| Editors: | ||
| Sam Beck | David A. Kideckel | |
| Cornell University | Central Connecticut | |
| State University |
Please address all editorial correspondence, submissions, news and otber such information to either:
Sam Beck
Field and International Study Program
College of Human Ecology
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
David A. Kideckel
Department of Anthropology
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT 06050
Book and Film Reviews and Requests should be addressed to:
Laszlo Kurti
Department of Anthropology
American University, Washington, DC 20016
As we go to press the Germanies are moments away from unification, the Soviet Union is about to embark on a five hundred day experiment of free market expansion and everywhere in the region (with Hungary possibly an exception) tendentious signs of political stagnation and conflict-both latent and manifest-are rending the fabric of the East and Central European states. Suddenly, too, the conflict on the Arabian peninsula has shifted the world's attention away from the East European transformation, just when those states could have best benefitted by an infusion of energy, assistance, and patience to complement their own people's struggles to fashion new societies on the still warm remains of the post-War system. The romance of the West with the region's revolutions lasted about eight months; not bad considering the prevalence of the "fifty second sound bite," in our contemporary political culture. Welcome to the nineties!
New to this issue are two "reports from the field" which we hope to make a regular feature of subsequent numbers. Thus, as both AEER editors (Beck and Kideckel) have recently returned from Romania they, hopefully along with others recently there, will contribute a groupthink piece about that society in a future issue. We hope, too, that Jan Kubik will continue his meditations on his Polish fieldwork. We strongly encourage any of you who have recently been to East Europe to contribute your thoughts and analyses about the on-going transformation. Such contributions can go beyond 'both the analytical limitations of journalism as well as the time limitations of scholarship. Given the region's fluidity, we see few other options left us.
Finally, it is sad to note the passing of Lajos Vincze who died unexpectedly this past May. Lajos was active in East European research and contributed a number of interesting articles on pastoralism in the region. A more complete obituary submitted by Eva Huseby-Darvas can be found in the current (annual meeting) issue of the AAA's Anthropology Newsletter.
There are a number of meetings and symposia at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association which deserve your attention. First, the East European Anthropology Group will meet Friday Nov. 30 at noon to 1:30 and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe meeting will also be the same day at 5:30-7:00 p.m. The Hungarian Research Group will meet Thurs, 11-29 at noon. SAE Network meeting for the Anthropology of Germany is also scheduled to meet Friday at 5:30 but that may well be changed due to conflicts with the SAE business meeting.
Notable symposia include "Germany Between Perestroika and European Integration” (We, 9-28), "The European Melting Pot: National ideologies and Ethnic Minorities' (Fri a.m., 11-30), "Communal Life and Collective Action" (Fri p.m., 11-30) and "Author Meets Critics: Ernest Gellner on the Structure of Human History" (Sat p.m., 12-1). A number of other SAE-sponsored sessions are devoted to Europeanist themes. A tout a l'heure!
Soviet Nationality Policy to 1985
Until recently the long-standing goal of Soviet nationality policy had been the eventual merger or fusion of all nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union into a single Soviet socialist community. This merger was to be accomplished in two stages. During the first stage, through participation in a common polity and economy, members of various nations and nationalities were to draw closer together (sblizhenie). During the second stage they were to merge (sliianie) into a single socialist community.(1) Attempts to manage cultural diversity based on these notions have been called syncretic amalgamation. According to Cohen and Warwick (1983:11), "syncretic amalgamation represented an attempt to dilute or eradicate existing cultural identities through the creation of completely new bonds or cases of collective solidarity" through high levels of governmental interference in social relations. Syncretic amalganiation in its revolutionary form attempted to replace existing group loyalties with bonds deriving from class consciousness so that parochial loyalties are superceded by regime ideology. Cohen and Warwick (1983:11-12) elaborate:
In practice, fusionist policy generally made allowances for the existence and even temporary cultivation of traditional cultural practices, provided that such activities (were) essentially of afolklore or pro-regime character.
The rationale for the temporary cultivation of ethnic institutions was that once different groups became aware of their own identities through the development of their languages and cultures, they would become aware of the superiority of an international identity and willingly substitute proletarian internationalism for parochial nationalism. However, such policies in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe contributed to the strengthening rather than diminishing of ethnic loyalties, ethnic chauvinism and ethnic antipathies, in the process dampening the enthusiasm of leaders for fusionist policies. One result of this was the adoption on the part of these same leaders of "an evolutionary strategy to achieve revolutionary goals" by replacing the more "blatant sanctions of utopian normative appeals by more persuasive appeals and material incentives" (Cohen and Warwick 1983:12). The authors continue:
The expectation still remained that traditional cultural ties (would) eventually decay as a result of modernization, but it [was] acknowledged that this [would] be a very extended and gradual process. Moreover, although the merging of long-established identities(could) be encouraged and guided, this process require[d] methods more mild and subtle than those utilized by the earlier fusionist policies (Cohen and Warwick 1983:12).
This process of ethnic amalgamation was not based on the study of actual developments among various nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union; rather, it was determined a priori by party ideologues and presented as a historically inevitable process. Developments on the ground were expected to fit ideological requirements. Even though the persistence and resilience of parochial identities could not be denied, party ideologues kept insisting that the process of ethnic amalgamation was well under way. (2)
Soviet Nationaty Policy under Gorbachev
With the advent of glasnost and perestroika a serious reexamination and rethinking of Soviet nationality policy began. During the January and July, 1987 plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party past approaches to ethnic relations in the Soviet Union came under serious criticism. Soviet social scientists were criticized for being too simplistic, rigidly dogmatic, and abstract in their discussions of the nationality question, painting "the state of nationality relations only in rosy colors" (Bagramov 1988:23). They were criticized for treating nationality relations in the Soviet Union "as a zone of general harmony, while anything that [didn't] fit into that harmony [was] tossed aside, branded as a phenomenon of bourgeois nationalism" (Bagramov 1988:24). Such a view of ethnic relations had little connection to reality and, as a result, serious problems in ethnic relations were ignored.
As a response to such criticisms, there came about a more realistic discussion of the complexity of ethnic relations in the Soviet Union. The search for simplistic and dogmatic solutions was abandoned. Gorbachev and his supporters came to the realization that there was no single, universal answer to the nationality question. Solutions to ethnic problems must emerge from a realistic study and analysis of developments among various nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union. It was recommended that greater attention be paid to the development of indigenous languages and cultures; and that more emphasis be placed on the flourishing of nations and nationalities and less on their convergence and merger.
Although Moscow has steadfastly refused to entertain any demands for outright secession from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev and his supporters have shown a willingness to grant greater autonomy to non-Russian republics in an attempt to molify a restive non-Russian population. In a rare televised speech to the nation on July 1, 1989, Gorbachev noted the serious threat of ethnic conflict to the country. While firmly rejecting the demands of ethnic separatists, he indicated Moscow's growing willingness to accomodate the flourishing of ethnic consciousness among nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union. He advocated greater sensitivity and greater flexibility toward all legitimate ethnic demands and aspirations and called for free development of the languages and cultures of ethnic minorities. Gorbachev also admitted that the root causes of current ethnic conflict in the country are to be found in serious mistakes of the past, among which he identified "economic hardship, historical efforts to stamp out local cultures and the forced relocation of groups like the Meskhetians, all of which [have] sometimes been exploited by corrupt local officials to protect their power" (Keller 1989:3). The Central Committee of the Communist Party scheduled a special meeting to discuss ethnic issues in late July, 1989 but postponed it until September, then postponed it again until the Party Congress later this year. Already the second stage of ethnic amalgamation, that of merger or fusion of all nations and nationalities in the Soviet Union into a single socialist community, has been abandoned as unattainable. If non-Russian nations and nationalities are allowed greater autonomy to develop their languages and cultures, the first stage of ethnic unification too, that of drawing together of nationalities in language and culture, is likely to be reversed, each republic following a relatively independent course of linguistic and cultural development. Such a development would effectively nullify almost seventy years of nationality policy in the Soviet Union.
The new policies, however, still suffer from serious naivete, as did the traditional Soviet nationality policy. The traditional Soviet nationality policy largely ignored the sources of ethnic tension and ethnic conflict in the Soviet Union. Before the advent of glasnost and perestroika Soviet ideologues held that under socialism ethnic interests would be superceded by class interests. Class interests would transform ethnic consciousness into class consciousness initiating a process of ethnic amalgamation that would result in the emergence of a socialist community of Soviet peoples. The drawing together and the eventual merger of all nations and nationalities into a single Soviet nation was taken for granted as historically inevitable. The nationality policy under Gorbachev suffers from a different kind of naivete. Although acknowledging the existence of ethnic tension and conflict in the Soviet Union, it seeks to locate the source of such tension and conflict in the mistakes of overzealous party aparatchiks of the past. The proposed remedy for ethnic problems is to allow greater autonomy to the republics and to encourage the development of ethnic institutions and cultures. With a more favorable environment for the expression of ethnic interests, Gorbachev and his supporters believe, ethnic tensions and conflicts would disappear. The real sources of ethnic conflict, the fact that non-Russian ethnic groups were incorporated into the Czarist Empire through conquest, that these same groups were kept in the Soviet Empire by force, that additional groups were incorporated into the Soviet Union by conquest, have not been given serious scrutiny.
Ethnic grievances and animosities in the Soviet Union must be seen against the backdrop of Russian and Soviet history. In the past such grievances and animosities were held in check by authoritarian rule from the Kremlin. Glasnost and perestroika have created an environment for the freer airing of a host of ethnic grievances, leading to the formation of strong nationalist movements and demands for greater autonomy among many non-Russian ethnic groups, while others- the Baltic republics, Moldavia, Georgia, Azerbaijan- have called for outright independence from the Soviet Union.
Certainly, the primary target of ethnic grievances and animosities is the Russians who have ruled the non-Russian republics for so long. However, major disputes over borders, over economic, political, and religious autonomy, have arisen among non-Russian ethnic groups themselves. These disputes too have their source in Czarist and Soviet history. Boundaries of republics, autonomous republics and regions were established arbitrarily. Groups were moved/deported from their home regions to other parts of the country for reasons of political expediency. As Hoffmann (1990: 1) observes, According to recent analysis, over 35 borders within the USSR are now disputed among different national groups. Some of these conflicts, such as that between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, have already had a major impact.
The Karelians claim parts of the Kola Peninsula; the Tadjiks and the Uzbeks have claims on each other’s territory; there is a strong independence movement in Georgia but several groups within Georgia, such as the Abkhazians, Ossetians, Adzhars, and Meshketians also want greater authonomy within Georgia if not outright secession; the Meshketi Turks, who were deported to the Fergana Oblast of Uzbekistan during World War II, recently were targets of Uzbek violence and want to return to their homeland in Georgia; Crimean Tatars, another group deported to Central Asia during World War 11, want to return to their homeland on the Crimean Peninsula; the Germans of Kaliningrad, the Poles of Lithuania and Byelorussia, and others want to be recognized as distinct ethnic groups and establish their autonomous republics (Hoffmann 1990:1-2). The Soviet Union itself has laid claim to parts of Lithuania if that republic decides to secede from the Soviet Union.
As Afanasyev, a Soviet historian and a radical parliamentarian in the Congress of Peoples Deputies, in a recent commentary observes, (1990:52) "the U.S.S.R. is not a country, nor is it a state ... It is a neighborhood of states and nations that are tired of their colonial and colonizing past, that have been tortured and humiliated by Stalinist efforts at unification. . ." He goes on to say that the Soviet Union as presently constituted has no future because many of the states and nations that make it up want nothing less than total independence from Moscow. The Lithuanian parliament has already declared its independence from Moscow (March 11). Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia, Georgia, and perhaps Azerbaijan, when elections are held there, are likely to follow suit in the future, other republics may want to exercise the right of secession from the Soviet Union if there is no fundamental alteration in their relations with Moscow.
The initial response from the Kremlin to the Lithuanian declaration of independence has been uncompromising. Gorbachev has called it invalid and illegal and stated that Moscow has no intention of negotiating the secession of Lithuania or any other Soviet republic from the Soviet Union until there is enabling legislation to do so. Although Gorbachev has promised a law which would spell out the procedures for secession, on this issue, the Soviet leadership finds itself between a rock and a hard place. if secession is made too easy, then, several republics are likely to exercise this option. If secession is made too difficult or impossible, then, the credibility of Soviet leadership, both within the country and in the international arena, will be seriously undermined. Can Gorbachev and his supporters preside over the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and still remain in power? Or will they resort to force once again to maintain the unity and integrity of the Soviet Union? The only viable alternative to secession may be to give full sovereignty and political independence to the republics within a loose Soviet federation. That would require a willingness on the part of the Kremlin to relinquish most of its powers of control over the republics.
To date, the Kremlin has not shown any willingness to do so. Gorbachev's call for a strong executive presidency with extraordinary and extra-legal powers to dissolve parliaments of republics and to rule by decree if necessary, was debated in the Congress of Peoples Deputies on March 13. After Gorbachev made some tactical concessions on the extra-legal powers of the proposed presidency, the Congress approved it. The next day, on March 14, the Congress elected Gorbachev as the first executive president of the Soviet Union. The establishment of a strong executive presidency is one indication that in any negotiations with republics over secession, Moscow is going to dictate the terms of independence. Glasnost and perestroika may yet founder on the rock of nationalism and separatism.
Nationality Policy in Bulgaria
While Soviet leaders have been seriously considering the reversal of a failed nationality policy since 1985, the leaders of Bulgaria, on the other hand, who normally follow their Soviet colleagues closely in such matters, resorted to brutal force to achieve the assimilation of the country's minorities into the mainstream Bulgarian culture. What the Soviet Union had failed to achieve in almost seventy years, Bulgaria tried to accomplish in less than forty years.
The Bulgarian version of ethnic processes has included, in addition to the historical inevitability of ethnic amalgamation that Soviet ideologues had subscribed to until recently, a strong dose of romantic Bulgarian nationalism. This romantic nationalism, which became an explicit and integral part of the govemment's strategy to eliminate cultural diversity in the country between 1984 and 1989, saw the "nation as a basic and natural subdivision of humanity, a political unit" (Lunt 1986:729). Although such a definition of a nation did not imply that members of a nation speak the same language and live on the same territory, Bulgarian ideologues considered both to be "natural and self evident peculiar characteristics of a proper nation" (Lunt1986:729). Lunt (1986:729-730) goes on to observe that Bulgarian ideologues, have taken for granted that nation = language = territory = whereby the term nation and language are absolutely equal and primary, while nation = language ordinarily equals territory, and finally nation = territory ought to correspond to state... Because the territory is Bulgarian, the dogma goes, the people who inhabit it are Bulgarian. Because they are Bulgarians, they must speak the Bulgarian language and sbould all be in a single nation state (emphasis in original).
According to this ideology of romantic nationalism, only cultural homogeneity legitimates a state's sovereignty. Ever since the Communist Party consolidated its power in Bulgaria after World War II, its program for the country's minorities has been clear-- the creation of a unified single-nation state through assimilation of all minority groups.
This virulent Bulgarian nationalism derives from a deep sense of misfortune or bad luck ingrained in the mindset of Bulgarian nationalists. Many Bulgarians feel that they have been frustrated by their neighbors in their attempts to resurrect and reestablish a greater Bulgaria within the boundaries of ancient Bulgarian empires. First, Bulgaria fell to the Byzantines during the thirteenth century; then Ottoman Turks ruled the country for 500 years. Several attempts to reestablish a greater Bulgaria after independence from Ottoman rule in 1878-- the Balkan wars, World War I and World War II also failed. Frustrations generated by these failures have found a convenient outlet in aggression toward minority populations in Bulgaria. The Turkish minority, being the largest and linguistically, culturally and religiously distinct from the majority, whose ancestors had ruled Bulgaria for five hundred years, has born the brunt of nationalist aggression. They have been made the scapegoat for all Bulgarian problen,is and the phrase "five hundred years of Turkish yoke" has frequently been invoked to explain away serious problems in the country. The extent of ill-feeling and hatred toward Turks among some segments of the Bulgarian population, mostly the less-educated and the less well off econon-dcally, were made apparent by large-scale nationalist demonstrations in Sofia and a number of cities with sizeable Turkish populations in early January, 1990 in response to the goverrunent decision to restore the human and civil rights of the Turks and Bulgarian speaking Muslims.
The ideological reconstruction of ethnic identities in line with the Bulgarian version of ethnic amalgamation and the romantic Bulgarian national myth began immediately afterworld War II. Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), were officially declared to be Bulgarians from the beginning and have been counted as Bulgarians in all of the censuses since then. Macedonians were officially declared to be Bulgarians after the 1956 census so that by the 1965 census their numbers had been reduced from 187,000 to less than 9,000 (King 1973:262). Gypsies and Turks were recognized as distinct minorities into the 1970s.(3) For a time the government even encouraged the development of Turkish ethnic institutions, such as native language primary and secondary schools, teacher-training institutes and educational institutes, ethnic press, ethnic theaters, clubs and so on. With hindsight it is clear that such support was intended as a vehicle of assimilation of Turks because these same institutions were used to disseminate assimilationist programs and values. However, very quickly it became clear that the development of Turkish ethnic institutions was strengthening rather than weakening Turkish identity. Consequently, the government withdrew its support and between 1960 and 1970 most of these institutions were eliminated (See Eminov 1983).
In 1971 the assimilation of the country's minority populations became an explicit official policy. Party ideologues began frequently to declare that Bulgaria was well along the way of becoming a unified, single-nation state. The platform of the Bulgarian Communist Party for 1971 noted that "the process of development of the socialist nation will expand further" and "citizens of our country of different national origins will come ever closer together (Rabotnichesko Delo, 1971). Around 1973 the use of the term "unified Bulgarian nation" began to appear in the official press. In 1977 an article in the Party daily, claimed that Bulgaria was “almost completely of one ethnic type and [was] moving toward complete national homogeneity" (Rabotnichesko Delo, 1977). And finally in 1979 Party leader Todor Zhivkov claimed that "the national question has been solved definitively and categorically by the population itself ... Bulgaria has no internal problems with the nationality question" (Rabotnichesko Delo, 1979).
