Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee. Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 264 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-6949-3.
Reviewed by Wim de Jong (Open University)
Published on H-Socialisms (October, 2018)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Legacies of Communism
In June 1989, Victor Orban gave a famous speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister who was executed in 1958. It has been hailed as one of the bravest speeches in the run-up to the downfall of communism, demanding the departure of Russian troops. In his speech he invoked democracy as the counterpoint of communism. He also refused the attempt at national reconciliation by party officials present at the reburial. The young Orban, part of a group called Fidesz which consisted of young, forward-looking, European-minded people, here foreshadowed the abiding theme of his career: the never-ending struggle against the Communist Party, long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Orban is representative of two themes in the book by anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee on the postcommunist blues of eastern Europe, aptly titled Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. The first is the trajectory from open-minded, hopeful heralding of Western democracy to the strong current of populist nationalism, of which Orban has become a prime spokesman, visible also in the rise of the right-wing Pegida movement in the former GDR; the other is the seemingly endless struggle against the phantomic bête noir of communism in eastern European countries, a bottomless source of conspiracy theories used by right-wing parties trying to create an authoritarian democracy, for instance in Poland and Hungary at this moment.
Ghodsee’s book comes at an important moment of reevaluation of the period since 1989. For a long time a triumphalist narrative was dominant, which depicted the victory of democracy and capitalism as an unmitigated normative success story, without caring much about what actually went on in the many countries which had now become part of Europe again, and no longer of the "Eastern bloc." As far as Western perception went, a colonialist logic prevailed in which civil society organizations were thought to be building parliamentary democracies that with long and patient guidance would one day be as highly developed as the Western ones.
This narrative has changed. With the advent of populism in western European democracies, with a neofascist government in Italy and Trump in the White House, the West is no longer certain that its own democracies are that strong, which might bring with it some humility that is well overdue. Ghodsee’s book adds to recent trends in European historiography, such as Philip Terr’s Europe since 1989: A History (2016), which accords equal attention to western and eastern parts of Europe. To increase our understanding of what exactly happened to Europe in these thirty years and how it can explain our current predicament, the postcommunist regime must be put into focus, and Ghodsee’s book contributes quite well to that task.
Just how bleak postcommunist reality can be is immediately brought home by Ghodsee in the first chapters of Red Hangover. The economic crisis and its consequences have hit many of the former Warsaw Pact countries hard. She reports on the gruesome self-immolations in her main country of study, Bulgaria, by desperate people who see no other way to make a statement to the government than by burning themselves in a final act to decry the corruption and economic hardship rampant there. Ghodsee adds her own fictional vignettes, one of which tells the story of a young woman abused by criminals in an organ donation racket which uses Roma children from orphanages.
As if to immediately show the contrast, Ghodsee recounts the story of the archive she found of an official in the communist system who oversaw cucumber production in Bulgaria, a flourishing and efficient industry with much higher output numbers than today. Here she deliberately provokes the sentiments of anticommunist dogma, as in other moments in the book, for instance the humorous part where she treats of comparative sexological research which shows that women under communism had more sex, and enjoyed it more. The dogma that literally everything under communism must ipso facto have been bad, is fiercely attacked by Ghodsee in a convincing manner. It is enlightening where she even makes a case for socialist realist art; huge Lenin statues aside, she makes a compelling argument for the beauty, for instance, of works commemorating railroad workers.
It is the contrast with the harshness of postcommunist neoliberalism that is most unsettling. For many people, life was not improved by the advent of democracy, she claims, especially not for middle-aged workers, who were too old to be reschooled and often spent their last days in boredom or alcoholism. The huge layoffs, wholesale selling-off of state companies, and large-scale unemployment present a very sad picture of life after 1989. In one of the strongest stories in the book, Ghodsee re-narrates George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) from the perspective of what happened to the collective farm after the pigs (the party leadership) and the dogs (the police) are thrown out of power. After the first democratic elections, the sell-off process leaves the other animals looking at a huge pile of economic rubble.
The sheer anger of being left behind during the transition process is an important factor in explaining why the population of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) now so vehemently protests current politics, in radical left-wing or right-wing movements. The reunification process had many of the same features as a takeover by the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). The way in which its former corporations were privatized and sold off to the highest bidder is an aspect of the reunification story deserving much more attention, which this book provides. Ghodsee attended the Mauerfall commemoration in 2014, which she portrays as a celebration of Western triumphalism.
Ghodsee pushes her argument to its limits. The big elephant here is whether it is better to have despotism and relative economic equality, or a corrupt parliamentary democracy with a harsh neoliberal system. In her zeal to point out the need for a more nuanced vision of the communist past, she does not take enough time to weigh the realities of communist life, showing how exactly one should see the balance between unfreedom, a police state, and religious persecution under communism versus its attractions. She might have argued that its economic system was supposed to have been better, when it had its obvious deficiencies: endless waiting lines for food, shortages of consumer goods, et cetera. The fact that all this is well known does not take away the responsibility to show how the pros and cons of life under communism should be measured. This would strengthen her argument about how the realities of neoliberal democracy are at least just as bad.
Ghodsee treads slippery ground where she argues that it is mainly Stalin who ruined the promise of communism. In her analysis of how the vilifying of communists can become a witch hunt with sinister motives, she defends Eric Hobsbawm for never publicly repenting for being a communist. She is indignant about the tardy translation of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes (1994) in France, but is it actually so strange for French academics to be appalled by his defense of his youthful Stalinism? A final point that puzzles the reader is why she makes no room for a third way between communism and neoliberalism—that of social democracy. She wants to save the idea of communism, but is it not too tainted by “really existing socialism,” at least in public usage? In her home country, the United States, an interesting discursive change right now comes to the fore in radical democratic candidates daring to call themselves socialists, supporting what Europeans know as (classical) social democracy. Ghodsee too cynically discards parliamentary democracy as a scam. The fight going on right now concerns how to bring some of the useful ideas that Ghodsee takes from the communist past back into the political conversation, by creating a revamped social democracy—a tough battle indeed but one worth fighting for.
This is an extraordinary book, not least because of its personal tone and set-up. Ghodsee tells of her life as a scholar, at home as well as on the road. She uses personal stories, for instance about her fondness for original typewriters, to tell a greater story about German history. Different genres are employed to great effect, offering a multidimensional view of the postcommunist world. Even though she sometimes gets carried away by her personal investment in the topic, this is a real contribution to the re-narration of European history after 1989.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-socialisms.
Citation:
Wim de Jong. Review of Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh, Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51132
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |