The Revolutions of 1989
It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I was interested to learn while in the former East Germany, that in the GDR economic system being a waiter was considered a very desirable job. It was apparently disorienting for some ambitious young East Germans who’d achieved the dream of waiterdom to discover that this is a low-status position in a market economy. The guy I heard about this from at greatest length made the transition okay, however, and now works in PR for Volkswagen.
Late-GDR life is the subject of two excellent films, Good Bye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others, that everyone should see. I’m not really clear how representative daily life in the GDR was of everyday existence in other Eastern Bloc countries, but since as far as I know there aren’t excellent movies about daily life in Communist Poland or Communist Bulgaria this is probably how we’ll remember things.
Charles Kenny has written a very interesting paper on the Soviet bloc’s economic performance.
Something remarkable to keep in mind about the Revolutions of 1989 is how peaceful they were—triumphs of people power and courageous non-violent resistance on the part of populations, aided by a late-Communist leadership that in the end mostly chose to do the right thing and give up rather than go down in a wave of bloodshed. With the exception of Romania and Yugoslovia, regimes that ruled by force and violence were not, themselves, brought down by force and violence. A lot of somewhat odd happenstance was involved in the happy ending of the Cold War in Germany, but as the pattern was largely repeated elsewhere I think perhaps it shouldn’t be chalked up to fluky contingencies.
59 Responses to “The Revolutions of 1989”
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November 9th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Tell me, do you really think the way our putative market economy dumps on waitpersons is a function of the market or a functionof power relations and the ideology of the powerful, or peryhaps the college educated? As opposed to the “market” deciding that bankets and marketing managers are worth the big bucks.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Here’s one more movie on life in the eastern bloc that is outstanding: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It’s set in the last days of Ceausescu-era Romania, and tells the story of a young college student seeking an abortion. It’s an amazing movie, and besides the incredibly compelling story, gives a vivid picture of everyday life in that country under communism.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:16 am
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a spectacular movie about life in Communist Romania.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:16 am
On the last point, I think the non-violence of the fall of the Eastern bloc regimes has a lot to do with the Helsinki accord and its long shadow. Therefore it’s worth acknowledging the success of those in the west who negotiated it (notwithstanding their other sins and errors), and also the importance of espect for the essential humanity of our erstwhile “enemies” as part of any coherent national security strategy.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:18 am
“With the exception of Romania and Yugoslovia, regimes that ruled by force and violence were not, themselves, brought down by force and violence. A lot of somewhat odd happenstance was involved in the happy ending of the Cold War in Germany, but as the pattern was largely repeated elsewhere I think perhaps it shouldn’t be chalked up to fluky contingencies.”
I understand the thought is not fashionable, but once the horrors of Stalin were done with, the Soviet system was actually reasonably humane.
The system obviously was problematic, and likely was unsustainable, but it wasn’t the evil system that American conventional wisdom contends.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:21 am
The desirability of the waiting profession of the GDR was its access to HARD CURRENCY in the form of DMarks, Dollars, Pounds, etc, with which a GDR citizen can buy otherwise unattainable goods at the hard currency shops. On one of my meals during a visit to East Berlin in the summer of 88, I spent the grand total of about $10 US for a four course gourmet dinner with wine at the Ratskeller restaurant in E. Berlin’s city hall. I gave the waiter a $5 tip for which he was very grateful. BTW, he also tried to solicit my phone number (I was a USAF officer in my uniform). This very clumsy attempt to solicit intelligence by an obvious Stasi informer was quite amusing. But it’s how the game was played.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:30 am
While not technically a movie (rather, 10 hour-long films), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue is a profound study of life in late-Communist era Poland.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Another fantastic movie about life in the Communist bloc is the Czech film, Kolya. It doesn’t just show the degradations and repression, but also the humor and creativity that people used to survive it. Also, if you’d rather read about it, the book Cafe Europa, by Slavenka Drakulic, is a fantastic collection of essays and commentaries on life in the Eastern bloc both before and after the fall.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:35 am
With the exception of Romania and Yugoslovia, regimes that ruled by force and violence were not, themselves, brought down by force and violence. [...]
I understand the thought is not fashionable, but once the horrors of Stalin were done with, the Soviet system was actually reasonably humane.
