Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism

Agnieszka Mrozik, Stanislav Holubec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138542266
• eBook ISBN: 9781351009263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented towards the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movement's victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movement´s history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalin's political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katy?, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This book's first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Part I
Memory of the Left in Post-Socialist Europe

1 “Of the Past Let Us Make a Clean Slate”

The Lack of a Left-Wing Narrative and the Failure of the Hungarian Left

Csilla Kiss

Introduction

In Hungary, the left is in a comatose state; there is no left-wing party in Hungary today that is sufficiently strong to play a role in political life. Although post-communist Hungary was not without left-wing successes, by 2010, the left seemed to have lost its footing and suffered a devastating defeat that was only slightly better than the results of the Polish left—which had lost all of its seats in the Polish Parliament—while the right-wing Fidesz scored an overwhelming victory. Despite significant efforts, the opposition did no better in the 2014 elections. There are many reasons for this, and it is important to consider them because, as the history of post-communist Hungary suggests, the left was not doomed to failure and was still capable of regeneration and resurrection.

Hungary’s main left force is the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), which can and has been regarded by many as a so-called successor party, as it was created from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP), the ruling party during Hungary’s period of “real socialism.” The HSWP was reformed in 1989 and changed its name to HSP. On the one hand, the name change was necessary because when regime change was already on the agenda, among other “historical” parties the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (HSDP) was also re-founded (the party had disappeared in 1948 when the social democrats united, or were forced to unite, with the Hungarian Communist Party to create the Party of Hungarian Workers). The newly recreated HSDP also participated in the Opposition Round Table with other newly formed opposition parties. Although they did not gain parliamentary seats in the 1990 elections, their existence prevented the HSWP from calling itself social democratic. On the other hand, the word “socialist” reflects an ideological and historical debate within the party, because while certain of the party’s groups, or “platforms” as they were called, embraced social democracy and democratic capitalism, other groups hoped that the party could stay to the left of social democracy and not unequivocally embrace the regime change: They rejected market economy and hoped for a version of democratic socialism. A coalition with the Alliance of Free Democrats, Hungary’s liberal party in 1994, as well as economic troubles and perhaps the force of foreign examples, such as the changes in the British Labor Party under Tony Blair, caused the party to move toward what, under the prime ministership of Ferenc Gyurcsány (2004–2009), became truly Third Way rhetoric and policies.¹ Moreover, coalition government with the liberals, which always occurred from 1994 on, led the socialists to describe themselves as “left liberal,” further cementing the Third Way image and impeding a truly leftist stance.

As Tony Judt points out in his Ill Fares the Land, the end of any kind of social democracy is imminent when instead of ideological debates we only talk about calculations and data, and discussions about the economy become depoliticized.² Furthermore, the Eastern European left can necessarily only have a very limited vision, since after the regime change, it has been taken for granted that capitalism is the only possible economic system, and, moreover, among the many forms of capitalism, it was Anglo-Saxon-type neoliberalism that prevailed. In Eastern Europe, it has become a ruling paradigm that economic crises and hardships can only be cured through more hardships, with austerity being seen as unavoidable and beneficial in the long run. Complaints or the idea of a different possible solution are usually countered by blaming the current woes on the previous socialist system and its lingering vestiges, on the one hand, and sternly warning against harboring illusions about an alternative economic system, on the other, by pointing to examples of the history of real socialism (or “communist history,” which is the shorthand used by many political scientists and by the right wing in the political arena to convey how terrible that system was). Thus the 2008 crisis did not help the left, and, using anti-communism in 2010, Fidesz won a landslide victory, while the HSP, in the absence of an attractive vision for the future and burdened by numerous scandals during its two terms in government (2002–10), was reduced to a handful of representatives in Parliament—a situation it has found difficult to break out of ever since.

Although an opposition party like the HSP has to react continuously to political events in the country, the time spent in opposition would also be useful for regrouping and clarifying the party’s political line as well as its ideological outlook and location within the country’s history. This appears to me to be one of the most important problems: The HSP seems to have no coherent politics of history. This, on the one hand, was not surprising because the party had been continuously attacked on account of its past, and it tried to avoid historical issues. On the other hand, history and memory are clearly very important in Hungarian society and politics, and so it would seem imperative that the HSP formulate its relationship to the country’s history as well as to the history of the left, especially in the twentieth century.

It is all the more important because one of the main features of post- communist, especially post-2010, Hungary is that the left allowed the political right to frame the country’s politics of history, which made the left defenseless in key debates that served as the ideological foundations for numerous political decisions.