Unfortunately for the government, the members of the largest minority groups in Bulgaria- Pomaks, Gypsies, and Turks- were unwilling to change their identities voluntarily in order to comply with ideological requirements in order to bring social realities in line with official ideology, the Bulgarian government mounted a number of brutal campaigns between 1972 and 1984 to force Pomaks, Gypsies, and Turks to replace their Muslim names with conventional Bulgarian names. Between 1972 and 1974 Pomaks were forced to take on Bulgarian names. Between 1981 and 1983 the same fate befell the Gypsy Muslims. Finally, during the winter months of 1984-1985 close to one million Turks and the small number of Tatar, Alevi, and Albanian Muslims were forced to assume Bulgarian names, so that in March, 1985 Bulgarian officials could confidently declare that Bulgaria was at last a unified, single nation state, that everyone living in Bulgaria was Bulgarian (Simsir 1986: 352-353).
High-ranking government officials were dispatched to "formerly" Turkish areas to tell Turks that they were henceforth Bulgarians. For example, Deputy Prime Minister Todor Bozhinov, in a speech given in the northern Bulgarian town of Ruse which has a sizeable Turkish population and reported in Dunavska Pravda On March 16, 1985 stated categorically:
Our countrymen who have reconstituted their Bulgarian names are Bulgarians ...They are the flesh and blood of the Bulgarian people. Bulgarian blood flows in their veins, even though their national consciousness is beclouded...(Quoted in Baest 1985:24; emphasis added).
Bulgarian historical texts were revised to reflect this new version of history. References to the existence of Turks in Bulgaria were deleted. Bulgarian historians went even further: they revised the history of the Balkans as well by eliminating all references to the existence of Turks in the entire Balkan Peninsula! Discussing the present ethnic make-up of the Balkans, Dimitrov (1982:14) wrote:
In terms of ethnic and linguistic affiliation tbe population of the Balkan states as a wbole belong to the Indo-European group. In the Balkans there also live Russians, Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Tatars, and otber ethnic groups.
The government enlisted the aid of anthropologists and other scientists to collect evidence in support of the 'racial purity' of the Bulgarian people. An article published in July 25, 1988 in an official journal presented the "findings" of anthropologists from the Sofia Institute of Morphology, based on, according to the article, over 30 years of research in three ethnically mixed districts. These "findings" suggested that the Bulgarian people had remained pure and uncontaminated since their emergence as a people during the early Middle Ages. A commentary on the article in the Newsletter of the East Eurol2en Anthropology Group (1988:16-17) observed:
According to anthropologists, the Bulgarian people took shape in the ninth and tenth centuries as a blending of Slavs, Thracians, and Asiatic tribes. This mixture evolved into a homogeneous entity, tbe people now called Bulgarians. The foreign invasions of tbe past 1,OOO years left no racial mark, it seems. The minority are merely Bulgarians wbo happen to speak Turkish.
Between 1985 and 1989, Bulgarian authorities insisted that there were no Turks in Bulgaria; that all Turks had "restored" their original Bulgarian names and identities voluntarily and spontaneously during the winter months of 1984 and 1985. However these "voluntary Bulgarians" engaged in widespred demonstrations and hunger strikes in late May and early June, 1989 demanding the restoration of their Turkish names and their civil and human rights. Peaceful demonstrators were fired upon by Bulgarian security forces and scores were killed and injured. As a response, the Bulgarian government began to deport native Turkish intellectuals and leaders of human rights organizations to Western countries, primarily to Austria, and to send thousands of others to the Turkish border on very short notice. Between late May and August 22, when the Turkish authorities closed the border, over 320,000 Turks were forced to leave Bulgaria. This mass exodus caused serious social and economic dislocations in both countries. Turkey, already overburdened with Iranian refugees and Kurdish refugees from Iraq, lacked adequate resources to settle the new refugees. The attention of Western countries was diverted by developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the plight of the Turkish refugees was largely forgotten. The mass exodus of Turks exacerbated the already acute labor shortages in key economic sectors in Bulgaria that led to the downfall of the Zhivkov regime.
In an attempt to slow down the exodus from Bulgaria, the Turkish government reinstituted visa requirments for Turks who wished to emigrate to Turkey. Since August 22, 1989, emigration of Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey has slowed down considerably. in fact, Turkish refugees returning to Bulgaria from Turkey have far Outnumbered those going to Turkey. To date, over half of those who emigrated to Turkey between late May and August 22, 1989 have returned to Bulgaria. Many Turkish refugees were rapidly disillusioned with conditions in Turkey. High unemployment, high inflation, lack of housing, lack of government resources to help them, hostile reaction from native Turks, and a lower standard of living in Turkey convinced many Turks that, at least economically, they were better off in Bulgaria. The political changes sweeping across Eastern Europe gave them hope that the conditions of minorities in Bulgaria would improve.
Recent Political Developments In Bulgaria
On November 10, 1989, the long-time leader of Bulgaria and the architect of the forced assimilation policy, Todor Zhivkov, was ousted from power in a parliamentary coup. A number of close Zhivkov loyalists were also purged from the Politbureau and the Central Committee. The new leadership moved quickly to repudiate the excesses of the Zhivkov regime and promised to establish a more democratic political system. Restrictions on dissent were eased, and a special police unit which had been harassing human rights activists was dismantled. On December 29,1989, the new leadership decided to reverse the forced assimilation policy against Turks and other Muslims by declaring it a "grave political error" and gave assurances that in the future "everyone in Bulgaria (would) be able to choose his name, religion, and language freely" (New York Times 1989:8). This decision triggered a well-organized Bulgarian nationalist backlash in early January, 1990. The nationalists demonstrated in Sofia, and in a number of cities with sizeable Turkish populations, such as Kurdzhali, Haskovo, Razgrad, Kolarovgrad and elsewhere in the country demanding that the government rescind its decision and submit the minority question to a national referendum. The depth of ill-feeling and hatred of Bulgarian nationalists toward Turks and other Muslirm were apparent as demonstrators carried placards and shouted slogans such as "Death to Turks," “"urks to Turkey," "The Central Committee Has Sold Out the Bulgarian Nation."
The new leadership stood firm and insisted that there would be no retreat from its decision nor would the minority question be put to a national referendum which would risk bringing back the denial of human rights once again. The government called the leaders of ethnic and religious factions to a national meeting in Sofia. The government was able to convince the nationalists that the recognition and protection of the rights of minority populations was in the interests of the country. However, nothing was done to implement this decision. Local and regional party organizations in predominantly Turkish areas of the country took a wait and see attitude. Since it had been these same leaders who had had a direct hand in formulating, implementing, and enforcing the forced assirwlation policy of the Zhivkov regime, they were in no hurry to dismantle their own edifice. At the same time, human rights groups in the country, under the aegis of the Union of Democratic Forces, pressed for the formulation and enactment of enabling legislation to implement the decision of December 29, 1989. The government finally prepared a draft law for debate in the parliament in early March. The draft law has already drawn protests from Turks and Bulgarian Muslims as having too many legalistic and bureaucratic hurdles that would slow the procedure of restoring original Turkish and Muslim names. They have demanded a simplified procedure to expedite the name-changing process.
Conclusions
Heightened ethnic conflict in the Soviet Union, in Bulgaria and elsewhere in Eastern Europe is a clear indication that traditional nationality policies have failed. The new leaders in the Soviet Union and East European countries are seriously reexamining their nationality policies and trying to come up with more viable alternatives to the policies of the past. Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika have opened the floodgates of pent-up ethnic grievances and animosities in the Soviet Union. Strong nationalist movements have emerged demanding greater autonomy and, in some cases, secession from the Soviet Union. So far no clear-cut alternatives to the policies of the past have emerged to deal effectively with these demands. For now it is difficult to predict what the outcome of these nationalist tendencies is going to be. The only certainty is that these tendencies will have a major impact on developments in the Soviet Union. In Bulgaria, the forced assimilation policy against the Turks and other Muslims in the country brought about the downfall of the Zhivkov regime in November, 1989. Since then, the new leadership in Bulgaria has taken positive steps to reverse the forced assimilation policy of the old regime and to restore the rights of minorities. Already, a number of rights which were restricted or denied in the past have been restored. Turks are allowed to speak Turkish in public once again. The restrictions on circumcision of young Muslim boys, the wearing of traditional dress by Muslim women, traditional Muslim funerary practices, traditional wedding ceremonies, the practice of the Islamic religion, among others, have been lifted. A draft law has been proposed to expedite the restoration of Turkish and Muslim names.
All of these developments provide hope for a better future for rwnorities but there is a sense of weariness too. The chill cast upon relations between members of minority groups and Bulgarians by the brutal forced assimilation policy of the past and recent Bulgarian nationalist demonstrations remain. As one of my informants from Bulgaria in a recent letter writes, "The government may restore our language, names, and religion, but the fact remains that Bulgaria is a very inhospitable place for us. We are still second-class citizens in this country. We are still made to feel less than human. How are we expected to relate to our Bulgarian workmates and classmates who, not so long ago, marched through the streets shouting "Death to the Turks"? The psychological scars caused by five years of brutalization at the hands of the government are deep and are unlikely to heal any time soon. The elimination of the distrust and hatred generated by the assimilation campaign will require a long period of reeducation of all Bulgarian citizens.
Recent events in Bulgaria demonstrate that at the threshhold of the 21st century it is not possible to force a people to change their identity by force and/or administrative fiat. Even though the new leadership in Bulgaria has repudiated the assimilation policies of the past, serious problems remain. Continued prejudice and discrimination against Turks and other Muslims, the persistence of economic and political inequalities between the ethnic Bulgarian and ethnic Turkish populations, and unique and separate cultural and religious traditions will motivate Turks to assert themselves. For the time being as in the past, the manifestation of Turkish identity in Bulgaria will revolve around the activation of cultural and religious support systems to maintain Turkish ethnic identity and integrity. The continued use of Turkish language in carrying out important social and cultural activities is likely to be an important factor in maintaining the cultural, religious, and familial bonds among the members of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, bonds that are essential for cultural survival.
Finally, in both the Soviet Union and Bulgaria, there are politically well-entrenched individuals and groups who are opposed to fundamental reforms. These individuals and groups will do all they can to slow down, if not scuttle, these reforms. It is a question of political survival for them. The final outcome is uncertain, but the tide of change is strong and the possibility of positive and fundamental changes in ethnic relations in the Soviet Union and in Bulgaria is real.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of pre-Gorbachev era Soviet nationality policy See Bromley (1971, 1979).
2. For an excellent discussion of the application of theory to nationality policy in the Soviet Union See Wixman (1986).
3. This section of the article concentrates primarily on Turks. Pomaks and Gypsies are mentioned only briefly. For a more detailed discussion of the experience of Pomaks and Gypsies in Bulgaria See Silverman (1984, 1986, and 1989) and Eminov (1987).
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1986 "Applied Soviet nationality policy: a suggested rationale." In Ch. Lemercier-Quelquejay et al., eds. Turco-Tatar Past, Soviet Present: Studies Presented to Alexandre Bennigsen. Paris: Editions Peeters, pp. 449-468.
Ethnicity and nationalism occupy a central space in the ongoing negotiation of transition throughout much of Eastern Europe and it is clear that the viability of some governments in the region, and perhaps even some of the states themselves, now hinges upon the successful management of these forces. Eminov provides a useful description of two such cases, the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. This combination is very illustrative since, as Eminov points out, the Soviet ideology provided a basis for Bulgaria's nationality policies. However, from a local Bulgarian perspective, the adherence to the Soviet line on nationality issues often coincided with indigenous Bulgarian bases for allegiance that were not strictly ideological. These bases account for the continued Bulgarian pursuit of ethnic homogeneity even after this objective was being questioned in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in the current context of retreat from monolithic ideology in Bulgaria, these bases are likely to be the primary concerns in the continuing search for a solution to the "nationality problem." I would like to devote this commentary to a discussion of some of these bases, examining how they have influenced the evolution of ethnic conflict in Bulgaria and suggesting how they might be approached theoretically to further our understanding of the Bulgarian case.
As Eminov makes clear, the Zhivkov regime was engaged for almost two decades in an attempt to eradicate ethnic variation in Bulgaria by such measures as restricting the use of the Turkish language and prohibiting the practice of Muslim religious rites. This assimilation campaign culminated in the attempt by the government in 1984-85 to forcibly change the names of all Turks in the country into standard Bulgarian names. Continued Turkish resistance to this policy then led to the forced, or at least rushed, exodus of thousands of Turks from the country in the summer of 1989, many of whom subsequendy returned. One of the first actions of the post-Zhivkov government was to halt this assimilation campaign, which, in turn, sparked anti-Turkish demonstrations on the part of Bulgarians in early January of 1990. To better understand this turn of events we must start with the assimilation campaign itself.
One of the primary factors prompting the assimilation campaign was the country's demographic decline--a suggestion made by Crampton (1987:205), although not pursued in most other discussions of the issue, whether popular or scholarly. This is surprising given the fact that while living in Bulgaria I was constantly confronted with comments about the specter of declining population, usually in the context of discussions about Turks and Gypsies. Government officials and ordinary Bulgarians perceive a demographic crisis. Bulgarian birth rates are very low, families with one child are common, and families with more than two children are unusual in both urban and rural contexts. Conversely, there is a perception, true to a degree, that Turks and Gypsies have a high birthrate. The logical result is clear: limited growth of the overall population with an increasing percentage of Turks and Gypsies. Bulgarians express this in the often repeated summation: "we are disappearing." Theoretically assimilation was to forestall the "disappearance" of Bulgarians. Having failed to reverse the fertility decline of the Bulgarian population, officials attempted to incorporate the reproductive resources of Turks and Gypsies.
As the above statement suggests, the government had also attempted to raise Bulgarian birth rates in an effort to solve the population problem. This attempt included a restriction of abortion availability and installation of a series of pro-natal financial incentives (McIntyre 1975:367-375). The timing of the assimilation strategy in relation to these other efforts supports a demographic role for the former as well. Assimilation attempts followed upon the early failure of the pro-natal policies and became more severe as the failure of the pro-natal policies became more evident. In 1987 an official describing the pro-natal policies advised me not to worry about remembering them because "they are not working and are going to be changed." it is logical that the continuing failure of these strategies prompted the greater reliance on assimilation tactics which characterized the last several years.
Besides the timing, the structure of the pronatal policies also reveals a concern with ethnic demographic differentials. Abortions were restricted for the first three births and financial incentives increased for each child up to three, while for subsequent children the incentives dropped and abortion restrictions disappeared. Why did the government cut back incentives at all if their objective was overall population growth? This paradox reflects the fact that Bulgarians rarely have more than two children so that encouraging a third birth is the objective of the incentives. Turks and Gypsies, however, commonly have more than three children so the incentives diminish beyond three births. As another official put it, "the incentives are cut back after three children because some groups will have as many children as they get paid for." No one needed to clarify who these groups are. The assimilation campaign was intended, at least in part, to redress these demographic differentials. Obviously, it was not going to solve the problem of low population growth, but it would eliminate the compounding problem of an increasing Turkish presence in the population.
The possibility of assimilation as a solution, however, must also be connected to the existence of the Pomaks, a group of Bulgarian speaking Muslims. The existence of this group provided empirical evidence for the claim that Bulgarians were forcibly converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, which was the government's main justification for the assimilation attempts. It is certainly arguable that such a severe program of assimilation would not have been pursued toward the Turkish population without this empirical "justification." Thus, as Eminov points out, the Pomaks were the first to be forced to change their names back in the 1970s, and there can be little doubt that the success of the policy among this segment was important in the decision to extend the accusation of Ottoman conversion and the correction of Bulgarian assimilation to other Muslim groups as well.
Of course neither the demographic factor nor the existence of the Pomak category justifies or excuses the responses of the government. They also do not explain why the government chose the assimilation strategy as the primary response. Clearly the assimilation policy articulated with other objectives as well. Paramount among these was the more general goal of cultural homogenization or standardization. By this I refer to the Bulgarian govermnent's desire to bring all areas and groups in the country into conformity with the government's centrally defined profile of "Bulgarian culture." Clearly the assimilation of Turks fit well with this more general cultural policy which attempted to eradicate the distinctiveness of various groups in the society. This process was by no means limited to ethnic minorities and, in fact, also affected many Bulgarians whose regional differences of dialect and especially folklore were devalued and restricted (see e.g. Silverman 1983).
Explaining the standardization policy itself brings up the issue of what Eminov refers to as the “strong dose of romantic Bulgarian nationalism" evident in Bulgarian nationality policy. Clearly standardization had nationalistic motives, yet I would suggest that such nationalism was not solely "romantic," but pragmatic as well. Each of Bulgaria's modem tragedies have ended with territorial losses and the desire to thoroughly "Bulgarianize" the current territory is less a reflection of frustrated greater ambitions of romantic nationalism than it is a rational policy to ensure that further losses do not take place. The more the country succeeds in creating a standardized Bulgarian population, the less the perceived threat of further territorial retrenchment coming from political changes in the area. Meanwhile, current political discussions in Eastern Europe reveal that this longstanding concern with territorial violability was not as irrational as it might have seemed a few years ago.
While the standardization of all social groups in Bulgaria clearly serves nationalistic aims, there are reasons why the process seems more like "romantic nationalism" in the particular case of the Turks. Bulgarian nationalism had its modern origins in the period of the National Revival in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Bulgaria was still under Ottoman control, this "national awakening" contained an expressly anti-Turkish component. Subsequent national events and policies have done little to supercede this association. Lacking great achievements in modem nation-building, Bulgarian leaders and historians have continued to characterize Bulgarian nationalism as a force of "struggle" and "survival" rather than "achievement," and particularly struggle and survival in the face of insurmountable odds. In this characterization, the 500 years of Ottoman control is the penultimate illustration.
Nonetheless, there is a limit to how far Bulgarian resentment of Ottoman control can be said to be the basis of contemporary ethnic conflicts. The excuse, "500 years under the yoke," as Eminov notes, is pervasive in Bulgaria as an excuse for any difficulty or deficiency, but it would be a mistake to suggest that the pervasive appeal to this excuse reveals the extent of anti-Turkish sentiments today. The common resort to this cliche on the part of Bulgarians is more akin to a laynian's attempt at historical socioeconomic analysis than an expression of ethnic hostility. I have heard this comment from many different people-some who express negative stereotypes of Turks and others who do not. One of the latter had actually worked a few years in a Turkish village, had learned a little Turkish, was proud of his knowledge of Turkish cultural practices, and in no way ever expressed anti-Turkish feelings. Bulgarians do not necessarily blame contemporary Turks for Ottoman actions or their long-term consequences.
