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(The End of) Communism as a Generational History: Some Thoughts on Czechoslovakia and Poland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

MARCI SHORE
MARCI SHORE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Yale University, Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York Street, PO Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520-8324, USA; marci.shore@yale.edu.
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Abstract

This article explores communism – including its pre-history and aftermath – as a generational history. The structure is diachronic and largely biographical. Attention is paid to the roles of milieu, the Second World War, generational cleavages and a Hegelian sense of time. Nineteen sixty-eight is a turning point, the moment when Marxism as belief was decoupled from communism as practice. The arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague meant a certain kind of end of European Marxism. It also meant the coming of age of a new generation: those born in the post-war years who were to play a large role in the opposition. The anti-communist opposition was organically connected to Marxism itself: the generation(s) of dissidents active in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood as a further chapter in the generational history of communism. Nineteen eight-nine was another moment of sharp generational rupture. The new post-communist generation, Havel's great hope, possessed the virtue of openness. Openness, however, proved a double-edged sword: as eastern Europe opened to the West, it also opened a Pandora's box. Perhaps today the most poignant generational question brought about by 1989 is not who has the right to claim authorship of the revolution, but rather who was old enough to be held responsible for the choices they made under the communist regime. There remains a division between those who have to account for their actions, and those who do not, between those who proved themselves opportunists, or cowards or heroes – and those who have clean hands by virtue of not having been tested.

(la fin du) communisme en tant qu'histoire générationnelle: des pensées à propos de la tchécoslovaquie et de la pologne

Cet article analyse le communisme – en incluant les périodes pré- et postcommunistes – comme une histoire générationnelle. La structure est diachronique et il est largement biographique. Une attention est portée aux rôles du milieu, de la deuxième guerre mondiale, des divisions générationnelles et d'un sens hégélien du temps. 1968 est un moment charnière, car c'était le moment où le marxisme en tant que croyance fut détaché du communisme en tant que pratique. L'arrivée des chars soviétiques à Prague signifiait une certaine fin du marxisme européen. Cela signifiait aussi l'arrivée d'une nouvelle génération: ceux nés dans les années de l'après-guerre et qui allaient jouer un rôle important dans l'opposition. L'opposition anti-communiste était organiquement liée au marxisme-même: les générations de dissidents actives durant les années 1970 et 1980 devraient être comprises comme un chapitre de plus dans l'histoire générationnelle du communisme. 1989 fut une autre césure générationnelle. La nouvelle génération postcommuniste, le grand espoir de Havel, présentait la vertu de l'ouverture. Mais cette ouverture était à double-tranchant: lorsque l'Europe de l'est s'est ouverte vers l'ouest, elle a aussi ouvert une boîte de Pandore. Aujourd'hui, la question générationnelle la plus poignante issue de 1989, ce n'est pas de déterminer qui peut prétendre à un droit d'auteur de la révolution, mais plutôt qui était assez âgé pour être tenu responsable des choix faits sous le régime communiste. Il reste une division entre ceux qui doivent rendre compte de leurs actes et ceux qui ne le font pas, entre ceux qui étaient des opportunistes, des lâches ou des héros – et ceux qui ont une virginité parce qu'ils n'ont pas été mis à l'épreuve.

(das ende des) kommunismus als generationengeschichte: einige gedanken über die tschechoslowakei und polen

