Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition by Detlef s> Pollack Jan Wielgohs (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 777 movies have been made. A Moscow TV adaptation of Solzhenitsyn'sIn the FirstCircle has recentlybeen aired, but there is stillno Russian film version of OneDay of IvanDenisovich. One might ask 'why?' and hope that the volume under review would provide some answers. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and the 'reflections'promised by the title are either missing (as in most of the contributions) or almost embarrassingly superficial,naive and banal (it is only in the Italian part of the book, for instance, that the I95I groundbreakingwork by F. Beck and W. Godin, RussianPurgeandtheExtraction of Confession, is mentioned, albeit very briefly). Perhaps this is because all the chapters are written either by Russians or by Westerners, with very little cross-fertilization.Another problem is that the articles, all based on a huge amount of hard work -in many cases in the archives are written in the driestof styles and translatedinto wooden and constricted English. How right Solzhenitsyn was to adopt an 'artistic' (khudozhestvennyi) approach, and how strangethat he and his work are hardly ever referred to, let alone reflected on or argued with he is not even mentioned in the body of the text until page 145. Despite its weaknesses,this weighty tome should be held in every library with a representativecollection of Rossicaand Sovietica. There are solid, plodding articleson the role of the GULag from I9I7 to I939, on forced labour in the USSR from I939 to I956, on CPSU repressionof foreigners,on the fate of numerous Comintern officials, on Italians in the Soviet Union, on oral and writtenmemoirs of the GULag, and on letterswrittenby prisonersand camp inmates. There is also an extremely useful bibliography,preparedby Helene Kaplan, of nearly a thousand books mainly or partly about the GULag. (It is Kaplan, in her introduction to the bibliography, who comes closest to reflectingon the GULag as a phenomenon of no lesser significancethan the Holocaust.) On page 30I the book moves into Italian and becomes (together with pp. I39-86) absolutely indispensablefor those interested in the fate of Italianswho lived in the USSR in the firsthalf of the twentieth century.The names of scores of people have been rescued from oblivion thanks to the strenuouseffortsof archivalresearchers,mainly in Russia, Ukraine and Italy. These personal stories should help readers to internalize and contemplate the main lessons of the GULag and to reflect more deeply on the human condition, the human comedy-cum-tragedy. Department of Slavonic Studies MARTIN DEWHIRST Universitof Glasgow Pollack, Detlef and Wielgohs, Jan (eds). Dissentand Opposition in Communist EasternEurope:Orzgins of Civil Soc_e and Demnocratic Transition. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2004. xviii + 275 pp. Notes. Bibliographies . Index. ?55.00? THIS symposium tackles the very broad issues of resistance, dissidence and politicaloppositionthroughindividualchaptercoverage of the six countriesof Communist Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Estonia as well as Slovenia 778 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 and Croatia. The gap in the coverage, therefore, encompasses the southern republics of Yugoslavia, which includes the significant case of nationalistauthoritarianismin Serbia and Albania. Each chapter adopts, with varying degrees of success, a common editorial format which summarizes the historical development of the above phenomena, in the light of new postCommunist documentation. The specialistauthorsattemptto link historically differentperiods to conceptuallydistincttypes and charactersof opposition to the Communist state. They conclude by attemptingan analyticalsynthesisof theirempiricalfindings.Finally,the editorsroundoff and synthesizethe country -basedfindingsby presentingcomparativeand bloc-wide conclusionsbased on historical periodization and categorization and the application of social movement theory. The above enterpriseof overviewinga wide range of national experiences of opposition to the Communist state is cast within a sensiblypragmaticand not overly intellectuallytight frameworkwhich allows for a stronggrounding in the empirical findings. The downside is that the definitions of dissidence and opposition, the distinctionbetween them and their differentembodiments duringthe Communist period are rathershakyand shallow. The coverage of the political science explanationsof the Communist system and its dynamics and, in particular, the totalitarian-pluralistdebate and the insights of the likes of H. G. Skilling and Ghita Ionescu on the middle period of mature established Communism, is also far too loose and eclectic. It is largely dependent on the slants of the individual authors as is the relationship between democratizationtheory and the phenomenon of opposition. The problemsinherentin the approachadopted by the editorsof this...