To say the connection is not always made between Ottoman and contemporary Turks is not to deny that the potential association exists and can be mobilized when conflict surfaces for other reasons. Clearly, officials thought it could be mobilized to muster support for the assimilation campaign, but they were wrong. In nearly two years of residence in Bulgaria--in towns and villages, among intellectuals and agricultural workers--I came across only one individual who voiced support for the policy of changing the names of the Turkish population. Clearly such a politically volatile issue was not a common topic of conversation, but people I knew well would reveal to me in private conversations their opposition to the policy and their genuine inability to understand why it was implemented. One woman said, in the context of an unrelated political discussion about Zhivkov, "I'd like to ask Zhivkov what was the purpose of changing the names of the Turks, that's what I'd like to know. It is not easy to be called by a name all your life and then one day to be called by another name. That would be hard." Similarly, even in more casual and public conversations the mere mention of the name changing campaign usually elicited a shake of the head and the mumbled evaluation, "stupidity" from someone present. Clearly, any strong support for the assimilation strategy of changing names was restricted to government officials and Party ideologues involved in the program. If this was the case, then why did Bulgarians take to the streets in anti-Turkish demonstrations when the new government reversed the assimilation policy? I admit that this was as much a surprise to me as it was to many Bulgarians. Some of the latter have attempted to make sense of this response by insisting that the demonstrations were organized by Party leaders who had been responsible for the policy and whose positions were being threatened by the new regime. While the conspiratorial flavor of this explanation might render it unpalatable to some, the degree of organization exhibited in the protests is consistent with a degree of central coordination. The Party leaders in the Zhivkov regime responsible for the assimilation campaign certainly had reasons for creating an impression of indigenous support for their policies, either to undermine the new regime or, failing that, to diminish the possibility of punitive actions being taken against them for their complicity in the discredited campaign. Bulgarians, for their part, are used to being mobilized by the Party for official "manifestations" and the demonstrations would not have been difficult for Party officials to arrange. Whether or not this proves to have been the case, there are other local factors that can help make sense of the popular response to the policy reversal and account for the receptivity of certain people to mobilization for opposing demonstrations.
The geography of the demonstrations is revealing in this regard. Apart from Sofia, the demonstrations were restricted to those cities with large Turkish populations. Besides the obvious issue of proximity, this geography is related to two other factors. most important is the temporal dovetailing of the regime change with the abandorunent of assimilation policies. The former rendered the pre-existing rhetoric of political-economic reform much more credible. The reform message in Bulgaria during the preceding years had included a heavy emphasis on greater decentralization and local autonomy, though most individuals remained skeptical that major changes would ever be implemented. With the ousting of Zhivkov in November of 1989, such changes suddenly appeared much more likely. In this context the simultaneous restoration of Turkish rights appeared threatening for those individuals residing in areas of Turkish predominance. if the ideals of democracy and decentralization were implemented on the local level, these Bulgarians were likely to lose out in various ways to the surrounding Turkish populations. Such losses were likely to be further extended and entrenched by linguistic exclusion of Bulgarians from commercial and political activity conducted in Turkish. Bulgarians in these areas already perceived themselves as a numerical and perhaps even cultural minority but the newly perceived threat of "losing ground" is linked to the possibility of political economic change and is a conclusion they would not have drawn if the assimilation policy had been halted by the previous regime when talk of reform was not taken seriously and central Bulgarian authority remained unquestioned. At the same time, the new reform context allowed for the expression of their concerns in a public way that also was not feasible previously.
The second factor that nourished the concerns expressed in the January demonstrations was the negative fallout from the excesses of the assimilation policy itself, especially the mass exodus of Turks in the summer of 1989. The exodus of thousands of Turks created hardships for many Bulgarians which easily translated into hard feelings. Such a sudden and extensive movement of people was a major shock to an economic system that is not noted for its quick response capabilities. Crops, especially tobacco, were left in the fields without provisions for care or harvest, and enterprises were rendered inoperative by the flight of their Turkish workers. Subsequent shortages were then blamed on the Turkish exodus, not only because of the consequent labor shortage, but also because they bought up mass quantities of goods to take with them to Turkey. Mind you, there were recurrent shortages before the Turks left and the buying up of goods was connected to the fact that all their Bulgarian currency was not convertible nor exportable. Still, the upheaval of the exodus provided an irresistible, if temporary, explanation for systematic problems.
While Bulgarians may have seized upon the opportunity to blame the Turks for their problems, we should not assume that blame means hate. To say, as was apparently common in the months following the exodus, that "the Turks are to blame for the lack of cheese" is not to deny that the Turks had legitimate reasons, such as attempted assimilation, for leaving. Nonetheless, the more Turkish responses to such provocations negatively affect the lives of Bulgarians, the less sympathetic Bulgarians are likely to be. In this way anti-Turkish sentiments can be generated where they previously did not exist.
I am not suggesting that tensions and conflicts between Bulgarians and Turks did not predate the current problems. They are indeed, as commentators on East European ethnic conflicts are wont to point out, "centuries old." Such observations, however, contribute very little to our understanding of ethnic-based processes. We need to look at these processes both holistically and with historical specificity to see how they interact with changing circumstances in creating the current profile of conflict and tension. As Verdery (1983) definitively demonstrates, processes of ethnicity interact with political and economic processes and change over time so that a particular ethnic identity or conflict does not necessarily represent the same thing at different periods and under different circumstances. Following Verdery's insight we should, therefore, be skeptical of explanations of current ethnic strife in Eastern Europe as simply age-old conflicts forcing their way through the weakening restraints of authoritarian communism. To suggest that ethnic conflict developed in the distant past and that conununism simply suppressed its expression is to miss the sociologically interesting issue of how political, economic and ethnic issues have interacted in the past and how they continue to do so in the present.
As an example of this process I have suggested here that the reforms and political-econornic changes occurring since November of 1989 in Bulgaria did not simply release pent up ethnic animosities but may have actually generated and intensified conflicts that were less significant and less charged, at least from the Bulgarian side of the issue, under previous political and economic conditions. in other words, it is not simply that new changes allowed old animosities to be expressed, but to a degree the tensions themselves were created and affected by these changes.
There are other ways as well that current changes may have exacerbated ethnic differentiation and tension. On a general level the current process of democratization requires competing representations and thereby enhances the potential of ethnic identity as a vehicle of both local interest promotion and political differentiation among non-minority political parties. Ethnic mobilization then engages international interest from those states with ethnic ties to minority populations, in this case Turkey, who often see an opportunity to pursue political interests in a humanitarian vein. The threat of intervention by Turkey acquires greater urgency with the declining reliability of Warsaw Pact alliances, which is another aspect of the current situation that has further sensitized the Turkish ethnic issue for Bulgarians.
In response to the potential political mobilization of Turks in Bulgaria and the perceived external threat of intervention by Turkey, Bulgaria has sought out a new security with Greece. In a report on this developing alliance Anastasi (1990:A9) suggests that "growing concern in Athens and Sofia over unrest among Muslim minorities may render Greece and Bulgaria allied 'front states' in Europe against the spread of Muslim fundamentalism." He goes on to report that "Greece no longer feels threatened by totalitarianism but by nationalist tensions in the Balkans." in these circumstances it is intellectually and politically crucial to have an appreciation of how ethnic processes in the area are being manipulated and exhibited in political-economic arenas. One consolation is that while such processes are becoming more significant in Bulgaria, they may also be more open to scholarly investigations. Hopefully, other scholars of the area will follow Eminov's lead and take up the issue.
Notes
1. All references to Eminov are to his article in this issue.
References
Anastasi, Paul
1990 "Greece and Bulgaria Plan Anti-Turkey Strategies," New York Times, February 7, 1990; p. A9.
Berent, Jerzy
1970 "Causes of Fertility Decline in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union," Population Studies 24: 35-58; 247-292.
Crampton, R. J.
1987 A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, New York: Cambridge University Press.
McIntyre, Robert J.
1975 "Pronatalist Programmes in Eastern Europe," Soviet Studies 27:366-380.
1980 "The Bulgarian Anomaly: Demographic Transition and Current Fertility," Southeastern Europe 7:147-170.
Silverman, Carol
1983 "The Politics of Folklore in Bulgaria," Anthropological Quarterly 56:55-61.
Sinisir, Bilal N.
1988 The Turks of Bulgaria (1878-1985). Nicosia, Northern Cyprus: K. Rustem and Brother.
Verdery, Katherine
1983 Transylvanian Villagers: "Three Centuries of Political, Economic and Ethnic Change."
Berkeley: University of California Press.
The "East-bloc countries" represent about one third of the population and about one half of the continent of Europe. Yet, since World War II until the mid-1980s, they were viewed by the Soviets, as well as by their own leaders, as "the member countries of the socialist camp". The other part of Europe echoed this view. They called Eastern Europe the "satellite countries" or simply "the Communist bloc".
The events of the late 1980s surprised both East and West. The peoples of that remote part of the continent made it clear that they would not belong to "Eastern Europe" anymore - and also, that they did not necessarily want to be an appendage of the West. They are deeply committed to "Europe" in the French sense - a concept, used mainly by opposition movements like Romania Libera. Or they try to revive an other concept that we thought had been buried forever, namely that of "Central Europe" - a German concept used by movements like the Hungarian Democratic Forum or the Slovenian Social Democrats.
Renaming themselves is far more than a game of the intellectuals. it represents a crisis of legitimacy faced by both ruling parties and opposition forces in Eastern Europe today. The Soviet leadership does not support "the old guard" anymore. Those who have not built up any grassroot legacies will ultimately go. Others, like the Bulgarians or the Hungarians, may be experimenting with peaceful transitions, their public policies aimed at forming welfare states. They called themselves socialist states and insisted upon ideological monopoly. But, since the mid-1920s, socialism, the ideology of the labour movements from the mid-1800s, has been used as a facade for Russian-Soviet "internationalism" that had fully deteriorated. For generations of teachers and students, socialist education came to mean simply ideological indoctrination -"the formation of the individuals' personality within the collective - and adrwnistrative bureaucracy - "the further development of our educational system".
There exist throughout these countries groups of intellectuals called "dissidents". Being ethusiasts for building new societies, they lost their illusions in the course of the 1950s. They started by criticizing "existing socialism" in the name of authentic Marxism, the rediscovery of the young Marx. After 1956, the Hungarian uprising, and 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, they absorbed the democratic ideas of democratic socialism, and Euro-Communism and later, the ideas of a liberal political order. Today they represent the neo-liberal initiatives in the economy, the ideas of a legal, constitutional state in politics and the protection of human rights and social equality in the society. Their educational manifestos stress the right of the individual to his/her own culture and education. As opposition, they are well prepared as advocates of modernization and as members of future governments they might become outstanding (if not extreme) advisors. But they alone will never win elections.
Populists, like the Democratic Forum in Hungary, the Patriotic Fronts in the Baltic countries, or the Solidarity in Poland, represent the real alternative. Only they are the recipients of a legacy of the civil society. They appeal to nationalism and nationalist sentiments as their political ideology. Nationalism, the ideology of national freedom and sovereignty, swept across Europe in the Napoleonic period and continued through World War I. Even though poisoned by fascist regimes (1923-64) it remained, nevertheless, as a sentiment of family histories. It steps to the forefront again in efforts to rethink the Soviet military invasions into the region before, during and after World War II. These incursions are many - Poland 1939, the Baltic countries, Bessarabia and Moldavia 1940, Katyn 1941, Berlin 1953, Poznan and Budapest 1956, Prague 1968. Appealing to the peoples' original heritages, stressing the nation's own values and restoring traditional institutions like the church or the school - these elements complete the ideological face of the populists.
It is this shift of both political power and the dominant ideology that initiate the new conservative wave. What then might be the slogan which summarizes this economic, political, and cultural reorientation - and by which, therefore, an election could be won? It sounds like this: Back to the normal! That is: back to the precommunist era. Unfortunately, it also means a turning back of almost half a century.
In this paper I present a brief overview of tne burning educational issues of Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, focusing on three points, namely the content, the structure, and the governance of education. Since the opposition forces have not clarified their educational agendas, it is sometimes hard to differentiate among them. Therefore, I shall refer to them someti es as the "opposition forces" in contrast to tne former political leadership. Yet, it is clear that issues like the role of the churches or the importance of "national subject matters" and the stress on academics come from the populists. Other proposals, like privatization or the kev role of foreign language teaching are mostly characteristic of the liberals.
Foreign language teaching
Foreign language teaching is among the most important issues, and may be the most visible issue of curriculum policy in Eastern Europe. This is not by chance. The major foreign language in those centralized school systems always has been connected with foreign policies.
Until the mid-1800s, Latin had been taught in the Prussian Gymnasium as well as in its Austrian version.it was the dominant foreign language from Berlin to the Baltic states as well as from the Prussian and Austrian parts of Poland down to the Adriatic (Croatia) as well as the Carpathians (Transylvania). Later, Latin was challenged by the dominant languages of those states that ruled Eastern Europe. Russian became the official language of education in countries under Czarist rule (the Baltic states and the major part of Poland); while German had been introduced to the state education of the Austrian (later Austro-Hungarian) Empire after 1848-49. The influence of these two languages remained uncertain in the Balkans where Germans, Austrians and Russians competed with each other and with the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, foreign language teaching clearly reflected the foreign policies of the new-born nation states. Thus, German became the major foreign language in the schools of Esthonia and Latvia, and it remained the first foreign language in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia) and Hungary. Other countries, like Poland or the Balkan-states adopted French because of the influence and cultural support of France. After World War II, the Soviet educational bureaucracy followed its Czarist predecessors in requiring Russian as the first foreign language to be taught throughout Eastern Europe. Russian became the "language of internationalism" everywhere, causing almost unsolvable problenis in terms of foreign language teacher training and supply.
After 1948, Tito left the Cominform (the successor of the Conununist International, first set up, then razed, then built up again by Stalin), Russian language teaching decreased in Yugoslavia. After Ceausescu's deal with the Soviet Union in 1964 with the Balkan Pact and the withdrawal of the Soviet military forces from the Balkans, Romania also stopped teaching obligatory Russian and substituted for it options of languages (in theory) with French (or, to a certain extent, English), as its daily practice. other countries followed their mandatory Russian language teaching till the end of the 1980s. States that remain parts of the Soviet Union like Moldavia or the Baltic countries practice Russian language teaching even today. Yet, teaching Russian proved to be a complete disaster, partly because Russian has never become a tool of everyday conununication in the region. During the past decades, all sorts of exchange and cooperation that would have provided occasions for speaking Russian were kept at the lowest possible level partly due to cautious Soviet bureaucrats and partly due to unwilling partners. it proved to be a complete failure also because forcing Russian blocked the teaching and learning of other European languages. The result is that entire nations have been cut off from the rest of Europe because of a lack of skill in using any second languages.
Today, foreign language teaching has again become an issue of political reorientation the solution of which depends upon how various political forces will relocate their countries on the map of Europe. Which language is to be taught in order to communicate with Europe?
The neo-liberal forces usually indicate English as the tool of international communication. it would serve their major target which is to join with the European Community. Those who would follow a vision of Central Europe argue in a different way. According to them, the region has traditionally been influenced by the Germans and might be influenced again by a unified Germany. This sounds like a strong argument for making German the first second language. The history of Nazi Germany, however, clouds this cultural sky. Therefore there is also an interest in teaching French as the second language as in Romania, Bulgaria, or Croatia, or teaching even Italian as in Hungary. In any case, however, the foreign language issue leads far away from the geopolitical realities.
Ideology
Obligatory Russian teaching was only one sign of oppression. Mandatory ideological teaching was another expression of it. The content of ideological teaching varied in the different school systems. Without question, the Polish system was the most liberal, where even Christian values were extensively taught. Hungary also adopted a kind of liberalism, and with it, the teaching of the Bible, as part of the world literature program of its secondary schools, as well as the study of Christian church history incorporated into the world history curriculum. Other systems required a much tougher indoctrination. Marxist-Leninist ideology was an independent subject matter of the Czechoslovak or the East German curricula. The Yugoslavi syllabi, which varied from republic to republic, were and still are less liberal than expected; while the Romanian regime developed its own version of national Marxism as its official ideology. The toughness of the indoctrination depended, and perhaps still does, upon the positions of the ruling parties.
Indoctrination went on smoother and in more sophisticated ways in countries where the political leadership felt its position to be safe, as in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, or in Croatia and Slovenia among the Yugoslav republics. in those countries the parties gained a certain respect from the intellectuals, especially among the teachers. indoctrination was tougher, however, in countries such as Czechoslovakia after 1968, where party leaderships could not establish solid grass-roots support or could gain credence only envisioning dangerous challenges from outside, such as the fall of the federation for the Yugoslav, a Soviet invasion for the Poles, or loss of territories for the Romanians.
These examples show also that ideological teaching had an additional function. It was necessary in order to maintain the (limited) national sovereignty of the ruling parties in the region. In the Brezhnev era, for example, the maintenance of ideological teaching could be offered as proof of loyalty to the preservation of Soviet hegemony in the region. At the same time, by emphasizing the "equality of the parties and the importance of "national characteristics," ideological instruction provided the national parties with a vocabulary for conceptualizing their resistance against outside evensoviet-influences. Romania,forexample, maintained its unified territories in ideological terms, and Yugoslav leaders always stressed the historical necessity of its federation in ideological expressions. For almost a decade, the Polish leadership opposed Soviet intervention partly by showing ideological loyalty; and the East German party had only one argument for an independent state (in opposition to the Federal Republic), and it was socialism. Marxism is the political terminology by which, at the end of the 1980s, the Communist parties of the Baltic states expressed their independence from the Soviet party.
The abolition of the ideology from the central syllabi is one of the main requirements of opposition groups. It is so important that they combine it with the abolition of the party monopoly from their constitutions as happened, for example, in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. Yet, the abolition of the state ideology creates an ideological vacuum and revitalizes alternative values.
The liberal oppositions are against any kind of officially stated values. To require official values in the educational system, they argue, means to substitute one totalitarianism with another. According to the populists, however, a new system of values is desperately needed. The teachers have been trained in the Marxist ideology. Now, they have to be provided with alternative values. The youth grew up in a political culture that has entirely been penetrated by Marxism; now they have to be offered alternatives. Yet agreement on those altematives is distant.
Religion represents one of the options, and, in fact there are some who would require it as part of school syllabi. For a long time religion lost its political and social influence in Europe and lost its chance to become an official ideology. Yet, there are considerable religious revivals throughout the region, and partly among the youth. Oppositions rightly expect a growing religious influence in state education.
Nationalism is another alternative. Nationalism has a long (although uneven) history in the region since the creation of the first nation states in Europe. Nationalist values contribute to the ideological indoctrinations of the youth in Romania, Poland, and in some Yugoslav republics. Hence the emphatic and enthusiastic turn to the revision of history textbooks, the heavy demand on mother tongues and the national literatures, the new interest toward geography, environment problems, and the deep sense for the traditional symbols.
National studies
At the end of the 1980s, Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians suddenly appeared on the streets under their own national flags. Slovaks and Hungarians were fighting for the official use of their traditional national shields. Romanians living in Moldavia want to replace their present Cyrillic alphabet with their original Latin characters. During the turbulent days of the Bucharest uprising (December 1989) a new national anthem was as important for the temporary Ronianian government as the arrest of the members of the Securitate (the former secret police).
One reflection of these political demands is a "back to the basics" movement. The slogan, familiar to Westerners from the 1950s and 1960s, reflects a reality: the ultimate importance of primary education. After decades of politically manifested and bureaucratically initiated reforms, the traditional elementary school teacher has come back to public life. Her/his message is clear: if you want to save your nation after decades of conununist rule, you have to turn back to the ultimate values of your people. That is: to its mother tongue and to its peoples' heritages.
Another reflection of these political demands is the movement to give higher priority to “national subjects” in the central syllabi. Analyses of the central syllabi show the dorrgnance of science as opposed to the social sciences, civics, and humanities. Forty seven to sixty one percent of the content of the syllabi of the general schools in Hungary, the GDR or Poland is covered by scientific subjects. Opposition forces, mainly the populists, urge an increase in the proportion of “national studies” which would automatically mean the reduction of science.
The present textbooks of history and its related fields are under siege. In the Baltic countries, the major concern is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 that gave legality to the Soviet invasion of Esthonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Moldavia. The Polish debates heated up around the fate of the Polish revolts and the Warsaw uprising during World War II. The Czechs and the Hungarians demand authentic interpretations of their liberation movements and their Soviet invasions. The role of Tito and the present power balance is challenged everywhere in Yugoslavia. It seems that history studies will turn back the clock to the 1940s. Lithuanians want to turn back to their history textbooks published before 1941; the new private publishers advertise the historical maps of the country in Hungary; the new political and intellectual leadership raise up the issues of the old Kingdom and Great Romania (containing Moldavia and Bessarabia) in mass communication.
The dilemma, however, is not so much the interpretation of the past as the interpretation of the present and moreover the future. Opposition forces agree in rejecting the former doctrine of “internationalism” because it covered Russification and Soviet influence. But they can hardly agree upon future steps. The liberals propose economic recovery and the political tum-back to Europe with the hope that - in the long run - economic expansion and a free market will eliminate nation state borders. Populists, however, insist upon independence and sovereignty which, in turn, assume ultimate commitment to one's own nation and homeland. Populist movements all over the region seem to be influential enough to penetrate the present subject matter debates and to intiate a kind of 19th century turn to national studies within the foreseeable future.
Structures
In present debates about the structure of education, the "general schools," those comprehensive and compulsory basic schools meant to unify elementary education with the middle schools, are being challenged by opposite forces. The opposite movements also criticize the vocational training and the admission to the higher education. if issues of the syllabi drive them toward a conservative pedagogical standpoint, so do issues about the structure. in the following lines, I try to make it clear why.
General schools
The general schools were established in the course of democratic school reforms at nearly the same time (1944-47) all over Eastern Europe. The reform cut down the first three (four or five) grades of the various, traditionally selective, secondary schools, unified their curricula, declared them obligatory and administratively connected them to the elementary schools. in this way, the Eastern European countries adopted a basic education system of eight years - seven years only in Romania or Bulgaria, and nine years in Czechoslovakia. The general schools were declared to be the democratic schools which would bring to an end the cultural privileges of selective secondary education.
In the early 1960s, the parties adopted the new idea initiated by Krushchev and his educational ideologists at the Soviet Pedagogical Academy. They started to introduce a new system of public education which went back to Lenin's wife, Krupskaja, which was called the ten-year general polytechnical secondary school. it was introduced to the Soviet republics (including Moldavia) during the 1960s, but the Baltic states saved their former systems of eleven year public education. The same system was also introduced (or planned) in countries with shorter traditions of secondary institutions, like Romania or Bulgaria. Outside the Soviet Union, the GDR was the first to establish a real ten-year public education system.
The ten-year secondary education met a social reality. After years of compulsory (mostly eight-year) basic education, a new generation grew with higher demands for schooling. A ten year compulsory and comprehensive system seemed to meet their demands. And it also promised to postpone the selection year from the age of 14 to 16 and was an alternative to the dominance of vocational training.
Though the brother parties were strongly advised to do so, two of them (the Czechoslovak and the Hungarian) did not adopt the ten-year system. Somewhat later (1973-77) others, namely Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia decided for it. The first and second grades of the secondary schools were separated from the remaining third and fourth grades and became independent, as in Yugoslavia and Romania, or were connected to the eight-grade general schools, as in the GDR. in the course of their nation-wide introduction, however, the ten year systems proved to be impossible to operate.
The governments simply declared the "new structure", even making it mandatory. In doing so, however, they did not expand the school networks and did not raise the numbers of the teachers. In the name of establishing a,new system the administration ruined the existing secondary schools. The secondary schools were rooted in the prewar period and already were accepted by families. Those schools and their faculties had already suffered an earlier reorganization (the creation of the general schools) and could hardly cope with it.
After eight years of comprehensive studies the entire population of the given age group was expected to attend the same type of schools for the additional two years. Many parents did not want to send their children into classrooms "poisoned" by unmotivated and undisciplined classmates. (it is a well-known argument which has received special publicity in Poland as well as in Voivodina, Yugoslavia.) Some of those restructuring actions were stopped and/or declared to be "experiments" at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, opposition groups became highly cautious about comprehensiveness. The real issue behind the comprehensive secondary education is, however, the future of the traditional secondary schools, called the Gymnasium in Hungary or Lycee in Romania and Bulgaria. There is an emerging demand for revitalizing them, and for reestablishing the selective and elitist secondary education of the pre-war period. The Hungarian authorities have already accepted - as an "experiment" - the eight-year Gymnasium, as it essentially looked until the creation of the general school. The liberals argue for them in the name of the individual right to establish or attend quality schools even if they prove to be socially selective. The populists, on the other hand, emphasize that the Gymnasium (Lycee) was part of the educational traditions of the country and the farwlies that had been ruined by the communists. Some intellectual groups are in favour of them because they promise more academics and by this way a better preparation for university studies. These days only few dare to argue for comprehensiveness. The opposition has no better alternatives to the comprehensive general schools - initiated and then deteriorated by the former bureaucracy - than the selective system of the pre-war period.
Vocational training
Soon after the communist take-over a new and strange system of vocational education was introduced into the entire region: an apprenticeship training combined with military-like boarding schools. First the Yugoslavs introduced it in connection with their international youth camps for railway construction (1945-46). The GDR got a selective system that offered only limited programs for agricultural apprentices. it favoured mining, energy and heavy industries to light industries and services.
Yugoslavia had the first state-organized vocational education in the Balkan countries (with minor exceptions in Croatia, Slovenia, factories in Serbia, Transylvania or Bulgaria). For others (Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians), it was a turn-away from their earlier apprenticeship of the German-Austrian type. in any case, however, it was a system imposed on public education. It served the parties' target of building up a heavy-industry based defence economy that relied upon Soviet energy and raw materials. The state training system was a copy of the state industry system which was dedicated to serve the production sphere with manpower. In countries with developed industries (like Czechoslovakia), the training system supported the rebuilding of the industry according to the Soviet model. In countries with strong agricultural traditions (like Bulgaria or Hungary) the new system forced the peasants to give up their private farnis together with their working habits and to move to industry as the new proletarians.
Economists of the 1960s and 1970s considered the new training systems as outstanding chances for manpower planning. During the economic reform wave of the mid-1960s, blocked by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian economic planners successfully influenced their govemments to expand the training system. In this way, they hoped to prepare their work force for a technological modernization.
The present state of their economies demonstrates that vocational training of that type contributed to the survival of the state-owned, heavily subsidized, energy consuniing industry. It provided these industries with an oversupply of young, technically undertrained, educationally counterselected, socially dependent labour force. It is a labour force which prefers job security to private ownership, economic ventures, and high technology. Vocational training of that type also served as a social segregation of those who were "sentenced to physical work" even if they did not want to do so. It also helped ruin the traditional middle classes in countries where they did not want to cooperate with the new leaderships, as in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Croatia. The former administration selected 45-55% of an age cohort for vocational training following their general school studies. That is, they were selected around the age of 14, with some exceptions, as in Bulgaria where there still exists an option to leave the general school early for vocational training.
Evidently, the new educational administrations cannot accept vocational training of that kind. The liberals would require a competitive labour market and would not even mind a limited rate of unemployment. On the other hand, they also emphasize the right of the families to choose the future careers of their own children. "Let them vote against dirty industrial labour and for more academics" they say - in the hope that they could reach higher education instead of the strictly controlled, physically exhausting factory work. The question, however, remains: Who will be employed in a society with so many academics, and who will become unemployed in the stagnating economies of Eastern Europe? To abandon a training system that was forced on them does not mean automatically that the youth will face a more prosperous future. on the contrary, it seems that the opposition would be driven into an equally selective system although one not selective in favour of the industries. A selective secondary education might cope with the the neo-liberal beliefs and the neo-conservative nostalgia. But it will not necessarily cope with the Eastern European realities.
Admission systems
After the communist take-over, the new educational administrations adopted the Soviet system of admissions into different types of schools. Between 1940-48 they introduced admission regulations for schools which were not obligatory. In this way they could double check the schooling of the entire population. Mandatory schooling was an instrument of extensive control over the families and their children. By controlling the admissions they selected those whom they wanted to give the nobility of higher educational diplomas.
The schooling statistics can be used as arguments for the rigid system of educational admissions in Eastern European countries. All of them can boast of a high level of primary and secondary schooling. In the GDR and Czechoslovakia a high proportion of those who completed general school also entered the secondary education. (The appropriate figures are also close to the optimal in Poland or Hungary where 85-89% of a given age group completes the general school within eight years, and 93-96% within ten years. Secondary enrollments in those countries are above 90%. Other statistics, including those of the Baltic states, are not clear. The corresponding Bulgarian and Romanian figures are higher than others while the federal statistics of Yugoslavia, like those from Albania, are hard to interpret.
The social mobility tables - first produced in the mid-1960s in Poland and Hungary - reflect a rapid restructuring of Eastern European societies. Of course those findings are closely related to the educational systems because they mostly use schooling figures. Analyses of those tables regularly show that the Eastern European school systerm offer better chances to working class children than other educational systems. One can easily attribute this to admissions regulated to accord with students' social backgrounds. The admission systems were more or less politically rigid according to the parties' control over the schools. There was almost no political selection for secondary school enrollment in Poland and in Hungary since the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, while it was tough and restrictive in Czechoslovakia and the GDR. Admission to higher education also varies from the nearly free admission at Jagellonian University, in Krakow, Poland during the 1970s to manifested quotas according to parents' occupation and service location in the Soviet Union. Being more or less sophisticated, however, the regulations have always openly preferred youngsters from the working classes.
The opposition movements aim to liberalize the admissions. it is one of their major demands in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and in Romania and, to a limited extent, everywhere else. But in doing so, they will have to expand their educational capacities considerably, something for which the governments will not have budgeted. Without increasing the number of teachers and schools, the opposition groups can do only one thing. They can give preference to those social strata that have been disfavored by the former political leaderships in the past, namely to the intelligentsia and small property holders. This would clearly be a liberalization of the admissions for the intellectuals (who already support the opposition movements). But it might end up in a more rigid selection against the majorities in Eastern European societies
Administration Finance
In the name of constructing socialism (communism), the former leaders of the region tried to develop their own welfare states. On the one hand, they accomplished an almost total state employment of their populations. The employment rates go up to 88-96% of the age group of the 15-55 year olds. Bulgaria reported the highest while Hungary the lowest figures at the turn of the 1970s-1980s. On the other hand they subsidized heavily the various fields of "social allocations" like health, education, transportation, housing, child-care, food supply, arts and entertainment.
But they paid incredible prices. Their economic policies - heavy industry, state ownership, self-reliance - did not match their social targets; therefore they could keep moving their welfare states only at a low standard, exploiting agriculture and nature, depending on cheap Soviet energy and raw materials, and creating huge Western debts. Thus, with some exceptions in Hungary and Bulgaria, the opposition forces have inherited from their predecessors economic disaster, deterioration of nature and agricultural poverty. State coffers are empty and few are free of foreign debt. Hungary has the highest per capita rate of foreign loans and Romania the lowest.
One of the unintended effects of those socialist welfare states has been the impoverishment of the schools and the teaching force. The salaries of those working in the service area are especially low. Teachers have the poorest salaries among all diploma holders throughout the region, with the slight exception of professors in some fields of higher education as well as teachers in public education in the GDR. The new governments will have to discover new resources to finance their educational systems. one option that seems to emerge from these debates is privatization. World Bank specialists formulated and discussed this proposal recently in considerable detail (1987-88). They visited Poland and Hungary to negotiate additional loans for education and vocational training as parts of their economic modernization programs.
Although it may seem shocking to those who have grown up under state paternalism, the idea of educational privatization is not quite new in Eastern Europe. Several decentralization efforts (Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary) undermined the central state monopoly in education and educational administration. What is really new about educational privatization is that some opposition groups (mostly the liberals) would include individuals as well as private owners into the financial sources of educational finance. Yet a question remains. Who will pay the total cost of education? There are only a few calculations of the per capita costs of education in these countries. According to those calculations, the school, even the most elementary type, is too expensive to be financed by individuals and without state support. Privatization, by itself, cannot save the schools and the teachers from their present poverty. So educational privatization is more a political than an economic issue on the agenda of the opposition. It may give, say the opposition groups, better chances for individual families and private organizations to influence the school. The liberals want to save the individual's right for public teaching and learning; a right which was never practiced without state limitations. Populists in Hungary and in Poland used to associate educational privatization with their community school experiments. Those experiments would give the schools to the local societies. Who will change the content of the education and who will modernize the system? influenced by decentralization and democratization rhetoric, neither the liberals nor the populists can answer these questions.
Churches
Since 1947-49, the churches of Eastern Europe have been expelled from the educational enterprise. It happened somewhat earlier in the Baltic countries as well as in Moldavia; and in Tito's Yugoslavia this separation occured between 1945-46. This step was accomplished legally through securalization acts that were enacted everywhere in the region. Under this name, the ruling parties completed a full state monopoly of education. Traditional elementary as well as secondary schools became elements of the state educational network and were soon reorganized into general schools. Separating the church from the state was without question a historical necessity in Eastern Europe. The necessity of the state monopoly in education, however, varied from country to country according to the roles their churches fulfilled. The Romanian Catholic churches took a major role in public education. Being the majority in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia, they also took strong stands on the political changes in their own countries. Some of them, like the Polish church, heavily opposed the Nazi German invasion; others, like the Slovak or the Croatian churches coped with it. It gave more political authority and respect to the Polish church to oppose the communist take-over in Poland than other churches which became suspicious after the war (like the Hungarian church).
Since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Protestant churches assumed a traditional role in elementary education. But their political roles varied according to the nationalities of their memberships. The Lutherans, the majority church in Estonia and a German-based church in the other countries, could easily be suspected of German cooperation. The Calvinists, Presbyterians in Hungary and Transylvania, fought constantly against Austrian, i.e., Habsburgian German influences, and referred easily to their democratic traditions.
Eastern Christianity continued its historical role to establish, maintain and develop Russia. The Balkans have always been under the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. They were incorporated into the Czarist regime and continued as the major ideological opponent of the young Soviet state. The Russian Church was treated accordingly. Other churches in the Balkans, however, were closely associated with the struggle for their nation states. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church happened to be the force of survival during five centuries of Ottoman occupation and oppression. The Church of Romania played the major role in establishing the new Romanian state after World War I. So they could not be turned easily from this cultural policy. All the more because those churches focused mainly on church education and the training of their priests.
Muslims in Albania, Bulgaria or Romania and in some republics of Yugoslavia had little influence (if any) on public education. The same was true of the orthodox Jewish communities in Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine. In some countries (Bosnia-Yugoslavia) Muslims got outside support from Arab states. in other countries the Jewish holocaust gave social respect to thejewish congregations who survived.
Some of the churches were able to make deals with their states, others were not. in Yugoslavia or Albania the party leadership heavily attacked all of the churches including Muslims and all Christian denominations. The traditional Christian holidays were banned, and basic Church services forbidden (e.g. baptism in Albania). in other countries, as Bulgaria, Romania or Hungary, the dominant churches could keep a few of their original educational institutions but used them mainly for church training. In Poland or the GDR the dominant churches saved large parts of their properties, including schools and universities but also hospitals and welfare institutions, and with them, their societal influences as well. From the mid-1980s they became the centers of the opposition movements in Poland (Solidarity), Lithuania, Ukraine and in East Germany.
The emerging roles of the churches became visible in the late 1980s. Populists demonstrated under Christian symbols, demanded their original churches in the Ukraine and Lithuania. They openly celebrated Christmas on the streets (Romania 1989), and organized their opposition in the Lutheran churches throughout the GDR. As part of the same wave, opposition movements want to receive back those (secondary) schools that had been nationalized in the late 1940s. And the schools will be returned, even if church officials declare their neutrality on public educational issues as the Ronian Catholic Church has done in Hungary.
This movement can be considered also as an element of educational privatization, although it is more than that. It represents partly a nostalgia for traditional institutions; a nostalgia shared by so many that it can soon become a political demand. Partly, it is also a human rights issue because the churches represent different ethnic or national minorities in each of the nation states. Anyway, it is a fact that the opposition forces have to cooperate with the churches that once were considered to be reactionaries and that are traditionally connected with the conservatism in the political arena.
Minorities
In order to understand the dilemmas of the new governments concerning their nationalities, we have to distinguish between two types, the ethnic minorities and the national minorities.
The predecessors of the present ethnic minorities arrived in the region during the last three centuries. Germans moved into the Baltic area as well as into the Carpatians during their historical "Move to the East" (Drang nach Osten). Turks moved into the present territories of Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia when those territories belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Before 1918 and after 1940, Russians immigrated to Moldavia, the Ukraine, Uthuania, Latvia and Esthonia. Romanians immigrated to Transylvania when it belonged to Hungary and to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Slovakians moved from the Northern Carpathians to the Great Plain when Turks moved out of the traditional Hungarian territories. The picture is by no means complete without mentioning the Jews who had moved from the German fields to present Poland, lithuania, Belorussia and the Ukraine, and later, during the XVIII-XIXth centuries, they moved back to the West, arriving in Hungary and Austria. Romanies (known as Gypsies) moved from the Middle East to the Balkan Peninsula under the Ottoman Empire, passed through Greece, Bulgaria and Roniania, and reached the soil of Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia.
All of these immigrated for economic reasons. They did not have political entities or nation states to leave behind. Therefore they always defined themselves as ethnic, cultural, language or religious minorities. They had no national identities and have never defined themselves as political minorities. In the course of the history, the ethnic minorities integrated and assimilated into host societies.The national minorities did not move anywhere; they were "created" by wars and peace treaties. One third of the Hungarian population is living outside of present Hungary because its original homelands became parts of Roniania, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine, Austria and Yugoslavia after World War I. Albanians and Bulgarians live outside of their nation states as a result of the two Balkan wars (before World War I). Roumanians in Moldavia and Bessarabia, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in the Soviet Union became also national minorities after 1940 and World War II.
In opposition to ethnic minorities, national minorities always defined themselves as parts of their "mother nations". Identifying themselves with existing nation states - although other than their pen-nanent locations - they cause unsolvable problems. Their situation is unique because they have to be the citizens of states that were created on the basis of ethnically and culturally homogeneous populations.
The communist regimes emphasized internationalism and argued strongly against national separatisnis. In other words, they tried to transform their original nation states into political states. In reality, however, these actions contributed to the supremacy of the Soviet Union in the region, guaranteed by party supremacy in each countries. The collapse of party power monopolies again drove the issue of national independence and sovereignity to the forefront. The movement is supported by strong nationalism which stirs up all the political problems of minorities.
In fighting against separatism (national and/or political), they denied the collective rights of minorities. The socialist constitutions stated the right for one's own culture but as an individual right only. The interest of the collective represented by the socialist state - could always precede the interest of the individual. This gave the legacy for the party and government to compel their political interests against the minorities. Unfortunately, national minorities receive legal support in the original United Nations documents. Their rights were stated as human rights.
From the legal point of view, the individual might have rights for his/her mother tongue or ethnic culture, but had no right (as a member of a collective) for a school other than the stateowned local institution. This argument served well to stress socialist humanism on the one hand and the closing down of minority schools on the other hand. it happened so in the Baltic states. The same thing happened to the Romanians in Moldavia and to the Hungarians in Romania.
This general trend of decreasing minority education in the name of majorities was opposed by an opposite trend. It used minority education as a tool of foreign policy. Moscow supported Russian elementary education throughout the Baltic area with the intent of Russification as the way to internationalism. The same happened to the Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania 1944-45. Here the Hungarian minorities group had to submit to the new communist regime led by the Romanians. As a reward, the Soviet military presence guaranteed the survival of that minority. Tito wanted to create as many republics as he could to create a balance against a strong Serbia which appeared to be deeply inluenced by Soviet party politics and secret agencies.
Hence the dilemma of all the opposition forces in Eastern Europe: they can receive popular support only if they use ideology opposite to that of the ancient regimes. The new ideology must rely upon common values like religion, ethnic heritage, and national traditions. Stressing, however, those values, will challenge the minorities. Until now the nationalities have suffered because they had no constitutional guarantees as minorities. So they supported the liberalization movements in the name of democracy. Under the new democracies, however, they may face another challenge: the nationalism of the majority, a nationalism of those (mainly the populists) who have liberated them in the name of democracy, but who need the support of the majority of their population - which is full of nationalist feelings.
Appendix
Unlike other comparative studies, I have included the Baltic countries plus Moldavia (Bessarabia) in this overview but not the entire Soviet Union, though, sometimes I referred to it. The debates reviewed in this paper assume an initial knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe. In a short overview, however, I cannot sumniarize information of that kind. Those who want to be acquainted with details may turn to the leading international handbooks (which mainly reflect the 1970s).
It seems, however, that comparative education has not yet coped with the new political and ideological realities of Eastern Europe, and this has its explanation. During the cold war, East European studies served anti-communism (while the opposite side used comparative education as an ideological arrn against capitalism). Later (from the mid-1960s), the Western comparatists limited themselves to fact-collecting and statistics-crunching of a positivistic type, while Easterners served their states and parties by informing them about the practices of the "brotherly parties". During the 1970s, studies of each others' systems tended to serve a kind of popular cultural @ssion, a kind of cultural tourism. Comparativists of both sides have established special and even personal connections which have contributed to the mutual international respect of key figures of the educational establishment of Eastern Europe.
Economic, sociological, political and cultural analysts, on the other hand, rarely understand the key role of the populist movements and the importance of the new conservative wave in Eastern Europe. This might be a consequence of the fact that the liberals, dissidents, new leftists, and Neo-Marxists, have better representation than the populists in the intemational social science conununity. Hence the surprise from time to time that Eastern Europe is full of conservative and nationalist ideas and that forces we have never heard about win elections. The importance of analysing educational issues is evident. What is going on in the classrooms influences the political future of Eastern Europe much deeper than what is happening in the public arena. The present collapse of the former establishments of Eastern Europe deniands a new approach to the educational issues as well as a new generation of comparativists.
Note
This is the summary of an introductory lecture series given at the Department of Cultural Foundations, Syracuse University, during the Fall semester of 1989/90. Since things are changing rapidly in Eastern Europe nowadays, it is important to notice that the manuscript was prepared between December 1989 - January 1990. The author thanks Thomas F. Green for his invaluable assistance as faculty associate, consultant as well as reader and editor.
In 1890 a Transylvanian journalist and banker by the name of Karl Wolff observed that "Nowadays a people (ein Volk) does not die the glorious death of ancient heroes. Instead it withers away, growing ever weaker until it disappears without a trace like water absorbed in dry sand" (Goeliner 1973: 15). The context of these words was the accelerating pace of modernization which was rapidly changing the social and economic face of eastern Europe, and which, in the process, was transforming the political nature of the multinational Habsburg state to which Transylvania belonged at that time. In fact just twenty eight years later the joined to Hungary whose government had Monarchy collapsed, and in its wake there embarked on a policy of forced assimilation sprang up several newly constituted countries, aimed at creating from the culturally and each striving to create from its own polyethnic linguistically diverse population a single Magyar population a modern unified nation state. nation.
It was not the fate of the larger nationalities which Wolff had in mind when he made his melancholy observations, but rather the fate of smaller ethnic communities caught up in the swirling events of the time. More specifically he was referring to his own people, an enclave of ethnic Germans, known as "Saxons", who had lived in the southern and northeastern portions of Transylvania for some seven hundred years. The Saxons encompassed (with the exception of a nobility) all the socioeconomic classes of the time; a large peasantry, a productive class of small town craftsmen and merchants, and (in the cities) workers, shop keepers, businessmen, officials, professionals, and a small but growing contingent of manufactuers. Saxon strength lay in their economic diversity, in their remarkably strong sense of ethnic identity (which served to bind together the different social and occupational classes of the population), and in their intellectual ties to Germany which gave them access to innovative new ideas and technologies.
Their weakness,however, lay in their small numbers, for despite their importance in Transylvanian history Saxons had always constituted a minority within the country. By the latter half of the nineteenth century they comprised less than 10% of the total population, numbering in the year 1890 only 217,670 in a country of 697,950 Hungarians and 1,276,890 Romanians (Illyes 1982: 18). This meant that the Saxons were too few in numbers even to dream of a separate nation state as did the larger nationalities. They were also too remote from the nearest German-speaking area for irredentism to ever have been a consideration, as indeed it was for their Hungarian and Romanian neighbors. Moreover Transylvania, formerly an autonomous principality within the empire, was now joined to Hungary whose government had embarked on a policy of forced assimilation aimed at creating from the culturally and linguistically diverse population a single Magyar nation.
Under these conditions survival could not when be assured through political means. Thus, said Wolff, "the roots of our people's power (unserer Volkskraft) lie not in parliament, but in the area of economic, community and cultural activity" (Goellner 1973: 15). With these words Karl Wolff founded the first credit union in Transylivania, one of many such voluntary co-operative enterprises which he either initiated or actively supported, thus earning for himself the name "father of the Transylvanian co-operative movetment". Wolff, however, was not the first to create voluntary associations for the organization of Saxon resources and as the means of directing Saxon energies along modern lines. In fact the first such efforts date back to the1840s when it became clear to Saxon leaders that the old order of things was over, and that new institutional forms were needed not only to protect Saxon interests, but to redefine underpin Saxon ethnic identity as well.
Ironically the very existence of the Saxon nation was in large part due to its earlier political autonomy, an autonomy which goes back to the first appearance of Germans in Transylvania in the twelfth century. tuted a minority within the country.
These Germans were brought into the country by the Hungarian Crown to develop and defend what was then the still vulnerable eastern flank of the Hungarian kingdom. As an inducement to settle on this exposed frontier the colonists were granted title to the land they occupied (the Koenigsboden or "King's Land" as it came to be called), as well as the privileges of retaining their own customary law, direct rule by the king under their own official (the King’s Judge, later known as the Saxon Count) and the privilege of selecting their own priests. These privileges were expanded, confirmed and increasingly consolidated to the point where the Saxons eventually constituted an autonomous nation within the Hungarian Kingdom.
In the fifteenth century the Saxons joined with the two other nations of Transylvania - the Magyar nobility which controlled the counties, and the Szeklers, a Magyar-speaking ethnic group concentrated in the southeastern portion of the country - to create a formal estates system which ruled Transylvania first under native princes, then under Austrian Emperors until modern times. Without this legal and administrative framework, which the Saxons guarded so jealously for centuries, it is doubtful that a German presence would have survived to any great extent in Transylvania. It also contributed to the Saxons developing a unified ethnic entity, a people with their own linguistic, cultural and psychological distinctiveness not only in Transylvania, but among other German-speaking populations of Europe as well.
This essentially mediaeval arrangement was temporarily abolished at the end of the eighteenth century when Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790) initiated a set of reforms designed to modernize the empire in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment which were prevalent at the time. The Saxons were suddenly transformed from a natio, a ruling legal entity, to a mere ethnic and religious minority with no political power at all. Joseph's reforms, however, overshot his ability to enforce them, and were thus ultimately rescinded. Yet the pattern had been set for a series of fundamental changes which in the course of the following century would mean the erosion of Saxon power, and its eventual termination.
As the legal-political basis of Saxon ethnic integrity weakened and finally disappeared, the only formal institution capable of replacing it was the Lutheran Church. In this respect Paul Binder observes that "in place of the political administrative units of the Saxon nation (the remaining Nationalkonflux) stood the church organization. In place of the national count stood the Saxon Bishop". The Church thus formed "a legally constituted unity in the cultural life of the nation" (1988: 239).
The Church through its administration of Saxon schools, its organization of congregations in all Saxon communities, and by means of its ceremonial role, was able to support Saxon ethnic identity. Yet the Church was unable to promote Saxon interests and to assure Saxon prosperity in the changing political and economic climate of the times. Thus throughout the nineteenth century a number of voluntary associations were organized. These associations served as "a defensive barrier against the all powerful state", first that of Austria then that of Hungary (Goellner 1988: 254), and as effective means of harnessing the new energies created by modernization in order to improve the lot of individual Saxons and to further the collective strength of the community. Participation in these associations further served to increase social solidarity and to strengthen group identity among Saxons of all social classes in a new and more effective manner appropriate to the times.
Economic Associations
One of the earliest and most successful of these organizations was the Transylvanian Agricultural Association founded in 1845 which, by 1912, had established 230 local branches throughout the Saxon territory. This body introduced new breeds of live stock and plants into the country as well as new agricultural implements and techniques. in order to disseminate agricultural information the association established schools, presented agriculural exhibitions, and sent agricultural agents into the field. Also in 1873 a periodical, Landwirtschaftliche Blaetter fuer Siebenbuergen, began publication in Herniannstadt. In fact the Agricultural Association served as a kind of Saxon "ministry of agriculture".
Another important activity of the association was the establishment of financial institutions and co-operatives designed to aid peasant producers. in 1867 Joseph Bedeus organized a savings and loan association, and later Bedeus, together with Karl Wolff, founded the Siebenbuergischer Vereinsbank, the Transylvanian Assocation Bank, which helped peasants purchase land formerly belonging to large estates. Co-operatives of various kinds also sprang up for dairy and egg production and export, for strengthening the financial position of vintners and for the purchase by small land holders of modern implements to be used in common. Other purposes of such co-operatives were to help their members purchase breeding stock and to help them over bad times due to crop failure or poor harvests.
Such co-operatives were not only concerned with the well-being of their individual members, but with the nation as a whole which, in the nineteenth century, was suffering a decline in population relative to the other ethnic groups in Transylvania. Co-operatives thus strove to improve the productivity of land already in Saxon hands, and to acquire new land for Saxon families as an alternative to emigration. In this regard Wolff said that "all the different kinds of co-operatives converge in the common task of stemmng the tide of emigration from the fatherland, in that they, with the help of the Agricultural Association, attempt to improve the management of resources, the use of new technologies and the productivity of the land worked by the peasants" (Goellner 1973: 20). Also when new land was acquired families with many children were given priority.
Wolff also attempted to expand the idea of the co-operative into the area of commodity distribution through the formation of consumer co-operatives. This was stiffly resisted by merchants, however, and thus met with no success. Attempts were also made to create craft and trade assciations, similar to the agricultural association, in an effort to place these enterprises on a more modern footing and to improve the welfare of tradesmen. For example the association in Mediasch stated its purpose as "to revitalize the trades, to make them aware of the current barriers to their progress and to raise the level of humane education in the middle classes" (Goellner 1988: 264). Such associations did succeed in establishing some technical libraries but were thwarted in their efforts due to state interference and disadvantageous economic conditions.
Community Associations
In 1780 the Schutzengesellschaft, a kind of "Saxon rifle association,” was founded with the double purpose of acquainting its members with the use of firearms and as an opportunity for social activities. In the decades before the 1848 Revolution athletic associations, Turnvereine, were also founded. These clubs were closely associated with the awakening of pan-German national consciousness as indeed were their counterparts in Germany. The goal of such organizations, as the constitution of the Mediasch club reads, was "to strength the spirit of ethnic awareness (des Volksgeistes) in a specifically German manner." This involved sport, song and practise at using weapons. Many members of such organizations filled the ranks of the Volunteer Brigade during the civil war of 1848. After the Revolution sports clubs faded, making a come back only in the latter part of the century, but this time for the sole purpose of sponsoring sporting activities. Volunteer fire departments were also organized in Saxon towns and cities with the aim both of fighting fires and of providing conviviality. After the turn of the century fire protection was taken over by municipalities and the social character of the fire companies was reduced.
In 1879 the Beautification Association, the Verschoenerungsverein was founded in Hermannstadt (sibiu). Its task was to plant gardens in public places throughout the city. Another such association was the Sebastian Hann-Verein founded in 1907 with the aim of preserving antiquities and establishing and maintaining museums, thereby adding a further dimension to the historical awareness of the Saxon people, and thus contributing to their identity as a unique community in history. There was also the Karpatenverein also founded by Karl Wolff, which was organized to encourage tourism in the Carpathians. The association developed a resort, the "Hohe Rinne" in the 1890s, constructed trails and rest houses and published a journal which served as an outlet for the dissemination of scholarly information on the Carpathian Mountains. There were also the the Gustav-Adoff Association and the General Evangelical Woman's Association (Allegmeiner Evangelische Frauenverein) both associated with the Lutheran Church. The woman's society was founded by the city pastor of Hermannstadt (sibiu) with the purpose of calling "women to work for the good of the conununity" (Goellner 1988: 272). As a result of the actions of this association schools, orphanages, hospitals were both founded and improved.
The Association for Transylvanian Studies
Anthony D. Smith has observed that if "ethnic forms" which he defines as "art, language, customs, family structure, religious literature, etc., lose their meaning, if the traditions become ossified and cannot develop anew, the entire ethnie (ethnic community) falls into cultural decline, however prosperous and powerful its individual members or their polity may be" (1986: 98). In the 1830s it was becoming evident that changing times were making obsolete the old juridical unity of the Saxons which had served as a conceptual as well as a legal justification of Saxon uniqueness. With the disappearance of the Saxon "university,” and in the face of increasing Magyar nationalism the need for a redefinition of Saxon ethnic identity became ever more apparent. In 1840 in an effort to bring this identity in line with the times, and in order to re-invigorate ethnic forms, the Verein fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde, the Association for Transylvanian Studies, was organized.
It was hoped that by careful research into all aspects of Transylvanian culture and history the localism which had marked the traditional Saxon experience would be erased; that "we should stop being Hermannstadters, Mediaschers, Sachaessburgers, Kronstaedters, and should be Saxons, and should feel Saxon". Also the protocol of procedings of 1847 stated that the association should animate "love for the fatherland," and that it should "unite, not divide...reconcile and not antagonize" (Goellner 1988: 55). This extended to the inclusion of other nationalities as well, for as the call for the founding of the association stated "all friends of Transylvanian studies" were invited to participate "from all nations and from all social stations" (Guendisch 1988: 17). In fact Hungarian and Romanian scholars have participated in the work of the association from its beginning to the present time.
The association began publication of a journal, Archiv des Vereins fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde in 1843, and in 1878 it published the Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde to further encourage regional studies. The association also established a prize for a Saxon history which would be accessable to the public at large. The result was the writing of the widely read Geschichte der Siebenbuerger Sachsen fuer das Saechsische Volk by Georg Daniel Teutsch. The association also stimulated the work of folklorists and philologists investigating Saxon culture, and it initiated the dictionary of the Saxon dialect (still underway) and a linguistic atlas of the Saxon speech area. Another result of the association's activity is the publication, in several volumes and over generations, of the primary sources for the history of Transylvania, the Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte Siebenbuergens, which provides a valuable source for the serious study of Transylvanian history.
Looking back over eighty-eight years of the associaton's activities Adoph Schullerus, editor of the Saxon Dictionary, noted in 1928 that the scholarly work of the association firmly established scholars as national leaders (Goellner 1988: 256). Indeed in place of a German university in Transylvania the association served to produce the kind of work (both in terms of scope and high quality objective scholarship) for which universities are responsible. In this regard a later Saxon scholar, Karl Kurt Klein, noted that the association was indeed a "little Transylvanian Saxon Academy of Science" (1971: 341). Saxon associations had their symbolic functions as well. This was seen in the ceremonial Vereintage, or special association days which were held each year during the week after Pentecost, and on special occasions such as the opening of a school, or the renovation of churches, historical sites, etc. By means of these celebrations, says Goellner, "national consciousness was extended to wider circles of the people” (1988: 282).
