Abstract: Tomislav SunicDepartment of Cultural Promotion, ZagrebPower, government, war, law, punishment and thousand other thinks had no terms wherein that language could express them--which made the difficulty almost insuperable to give my master and conception of what I meant.Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 1726As a programmatic ideology, Communism is dead. After a century of totalitarian aberrations which came to be associated with scenes from the Gulag, the Kolyma, the Berlin Wall and psychiatric hospitals, Communism no longer seems to pose an organized military threat to Western democracies, nor does it seem to exert intellectual attraction in its pure form.(1) A significant number of former left-leaning intellectuals and politicians, who were once tempted by socialist political romanticism, seem to be now in favor of less dramatic, sometimes apolitical, social experiments. As Klaus Hornung observed: interventions become more and more a calculation of special effects, ambiance and performance. Their ideology does not appeal to our profound convictions.(2)Although Communism, as a muscled ideology, is dead, as a way of i.e, as a peculiar social psychology, the communist mystique is very much alive. Like many other past and present ideologies and theologies, and despite its quasi-universal rejection, Communism created distinct patterns of attitude and mass behavior which will take much longer to discard than the legacy of repression. Although the monolith has been replaced in Eastern Europe and Russia by democratic legal structures, and despite frequent anti-Communist rhetoric used by the new Russian and East European elites, the communist culture seems to be holding a firm grip over a large number of officials and ordinary citizens. It would be difficult to understand the problems of political and economic transition which post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe are facing today on their difficult road towards democracy without a cursory excursion into the still strong mentality of their citizens.The Utopia AchievedThe conceptual framework appropriate for studying social phenomena in the liberal West may not always be appropriate for the analyses of social phenomena in the post-Communist East. Although the end of rule has been welcomed by the masses in Eastern Europe and Russia, rule so effectively suppressed their traditional culture and implanted its own that their social conduct has not changed very much in the short time have been free. True, the old iconography, i.e. the hammer and the sickle, accompanied by the ever present red star, have been replaced by older national symbols; but, the substance of the old culture in day to day life, remains still strong. In retrospect, one could say that systems succeed in carrying out a form of social selection to the point where, anthropologically speaking, different social species have emerged. Alexander Zinoviev, a Russian exile writer, wrote several years before the end of Soviet Communism, that the mentality that developed under Communism was likely to outlive the political and ideological collapse of Communism itself. He noted that the analyses by Western experts on Communism were too narrow and in part due to the fact that they placed upon the phenomenon of Soviet society criteria of Western societies, which are alien to the Soviet society.(3) The ongoing disillusion with liberal experiments in Eastern Europe, the growing economic poverty of the masses, the Zhirinovsky syndrome in Russia, may require a less optimistic and different approach to the study of totalitarian phenomena.Despite the end of the nomenclature and the ongoing attempts at democratization, the citizens of Eastern Europe and Russia continue to behave and respond to non-Communist social stimuli in the same old Communist way. Words like democracy, tolerance, pluralism, parliamentarianism, are being endlessly repeated on all wave lengths, but in most cases these words are but empty rhetoric which are hardly reflected in any substantive change in political behavior. …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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