2 Violence and the End of Revolution After 1989

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VIOLENCE AND THE END OFREVOLUTION AFTER 1989

Stefan Auer

ABSTRACT The series of Velvet revolutions in 1989, which brought about thecollapse of communism in Europe, seem to have vindicated those politicaltheorists and activists who believed in the possibility of non-violent power.The relative success of the 1989 revolutions has validated a new paradigm ofrevolutionary change based on the assumption that radical changes were attain-able through moderate means. Yet the legacy of these non-violent revolutionsalso points towards the limits of political strategies fundamentally opposed toviolence. The article shows that the key architects of non-violent revolutionsin 1989 were well aware of the contingent nature of all political actions, andwere thus willing to take risks in their pursuit of freedom.

KEYWORDS Hannah Arendt • Václav Havel • Jan Patocka • power • revol-ution • violence

Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, violence has been at thecentre of revolutionary politics. Just as repressive regimes relied on violence,their opponents felt pressured to resort to violence too. Thus, all too often,the commitment of true revolutionists was measured by their willingness toexterminate their enemies. Theorists and practitioners of revolution as differ-ent as Robespierre, Marx, Sorel, Lenin, Fanon and Zizek understood well thatexemplary acts of violence could mobilize a population for their revolution-ary cause. Moreover, they believed that revolutionaries truthful to their idealsshould not hesitate to sacrifice themselves, driven as they were by the convic-tion that their political cause transcended the meaning of their individual lives.Their martyrdom would make them immortal. From this broader perspective,it was less important whether the victims of such violence were the perceivedenemies of the revolution or the revolutionaries themselves.

Since 1989 this logic seems to have changed irrevocably. Revolutionsare now no longer what they used to be. There can be little doubt that violent

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revolutionary upheavals can radically transform societies. What is doubtful,after the horrific records of revolutionary dictatorship on the left and theright, is that (violent) revolutions can change societies for the better. This isone of the key insights that shaped the resistance strategies against commun-ism, which dissident intellectuals, such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia andAdam Michnik in Poland, adopted in response to the revolutionary regimesin Central and Eastern Europe. They rejected the Marxist-Leninist justificationof violence and sought to maintain order and a sense of legality in the midstof revolutionary turmoil. Unlike their more radical predecessors, these revol-utionaries were not wedded to teleological views. They did not aim at yetanother utopian end-goal, but rather sought to create the possibility for anew beginning without a radical break with the past. To the extent that the1989 revolutions in Central Europe were successful in creating conditionsfor liberty, they undermined the pre-existing notions of revolution.

In a similar vein, the Georgian Rose Revolution in 2003 and the Ukrain-ian Orange Revolution of 2004 were neither radical in their means, their endsor their outcomes. Like their predecessors in 1989, these were strange, even‘conservative’ revolutions (Auer, 2004b: 362) that sought not the total destruc-tion of the ‘old order’, but rather aimed at the restoration of ‘normality’, eventhough paradoxically it might never have existed there before. In their appear-ance, they resembled a rock-concert or a carnival; in their outcomes theyseemed rather like elections that led merely to the replacement of one setof elites by another. Yet the political and societal impact of these revolutionswas far more radical than a narrow focus on elite change might suggest.Intensive mass-mobilization of citizens utterly transformed Georgian andUkrainian societies and created political constellations far more conduciveto freedom than was the case before.

What are the advantages and limitations of this new revolutionary para-digm? Is the very term ‘non-violent revolution’ simply a contradiction in terms?Is there a danger of a new myth emerging from 1989, a myth of the VelvetRevolution?

To address these questions, I will turn to the political thinking of HannahArendt. Her accounts of totalitarianism as the negation of politics and herpre-occupation with non-violent power enable a better understanding of theVelvet Revolution in 1989 and its more recent ‘coloured’ reincarnations. AnArendtian perspective will also help in comprehending the ideas and actionsof some of the key figureheads of opposition against communism in CentralEurope. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on Václav Havel, particu-larly because of his astute diagnosis of late communism in his seminal essay‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1991b), and Jan Patocka, because of his philo-sophical writings about the ‘solidarity of the shattered’, which underpinnedthe Charter 77 human rights movement.

Auer: Violence and the End of Revolution after 1989 7



ARENDT, REVOLUTIONS AND VIOLENCE

Hannah Arendt, with her Burkean concern for the stability of politicalinstitutions and the rule of law (Villa, 2007: 42), is an unlikely advocate ofrevolutions. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holo-caust, Arendt could not have shared the progressivist assumptions of classictheorists of revolutions. If Marx believed that it was not enough for philoso-phers ‘to have only interpreted the world’, because the challenge was tochange it, Arendt’s enterprise was more modest.1 Like Marx, Arendt wassuspicious of philosophy,2 but for very different reasons. The task that Arendtset herself was to understand the world not in order to radically change itfor the better, but to prevent further, bigger catastrophes from happening.Her lifelong project can be understood as an attempt to reconstitute the basiccategories of political life after the onslaught of totalitarian regimes. In herunfinished manuscripts from the early 1950s, Arendt pondered the questionof whether politics still had any meaning at all. Considering the revolution-ary nature of these regimes, it is not surprising that Arendt seemed initiallyto be utterly dismissive of revolutions:

All that revolutions – if we seriously regard them with Marx as the ‘locomotivesof history’ (‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848–50’) – have demonstrated withany clarity is that this train of history is evidently hurtling towards an abyss,and that revolutions, far from being able to avert calamity, only frighteninglyaccelerate the speed with which it unfolds. (2005: 191)

Considering her initially negative view of revolutions, it is surprisingthat Arendt seldom referred to the National Socialist movement in Germanyas a revolution. Undoubtedly, Arendt was aware of the Nazis and some oftheir opponents using this term. In an essay that seeks to comprehend thechallenge that the institution of concentration and extermination campsposes to social sciences, she quotes a senior Nazi official describing ‘therevolutionary principle’ that underpinned the Nazi ideology (Arendt, 1994a[1950]: 237). In a similar vein, she writes about the tendency in Nazi Germanytoward a ‘permanent revolution’ (1951: 377).3 After the Hungarian Uprisingin 1956, however, Arendt seems to have accepted the general consensus inhistory and social sciences that for a long time sought to protect the veryterm revolution from the contagion of Nazism.4 Arendt’s book On Revolution(1965), for example, has no references to the National Socialist revolution.

There are important if seemingly minor differences in different editionsof The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1958b), which give us a clue aboutArendt’s evolving thinking about politics and revolutions. The original editionis rather gloomy in its predictions about the future, despite its stated aim towrite against ‘reckless despair’ (1951: vii). The horrific track record of total-itarian regimes had for her radically undermined the fundamental beliefs ofWestern civilization. ‘Though we may have many traditions and know themmore intimately than any generation before us’, Arendt argued, ‘we can fall

8 Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)



back upon none’ (1951: 434). Yet already in the first edition she also contem-plated the possibility of change. In fact, she explicitly stated that ‘the idealof totalitarian domination has not been achieved’ (1951: 428) and is unlikelyever to be fully achieved, because this would require the conquest of ‘allpeoples of the world’ (1951: 429). Remarkably, Arendt even anticipated theliberating potential from within the satellite countries of the Soviet bloc, whereshe observed ‘fanatic hatred for Communism’ (1951: 429). As long as peoplerealize that they are ‘not alone in the world’ and that not ‘a single man butMen inhabit the earth’ (1951: 438, 439), there remains a possibility for a newbeginning:

every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is thepromise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, beforeit becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it isidentical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – ‘that a beginningbe made man was created’ said Augustine (Civitas Dei, Book 12, ch. 20). Thisbeginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man. (1953: 327)

These are the concluding remarks of the chapter ‘Ideology and Terror’that was written after the first edition of the Origins of Totalitarianism, butwell before anyone could have expected the events of 1956. All these insightsbelie one of the common criticisms levelled against Arendt and other theor-ists of totalitarianism from the early 1950s: the argument that they could notanticipate societal changes of any kind, let alone revolts, or revolutions.5

However, it was only after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 thatArendt gained enough confidence to proclaim that ‘totalitarian domination,like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction’ (1958b: 478). While shewas not as optimistic as Milovan Djilas, who saw in the revolution ‘the begin-ning of the end of Communism generally’ (Djilas, 2006: 670), Arendt certainlybelieved that its legacy was crucially important for the future of Soviet-stylecommunism. As she wrote to Karl Jaspers in December 1956: ‘Hungary isthe best thing that has happened for a long time. It seems to me it still isn’tover, and regardless of how it ends, it is a clear victory for freedom’ (Kohlerand Saner, 1992: 306).6 It may well be argued that it was at this point in timethat Arendt brought together three key concepts of her political thought thatunderpin her understanding of power: freedom, revolution and political action.

Freedom, which only seldom – in the times of crises and revolutions – becomesthe direct purpose of political action, is in reality the only thing that makessomething like politics possible. (Arendt, 1958a: 1)

In other words, the purpose of any politics worth its name must befreedom. This aim, however, must be pursued by appropriate means. In fact,the very distinction between means and ends is problematic, because sucha separation allows for political ends becoming mere abstract ideals.7 Arendtwas opposed to the widespread fallacy, which informed the actions of many




revolutionaries, that the end purpose of politics lies outside of politics (2005:152). Thus, while the (proclaimed) aim of all modern revolutions was freedom,all too often they betrayed that ideal by relying on violent means. Freedom,at any rate, ought not to be conceived merely as an abstract ideal, an end tobe achieved, but rather as a practical activity, and therefore a means andend in one. It was a practical activity, which could only take place wheneverpeople encountered each other as equals in a public sphere. This is whatArendt believed took place in Hungary with the spontaneous emergence ofthe council system. These revolutionary councils represented the kind of co-operative power that was essentially non-violent, and their rise in Hungary,for Arendt, was ‘the clear sign of a true upsurge of democracy against dictator-ship, of freedom against tyranny’ (1958b: 501).

