people and tracking down important ones. He weaves their words with his clear-eyed reporting of events into a compelling narrative about the end of the cruel but bungling East German regime.

View from the top

At the other end of the spectrum is the Olympian perspective of a former Newsweek bureau chief for Germany and eastern Europe. Michael Meyer ranges widely and not always deeply. His best reporting is on Hungary, particularly on the decision by the reform-minded leadership there to open the border with Austria. That destabilised the East German regime, first creating an embarrassing outflow of refugees, and then forcing the Berlin authorities to restrict travel freedoms still further. This is a competent and professional account—though it does not quite merit its claim to be the untold story.

A more solid and less pretentious book comes from Victor Sebestyen, who has covered the region since the 1970s. His book deals more thoroughly with both history and geography. He starts the story, rightly, with the election in 1978 of John Paul II, the Polish pope. He highlights Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the other two giant figures who ended the communist epoch. Unlike his rivals, the author devotes at least some space to developments in other continents.

Few journalists covering the region lived there in the communist era, inevitably giving their accounts a second-hand feel. An exception is Nick Thorpe, who moved to Budapest in 1986 and has mastered Hungary’s beautiful, impenetrable language. His account of the interplay between dissidents and reformists inside the regime shows a level of sympathy and nuance that is missing from more ambitious accounts—and makes his own chapters on events in other countries look skimpy.

Almost more interesting than his description of the collapse of Hungarian communism are Mr Thorpe’s insights into what came next, told through the unlikely prism of obstetrics. Abominable practices stayed in place after 1989, treating birth as a medical emergency in which painful and humiliating procedures such as episiotomy, shaving and enemas were mandatory. Parents’ wishes were habitually ignored. Mr Thorpe and his wife decided they wanted their children born at home: a normal procedure in western Europe but illegal in Hungary. The medical bureaucracy’s cartel-like resistance gives a pungent flavour of the lingering communist-era mindset that the region still has to shake off.

No whiff of the personal contaminates Mary Elise Sarotte’s scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, she has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives and other libraries for documents that illustrate the decision-making (and lack of it) that year. The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places.

Some of it, however, is commendable. After the Tiananmen massacre in June, communist leaders could not quite summon the willpower to use mass murder to stay in power. On the Western side, it is sometimes deplorable. For all her fiery freedom-loving speeches, Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s prime minister, privately loathed the idea of German unification and tried to sabotage it, covering her tracks as she did so. The then American president, George Bush senior, comes across badly too, giving tepid and unemotional responses in public and missing the chances that 1989 presented.

Ms Sarotte debunks myths: the opening of the wall on November 9th was not planned, let alone forced. It was the result of a bungle: a bureaucratic rule-change misleadingly announced and over-excitedly reported. German unification was not inevitable: outsiders, the new East German leadership and many West Germans wanted something else. It came thanks to a combination of electoral pressure in the East and highly effective arm-twisting by the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.

Missing in all this is a powerful voice from the countries concerned. Writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet, and Czech novelists such as Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima and Josef Skvorecky helped the world understand life under communism. But no writer from the region, in fact or fiction, has produced a matching account of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and its aftermath. The way in which the countries of central Europe, the Baltics and the Balkans emerged from communist captivity, made peace (mostly) with their history, and rebuilt the economic, legal, moral and psychological order destroyed five decades previously is a gripping story. It has yet to be fully told.The author comes across as more at home with her sources than with the region’s wider history. The pope, she writes, “continued to dominate the Vatican” in 1989. That is what popes normally do. In analysing the question of whether NATO’s eastward expansion broke a promise to Mr Gorbachev (it didn’t), she overlooks the worries of countries in central Europe about Russia’s ominous drift back to old habits in the 1990s.

1989 revisited

The world after 1989

Walls in the mind

Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The ex-communist countries of central Europe have fared well, mostly, since 1989. But they still have to shed their image as poor and troubled relations

PICTURE yourself in a smoky café somewhere in the middle of Europe—Prague, say—in late 1989. Sipping muddy coffee sweetened with gritty sugar, served by a sullen waiter at a greasy table, you are discussing the future with friends. Their ill-cut clothes are in dull blue, brown and green, the hallmarks of planned-economy tailoring. Your foreign gear stands out a mile.

In the café window, posters tell of a revolution won (see article). One is a poignant death notice for “Comrade Fear”—the once omnipresent and omnipotent embodiment of the totalitarian regimes, newly toppled by candles, flags and courage. Another poster shows a simple starburst, with the words “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”. Religion, like so much else, is now a matter of free choice. But a third poster shows the task ahead. It depicts Europe divided by a cliff that runs along the old Iron Curtain. A precarious ladder leads from the gloomy east to the sunny western uplands. “Back to Europe”, it reads. Before the communist era, countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were at the centre of the continent, not its impoverished and isolated backwater.

The cliff looks dauntingly steep. Climbing it means long queues at Western consulates before facing the suspicious officials inside them. Western Europe may have cheered the revolution, but it fears a flood of riff-raff from the east. Abroad, easterners feel like humiliatingly poor relations. Their savings and salaries are all but worthless. You buy the coffees without a glance at the bill. When easterners head west, they pack sandwiches.

Ghosts of the past are everywhere. Some are welcome. Old songs, long-banned, are on the radio again. Heroes once vilified by official propaganda are celebrated. Other ghosts are more sinister. Central Europe before communism was no paradise. What will emerge as the region defrosts? Will Hungarians be content with their constricted borders? Will the Germans, so brutally deported from Silesia and the Sudetenland after the war, now demand justice? Will it be safer to be a Jew—or more dangerous?

Nor are the more recent spectres of the evil empire laid to rest. Will the secret police, still hunkered in their bunkers, give up their power peacefully? What will happen to the millions of guilty secrets in their files? Scariest of all, what happens if the wind from the east changes? Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops still occupy the region. Will they leave peacefully? Facing all those questions is a fragile new political elite: dissidents, oddballs, turncoat communists and university professors, blinking at the task of building justice and prosperity on the ruins of communism.

Central Europe 20 years later, if glimpsed from 1989, would have seemed a glorious pipe-dream. A generation has grown up in free and law-governed societies. Fears of economic ruin and political chaos have proved unfounded. Ten countries have climbed that cliff and joined the European Union. Two more, Croatia and Albania, have joined NATO.

For all the unsolved and new problems facing the region now, it is voters, not outsiders, who determine who rules and how. Judges, lawyers and police have shed the shackles of Communist Party control. Courts may be slow, politicians meddlesome and bribery a problem. But nobody can count on impunity.

The huge exception has been Yugoslavia, seen in 1989 as a template of multi- ethnicity and pluralism, a halfway house between centrally planned socialism and the harsh and distant world of Western capitalism. It is still an example, but a dreadful one. For a decade, the outside world was unable to stop rampaging ethno-nationalist militias turning ancient grudges into bloody revenge. Some 140,000 people died in wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, as authoritarian politicians purged their countries of those they saw as subversive or subhuman.

That was far worse than anything witnessed in central Europe before the war, though it still pales by comparison with the horrors of the Nazi era. Even outside ex-Yugoslavia, authoritarian and bigoted ideas still haunt the political fringe. Explicitly racist parties come and go in some parliaments; in Slovakia, one is in the government. But in no country over the past 20 years have they gained full political power. That is cause for relief and pride.

The economic achievements are barely less astonishing. At the end of 1989 it was easy to imagine the region staying mired in poverty for decades. Only the over-60s remembered how a market economy worked. For decades official propaganda had lambasted capitalism as akin to cannibalism. Industry was state-owned and run by party placemen. Management meant hunting for resources and then hoarding them, not dealing with costs, customers and competition. Foreign trade involved haggling with state planners in Russian, not closing deals in English.

So even granted the will-power to stabilise the economy, privatise state property and liberalise markets, would it work? As Lech Walesa, Poland’s first freely elected post-war president, noted, it is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup. Reversing the process is much harder.

Yet free prices, free exchange rates, free trade, free labour markets and privatisation have proved a colossal success. The profit motive—however ugly, sleazy or vulgar—unleashed the caged talents of millions of entrepreneurs. Foreign investors, at first deterred by scarce telephones, bumpy roads and obnoxious officials, have come in droves, bringing a huge transfer of management and technical know-how. The first wave came because of low labour costs. Membership of the EU attracted the next influx. The EU has improved life in other ways too, forcing the pace of reform as a condition of membership and providing billions of euros for modernisation. Borders once sealed by minefields are now just lines on the map. You can drive from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean without even showing your passport. Water and air are cleaner than in 1989, transport faster and safer.

For the young, flexible and ambitious, the past 20 years have proved a bonanza. For the losers—the old, the timid, the dim—life has been punishingly difficult (see article). Yet outside the former East Germany, nostalgia for the past plays no part in politics. Only in the Czech Republic does a Communist party still have a political role. Elsewhere, the former proletarian internationalists have rebranded themselves as slightly sleazy centre-leftists.

The third big achievement, alongside democracy and prosperity, is the partial restoration of public-spiritedness, trust, decency and kindness. Communism habitually imposed horrible moral choices: denounce your colleague, or your child will never go to university. It preached altruism but ingrained selfishness. Statistics can barely capture the legacy of 50 years of lies and fear. Freeing central Europe’s captive nations has proved far easier than freeing its captive minds. Most adults in the region spent their formative years under communism. Only when those in charge have no memory of totalitarian rule will communism’s shadow finally be lifted.

The biggest disappointment is the continuing power and wealth of the old system’s elite, who have proved much better at running the capitalism they decried than the socialism they preached. Party bosses and their secret-police henchmen successfully squirrelled money abroad, using it to buy assets cheaply in the chaotic years of the 1990s.

The western half of the continent can still seem far off when viewed from the middle. And vice versa. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s sharp-tongued, American-educated president, says Westerners privately regard people from ex-communist countries as “troublesome cripples whose views can be ignored”. Seen through the fug of a café in late 1989, 2009 looks pretty good. But central Europeans can be forgiven if they see the present a bit cynically.

Upcoming talk

Thursday 3^rd December

Rewriting History

A Critique of the Putin-Medvedev Approach

with Edward Lucas

6.30-8.00pm

Seen from the Kremlin, history is simple: the Soviet Union, with extraordinary sacrifice, liberated Europe from fascism and Europe should be grateful. Anyone who disagrees is a fascist. Stalin may have been bad in some ways, but he was an effective leader in difficult times. The Soviet Union had its flaws, but so do other countries. Criticism reflects double standards and jealousy of Russia's recovery.

This simplistic and triumphalist version of 20th-century history is the central plank in Russia's new ideology. Edward Lucas, a journalist and author who has been covering the region for more than 20 years, will show why it is not just mistaken but pernicious. The revival of Stalinist history is a threat to the countries of Eastern Europe--and a dreadful dead end for Russia.

Edward Lucas is the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist. He has been covering the region for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin's downfall and Vladimir Putin's rise to power. From 1992 to 1994, he was the managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tallinn. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. The New Cold War is his first book.

£5 Full / £3 Concession

Advance booking is recommended, tickets at the door subject to availability.

To book please call the Louise Blouin Foundation on 020 7985 9600, payment is required upon booking.