Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment

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Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library Chronicles #32)

by Stephen Kotkin, Jan Tomasz Gross (Contributor)

3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 · rating details · 38 ratings · 10 reviews

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they emplo...more

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published October 6th 2009 by Modern Library (first published 2009)

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Aug 13, 2012 Jay Hinman rated it 4 of 5 stars

It’s been said so many times (particularly in conservative circles) that it has ceased to lose its sense of moral outrage, but the most “underreported” story of the twentieth century was the misery, economic destruction and mass death caused by Communism - both as an idea, and certainly far more so in practice. Underreported, you ask? I’d say so. It’s not difficult to find books, articles and speeches decrying 20th-century communism’s crimes, from Stalin and Mao to famines and entire generations...more It’s been said so many times (particularly in conservative circles) that it has ceased to lose its sense of moral outrage, but the most “underreported” story of the twentieth century was the misery, economic destruction and mass death caused by Communism - both as an idea, and certainly far more so in practice. Underreported, you ask? I’d say so. It’s not difficult to find books, articles and speeches decrying 20th-century communism’s crimes, from Stalin and Mao to famines and entire generations lost to mind-numbing conformity and repression. Yet the thumbnail view of the century is usually reduced to the two World Wars, or to some general struggle between East and West, rather than to the murderous idea that helped beget so much of that struggle to begin with. Forgotten, at some level, is just how much of the world’s people were made to suffer and stagnate for decades in the name of idea that promised a “worker’s paradise” and instead provided anything but.

Stephen Kotkin’s “UNCIVIL SOCIETY – 1989 AND THE IMPLOSION OF THE COMMUNIST ESTABLISHMENT” helps us remember a bit. Its thesis is fairly straightforward. Remember in 1989, when Communist governments were collapsing across Eastern Europe, how there was loads of talk about well-organized “civil society” movements that were bringing them down? Rubbish, says Kotkin. The sclerotic Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, propped up for decades by Moscow, were never in danger of real democratic revolution from within, and no matter how much hindsight allows us to inflate the power of nascent democratic movements, their abilities to affect true change were years away. No, it was “uncivil society” – the corrupt regimes of delusional, state-plundering Communist bureaucrats that led these countries – that paved the way to their own demise. When they fell, they didn’t all fall the same way – but they fell quickly, and in rapid succession to each other.

The book chooses to focus its lens on how the regimes unraveled in three countries – East Germany, Romania and Poland. Kotkin rightly makes the widely-shared point that the kindling for 1989 was certainly set by Mikael Gorbachev’s perestroika policies in the Soviet Union, and in his tacit guarantees that countries within Easter Europe those chose to accelerate the process of opening up their economies and societies would not be invaded, the way Hungary was in 1956 and Czechoslovakia was in 1968. Yet the three countries all had different paths to the surrender by uncivil society. In East Germany’s case, a stealthy “peace” movement, which had been marching under a vague banner of non-regime-provoking solidarity since 1982, snowballed and culminated after years of frustration in small demonstrations in the city of Leipzig during 1989. The regime fought back, and beat the protestors badly for weeks, but East German society at large was relatively unmoved and unprovoked until events began to quickly spiral, and as residents began fleeing into Austria through Hungary’s now-open borders. Once the “run on the bank” started, powerless, cornered and widely-hated East German leaders chose to not crack down, and within weeks, the Berlin Wall was being dismantled on worldwide television.

Romanian events moved even more quickly, and shocked the world when the dictator Nikolai Ceausescu was executed in extra-legal fashion toward the end of 1989. Only two weeks before, there had been zero stirrings of democratic activity, and the state was fully in the hands of Ceausescu and the Securitate, the KGB of the Romanian police state. This is the most fascinating part of Kotkin’s book, and would be inspiring to the end if not for the civil war-like ethnic killings and religious reprisals that followed the 1989 turmoil that gave Romania democracy for the first time in decades. Finally, Poland’s example seems to refute Kotkin’s premise a bit. If the Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa since 1980, which won democratic elections in 1989 without bloodshed, did not comprise the triumph of “civil society” over the uncivil, then what did? Kotkin feels that because the Communist establishment had no idea it would lose these elections, and because in calling Solidarity’s bluff, they were certain of continued power by co-opting them, it was just as much of a “collapse” as the other examples. Not buying it.

