by | 3 August 2023 · 6:17 am

Memories of Saigon’s Last Night

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 69-70:

It was a night of madness and spectacular fires. I was eight and wild with greed for all the loot people had tossed in the street. You could find almost anything that night. The defeated army discarded guns, ammo, helmets, knives, uniforms, boots, water tins, and heaps of things covered with the flat green paint of army-issued equipment. Fugitives, peasants, and city dwellers left belongings where they dropped them: baskets, food, clothes, chairs, sleeping mats, pottery, wads of no-longer-valid currency. The night was choked with those who fled, those who hid, those who scavenged, and those who went mad with fear, or greed, or anger.

The bullies chased me down the alley. I heard them pounding the pavement hard on my heels. They were yelling. BANG! A shot went off. I couldn’t tell if they were shooting at me. Maybe they were shooting in another part of the neighborhood. Guns had been going off around the city all day, but I was pretty sure they were shooting at me.

Earlier, I had been down by the empty lot showing off some of my loot to the other kids. Mom and Dad were busy packing suitcases and burning documents, so I was able to sneak out of the house and scavenge the streets. All the kids had something, mostly guns, ammo, and broken telephones. Some had pliers and were using them to take the tips off the bullets to get at the gunpowder. We drew dragons in the dirt with the powder and ignited them. I was firing my name when the older bullies came around. They had pistols and demanded we hand over our loot. The biggest bully wanted my pistol, which wasn’t the black metal army kind. It was a shiny, pug-nosed six-shooter.

They started waving their guns at us, just fooling, when a shot went off and hit a boy in the leg. He screamed and blood squirted out of the wound. We scattered. I bolted with my gun and bag of goodies. The bullies yelled for us to stop. I glanced back and a couple of them were after me and my six-shooter.

I fled down a dark alley, running by instinct, feeling my way with the tips of my fingers on the moist walls. Turn right. Run down another alley. Keep the gun. Drop the bag. Too heavy. Turn again. Run through a larger alley. They were closing in on me. I stumbled over trash. Kept going, heading for the clear up ahead.

Then I burst onto the street. Crashed into the flood of refugees swarming in one direction. Refuse covered the ground, stampeded over and over again. The air reeked of smoke, loud with people. Down the road, the fish market was burning unchecked. Gunfire snapped in staccato across the city. Somewhere far away a siren howled. Above, red zipping bullets crossed the night. The sky ruptured with false thunder. Dull flashes of light bruised the city skyline. Growling helicopters skimmed low, their humping air vibrating my ribs, their rope ladders trailing behind like kite tails.

I dove into the tide and was swept along with it. The air swelled with panic, lanced with torchlight. I ran with everyone else, coursing down the avenue. The crowd parted, then closed again around abandoned vehicles like a wild river. In the narrows, people crushed and hammered each other against the brick walls, stampeding, barreling to salvation—the American ships waiting in the harbor.

I had lost the bullies. I ran back to the house and pounded on the metal screen door, suddenly infected with the city’s terror. Let me in! Let me in! I want to come home!

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Filed under migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 2 August 2023 · 3:15 am

Two Old Opium Smokers in Vietnam

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 162-164:

Grandpa Pham smelled of plum candy and Chinese medicine.

It was an odor that made me nauseous and hungry all at once.

His opium smoke.

I served as the footman of Grandpa’s opiate dreams. As his family went through the process of closing doors, shutting windows, keeping the confidence, I knelt at the door of Grandpa Pham’s study, a servant awaiting his wishes, witnessing the rite that came to be the center of his existence. In the seasons before Saigon fell, Grandpa was many years into his pipes, his grown children’s wages keeping him in the habit. I brought him the accoutrements of his ceremony and he arranged them on the straw mat: an oil lamp, matches, crisp unwrinkled newspaper, a bowl with a spoonful of steamed rice, a kettle of lotus tea, porcelain cups, a water-smoke pot, and old-fashioned Chinese brick pillows. He produced a cough-drop tin rattling with loose nuggets of black opium.