Reading Arendt’s reflections on the Hungarian Revolution half a centuryafter she wrote them, what is striking is her fascination with non-violentpower. It is almost as if Arendt was describing the Velvet revolutions of 1989(Auer, 2006), which, like their predecessor in 1956, were driven primarily bypolitical demands rather than concerns for material welfare. She admired thepolitical prudence of the Hungarian people who ‘knew that they were “livingamidst lies” and asked, unanimously and in all manifestos . . . for freedomof thought’ (1958b: 496). She praised the orderly nature of the revolutionand the speed by which radical changes were implemented by remarkablymoderate means. Commenting on the initial phase in which the communistpower seems to have disintegrated virtually overnight, Arendt wrote:

We may well say that never a revolution achieved its aims so quickly, socompletely and with so few losses. The amazing thing about the Hungarianrevolution is that there was no civil war. For the Hungarian army disintegratedin hours and the dictatorship was stripped of power in a couple of days.(1958b: 496)

There were no internal enemies to speak of, according to Arendt, apartfrom a handful of misguided secret police agents from the AVH (HungarianSecret Police). As there was hardly any military resistance, Arendt argued,the uprising had very few victims, for the ‘few instances of public hangingof AVH officers were conducted with remarkable restraint and discrimination’(1958b: 497). This depiction seems idealized. It is surely questionable whetherthere can ever be public hangings conducted with ‘restraint and discrimin-ation’. Yet Arendt is right to note that violence was not essential to this revol-ution,8 in a marked contrast to the violent means that were used to suppressit. At any rate, the number of victims of revolutionary excesses was quicklyovershadowed by a vast number of victims of the Soviet invasion and theensuing policies of neo-Stalinist restoration. The most prominent martyr ofthe 1956 uprising became the reform-minded communist leader Imré Nagy,who was executed in June 1958 and buried secretly in an unmarked grave.





1956 AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

In the long run, even more important than the actual event might havebeen the public memory of that event. In fact, the temporal distance fromthe upheavals allowed the revolution to enter the true sphere of politics,which is language and symbolic action, rather than violence.9 Regardless ofits military defeat, the greatness of the revolution ‘is secure in the tragedy itenacted’, Arendt proclaimed:

For who can forget the silent procession of black-clad women in the streets ofRussian-occupied Budapest, mourning their dead in public, the last politicalgesture of the revolution? And who can doubt the solidity of this remembrance. . . ? (1958b: 480)

Unfortunately, many people would be made to forget the revolution,at least in the public sphere. The neo-Stalinist rulers in Hungary understoodthe importance of public memory as well as Arendt did, and as long as theyremained committed to controlling the past as much as the present, theirregime seemed remarkably stable. As István Rév observed in a fascinatingstudy of the post-1956 history of public memory: ‘Nontalk was an importanttool of retelling history. In the official Communist chronology certain dates,events, and persons lost intelligibility; they ceased to make sense’ (2005: 31).Political instrumentalization of history is not new, but the communists broughtit to a new level:

Unlike the power of the bishops of late antiquity that derived partly from thetombs of the saints, the strength of the Communist Party stemmed not only fromits dead martyrs, the Communist heroes, but also from the unmarked graves ofunburied, nameless victims, the persons not talked about. (Rév, 2005: 32)

Rév’s study shows what Arendt underestimated: the capacity of the late-totalitarian regimes, like János Kádár’s Hungary, to control the public sphereas effectively as they did for more than 30 years, mostly without any needto resort to violence. This is something that Havel analysed perceptivelymany years later in his influential essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1991b).Havel reflected on the lessons of yet another unsuccessful revolt against com-munism, the Prague Spring, which was suppressed by the Soviet-led invasionin August 1968 and the ensuing policies of the euphemistically called processof ‘normalization’. While the attempt to liberalize communism in Czechoslo-vakia in the late 1960s was radically different from the Hungarian Uprisingof 1956, the late-totalitarian regime that emerged there after 1969 was insome ways rather similar to the ‘goulash’ communism in Kádár’s Hungaryfollowing 1956. The regime no longer required active allegiance to the rulersand the basic tenets of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Instead, as Havelargued, ideology served simply as a handy tool to abdicate one’s responsi-bility for public matters, ‘by creating a bridge of excuses between the systemand the individual’ (1991b: 135). To describe this situation in Arendtian terms




one can argue that what Havel calls ‘evasive thinking’ (1991a), which wasthinking embedded in dogmatic ideology, destroyed space for politics as muchas any politics worthy of its name is constituted through language.

The Prague Spring and its defeat marked yet another important step inthe development of the paradigm of non-violent revolution. Czechoslovakintellectuals and reform communists at the heart of that movement believedthat they had learned a lesson from the Hungarian experience and soughtto refrain from open confrontation with the Soviet Union. In line with this,their demands were much more modest. They did not seek to abolish social-ism, but rather simply to humanize it, and they did not aspire for Czechoslo-vakia to leave the Warsaw Pact Treaty. We know now that this restraint wasnot sufficient to pacify a Soviet leadership concerned about losing its controlover the satellite countries. But we also know, with the privilege of hind-sight, that the Soviet response proved counterproductive in the long term.It significantly contributed to the delegitimization of Soviet power inter-nationally and it severely undermined the popularity of communist rule inCzechoslovakia. For Arendt, as she observed already in 1969, the invasionironically demonstrated Soviet weakness, with their rulers imprudently sub-stituting violence for power (1969: 53). For almost two decades after theinvasion, the Soviet empire continued to exist on the basis of an implicitmilitary threat to the satellite states, and the repression of any open discus-sion within these countries.

