Slovo vol. 19.2

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SLOVO

SLOVO VOLUME 19

NUMBER 2

AUTUMN 2007

Contents

Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

ISSN 0954–6839

slovo

PAGE

EDITORIAL

81–82

ARTICLES

The Diffusion of “Dissident” Political Theory in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989 JAMES KRAPFL Beyond Transitional Justice: Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Miloševic´ Serbia MLADEN OSTOJIC´ The Elephant in the Room: Orientalism and Russian Studies SALLY HENDERSON Memory and Identity in Dubravka Ugrešic´’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender MICHELE SIMEON

An Inter-disciplinary Journal of Russian, East-Central European and Eurasian Affairs 83–101

beseda peJ

103–123

– sanavards szó slova zvop slovo

125–135

137–148

STORY

149–156

BOOK REVIEWS

157–163

slovo ^

Escape from the City of Lions UILLEAM BLACKER

Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

zodis wort CLOBO rijec ^

DRAGANA OBRADOVIC´

fjalë slowo l e´ j g

sõna

Maney Publishing for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

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Notes for Contributors SLOVO EXECUTIVE EDITOR: MANAGING EDITOR:

Dragana Obradovic´ Erica Grigg

For editorial addresses and submissions, see inside back cover.

Deadlines Deadlines are normally September for the spring issue and March for the autumn issue.

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR:

Sarah V. Smith

ARTICLE EDITOR:

Jakob Horstmann

GENERAL EDITORS:

Ian Klinke Alex Nice Claire Popovich Matt White Jaroslaw Wisniewski Samantha Wolreich

ACADEMIC ADVISOR:

Dr Alena Ledeneva

EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE (MANEY PUBLISHING): PRODUCTION EDITOR (MANEY PUBLISHING):

Slovo welcomes original contributions that match the aims and scope of the journal (as described on the inside front cover) on the understanding that their contents have not previously been published or are currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be sent to independent referees. It is a condition of publication that papers become the copyright of the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London. All editorial correspondence should be sent to the Executive Editor, Slovo, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Email: slovo@ssees.ac.uk

Lisa Johnstone Geetha Nair

Slovo discusses and interprets Russian, Eastern and Central European, and Eurasian affairs from a number of different perspectives including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, economics, film, history, international studies, linguistics, literature, media, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

Slovo is a fully refereed journal, edited and managed by postgraduates of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Each year a new Editorial Board is selected from the postgraduate community to produce two volumes of academic depth and rigour, considering articles, book, and film review submissions from both established and emerging academics.

Indexing and Abstracting Slovo is indexed in MLA International Bibliography and the Directory of Periodicals.

Slovo (ISSN 0954–6839) is published for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, twice yearly, in the spring and autumn.

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Copyright © 2007 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for such permission must be addressed to Permissions Section, Maney Publishing, at the above address.

Presentation and Style Two complete copies should be submitted printed double-spaced with ample margins and not normally exceeding 6–8000 words. All pages should be numbered: the first page should state only the title of the paper, name(s) of the author(s) and, for each author, a short institutional affiliation, and an abbreviated title (for running headlines within the article). At the bottom of the page give the full name, address and e-mail address to which all correspondence, including proofs, should be sent. The second page should contain an abstract in English of not more than 200 words.

Contributions should follow the MHRA Style Guide (2002) and the house-style of the journal. Words should not be hyphenated at the end of a line. Use single inverted commas for short quotations (double for quotations within quotations), but quotations over fifty words should be indented and single-spaced without inverted commas. Translations are not generally needed for quotations from the Slavonic languages, although it is left to the author’s discretion if they wish to include the original. Where a passage presents particular difficulty, translation may be offered, either in parentheses in the text, or in an endnote. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system without diacritics, which must be used except where conventions for alternative transliterations exist. Quotations in languages other than Slavonic will require translation. Non-English words in the text, apart from names, should be italicized.

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For particular text(s) repeatedly cited, full bibliographical reference should be given in an initial footnote, with author/page references thereafter in parentheses in the text (Schöpflin, p. 31). Consistent abbreviations may be used in such references where appropriate. Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of references.

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Maney Publishing is the trading name of W. S. Maney & Son Ltd, Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB, UK.

SLOVO VOLUME 19

NUMBER 2

AUTUMN 2007

Contents page Editorial Dragana Obradovica

81–82

Articles The Diffusion of “Dissident” Political Theory in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989 James Krapfl

83–101

Beyond Transitional Justice: Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Miloševica Serbia Mladen Ostojica

103–123

The Elephant in the Room: Orientalism and Russian Studies Sally Henderson

125–135

Memory and Identity in Dubravka Ugrešica’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender michele Simeon

137–148

Story Escape from the City of Lions Uilleam Blacker

149–156

Book reviews Janina Falkowska, History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (Marga Goranova)

157–158

Az Elsó Katonai Felmérés (The First Military Survey), A Második Katonai Felmérés (The Second Military Survey), DVD collection (Irina Marin)

158–159

Boyan Kastelov, Todor Zhivkov: Mit i istina (Todor Zhivkov: Myth and Truth) (Kalin Ivanov)

160–161

Serban Orescu, Ceusc ismul: Romania Intre Anii 1965 sc i 1989 (Ceusc ismul: Romania Between 1965–1989) (Alex Boican)

161–163

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

Editorial In issue 19.2 we present a number of articles by young scholars redefining old fields, marking out new subjects for scholarly discussion but also incorporating features of inter-disciplinary work. While two articles show a sensitivity to contemporary issues and the urgency with which post-conflict societies (in this case, the former Yugoslavia) need to be addressed, two other writers shed light on topics that have been well documented and voluminously responded to in scholarly circles.

In the first article, ‘The Diffusion of “Dissident” Politcal Theory in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989’, James Krapfl considers how dissident ideas were diffused in order that the revolutionary actions of a sufficient number of actors could have been influenced by these ideas. The author analyzes evidence of diffusion contained in the flyers and bulletins of the revolution between its start on 17 November 1989 and Vaclav Havel’s election as president on 29 December of that year, simultaneously challenging some established perspectives on the Velvet Revolution.

Following on, in ‘Beyond Transitional Justice: Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Miloševica Serbia’ Mladen Ostojica examines the processes of transitional justice which aim to enable societies to cope with the legacy of mass violence, unlawfulness and authoritarian rule. The article begins with an in-depth analysis of the theoretical framework but then switches to implement these ideas specifically in relation to Serbia and the obstacles the society faces in promoting public engagement with the atrocities of the past. The paper draws on interviews conducted with prominent members of Serbia’s academic institutions as well as leaders of various NGOs, in addition to the vast literature on the processes of transitional justice.

Turning the gaze towards the arts and humanities in the third article, Sally Henderson explores the notion of Russia vis-à-vis Edward Said’s ‘imagined geography,’ a term borrowed from his seminal work Orientalism. The article titled ‘The Elephant in the Room: Orientalism and Russian Studies’ provides examples of Orientalism manifest in travel writing on Russia (covering the period between the eighteenth to the twentieth century) in order to demonstrate the unchanging perceptions of this symbolic and real space.

Our final article by Michele Simeon brings to attention the literary works of Dubravka Ugrešica, a writer also affected by the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, but a writer whose works attempt to align her own experiences within the canon of exilic literature. While the article focuses on the themes of memory and identity, this is done in order to illuminate Ugresic’s integration and interaction of these two themes within the novel’s structure.

This issue also contains a short story by Uilleam Blacker, set in Lviv, Ukraine — a story best introduced through the very act of reading. However, it might be worth adding that Slovo always welcomes creative contributions from postgraduates; whether it is short prose, poetry, or even travel writing. The only stipulation is that © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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it concerns the region we study, which is not a restraining condition but rather acknowledges the inspiration to be found in our own academic endeavours.

As this is the last issue of the current editorial board, I would like to thank my team of SSEES postgraduates who have helped maintain rigorous academic standards but who have also provided much humour in long editorial meetings.

Many thanks are due to Dr. Zoran Milutinovica, Dr. Ger Duijzings, Dr. Seth Graham, Dr. Polly Jones and Dr. Kieran Williams for their professional help and expertise.

Once again Geetha Nair has been invaluable and accommodating with our demands and requests; the success of Slovo is her achievement as much as that of the editorial team.

Dragana Obradovica Executive Editor Slovo, 2006–07

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

Escape from the City of Lions Uilleam Blacker School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London I recalled the words of a poet who had written about the starlessness of London’s illuminated midnights, as I stood at Diana’s elbow, one hand on her dog’s pointed head, and drank in the starfullness of Lviv’s unilluminated midnight.

Isn’t it true that we live between moments of melancholy, between moments of poetry? Between them is life, but only in them is being alive. We sit staring into space, waiting for something beautiful to happen, for life’s syllables to lay themselves into some kind of pentameter. For the sky above us to startle with a metaphor, for the sea below us to surprise with a lucid phrase or a delicious combination of consonants.

And here the crumbling angels of Lviv’s gutters had formed themselves into a Matisse dance around my head, a crown of daisies or perhaps of stars, the poetic possibilities were almost infinite.

Lviv’s market square, for those unacquainted, is a sloping cobbled space almost entirely occupied by a large, squat Rathaus, into the many narrow windows of which peer tenements of many Mediterranean shades, their long flaking baroque eyelashes half closed on blank eyes misted by the most exquisite post-socialist grime.

The echoes of languages long vanished for warmer climes still slither along the weary walls and cower every time a raw local shout hurls itself around the cobwebbed corners of the courtyards. The plaintive songs of a blind guitarist who sits in one corner drift across the square’s expanse on gentle, warm winds.

And on each of the four corners of the square stands a different Roman, on a pedestal surrounded by a dried-up fountain, pale and slowly suffering the indignity of the dust and chipped fingernails and noses. In the north-western corner of the square (or was it the south-eastern?) stands the elegant and somewhat startled-looking figure of Diana, her arrows slung useless across her back and two long dogs sniffing the air in disbelief at her sides.

So what is a young man to do, faced with such decay and such profligate starlight, but clamber up onto Diana’s pedestal, place one soothing hand on her shoulder, another on her dog’s head, a plastic bag with the remnants of a well-spent bottle of horilka dangling from the wrist, gaze up into the starfullness and see the reverse of the London sky, and stand there for a length of time, the length of which can only be vainly speculated at, and feel the circling Matisse dance of disintegrating angels gently spin the world around, perhaps in the right direction, perhaps not.

Then I looked down to see where the noise had come from. The reflection of the starfilled night shimmered faint and afraid in the black eyes of two young militiamen. The almost empty bottle dangled guiltily from my wrist, and the dog winced its pointed muzzle. They were telling me, in gruff voices, to come down from there. © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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I came down, sliding less than elegantly from my pedestal, stepping across the absent waters of the fountain, and climbed over the wall, back into the area permitted for legal pedestrian use.

They asked me what I was doing, why I was climbing on monuments, what did I have in the bag, had I been drinking, was I drunk, what is this, eh? I had no explanation. I felt that excusing myself by citing the filthy orange skies over London where not a star is to be seen, only the latent threats of aeroplanes, would not get me far.

So I chose to avoid answering their questions directly and resorted to a straightforward reiteration of my innocence, as they inspected my passport. But the questions continued, gaining a more existential and then culturological tone: why are you so drunk? why are you climbing on monuments? is this what you do in your country?

Here climbing on monuments drunk is illegal, even if all you want to do is admire the stars and feel Diana’s warm breath on your cheek, it’s no excuse, its against the law, and that’s it. Well, if that was the case I knew I had little defence, and I let myself be led off in the direction of the ominous sounding Station, to the Cell, to the Court and the Judge, to the Hangman, his Noose and the End of my Young Years.

Perhaps in reality the hangman was unlikely to get involved, but my despair was quite real as they led me through the uneven city, as we navigated the potholes of its unlit streets and avoided the many cats hiding like small thunderclouds in dark corners, and passed unnoticed under the chubby, disembodied stone cheeks of filthy angels. How I longed to call out to the Virgin Mary in her little hollow above some gaping doorway – but she was shut behind a film of soundproof glass and my voice was trapped in my throat by police-induced despair, and she could not see me, being so occupied with gazing bewildered upwards at her elusive erstwhile lover, doubtless shifting mysteriously somewhere among the stars.

And everywhere silence but for the echoing footsteps all around, which seemed to come from everywhere but from the ground beneath our feet.

But how on earth had I arrived at such a predicament? The story was a simple and unremarkable one. The sort of thing that can happen to anyone in a place such as Lviv with its endless, clunking tramrides and vanished rivers under every street, and its train tickets that are so hard to come by.

Yes, my unfortunate predicament had come about because the city had refused to let us go.

Of course, I should explain first of all why I have suddenly introduced the first person plural into my narrative, for indeed I was not alone in that crumbling sculpture park, but accompanied by another young man, a tall Pole with a look of innocence in his eyes by the name of Z. Or at least I had not been alone, until I had suddenly lost him in the most unremarkable of circumstances.

But since we have already begun to rewind our narrative to what came, in reality, before any ideas of starrfullness or starlessness or Diana or other such ephemeredes had entered my head, we might as well return to the very start of the story, beginning with its topographical context.

There is a long uphill street which leads from the centre of Lviv to its renowned Viennese Secession train station. The street is like a metaphorical preamble and its genitive part is indeed the station at its end. And somewhat paradoxically it is the structure of reality in the train station that is more akin to this street than the form

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of the building itself, which is elegant, graceful, spare and harmonious. The street on the other hand is long, dusty, hot, noisy and exhausting. Which is a fair description of the experience of trying to purchase a ticket at the station. Perhaps in the days of the city’s glorious imperial provinciality it had been easier to come by tickets there, perhaps there had been some sort of germanophone efficiency to its internal grammar, and perhaps then the sentence of that street had been effortless and orderly, despite its length, with the verb (leave) at the end.

Earlier, before the events of the day had begun to take shape into a nondiachronic narrative, Z. and I had sweated our way through the chaotic syntax of the present day Horodotska Street with the aim of buying tickets back to Poland, where the world turned more steadily, and slightly fewer stars dizzied the mind from the more distant night sky. While we had been successful in reaching the station, tickets we did not manage to buy. At a distance the station’s Secession silhouette is indeed elegantly decadent: up close its environment is simply decadent, in the most literal sense of the word. Greasy eateries, flimsy kiosks and makeshift food stalls do brisk business with thick-skinned passengers in tracksuits carrying enormous and mysterious plastic bags. Men buy beer with their stumpy brown thumbs and women flash gold teeth as they count tattered notes. Taxi drivers prowl the buzzing entrance, dejected and rejected at every turn. Gypsy children burn darkly and quietly in the sun-lit, urine-soaked corners around the station and its attendant bazaar.

Inside darkness reigns, both in terms of the level of lighting and the level of our understanding of where we should queue to buy tickets for our international (transcontinental) train. To recount the exact details of our unsuccessful mission would be something of a superfluity. Suffice to say that the process was long and mysterious, involved standing in many long lines in several of the dark, catacombic apartments of the station, as well as scrutinizing meticulously the intriguing riddles given us by those stern oracles from behind their shields of soundproof glass, the station cashiers.

In truth, there is an art to successfully buying international train tickets at the Lviv train station and many other such stations the length and breadth of the ex-empire.

One must simply be trained in this art. This art, or skill, is, however, not something that is easily acquirable west of, let’s say, Bratislava. Since I was born and brought up many miles from even Vienna, I could no more easily master the niceties of Japanese tea rituals than I could fathom the inner logic of the outer chaos of the Lviv train station.

Defeated we left the place, and as we trudged back along the tram-tracks, stopping at one of the many kiosks to buy two consolatory beers, the first stars of the evening were already singing the first notes of their silent, white song high above us. Our descent along Horodotska was far less taxing than our ascent. The evening was cool, and we strolled down the long hill barely noticing the river of cobbles flowing uphill, back towards the station, under the clanking steamships of the trams.

Inexplicably, but most decidedly, the beer we were drinking, and the successive ones bought roughly at the half way point towards the town centre, proved inadequate to the magnitude of our melancholic acquiescence — we thus made the

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fateful decision to buy the bottle of horilka that has already figured prominently in this still young tale, which fact most definitely deserves its own paragraph for emphasis.

We reached the narrow little street where we were staying, now plunged in delicious, warm darkness, and sat down on a conveniently vacant bench right opposite our first floor window.

We sat looking up at the window of our room, the room in which for all we knew we might have to spend the rest of our lives — for why should we be any more successful tomorrow in buying tickets? — and breathed in the darkness, which smelled of bitter chocolate, cinnamon and distant urine.

From his pocket Z. fished two metal shot glasses that looked like thimbles for large men. Z. had with uncanny foresight acquired them, on loan, especially for this eventuality.

The bottle was opened and the first shots poured. There followed immediately a most unpleasant realisation, which at least one if not both of us should have foreseen — the horilka was warm. And thus unpleasant. There ensued a short and earnest discussion as to whether it was worth continuing. In the end reason won out — we decided that buying a packet of crisps and a carton of juice from the kiosk situated only yards from our bench, as well as the tendency of such drinks to become tastier the more the drinking goes on, would make the experience bearable and probably ultimately enjoyable.

Our reasoning was proved correct before long, as the conversation began to, if not flow, then trickle pleasantly, like gentle, cool rain, gradually soaking the parched earth of our melancholy mood and turning it pleasantly warm and damp, so that the prospect of being stranded in this most pleasant and stinking gut of Europe and sentenced to eternal horilka drinking on shadowy benches surrounded by the echoes of the warm night and the scent of cinnamon seemed well worth giving in to.

And thus things continued until a certain unlocatable point where things probably stopped continuing and entered a new dimension in which continuation is impossible, memory loses its shape and significance, and all the senses, including speech, are attacked by a luxurious blurring. It was this transition, no doubt, which prompted Z. to announce his intention to make a short break in our conversation (now so abstract that were it a painting such a vacuum would no doubt be seen as entirely deliberate and indeed significant) to relieve the pressure our intellectual meanderings had amassed on his bladder. This break would indeed prove to be of quite considerable significance, if not for our conversation, then for the course of this narrative.

And the longer the break lasted, the more narrative significance it accumulated, until finally it became a crucial turning point in the flow of events, and realising this, I got up and set off in search of my friend. While commendable in its intention, my mission was doomed from the beginning due to my being in the state outlined in the previous paragraph, and very soon, in fact almost immediately I became distracted from my search by the expanse of the market square wheeling around me, as we have already agreed, like Matisse’s dancers.

And then I saw her. Diana, standing white in the starlight, her dogs alert at her side, her arrows slung across her back, a confused and slightly lost expression on

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her face. I looked around at the many stone emptinesses in the many stone eyes of the angels and other gargoyles peering at us from the tenement walls, at the grime and decay, at the cobwebbed echoes of strange tongues ricocheting around the warm dusty corners, and at the streaming starlight which coated everything, immediately making it unreal, and I understood exactly how she felt, and tried my best to form my facial features into a similar grimace of gentle despair.

And of course, and lets not fool ourselves, such stories are never quite complete without the flowery whiff of the fairer sex: of course Diana reminded me of a certain far-away young lady. A young lady sharing the godly initial D., a weakness for four-legged creatures of all sorts, and on whose delicate features an expression of similar bewilderment is often to be found.

Alas, I was unable to verify whether Diana’s embrace was as sweet and soft as my distant D.’s, as before we could become properly acquainted, before we had taken in our fill of the starlit night, breathed it into the deepest nooks of our beings, we were interrupted by two gruff voices, and the reader will recognise the opening scene of our story.

To which I now propose to return, or perhaps I should say, proceed. In either case, they led me off, their firm but somehow undetermined hands gripping me by the elbows, and neither the holes in the street, the small thunderclouds, nor the Virgin Mary could do anything to wrest me from the firm grip of the Organs of Order. I began to have visions of filthy, overcrowded cells, rats, hands and faces with tattoos of unknowable and terrible significance glinting at me from the filthy dark, and I grew weak at the knees.

Somehow sensing my resignation, my captors loosened their grip, and eventually let go of my arms. We walked (how far away was this mysterious Station?) without touching or even looking at one another. Our footsteps were so steady, dull and monotonous, theirs from tiredness and the weight of authority, and mine from hopelessness and despair, that they seemed to lull us into a sort of slow, trudging trance. It was in this state that the two officers made their next mistake — they allowed me to fall a little behind them (after all, my despair, as opposed to their authority, gave me the right to be more sluggish and reluctant than they). And at some point my despair became sharp enough to spark a sober glint in the dark sea of my senses, like the silver back of a herring in the moonlight: and at that very moment — salvation. Suddenly, and yet at the same time with a beautiful, steady slowness, an arrow of white stone flashed past my ear, almost nicking it, and sped off down a dark side-street into the night. I understood immediately: Diana. And I understood that this was my road to freedom, this narrow, blind thoroughfare — and I turned deftly and ran.

I ran off into the darkness and Diana ran with me, her speedy arrows, her speedy dogs pulling me along. Did the heavy, urgent stamp of police boots follow me down that dark street? I could not tell, for I paid no heed to what was behind me, only that which was before me. Dishevelled cobbles rushed past under my feet, as though I were not running along their surface, but a paddler standing in their stream. If it hadn’t been for Diana’s insistent hand and sharp eye, I would surely have fallen foul of one of the many gaping holes dug in the road, but her cold, marble fingers held my hand fast and steered me unfailingly among the mounds of dirt and stone, the

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pitfalls and potholes. We turned sharply again and again into ever darker and narrower streets, as the placid, empty eyes of saints, virgins and angels watched us go beneath them, smiling benignly at the delicate sound of our footsteps echoing in the cobbled stream. Without warning we ducked into a low, open doorway. The expression carved on the heavy inviting wooden doors was one of wisdom and warm conspiracy, but I had only a part of a second to notice this as she tugged me onwards, into the darkness of the stairwell, smelling of dampness and wine. We rushed up stairs, wooden, sloping, worn by the many feet of people long vanished from this or any other world. We came out onto a balcony, ducked under some washing, into another stairwell then along another balcony, past a toilet with a yawning door and an intriguing smell, then vaulted a banister, slipped down four or five stairs and came out somehow at ground level into a narrow courtyard with high buildings all around us, and here we stopped, in what felt like one of many centres of this great labyrinth of strange flats, porches, balconies, verandas, walkways, unexpected entrances and exits into strange courtyards, where it seemed perfectly possible that one might forget why on earth one had wandered in here in the first place, where one could most likely wander absently and endlessly, returning only after several days of strange and confused adventures on some grey dawn, with a feeling of dazed guilt at having neglected one’s real life for so long.

We stood and listened to the silence of the night – which in fact, on closer listening, turned out to be no silence at all. As one who knew such places well once said, only for the uninitiated does the summer night mean rest and forgetting: it is filled with chaotic bustle, the confused and enormous babble of the July night. Every building, every flat, every room and alcove is filled with chatter and various wanderings, in-goings and out-goings. In every window there are lamps, even the corridors are all lit up, and every door is ceaselessly opened and closed. One huge, chaotic, half-ironic conversation weaves its way and branches off in all directions amongst endless misunderstandings through every cell of the beehive. Somewhere above us among the canopy of walkways attics and balconies and useless windows we could hear the pattering footsteps of so many messengers bearing garbled messages, half forgotten, in directions unknown to anyone, least of all themselves; and in-between the rapid footsteps the deep breathing of pregnant women, filled with milk and sleeping, sucking deep on the starry milk of the darkness, underneath which the strange and anxious melody of those who have finally fallen into uneasy sleep, and now fight with it as though with an angel, clutching it and pressing it face down into their pillow, snoring sporadically and insistently, as though arguing hatefully with their winged bedmate.

We stood and listed to all this, until either she or I decided it was enough filling of our narrative with others’ night-time sounds, and we moved on.

We rushed soundlessly back into the doorway we had just come out of, up a flight of stairs, left along an enclosed corridor, up again and out onto a walkway running along right under the roof, running round three sides of a courtyard, down a few steps into another courtyard, past several open windows, from which the sounds of angel-wrestling could be heard, then down, down, down, twisting leftwards, and eventually we stumbled out onto another cobbled street, with tramlines running down it, silvery in the moonlight like herrings’ backs on a silent sea or the flashes of

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inspiration in a darkened consciousness. We ran through the open air now breathing deep and feeling the starlight drizzle onto the backs of our necks. Diana’s dogs breathed hoarsely, tiring, their thin paws falling dully and lightly on the silvery cobbles, though she herself, barefoot and white as milk, made not a sound as she ran. I felt my lungs would burst and my heart along with them, if my legs did not crumble below me first, and longed for her to stop as we made more and more blind and reckless turns through the dark streets.

Finally, just as it seemed neither I, the dogs, nor the reader could take any more, she stopped. I staggered to a halt and then slowly and gently collapsed in a heap on a pile of rubble.

My chest heaved and the silence after the rush of our escape rung through the night like bells. I looked up and saw her standing placid above me looking down, her face in shadow, and behind her, lit by the light of so many stars rose the flaking façade of a magnificent baroque church, standing stark and glowing blankly like a tired and bewildered lady who has stumbled on a party of street-urchins at feast.

She turned her face toward the night sky and the sound of the receding bells, and the pale light slipped coolly across her cheek. The dogs lay down at her feet, muzzles on thin paws. We were in a narrow alley between two tall, yellowish tenement buildings, one of which adjoined the pale, elegant phantom of the church.

The alley’s walls were strewn with graffiti, and rubbish lay between the chaos of dusty stones. It was hard to say whether the stones were there to be used in future building, or the results of past destruction. Diana sat down soundlessly on a stone beside me, and looked at me with a distracted curiosity. I had almost regained my breath.