He smoked with an old friend, both of them Hanoi expatriates so wizened and emaciated it was difficult to tell them apart in the gloom of their conspiracy—hovering over their opium, their instrument of sedition from the world. Those Nationalist bastards, one cheroot figure said to the other, sold nine American bullets out of ten, no wonder we are still fighting this war. The other figure protested, though without much passion, It’s good for the economy, all the foreign money pouring in. Impotent to the world, they were still supreme patriarchs of their extended families. This, their War Room: two ancients sipping tea in cement air. Saigon is too hot, too corrupt, nothing but barbarians, said one. Yes, yes, Hanoi is the true soul of Vietnam, agreed the other. Shirtless in the heat, they sat on a handwoven straw mat, propping themselves with one arm locked at the elbow like a tent pole, a knee up near their chins. The room was bolted tight against ill winds. Their liver-spotted hide, the texture of week-old tofu-skin, did not sweat but drooped, flaccid on their chests and bellies, stretched taut over the ridges of their spines. The Americans are generous with their aid, but the French, they knew how to live well, one observed. True, the other nodded, true, they built the most beautiful mansions in Hanoi. The two jurors reached into a bowl, clawed a few grains of leftover rice, and wedged these between their gum and cheek like chewing tobacco. The newspaper was smoothed out, folded, and torn into two perfect squares. Starting with one corner, they rolled the papers into tapered pipes, overlapping the layers tightly. They took the moistened rice out of their mouths, pressed it into a paste, and glued the pipes. With tinker deftness, they fit the pipes to the water-smoke pot. Every practiced motion carried the serene precision of a ritual even as they talked. The Japanese were the true bastards, weren’t they? All that killing and the famines. Yes, yes, but that was war and so is this. No, for the Northerners, it is war. For the Americans, it is politics. For the Southerners, it is business. A precious opium nugget was placed on the pot they shared. Ah, but wasn’t Hanoi beautiful in winter? Yes, persimmon winters. They lay their bones down on the mat, on their sides facing each other, heads on brick pillows, the opium between them. Don’t you remember that one hot summer, so hot catfish died and floated in the creek? Yes, but wasn’t the monsoon wind blowing off Ha Long Bay magical? They worked themselves back through the years to the good memories, and when they were ready, they touched the flame to the opium and, with great sighs, began to feed from their paper pipes. They perfumed the air with opium sweetness, making it wet and soft, filling it with the watery gurgle of two old men drowning.

Once they slipped far into their refuge, a pair of goldfish dying on the floor, I moved the oil lamp out of the reach of their limbs and left them to their slumber. Their smoke swarmed the house, announcing that their spirits were temporarily on a journey, yet everyone tiptoed past the room as though fearful of waking a baby.

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Filed under China, economics, France, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, opium, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 1 August 2023 · 6:17 am

A Vietnamese Fishsauce Baron

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

My step-grandfather Grandpa Le was a fishsauce baron, born into a sea-heritage that dated back before the Japanese and the French occupation. He used to claim that his ancestors invented fishsauce. The whole town was built on this industry. Everyone knew how it was made and at one time most people in town, when they weren’t dragging the ocean for fish, were putting fresh fish, unwashed and ungutted, into salt barrels to ferment. While they waited on the decomposition process, all they ever talked about was fishsauce. Which fish produced the best-tasting extract? How to mix various types of fish to make a balanced bouquet. Indeed, there were many varieties of fishsauce, each suitable for a certain style of cooking. The finest batches were flavorful enough to be savored directly from the bottle. In a few weeks, a smelly black ooze seeped out the bottom of the barrel. Fisherfolk diluted and bottled this black gold and sold it all over the country. Blend masters—like Grandpa Le—guarded their secrets zealously and made fortunes. In the old days, the village folk prized bottles of fishsauce concentrate as great gifts, the equivalent of fine wine and cash.

Uncle Long said these days people treated it like an illicit narcotic, hiding their production from the tax collectors, squirreling bottles of it away for bartering. Liberated into Communism or not, Vietnamese needed fishsauce the way we needed air. For us, it was salt and a thousand other spices, the very marrow of the sea to a country of coastal people. It was a good thing Grandpa left us a stockpile of fishsauce when he died.

Grandma Le’s house and sundry shop sat five yards from the main road, the national highway. The bus dropped us at the front door. Grandma, Auntie Dung, and all my siblings—Chi, Huy, Tien, and Hien—came out to greet us. Grandma took me into her shop and said I could eat as much candy from her store as I could swallow on account that she hadn’t had chance to spoil me as she had my siblings. They had been living with Grandma when we came back from prison. While I was locked up in Saigon, they were running wild with the local kids.

Auntie Dung took all of us out for milkshakes. We walked down the shady avenue, holding hands, singing, our sandals scrunching on sand—this a beach town—to a kiosk that had been in the same spot under a tamarind tree since I could remember. The vendor, whose laughs were as fresh as the sweet fruits she served, hand-shaved ice for us until her arms ached. Huy and Chi had durian milkshakes made with shaved ice and condensed milk. Tien had his favorite, a breadfruit milkshake. I had soursop.