In Czechoslovakia itself, Arendt’s assessment was foreshadowed byMilan Kundera who argued in an influential article, ‘Czech Fate’, that the‘Prague autumn may well trump in importance the Prague Spring’ (1968: 5).Kundera celebrated the fact that Czechs and Slovaks remained truthful tothe ideals of the Prague Spring and defended its political accomplishments.It is indeed important to recall that the invasion alone did not bring aboutthe end of the Prague Spring, and that Czechoslovak citizens really seemedsuccessful in defying the invaders for many months. Yet Kundera’s optimismproved premature. His somewhat complacent and self-congratulatory attitudemight have unwittingly contributed to the success of the policies of neo-Stalinist restoration, which depended on the appearance of calm. The tragedyof the Prague autumn was that Czechs and Slovaks, who believed that itwas only sensible to avoid open confrontation, deluded themselves intothinking that they could maintain freedom without fighting for it. Step by step,the post-1968 Czechoslovak leadership reversed the policies of liberalizationand a vast majority of citizens ultimately succumbed to the newly restored,repressive order (Auer, 2008).

POST-1968 ORDER IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA: CONFORMISM ANDBOREDOM

The best-known victim of the failed attempt at liberalization in Czecho-slovakia is Jan Palach, who immolated himself in Wenceslas Square in Prague




in January 1969. It is revealing that Palach made this ultimate sacrifice notsimply in protest against the invasion, but rather in protest against the wide-spread attitude of his co-patriots who showed themselves increasingly com-pliant with the new regime (Williams, 1997: 189–90). Palach’s daring challengeremained largely unheeded and Czechoslovak society remained paralysedfor the next 20 years. It is hence hard to accept Gene Sharp’s propositionto consider the peaceful resistance in Czechoslovakia as an example of theeffectiveness of ‘civilian struggle for national defence purposes’ (1985: 47).To be sure, the invasion itself did not suffice to restore a more repressivepolitical regime, but the lack of more sustained resistance against the SovietUnion made later concessions easier to accept.

The political regime which characterized Czechoslovakia in the 1970sand 1980s developed novel and more insidious ways of domination andcontrol that were less dependent on violence. As Havel observed, the latetotalitarian order10 was not sustained primarily by the ‘armed might of itssoldiers and police’ (1991b: 128) but by the passive support of a populationthat appeared to have accepted the lies of the dominant ideology. Just asin post-1956 Hungary, forgetting was the key to post-1968 normalization inCzechoslovakia (Garton Ash, 1999: 55).11 People were made to forget theexhilarating experience of freedom as well as their short-lived non-violentresistance against the Soviet occupation. Instead of engaging politically, mostpeople were induced to devote their lives to the pursuit of material interests.Consumerism in the late totalitarian order contributed to the destruction ofliberty almost as effectively as violence did in the early stages of totalitarianregimes. The unwritten trade-off established through normalization was similarto Kadar’s Hungary and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union: as a denizen of the latetotalitarian regime, you will be left alone to pursue a (however restricted)consumer life-style as long as you maintain the appearance of political com-pliance.

The manifold accounts of the re-birth of civil society in Central andEastern Europe, which dominated the literature of the 1980s,12 were as excitingas they were fictitious. This is not to underestimate the activities of dissidentintellectuals, but their impact was constrained by the limited public supportthey received. The Charter 77 human rights movement, for example, wasimportant in articulating a vision of non-violent resistance against the regime,but its reach amongst ordinary Czechs and Slovaks was not very wide.13 Innormalized Czechoslovakia, at any rate, there was no civil society to speakof. Most people most of the time were unable or unwilling to act as politi-cal beings, because they felt isolated and were distrustful of each other. Latetotalitarian society was sufficiently atomised to prevent meaningful politicalactions from occurring. What has seldom been described in the vast and stillgrowing literature on communism and post-communism is how dull the dailylife was for the vast majority of denizens of the really existing communism.14

If life at the height of ‘classic’ totalitarian power in the early 1950s – particu-larly for the victims of purges and show trials – could be described as ‘brutish,




nasty and short’, life in the late totalitarian regime became utterly predictableand boring, if not necessarily longer.15 With some simplification one couldsay that the regime was sustained by the prevalent attitude of people char-acterized by a mixture of apathy, cynicism and opportunism.

This is the background against which Havel sought to mobilize his co-patriots against the late totalitarian regime by exposing its inherent weakness.Because the system relied on the tacit support of a vast majority of the popu-lation, it was, ironically, very vulnerable. This is the reason why the ‘power-less’ masses were in fact potentially very powerful. Individuals could regainpolitical power simply by refusing to play their part in the inauthentic system.‘The power of the powerless’ would be realized once more, and more peoplerejected a life of lies and attempted to ‘live in truth’. As simple as this propo-sition may appear, Havel was aware of the fact that what he was calling forwas, in many ways, more ambitious than a traditional political revolution. Hecalled for an ‘existential revolution’ (1991b: 207) that would lead to a far-reaching ‘moral reconstitution of society’ (1991b: 209). Havel insisted thatthese ambitious goals must not be pursued by violent means, based on hisconviction that ‘a future secured by violence might actually be worse thanwhat exists now’ (1991b: 184). Yet Havel was also fully aware of the needfor courage (p. 208). It is worth noting that this classic essay was devoted toJan Patocka, one of the key architects of the Charter 77 movement and thefirst prominent victim of the communist clampdown against the movement.Havel understood well that the commitment to freedom might require signifi-cant personal sacrifices, as demonstrated, for example, by Patocka’s selflesscommitment to Charter 77; but he consistently opposed the idea that thelives of others could be sacrificed for a higher goal, including the one of ‘ourcommon freedom’ (Havel, 1990: 102).16