‘Well?’ she asked in a voice like milk.

I looked at her, at a loss. What does one say to a Greek goddess who has just saved one from incarceration in a Ukrainian jail?

‘You must have had some reason for disturbing me tonight,’ she continued, her every word coated in starlight.

I thought about her question. Surely she was right, I must have had a reason.

What on earth could it have been? There was the bewildered expression and the dogs and the girl, there was the starlight, the drink and the railway station, and of course Z. ‘I wanted to look at the stars,’ I told her. It was lame but better than nothing.

She smiled, ‘Couldn’t you have looked at the stars from the cobblestones? Why did you need to come breathing down my neck?’

‘Well,’ I answered uncertainly, ‘I wanted some company. And I looked at you with the stars drizzling their cold light down onto you, and I saw how you seemed so bewildered, looking around you at the black eyes of the tenements, at the muck on their eyelids, at the filthy faces of the eroded angels, and I felt we were both somewhat lost here in this echoing market square, among all those silent echoes of strange languages crawling around the darkened corners and along the crumbling walls . . .’

She laughed sharply and quietly, like a white stone on a black pond, and I stopped.

‘What makes you think I am lost? I have stood on my pedestal amid my fountain for more years than you can count and watched the world crumble around me. I’ve

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seen more stars than you’ve drawn breaths, and every one of them from my corner of the square. I know every crack on every wall — I’ve watched them open up! I know the shape of every little smile on the face of every cherub, I know how many whiskers are on the dusty face of every cat, I know every song the blind guitarist on the corner plays by heart. I can tell which tram is coming just by the rhythm of its clank and the tone of its trundling. I’ve seen princes, emperors, archdukes and commissars strut past below me, I’ve seen flags waved, stones thrown and guns fired.

I’ve seen people hanged and I’ve seen them make love in doorways. Lost? How could I be lost here? You may be lost, your friend may be lost — the world may be lost and the stars spinning around our heads may be lost, but I know where I am.

And don’t start about the starlight slipping coolly over my cheek, or about some young lady or other. You can look into a coffee cup and see whatever phantoms you want. But I’m not superstitious.’

I was dumbfounded. Not a single word would drop into my head with which I might answer her.

‘And can you really hear echoes on this square? What do you really see in the eyes of those stone cherubs? Do you know what Mary is thinking in her little glass box above the doorway? I know the poem of this city, I know every syllable, every beat and every inflection. I can hear it and say it because it lives on my tongue and in my ears. Can you hear it? Can you say it?’

I wasn’t sure now. I had been sure that I could hear it. I had been sure that I could say it. The place had seemed to cast images and metaphors at me from all sides, it had seemed to seep into the rhythm of my words and my words into it. I felt I was learning its language, and not only that but I felt that deep down I had known this language from long ago, that it was buried deep down inside me, in my guts and stomach, and that walking the streets, smelling the dark doorways, listening to the ringing silence and soaking up its starfilled midnight, I felt those buried words rise up and ask to be released into the air . . .

But all of a sudden I felt deaf and dumb. The city in its darkness fell silent, uttered not a word to me, and I was as empty as it.

I heard her say one last thing, before she disappeared: ‘Why do you dream me?’

Her voice was thin, like water, if like anything at all. I felt her cold hand touch mine, grip it fast and stony hard, as though in a handshake, and then she was gone.

I sat with my eyes closed and my fist clenched, the feel of cold stone still stinging it.

After a length of time, I cannot be sure how long, I opened my eyes and stood up. I trudged homeward. The walls were blank, the cobblestones irregular and dusty, the night was chill, the street was dark. Every thump in my head brought me one step closer to being sober. It turned out that my flight had ended within barely five minutes of our lodgings, and before I knew it I was passing the fateful bench, the nearby kiosk by now dark and closed up.

I pushed the door and ascended the creaking stairs to our apartment. On an old sofa on the landing I found Z., drowsy but not sleeping, a slightly worried look on his face. He asked me where I had been. I silently handed him the crumpled train tickets I held in my fist.

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

The Elephant in the Room: Orientalism and Russian Studies Sally Henderson University of Edinburgh This paper aims to redress the issue of Russian studies and Orientalism, an issue which looms rather silent and large at present, both within Edward Said’s text and related scholarship. There has been some exploration of Orientalism within Russia, but I wish to assert that it is possible to apply the paradigm of Orientalism to Western responses to Russia. For the first part of this paper I will provide justification for this through an exploration of Russia’s ambiguity in terms of Said’s imagined geography. Secondly, I will argue that as Orientalism is, in Said’s own description, a discourse, it has recognisable language traits that act as hallmarks of Orientalism which can be applied directly to texts. I will provide examples of Orientalism manifest in travel writing on Russia, sources which are chronologically varied, so as to demonstrate the unchanging nature of Orientalism as outlined by Said, from the observations of Elizabeth Dimsdale in the late eighteenth-century, through to Colin Thubron in the late twentieth. This involves a demonstration of the way these writers create Russia for their readers as barbaric, luxurious, and sensual; and inclined to despotism and the portrayal of Russia as in need of western correction.

It is difficult to read Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism, or much of the scholarship which has followed it in either agreement or disagreement, without developing a growing sense of Russia as a silent and unmentioned presence looming large.

By this I mean that although Said makes it plain that he refers to Orientalism as a discourse rather than a discipline, and as a way of responding to and interpreting Eastern Others, and although there is widespread discussion about where Russia falls in the collective imagination between the East-West divide, there appears to be a marked reluctance on the part of scholars to make more than a passing reference to the possible application of the Orientalism paradigm to the arena of Russian Studies.1 Any discussion of this possibility is limited to Russia’s experience of her own colonized Asiatic regions,2 rather than to examine Orientalism in the West’s

1 This gap in scholarship is outlined briefly by Jeff Sahadeo in ‘Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 4:4 (2003), 942–954.

2 For example, David Chione Moore explores the validity and limitations of postcolonialism as an interpretative tool in the post-Soviet context, describing the ‘silence’ regarding the Second World, and also draws similarities between Russian and Anglo-French colonial enterprise. See ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,’ PMLA, 116:1 (January 2001), 111–28.

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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response to Russia. There is some willingness to acknowledge that in the twentieth century context the Cold War pushed the Soviet Union firmly into the confrontational East in terms of American Orientalism and area studies, as will be discussed.

However within the high Orientalist period, that is, the early and mid-nineteenth century, Russia is generally presumed to fall neatly within Europe, despite much geopolitical and cultural scholarship that suggests such a position was felt by neither Russians nor Europeans at the given time. In this paper, then, I will attempt to examine the ways in which Said’s text, and the geopolitical, socio-philosophical and literary evidence creates potential for the scope of Orientalism to be extended to Russia in both nineteenth and twentieth century contexts. However, simply to establish what should be the case is a largely a futile exercise, and so the second part of this paper will be an exploration of ways in which, to my mind, Orientalism is actually manifest in Western responses to Russia.

Firstly, however, it is perhaps wise to explore the reasons for the abovementioned reluctance. This is based on more than simple truisms, e.g. that Russia is not in the Orient and that Russians are not Orientals, and hence the issue is irrelevant. Nor is it enough to say that as Said himself even refers to Russia as one of the European countries which was involved in Orientalism rather than the object of it,3 there is no further issue to be explored. These are, of course, considerations, but in light of the imagined geography arguments, and also in view of the religious elements that will be discussed here, I believe that these problems are surmountable in the Russian context. Rather it is the ways in which applying Orientalism to other cultures in general poses scholars with a problem regarding the very possibility of interpreting other cultures, what Ruben Chuaqui has called their ‘Knowability,’ within any discursive framework.4 This is a problem that Said is well aware of when he suggests that there is a need for a new way of examining other cultures, outside the traditional Orientalist framework which has shaped so much of western understanding and scholarship: Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective.

But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power.5

Said offers no solution to the quandary, and it is certainly not the purpose of this paper to even begin to establish one. I simply argue that Said’s definitions and description of the way language can behave to create knowledge or assumed knowledge of other and particularly Eastern cultures provide concrete characteristics to look for in discourse relating to particular countries. In describing Orientalism as a

3

See for example, page 1, 10 and 100 of Said’s Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995). While not as significant as the British or French, Russians are listed alongside Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians and Swiss as lesser practitioners of Orientalism.

4 Chuaqui provides in-depth analysis of the philosophical implications of Orientalism in ‘Orientalism, Anti-Orientalism, Relativism’, Nepantla: Views from South, 3:2 (2002) 373–390.

5 Said, p.24

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discourse, and using the term to denote not merely a discipline but to designate that collection of dreams, images and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line.’6 Said creates the idea of a discourse with marked features some of which are linguistic: They are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is timeless and eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes not. For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is.7

There is a description therefore of the type of language that might be symptomatic of an Orientalist attitude, and these can act as signals to a reader of any material relating to a country or people. But there are also a set of features which mark out Orientalism in the content of discourse: portrayals of a tendency towards despotism, inadequacy, barbarism, silence, sensuality and perhaps most crucially presentation of Others as ‘if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West.’8 There is also a marked ambivalence, an alternating sense of fascination and revulsion, as ‘the Orient at large [. . .] vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in — or fear of — novelty.’9 Again, these features can act as hallmarks of an Orientalist attitude when examining texts which describe a people or culture, and, I venture, strike a familiar chord with anyone who has read travel writing about Russia.

There are theoretical reasons why this should be the case. Part of the mechanism by which discourse appears to create truths is a reliance on what Said calls textual attitude, the ability or readiness ‘to make out of every observable detail a generalization, and out of every generalization an immutable law [. . .] above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality.’10 Of the two conditions Said describes under which textual attitude is more likely,11 both are particularly relevant to Russia. The first is distance and inexperience, clearly important in the Russian context given the country’s vastness; for even if the Western metropolises of Russia are close to Europe, the majority of the land mass sprawls east seemingly infinitely. Climate and language also contribute to the air of impenetrability, and perhaps in the modern context bureaucracy has also reduced possible foreign experience of Russia. Yet the second condition is rather less clear cut: the issue of success.12 Here something of a vicious circle seems to be set up, as textual attitude becomes more likely when the descriptions set out within texts are proved to be accurate to the reader. To the observer of Russian culture, there is an uncomfortable sense that the stereotypes which lie within the discourse

6

ibid., p.73. ibid., p.72 8 ibid., p.41.

9 ibid., p.59.

10 ibid., p.86.

11 ibid., p.93.

12 ibid., p.93.

7

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surrounding Russia are so very often confounded. Indeed, the preoccupation with Russianness often seems to create a sense of pride in such confirmation of stereotypes, the kind of delight in intriguing or confusing foreigners which inspired Marquis de Custine, in 1838, to state that ‘Russia is a country where everyone is part of a conspiracy to mystify the foreigner.’14 If the discursive element of Orientalism, then, appears to fit the Russian context, I must now turn to the geographic, or imagined geographic element, as Said would have it. Said describes how ‘men have always divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined distinctions from each other. The absolute demarcations between East and West had been years, even centuries, in the making.’15 In these centuries of establishing dividing lines, Russia’s position has always been something of a problem, falling within what Nathaniel Knight calls an ‘awkward Triptych’: Europe, Russia, Asia.16 Indeed, as the boundaries of Europe, Asia and Africa in the collective imagination stem from ancient Greek philosophy, Mark Bassin describes the tradition of overlooking Russia in this mindset, that indeed early cartography did not even chart the existence of much of the land mass between the river Tanais and the Arctic Circle. As awareness of the actual existence of Russia increased, the process of arbitrarily dividing it between the two regions took centuries. Whatever precise divide was observed at a given point, the majority of Russia always lay in Asia. Danilevskii took great pains to show that there was no geographical justification whatsoever for any such divisions; that due to and absence of topographic interruption ‘Russia was depicted as possessing an elemental unity bestowed by Nature herself.’17 However, convincing as Danilevskii’s arguments appear, Bassin makes it plain that they were largely overlooked,18 until in 1921 the Eurasianist movement demonstrated, through what Riasanovsky has called pseudo-scientific and ethno-cultural means, the fact that Russia was indeed neither European nor Asian. Indo-Chinese musical roots were identified in Russian folk music, the linguistic inheritance from the Mongols was examined, and one scholar went so far as to state that blood group analysis showed conclusively that Russians were more Asian than European.19 Again, however, such notions were not widely accepted: scientific or geographical evidence does not overcome the imagined divides. The general sense of post-Petrine Russia was of the European, Western, Metropolitan Russia which had organically absorbed Eastern, Asian, rural territory.

13

For discussion of how stereotypes may be a psychological mechanism but also contain truths see T.W.Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected essays in mass culture. (London: Routledge, 1991), p.138.

14 Colin Thurbon, Among the Russians (London: Heinneman, 1983), p.1.

15 Said, p.39.

16 Nathaniel Knight, ‘Grigoriev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?’, Slavic Review, 59:1 (Spring 2000), 74–100 (p.77) 17 Mark Bassin ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,’ Slavic Review, 50:1 (Spring 1991), p.11.

18 This argument in full can be found in Bassin’s aforementioned article, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space.’

19 Nicolas V. Riasanovsky, ‘The Emergence of Eurasionism,’ California Slavic Studies, 4 (1967), 39–72.

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It is these eastern territories and Russia’s responses to them, which spark much of the debate surrounding Orientalism in Russia, but in my view limit it. Knight uses the example of Grigoriev, an early Russian Orientalist, to explore Russian colonial attitudes in the nineteenth century. While Knight states that it has become nearly impossible to speak or write about Orientalism solely as the body of Western scholarship on Asia without also evoking images of a specific type of imperial discourse that functions to create and marginalise the degraded ‘Other’, it is only because Russia has ‘more than its fair share of others’ that it is ‘ a clear and obvious field in which to apply Said’s principles an methodology.’20 Here Knight seems to overlook a key point in his own argument, as he also points out that ‘Russia, after all was not only the subject of Orientalist discourse. But also its object. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century Russia was depicted as the quintessential oriental despotism.’21 Katya Hokanson limits her study of Orientalism and Russia in a similar way, describing the ways in which Russian perception of the Caucasus was shaped, or indeed created by Pushkin.22 Yet there is evidence that it is not only Russia’s colonised ‘others’ which may provide scope for examination of Orientalism: that Russia as a whole may be considered part of the East. For the East-West divide, Said’s writing is ideological and largely imagined; it need not rely on actual ethnicity. Two elements are particularly useful here: the East as Confrontational and the East as non-Christian.

In the twentieth century context, Said describes how the armies of the Soviet Union moved into the confrontational East, for, as Stephen Graham states, the ‘stark binaries of place attachment’ which characterise imaginative geographies are particularly clear at times of war.23 The Cold War is hugely significant, as it not only sided the Soviet Union with Asian enemies for a large part of the century, but also provided the West with a Communist non-Christian enemy as opposed to an Islamic one.24 The extremely closed Soviet system also contributed to the feeling of silence on behalf of the Russian people at this time; the impenetrable nature of the Iron Curtain — in itself a discursive formation which denotes an ideological boundary — shrouded the soviet union in mystery. Reports of Soviet technological and economic inadequacy filtered through, and the totalitarian nature of the regime confirmed a lack of susceptibility to Western democracy. Even after the fall of Communism, there is a general feeling that Russia is somehow unable or unwilling to achieve democracy.25 This is a clear example of what Said calls ‘Walt Disneyism’:

20

Knight, p.75.

Knight, p.77.

22 Katya Hokanson. ‘Literary Imperialism, Narodnost’, and Pushkin’s Invention of the Caucasus’, Russian Review 53:2 (July 1994), p. 338.

23 Stephen Graham. ‘Constructing homeland and target cities in the war on terror’, page 3, available at http://eprints.dur.ac.uk/archive/00000048/. Accessed on 14 May 2007.

24 M Faruk Zein describes the religious aspects of Orientalism in detail, showing how in the twentiethcentury it can be seen as an American phenomenon, relying on a strong Christian identity. See Zein, Christianity, Islam and Orientalism (London: Saqi Books, 2003).

25 This notion is widespread, see for example Colton and Mcfaul, ‘Are Russians undemocratic?’ Post soviet affairs 18:2 (2002), pp. 91–121.

21

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a tendency to project Western political aims onto Eastern states which characterises modern Orientalism.26 Such arguments from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, however, do tread very dangerous ground in that they appear to approach Occidentalism. That is, they take issue with a predominantly American form of response to the East. This is symptomatic of the way Orientalism has shaped what has become area studies, where scholars are uncomfortable with discourse surrounding binary, ideologicallydefined, geographic boundaries, whereby Westerners can ‘invoke these categories of good/evil, civilized/uncivilized, Western/Eastern without any hesitation precisely because they represent the tip of an iceberg whose enormous body itself goes deep in the ocean of Western epistemology and the imaginary.’27 Said states that the Cold War, and interest in the Soviet Union, was indeed a factor in the development of such scholarship.28 However, he objects to this social science approach because of its neglect of literature, as ‘a living text speaks more or less directly of a living reality.’29 However I feel that there is significant scope for the notion of Orientalism in Western responses to Russia well before the twentieth century. As mentioned above, Knight points out that Russia was famed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as despotic. The Petrine reforms, and in particular the creation of the new capital of St Petersburg may have lent Russia an air of slightly more European civilization, as may the enlightened reforms of Catherine II. Yet the late abolition of serfdom and the rural economy left Russia appearing backward throughout the nineteenth century, and the urban-rural divide created a large mysterious territory and a silent, illiterate population. Moreover, although Russia was a Christian country, it had an exotic, Eastern form of Christianity which may well have been deemed inferior by nineteenth-century European Protestants. While Said described the British and Foreign Bible society as an instrument in Orientalist correction of the East from 1804,30 he fails to recognise that the society enthusiastically sent missionaries to Russia in the following years.31 Russia was identified as in need of Western evangelism, her Christianity somehow inferior. As the century progressed, and with the emergence of slavophilism, there is a growing sense of the need to learn from Russia as well as educate it: Owen Chadwick outlines the ways in which Europe looked to the transcendent qualities in the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as an antidote to European ‘sex-and-belly realism.’32 This is the reconstructive, utopian element of Orientalism which Said identifies as emerging post-Compte.33 26

Said, p.107.

Birlay Kollouglu-Kirli, ‘From Orientalism to Area Studies’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3 (2003), 93–111 (p.94) 28 Said, p.291.

29 ibid., p.291.

30 ibid., p.300.

31 Extracts from missionary writings from this period follows, but for a history of the society’s actions in Russia see Stuart R. Tompkins, ‘The Russian Bible Society-A Case of Religious Xenophobia’, American Slavic and East European Review, 7:3 (Oct., 1948), 251–268.

32 See Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

33 Said, p.115.

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Having examined the justifications for possible Orientalism in responses to Russia, I will now turn to examine examples of how it is, I believe, actually manifest.

I will do this through a selection of travel writings. I have deliberately selected examples from a broad time frame because if Orientalism exists in its latent form as I am suggesting, then it ought to be ‘unanimous and constant.’34 Following the characteristics of Orientalist discourse, I will look for evidence of a need for correction, coupled with a desire to learn from the East, ambivalence, generalisation and representations of barbarism and inadequacy. I will also look for ways in which Russians are portrayed as silent and enduring passive suffering and degradation, key features of the traditional Oriental. This will be coupled with a consideration of how a general atmosphere of silence and mystery are attributed to the geographic region.

The assumed silence and impenetrability of Russia as a whole is immediately evident from the introductions of two very different texts. Scottish Missionary Robert Pinkerton begins his writings with the following: ‘The Period in History is still very recent, at which the vast extent of country now composing the Russian Empire began to unfold its dimensions to the civilised nations of Europe.’35 Pinkerton is performing a service to his readers, educating them about this little known and uncivilised empire. Writing of his travels in Russia as late as 1983, Colin Thubron opens what he aims to be his exposé of the real Russia by stating that he ‘had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember.’36 He states that from his education and upbringing ‘Russia gave out only silence, and was somehow incomplete,’ and rather poignantly links its ‘shadow’ to that cast over his parents’ upbringing in Germany.37 He is attempting to break the assumed silence with his writing.

The issue which conveys much about the perceived Russian capacity for endurance also links to the portrayal of their attitude towards authority, and that is the toleration of violence and punishment. A Scottish surgeon who worked in Russia during the First World War was said to have observed that ‘I don’t think there can be a wound from which the Russian can’t recover: you can cut off his leg without anaesthetics and he says “Thank you, Sir.”’38 Pares, writing on the Russian character in 1941, continues with another account of nonchalance in the face of violence as he meets a man who has just been flogged: “How many strokes did they give you?” I asked. “Who counted them?” he said carelessly and told us the rest just as if he himself had not been the victim: for instance how the doctor was called to see what he could stand and retires saying “you can give him some more.”39

34

ibid., p.206.

Robert Pinkerton, Russia, or Miscellaneous observations . . . (London: Seeley and Sons, 1833), no page indicated.

36 Thubron, p.12 37 Thubron, p.12 38 Bernard Pares, Russia (New York: Penguin, 1941), p.20.

39 Pares, p.22 35

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Writing over a century and a half earlier Elizabeth Dimsdale is particularly preoccupied with the ‘extreme boldness and hardiness’40 of Russian women’s response to childbirth, recounting with fascination how one peasant women was seen at the river washing her clothes just one day after being beaten by her drunken husband for delivering a girl rather than a boy the previous day. For Dimsdale, this admiration of the endurance is coupled with revulsion at the violence women must tolerate, as well as the drunkenness. She is typically ambivalent along the Orientalist model; as the heady mix of sensual communal nudity, alcohol, singing and ingrained violence perplex her.41 She is intrigued by the practise of giving birth at the banya, where ‘Men and Women go in together without the least reserve,’ and understands ‘the usual Custom among the inferior people was, for the man to get drunk as soon as his Wife was brought to bed, and continue so long as the strong Liquors in the house lasted.’42 Dimsdale coyly adds that it is not improper to include her own translation of a Russian song: When I was a little boy not more than two foot high O Then my Father he did band till he made me cry O . . . . . . But now that I am grown a Man and almost six feet high O.43

Two hundred years later, Thubron recounts his experiences in a remarkably similar way. He begins with a generalisation of the physical attributes of Russians, making use of Said’s afore-mentioned copula is to which he arbitrarily matches characteristics of passivity: ‘The Russian body is unlike any other. Hundreds of bull-necks, ponderous shoulders and nerveless torsos descended to a burgeoning delta of stomachs and thighs. The muscles were strong but passive.’44 In describing the banya scene which follows, Thubron shows typical unease coupled with what appears to be enthrallment at the ‘whirring and thwacking’ that fills the air. When a Russian man confronts him for stealing his seat, the reader is told that ‘it was the nearest thing to anger that I had seen in any Russian.’45 Later he recounts a ‘strange moment near the Arbat’ which captures very much of the essence which Said refers to. He sees a ‘big-boned young man’ — note once again the description of differing physical characteristics — repeatedly punch a young women in the face and stomach. The reader is told that woman’s ‘unblemished’ face ‘wears a look of timeless endurance.’ The couple do not react at all when he confronts them, and as they walk away arm in arm Thubron is left: . . . feeling as if as if I had interrupted some arcane mating ritual. I remember too, reading from a sixteenth century manual of Moscow etiquette. A husband should beat his wife lovingly, it advises, so that she will not be rendered blind or permanently deaf. I suppose I intruded.46 40

Elizabeth Dimsdale, English Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great: the Journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale 1781, ed. by A.G. Cross (Cambridge: Crest, 1989), p.60.

41 Dimsdale, p.60 42 Dimsdale, p.67 43 Dimsdale, p,67.

44 Thurbon, p.45.

45 ibid, p.45.

46 ibid, p.47.

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Thus with one anecdote Thubron heaps centuries of barbarism and passivity onto the Russians in general, one incident appears to form a bold statement about an entire people and their history. This is symptomatic of Said’s Orientalism, where through observations of oddity, anecdotal references become generalisations.47 Pinkerton also observes and then generalises about Russian physical strength and stamina, as ‘The peasantry are of a sound constitution, stout and firmly built.’48 Yet he even adds a magical, mystical quality to this strength of constitution — or at least an element of fable — as he describes ‘instances of extraordinary longevity among the common people’ that many peasants live until the age of ninety or one hundred, with some reaching 125 or 130.49 Thus the Russian as human being possesses a remarkable quality.

Writing in 1958, Stevenson grapples on the one hand with the opposite, that is, the lack of unusualness among Russian children and parents, and their similarity to his own nation; and yet on the other hand he cannot resist mentioning the occasional stereotype: The children, on the other hand, are usually well dressed, well fed, well mannered and alert. By day their parents, walking briskly the way Americans do, or standing patiently in queues, usually look serious and often weary. But at night and on holidays in the parks of “Rest and Culture” and at theaters and games they seem cheerful and content. (And, speaking of queues, they say that if three Muscovite met on a desert island they would form a queue).50

The issue of queuing is, in the twentieth-century context, central to portraying not only Russian passivity but also inadequacy. While there are early references to Russian organisational or productive inadequacy, such as Dimsdale’s assertion that ‘The Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit and for a little time go on very rapidly, then leave for some other Object’51 in the nineteenth-century much of the portrayal of backwardness and inadequacy comes from the depiction of popular religion.