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by | 30 July 2023 · 5:54 am

Danish Civil Warriors and Crusaders

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 103-105:

On Christmas Day 1144, the Christian Principality of Edessa was lost to Sultan Zenghi of Mosul. It was the first major defeat in the Latin Middle East, and when the news reached Western Europe, it was met with despair and determination. Something had to be done, and preparations were underway for a new crusade just as large as the first (in general, see Phillips 2007). An absolutely crucial force in this effort was Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot of the wide-reaching Cistercian order. Bernhard was a gifted speaker and traveled throughout northern Europe on a preaching mission, and it was also he who initially allowed Northern German princes to fight the pagan Slavic peoples instead of traveling to Edessa. He rationalized this on the theological grounds that the devil attacked Christianity on all fronts simultaneously, and that it was just as important to defend themselves in the north as it was in the south. This cumulatively led to the so-called Second Crusade in 1147, which was one crusade but executed on many fronts, as it was described by contemporaries. Crusades were led against Damascus, against several places in the Iberian Peninsula, and in the Baltic Sea.

In 1146, Cardinal Ubaldus hosted a church meeting in Odense to preach crusade and drum up support (Bysted et al. 2012; Jensen 2017). The reaction must have amazed him, because King Erik III Lamb of Denmark immediately abdicated and entered a monastery, thus becoming the first and so far the only Danish king to voluntarily surrender the throne. He also died shortly afterwards and presumably resigned due to illness. He was followed by Sweyn III, who was later nicknamed Sweyn Grathe. Grathe was chosen by the Sealanders, but the people of Jutland concurrently chose Canute, the son of Magnus (Nilsson) (who had killed Canute Lavard). The third individual to partake in the battle for the throne was Canute Lavard’s son, Valdemar, who was now about 15 years old. The struggle developed into an eleven year war between Sweyn III, Canute, and Valdemar, and is often portrayed as a civil war. It is probably more accurate to see the conflict as formerly independent countries who now seized the opportunity to choose their own king. Conversely, these kings sought to expand their own power and unite the kingdoms over which their predecessors had ruled. During this same time period, several kings fought for power in Norway and Sweden as well.

The bloody wars in Denmark give a rare insight to the rulers’ paths, both physically and mentally, to power within the empire. Sweyn III began his king’s reign by working with Valdemar to declare Canute Lavard a saint and place his bones as relics upon the high altar in Ringsted. It was not recognized by Archbishop Eskild because it was a private canonization without the pope’s acceptance, but it does show that Valdemar would henceforth use his father’s miracles as an argument to support his own position as king. After that, Keld of Viborg, who had previously sought the pope for permission to mission and become a martyr among the pagan Wends, mediated between Sweyn and Canute by having them participate in a joint crusade against the Wendish Dobin, near present-day Rostock. They participated because the pope promised that if they fell, their souls would be in heaven before their blood cooled on the earth (Knytlingesaga 1919–25, 108). At Dobin, they met with a Saxon cavalry, and succeeded in occupying the city, baptizing the inhabitants and forcing them to free their Christian slaves. Then, according to Saxo, the Danish army withdrew because Sweyn and Canute did not trust each other. According to his contemporary, German historian Helmold of Bosau, retreat was because “the Danes are mighty warriors at home, but completely useless in real battle” (Helmold 1868, 65).

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Filed under Baltics, Germany, Mediterranean, military, religion, Scandinavia, war

by | 28 July 2023 · 6:01 am

Scandinavian Warriors in 9th c.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 62-64:

Ireland had previously been the target of Norwegian warriors, and in 851 Danes also started raiding the island. In 853 Ivar became king of Dublin and later participated in the conquest of York in 866. In 844 and 846 some of the armies that had fought in France pressed onwards to Galicia in northern Spain, and even to Arabic Lisbon: according to some later Spanish sources, these troops were dispatched by the Danish king Horik. In 854, 70 ships, led by Björn Ironside and Hastings, sailed from England via Spain to Morocco, into the Mediterranean, ultimately reaching Italy. Although it is difficult to measure the scale of these battles compared to earlier periods with fewer sources, it seems clear that the battles from the mid-800s onwards were vaster in scope, earning attention from their contemporaries who became the victims. There are three main reasons for this intensification of warfare.

