Coming In From the Cold
How ‘Glasnost’ inadvertently opened up a whole new world
When I sat down to read Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 treatise The End of History, which you can easily access online, I didn’t think I would need to be conversant in Hegel. I thought this was going to be about the end of communism, the Soviet version anyway, but Fukuyama dug back into the philosophical vault to when Hegel first predicted the end of history with the rise of the Napoleonic Era and the “realization of a universal, homogeneous state.”
It didn’t come to be, but it did seem like the end of history for a lot of nobility as Napoleon marched across Europe spreading the French belief in liberty, equality and freedom for all. He camped out in Vilnius for a while, rallying Lithuanians, Polish and Belarusians against the Russian empire. They had been partitioned only a few years before and were chomping at the bit to be free again, especially Lithuania which had been absorbed into the empire and no longer had a flag to call its own.
Unfortunately, Napoleon hadn’t calculated how big Russia was or how bitter the winters were and was forced to beat a retreat after the infamous Battle of Borodino. It’s well documented in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Russians were able to hold onto their newly acquired territorial possessions and so ended what was left of the great Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth.
Nearly two centuries later, Fukuyama wrote about this long deferred emancipation from the tyranny of the Soviet Union, all forms of authoritarianism for that matter. He felt that “history” had completed its natural evolution and that liberal democracy had won over other forms of government, citing Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève as the primary source of inspiration for his essay.
Oddly enough, he didn’t credit all the movements that paved the way for the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Most notably the Solidarity movement, which started in the shipyards of Gdansk and spread throughout the Imperium, as Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński called it, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Lech Walesa was not only calling for Polish solidarity but that of all countries held under the yoke of communism, likening their situation to a badly beaten bull that refused to yield.
Fukuyama saw this victory more for consumerism than liberal democracy, which in his view had become the most viable means of spreading prosperity, or at least the illusion of it. It was the products of the West that all these former Soviet republics and satellite nations craved. To a certain degree that was true. Proletarians had been waiting in breadlines for years. Electricity and heat, especially in winter, were a fickle thing. Even a roll of toilet paper was hard to come by and so one made due with pages from Pravda. The Soviet Union could no longer sustain its far flung empire, the largest in the history of the world, and so it burst apart at the seams.
This was mostly due to the failure of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Not content with its massive footprint in Central Asia, Brezhnev chose to go one step further, and soon found himself lost in a war he had no idea how to pull out of without losing face, a cardinal sin in Soviet Russia.
Gorbachev had promised a new vision, which he called Glasnost, or openness, but had no idea what it would lead to. He just wanted to make the Soviet Union a “kinder, gentler nation,” to borrow a phrase from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. Only problem was the socialist republics wanted no part of it, not even Russia.
Lithuania’s secession in March, 1990, triggered a chain reaction that Gorby couldn’t control without the use of force, but the Nobel Committee had bestowed its highest honor upon him that year and so he tried to cajole Lithuania back into the Soviet fold. He even came to Vilnius to plead with the country’s new leaders. When that didn’t work, he cut off the gas in late autumn, and when that failed called in the tanks on a bitter cold day in January, 1991, only to find tens of thousands of Lithuanians stand before the Soviet army in the streets of Vilnius refusing to yield.
What’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner to do? He couldn’t very well open fire, so his tank operators shot very loud blanks instead. It deafened my wife’s right ear, who was 25 at the time. Daina like many others stood before these tanks as had Chinese protestors the year before in Tiananmen Square. Many thought the same thing would happen in Vilnius but instead Gorbachev backed down, and in doing so the Soviet Union breathed its last gasp and this in fact was the “end of history,” at least from the Lithuanian perspective and that of the other former socialist republics. They would no longer be part of the Soviet Union or any false construct that took away their liberty, equality and freedom. It wasn’t without casualties. Thirteen Lithuanians died in the insurrection and scores were injured.
As Fukuyama predicted, this new era would see populists fill the vacuum created by all these “new countries.” It was the first many of us in the West had ever heard of these countries other than in a Beatles’ song, but it was Bob Marley’s classic song that resonated in the “East.” Here he was in Dortmund, Germany, in 1980.
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The West had long been creeping into the Soviet Union. There’s a fun Russian movie called Stilyagi, or Hipsters, that captures the spirit of the 1950s when jazz was the rage. Young medical students were making pirate copies of Louis Armstrong on x-ray sheets, known as roentgenizdat or “bone music.” Everyone wanted a taste of the West, even the nomenklatura.
Khrushchev’s opening up of the cultural boundaries in the late 50s was well-calculated in this regard but short lived. The Soviets ousted him in favor of Brezhnev in 1964 and that was the end of Khrushchovskaya ottepel, or Khrushchev’s Thaw as we know it. Not like he was a particularly nice guy. He just wanted to revitalize a decaying empire still mired in Stalinism.
Bringing in new leadership didn’t help much. Things quieted down but Brezhnev’s unwillingness to do any kind of major reform led to stagnation, which Daina well remembered from the 1970s. I get most of my stories from her as she lived through it as a child. Her mother struggled to put food on the table. Fortunately, she had connections and could get fine cuts of meat and other delicacies that were very hard to come by in the groceries stores.
The Brezhnev era created black markets for virtually anything and with it a criminal class that would boom when the iron curtain came down in 1991. It became the prime subject of Russian literature and movies, including its spread to other countries in the form of human and drug trafficking.
This was about the time I met Daina in Birmingham, Alabama. She couldn’t believe all we had in the supermarkets, but was disappointed in the quality of the dairy products, which she said were so much better back home. For decades Lithuania had been the “dairy capital” of the Soviet Union.
Still, it wasn’t the consumerism she craved but rather the sense of freedom she experienced that summer in the United States. People were much more open. It was easy to make friends, although she didn’t know how far to take all these invitations. I said it is mostly out of politeness, which was new to her too. When she got back to Lithuania all her friends there said it was fake. She told them she would rather have fake politeness than the typical rudeness she experienced at home.
Of course that rudeness wasn’t without precedent. People didn’t trust each other for obvious reasons, so she kept to a tight circle of friends she felt comfortable with. There was also the sense this new “thaw” wouldn’t last long and that once again Russia would try to take back Lithuania and all the other wayward republics. It’s not just in the West that Russia and the Soviet Union are synonymous. Lithuania had gone through it all before during the Napoleonic era.
I think Fukuyama spent too much time grounding his famous essay in Hegel and not enough time grounding it in the events occurring at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but then he is a philosopher not a political scientist, and I suppose he needed that grounding to make sense of the maelstrom that engulfed Europe.
It seemed to catch everyone off guard but this storm had been brewing for decades. The first sign was in 1956 with the Budapest uprising, then again the Prague Spring in 1968. These are just the most famous examples. There were uprisings throughout the Soviet Union. No one was content with the grip Moscow held these nominal republics in its “iron fist.” Even in Lithuania, there was the Kaunas Spring in 1972, when a young man set himself afire in a public square, protesting decades of Russian and Soviet Union control, briefly igniting a period of insurrection that was soon quelled.
There’s a really good Lithuanian movie Children of the Hotel America, made in 1990, which evocatively captured this era. Kids were trying to stage their own Woodstock near the beach at Palanga before Soviet authorities caught wind of it and broke the event up.
It is easy to see that our consumerist culture is a great lure, especially when we view events in retrospect, but it wasn’t so much the consumerism as it was the sense of freedom people seemed to enjoy in the West, especially young people, which greatly attracted those living under the yoke of “communism.” This was particularly true of the music, which had already seeped into the Soviet Union with home grown-bands picking up the popular melodies and writing their own anarchistic lyrics to the songs, exploding full force in the 1990s.
Here’s a Lithuanian example from a band called Antis. They stole the melody from Men at Work and turned it into a song about zombies, which is what the Soviet Union wanted all of them to become, but they would wash themselves of this “disease.” The song was written at the dawn of Glasnost in 1986.
Vaclav Havel, the famous Czech dissident and eventual president of the country, had hoped that there would be a mutual acceptance of Western and Eastern European values, but unfortunately Western consumerism won out, with Levi’s even making an ad where a student traded his 501 jeans for a car on the busy streets of Prague that became synonymous for the way the West viewed the East.
It’s not so easy to get a Škoda car anymore. In most ways, the East has caught up to the West, especially in terms of cost of living. You aren’t going to find any great deals over here except maybe in Albania. That time is gone.
It never really was about the consumerism but rather self-determination, something I found missing in Fukuyama’s essay. Communism, at least the Soviet model, was about state control over virtually every aspect of your life. This is what its citizens wanted desperately to shed, not their pants for cheap transportation. One finally feels a sense of openness, especially in a young generation who didn’t grow up under the hammer and sickle. Still people fret, at least the older generation, that this isn’t the end of history but simply a thaw, giving the illusion of freedom for a brief moment.