Diaspora
The Saxon Church and voluntary associations were extraordinarily successful in facilitating the shift from a mediaeval estate to a viable modern ethnic community. In this way they were able to avert the fate of many of the smaller nationalities of the modern world, a fate so graphically described by Karl Wolff in his 1890 remarks. Today, however, the Saxons face an even greater threat to their survival as a separate ethnic entity due to a combination of factors both in Transylvania and abroad. The first are the ruinous economic conditions and the oppression suffered in Romania under the communist regimes which ruled the country since the end of the Second World War. And the second are the generous conditions under which ethnic Germans from eastern Europe are received in West Germany. All this had led to an unprecedented emigration from Transylvania to the German Federal Republic, an emigration which appears to be accelerating. In fact, according to one current joke, nobody wants to be the last Saxon out.
With fewer and fewer Saxons left in the country their already weak position there becomes ever more precarious. And once established in Germany neither church nor language serve to differentiate them from the rest of the population as indeed they did in their homeland. Also economic opportunities in Germany promote individual initiative rather than communal ties, thus weakening the solidarity which still prevails among Saxon communities in the West. It thus remains to be seen whether the Saxons can manage to survive as a separate entity into the next century or whether, as Karl Wolff said a century ago, they will eventually "disappear without a trace like water absorbed into dry sand."
Bibliography
Binder, Paul
1988 "Die evangelische Kirche 1849-1914," In, Die Siebenbuerger Sachsen in den Jahren 1848-1918.
Siebenbuergisches Archive, 22. Koeln/Wien: Boehlau Verlag.
Goellner, Carl
1973 "Karl Wolffs politisches und wirtschaftliches Wirken." Forschungen zur Volks-und Landeskunde. 16: 5-36.
Goellner, Carl
1988 "Vereine," In, Die Siebenbuerger Sachsen in den Jahren 1848-1918. Siebenbuergisches Archiv, 22. Koeln/Wien: Boehlau Verlag.
Guendisch, Gustav
1988 "Der Verein fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde; eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte," In, Wege Landeskundlicher Forschung." Siebenbuergisches Archiv, 21. Koeln/Wien: Boehlau Verlag.
Herbert, H.
1898 "Der Verein fuer siebenbuergische Landeskunde," Archiv des Vereins fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde, XXVIII. Hermanstadt.
Illyes, Elemer
1982 National Minorities in Romania, Change in Transylvania. East European Monographs, No. CXII. New York: Columbia University Press.
Klein, Karl Kurt
1971 Saxonica Septemcastrensia. Marburg: Elwert Verlag.
Schobel, J.
1975 "Beitraege der Siebenbuerger Sachsen zur Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft in den Jahren 1840-1918.” Forschungen zur Volks-und Landeskunde XVIII, 2.
Smith, Anthony D.
1986 The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc.
Wagner, Ernst
1979 "Zur Geschichte des Siebenbuergischsaechischen Landwirtschaftsverein." Siebenbuergisches Archiv, XIV.
Wagner, Ernst
1982 The Transylvanian Saxons: Historical Highlights. Cleveland, Ohio: Alliance of Transylvanian Saxons.
Zimmermann, Harald
1967 "Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Vereins fuer Siebenbuergische Landeskunde," In, Studien zur Geschichsschreibung im 19 und 20, Jahrhundert, Siebenbuergisches Archiv, 6. Koeln/Graz: Boehlau Verlag.
Marylin Rueschemeyer and Christiane Lemke. eds. The Quality of Life in the German Democratic Republic: Changes and Development in a State Socialist Society. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xiii + 242 pp., tables, notes, references, selected bibliography. $40 (cloth).
Hermine G. DeSoto
University Of Wisconsin-Madison
Neither the editors nor the ten contributors of this volume could have imagined that changes in Eastern Europe would occur with such speed that they would defy our previous understanding of social transformation in such societies. Taken by surprise, the contributors to this volume examine social contradictions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the November 1989 revolution. By focusing on state, society, policy, planning, women, personhood, cities, environment and the church, the authors portray a rare picture of a societal part of Europe about which the English audience of social scientists has been uninformed.
While the articles explore multidimensional issues supported by qualitative and quantitative data, one major theme throughout suggests that the authoritative and centralized policy implementations of the political society led to intended and unintended contradictory results inimical to humanistic and socialist-oriented principles. Although the similarity to Western processes is not pointed out, the GDR was also confronted with bureaucratic inefficiency, crises of mismanagement, reproduction rather than transformation of unequal gender relations, value transmissions of sex-role differentiations, non-socialist personhood developments, Fordism and alienation and last but not least, the alarming devastation of urban and environmental junctures. Scharfs opening article describes how functional, pragmatic and economistic-guided planning interests worked against a humanistically oriented social development.
Of main interest for women's studies are Dölling's, Nickel's, and Lemke's analyses on how legal equality translates into a contradictory everyday praxis for women regarding work, gender, sex roles and personality development. The information presented is relevant to comparative anthropological studies on women, work and social change. The new struggle of east German women now will be related, not to the idealization of the kleinbürgerliche Familienleben of the GDR, but to the idealization of this family form within the bourgeois law of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This should be researched further.
Examining recruitment and education, Glaessner's startling results are similar to processes reported from Hungary. Although his analysis is critical and informative, the essay could have gained in theoretical and analytical comparative weight if he had also drawn on literature published in 1979 by Ivan Szelenyi and George Konrad.
In clashing opposition to socialist work ethics regarding a workplace free of alienation, Dennis'article affirms that shiftworking women in the GDR suffered from insufficient facilities and poor workplace conditions. In a similar manner, the urban and environmental degradation is far from successful development in the GDR; rather, the urban and environmental question examined by Rueschemeyer and DeBardeleben only mildly anticipates what daily postrevolutionary news affirms, namely, that damages are of such magnitudes that their future effects are incomprehensible.
In the final part on culture and leisure time, Hanke juxtaposes Marx's view on society and time, and Brisky's and Gransow's related essays implicitly support Hanke's critique that, according to leisure time reality in the GDR, the "socialist" society was neither rich nor progressive in achieving more leisure and free time because, as Hanke writes, "necessities still dominate action." Goeckel's merely implicit allusion to grass-root resistance and the Protestant church's struggle for existence within different periods of the political society, and its trying bargaining for social space for mediating culture without a civic society, leads us to the theoretical shortcomings of the volume.
The essays are readable, superbly translated (five of the essays were translated by Michel Vale), and usefully organized with related themes. The volume opens an interdisciplinary perspective that has been characteristically neglected on eastern Germany. Historians, political scientists, sociologists and scholars of aesthetics, communication and arts have participated in transmitting to us multicolored cultural processes of life in the GDR. It is regrettable that the anthropological perspective is nowhere to be found. On the other hand, the Qualily of Life in the German Democratic Republic suffers from scant methodological and theoretical shortcomings. More concretely, while the editors’ stated aim includes a transmission of "grass-root perspectives," the voices of the people are surprisingly out of sight. Here, participant observation (i.e., studying up as well as studying down) would have captured more detailed portrayals of the different facets of culture (i.e., the voices of those with power as well as voices of those who are less privileged and less powerful).
While the authors are successful in informing us of social problems, the analyses lack dynamic and theoretical richness. Literature of scholars who have grappled with related problematics, remain unexplored. One wonders why the church was unable to mediate more successfully for space to create a potentiality for the rise of a dialectic of culture. Or why the church and not other institutions? Why did social movements develop in late capitalist societies but not in the GDR, where similar policy mismanagement occurred.? For a widened understanding, works of Habermas, Offe, Touraine, Weber and Gramsci are pertinent. The only exception is Volker Gransow's essay. His concept of "complexity of hegemony" is promising for explaining power, conflict, culture and discontent, but he also neglects the question of resistance. To fully conceptualize social change in Europe and particularly in Gemiany, we need more theoretically oriented and empirically grounded systematic research. In this vein, The Quality of Life in the German Democratic Republici remains a valuable background source and initiates further study of the emerging contradictions of "the unification process of Germany" and its relationship to European and international scenarios.
Bob Arnot. Controlling Soviet Labour: Experimental Change from Brezhney to Gorbachev. Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1988. Inc. vx, 305 pp., glossary, appendix, notes, bibliography, name and subject indexes. $39.95
David Hakken, Acting Director
Technology Policy Center, State University of New York Institute of Technology, Utica
Controlling Soviet Labour is primarily an analysis of recent attempts to reform Soviet work institutions. The initial portion of the book develops a theory of the Soviet social formation which stresses problems in labor discipline. The bulk of the book is a detailed analysis of the Shchekino experiment, which began as an attempt to change work organization in a chemical plant but was extended broadly, and similar reform efforts of the 1970s and '80s. The analysis of these experiments links their failure to the terrm of the initial theory. It also implies a similar fate for any initiative which fails to confront the basic contradictions of the Soviet political economy. The brief conclusion is pessimistic regarding the options available to Gorbachev at the time of writing (1986?). That the most recent events in the Soviet Union pass beyond what seemed possible to Arnot at that time provides some justification for an underdeveloped conclusion.
Arnot acknowledges two theoretical influences. One is the resurgence of interest in the labor process occasioned by the work of Harry Braverman; he wishes to place "point of production" events at the center of social dynamics. The other influence is the argument, contained in the British left journal Critique and especially the work of his teacher, Hillel Ticktin, "that the methodology of Marxist political economy can provide the basis for understanding non-capitalist social formations" (p.4).
Arnot's book is empirically quite convincing. If his analysis is correct, there is little reason to be hopeful that the Soviet social formation will survive in its present form, let alone emerge from this period of crisis to provide the world with an appealing vision of an alternative future. In this review, I will concentrate on Arnot's theory. While I have recently developed some interest in Eastern Europe, I am not a Sovietologist, nor am I well versed in Soviet economics. I do have a more than passing interest in Marxist theory and in the labor process, and I do believe that current events in the Soviet Union have a profound impact on global futures.
The Contradictions of the Soviet Social Formation
Arnot's model of Soviet society is decidedly Marxist, although he takes pains to separate his views from those of most other contemporary Marxists, either East or West. His desire is to show theoretically why the experiments on which he wishes to concentrate are doomed to fail, as they misrepresent the fundamental problems of societies of the Soviet type. To grasp these problems, one needs a specific political economy of the Soviet Union, one which connects specific economic problems to "the antagonistic nature of the social relations of production in the USSR" (p. 2).
For Arnot, the job of political economy is to explain the main mode of production, and the key to this is identifying how the surplus is produced, something which varies from society to society and time to time. The mode of production conditions and is conditioned by the class structure. The volume of the surplus is affected by the ability of direct producers to resist the control of the dominant class over the labor process through which the surplus is produced and assert their own forms of control-- the negative control of the day to day class struggle.
Arnot argues that contemporary Soviet and most Western analyses, even ones purporting to be Marxist, fail to correctly analyze the Soviet situation because they fail to start at the analysis of surplus extraction and control (p. 29). He posits a ruling group which is constrained in its ability to extract and control a growing surplus by specific historical conditions, like the need to maintain low food prices and a sphere of influence on the world stage, but mostly by specific limits on control of labor. He argues that the ruling group and workers are highly dependent on each other. By abolishing unemployment, the ruling group provided Soviet workers with an important degree of economic security. Further, wage leveling loosens the tie of reward to effort, as does the relatively high proportion of use-values which are not obtained through money; e.g., a flat or health care obtained through your job. Ultimately, Arnot argues,
"the Soviet workforce is controlled by neither the stick of unemployment nor the carrot of increased wages. Labour power cannot be considered a commodity because for this to be the case labour would have to be free...Economic regulation in the USSR can be seen in terms of overt and continual state intervention because the social relations of production are necessarily transparent...The veil of commodity fetishism does not hide the political nature of economic decisions from the direct producers" (p. 37).
A number of implications follow from such an analysis of the social relations of production: effective planning is impossible because managers don't have sufficient control, there is a tendency toward overmanning (personing) of worksites, a tendency to underestimate potential for production, and so forth. (Many readers of AEER will have heard similar arguments from anthropologists like John Cole). Theoretically, Arnot concludes that there is nothing in the Soviet political economy comparable to the law of value in a capitalist system, an entity which among other things would provide "an unambiguous objective medium through which managerial performance can be assessed" (p. 39). The inability of reform to accomplish its objectives is rooted in the structural properties of the mode of production.
Problems in Arnot's Theory
There are two parts of Arnot's analysis which give me pause. One is the tendency, which emerges in the comment quoted above, to present a somewhat idealized view of the "functioning" of the operation of a capitalist system-- e.g., the implication that capitalism's mechanisms have "objectivity." Arnot shares this tendency with others who take a "political economistic" reading of Marx. While the operation of capitalism may be hidden behind of veil of commodity fetishism, once the veil is removed-- a primary task of the political economic analysis of capitalism-- the underlying anti-rationalities of class domination can be analyzed. Too often, Arnot appears to be comparing the actual workings of Soviet society with the purported workings of capitalist ones.
My second problem is his ambiguous use of the notion of class, especially his refusal to apply the notion to the Soviet Union. He asserts that political economy involves the analysis of class and the generation of surplus. He correctly emphasizes that class is a relational concept, and he is appropriately critical of those analyses which would reduce the interest of a posited dominant stratum in Soviet society to the privileges of the nomenklatura. Yet even though his whole analysis depends on the posited cxistence of such a stratum, he refused to call them a class, preferring "ruling group." Indeed, in his conclusion, he rejects class analysis altogether:
...The concept of class is adjudged to be inappropriate in the Soviet context. What exists are direct producers who produce a surplus which is extracted by a ruling group...The relationship between these elements in the surplus extraction process and their composition are in a state of continual flux. Iin other words, there are classes in the process of 'becoming,' they are not finished and formed in an unambiguous relationship to one another (p. 252).
This appears to reserve the notion of class only for "classes-for-themselves," whereas classes-in-themselves have long been foci of Marxist analysis. It is unclear what Arnot gains by this move. Further, if there are no classes, is one justified in focusing analysis on the generation of surplus and class analysis-- even political economy-- in general? Arnot's shyness about using class leads to ambiguity in drawing implications from his work.
Interpreting Experimentation in the Soviet Economy
Arnot's analysis of Shchekino and related experiments in workplace organization appears to be first rate. He has read widely in various Soviet sources, and he uses them to construct a compelling picture of a pattern of innovation, with initial positive results, followed by bureaucratization, watering down, and falling off of benefits. Arnot does a good job of showing how a variety of reforms come ultimately to fit a similar pattern, clearly suggesting limits to what is possible.
This general pattern is certainly compatible with the theoretical analysis Arnot develops, but his conclusion is too brief to constitute an argument that his is the only correct analysis. At a policy level, Arnot presumes that a return to either the unlimited direct exploitation of the Stalin years, or the imposition of a capitalist law of value, are impossible:
If the return to overt force in (sic) impossible, if direct attempts at raising the level of exploitation are likely to provoke hostility and if the law of value cannot easily be reinstated, this provides an explanation for the necessity for experimentation (p. 253).
It would appear, however, that something like the latter is the aim of the most influential group of current Soviet economic advisors. Still, the actual proposals of May 1990, appear to have a quality of halfheartedness quite compatible with the "limited reform" analysis Arnot presents.
Conclusion
I would imagine that a neo-conservative, if able to overcome revulsion at Arnot's Marxist framework would ultimately find sympathy with his analysis. His picture of the Soviet system appears to offer no way out except the discipline of a capitalist market in labor. For those of us who would prefer a communist alternative, one which combines the benefits of a social system capable of generating a substantial surplus with humane mechanisms for allocating these benefits, Arnot offers little.
Arnot's analysis of the dynamics of Soviet reform is clearly thorough and convincing in its own terms. The inadequacies of his class analysis and the related political economistic, overly structural character of his theory of mode of production have been noted. His work poses a challenge to those of us who wish to encourage a more hopeful future. Such a view might be based on the wage leveling, preference for social over individual provision and working class identity which also seem to be characteristics of the Soviet social formation. What cultural process would be necessary if a structure which includes a quasi-class or "ruling group" were to be transformed into one with "real" workers' control? Such issues suggest that there is still some space for a more anthropologically informed analyses of Soviet-type social formations.
Ronald Wixman. The Peoples of the U.S.S.R.: An Ethnographic Handbook. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1988. 246 pp. $15.95 (paper).
G. James Patterson
Eastern Oregon State College
This book is designed to provide brief information for Western social scientists on ethnic groups in the Russian Empire and the U.S.S.R. As such it fills a needed vacuum. Most nonspecialists on the area do not read Russian, the language of the Soviet ethnic atlases. Now, at a glance, the interested student of Soviet ethnicity can look up hundreds of groups, from Aba (a clan of Shors living along the Tom River near Kuznetsk in Southwestern Siberia) to Zyuzdin (a group of Komi Permayaks in Zyuzdinskiy Rayon in Kirov Oblast).
Producing such a work is obviously a formidable task. Compilation of the material, crossreferencing it, and checking for linguistic consistency and accuracy requires painstaking care and scholarship. Because of this, I hesitate to nitpick about some omissions, but they do exist, and ought to be mentioned, if only for incorporation in a later volume.
Missing from the work are the Lipoveni (Old Church Slavonic Romanians in Moldavia), the Iravan/Irevan/Yerevan/Erevan (Armenians in Tiblisi), and the Savjabalaghi (Kadjar Turkic Moslems of Azerbaidzhan). If I spotted these omissions from the regions of the Black and Caspian Seas, what groups might the Mongol or China specialist find missing?
Also, the IAN or INIAN ending forms in the main entries are dropped because Wixman says they're cumbersome, but not using them can distort the name by which certain groups are known. An example is the Lazgian, called the Lezg by the author. It's also bothersome for Wixman to refer to a culture by its place name. Azerbaidzhans should be Azerbaidzhani.
My last criticism has to do with the fact that there are not bibliographic sources for each entry, but perhaps that would have been too ambitious for an already ambitious volume. Their lack does make the scholar interested in finding more about specific groups having to turn to the general sources Wixman cites rather than on a specific one for the group.