Regardless, they all imploded in 1989 and within weeks and months of each other, and it was a head-spinning set of simultaneous events. I’d have liked a little more focus on Czechoslovakia in this book, as this is the country I most associate with the whole “civil society” trope, but the point remains. It wasn’t spontaneous uprisings of the people that brought down Soviet Communism across Eastern Europe. It was Soviet Communism’s toxicity itself. It’s important to revisit this period, recent as it is, because we are seeing it happen all over again in the Middle East this year, and it’s thrilling and more than a little painful to watch. I’m coupling my reading of this with an excellent, albeit massive, book by Orlando Figes about the birth of the Bolsheviks called “A PEOPLE’S TRAGEDY" , giving me two nice bookends to understand the ideology & deluded players that caused the world so much pain over the 1900s.(less)

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Jan 31, 2011 Lauren Albert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-european, politics

In this look at the revolutionary events of 1989, Kotkin reviews the causes of what unfolded in three countries--East Germany, Romania and Poland. It is a revisionist text in that he disagrees with what has become a predominant argument that the arms race is what lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. Economics played a large role but it was debt, he thinks, more than spending on weaponry, that did in the communist regime. For instance, Eastern European countries thought they could produce inexpe...more

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Mar 30, 2011 Daniel Hammer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a good addition to the large body of scholarship on the collapse of socialism. Kotkin focuses on three cases; the former GDR, Romania, and Poland. He basic argument is that the collapse of the system was brought about by the economic mismanagement of the regimes, coupled with their delusional sense of stability and control in each country and regionally. He refers to socialist regimes as "uncivil society," a term meant to deliberately discount the argument of other scholars that citizen...more

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Apr 25, 2011 John David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-history

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’v...more 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.
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May 11, 2010 Wm rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-biography-memoir, romania

Very readable and an important read not only to correct perceptions on how everything went down in 1989, but also to shed some light on where capitalism can make the same mistakes. There are important differences, of course, but it really was a combination of the creation of an uncivil society (that is Communist officials that received special perks and entrenched their positions and grew out of touch) and the taking on of major amounts of debt from Western countries in order to pay for increase...more

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Jul 26, 2011 H Wesselius added it

Brilliant. Traces the fall of the various regimes to implosion of the uncivil groups. With the exception of Poland, there were no mass civil society to topple the regimes so logically the cause of the demise is elsewhere. A disastrous economic performance, massive debt, and consumer shortages forced the elites to consider changes and these changes had unforeseen repercussions. Allowing these repercussions to play themselves out is Gorbachev and his policy of non-intervention. Unsaid by the autho...more

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Apr 04, 2010 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin

The narrative held by most Americans about the fall of the Eastern Bloc is almost entirely false. It goes something like this. Ronald Reagan is elected. He calls the Soviet Union an evil empire. He decides to build Star Wars. The Soviets can't keep up. He tells Gorby to tear down that wall, and they have no choice. We win. USA! USA! USA!

Well, I lived through enough of this to know that narrative was bunk at...more Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin

The narrative held by most Americans about the fall of the Eastern Bloc is almost entirely false. It goes something like this. Ronald Reagan is elected. He calls the Soviet Union an evil empire. He decides to build Star Wars. The Soviets can't keep up. He tells Gorby to tear down that wall, and they have no choice. We win. USA! USA! USA!

Well, I lived through enough of this to know that narrative was bunk at the time, and the mythology that has developed around it is truly mystifying. But, there is one reason that this mythology has been allowed to flourish. It is very hard to explain how it is that the Soviet Empire, which had brutally suppressed uprisings before, let itself be consigned to the ash-heap of history without so much as a whimper.

