Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 9: East European Dissident Thought

Two lectures left. I know this is very sad for many of you. Some of you have been writing me emails asking how you're going to spend your next term. By the way, I now understand why this is called winter term. Like that puzzled me when I first got here, like why is this called winter term? But this morning as I was walking in, the answer came to me. And it shall wind.

So we have a gentle subject today. We'll be talking more about ideas and less about events. Although of course, as historians, we will always be keeping the events, the setting in mind as we talk about the ideas. We're going to be talking about dissidence today, and I'm going to move through six stages. The first is I will propose some definitions of what dissidence was. I will mention briefly some of the central concepts that we learned from the dissidents. Then I will give an account of Czechoslovakia. And then fourth, a discussion of Poland. Fifth, we'll talk a bit about Marxism. And sixth, we'll talk about immigration, people in immigration, and how they dealt with the problem of nationalism.

So dissidence. Now, dissidence is something which is hard to define because a dissident is by nature someone who is sitting apart from everyone else. That's what dissidence means. Dissidence means that you're not doing what everyone else is doing. You've put yourself to the side. You've put yourself askance. And so dissidents themselves generally resisted any kind of clear definition of what it was that they were doing. And very often, as in the case of Václav Havel, who we'll be talking about a good deal later on, they were annoyed by the notion of being a dissident. They thought that being a dissident made it sound like they were doing something glorious, something which was above the normal, something which made them superior to others. And Havel, and he was not alone, tried to stress that a dissident is just someone who is trying to be himself or herself. Right? A dissident is somebody who is just listening to an inner voice and trying to do things the way that they ought to be done. And in this way, what Havel was doing is he was trying to recapture the nobility of the normal.

And this word, like what normal means, is something which is heavily contested, and I want you to keep it in mind as we go along. Where for the dissident, to be normal meant to listen to your own sense of right and wrong. To be normal meant to have some notion of what is real aside from what people were telling you was real. And so to be normal, in other words, meant to be a bit eccentric. Whereas, but to be normal above all meant to live in a world of values, a world of truth, a world in which there were things that existed beyond appearances and conformity. Whereas there's another sense of the word normal which we will hear in the 1970s when we get to it in Czechoslovakia. The sense of the word normalization, which is in effect the opposite. That normalization means anything which is off to the side, anything which seems marginal, anything which seems eccentric, we're going to cut out, we're going to punish, we're going to suppress, we're going to put in concentration camps. In this sense of normal, normal is just what everyone is doing. Normal is just to be conformist. Normal is just to follow the power. So one way to think about dissidence in politics in the 1970s and 80s, which is our period today mostly, is to think of those two senses of the word normal. Does normal mean living in a world of values? Living in a world of truth, living in your own world, living in that world where you know, as you suspect, there are other things going on besides the things that people are serving up to you on a platter. Is that normal? Or is it normal to just go along to get along, to do what the regime expects of you? Is that in fact what's normal?

Okay, so that's the first thing I want to say about dissidence. The second thing I want to say about dissidence is that dissident thought is not some kind of synthetic body of literature. Right? So dissident thought is not like Marxism where you can say there's a central text, there's a doctrine. It's not like discussing theology where you can say there's the Bible and then there are commentaries and church fathers and so on. The dissidents are in a post-narrative moment. So they're in a moment where it's not just that they're not particularly concerned about commenting on Marxism. It's that they're not moving primarily from some overall narrative or from some synthetic idea into action. On the contrary, a lot of what the dissidents are doing is trying to explain why they are behaving the way that they are. And so I think it's fair to say that for most of them, it's the action that came first, and then the texts that we have are commentaries on the action. Right? Why was it that I decided to defend a rock and roll band and ended up in prison? Or why was it that I decided to keep a record of other people who were in Soviet concentration camps and ended up in a concentration camp myself? So often it was the action that came first, and then what we have are glosses. What we have are commentaries. What we have are reflections on actions that people chose to take. Okay. And then that leads to the third thing I wanted to say about dissidence, which I've already said, which is that it is a moment.

Now you're famous. Thank you. By the 1970s, at least in Eastern Europe, it's fair to say that we were in a moment which is post-grand narrative. So what's a grand narrative? A grand narrative is a narrative that absorbs all other narratives. A grand narrative is a story that explains everything. So Marxism, for example, is a grand narrative. Marxism is a way of explaining everything that happens in the world at the same time. Neoliberalism is a grand narrative. Neoliberalism is also a way of explaining everything that happens in the world at the same time. These are big stories that are basically impossible to contradict because no matter what you say about them, there's always some answer. There's always some way of folding it back up into the story. The dissidents were not working in a world where Marxism seemed to have all the answers. But this is important to note. They were also not working in a world where capitalism seemed to have all the answers. They were in a moment where it didn't seem like there were stories that provided all of the big answers. So I don't want to exaggerate the point, but several of them were influenced rather by a current of thought which we would call existentialist. So you're in the world. There's no larger sense to the world. And therefore the sense that you make of the world is the sense that there is in the world. It's your responsibility to find the sense in the world or to make the sense in the world. Now this isn't to say that they were all like card-carrying readers of Jean-Paul Sartre, and many of them, and Jean-Paul Sartre was generally an irritating figure in Eastern Europe because Sartre was a communist fellow traveler. But I think it's fair to say that in general this tradition of existentialism was a way that people found their way out of Marxism. This is a subject that Professor Shore discusses at greater length in her class.

And the final thing I want you to remember, and it's the title of this class and the topic of this class, is that all of this is happening in a world of Hitler and Stalin. So when we teach a class or take a class which is called Hitler, Stalin, and the Present, it was meant to be, I'm sure I've told you this, it was meant to be called Hitler, Stalin, and Us, but the authorities of the University of Toronto decided that somehow Canada should be excluded from Us. Right, exactly, that was my feeling too. But Hitler, Stalin, and Us wasn't actually meant to be a pun on the US when I taught the class at Yale. The notion is that we are all implicated in history, right? That's the notion. And what do we do in a world that we've inherited, in which we've inherited these things? So, but what I want to say is that the people who we're talking about were generally born in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and therefore in a very direct sense they were inheriting a world of Hitler and Stalin if they hadn't lived.

So, Eastern Europe is the place where both Hitler and Stalin were present, where both Nazi power and Soviet power were present. If you're in Toronto or if you're in Alberta or if you're in De Moines, or if you're in Paris for that matter, you can separate the communist tradition and the fascist tradition and you can weigh them one against the other. You can treat them as competing. You can imagine they don't ever make contact. But in Eastern Europe that's not possible just because the lived experience of human beings involves both. Right? So, not to an extreme case which reveals the sort of general truth, is that quite a few of the people that we are talking about would have known people who were in both Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. Right? Some of the people in the dissident tradition were themselves in both Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. So I mention this not to say that the two things were identical. They weren't. I mention this to say that the people that we're talking about are coming out of a moment, the middle of the 20th century in the middle of Europe, in which both Nazi and Soviet power were a lived reality.

And partly I'm mentioning that because I mean to sort of call into question a conclusion to which people come in the late 20th century, and we'll be talking about it in the next lecture, and that conclusion is that after the failure of fascism and after the failure of communism, there's only one thing left, and that one thing is a kind of bland, you know, democracy because there are no alternatives and capitalism because there are no alternatives. In the 1970s and 80s, we're dealing with a population of people who had themselves been through one way or the other, more or less directly, both of these experiences. And that's not the conclusion that they came to. So this is just something to note before we get into the details, that this notion that you, we'll talk about it next time, but this notion that history is over, fascism has been here, communism has been here, all that's left is a kind of reservoir of neutrality. And this reservoir of neutrality is just democracy and capitalism. Then by the 1970s in Eastern Europe, people had in a much more active way, so to speak, in a much more human way, in a much more physical way, a much more fleshy way, passed through both of these experiences. And the conclusions they drew were different, right?

And in case I forget to say it later, almost none of these people were talking about the economy, right? Almost, this is the final point about the dissidents. Almost none of them were talking about the economy, and virtually none of them in the 1970s or 1980s anyway came to the conclusion that the way you solve the problems of communism is you replace it with capitalism. Almost none of them thought that. By the 1990s, many of them were persuaded of it, but that may be a different story. But in the moment we're talking about, almost none of them were thinking about the economy as central, because remember Marxism said the economy was central. So their minds are elsewhere. And almost none of them thought that the way to solve all these problems is to bring in capitalism. And just to sort of bring the point home, you would not find any of these people who would say the way to get out of communism is to get rid of our public health service, or the way to get out of communism is to get rid of public education. Right? None of these people were opposed to those things, right? When they were opposed to communism, it wasn't that they were opposed to the welfare state. Okay?

So that's by way of a general definition of dissidence. And I have to say, as I move into the second point, which is about the central concepts, we have to remember that these were eccentric people in various countries who didn't necessarily agree with one another. Right? And so as I try to bring things together, just remember that these are not people who belong to a Leninist party. These people aren't forced to agree, and they don't agree on many things. Okay. Second point, what are the useful concepts or what are the big concepts that tend to endure from this period and that you can be thinking about as the lecture goes on and as we get into the specific details? I think there are essentially two. The first is the notion of living in truth.

So what does living in truth mean? Well, first there's the backdrop. And the backdrop, as I've already said, is that there is no longer one big truth. So what Marxism provides, a bit like the way a religion can provide it, what Marxism provides is a sense of one overarching truth that can explain everything. So it just is the case that there is class struggle and that class struggle brings progress. It just is the case that technological change is the root of all other changes. It just is the case that the party understands this better than you do, and so on. Like that is one big truth. And when one big truth breaks down, you begin to ask yourself, okay, well maybe if that one big truth is not persuasive, I have to ask what is truth? If truth is not something that comes from some kind of outside system, then perhaps truth is something that I experience myself or something for which I myself take risks. And if there aren't big truths, perhaps the truths are little.

And so living in truth, and it's basically impossible to push this point too far, living in truth was about small things. It was about whether the river or the lake next to you was polluted or not. Right? So dissidence was heavily connected with things that we might call an early environmental movement. Is it polluted or not? Or after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Ukraine, did the radiation pass through Kiev or not? Of course, the answer is that it did. But it has to do with empirical things like this, very often about the land, very often about the environment. Little truths like, little truths like what do I as a person actually care about? So we're going to talk later on about Havel and The Power of the Powerless, which is probably the most important dissident text. And in The Power of the Powerless, Havel's main example of living in truth, his main example is good beer is better than bad beer. That is his central example, right? So, and it's actually a philosophically rich example because it includes the notion that there's good and bad in the world. They just, you know, they manifest in beer. And in the story that he tells inside this essay, The Power of the Powerless, he talks about someone who works at a brewery and who gets in trouble because he actually cares about the quality of the beer. So it's at that level, right? Like you don't want to lie that bad beer is actually good beer. You actually know the difference and you care.

And so it's very, the living in truth business, it sounds glorious and saintly when you say living in truth, but it generally was meant to be something that was low to the ground. It was not meant to be directly political. It was meant to be metaphysical and individual, that you actually thought that some things were better than others in your own life, and then maybe indirectly that would have some kind of political consequence. But living in truth was chiefly about your own commitments.

The second, I think, large idea that comes out of the 1970s and 1980s, and this one is more associated with Poland than with Czechoslovakia, as we'll see, is the notion of civil society. So traditionally, what civil society means is that there's power, and power is represented in civil society, and civil society is represented in power. The new notion of civil society in the 1970s and 1980s is very different, is that civil society is not connected to power. Power is something alien. Power is something that we cannot change. And this, by the way, is important. We know, or at least I hope we know by this point in the class, that communism is going to come to an end in 1989. Okay? But for the purposes of this lecture, you have to take into account that most of these people did not really suspect that anything like that was going to happen in the near future. The 1970s and 1980s were a moment when, at least to the late 80s, it seemed like communism could go on indefinitely. Not with progress, not with any revolution, not with any great change, not with any grand narrative, but the thing itself seemed like it could just sustain itself indefinitely. And so the dissidents don't know that these changes are around the corner.

So power is something which is there, and we are here, and so it's not just I, it's we. And the connection between living in truth and civil society is this, that if you authentically care about things, and again these are not necessarily political things. If you authentically care about things like speaking your own language or like collecting stamps, to take a true example, if you authentically care about things, a sport, if you care about rock and roll music, an example which turns out to be world-historically important, as we'll see, if you authentically care about these things, if you're doing them because they're part of your own truth, you end up meeting other people who have similar engagements, who are similarly authentic, and with them you build up groups. Right? Not to overthrow the government. That's not the idea. You're doing this because you're expressing your own view of life. And you can't express your own view of life completely without other people.

So if your interest is, I mean, I'm taking this example because it's going to turn out to be very important. But if your interest is rock and roll music, there are limits to which you can do it alone, right? You need other people. You need other people to be in your band. You need other people to help you. You need people to travel with you. You need fans and so on. Okay. And so civil society means, in the East European understanding, it doesn't mean a relationship with power. It means a kind of set of little organizations with horizontal rather than vertical connections. So civil society, a little bit like living in truth, civil society might turn out to be political. That is, it might turn out to have political consequences, that there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of these little organizations, but it's not explicitly political. It's not defined as changing the regime or it's not defined as aiming towards changing the regime. Okay. So we've got a definition of dissidence. We've got a couple of concepts, living in truth and civil society. Now, let me give you a couple of examples.

And the two examples that we're going to dwell on are Czechoslovakia and Poland. And before I do this, and we're going to get to a little bit of Ukraine at the end. But before I do this, I just want to say Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ukraine are not the only possible examples. There are other things that we could be talking about. I'm not going to be talking much about famous Russian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. I'm not going to be talking much or at all about a Yugoslav tradition which was very different in Yugoslavia, which followed a different historical trajectory. Marxism seemed plausible for much longer, and there was an interesting group called the Praxis group which was still trying to work Marxism together with other currents of thought into the 1970s and 1980s. There were dissidents in the Caucasus and in the Baltics. I can't talk about all these examples. I'm focusing on a couple which help us to deliver the central dissident ideas. Okay. So the first area of focus here is Czechoslovakia. And in order to explain Czechoslovakia, I'm going to remind you or give you a bit of history first.

So Czechoslovakia, when we talk about Eastern Europe and communism, it's very easy to think, okay, there was a communist bloc and there was an Iron Curtain, and behind that Iron Curtain everything was gray and hard to see. And from the point of view of Canada or the United States or even Western Europe, this was generally true. But from the point of view of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the communist countries, there were not just specificities, there were individualities, there were particular experiences which intersected with the Soviet imposition of communism. And I say this because otherwise we can't understand Czechoslovakia and the special Czechoslovak encounter with Marxism. So to understand this, I'm going to take you all the way back to 1938. Okay. What happened in 1938, by the way, that was relevant to Czechoslovakia? Anybody know, remember? I realize it was a long time ago in the club.

Dayton, Munich. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Exactly. So 1938 was, I'm going to call it, the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the democracies. Czechoslovakia in 1938 was, by the standards of the time, a model democracy. There were not any more impressive democracies in Europe in 1938 than Czechoslovakia. There were also, by the way, not any more prosperous democracies than Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, or at least the western part of Czechoslovakia, was more prosperous than France in the 1930s. So, and this is relevant for a number of reasons. Okay. So first, Czechoslovakia actually had a working class and a big social democratic party and also a big communist party in the 1930s. When Britain and France sell out Czechoslovakia to the Germans in 1938 by forcing Czechoslovakia to cede a territory which the Germans called the Sudetenland, and when France essentially doesn't honor its alliance commitments to Czechoslovakia in 1938, what does this do? It discredits democracy. It discredits the idea of the West.

So in order to understand the path of Czechoslovakia to communism, one has to start before the Second World War at the latest with 1938. So 1938 is one of the points. The second point is 1948 when Czechoslovakia actually goes communist. And this isn't a class on the communist takeovers. We've had a fair amount about it. But there are certain things that I do want you to know. And one of them is that when Czechoslovakia went communist, the Red Army was actually not present, which is unusual. When Czechoslovakia went communist, it was in large measure because the communists had actually won a democratic election, which is a rare thing, but it happened in 1948. And true, the communist leadership was pushed forward by Stalin to, as he put it, resolve the question of power. And true, there were elements of propaganda, intimidation, and violence, including political assassinations, involved. But in 1948, there were quite a few believers in communism in Czechoslovakia. And this is important to help us get to 1968.

So we talked about this a little bit last time. I'm going to remind you what happens in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s is the attempt to revise Marxism. Okay, revise Marxism. There was a tendency or a possibility inside Marxism which was called revisionism. And what revisionism meant in this context is that we go back and we discover what Marx actually thought. Okay, so you're all sophisticated university students and you know that it's hard to go back and figure out what anybody actually thought. But you can see the political logic, and the political logic is this. Stalin dies in 1953. Khrushchev criticizes him in a secret speech. It's no longer clear exactly what the Soviet Union is trying to say. And so in that moment, with Stalin dead and discredited, what do you do? You go back to Lenin. Okay. But when you go back to Lenin, Lenin seems to be, and we've talked about this a lot in class, he seems to be a bundle of very effective tactics in order to get to a revolution. Oh, okay. Well, then what was that revolution really supposed to be about? And so then you go back to Marx.

And so interestingly, in the 1960s in Eastern Europe, you have a lot of people who are going back a hundred years or so and trying to read Marx and figure out what Marx was actually about. And in the history of Marxism, incidentally, and this is something which is happening in both Eastern and Western Europe to some extent, this is also the moment, the 1960s, where Marx is being reread not as an economist but as a theorist of alienation, which is where I started in the lecture about Marx. So Marx the economist says things like there are contradictions in the means of production. Feudalism gives way to capitalism. Capitalism gives way to communism. Marx the economist dies trying to finish a long book which is called Capital, which is a political economic explanation of this whole process. But the young Marx doesn't, that sound appealing, the young Marx, right? Like if you have to choose between the young Marx and the old Marx, who's going to choose the old Marx? The young Marx, though, the author of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the person who I discussed earlier, is a philosopher of alienation, right? The young Marx says that there is a, we have, there's a natural way for us to be in the world, but we've lost it, and we've lost it because of private property, but we could return to ourselves, right? And so that theorist of alienation is recovering prestige precisely in the 1960s. Okay, so that's happening on kind of a world level. Those texts of Marx were literally rediscovered and translated into various languages in the 1960s.

Okay. So we need all of this to understand what happens in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and how that sets us up for dissidence, because what happens in 1968 is not a rebellion against Marxism. On the contrary, the Czechoslovak Communist Party are the last people, at least in Eastern Europe, who believe that you can get from Leninism back to social democracy, essentially. So they think that we can have an experiment, we can have free speech, maybe we can even have elections at some later point, and the result of this will be we'll keep the same, the same people will somehow stay in power and we'll somehow have the same system. Now you can see the contradictions of this, and by the way, this is like, this is a tension inside the notion of free speech, which is relevant to today as well. There are many people in the world who think that if I give you free speech, that means that you just say the same things that I say. You might have noticed that this is a feature of how people often talk about free speech.

Okay, so the Czechoslovak communists had that problem as well. Maybe not to the same extent as some of the fascists today, but they thought, okay, we can give society free speech, and what will happen is that they will all say the same things that we're saying, and that will be great because then there will be consensus. But in fact, if you give people the freedom of speech, they turn out to have all kinds of wild commitments and interests, and it's very hard, and you create a situation which is very hard to control. And this is where things broke down in 1968. There was a contradiction where the Czechoslovak Communist Party thought, okay, we're going to give people free speech, and the result of that is we will march forward to reform together, and we'll all do the same things. That didn't really work out. Incidentally, just to jump ahead to the next lecture for a moment, Gorbachev and the Soviet Union did essentially the same thing. He said, okay, I'm going to give you free speech, and now you're going to talk about how my reforms are exactly right. And the result was that people said, actually, I want to talk about, you know, 18th century history, and I want to talk about how the Russians have always exploited me, and by the way, there was a concentration camp that I want you to know about.

So free speech leads to unpredictable results. Like that's the nature of freedom of speech. Okay. And this appearance of pluralism was in a way the basic problem that the Czechoslovak communists had, because in 1968 they were dealing with the Soviet Union that was no longer Marxist in any meaningful sense. So after the power struggles, after the death of Stalin were over, the person who came to power and who was consolidating power in 1968 was Leonid Brezhnev. And Brezhnev was not an ideologist. He was not a big reader. He was essentially a backer of the status quo. And for him, Marxism was a system of power. It basically functioned in three ways. The first way was a series of patron-client relationships. So the Leninist party with its kind of pyramid of power was understood as patron-client relationships. So I in Moscow, I'm the patron. The rest of you are the clients. You're supposed to do what I want, and if not, I will just replace you.

The second way that power functioned was by way of military intervention. So if you don't do what I want and you don't leave voluntarily, I will just come in with the Red Army and I will make sure that you get replaced, which is what happens in 1968. And the third way that Brezhnev thought about power was economics. No longer in a Marxist sense of we are going to radically change the world. We're going to overcome capitalism. We're going to catch up to capitalism and surpass it. By Brezhnev, they don't really believe that anymore. By Brezhnev, the notion is more that, okay, we've taken the system as far as it can go, and now we're going to pacify people. We're going to give them what they want. We're going to give them consumer goods. You'll notice how this is inherently problematic, because if you no longer have a future to promise people and it's all about the present, then your present had better be competitive with other people's present, right? And that's a problem that the communists got into in the 1970s.

Okay, but the essential point here is that in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, the people who were removed from power were still Marxists. They were believers in Marxism. When the Soviets invade in August of 1968, they are taking out of power true believers in Marxism, and they're replacing them with people who are very practical, technical organizers. They're replacing them with people who they trust, where trust means not changing anything. Okay, so I'm setting all of this up because I want you to see how dissidence fits into the long arc of the history of Marxism, where by 1968, precisely with the arrival of Soviet and Warsaw Pact allies in Prague in 1968, precisely at that moment, the notion of Marxism as a lively doctrine, as something that you could revise, from that moment on in Eastern Europe, it's essentially dead. In Western Europe, the story is different. Of course, in Western Europe, there's no such decisive event. In Western Europe, the idea of Marx as a philosopher of alienation can continue. Not just Western Europe, in North America, around the world, it can continue in Latin America and in Africa. The idea of Leninism as a revolutionary doctrine can also continue. But specifically in Eastern Europe, the notion that you could get back to the real Marx and that that was the central intellectual challenge of the time, as of August 1968, that's done. And it finishes with both a bang and a whimper.

Okay, so the arrival of Soviet force teaches a lesson. But then the other, that's the bang, but the whimper is a thing called normalization, where in effect Czechoslovaks are forced to themselves take part in the end of the reform process, where it's of course it's different Czechoslovaks who are put on top of the party. The party is purged of all the people who might be interested in reform. And so the Czechoslovaks themselves are co-creating this reality which emerges in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it's this reality which is called normalization. And so the interesting thing about normalization is that it's so uninteresting, right? There's normalization, I mean, if you, it's like a whirl, right? There's nothing in the center of it, but everything is brought towards the center in normalization. The party no longer pretends that it believes in Marxism, and it no longer cares that you believe in Marxism. Things just are what they are, and that's normal, and nothing is ever going to change. So it's this normalization which is the backdrop for Czechoslovak dissident thinking in the 1970s and the 1980s.

Now there is a kind of interesting, you know, if you want, dialectical twist here. Brezhnev is no longer interested in enormous Marxist transformations. Brezhnev is essentially interested in preserving the status quo. And so for him, the victory is keeping his own people in power in Eastern Europe. And Gromyko, what he's interested in is continuing to have the Warsaw Pact, continuing to have Eastern Europe under his control. And this is what draws the Soviet Union into the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

So the Helsinki Final Act is a major turning point in the Cold War. And this is not a class about the Cold War. That would be a great subject for a class, but I'm just going to summarize where things looked in the 1970s. If you're in the middle of the 1970s, it's a time when it seems like everybody is losing the Cold War. So like in retrospect, it's very easy to think, oh, one side won and one side lost, and it must have been clear what was going on.

all the time. In the mid-1970s it seemed like everybody was losing the Cold War. It didn't look great for Moscow, but it also didn't look great from Washington. The 1970s in the United States are a period of oil crisis, stagflation, and general despondence about the political future. It's not at all a period of self-organization, or it's definitely not a period where Americans thought they were winning the Cold War. In general, they thought they were losing it in the 1970s. But from the point of view of Moscow, things don't look great either. Economic growth, as in the US, has flattened. In some East European countries, it's gone negative. The oil crisis is also not great for the Soviet Union and for its satellite states. And I'll explain that later. And also in the Soviet Union, a bit later, you invade Afghanistan in 1979, and that doesn't turn out well. So the 1970s are not a time where either side thinks it's winning, and this is essential to...

and this is also incidentally why the 1970s and the early 80s were the glory moment for arms control pacts, which they were. So all of these nuclear arms control pacts, their longer history goes back to the late 60s and the 1970s into the early 1980s. Nuclear deterrence seems to make sense in a world which you think might be frozen, where you think like the things not changing is as good as it's going to get. Then nuclear deterrence seems to make sense. Then the logic of mutually assured destruction—that we're all just going to keep our nuclear weapons in our silos and that's the way it's going to be—that fits an overall sense of the way things are going. Okay. So, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the essential element of the Helsinki Act of 1975 was that there was finally a peace settlement to the Second World War. Okay, so now you're saying to yourselves, the Second World War ended in 1945, so there must have been a peace settlement in 1945. No, there was not, right? There was no peace settlement in the Second World War. Wars can end without there being a peace settlement. It happens all the time. What happened in 1945 was unconditional surrender by the Germans, and then immediately Cold War, and so borders weren't recognized all through Eastern Europe. There was no final settlement of the war. So the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 was essentially the final settlement of the Second World War, in which Canada, the United States, Western Europe agree that we are not going to challenge the borders, and the Soviets, their East European allies, agree they're not going to challenge the borders. And so it's a confirmation or a legalization, a formalization of the status quo for our purposes.

