Dashed Hopes: a careful look at four ex-Soviet states shows little but disillusionment and greed.

Dashed Hopes: a careful look at four ex-Soviet states shows little but disillusionment and greed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe'sTroubled Past and Uncertain Future Anna Porter Douglas and McIntyre 310 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781553655152 TWENTY YEARS AGO, THE COLD War came to a sudden and unpredictedend. The Berlin Wall, symbol of the post-1945 fracture of Europe betweenStalinist tyranny and liberal capitalism, dissolved into chunks ofmasonry, widely sold, although less as souvenirs of brutal oppressionand more as proof of capitalism's triumph over communism. Previousrebellions in Hungary in 1956, in Poland and East Germany had beencrushed in blood. A decade earlier, Poland's General WojciechJaruzelski boasted that he had forestalled a Soviet invasion by crushinghis country's Solidarity movement and slaughtering a hundred of itssupporters. But in February 1989, Solidarity-selected intellectuals sataround a table with communist officials, planning a partially fleeelection. That summer, Poland had its first non-communist premier since1947. By 1990, Jaruzelski was on trial for his life. In Hungary, acommunist government let East German refugees cross its border to theWest. If a fellow-government ignored the Berlin Wall, should it be torndown? "Why not?" asked Mikhail Gorbachev, the last ofStalin's heirs. By the end of the year, Stalin's brutal legacywas gone, a victim of a scattering of valiant rebels and its ownideological contradictions. Among the rapturous onlookers was a refugee from the failedHungarian revolution of 1956, a successful Canadian author and publishernamed Anna Porter. Born a Jew in Budapest after the Nazis had fled, AnnaMaria Szigethy's parents were middle-class victims of the communisttakeover, and she had sufficient experience of communist-eraanti-Semitism to flee her homeland with the flood of refugees who soughtsanctuary in the West. She grew up in New Zealand, came to Canada as acredentialled scholar and, in 1970, married Toronto's leading libellawyer, Julian Porter, an admirable and beneficial adjunct to thepublishing industry. Anticipating the 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolution, AnnaPorter felt empowered to visit four of the liberated countries--Poland,Slovakia, the Czech Republic and her native Hungary--to see and hear forherself what had happened. It turned out to be both a hectic andsometimes painful learning experience, and The Ghosts of Europe:Journeys Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and UncertainFuture will make any thoughtful reader a lot wiser in the world. Sheinterviewed most of the leaders and intellectuals who have mattered inthese countries over the past generation; those who had no time for herwill find out their penalty if they ever read her book. Porter is no neutral. In a book about the inheritors of theHapsburg Empire, she spares no time for the hapless people of theBalkans, be they Romanians, Croats or Serbs. She has more time for theSlovaks, who escaped Hungarian imperialism only to find themselves in aforced marriage to the Czechs. Their fate will remind Canadian readersthat linguistic and cultural manoeuvres are not limited to Quebec,although the local bully-boy politics may well be universal. In novels, happy endings allow readers to finish a story with asmile; real experience usually leads to tragedy. Far from endinghistory, as Francis Fukuyama cheerfully predicted, the aftermath of 1989has restored even some demons the communists tried to exorcise. Racistnationalism, a crime in the Stalinist era, has spread across the formerWarsaw Pact states with a brutality that has even shaken Quebecseparatists out of some of their gentler illusions. As a Jew, Porter wants Central Europeans to accept and apologizefor their direct involvement in the Holocaust. Instead, Poles,Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks have experienced too many other horrors(largely forgotten in the West), from the Katyn massacre to the ethniccleansing by forced migrations that drove millions of Germans from EastPrussia and the Sudetenland and even more Poles from the Ukraine,regions where they had lived for centuries. The Holocaust may have beena Nazi atrocity but the others were made possible by the Allied powerswhen their Yalta Agreement handed Central Europe to Josef Stalin. Porterjoins many historians in blaming the First World War as the ultimatedisaster for a civilized Europe. The destruction of the Hapsburgs'central European empire by Woodrow Wilson and his allies through theTreaty of Trianon in 1920 for the sake of "self-determination"ennobled and legitimized racial nationalism throughout the world,nowhere more than in the former Hapsburg domain. Anna Porter began her tour of these four post-communist countriesconvinced that the Holocaust and the crimes of the communist era mustnot be relegated to mere history. As an intellectual, the idea that evilmust prudently and pragmatically be consigned to oblivion was anathemato her. A central theme of The Ghosts of Europe is her struggle tounderstand and to help us realize why bringing notorious malefactors tojustice has proved so difficult to achieve. A major part of the problem is the astonishing bulk of the evidenceaccumulated by secret police in all of her four countries. Moreover, themonths and years it took the rebels of 1989 to establish their authorityleft the evidence in the hands of the villains, to be manipulated, soldand destroyed. On those occasions when they could then be charged andtried, the courts were controlled by communistera judges, reluctant tofind guilt in officials who were carrying out the law of their time.Even when democrats laid hands on the levers of power, veterans of theold regime and their well-educated children were the chief beneficiariesof the rush to privatize industries and institutions they themselves hadbeen managing. So if the torturers and operatives of Hungary's AVOor the notorious Czech Statni bezpecnost (StB) were removed, theircountless feet of security files made it clear that millions of fellowcitizens were compromised, such as the highly acclaimed Czech novelistMilan Kundera, whose teenage friend went to prison as a foreign agent.Even the hero of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, had been a police informer. Polish opinion was outraged when Walesa's name was publicizedby the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Its director, Dr. AntoniDudek, confessed to Porter that he had voted