Dieser Artikel erforscht den Kommunismus – seine Vor- und Nachgeschichte eingeschlossen – als Generationengeschichte. Die Struktur ist diachronisch und größtenteils biographisch. Ein besonderes Augenmerk gilt den Rollen des Milieus, des Zweiten Weltkriegs, der Generationenspaltung und einem hegelianischen Sinn für die Zeit. 1968 ist ein Wendepunkt. Es ist der Moment, an dem der Marxismus als Glaube vom Kommunismus in der Praxis getrennt wurde. Er bedeutete auch das Erwachsenwerden einer neuen Generation: Die in der Nachkriegszeit Geborenen, welche eine große Rolle in der Opposition einnehmen werden. Die antikommunistische Opposition war mit dem Marxismus organisch verbunden: die Generation(en) von aktiven Dissidenten in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren sollten als ein weiteres Kapitel in der Generationengeschichte des Kommunismus gesehen werden. 1989 war erneut ein Moment des markanten Generationenwechsels. Die neue postkommunistische Generation, Havels große Hoffnung, hatte die Tugend der Offenheit. Diese war jedoch nicht nur von Vorteil, denn als Osteuropa sich Richtung Westen öffnete, öffnete es auch eine Pandorabüchse. Die heute wahrscheinlich am meisten bewegende, durch die Ereignisse von 1989 provozierte, Frage ist nicht, wer die Revolution verursacht hat, aber eher wer alt genug war für die Entscheidungen unter dem kommunistischen Regime die Verantwortung zu übernehmen. Ein Unterschied bleibt bestehen zwischen jenen, die für ihr Handeln gerade stehen müssen und jenen, die dies nicht tun; zwischen jenen, die sich als Opportunisten, Feiglinge oder Helden entpuppten – und jenen die eine weiße Weste haben, da sie nicht auf die Probe gestellt wurden.

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Articles
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Contemporary European History , Volume 18 , Issue 3: Revisiting 1989: Causes, Course and Consequences , August 2009 , pp. 303 - 329
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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12 The Russian art historian Boris Groys makes an analogous argument about the later development of Stalinist culture. Bearing responsibility for the socialist realism of which it itself was the first victim, Groys argues, was the avant-garde. In Groys's narrative, the fatal step was not the injection of communist ideology into art, but rather the leap from art as representation to art as transformation. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

13 Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 74.

14 Quoted in Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 104. On Herzen, see also Malia, Martin, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Compare Arendt's idea of ‘superfluous people’: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1973). On the history of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and its engagement with revolutionary ideas, see Venturi, Franc, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Haskell, Frances (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)Google Scholar, and Walicki, Andrzej, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Andrews-Rusiecka, Hilda (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

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18 On the fin-de-siècle crisis of liberalism in east-central Europe and the response of a new generation of intellectuals, see Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation; John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Cultures (New York; Grove Press, 1988); and Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

19 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 75 and 43 (from Béla Balázs's 1915 letter to Lukács).

20 Ibid., 65.

21 On this subject I am grateful for conversations with Pavel Barša. See also Kolonitskii, Boris, ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and “Anti –Burzhui” Consciousness in 1917’, Russian Review, 53, 2 (April 1994), 183–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men’, in Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Cress, Donald A. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 67Google Scholar.

23 Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Quoted by Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 203.

25 Jakobson, Roman, My Futurist Years, ed. Jangfeldt, Bengt, trans. Stephen Rudy (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1992), 26Google Scholar.

26 On Lukács's household see Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 34. On Mayakovsky and the Briks see Vladimir Mayakovsky, Love is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915–1930, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Julian Graffy (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986); Lilia Brik and Elsa Triolet, Lilia Brik–El'za Triole: Neizdannaia perepiska (1921–1970), ed. Vasilii Katanian (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2000); L. F. Katsis, Vladimir Maiakovskii: Poet v intellektual'nom kontekste epokhi (Moscow: Rossiiskii Gosudarstevennyi Gumanitarnyi Universitet, 2004); S. E. Strikhneva, ed., ‘V tom, chto umiraiu, ne vinite nikogo’?.. Sledstvennoe delo V. V. Maiakovskogo: Dokumenty, vospominaniia sovremennikov (Moscow: Ellis Lak 2000, 2005); Lilia Brik, Pristrastnye rasskazy (Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom, 2003).

27 Quoted in Jakobson, ‘On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets’, in Edward J. Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 13. Original title: ‘O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov’.

28 The Devětsil Association of Artists, ‘Statement’, in Timothy O. Beson and Éva Forgács, eds., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930 (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002), 240–1, quotation at 240. Originally published in Pražské pondelí, 6 December 1920.

29 ‘= segodnia utrom wolodia pokontschil soboi lewa fiania +’. Plinkrugov [?] L. G. i F. to Lilia and Osip Brik, 14 April 1930, Moscow, fond 130, opis’ 5, delo 27, Gosudarstvenyi Literaturnyi Muzei, Moscow.

