One of the key contributions of the Polish opposition movement was its concept of living “as if.” At a certain point in the 1970s, dissidents like Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron proposed to create a parallel society in which people acted as if they were already living in a democratic society. They would act openly,… Continue reading Creating a Parallel Society
In the early 1990s, Eastern Europe entered the list of expatriate wonderlands, like the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s or Tokyo of the 1980s. Prague was the most powerful magnet: Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution was relatively cheap, jobs teaching English were plentiful, and the city was full of beautiful buildings and creative… Continue reading Following the Magic
The intellectual revolutionaries of the Age of Enlightenment created a community through the exchange of letters. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, this “republic of letters” created a common intellectual language across countries and, indeed, across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States. This non-territorial republic played a role in various scientific… Continue reading YU-Rock!
When Communism collapsed in 1989 in East-Central Europe, many industries collapsed with it. Factories closed, workers were out of jobs, and economies shrank. But one sector of the economy grew: the media. Where there had once been a state monopoly, now there was pluralism. There was suddenly an explosion of reporting, commentary, TV debates. All… Continue reading Expanding the Fourth Estate
He started out his career by painting a tank pink. In 1991, David Cerny was an art student in Prague. For years he had walked by the Soviet tank mounted on a pedestal in Kinsky Square and fumed. The tank commemorated the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, and indeed the square was once known… Continue reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Provocateur
There is often more support for radical change in the city than in the countryside. The Green movement in Iran in 2009 had tremendous support in Tehran but considerably less in the countryside. The Bulgarian opposition was convinced that it would win in the first democratic elections in 1990 elections but failed to take into… Continue reading To the People
The changes that took place in East-Central Europe in 1989 were not just an inflection point for people in the region. The lives of many outsiders were profoundly altered by what happened year. I was 25 years old in January 1989 and living in Warsaw. I had no clear idea of what to do with… Continue reading A Child of 1989
Of the three multiethnic countries that dissolved in the aftermath of the Cold War, Czechoslovakia fared the best. The two successor states suffered none of the violence, economic catastrophe, or political discord that Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union experienced. Indeed, the relations between Prague and Bratislava are probably better now than they’ve ever been. The… Continue reading The Slovak Example
During the Communist era, the governments in East-Central Europe tried to shoehorn art into the category of socialist realism. Artists were reconfigured as cultural workers who ideally created works to advance society in the same way that a steelworker shaped pig iron to advance skyscraper construction. The overlap was often quite direct. Many paintings and… Continue reading Public, Private, and Political Art
I took a break from interviews when I was in Prague to go with my wife on an excursion to Marianske Lazne in the western part of the Czech Republic. This is the famous Marienbad, the spa that attracted celebrities from all over Europe in the 19th century –Goethe, Chopin, Edison, Wagner – to take… Continue reading Making the Best Food in the Czech Republic
When I started working on U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1980s, I encountered my first GONGO. This was a “government-organized non-governmental organization.” It was like something out of Alice in Wonderland. An early GONGO, the Soviet Peace Committee styled itself as an NGO. It worked with various NGOs in the West. But it closely hewed to… Continue reading Creating an NGO Culture
In the early days of the changes in 1989, a new kind of politics emerged within the opposition movements poised to enter parliaments and governments. Many dissidents had a deep distrust of political parties and of political compromise. After all, under Communism, all the official political parties merely followed the script provided by the ruling… Continue reading Maintaining a Moral Politics
There is a famous scene in the movie Spartacus, with Kirk Douglas in the role of the leader of the Roman Empire’s most famous slave revolt. The Romans have captured the slave army and demanded that they give up their leader or else be slaughtered. Spartacus steps forward to save his men. He says, “I… Continue reading Reviving Local Media in Serbia
A typical story of the economic transition in East-Central Europe is of the frustrated manager in a state-owned company under Communism who becomes a rich and successful entrepreneur after 1989. Certainly there were plenty of frustrated managers during the Communist period. And you can read plenty of stories about the new fabulously wealthy business owners… Continue reading Doing Business in Eastern Europe
The comparison has frequently been made between the experience of Roma in East-Central Europe and African Americans in the United States. Roma have likewise suffered from slavery, segregation, rampant discrimination, forced assimilation. They have also campaigned for their civil rights in nearly every country where they live. So far, however, these campaigns have had only… Continue reading Roma and the Civil Rights Movement
In the wake of the changes of 1989, many outside organizations rushed to East-Central Europe to see how they could be involved. I was hired, for instance, by the American Friends Service Committee to travel through the region and conduct interviews with leading activists and NGO representatives to see how AFSC could help. During my… Continue reading Helping from Outside
The disintegration of Yugoslavia was a triumph of nationalist passions over political interests. If the latter had prevailed, the process would at least have proceeded peacefully, as was the case with Czechoslovakia. Instead, three wars took place one after the other, in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, along with NATO attacks on Serbia. Some of those… Continue reading Passions v. Interests
It’s already been nearly a quarter of a century since the two Germanies were reunified. An entire generation that never experienced life in a divided country has already graduated from university. Common sense suggests that young Germans are looking exclusively at the future, and the country has moved on from the debates over reunification and… Continue reading Germany’s Third Generation East
The first major challenge to the new Communist authorities in East-Central Europe came from the workers in East Germany. It was 1953. Stalin had died a few months earlier, and the heavy fog of paranoia seemed to be lifting ever so slightly. What started out as a strike of 300 East Berlin construction workers upset… Continue reading What Happened to East Germany’s Workers?