First, it is clear that the Nordic longship had developed into a maneuverable and efficient war machine: Danish and Scandinavian fleets were famous and desired by other rulers for centuries to come. It probably wasn’t until around 1200 that other countries off the Atlantic coast built equally strong fleets; in the Mediterranean it probably happened in the early 1100s. Until then, the Scandinavians had a significant advantage at sea.

Secondly, the expansion in the 800s shows that Scandinavia was an extremely rich area. There is a very specific reason for that. With the rise of Islam in the 600s and the conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean world until the beginning of the 700s, Europe’s economic center of gravity shifted to the east. The link between East and West in the Mediterranean was left un-interrupted, but the Arab gold mines and new efficient exploitation of the Silk Road and its access to the East’s lucrative trade system provided an economic boost to the Byzantine Empire, particularly to the capital of Constantinople. The Scandinavians had access to this via the Gulf of Finland, Lake Ladoga in northwest Russia, and along the great Russian rivers to the Black Sea (Bjerg et al. 2013). Islam actually brought Scandinavia closer to being Europe’s economic center, becoming bridge and a transit area between the East and West. The vast quantities of gold coins found in Scandinavia clearly illustrate this. So far at least 200,000 Arabic gold coins have been excavated by archeologists, and with the spread of metal detectors more and more are discovered each year. Yet it is still only a small percentage of the many coins that were buried, and they represent only those treasures that were not dug up again by their owner or his heirs. Most of these immense riches were later invested towards war technology and political capital, in ships and men.

Third, most of these raiding expeditions were not random looting. Nor did they reflect a large-scale war between Denmark and other countries or between two cultures, one European and one Scandinavian, or between two religions, one Christian and one pagan. Rather, they were a natural element of an intricate political game between a variety of different rulers, with opponents and allied partners coming together across the political and religious spectrum.

The Danish wars in England were a continuation of old alliances across the North Sea. In northern England, Danish armies were apparently well received by the local population, whose elite probably had ancient Scandinavian roots. Several groups of warriors joined together to form the “great army” in 865, and in the coming years they conquered relatively easily East Anglia and Northumbria, which starting in around 870 came under Danish control. The Great Army threatened the kingdom of Mercia and Wessex in southern England, where it was stopped by King Alfred the Great. The warriors were soon followed by peasants who settled and cultivated the land. Danish had a lasting influence on the English language, and northern England became known as the Danelaw, the area under Danish law and control. We do know the names of several Danish commanders and kings located in England from the 800 and 900s. However, we don’t know if these kings also simultaneously ruled over anything back in Denmark. English sources say that they occasionally returned home to Denmark. This indicates that the relationship would have been close at the time, and the involvement in England clearly had a profound effect on the political hierarchy and power dynamics in Denmark.

The same certainly applies to the Frankish empire. One of the most important defensive strategies of the French king against the attack of the Scandinavian armies was to quickly ally himself with other Scandinavian rulers who were given land to which to defend [like Rollo in Normandy].

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Filed under economics, England, France, Ireland, Mediterranean, migration, military, piracy, Scandinavia, Spain, war

by | 26 July 2023 · 6:18 am

The Danish Empire!

Here’s a book I’ve long been waiting for, after coming across accounts of Danish colonies in Africa and India, Danish intercession with the Barbary pirates, and Denmark’s more familiar (and longer-lasting) Atlantic colonies, let alone the once dominant role of Danes in the Baltic region. This is a new and comprehensive book, so I’ll make an effort not to quote as many passages as I would do if it had been on the market for a longer time.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 13-14, 16-17:

The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall. This sounds as a pretentious title for the small kingdom of Denmark, but it is inspired by English historian Edward Gibbon’s grande opus, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Released in 1776–88, it has since become a classic, not only serving as an unattainable standard for later historians due to its vivid narrative style, but also as a landmark work. It became an essential source for later generations in their understanding of the Middle Ages as a dark period and became a manifest for enlightened thought and rationality in the face of superstition and sensations.

We have chosen to title this book The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall—to stress the volatile and shifting nature of the political unit that throughout history has been called Denmark. Today, one rarely hears much about the topic of Denmark’s having been a great and politically important power. Denmark is mostly understood as a small country content with its current modest political situation. It is certainly true that Denmark is a country that has become smaller over time. However, modern descriptions of Danish history have cultivated the idea that Denmark has always been a miniscule country and has always been threatened by its powerful southern neighbor, as evident in the traditional general histories of Denmark (Christensen 1977–92; Olsen 1988–91). Images of Denmark as a large country, a substantial political power, something that may even be called an empire, lie beyond the tradition of modern Danish history. This is what we would like to attempt to challenge, and therefore we have emphasized the phraseology of rise and fall in the title.