What's interesting about the Helsinki Final Act are a few sentences which you have to dig pretty deep into to find, and I challenge you to do it after class if you want to, which concerns something called human rights. By the mid-1970s there was already a notion of universal human rights. It was ensconced in the United Nations. There were treaties on human rights, generally honored in the breach, of course, but they were signed. And what all the Helsinki Final Act did was it said that the signatories reaffirm their prior commitments as articulated in certain other treaties which mention human rights. Okay. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because this provides a way for dissidents to talk about politics without introducing any new element to the story. What the dissidents do after 1975, and this is true not just of Czechoslovakia, it's actually true all throughout the Soviet Union and all throughout Eastern Europe. What the dissidents do is they say, now our governments have legally committed themselves to something called human rights. And human rights as a concept, it doesn't fit at all within communism at all. Communism says there is no notion of an individual and their rights under communism, right? And under communism there may be a notion of human fulfillment which is brought by the party or whatever. But a human right is your ability to be individual, unpredictable, right? Unboundable. It means that if there are human rights, that means that there is something which goes beyond the law. It's something before which law has to bow, and that is the inherent dignity of the individual. That's a problematic concept for communism. And also human rights are politically very interesting because they can be applied to almost any situation, right? So if there are human rights, that means that in a situation where you can't speak, where you can't assemble, perhaps also where you can't have healthcare, all of these things can raise a question of human rights. So it became a way for dissidents to criticize their regimes, but they did it only by saying, we are the ones who care about the law. That was the move that they made. They said, 'Okay, there's a treaty, and the treaty has human rights in it, and all we're going to do—this is all we're doing. We're just going to make sure that our own country adheres to its treaty. That's all we're doing.' Right? So that's why the Helsinki Final Act was important for the dissidents. And we'll see some examples as we move on. Now, let's try to get to an example and try to get to the ideas.

So the example from Czechoslovakia was music, and music I think is particularly interesting for us because it helps us to take seriously this notion that dissidence wasn't about politics—not in the sense of overturning the regime anyway, not in the sense of forming a political party. They were not interested in political parties. It was not about politics in the normal, formal understanding of the term. Anyway, the main action in the middle of the 1970s concerning dissidents had to do with music. There were a couple of rock and roll bands in Czechoslovakia that were performing illegally, and members of these bands and people associated with them and other people in various other kinds of underground scenes were brought to trial in Czechoslovakia in 1976 and 1977. And as a result of these trials, a group of intellectuals formed something called Charter 77. So Charter 77 is where these two factors that I've been talking about come together. So on the one side, the people who write and sign Charter 77, they start from the premise that all we're doing is enforcing. Our country has committed itself to human rights. We're just making sure that it does. That's all we're doing. We can't possibly be doing anything bad. So it's very formalistic, very legalistic. On the other hand, the reason why Václav Havel and Jan Patočka—which is P-A-T-O-Č with a little hat, which is called a háček, a P-A-T-O-Čka, Jan Patočka—the reason why they and others got interested in the rock and roll musicians was not that they liked the music. Okay, they didn't like the music. They were too old for the music. They didn't like the music, but they recognized that the music was an authentic expression of what these young people really wanted to be. That was their point, right? That these people, you know, these rock and roll musicians, they're not trying to do politics. They're just trying to live their life. This is the thing that they actually care about, and that's why they're doing it. And because it's what they actually care about, then we are going to take risks on their behalf. We're going to sign this petition, which is what Charter 77 was, and we're going to take the risk of going to prison, which they all did. Patočka, who was of an older generation, was arrested and interrogated and died the day after his interrogation. Havel was imprisoned for several years afterwards. So they were taking very real risks. And so that's the situation, and I want you to note it because it's exactly the kind of thing that gets lost. Like by the time we get to the 1990s, and Václav Havel is president of already a non-communist Czechoslovakia, and he's inviting, you know, he's inviting Lou Reed and... Do these names mean anything to you? Velvet Underground. Okay. Most important band in the history of rock and roll. All right.

Okay. This is not a class about that, or else we would talk a lot more about it. But in the 1990s, by the time that Havel is in the castle and he's the president of Czechoslovakia and he's inviting rock and roll musicians to visit, it's a little bit unclear why, right? Why exactly is he doing this? Why, you know, where does this come from? And the answer is that it comes from his recognition in the 70s that rock and roll was actually an authentic expression of how people wanted to be, how they wanted to live their lives. So it's important for us to pause on this because a lot of dissidence had to do with things like this, right? It had to do with actually caring about something. And this has its charm, right? Like I hope it has its charm. I hope you think it's charming that people would actually take risks because of what other people actually cared about. It also has its limits, as we will see in the 1990s and 2000s. Being anti-political in this way makes it difficult for you to practice politics, because if your whole notion was power is for other people, we don't want to have power, we just want to do things we care about, after your revolution, you know, when you have to take power in some form, how do you do it? Right? And you may end up being outwitted. You may end up being a little naive. That's the other side of this. Okay. So, what's the great thinking that comes out of this? And this is so I'm just going to give you the one example that we're treating in class. And that is an essay called Power of the Powerless, which Havel wrote in 1978 before he was going to go back to prison. In Power of the Powerless, okay, first of all, I want you to see the setting. It's 1978. All the things I've talked about are present. We're in the middle of normalization. Nothing seems like it will ever change. Havel is incredibly demoralized by television.

Um, and, okay, so like now it's 2026 and I was just like at softball practice and I was talking to a mom and a dad and we're like, you know, television was so great because like in television you had to at least pay attention for half an hour and follow the plot, you know, like compared to the internet. It's amazing. Like it's practically, you know, it's like reading the Bible in Greek. But for Havel, television was a distressing sign of stagnation. It was very distressing for Havel that the regime was able to mechanize its propaganda by way essentially of situation comedies. So what the Czechoslovak regime did with TV, they didn't just have like 24 hours of like Lenin was right, Marx was right. They didn't do that at all. They had sitcoms. And in the sitcoms on the margin, you know, like a plot feature would be, oh, a church got destroyed, right? We just destroyed a beautiful Baroque church in the middle of a town. But the guy who's doing the destruction, he's kind of charming and like he's in love with his secretary, but he's married and like you're sort of following the adventure. That's what they did, right? They made their own people the stars of situation comedies on television, right? And so what depressed Havel was that at 7:00 or I forget 8:00, everybody in Czechoslovakia would be watching the same TV program, and this is what really worried him. And in the essay he spends a lot of time on this problem, and I just mention it because he's anticipating something we're going to be talking about in the next lecture, which is the possibility of the mechanization of conformity, right? The mechanization of emotion, like taking things which seem human, like, you know, the Communist Party official who has trouble in his love life or whatever. All this was only suggested, by the way, they had kept a great distance from actual sex. But the Communist Party official who's kind of bumbling but charming or whatever, and by the way he destroyed a church and oh we collectivized the agriculture in this village but it was kind of a romp while we were doing it. This sort of thing where you could use mass media to appeal to emotions in order to preserve the status quo. Havel found this terrifying. And so when I talk about the normalization of the 1970s, one of the things I'm talking about is television. And the arrival of television specifically, not as a stupid regime tool, but as a rather sophisticated regime tool. Okay, so all that's in the background. In 1978, Havel and a bunch of his friends climb a mountain. Very healthy thing to do. And the mountain happens to be on the Polish-Czechoslovak border. They meet a Polish dissident whose name is Adam Michnik. M-I-C-H-N-I-K. Michnik, a bunch of Poles. They meet at the top of the mountain. You know, they're in a jolly mood as you are when you climb to the top of the mountain. Everybody's brought vodka. Everybody's brought something to barbecue. They make a campfire. They sit around. They drink vodka. Talk.

