Agnieszka Mrozik - Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism

Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented toward the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marxs and Friedrich Engelss writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movements victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movements history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalins political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katyn, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This books first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Agnieszka Mrozik is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Stanislav Holubec is Associate Professor at the University of esk Budjovice and University of Hradec Krlov, Czech Republic.

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Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism

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For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367

Edited by Agnieszka Mrozik and Stanislav Holubec

First published 2018

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Contents

STANISLAV HOLUBEC AND AGNIESZKA MROZIK

CSILLA KISS

THORSTEN HOLZHAUSER AND ANTONY KALASHNIKOV

WALTER BAIER

ALEKSANDRA KUCZYSKA-ZONIK

STANISLAV HOLUBEC

EKATERINA V. KLIMENKO

JAKUB SZUMSKI

AGNIESZKA MROZIK

MONICA CIOBANU

DARINA VOLF

OKSANA KLYMENKO

We are grateful to Routledgein particular to our editors Jennifer Morrow and Max Novickfor their encouragement, assistance and technical support. We are grateful for the helpful comments of the two anonymous reviewers.

The contributions were coordinated by Dagmar vendov and proofread by Eric Canepa with the support of transform! europe, the European network for alternative thinking and political dialogue. This project was partially financed through a subsidy from the European Parliament.

The proofreading was also partly financed by the Association for Left Theory SOK (Czech Republic), by the University of South Bohemia in esk Budjovice (Czech Republic) and by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland).

Stanislav Holubec and Agnieszka Mrozik

George Orwell wrote in his famous 1984 that history was continuously changed in fictional Oceania by decision of its rulers. The past activities of current leaders were magnified and celebrated; their defeated opponents either disappeared from the pages of history or were demonized as eternal traitors, and allies called eternal friends suddenly became archenemies. Orwells book, written between 1945 and 1948, was clearly meant to reflect the politics of history under Joseph Stalin, familiar to Orwell since the Spanish Civil War. His image of the communist movement as systematically fabricating its own history became influential during the Cold War and was taken over by anti-communists. One of the posters of the Civic Forum, the leading force of the Czech Velvet Revolution in 1989, depicted two pupils saying, Ms. Teacher, you do not need to lie to us anymore. Not only was the communist term comrade (soudruka) used by children to address their teachers, replaced by the civic version Ms. (pan), but also the poster text as a whole evidenced one of the most important aspects of Czechoslovak public anger in the 1980s: that the regime constantly lied about historyat school, in the media and in official speeches. People expressed their demand to hear the truth about Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, Tom Garrigue Masaryk, Klement Gottwald, 1948, 1968, etc. The official interpretation of history was perceived as one big lie. It was believed that the state authorities had to lie about their own history to prevent their power from collapsing.