The Hungarian political right was eager from the beginning to employ a politics of history and establish a narrative it wanted to enshrine as the decisive memory of the whole country: In 2011, Fidesz did not even hesitate to include it in the Constitution.³ The most notable attempt at the institutionalization of memory politics by the first Fidesz government was the opening of the House of Terror Museum in 2002. While playing a significant part in the electoral campaign of the party that year, the museum also presents Fidesz’s view of history, which it hoped to make the official view accepted by the whole nation. In 2014, as a sort of extension of the exhibition and the historical emphasis projected by the House of Terror, the Fidesz government also erected a monument commemorating the German occupation on Szabadság Square next to the Soviet liberation memorial, as if to suggest the existence of two occupations in contemporary Hungarian history, exonerating Hungary and Hungarians from responsibility for subsequent acts, including the deportation and murder of Jewish citizens, since these would then have to be regarded as the responsibility of the occupying power. As Viktor Orbán said at the opening of the House of Terror, neither the Nazi nor the Soviet dictatorship could have been introduced and maintained without foreign troops.⁴

Although Fidesz lost the elections in 2002 despite its fierce campaign, it gained a supermajority in 2010, which allowed the party to ratify a new Constitution, or Fundamental Law as they have called it, claiming that the Constitution in effect up to then was a communist (Stalinist) heritage.⁵ The new Fundamental Law enshrined certain principles concerning the history of the country both in the “Preamble” and the basic text itself, declaring the incompatibility of the communist and the successor regimes; it calls the Communist Party a criminal organization, whose leaders

shall have responsibility without statute of limitations for […] thwarting with Soviet military assistance the democratic attempt built on a multi-party system in the years after World War II.

It names the HSP as the successor to the criminalized Communist Party and “as beneficiaries of their unlawfully accumulated assets.”⁶ This and other acts of the right, including the rehabilitation of certain fascist politicians, means, according to Iván Harsányi, that the political right with Fidesz as its representative is trying to reevaluate the basic ideological and political pillars of the anti-fascist coalition/consensus and thus revise the whole historical configuration that existed after the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition. This, he argues, is part of the right-wing project everywhere in Eastern Europe, and the left finds it difficult to oppose it effectively.⁷

The Politics of History in Contemporary Hungary

While the political right has been and remains very active in framing the politics of history and memory, the left allows it to do so, looking on meekly as the right takes over these important issues. If anything, what we can discern is either continuous penance performed by the socialists—they have kept apologizing for their past, that is for the real socialist era in general and for the repression during and after the 1956 uprising in particular—or they have at best tried to keep silent about their past.⁸ One of the major goals of the right is to force the left in general and the socialists in particular to regard the crimes of the Kádár regime as an inheritance they cannot shake off.⁹ But the socialists’ contrition is only in part due to the continuous attacks.

While the feeling of guilt and responsibility on the one hand, and the desire not to be forced to continuously defend the party on the other, may account for the lack of a left politics of history, it is also possible that the political left does not find anything in Hungary’s left-wing past that it would like to tout, either because none of it appears attractive enough for them, or because Hungary’s left tradition is very thin. In fact, it can be argued that the political left suffers from both the burden of the so-called communist period and the lack of left-wing traditions during the twentieth century as a whole, with the exception of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which, however, does not provide a proud memory, as we will see. At the same time, the left has no coherent narrative regarding whatever left-wing traditions the country actually has, and, what is worse, it is unable to give a left answer to the political right’s approach to national history. Thus if we see memory politics as a field of struggle, then the picture is very lopsided in Hungary.

In what follows, I will show how the Hungarian left, despite some weak attempts, has not managed to create its own narrative that could counter that of the right. In this respect, it is first of all necessary to clarify what we mean by left in Hungary. I will concentrate on political parties, especially the HSP, not because there are no significant civil-society actors or participants of social movements playing important political roles and classifiable as left, but because I consider political parties to be the main actors of political life and the most important mediating institutions between the citizenry and the state, even though other social actors also participate in decision-making, for instance trade unions, interest groups, lobbies and other civil-society organizations or movements. For the present, without political parties “a modern representative democracy is not conceivable,” as “they articulate and integrate different interests, visions and opinions.” “They are also the main source for the recruitment of political elites” and thus they deserve to be prioritized in analyses.¹⁰ I will concentrate on the HSP as the main left-wing actor in Hungarian politics, only then looking briefly at the other left formations.

Hunga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Historical Memory of European Communisms Before and After 1989
• Part I Memory of the Left in Post-Socialist Europe
• Part II Memorial Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe
• Part III Communist Politics of Memory Before 1989
• Contributors
• Index