In Romania, we did have bloody revolution, but in Yugoslavia, change happened before wars started. Wars in Yugoslavia were conducted nationalists, and comunists were already out of power.
Also, as a person growing up in Yugoslavia, I would not say that we were governed by ‘force and violence’. As poster before me says, it was quite humane. My grandfather was illiterate peasant, my father had opportunity to work and study alongside work, finish high school and become railway dispatcher (this guy with red cap, sending trains off). I grew up in middle-lower class family and finished computer science degree for free, got nice job, and nice life.
For majority of people of Yugoslavia, rule of communists were step up from toils of lower class labor. Nobody in my family who lived in capitalist, royal Yugoslavia before WWII remembers it fondly — they were poor peasants, exploited by rich people all the time.
Now, in hindsight, we may have been even more successful with market economy, but overall, Yugoslavia experienced progress under communist rule. Go to YouTube and see how many views has Yugo-nostalgic songs. We truly loved our country and genuinely sang patriotic songs.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Just to add to my previous comment: Nobody in my family was member of communist party, I was baptized in church in middle of the city, I celebrated Christmas and Easter, and we as a family generally did well. Nobody was bothering us ever.
We looked at member of communist party as someone without priniciples, who would sold anything for material advance.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:40 am
!!! OMG, Matthew: “Man of Marble” by Andrzej Wajda was one of the best movies I saw in the 80s (it’s from ‘77 actually, and is the better off for being pre-Solidarnosc). Wajda is a great director and all of his stuff is interesting.
Another Polish one you must consider: Krzystof Zanussi.
These guys were making movies during Communism, though: you can see the currents of daily life through the films, but the films are not as explicitly about that.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Matt, you should check out Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue–ten one-hour films organized around the ten commandments and set in late-communist Poland.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:44 am
There’s also something to be said for security forces not willing to wage war on everyday people. It’s not just about ordering crackdowns–you have to have soldiers willing to shoot.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:49 am
“I know there aren’t excellent movies about daily life in Communist Poland or Communist Bulgaria this is probably how we’ll remember things.”
This is the problem with being young and superficial and not interested in the past. There were lots of excellent movies about daily life in communist countries. But they were made in the communist period. Man of Marble, Man of Iron, Time Stands Still, Agni Vera, A Diary for my Children, Loves of a Blonde, Teddy Bear, The Witness (and lots more). More political freedom has overall improved the quality of life, but Eastern European film has yet to fully recover from the fall of communism.
Petey is roughly correct. After the Stalinist period, the Eastern European communist governments were pretty bad by European standards, but all in all not really worse than most third world governments (then and now) including lots of US allies. For Russia, the post Stalinist USSR was about as close to civil society as they’ve ever gotten, probably closer than what they’ve got now.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Growing up and hearing about all the upheaval and change around the year 1968 it is a little odd that the actually truly momentous changes of 1989 seem still to me not to be remembered as being the much more significant turning point that it is.
I remember it all happened so fast, and so quickly went from seeming impossible to inevitable, that it is hard to recall effectively.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I’m not an expert by any means, but it seems like “doing the right thing” may have been a smart strategic move for many late communist leaders. Peacefully ceding power allowed many of them to continue their political careers.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:08 am
On the subject of eastern European film-making and the transition from communism to capitalism, there’s a very good book on a very similar topic, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light. It’s by Czech author Ivan Klima.
http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Dark-Light-Novel/dp/0802142435/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257782768&sr=8-1
November 9th, 2009 at 11:08 am
The Decalogue certainly is a good movie about everyday life in Poland. Now if only someone could write a good long poem about war in ancient Greece.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am
The Lives Of Others is the movie of the decade.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is good, but some sequences are too long (the birthday scene is looong).
Goodbye, Lenin! is great too. German cinema has been great in the last decade.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Reagan deserves all the credit. By funding the non-violent humanist movement in Nicaragua, Reagan sent an example for the world. The communist knew they could never defeat St. Ronald because of his family man lifestyle and the power of supply side economics that ran through his vein. During his first visit on Earth he defeat communism. During his second coming, he will lay judgment upon the quick and the dead.