…

Many Danish historians of the twentieth century tacitly assume that Denmark has always had the same size and political influence that it has today. If asked directly they would agree that it is an incorrect assumption. Yet history continues to be written accordingly: addressing how the territories that lie within the current borders of Denmark have changed over time. The border duchies of Schleswig and Holstein are mentioned due to the political problems they have always caused. Scania in southern Sweden is seldom referred to as a Danish territory as it was during the Middle Ages; other former Danish regions as Halland and Blekinge in Sweden are rarely addressed at all, not to mention the Baltic islands of Gotland, Øsel (Saaremaa), Rügen, and the country of Estonia. The Danish Empire actually stretched from the North Cape in northern Norway to Hamburg in Germany for over three hundred years, roughly equivalent to the distance between Hamburg and Sicily. This book hopes to recognize, include, and allocate these territories within their accurate place time and in history, such as England [Danelaw] in the Viking Period, Norway from the time of the Kalmar Union between 1397–1814, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the West Indies, and Colonies in Africa [Danish Gold Coast] and India. While Denmark’s history should be acknowledged in its collective entirety, it should also remain in its European context. Denmark was at times a relatively large power in Europe, and functioned as a direct threat, particularly to many of the smaller Germanic principalities of the south: it wasn’t until later in history that these power dynamics became inverted.

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Filed under economics, education, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Scandinavia, war

by | 23 July 2023 · 6:20 am

Poland’s Election of 4 June 1989

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 188-191:

The election turned out to be a single-issue referendum: Do you want the Communist system to continue in Poland? This was hinted at when the opposition discovered it did not need to promote its previously unknown candidates to the public. It ran the same electoral poster throughout the entire country: a photograph of its local candidate, whoever that was, shaking hands with Wałęsa, over a Solidarity logo. As Kwaśniewski later said in mocking complaint, even a cow running on a Solidarity ticket would have won. Furthermore, the electoral law adopted for this election stipulated a winner-take-all system, rather than proportional representation; that is, only a candidate who received an absolute majority of the votes cast (at least 50 percent plus one vote) would be elected in a first round. Absent such a result, in a second round, two weeks later, the winner of a plurality of votes cast would get the mandate. Back in March, Prime Minister Rakowski had been warned by a wizened and wise colleague that under such an electoral procedure the party would not win a single Senate seat. But the clairvoyant only passed the memo along, without doing anything about it, because electoral law was not his bailiwick. In the first round, the opposition won 160 mandates out of the 161 it was allowed to contest in the Sejm and 92 of the 100 in the Senate. The ruling coalition, in the first round, took 3 seats in the Sejm—out of the 264 set aside for it—and zero Senate seats.

Two weeks after the debacle, Rakowski wrote in his Diaries that “to assume a candidate from the national list would get 50 percent plus one vote was a fundamental mistake. That the entire establishment of the state exposed itself to such a test is simply incomprehensible.” Indeed it was, Mr. Prime Minister. He added that “another mistake was the method for Senate elections. If the proportional system had been adopted, we would have gained thirty to forty seats in the Senate.” Most embarrassing of all, thirty-three out of the thirty-five candidates from the special “national list”—the top establishment figures—although running unopposed, had nonetheless been crossed off by a majority of voters. General Kiszczak was beside himself that in Polish embassies all over the world—except Albania—the national list had been voted down by the diplomatic corps and staff. “Somehow, in the depth of our brains, we were convinced that we would win the elections,” wrote Rakowski, a party member since 1946, “because, after all, we had always won elections.” In the races that Solidarity had not been allowed to contest, there was still the second round to ensure victories for the candidates of uncivil society by a mere plurality of votes, thereby securing the original plan of a regime-dominated parliament, which in turn would elect Jaruzelski to the presidency. But there were no provisions to recuperate the establishment figures’ completely unopposed thirty-five seats: against whom would they run in a second round? The opposition, wary of losing everything, left it to the party-state to fill these seats by post facto procedural sleight of hand. The generals still had command over the repressive apparatus, and while many people suspected (rightly) that Poland’s uncivil society had lost the stomach to shed blood, again, for such a ruinous system, the Chinese launched a crackdown in Tiananmen Square on the very day of the Polish elections.

