A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe, 1989 by Padraic Kenney (review)

Abstract

720 Рецензии/Reviews barbaric countries (Pp. 198-199). The Soviet Union, however, only damaged those it colonized and thereby did not properly bear “the white men’s burden.” While every “good” country perpetually marches towards enlightenment , i.e., capitalism and democracy, “bad” Russia deviated and errantly built socialism (P. 237). Lieven does not question the goal of the march, or the worthiness of the collectivization of peoples into grand movements of historical marches, regardless of their goals. Furthermore, he does not define either socialism or capitalism nor does he question the Soviet type of socialism, compare contemporary socialist views, or explain the popularity of socialist ideologies in many recent elections. His readers are also left wondering why the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring much relief to people in its aftermath and why capitalism does not ipso facto resolve the problems of poverty, corruption, and the alienation of social groups. While the objective of the publication is honorable, it lacks coordination and does not represent the full spectrum of new approaches. Russian students and teachers are overly familiar with the politics of new “interpretations” and “revisions .” What they need is good research methods and open forums for discussion and debate. Magdalena ŻÓŁKOŚ Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe, 1989. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-691-05028-7. 352 pр. The dissident movements that developed in post-war Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), as well as the intellectual and ideational currents that inspired them, have been recurrently highlighted and theorized upon as acts of independent social self-organization in the pursuit of achieving public freedom and ethically informed politics under autho-ritarian communist regimes. Most of those studies, however, reflect similar patterns of analysis and focus on opposition activities subsequent to the Prague Spring in 1968 (associated with the ultimate failure of attempts at reform), which took on novel forms of “anti-politics” and “new evolutionism” and which resulted in, inter alia, the formation of Solidarity in Poland and its unprecedented victory – brought to a halt with the introduction of martial law in 1981. Subsequently, there has been a striking lack of scholarly inte-rest in later forms of dissident expression. This has created the impression that the 1980s in CEE witnessed a prolonged impasse between the communist authorities 721 Ab Imperio, 4/2004 and a substantially weakened, underground , and uniform opposition. This impression, we learn from Padraic Kenney’s recent book, is erroneous and highly misleading. His A Carnival of Revolution tells a fascinating and thus far untold story of the “new generation” of dissidents that emerged in Poland , Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovenia, and the GDR in the post-Solidarity era. Taking the Bakhtinian notion of carnival as a point of departure, Kenney develops a picture of diverse and vibrant civic movements that emerged, but also distanced themselves from, the revisionist ethos of the 1970s, and remained critical of its hegemonic oppositional discourse and the “seriousness ” with which it addressed the communist regime. He labels them “carnival movement” and the “konkretny generation” (i.e., realist or pragmatic in contrast with the ideational dissidents of the 1970s). Kenney’s introductory thesis is that the changing international politics, economic failures, and intellectual activities in CEE will not suffice as explanatory factors of the 1989 revolutions unless placed in the context of the novel dynamics of dissidence of the “carnival movements ” that developed throughout the whole European communist region. Based on an impressive variety of sources (e.g., numerous interviews and samizdat and tamizdat publications in original languages), Kenney’s book consists of three main parts: (i) a detailed description and careful analysis of the pre-1989 “carnival movements” (P. ii) a “hoto essay” (a collection of pictures documenting opposition activities in 1988 and 1989) and (iii) a factual presentation of “16 scenes” from the final phases of regime change. Kenney’s book – with its multiplicity of actors, movements, and events - captures well the complexity and specificity of alternative dissidence. It also manages to picture its cross-border commonalities and analogies (with increased mobility and international contacts as two crucial characteristics ), and at the same time emphasizes the particular national contexts and predilections that determined different paths. (Thus...