POLISH SOLIDARITY IN 1980–81 AS THE CULMINATION OFNON-VIOLENT POWER

It is telling that Havel’s prescriptions that aimed to mobilize ‘the powerof the powerless’ in Czechoslovakia seem to have applied better to Poland.For it was the Polish people who displayed more courage than any othernation in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the 1970s and the 1980s.Their ‘carnival of revolution’ spearheaded the end of boredom in the Easternbloc. The rise of the Solidarnosc movement appeared to mark the culmina-tion of non-violent struggle against communism. The Solidarnosc activists,like Adam Michik and Jacek Kuron, seemed to have found a way to squarethe circle: how to defy the communist rule without confronting it head-on.The earlier experiences clearly showed that whether radical changes werebeing pursued from below, as in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or whetherthey were (partly) steered from above, as in the Prague Spring of 1968, theywere doomed to fail because they attracted the Soviet intervention. In response,




the new maxim became evolution rather than revolution. This maxim, articu-lated by Michnik, was based on a widespread belief that to seek to over-throw ‘the dictatorship of the party by revolution . . . [was] both unrealisticand dangerous’ (1985a: 142). And for a period of time, this moderate, non-revolutionary strategy of ‘new evolutionism’ seemed to have worked remark-ably well. No other country achieved such high levels of mass mobilizationagainst the system as Poland in 1980–81, but even here violence ultimatelyproved capable of destroying power. The proclamation of martial law inDecember 1981, that is said to have been motivated by the desire to preventa Soviet-led invasion, succeeded in arresting further developments for almosta decade.

Further changes in the countries of Central Europe could only occurthanks to the changes in the Soviet Union, which became possible with therise to power of the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Without overstatingthe importance of the Prague Spring for the Soviet Union proper, it is worthnoting that the reformist changes introduced in the 1980s were presaged bya handful of dissident intellectuals who were inspired by its legacy. As arecent study showed, 1968 marked ‘the birth of the human rights movement’in the Soviet Union (Daniel, 2008). Despite their limited popular support,Russian dissidents profoundly changed the intellectual climate in the country.This in turn influenced the course of perestroika (Horvath, 2005). Further-more, Gorbachev himself learned the ‘Arendtian lesson’ about the limitationsof power based on violence precisely in response to the intervention of1968.17 This partly explains the puzzle of ‘the guns that didn’t smoke’ (Bennet,2005) in 1989, when the disintegration of the Soviet empire was not resistedby military means. While the Soviet Union still had the military capacity toprevent these developments from happening, its leaders no longer sharedthe conviction of their predecessors that their power should be maintainedby violence.

The Soviet policies of Glasnost that aimed at opening up public debateswere bound to undermine regimes based on hypocrisy and historical lies.In Hungary, for example, as much as the enforced silence about the 1956revolution was crucial for the survival of communism, the open admissionof the ruling party about its past crimes committed to suppress that revol-ution eventually led to its speedy demise. If there is a day that could besingled out as decisive for the end of communism in Hungary, it was 16June 1989 when the state-sponsored reburial of Imré Nagy took place (Rév,2005: 30). In a similar vein, ‘Czechoslovakia’s interrupted revolution’ of 1968(Skilling, 1976) was bound to resume, if in a radically different form, onceit became more and more obvious that Gorbachev’s reforms resembled thosethat were attempted in Czechoslovakia 20 years earlier. While not muchhappened in 1988, that is 20 years after the Prague Spring, the expectationthat something could or should have happened in yet another year of Czech‘magic eights’18 paved the way for the changes in 1989 (Simecka, 1990). A




public demonstration that commemorated student victims of Nazi repressionsfrom 17 November 1939 by violent means backfired by strengthening theresolve of many Czechs and Slovaks to defy the regime. In Poland, the con-cession towards the legalization of Solidarnosc made in early 1989 led ulti-mately to the de-legitimization of the Communist Party and its embarrassingdefeat in the first semi-free elections in June 1989. This is not the place togive a comprehensive account of the reasons for the collapse of commun-ism, or to describe the sequence of key events; it suffices to say that, inhindsight, the collapse of communism in Central Europe seems almostoverdetermined. Yet there can be little doubt that neither the outcome ofthese events nor their non-violent character were inevitable, as the concur-rent developments of that year in China and Romania demonstrated.