I LOVE REAGAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
November 9th, 2009 at 11:26 am
One interesting note from Timothy Garton Ash’s recent NYRB article:
The great success of the counterrevolutions of 1989 was primarily due to internal factors, but the fact that George H. W. Bush wasn’t a neocon who believed that demonstrating American force of will and idealism by loudly demanding democracy and publicly supporting dissidents at every opportunity also helped.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Goodbye Lenin is a horrible film. If you want entertainment, forget it, if you want to learn about the east, also forget it, its you know still a film aiming at entertainment but failing.
Get a history book forget those pseudo intelectual films.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I, too, thought of Krzysztof Kieślowski. His early stuff is very good at depicting everyday life in Poland. I also have seen “Man of Marble,” but forgot about it — it’s great, well-worth a rental.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:46 am
They’re only nonviolent if you ignore the one that wasn’t.
Tienanmen occurred in 1989, as well.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Agreed with everyone else who said it: The Decalogue is a masterpiece deserving of every ounce of praise it receives. It’s not a political film, but the day-to-day life of Poland is very much on display.
For the last ten years of his life, Kieslowski was easily the best filmmaker on earth.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Poppy Bush took a lot of heat for not supporting the Baltic states’ independence efforts, but he was absolutely right. He left the hardline Soviet militarists with nothing to rally around.
My non-cliche statement about 1989: the Containment people were right, and the Rollback people were wrong. The Soviet empire didn’t start falling in Nicaragua, Angola, and Vietnam and then shrink from the fringes to the heartland. It fell first in Berlin and Moscow, the very center of the empire. That’s why there are still communist outposts like Cuba and North Korea, but none in Eastern Europe.
Reagan spent three decades promoting Rollback over Containment. It’s what he built his political reputation around. This fact makes it all the more impressive that he was able to recognize, after he came to office, that Containment had actually worked, and the Soviet Union was undergoing the very reform and collapse that the Rollbackers assured us could never happen. For him to be able to recognize and act on this observation is one of the more impressive and surprising intellectual and political deeds in American political history, but nobody wants to talk about it, because it goes against the narratives about Reagan that both the left and the right treasure so much.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:59 am
My favorite movie about the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe is easily ‘12.08 East of Bucharest’ (Romanian title: A fost sau n-a fost ‘Was it or wasn’t it’).
The first half set-up is slow (and it’s easy for a foreigner to get confused a little) but the second half life tv show is amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI97EXm48GY
November 9th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Poppy Bush took a lot of heat for not supporting the Baltic states’ independence efforts, but he was absolutely right.
That is absolutely true. Bush/41 pretty much did what needed to be done, even if it was for the wrong reasons. And once his administration had the necessary information in front of them, they handled it well– managing German reunification by keeping Germany in NATO and the Soviet Union’s collapse by having Russia replace the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN security council were two of the greatest diplomatic accomplishments when it came to managing the collapse of European communism.
But Bush hated the neocons. Even if he didn’t know what was right at any given moment, he definitely knew that the neocons were wrong. Unfortunately, part of Bush/43’s daddy issues meant that he was going to rebel and try to outdo his father by throwing his lot with the neocons.
The thing is about Reagan is that I don’t think he understood that Containment worked until well into his second term. If he figured that out, it is not something he suddenly discovered when assuming office.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
What ReaganLovedFreedomFreedomLovedReagan said.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I wonder if Bush the Elder played any role in getting Reagan to recognize Gorbachev’s actions for what they were.
I’ll note that Richard Perle – he of the “Team B” report that Reagan’s “missile gap” argument was based around – blasted Reagan for his diplomatic thaw towards the Soviets.
Well, it hadn’t happened when Reagan first took office. Gromyko and Chernenko and Andropov were still Cold Warriors.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Petey is right- Post-Stalinist communism in the USSR and in Eastern Europe was pretty mild stuff and the desultory way in which it died was a logical continuation of how it lived.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Post-Stalinist Eastern European communism wasn’t “all that bad” — in the same sense that Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile weren’t “all that bad”: namely, in the sense that living a normal life, so long as you’re willing to give up political freedom, was possible (in contrast to the precariousness of day-to-day life for even apolitical people in a Stalinist state).