The impression made on English Catholic traveller William Palmer when he enters a Russian church is that of an ‘outward devotion of the people [that] was one of wonder, curiosity, suspicion and a certain repugnance.’52 His ambivalence is, again, a classic hallmark of Orientalism. Pinkerton also appears similarly enthralled yet repelled as he describes the ‘gaudy decorations’, ‘sumptuous dresses’ and the jewels and pearls of the Russian church which contribute to the ‘almost confounding splendour and stupefying effects of this crowded scene.’53 Pinkerton, having a Presbyterian background, is also repelled by witnessing young babies being taught to cross themselves or the elderly struggling to make physical demonstrations of faith, and declares that ‘The traveller must at once come to the conclusion that the Eastern 47

Said, p.103.

Pinkerton, p.77.

49 ibid., p.79.

50 Adlai E. Stevenson, Friends and Enemies : what I learned in Russia (New York: Harper, 1953), p.62.

51 Dimsdale, p.41.

52 William Palmer, Notes on a visit to the Russian church in the year 1841/1841 (London: K. Paul, 1882), p.57 53 Pinkerton, p.55 48

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Church is, in all respects, as corrupt in doctrine, and as superstitious in practise as the Church of Rome.’54 Yet even as a Roman Catholic, Palmer is sceptical of Russian religious integrity, noting that ‘A Russian who is going to do anything sinful will first turn the icon with its face to the wall.’55 Their religion is largely superstition, and merely seems to tap in to their inherent susceptibility to obey rules and believe in harsh punishments. The reader is told that ‘here the people make themselves ill with fasting’56 and one of ‘Mr Blackmore’s illustrative anecdotes’ is an account of an old peasant who cleft a visiting German man’s skull for eating pork during a fast. This is not only another clear example of how an anecdote creates a generalisation, in this case about the barbarism of the people, but also a portrayal of a tendency towards retribution — a marked feature in Orientalism usually associated with Islamic peoples. The sense of generalisation is then broadened further as Palmer adds that ‘the villagers were far from considering him a murderer.’57 Palmer is not a missionary, he is making an ecumenical visit in an attempt to learn from the Russian church, yet his work is imbued with a sense of the need for correction. He is a typical Orientalist in the sense he is, as William Hart argues, ‘both Missionary and Pilgrim’ at the same time.58 This notion of teaching and learning, and of the Other as both redeemer and redeemed, is echoed centuries later by Adlai Stevenson: It is important, I believe, for us to make every possible effort to lessen their ignorance of our country and its democratic way of life. But likewise we need to study them hard and try by every means for better understanding of the Russian people and their Communist masters.59

I have presented, then, a number of ways in which western travellers in Russia have behaved like traditional Orientalists, in their intentions for travelling, in the content of their writings and in the ways they have written. Over differing periods they explored Russia in order to educate Westerners back home about this mysterious empire, and to correct Russians either about their religious or democratic shortfalls.

Within their writing they have seemed unable or unwilling to fight the preoccupations with sensuality, violence but also silence and passivity which seem to flow freely from the discursive framework of Orientalism, and they have allowed their individual observations to create vast generalisations about how Russians are, or how Russia is. In the first part of this paper I have also tried to provide justification for the argument that extracts such as these may be treated as actually exhibiting Orientalism along Said’s model, rather than just displaying the characteristics of a particular discourse. That is, the argument of imagined geography, in light of the unique history and physical location of the Russian Empire, allows it to be 54

Pinkerton, p.56.

Palmer, p.57.

56 Palmer, p.55.

57 Palmer, p.58.

58 William Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.64 59 Stevenson, p.97 55

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considered Eastern, and many its characteristics can be considered, or have at times been viewed as Oriental.

Yet there still appears to be a slight discomfort here, or at least another element in the discussion to be considered before a firm conclusion can be reached. This stems from the fact that so much of the image of Russia comes from within Russia itself, the silence is not complete. Moreover, Russia appears to have a tradition of generalising about herself, of creating her own strong sense of national identity through discourse.60 Even in the twentieth century under the Soviet regime, Western experience of Russia came through dissident voices, and so Russia was lent an air of satire and rebellion. In the nineteenth century, Russian voices rang out through Europe with incredible clarity through those literary texts which Said claims reflect living realities. Central to this identity created by these texts, as Rancour-Laferriere argues, is an emphasis on endurance which he sees as masochistic, referring to the ‘wide ranging and flamboyant’ nature of ‘the literary imagery of Russian selfabnegation.’61 And it is as much from these works, if not more so, than from travel writers, that Western perceptions of Russia and the Russians have been shaped.

Thus when Pares writes that “[t]he Russian is capable of violent if temporary savagery, of wild accesses”, in language typical of Orientalism outlined by Said, he is citing Dostoevsky’s descriptions of these ‘stormy impulses’.(Pares, 1941, page 22).

When the Russian peasant is viewed as humble and enduring, it is an image that has been created by centuries of Russian writers trying to get to grips with the notion of that section of society ‘in the “ocean of people” where only the sum total of individual existences has meaning.’62 As Russian literature has objectified its peasant classes it may be possible to trace a kind of inner Orientalism, a system which allied members of the educated elite with foreign visitors and allowed Princess Dolgorovky to tell William Palmer that while she agreed that her country required his correction he ‘can have no notion of the ignorance of our peasants and its effects.’63 Perhaps the only conclusion which can be drawn then is that Russia poses new and interesting problems in the field of Orientalism. It is certainly a fine example of how texts and discourses can create an imagined Other, the Russian as passionate, yet tolerant, barbaric yet obedient, and perhaps, most significantly of all, infinitely appealing. This is a process Said describes as the emergence of doctrines fashioned from experience, and I believe that I have shown he could be writing just as well of Russia as the Orient when he describes of the process channelling ‘[i]ts sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its backwardness — into a separate and unchallenged coherence.’64 Russianness, as a phenomenon, might render that the created Russian is far from imaginary, that in the Russian context at least there are inherent truths about the way people and cultures are and always will be.

60

For an exploration of how Russia constructs her own identity, see The search for self-definition in Russian literature, ed by. Ewa Thompson, (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991).

61 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York. New York University Press, 1995), p.3.

62 Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A study of Dostoevsky in relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p.232.

63 Palmer, p.409.

64 Said, p.205.

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

The Diffusion of “Dissident” Political Theory in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989 James Krapfl McGill University, Quebec It is often claimed that the non-violent and self-limiting character of the “Velvet” Revolution in Czechoslovakia can be attributed directly to the nonpolitical politics of prominent dissidents under Communism. Given the social isolation of the dissidents and popular unfamiliarity with their political thought prior to the revolution, however, this notion of “deterministic dissidence” is problematic. How did dissident ideas diffuse rapidly enough and in such a way that the revolutionary actions of a sufficient number of actors could have been influenced by these ideas? This paper considers this question by analyzing evidence of diffusion contained in the flyers and bulletins of the revolution between its start on 17 November 1989 and Havel’s election as president on 29 December of that year. Interpreting the evidence with the aid of sociological theories of the diffusion of innovations, the paper demonstrates that only a few tenets of dissident thought diffused widely enough to enjoy significant rates of adoption during the revolution, such that the ideological origins of the popular revolution must by and large be sought elsewhere.

It is often claimed that the non-violent and self-limiting character of the “Velvet” Revolution in Czechoslovakia can be attributed directly to the “nonpolitical politics” of prominent dissidents under Communism, one author going so far as to claim that the Revolution was like a play directed by Václav Havel, following a script the dissidents had written.1 Given the social isolation of the dissidents and popular unfamiliarity with their political thought prior to the revolution, however, this thesis of “deterministic dissidence” is problematic. How did dissident ideas diffuse rapidly enough and in such a way that the revolutionary actions of a sufficient number of actors could have been influenced by these ideas? To date, no account has tackled this question in any but a cursory

1 Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Cambridge: Granta Books, 1990), p. 79. More recent assertions about the crucial role of dissident political theory in the revolutions of 1989 can be found in Mark Frankland, The Patriot’s Revolution: How Eastern Europe Toppled Communism and Won Its Freedom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), p. 54; Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 146; and Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 114.

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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fashion. This paper, therefore, sets out to test the deterministic dissidence thesis by analyzing evidence of diffusion contained in the flyers and bulletins of the revolution between its start on 17 November 1989 and Havel’s election as president on 29 December of that year.

Understanding the diffusion of dissident political thought is important, generally, for understanding the relationship between political theory and revolution, and specifically for understanding what kind of revolution actually occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1989. If we are to make claims about the relevance of dissident theory to what happened in 1989, we need to understand how crowds on the squares were informed or conditioned by this theory. My concern is therefore not with high politics, such as elite negotiations at the round table or the drafting of the postCommunist bill of rights — where it can clearly be demonstrated that dissidents and their ideas played a crucial role3 — but with the politics of the street. The debate on the relevance of dissident political theory to this politics began in the revolution itself between proponents of what might be called “preparation” and “spontaneity” theses. The preparation thesis (forerunner of the more restrictive “deterministic” thesis) posited that dissidents had made the revolution possible. The spontaneity thesis, on the other hand, maintained that dissidents had done no more than anticipate the revolution, which was a spontaneous awakening of the entire nation (or nations).4 The distinction between the two perspectives was not always clear, such that some authors (including Havel) claimed both on different occasions. We shall see, however, that the distinction is significant, and is in some ways congruent with the earlier distinction within Charter 77 between Patochka’s and Benda’s conceptions of the Charter’s nature.

The materials I use to gain purchase on the diffusion process are nearly 1700 flyers and bulletins that circulated in Czechoslovakia between 17 November and the end of 1989, collected mostly from Moravia and Silesia. Generally typewritten (though occasionally hand-written or printed) on normal sheets of A4 paper, frequently photocopied or mimeographed for distribution, these documents were created for purposes of persuasion as well as for distributing information amid circumstances that were changing by the hour not just in Prague, but throughout Czechoslovakia.

Their authors were students, actors, workers, representatives of old and new independent initiatives, Communists, pensioners — practically anyone who felt 2

Milan Otáhal and Miroslav Vaneh k, in Sto studentských revolucí (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1999) examine the pre-revolutionary diffusion of dissident thought to students who were at the forefront of the revolution, and Padraic Kenney builds on this study in his account of pre-revolutionary ferment, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

The students and denizens of the cultural underground who assumed leading roles in the revolution were not the only revolutionary actors, however, but only a minority; these two studies, fine though they are, leave majority behaviour unexplained. Many authors have noted the importance of students and artists in spreading revolutionary fervor outside of the cities where it originally took root, but none have looked specifically at representations of dissident thought in this diffusion process.

3 Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), pp. 252–253.

4 Czech and Slovak documents from November and December 1989 are inconsistent about whether Czechoslovakia consisted of one nation or two; sometimes both formulations are employed in the same text.

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like contributing to the avalanche of public discussion which the revolution had set off. The flyers and bulletins were of course not the only vehicles through which dissident ideas diffused — television, radio, newspapers, and unrecorded public speeches were also important — but the bulletins and especially the flyers are unique because the ability to produce them or contribute to them was in practically everyone’s reach. They consequently provide insight into the rapidly evolving perceptions, opinions, and attitudes of a far wider public than those few who could get time on the air or space in print. Students and others committed to dissemination of news and revolutionary opinions regarded flyers and bulletins as one of their most crucial tools, second in importance only to personal agitation.5 While this sample is of course not representative enough to anchor definitive conclusions about Czechoslovakia as a whole, I believe it can be used to establish some facts about the diffusion process in the Czech lands. I will therefore speak mostly about the Czech case, applying generalizations to Slovakia only when this seems clearly warranted.

In order to make sense of the evidence, and in the hope of introducing standard terminology to the debate, I will employ concepts taken from theories of the diffusion of innovations, as synthesized by the sociologist Everett Rogers.6 These concepts include adopter categories, opinion leaders, diffusion networks, change agents, and the innovation-decision process. Derived from over sixty years of research on the diffusion of new technologies and new ideas in diverse cultural settings, these concepts can help us ask discerning questions about the diffusion of dissident ideas in Czechoslovakia, and understand the complexity of the answers.

A note is in order about the appropriateness of the term “dissident”. Václav Havel spoke for many of his colleagues when he expressed unease with the term, and in his own work he consistently places it in quotation marks. Havel based his objection on two reasons. First, the term “dissident” usually implies rejection of something, but Havel insists that he and his colleagues were not primarily rejecting anything, but rather affirming their own human identity. Second, Havel argues that the term can suggest a vocation, which Havel insists was emphatically not the case for dissidents in what he calls ‘post-totalitarian’ regimes. On the contrary, ‘dissidents’ were simply scientists, workers, writers, etc., ‘who are doing what they feel they must and, consequently, who find themselves in open conflict with the regime.’7 5

Students in fact distributed flyers as part of their agitation, sometimes even organizing special train runs to do so (‘Vlak nehžné revoluce,’ Prhetlak [Olomouc], no. 12 [9 December 1989], p. 9). Taking down student or OF flyers was considered sabotage or provocation dangerous to society (‘Obchanské fórum bylo vládou uznáno. . .,’ Prhetlak, no. 13 [10 December 1989], p. 8). Community members often report reading student flyers carefully, and being moved by them (cf. Robert Brh ezina, ‘Stávkovému výboru UP Olomouc,’ Prhetlak, no. 8 [4 December 1989], p. 3). Flyers frequently sparked spontaneous political discussion among pedestrians, even when they were strangers (David Matura and Slávek Žõ ánský, ‘Momentka z Prahy,’ Prh etlak, no. 23 [21 December 1989], p. 5). Flyers were considered so important that middle school students wanting to contribute to the cause placed it at the top of the list of services they could offer (‘Strhedoškoláci opeh t bojují,’ Prh etlak, no. 18 [15 December 1989], p. 2). Students in Olomouc even argued that if an opinion was not represented in a flyer, one could assume it did not exist (Studenti UP, ‘Kdo je krátkozraký,‘ Prh etlak, no. 7 [3 December 1989], p. 3).

6 Everett Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

7 Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ trans. by Paul Wilson, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1991), pp. 169–171.

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While taking Havel’s point, I will nonetheless use the term in this essay (as Havel finds himself doing in his) for lack of a better alternative.

I will begin with an exposition of diffusion theory and a discussion of how it can be applied to Czechoslovakia. I will then turn to the flyers and bulletins to examine how information about dissidents and their ideas was diffused, as well as the manner and extent to which these ideas were adopted. Finally, I will argue for the superiority of the spontaneity thesis over the preparation thesis.

The Diffusion of Innovations An innovation is ‘an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.’8 In our case, the innovations of 1989 can be defined in a spectrum of ways ranging from very broad (e.g. the decision to engage in public criticism of public matters) to very narrow (e.g. the decision to adopt the way of life advocated by a particular dissident, such as Jan Patoch ka). The broader the definition, generally, the wider the diffusion. We can treat the whole spectrum as a bundle of innovations or technology cluster, such that related innovations were more likely to diffuse in combination with each other than with innovations outside the cluster, but did not necessarily have to do so.9 Change agents and adopters can choose certain innovations from a bundle while rejecting others, and processes of communication can cause different innovations within a bundle to diffuse at different rates and to different potential adopters. In the Czechoslovak case, we can identify the whole bundle as the innovation to dissent, and the more specific innovation as the innovation to act in accordance with the political principles of prominent dissidents.

If the total number of an innovation’s adopters over time is plotted on a graph, the result is an S-shaped curve with a take-off point lying between 10% and 20% adoption. If the number of new adopters per unit of time is plotted, the result approaches a normal bell-shaped curve. Adopters can be divided into five ideal types according to their position along this normal curve. These types are innovators (the first 2.5%, up two standard deviations below the mean), early adopters (the next 13.5%, between one and two standard deviations below the mean), the early majority (34%, between the mean and one standard deviation below the mean), the late majority (34%, between the mean and one standard deviation above the mean), and laggards (16%, more than one standard deviation above the mean). Keeping in mind that these are ideal types, the percentages being theoretical, social generalizations about each category can be made. Innovators generally display an interest in new ideas which lead them out of local social networks into more cosmopolitan social relationships. Innovators are risk-takers, usually with a gift for abstract, counterfactual thinking, who consistently act independently of local peer pressure.

Early adopters are more integrated into local social systems. Among them are opinion leaders, who provide a model for other members of the social system.

Opinion leaders are respected for demonstrating over time a consistent ability to determine when the decision to adopt an innovation is most likely to be successful; 8 9

Rogers, p. 11. ibid., pp. 14–15, 235–236.

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given their moral authority, such determinations sometimes resemble self-fulfilling prophecies. The early majority tend to cultivate frequent social interactions but not to hold positions of opinion leadership. The late majority tend to be sceptical of innovations — frequently because they believe they lack the resources to take risks — and they tend to adopt only when risk associated with a new idea has been demonstrably reduced to a minimum and the weight of social norms makes it increasingly difficult not to adopt. Laggards, finally, tend to have the most limited social relations — travelling routinely in the same circles and so avoiding pressure to adopt new ideas — and they tend to be backward-looking even to the point of an ideological reverence for the past. Laggards adopt innovations only when they are so socially dominant as to make non-adoption practically impossible.10 Both the “prominent dissidents,” analyzed by Aviezer Tucker and Barbara Falk, and the cultural underground analyzed by Padraic Kenney, belonged to the “innovator” category in Czechoslovakia.11 Their social relationships (as Kenney emphasizes) tended to be cosmopolitan, such that they maintained links among the cities of Czechoslovakia and internationally. It should also be borne in mind that they were relatively isolated from local societies — partly because potential persecution made it dangerous for community members to associate with individuals operating beyond or at the margins of the allowable, partly because much of the dissident project seemed too remote from the lives of ordinary people.

As Ivo Možný has observed, dissident circles were perceived as just a special kind of seigneurial family. From the viewpoint of popular wisdom, dissidents were in the end people who — just like the Communists — made their living from ideology, and whose status was anchored in the world of public respect. Their notoriety, even if negative, provided them with privileges which the ordinary fellow didn’t have.12

The innovator category blends into the early adopter category when we come to consider the students who organized the Prague demonstration of 17 November and initiated the strikes there and at universities elsewhere in Czechoslovakia.

While all of them had some ties to dissent or unofficial culture, they were not generally old enough to have begun to specialize in either, so that they maintained significant ties with a range of ordinary people.13 The students and actors who joined these first students, as well as individuals in the localities who took part in the first demonstrations and moved to establish Civic Fora (OF) or branches of Public against Violence (VPN), can clearly be considered early adopters. The early majority can then be identified as those who are neither, in Alexander Pope’s words, ‘the first by whom the new is tried, nor the last to lay the old aside,’ but who joined the movement in time for the General Strike. This open display of adoption by over half the Czechoslovak population sufficiently lowered the risks of adoption and raised 10

ibid., pp. 252–280.

Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patoch ka to Havel (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Falk and Kenney, op. cit.

12 Ivo Možný, Proch tak snadno? Neh které rodinné durvody sametové revoluce (Prague: Sociologické nakladatelství, 1991), p. 25.

13 Otáhal and Vaneh k, pp. 109–113, 145–152.

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peer pressure to adopt that the late majority, too, joined the movement.14 Laggards, finally, were those ideologically committed to socialism who thought it was incompatible with a pluralist political system, a few of whom remain to this day.15 It bears reiterating that these categories are ideal types, such that boundaries between them are arbitrary and transitions from one type to another continuous.

Their value lies not in the degree to which we can assign any particular person to a particular category, but in enabling us to see the general temporal contours of the diffusion process.16 In speaking of adopter categories I have already mentioned a second important aspect of the diffusion process: diffusion networks. Much writing on the Czechoslovak revolution — no doubt informed by contemporaries’ emphasis on the importance of gaining access to mass media — betrays an assumption that the decision to adopt an innovation is simply a two-step process: media emit signal and recipient adopts.17 Diffusion research has shown, however, that while mass media may increase awareness that an innovation exists, it is primarily personal contacts that most affect individuals’ decisions to adopt.18 Again, most critical are opinion leaders. In Czechoslovakia, these were frequently members of the ‘grey zone’ — individuals who sympathized with and had contacts with risk-taking dissidents and members of the cultural underground, but who personally preferred to operate within the system.19 Such individuals came from diverse backgrounds — universities, factories, research institutes, churches, etc. — and included members of the front parties, Ch SL and Ch SS,20 as well as some Communists who used their positions to smuggle and read samizdat.21 A second important aspect of diffusion networks is that individuals tend to be most susceptible to persuasion 14

Bernard Wheaton and Zdeneh k Kavan estimate that 38% went on strike for the full two hours, while 33% showed support in other ways. The midpoint of participation (the theoretical dividing-line between early and late majority) may have occurred before or during the strike, but this is of merely pedantic interest, since the adopter categories are only ideal types. The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia, 1988–91 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), p. 95.

15 Rasma Karklins and Roger Petersen offer an interpretation of the diffusion of the innovation to protest comparable to mine on the basis of threshold models. ‘Decision Calculus of Protesters and Regimes: Eastern Europe 1989,’ Journal of Politics, 55:3 (August 1993): 588–614.

16 A further advantage of this way of looking at the diffusion of the innovation to protest is that it facilitates comparison among civic movements in central and eastern Europe in 1989. This comparative framework highlights social factors in the various countries as reasons for different rates and timing of diffusion, eliminating the need for blanket cultural assertions, such as Rothschild’s, that one people is simply more cowardly than another (cf. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993]).

17 See, for example, Garton Ash, pp. 91, 94; and Robin Okey, The Demise of Communist East Europe: 1989 in Context (London: Arnold, 2004), p. 92.

18 Rogers, pp. 281–285, 290–303.

19 See Jirh ina Šiklová, ‘The “Gray Zone” and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia,’ in Good-bye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing, ed. by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992).

20 The Czechoslovak People’s Party (Ch eskoslovenská strana lidová) and Czechoslovak Socialist Party (Ch eskoslovenská strana socialistická) had been officially allied with the Communist Party in the National Front since 1946, though subordinated since 1948).

21 Petr Vojtal, interview by author, Opava, 18 February 1997.

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from geographically proximate, homophilous (socially and psychologically similar) individuals.22 Weak ties with heterophilous or more distant individuals can be useful for the spread of information, but they are less so with regard to persuasion.

As a result, information about any innovation must frequently pass through many mediators — each capable of reinterpreting the innovation — until reaching a mediator capable of persuading an extremely isolated group. Thus, for example, we find individuals in major urban areas adopting the innovation to organize Civic Fora or branches of Public against Violence immediately after the idea emerged, while individuals in more isolated areas did not do so until a month or more later. We also find understandings of such innovations as dissident political theory changing significantly as they diffused.

Diffusion can be accelerated by change agents, particularly when they are relatively homophilous with target populations and enjoy credibility in their eyes.23 John Glenn, among others, emphasizes the role of theatres and actors as change agents in revolutionary Czechoslovakia, even providing a partial list of which theatres sent actors to what towns in order to speak at public meetings.24 While the important role of theatres cannot be denied, the evidence suggests that students were much more powerful change agents, appealing to a broader spectrum of people across wider geographic areas. The flyers and bulletins contain numerous examples of ordinary citizens claiming to have been inspired by students to join the protests, but there are no comparable claims vis-à-vis actors — admiration for them and their strike notwithstanding. There are several reasons for this. First, it was students who were perceived to have started the revolution on 17 November and suffered physically for their ideals; the resulting popular movement was largely that of a public reacting in defense of the students against the violence of the regime.

Second, students frequently had personal, homophilous ties to non-intellectual social groups both in urban centers and in more remote geographic locations; since there were many more of them than theatre personnel (especially when active secondary school students are counted) they were better equipped than any other group to spread innovations by personal means. Third, students remained on strike and able to devote full energies to political activity and agitation until 29 December or shortly thereafter, whereas most actors ended their strikes on 3 December; even though more than half the Czechoslovak people had adopted the innovation to protest by 27 November, this should not be regarded as the end either of the revolution or of the diffusion process (especially with regard to more subtle innovations like dissident political thought). Finally, judging by students’ and OF/VPN’s concern to respond to them, provocative flyers about actors’ incomes succeeded to a certain extent in raising questions about their motivations, while in light of 17 November it was much more difficult to claim that students were insincere.

To complete this survey of relevant diffusion theory, it is necessary to consider the innovation-decision process through which individual adopters proceed. There 22

Rogers, pp. 286–289, 304–312. ibid., pp. 335–356.

24 John Glenn, Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 143–159.

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are five steps in this process: 1) knowledge, 2) persuasion, 3) decision, 4) implementation, and 5) confirmation. At the knowledge stage, an individual becomes aware of an innovation’s existence and gains some understanding of how it functions; mass media tend to be more effective here than at any other stage. At the persuasion stage, an individual forms either a positive or negative attitude toward an innovation; homophilous personal relationships are especially important here. At the decision stage, an individual chooses either to adopt or reject an innovation, possibly by subjecting the innovation to a trial or watching a demonstration; heterophilous personal relations are frequently instrumental at this stage. The implementation stage involves actual behavioral change on the part of the individual, as he or she puts the innovation into practice; new questions are likely to emerge at this stage, and the innovation may be re-invented (especially likely with intangible innovations). Finally, at the confirmation stage, an individual seeks reinforcement of his or her decision to adopt the innovation, and may choose to discontinue the innovation if it is perceived to create social or personal dissonance.25 In the following discussion of diffusion in revolutionary Czechoslovakia, evidence will be mustered which illuminates primarily the knowledge and implementation stages. We will be concerned with they quality of the information about dissidents and their ideas available to potential adopters, and qualitative evidence about how they implemented these ideas in public practice.