against "outing"Walesa, but added "if nothing is done about the past, there can beno sense of justice." One must note, though, as Porter does, thatthe cost of defying the secret police when torture, prison and povertywere the alternative, not just for you but for your spouse and children,too. Among the scores of leaders and officials in her four chosenrepublics, Porter understandably focused on the people currently incharge of the explosive police records. Understandably too, they shareher demand for an unflinching view of a grim and sordid history: iftruth is simply left for future generations to judge, how can the guiltybe punished? However, Porter found that public opinion more generally inthese countries seems content, along with Vaclav Havel and otherintellectual heroes of the "end of communism;' to let agingcommunists die in peace. Adam Michnik, a Polish Jew, now editor ofWarsaw's largest daily, had guided Solidarity to its"semi-free" election of 1989, and so came to number himselfamong General Jaruzelski's friends and confidants. This put him atodds with Dudek, as head of the IPN, who gleefully prosecuted thegeneral for ordering the killing of Solidarity unionists. In all her countries, Porter discovers that the intellectuals whoinspired and guided the expulsion of the communists have lost publiccredibility. Perhaps the values of a liberal, democratic state are toomaterialistic, not to say selfish, to heed for very long the righteousmoralizing of any self-proclaimed intelligentsia. This would hardlyastonish anyone who studies American or Canadian politics, much lessthose of countries lacking any serious or enduring experience ofelectoral competition. One of the unwritten but essential rules of thatgame is that electoral defeat and exclusion from power are the onlysignificant penalties for defeat. By quietly yielding power in 1989,Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, not to mention Soviet and East Germancommunists, earned the right, whatever their sins, to join private life. If they profited from their political experience to join thesuper-rich, so have many democratic politicians dismissed by voters."Me first and the devil take the hindmost" suited acommunist-trained bureaucrat as much as any disciple of Chicago Schooleconomics. By the end of the book, even Porter seems sadly reconciled tosetting aside her punitive dreams. Perhaps the best reason is that ifshe did not, she would have to keep company with the idealistic victimsof the post-1989 greedfest. The intelligentsia, her class and, in herview, the architects of 1989, have largely vanished from influence oreven life. Most had been men in their sixties and, like our war veteransof the same vintage, age is a fatal disease. Others, like Havel, ignoredwarnings and accepted political office. Havel's indifference totouching base with the Slovaks in his political partnership helped makehim responsible for the national break-up jointly promoted by hispro-European Union economics minister Vaclav Klaus and Slovaknationalist Vladimir Meciar. The growth of social inequality left the poor of most formerlycommunist countries pining for benefits cast aside in the newwinner-take-all style of capitalism. Corruption, endemic undercommunism, grew worse, not better, as the apparatchiks of the previousregime squeezed their way past the amateurs into a post-communist worldof management. In the countries Porter visited between 2006 and 2008 whileresearching The Ghosts of Europe, a surprising variety of top politicalleaders sat down with her, boasted a little and then wrestled with herquestions about their failures and shortcomings. One dreams of the daywhen our own Stephen Harper might also unburden his mind to a charming,articulate but essentially uninfluential interviewer. Porter'sinterviews do not add up to a happy story. Why should they? Porter's chosen countries proclaimed themselves democracies,and eager, naive and avaricious missionaries of free enterpriseimmediately began urging the proposition that unbridled capitalism wasthe ideal recipe for American-style freedom, happiness and personalwealth. A generation later, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the CzechRepublic are more solvent than some of their EU partners, but povertyand mismanagement are as evident as they were behind the Iron Curtain.What has persisted in all these countries is an ideology that easilyoutsells democracy and free market capitalism: 19th-century nationalism,with its arrogance, its hatreds and its menace of violence. From Porter's description, it appears that democracy, tooeasily defined as freedom for intellectuals to spread their opinionswithout constraint or challenge, has not worked very well in the fourcountries she concentrates on. Politicians of both left and right stillpreside over the bloated bureaucracies inherited from the communists(and the Hapsburgs before them), and over a paralyzing corruption thathas more to do with democratic institutions than Porter cares toacknowledge. How do democratic politicians anywhere acquire the funds to gainaccess to the media and to millions of voters? The answer, as obvious toJohn A. Macdonald or Wilfrid Laurier as to Ronald Reagan, George Bush,Barack Obama or any representative of the U.S. Congress, is that theydepend on gratitude, formally expressed as bribes for governmentfavours. There are better ways to fund democratic politics; but suchreforms have a low priority in Washington, Ottawa and other democraticcapitals, including Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest. Nor willsuch reforms gain much traction while low-income voters continue tomourn the disappearance of "goulash socialism" and theegalitarian poverty of communist times, or when public villainy can soeasily be blamed on Roma, Jews, Hungarians and other unloved minorities. Porter's ultimate message may be more welcome to her fellowliterary intellectuals than to the dominant voices in today'scentral Europe. In her conclusion, she cites the Czech philosopher JanPatocka, inspiration for Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himselfon fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion: No society ... can function without a moral foundation, without conviction that has nothing to do with opportunism, circumstances and expected advantage. Man does not define morality according to the caprice of his needs, wishes, tendencies and cravings; it is morality that defines man. Desmond Morton was founding director of the McGill Institute forthe Study of Canada and, in that role, visited most of the countriesincluded in Anna Porter's book.