But these are relatively minor criticisms. Any handbook is by definition inclusive yet brief for each entry. Further, the inability of American scholars to read Russian, Arabic and other languages necessary for understanding the Soviet Union is a noticeable deficiency in our training. Thus we need researchers such as Wixman to compile material on that part of the world for us. My work in the Balkans has made me realize how few of us read the languages of those countries, and the U.S.S.R. is a similar example.
This book will be useful for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars interested in the ethnic groups in the U.S.S.R. For the larger groups cited, information about their history, language, subdivisions, religion and population is provided. Scholars wanting more than a summary of this information will have to go to other sources, but for basic data in English on the groups this volume is a first, and will serve an important function.
Viktor Kozlov. 1988. The Peoples of the Soviet Union. A translation of Natsional 'nostri SSSR.
Translated by Pauline M. Tiffen. Hutchinson Press: London and Indiana University Press:
Bloomington. ISBN 0-253-34356-9. 262 pages. $37-50.
Walter J. Komorowski
North Adams State College
The Peoples of the Soviet Union (PSU) uses the six Russian/Soviet censuses conducted since 1897 to describe basic demographic trends in the Soviet Union from its inception in late 1910's to its present day configuration as represented in the 1979 census. Published in Russian as Natsional'nostri SSSR in 1982, PSU represents the fourth work to appear in the Second World Series--a series which provides English translations for progressive contemporary Soviet works on Soviet society and politics. In this essay, I will discuss PSU's value as a work on Soviet demography, comment on its place in the Second World Series, and critique the technical quality of PSU in terms of its readability, graphic design, and attention given to editorial details.
Kozlov begins with a laborious twenty page chapter introducing the 200+ ethnic communities mentioned in the six Russian/Soviet censuses. Both here and throughout the book, most ethnic groups receive rather short shrift; only certain Slavic communities are explored in depth. His tendency to list non-Slavic ethnic communities rather than describing them in detail makes the introductory chapter and various other parts of the book difficult if not impossible to read. For example, in the course of only nine pages (pp. 18-26) Kozlov describes the religious, linguistic, and physical characteristics and geographic distribution of over eighty ethnic groups.
In chapter two, Kozlov continues with a systematic and highly readable discussion of Soviet geography and its effects on demographic processes. Here, he also describes the rise in ethnic heterogeneity that characterizes all Soviet provinces. In particular, he notes the ethnic diversification of cities, as Slavic groups and others began to emigrate to urban centers outside their native republics. In most republics today sizeable non-native populations (mostly Russian) live in the cities, while native populations continue to reside in rural areas. Perhaps because PSU was written before the new openness, Kozlov discusses neither the policies that have created these present demographics nor their important political implications.
Kozlov devotes chapter three to a detailed discussion of changes in birth, death, marriage, and divorce rates in the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, he devotes a good share of the chapter to the effects of the First and Second World Wars on conditions reflected in Soviet vital statistics. Equally predictably, he presents the reader with a barrage of tables, statistics and percentages, mostly drawn uncritically from the various Soviet censuses. Although Kozlov briefly discusses the role that contraception and child care practices play in shaping Soviet birth and infant mortality rates, he surprisingly devotes very little attention to cultural factors as explanations for demographic differences between ethnic groups. In the fourth and final chapter, Kozlov describes what he calls the "transformational ethnic process" (p. 153). Here he discusses the consolidation of smaller ethnic enclaves with larger ethnic conununities, and the gradual assimilation of peoples throughout the Soviet Union into a general Soviet (read: Russian) culture. He discusses the rise in interethnic marriages, particularly in the European republics, and the spread of Russian as the primary or secondary language of most peoples throughout the Soviet Union. In a pre-openness environment, Kozlov finds himself in a difficult position, because he must simultaneously defend the assimilation process as natural and peaceful, ignore large-scale interethnic conflicts, and maintain that steps have been taken to assure the ethnic vitality of conununities that do not what to (or perhaps are not asked to) assimilate, e.g., Gypsies and Mongolians. lie does none of these convincingly.
Although I found sections of this book interesting and I believe this text could stimulate a lively discussion in an advanced seminar on Eastern Europe, I was surprised to find it included in the Second World Series. Teodor Shanin, the editor of the series, states that the series will "prefer authors who have shown originality and courage of style and form. (P. x)." Kozlov shows none of these. Instead he presents a broad-based demographic treatment that uses sources uncritically and carries a heavy ideological message that supports Soviet ethnic policies.
Since I do not read Russian well enough to compare PSU to the original Natsional 'nostri SSSR I can not comment on the accuracy of the translation. I can, however, note the PSU reads well (perhaps, the sign of a good rendering), but is in serious need of a good copy editor. Mistakes abound and include the transposition of words [decreased had for had decreased (p. 50)], typographic errors [gineteenth for nineteenth (p.44)], inconsistent American and British spellings (even on the same page) [urbanisation and urbanization (p.62)], inconsistent transliteration of Russian words [Dnieper (p.40) and Dnepre (p. 18)], general inaccuracies [the implication that Georgian is an Germanic language (p.247)], and unconventional use of italics [Christianity and Islam (p. 21)]. Furthermore, the graphs (pp. 85 and 134) appear to have been generated on a poor- quality dot matrix printer and are amateurish and difficult to read.
Perhaps most disturbing is the marketing of the book itself. With its title Peoples of the Soviet Union and a front and back jacket that lists Kozlov as the "Key Ethnographer of the Soviet Union", one expects an in-depth ethnography of the Soviet people. Instead one is presented with a survey of demographic changes in the Soviet Union since the revolution, which contains little ethnographic data and even less critical analysis of population policies.
Tyrnauer, Gabrielle. 1989. Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay. Bibliography Series No. 2. Interuniversity Centre for European Studies, Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies. Montreal Canada. Pp i - xxxvii, 1- 52. $10.00.
Sam Beck
Cornell University
Gabrielle Tyrnauer enriched Gypsy research by contributing a 576 citation bibliography dealing with Gypsies and the Holocaust. She also provided an introductory essay concerning this subject for the benefit of lay readers and experts. As she indicates, a number of obstacles stood in the way of her completing this valuable work. Not the least of these was the lack of financial support as was the lack of recognition of a Gypsy Holocaust. Together these are indicative of the state of Gypsy studies in general.
The general disinterest in Gypsies by the American academy is a constant barrier to such scholarship. Holocaust scholars have not been convinced of the equal suffering of Gypsies as Jews during the era of National Socialism.
The extent to which the Nazis nearly succeeded in totally wiping out the European Gypsies, between 1942-1945, is not commonly known, much less appreciated as an experience of genocidal proportions. The struggle to bring the Gypsy Holocaust to light is to Dr. Tyrnaurer's credit. Moreover, she has done this in a tradition of research that other anthropologists would do well to follow. Her work serves the interests of those of whom she writes. Particularly, she has assisted the leadership of the international Romani Union, the intelligentsia of the international Gypsy movement, and those individuals who struggle against discrimination and for human rights by giving their movement a voice in scholarly and public debates.
Dr. Tyrnauer's essay provides even the uninitiated reader with a coherent historical picture of Gypsies in West Europe, particularly Germany, and unavoidably draws on the jewish Holocaust as a counter--and reference point. Her contribution fills some of the gaps in the knowledge regarding the continuous European presence of a people of North Indian descent, who still speak a Sanskrit-based language called Romanes. This group of people has worked out a means of existence within the bosom of Western Civilization since the twelfth century, the earliest documented mention of Gypsies in Greece.
The poverty of understanding regarding Gypsies, even in regions where they appear in large numbers, helps subject this population to discrimination of the most virulent kind. Furthermore, the general disregard of Gypsies as a legitimate social group demanding the kind of consideration obtained by other groups continues to be a barrier to their proper study. Although scholarship in the last 10 years has at last focused on the suppression of Gypsies, Tyrnauer suggests much work still considers Gypsies as an exotic, useless intrusion in European societies, rather than an integral and productive part. The refusal to acknowledge Gypsy upward mobility in the context of dominant society has also prevented research of class differences within Gypsy groups and created a sense of marginalized homogeneity that does not reflect reality. It is rather surprising that anthropology has not recognized the theoretical significance of the Gypsies ("very much like the Jews," as Mort Fried once pointed out to me), a population that has systematically and quite successfully mounted counter-hegemonic (in a Gramscian sense) resistance to local, regional, national and international governments and modes of production that has spanned feudalism, capitalism and socialism.
Education in their own language, media representations of themselves as they choose to be perceived, and civil rights accorded them as any ethnic minority in pluralized states, remain distant possibilities in most countries where they make up sizable population numbers in local administrative units. Yugoslavia seems to be an exception and model for the development of policies and opportunities for Roma ethnic expression, a consequence very much also of the leadership provided by Gypsies in that country. Radio programs, cultural centers and Roma language publications are available in a number of the republics.
When they have not been studied as a romantic alternative to civilized life, they have been studied as a marginalized and self-marginalizing population with only a tangential role in the larger arena of economic and political life. Such studies, moreover, have reinforced the popular stereotype of Gypsies, i.e. that "true" Gypsies are only those who are marginalized and who maintain a more or less precise trait list of traditions. Such orthodoxy would prevent most members of most ethnic groups to claim membership in their respective groups.
Tyrnauer, perhaps too uncritically, accepts the Holocaust, concocted and implemented by National Socialism, as a unique mode of production which had created an incomparable experience of genocide, one that was specific to the experiences of Jews and Gypsies alone. This is so, she explains, because the Holocaust was based on the accepted notion of the biological inferiority of these two groups of people seen by a "master race" to be basically flawed and a barrier to the flowering of human existence. Certainly, the experience is unique-thankfully so-but not so uncommon to make this historical instance serve as the only instance of such horror capable of human inhumanity to large numbers of people. The causes of the wholesale slaughter of entire population groups is poorly understood and reference to discrimination and scapegoating, or the political economic position of specific groups within society is circular and fails to explain why and how discrimination, scapegoating, or political economic-based hierarchies develop in the first place.
Tyrnauer is right to focus on an historical analysis of this period and on the forces and conditions shaping the events in which hundreds of thousands (one half million to one million according to some experts) of Gypsies lost their lives. The Gypsy Holocaust, Dr. Tyrnauer makes clear, is a history of the silenced. The poignancy of this notion is not metaphoric, as is made clear by an autobiography written by a Viennese Gypsy, Ceija Stojka (1989 [1988]). Ms. Stojka experienced and survived Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Ravensbruck, and Auschwitz. While in the Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp, an ailing woman from her barracks, whom she had come to know as "aunty," was sentenced to a severe form of punishment. She had been at the wrong place at the wrong time--in the way of an SS Officer. She was forced to stand up to her neck in ice cold water during a cold winter day. She never returned to the barracks, Ceija Stojka recounted.
Even emotions had to be stilled. Ms. Stojka reflected on the impact that the death of a fellow inmate had on them. "All the women in our barracks were even more afraid now that they knew what can happen to them. Aunty Ria told us: 'You mush not show your anger; the SS Women [officers in charge of the camp were women] will be even more glad to see this" (1989: 48-49). In another instance of horror, after two women prisoners attempted to escape they were captured, returned to camp and summarily executed. Ceija Stojka comments: "We knew then what will happen to us should we try to escape, we had already decided; we had not the littlest of hope" (ibid: 54). Even hope was silenced.
Of course, the silencing took on entirely different proportions as well. Ceija Stojka tells us that after her mother was threatened with the same ice water punishment, which caused almost certain death, they took the first opportunity to leave the camp. This, however, was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. They went to the Bergen-Belsen camp and here Ms. Stojka relates: "It was no longer cold; one could already see the grass growing on the camp's grounds. People from other camps were constandy coming and everyday half of them died. In the camp there were already two large piles of the dead. The dead grew constantly; one couldn't count them anymore" (ibid; 58-59).
The conditions that created the Holocaust were not only created by the state and those who represented it. While official discriminatory behavior and laws provided a model for society as a whole and created the possibility for public displays of hate, popular prejudice permitted the horror to emerge without a vigorous enough critical opposition to question the justice of such social conditions. According to Tyrnauer, "...there was little evidence of resistance in any country to measures against them (xvi)." Under these conditions, the invisible Gypsy became visible only as social problems appeared.
The history of Gypsies is a history of the silenced--a condition we must not and cannot forget. The silence and the silencing is multiple. First, it is a silence related to a people without a written history of their own. Second, it is a silence created from conditions of suppression and marginalization. Finally, the Holocaust for the Gypsies was a silencing of a most radical type, the eradication of a people. Not only was this act the taking away of physical life, but also their human regeneration. It meant the extermination of their possibilities. It meant to rob them of their future and their past--as if they had never existed. They were to have been erased totally and irrevocably.
An Austrian researcher, Claudia Mayerhofer, noted that Burgenland-Roma were ashamed to be Gypsies and believed their salvation lay in upward mobility and abstaining from the use of their language. One little girl told her that she would gladly give up her language for the sum of 5,000 Austrian Schillings. The children who moved to Vienna, Mayerhofer indicated, for the most part no longer know that their parents are Gypsies and the Romani language is totally foreign to them (1987:58). The process of silencing here, sadly, is almost complete.
Researchers continue to assist in the process of silencing. A recent collection of Russian Gypsy tales, translated from the Russian into English, sympathetically approaches Gypsy folklore (1986 Druts and Gessler). Yet, in the introduction to the book written by James Riordan, a folklorist, he states: "in folk tales too, as in their faith, they took the external forms of customs and beliefs of their adopted land; they have no body of historical legends, no national heroes of their own." in the same breath, Mr. Riordan continues and indicates: "What Rom tales do contain is a lingering custom handed down from times gone by, the dimly recalled story of exile and persecution, of their homelands and wanderings abroad, of scraping a living, and the often unconscious adaptation of the folk tales of other peoples to their storytelling." The denial of Gypsy history runs deep. It is erroneous to state that all Gypsies have no sense of history or one that is based only on folklore. While the collection is valuable in that the book documents some of the lore of Russian Gypsies, the authors feed the cliched conceptualization of Gypsies.
Thus Tyrnauer is right again to focus on the history of whom others assert as a people without history. Gypsies, like many indigenous populations of the world, did not become literate until relatively recently with the development of a national self-consciousness. The participants in the establishment of the lnternational Romani Union provided that leadership. Their history like those of conquered and oppressed indigenous people the world over has had to be reconstructed from documents and archival materials normally generated by members of dominant society, through testaments of oral histories, or ethnographic research. The year 1989 has been momentous for all of Europe, East and West. The reformation of states is occurring at a revolutionary pace. New regional identities are in the making as the notion of Mitteleuropa is being recirculated, the unification of the Germanies may (has) become a reality, and new market-based economic alliances are constructed in which an international division of labor is formalized at levels that transcend the Gastarbeitgr phenomenon of the past decades. This is also a new opportunity to restructure the relationship among ethnic groups, particularly between ethnic minorities and states or state-like structures.
As Dr. Tyrnauer put it, Gypsies under conditions of feudalism had a "clear niche in society", one in which "their existence was not called into question (x)." As the bourgeois nation-state emerged, the "central focus on national identity, the ‘Zigeunerfrage’ was born... (xi)." The Gypsies became the inner enemy to the state and in the final analysis socially and physically isolated from the rest of society. in a post-modern era, Gypsies may find themselves equals among a wide range of ethnic groups competing for resources in an international community. In order for this to occur, the states in which they reside will need to recognize the Roma as a legitimate people having rightful and honorable places in society, with a history and a future.
Notes
The translations from German are my own.
Druts, Yefim and Alexei Gessler
1986 Russian Gypsy Tales. Translated and Introduction by James Riordan. Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing Limited.
Mayerhofer, Claudia
1987 Dorfzigeuner Kultur und Geschichte der Burgenland-Roma von der Ersten Republik
bis zur Gegenwart (Village Gypsy Culture and History of the Burgenland-Roma from the First Republic to the Present). Wien: Picus Vertag.
Stojka, Deija
1989 [1988] Wir Leben Im Verborgenen Erinnerungen Einer Rom-Zigeunerin (We Are
Living in the Borrowed Rememberences of a Rom-Gypsy). Second Edition. Edited by
Karin Berger. Wien: Picus Verlag.
Anthropology as an academic discipline varies considerably cross-nationally. My Fulbright Lectureship in the Department of British and American Studies at Humboldt University in East Berlin during September 1988 - February 1989 provided me with the opportunity to meet fellow anthropologists who acquainted me with the history and organization of our discipline in the German Democratic Republic. Dr. Walter Rusch in Bereich Ethnographie at Humboldt University and Professor Karl Sommer, Director of the institute for Anthropology at Humboldt University, played particularly significant roles in my personal odyssey through GDR anthropology. My contacts with GDR anthropologists also brought me into contact with anthropologists from other European countries, including Emmanuel Terray from the Ehess African Studies Center in Paris, Tamas Hoffman (the General Director of the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest), Josef Kotecs (the University of Debrecen in Hungary), Professor Piminov (Director of the Ethnographic Institute at Moscow University), and Josef Wolf (Member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague).
German Anthropology Prior to 1949
Prior to the late nineteenth century, German anthropology was a holistic discipline as was evidenced by Henrik Steffin's textbook Anthropologie. Steffin, a Norwegian, lectured primarily on ethnography at Berlin University. Early German anthropology drew upon Naturphilosphie or natural philosophy, an endeavor that attracted naturalists, physicists, and anatomists. Naturphilosophie, however, went into decline as Darwinian theory gained popularity on the Continent. In organizing American anthropology as a four subdiscipline endeavor, Franz Boas drew some of his inspiration from two famous German scholars - Adolf Bastien, an ethnographer at Berlin University (or what is today Humboldt University), and Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist at the same institution. According to Harris (1968:265), "Both of them, Bastien with his belief in universal genn thoughts and Virchow with his strong physiological interests, were concerned with regularities and processes." Ironically, German anthropology or Anthropologie as a biocultural endeavor began to divide up into relatively separate disciplines consisting of Anthropologie (physical anthropology), Ethnologie or Ethnographie (ethnology or ethnography), and Ur-Geschichte or Archeologie (prehistory or archeology) beginning in the 1860s. Nevertheless, the three disciplines found a common institutional base within the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory which was established in 1870. After World War I the Society disbanded into separate organizations, including the German Anthropological Society and the German Ethnographic Society. Fredrich Ratzel, an anthropogeographer, also played a significant role in the development of German anthropology. Bastien is regarded to be the father of modern-day German Ethnographie. Ethnographie became divided into Vo1kskunde (the study of German-speaking peoples) and erkunde (the study of other cultures). Many German physical anthropologists, including Josef Mengele, were involved in raciology and eugenics studies, during the Nazi period. Otto Reche, a racist physical anthropologist, established the institut fur Racen und Volkerkunde at the University of Leipzig.
