The dissident movements that developed in post-war Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), as well as the intellectual and ideational currents that inspired them, have been recurrently highlighted and theorized upon as acts of independent social self-organization in the pursuit of achieving public freedom and ethically informed politics under authoritarian communist regimes. Most of those studies, however, reflect similar patterns of analysis and focus on opposition activities subsequent to the Prague Spring in 1968 (associated with the ultimate failure of attempts at reform), which took on novel forms of “anti-politics” and “new evolutionism” and which resulted in, inter alia, the formation of Solidarity in Poland and its unprecedented victory – brought to a halt with the introduction of martial law in 1981. Subsequently, there has been a striking lack of scholarly interest in later forms of dissident expression. This has created the impression that the 1980s in CEE witnessed a prolonged impasse between the communist authorities and a substantially weakened, underground, and uniform opposition.
This impression, we learn from Padraic Kenney’s recent book, is erroneous and highly misleading. His A Carnival of Revolution tells a fascinating and thus far untold story of the “new generation” of dissidents that emerged in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovenia, and the GDR in the post-Solidarity era. Taking the Bakhtinian notion of carnival as a point of departure, Kenney develops a picture of diverse and vibrant civic movements that emerged, but also distanced themselves from, the revisionist ethos of the 1970s, and remained critical of its hegemonic oppositional discourse and the “seriousness” with which it addressed the communist regime. He labels them “carnival movement” and the “konkretny generation” (i.e., realist or pragmatic in contrast with the ideational dissidents of the 1970s). Kenney’s introductory thesis is that the changing international politics, economic failures, and intellectual activities in CEE will not suffice as explanatory factors of the 1989 revolutions unless placed in the context of the novel dynamics of dissidence of the “carnival movements” that developed throughout the whole European communist region.
Based on an impressive variety of sources (e.g., numerous interviews and samizdat and tamizdat publications in original languages), Kenney’s book consists of three main parts: (i) a detailed description and careful analysis of the pre-1989 “carnival movements” (P. ii) a “hoto essay” (a collection of pictures documenting opposition activities in 1988 and 1989) and (iii) a factual presentation of “16 scenes” from the final phases of regime change. Kenney’s book – with its multiplicity of actors, movements, and events - captures well the complexity and specificity of alternative dissidence. It also manages to picture its cross-border commonalities and analogies (with increased mobility and international contacts as two crucial characteristics), and at the same time emphasizes the particular national contexts and predilections that determined different paths. (Thus he emphasizes for instance that it was in highly religious Poland and Slovakia that Catholic communities became centers of opposition, or in relatively open Slovenia that different identity groups – gay, feminist, etc.– emerged).
Kenney’s perspective accentuates that alternative dissidence was in fact a (late and unplanned) child of the oppositional culture that had developed a decade earlier. Just as the generation of Havel and Michnik redefined politics as an act of public conciliation, negotiation, and engagement (as opposed to “the business of government”), and emphasized that the very act of social mobilization or rejection to consent with regime propaganda becomes political, representatives of the young generation (Jakubczak, Budrewicz, Hren, Orbán, Maranová, Dvořák, etc.) brought this claim even further and practiced it more radically. They politicized artistic happenings, ecological and gender issues, religious events, hippy lifestyle and punk music, etc., and consequently “broke free of the usual opposition sites [as] in this revolution, opposition could take place anywhere” (P. 5). They differed from the former generation of idealists and “truth-tellers” in that they did not direct their activities at the regime. On the contrary, they remained self-focused and indifferent toward official reactions, and even somehow flippant and cynical about their own actions. If one tries to define dissidence as an attempt to practice social freedom under authoritarian conditions that in their very definition deny its achievement, then for the “konkretny generation” this freedom is not longer realizable through self-organization or “living in truth.” Rather, it becomes synonymous with being able “to make political statements, to ridicule (or ignore) political ideas, or simply to enjoy oneself” (P. 163).
A characteristic trait of Kenney’s study is the focus on Poland, with the implicit suggestion of its centrality to dissident activity throughout the region. Thus the emphasis is placed on the relatively frequent cross-boundary interactions, assistance, and the inspirational role of Poles in the formation of the alternative dissident movements in Ukraine (the Lion Society, Doviria), Czechoslovakia (the Independent Peace Association NMS, the Slovak Union of Protectors of Nature and the Land SZOPK) and Hungary (Fidesz). Regardless of whether this is a correct observation, it might be partially attributed to Kenney’s specific national and local perspective – as is his focus on the city of Wrocław, which in his account becomes the birthplace of the “konkretny generation”. This, in fact, gains a truly symbolic meaning: while Warsaw gave rise to the intellectual and ideational opposition, and Gdańsk was the center of worker protests and Solidarity’s hometown, it was Wrocław – with its vibrant cultural and artistic life, cosmopolitan appeal and historically close German and Czech ties – that became the hub of alternative dissidence in the 1980s.