30 Jakobson, ‘On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets’, 7.

31 Ibid., 31.

32 Ibid., 32.

33 ‘The Hegelian bite’ (ukąszenie heglowskie) is Miłosz's term. See Miłosz, Czesław, The Captive Mind, trans. Zielonko, Jane (New York: Vintage International, 1990)Google Scholar.

34 Tony Judt, ‘The Last Romantic’, New York Review of Books, 50, 18 (20 November 2003). The essay is a review of Eric Hobsbawn's autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).

35 Stephen Kotkin, ‘Left Behind: Is Eric Hobsbawn history?’ New Yorker, 29 September 2003, 102–6, quotation at 106.

36 On prison as a sociologically formative experience of a generation, see Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

37 I have written about Milan Kundera's generation in the first two decades of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in more detail elsewhere: Marci Shore, ‘Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse inside the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 1949–1967’, East European Politics and Societies, 12, 3 (fall 1998), 397–441.

38 On this topic see Abrams, Bradley F., The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)Google Scholar, especially ch. 1 (‘The Second World War and the East European Revolution’), pages 9–38.

39 Jan Kavan and Alexandr Kramer (interview with Heda Kovályová-Margoliová), ‘Ženy s podobným osudem’ (seriál rozhovorů Studenta s vdovami po popravených v procesu z roku 1952), Student, ročnik 4 (20 March 1968), 1, 3, quotation at 1. Her feeling towards those communists she met in Auschwitz did not change after 1989; in the post-communist years she remembered them still as ‘the ones who best resisted the oppression’, who ‘saw their own fate as part of the struggle for the future of humanity’. ‘Everyone’, she added, ‘who survived the camps remembers them with respect.’ Heda Margolius Kovály (interviewed by Marci Shore and Eva Věšínová-Kalivodová), ‘In a Conversation with One Eye Open’, trans. Andrea Orzoff, Elizabeth Papazian and Marci Shore, Jedním Okem/One Eye Open, special issue, 2 (summer 2002), 2–3. Interview originally conducted in 1997.

40 Liehm, Politics of Culture, 236.

41 Svaz československých spisovatelů, Od slov k činů m: Sjezd československých spisovatelů 4–6.III.1949 (Prague: Orbis, 1949), 129.

42 Stanislav Neumann, [Contribution to the Second Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers], Literární Noviny 5 (16 May 1956), 7.

43 Jiří Gruša, ‘Jací vlastně jsme’, Literární Noviny 12 (1 June 1963), 10.

44 Pavel Kohout, ‘Čím jsem byl’, Literární Noviny 13 (21 May 1964), 3–4. See also Liehm, Politics of Culture, 49–92.

45 Liehm, Politics of Culture, 142–5, quotation at 145.

46 Ibid., 48.

47 Ibid., 179.

48 Ibid., 249.

49 ‘Odpis tajne wystąpienie profesora U.W. Leszka Kołakowskiego na zebraniu dyskusyjnym zorganizowanym w dniu 21. 10. 1966 w Instytucie Historycznym UW przez Zarząd ZMS Wydziału Historycznego UW na temat “Kultura polska w ostatnim 10-leciu”‘, 22 October 1966, Warsaw, K. 103, S V/16, Archiwum Dokumentacji Historycznej PRL-u, Warsaw.

50 Antonín Liehm to Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon, 30 October 1967, Prague, Fond de Elsa Triolet et Louis Aragon, Bibiliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Liehm enclosed texts of some of the speeches made at the recent Writers’ Union Congress in Prague – speeches that had served as the impetus for Party expulsions.

51 Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. (from the French) Asher, Aaron (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 18Google Scholar.

52 Antonín Liehm to Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon, 10 August 1968, Prague, Fond de Elsa Triolet et Louis Aragon, Bibiliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

53 On the ill-fated Prague Spring, in English see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Simečka, Milan, The Restoration of Order: The Normalisation of Czechoslovakia, trans. Brain, A. G. (London: Verso, 1984)Google Scholar.

54 Quoted in Harry Järv, ‘Normalization in the Library System’, in A. Heneka et al., eds., A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years after Helsinki (Stockholm: The Charter 77 Foundation, 1985), 25–9, quotation at 28.

