The only real opposition to communism

Heresy

Dear gentlemen, although I am speaking before you in Spanish, I will use the English word dissent at the beginning, which means a difference in feeling or opinion, disagreement with someone else, disagreement with an opposing position, philosophy, political goal, etc. (Lectures at the National University of Mexico, semester 2013/14 and 2014/15)

The English word dissent comes from medieval Latin (dissentire, French equivalent of dissentire), and from it comes the derivative dissent, disagreement with the opinion of the majority. Dissent suggests not only strong dissatisfaction, but also a certain opposition in thought and action, ideas and practice. Apostasy, apostasy, heresy. Domesticated both in Eastern Europe and in the West, in the second half of the 20th century, the word indicates the split of an individual or a group, an entire movement, the most significant in the European East in recent times - with communism. What is the taste of breaking with the dictatorship?

Eastern Europe (IE)

There is no definition of Eastern Europe, just as there is no definition of Europe, or Mexico, nor is anyone looking for it, except, perhaps, in the form of the assumption that IE is an integral part of one civilization - European. If, on the other hand, instead of civilizations we say literature, the doubt is bigger because it includes several national literatures: Montenegrin, let's start with the smallest and in your country, in Mexico, the least known, and Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian , Bosnian, Albanian, Ukrainian and, with a few smaller ones, of course, Russian, which is better known than all of them.

There are almost as many languages, although similar among themselves (in the South Slavic case, identical) in which these literatures were born, which, of course, suggests a softer common name: IE literature.

Nevertheless, when you ask my friends, writers from these countries today, about their regional affiliation, they can say that they are Eastern European writers, although they could not before. The world has become global, you will say, space and time have been reduced. Finally, the resources of language are no longer so impressive in the age of images and spectacles. Today, the words love and death are losing the power that Njegoš's pen once bestowed upon them, in spasm. That's right, I don't dispute it, although I add that the reformist movement in IE, the dissidence of the second half of the 20th century. (Dissent), the most responsible for the fact that today we can consider literature in IE as a significant player in the world cultural scene, and in these countries we can be called Eastern European authors.

What we Eastern European writers are fighting for today is that everyone, regardless of language differences (90% of the former Yugoslavia speaks one language, Serbo-Croatian, even though the peoples, the speakers of the language, call it Serbian and Croatian each in their own way, and the constitutions of the states of BiH and Montenegro recognize under their name), we serve the unique cultural experience of IE and use it equally.

Worldview

The dissident movement was a unique Weltanschauung in IE. Dissent, as it is popularly called, occupies an important place in the history of modern European ideas. It is a complete view of the world, built on an oppositional attitude towards authoritarian regimes, on an attempt to expand the national culture of Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Yugoslavia (with successors), i.e. a view of the national cultures of all countries together in the IE corpus.

A radical and honorable view of the world, a dissident movement, it was - brave and fruitful, relatively original in European thought. The dissident movement was the only real opposition to communism, the reserve position of social, political and artistic culture in an area with some two hundred and fifty million citizens.

Analyzes and suspicion of repression, theoretical and creative approach to the overthrow of autocracy, defense against vicious regimes, resistance to the police pleasure of oppression, that, in short, is the semiotic echo of the term dissidence.

I have a special sensibility for revolt and rebellion, formed, possibly, under the auspices of the dissident movement, which in my opinion was a reformist act. Dissidence is sometimes a coup, in the extreme. Finally, the last but not the least, the dissident movement is most closely related to the textuality of the dissident epoch, which characterized contemporary world literature.

Today, we feel a debt to the dissidents - to their opinion, courage, ideas, struggle and their honest textuality. What more can an era expect than that - especially if it is known that all that, struggle, courage, ideas, avant-garde was forbidden, declared dangerous and infected by the ruling regimes in the IE countries?

The movement was born and developed authentically in a dozen national environments (mostly Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, and to a lesser extent: Yugoslav, Bulgarian, Slovakian), while the East German environment is somewhat of a puzzle. The development of dissent in East Germany is discussed by Berng Gehrke, a historian who started out as an ordinary worker and leftist in the XNUMXs, the founder of conspiratorial groups for silent resistance to the dictatorial regime and a reliable witness of East Germany's second-minded development:

"The dissident opposition in East Germany is unjustifiably underestimated. There are many reasons, all other countries belonged to the Slavic world, except for Albania where there were no dissidents, first of all; secondly, each of them was at least a shade under milder police repression than the GDR and, finally, none of them groaned under such a burden of political legacy as this part of post-Hitler Germany.

The opposition in the GDR was not born until the 1977s, when it began to be present in the foreign press, but in the 89s. In the beginning, however, it was different from the independent peace movements and organizations for the defense of human rights under the roof of the evangelical church. For the formation and development of the opposition in the GDR, the Czechoslovak and later the Czech opposition played a key role from the beginning. 2007, 152, XNUMX.)

Oppressed opposition

In the same way as this movement in IE had an authentic development, depending on individual national-cultural environments, it can be said that not even a single worldview in Western culture has so far detected its sources and its genesis, no less, no more, no better, no worse. neither more nor less successful than IE-dissidence. Dissidents are a symbol of IE, more original and long-lived than the Cold War. The roots of spiritual upheavals are not as simple as they seem at first glance. The reason is clear - these are things and relationships of a procedural, not excessive, character and are not subject to superficial simplification. Dissidence is a complex system and should be observed in the context of other, no less complex systems, and always in the most complex of all sociocultural systems - in the state and its cultural age.

