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Philippe de LaraThe “normal life” argumentAmong the criticisms raised by the “decommunization bills” passed by the Rada in April, there
is an interesting argument worth reflecting upon. It says that the soviet era
cannot be reduced to the crimes of the soviet regime, that
it had positive aspects or, at least, that it allowed millions of people to
lead a normal life, to be happy, to go to school, have a job, etc. The argument
is flawed but has a partial truth which makes it plausible. Let’s unfold the
thing. There were indeed, marriages and divorces, ordinary
crimes, fair trials (there must have been some!), scientific discoveries made, artistic
masterpieces created, joy and sorrow experienced, as in a normal society. They
left recollections and traces one cannot mistake for the misdeeds of the
regime. In the academic discussion, some scholars argue that communist
societies were complex, that one should not reduce them to ideocracy,
to the power of the Party. There would be something inaccurate and misleading
in the very concept of totalitarianism: first, it mistakes the party-state for
the society as a whole, and therefore ratifies the self image built by the
regime, that is a unanimous society, without conflicts, merging with the power
that leads and controls it. The totalitarianism theory ignores then that
despite all the efforts of the “organs”, there was an independent civil
society, which imposed its own agenda and dynamics to a reluctant ideology.
Second, this theory ignores history and time: Soviet rule lasted for 74 years
and included very different phases. After Stalin’s death, the Thaw relaxed the
vice, liberty or at least normality appeared to some extent. Contradicting the
view that totalitarianism cannot amend itself, there were economic and cultural
changes, even under Brezhnev (one of the foremost pro Putin lobbyist in France,
Jacques Sapir, is a fan of Kosygin), even more under Gorbachev. From an
individual point of view, one can say that honest people lived happy, had a
decent life, were stirred by Gagarine’s achievement,
by the victories of the Moscow Spartak (not to mention the Kiev Dynamo). They
were not members of the Nomenklatura, and they don’t
understand the global bashing of the Soviet legacy. One should respect their
feelings. This is flawed but very persuasive, both at the
academic level (complexity etc.) and at the common level of discussion (the
normal happiness). It looks sound because long lasting changes everything. By
becoming a long term routinized regime, “socialism in one country” did not
amount to the end of totalitarianism, but it created a special, unheard of,
system, different from “normal” totalitarianism, if I may say so. To put it briefly, the secret of soviet totalitarianism, is its survival by the withdrawal of its revolutionary dimension. Meanwhile fascist
and Nazi totalitarianism were revolutionary from beginning to the end. Communism
managed to stabilize, to rationalize itself so to speak, by shifting from world
revolution to the world communist system. This makes communism a bewildering
political experience. The power of the party was omnipresent but softened.
Nepotism and cynicism replaced frenzied politization
and revolutionary faith, so that the board between party-state and civil
society went blurred, between oppressed or corrupted sectors of society, and
the growing sectors of more or less autonomous activity. Did the hormonal manipulations
of female Olympic swimmers affected the whole practice
of sports in GDR? Did the mandatory study of Marxism-Leninism prevented
universities to produce good engineers and good physicians? One cannot answer
“yes” or “no”, period. Daily life under “socialism” entailed small cowardice,
small corruption, small fear, which can be easily forgotten, down played or
even idealised. They were intertwined in the honourable or glorious features of
Soviet life, as for instance the lies and silences of the myth of the Great
Patriotic War are intertwined in the genuine heroic deeds and sacrifices of the
Soviet population and army during the war. At this point, the necessary analogy between
totalitarianisms may become misleading. The Nazi type, apocalyptic and brief,
does not suffice to understand the communist type, routinized and never ending. Everybody knows that Mussolini has dewatered the Pontins Swamps and that Hitler equipped Germany with a
remarkable highway network, but this does not affect much the judgement of
history on their regime. On the other hand, the least “achievement of
socialism”, be it the building of vacation villages or the Soviet supremacy
concerning great pianists (Richter, Gilels… one born
in Zhitomir, the other in Odessa) seems able to mitigate the failures and
crimes of the communist regime. Such a binary accounting leads nowhere (or to
the idea of a “globally positive assessment”, as used to say Georges Marchais, the general secretary of the French Communist Party
in the seventies). We have to go further in the study of routinized
totalitarianism to understand what is at stake in “decommunization”
in Central and Oriental Europe. Treating as separate facts political oppression
on one side, daily life and positive achievements on the other is not the right
way of understanding what it is about. The pockets of daily normal life, the
admirable achievements, notably in arts and science, are not a quantity to put
in balance with the quantity of oppression and corruption, because oppression
and corruption were diffuse and infiltrated the normal life. Some activities
were more affected than others: press, university, literature, but none escaped
from the totalitarian routine. This is the meaning of the third term coining the
Maidan: revolution of freedom, of dignity, and of truth. I am not a Ukrainian citizen and my purpose is not to
urge the President to sign or not to sign the four bills of April. There may be
concerns regarding freedom of speech although I do not detect them until now.
Some great scholars, in Ukraine and abroad did, like David Marples
or John-Paul Himka, others did not, the discussion is
legitimate. My point is to stress the specific dimension of communist ideology
and experience and the long-lasting global lie surrounding and protecting them
(the ban on comparing Nazi and Soviet regimes is central to this global lie).
This calls for specific understanding categories and specific policies of
liberation, which should match the European standards of free speech, but are
nevertheless specific. |