In Poland, all the political figures who profoundly mistrusted one another and who worked doggedly to ensure they were not outfoxed by the other side were dumbfounded by the results of their joint labors. Together they had written a political script that neither side had anticipated. Would uncivil society accept its defeat, something it had always said it would never do? Would Solidarity seek to take power, something it had said it would never do? Amid the uncertainty, on July 3, Michnik—as was his style—raised a scandal. He wrote an editorial in the opposition newspaper he edited, Gazeta Wyborcza, entitled “Your President, our Prime Minister.” Michnik’s closest colleagues jumped on him for “prematurely” advocating a Solidarity government. One of his most eloquent critics was Tadeusz Mazowiecki. But it turned out that opportunists were opportunistic, for when Wałęsa approached the forgotten United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party—the “historical allies” of the ruling Communists-both eagerly accepted Solidarity’s offer of alliance against the Communists. Wałęsa then tapped his trusted adviser, General Kiszczak’s former detainee, to lead the governing coalition; Mazowiecki was duly confirmed as Poland’s prime minister. During his inaugural speech on September 12, 1989, the first postwar head of government in Poland not assigned to the office by the Communist regime fainted on the rostrum of the Sejm. Doctors took him for a short walk in the park, whence he returned to the parliament chamber. “Excuse me, but I have reached the same state as the Polish economy,” Mazowiecki quipped. “But I have recovered, and I hope the economy will recover too.” In the 1990s, half of Poland’s then $45 billion in foreign debt to Western governments and commercial banks was forgiven, in what at the time was the most generous treatment ever extended to a debtor country.

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Filed under China, democracy, economics, military, nationalism, Poland

by | 22 July 2023 · 6:01 am

Poland Was Different

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 173-175:

Poland was different. Even though peasants fiercely resisted the collectivization of agriculture everywhere, only in Poland did the party abandon the process (in 1956), so that the overwhelming majority of Polish farmland (80 percent) reverted to individual households, with only 1 percent organized as collective farms (and the rest as state farms). Such an independent peasantry was unique in the East bloc (and matched only by China when it disbanded its communes beginning in the 1970s). Further, as a result of Hitler’s murderous war and Stalin’s border shifts, Poland had become an almost universally Catholic country, and most people were churchgoers, including—often on the sly—party members. By 1977, after three decades of continuous administrative and fiscal pressure against it, the Church in Poland counted 20,000 priests and 27,600 nuns—many thousands more than during the pre-Communist interwar period. Communist Poland was organized into nearly 7,000 parishes, as well as 27 dioceses supervised by 77 bishops, with some 10,000 churches along with 4,000 chapels. Almost 5,000 students were enrolled in 44 higher Catholic seminaries, while another 1,400 studied at the Catholic Theological Academy and 2,500 at the Catholic University in Lublin—the only such Catholic institution of higher learning in the Communist world. In 1978, the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Józef Wojtyła (1920–2005), became the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first-ever Polish pope.

No less distinctive was Poland’s militant working class (which Communist industrialization had greatly enlarged). Unlike the oneoff explosions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and (on a smaller scale) Romania (1977), eruptions in Poland recurred. In Poznań in 1956, a strike at the gigantic Josef Stalin Metallurgical Complex against a new system for calculating wages prompted more than 100,000 people (out of the city’s 380,000) to march to Adam Mickiewicz Square, where, in front of Poznań’s old royal castle, they chanted “We are hungry,” “Down with the Red bourgeoisie.” Around seventy were killed and many hundreds wounded when Poland’s uncivil society unleashed one of the bloodiest repressions in the East bloc’s history that did not involve Soviet troops. But more strike waves and demonstrations followed in 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980 like jolts on an uncivil-society electrocardiogram. Poland’s workers developed powerful organizational forms—above all, elected interfactory strike committees—that would culminate in an independent (non-Communist) trade union known as Solidarity. In a parallel breakthrough in fall 1976, fourteen members of the intelligentsia established a Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników, or KOR). These were men and women of different generations and different political biographies: a well-known elderly writer, a famous actress, a young and an old university professor, two retired attorneys, two officers of the wartime Home Army, a priest, some student activists, and a few hard-core dissidents. Making public their names, addresses, and telephone numbers, they invited victimized workers and their families to contact them for help. “Do not burn down committees,” exclaimed KOR’s Jacek Kuroń (1934–2004) in the aftermath of the 1976 strikes and riots, “set up your own!”