The German dissident Wolfgang Templin talks about the specific closeness that the muted opposition of the GDR felt and cultivated towards the Slavic world, in an era when it was indeed not easy, barely a quarter of a century after World War II and its traces and consequences, but what he wants to emphasize something is stronger than closeness and sympathy. It is influence, intellectual and political influence through textuality and filmstrip, lifestyle and music, through those youth currents with irreplaceable energy for reforms and changes. (Cf. B. Gehrke: Opposition in East Germany, 152.)

I was convinced of this myself, during an unforgettable study stay in Berlin in 1987, when I got to know the work of the dissident playwright Heiner Müller. Later, I directed his plays in Yugoslavia (Kula, Herceg-Novi), including Hamletmaschine, precisely at the time of the fall of Yugoslav communism. And my graduate thesis about this writer, at DAMU in Prague (for which dean Jana Makovská demanded that I be expelled from the faculty, as later testified by my professor and member of the committee, Jan Císař, and that they expel me in the fifth year of my studies), it exudes that atmosphere, the influence of German literature on cultural trends in IE.

What distinguished Yugoslavia and the GDR, unfortunately and to their incalculable damage, from Russia, Czechoslovakia and Poland was precisely the institutional opposition, which the first two did not have, and most of the other IE countries, despite everything, did. More precisely, the opposition was from those countries that had organized Dissent. Yugoslavia, and therefore Montenegro (unfortunately for us until this day), was a country of disenfranchised and oppressed opposition, i.e. from this point of view disabled in the modern political sense of the word. Yugoslav dissident creativity, apart from Đilas, was miserable in relation to the need for democracy; thin, measured by the yardstick of necessity. False apostates have flooded the earth. Albania was a total invalid in that sense, where dissidents were exterminated.

Unfortunately, in Yugoslavia I never had that experience, even less in Montenegro, that I was influenced by a text from the other side. I love the consternation of the open text, and freer minds than myself. That otherness in thinking, so healing for the developing intellect, was never available to me in the Balkans.

"What are you surprised at?" philosopher and theologian Slobodan Tomović asked me, when the chase and robbery of the Thirteenth of July Prize began, in mid-June 2013, in a phone call from a village in the north of Montenegro, where he was on vacation.

"You come from the other coast alone, with your modest portfolio," he told me, "which these communists and neo-communists will tear apart in the blink of an eye, if you are not at least as determined, in your defense, as they are blinded?" If Yugoslavia had an institutional dissidence, there is no doubt that it would have been institutionalized, therefore uniquely, critically in relation to the civil war at the start of the Yugoslav war drama. Systematic, firm, oppositional.

Dissent would fill the void called institutions, the gaping void in place of institutional resistance to civil war.

Let your dreams go, my dear Mare!

The only opposition to the bloodshed was the non-institutionalized civil consciousness, disseminated without order, decapitated and scattered, individual and desperate, in fact - easy prey for the forces of war and blood, which previously provided themselves with bloody officialdom through single-mindedness and partocracy.

It did not suit the West to sincerely support Tito's opposition, nor was this, unfortunately, ever included in the Western agenda, either in the short or long term. The West, for some reason, did not really help the Yugoslav opposition. There was a lot of foiling, but someone didn't believe someone.

The spirit of revolution

The spirit of revolution is preceded by the spirit of reform. The dissidence in IE was, in fact, a reform movement, and it carried out a coup.

Some authors in the West, however, observed that dictatorship is not a temporary and accidental excess, but a long-term and large-scale process: the reduction of the spiritual space of a people to a purely local originality (local from a phenomenological point of view), as in the USSR and elsewhere in the IE was the regime's attitude towards cultural freedoms. The absence of criticism towards institutions in the country is devastating, just as the absence of basic institutions such as the post office, hospital, barracks or insane asylum would be devastating.

As a young writer, I translated Heinrich Böll's response to the letter of the Czech dissident Jaroslav Seifert (I translated his poetry in the Titograd Creation when it was not to the liking of anyone in Prague, except the dissidents, who welcomed me into their fold: 1984, in the fiercest censorship). In the mid-seventies, while he was writing, Böll was the recipient of the Nobel Prize, and Seifert did not even dream of this or any other (he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984). The German writer says: "Dear Jaroslav Seifert,

Your letter testifies to a hopeless situation, more absurd than can be imagined, and I do not see any consolation in it: I have never heard that a group of poets, philosophers, professors in another socialist country had to move out of their country (being denied to convert own audience without access to the media)."

yours,

Heinrich Boell

A single paragraph suggested to me that it was a process of terror, and that the crushing of totalitarianism, which the Czechs at the time of my beginnings, in Prague, called "totač" because of their bloodthirsty alms, would last a long time - from that perspective, it seemed eternal to me.

What arose and developed as a process cannot, therefore, be defined or explained as an excess. I believe that dissident thought reaffirmed, nay, reborn modern IE - no amount of ethnographic arguments will convince me otherwise. I, as a Balkan, am hypersensitive to ethnographic fairy tales and I have no confidence in ethnography. To me, ethnography seems like an affect even when it is not.

The path of dissident ideas was long. From that angle, the Yugoslav ruin will be clearer to us. Especially if one takes into account the chance that Yugoslavia had and squandered in the Helsinki Agreements, and the Central European dissidence, although positioned much higher and more difficult, took advantage of it.