Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by | 2 July 2025 · 6:11 am

Dilemmas of Pagan Lithuania

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 88-90:

The pagan Lithuanians had managed to conquer the western Ruthenian territories (roughly today’s Belarus and Ukraine) at the time of these lands’ greatest weakness. In a relatively short space of time, they made huge advances. Lithuania gained control over Polatsk in 1307, over Minsk in 1340, over Smolensk (a mere 230 miles from Moscow) in 1356, and even over the far-distant Kyiv—the former, great capital of Kyivan Rus’—in 1363.

This tremendous expansion was in part facilitated by the protoplast [= progenitor] of the great Lithuanian dynasty, Gediminas (1315–1341). He was ably assisted by his numerous sons, the most important Kestutis and Algirdas. While Kestutis’s presence could be felt in the Polish southeast in 1376, it was Algirdas who earlier defeated the Golden Horde at Syni Vody (Blue Waters; Polish: Sine Wody) and gained control over Kyiv. The two formed a sort of diarchy—a kind of dual rule that would be inherited by their sons, Jogaila (Algirdas’s favorite son) and Vytautas.

In the process of conquering this large swath of Eastern Europe, the Lithuanian Gediminid dynasty inherited a sizable population that was Slavic and Orthodox—a population that outnumbered the Lithuanians themselves eight to one. The Lithuanians figured mainly as rulers and elites. Most of the East Slavic inhabitants—most notably, the boyars (nobles) of Ruthenia to the south—were members of the Orthodox faith. In other words, they were Christians, but not followers of the Church of Rome.

The pagan Lithuanians within this large multiethnic entity were the nobles and villagers of the north—that is, residing in the core Lithuanian territories, before the decline of Rus’ allowed the Lithuanians to gain control of a good chunk of the Ruthenian lands. This was a small but not insignificant population, especially as it included members of the ruling family, such as the future king of Poland. This expanded Lithuanian state was a completely decentralized entity, with descendants of Gediminas ruling over various sections of the state (and often quarreling among themselves).

Although Lithuanians ruled, the rapid expansion of the state left the initial population, which had yet to establish a written language, with real challenges. How could they rule over Christian, and lettered, peoples? In part this imbalance was ameliorated by the Lithuanians availing themselves of a ready-made state language—the language of the conquered Ruthenes. Intermarriage with Ruthenian princes led to the spread of Ruthenian culture within the Grand Duchy. Many Gediminids became converts to Orthodoxy and otherwise found the culture of the conquered Slavs to be attractive. Some went so far as to ally themselves with the Muscovite state to the east. This most certainly was true of the numerous sons of Algirdas and his first wife, Maria, all of whom embraced Orthodoxy and ruled in the eastern section of the Grand Duchy. (Their half-brother Jogaila long remained a pagan, as did the other children of Algirdas and his second wife, Juliana of Tver—this notwithstanding her Orthodox provenance.)

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Filed under Baltics, Belarus, education, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, Ukraine

by | 1 July 2025 · 5:44 am

Polak, Węgier dwa bratanki

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 74-75:

But the Hungarian and Polish king found himself in the same situation as had Kazimierz. He too had no male heir—only daughters, and these were born to him late in life. They included the previously mentioned Maria and her younger sister, Hedwig. (An older sister, Catherine, also figured in the picture until her death in 1378.) As already noted, Maria was betrothed to Sigismund of Luxemburg, whose father was king of Bohemia as well as Holy Roman Emperor. Hedwig—born only in the year 1374—also awaited a princely husband, having been promised in marriage since early childhood to Wilhelm of Habsburg.

…

All of this might have been enough to inspire a degree of friendliness between Hungarians and Poles. Historically they were on good terms. They did not figure as much of a threat to each other, as they were both just one step removed from Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire. The Carpathian Mountains served as a boundary between the two countries, but it was a porous one. There was much contact across that border. Furthermore, it is important to note, the clanlike structure and the substantial role played by the nobilities in the two countries were similar. It is not for nothing that, even today, Poles know the ditty “Polak, Węgier dwa bratanki—tak do szabli, jak do szklanki” [emphasis added] (The Pole and the Magyar like brothers stand / Whether with sword or with tankard in hand), whereas the corresponding Hungarian rhyme affects the same brotherly affection for the hard-fighting—and drinking—Poles. (The verse, however, dates from a much later period.)

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Filed under Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion

by | 30 June 2025 · 1:13 pm

King Kazimierz III the Great

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 62-63:

King Kazimierz III the Great encouraged Jewish settlement in the Polish lands. The recent incidence of the so-called Black Death in Europe’s west had led Jews there to be turned into scapegoats, leading many to flee eastward. Kazimierz’s reception of the Jewish communities led some even to label him “king of the Jews”—and led Jews to revere his name. In charters granted in 1334, 1364, and 1367, Kazimierz made it clear that Jews were subjects of the Crown, and as such they were protected by it.