The Diffusion of Information about Dissidents and their Ideas Revolutionary bulletins and secondary accounts consistently draw attention to widespread ignorance about dissidents before 17 November. Information about dissidents had been restricted by the Communist regime and perverted by its media; the actual texts of dissident political theory had been available only in illegal samizdat. While the innovators and many early adopters in our schema possessed truer notions of who the dissidents were and had often either read samizdat or heard about ideas contained therein, the same cannot be said of the broader public — notably the early and late majorities. Most Czechs and Slovaks — even if they had officially condemned ‘A Few Sentences’ in their ROH meetings — did not actually get a chance to read the pamphlet until November 1989.26 In order to gauge the influence of dissident thought in what was an overwhelmingly popular revolution, therefore, we need to look at information that was diffused to the majority in the period after 17 November. The following discussion proceeds on the assumption that the flyers and bulletins provide a representative sample of this information.

The first thing one notes is that information about dissidents was not the centerpiece of public discourse in 1989. Roughly 15% of the flyers and bulletins here surveyed mention Charter 77 or its signatories in some fashion; far fewer deal directly with dissident political thought. The diffusion of information about 25

Rogers, pp. 161–203.

ROH (Revoluch ní odborové hnutí / Revoluchné odborové hnutie, or ‘Revolutionary union movement’) was Czechoslovakia’s hegemonic trade union prior to the revolution; like everything else, it was subject to the Communist Party’s ‘leading role in society.’ See Alexandr Gregar, ‘Otevrh ený dopis šéfredaktorovi Jiskry Orlicka Ústí nad Orlicí,’ Jiskra Orlicka, 12 December 1989, p. 3.

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dissidents went through four phases during the revolution. In the first, lasting until the General Strike, change agents’ primary concern was to mobilize support for the strike and for societal dialogue; mention of dissidents therefore focused on their having been persecuted by the regime, or involved Charter 77 and other organizations making statements responding to events. While these concerns continued after 27 November, differences between the student movement and Civic Forum — which was led by dissidents — gave impetus to a fresh look at who the dissidents were and what Charter 77 had been.27 The third phase began on 10 December, when Václav Havel’s presidential candidacy was publicly announced; while Havel had been prominent in coverage of dissidents before, after this date he became absolutely the centre of attention. A fourth phase can be seen beginning in early 1990, when a plethora of new journals, newspapers, and publishing houses began more leisurely disseminating information about and writings from former dissidents now in power.

While Havel was many times over the dissident most often discussed in the flyers and bulletins, he was not the only one. The most common other Charter 77 signers to be mentioned in the present sample were the spokesperson Tomáš Hradílek, the writer Ludvík Vaculík, and the musicians Marta Kubišová and Jaroslav Hutka. Less commonly discussed signers included Petr Cibulka, Vlasta Chramostová, Stanislav Devátý, Ivan Martin Jirous, Zdeneh k Mlynarh , Jaroslav Šabata, and Petr Uhl. A regional focus is noteworthy in some cases, such as Hradílek in Ostrava or Šabata in Brno, and these foci sometimes became significant in terms of geographic variation in revolutionary demands (e.g. Šabata’s connection with Moravian regionalism).

Finally, a small number of foreign dissidents make appearances in the flyers and bulletins, most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Leszek Kołakowski.

The diffusion of information about dissidents and their political thought took five forms: 1) concise, objective reporting (e.g. ‘the Civic Forum of Czech Writers was formed’), 2) arguments against Communist propaganda and in favor of a positive attitude toward dissidents, whether presented polemically or as purportedly objective expositions of facts (the argument was clearly implied), 3) reprinting of excerpts from pre-revolutionary dissident writings and interviews, 4) circulation of dissident pronouncements made after 17 November, and 5) personal visits by and public dialogues with dissidents themselves. Since the first form is uninteresting and the fifth has left only scant records, I shall focus on the second, third, and fourth forms.

In the first two phases of the diffusion process, prior to the announcement of Havel’s candidacy, change agents sought mostly to counter Communist disinformation about Charter 77 and the dissidents. Surveys as well as certain flyers and letters written to revolutionary bulletins indicate that the Communist-inculcated belief that Charter 77 was a gang of criminals was not uncommon.28 Given the 27

This debate had actually been sparked by the massive demonstration that Civic Forum had organized on Letenská plánh on November 26, at which only one student had been invited to speak, but it was not until after the General Strike that change agents had time to deal with it.

28 See Studenti UP, ‘Stávka studentur pokrachuje,’ Prh etlak, no. 2 (28 November 1989), pp. 1–2; ‘Strhípky,’ Prh etlak, no. 4 (30 November 1989), p. 7; ‘Kdo je krátkozratý?’ op. cit.; as well as the survey published in Svobodné slovo, 12 December 1989, reprinted in Prh etlak, no. 21 (18 December 1989), p. 2.

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centrality of dissidents in Civic Forum, this was a potential liability for the revolutionary movement: ‘I would have nothing against Civic Forum,’ said one woman in a typical comment, ‘if only the Charter weren’t part of it.’29 Change agents therefore argued that the dissidents were self-sacrificing citizens committed to non-violence and human rights, emphasizing that Communist deception had hidden these truths from view.

Music played an important role in the diffusion of at least part of the innovation bundle. Previously banned or exiled musicians gave repeated performances, and their songs were widely printed in flyers and bulletins and sung by participants in public meetings.30 Marta Kubišová’s ‘Modlitba’ (‘Prayer’) from 1968 became the theme song of the revolution in the Czech lands, while Ivan Hoffman’s ‘SŸubili sme si lásku’ (‘We Promised One Another Love’) achieved parallel popularity in Slovakia. Kubišová, as a heroine of 1968 and later a signer of Charter 77, provided an appealing bridge between the Prague Spring — to which most Czechs felt patriotic attachment — and the dissident movement. Condemning ‘injustice, lies, and violence,’ Kubišová’s prayer incarnated five centuries of Czech revolutionary thought; by invoking the thought of Jan Amos Komenský, the prayer implicitly reached back to Petr Chelchický, who had been an inspiration via Masaryk and Husserl for Patochka, one of the founders of Charter 77. Commentary on the prayer and on Komenský in the bulletins brought some of these connections to light, though it is likely that most adopters of the innovation to sing were less than fully aware of them.31 Ivan Hoffman achieved popular appreciation in Slovakia for what may have been a more provocative tenet of dissident thought — that the line between oppressor and victim ran through each citizen. ‘The youth raised their hands for us,’ he wrote, ‘for us they were beaten, for our keeping silent.’32 Flyers in support of Václav Havel’s presidential campaign belong to a special category. These documents were intended to drum up popular pressure on the Federal Assembly to elect Havel as president, rather than leave the decision to a referendum; for instrumental reasons conditioned by the need for speed, they appealed directly to existing popular assumptions rather than trying to change these assumptions. The flyers reiterate nine common points: 1) Havel did not want to be president but was willing to accept the office out of a sense of duty if that were the people’s will; 2) Havel had been active in the cultural movement of 1968, and had been vocal in condemning the Soviet occupation and subsequent normalization; 3) Havel was patriotic — he had even rejected an opportunity to emigrate to New York — and he came from a patriotic family that had participated in the resistance to Nazi occupation; 4) the regime had persecuted Havel for speaking out in defense of his country and fellow citizens, repeatedly imprisoning him and almost killing him; 5) while Havel came from a bourgeois family, he did not want to restore an 29

‘“Strašák” jménem Charta,’ Prh etlak, no. 3 (29 November 1989), p. 3.

See, for example, Manifestace v Opaveh 27.11.1989, video recording (Státní okresní archiv Opava, sbírka dokumentachních materiálur — rok 1989, box ‘Listopad 1989 — leden 1990: OF Opava’).

31 ‘Modlitba pro Martu aneb “Kdo za to mur že?”’ Letohradský zpravodaj, February 1990, p. 15.

32 Ivan Hoffman, ‘SŸubili sme si lásku,’ in Ked sme brali do rúk budúcnosþ, ed. –ubomír Feldek (Bratislava: Archa, 1990).

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exploitative bourgeois order, and he had even married a proletarian; he was not against Communism per se, but only bad government; 6) Havel was not rich, but gave away all his prize money to friends in need; he was an ordinary citizen who believed in equality; 7) Havel stood in the humanist and democratic Czechoslovak tradition; 8) Havel was renowned worldwide for his plays and political writings; foreign political leaders would respect him; and 9) Havel was a great man, a prophet, the Masaryk of the present (one laudatory author even claimed that Havel was capable of flying to the moon).33 Amidst these appeals to Czech patriotism, concern for world opinion, and egalitarian sentiment, political theory definitely recedes to the background. Only one of the five most widely distributed flyers dealt explicitly with any tenets of dissident philosophy. ‘Who Is Václav Havel,’ written by the Information Center of the Czecho-Moravian Theatre Community, quotes an interview Havel gave after being released from prison in 1983, in which he claimed not to know how to hate, explaining that hatred prevents understanding of truth.34 A component of Patochka’s ‘solidarity of the shaken’ had been that perception of the true state of human existence could be achieved only by renouncing hate and entering into loving relationships with one’s supposed enemies — who were in fact sacrificial victims of their societies.35 The flyer appropriately concludes with Havel’s innovation upon an old dictum of Masaryk’s, to insist that ‘Truth and love will prevail.’ With regard to Havel’s willingness to become president against his own avowed preferences, the flyer suggested that Havel was living according to a principle of Patochka’s philosophy, that ‘the real test of a person is not how he fulfils a role which he himself has chosen, but how he fulfils the role to which fate has destined him.’36 In this statement can be seen echoes of Patochka’s emphasis on self-sacrifice as a means for care of the soul.

The actual dissident texts which change agents chose to cite in 1989 were selected primarily on the basis of their potential to persuade people to adopt the innovation to engage in public protest; the diffusion of information about dissident philosophy in 1989 was therefore quite limited.37 Among the most common texts to be circulated were the original Charter 77 declaration, Ludvík Vaculík’s ‘Two Thousand Words’ from 1968, and ‘A Few Sentences’ from the summer of 1989. In their flyers and

33 The most common of these flyers to circulate in Moravia and Silesia were ‘Ch lovehk bojující o lidskou identitu;’ ‘Havel — osobnost listopadové vzpoury,’ translated from an article in Le Monde; Josef Kemr, ‘K rodokmenu Václava Havla;’ Informachní centrum Ch eskomoravské divadelní obce, ‘Kdo je Václav Havel;’ and Eva Kriseová, ‘Václav Havel se národil 5. rh íjna 1936 v Praze.’ It is significant that at least three of these (possibly four) were written by members of the theatre community. My copies of all but ‘Kdo’ are from the private collection of Lenka Wünschová, Olomouc; my copy of ‘Kdo je Václav Havel’ is from the collection ‘Listopadová revoluce/1989–90 ONV Brh eclav,’ Státní okresní archiv Brh eclav, Mikulov. For the Havel-to-the-moon accolade, see Jan Kacer, ‘Nebojme se velikosti’ (Archiv meh sta Ostravy, box ‘Revoluce 1989: Materiály 1989–1990’).

34 ‘Kdo je Václav Havel,’ op. cit.

35 Jan Patoch ka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).

36 ‘Kdo je Václav Havel,’ op. cit.

37 It would accelerate rapidly with the burgeoning of new presses in 1990.

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bulletins, change agents also quoted from Havel’s essays ‘The Burden of August 21,’ ‘The Cipher of Socialism,’ ‘The Forgotten Generation,’ ‘The Politics of Conscience,’ ‘Truth and Persecution,’ ‘To Various Sides,’ ‘A Word about Words,’ Disturbing the Peace, On Human Identity, and miscellaneous interviews.

The Charter 77 declaration was circulated to clarify public perception of this association whose members were so actively involved in Civic Forum. It emphasized that the Charter stood for civic and political rights, such as speech and religion, as well as for the humane development of society — claiming in Patochkan fashion that this was part of a historical movement. It also emphasized that the Charter was not a formal organization, but a different kind of human association.

Since this principle of non-organization was adopted by Civic Forum and Public against Violence, public reiteration of the subtle reasoning behind it was important.

Whether or not it was understood, this particular innovation found widespread resonance, and many of the new associations that Czechs and Slovaks raced to establish in 1989 embraced it.

The reprinted text which provided perhaps the most explicit statement of the fundamental principles of dissident political theory was an excerpt from Havel’s On Human Identity, on the origins of Charter 77.38 Beginning with Havel’s statement that ‘the Charter was founded by those who wanted to salvage hopes remaining from 1968‘ — thereby linking the text to a cause widely considered legitimate — the excerpt’s central point is that the founding of Charter 77 was an example of a phenomenon that Patochka called ‘the solidarity of the shaken,’ mentioned earlier. In the context of the 1976 Plastic People trial, two groups who had previously been isolated from each other began to realize their essential identity — to realize that the freedom of one was essentially the freedom of the other. As Havel put it, echoing Patochka, this ‘strike against young, unknown musicians was an act of substitution. . .it was actually a strike against everyone . . . who is not completely resigned and subordinate to power.’ By uniting in Charter 77, the previously isolated musicians and philosophers — as well as Communists, writers, Catholics, and others — fulfilled Patochka’s programmatic aim of making the solidarity of the shaken a force in history.39 Charter 77’s first post-massacre statement, as well as several of Havel’s speeches during the revolution, reiterated Patochkan themes by claiming that the revolution, like the Charter, was a historical incarnation of the solidarity of the shaken. ‘Who, if not us?’ asked Charter 77 in its communiqué of 18 November appealing to citizens to act. In a speech on 10 December, Havel characterized the revolution as ‘the spontaneous awakening of both our nations [. . .] against violence.’40 Implicit was the idea of solidarity with the students beaten on 17 November — an assault that 38

Václav Havel, ‘O pochátcích Charty 77’ (Státní okresní archiv Olomouc, sbírka soudobé dokumentace, sign. 148–22 ‘Studentský stávkový výbor Olomouc: 1989–1990 B’). The following paragraph will interpret the text and so additional citations will not be indicated.

39 See Patochka, p. 134.

40 Tomáš Hradílek, Dana Nehmcová, and Alexandr Vondra, ‘Stanovisko Charty 77,’ Prague, 18 November 1989 (Státní okresní archiv Olomouc, sbírka soudobé dokumentace, sign. 148–22 ‘Studentský stávkový výbor Olomouc: 1989–1990 B’).

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was as much an act of substitution as the persecution of the Plastic People thirteen years previously.41 Six days later, in his campaign speech, Havel was more explicit: ‘Civic Forum,’ he said, ‘is an attempt by word and deed to unify liberal-minded people, to create a space for independent action by citizens.’ He added that Public against Violence was like it.42 Adoption and Implementation of Dissident-Related Innovations Thus far we have been concerned only with the information about dissidents and their ideas which change agents were directing toward potential adopters of our innovation bundle; it is now time to consider evidence of adoption. Again, later innovators and early adopters of the innovation to protest can frequently, albeit not always, be shown to have adopted some ideas of the prominent dissidents as well.

‘The Charter speaks for us,’ shouted innovators on Národní trhída.43 Many of the student leaders interviewed by Milan Otáhal and Miroslav Vaneh k recall having been influenced by dissident political theory before the revolution, but others recall only being aware of the dissidents without knowingly having been influenced by them.44 Non-student organizers of demonstrations and Civic Fora outside of Prague also testify to having generally been aware of dissident works in samizdat, though not all had read them or knowingly been influenced by them.45 Our main concern, however, is with the early and late majorities. Before attempting a rhetorical analysis of the flyers, a few general remarks about practice are in order. Since the founders of Civic Forum and Public against Violence were dissidents or members of dissident circles, they exhibited tremendous influence on the practices of citizens who later joined these associations simply by establishing the formal framework for their associational interaction. Such Charter 77 practices as having spokespersons, striving to be a fluid, pluralistic association rather than an organization, and accepting new members who simply agreed with basic principles and signed their name in witness, were carried wholesale into Civic Forum.

The Charter 77 newsletter Infoch became the model for OF’s Inforum. Outside of Prague as well, the first organizers of Civic Fora and many popular demonstrations tended to be Charter 77 signers (where they existed) and individuals with ties to

41

Václav Havel, ‘Celá zemeh jediným fórem,’ Prague, 10 December 1989, private collection of Lenka Wünschová, Olomouc.

42 Václav Havel, ‘Václav Havel’s TV speech, December 16, 1989’ (Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif., Czech Subject Collection, box 8, folder ‘1989—Havel, Václav’).

43 Ivan Fejfar, ‘Sveh dectví,’ 19 November 1989 (Státní okresní archiv Prosteh jov, box ‘Obch anské fórum: plakáty a rur zné’).

44 Otáhal and Vaneh k, op. cit.

45 Ladislav Kupchík, Ch SL member and co-founder of the Opava Civic Forum, testifies to having known of samizdat works only second-hand. Other key figures in the initial stages of Opava demonstrations, such as the Charter 77 signer Ivo Mludek, the student Jirh í Siostrzonek, and the Ch SS member Dalibor Fronchek, had all been more intimately acquainted with dissident writing (though to varying degrees).

Ladislav Kupchík, interview by author, Opava, 18 February 1997; Ivo Mludek, interview by author, tape recording, Opava, 20 February 1997; Jirh í Siostrzonek, interview by author, Opava, 20 February 1997; Dalibor Fronchek, interview by author, tape recording, Opava, 13 March 1997.

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independent initiatives. By joining Civic Forum, a majority of Czechs came to live a part of their lives in accordance with a few basic principles of dissident political philosophy, even if they did not fully realize it.

While Charter 77 exercised decisive influence on Civic Forum, it was the younger cultural underground that more directly influenced the student practices which sparked the revolution, and which were then imitated throughout Czechoslovakia.47 At the heart of the student justification for their strike and their appeal to the public to join them was the fact that their demonstration on 17 November had been peaceful and law-abiding. In order to maintain their case against a violent and law-breaking government, the students and those who joined them had to continue tactics of peaceful demonstration. The practical imitation of the original demonstration was at times quite vivid, as when students in Olomouc dramatically reenacted the Národní trh ída massacre;48 more often the connection was maintained by recalling such chants from 17 November as ‘We have empty hands,’ and simply maintaining peace and order. The happenings — rooted in such pre-revolutionary activities as those of the Committee for a Merrier Present — provided widespread ritual means for channelling violent impulses into non-violent, symbolic outlets.49 Revolutionary rhetoric, as revealed in the bulletins and flyers, might seem the most promising source of information on the ways and degrees to which early adopters and the early and late majorities actually internalized dissident ideas.

Unfortunately, however, the task is not straightforward. While a few concepts, like antipolitics and parallel polis, are so characteristically dissident that their usage automatically implies adoption of some dissident ideas, most of the chief ideas of the revolution can conceivably be attributed to other strands of thought as well. A writer concerned with democracy, humanity, truth, and non-violence may have drawn inspiration from a variety of sources besides the dissidents. In fact, the first thing to jump out at the student of the revolutionary public sphere is the multiplicity of pre-revolutionary discourses upon which writers and speakers built.

Among the most prominent of these pre-revolutionary discourses were those around prh estavba/prestavba (the Czechoslovak equivalent of perestroika) and 1968 — with or without its attendant idea of ‘socialism with a human face.’ Padraic Kenney, among others, writes that no one wanted socialism in 1989, but the documents do not support this view. While none of the informants Kenney interviewed (who could all be identified as innovators in the diffusion model) may have wanted a reconstruction (prh estavba) of socialism, or a return to 1968 ideals, the same cannot be said of the early and late majority or even of all the early adopters (let alone the laggards). A committee of the Association of Czech Doctors, for example, in a 46

It is worth noting that not all Charter 77 signers joined Civic Forum. Ivo Mludek, for one, refused to join OF on the grounds that it would conflict with his existential commitment to independence. He did cooperate with the association, however. Ivo Mludek, op. cit.

47 This is Padraic Kenney’s argument. Kenney, op. cit.

48 See Ivan Langer and Zdenehk Zukal, Happening, video recording (Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 1990).

49 Examples of such happenings include the symbolic execution of an effigy of Communism in Olomouc, or the building of a wall of cardboard boxes around the District Party Headquarters in that city. See Langer and Zukal, Happening.

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statement typical of many, expressed hope that the revolution would inaugurate a genuine prh estavba; the desirability of preserving socialism itself went unquestioned.50 In a letter to the student bulletin in Olomouc, one pensioner expressed the not uncommon opinion that, in 1968, ‘ordinary worker-Communists called for socialism with a human face, and thereby stood for practically all demands which are being proclaimed today.’51 The spread of Obroda (‘Renewal’) during the revolution also evidences a degree of popular support for preservation of some version of socialism.52 Kenney sees calls for dialogue as being typical of older dissidents — and it was — but most of the revolutionary writers employing this ubiquitous concept seem to have built on the rhetoric of prh estavba and glasnost.53 Prh estavba and 1968 reform socialism also provided the starting point for many discussions of democratization.

As the revolution progressed, Western models of political and economic organization informed other stands of discourse. ‘In ten years we’ll be like Austria,’ the saying went, and numerous flyers and bulletins expressed fascination with the ‘Swedish model’ of socialism.54 In writing about democracy, responsibility, decency, and pluralism, one could just as easily invoke concrete Western models as the subtleties of dissident philosophy. ‘We’re not some Central American banana republic,’ insisted the Olomouc Civic Forum. Instead, ‘we will build a modern democratic state with a pluralist system of political parties [. . .] democratically indicating the direction of further development.’55 In the context of this rejection of the Third World, “modern” clearly referred to the contemporaneous Western “Free World,” understood in its bipolar Cold War context. While Václav Havel insisted that the democratic order under construction in eastern Europe would not be a carbon copy of Western models (one can infer a hope for the kind of social order Havel had imagined at the end of ‘The Power of the Powerless’), many of his compatriots had other ideas.56 While dissidents may have set the initial terms for some of the debates which filled the revolutionary public sphere, they did not do so for all debates — and even the terms that they set shifted. Since much of the diffusion was accomplished by word of mouth and copying of what had been heard or read elsewhere, we can imagine a nationwide game of “telephone,” with the accompanying transformation of details that results. Superficial examples of this can be seen in students demanding an investigation into the death of Pavel Wožniak (meaning Pavel 50 Výbor spolku cheských lekárh ur v Brneh, ‘Prohlášení,’ Brno, 30 November 1989 (Státní okresní archiv Brno-venkov, Rajhrad, sbírka soudobé dokumentace, sign. F-8.04).

51 Robert Brh ezina, op. cit.

52 See ‘Úplné potrh ení Stalinismu’ (Státní okresní archiv Prosteh jov, box ‘Obchanské fórum: Plakáty a rurzné,’ folder ‘Prh ebytky od archívu’).

53 Kenney, op. cit.

54 Valtr Komárek, ‘Kudy jít dál?’ Svobodné slovo, 28 November 1989. See also, for example, ‘Švédský model,’ Prh etlak, no. 18 (15 December 1989), p. 7.

55 OF Olomouc, ‘Nehkolik veht k Lidovým milicím,’ 30 November, 1989, private collection of Lenka Wünschová, Olomouc.

56 Havel, interview for Der Spiegel, translated by Tomáš Zábranský and reprinted in Prh etlak, no. 15 (12 December 1989), p. 6.

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Wonka), or in the metamorphosis of a flyer on Václav Havel from ‘A Man Fighting for Human Identity’ to ‘A Man Fighting for His Identity.’57 Harmless though these examples are, they are indicative of deeper, more profound mutations of content and meaning. Indeed, the meanings of revolutionary catch-phrases often came to be only of secondary importance; as Lynn Hunt writes of a comparable situation, when ‘uttered in a certain context or included in soon-familiar formulaic expressions, such words bespoke nothing less than adherence to the revolutionary community.’58 We should also not underestimate adopters’ ability to re-invent innovations. Just as Kenney’s ‘konkretný generation’ had re-invented dissent as originally invented by elder dissidents, so the early adopters and early and late majorities in 1989 tailored the innovation to fit local needs and understandings.59 Since the diffusion system was relatively decentralized, re-invention and selective adoption from the innovation bundle was encouraged.60 This can help us to accept more confidently contemporaries’ frequent insistence that the revolution was spontaneous. Unknown people in the small towns and villages of Czechoslovakia — as well as in the capitals — churned out a breathtaking variety of creative practices and discourses, which made the revolution real for them and more than anything else announced their implementation of its innovations. From the idea to create an open-air museum of totalitarianism in an obscure village in eastern Bohemia to the widely circulated ‘Ten Commandments of Our Revolution,’ which apparently came from an anonymous pen in Gottwaldov (before the city changed its name to Zlín), the revolution was as much the spontaneous product of anonymous individuals in the middle of the bell curve as it was of the dissidents on its left-hand side.61 In sum, though the revolution had ideals, they were only partially traceable to the dissidents. They can be more accurately described as the product of a “conversation” between the dissidents and the rest of society.62 Even the ideals of non-violence and legal continuity, which many commentators hailed as the most innovative features of 1989 and among the most important components of dissident political thought, cannot legitimately be considered the dissidents’ private property. All revolutions in modern European history (with the exception of those inspired by Marxism) have valued non-violence and legal continuity, and this has always been as much a spontaneous concern as a doctrine of intellectuals.63 What was unique in ‘Ch loveh k bojující o svou identitu,’ Olomouc, private collection of Lenka Wünschová, Olomouc.

Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 21.

59 Kenney, p. 13.

60 Rogers, pp. 364–369.

61 ‘Desatero naší revoluce,’ Gottwaldov, 5 December 1989, private collection of Lenka Wünschová, Olomouc.

62 Rogers, p. 6.

63 For arguments about the initial prevalence of non-violent ideas in the French, American, and Russian Revolutions, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of the American Republics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

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1989 was that these initial non-violent impulses were successfully defended, and this cannot be attributed solely to the dissidents.