I feel embarrassed for the the writers whenever I see some revisionist apology for Marcos or Pinochet in the National Review or Weekly Standard, and I find the vindications of Eastern Bloc societies as jumping the extraordinarily low bar of being better on human rights than Stalinism kind of embarrassing too. Heck, I’d be reluctant to call the PATRIOT Act pretty mild stuff.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I dont know, i wouldnt call a dicatorship that kills everyone that tries to leave the country and employs every tenth grownup spying on the others to check if they might anything regime crticial “mild stuff”. Actually i dont think any of todays dictatorships has such an extreme surveilance system….
November 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
The argument about Soviet Communism reforming itself is a lot stronger if you limit it to the Gorbachev era.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Another good movie about commie day-to-day: The Irony of Fate
November 9th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Are there few or no films about the evils and mass genocide of the Commies because everyone in Hollywood is a Commie?
November 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Not that that stopped Ross Douthat.
The BBC’s three-part doc from earlier this year, The Lost World of Communism, is worth a look.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Are there few or no films about the evils and mass genocide of the Commies because everyone in Hollywood is a Commie?
It’s probably for the same reason that your script for Hayek Is My Messiah didn’t get greenlighted, Bobbis.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
36. Actually, chief, there was a very good film about Stalin told from the point of view of his film projectionist called the Inner Circle I believe. Anti-Stalin films wouldn’t work because there’s very little cinematical left to say about that period. That’s why we don’t have 8 zillion WWII films anymore.
Please don’t fall into the trap that movement conservatives do when discussing movies. Just because all films aren’t anti-commie propoganda, that doesn’t exactly mean that the filmmakers as a whole ENDORSE Stalin, Lenin, et. al. Moreover, just because Iraq War films don’t do that hot at the box office, that doesn’t mean that the American people are really pleased about what went on there.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Let’s pay our respects to those men and women who died and were lost in the struggle for freedom, against totalitarian tyranny. Let us commemorate, with bowed heads and in solemnity, the the long, difficult struggle against the terror, against humanity, that was Communism. Let us salute the sacrifices of those men, that were made in the pursuit of the noblest ideal, that of human liberty.
It’s not yet that far in the distant past. The world underwent a continual, global civil war in the last century, from 1914 to 1989. It is our great fortune that liberty and happiness, instead of tyranny and terror, won out in the end.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
When Father Was Away On Business is an extraordinary movie about daily life in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
If you like numerous 1950s big band Vegas-Style Cuban dance numbers combined with showing the Commies as beasts (two of my personal faves), there’s always Andy Garcia’s The Lost City. My favorite part was when the revolution (as played by Sonia Sotomayor) bans the Saxophone.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for proving MattY’s point, Myles.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That sounds like a challenge. Let me throw in my $0.02. I’ve talked to a lot of late 30, early 40-something Czechs and I’ll just relate what they’ve told me, which is that the Velvet Revolution was one of the greatest pussy bonanz—, wait, late me rephrase that: one of greatest opportunities for erotic exploration in modern history.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Shorter Bobbis: oh for the days when you could bone Cuban hookers in a Mob-run casino under a military dictatorship.
Thanks for proving MattY’s point, Myles.
Oh, give Miley a break this once: his Mater and Pater probably told their little foplet that he was conceived in a rapturous celebration of the Wall coming down.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
To pseudonymous in nc:
Turning Cuba into a big slave plantation sure got rid of those prostitutes.
It always warms my heart to see “progressives” defend Commies.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
It always warms my heart to see “progressives” defend Commies.
News flash: it’s possible to oppose both an oppressive right-wing dictatorship and the oppressive left-wing dictatorship that replaced it. Vice-versa, too.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Ah, the anti-communist equivalent of “You know who else built a highway system? You know who else didn’t like trade unions?”
November 9th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
They’re only nonviolent if you ignore the one that wasn’t.
Tienanmen occurred in 1989, as well.
Ah, so many people would love to push this aside.
Gorbachev and, frankly, the Red Army leadership at Karlshorst, and later in Moscow and the Military Districts in 1991, deserve way, way more credit than even what they now get.
All they had to do, as the People’s Republic did, was flex. And the whole thing would have collapsed, albeit in rivers of blood.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
night crossing, der tunnel, die legende von paul und paula
November 9th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Ah, the anti-communist equivalent of “You know who else built a highway system? You know who else didn’t like trade unions?”