Kazimierz was a nearly model medieval monarch. He did more than consolidate and make secure the country’s expanding borders and provide for further economic development. He truly established the Corona Regni Poloniae—the Crown of the Polish Kingdom. No longer were the Polish lands simply the property of the Piast dynasty. As the Crown of the Polish Kingdom, they existed independently, outside the person of the monarch. In this way, one can see parallels between the formation of other states in the region. The united Bohemian lands were also referred to as the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, which Charles IV declared distinct from the fate of the Luxemburg dynasty; a similar understanding took hold in Hungary, which was also known as the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.

Kazimierz drew up a number of statutes that would help shape the administration of the state, especially insofar as laws and the functioning of a judiciary were concerned. He also upheld the country’s defense. Even today, any Polish child can recite the ditty (unpoetically rendered here) that Kazimierz “inherited wooden towns and left them fortified with stone and brick” (Kazimierz miasta zastał drewniane i zostawił murowane). The country underwent a great program of construction. It was funded in part by a land tax paid by peasants (who nonetheless had a favorable view of the monarch, who was also known as “king of the peasants”), in part by income that came from the rich salt mines of Wieliczka and Bochnia in the south of the country. (Even today, the salt mine at Wieliczka—quite a tourist destination—is a testament to the technological feat undertaken in this early period.) Growing exports and tax revenues funded the construction of some fifty castles, and fortification walls were supplied to nearly another thirty towns.

Another major and far-sighted achievement of King Kazimierz the Great was his establishment, in 1364, of a studium generale (variously titled an academy or a university) in his capital of Kraków. Pope Urban V gave his permission for instruction to be provided in canon and civil law and all other faculties except for theology. Nonetheless, Kazimierz’s academy was a secular institution, like the universities of Padua and Bologna. Its establishment boded well for education in the Polish lands. Furthermore, it was a rare distinction in this part of the world: in Central Europe, only Prague can boast of having obtained a university earlier.

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Filed under economics, education, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion

by | 29 June 2025 · 5:18 am

Reuniting Polish Lands, 1300s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 52-55:

Even if Poland was in pieces, the lands were developing and its people were thriving. Nor had the broader population lost its identity and connection to the Polish past. Indeed: despite a series of hurdles, an entity to be called Poland once more would come together, as a monarchy, in the early fourteenth century.

…

This coming together was the work of one of the Piast princes, Władysław Łokietek. A grandson of Duke Konrad of Mazovia, Łokietek hailed from neighboring Cuiavia, in the central-northern reaches of the Polish lands. His sobriquet was “Elbow-High,” which suggests the prince was short of stature. What Łokietek lacked in height, he surely made up for in chutzpah. This plucky—and lucky—Piast prince would begin what can be seen as an upward trajectory for the Poles. The vertically challenged Łokietek was chosen prince of Greater Poland after the death of a different Piast ruler, Przemysł II (1257–1296), who was assassinated on Ash Wednesday on orders of the margraves of Brandenburg. The German margraves were unhappy with Przemysł’s attempts to unify the Polish lands: Przemysł had brought together Greater Poland and the seacoast region known as Gdańsk-Pomerania, and in 1295 was even crowned king in Gniezno, albeit of those two regions alone. Łokietek hoped to build on these achievements.

…

The Piast was aided in other, more prosaic ways as well. One was the problem faced by many a medieval dynasty: life was brutish and short. The reign of King Václav II came to an end with his sudden death in 1305. His son and successor, also named Václav (who had become king of Hungary before inheriting Bohemia and Poland from his father), was assassinated in Bohemia the following year. The extinction of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty left the throne open (in fact, it left several thrones open), which was then contested from all sides. Habsburgs, Luxemburgs, as well as a number of Piast princes (if not Łokietek) all sought to claim the throne. Married to a Bohemian Přemyslid princess, John of Luxemburg ultimately proved victorious—thus initiating a new Bohemian dynasty. He would consider himself also heir to the Polish throne.

Tiny but tenacious, Łokietek was not one to abandon the cause of conquest and unification so lightly. Whereas Václav II and subsequent Bohemian monarchs had found support in the Germanized towns, the Piast prince managed to rally the knights (if not the towns) to his side. And he was willing to fight. With Hungarian help, Łokietek reconquered Lesser Poland, Cuiavia, and other territories, thus establishing himself as a legitimate ruler of the Polish lands circa 1306. Holding onto them proved a challenge: for example, at one point burghers rebelled in Kraków and other towns of Lesser Poland, and they had to be subdued. The Polish unifier sought to rid Kraków of the miscreants by use of a shibboleth. Those burghers who could pronounce the four words “soczewica, koło, miele, młyn” [emphasis added] (lentil, wheel, grinds, mill) were allowed to stay. Native German speakers stumbled over the pronunciation of the Polish letters “ł” and “s,” which allowed the authorities to shuffle and rearrange the city’s population. Henceforth, the Kraków burghers would find it politic to Polonize. The process of unification was anything but smooth.