Conclusion: The Dissident Myth A final part of the revolutionary discussion that we must consider is the debate on whether or not the dissidents — with their theories — prepared the way for the revolution. The opposing positions were summarized succinctly by the student Jan Gogola in an editorial for the OF newsletter in Uherské Hradišteh .64 ‘Many of my colleagues,’ he wrote, ‘are completely unaware and some do not even want to allow that students are not the source of freedom.’ Gogola challenged ‘sentimental expressions’ that he saw prevalent in public discourse, ‘gentle revolution, golden students, cultured nation, joyful nation, etc.,’ arguing that the pre-revolutionary situation provided a truer picture of who his countrymen — including the youth — actually were: cynical, materialistic, petty, envious, and unclean. The moral potential which Gogola claimed had made the revolution possible had not been latent in the Czechoslovak people, but had been given them by activists in prerevolutionary independent initiatives, who had risked ‘death, injury, torture, humiliation, and other features of repression.’

Many innovators and early adopters joined Gogola in arguing for the importance of the dissidents, though their assessments of this importance varied. Docent Josef Jarh ab in Olomouc took a more moderate tone than Gogola in praising the political maturity of the students who had led the revolution, but emphasizing the importance of Charter 77’s program and the various pre-November demonstrations.65 The editor of the OF newsletter in Ostrava suggested that Charter 77 and other independent initiatives had anticipated the revolution, a formulation which assigned to the dissidents a prophetic role without denying the role of independent spontaneity in the revolution itself.66 The Charter 77 spokesman Tomáš Hradílek, finally, argued that there was no cause-effect relation between dissidence and the revolutionary movement, insisting that the latter was wholly spontaneous.67 I would like to suggest that this disparity in how innovators and early adopters interpreted the importance of dissidents and their thought parallels a tension within dissident thought itself. If one accepts Patochka’s thesis that there are moments when the solidarity of the shaken spontaneously appears as a force in history, then it makes sense to see popular solidarity with the students beaten on Národní as an example of this force, and the revolution itself as spontaneous. The solidarity of the dissidents in this case cannot have been an absolutely necessary factor, but at most an anticipation, prophecy, or inspiration. If, however, one adopts Benda’s emphasis on small-scale work within a parallel polis that may one day become the polis, then it becomes more natural to interpret the revolution as the 64

Jan Gogola, jr., ‘Jací jsme,’ Nezávislost (Uherské Hradišteh), no. 2 (14 December 1989), p. 1. The following paragraph will interpret the text and so additional citations to this article will not be indicated.

65 Josef Jarhab, ‘Nedehlní zamyšlení,’ Prh etlak, no. 21 (18 December 1989), p. 3.

66 ‘Exodus,’ Hlasatel OF (Ostrava), no. 2 (January 1990), p. 8.

67 ‘Jedna otázka,’ Obch an (Ostrava), 5 December 1989, p. 4.

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culmination of this process, with the revolutionary polis as a genetic outgrowth of the pre-existing dissident polis. Given that Havel had striven to mediate between Patochkan and Bendan orientations before the revolution, it is not surprising that in 1989 he publicly embraced both interpretations of the dissidents’ contribution.68 On 10 December, as we have noted, Havel emphasized ‘the spontaneous awakening of both our nations. . .arising from the impulse of the students and finally the whole nation against violence.’69 On 16 December, however, he emphasized that ‘the arrival of this moment was prepared by Charter 77 and others working in the shadow of official disinformation. Their sacrifices all contributed — now is not the time to argue about who contributed more.’70 Havel’s emphasis on sacrifice is noteworthy, for both interpretations are fundamentally myths structured around sacrifice. For Patochka, every individual in modern society is a potential sacrificial victim, and the solidarity of the shaken results directly from the victims’ dawning awareness of this fact. Solidarity is based on seeing the self in the other, which makes the transcendence of sacrificial forms of social organization theoretically possible. The Bendan notion of a parallel polis, while it need not imply perception of difference between self and other, generally tends to do so. It is very easy from the Bendan perspective to see those inside the parallel polis as innocent victims sacrificed by culpable members of outside society, thus re-introducing radical difference between self and other. Unfortunately, the function of sacrifice is precisely to generate and fix such differences, so that a stable symbolic system can be grounded upon them.71 By defining the parallel polis in opposition to the original polis, rather than heeding Chelchický’s advice to ignore it, and by therefore admitting a difference between the innocent and the guilty, the Bendan perspective merely inverts the sacrificial system rather than destroying it.

The flyers supporting Havel in his election campaign frequently concluded by stating that ‘Havel embodies the hope of Czech and Slovak citizens for life in a democratic and free state,’ or a similar formulation which emphasized his symbolic stature.72 By reducing Havel and other dissidents to symbols of the revolution, change agents bypassed the fundamental Patochkan principles of dissident thought, and in effect reconfirmed the dissidents as sacrificial victims. By emphasizing their pre-revolutionary sacrifices and their special role in ‘preparing’ the revolution, moreover, many dissidents actually sanctioned their renewed marginalization. The expulsion itself was deferred, of course, and the dissidents initially enjoyed prestige and power in the manner Girard describes of monarchy accruing to victims whose sacrifice is deferred, but this prestige would last only so long as the dissidents

68

Martin Palouš, ‘Poznámky ke generach ním sporur m v Charteh 77 v druhé polovineh osmdesátých let,’ in Dveh desetiletí prhed listopadem 89, ed. by Emanuel Mandler (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé deh jiny, 1993), p. 43.

69 Havel, ‘Celá zemeh ,’ op. cit. Emphasis added.

70 Havel, ‘TV Speech,’ op. cit. Emphasis added.

71 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

72 Studenti Univerzity Palackého, ‘Úrhad prezidenta: Podporujeme kandidáturu Václava Havla,’ private collection of Michaela Borunská, Olomouc.

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continued to symbolize the hopes of Czechs and Slovaks.73 Because their thought did not diffuse sufficiently widely or deeply in the revolution for the dissidents to have decisively remoulded these hopes, the dissidents’ symbolic value quickly faded.

73

René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 51–57.

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Beyond Transitional Justice: Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Miloševica Serbia Mladen Ostojica School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL Processes of transitional justice seek to enable societies to cope with the legacy of mass violence, unlawfulness and authoritarian rule. Besides providing justice to victims and punishing the perpetrators, transitional justice aims to promote public engagement with the past in order to give citizens an opportunity for rejecting compromised values and to facilitate the development of a democratic and pluralistic society. In this paper, I examine the obstacles to accomplishing such an objective, focusing on the case of Serbia. I articulate the debate around two mechanisms for the delivery of justice — war crimes trials and truth commissions — and point to the function of civil society in initiating public debate about past atrocities.

In recent years, the notion of confronting or coming to terms with the past has become pervasive in the public discourse in Serbia. This concept is inextricably linked to the polemics surrounding accountability for the violence and atrocities that accompanied the dismembering of the former Yugoslavia. The tendency to ignore, deny, or avoid acknowledgement of atrocities committed in the name of the Serbian nation is increasingly challenged by pressure from the international community and civil society.

This may be exemplified by the broadcast, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of Srebrenica, in June 2005, of video footage featuring the execution of six Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica by members of the Serb paramilitary unit ‘Škorpioni’.

This broadcast was made possible by the Humanitarian Law Centre, an NGO playing a crucial role in the enforcement of transitional justice in Serbia. At that time, it produced ample reactions in society by sparking off the debate over the Srebrenica massacre, an issue that had been constantly ignored until then in the public sphere.

However, almost a year later in 2006, the European Union broke off negotiations regarding the Stabilisation and Accession Agreement with Serbia on the basis that the former Bosnian Serb Commander Ratko Mladica had not been handed over to the Hague Tribunal. Although these negotiations were of major importance to Serbia, given that they represent the first step in the process of integration with the European Union, their disruption has generated little reaction within Serbian society. Indeed, a recent poll shows that one third of respondents consider Mladica’s © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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extradition to be ‘against the State’s interest,’ while only one fifth fully support his handing over, and half of them remain undecided.1 These events show how divided Serbian society is with regard to attitudes towards war crimes, in spite of the prosecutions and verdicts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In summer 2006, I undertook research to understand why the process of transitional justice has so far been unsuccessful in helping Serbian society come to terms with the past. In this paper, I argue that the retributive justice approach adopted has failed to stimulate public engagement sufficiently. I first outline the relationship between transitional justice and collective memory, and reflect upon the capacity of trials and truth commissions to instigate public reckoning with the past. On the basis of my fieldwork, I subsequently assess the impact of war crimes trials on levels of public engagement in the process of transitional justice in Serbia. Furthermore, I analyze the work of the Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation and draw the implications of its failure for potential future attempts to resort to restorative justice. Finally, I explore the extent to which civil society has contributed to the process of transitional justice, and its role in helping Serbia come to terms with its past.

‘Facing the past’ in the context of transitional justice In the last twenty years, the concept of transitional justice has come to the fore as an emerging field in the realm of social sciences. The large number of countries experiencing a break with an authoritarian or conflictual past has attracted the interest of an increasing number of scholars. Such processes can be illustrated by the establishment of truth commissions in South Africa and several Latin American countries, the international war crimes courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the practice of lustration and reparation in a number of former Communist states.

Transitional justice can generally be defined as the set of institutions, mechanisms and processes aimed at enabling society to cope with the legacy of a repressive regime. It primarily concerns the short-term and temporary judicial and nonjudicial mechanisms addressing the legacy of human rights abuses and mass violence.2 In the aftermath of conflict or authoritarian rule, the priority of the transitional authorities is to avoid the eruption of new cycles of violence through the re-establishment of the rule of law. Transferring the responsibility for apportioning blame and punishment from victims to public bodies institutionalizes and moderates desires for vengeance, thereby preventing arbitrary revenge and allowing for a departure from violence.3 It gives the victims a sense of justice indispensable for overcoming their suffering and opens the way for the rebuilding of networks of

1

Radio B92, ‘Trecaina Protiv Izruchenja Mladicaa’ (A Third against the Extradition of Mladica), Radio B92, 1 august 2006. < http://www.b92.net> [accessed 1 August 2006] 2 Anderlini Saram Naraghi, Conaway Camille Pampell, and Kays Lisa, ‘Transitional Justice and Reconciliation’ in Inclusive Security, Sustainable Peace: A Toolkit for Advocacy and Action, ed. by Women Waging Peace (International Alert, United Kingdom, 2004), pp. 1–15 (p.1) 3 Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) , pp. 10–14

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trust and principles of accountability in society.4 Besides normalizing relationships in society, the reinstatement of the legal order represents an opportunity to restore the confidence of the citizens in State institutions.

It is important to emphasize that transitional justice processes have different objectives which can be at odds with each other. The pursuit of justice, for instance, may clash with attempts to promote reconciliation or rebuild State institutions.

Peaceful transitions often imply cooperation between the new authorities and members of the former regime, who usually benefit from amnesty or leniency in return. This kind of compromise may represent an obstacle to the establishment of full accountability and justice for past atrocities. In turn, failure to restore the rule of law represents a potential threat to the authority of the State as it risks impeding the recovery of its citizens’ allegiance and perpetuating antagonisms within society.

On the other hand, adhering strictly to the legalistic principles entailing the prosecution of all the perpetrators might be a far too idealistic approach, hardly feasible in the real world.

In order to surmount the heavy burden of the past and lay the foundations for the advent of a just and fair society, transitional justice exceeds the sole purpose of providing justice to the victims and accountability for perpetrators. Besides restoring the rule of law, the process aims to engage society in a critical reflection about the past that will enable moral reconstruction to take place. According to Osiel, transitional justice should ‘stimulate public discussion in ways that foster the liberal virtues of tolerance, moderation, and civil respect.’5 Therefore, a crucial task is to establish an accurate historical record that will provide a basis for the reinterpretation of past events. The critical examination of a painful history should allow for political learning to take place at the collective level, thereby promoting the development of a more open, classically liberal society. Such a conception of transitional justice processes has mostly developed out of the literature dealing with the impact of the Holocaust on post-war Germany. According to this standpoint, it is necessary to reveal and remember past atrocities in order to avoid amnesia, which could engender political denial and delay the problem by postponing vengeance and impeding political learning.

Reckoning with past atrocities is essential in order to unveil the ideological foundation of the atrocity and to allow citizens the possibility of rejecting the compromised values.6 It is therefore crucial to establish a heterogeneous picture of a nation’s history, through which its dark chapters would be acknowledged and condemned in the same way as the glorious episodes are celebrated. In other terms, the atrocity must become part of the nation’s identity so that it can never be repeated.

Gabriel Motzkin argues that such an enterprise requires the inclusion of the crime

4

John Borneman, ‘Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation’, Public Culture, 14 (2002), 281–304 (pp. 287–289) 5 Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997), p.2 6 Dimitrijevica Nenad, ‘Moral Responsibility for Collective Crime’, Belgrade Circle, 1–4 (2006), 25–44 (p. 26)

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in the institutional memory of a society. According to him, these memories need to be ‘sacralized’ in order to be continually recollected and thus to avoid the natural human process of forgetting. The best example is shown by the place of the Holocaust in German national memory. Failure to acknowledge and sacralize the memory of atrocities may result in the entrenchment of denial. This can be illustrated by eighty years of denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915–17 genocide against the Armenians.8 In order to promote reconciliation, this process should enable the conflicting points between the historical accounts to be resolved and emphasize the periods of peaceful cohabitation between the parties. According to Prof. Obrad Savica, Director of the Belgrade Circle, the objective is to transform visualization of the past, with the aim of promoting a productive future, by rendering collective memories compatible. This objective was clearly on the agenda of the Franco-German historical commission established in 1950 which dismantled the myth of the timeless antagonism between the two nations. While the overall impact of the commission’s work is difficult to assess, the immediate effect was the reform of the history textbooks in both countries.

Similar initiatives have been instigated in Serbia, where the introduction of alternative textbooks resulting from the cooperation of renowned historians from the region was dismissed by the authorities.9 As Kuljica suggests, it might be useful to initiate such a process in the region by opening a `Museum of shame of the Balkans.’10 However unrealistic this might seem at the moment, the influence of the European Union, which imposes rigorous standards regarding national teaching programmes in history and other subjects, gives hope for a brighter future.

The mechanisms of transitional justice The case-specificity of the transitional processes has resulted in the development of a wide range of institutional mechanisms meant to support reconciliation. In this section, we focus on the work of war crimes tribunals and truth commissions by distinguishing between the principles of retributive and restorative justice.

Retributive justice Retributive justice seeks to respond to mass atrocity by embracing the rule of law.11 It consists in the reinstatement of the pre-existing norms formalized in the judicial system. Therefore, it seeks to put an end to violence and impunity by trying in courts of law, and punishing, the perpetrators of human rights violations. Trials ought to diminish desires for vengeance and break the cycle of violence by making

7 Gabriel Motzkin, ‘The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity’, in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. by Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 196–210 8 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p.134 9 Interview with Dubravka Stojanovica, Lecturer in History at Belgrade University, on 15.07.06 10 Kuljica Todor, Kultura Secaanja (Culture of Memory) (Belgrade: Ch igoja Štampa, 2006), p. 318 11 Minow, pp. 25–29

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the perpetrators accountable for their past actions, and thus individualize responsibility. The enforcement of retributive justice is carried out by the judicial institutions set up at the national or international level. The success of the Nuremberg trial set up by the allies in the aftermath of World War II largely contributed to the development of an international movement for human rights founded on the rule of law. It also raised many issues and fomented debate about the advantages and shortcomings of retributive justice.

According to Bass, trials have several major functions.12 First of all, they contribute to the political stabilization of the country by purging the threatening leaders. Prosecutions deflate the prestige of the leaders by publicly revealing their weaknesses and wrongdoing, although the effect may be adverse if they still enjoy wide popularity among the population. Secondly, criminal prosecutions generally have a deterrent effect, as the threat of punishment generally prevents people from committing atrocities. In the case of transitional trials, such an outcome is uncertain owing to the fact that the threat of punishment usually comes after the crime has been committed and that mass murderers seldom act as rational agents. Moreover, prosecutions represent a first step towards the rehabilitation of renegade States, which can thus prove their willingness to establish the rule of law. By putting the blame on individuals, they ensure that entire communities or groups are not held responsible for crimes, therefore opening the way for reconciliation. Finally, tribunals play a crucial role in establishing the truth, initiating the process of truth-telling and rendering denial impossible. In that sense, trials do represent an important source for history writing and collective remembering.

Martha Minow identified three groups of issues related to the work of transitional trials: retroactivity, politicization and selectivity.13 Retroactivity designates the differences in visions of justice between the predecessor and the successor regime. More precisely, it refers to the differences in legislation, norms and values between the moment when the trial takes place and the time the acts were committed. The issue is: which rule-of-law should the transitional tribunals adhere to? Ruti Teitel argues that in transitional periods, rule-of-law norms are ‘socially constructed; in some part it is judge-made.’14 The Nuremberg trial perfectly illustrates the case, since it applied norms that did not exist until then. Indeed, no prior court had charged individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, nor did any existing law at that time prohibit deportation, forced labour, or following the orders of a superior officer. Although Nuremberg substantially contributed to the codification and advancement of human rights legislation at the international level, these issues are still at stake in the case of the ICTY and ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), owing in particular to the fact that these are the first international war crime trials after Nuremberg.

These issues of retroactivity reveal how the interpretation of the rule of law depends on the political context. In periods of transition following violence or 12

Bass Gary Jonathan, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 284–304 13 Minow, pp. 33–36 14 Ruti Teitel, ‘The Rule of Law in Transition’, Belgrade Circle, 1–4 (2006), 103–125 (p. 118)

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repression, tribunals carry the risk of becoming theatres of domination rather than providing opportunities for a just and fair process.15 The victor’s justice threatens to undermine reconciliation by causing bitterness and creating further divisions in society. In addition, it could reduce people’s confidence in the institutions and imperil the democratization process. On the other hand, when the transfer of power has taken place peacefully, the States’ capacity to prosecute the perpetrators of mass atrocity is often compromised by political agreements.16 In that case, it is unlikely that trials will enable institutional accountability to be revealed and the stigmatization of the preceding regime to be established. Finally, as the example of the ICTY shows, international tribunals depend on politics in many practical ways, such as funding and the enforcement of orders related to gathering evidence or arresting offenders.

Selectivity arises as a consequence of the incapacity to prosecute all those bearing responsibility for mass atrocities. Trials are necessarily discriminatory when defining the criteria of responsibility and selecting who shall be prosecuted. The stigmatization of the former regime may not take place if prosecutions are restricted to the first-hand perpetrators. A narrow definition of responsibility may foreclose wider moral issues such as public collusion. Hence, focusing on individual responsibility risks inhibiting public engagement with the past by overburdening the prosecuted with guilt and disqualifying the public from moral dialogue and feeling of responsibility. In addition, the inflexible proceedings of criminal courts and the complexity of the legal argument render the trial out of reach for the majority of people. The extent of truth-telling is limited owing to the fact that the perpetrators have no incentives to confess, and often dispute the indictment through defamation, inflicting additional pain on the victims. Hence, by focusing on the perpetrators, legal proceedings carry the risk of neglecting the attention and recognition victims need and deserve.

The corollary is that while they are necessary for establishing individual responsibility and initiating the process of reconciliation, trials may be ‘ill suited to deal with the subtleties of facing the past.’17 Indeed, when they do not raise issues of public responsibility and promote dialogue about law and morality, trials are mere instruments for re-establishing the rule of law.

Restorative justice Approaches to conflict resolution and reconciliation have significantly evolved in the past decades with the advent of restorative justice. In contrast with the conventional retributive approach consisting in prosecuting and punishing the offenders, restorative justice emphasizes the healing of wounds and reconstruction of relationships by calling all those affected by an offence to deal collectively with its consequences.18 Therefore, it enables the victims to express the harm or loss they 15

Susan Opotow, ‘Reconciliation in Times of Impunity: Challenges for Social Justice’, Social Justice Research, 14 (2001), 149–170 (pp. 162–165) 16 Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation. From Terror to Trauma (London: Routledge, 2002) p. 127–134 17 Minow, p. 51 18 Anderlini, Conaway, Kays, p. 2

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have suffered and offers an opportunity for the offenders to acknowledge their wrongs and make reparation.

The objective of this process is to displace the legacy of violence in individuals and societies by restoring the dignity of the victims and establishing the truth.19 In order to meet these goals, the victims and the offenders of mass atrocity are called to publicly testify before the truth commission, usually set up by the transitional authorities. Thus, the victims are offered the attention of the whole community which permits them to share their suffering with the public so as to release their pain and overcome trauma. These mechanisms are founded on psychological theories of healing individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to these theories, healing is achieved through the empowerment of the victims and their reconnection with the community. By applying the same principles at the collective level, the testimonies seek to rehabilitate the victims and reconstitute society through shared suffering.

At the same time, the testimonies of the perpetrators obtained in exchange for conditional amnesty or leniency, take the truth-finding process forward and uncover facts that are unreachable for trials. Revealing the fate of the victims is often essential for the families to overcome the suffering engendered by the loss of their beloved ones. By focusing their attention on the victims, including the forgotten ones, and avoiding cross-examination of the testimonies, truth commissions respect the integrity of the victims. And since they promote third-party listening, they may foster understanding and debate by contributing to creating a vigilant, critical and engaged public sphere.20 Indeed, sharing the truth suggests that bystanders empathize with the victims and acknowledge their share of responsibility.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up in the aftermath of apartheid is an exemplary model of this kind of justice. In a context of peaceful transition which might have been endangered by the prosecution of the former elite, the TRC was seen as an appropriate tool for dealing with the legacy of the past. This institution, which resulted from ample debate in society, provided public space and reparation for the victims and conditional amnesty for the offenders in return for the provision of truth.21 Obviously, this opportunity could not have been offered to all the wrong-doers, bearing in mind the degree of atrocities committed. Resorting to truth commissions does not preclude prosecutions and punishment. The testimonies of those involved in the former regime fully contributed to establishing a consistent account of past events. The two-year-long work of the TRC resulted in the publication of a report meant to provide the most accurate picture of the apartheid period. Bishop Tutu, the chair of the commission, described it as a road map for those who wish to travel into South Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past.22 Indeed, writing history represents a central task for truth commissions whereas it is not on the agenda of trials.

19 20 21 22

Minow, pp. 52â&#x20AC;&#x201C;65 Borneman, pp. 289â&#x20AC;&#x201C;293 Minow, p. 56 Humphrey, p. 110

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However, the search for truth may prove to be very problematic in confronting different interpretations of past events. Producing a unique historical report out of heterogeneous accounts implies selecting the memories that should be included in this ‘stored collective memory.’23 Therefore, the sufferings that are not acknowledged by the official account are restricted to alternative memories in the private sphere. Instead of promoting reconciliation, the establishment of an over-arching account could increase the tensions and engender resistance and opposition in some parts of society. Moreover, the quest for truth may be exploited for political purposes. When the transition does not permit all the elements of the former regime to be removed, truth-telling may be used as a mode of political containment seeking to conceal divisions in society through collective mourning. In that case, the transitional process may fail in establishing enduring morality and legality. The success of the TRC is in part due to the fact that it was an initiative ‘from the bottom’ which sought general consensus through extensive public debate and involvement in its design.24 Other truth commissions have been less fruitful when resulting from presidential decisions, as was the case in Argentina, or international initiatives, like in El Salvador.

Several limitations to the work of truth commissions need to be acknowledged.

First of all, by impeding examination and establishing facts without requiring further proof than testimonies, these practices bypass the principles of the rule of law. As Humphrey notes: ‘Memory as truth is problematic: it’s partial, can be obscured by trauma and may be culturally censored and unable to be spoken.’25 The facts established in such a manner can be easily disputed, which advances the possibility of denial, especially when participation of high-ranking officials is not guaranteed. Furthermore, the lack of punishment or deficiency of political consequences can produce widespread dissatisfaction. Although amnesty is granted in return for truth, forgiveness cannot be a substitute for justice and punishment.26 It brings the risk of normalizing violence in society and may cause further psychological and emotional harm to the victims. In that sense, commissions are problematic because they disconnect testimony from retribution, whereas these elements should be part of the same complex. Finally, the positive scope of truth-telling is also subject to debate. Indeed, recounting atrocities represents a psychological challenge for victims who may not have overcome the traumatic consequences of such events.

The capacity of the victims to recount their experiences is limited by the difficulties of putting pain into language and accommodating memories to public narrative.

As a consequence, the testimonies are often fitted into a pre-established narrative which deprives them of their genuine character. At the same time, the capacity of the public to witness and digest these testimonies is limited too. Overloading the public with images of suffering and pain may generate an adverse effect resulting in general disinterest and blame towards the victims.

23

ibid., p. 124 Minow, p. 53 25 Humphrey, p. 125 26 Raquel Adlana, ‘A Victim-Centered Reflection on Truth Commissions and Prosecutions as a Response to Mass Atrocities’, Journal of Human Rights, 5 (2006), 107–126 24

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We can conclude that while they permit truth-telling and healing at the individual and societal level, truth commissions on their own may not assuage desires for vengeance, as they grant clemency to the perpetrators. Therefore, prosecutions are necessary for restoring a sense of justice, even if they are selective and mainly symbolic. On the other hand, as we have noted earlier, societal responses to collective violence should not be reduced to juridical procedures if they seek wider objectives than the mere rehabilitation of the rule of law. As transitional justice requires public engagement and critical re-assessment of the past, trials need to be supported by complementary mechanisms that will facilitate the gathering and dissemination of factual materials. Since they are most appropriate for that purpose, truth commissions remain necessary for the success of transitional justice processes.