AGAINST THE MYTH OF THE VELVET REVOLUTION

It is tempting to think of the 1989 revolution as the fairytale-like endingto a century characterized by devastating wars, revolutions and other cata-strophes. According to Havel, for example, the events of 1989 demonstratedthat the

world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthfulword, the strength of a free spirit, conscience, and responsibility – with no guns,no lust for power, no political wheeling and dealing. (1992: 5)

Havel, who turned virtually overnight from a dissident intellectual, fearedand despised by the communist regime, into the first post-communist presi-dent, should be forgiven for this initial enthusiasm. It is more troublesometo see such a simplistic approach adopted and maintained by historians andcommentators later on.19 The argument that the 1989 collapse of communismin Central Europe ‘presents the most sweeping demonstration so far of thepower of “politics” without violence’ (Schell, 2003: 186) appears pleasing, butit is problematic. The excessive focus on 1989 might indeed be misleading.A backward reading of history of communism that considers all the previousdevelopments from the prism of its actual peaceful demise obscures both thenature of the communist regime and the struggle against it. Clearly, through-out its history neither the regime nor the opposition against it were alwaysfree of violence. In this sense, the non-violent revolutions of 1989 were notentirely without their victims, because 1989 could not have happened theway it did was it not preceded by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the PragueSpring of 1968, the Charter 77 movement and the rise of Solidarnosc in 1980–1.

Such an approach also fails to do justice to the legacy of dissident intel-lectuals and their predecessors, whose thinking shaped the opposition againstcommunism. While political thinkers and activists like Arendt, Havel, Michnikand Patocka conceptualized non-violent power and were anxious to avoida violent confrontation, they were also acutely aware of the limits of this




strategy. They were certainly no pacifists dogmatically opposed to violence.They shared a strong conviction that there ‘were causes worth suffering anddying for’ (Michnik, 1985b: 89) and believed that there were circumstancesin which a violent fight for liberty was not only justifiable but indeed required.Hence, it should not have come as a surprise that Michnik, alongside Haveland George Konrad, supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, despitetheir reservations against the deficient justification of that invasion. Theyconsidered the invasion legitimate to the extent that it was directed againsta totalitarian regime that could not have been challenged simply by non-violent means (Cushman, 2004: 31; Konrád, 2004: 27; Kramer, 2004).

As Arendt never ceased to remind us, already ancient Greeks under-stood that politics requires sacrifices and courage:

It requires courage even to leave the protective security of our four walls andenter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may lie in waitfor us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the concern for life haslost its validity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for thefreedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life butthe world is at stake. (Arendt, 1961: 156)

In a similar vein, Havel, echoing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was concernedalready in the late 1970s that consumerism both in the East and the Westerodes liberty (Havel, 1991b: 208). A complacent, egotistic way of life, devotedto solely materialistic pursuits, was not conducive to the kind of politics thatmakes liberty possible. Both Patocka and Solzhenitsyn argued, from theirradically different philosophical positions, that the purpose of life must gobeyond the mere fulfilment of material needs. ‘If, as claimed by humanism,man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die’ (Solzhenitsyn,1980: 19). Patocka, who considered Solzhenitsyn alongside Sacharov andHeidegger as amongst ‘the heroes of our times’ (Patocka, 2002a), built onArendt’s insights to argue that there are two ways in which a human life canreach beyond its mere effort to survive:

Firstly through creating above such basic life [of mere biological survival] andin some ways against it a life in risk for other people, one’s equals. That iswhat marked the emergence of political action. Such political action gave rise. . . to the historical life of the Western man, and in that sense of history assuch. Secondly, a man who takes full responsibility sub specie aeterni and isfully aware of the risks he is taking . . . is not taking away responsibility fromhis co-equals but challenges them through his actions to accept equally theirown responsibility. (Patocka, 2002c: 314)

People engaged in an existential struggle for liberty, which is funda-mentally a struggle for politics in Arendt’s sense, must be prepared toconfront challenges, which in certain circumstances may even lead to thempaying the ultimate price. Through that experience a specific bondage iscreated, which Patocka calls ‘the solidarity of the shattered ’:




The solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and deathare all about, and consequently also what history is all about. That history isthis conflict of mere life, naked and constrained by fear, with life at the peak,life that does not [merely] plan for the future ordinary days, but sees clearlythat ordinary day, his life and ‘peace’ come to an end. (Patocka, 2002d: 129;for an English translation see also Patocka, 1996: 134)

It is worth stressing that none of these arguments amount to the defenceof ‘revolutionary privilege’, that is the justification of violence through somelofty goals that the revolution is meant to follow (Horvath, 2007). The argu-ment is rather the opposite one: it is explicitly directed against any violentrevolution. For Patocka, the political program that would arise from suchsolidarity ‘must be directed against all radical programs of total change, whichpromise the elimination of evil, all wars, exploitation, oppression. . . . Theprogram must simply be: to prevent something awful from happening’(Patocka, 2002b: 502). Such a programme is very much in line with thelegacy of the Velvet Revolution. ‘Velvet Revolutionaries’ did not shirk fromviolence out of fear; rather they opposed and successfully refuted the notionthat violence must be an integral part of radical political change. Havingshown that a society could be dramatically transformed without violence,they made the prospect for future revolutions less terrifying.

FROM VELVET TO ORANGE: A NEW MODEL FOR THENON-REVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION?