Nonetheless, the Piast was persistent—and his persistence paid off. The sixty-year-old Łokietek was crowned King Władysław Łokietek in 1320. His coronation on January 20 of that year took place not in Gniezno but in Kraków, which had been gaining in political significance since Kazimierz the Restorer moved there in the eleventh century. Still, the Elbow-High succeeded in unifying only two provinces: Lesser Poland and Greater Poland. His Poland had no Mazovia, no Prussia (despite Łokietek’s best efforts, the Teutonic Knights had seized control there), no Gdańsk-Pomerania (treacherously taken by the Teutonic Knights), and no Silesia (the Silesian Piasts did not feel compelled to subordinate themselves to the upstart Łokietek, and they remained firmly in the Bohemian orbit). Once again coronation was an important symbolic act, if still just a beginning.

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Filed under Bohemia, Germany, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Poland

by | 28 June 2025 · 9:59 am

Poland Becomes Catholic, 966

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 28-31:

Mieszko seems to have led the Polanie as of about the year 960. The reason we know of him and his state is that, like the Moravians to the south, the Germans (that is, the Christian population to the west, which was part of post-Carolingian Europe, the eastern part of which was ruled by the German emperor) were beginning to pay attention to this emerging state centered around Gniezno [cf. gniazdo ‘nest’]. Early recorded mention of Mieszko’s doings has come down to us from a Jewish trader, Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, who, while on business in Magdeburg in 966, learned of the existence of a well-organized state that was conquering some of the Slavic tribes to its west. A Saxon monk noted the existence of the dynamically expanding state, which likewise caught the attention of Otto I. Titled Emperor of the Romans by the pope only in 962, the German Otto had pretentions to the same region. Before long, Mieszko’s realm came to be referred to as Poland, or the land of the Poles.

It is customary to date the beginnings of the history of Poland to 966. This choice of date reflects a momentous decision made that year. Until this point, the Polanie and the neighboring tribes in the vicinity of Central and Eastern Europe were for the most part pagans. This was not true of the Germans further west, who had already converted to Christianity in late antiquity or the early medieval period; nor was it true for the Moravians, who had witnessed the ninth-century ministry of Cyril and Methodius, the missionaries to the Slavs, although by this time—a century later—they were under German influence. (Note that Kyivan Rus’, lying further to the east, was baptized only as of 988, but its baptism came from Greek sources, that is, Constantinople.) In this part of the world, of world-historical significance was what religion these pagan rulers chose, and at whose hands they were baptized.

It is in 966 that the baptism of Mieszko—head of the Gniezno state, this nascent Polish polity—took place. It is both interesting and important that this was facilitated not by the Germans but by a Bohemian (Czech) connection. A Czech state had emerged around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries; first baptized by Saint Methodius, the Czechs relatively quickly came under Bavarian influence, their church under the bishop of Regensburg. In 965 Mieszko strengthened the connection with this Slavic neighbor by marrying a Bohemian princess, the daughter of Boleslav I. This Dubravka, known variously also as Dąbrówka or Dobrava, was a Christian, and she likely brought some Christian clergy with her to Gniezno. The next year, Mieszko accepted baptism at their hands.

What is important for the future history of Poland is that this was Western, and not Eastern, Christianity—that is, Mieszko was baptized into the Church of Rome, as it was then known. No less important is that baptism came from Bohemia, not from the imperial power to the west. Mieszko furthermore took care to ensure that his state was placed under the care of missionaries. As missionary priests were directly subordinated to the papacy and not to a bishop within any given territory, this gave the nascent Polish church more flexibility because it was not placed under another sovereign state.

Thus began the Poles’ connection with Roman Catholicism, one that dates back a millennium. It is a connection that has stuck. Until very recently, many people around the world associated Poland above all with the man who, until not so long ago, was head of the Universal Church—Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. During his first trip to Poland after he became pontiff, John Paul II famously declared to his countrymen that “it was impossible, without reference to Christ, to understand the history of the Polish nation, this great thousand-year-old community that so profoundly shapes my existence and that of each of us.” While clearly there is much to this statement, one cannot say that the Christianization of Poland or the Poles’ historic identification with Roman Catholicism were inevitable. Nor (as we shall see) is the belief that all “real” Poles have always been, or must be, Roman Catholics borne out by the country’s history, certainly not if one examines that history in its entirety. (Such Polish paradoxes await the patient reader.)