The Impact of War Crimes Trials on the Process of Transitional Justice in Serbia Retributive justice has been the principal approach to transitional justice in the former Yugoslav Republics so far. Promoted by the international community through the creation of the ICTY, it has recently been endorsed by the Serbian authorities through the establishment of a domestic war crimes court. The following section seeks to assess the impact of these institutions on public engagement with the past in Serbia.

Public perceptions of The Hague The foundation of the ICTY by the UN Security Council in February 1993 entailed high aspirations as the war in Bosnia was raging. The ICTY was set up to contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace by bringing justice through ‘proceedings that are fair, in accordance with international human rights standards and which accord due regard to the rights of the accused and the victims.’27 The establishment of individual guilt purports to free society from collective responsibility, thereby reducing tensions between the communities. Consequently, the tribunal’s objectives are to promote reconciliation by prosecuting persons responsible for mass atrocities and thus returning the rule of law to the former Yugoslavia.

By concentrating its efforts on indicting high-ranking officials, the tribunal sought to help purge threatening leaders from the region, thereby fulfilling a major function of war crimes trials. Indeed, the charges against Radovan Karadžica and Ratko Mladica ensured their eviction from the Bosnian political scene in the aftermath of the Dayton peace agreement. Although the two fugitives have not been captured yet, they are effectively barred from public life.

In the case of Miloševica, the outcome is more ambiguous. Throughout the nineties, the West had an ambivalent attitude towards him. Miloševica was first represented as a guarantor of peace in Dayton and subsequently became the ‘butcher of the Balkans’ during the Kosovo crisis.28 The fact that he was charged for the events 27

Dan Saxon, ‘Exporting Justice: Perceptions of the ICTY among the Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim Communities in the Former Yugoslavia’, Journal of Human Rights, 4 (2005), 559–572 (p. 559) 28 Interview with Drinka Gojkovica, Director of the Documentation Centre [Wars 1991–1999], on 26.06.06

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that took place in Bosnia and Croatia between 1991 and 1995 four years after the end of those conflicts, during the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia, added a great deal of suspicion and confusion in the public perception of The Hague. The prosecution was severely criticized for the strategy adopted in trying Miloševica. Biljana Kovachevica-Vucho, the president of the Serbian Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, argues that instead of treating Miloševica as an `isolated cavalier’, the prosecution should have organized a `horizontal’ trial in order to establish the responsibility of the entire line of command of the former regime.29 The broad scope of charges filed against him and the simultaneous indictments for Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo engendered a lengthy trial disrupted by his death in March 2006. The result is that no Serbian official has been sentenced until now, and that the responsibility of the former regime has not yet been established.

The ICTY’s combination of common and civil law principles, granting leniency to the indictees who cooperate, certainly promoted the advancement of truth.30 Hence, several indictees have acknowledged their responsibility and expressed remorse, such as the former co-president of the Republika Sprska, Biljana Plavšica, who pleaded guilty to the crime of persecution. Nevertheless, the victims often disapprove of reducing the sentence in return for acknowledgment of responsibility, and so does the wider public in the Balkans. As they are unfamiliar with common law principles, people criticize such proceedings because they tend to think that the indictees feign remorse.31 The complex and technical proceedings of the tribunal are a plausible explanation for the weak repercussion of war crime trials on the Serbian public opinion. According to Drinka Gojkovica, of the Documentation Centre ‘Wars 1991–1999’, the judicial routine has led to ‘banalization’ of the prosecutions in Serbian society.32 The Miloševica trial, the only one to have been broadcast live in Serbia, soon turned into a media show featuring the head-to-head confrontation between the accused and the prosecution, represented by Carla Del Ponte, and thus missing the point of the terrible atrocities it was supposedly dealing with.33 This corroborates the limitations of legal framing on truth-telling processes. Only six per cent of those interrogated consider themselves to be acquainted with the proceedings of the ICTY, and a study shows that the combination of common law and civil law systems even renders the proceedings inaccessible to lawyers from the region.34 The ensuing ignorance of the public regarding the work of the ICTY is a major problem since it allows for distortion of the facts by political or other parties. In Serbia, the politicization of issues related to The Hague has diverted the public’s 29

Interview with Biljana Kovachevic-Vucho, President of the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM), on 21 June 2006 30 Rachel S. Taylor, ‘The Hague: A Tale of Two Systems’, Belgrade Circle, 1–4 (2006), 207–214 31 Public opinion polls show that 73% of informants consider that pleading guilty is done for the sole purpose of getting a lower sentence. (Source: Strategic Marketing , ‘Javno Mnenje u Srbiji’ [Public Opinion in Serbia], Belgrade Centre for Human Rights and Strategic Marketing Research, April 2005 <http:// www.tuzilastvorz.org.yu/html_cyr/drugionama.html> [accessed 28 June 2006]) 32 Interview with Gojkovica Drinka, as above.

33 Gojkovica Drinka, ‘Politika Prošlosti’(Politics of the past), Rech, 65/II (2002), 45–57 (p. 50) 34 Taylor, p. 213

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attention from the essence of the trials. This is principally due to the attitude of the authorities regarding extradition of the indictees. The degree of cooperation of the Serbian government with the ICTY has ranged from nil during Miloševica’s regime, to active collaboration under Ðinœica’s government, and passive cooperation from the succeeding authorities.

Since Miloševica used the ICTY as another instrument of victimization of the Serbian people, opposition to that institution remained widespread after his overthrow. Indeed, this stance is still supported by the nationalist parties which have significant weight on the political scene. This is reflected by the fact that two-thirds of the population considers that the trials are biased against the Serbs, mainly owing to the fact that there are more Serbs indicted that any other nationality.35 The myth of the ‘tribunal against the Serbs’ is supported by criticism of the indictments and the verdicts of the ICTY. For instance, the mild sentence accorded to Naser Orica, the commander of the Muslim forces accused of having ordered the slaughter of Serbian civilians in the vicinity of Srebrenica, has spurred a wave of scepticism towards the work of the Tribunal.36 That decision was based on the consideration that circumstances of duress and extreme necessity diminish mental capacity, and thus provide a viable defence for crimes against humanity. This norm represents an innovation in international law introduced by the ICTY in a prior case, pointing to the problem of retroactivity discussed earlier.37 After the assassination of Prime Minister Ðinœica in March 2003, cooperation with The Hague has suffered a downturn as the succeeding government was constituted by a coalition of more or less conservative parties relying on the support of Miloševica’s former Serbian Socialist Party (SPS). This was manifested by the policy of benevolent surrender, entailing moral and material support to those accused and their families. This policy has irritated human rights activists and foreign governments, many of which suspended their financial support to the country. It also provoked the subsequent decision of the European Union to break off the negotiations regarding the Stabilization and Accession Agreement, as explained in the introduction.

The result is that cooperation with The Hague is mainly perceived as a requirement for Serbia’s integration into the European institutions, rather than a step towards the rehabilitation of justice for the sake of reconciliation.38 On the whole, the politicization of The Hague tribunal and its inaccessibility to the wider public have dissociated its proceedings from the process of reckoning with the past in Serbia. Since no higher officials have been sentenced, the trials have not promoted the stigmatization of the former regime. Even if that had happened, it is very questionable whether it would have engendered wider debate in society, as people are generally distrustful towards the ICTY’s ability to establish justice.39 35

Strategic Marketing, p.20 Bogdan Ivaniševica, ‘Mit o tribunalu protiv Srba’ (The Myth of the Tribunal against the Serbs), Politika, 12 June 2006 37 This norm has been introduced in the case against Dražen Erdemovica. (Minow, pp. 35–37) 38 Indeed, 66 per cent of the people interrogated consider that cooperation with The Hague is essential for utilitarian reasons according to public opinion polls by Strategic Marketing.

39 Almost half of the respondents to public opinion polls believe that the Tribunal does not provide justice to the victims. (Source: Strategic Marketing, 2005) 36

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While the authorities are the first to be blamed for this situation, the media certainly bear their share of responsibility as they are often at the service of the politicians.40 But even if the ICTY has not promoted public engagement with the past, it has nonetheless played a crucial role in initiating the process of transitional justice in Serbia. By trying war criminals and insisting on the involvement of Miloševica’s regime, it has amply contributed to restoring justice and purging threatening leaders from the political scene. Nataša Kandica, the Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, notes that the tribunal has done a monumental job in gathering evidence and documentation over the past thirteen years. This material will be extremely precious to the domestic courts which are supposed to carry on the process.

Indeed, the completion strategy of the ICTY endorsed by the UN Security Council provides that the domestic courts shall become the principal tool for prosecuting perpetrators of war crimes in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Therefore, the tribunal is assisting in strengthening the capacity of national courts in the region to handle war crimes trials. In a first stage, a small number of cases will be referred to national courts, which are also carrying on their own prosecutions. Ultimately, these institutions will take over the restoration of the rule of law in the region as UN Security Council resolutions 503 and 1534 projected the end of the ICTY’s investigations in 2004, the closing-down of trials in 2008/2009 and appeal processes by 2010.41 The promise of domestic war crimes trials The law on the organisation and jurisdiction of State organs in proceedings against perpetrators of war crimes adopted by the Serbian Assembly on 1 July 2003 marked a turning-point in the official attitude towards war crimes. It provided for the creation of a War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Serbia and the establishment of a War Crimes Chamber at the District Court in Belgrade.

Until then, war crimes cases had been handled marginally and unprofessionally during Miloševica’s rule.42 These cases mainly consisted in show trials sentencing members of other ethnic groups, or ordering disproportionately light sentences to Serbian offenders who had the prosecutor on their side. The inability of the local judiciary to try war criminals impartially was one of the reasons for creating the ICTY. After Miloševica was ousted from power, the Belgrade district court carried out two trials that indicated major progress in that respect. The ‘Sjeverin’ and ‘Podujevo’ cases were the first to allow for the direct participation of the victims and their families and to impose the highest sentence on the offenders.

To date, the newly created War Crimes Chamber has completed one case (‘Ovchara’), praised by civil society and foreign observers for its professional and conscientious conduct. Several other cases are under way, amongst which that of 40

Interview with Miša Vasica, reporter for the weekly magazine “Vreme”, on 20.07.06 ICTY, ‘Partnership and Transition Between the ICTY and National Courts’, <http://www.un.org/ icty> (accessed 23 August 2006) 42 Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), Transitional Justice Report Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo 1999–2005 (Belgrade: Humanitarian Law Centre, 2006), p. 31–33 41

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the paramilitary group ‘Škorpioni’, which perpetrated the atrocities shown on the Srebrenica footage mentioned earlier. The quality of war crimes prosecution has been improved through the introduction of several laws, legal provisions and procedural innovations made possible by financial and technical support from abroad.43 These conditions have enabled cooperation with the ICTY and the domestic War Crimes Courts in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to advance. Indeed, the ICTY has already referred several cases to domestic courts in the region, and the Serbian prosecution has been granted open access to the Hague Tribunal’s documentation.44 According to Jasna Jankovica, the Public Information Coordinator of the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, the current objective of the prosecution is to try the intermediate and lower-ranked persons accused of war crimes. Thus, the approach ‘from the bottom’ by the domestic judiciary is complementary to the work of the ICTY which focuses on the prosecution of the most senior leaders. Although it may be too early to judge the attitude of the prosecution, its proceedings have been severely criticized by several members of civil society for being narrowly focused on the first-hand perpetrators. So far, the sentencing of the executors has not led to the incrimination of any officials from the Serbian army or police. Indeed, the trials tend to demonstrate that war crimes are the result of isolated actions undertaken by paramilitary units, criminal groups, or individual transgressors. This shows how ‘the prosecution minimizes or fully rejects any involvement of the institutions of the Republic of Serbia, its regular military and police forces, and their relation to the war crimes and armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.’45 This situation may be technically explained by the introduction of the legal provision on the cooperating witness, a new institution in domestic criminal law. As Serbian jurisdiction is based on civil law, it does not allow for the attribution of a lower sentence in return for the plea of guilty and the revelation of information crucial for the process. The status of cooperating witness permits an offender whose testimony is essential for the detection, proof or prevention of other criminal offences to be discharged, or have his sentence reduced, on the grounds that those crimes outweigh the harm he has caused.46 This provision is essential for establishing the truth and supporting the evidence presented by the prosecution. Indeed, while executors are easily recognizable by the victims, the chain of command is hard to reveal without the cooperation of those who have taken part in it. This can be illustrated by the ‘Ovch ara’ case which required two cooperating witnesses to support the accusation. On the other hand, the fact that those who have ordered the atrocities, and thus carry a large share of responsibility, are amnestied is ethically and morally problematic. Such a form of justice is necessarily dubious as it implies that those who have instigated and planned the atrocities are released from accountability in order to allow for the punishment of their subordinates.

43

HLC, Transitional Justice Report, pp. 25–29 Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, ‘War Crimes Prosecutor Gets Access to The Hague Database’, Memorandum, <http://www.tuzilastvorz.org.yu> (accessed 24 August 2006) 45 Humanitarian Law Centre, ‘HLC on War Crime Trials in Serbia’, HLC Press Release <http://www. hlc.org.yu> (accessed 24 August 06) 46 HLC, Transitional Justice Report, p. 27 44

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These outcomes seem hardly dissociable from the political and institutional environment in which the domestic war crimes trials operate. Bearing in mind that the War Crimes Prosecutor is elected by the National Assembly for a period of four years, it is hard to believe that he has full independence from the political establishment. This is particularly plausible in a country where the institutions are still marked by the presence of criminal structures from the Miloševica era.47 Although the former leaders have mainly been removed from the political scene, the Serbian transition did not entail the reform of the State institutions, which was above all necessary in the judiciary, as well as in the police and the army. Hence, people who were responsible for, or even directly participated in, war crimes may still be holding positions of power. It is thus obvious that there is structural opposition to the establishment of accountability for past atrocities emanating from the personal interests of people holding key positions in the State apparatus. The situation is identical in the case of organized crime trials, which aim to prosecute persons responsible for the political crimes committed by Miloševica’s regime in Serbia. Not surprisingly, war crimes trials are deeply related to these issues.

Another reason for avoiding confrontation with the involvement of State institutions in war crimes may be related to the political implications this would induce.

Since 1993, the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been suing Serbia and Montenegro for charges of aggression and genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).48 It is important to remember here that the Serbian authorities deny any form of responsibility and involvement in the conflicts that resulted from the disintegration of Socialist Yugoslavia. Indeed, these are described as civil wars that occurred in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as a consequence of the anticonstitutional secession of these two republics from the Yugoslav Federation. Hence, any evidence incriminating the structures of the State may have negative repercussions on Serbia’s position in this lawsuit. The defence of the country’s interests in this litigation is a priority for Serbia as an unfavourable sentence would have disastrous consequences, both in political and economic terms.

Whether the domestic war crimes trials are restricted to first-hand perpetrators for political or institutional reasons, this case illustrates the limitations of retributive justice discussed in the first chapter. Owing to their selectivity, war crimes trials did not allow for the stigmatization of the former regime in Serbia as they did not incriminate the chain of command and State officials. Their truth-telling effect is very limited as the community is distanced and poorly informed of its proceedings.49 Domestic prosecutions are even less accessible to the public than the ones organized by the ICTY, primarily because Serbian jurisdiction does not allow for broadcasting of the trials. Finally, in this case, the re-establishment of the rule of law did not allow for the rehabilitation of a renegade State since Serbia is the first

47

Saxon, p. 567 Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Human Security in an Unfinished State: The Annual Report 2005 (Belgrade: HCHRS, 2006), p. 73–75 49 Indeed, 75 per cent of respondents to public opinion polls could not identify any domestic institution dealing with war crimes trials (Source: Strategic Marketing, 2005) 48

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country to have been indicted for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Restorative approaches to transitional justice in Serbia As the theory suggests that restorative justice is more efficient at promoting public acknowledgement and reckoning with the past, I now turn to the analysis of such proceedings in the region. Therefore, I first refer to the short-lived Yugoslav Commission for Truth & Reconciliation and bring out some implications on the relevance of such a mechanism in the Serbian case. Subsequently, I discuss the role of civil society in transitional justice processes and look briefly at the activities of the NGO sector in Serbia.

The Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation After the regime of Slobodan Miloševica was ousted from power in October 2000, the government was formed by a multitude of parties from different backgrounds belonging to the so-called democratic opposition. The DOS coalition was a rather heterogeneous political formation, composed of eighteen parties that could not agree upon issues of crucial importance for the country. One of these issues was the attitude to adopt towards the responsibility of the Serbian State in the atrocities committed during the preceding conflicts. This matter was extremely contentious, especially with respect to cooperation with the Hague Tribunal. The new authorities were divided regarding what the transition implied and how it should be envisaged.

The Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was founded on 29th March 2001 by a presidential decree.50 The project was supported by the most liberal factions in government and a fragment of civil society which promoted the idea that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission should serve as a model for the Serbian process of transitional justice.51 Although the idea had been vaguely divulged in the media, there had been no prior consultations within society nor public debate in relation to that subject.

Owing to differences of opinion among its instigators, the definition of the intentions and objectives of the Commission was problematic from the beginning, which led several eminent members to resign at the start. The task attributed to the Commission mainly consisted in elucidating the circumstances that led to the outbreak of the conflict and establishing a historical account that would give an explanation for the war, whereas the questions of atrocities and war crimes were secondary. While there was certainly a genuine will to come to terms with the legacy of Miloševica’s regime on the part of the most liberal faction in the new government, the Commission turned out to be a political tool for appeasing the pressure of the Hague Tribunal and consolidating the nationalist narrative in Serbia.

50 Dejan Ilica, ‘Jugoslovenska Komisija za Istinu i Pomirenje 2001–?’ (The Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 2001–?), Rech, 73/19 (2005), p. 53–79 51 Alex Boraine, the vice chair of the South African Commission, became the special adviser in matters of truth and reconciliation to Vojislav Koštunica, who was then President of Yugoslavia. (Ilica, p.61)

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The Commission was thus not intended to rehabilitate the victims, nor to establish the facts and promote truth-telling regarding war crimes. Neither did it have the competency to carry out such a task, as Yugoslav jurisdiction did not empower it to summon witnesses to testify. In addition to that, most of the actors in the conflict lived outside the boundaries of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which comprised only Serbia and Montenegro. Generally speaking, the project was discredited from the beginning as it did not involve the other communities affected by the conflict.

This explains why the Commission did not move from its starting-point during the two years of its pointless existence. The Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was extinguished in 2003 through the transformation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.

Several conclusions must be drawn from this unsuccessful experience. First of all, a Commission aspiring to promote reconciliation in the region should involve in that project all the parties affected by the conflict. It seems pointless that a Serbian institution should seek to establish the truth about conflicts that took place in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo without involving the respective communities. Some authors argue that a Serbian Commission could be viable if it dealt exclusively with the atrocities committed by the Serb side.52 Others consider that it should only focus on the crimes that occurred in Serbia, as most of the Serb offenders and their victims live outside the boundaries of the country, notably in Bosnia.53 In that case, a Commission could have been envisaged to address the wrongs committed by Miloševica’s regime in Serbia with the aim of promoting societal reconciliation. Vojin Dimitrijevica, from the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, dismisses this option as he considers that political and societal reconciliation in Serbia has already been achieved through amnesia.54 Secondly, in order to be successful, the Commission should focus exclusively on the violations of human rights and war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the nineties.55 Apart from being a colossal task, a historical enquiry into the origins of the conflict bears the risk of politicizing a very sensitive issue. The work of the Commission should consist in establishing the facts in order to rehabilitate the victims and inform the wider public. Such work is badly needed in order to impede denial of past atrocities and dissipate the doubts resulting from contestation of the most basic facts. As Drinka Gojkovica argues, it is crucial to move away from aggressor/aggressed hindsight and acknowledge the suffering of all the victims in order to make reconciliation possible.56 This leads to a last suggestion, which is that the initiative for the creation of the Commission should come from the region and that this institution must benefit 52 Nenad Dimitrijevica, ‘Suochavanje s lošom prošlošchu: treba li Srbiji i Crnoj Gori Komisija za Istinu?’

(Coming to terms with a bad past: Does Serbia and Montenegro need a Truth Commission?), Rech, 71/17 (2003), 65–83 53 Vojin Dimitrijevica, ‘Izgledi za utvrœivanje istine i postizanje pomirenja u Srbiji’ (The Prospects of Establishing the Truth and Achieving Reconciliation in Serbia), Rech, 62/8 (2001), 69–74 54 ibid., p.74 55 Ilica, p. 68 56 Interview with Drinka Gojkovica, Director of the Dokumentacioni Centar [Ratovi 1991–1999], on 25.06.2006

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from the political support of all the parties involved in the conflict. Such a process can hardly be instigated from abroad as it relies on the cooperation, goodwill and understanding of all the participants. Although the international community has been to some extent successful in enforcing retributive justice through the work of the ICTY, it would certainly not be able to carry out such a project that requires the active engagement of the actors from the region. As we have discussed earlier, the feeble repercussions of the ICTY in Serbian society are one of the major weaknesses in the work of the Hague Tribunal. Furthermore, such an institution cannot be a mere imitation of models adopted abroad. The specificity of the post-Yugoslav context, in which the affected communities live separated from each other, requires the design of a mechanism adapted to the situation. In this light, it is essential to engage in consultations with the public and seek a broad consensus regarding the structure and objectives of this institution before taking any further steps.

These same issues are currently at stake in Bosnia, where an initiative for creating a truth commission at the national level has been instigated by foreign NGOs in cooperation with the government, without involving the wider public.57 Such proceedings carry the risk of repeating the mistakes of the Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, once again compromising an institution that might be valuable once the conditions for its proper implementation are met.

The role of civil society Considering that the unawareness or denial of past atrocities is widespread and that there are no institutional mechanisms designed to establish the truth and make it known to the wider public, the task of enabling Serbian society to come to terms with its past is relegated to the civic sector. The role of civil society in transitional justice processes has already been assessed by various authors. In this section, I rely on the frameworks established by Crocker58 and Backer59 to discuss the contributions of Serbian civil society to the process of transitional justice, especially in its restorative dimension.

The civic sector is one of the major strengths of Serbia in the hard task of facing the past.60 First of all, it has a relatively long tradition as most of the influential NGOs and independent media acting in that field were created at the beginning of the conflicts of Yugoslav secession. Therefore, they could follow up the events on a regular basis and represented a valuable source of information in the darkest times of the Miloševica regime. In the absence of official evidence, the NGOs play a crucial role in collecting data and creating a historical record that is concrete and thus hard to dismiss as unsubstantiated. As Backer argues, ‘such contemporaneous evidence

57

Hodžica Refik, ‘Kontroverze “Dejton projekta”’(The Controversy of the ‘Dayton Project’), Pravda u Tranziciji, 4 (2006), 22–24 58 David A. Crocker, ‘Transitional Justice and International Civil Society: Toward a Normative Framework’, Constellations, 5 (1998), 492–517 59 David Backer, ‘Civil Society and Transitional Justice: Possibilities, Patterns and Prospects’, Journal of Human Rights, 2 (2003), 297–313 60 Speech given by Bob Reid, deputy chief of investigations at the ICTY, at the conference ‘Prijedor 1992: Beyond any Doubt’ organised by the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade on 24.06.2006 in Belgrade.

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is indispensable given that memories fade and vital corroborating witnesses may no longer be available.’61 In Serbia, such a task has been carried out by the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) which has opened a ‘Documentation and Research Centre’ comprising a war crimes database, a primary documentations archive, a video archive of the ICTY trials and an archive for The Hague trials transcripts.62 In a similar vein, the Documentation Centre [Wars 1991–1999] has published a series of testimonies of first-hand protagonists in the Bosnian and Croatian wars, including combatants and victims from all three communities.63 Besides data collection and documentation, NGOs in Serbia play a major role in promoting public acknowledgement of past atrocities and exerting pressure on the authorities in order to generate political recognition. In that sense, Serbian civil society rather corresponds to the public sphere model aiming to advance debate in society, and thus support the formation of public opinion which is a necessary component of democracy.64 This is primarily done through the organization of seminars and conferences seeking to allow for truth-telling. The HLC has, for example, organized three conferences in cooperation with the Outreach Programme of the ICTY in order to present the facts established by the Hague Tribunal to the wider public.65 Each conference included the testimony of the victims, emphasizing the importance of truth-telling and mourning as suggested by restorative justice.

Similarly, the Centre for Non-violent Action has organized seminars entitled ‘Four Views’, in which people who took part in the war on opposite sides expressed their views and experiences.

The NGO campaign also includes the production of documentary movies and the organization of provocative public actions, such as the exhibition of billboards, organized by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the massacre, reminding the Belgrade residents about Srebrenica.66 As previously mentioned, the broadcast of the footage on Srebrenica was one of the most important media actions undertaken by civil society. Several NGOs joined to form a lobby group named G8 that initiated the parliamentary debate regarding the adoption of a draft declaration on Srebrenica in June 2005. The initiative was eventually turned down owing to the lack of consensus, but it led to the Serbian President Boris Tadica symbolically attending the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. This is perceived as civil society’s most salient success in terms of public impact, as it has instigated discussion about past atrocities, an issue that was until then barred from political life.

In parallel, civil society plays an important role in assisting, monitoring and evaluating the government’s activities67. For example, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights provides legal aid and expertise to victims and advocates the respect 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Backer, p. 302 HLC, Transitional Justice Report, p. 24 See People in War Edition (Belgrade: Documentation Centre [Wars 1991–1999], 2003) Crocker, p. 502 Interview with Nataša Kandica, Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, on 21.07.06 Interview with Ivan Stojanovica, YIHR program coordinator, on 10.07.2006 Crocker, p. 506

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of the rule of law in Serbia. The HLC has amply contributed to the domestic war crimes trials by providing representation and psychological support for the victims.

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights publishes yearly reports on the situation of human rights in the country.68 The NGOs also have a crucial function in deliberating, formulating and prioritizing new goals in the transitional process.69 In this light, the Belgrade Circle has a didactic mission aiming to instigate reflection about the principles of transitional justice and their adoption at the local level.70 Several organizations are working on the promotion of restorative justice, which suggests that such a mechanism could be established some day. Two parallel initiatives should be highlighted in this respect.

On the one hand, the HLC is organizing conferences in cooperation with organizations from Bosnia and Croatia in order to discuss what kind of mechanism should be envisaged at the regional level.71 This project derives from the initiative of the Bosnian authorities to create a Truth Commission, as discussed earlier. As the Bosnian government did not undertake any public consultations in relation to this issue, this group of NGOs decided to instigate public debate by organizing conferences among all the affected communities. At another level, the Victimology Society is striving to create a forum which would bring together organizations from different backgrounds, such as for example human rights organizations, associations of veterans, or refugee groups at the level of Serbia.72 The objective is to enable discussion to take place between different parties which are all concerned by transitional justice, but often act at odds with each other.

Indeed, one of the main weaknesses of civil society is that it is often disunited,73 and the Serbian case is not an exception in that respect. The visions of the various organizations amply differ regarding how reconciliation should be approached.

While some argue that Serbia must first recognize its role as aggressor, and above all acknowledge the other victims, in order to enable normalization to take place, others affirm the need for mutual acknowledgement and departure from aggressors/aggressed discourses. Several of the most influential NGOs are widely criticized for being too radical in their requirements and aggressive in their proceedings, an attitude that has produced opposition and distrust towards civil society among the population. According to Todor Kuljica, Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Belgrade, the pragmatic culture of memory exclusively focused on criticism of Serbian nationalism is often interpreted as masochism because there is no synchronized criticism of the nationalisms in the neighbouring countries. This is due to the conception that each community should face its own responsibility, which can only be viable if this takes place in all countries at the same time, and if the public is kept informed of these processes. Moreover, there is an impression that the process of coming to terms with the past cannot be instigated by the mere 68 69 70 71 72 73

See the website of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia on www.helsinki.org.yu Crocker, p. 503 Interview with Obrad Savica, Director of the Belgrade Circle, on 17.07.2006 Interview with Nataša Kandica, Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, on 21.07.06 Interview with Vesna Ristanovica-Nikolica, Director of the Victimology Society of Serbia, on 21.07.06 Crocker, p. 507

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pressure of civil society. Instead of having a rigid strategy of provoking the public by simply showing footages or other materials, civic organizations need to adopt a dynamic approach that would permit the initiation of debates in which the public would be actively involved.

On the other hand, those initiatives seeking to bring together the disagreeing groups are accused of collaborating in the government’s effort to lessen the importance of past atrocities. The divisions in civil society often reflect those on the political scene, which may be indicative of an over-politicization of the activities of NGOs and voluntary associations. According to Backer, this occurs when there is a big gap between government and civil society, which results in the marginalization of the latter.75 This situation has significant negative effects as it compromises the ability of the NGOs to operate as ostensibly autonomous and non-partisan bodies, and deprives society of these key intermediaries between government and the general population. This is certainly the case in Serbia, where the government is rather hostile towards NGOs dealing with human rights and past atrocities. Indeed, these organisations are constantly subject to intimidation and harassment organized by the nationalist and conservative parties, which are very influential in both the assembly and government.76 The persecution campaign oriented towards `anti-Serb organizations’ was more than ever exacerbated by the broadcast of the footage and the declaration on Srebrenica presented to the parliament by the NGOs, as mentioned earlier.

The marginalization of these organizations is their biggest restriction. Isolation renders civil society too inwardly-oriented.77 At the conference presenting the findings of the ICTY in the case of the atrocities committed in Prijedor, Sonja Biserko pointed out that while Serbian NGOs are very active, their scope is often narrowly limited to the activists participating in these associations.78 This is mostly due to the lack of coverage of their activities in the media, especially those sponsored by the State, which reduces considerably their impact on the public sphere.

Under these circumstances, civil society can hardly assume on its own the task of making Serbia face its past. However, by operating bottom-up, it is a major factor for change that could enable Serbia to complete its transition process someday.

Conclusion This paper addresses the lack of public engagement in the process of transitional justice in Serbia. It first embarks on a theoretical discussion about the objectives of transitional justice at the societal level, arguing that public reckoning with past atrocities is necessary for the development of a liberal democracy. In that respect, it is essential to promote a public debate and initiate a critical examination of the past

74

Interview with Drinka Gojkovica, Director of the Dokumentacioni Centar [Ratovi 1991–1999], on 25.06.2006 75 Backer, p. 308 76 HLC, Transitional Justice Report, pp. 16–18 77 Crocker, p. 508 78 Conference organised by the Humanitarian Law Centre and the ICTY Outreach Programme, “Prijedor 1992: Beyond any Doubt”, Belgrade 24.06.2006

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in order to foster democratic values and allow for the development of a coherent collective memory.

The capacity of trials and truth commissions to meet these goals is subsequently assessed. While trials are essential for establishing individual responsibility and punishing the wrong-doers, truth commissions are a far better tool for enabling truth-telling and public engagement to take place. Indeed, restorative justice allows for reflection on the past and raises issues of public morality that are omitted by trials.

The evidence from the Serbian case corroborates those theoretical findings.

Although they are playing a crucial role in (re-)establishing the rule of law in the region, the retributive mechanisms embodied in the ICTY and the domestic war crimes trials have not facilitated public acknowledgement of past atrocities. As previously set out, these trials did not allow for the stigmatization of the former regime, nor did they promote truth-telling that could have generated public debate and potentially raised questions of public collusion and responsibility. Hence, unawareness and denial of atrocities committed in the name of the Serb nation remain widespread both at the political and societal levels.

At the same time, there are no institutional mechanisms to counterbalance this tendency. The Yugoslav Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was certainly not meant to accomplish this task, as its principal function was to provide a historical account of the disintegration of Yugoslavia from a Serbian perspective. In order to be viable, such an institution should be of a regional nature and ought to deal primarily with human rights violations committed during the conflicts of Yugoslav secession. Furthermore, a truth commission would be conceivable only if there were political support and public consent for its creation among all the communities concerned. Owing to the fact that none of these conditions are fulfilled, the formal establishment of restorative justice structures may never take place in the region.

In those circumstances, the task of enabling society to come to terms with the past is relegated to the civil sector. Although marginalized by authorities that are hostile to human rights organizations and neglected by the media, civil society contributes in many ways to advancing the process of transitional justice in Serbia. Considering the magnitude of the task, the struggle is bound to continue for the foreseeable future.

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

Memory and Identity in Dubravka Ugrešica’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender Michele Simeon University of Helsinki Dubravka Ugrešica’s 1996 novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a firstperson narrative of wartime displacement. Although it has been referred to as disjointed in its structure, the novel gradually reveals a unity of motifs, themes, and form. Central to this marriage of construct and topic are the themes of memory and identity. This article examines the way in which Ugrešica accomplishes an integration of the nature and interaction of memory and identity in the novel’s theme and structure. In addition to a close analysis of the primary text, the article draws upon scholarship from the field of memory research, secondary criticisms of the text, relevant literary works, as well as a topical interview conducted with the author.

Dubravka Ugrešica is a Croatian scholar, translator, and writer currently living and working in the Netherlands. As a result of her anti-nationalistic stance during the breakup of Yugoslavia, Ugrešica became a target of media hostility and eventually chose voluntary exile from her native country. Nevertheless, she remains among the most prestigious contemporary writers of the former Yugoslavia, and has been awarded several regional and international literary prizes.

As Celia Hawkesworth has pointed out, Ugrešica’s work can be divided into two phases (with the exception of her latest work Thank You for Not Reading): before the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia and after.1 Whilst Ugrešica’s pre-war books focus largely on issues of genre, writing, and the literary world, her succeeding works retain her distinctive metafictional approach, but embrace new material: war and displacement.

Completed in 1996, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a poignant novel set during the collapse of Yugoslavia. This first-person narrative of a life interrupted by war is presented as a collection of episodes and seemingly disjointed memories.

Remembrance and oblivion and their influence on identity lie at the heart of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Ugrešica’s exiled, ex-Yugoslav narrator struggles in her journey from her divided home country to the foreign city of Berlin in an attempt to make sense of her circumstances.

1

Celia Hawkesworth, ‘Croatian Women Writers, 1945–95’, in A History of Central European Women’s Writing, ed. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Palgrave Publishers, 2001) p. 271.

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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I am in Berlin, I am pursued by two nightmares around which like large spools I am winding the taut threads of my life. The name of one is home, the one I no longer have, and the name of the other is wall, the one which has sprung up in my lost homeland. In Berlin I often stretch up to invisible observation posts and vaguely shake my fist in the direction of the south. In nightmare dreams, I build a home which is always destroyed anew.2

The novel addresses the difficulty of creating a narrative that explains who one is and where one comes from when the basic signifiers of identity have been demolished. The foundation of identity, as expressed in the novel, is memory; Ugrešica simultaneously demonstrates its crucial role in forming our personal narratives whilst questioning its reliability. The interplay of memory and identity is dealt with both thematically and structurally in the novel. As a theme, memory is portrayed as a vital, yet terrible, force which creates a point of reference, or, when absent, a void of oblivion.

The formal and topical coherence of the seemingly disjointed narrative is gradually and persuasively demonstrated through the unity of its motifs, themes and structure. Intertextual references concurrently complement major themes such as autobiography and Berlin, whilst self-consciously drawing attention to the novel as a construct. The novel’s interior allusions strengthen the potency of its many motifs, notably angels, and create an internal framework of references and symbols. In this way, Ugrešica challenges the competence of the reader’s own memory, forcing him to recall where and even if such references have occurred in the text, thereby addressing the topic of memory in the novel’s very composition.

In examining the themes of memory and identity, we will discuss not only the act of telling one’s own story or the autobiography, but also the destructive effects of war and displacement on memory and people’s understanding of themselves, as well as the way in which the structure of the novel reflects and details these topics.

In his book On Stories, Richard Kearney discusses the human compulsion towards storytelling as a means for explaining ourselves and understanding the world around us.

When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations. You interpret where you are now in terms of where you have come from and where you are going to. And so doing you give a sense of yourself as a narrative identity [. . .].3

The complexities posed by forming a coherent narrative identity are central to The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. In the second part of the novel, ‘Family museum’, the story of the narrator’s mother is pieced together and interwoven with the protagonist’s own anecdotes and reflections. Through the mother’s tale the narrator attains a heightened understanding of her own history.

2

Dubravka Ugrešica, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Phoenix, 1998) p. 147. All further references are from this edition and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

3 Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.

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‘Family museum’ begins with a section called ‘The poetics of the album’, which attempts to impose order and meaning into a sundry sequence of memories and scrutinizes the way in which we, as a whole, achieve this order. Ugrešica uses the motif of albums and photographs as a physical representation of those memories that make up our personal histories.

The beginning of this story is hidden in a lady’s pigskin bag, which she had brought with her, along with the suitcase of modest contents in that far-off year of 1946. As soon as the first (post-war) opportunity permitted her to buy a new lady’s bag, the old one settled in the corner of the wardrobe and from that moment on served as a storehouse for memories. (pp. 15–16)

Using her mother’s albums, which ‘revived before my eyes an everyday life I had forgotten,’ (p. 24) as a foundation, the narrator goes on to seek an understanding of the role artifacts such as photographs play in our memories. This understanding is not easily reached, and the narrator questions the benefit of having documentary evidence of past events which, whilst helping us to remember in turn dictate our memories.

During one trip abroad I bought a cheap automatic camera [. . .]. After some time I looked through the photographs and established that the scenes I had photographed were all I remembered of that journey. I tried to remember something else, but my memories stayed tenaciously fixed on the contents of the photographs. (p. 26)

Ugrešica’s narrator then compares the act of compiling a photo album to that of writing an autobiography, thereby making a self-conscious and ironic allusion to the content of the novel. This is especially noteworthy as many of the details within the novel bear a striking resemblance to the author’s own experiences.

Similar references are prevalent in other works of fiction; discussing her earlier novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness, Hawkesworth writes that ‘[t]he body of the work is set within two sets of ‘diary’ entries which contain enough autobiographical detail to convince the reader that they refer to the author.’4 Ugrešica herself adds the following: Both the album and autobiography are by their very nature amateur activities, doomed from the outset to failure and second-rateness. That is, the very act of arranging pictures in an album is dictated by our unconscious desire to show life in all its variety, and as a consequence life is reduced to a series of dead fragments. (p. 31)

It is, perhaps, for this reason, the reduction of life ‘to a series of dead fragments’, that it is crucial for the mother’s story to be voiced through a different medium. Much like the novel, the autobiography is deliberately constructed by the author to frame the story in a specific, calculated manner. Conversely, the diary represents a true embracement of the everyday and seemingly insignificant events that construct our worldly existence, and hence embodies a more authentic depiction of life.

4

Hawkesworth, Celia, ‘Dubravka Ugrešica: the Insider’s Story’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 68 (1990), p. 446.

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In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the narrator reaches beyond the resurrection of her own story to include that of her mother, who similarly found herself in the context of war and emigration (though unlike ‘Bubi’, the mother’s nickname for the narrator, one did not come as a result of the other). Presenting the diary of her mother within her own story, the narrator shows deference for her family history and recognizes the interplay of individual narratives. Beginning with seemingly unedited extracts of her mother’s diary, the narrator then confesses to her interference as editor and incorporator of her mother’s story into her own. This is followed by a powerful section in which the mother’s musings and observations are at once juxtaposed and complemented by quotations from renowned literary figures.

‘I sometimes think I have forgotten everything. Why does a person live at all if he forgets everything anyway?’ asks my mother.

‘Memory betrays everybody, especially those whom we knew best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. It is a fishnet with a very small catch and with the water gone. You can’t use it to reconstruct anyone, even on paper. What’s the matter with all those millions of cells in our brain? What’s the matter with Pasternak’s “Great god of love, great god of details”? On what number of details must one be prepared to settle?’ says Joseph Brodsky. (p. 55)

Integrating the mother’s diary into the novel and pairing it with published works elevates the writings of an ordinary woman to the status of literature, pointing to an appreciation of the poetry in everyday existence.

Danilo Kiš, to whom Ugrešica has been compared, also directly utilized autobiographical material in his writing, most notably in what is sometimes referred to as his ‘family cycle’, the three novels Garden, Ashes, Early Sorrows, and Hourglass. In these novels we again encounter the importance of personal and family history, of understanding where we come from and the delicate intertwining of our identities with others, particularly our parents. Kiš’s novels seek to unravel the mystery of an absent father: in Garden, Ashes, Andreas Šam (like Kiš himself) loses his father to a Second World War concentration camps. In one passage, Andreas struggles to understand what will become of his story in the absence of his father: Ever since my father vanished from the story, from the novel, everything has come loose, fallen apart. His mighty figure, his authority, even his very name, were sufficient to hold the plot within fixed limits, the story that ferments like grapes in barrels, the story in which fruit slowly rots, trampled underfoot, crushed by the press of memories, weighted down by its own juices and by the sun.5

In the aftermath of war, when borders and nations are redefined and national history is reinterpreted, both Ugrešica and Kiš seem to look with urgency to their family history to restore an otherwise absent (or at least broken) continuity. In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, the mother’s story as well as the narrator’s childhood reminiscences take up most of the second part of the novel, but these 5

Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes, trans. by William J. Hannaher (London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975), p. 147.

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memories fail to appear later. Like the childhood memories depicted in Garden, Ashes and Early Sorrows, they herald that early period of life when a child’s identity is hardly separate from its parents’.

Though Kiš commented frequently on his use of autobiographical material, even going so far as to refer to Eduard Šam (or E. Š.), the father in his family cycle, as his own father,6 Ugrešica is wary of any attempts to categorize her writing as autobiographical. The opening page of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender confronts the reader with instructions on how to approach the book and, perhaps more importantly, how not to approach it. ‘And one more thing: the question as to whether this novel is autobiographical might at some hypothetical moment be of concern to the police, not to the reader.’ (p. 3) Ugrešica thus discredits any attempt to read the novel as an autobiography, and challenges the reader’s likely curiosity as to whether the novel is, in fact, ‘based on a true story.’

Nevertheless, autobiography remains a major theme of the novel, and it is no secret that at least the outline of events within the novel bears some relation to the course of the author’s life. In an interview with Ugrešica in April 2004, I questioned her about the seemingly autobiographical content of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, how she hoped it would be interpreted, and why she had chosen to warn readers at the novel’s start not to read it as autobiography. She responded that: It is not possible to tell truthful stories because you yourself don’t know what is true. Your memory is weak. You do not remember. And even if you do, what part of it do you remember? So there is no autobiography, there is no truth. There are fragments, there are pieces, which then artistically are transformed, but any other piece of material could be equally transformed.7

Referring again to the ‘diary entries’ in Fording the Stream of Consciousness, Hawkesworth states that ‘[. . .] they serve to remind the reader of the arbitrary origins of fictitious material, the tenuous boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and to ensure that the work itself never loses that self-consciousness and self-deprecation that are its engaging hallmarks.’8 This observation can be extended to The Museum of Unconditional Surrender in which Ugrešica’s conscious flirtation with the border between fact and fiction, real and imagined memories compels the reader to question where this distinction lies.

An appreciation of the link between memory and identity is by no means recent.

Resisting Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum, John Locke’s 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding claims that the substance of human identity lies in what we are able to remember of our past. According to Locke: [. . .] it is plain, consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended, should it be to ages past, unites existence and actions, very remote in time, into the same person, as well as it does the existence and actions of the immediately preceding moment: so that

6

Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. by Susan Sontag (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996) p. 214.

7 Dubravka Ugrešica. (2004) Interview with the author on April 1st and 3rd, 2004. [Cassette recording in possession of author].

8 Hawkesworth, ‘Dubravka Ugrešica’, p. 446.

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whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions is the same person to whom they both belong.9

Locke states that the converse is true of what we forget. That is, our identities do not consist of what is forgotten.10 Fifty years later, David Hume supported Locke’s association of memory with identity, but also viewed memory as a means by which we comprehend causation, thereby establishing a continuity between that which we certainly remember and that which (according to what we remember) therefore must have occurred. ‘In this view, therefore,’ writes Hume ‘memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by showing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions.’11 Hume’s claim is echoed in the structure of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, which features a fragmented, temporally and spatially discontinuous narration. The basic structure of the novel is such that time alternates between the present and past with each part; the four odd numbered parts of the novel, all with German titles, are written in the present tense and comprise smaller, numbered sections. The numbered sections impose a seemingly artificial order on the myriad of reflections, quotations, anecdotes, and character sketches that make up the present-tense, ‘German’ parts of the novel. Sandwiched between these are the second, forth and sixth parts, all with Croatian headings. These parts comprise of longer, past-tense narratives, but feature a similar metafictionality demonstrated in the author’s employment of intertextuality as well as integrated styles, subjects, and motifs.

Ugrešica’s liberal amalgamation of genres causes sections of the novel to verge on memoir, diary, travel writing, and magic realism. The juxtaposition of these different genres effectively undermines the validity of each, which in turn creates an often playful tone that allows potentially sentimental topics to be dwelt upon with neither sentimentality nor cliché. This experimentation and playfulness, this defamiliarization, simultaneously challenges our views of literary genres, adds comic relief and lends the novel what would be an otherwise unattainable depth.

Let us take the sixth part of the novel, ‘Group photograph’, as an example. ‘Group photograph’ deals with the devastation of individual lives and relationships in the context of war. It begins with a blank, failed photograph and a reminiscence of the image that should have been visible. Seven friends of the narrator are introduced, and we follow their lives from the evening the photograph was taken, which coincides with the breakout of war in the former Yugoslavia. An ostensibly straightforward description of a dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of an angel. This fantastical turn of events gives the narrator creative licence to make sense of the incomprehensible, to create an alternate reality by means of storytelling.

By naming the angel Alfred, after the unfortunate angel sent to earth to provide sexual pleasure for a wanton cleaning lady in Isaak Babel’s ‘The Sin of Jesus’, Ugrešica at once pays homage to Babel and resurrects and modernizes his characters. Alfred is not the first angel to appear in the text (though he certainly is the most explicit and

9

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1998) p. 218. ibid, p. 220.

11 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Book One (London: Collins, 1962) p. 311.

10

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obvious occurrence of one), as allusions to angels form an initially subtle motif that gradually progresses into the fantastical personage of Alfred, the angel of oblivion.

The first notable appearance of an angel is the mother’s budgie: Every time she went to the shelter, she would take with her . . . a cage containing her budgerigar! [. . .] The whole of her — who no longer knew who she was, or where she was or whose she was — was wrapped with her last breath around that tiny caricature of an angel. Faced with possible death she carried into the shelter just two things: her identity card and her budgie, a little replica angel [. . .]. (pp. 58–59)

More angels appear in the fourth part of the novel, ‘Archive: six stories with the discreet motif of a departing angel’. Among these angels are Lucy, who resembles a frail, pathetic, winged creature (and whose surname means ‘little wing’), Uma who has feather in the place of pubic hair, and a male prostitute with wing scars on his back. ‘I saw myself approaching him from behind, passing my tongue over the edges of his shoulder blades, following the path of two small mother-of-pearl scars, one on each shoulder blade, I saw myself moistening with my own compassionate saliva the place where, until recently, there had been wings . . .’ (p. 163). Once the audience encounters Alfred, a fantastic but ‘real’ angel, in ‘Group photograph’, the motif is encountered at the climax of its development rather than as an isolated flight of the imagination.

Here, those same metafictional aspects of the book which impart an ironic wit and charm emphasize its actual seriousness and sincerity. In recounting the story that tells who a person is and where he comes from, Ugrešica is acutely aware that a linear, realist approach is insufficient. Hence, the conclusion seems to be that we largely create our own meaning, that the fortuitous events that make up our lives and memories are bound by us (in photo albums, in biographies, in museums) to form a coherent order that comes to represent our personal story.

Nevertheless, Ugrešica is aware that physical mementos, such as the blank photograph, are not necessarily the substance of memory. Despite possessing photographs in abundance, the narrator’s mother is distressed by how little of her life she is able to recall. Ugrešica’s frequent and repeated allusions and motifs bear testament to these characteristics of remembrance by apparently playing with the audience’s own memory. This forces the reader to contemplate the context and occasion of the repetition in the novel, thus making a connection between the past and the present. In this way, the structure of the novel endeavors to form a microcosm of the pattern of human remembrance by creating an interconnected trail of memories. As Hume asserts that we discover personal identity by understanding the relation between the cause and effect of our perceptions, Ugrešica causes the reader to realize a meaningful, complete story from the fragments presented.

In Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel considers the impact of memory in shaping our identities, as well as the relationship between memory and history. [. . .] Memory so far from being merely a passive receptacle or storage system, an image bank of the past, is rather an active, shaping force [. . .] is dynamic — what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important as what it remembers — and

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[. . .] it is dialectically related to historical thought, rather than being some kind of negative other to it.12 [. . .] Memory is historically conditioned, changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of the moment; that so far from being handed down in the timeless form of ‘tradition’ it is progressively altered from generation to generation.13

The link between memory and history is particularly pertinent to the post-war context, when nations and people, perhaps more actively than ever, recall and mould their experiences to augment history dynamically. Samuel explains that there has been an emphasis on visual matter since the proclaimed beginnings of the study of memory in Ancient Greece.14 The visual stimuli around us — houses, schools, churches — that mark our sense of home and belonging are what Samuel refers to as a ‘mnemonic landscape’.15 It is precisely this landscape that is so often left devastated in the aftermath of war, destroying the everyday reminders of who and where we are. Consequently, the narratives of those without a physical mnemonic reference point, such as refugees and exiles, as well as those living in war-torn areas, must be constructed from intangible recollections.

The centrality of war in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is manifold; it is the true core of the novel out of which other themes arise and are derived, it bridges the generation gap between the narrator and her mother, it validates the spatial and temporal disparity between Berlin and Yugoslavia, the Second World War and the recent war in the Balkans, and it is the reason for the narrator’s displacement.

This context renders Berlin, a city itself once shattered and divided by war, a thematically appropriate setting for the writer seeking refuge from the aggression in her own country. The outcome is that Ugrešica successfully compels war, the underlying cause of the break in her own personal narrative, to act as the creative force of her novel.

In his article ‘Narrations of Post-Yugoslav Identities’, Stefan Jansen asserts that ‘in many ways, the war that tore Yugoslavia apart was precisely a war about the notion of “home,” and this notion was there at the beginning and the end of the war.’16 With the siege and systematic ruin of Sarajevo, the city that epitomized the Yugoslav ideal of national and ethnic diversity within the framework of bratstvo i jedinstvo, this polysemic ideal of home and belonging came to its tragic end. However, Ugrešica and her contemporary Slavenka Drakulica have both drawn attention to the significant minority of ex-Yugoslav citizens who refer to themselves first and foremost as Yugoslav.17 This sentiment became a controversial and highly charged political issue in the break up of Yugoslavia and its aftermath. ‘It is likely, 12

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994) pp. ix–x ibid., p. x.

14 ibid., pp. viii–ix.

15 ibid., pp. viii–ix.

16 Stefan Jansen. ‘Homeless at Home: Narratives of Post-Yugoslav Identities’, in Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, ed. by A. Dawson and N. Rapport (Oxford: Berg, 1998) p. 86.

17 ibid., p. 89 13

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therefore, that the question will remain as to what extent this idea of a Yugoslav “home” had taken root in people’s minds and hearts.’18 The narrator of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender certainly stands among those who call themselves Yugoslav, and in the novel Ugrešica attempts to make sense of coming from and linking one’s identity to a country that no longer exists.

The protagonist’s isolation from her cultural context is manifest in two ways: first, ill at ease in the newly formed Croatian state, she wishes to leave the country.

Relocation to Berlin finds her, predictably, no more at home. It is, for the most part, in the German-titled parts of the novel, ‘Ich bin müde’, ‘Guten Tag’, ‘Was ist Kunst?’, and ‘Wo bin ich?’, all of which appropriately are set in Berlin, that this problem of displacement is confronted. By including explicit references to an international community of artists, including many exiles, all of whom are in some way linked to Berlin, Ugrešica creates something of a nation and genealogy of homelessness in response to her protagonist’s feelings of dislocation.

86. ‘Berlin is hard to describe,’ wrote Viktor Shklovsky long ago.

‘That’s because in Berlin there’s more of what there’s not than what there is,’ says Bojana.

‘That’s because Berlin is a non-place,’ says Richard. (p. 231)

This technique mirrors that of the mother’s diary much to the same effect. Furthermore, the act of integrating the observations and memories of others into her own narrative can be interpreted as the author’s commentary on the extent to which our experiences are individual. This can be further applied to the act of writing and creating itself, as in the fifth part of the novel ‘Was ist Kunst?’. Here the question ‘What is art?’ is posed to a number of people, none of whom can offer a definitive answer: 61. ‘Was ist Kunst?’ I ask a colleague.

‘Art is the endeavour to defend the wholeness of the world, the secret connection between all things . . . Only true art can assume a secret connection between the nail on my wife’s little finger and the earthquake in Kobe,’ says my colleague. (p. 169) 76. ‘Was ist Kunst?’ I ask my neighbour Brigitte.

‘I don’t know. I always write my poems about something else, so as not to write about the first thing, just as I always paint something else, so as not to paint the first thing,’ says Brigitte. (p. 175)

In presenting this question to the reader, Ugrešica provides a number of answers that collaborate to form a collective response.

Also presented dialogically is the subject of collective memory in the wake of the Yugoslav war.

118. ‘[. . .] But if the country has disappeared, then so has collective memory. If the objects that surrounded us have disappeared, then so has memory of the everyday life that we lived. And besides, memory of the former country is tacitly forbidden.

And when the ban is one day lifted, everyone will forget . . . There’ll be nothing left to remember,’ I say.

18

ibid., p. 93

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‘Then everyone will remember something that never existed . . .’ says Mira.

‘I remember everything,’ says Zoran.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Gavrilovica meat pâté,’ he says.

‘I remember as well,’ says Mira.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘The first Yugoslav washing powder, Plavi Radion!’

‘I remember as well,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘The first Yugoslav television programme, Studio Uno with Mike Bongiorno and the Kessler sisters!’

‘There, that’s what I’ve been telling you all along. We’re all just walking museum exhibits . . .’ says Zoran. (pp. 243–244)

The sense of nostalgia in this passage becomes all the more powerful with the statement ‘memory of the former country is tacitly forbidden.’ Actual homecoming is impossible and in the wake of war even personal remembrance is proscribed. This has implications for both individual and collective memories, as people and nations are obliged to reconsider their past in light of the present and future. In her study The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym writes that Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.19

Boym’s statement embodies the sentiment expressed in the preceding passage.

But even, or perhaps especially, in light of the impossibility of return and the resulting perpetual displacement, the novel’s narrator refuses to disengage from her memories.

Whilst in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender the problem of homelessness is considered from the position of voluntary exile, in his story ‘Cactus’ Miljenko Jergovica confronts the dilemma from the perspective of one who decides to remain.

The decision whether to stay in a city under siege or to leave is the central theme of Jergovica’s collection of short stories Sarajevo Marlboro. The young protagonist of ‘Cactus’ is given the eponymous plant by his girlfriend, and it soon becomes a symbol of their love. As war descends on Sarajevo, the cactus remains in its place on a sunny window ledge, the protagonist retreats to his basement, and his girlfriend emigrates to New Zealand. Finding himself unable to leave with her, he emerges from the basement every five days to water the cactus.

One morning — it was day five — I woke to discover that all the water in the flat had frozen up. Only then did it occur to me that cacti have difficulty withstanding the cold. I took the plant downstairs and placed it in the cellar opposite the stove that we used to stoke with coal dust. Not too close, not too far away. In the precise spot that I reckoned would suit both a cactus and a human being. The next day it was drooping over the side of the pot [. . .] the tip was pointing downwards as if 19

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 8.

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the sun was under the ground. I watered the cactus for the last time but I realized it was too late.20

Caught in the turbulence of war, Jergovica’s characters who remain in the city do so with the memory of a place that is in the midst of destruction. Like Ugrešica’s protagonist, all of Jergovica’s characters experience a break in their stories: there is life before the war, and life since.

In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, life after the war additionally brings about a linguistic rupture for the narrator. Language is a recurrent theme in the novel: the difficulty of learning and communicating in a new language, distance from one’s native language context, as well as language as an artistic tool. As demonstrated by the titles of the different parts of the book, movement between languages signifies a movement between different worlds and different times.

The opening page of ‘Ich bin müde’ reveals the protagonist’s resistance to assimilate into a foreign environment by refusing to learn the language.

1. ‘Ich bin müde,’ I say to Fred. His sorrowful, pale face stretches into a grin. Ich bin müde is the only German sentence I know at the moment. And right now I don’t want to learn any more. Learning more means opening up. And I want to stay closed for a while longer. (p. 5)

Ugrešica cites the example of Joseph Brodsky who wrote his memoirs of growing up in the Soviet Union in English. ‘The reason lies partly also in good taste: passing through the filter of a foreign language, the invincible nostalgia of the genre acquired, instead of wetness, a fine, dry quality.’(p. 35) As a writer, Ugrešica is forced to confront the difficulty of language in terms of both art and identity. Language is the essential tool of our daily communication, a social and geographical indicator, and, crucially, language is the tool of the writer. Although Dubravka Ugrešica writes in her native Croatian, as an émigré she does this outside of her native language context. On questioning the author about this experience, Ugrešica keenly pointed out the enforced evolution of the Croatian language, explaining that her linguistic situation would not necessarily be more stable in Croatia. ‘My native language has changed. The Croatian language is changing.’21 The novel’s setting in Berlin is not a random indication of linguistic estrangement, but further contributes to the themes of collective memory and nostalgia. Ugrešica believes that Berlin was the perfect place to set the novel because it demonstrated to her, with its disposed memories of East Germany, what the former Yugoslavia would soon become. In The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Berlin is described as a city of exiles as well as one that is in fundamental and irreconcilable confusion and disarray; it is described as a city of chance and randomness with a significant, but obscured past.

59. Things in Berlin acquire the most various interconnections. Berlin is Teufelsberg, a walrus which has swallowed too many indigestible items. That is why one has to tread carefully in Berlin streets; without thinking the walker could step on someone’s roof. The asphalt is only a thin crust covering human bones. Yellow 20 21

Miljenko Jergovica, Sarajevo Marlboro, trans. by Stela Tomaševica (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 17.

Interview with Ugrešica.

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stars, black swastikas, red hammers and sickles crunch like cockroaches under the walker’s feet. (p. 169)

In the essay ‘The Confiscation of Memory’ in The Culture of Lies, Ugrešica compares East Germany and Yugoslavia: When chance brings them together — ex-Yugoslavs suddenly discover the charm of collective memory. Many are astonished at the realisation that ‘all that’ existed and disappeared ‘just like that’ without their even noticing. It occurs to some of them that the East German ‘Trabant’ is now a museum piece, while the Yugoslav ‘Ficao’ has simply disappeared and it never occurred to anyone to put it in a museum.22

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a novel of belonging and displacement, memory and identity. The narrator’s personal story unfolds in a chronologically and thematically fractured manner, which gradually reveals a text unified in both structure and theme. Jasmina Lukica writes that ‘[. . .] the loose structure of the novel is just a narrative device which signals to the reader how the text should be perceived. In this case, fragmented narration corresponds to the way in which displaced people perceive their realities.’23 The fragmented narration does indeed highlight the break in the narrator’s perception of her life as the result of the disintegration of her native country. However, it would be erroneous to describe the construction of the novel as ‘loose’. Rather, what may at first appear a disjointed work, is gradually revealed to be an intricately structured and cohesive piece with its major themes integrated within its very structure.

As its title suggests, though the novel despairs both the loss of individual memories and the destruction of collective memory in the former Yugoslavia, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender itself acts in opposition to this, creating something of a museum of collective memory. Even the most quotidian details, such as the Ficao, become relevant and evocative as bygone relics of a reality obliterated by war. As the dates of the narrator’s birth and departure from her native country correspond closely to the duration of the Yugoslav state, by collecting these details from her charaters’ memories, Ugrešica successfully weaves together a story that relates not only the life of one single person, but also that of an entire nation which no longer exists. In the words of Dubravka Ugrešica, ‘the only thing that guarantees us some sense is a story.’24

22

Dubravka Ugrešica, The Culture of Lies, trans. by. Celia Hawkesworth (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 232–233.

23 Jasmina Lukica, ‘Witches Fly High: The Sweeping Broom of Dubravka Ugrešica’ The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 7 (2000), p. 390.

24 Interview with Ugrešica.

Slovo, Vol. 19, No. 2, Autumn 2007

Reviews History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema. By Janina Falkowska, Andrzej Wajda:. Berghahn books: New York, Oxford, 2007, Hardback viii+340 pp. ISBN 1 84545 225 9 Janina Falkowska’s book on Andrzej Wajda is an attempt to cover all of the Polish film director’s creative work from his short fiction work in the early 1950s, while he was still in the Polish film school, to his last grand work made during the late 1990s.

The chapters follow the director’s professional biography through the decades: from his childhood and education in the 1930s and 1940s (chapter 1), through “the birth of a master” in the 1950s (chapter 2), or his thematization of politics, life and death with his films from 1970s (chapter 4), through to the “grande finale” in his productions from the 1990s (chapter 6). The book includes stills from every film, an extensive bibliography on, and filmography by Andrzej Wajda. Each chapter starts by discussing Wajda’s choice of screenplay or texts for adaptation. A rather detailed description of all the scenes follows, succeeded by a review of the professional and critical debates the film has given rise to, also including the response from various officials and notes on audience reception, collected from Wajda’s personal archive at the Manggha Centre in Krakow.

As we learn from the conclusion (p. 266) this study is an artistic biography, discussing the plots of the films, and their various themes. Falkowska singles out history and historic representations as one key theme among politics and nostalgia.

In the early career of the director (Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds) as well as in Landscape after Battle, Man of Marble, and the films concerned with Polish Jewry she follows extensively Wajda’s subversive cinematic gestures towards the tradition of heroics and romantic representations of the nation in Polish literary history. We learn how the representations in these films and their narrative strategies break with the socialist-realist canon and the more deeply rooted Polish culture traditions dominating cultural production in this period. However we fail to learn how Wajda was able to persuade the cultural administrations and editors at the studios to allow these seemingly risky projects.

Although the book is named “Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema”, the politics in and of cinema remain largely unquestioned with one notable exception. The political aspects of aesthetics become an explicit theme in Falkowska’s interpretation of Man of Marble, which is hardly to be credited to her, since memory, film-making and forms of representation appear in the focus of the film itself. The ways in which aesthetics reflect politics also vaguely show in her discussion of Wajda’s challenges to the romantic heroisation in the films from the beginning of his career. © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2007

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Falkowska dubs the controversial attitude of the highly educated Polish intelligentsia toward the volk and the countryside as ‘nostalgia’. She points out that similar nostalgic trends persist in intellectual debate from the end of 19th century onwards. The highly aesthetic cinematic rendering of the peasants’ world of beauty and simple life receives a good deal of attention in the chapters on The Birchwood, The Wedding, The Young Ladies of Wilko, A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents. Yet it remains unquestioned as to how this theme finds its way from the anxieties of the interwar period to Wajda’s work, why nostalgia alternates with the films of “moral concern”.

From the chapter organization of the book and its narrative, it becomes apparent that the guiding principle of this study is Andrzej Wajda’s talent and personality, rather than the historical conditions for his achievements and the complex process of making films. Therefore we observe one general fault in Falkowska’s interpretation which reoccurs throughout the book. Her critique slips into a romantic preconception of what art is and how it should be approached. She frequently uses the notions of the Polish soul, destiny, the Polish people, and nation claiming that the artist relishes a firm connection to the essences of Polishness. Therefore, giving a genuine expression to what it is to be Polish turns out to be a key mission for an artist of Wajda’s rank. In this way Falkowska glosses over the critical potential of Wajda’s films and makes more of a nationalist out of him than we would ever expect.

UCL Centre for European Studies

Marga Goranova

Az Elsó Katonai Felmérés (The First Military Survey), Erdély és a Temesi Bánság (Transylvania and Temes), DVD collection, Arcanum Kft, Budapest, 2005. A Második Katonai Felmérés (The Second Military Survey), A Magyar Királyság és a Temesi Bánság Nagyfelbontású, Színes Térképei (Colour Map Sections of the Kingdom of Hungary and Temes), DVD collection, Arcanum Kft, Budapest, 2005.

The DVD collection published by Arcanum Kft in association with Hadtörténeti intézet és Muzeum Térképtára (The Cartographical Section of the War History Museum and Institute in Budapest) provides the general public with fascinating insight into one of the essential instruments of Habsburg statecraft: military cartography.

The editorial team (Dr. Annamária Jankó, András Oross and Gábor Timár) have compiled a corpus containing detailed sections of the first two major Habsburg military land surveys. Volume one covers Transylvania and the Temeser Banat, charted as part of the Josephinian cartographic project of 1763-1785, the first comprehensive survey of the Habsburg Empire. The second volume, drawing on the post-Napoleonic survey initiated by Emperor Francis I and extending over a period of fifty years (1819-1869), contains maps of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Banat.

The technique employed for the digitization of this material does justice to the painstakingly detailed Habsburg maps, which zoom in to the level of individual

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house and garden and achieve a degree of accuracy that only present-day satellite maps can outdo. One can still walk into the odd Transylvanian Székely village and discover the same layout as that recorded by the Habsburg cartographers more than two hundred years ago. Each province is presented in the form of an interactive map, to which the editors have appended, as a very useful research tool, a comprehensive list of place names and their equivalents in Hungarian, German, Serbian and Romanian, as well as their current country location and a direct link to the corresponding sector on the general map. The value of this collection is enhanced by the synthetic maps offering a unitary view of the chronology of these land surveys and revealing potentially significant synchronies between geographically remote regions of the Empire.

As pointed out by the editors, these military maps were never intended for publication and for a long time constituted classified material. This was a practice that Prussian or French statesmen of the time were themselves no strangers to, and which prompts a necessary distinction between, on the one hand, the erratic, if enthusiastic, statistical and geographical information purveyed by various 18th-century dilettanti and travellers and, on the other hand, the methodical and professional official land surveys and statistics, which constituted vital input for the effective running of the state and, as such, secret information. This unprecedented effort at cartographical centralization testifies to the consolidation of the General Staff (der Generalstab), an elite institution representing the ultimate military authority and formed of highly skilled officers, who were in charge of the survey. This constitutes a significant difference from the traditional practice of relying on, more often than not unreliable, local authorities for cadastral information.

These considerations add to the importance of this cartographic material, whose accuracy derives from its function as a strategic instrument for military operations and defence purposes. If one, moreover, thinks of the fiscal use to which these maps were put at the time (the officers conducting the 18th-century military survey were, for instance, called in to supervise the tax survey initiated by Joseph II in Hungary and Transylvania in 1786-90), the precision of mapping taxable property (households, arable land etc.) cannot be doubted. As such, the elaborate cartographical information contained in this DVD collection can be brought to bear on contentious demographic issues such as the claim staked by Romanian historians that 18th-century authors (the polymath Francesco Griselini, for instance) tended to exaggerate the extent to which the Temeser Banat was depopulated in the early 18th century.

The only conceivable shortcoming of the present collection is the linguistic ‘Hobson’s choice’ the user is given. Although one can ostensibly opt for the language one is most comfortable in (Hungarian, German or English), this choice only refers to the introductory sections whereas the ample essays glossing on the historical coordinates of the survey are for the most part in Hungarian with no attempt at translation into either German or English. This, however, is just a minor quibble. The cartographical material in this electronic compilation is an invaluable reference work, which greatly facilitates academic research.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

Irina Marin

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Todor Zhivkov: Mit i istina (Todor Zhivkov: Myth and Truth). By Boyan Kastelov, Trud: Sofia, December 2005. 830 pp. (Paperback), ISBN 954 528 560 5.

Todor Zhivkov ruled Bulgaria for thirtry-three of the forty-five years that the country was under communism. When he was finally deposed in November 1989, Zhivkov became the scapegoat of his former sycophants, and the target of pent-up popular anger. By the mid-1990s, however, the pendulum of public opinion swung back. Post-communist chaos made some Bulgarians look back fondly upon their predictable lives under Zhivkov. The fallen dictator reveled in such nostalgia.

Spared the fate of his Romanian counterpart Ceaus, escu, he lived to give interviews from under house arrest, skirting uncomfortable questions and singing his own praises.

Since Zhivkov’s death (of natural causes) in 1998, invective and nostalgia have slowly given way to more dispassionate analyses. The latest effort, entitled Todor Zhivkov: Myth and Truth, aims at a sober assessment of the man and his times. The book opens with Zhivkov’s own CV, written in December 1945 to embellish the facts about his involvement in the underground partisan movement. As Zhivkov rose in party ranks, so did tales of his one-time partisan feats. Once Zhivkov was firmly in power in the 1960s, poets, sculptors and filmmakers competed to depict his youth in heroic poses. Claims about Zhivkov’s putative role against ‘monarcho-fascism’ were backed up by a letter that Zhivkov supposedly wrote to his comrades in June 1944. Kastelov shows the letter to be a forgery, as it follows orthographic rules adopted later.

In fact, Zhivkov’s youth was unremarkable. He worked as a printer, played backgammon in cafés, and occasionally ran low-risk errands for the communist party.

Some fellow communists distrusted him as an informer. Kastelov is sympathetic towards such suspicions, but he admits they cannot be substantiated.

After the war, Zhivkov outfoxed rivals who had greater competence and genuine antifascist credentials. Having barely finished high school and speaking a provincial dialect, Zhivkov remained self-conscious even at the height of power. He compensated by writing countless books through the use of ghostwriters. By Zhivkov’s own admission, he would share a few words with the ‘boys’ who returned with chapters or even quires (p. 154). The regime paid for the translation of these books in dozens of languages, from English (through Robert Maxwell) to Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe.

Zhivkov rode the wave of reform that followed Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist repression and ‘personality cult’. Before long, Zhivkov introduced a ‘personality cult’ of his own. Old photos were retouched to show Zhivkov as Georgi Dimitrov’s right hand man, just as Stalin had once airbrushed his rivals out of pictures with Lenin. Zhivkov reopened concentration camps, but over the years he came to rely on a mixture of promotions and enticements as well as threats and punishments.

In 1968, a pocket-format book named Chili Peppers featured epigrams and caricatures including a pig whose tail curled into Zhivkov’s signature. Accused of ‘pettybourgeois revisionism’ and ‘nihilism,’ the authors were summarily fired from their jobs. Censors ordered the book burned in the heating unit of the press. But in the rush, the chimney sucked up partially intact pages and scattered them, inspiring

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Hungarian poet László Nagy: Frozen in a puddle Two scorched pages tremble Like the wings of Phoenix (p. 486)

Kastelov draws on an astonishing variety of sources, both primary and secondary. Some of them are acknowledged in passing, but there is no bibliography. The book, Kastelov’s fourteenth, appears to have been written hastily, which would explain the chaotic organization and frequent slips. For example, in discussing Sofia’s relations with Washington, Kastelov repeatedly places the Oval Office on Capitol Hill (p. 638, 639, 671).

Kastelov puts some Zhivkov-era clichés in quotation marks but he uses others uncritically. Post-1989 tabloid jargon also seeps in unfiltered. Repetitive examples of banned plays and newspapers take up too much space, while Zhivkov’s mid-1980s campaign to force Slavic names on Bulgaria’s Turkish minority gets less than five pages out of nearly eight hundred. While recounting occasionally vivid episodes, Kastelov’s prose tries to make up in length what it lacks in depth. Fortunately, these flaws are more than offset by Iskra Baeva’s afterword. Terser, sharper and thoroughly footnoted, her contribution makes one regret that she did not write the entire book.

For all his megalomania, Zhivkov did retain a sense of humor. Kastelov finds this humor calculated and manipulative. But it was also one of Zhivkov’s few redeeming features. As early as 1964, the British ambassador described Zhivkov as a crook whose hearty laughter endeared him even to people who despised his policies (p. 659). Zhivkov liked to tell jokes, some in questionable taste, others to humiliate a helpless subordinate, but occasionally to poke fun at himself. Then came his characteristic laughter, terrifying those who wondered if the joke was a ‘provocation.’

Bulgaria has recovered from the economic collapse brought on by Zhivkov’s five year plans. Yet the country is still struggling with its communist legacy, personified by a man who often smiled — as shown on the book’s cover — but whose eyes rarely did (p. 711).

University of Oxford

Kalin Ivanov

Ceusc ismul: Romania Intre Anii 1965 sc i 1989 (Ceusc ismul: Romania Between 1965–1989).

By Serban Orescu Albatros: Bucharest, 2006, 330 pp ISBN: 973 87959 0 7 As the back-page description states, Serban Orescu’s book Ceusc ismul is an attempt to present a synthesis of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausc escu’s version of communism in its specific aspects, hence the title. Although the author has the credentials, this is not a scholarly work, rather more of a ‘guide to’ Ceausc escu’s communism and dictatorship. This aim is well suited by the organisation of the material in short chapters which address, in a concise and clear manner, a broad range of topics, for example the biographies of Nicolae Ceausc escu and his wife, the

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infamous Elena, the internal and external political success and failures of the dictator, his odd role within the communist block, the role of the ‘Securitatea’ (the Romanian communist secret service) and its highly corrupt nature, the struggle within the party and even within the close circle of the Ceausc escu’s clan, the transforming effects the dictatorship had on society, and the bloody revolution of December 1989, etc. However, the chapters do not follow chronological order or even topic, but each one acts as a short, partial insight, together weaving a panoramic view. Each chapter is suggestively titled, which is very helpful as there is unfortunately neither an index or bibliography.

For the most part the book is fairly well informed and referenced, but in the case of Ceausc escu’s crimes and personality there is much subjectivity. This is partly because of a lack of sources. As the author himself mentions, Ceausc escu used his position to destroy any evidence, and the Securitatea’s relevant files are still not available. As such, much of the information is gathered from the memoirs and interviews of persons who were in contact with the Ceausc escus, i.e. members of the communist party, foreign diplomats, and outside observers. The author himself worked for the Romanian section of “Radio Free Europe” since the late 70’s and being a keen critic of the regime, had some first hand encounters with the criminal Securitatea. As a result of the biased nature of some of the sources, of the high political and even personal sensitivity of the subject, and perhaps even for sensationalist purposes, the book sometimes reads like a novel by Balzac. Ceausc escu is even compared with Tanase Scatiu, a Romanian literary character epitomising the vanity, stupidity, vulgarity and cruelty of the Romanian parvenu. However, such were the times and deeds of Ceausc escu. Therefore, the book remains a fairly good source of information regarding the Ceausc escu’s dictatorship, gathering insightful facts, like for example that in its hunger for foreign cash the regime was selling Russian military equipment to the Americans, and the German ethnic minority of Romania to the then West Germany.

Although his anti-communism is made clear, most of the time the author proves a sober and astute interpreter. However, from time to time his bias leads him to some surprising remarks, for example, his suggestion that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a product of the Soviet system because he had access to Western books on political economy.

Interestingly, the book itself provides a view into the troubled Romanian postcommunist mentality in search of ‘normality’. Of peasant extraction, uprooted from his tradition and social place, uneducated, vulgar, cynical, power-hungry and full of vanity, Ceausc escu appears to be the embodiment of abnormality. Through the mechanism of political power, and a selective process based on the communist ideology of class struggle, but also a hate of intellectuals, Ceausc escu has socially reproduced himself transforming Romanian society into an almost homogenous group of “ceausesti”. In contrast to Ceausc escu’s communist abnormality, the author sees normality to be a meritocracy of western oriented, educated individuals with high I.Q., which he refers to as the ‘cognitive elite’.

Written against the context of the difficult process of transition from communism to liberal democracy, Serban Orescu’s book provides the reader not only with an

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interesting account of Ceausc escu’s reign, but also an insight into how Romanian consciousness, like a traumatised mind wrestling with its neuroses through dreams, tries to overcome its past legacy and contemporary social antagonism. From this perspective, it appears that ‘ceausc ismul’ is not only a phenomenon of the past but that it persists into the present.

School of Slavonic and East European studies University College London

Alex Boican