It is encouraging that the Velvet Revolution has served as a model fora ‘non-revolutionary’ change in places as different as post-communist Serbia(2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005).20 None of these‘coloured’ revolutions aimed at the creation of a new political system, letalone the final elimination of all injustices; they were rather like ‘correctiverevolutions’, attempting to challenge those corrupt autocratic regimes thatemerged in these places after the demise of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Unionrespectively. While classic revolutions aimed at creating a new constitutionalorder, the leaders of the ‘coloured revolutions’ demanded from their rulerssimply that they respect the constitutional order which often existed only onpaper. The Rose Revolution in Georgia, for example, ‘did not involve a changeof a political regime, but rather its defense’ (Nodia, 2005: 100). In a similarvein, a year later in Ukraine during the Orange revolution:

There were no demands to replace democracy with a fundamentally new anddifferent form of government. Rather, Ukrainians protested in order to guaranteethat the rules and institutions of democracy – formally outlined in the consti-tution and other documents but informally undermined by corrupt governmentpractices – were followed. (McFaul, 2006: 190–1)

Another significant legacy of 1989 was the programmatic rejection ofviolence. While the Jacobin-style revolutionary leaders in the past assumed




that their politics would not be taken seriously unless and until they showedwhat cruelty they were capable of against their enemies, the new revolu-tionaries, such as Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia and Viktor Yushchenko inUkraine, were anxious to demonstrate their willingness for a negotiated settle-ment. This served as an invitation to the powers that be to resist their temp-tation to resort to violence. To put it crudely, corrupt leaders, such as theformer Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, were free to choose between thePolish or the Romanian option. Following the first one they would lose powerbut save their lives (and possibly some privileges), as did General Jaruzelskiin Poland. Following the second option, they might end up paying with theirlives, as did Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

Yet none of these revolutionaries, despite their rejection of violence,were able to foresee whether their struggle would remain non-violent. Evenin that paradigmatic case, which was the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia,many demonstrators could have reasonably expected that they were puttingthemselves into harm’s way. The fears of a violent clampdown were wellfounded, especially after a widely circulated rumour about the killing of astudent demonstrator, Martin Smíd. Although no-one actually died in thesedemonstrations, the fictitious martyr of the Velvet Revolution fulfilled its roleby mobilizing even more protesters against the regime (Auer, 2004a: 101).21

Similarly, as Ghia Nodia observed, it was never a foregone conclusion thatthe revolution in Georgia would not turn violent:

People in the crowd did not want bloodshed, but they knew they were riskingit, and they still did what they did. People hoped that all would be resolvedwithout bloodshed, but many also believed that if bloodshed proved to beunavoidable, so be it. What the events did demonstrate was that Georgia hasindeed joined in the universalistic humanist mood of minimalist violence : viol-ence can only be justified if it constitutes a last resort and constitutes necessaryself-defense. (Nodia, 2005: 100)

Hence, to acknowledge that there are times and situations in whichviolence cannot be avoided should not be read as an attempt to rehabilitatethe arguments in favour of revolutionary violence. The point is simply tomodify the more pleasing assumptions about non-violent power. At the timeof writing, Georgia, entangled in a military confrontation with Russia, servedas a timely reminder of the danger that violence can prevail over power inthe Arendtian sense. This is the negative lesson of 1989 which autocratic rulers,like Vladimir Putin, learned in response to the ‘Spectre of Velvet Revolution’(Simon, 2006). The violent revolutions may well be a thing of the past, butviolence is not. Its capacity to destroy power remains undiminished.

Stefan Auer is Senior Lecturer in history and politics at La Trobe University inMelbourne, Australia, and the Deputy Director of the Innovative Universities EuropeanUnion (IUEU) Centre. Prior to this, he was Lecturer (2001–6) and Academic Director(2004–5) of the Dublin European Institute, University College Dublin. His book, Liberal




Nationalism in Central Europe (Routledge, 2004, pbk 2006) won the prize for BestBook in European Studies (2005) with the University Association for ContemporaryEuropean Studies (UACES). He has published articles in Critical Horizons, East Euro-pean Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics,Osteuropa and elsewhere. [email: [email protected]]

AcknowledgementsI presented an earlier version of this article at the annual conference of the

Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical Universityof Dresden, 23–25 June 2008, and I am very grateful for the feedback from the partici-pants and organizers of the conference – in particular from Uwe Backes and GerhardSimon. I would also like to thank Christopher Finlay, Robert Horvath and especiallyTony Philips for their support and extensive feedback.

Notes1. As John Lechte argued in one of the early issues of Thesis Eleven, the apparent

inherent contradiction in Marx’s famous statement can be resolved by the real-ization that the division between theory and practice is based on the basicmisunderstanding of the nature of language. Once the thesis is considered asa speech act, or in fact a provocation, the problem of the link between revol-utionary theory and practice no longer exists (Lechte, 1981). Interestingly, thisunderstanding of the speech act as constituting political action is very close toArendt’s understanding of politics. For Arendt, as I discuss below, language isthe only legitimate medium of politics.

2. Arendt vehemently rejected the idea that she was a philosopher (1994c: 1–2).To her, political philosophy actually came to a ‘definite end in the theories ofKarl Marx’ (1961: 17).

3. Both the essay and the cited passage in the Origins heavily rely on the officialreports from the Nuremberg trials, in which justice Robert H. Jackson in hisopening address described Nazi conspiracy as a revolution ( Jackson, 1946: 126).

4. This was particularly the case in Germany. As Milan Hauner observed in antici-pation of the Historikerstreit, there was ‘a general reluctance, combined withtimidity as well as justified revulsion, amongst the majority of historians andpolitical scientists, to apply the term revolution to the National Socialist move-ment’ (Hauner, 1984: 671). This reluctance only abated after the end of the ColdWar (Bracher, 1995: 36). François Furet argued, for example, that there was ‘noreason to exclude fascism from the revolutionary privilege or curse under thepretext that it fought under the flag of a single nation or race’ (Furet, 1999: 33).