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by | 20 July 2023 · 5:57 am

The Spark that Toppled Ceauşescu

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 111-115:

László Tőkés had a history of conflict with Romania’s Reformed (Calvinist) Church authorities as well as with the political authorities; that’s how the pastor had ended up in Timişoara. At previous postings in Braşov and Dej, both in Transylvania (which has a large ethnic Hungarian minority), Tőkés had spoken out against the leadership of the Reformed Church, whose congregation in Romania was entirely ethnic Hungarian, and the condition of Romania’s Hungarians. This had provoked his relocation to Cluj—where his father had been dismissed as deputy bishop—and then, in 1986, to Timişoara (outside Transylvania), a predominantly Romanian Orthodox yet cosmopolitan city of about 350,000. What major trouble could the Hungarian pastor possibly cause there? In Timişoara, Tőkés set about reviving the small local Reformed church with his charisma. He allowed students to recite poetry at services, which was expressly forbidden, and spoke out against Ceauşescu’s unpopular “systematization” (destruction) of villages and their Orthodox churches. The Timişoaran authorities, faced with the prospect of organized dissent, pressured the Reformed Church bishop to remove Tőkés as pastor, which he did in March 1989. On that ground, the authorities set eviction proceedings in motion. Tőkés appealed. At Timişoara’s Reformed church building—three modest stories of grimy brick and stone, lacking even a cross or spire—every window of the pastor’s flat was smashed. In November, Tőkés was slashed in a knife assault by thugs during a break-in; police who were posted outside to keep him under house arrest did nothing. Finally, losing his official appeals, Tőkés appealed to parishioners at Sunday Mass to witness his scheduled “illegal” eviction on the coming Friday, December 15. That’s right: the authorities had informed the pastor of the precise date.

Around forty parishioners, mostly elderly, formed a human chain outside the pastor’s residence. They benefited from a sudden unseasonably warm winter stretch, following a brutal cold snap, but, more important, they defied the conspicuous Securitate. When the Securitate did not disperse the small crowd, more people beyond the pastor’s supporters joined, including ethnic Romanians, Germans, Serbs, Greeks, and, some have said, a few Gypsies. The Hungarian pastor spoke from his windows to the crowd outside in Romanian. Some who joined were from other Protestant denominations, such as the Baptists and Pentecostals, religious minorities that were similarly harassed. Others came from an adjacent stop for the tram that ferried workers to the city’s outlying industrial plants and students to the big local universities. The tram also facilitated the spread of information about the confrontation throughout the town. Timişoara’s inhabitants that winter, as previously, had no electricity for most of the day and often for much of the evening, including during the interval from 6:00 until 9:00 P.M., when people needed it most. Elevators were avoided, since the blackouts, coming without warning, trapped people in them. The strongest lightbulbs sold were only 40 watts. The temperature inside homes was no more than 55 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, and hot water usually came on just once a week.

People in Timişoara, as elsewhere in Romania, were given coupons to buy a few kilos of meat and fifty grams of butter—a month. They queued for hours, and sometimes even the meager allotments their coupons permitted ran out. Meanwhile, as everyone in Timişoara knew, on the outskirts lay one of Europe’s largest pork-processing plants. The town also had large local bread factories and other major food production facilities. Many Timişoarans labored in these plants, and they doubtless told others what was made in them and in what quantities. But much of this locally produced food, like everything else, was being exported for hard currency. The furious townsfolk, spending years shoulder to shoulder in queues, were united in their deprivation. But they could call upon no forms of social organization other than their churches, which were under Securitate surveillance. Their workplaces belonged to the regime. Furthermore, crowds on the streets were permitted only in connection with scripted holidays and soccer matches. In fact, back on November 15, following Romania’s defeat of Denmark in a World Cup qualifier in Bucharest, Timişoara’s streets had filled with elated fans, some of whom had apparently chanted “Down with Ceauşescu!” This unpublicized incident had indicated the potential for a wider conflagration if some thing set it off. That is exactly what the pastor’s principled, stubborn defiance had triggered on December 15.

On December 16, Timişoara’s mayor, summoned to intervene by the Securitate, arrived at the Reformed church with workmen to replace the shattered windows and with doctors to examine the pastor’s pregnant wife. In turn, the mayor requested that Tőkés instruct the crowd to disperse. In order to avoid bloodshed, the pastor agreed. But the crowd, by then much beyond his congregation, was in no mood to go home; some began accusing Tőkés of collaboration. Others assumed that his dispersal request resulted from pressure by the Securitate. Tőkés discovered himself a “prisoner” of the people’s anger. But “in that street,” recalled one eyewitness, “was a tension and a feeling of power that you could almost touch.” Both joyous and apprehensive, the gathering crowd began to relocate from the small church toward the city center, Opera Square, several blocks away. Having initially assembled to defend the ethnic Hungarian pastor, the crowd began singing the 1848 nationalist anthem, “Awake, Romanians.” Shop windows were smashed—the regime’s blackouts enabled some people to hurl rocks without being seen—and some chanted “Down with Ceauşescu!” “Down with tyranny!” “Freedom!” This lightning escalation—precisely what the appearance of the mayor had sought to preempt—had transpired in a single day.

