Book Slobodna: Growing up at the end of history received a poor reception in Albania, Lee Ipa's homeland, and it's easy to see why. The author describes herself as a "Marxist Albanian professor of political theory at the London School of Economics" - and that says it all.
As I read Lee Ipa's memoirs, I was struck by the similarity between her life and that of Viktor Kravchenko, a Soviet official who defected while in New York in 1944. His bestselling memoir I chose freedom were the first concrete testimony to the horrors of Stalinism, beginning with a detailed description of the Holodomor (famine) in Ukraine in the early 1930s. At that time, still a sincere devotee of the regime, Kravchenko participated in the implementation of collectivization, and he knew very well what he was talking about.
Kravchenko's publicly known story ends in 1949 when he triumphed in a libel suit against a French communist weekly. At his trial in Paris, the Soviets brought his ex-wife to testify about his corruption, alcoholism and domestic abuse. This did not sway the judges, but Kravchenko's fate fell into oblivion. Immediately after the trial, while he was hailed worldwide as a Cold War hero, the anti-communist witch hunt in the United States deeply troubled Kravchenko. Fighting Stalinism with McCarthyism, he warned, meant stooping to the level of the Stalinists.
While in the West, Kravchenko became increasingly aware of the injustices there and became obsessed with the need to reform Western democratic societies from within. Since he wrote a lesser-known sequel to his book, titled I chose justice, embarked on a crusade to discover a new, less exploitative way of economic production. That search took him to Bolivia, where he tried to organize poor farmers into new collectives.
Devastated by his failure, he withdrew from the public eye and eventually committed suicide at his home in New York. And no, his suicide was not the result of some dastardly KGB blackmail operation. It was an expression of desperation and further proof that his original condemnation of the Soviet Union had always been a sincere protest against injustice.
Lea Ipi does in one book what Kravchenko needed two. When the civil war broke out in Albania in 1997, her world fell apart. Forced to hide in her apartment and write a diary while Kalashnikov gunfire echoed outside, she made an extraordinary decision: she would study philosophy.
But it is even more unusual that her pursuit of philosophy brought her back to Marxism. Her story testifies to the fact that the most penetrating critics of communism were often former communists, for whom criticism of "really existing socialism" was simply the only way to stay true to their political commitments.
free arose out of an earlier discussion of how socialist and liberal notions of freedom are interrelated, a perspective that forms the structure of the book. The first part, about how the Albanians "chose freedom", provides extremely readable memories of Lea Ipi's childhood in the last decade of communist rule in Albania. Although it covers all the horrors of everyday life - food shortages, political persecution, control, torture and severe punishment - it is interspersed with humorous episodes. Even under harsh and desperate conditions, people found a way to preserve a shred of dignity and integrity.
In the second part, which describes the post-communist turmoil in Albania after 1990, Ipi tells how the freedom that the Albanians chose - or, rather, that was imposed on them - did not bring justice. The culmination is the chapter about the civil war in 1997, when the narrative is interrupted and given space to excerpts from the author's diary. The strength of her writing lies in the fact that even in her personal writings she tackles the big questions, exploring how ambitious ideological projects usually end not in triumph but in confusion and disorientation.
One such project was replaced by another. After the collapse of communism, ordinary Albanians were subjected to a "democratic transition" and "structural reforms" designed to "bring them closer to Europe" and its "free market". Lee Ipa's bitter conclusion in the last paragraph of the book is worth quoting in full:
"My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape from. None achieves that ideal. But their dooms are different and if we are unable to understand them, we will remain forever divided. I wrote my story to explain, make peace and keep fighting."
Here, Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach is ironically refuted, in which it is claimed that "philosophers have so far only interpreted this world differently. The thing is that he changes". The counterpoint is that the world cannot change for the better if we do not first understand it. This is where the great initiators of both communist and liberal projects fell.
The conclusion that Ipi draws from this insight, however, is not the cynical view that significant changes are either impossible or inevitable. On the contrary, the struggle (for freedom) lasts forever. Ipi believes that he owes "all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic or cynical and did not believe that things will fall into place by themselves if you let them take their course".
This is where our global pain lies. If we think that things will fall into place by themselves if we let them take their course, we will end up with multiple disasters, from ecological breakdown and the rise of authoritarianism, to social chaos and disintegration. Ipi expresses what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called "the courage of hopelessness" - the recognition that passive optimism is a recipe for complacency, and thus an obstacle to any meaningful idea and action.
At the end of communism, there was widespread euphoric hope in society that freedom and democracy would bring a better life; in the end, however, many found themselves in despair. This is where the real work begins. Finally, Ipa does not offer an easy solution and therein lies the strength of her book. Such restraint is what makes the book philosophical. The point is not to change the world blindly; but, above all, to be seen and understood.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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