Bobbis always gets weepy watching the New Year’s party in The Godfather Part II.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Re: By funding the non-violent humanist movement in Nicaragua,
Yes, that would be the bunch of Nazi-Klansman terrorists who spent their time blowing up health clinics and murdering peasants. Anyone who defends the Contras and their scumbag sympathizers like the Chamorro family, is welcome to go f*ck a fascist pig. Reagan’s record in central America = Crimes Against Humanity. And the entire Nicaraguan opposition, ‘peaceful’ or not, was either Fascist or the accomplices of Fascists. Just as in Venezuela today.
Petey raises a good point above- in particular, Yugoslavia was, as I understand it, quite a nice place to live prior to about 1990. It also wasn’t a command economy- it was market socialism, with worker-managed firms.
Julian Elson,
I don’t think most people care as much about political freedom as you seem to think (and I don’t, either). Yes, the GDR took political authoritarianism to an extreme, and was disliked by its people for that reason, but I think most people would be fine with living in a place like Yugoslavia.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
orange wartburg
November 9th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I think that the most important determinants of human happiness are not really in the government’s purview, or are only minimally so. If your spouse has an alcohol problem, for instance, that’s a lot more likely to make your life unhappy on the day-to-day level than whether your newspapers are censored.
However, among the things that governments do have purview over, I’d say political freedom is fairly important: not the only thing, to be sure, and maybe not even the #1 most important thing, but I’d say it’s pretty important within the (limited) sphere of human life over which the government has a lot of power.
November 10th, 2009 at 1:28 am
However, among the things that governments do have purview over, I’d say political freedom is fairly important: not the only thing, to be sure, and maybe not even the #1 most important thing, but I’d say it’s pretty important within the (limited) sphere of human life over which the government has a lot of power.
You have to mean the *appearance* of political freedom. Because, I mean, c’mon.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:39 am
there’s an excellent movie about daily life in communist Hungary (a multi-generational epic from the 40s to the 90s that’s basically their equivalent of “To Live”)… but I can’t remember what it’s called.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Julian Elson,
Depends what you mean by ‘political freedom’. The right not to be pumped full of mind-bending drugs for telling a joke about Brezhnev, or to be sent to Siberia for telling a joke about Stalin? Certainly most people would like to have that right. The right to vote? I think most people, for most of human history, never even conceived of that as something they were entitled to. As I said, while East Germany and ROumania (in different ways) were oppressive by any standard, I don’t think many of its citizens, outside some disaffected political elites, thought Yugoslavia was a deeply oppressive or unjust society.
I think for most people (across the broad sweep of cultures and historical periods) _social_ freedom (the right to make certain decisions about where to live, what to do for a living, who to marry, what religion to practice) is much more important than political freedom. As are the economic necessities (the rights to food, housing, medicine, etc.) And I think most people also want some sense of meaning to their lives, usually provided by either the church, the state, or some other quasi political movement, which liberal societies (precisely because they are, by definition, non-ideological) are not all that great at providing. I think that to the extent that the Eastern European regimes outside Yugoslavia were disliked by most of their people it was more because they denied the social freedoms then because they lacked the right to vote and things of that nature. And, of course, because after 1968 it was evident that they were bought and paid for by the Soviet Red Army.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Hector is completely right.
Yugoslavia was so good in providing social freedoms that most people didn’t miss multi-party system much.
a) We were free to travel. Everyone could get passport without questions and travel to western Europe without visas.
b) We were free to choose where to live. Moving to other side of country was completely free, also, moving abroad. No internal passports and such things.
c) We were free to choose vocation and if you choose wrong you would be unemployed.
d) We were free to listen to whatever music we wanted, rock’n'roll concerts, disco clubs, etc were commonplace. We had plenty of good TV programming to watch, full of movies from capitalist countries, western music, good domestic movies…
e) We were free to practice religion. Churches, mosques, existed and were full on holidays. I think that churches had better attendance in Yugoslavia, than in today’s Germany, for example. As I said, I was baptized in middle of big city…
f) You could not have been big capitalist, but you could have small factory if you wanted to. Land was mostly in private hands, so there were people who earned good money from agriculture (for example, virtually all raspberry harvest — very profitable crop — was coming from private holdings).
November 10th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
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