55 On the ‘anti-Zionist campaign of March 1968’ see Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna 1967–1968 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2000); Mieczysław Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1967–1968 (Warsaw: Iskry, 1999); Grzegorz Sołtysiak and Józef Stępień, eds., Marzec ‘68: Między tragedią a podłością (Warsaw: Profi, 1998); Stefan Jędrychowski, rozmowa z Grzegorzem Sołtysiakiem, 17 February 1994, kolekcja Jędrychowskiego, K. 143, W/R 5, Archiwum Dokumentacji Historycznej PRL-u, Warsaw; Artur Starewicz, relacja, cz. 7, W-R/26, Archiwum Dokumentacji Historycznej PRL-u, Warsaw. In English see Steinlauf, Michael, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Dariusz Stola, ‘The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland 1967–1968’, in András Kovács and E. Andor, eds., Jewish Studies at the Central European University, vol. 2 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002).

56 Władysław Gomułka, ‘Przemówienie na spotkaniu z warszawskim aktywem partyjnym’, 19 March 1968, in Gomułka, Przemówienia 1968 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1969), 74–5.

57 Kovály, ‘In a Conversation with One Eye Open’, 16.

58 Luděk Pachman to Ferdinand Peroutka, 21 April 1973, box 2, Ferdinand Peroutka collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford.

59 Ryszarda Zachariasz, interview, Warsaw, 9 November 1997.

60 Henry Dasko, ‘From My Childhood with Stalin to the Skyscrapers of Hong Kong and Beyond’, unpublished memoir, 2006.

61 Anna Bikont, ‘Moi chłopi wymordowali moich żydów’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 5 February 2008.

62 ‘Poles of Jewish origin’ were distinctly over-represented not only among the leadership of the Communist Party of Poland, but also among the leadership of the democratic opposition. On this topic see, for example, Abel Kainer [Stanisław Krajewski], ‘żydzi a Komunizm’, Krytyka, 15 (1983), 214–47. In English translation: Stanisław Krajewski, ‘Jews and Communism’, in M. Bernard and H. Szlajfer, eds., From the Polish Underground: Selections from Krytyka 1978–1993 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 353–94.

63 Ladislav Hejdanek, interview, Prague, 2 September 1993.

64 Jan Urban, interview, Prague, 30 August 1993.

65 Miroslav Kusý, interview, Bratislava, 27 August 1993.

66 ‘Biafra of the spirit’ was an expression subsequently appropriated by many dissident intellectuals. See, for instance, Václav Havel, ‘Six Asides about Culture’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, 2, 1 (spring 1990), 43–52.

67 Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane (Armonk: ME Sharpe, 1985), 24–96 (original title: ‘Moc bezmocných’).

68 Ibid., 37.

69 Jan Urban, interview, Prague, 30 August 1993.

70 Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33–8. On ‘central Europe’, see also Czesław Miłosz, ‘About Our Europe’, in Robert Kostrzewa, ed., Between East and West: Writings from Kultura, ed. (New York: Hills & Wang, 1990), 99–108.

71 Havel, ‘Power of the Powerless’, 40.

72 The references are from Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001 [1927]). On the Heideggerean influence on Havel, see also Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).

73 Bohumír Janat, interview, Prague, 22 June 1993.

74 Malcolm, Janet, ‘The Trial of Alyosha’, in Malcom, The Purloined Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 162Google Scholar.

75 Zdeněk Novák, interview, Domažlice, November 1994.

76 Pavel Barša, interview, New Haven, 10 February 2008.

77 Miloš Vajda, interview, Bratislava, 4 August 1993.

78 Jan Urban, interview, Prague, 30 August 1993.

79 Ibid.

80 Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, also of the Polish opposition, was harsher: ‘Freedom simply came for us too soon. We weren't prepared for it.’ Teresa Torańska, My (Warsaw: Oficyjna Wydawnicza MOST, 1994), 172, 87.

