Anyone who looks back to 1989, the year of the “Wende” or transformation, from today’s perspective is confronted at first with an odd paradox. Back then, intellectual opinion formers unanimously declared the annus mirabilis to be a momentous caesura of world-historical proportions. Today, barely 20 years later, that once ubiquitous belief in miracles is practically gone.
It seems that only recently the talk was of the start of a new epoch; nowadays, the term forgotten revolution is circulating through the eastern-central European media. This is also referenced in many contemporary positions of artistic photography and video art collected in this exhibition, at least indirectly. Notwithstanding all their individual differences, they come together in their expression of a certain distance vis-à-vis the hopes that were raised, which in some places were linked to the launching of a new order. Far from large projections or even syntheses, rather it is various forms of recounting that come to the fore, the irritating and irritated registration of contradictions in a present that – if one listens to Clifford Geertz – apparently can only be “grasped piecemeal”. As in 1964–1982 under Leonid Brezhnev, when Socialism renounced its utopian promise of a new world, some of the images here reflect a withdrawal into the private sphere, or an ironic game with competing alternative possibilities of identification. That appears to be the most appropriate strategy in the confrontation with a reality that long ago rejected clear terms, a reality that we in general describe as post-Socialist.
By the time the tenth anniversary of the “transformational year” came around in 1999, there were early intimations of how shallow the roots of collective memory were. Ten years ago, the only major celebrations were in Berlin and Prague, where George Bush, Sr. and Mikhail Gorbachev represented the two superpowers. At least on the level of symbolic dramatization, the importance of 1989 was thus reduced, almost unnoticed, to the overcoming of the east-west split. Today we know that the interpretation put forward then may be challenged from at least two angles. On one hand, there has been talk of a return of the Cold War, at least since the Georgia-Russia conflict of August 2008. It may also to be seen as a suggestion that hardly anyone – in the East or West – believed the story that the great confrontation had come to an end. On the other hand, the seriousness of the east-west split before 1989 is increasingly a topic of discussion.
There is even confusion about the extent to which 1989 plays a role today. The confusion arises primarily because it is impossible to write about history without interpreting the past. That also applies to the period between 1989 and 2009. Without a doubt, these two decades represented an intensely compact period. Much of what happened in that extremely busy year of 1989 is nearly forgotten now. The fall of the Berlin Wall has become the eclipsing icon of the period. Nowadays, who remembers the live broadcasting on Soviet TV of the first Congress of People’s Deputies debates in March 1989? And who recalls that Soviet troops used poison gas to break up a demonstration in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on 9 April 1989, killing 20 people? And does anyone still remember that in the spring of that same year, the Ferghana Valley was the scene of bloody clashes between Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks, ending with the hasty evacuation of more than 16,000 people to other Soviet republics?
These and similar events are barely relevant to us, because they don’t fit into the framework of the history presented to us today. And so each of these suppressed stories may trigger personal, to some extent also contradictory narratives. In their shimmering contradiction and ambiguity, they raise not least the question of whether it is even possible to relate a single story that is valid in every place where 1989 left its mark. Ultimately, it addresses an area that embraces eastern Europe and the Soviet regions of Eurasia, a territory that stretches from Berlin to Riga, from Minsk and Moscow to Tbilisi and Tashkent. Not accidentally, this very space – which western observers lump together into kind of artificial regional unit under the vague concept of post-Socialism – is actually one of the most heterogeneous regions of the world. To convey its enormous breadth using one single indicator, this region includes countries like Estonia, whose gross national product of $20,000 per capita approaches the level of Spain, and countries like Kyrgyzstan, whose GNP of about $2,000 per capita is on a par with Mauritania in Africa.
One could deduce from these figures that the construction of a regional unity becomes plausible only through the slightly condescending Western view that remains fixated on the Socialist past, seeing only inherited structural and mental obstacles to development. One could extend this notion by saying that this view is not only foreign, but also leads us astray. Anyone who focuses solely on discovering homo sovieticus – a creature with an acquired propensity for inaction – will lose sight of the enormous potential for creative inventiveness with which the people in this region have adapted to the confusing times that descended upon them with the collapse of Socialism. This holds true particularly in societies such as those in Georgia or Armenia, where the change of political system brought about not only the dissolution of the previous state order, but also war and the collapse of public infrastructure. The nearly complete breakdown of public electricity and water supply was a bitter feature of everyday life for years. This was devastating and demoralizing, not least because this catastrophe affected exactly those people whom the Socialist program of modernization had catapulted into rapidly expanding urban centres only a few decades before. People living, for example, in prefabricated high-rise apartment buildings that were growing more dilapidated by the day could not even fall back on the resources of traditional village life when developing coping strategies. This led to the radical collapse of people’s day-to-day lives, lasting well into the 1990s. This collapse is a theme in some of the works presented in the exhibition. The new reality contrasted quite sharply with experiences of the relatively recent, final period of Soviet Socialism. Even if we now refers to this period as one of stagnation, it was then that the urban middle classes in particular became accustomed to a modest level of prosperity. Given the background of shock and loss due to the transformation, there is a tendency to glorify this earlier period today as a Golden Age, whether in private recollections or in public discourse. What really begs for explanation is the fact that the inevitable massive frustrations caused by the collapse of expectations for the future did not create a breeding ground for radicalism. This remains a profound enigma to anyone trying to understanding the effects and after-effects of Socialist paternalism. The answer is to be found primarily in two different but closely connected talents that distinguish the people of the former USSR, as they see themselves. Anyone who lived through the upheavals of Soviet history, when those in power invariably used transformations decreed from on high to turn their subjects’ lives upside down, generally learned not only to adapt to unfavourable circumstances by falling back on a knack for improvisation, but also developed the essential survival skill of subtle irony, with which to view the absurd dictates and rituals to which they were subjected. Above all, irony provided distance – distance from conditions that were often unbearable, but also from the mimicry and hypocrisy forced upon all who had to demonstrate loyalty to a cause that they had long ago stopped believing in. Some of the artistic works in this exhibition bear witness to the fact that this hidden cultural resource also helped people cope with many an outrageous demand linked to the transformation.
Such experiences and interpretations do not fit readily in the framework of common Western meta-narratives. Oddly enough, aside from a few fragmentary exceptions, none of the countries of Eastern Europe and Eurasia that were swept up in the transformation came up with significant alternatives to the dominant Western narrative – at least, no alternatives that could close this gap. This may have many root causes: capitulation to an overpowering Western influence; the inability to make sense of the confusing times and great shocks following 1989, the year of transformation; or a lack of social and political stability that would permit reflection on contemporary history in these regions and countries. This represents a loss not only because so many stories remain untold, but also because it is also evident – especially in the so-called post-Soviet space – that the lack of a basic social consensus regarding the recent past contributes repeatedly to profound bewilderment and sharp polarization. Not only is there a lack of consensus regarding the interpretation of events. There also is a failure to agree on what actually happened. This text, as it unfolds below, will question the currently circulating narratives, most of which stem from the West.
The narrative that doubtless had the most powerful effect, long determining the course of our deliberations on the significance of 1989 and the aforementioned end of the Cold War, focuses on the triumph of democracy and the market economy as the two pillars of modern Western life. This interpretive framework influenced German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s ideas about a catching-up revolution, and American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s dramatic formulation of the End of History, subsequently called into question, also draws on this imagery. The same applies to the Return to Europe, the slogan proclaimed by many Eastern European intellectuals, including East German Jens Reich and Hungarian György Konrád. All these figures of thought are guided by the notion that in the final analysis, Socialism proved to be a disastrous mistake, a mistake that has to be corrected. Such unbroken optimism seems hard to imagine nowadays. In this vein, the American NGO Freedom House pointed out a significant increase in authoritarian tendencies in its 2008 report on the status of the political transformation in the USSR’s successor states.
But it is not only the empirical failure of the expansion of the Western model of democracy that raises doubts about the narrative. The counter-narrative of self-colonization through the adoption of Western models, recounted today by many a critical mind in Eastern Europe, was unable even then to accurately reflect the self-image of many active players. Members of the East German civil rights movement were not the only ones who wanted to pursue a Third Way and hoped for a reinvention of politics beyond the classical Western party system. In the former Soviet Union, too, the shift towards political competition and pluralism of opinions began in the days of Perestroika with the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” We know today that nothing became of it. The same holds true for importing ready-made models of democracy from the West, which in many places now function merely as colourful facades. That is dangerous, because time and again the routine recourse to Western role models encourages the paralyzing notion that talking and acting, discourse and practice need not have anything to do with one another. Russia is an exception in this instance; by inventing the formula of sovereign democracy, it attacked the pre-eminence of the West on its very own territory. This conceptual innovation has significantly influenced the reconstruction of recent history. Among other things, it results in the mutation of the public perception of Russia’s first freely elected President, Boris Yeltsin, from a courageous pioneer of freedom and democracy to a perfidious (or at least naïve) traitor who undermined Russia by institutionalizing a system corrupt beyond compare, thereby playing into the hands of Western imperial interests. It is surely no coincidence that the largest successor state to the collapsed USSR challenged the hegemony of the West on the level of discourse as well, producing the most important counter-narrative based on its revisionist view of recent history.
To see this line of argument merely as another variant of a “typically Russian and anti-Western stance” would fall short. We can discern signs of similar processes in the predominantly anti-Russian Baltic region, even if they are taking place within an opposing ideological framework. There, too, the history of the transformation is being partially rewritten. There, too, one finds talk of treason. And again, this accusation is directed against the protagonists of the years 1989 to 1991, who are now blamed for not being radical enough in their endeavours towards democratization and for having acquiesced to a cowardly pact with the old elites. The negotiated revolution, which Western research on transition declared to be the recipe for successful political system change, and which relies on an alliance of moderate new elites with old elites willing to reform, appears, from this perspective, to be the beginning of the end of all hopes for a truly new start. Anecdotes about privatization scandals and examples of corrupt members of the old nomenklatura helping themselves to whatever they could get their hands on are given a prominent place in these narratives. In Western discourse, such lines of argument are often prematurely brushed off as populist, even though they can certainly tie into many people’s experiences and memories.
