I wonder for the hundredth time in my life: why were the Dissent a unique and unrepeatable movement?
I am attracted to ideas, youth movements that mobilize intellectual orientations, generations far from each other in terms of experience and vitality, and remove puritanical barriers that, in the embrace of universalism, cease to be norms and prohibitions. I understand the idea of universalism as the last rapprochement of irreconcilable people and relationships, after all other chances are extinguished.
After the Hippy movement, Dissent, one might say, took up the torch of universalism. More precisely, they took place in parallel, except that Hippy was closer to the ordinary world due to its iconography and genre coloring (music and film). It was born and developed in free and rich countries, but it was short-lived and subsided faster.
Dissidents - it was a book. That's why they last. Even musicians, architects or painters were people of the book. The text is more permanent. It is as if he withdrew something from his first substrates on which he was inscribed, stone and bronze.
Dissident rhapsody was born in the impoverished European countries of the IE, oppressed by dictatorship, in the crisis of bread and letters. That's why I think that the dissident movement was the most necessary for us - for us in Montenegro - where people have always fought for bread and letters. We haven't been very lucky lately.
Budapest
When Map 77 appeared, in Prague, the entire Budapest School (junior Hungarian neo-Marxist dissidence) supported the ideas of radical reform in IE. The Hungarians had their famous Profile in samizdat activity, while the New Left initially had 1000 regular subscribers in samizdat; and they started with the book on Goliath - on the dictator.
In 1980, the movement published its In Memoriam István Bibó (in honor of the former minister from 1956 who was put in prison), contributions by seventy-six writers on 1000 pages, in honor of Bibó.
Not long after, in its March issue, Keleteurópai Figyeló (East European Observer - real name, fortunately it hasn't been extinguished yet, today some people would welcome it outside of Hungary!) published a report from the 1956 revolution. with a list of political prisoners in IE.
In September of that truly dissident year, finally, the dissident Szféra Magyar Figyeló for young writers began to be published. Reference groups in the Hungarian dissidence weighed heavily on the scales of social consciousness. The concern is not only about personal but also about public morality.
Hírmondó (Courier) was dedicated during the decade of the eighties more to the whole of IE than to Hungary itself. I lived through the most turbulent years of the dissident movement in Prague and I saw that something big was happening, which I attributed to literature. I received copies of the magazine from friends in Pest at the Maria Luisa Teer metro station, he printed excerpts in English, I still have a thread somewhere dedicated to Baranczak (Stanislaw Baranczak) and the Polish dissident report The Gag and the Word.
Although it was weaker than the Polish and Czech, it is a shame to waste words on the Russian, the Hungarian samizdat nevertheless had several thousand regular readers and played a significant role in the creation of independent communications and the dismantling of totalitarianism in IE.
Perhaps only two epochs in modern history, the Baroque and the dissidents, could have given birth to people with such a violent diversity that amazes man. In Elizabethan London, one afternoon, the same guy cold-bloodedly watches as a bear mauls a dog in a fight, staged in a corral on the south bank of the Thames, enthralled by the carnage, and only an hour later, under the window of his sweetheart, he plays the lute and sings to her tender madrigals about love and fidelity. It all fits into one heart.
To be more specific: in the Hungary of the dissident era, I see a coal burner, a guard, a press colporteur, a porter in rags and, on the other hand, in that same person I see a novelist, essayist, poet, social critic, philosopher and dissident who ranks among the most prolific European writers of all time: Béla Hamvas (1897-1968)!
I don't know about others, but I don't find any contradiction in that.
Radio
The most bitter enemy of the Soviet Union and its satellites in IE, according to some contemporary writers who have that experience, was Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Freedom (RL). They started their work in the early fifties and their propaganda practically coincides with the emergence of the dissident movement. Both stations merged in 1976. as a whole, RFE/RL, Inc. (see in detail Prokop Tomek: Spoluparace KGB a StB proti Rádiu Svobodná Evropa, 2007, 113).
Other stations were also active, Deutsche Wele, Radio France Internationale in Paris, for example, but these two were the most sympathetic to the dissident movement and followed the dissidents so devotedly, with such confidence that they deserve the recognition and gratitude of the new generation of Europeans.
Dissidents had a radio cult. They carefully read Bertold Brecht: Little, noisy device, I lie down with you, I get up with you!...
He was listened to Voice of America, BBC, Deutsche Wele, Radio France International (there I read texts about dissidence in IE, in the summer of 1984 and 1985, in the Paris newsroom on the west bank of the Seine courtesy of the editor Stanko Cerović). Radio - it was free breathing. A small device with an antenna on a metal ball, kept like an eye in the head, was the bridge to the West.
I have never met a more sincere, deeper trust in my artistic life than the one we placed in that corner listening to Western radio stations in English. It was a confidence in freedom stronger than a confidence in England, France or any other country.
As "the structure of social movements in IE took an often unpredictable direction" (physicist Sakharov, leader of Soviet dissidence in a conversation with Solzhenitsyn), so, in a certain way, the reception in the West took the literary underground more seriously. Admittedly long, perhaps too long as purely "literary".
All communications were under control except, partially, the radio. Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself on fire in the middle of Prague, in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, became a myth, among other things, because the physical circumstances of his death were erased from public space and one could hear something about him only on the radio. Jan Palach became the dust of the epoch, a symbol of rebellion.