Okay. So, several things I want you to note about the situation. The first is that it's international. So, Havel only writes the essay because he has a conversation with a bunch of people who are from another country. And it's actually Michnik who says, 'Hey, Václav or whatever, you know, Váťa, I want you to write an essay about the philosophy of dissidence or the philosophy of everyday courage.' Second thing I want you to note about this situation is language, because I want you to taste the foreignness of this. If a Pole and a Czech climbed a mountain today and met at the top, they would almost certainly talk in English. Like it's gotten to this ridiculous point that like you're in Slovakia, as I was the other day, where I was in Eastern Slovakia, where like everybody can understand Ukrainian and they can also understand Polish and they really should be able to understand Czech, and like but if you try these languages they're like, no, no, I'm going to go over to English on you, you know, and then we're going to talk incredibly bad English. I mean I hope my English is okay, but like we're all going to talk incredibly bad English. Even though we could talk Slavic languages together, we're not going to. I want you just to note that in the 70s it was a different linguistic world. So if you imagine this campfire, the Poles are speaking Polish and the Czechs are speaking Czech, and we're in a different linguistic structure where insofar as they had second languages they would have been French. I mean everybody studied Russian and pretended not to know it, but the Western languages would have been French and then German. It was not a world in which everybody knew English. Right? And so when we think about these linguistic products, these dissident texts, these are texts that were not produced in English. And very often it would be years before they ended up being published in English. And so a lot of this stuff, even when it was published in English, it was out of context, like not just out of place, but also out of time. And so this intellectual moment that we're discussing was hard to understand while it was going on. Okay? And the third thing I want you to see about this moment is, well, it's actually about the means of production, the level of communication technology. So, Michnik says to Havel, I want you to write me a text. Okay, I say text and you're thinking like, oh, you know, like... but I want you to write me an essay. And then I'm going to publish it in Poland in my underground publishing house. Okay, this is the level of technology. Radio matters a lot. TV is coming onto the scene in an essentially repressive way, but you could have underground publishing houses, which often just meant you'd stolen a printing press from somewhere, right? And you had, crucially, you had somebody who knew how to work it. You had to have the press. You had somebody who knew how to work it. You had to have paper. You had to steal the ink, you know? But that was important. If you could publish a few thousand copies of an essay, that was thought to be important. This was the level of communications technology that prevailed at the time. And it's really important to know this to understand the dissidents, because otherwise, like if you imagine an internet world where you can just tweet whatever you want and then exactly zero people read it, which is the—that's the average. I mean that's like the tragedy of the internet, right? That like some people have bazillions of—I mean I'm sure all of you are like major influencers and like you go home and you're going to like, you know, you're going to Instagram this lecture and like 50 million people will follow your comedic imitation of Professor Snyder. But the sad truth of the internet is that basically nobody has any influence. Like most of us are writing—oh, you didn't know this, okay. But like the vast majority of time that people spend on the internet exerts no influence on anybody at all. It's more you're being influenced, but you're not. So whereas text is a much more 50/50 even proposition, right? Somebody writes something, somebody else reads it, there's some chance that it's actually going to have an effect, especially if what the regime is trying to do is to wipe out all competitive text. And so this is why dissidence is connected. It's a Russian word. All the other languages have their own word, but the Russian word is the one that came through, connected with the idea of samizdat, which just means self-publishing, right? So, if I say self-publishing, it means like, oh, well, nobody would publish my memoir. You know, I had very interesting teenage years, but for some reason, no major publishing house would publish my book. And so, I self-published, right? If I say self-publishing, that's what it sounds like to you. But samizdat basically meant you had your own printing press. You published it yourself. Your friends circulated it. And this was meaningful. Okay, that's all in the background before we get to the ideas. So, the essay that Havel wrote for Michnik was called, as you know, The Power of the Powerless. And in The Power of the Powerless, it's a fable. Okay. And the fact that it's a fable is also interesting. The form The Power of the Powerless takes is a fable. It's about something that didn't happen but could have happened. And like other fables, the point of it is to teach you indirectly larger truths about the world. So it's a fable. It's not a philosophical tract. It's not a critique of Marxism or anything like that. It's a fable. And in the fable, there's a greengrocer. There's somebody who owns a grocery store. He doesn't own it, sorry. There's somebody who runs a grocery store. And in the grocery store, like in all the other stores around, he has a sign. And the sign says, 'Workers of the world, unite.' Now, the thing about this sign, Havel says, is that the greengrocer doesn't believe the workers of the world are uniting or should unite. He doesn't care. Also, the political party, the communists who require him to put the sign up, they also don't believe that the workers of the world are uniting, and they also don't care. So there's no real signifier, right? The sign doesn't mean what it says because nobody is actually concerned about the workers of the world uniting. So what does it mean then to put the sign up? And what Havel says is that by putting the sign up, you are communicating a certain kind of conformity. Right? When you put the sign up, you make it slightly more necessary that the person in the store next to you also puts the sign up. And when you put the sign up, you're telling the authorities, I'm not going to cause any trouble to you. You're not saying you agree. They don't demand that you agree. You're just saying, I'm not going to cause you any trouble. And so in this setting, in what Havel calls a post-totalitarian setting where there still is a fair amount of violence but much less than there had been before, Havel says this makes us all co-responsible. So, and in order to explain how we're co-responsible, Havel has to get into the metaphysical territory of lies and truth, which is very characteristic, right? So it's wrong, says Havel, that the greengrocer is putting up a sign in which he doesn't believe, not just for the superficial reason that he's setting a superficial example, but for the deeper reason that he's setting a deeper example of lying all of the time. And if we all lie all of the time, then we are co-producers of a general panorama of falsehood in which no one really believes in anything. We create a kind of slippery surface all around us where it's very hard for anyone to find out what's true or to take any meaningful action. Not because of the specific lies we tell, but because the specific lies are conceding to this overall notion that nothing's really true and nothing really matters. Okay? And so in this way you can see how what Havel is talking about in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, without pushing the point too far, it's a little bit like the problem that liberal political systems began to face in the 2000s or 2010s where post-truth seemed to be the issue. And I'll talk about the connections next lecture. I just want you to notice that this is one of the reasons why the dissident thought of the 70s is relevant today, is that Havel is already trying to confront a world which we might call a post-truth world, and what he's saying is it's not just that the dissidents are out there looking for the truth. Okay, the problem is that we are all co-producing a world of falsehood. We're all co-producing it. And therefore, as he says famously in the essay, the line of responsibility for the regime isn't between us and them. The line runs down the middle of each of us, which is a tough thing to take, right? But it's a profound point. Okay. So that's The Power of the Powerless. It has the philosophical implication, which may be a political implication too, that everybody is to some extent responsible. That is of course hard to take, right? It's much easier not to be responsible at all. It's much easier to say, well, you know, the subway in Prague runs on time and I can afford a meal at the pub and I just got my TV and there's this great sitcom. You know, that's easier, right? And what if like what if you don't have a lot of power? What if you just have a tiny bit of power? What if you're in prison? How comfortable is it to say, well, you're also a little bit responsible, right? So this is a doctrine which is not that attractive. Okay, it may be true and it may work, but I'm just trying to get across to you that the notion that you are responsible to some extent for everything that's going on around you is a hard thing to take. And if you're in a non-democratic situation, as they were, where you can't actually vote, when you're in a situation where you can't actually speak freely, it's even harder to take. Okay, first thing. And the second thing is that, as I've already suggested, I want you to notice how Havel is concerned about the human versus the machine. He's really concerned about what's special about being human, which I think for him had to do most of all with something which he would have called improbability, or maybe which we might call unpredictability. What Havel thought was that the way that the regime controlled us was by putting us into—and I'm quoting now—our most probable states. So, our most probable states are things like we're hungry, we want to eat, right? We want to get along with other people, you know, we don't want any trouble, right? The things that are true about us but are the least interesting things about us. So, Havel was saying that the way the regime stays in power is not by asking anything of us. It's no longer a moment where we're all expected to be revolutionary heroes. On the contrary, the regime is just asking us to be the most boring version of ourselves, which is attractive, right? It's attractive to be the most boring version of yourself. We all—thank you for the smiles of recognition. I appreciate that. We all do it, right? It's tempting to think the things you already think. It's tempting to accept the authorities you've already accepted. It's tempting to do the same thing tomorrow that you did today, right? And so what Havel is saying is that's all the regime needs. That's all it needs from you—to be in your most probable states. And he was deeply concerned with the prospect, which he vaguely foresaw, that from the television the machines were going to get better and better at this. I just leave you with that thought. And so what he was really concerned about, the terrain that he was really concerned about, was the human, which is very hard to define precisely. But what he has in mind is this zone of authenticity. The things that we actually care about, the things for which we would take risks, not because other people would admire us for it and not because other people would agree with us, but because we really believe in them. And again, this is a tender, tricky territory, right? Because we all do have things that we really care about, but we don't necessarily find ourselves telling other people about them, let alone taking risks for them. Because taking risks for them means accepting that you actually care about them. And I'm just going to go back to this, to the rock and roll music, right? The young people who played rock and roll music in Czechoslovakia, they were doing it because they liked to play rock and roll music. They were not especially articulate people, especially. They were doing it because they actually cared about it. But, and this is the proviso, they knew that they could go to prison for it. And they did it anyway. They did it anyway. And that's why they fit into—like it's not that Havel knew them personally or he liked the music, but that's how they fit into his worldview, that they were doing the thing that they actually cared about, knowing that there was a risk involved, right? And so for us, when we say what we really care about, the risk is that the person next to us will say, 'Oh, that's stupid.' But so there's always a risk, right? There's always a risk. And what Havel is endorsing is the courage to actually care about the things that you care about. And it's that terrain, Havel thinks, that becomes harder as regimes are able to mechanize predictability or probability. Okay. Next up is Poland. And for Poland, the key idea is—so we're shifting now from living in truth to civil society. And the two overlap, as I hope I've made clear, because civil society is what happens when people who actually care about things work together and form groups. And you know, I'm just going to—so I want you to see the problem of that for a communist society. In a Leninist society, there were of course groups, like there were stamp collecting groups. I'm not going to ask how many of you collect stamps because, like, you know, that could be embarrassing, right? How many of you collect stamps? Nobody. Okay. Yay. Okay. So see, this is what I'm talking about, right? So like, all right, I'm not going to pursue this any further with your habits and practices, but the point is that in communist Czechoslovakia or communist Poland, there were stamp collecting clubs, but they were the official party stamp collecting clubs. I'm not joking. This is how it worked. So, there were organizations, like if you wanted to have a kite flying group, that was cool. You just had to get your kite flying group approved by the local party section and then you could become the official kite flying group of this neighborhood of Warsaw. Right? That's how it worked. You couldn't have your own kite flying group. I'm not—this may seem like a joke, but it's a serious point because what it means is that all human activity was meant to be organized in this vertical, right? All human activity right down to stamp collecting, kite flying. And so the moment you say, I actually care enough about those stamps that I'm going to just meet with my friends who also care about the stamps and I'm not going to tell the party authorities, you're already breaking the law, right? You're already a dissident because you actually care about the stamps. And so the reason where I'm going with this is I just want you to see from the beginning that this notion of civil society is inherently—like it doesn't present itself as such, but it is inherently a challenge to the Leninist way of organizing things, which is that the party is at the top, the politburo is at the top of the party, and there are organizations but they're all known about and they're all classified, we're familiar with all of them. Okay. So, civil society in Poland is the story of a labor union called Solidarity. And as with Czechoslovakia, there's a bit of a historical background here which we have to have in mind. So the historical background with Poland has to do chiefly with economic collapse, and it has to do with another arc in the history of Marxism, which is the arc of economic productivity up and then down. The reason why the Leninist model was attractive around the world in the middle of the 20th century was because it worked in a certain way at huge costs, which involved not only repression but also usually, or at least often, mass starvation, as in China. At huge costs, you really could get 10 or 15 years of rapid economic growth. You really could transform an agrarian society into something that looked like a modern industrial society over the course of a generation by these methods. It did work. It's of course, I mean, just to voice the obvious critique, that wasn't the only way to modernize. There were other ways to modernize. And it's also not clear that generating an industrial society based on capitalism was the only version of modernity they aimed for. Right? Okay. So there are many obvious critiques, but the point is that as a matter of fact, the Leninist style of economy or the Stalinist style of economy, where you gain control of the peasants and their land, you extract capital from the land, you push surviving peasants into the cities and you built industry, that really did lead to economic transformation and rapid economic growth and a transformation which could be very impressive also to the outside world. Okay. But it's a one-off. You can only do it once. You can only take the peasants out of the countryside once. You can only steal their land once. You can't do that over and over and over again. It can only be done once. And when you get to the end of it, then you have a question about what comes next. Okay? And so in the East European countries, this is what was happening one country after another. In Czechoslovakia, it happens rather early. And this is part of the background to the story I was telling before because Czechoslovakia was already a modern capitalist economy. And so there wasn't much more you could do for it by forcing it forwards to more industrialization. Poland on the other hand was not really a modern industrial economy. So you could develop Poland rapidly for, you know, 20 years or so and then you hit a limit. But when you hit the limit, when the peasants are already workers, when the factories have already been built, what do you do? Okay, you may not have an answer, but Brezhnev did. And Brezhnev's answer—so remember Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, consolidating power in the mid-1960s, invading Czechoslovakia in 1968—he had an answer. And the answer was, we preserve what we have. We preserve what we have. And here's why we preserve what we have. Because you can't go back to Marx. That's dangerous. It's confusing. Right? So by the time you get to Brezhnev, Soviet leaders don't care about Marx. They don't read Marx. But somebody who does read Marx is a threat to them. That's the whole Czechoslovak story that we talked about. You can't revise Marx. It's unpredictable. And you also can't reform meaningfully. It's hard to meaningfully reform a communist system because essentially anything that you try to do to decentralize leads to undesirable consequences. So in a centrally controlled economy where prices aren't meaningful, if I say to the factory manager, you're in charge of the factory now, not me, no longer centrally controlled, then the fact that the factory manager is in charge and prices are meaningless means that the factory manager is going to do something besides produce the things that he's supposed to produce. They're going to collect a bunch of raw materials and sell them on the black market, for example. Right? That is in fact what happened. And so it's very hard to meaningfully reform the system once you're inside the system. So you can't really revise, you can't really reform. So what do you do? You hunker down. You take for granted that you have a working-class society and you try to appease the workers. And that's basically it. But appeasing the workers is relative. When you took the...

