Communist One-Two

Hitchens: Let's Not Get Sentimental About Communism


Thesis Paragraph:


This 20^th anniversary has seen yet another crop of boring articles about how so many people, especially in former East Germany, are supposedly "nostalgic" for the security of the old Stalinist system. Such sentimental piffle—which got a good airing in that irritating movie Good Bye Lenin!—would not long survive a reading of another new book: Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen. Making effective use of archives opened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Sebestyen describes the day in late October 1989 when the head of State Planning in the German Democratic Republic, Gerhard Schürer, presented the party leadership with the unvarnished economic news. "Nearly 60 per cent of East Germany's entire economic base could be written off as scrap, and productivity in mines and factories was nearly 50 per cent behind the West." Even more appalling was the 12-fold increase in the GDR's national debt—a situation so grotesque that it had been classified as a state secret lest loans from Western creditors dry up. "Just to avoid further indebtedness," wrote Schürer, "would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable." So the wall came down just before the hermetic state that it enclosed would have imploded. I doubt that there would have been much "nostalgia" for that.




Applebaum: Did Anti-Communists Really End Communism?


Thesis Paragraph:


Everything comes around again, in the end; every debate needs to be held twice. For the past few years, the Russians have been conducting an extraordinary national argument about whether Stalin was bad, a question one would have thought was settled long ago. And now, to celebrate the 20^thanniversary of 1989, we have two books, both by eminent historians, both seeking to start an argument about whether there was an anti-Communist opposition in Central Europe. In Uncivil Society Stephen Kotkin, a Soviet historian at Princeton, makes an unusually strident version of the case that there was not. Konstantin Pleshakov, a Soviet historian at Mount Holyoke, presents a milder and more complicated version in There Is No Freedom Without Bread.