81 On the timelessness of socialist time in the Soviet Union, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv.

82 Jolanta Mickute, personal communication, 16 March 2008.

83 Lenka Bauderová, untitled and unpublished essay, Domažlice, 1994.

84 Libor Valečka, interview, Domažlice, November 1994.

85 On this topic, see, for instance, Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

86 Anna Muller, personal communication, 12 March 2008.

87 Tony Judt makes this point in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

88 Jan Urban, ‘The Powerlessness of the Powerful’, November 1992, unpublished English draft.

89 See, for instance, ‘Václav Havel podpořil výzvu k odchodu stranických špiček’, Právo, 20 November 1999, 2. See also Václav Havel, ‘Rewolucjo ducha, przyjdź’ (interview with Adam Michnik), Gazeta Wyborcza, 15–16 Nov. 2008, 18–20.

90 Aleš Haman, Arnošt Lustig (Jinočany: Nakladatelství a Vydavatelství H & H, 1995), 11.

91 The quotation is from the documentary film, Fighter (directed by Amir Bar-Lev, 2001), the story of Lustig's friend – and Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia – Jan Wiener.

92 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 236.

93 Horáková, Milada, Dopisy Milady Horákové: Pankrác 24.6–27.6.1950 (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 1990)Google Scholar.

94 The material first appeared in Wojciech Materski and Ewa Wosik, eds., Dokumenty ludobójstwa. Dokumenty i materiały archiwalne przekazane Polsce 14 października 1992 r. (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1992). In English, see Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Stéphane Courtois, et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

95 Anne Applebaum, ‘A Movie that Matters’, New York Review of Books, 14 Feb. 2008.

96 Bogna Pawlisz, interview, Warsaw, 25 December 1997.

97 Václav Benda, ‘The Parallel Polis’, in Gordon, H. Skilling and Paul Wilson, eds., Civic Freedom in Central Europe (London: Macmillan, 1991)Google Scholar.

98 The American expatriate community is beautifully satirised in the novel by Shteyngart, Gary, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (New York: Riverhead, 2003)Google Scholar.

99 On post-communist Poland's harsh anti-abortion laws and on American versus Polish feminism, see Graff, Agnieszka, Świat bez kobiet: Płeć w polskim życiu publicznym (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2001)Google Scholar. Eva Hauserová's Na koštěti se dá i lítat aneb Nemožné ženy dokážou i nemožné (Prague: Nakl. LN, 1995) is considered the first Czech book of feminist enlightenment, grappling with the specifically Czech context and the problems of translation from English – in terms of both words and concepts. See the book review by Eva Věšínová, ‘Nejen o čarodějnických košťatech’, Jedním Okem/One Eye Open, 4 (summer 1996), 65–7. See also Suzy Ort, ‘East–West Feminism: An Interview with Rita Klímová’, Jedním Okem/One Eye Open 1, 2 (summer 1993), 59–64.

100 Erica Jongová, Strach vzlétnout, trans Eva Věšínová (Prague: Odeon, 1994).

101 Eva Věšínová, ‘Backlash a osudy feminismu’ (interview with Nad'a Macurová), Tvar 1 (12 January 1995), 12.

102 See Jana Hradilková, ‘Nejen rodinná historie/More Than a Family Saga’, part I, trans. Laura Busheikin and Šimon Pellar, Jedním Okem/One Eye Open, special issue 1 (spring 1998), 42–83, and part II, trans. Marci Shore and Šimon Pellar, Jedním Okem/One Eye Open, special issue 2 (summer 2002), 134–53.

103 The following year a second, larger-scale endeavour made its debut: the anarcha-feminist group Feministická skupina 8. Března (Feminist Group of the 8 March) together with its journal, Přímá Cesta (Direct Path).

104 The memoir tells both of the author's time in the Warsaw Ghetto and of his years in hiding on the so-called ‘Aryan Side’. Michał Głowinski, Czarne sezony (Warsaw: OPEN, 1998); in English: Michał Głowinski, The Black Seasons, trans. Marci Shore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).

105 See Bogna Pawlisz and Michał Bilewicz, ‘Słowo wstępne’, Jidełe: żydowskie pismo otwarte (wydanie specjalne ‘żydzi i komunizm’) (spring 2000), 6–7; and Michał Bilewicz et al, ‘Dyskusja: Wnuki “żydokomuny”‘, Jidełe: żydowskie pismo otwarte (wydanie specjalne ‘żydzi i komunizm’) (spring 2000), 163–74.