So what motivated Mieszko’s conversion? The baptism of “Poland” into the larger Roman Catholic family appears to have been, above all, a political decision and not simply (if such matters are ever simple!) a matter of spiritual conversion. It likely extended originally only to Mieszko’s court and entourage, who through the person of his wife and her entourage were pulled into the Christian orbit. Surely Mieszko realized that, by accepting Christianity, he would no longer be subject to incursions from the west—at least, the types of incursions from the eastern marches that doubtless had long been intended to turn these Slavic peoples from paganism to Christianity. By converting, he would deny the Holy Roman Empire the pretext to interfere with his state. The fact that the baptism came at the hands of a missionary who was under papal jurisdiction proved important. The Polish church thus would not be subordinated to the Holy Roman Empire or any other lay power. Moreover, as denizens of a Christian power the Poles could now seek to spread Christianity to other pagan tribes in the region (for example, the Pomeranians or the tribes further east), thus expanding their own influence.

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Filed under Bohemia, Germany, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia

by | 23 February 2025 · 2:49 pm

Down the Danube: Romania

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from our return to Romania at the end of our cruise. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Romania is far better off than during our year there in 1983–84. It is almost self-sufficient in energy from its old oil wells and new natural gas fields, and Bucharest daytime traffic is in perpetual gridlock. We didn’t have time to ex­plore all our old haunts, but we did get to visit the Old Town: Calea Victoriei and the old merchant quarter of Lipscani (< Leipzig), where we had a big lunch at the renovated classic Hanul lui Manuc, which we well remembered from our earlier time there. Afterwards, we paid a short visit to the Village Museum of old buildings from all over the country. On a lovely spring day in 1984, we spent time there. Many of the old wooden buildings from that time had to be replaced after a big fire.

Our fancy hotel was north of the huge Parliament building and the huge People’s Salvation Cathedral, so we didn’t have time to explore our old haunts around the University of Bucharest and Parcul Tineretului (Park of Youth) near where we used to live. But my Romanian language returned enough that I was able to use it to talk with drivers, waiters, desk clerks, and others besides our guides with their fluent English. I was once or twice mistaken for an expat Romanian.

The next day we headed through the Carpathians to Brasov, with a long, tedious stop at the old royal palace at Sinaia, very much overtouristed. We had fond memories of Brasov and fell in love with it all over again. We met a Ukrainian old friend of an old friend (who had taught in Ukraine) for a fine dinner of Romanian cuisine at the Sergiana Muresenilor. We opted out of any guided excursions the next day and enjoyed walking around the old town, visiting the nostalgic Museum of Communism near our hotel, riding the gondola up to the top of Mt. Tampa, and exploring the old Romanian quarter outside the Schei Gate. where we found Colegiul Andrei Saguna, the first Romanian language school in old Kronstadt.

We also made a pilgrimage to the memorial childhood home of Stefan Baciu, and spent a long time chatting with the very hospitable docent. I had known that Baciu attended Andrei Saguna, where his father taught German and Latin. But I had not heard that his mother was the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Austrian forestry engineer, Arthur Sager, who had Jewish heritage. Baciu’s parents were among the wealthiest and most cultivated citizens of Brasov. They raised their children as Romanian Orthodox, and Baciu achieved some fame as a young poet. At the end of World War II, he got a diplomatic post to Switzerland, then went into exile in Latin America. He spent his last years in Honolulu, where he gave me a Romanian proficiency exam for graduate school, as my second language for academic research, after French, for which I took a standardized exam. (I had more use for German than French in my Papua New Guinea research.)

Our final stop in Romania was at scenic Bran Castle, a tourist trap wrongly tied to Count Dracula. We had spent an April weekend there after Easter in 1984, when it was a sleepy town with dirt roads and not chock full of tourists, traffic, and souvenir vendors. When I asked a Turkish-coffee vendor for two Armenian coffees, he nodded knowingly and said, yes, they were the coffee vendors back in the day. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch at a nice inn, and then boarded our Viking bus back to the Bucharest hotel for a very short night before heading for Otopeni Airport hours before dawn, when the roads were less crowded.

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Filed under Hawai'i, language, literature, migration, nationalism, Romania, travel, U.S.

by | 20 February 2025 · 5:19 pm

Whence Eastern European Nationalism?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 798-800:

Thus capitalism did not produce nationalism in Eastern Europe; instead, it was a device that helped reshape and spread national ideas and identities that already existed. What generated those ideas and identities, and the commitment to live for them, was the consuming fear of oblivion, profound resentment over condescension, and smoldering hatred of subjugation. Why these emotions emerged across the East European map in the late eighteenth century had to do with imperial powers being themselves (that is, trying to outdo one another for power and glory). Joseph II wanted to be France and Great Britain—simultaneously nation-state and vast empire—Catherine the preeminent European land power, and the sultans wanted to ensure that they were not driven from Europe altogether. Thus their dangerous acts of rooting out corruption in the Greek and Serb lands.

The first visible substance that the new nationalisms nurtured in this vast space on the edges of empires was language, and language is the most arresting blind spot in the analyses of the best-known theorists. In [Benedict] Anderson’s scheme, the vernacular was a given that had only to be transcribed; in fact, the vernacular emerged only after decades of contentious “imagining” brought it to life despite internal dissension among patriots, and against the wishes of recalcitrant censors. The Czech case again is paradigmatic: every inch of Czech newspaper space, every minute of Czech theater performance, each new Czech classroom were objects of human effort—effort for which neither Anderson, nor the other major theorists have time, because they are not universal.

Anderson imagined nationalism moving across borders in a chain reaction beginning in France. In basic outline this claim is incontrovertible. That a nation should control its destiny from within defined boundaries, was a lesson people in and beyond Europe drew from Paris. But where Eastern Europe is concerned, the reality of transfer was more paradoxical. The first to absorb the French model—Germans—simultaneously rejected it and molded their version of nationhood around things that had supposedly eluded the model nation, namely, the language and culture the French took for granted. East Europeans then formed their own ideas of nationness against Germany, while also focusing on culture and language. To an outsider visiting Prague in 1860, the Czech anti-world seemed indistinguishable from the local German variant: Czechs ate the same food, wore the same clothes, loved similar music and stories, had the same local saints, and the same professional ambitions and aspirations for the good life. That was the impression one had until one began listening to what Czechs were saying in their distinct, precious, and, for the Germans, vexingly difficult vernacular.

They spoke of the fate of being a small nation, controlled like a colony, desperately in need of secure borders in a way that citizens of long-established and powerful states like Britain and France could not understand. T. G. Masaryk—an outsider who became an insider—first had to master that language to build the Czechoslovak nation-state. It’s a message that still eludes Western observers, oddly enough, precisely for their insistence on seeing Eastern Europe simply as an extension of their own European space. (Rejoining Europe, after all, was the prime goal of the dissident movements.) In Cold War terms, what happened after 1989 appeared to be the first world embracing and absorbing the second in a concluding act of history.

Yet beginning in about 2010, we have seen that East Central Europe stubbornly carries its own past. This morning, January 4, 2019, the New York Times printed a letter on the injustice of Trianon! The fact is that East Central Europe is a place where the first, second, and third worlds persist and overlap, each making claims on the same and different pasts. After 1989, the Czech lands, for example, came under the sway of the determined neoliberal Václav Klaus, a local nationalist of sorts, but before that they were a center of the second world’s anticapitalism, and before that, colonial subjects, co-inventors of the idea of national liberation struggles, going back to the late eighteenth century.

The scholar-patriots of that distant time, together with the Czech students of 1968 and 1989, Polish workers of 1956 and 1988, and Yugoslav intellectuals of the 1960s or 1980s, all intertwined three strands of struggle for liberal, social, and national rights: for responsible political representation, lives in dignity without want, protection of their national cultures. The stories of 1938, 1948, and 1968 were not a radical break but a refreshed version of older stories of self-assertion against foreign domination. In many ways the big-bang of 1919, or Budapest’s 1956 and Prague’s 1968, were a replay of the ferment of 1848/1849. The miraculous 1989 was a national liberation struggle, as well as an assertion of deeper traditions of local democracy, and basic civic rights, traditions going back centuries. See, for example, the Polish constitution of 1791 or the very old Hungarian traditions of local self-rule.

If there is a lesson from these stories, it is that when the demands of any of these three worlds are met with contempt, forces emerge claiming to set things right, forces that are rarely liberal. The Habsburg monarchy, under siege from many claimants, liberal and otherwise, opened the Pandora’s box of representative government in the 1860s, and what came forth, especially after the liberals’ failure of 1879, has been various kinds of populism, left and right, all briefly united in 1882 at Linz. The intervening generations have witnessed the temporary victories of liberal nationalism; national socialism; socialist nationalism; and most recently after the “return to Europe,” yet again an intense nationalism, connected to the past—to events like Trianon—but also to a politics for which a name has yet to be found.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, education, language, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by | 16 February 2025 · 6:21 am

Comparing 1989 With 1848

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 738-740:

People speak of the revolutions of 1989, but the process of transformation preceded that year and extended far beyond it, to our present time. The earliest revolutionary event occurred in August 1980, when Poles launched a 10-million-strong protest movement that authorities outlawed but never crushed. When strikes broke out in Poland toward the end of the decade, reform Communists called on Solidarity’s leaders to negotiate the “solution” of (partly) free elections. The resonance of that event traveled beyond Poland, however, because the trade union’s continued strength showed people across the Soviet Bloc that state socialism was in need of repairs that went beyond and indeed contradicted Leninism.

That is one strand of the story: how some East Europeans showed others the character of their common predicament and how to escape it. Another strand was within the Communist parties themselves, when liberals—most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev but also Hungarian and Polish socialists—discussed and prepared for change, for example, through reforms of legal codes. Without Gorbachev, the Communist system could have continued, and perhaps transformed into something different. Reformers were absent in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, which is why the events of 1989 appeared more explosive (and revolutionary) in these places than in Hungary and Poland. One author described the transition in Hungary as a “negotiated revolution.”

The “structural” argument that favored Gorbachev’s reform program was economic; all the East European states registered deepening debt and thus growing dependence on banks, with no end in sight. In the 1980s, Poland was struggling simply to pay interest on its debt. The one state that opposed the reliance on Western credit, Romania, which decided in 1982 to pay all foreign debt, maneuvered itself into a position that was reminiscent of Russia in 1917: the question was not whether there would be an explosion but when. The chain-reaction character of the revolutions of 1989 ensured that when the explosion ignited in Timișoara, the subsequent denouement took place within a “discourse” of democracy, though in fact only Communists had changed places with each other. An actual transition to democratic rule had to wait until later in the following decade.

Thus, when writing about chain reactions, or “avalanches” of revolution that crossed borders in 1988 and 1989, from small to huge (more like icebergs falling into the sea than a collapse of part of a glacier), historians do well to keep in mind that no one knew about the extent of change at the time. Perhaps that is because actors—the Polish dissidents and the Hungarian socialist reformers—could not discern what we now see clearly: the international dimensions of the phenomenon. The first people to make out the larger dynamic were the Czechs. After the East German trains left in early October, and the Berlin Wall fell in early November, Prague, with foreign camera crews on the scene, itself became the set for revolution, a very sudden one, where the major questions were posed and seemed to be answered in a week and a half.

There is a third level to the transnational agitation and ferment: the role of the West in the East, beginning with the work of US consular officials promoting dissenters as well as reform Communists in the 1980s, but continuing in the careful monitoring of political change in the 1990s. Next to Poland, Hungary was the front-runner. The émigré philanthropist George Soros had legally moved his Open Society Foundation to Hungary in the early 1980s, cooperating with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and offered technical equipment (such as copiers), stipends, and contacts with Western civil society organizations. Even before Communism’s collapse, Hungary was thus “networked” with pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The later fall of authoritarian leaders in Slovakia and Bulgaria would be directly tied to the work of NGOs active in those countries, as well as officials of the European Union.

The region’s response to a growing debt crisis, and the pressures of Western creditors, also had echoes of a deeper past. The last time peoples had mobilized en masse for freedom across Europe’s borders was the spring of 1848. That crisis had been preceded by a European-wide series of bad harvests, economic downturn, democratic agitation, and thus a political and intellectual ferment that went across the map. Events in France gave a signal that an opportunity had come for common aspirations to be fulfilled; and as soon as word could travel to Naples, Mannheim, or Bucharest, students, workers, and other urban revolutionaries responded. The enthusiasm was relatively short lived, as the old regime in fact was not vanquished but began reasserting itself from the summer of 1848 in northern Italy and Prague, and the revolution was crushed during the following year.

If 1848 was an attempt of urban classes to throw off the shackles of feudalism, 1989 was the effort of entire societies to shake off a modernization that came to seem counterproductive and inappropriate; from the late 1970s, the region was falling behind economically, as we know now inexorably, and outside of East Germany and the Soviet Union, even the party bureaucracy had long since abandoned commitment based on belief.

The year 1989 seemed to offer a similar script to 1848 but had a happier outcome. There was also a parallel to the Habsburg dilemma of a decade later, of the early 1860s, when perennial financial woes had forced constitutional reform on the monarchy, so that it could satisfy lenders in London and Paris. In a similar way, Polish and Hungarian governments ascended to freedom in 1990 with the immediate challenge of putting their countries back on sound financial footings to prevent their falling out of the international system of exchange. But the hyperinflation that Poland witnessed in early 1990 was a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, beyond anything Habsburg officials could have imagined or dealt with.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Eastern Europe, economics, migration, nationalism, NGOs, U.S., USSR

by | 15 February 2025 · 5:57 am

Romania’s Bizarre Revolution, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 733-736:

Like its East German counterpart, the Czechoslovak regime had discovered it lacked the will and conviction to escalate beyond truncheon and tear gas to live ammunition. Remarkably, these two well-armed hardline regimes had accepted oblivion with little protest. Except for the beatings and arrests in the early Leipzig demonstrations, those that followed in East Berlin and Dresden in early October, and the “massacre” (in which no one actually died in Prague) on November 17, the neo-Stalinist dictators departed the scene peacefully if not always gracefully. The transfer of power in Czechoslovakia became known as the Velvet Revolution.

Yet a little to the south, also in former Habsburg lands, this time in Romania, an inflexible dictator was sending militia to quell protest, and the violence he unleashed cost hundreds of lives. The situation there differed from the countries to the north in the absolute separation of the nepotistic regime from society; the extraordinary sacrifices that had been demanded for years—electricity and gas were limited to a few hours a day—and the outrage that resulted, along with revulsion and active hatred. Ceaușescu sought no understanding with groups in the party, let alone beyond the party, and, in contrast to the lands farther north, virtually no opposition groups emerged in Romania’s civil society to articulate interests separate from those of the state. The dictator had regularly cleared the terrain of contenders and destroyed all loci of opposition, producing a “remarkable atomization of Romanian society, in which fear and distrust became the currency of human relations.” The regime and its supporters had no doubt that they would be held responsible for the injustice and misery when the inevitable accounting came, and they fought with corresponding desperation. By 1989 alienation was countrywide, and when demonstrations erupted in one place, they spread quickly, despite—but then because of—knowledge of the numbers of victims.

Protest flared in former Habsburg Transylvania because it had suffered not only privation but also the destruction of local Hungarian culture, including the bulldozing of villages and the deportation of their inhabitants to Eastern Romania. Anger crystalized in mid-December, when authorities scheduled the ejection of the popular Hungarian Reformed Pastor László Tőkés from the city of Timișoara. His memoirs make clear that the Reformed church’s hierarchy was colluding with the state’s plans to help erase his independent voice; Tőkés had routinely acted without bothering to get approval from his superiors, for example, in organizing inter-denominational services at his church.

On December 15, protesters who had been camping near his residence marched toward the city center, where they took control of public offices and looted the well-stocked stores reserved for the Securitate. The following day, security forces fired on the protesters, but instead of extinguishing the embers of revolution, they caused them to spread, and even more citizens of Timișoara converged on the city center. Many were Hungarian-speakers with access to informative media broadcasts from Hungary and Yugoslavia, and word of their demonstrations was carried eastward by railway workers, troops who had rotated out of the city, and the international media. On December 18, Nicolae Ceaușescu left Romania to visit some of his last supporters, the theocratic rulers of Iran. Kept apprised of the growing unrest though his embassy in Bucharest, Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze said he would welcome Ceaușescu’s fall.

On returning on the afternoon of December 20, Ceaușescu declared a state of emergency in Timișoara, claiming that the demonstrators were terrorists who were serving foreign espionage agencies. He then attempted to organize mass rallies in his own favor in Bucharest. Until recently, individuals summoned by the party for mass spectacles could be counted on for abject expressions of adulation; now they demanded Ceaușescu’s resignation. On the evening of December 21, the dictator sent in security forces to disperse the crowd and hundreds were injured. The following day, the armed forces defected to the people, and Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest by helicopter. Under still unexplained circumstances, they touched down in the countryside and were apprehended, placed on trial before a military tribunal, and then executed before television cameras on Christmas Eve. But the fighting between security forces and crowds, now supported by the army, lasted until December 27, spreading to other cities. In all, 1,104 Romanians lost their lives in the revolution.

One explanation that has emerged for the haste in doing away with the rulers was concern that they might lead a counterrevolution against an emerging challenger, the “Front of National Salvation” that suddenly announced its existence over state radio on December 22, just as crowds were seizing the Communist Central Committee building and television station in Bucharest. The Front consisted not of leaders of civil society, let alone dissident groups—none existed—but of formerly high-placed Communists, some of whom had been disgraced by Ceaușescu. Prominent was the onetime apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who enjoyed support among top officials of the police and army. In his first speech, Iliescu called Ceaușescu a “man without a heart or soul or common sense, a feudal fanatic, who destroyed the country” and “perpetrated the worst crimes upon the people.”

Even in its time, this revolution seemed bizarre. Beyond the chilling spectacle of the execution of the dictator and his wife before running cameras, still dressed in heavy winter clothing and looking more like ragged senior citizens than all-powerful rulers, were the sudden change of heart of the crowd facing Ceaușescu in Bucharest; the inexplicably sudden defection of the military; and the sudden rise out of nowhere of a de facto countergovernment. Even in Timișoara, pastor Tőkés had registered an uncanny shift in mood, beyond his control or anyone else’s, perhaps the work of provocateurs from within the police. Was the revolution orchestrated by Ceaușescu’s rivals in the party? Was it in fact staged with demonstrators acting as unwitting actors in someone else’s drama? Afterward rumors spread that the secret services of the United States and the Soviet Union were informed about the activities of anti-Ceaușescu forces.