peasants and you made them workers, there was a huge amount of pain, a huge amount of suffering. But by the time you get to having a working class, most of the people in the working class don't want to go back to being peasants. They accept that they've had a status increase. But what about their children? How is there a next status increase? There isn't, right? That's where you're stuck. And so you have to make sure that at least the standard of living is going up somewhat. Okay? Now, as I've already hinted, this is a bit of a trap because standard of living is always relative. How happy you are depends upon your perception of how happy other people are. So it's a bit of a trap, but nevertheless, that's where they were.

So, in the 1970s, Brezhnev's answer is we engage with the capitalist world. So, we can't reform. What we can do is take advantage of technological innovations in the capitalist world and import things from the West, and we can pay for that by exporting grain, and we can pay for that by exporting natural gas and oil. And so the Soviet Union in the 1970s enters into a kind of reform substitution system where the goal is to preserve the status quo by more or less appeasing the workers by allowing a measure of consumerism, you know, complemented by television, and but engaging with the capitalist West in order to do this. Okay. Now, I say all this because it's necessary to understand the situation that Poland was in in the 1970s.

When Poland hits this wall, when there's no longer economic growth, when there's no longer social mobility, what is Poland supposed to do? And you can't reform. It proves to be very difficult. In Poland in 1970 and 1976, they attempted to reform by raising prices. But you can't raise prices in the communist system because the one thing people are used to is very low prices. So you raise the prices and everybody rebels, and then in 1970 you end up shooting a lot of them. And so they can't do that. What do they do? They embark instead on this kind of thing that Brezhnev is talking about. Not a reform exactly, but an attempt to build a kind of communist consumerism. And so here's what Poland does in the early 1970s.

And I suspect you're going to see some of the flaws in it as I describe it. They borrow a huge amount of money from the West and then they spend it on consumer goods. Okay, so essentially they run up a giant credit card bill, basically. Like I'm sure none of you has ever done any of this, right? None of you has ever gotten a credit card and then said, 'Okay, what I really need is like a new popcorn maker or a vacation.' Um, okay. No, you don't do this, right? Like Americans do this. You guys don't do this. It's American. Okay.

So they borrowed a bunch of hard currency from the West and a lot of it went to consumer goods to keep the population happy. But then it was the worst of all possible worlds because when they invested it, they tended to invest in things that were traditional communist priorities like shipbuilding and not things that were going to themselves generate hard currency. Okay. So then the bill comes due. If you have a debt in hard currency, you can't pay it back in your own currency. You have to pay it back in hard currency. Oh, by the way, this is just something to know about the communist world. Those currencies were non-convertible. They were non-convertible. You couldn't convert them into hard currency. You could only convert them among themselves.

Yeah, that's a mystery, isn't it? Okay. You live in a world where everything is convertible, right? Um, well, I mean, I don't know. Is Trumpcoin? I guess it is. But you couldn't pay off your debts to the Americans in Polish zloty. Like you had to actually have the hard currency to hand. Someone had to pay you in hard currency for something, and there were limits to what people would pay hard currency for. Agricultural goods, sure. Industrial goods, not so much because they were regarded as second rate. And so when the world economy gets worse, when the oil crash begins in 1973, suddenly Poland has growing problems with the economy. And in 1979 economic growth is actually negative.

So that's part of the story. Then there's another part of the story which is organization. Over the course of the 1970s, especially on the Baltic coast, people were engaging in illegal acts of labor organization. Over the course of the 1970s, as the Polish government was experimenting with these efforts, people in the Baltics were experimenting with contacts between labor and organizers. And the result of this was that when we got to a third crisis, the first was '70, the second was '76, the third was 1980, and the third attempt to raise prices, the response was to form a labor union.

Now, why is this so interesting? Okay, well, you already know one reason. There were labor unions in the communist world. Everybody was in one. They were just the official labor union, right? You can see the problem with this. So let's imagine the university gives you an official union. You have to join it. But that would make sense, right? But it only begins to capture the sort of sinister character of this. So there were labor unions, but the labor unions were there to prevent you from protesting. The labor unions were there to explain to you why everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

And so the labor union Solidarity was founded as an independent labor union. That's the first thing which is important. And you already understand the challenge this poses to a Leninist system because as soon as you have any institution which is not part of the overall structure, it's delegitimizing the structure itself. The second thing which is interesting about a labor union as a response, and this again started in Gdańsk, it started on the Baltic coast among shipyard workers in August of 1980. The second thing which is interesting is that the demands that the labor union made were not all economic.

They were economic as well, but they included two very central non-economic demands: the release of all political prisoners and freedom of speech in the press. And interestingly, the regime consented to those things, and the result was that there was a period between August of 1980 and December of 1981 in which political prisoners were freed, in which you had a certain amount of legal publication, and most importantly, in which you had a trade union. This trade union expanded to 10 million people, which is a very, very large trade union. I mean, Canada, the Canadian Polish population is roughly the same. So imagine that you had a trade union that had 10 million people in it. That would be a different Canada.

So during this 16 months, people also had the experience, and this is the thing which is maybe hardest to describe but most important, of not having to live in a lie anymore, of being able to say the things that they always wanted to say but couldn't. And the sociologists actually measured the significance of that. Over the course of those 16 months, rates of alcoholism plummeted and rates of suicide plummeted, which are just statistical ways of trying to convey the qualitative change in people's lives over the course of that 16 months.

So the Solidarity labor union, which exists in Poland from '80 to '81, is the central example of civil society. And I want to be clear about the relationship between the dissident and Solidarity. Solidarity was first of all the work of workers, and this is the great irony of the history of communism. There has really only been one working-class revolution in the history of the world. You're welcome to try to correct me on the final exam. But there's only really been one clearly working-class revolution in the history of the world, and it was against communism in 1980-1981.

