Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Ludvík Vaculík, addressing the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in June 1967, had recommended a similar ‘as if’ strategy to his colleagues even then. We should, he told them, ‘play at being citizens . . . make speeches as if we were grown-up and legally independent.’ But in the more optimistic atmosphere of the Sixties Vaculík and others could still hope for some accommodation and adaptation from those in power. By the time Michnik or Havel were espousing similar arguments, circumstances had changed. The point was no longer to advise the government how to govern, but to suggest to the nation—by example—how it might live. In the circumstances of the Seventies, the idea that Eastern European intellectuals could ‘suggest to the nation’ how it should comport itself might appear more than a little ambitious—most intellectuals were in no position to suggest much of anything even to one another, far less to their fellow citizens at large. The intelligentsia in Hungary and Poland especially was largely ignorant of conditions and opinion in the industrial centers, and even more cut off from the world of the peasantry. Indeed it might be said that thanks to Communism—a political system which, in the words of the Hungarian dissidents Ivan Szelenyi and George Konrád, put ‘intellectuals on the road to class power’—the old Central-European distinction between ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘people’ (more applicable in aristocratic societies like Hungary and Poland than in plebei...

Non political citizens groups undermine oppression somewhat more safely