In the years since, no evidence has emerged to support claims of a wider or deeper conspiracy; what seems clear is that formerly highly placed officials wanted Ceaușescu out of the way. But they themselves were surprised and overwhelmed by the revolutionary events of those late fall days and adapted well to the events as they unfolded, posing as saviors to a deeply traumatized society. The revolution had resulted from a mix of planning and spontaneity. Opposition leaders emerged who, inspired by the example of Timișoara, had hoped to turn the Bucharest demonstration against the dictator. Their hopes proved justified. Many thousands arrived on December 21 in central Bucharest because they had been instructed to do so; they had no plans to oppose, much less topple the dictator. Yet once others, especially young people, began demanding the dictator’s fall, they joined in, suddenly and decisively, at great personal risk, propelled by years of humiliating privation.

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by | 11 February 2025 · 5:43 am

Collapse of Eastern Europe, 1989

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 685-686:

The East European revolutions of 1989 brought an end to complex ways of organizing and experiencing virtually everything, and even the most basic activities were suddenly new: students learned western languages instead of Russian and read books previously called “poisonous.” No one cared who went to church or what was said there. Spaces opened for entrepreneurship, and within months, advertising and small shops proliferated, transforming even villages. Newsstands featured glossy entertainment, even pornography, and restaurants served “exotic” dishes like pizza or Thai noodles. Scaffolding went up around apartment buildings unpainted for decades, while below high-powered German and Italian sedans raced over streets still paved in cobblestone. In the summers, cities emptied as populations fled for the beaches, often in the west, and the divide through Europe began to fade. I remember a mother telling her child as they changed trains at Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin two days after the Wall opened: “At school you can tell everyone that you went to a different country [ein anderes Land] this weekend.” That was an understatement. In West Berlin, the child had visited not a different country but a different world. Yet soon, downsides of the new reality also became evident: East Europeans could become unemployed. Violence, too, returned to the streets, often directed against ethnic others.

How did this radical shift occur? Television footage shows crowds filling the streets in 1989. Perhaps they were seizing power like revolutionaries of the distant past. But appearances deceived, a fact with a long tradition. “The people” did not take the reins of government in France in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, or Manila in 1986. Similarly, the crowds that formed around the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 did not break Communism. The party elite had lost its grip on power weeks earlier, and the border point opening—due to a misstatement on television about travel regulations by SED spokesman Günter Schabowski—confirmed, and hastened, a transfer of power that was already under way. Some two weeks later, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators began pouring into the streets of Czechoslovakia, but a few weeks after that, power traded hands behind closed doors. By the summer of 1990, a new elite was forming that revolutionaries never imagined, favoring neoliberalism and national exclusivism. In Romania, revolutionaries fought and died for their cause, but when the air cleared, the “victors” saw that one set of Communist leaders had traded places with another. Still, state socialism everywhere gave way to some form of pluralism.

No one had expected the old regimes to collapse, and no single act was calculated to bring about their end. In early 1989, it seemed that change would be limited to tinkering with the planned economy, still based on single-party rule. As late as February, an East German died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. The democratic opposition of 1989 had initially wanted to infuse the regimes with “greater momentum,” advocating respect for human rights, political pluralism, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly. It did not expect a transition to democracy.2 Even the seasoned revolutionaries of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, permitted to field candidates in the elections of June 1989, anticipated at first an advisory role in a liberalized Communist regime allied with the Soviet Union. East German protesters of October 1989 wanted a democratic socialism that did not exist in the West—and did not imagine their country leaving the Warsaw Pact to become part of the European Community, allied to NATO. (That happened just a year later.)

The collapse of 1989 grew out of a social and economic crisis that had been building for decades, yielding a malaise that reached deep into the Communist Party. For Communist regimes, faith was crucial. If Western modernity approximated a business model of rationality, where the state acts as caretaker of economic growth and social stability, the Eastern variant was ultimately a religion with legitimacy tied to claims about ultimate truths. State publishing houses printed pamphlets answering basic questions like: why am I alive? Yet by the 1980s, Communism had become a church where people not only forgot their prayers but also scoffed at basic teachings—finding them hypocritical, fictitious, damaging, and irrelevant. In the final years, neither functionaries nor citizens thought the party had a clear right to rule, because any such right was vested in a vision of history that few continued to accept. In the late 1980s, believers among the leadership were considered naïve or worse. According to an East German joke, three attributes never went together in a party functionary: belief, intelligence, and honesty. Those who were honest and intelligent did not believe; those who believed and were intelligent could not be honest. Those who believed and were honest could not be intelligent.

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