The leading force in the Solidarity movement was the workers. The second most important group were the organizers, the labor organizers. And you could think of them as dissident if you want, but most of them didn't leave behind any kind of written trail of dissident thought. They were certainly people who were working illegally, but they were the second most important group. The dissidents themselves, when they showed up in Gdańsk in August or September of 1980, they generally thought that their job was to try to hold back the workers and make sure they didn't do too much. Okay? And then they arrived on the scene and they changed their minds.

But the point is that you can't think of this as being something where there were heroic dissidents and then there were millions of working-class people following them. That's not the way that it worked out. So it was more, and this is the last point about it, it was more of a coalition. And this is the interesting thing: there were organizers, there were workers. The workers by 1980 had the political experience to make political demands as well as economic ones. And then over the course of '80 and '81 you see that there's a broader coalition which involves a number of dissident thinkers and which also interestingly involves the church.

The church by that period had produced its own brand of dissident thinker, chiefly inspired by the notion of personalism in the Second Vatican Council of 1968. And so you had a broader coalition in which the church was friendly to Solidarity, intellectuals, some of whom were former Marxists, right, who had come out of Marxism, were friendly to Solidarity, and then there was the working class. Okay. So that was the main example of civil society.

How was it suppressed? It was suppressed in December of 1981 by martial law. In other words, by a kind of self-invasion. And the suppression of Solidarity was incredibly impressive. Having 10 million people join a group in a communist country and have that group last for well over a year is impressive. The suppression of Solidarity in a way showed some of the weaknesses of its strengths or some of the vices of its virtues because they weren't really prepared for something like this. And it wasn't that difficult for the government to find and to put the leaders into internment camps.

What was very difficult was what to do next after that had happened because the system itself was exhausted. And I also want to note, just to give you the general context before we move on, there's a reason why the Polish regime invaded itself, and that is that the Soviet Union couldn't do it. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and was losing. That's very important to the whole next chain of events. But it's one of the reasons why the Soviet Union wasn't going to invade Poland as it invaded Czechoslovakia 12 years before, as it invaded Hungary 34 years before. It was the Polish regime itself.

And the second reason why the Soviet Union wasn't going to invade is that Poland is a big country and they weren't sure how the Polish army itself was going to react. And so they arranged things until they found a government that was willing to impose what they called a stan wojenny, a state of martial law. Okay. The third, sorry, I'm way beyond three. I'm on a higher number than three. The next topic that I want to talk about briefly is the demolition of Marxism itself.

And this is kind of an excursus. It's basically an excursus about a book that I want you to read if you're serious about pursuing these topics. The book is called Main Currents of Marxism and it was written by Leszek Kołakowski. K-O-L-A-K-O-W-S-K-I. And if you want to be correct, you put a little line through the L. Kołakowski. Leszek Kołakowski was a philosopher who taught at the University of Warsaw until 1968.

He taught an improbably large percentage of the people who would become important dissident thinkers in Poland, one of whom was Adam Michnik, who was the character who we found going up the mountain to meet Havel. And Michnik would also be the person who during and after Solidarity would publish a newspaper with the slogan, 'There's no freedom without solidarity,' which is an interesting example of civil society thinking that freedom is not about the individual, freedom is something that you have to do together.

Kołakowski had to leave Poland in 1968, and in emigration from 1968 to 1976 he wrote this book, Main Currents of Marxism. And I mention it for a couple of reasons. The first is that I just want you to note that the most important book which undid intellectually the Marxist tradition was not written by some Western Cold Warrior. It was written by a Pole who had himself been a Stalinist believer and then a revisionist Marxist and who was then expelled from his own country in 1968.

In other words, the level of intellectual engagement with Marxism was much higher inside these countries. The Cold War was not particularly an intellectual victory on the Western side, right? If it was about dealing with Marxism, the main critics of Marxism over and over again were former believers from Central and Eastern Europe. This was true in the interwar period and with Kołakowski as the chief example in the postwar period. That's the first thing I want you to note. The Cold War didn't really involve Canadians or Americans, not to mention the French or the Germans, coming up with very powerful critiques of Marxism. It did involve people coming from inside the tradition producing the critiques, and this is the most important example.

The second thing I want to get across to you is just what his critique was, because it helps to describe the overall moment. Kołakowski is very much a participant in these events. He was a teacher of a lot of the people who mattered. He was probably the single most important influence on Polish thinking in the '70s and '80s. So I just want to run over very quickly his critique, and it has to be quick. The book is a thousand pages long. It's a book of extraordinary erudition which covers Marxism from the founders all the way through the 1960s.

But his critique, and again I feel very guilty and I'm glad he's not here. Leszek passed away in 2010. So the critique, and he was the most interesting Marxist of his time and also the most important critic of Marxism. So it's a bit shameful to boil this down into two minutes. But here's the critique. The first part of the critique is that Marxism is essentially a sublimation of religious thought which replaces God with man.

That by way of Hegel, what Marxism does is it takes an essentially divine idea of truth and it tries to bring it down to earth. It takes the idea that there could be some kind of absolute, complete truth with no contradictions where everything holds together, which is not a worldly idea. It's a theological idea. It takes a divine idea of truth and it brings it into the human world where it has to be dangerous because in fact there is no one truth like that in our world. Our world is full of contradictions and none of the little truths fit together.

The second critique is that if you base your notion of politics on the idea that there is one overarching truth, then in political practice what will have to happen is that you don't allow for pluralism. So if there is one truth, the form of politics you're going to have is always going to be a contestation of who is the correct interpreter of that one truth. You're not ever going to be able to exhale and allow different institutions to have their own different kinds of truths. So Marxism can't allow pluralism. That's the second major critique.

The third major critique is that Leninism is an acceptable form of Marxism. Okay. Why is that a critique? Because a whole bunch of the effort to rescue Marxism from the 1950s forward was to say Lenin got it wrong. Lenin wasn't a Marxist. And once you say Lenin wasn't a Marxist, then you can say Marxism itself is not contaminated by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is not Marxist. Therefore, we can still take Marxism and do with it whatever we want.

So Kołakowski said no, there were many reasonable interpretations of Marxism and Leninism was one of them. There is no way in which Lenin contradicted Marx. Lenin was a reasonable continuator of Marx. That's the third thing. And then the final point is, I mean there are so many points that I encourage you to read the book or at least become acquainted with it. But the final point is that Stalinism is nonsense.

So Stalinism, with its notion that there's a party and the party has a line and politics is about following the line, that this is an essentially psychological procedure. It works in practice. It's not hard for me to say you're the enemies and now you're the enemies and the people on this side who survive are perfectly happy now to take on these people. As psychology, as power, it works perfectly well. But it's not ideology. It's nonsense. If you look at it as a series of propositions, it's nonsensical.

And then the final thing I want you to note about this, because it's a transition to the next thing I want to say, is that this book was published in emigration. Okay, that may seem obvious, right? You may think, okay, well obviously it wasn't published in communist Poland. You know, Kołakowski wasn't going to be publishing his demolition of Marxism in communist Poland. Yes, okay. But when we imagine that there's a communism where there's censorship and then there's a West where everything is free, okay, maybe you're not imagining that, but it's not the right way to think about things because in order to publish a thousand-page book, not self-publish, but in order to publish a thousand-page book, there has to be a publishing house, there has to be marketing, there has to be institutions. It doesn't just happen.

And the people who published Main Currents, they published it. If they don't publish it, it's not published. It was eventually published in translations, but if you don't publish the original, there's not going to be translation. There's an English edition, which is an excellent translation. It's an absolutely fabulous translation from 1978 by P.S. Falla. But if you don't have the Polish original, you're not going to have the English translation. There is a French translation of the first two volumes.

There's not a French translation of the third volume because the third volume involved French Marxists who are still alive. And so it was literally never published. Like it's 2026 and it still hasn't been published. So, but my point is that there has to be an institution. Okay. And what emigration often provided was an institution.

So the Kultura was an institution that existed in the suburbs of Paris in Maisons-Laffitte, which is mainly known for horse racing. In Maisons-Laffitte, just outside of Paris, there was an institution called Kultura which was run by a group of Polish émigré thinkers, émigré organizers, émigré publishers from 1948 until 2000. And they were important because they published books. They were also important because they published a journal called Kultura. And in this journal called Kultura, they carried out some political activities that would have been impossible inside of Poland itself.

And I'm just going to mention one because it has to do with our final topic, which is how you deal with nationalism. Let me take a step back here. Nationalism is a basic response to empire, right? So there's an empire. The empire came. But before the empire came, we were all wonderful people and we lived in pure innocence and everything bad that happened was the empire's fault. Right? Is this familiar to anyone out there? So that's nationalism.

Like the moment where you say, well, the empire, you know, the French came, but before the French came, like Algeria was wonderful. Um, you know, no, it isn't. I mean, it's like no one is ever innocent. It's never entirely the empire's fault. Nationalism is not innocent just because empire is guilty.

So a very unsurprising reaction to empire is nationalism. A politically predictable, psychologically predictable response to empire is nationalism. It's very easy to say if, for example, you're Poland. It's terrible what the Soviet Union did in 1940. They executed 20,000 people, which they did. They executed much of our intellectual class during the war, which they did. They sent tens of thousands of people to the Gulag. They did. They imposed their own form of regime when we would have had a democracy. True. They suppressed political life in our country for generations. They did. They took half of our territory. They did.