5. Irving Howe, for example, argued that

the implicit assumption of Arendt, Orwell, and other such writers is thattotalitarianism is a society which has achieved a kind of stasis, even if oneof systematized chaos; a society that has established an equilibrium betweenthe flow of terror that is essential to its existence and the energies thatmake possible the permanence of this terror. (Howe, 1956: 526)

6. Arendt is more guarded in the preface to the second edition of The Origins,where she writes that ‘no one can tell whether this was only the last flare-up




of a spirit which, since 1789, has manifested itself in a series of European revol-utions, or if it contains the germ of something new which will have consequenceof its own’ (Arendt, 1958b: xi). It is only in the 1966 edition that Arendt cameto believe that the process of detotalitarization had started already in 1953, thatis after the death of Stalin (Arendt, 1966: ix).

7. ‘If systematic murder is perpetrated in the name of a noble political goal, sois the meaning of such politics murder, regardless whether its intended purposeis meant to be the eternal peace or the classless society’, as Arendt noted inher unpresented lecture notes (1958a: 3).

8. As Christopher Finlay shows in this issue, this is consistent with Arendt’s viewthat although violence can never be legitimate, in certain circumstances it canbe justified.

9. As Arendt argued, what makes man a political being is his ‘capacity for actingand speaking,’ whereby ‘speaking is but another mode of acting’ (1966–7: 21).In contrast, ‘violence, as distinguished from power, is mute; violence beginswhere speech ends’ (1994b: 308).

10. Havel uses the term ‘post-totalitarian’ to differentiate between the early stageof communism in which the rulers depended more on the crude force from the‘normalized’ regime in the 1970s. I prefer to reserve the term post-totalitarianto describe the situation after the collapse of communism, concurring, forexample, with Avi Tucker (Tucker, forthcoming).

11. Mirek, a fictional character in Kundera’s bestselling novel, The Book of Laughterand Forgetting, expressed this logic pithily: ‘The struggle of man against poweris the struggle of memory against forgetting’ (Kundera, 1999: 4).

12. One of the key essays that presents an insightful early analysis of Poland in1980–1 is Arato (1981).

13. Even as late as ‘1985 only about 1,200 people had signed’, of which only ahandful were Slovaks (Agnew, 2004: 280).

14. István Rév refers to the ‘boredom factor’ (1994: 170). For a witty and somewhatpoetic description of the ‘nature of boredom’ in East Germany see (Ahrends,1991).

15. Paradoxically, the expansion of consumer society in Central and Eastern Europedid not lead to longer and healthier lives. As a recent comparative study demon-strated, one of the characteristic features of all the countries in the communistbloc has been the declining life expectancy since the early 1970s (Cockerham,1999).

16. As Havel admitted explicitly in response to Karel Hvízd’ala and his proposi-tion that ‘freedom must be fought for and usually paid in blood’: ‘If peopleare willing, in extreme situations, to shed their own blood for freedom, theyhave a greater chance of actually gaining that freedom than if they are notwilling to do so. . . . But I would immediately add another important thing:such decisions cannot be made for others’ (Havel, 1990: 102).

17. As Gorbachev later admitted to his student-friend, Zdenek Mlynár, who wasone of the intellectual architects of the Prague Spring and a signatory of theCharter 77 movement, ‘violence never provides a lasting solution’. As Mlynárput it, ‘the Soviet tanks in August 1968, from the point of view of long-termdevelopments, achieved exactly the opposite result of what those who sentthem said they wanted to achieve. And so, to try to hold together the “socialist




camp” in 1989 with the use of force would undoubtedly not have “savedsocialism”’ (Gorbachev and Mlynar, 2002: 128–9).

18. Most crucial events in Czech and Czechoslovak history of the 20th century tookplace in a year ending with the number 8. The First Czechoslovak Republicwas created in 1918, to be later destroyed by the expansionist policies of NaziGermany endorsed by the Munich Treaty of 1938. After the war, the communisttakeover took place in 1948 and reform communism culminated in 1968 (Auer,2008).

19. The most recent poetic restatement of Havel’s early assessment comes fromChristopher Hitchens, who believes that in 1989 ‘the system farcically evaporatedin the face of a wave of literate and humorous and ironic and defiant words,uttered by novelists like Milan Kundera, playwrights like Vaclav Havel, andsingers like the Plastic People of the Universe’ (Hitchens, 2008).

20. It is not argued here that there was a direct causal relation between 1989 andthe ensuing revolutions in Eastern Europe. While very few leaders made areference to a ‘European-type velvet revolution’ as explicitly as MikheilSaakashvili, who chose the term to describe what became known as the ‘RoseRevolution’ in Georgia (BBC Worldwide Monitoring, 21 November 2003), itcannot be doubted that most activists must have been aware of historical prece-dence for their actions.

21. Ironically, a recent publication that feeds into ‘the myth of the Velvet Revol-ution’ that I criticize above erroneously refers to this alleged victim, ignoringall the contrary evidence (Sharp, 2005: 272).

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Documents

2 Violence and the End of Revolution After 1989