Shock Waves: Eastern Europe after the Revolutions

John Stanley is a policy advisor with the Ontario Government.

The democratic left has always had difficulty coming to terms with the
undemocratic left, the Communists. That difficulty becomes apparent in
discussions of the lands ruled by the Communists. A mainstay of the
American left, the American Friends Service Committee, supported John
Feffer’s research and travels through Eastern Europe. A reader might
therefore expect him to repeat the wide-eyed pronouncements of
distinguished, if blinkered, predecessors, such as Bernard Shaw and
Beatrice Webb, in commenting on events east of the Elbe. To his credit,
he recognizes that Communism in Eastern Europe was a dictatorship with
totalitarian aims.

Although Feffer is sometimes swept away by his own verbiage (“Eastern
Europe was a territorial Frankenstein monster . . .”), his analysis is
generally sound. The volume’s only sour note is struck in its first
chapter, which purports to provide a historical background.
Unfortunately, there is hardly a page in this chapter without an error
of fact. The author’s weak historical background is painfully obvious.
Where were the publisher’s reviewers and fact checkers?

Readers are advised to skip this error-ridden chapter and go straight
to Feffer’s country-by-country analysis of the region. His method is
to devote a chapter to each country. Within each chapter, he makes
comparisons with other East European countries’ experiences. In
analyzing these nations’ path to change, he focuses on a particular
factor: the democratic left (GDR); trade unions (Poland); Greens
(Hungary); intellectuals (Czechoslovakia); the secret police (Romania);
national minorities (Bulgaria); and federalism (Yugoslavia). Feffer’s
choices seem somewhat arbitrary. For example, a discussion of the
democratic left could have been just as appropriate for Czechoslovakia
as for East Germany. Important issues, such as the role of the Roman
Catholic Church in Poland, are treated cursorily. The strongest chapters
are on the GDR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The Balkan countries are,
typically, given short shrift, and Albania is simply ignored, despite
being included in the author’s definition of Eastern Europe.

In each chapter, there is a sensitive discussion of economics. A
lingering sympathy for the Communists’ aims, if not their methods,
soon becomes clear. Although Feffer does not ignore the terrible price
for Communist rule paid by Eastern Europe’s peoples, he sympathizes
with the first wave of reformers, who hoped to retain its
benefits—controlled prices, guaranteed employment, free (if shoddy)
medical and social services—without recognizing that they were
essential to the dictators’ system of control. It is true that the
path of austerity on which the various East European peoples have
embarked since 1989 has been dictated by right-wing ideologues at the
IMF and the World Bank; Feffer is right to condemn this new form of
control from abroad. Nevertheless, his search for a third way—between
capitalism and communism—is founded more on sentimentalism than on
economic analysis. The Communists drained the region, impelling its
nations to embark once more on what may be a Sisyphean task: the
development of a capitalism tempered by liberal or social democracy.
Most of the East European peoples failed at this task during the
difficult interwar period. Have they, and the West, learned from these
mistakes? Does our own era make this transition easy? Feffer asks the
necessary questions; he does not provide satisfying answers.