All those things are true. And so in that position, it's not surprising that people would react as nationalists. I mean, imagine what country you come from and imagine a range of things like that that happened to it. Losing half the territory, can't choose your own government for two generations. Your best and brightest are all executed, right? The idea that, okay, we're against this empire and that's because we are the good guys is a very attractive one.

And so what Kultura did was it worked against that impulse, which is hard work. What Kultura did was they said, 'Okay, the main thing that Poland needs is not a nation that thinks it's innocent.' Again, very attractive, the idea that you're innocent. What Poland needs is a state that can survive. It's a different proposition. And the way that we could have a state that can survive is for there to be other states around us that can survive. And what that means is that we have to get along with the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and the Ukrainians.

This is not a popular thought because thanks to Soviet power, Poland lost territory to Soviet Ukraine. Poland lost territory to Soviet Belarus. Poland lost territory to Soviet Lithuania. But what Kultura says is, 'Yeah, we know, you know, we're from there. It happened to us. We lost our lands. We lost our families. But the best thing for us to do politically is to accept the boundaries as they stand.'

And the best thing for us to do politically is to publish the books of the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, and Ukrainians who might not otherwise be able to publish them, and to make friends with the immigrants from these countries, and to create a milieu which is not just national. Again, to emphasize the point, this was not popular. It was not the easy move to make. It is not the move that most of the Polish immigrants made.

So, some of you may be involved in émigré politics or you may belong to émigré communities yourself, and you might have noticed that immigration isn't always the place where people move beyond nationalism. Okay. Oh, you hadn't noticed that about Canada? That's interesting. Okay. I mean, the way that Canada functions is as an aquarium for a hundred unreasonable nationalisms that couldn't exist anywhere else. That's how Canada works. That's Canadian multiculturalism. You have a bunch of émigré communities who hold up a bunch of propositions which are entirely untenable except that you're in Canada.

Okay? I mean, I said I didn't know anything about Canada, but that's one thing that any outside observer immediately notices about Canada. So this position wasn't popular because it wasn't what most immigrants wanted. Most immigrants wanted the land back, right? They wanted revenge. And the last thing they wanted was to make friends with Ukrainians and Russians and Lithuanians who had taken the land.

But in emigration, this kind of argument could be sustained. And because Kultura was an institution and not just a bunch of thinkers, it published its journal every month for more than four decades. It published books. And it made this argument, and the way it made it, the extent to which this fits into intellectual thought, would be the notion of self-awareness. Because what they were arguing deeply was we are not innocent. We're not actually innocent.

I met the publisher of Kultura when I was living in Paris in 1995. His name was Jacek Gedroyc, and I was speaking to him in Polish, and we walked into his office and he began the conversation by saying, 'You know, young man, you are probably versed in the Polish romantic tradition. You probably know all about, you know, the heroic tales of Poland and its adventures in the east. I need you to know that all of this is complete nonsense.' It's the first thing that he said to me, right? Like directly confronting his own national tradition and saying it's not true.

So Polish imperialism, they said, was a problem. They said we have been imperialists too. We were imperialists vis-à-vis the Belarusians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians. We have been imperialists, and in order for us not to be imperialists, it would be best for us just to have a state and to recognize the states next to us. Okay? And so as an institution they made this case for decades, and this connects to Solidarity because by the time the Solidarity movement emerged in 1980, geopolitics could be discussed on the basis of what Kultura had been arguing for the previous several decades.

And it is of great and indeed world historical importance that by the time Poland was sovereign in 1989, it made its foreign policy vis-à-vis Ukraine and other countries on these principles. So that's an example of emigration and how it intersects with dissidence. The second example I want to close with briefly is Ukraine.

So the history of dissidence in Ukraine has a very different trajectory. Obviously, unlike Poland and Czechoslovakia, the countries we've been focusing on, Ukraine has been part of the Soviet Union from the beginning. And the experience of Poland and Czechoslovakia under communism, difficult and painful though it was, was nevertheless of a different quality. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, there's no starvation associated with collectivization. There is terror, but the terror touches hundreds or thousands of people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of people. There is imprisonment, there is political imprisonment, but it's on a much smaller scale than in the pre-war period.

So in Ukraine there's a very different trajectory in which the Holodomor, the mass famine of '32-'33, is a central event. And in Ukraine there's the experience of having all of the land of Ukraine, Ukrainians called this subordination, of having all of the land of Ukraine actually brought into one unit by the Soviet Union. So the Soviet Union says we brought in Western Ukraine in 1945. Therefore, we are the ones who have created Ukraine.

And there's a special Soviet story which is articulated for the first time in public in 1954, which every Ukrainian will know about. But the Soviet story is that Ukraine is a nation, but the historical destiny of Ukraine as a nation was always to join with Russia. And the reason the celebration took place in 1954 was that it was the 300th anniversary of a military agreement that took place among Cossacks and Muscovites in 1654. And the notion was that this ancient history meant that Ukraine, on the one hand, it was a sovereign entity, but it had chosen not to be sovereign. And that's the end of the story.

In the 1960s, there was an interesting revival of Ukrainian political thought and Ukrainian literature which was brought to a halt early in the 1970s. And the 1970s, from '73 all the way until 1989, were a period of what I was calling normalization, but a much more intense form of normalization which involved Russification.

So in Ukraine in the 1970s and indeed all through the 1980s, Ukrainian as a language was progressively replaced by Russian as a language on television and in printing and also in schools. And the logic of this was not a revolutionary one anymore. I mean, in keeping with the times, the logic was an entirely technocratic one. The logic was we only need one. The only thing that matters is technical things.

And so think back to Havel, right? Think back to Havel. This is very important. Havel is saying, the dissidents are saying, there's a logic to life besides efficiency. Okay? Because the poison of efficiency is that efficiency means let's keep all the stuff that we've got right now but let's make it happen faster. Okay? That's all that efficiency means. And so when we worship efficiency, what we're saying is the stuff that we've got right now is unquestionable. We should just make more of it faster, right?

And so the logic of Russification in the 1970s was efficiency. The logic was, look, we only need one technical intelligentsia throughout the Soviet Union. It would be more efficient if they all spoke Russian. So why are we bothering with these other languages? So the form that Ukrainian dissidence took in the 1970s was a resistance to that, with the argument, and it's a human rights argument, because the Ukrainians, like everybody else, adopted the Helsinki mode. There was a Helsinki human rights group in Ukraine. It was called the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

And again, there were many different individuals. They said different things, but the heart of their contention was something like an individual right involves the language that I speak. You can't actually take an individual and remove all of the qualities of the individual because the qualities of the individual always connect to other people. So the fact that I sing songs, right? Again, this is actually the example that was used, that I sing songs in Ukrainian is part of who I am. And so when you take Ukrainian language away, it's not just some administrative technocratic move. You're wounding the person who I am. You're asking me to alter who I actually am, what I actually care about.

Meanwhile, in emigration, and this is the very last point, there was a long, and some of you, if there are any Ukrainians in here, I'm trying to spot them. Okay. Oh, they're giving themselves away. There was a long, in the spirit of the stamp collectors, solidarity with the stamp collectors, the Ukrainians have also owned up to being Ukrainians. Are there any Ukrainian stamp collectors? Ukrainian stamp. Yay.

So in Canadian diaspora and also in American diaspora and also in Western Europe, the dominant force in Ukrainian politics was right-wing. It was a tradition of resistance to Soviet power which was organized and far right. And without going into details, the essential thrust was everything Ukrainian is fine. Everything Polish, Jewish, Russian, not so much. And we are the victims of imperial oppression, which of course is true. You know, nationalists are right that they're the victims of imperial oppression. The question is whether the answer to imperialism is nationalism.

And interestingly, in Canadian emigration there was a counterargument, and the counterargument was voiced by a specific political thinker and historian called Ivan Dzyuba. But he was associated with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, and his argument also carried the day in another institution, which was the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. And the argument was that the history of Ukraine is not essentially about righteous Ukrainians defending themselves against empires.

The history of Ukraine is actually a history of various kinds of political systems over a long period of time and people of various origins making commitments to a Ukrainian state. Something like that, right? Simple idea, but shifting the central focus of politics from the ethnicity and the defensiveness and the sense of innocence to politics as something where there's a notion of responsibility and reflection and which different kinds of people can take part.

So I'm closing on emigration and nationalism because it's a very important point about where the dissidents were. Insofar as dissidents, I mean, I don't mean to downplay the importance of nationalism. I mean, it was significant as a motivator, it's significant in politics. But interestingly, in both the Polish and the Ukrainian case, one of the things that émigré organizations and émigré thinkers allowed was for people not to get caught in a version of politics where it's just us against them.

It was the institutions of emigration allowed for an expansion of the dissident thought, which is all of us are maybe in some sense a little bit responsible, and therefore in order to change the world, it's not enough just to be against, but you have to decide a little bit also what you're for. Okay. Thanks.