Approaching 1989, the Communist governments in East-Central Europe were like the residents of a continuing care facility. Some governments – in Czechoslovakia, for instance – appeared to be very sturdy and, although quite elderly, were capable of living independently for some time. Others, as in Poland, were already in assisted care, needing the help of… Continue reading Pushing Boundaries
The reunification of Germany was all about Germans. This might seem obvious. After all, reunification focused largely on the coming together of ethnic Germans living on either side of the Berlin Wall. Demonstrators in East Germany initially focused on das Volk (the people) but switched after the fall of the Wall to ein Volk (one… Continue reading An Inclusive Germany
One of the great joys of driving from Hungary to Italy is the absence of border controls. You don’t have to slow down and show your passport. You don’t have to worry about waiting in a queue with commuters and vacationers and truckers. It’s just a straight shot from Budapest through Slovenia to Trieste. But… Continue reading Schengen
I once asked someone that I was re-interviewing here in East-Central Europe how he would compare his life back in 1988 with his life today. He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Of course it was better then!” he exclaimed. “It was better under Communism?” He laughed. “No, it was better when I… Continue reading The Lost Treasure of Revolutions
In explaining the fall of Communism, most analysts talk about pressure from the inside (dissidents) coupled with pressure from the outside (Gorbachev, Reagan). But equally important were the inside-outsiders. These were people from the region who found themselves in other countries as a result of war, uprising, or other dislocations. The Hungarian-born financier George Soros… Continue reading Inside Outsiders
The debate continues over whether the people of East-Central Europe have benefitted economically from the post-1989 transition. But this discussion of economic winners and losers largely ignores a key demand of the people in the region. Yes, they wanted bananas and travel to the West and propaganda-free media. But they also wanted an end to… Continue reading And Justice for All?
When people praise or criticize the centralized planning of the Communist era in East-Central Europe, they focus most of their attention on the “planning” side. The chief vice – or virtue – of this system was its claim to replace the market with a state that could determine prices, dictate supply and demand, own much… Continue reading The Center Holds (Too Much)
In her book Oni (Them), the journalist Teresa Toranska profiled Poland’s hardcore Stalinists, what the Poles used to call beton or concrete. When the book came out in 1985, it became an underground classic. The world of the “true believers” was in its twilight years, and soon it would be extinguished altogether. But with her… Continue reading Them
The Occupy movement began in the United States – at a statue of a bull standing in the heart of Wall Street in New York City. It spread quite rapidly to other places around the country and around the world. In many locations, it built on or connected to pre-existing movements that had been working… Continue reading Occupy Slovenia
Germany, it seems, is in a constant process of debating its own history. In fact, there’s a word in German, historikerstreit, that means “the historians’ dispute.” It refers specifically to a debate at the end of the 1980s about the crimes of Nazi Germany, often in comparison to those of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the… Continue reading Confronting History
In April, Serbia and Kosovo signed a landmark normalization treaty. The deal, in what might seem a paradoxical quid pro quo, gives Kosovo authority over the Serbian pocket in the north and greater autonomy to the Serbs living in that region. Despite protests from some Serbs in that area as well as their supporters in… Continue reading Making the Jump Together