"From the fall of 1968 to the spring of 1969, although the end was in sight, many spontaneous activities took place. Censorship gradually returned, but there was constant public discussion about the 'invasion of armies', as the invasion was called. Student protests and demonstrations were held, but nothing could stop the growing frost. In January 1969, the young student Jan Palach became a living torch and died a few days later. Thousands of people attended the funeral, and it became the last major public event for many years to come. Unlike similar funerals in Iran, South Africa or China, Palach's funeral meant the end and not the beginning of the resistance" (cf. Paul Wilson: Bohemian Raphsodies, 2011, 33).
Radio has become a myth somehow more literary, chamber. The genre energy of this medium was broadcast on the air instead of defunct magazines and diaries. Generals and bureaucrats edited TV, after all, just like today in some countries, professionals kicked out of institutions and replaced by apparatchiks, informers and scoundrels.
Many scholars, oppressed by the bitter experience of the present, abandoned their professions and wrote historical works. Only in the distant past could they project their personal attitudes and, running away from the truth of their lives, seek the truth in ancient events. Many of them worked on the radio, perhaps the most educated forum in the dissident era.
Yugoslavia - Nondissent
What consequences did it leave, what can the absence of subculture leave in the experience of IE, that is, in the experience of a European being gravitating around the Danube? In the unfortunate Yugoslav decade, when the country disintegrated in blood and shame, and madness spread the umbrella over its borders, I often read articles in the Western press about how "the country right now lacks dissident experience", how the Western Balkans "excluded itself from of its natural context" (referring to the opposition gap around JB Tito). What is the result of "a public scene full of pseudo-dissidents without real opposition experience"?
Who wouldn't agree with those diagnoses much earlier, in the leisurely eighties?
Who would not agree with Sharon Zukin, when she, even before "the death of one man, which also meant the death of a country", asserted that the absence of Dissent in the former YU occurred because the Yugoslav regime, "instead of restriction, created a space within the country”?
Tito's regime allowed, she says, the so-called "broad and free discussion in government institutions and in society", with "relatively free travel abroad", even tolerating strikes and demonstrations. Zukin praises the praxisists, but, alas, one swallow does not make a spring: they saw themselves not as an opposition movement, but as an "institution of social criticism" (cf. Gerson S. Sher: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia, Bloomington, 1977, 53-67).
That wasn't all, when you take into account the not-so-small country at the time, but that was all, precisely when, on the other hand, you look at it from the standpoint of institutional and human resources; from there it seems that it was indeed little, insufficient for the coefficient of critical awareness of a large country.
"A systematic samizdat was not organized here," concludes Gordon Skilling, "partly because the opportunities for public action were much wider than in other communist countries" (HG Skilling: Samizdat..., 198). In his work Yugoslavia in the eighties, published in the middle of that decade in London, Pedro Ramet calls the situation in the country apocalypse culture. He notes, of course, the decline in trust, calls the Yugoslav system apocalypse politics, and sees the causes in "the unwillingness of the elite to provide acceptable solutions to the growing problems".
"Paradoxically", says Ramet, "controversial debates were conducted, but not in samizdat, but within the party and in state institutions at all levels" (cf. more details Pedro Ramet: Yugoslavia in the 1980s, London, 1985). The rest is a well-known story, but it also lies mainly in the function of the problem of how to see the consequences of cultural and state policy without true and sincere opposition activities. How to appreciate the pride of the state and the citizen without oppositional pride, which is built up for a long time in artistic creation and serves as a critical correlative?
In our country, dissident activity is often equated with prison, with hunger strikes and walking around in certain rhythms, which is also a consequence of ignorance of the intellectual structure of the movement and critical discourse. That's a mistake. It is not a condition for the prisoners' dissidence, but sometimes only its consequence. Dissent is a critical opinion against censorship and repression (not a hunger strike in prisons) - it is criticism as a habit, like a breathing apparatus in the lungs.
Anecdote
Béla Hamvasz was not the only prodigy of a writer - a writer born only in an apostate age!
I will tell an anecdote that circulated among dissidents after the fall of communism. Two silent fishermen from Budapest have been hanging out every Saturday on the Danube for decades: one is an ordinary man from the people, a shoemaker, the other a dissident who stood in front of the firing barrels in the anti-Soviet revolution in 1956 and a writer, and above all a polyglot, famous for his ability to overcome even exotic languages like Vietnamese, Hindi or Swahili in just a few weeks.
After his pardon and imprisonment (1957-63), he earned his living from his literary talent (the communist government used to get him out of bed in the middle of the night to translate for exotic guests), but he still fished on the Danube on Saturdays with a snowshoe. Then communism collapsed and the first fisherman became the president of Hungary, and the second didn't know or care. One day the president said to his friend:
"I'm sorry, but I can't go fishing tomorrow." "Yes, I know, I know," said the shoemaker. "The citizens of Buda are calling you again to the presidential palace in Buda to translate for them in the middle of the night from those strange languages." "No, my friend, I already have other obligations and worries!"
This first silent fisherman, a classic of Hungarian literature, a dissident who stood in front of the shooting machine was called: Árpád Göncz! (Writer and polyglot Árpád Göncz was Hungary's head of state - and the cobbler's silent fishing buddy - in terms of 1990-1995 and 1995-2000).
Bonus video:
