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BORIS KAGARLITSKY, MOSCOW
20 LOST YEARS
The East European countries began celebrating jubilees, the historians and political scientists in the Western countries hold conferences and discussions: twenty years have passed since the “autumn revolutions”, which started the democratic epoch in the former Communist countries.
It is the worst time to observe the anniversary. The new regimes in Eastern Europe are suffering acute social, economic and political crises. Illusions are lost, the public enthusiasm of the late eighties provokes the people’s sneers and nothing but. The main problem is not that after the lapse of 20 years since the transition to the new system, Eastern Europe is still much poorer than Western Europe, that the economic conditions of the great part of the population have worsened since the Communist epoch, and that people feel nostalgic for bygone social protection and predictability. The main problem is that the public life has no prospects, goals and sense.
The democratic procedures have come to normal, but they are becoming more and more meaningless. We can elect one parliamentary or presidential candidate, but all of the candidates are as like as two peas in a pod and, in reality, they are equally disgusting. Mass media are free, but they contain neither ideas, nor discussions, nor even analyses. The Communist propaganda myths are removed from the education system and from the school textbooks only to pave the way for new myths, which are still more absurd and imposed still more aggressively than the previous ones.
The 1989 change was connected with the mass movement of East Germany’s citizens to the West. The reasons for that movement were political rather than economic. Then a joke about a dog crossing the Western Germany-Eastern Germany frontier was popular: “Is the food bad there?”, “No, I am not allowed to bark!”.
Now people can speak on different subjects, but they do not wish to do that.
The East European societies are both unhappy about the current situation and demoralized. That’s why when the people become much angrier than they were in 1989, nothing like the 1989 actions takes place now. The Communist regimes (in spite of the lack of civil freedoms, chronic commodity shortage and bureaucratic control) cultivated in the people optimism, self-respect, faith in themselves and confidence in their future. In 1989 all those positive traits of the people got the regimes, which had formed such psychology and culture, into trouble. The philistines wanted to become full-fledged citizens demanding the rights and freedoms. After all, they were formally given the rights and freedoms, but those people lost their informal right to participate in public life, which they had had under the Communist rule, though the right was restricted.
No wonder that only one issue, which is far from being optimistic, can be seriously discussed in Eastern Europe today – why have the reforms resulted in a failure?
The answer is simple enough: the transition from one system to another, even though it was accompanied by democratic slogans and mass actions, was, in fact, implemented by the elite who solved their own problems reestablishing the public institutions for their own convenience and benefits. The East European optimistic society was the extremely naïve society, which is one of the reasons for its optimism. As a result, the people let the elites take advantage of their enthusiasm and their hopes. Today the former national heritage is shared among people from high society and branches of transnational corporations. The naivety of the late eighties has become a thing of the past. The population came to know what is what. But at present illusions are replaced by cynicism, which is bad for carrying out social reforms.
Boris Kagarlitsky is a Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements
October 26, 2009
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