One of the main problems about this otherwise highly educational and valuable book is that it remains imprecise about the actual role that the “carnival movements” played in the events of 1989. Kenney’s initial assumption is that it is impossible to capture the complexity of the demise of communism in CEE without prior discernment of the civic movements of the 1980s, as they “created the framework, and the language” (P. 13) of the subsequent transition. Nevertheless, in spite of his meticulous analysis, Kenney fails to convince the reader about any significant causal links between the countercultural dissidence in the 1980s and actual regime change. Rather, as he himself reluctantly admits in the Polish case (Pp. 250-251), the conclusive negotiations (necessitated by both the economic and international political factors) included representatives of the older generation of oppositionists rather than delegates of the student and artistic milieus. The popular unrest might have taken the form of “carnival”, and be a crucial “catalyst to dialogue” (P. 300), but it was the recognized and “serious” dissidents that partnered soft-line authorities in the Round Table dialogues. Thus the impact of the “konkretny generation” is unavoidably reduced to imply (i) the societal pressure on the authorities throughout the 1980s and – through its diverse forms - to introduce (ii) “the idea of internal pluralism” (P. 301) into postcommunist politics. This does not diminish the value of the book per se, but it does suggest a reformulation of the causality question into a seemingly more modest query about the dynamics of dissidence in CEE and their evolution. As indicated above, it is the context of the former oppositional paradigms and of their political and ideological narrations that provides potentially more fruitful material for the study of the 1980s movements, rather than the future-oriented perspective of the 1989 events, which happened somehow alongside and without close relation to those forms of dissidence that Kenney describes. Without the artificial assumptions that close explanatory links need to be identified and that they can actually contribute to our understanding of regime collapse in CEE, emphasis can be placed on the impact that the “konkretny generation” has had on the postcommunist political diversification, redefinition of oppositional politics, and cultural (and countercultural) drifts.
Another problem is whether the book fulfils the – admittedly not explicit – promise to present the new forms of dissidence as “carnival movements” and the 1989 events as a “carnival revolution”. It is slightly disappointing that even though Kenney invokes the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, he hardly explains to the reader his understanding of it, and does not operationalize this conception in the particular late-communist context. (Besides, to describe these movements in terms of carnival is hardly a novelty per se, but rather a reiteration of their own self-reference). For instance the very interesting claim (Pp. 4-5) that carnival connotes a ceremony of the breakdown of borders (understood as an action of merging discourses officially considered as disparate or even contradictory) is not developed in the book. Bakhtin emphasizes that carnival is initiated through interactions between its participants, and that carnival does not relate to the everyday political and social reality in terms of mere imitation or caricature. Rather, it is of independent existence in the sense that it creates a situation beyond the everyday language of the official aesthetic or religious order. Its rituals of putting on masks and costumes bring up metamorphic representations and epitomize processes of completion, bereavement, death, reincarnation, and new life. Carnivalesque ceremonies express a belief in the termination of a given era and the beginning of a new one; and in this sense they gain an almost prophetic quality in the late-communist context. Unfortunately, from Kenney’s study of civic movements and the “konkretny generation,” we learn little about the transformative potential of the ritual of carnival. The conception of carnival is employed here to capture the hilarity, joyfulness, and nonchalance of the participants, the grotesque forms of their artistic expression, the negation of cultural uniformity, the increased crossborder interactions, etc., but the analysis does not go beyond the contestation that the dissidence in 1980s fits into the carnivalesque paradigm (a very interesting exception is a description we find on P. 191 of an Orange Alternative happening, at which the previously imprisoned Fydrych becomes hailed as “Papa Smurf” – a contemporary realization of the carnival rolereversion at which a jester becomes the king).
The point here is that Kenney does not exploit fully the potential of Bakhtin’s conception of carnival because he does not bring into play all of its essential components (for instance the public, universal but also ambivalent carnival laughter; not tantamount to the mood of irony and hilarity that Kenney recalls), and, what is more important, he does not explicate the meaning and significance of the juxtaposition of carnival and the late-communist opposition. These minor drawbacks, however, do not prevent one from evaluating his book as an informative and a highly original contribution to the study of European dissidence.