An additional narrative about the significance of 1989, which also is rooted mostly in Western discourses and which should be brought into dialogue with dissenting Eastern voices, replaces the hopeful story of the breakthrough to freedom and democracy with a gloomy parable of relapse into 19th century nationalist stereotypes. However, in contrast to the thrust of identical, mostly Western commentaries, which were also reproduced in the East, it was not Enlightenment ideals that made people take to the streets but rather nationalist passions that Socialism had only superficially neutralized, and that were reawakened by charismatic figures such as Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania or Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia. Empirical evidence in support of this rhetoric is not at all lacking; it resonates with the West’s practically furious marginalization of the East, which it accuses of being unable to learn and of being trapped in a recurring loop of romanticism, whereas the West supposedly arrived in the post-national era long ago. It is true: In East Germany, in the autumn of 1989, the slogan of ein Volk (“one people”) that would finally be unified doubtless contained more potential to mobilize than the rallying cry “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), which demanded opportunities for social involvement. In the rhetoric of the new Baltic, Ukrainian and Caucasian tribunes of the plebs, there was no lack of slogans invoking national greatness. In Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Republic of Moldova, this became the spark that triggered bloody ethnic conflicts.
And yet – Western chastisement of post-Socialist nationalism misses quite a lot due to arrogance. Not only does it remain blind to its own clinging to essentialist categories. Above all, it remains ignorant of achievements related to the use of nationhood as a formula for legitimation, achievements that hold a prominent place in many counter-narratives. There is no other explanation for the fact that the three Baltic republics – the former Soviet successor states most suspected of nationalism – are also the only former satellites where the project of institutionalizing democratic structures is widely considered to have borne fruit – followed by Ukraine, eyed no less critically, which used its Orange Revolution as an opportunity to dismantle an authoritarian presidential system (disregarding all other domestic turmoil), in contrast to Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Beyond empirical evidence, the tandem of nationalism and democracy makes theoretical sense as well. The nation – one might cogently argue – evidently provides the only means for escaping the quagmire of dilemmas of transformation. After all, the project of transformation requires a stable social consensus to be able to implement its reforms successfully. In the course of introducing market mechanisms, it seems that people have been doing everything they can to polarize society, splitting it into winners and losers. For this reason, the reforms repeatedly threaten to saw off the narrow branch of consensus along which they move. So much for the other side of nationalism, often overlooked in the West, and whose greatest merit in Eastern countries lies in having contributed towards establishing governmental structures that are in a position to act. Where the situation is different, as in broad areas of the space once organized under the Soviet Union, it causes the most severe problems, doubtless including the inability to limit endemic corruption and egoistic self-interest on the part of powerful individual actors. This perspective, which determines many people’s perceptions and experiences, changes our view of those regions of the post-Soviet space that display blatant shortcomings in democratization, but that are nevertheless frequently cited as examples of authoritarian yet somewhat stable statehood. The Western-type, critical post-national position overlooks much, including how commonplace the extreme violence is with which social conflicts are routinely handled. However, if we focus only on ethnic violence, which doubtless continues to exist, we lose sight of other problems, such as the countless struggles between rival factions within the elite in many post-Soviet states, carried out with extreme force. To illustrate, we point here to a few examples that are discussed astoundingly rarely, and that we know strikingly little about. Today, there is no consistent narrative – whether in Tbilisi or in Harvard – about the so-called Georgian Winter War in 1992, which laid the groundwork for the ousting of President Gamsakhurdia, elected a few months earlier in a landslide victory. The same holds true for the overthrow of Elchibey in Azerbaijan in 1993 or the bloody massacre in the Armenian parliament in 1999 during which eight members, including the speaker and the minister of defence, were murdered. And one could keep adding to the list of these barely considered, oft forgotten events. What matters most, however, is that all these events can barely be perceived through the lens of prevailing narrative structures. The consequences are major. Even in societies affected by such excesses of violence, people are unsure of what has happened. As a result, countless conspiracy theories thrive on this unstable ground – theories that can postpone for quite some time an urgently needed basic consensus, notwithstanding the post-modern insight that “the one great narrative” is impossible. In the end, only speechlessness remains, largely because democratic norms are used in the constitutions of many post-Soviet countries – in blatant contrast to a political practice that is flagrantly at odds with these norms – but also because narrated and experienced histories often diverge enormously from one another. Our 16 artists from eight countries affected by the transformation processes do not overlook these phenomena. Bearing artistic messages of very telling times, they stand as witnesses amidst a turbulent world.
