MULTIPLE PASTS FOR A TROUBLED PRESENT The Case of Hungary Professor Chris Hann Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
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ew Western Europeans (hereafter WEs) realise that Eastern Europeans (EEs) are just as diverse as they are. Beyond differences in physical appearance, language, and religion, EEs belong to societies with histories just as complicated and different from each other as those of WEs in Britain, France, Spain, and so on. For WEs, and to a more limited extent EEs themselves, these differences were collapsed during the Cold War into the semblance of a monolithic bloc. For seven decades in the case of societies incorporated into the Soviet Union, and four decades for those added to the Soviet empire after the Second World War, Marxism-Leninist ideology imposed a stifling homogeneity. The focus was on building an international communist future dominated by an emancipated working class, rather than commemorating more or less glorious national pasts. There was no political freedom to put forward alternative visions of either past or future. Everyday life in the present was a struggle, such that socialist textbook renderings of the past were hardly contested outside small circles of intellectuals known as “dissidents”. But this narrative of the Cold War is itself a little too simple. EEs’ experiences with socialism were very diverse, ranging from repression in East Germany and Romania to experiments with a decentralised market socialism in Hungary and even self-management in Yugoslavia, which remained outside the Soviet bloc altogether. By the late 1980s, following the impact of glasnost and perestroika in Moscow, it was impossible to ignore what US historian Joseph Rothschild termed the
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