106 Bogna Pawlisz, interview, Warsaw, 25 December 1997.

107 Gross, Jan T., Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka (Sejny: Fundacja pogranicze, 2000)Google Scholar. The English version appeared a year later: Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gross, Jan T., Upiorna dekada: Trzy eseje na temat wzajemnych relacji między żydami, Polakami, Niemcami i komunistami w latach 1939–1948 (Cracow: Universitas, 1998)Google Scholar; Gross, Jan T., Wokół Sąsiadów: Polemiki i wyjaśnienia (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2003)Google Scholar; Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Prószyński i s-ka, 2004); Polonsky, Antony and Michlic, Joanna, The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Pawel Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, eds., Wokół Jedwabnego I ‘Studia’ and II ‘Dokumenty’ (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002); Marci Shore, ‘Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism’, Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History, 6, 2 (spring 2005), 345–74. More recently there have been fierce debates about Gross's more recent book, published first in English as Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), and subsequently in Polish as Strach. Antysemitzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie (Kraków: Znak, 2008).

108 On the ‘Konkretny generation’ and the demand for less theory and more practical action, see Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Konkretny (concrete) was actually a re-appropriation of a classic Marxist – and Stalinist – term. See for instance the essay by Arthur Koestler in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 15–75 (especially 45) and Ladislav Štoll, Třicet let bojů za českou socialistickou poesii (Prague: Orbis, 1950), 134.

109 In 1999, former Czech students protested against the kidnapping of what they felt was their revolution. They issued a proclamation, ‘Děkujeme, odejděte! (Prohlášení bývalých studentů k desátému výročí 17. listopadu 1989) [We thank you, [now] go away! (Declaration of former students on the tenth anniversary of 17 November 1989)]’. Josef Brož, Igor Chaun, Vlastimil Ježek, Martin Mejstřík, Šimon Pánek, Vráťa Řehák, ‘Děkujeme, odejděte!’ 17 November 1999, available at www.sdo.jola.cz/prohlas_cz.htm (accessed 15 February 2008). On this topic see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990); Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002); Marcel Tomašek, ‘More Than the Symbolic Power of a Student Death: the Role of National Memory in the Regime Change in Czechoslovakia’, paper presented at the 7th Annual New School for Social Research Sociology and Historical Studies Joint Conference ‘History Matters: Spaces of Violence, Spaces of Memory’, New York, April 2004; Deanna Wooley, ‘The Anti-generation: Memory, Politics and the Student Movement in the 1989 Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution’, dissertation-in-progress at Indiana University; and Milan Otáhal and Miroslav Vaněk, eds., Sto studenských revolucí (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 1999). Historian Milan Otáhal at Prague's Ústav pro soudobé dějiny (Institute for Contemporary History) is among those who credit Czechoslovak students for giving impetus to the Velvet Revolution. Milan Otáhal, interview, Prague, 24 July 1993. The debate about authorship has a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension: that is, did the revolutions happen due to internal or external causes?

110 Liehm and Kundera are among those who discuss this phenomenon. See, for instance, Liehm, Politics of Culture, 140. See also Radim Marada, ‘Pamět, trauma, generace’, Sociální Studia, 1–2 (2007), 79–95. Marada, drawing on Mannheim, writes of how cultural trauma sharpens generational divisions. Generations, Marada argues, are relational phenomena, formed by clashing historical interpretations. The end of communism and the uneasy memories left in its wake – like slavery in the United States, Nazism in Germany and the Holocaust throughout Europe – was precisely such a generation-constitutive event.

111 The line is from Wisława Szymborska's poem ‘Minuta ciszy po Ludwice Wawrzyńskiej’, published in Wołanie do Yeti (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957).

112 Bogna Pawlisz, interview, Warsaw, 25 December 1997.

113 Jiří Ratinger and Marie Ratingerová, interview, New Haven, 10 July 2008.

114 Roger Cohen, ‘The Cold War as Ancient History’, New York Times, 4 February 2008.

115 Kovály, ‘In a Conversation with One Eye Open’, 9–10.