It was the beginning of a political bank run.

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by | 19 July 2023 · 6:17 am

Romania’s Ruling Elite Before 1989

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 117-120:

Ceauşescu (1918–89), the third of ten children, came from poor peasant stock, signed on as a shoemaker’s apprentice at age eleven, and joined the Communists as a teenager. As a “person dangerous to the public order,” he spent much of his youth in Romania’s Doftana Prison—the “Marxist University”—where he met [Gheorghe Gheorghiu]-Dej. Following the late-1947 Communist takeover, Ceauşescu was eventually put in charge of personnel. When he became general secretary at age fortyseven in 1965, he was not only the youngest Romanian Politburo member but the youngest party chieftain in Eastern Europe. Six years later, during the Sino-Soviet split, he provoked Soviet military maneuvers on Romania’s border by undertaking a bold state visit to China. Ceauşescu aimed to study what could be adapted from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to forestall “socialism with a human face” in Romania. On the same trip he visited Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, and liked what he saw there, too. Back in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s mini—cultural revolution and maximal cult unfolded, at least twenty-seven members of his extended clan got high posts. Most prominently, and unusually for Communist regimes, his wife, Elena (1916–89), who had dropped out of grade school but suddenly held a doctorate in chemistry, became coruler. Their debauched son Nicu (1951–1996), the minister of youth, became the heir apparent. The patriarch himself, who had completed only the four-year elementary school in his village, became a god. He bore the same title as had Antonescu (and Dej): Conducător.

Samizdat was virtually unknown in Communist Romania, and dissidents there always seemed fewer than even the small numbers elsewhere in the bloc. “Romanian dissent,” went the saying, “lives in Paris, and his name is Paul Goma” (the Romanian writer [1935—]). One reason was that unlike dissenters under other Communist regimes, those in Romania elicited indifference or even scorn from the West, where Ceauşescu was lauded as the great “maverick” willing to buck Moscow. As one analyst noted, “three presidents of the United States, three presidents of France, the Emperor of Japan, the Queen of England and a lot of other important people expressed their admiration” for Romania’s supposed “independent course.” In 1968, Ceauşescu, alone among East bloc leaders, refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, on August 23, a holiday in Romania commemorating the anniversary of the 1944 coup against the pro-Nazi regime, he publicly condemned the operation against the Prague Spring. The West was not alone in going bananas with approval: the overjoyed Goma joined the Romanian Communist party. In 1973, however, he was expelled from the party and in 1977 exiled for supporting the Czechoslovak Charter 77 human rights movement and writing two letters to Ceauşescu denouncing the Securitate, making Goma an international cause célèbre. Still, that such a nonparty critic could have joined the Romanian Communist party, even if only briefly, showed that many Romanians strongly identified with the regime’s gestures to distance Romanian communism from Soviet tutelage, while aiming for a special Romanian mission within the Communist world.

Leaving aside the few pro-Western critical types, such as Goma abroad and, at home, Doina Cornea (1929—), a professor of French literature at Cluj and advocate for human rights, the émigré historian Vladimir Tismăneanu has observed that “many Romanians despised, even hated Ceauşescu and his tyranny, but did not like liberal, Western-style democratic values either.” Communism drew upon and deepened this illiberal side of Romania’s political culture, while also spawning a new elite—Romania’s uncivil society. Around 10,000 made up the central establishment and 200,000 the regional one. This elite, largely provincial and undereducated, by design had become far more Romanian and far less Jewish, Hungarian, or German than any previous elite in Romania. Its grateful members shared career paths and life experiences—to a point. Officials “regularly attended party meetings and courses for ideological indoctrination and in this way were molded and shaped in a certain spirit and acquired a certain behavior in society,” explained Silviu Brucan (1916–2006), a onetime protégé of Dej. “The cohesion of this social group sprang from the status of its members and the special relations among them, from their position in the structure of power, from their high salaries, and particularly from their access to a wide range of restricted benefits and privileges.” Brucan—a Jew who had been born Saul Bruckner—was uncivil society’s ambassador to Washington (1956–9) and to the United Nations (1959–62), and then head of Romanian TV.

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