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My two weeks at the Pioneers camp were the last of their kind. The red Pioneer scarf I worked impossibly hard to earn, and which I proudly wore every day to school, would soon turn into a rag with which we wiped the dust off our bookshelves. The stars, medals, and certificates, and the very title of “pioneer,” would soon become museum relics, memories from a different era, fragments of a past life that someone had lived, somewhere.
But in December 1990, the same human beings who had been marching to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end. The representatives of the people declared that the only things they had ever known under socialism were not freedom and democracy but tyranny and coercion.
They had simply mastered the slogans and gone on reciting them, just like everyone else, just like I did when I swore my oath of loyalty in school every morning. But there was a difference between us. I believed. I knew nothing else. Now I had nothing left, except for all the small, mysterious fragments of the past, like the solitary notes of a long-lost opera.
In a society where politics and education pervaded all aspects of life, I was a product of both my family and my country. When the conflict between the two was brought to light, I was dazzled.
Only one word was left: freedom. It featured in every speech on television, in every slogan barked out in rage on the streets. When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen. We chewed little, swallowed fast, and remained hungry. Some wondered if we had been given leftovers. Others noted
Yet all I remember from that time is fear, confusion, hesitation. We used the term freedom to talk about an ideal that had finally materialized, just as we had done in the past. But things changed so much that it would be difficult to say later if it was the same “we.”
In socialism, we relied on science—we didn’t just make things up. Science is real because you can make experiments and test theories. I don’t know how you can test God.”
He says the Party did some good things, like making sure everyone could read and write, building hospitals, bringing electricity, that kind of thing. But it did terrible things too, like destroying churches and killing people. He says he is a Socialist and a Christian, and that if you’re a Christian it’s very easy to be a Socialist.
The Party had gone, but it was still there. The Party was above us, but it was also deep inside. Everyone, everything, came from it. Its voice had changed; it had acquired a different shape and spoke a new language. But what was the colour of its soul?
The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died—those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims.
The cure was a transformative monetary policy: balancing budgets, liberalizing prices, eliminating government subsidies, privatizing the state sector, and opening up the economy to foreign trade and direct investment. The market’s behaviour would then adjust itself, and the emerging capitalist institutions would become efficient without great need for central coordination. A crisis was foreseen, but people had spent a lifetime making sacrifices in the name of better days to come.
Speed was of the essence. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek replaced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost overnight.
But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out?
But if there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose.