Stephen Kotkin expertly attempts to answer that question. He does so by examining the peculiar circumstances of the revolutions in Poland, East Germany, and Romania. The keys he identifies are two-fold. First, there is Gorbachev. He is truly the indispensable man of Eastern European freedom. With a very simple nod, Red Army tanks could have easily returned to Poland, Hungary or any member of the Eastern bloc. They did not because Gorbachev decided that the Breshnev doctrine was dead, and he was not going to bear the burden for failing Eastern European economies any longer.

You see, starting with détente and accelerating through the 80s, Eastern European flirtation with the West had allowed for ever increasing loans from western banks to Eastern Bloc countries. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany -- all the countries participated to a greater or lesser extent. The loans, theoretically, funded the expansion of industrial production -- allowing Eastern Europe to produce lower-quality consumer products for their own consumption -- and they hoped -- for export to the West.

The scheme might have worked saved for one important development which was unforeseen -- development of the Tigers of Asia. Suddenly the economies of Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong were able to manufacture consumer products at incredibly low prices. And while quality may not have been up to first world standards initially, it would become so. And given the relative transparency of those economies compared to Eastern bloc nations, it was no time before Eastern German dreams of producing home computers came to naught.

So the Eastern bloc countries found themselves in a debt spiral. They needed more western cash to maintain their current standard of living, and they only way to get it was to borrow more from the west. This turned what had once been a neo-mercantalist arrangement between the Soviet Union and its satellites on its head. Suddenly, the Soviet Union was propping up its satellites by overpaying them for inferior goods. With all of the Soviet Union's other problems, this seemed to Gorbachev a bridge too far.

But once the communist bloc essentially had to admit economic defeat, the underpinnings for everything else crumbled beneath them. Which brings us to the second major point that Kotkin explores -- the disillusionment of the ruling elite, or as Kotkin terms them, the "uncivil society."

At the end of the day, the enormous security apparatus in East Germany, Romania and several other eastern bloc nations just blinked. They themselves could not muster the will to defend with tooth and claw a system that had placed them at its head. It speaks to the moral bankruptcy and internal decay of the regimes that even their beneficiaries were ready for them to go.

Poland, as Kotkin points out, is a bit of an exception. In the rest of the Eastern Bloc, there is no real "civil society" -- which is to say independent pillar of moral or secular authority outside of government control. Poland was different. Catholicism had never been abandoned in Poland as organized religion had been in much of the Eastern bloc. And then of course there was Solidarity, a remarkable expression of independence for any country. So here, unlike the rest of the Eastern bloc, there was a real counter-force to the government. Almost everywhere else, it was the government itself that essentially collapsed on itself.

It is interesting though that in the cases of Poland, Romania and Eastern Germany, the initial spark that caused the conflagration can be traced back to religious activities. They seemed to provide an initial space of benign protest that ultimately undermined the entire reason de tat for communism.

Uncivil Societies is a very focused and crisp look that tries to explain, what at the time, seemed the unimaginable. Since we, in the United States, are very foggy on how it all went down, I highly recommend this book to anyone intrigued by the Cold War's happy resolution.(less)

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Nov 09, 2012 Becky Gamble rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: school-books

This book was boring. Maybe it's because I find Eastern European history/ Communism history extremely boring. Soooo dry.

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Sep 05, 2012 Laura Miller rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent, lucid and amazingly concise overview of the fall of the Soviet block in Eastern Europe.

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About Stephen Kotkin

Stephen Mark Kotkin is Professor of History and director of the Program in Russian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of the Soviet Union and has recently begun to research Eurasia more generally.

More about Stephen Kotkin...

Books by Stephen Kotkin

Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000

Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization

Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era

Sociedade Incivil: 1989 e a derrocada do comunismo

Steeltown, USSR: Glasnost, destalinization, and perestroika in the provinces (Occasional papers. University of California, Berkeley. Center for Slavic and East European Studies, #1)

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Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library Chronicles #32)

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