The Reemergence and Organization of Andthropology and Ethnography in the GDR
The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the newly created German Democratic Republic (est. in 1949) viewed Anthropologie and perhaps to a lesser degree Ethnograhie with suspicion because of their associations with the fascist cause. Nevertheless, both disciplines underwent a gradual rehabilitation in the early years of the GDR. Julius Lips, who taught in exile during the Nazi period in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, reestablished in 1947 an ethnographic institute at the University of Leipzig (renamed Karl Marx University in 1953). Lips conducted research on the Naskapi, particularly on the impact of colonialism on their economy. He became the rector of the University of Leipzig in 1949, but died in 1952. His wife, Ava Lips, served as Director of the Institute until 1968. She had conducted research and wrote popular books on Native Americans, particularly in the Andes. An ethnographic institute was reestablished at Humboldt University in Berlin. Lectures in Anthropology began to be conducted in the GDR during the early 1950s, and the Institute for Anthropology was established at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin in 1955. An Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics was also established at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena. Presently Ethnographie and Archeologie, exist as sub-departments in the Department of History at Humboldt University. Bereich Ethnographie forms a sub-department of the Department of African and Near Eastern Studies at Karl Marx University. Bereich Ethnographie at Humboldt University includes specialists in both schools in Berlin and Jena. Twelve physical anthropologists work at the institute for Anthropology at Humboldt University. The Institute also has 153 collaborators, primarily physicians situated in clinics and institutes. Anthropologie in the GDR has developed subspecialities in medical anthropology, developmental anthropology, industrial anthropology, and historical anthropology. Medical anthropology focuses on issues such as human orthopedics, forensic medicine, dental growth, and the relationship between body composition and disease. In its research on developmental anthropology, the Institute for Anthropology conducts research on the physiological and genetic characteristics of various population cohorts in the GDR (Flugel, Greil, and Sommer 1988) and, in cooperation with the Institute for the Hygiene of Children and Youth, on the psychosexual development of GDR youth. Industrial anthropology applies physical anthropological data to the design of work clothes and furniture for state firms. Historical anthropology focuses on the examination of skeletal remains of former populations that resided in present-day GDR territory and serves as a link between Anthropologie and Archeologie.
The Institute for Anthropology is in the process of restoring and examining the Virchow collection of skeletal remains from all over the world. Much of the collection, which was stored in boxes during World War II, is covered with algae and water-damaged. Lothar von Schbtt directed the investigation of the skeletal remains of the Old Berliners and the construction of the Old Berliners exhibit which was originally assembled for the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987 and is not housed in the Museum of Natural History - the site of the institute for Anthropology.
GDR Anthropology In Its Societal and Global Context
GDR Ethnographie draws upon Marxist-Leninist theory in its attempt to chronicle the socio-economic development of human societies (Rusch and Winkelmann 1987). While much of GDR Ethnographie has focused on preliterate and pre-capitalist state societies or traditional customs in the GDR, some GDR ethnographers, such as Ute Mohrmann and Irene Runge, are giving increasing attention to social life in GDR cities. While at first glance Anthropolgie may appear to be more apolitical in its concerns, Professor Karl Sommer told me that, in keeping with socialist ideals, the discipline is interested in altering the biosocial environment in order to further develop human potentials.
GDR ethnographers maintain active contacts with their colleagues in the Soviet Union, other Eastern European countries, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Austria. Frederick Rose corresponds regularly with Richard Lee at the University of Toronto since both of them share interests in hunting and gathering societies. GDR physical anthropologists also maintain contacts with colleagues in other countries, including those in the FRG. One physical anthropologist suggested to me that his FRG colleagues are looking to developments in GDR Anthropologie with great interest because Anthropologie in the FRG has not undergone the same process of rehabilitation as it has in the GDR.
Compared to American anthropology, GDR anthropology remains a relatively obscure academic endeavor both within its own country and internationally. In some ways, GDR anthropologists work in an environment reminscient of American anthropology in the early decades of this century. One GDR ethnographer described the community of GDR ethnographers as a Dorf or village. Bereich Ethnogralphie at Humboldt University has only some 30 undergraduate students and only a few graduate students. As noted earlier, Anthropologie can only be studied at the post-doctoral levels. According to one GDR ethnographer, some GDR Vo1kerkunde specialists have been unable to conduct participant observation on various cultural groups in capitalistibird World countries or North America due to the shortage of hard currency faced by the GDR state. As a consequence, these specialists must rely upon the limited library materials that exist in the GDR. The shortage of hard currency also makes it dificult for GDR physical anthropologists to visit their colleagues in the FRG, despite their mutual research interests. Nonetheless, both ethnographers and physical anthropologists from Western Europe seem to increasingly be visiting their GDR colleagues and even collaborating with them.
I suspect that I have been one of the few American anthropologists who has established contacts with GDR anthropologists. On December 14, 1988, I, presented an overview of recent trends in American anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology, in Bereich Ethnographie at Humboldt University. In the spirit of glasnost, I am pleased to add that Professor Pimenov from Moscow University was also present at my talk. I also presented a paper on the development of medical anthropology in the United States at the Biopsychosocial Unity of Humanity Conference, an interdisciplinary conference at Humboldt University Vo1kerkunde and Vo1kerkunde whereas Bereich Ethnographie at Karl Marx University focuses on Volkerkunde. At Humboldt University, Ute Mohrmann (1988) focuses on GDR folk life and factory workers, Walter Rusch on African studies, Ursual Wittenberg on Vietnam, Jugenburg Winklmann on Soviet peoples, Irene Runge on the Netherlands (1988) and family and aging in the GDR, and Frederick Rose on Australian aborigines. At Karl Marx University, some eight ethnographers have tended to concentrate their research activities on peoples of Africa and the Middle East and, at the theoretical level, the Bereich is developing an interest in state formations and ethnic minorities.
At the present time, there are some 300 ethnographers in the GDR, with about 40-45 of them specializing in Vo1kerkunde and the remainder specializing in Vo1kskunde. Most of the Volkskunde specialists work in local museums scattered throughout the GDR. Sixteen Volkerkunde specialists work at the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Leipzig and 11 or 12 Volkerkunde specialists work at the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Dresden. Some ethnographers also work at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The sole professional anthropological journal in the GDR is the Ethnographisch-Archaolgishe Zeitschrift but the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Leipzig publishes a popular ethnographic journal as well as annual yearbook. Whereas training exists at both the undergraduate and graduate level in ethnography at two of the seven GDR universities, training in physical anthropology exists only at the graduate level. GDR physical anthropologists are either human biologists or physicians, many of whom are conducting research on Anthropolgie. The two Institutes for Anthropology are affiliated with the medical duringjanuary 25-27, 1989 attended by scholars from the GDR, FRG, Soviet Union, United States, and various Eastern European countries. What the possibilities for research opportunities for American anthropologists are in the GDR remain to be seen, but in the spirit of increasing dialogue between scholars from the East and West, I feel that the potential for contact with our colleagues in the German Democratic Republic looks promising, regardless of whether or not the two Germanies reunify.
Acknowledgements:
I am grateful to Professor Ute Mohrmann and Frederick Rose and Drs. Walter Runge and Irene in Bereich Ethnographie at Humboldt University, to Professors Karl Sommer and Lothar von Sch6tt and Dr. Holle Greil at the Institute for Anthropology at Humboldt University, Professor Dietrich Treide in Bereich Ethnographie at Karl Marx University, and to Drs. Wolf-Dieter Seiwert and Lothar Drager at the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Leipzig for providing me with much of the infomiation contained in this paper.
References
Harris, Marvin
1928 The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Luugel, Bernd, Holle Greil, and Karl Sommer
1986 Anthropologischer Atlas: Grundlagen und Daten, DDR. Berlin, German Democratic Republic: Verlag Tribune.
Mohrffiann, Ute
1988 "Studienmaterial zu den Lehrerveranstaltungen Einfuhrung in Volkes/Sozialismus". Typescript manuscript.
Runge, Irene
1988 Du Sollst Nicht Immer Holland Sagen. Berlin, German Democratic Republic: Buchverlag Der Morgan.
Rusch, Walter, and ingeburg Winkelmann 1987 "Zur Entwicklung der aussereuropaischen Ethnographie am der DDR". Ethnographisch-Archaologische Zeitschrift 28:295-320.
Jan Kubik
IREX Scholar-Poland
Upon learning that the whole Kubik family was preparing to leave this August for a yearlong fieldwork in Poland, David Kideckel suggested that I should keep sending to the Review brief reports from the field. I love the idea (one more reason to be systematic) and promise to be a diligent correspondent. By the way of introduction, let me tell you a brief story of how the idea of this fieldwork came about and what preparations have been made so far.
In July 1989 I returned to Poland after almost seven years of absence. Having just finished my doctoral dissertation at Columbia, entitled The Role of Symbols in the Legitimation of Power, Poland: 1976-1981, I was anxious to immerse myself in the country undergoing a dramatic change and find ideas for new research projects. A four week stay, in addition to the very emotional reunion with my family and friends, allowed me to collect a considerable amount of data on the recent (June 1989) semi-democratic elections and the emergence of the movement of Citizens' Committees. This preliminary study helped me later to developed a proposal for long-term fieldwork under the working tide of Political Discourse and Political Praxis of the Current Polish Democratization, which I hope to begin in September 1990, thanks to the IREX grant.
The country I visited was still euphoric after the unexpectedly high electoral victory of Solidarity. I interviewed several Solidarity activists who had worked in the union's election campaign. All shared with me an amazing story of the frantic 57 days before the elections, during which the powerful communist party, although still in firm control of the media, practically disappeared from the public spaces. Instead, these spaces were filled with home-made and often amateurish visual propaganda by Solidarity. What really attracted my curiosity and later became a subject of two conference presentations (including my last AAA meeting paper) was the fact that during this campaign the communist party candidates pretended to be everything but communists. They were instead promoting themselves as patriots, champions of democracy and self-government, efficient and successful managers and, very often, unam-biguous supporters of private enterprise (sic!). This strategy of mimicry, which served to hide the real political affiliations of the communist candidates, seems to have been the most conspicuous feature of the 1989 election campaign.
I also did some interviewing and background research on the Citizens' Committees. These spontaneously created bodies replaced in many places chapters of Solidarity as focal points of social activism. In Ustron (a site of my planned fieldwork in the Beskidy Mountains, southern Poland) I participated in a meeting of the local Citizens' Committee whose members were deliberating how to resurrect the local chapter of Solidarity. This exemplifies one of the fundamental dilemmas of the emerging civil society in Poland: Solidarity has been organized by people in the workplace; Citizens' Committees have been organized by people living in a certain area. The transition from the former organizing principle to the latter proves to be very difficult.
I started also working on the theoretical and conceptual background of my upcoming fieldwork. I decided to concentrate on three themes. First, I have been reading literature on the transition to democracy from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. I am studying, for example, O'Donnell's and Schmitter's Transitions from Authoritarian Rule and trying to figure out how to connect such analyses with my "anthropological/ethnographic" framework and problematic. Second, I have been developing an analytical framework I will need to study the change in the public discourse (symbols, works, styles of thinking, concepts, etc.). I intend to study the interaction of symbols and politics/power in a small community - thus far I concentrated on the national level. I would like to utilize some linguistic methods (although my competence here is limited). It seems to me, for example, that M. Moerman's Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis provides me with enough clues to develop an efficient mode of analysis of everyday verbal exchanges (beside I am a long-standing fan of Schutz and Luckman and The Structures of the Li fe-World will travel with us to Poland). Third, I have been looking at the more recent works dealing with the folk religion in Europe, such as, for example, a volume edited by Ellen Badone (in my preliminary research in Ustron I detected a growing tension between Protestants and Catholics; the former voted for Solidarity candidates, the latter had their own representatives). Another very useful aspect of my trip to Poland was an opportunity to catch up with the most recent publications on a variety of topics. Here I would like to share with you brief bibliographic information about several works recendy published in Poland in the fields of ethnography and sociology.
Arkady, a Warsaw publishing house, put out Sztuka Ludowa w Polsce (Folk Art in Poland) by Ewa Frys-Pietraszkowa, Anna Kunczynska-Iracka and Marian Pokropek (1988). This carefully edited work contains 13 synthetic studies (emphasizing history) on such topics as architecture, pottery, cloth, painting, etc; an extensive bibliography; index of geographic locations; index of names; index of terms and iconographic motifs; and 453 black-and-white and color pictures.
Artia (a Czechoslovak publisher) and PA Interpress (a Polish house) brought out Tradycje Tworczosci Ludowej, Ludowa Kultura Materialna w Czechach i na Morawach (Traditions of Folk Arts and Crafts. Folk Material Culture in Bohemia and Moravia) by Alena Vondruskova and Vlastimil Vondruska. A handsome volume (many beautiful black-and-white and color pictures), though not as carefully edited as the previous one (no indexes or bibliography), contains a lot of useful information about the material culture of the two Czechoslovak lands.
The work I found particularly interesting is Cyganie w Polsce, Dzieje i Obycaje. (Gypsies in Poland. History and Customs) by Jerzy Ficowski (known to the English-speaking public for his superb editorial work on the English version of Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz. with Selected Prose). It is a carefully researched and concisely written essay presenting a story of Gypsies in Poland (note: not Polish Gypsies), accompanied by 207 black-and-white and color pictures. It begins with an examination of the first written sources documenting the Gypsy presence in Europe and on Polish territories. A brief history of the Gypsies in Poland until 1939 is followed by a detailed description of their tragic fate under the Nazis. Then, the very difficult relationship between Gypsies and both the communist authorities ("productivizing" actions) and ethnic Poles (e.g., an attempted pogrom in Konin in 1981) is scrutinized. The last and the largest part of the essay is devoted to a presentation and analysis of old and modern Gypsy folklore. I would also like to bring to your attention a serial publication of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences entitled Sisyphus, Sociological Studies. Some of you may know Volume III: Crises and Conflicts, The Case of Poland 1980-81, one of the best sources of primary materials (e.g., fragments of workers' memoirs) and original studies by Polish sociologists dealing with the Polish "self-acting" revolution of 1980-81. By now six volumes are available. Volume IV, for example, entitled Poland in the 1980s. Reassessment of Crises and Conflicts, contains such studies as W. Morawski's "Dilemmuas of the institutional change in Contemporary Poland," Stefan Nowak's "The attitudes, values, and aspirations of Polish society," J. Wasilewski's "Social processes of regional power elite recruitment," or J. Koralewicz's and E. Wnuk-Lipinski's "Vision of society, differentiations and inequalities in the collective consciousness." Sisyphus is an invaluable source of first-rate, original sociological studies, although the quality of English translations is very uneven. I know that the future of this publication is endangered by the lack of funds and our Polish colleagues appeal for help, for example in the form of subscriptions (if you have questions concerning this issue or you need more information please, call or write me).
If you have any comments, criticisms, useful hints, bibliographic suggestions etc., concerning my fieldwork or the works I briefly reviewed, please call me at (216) 263-2219[(919) 299-0653 after May 31)] or write to: Jan Kubik, c/o Ruth Shope, 516 Willowbrook Dr., Greensboro, NC 27403.
JanKubik
IREX Scholar, Poland
In October 1980 I went to Gdansk to immerse myself in the electrifying atmosphere of the town known as a cradle of the Polish "self-limiting" revolution. I was told I should see the film Workers 87 a chronicle of the historic negotiations between the representatives of the Party-state and the workers. Since the film was not advertised in the media I was not able to find the movie theater where it was shown. Finally, someone pointed me in the direction of the right building. A huge poster informed me that inside they were showing... "Return of Godzilla," but the actual film shown to a capacity crowd of Gdansk factory workers was Workers. During all the screenings reported to me the film was received with tremendous enthusiasm. In fact all over the country it was a phenomenal box office and artistic success which upstaged Wajda's fictitious rendition of the same historical moment in his man of Iron. In this case, documentary genre proved more able to communicate the essence and atmosphere of the Solidarity revolution than did the feature film made by an acclaimed artist.
Bikont's film which for documentary reasons is most fascinating, is unfortunately available only in Polish. It tells the story of the round table negotiations between the communist government and Solidarity. Bikont's crew moved video cameras and microphones through the corridors and halls of the Palace housing the Council of Ministers without entering the rooms where the official negotiations took place trying to document this unprecedented event. They caught off-the-record remarks and bits of conversations and recorded brief interviews with some key participants as well as a few more formal accounts of what was going on "inside." On several occasions one can actually listen to fragments of the strategy planning sessions of the Solidarity side, led by Bronislaw Geremek or to irreverent and certainly not intended for "official" publication comments made by the "party" journalists. Adam Michnik always a brilliant jester, exchanges jokes with and about his former oppressors and challenges them on the key points of negotiations The film should be subtitled and made accessible to a wider world audience as soon as possible for it is one of the most unique documents of current East European history.
In After Solidarity Gaylen Ross and his crew portray three families of former Solidarity activists who ended up in the USA in 1984 after a period of internment. The film covers the first two years of the difficult period of transition and adjustment to their new environment. It is about the tragedy of displacement ("I have nothing in Poland and nothing in New York"-- confesses a young woman) and hope ("It is easy here but you have to work"); cultural confusion and isolation ("American people can't think what we feel”) and newly gained freedom which no one is quite sure what to do with. it is also about economic hardship and suddenly discovered unlimited possibilities of material enrichment, first hypothetical and then increasingly more real- ("... beautiful American bedroom"). It is also about ethnic stereotypes and Polish xenophobia: one of the most insightful motifs of the film is a tragi-comic story of a young girl who marries a young immigrant from Egypt. Her mother, shocked and confused, keeps complaining in her broken English: "Not good Arabic." All Poles develop a characteristic cultural schiophrenia, a love-hate relationship with the old and new countries ("I hate Poland" exclaims a child, causing a resigned shrug of the arms by her mother). The men of the families, still dearly in the patriarchal positions of authority (a carry over from Polish culture), were the ones who decided to leave their country. They are now burdened with responsibilities and hardships, yet they slowly gain confidence as their situations stabilize. interestingly, even after two years in New York City they do not engage in any form of political activism, but as one of them explains: "my first goal is to provide minimum subsistence for my family." The film can be most helpful if you are looking for a teaching tool to be used in your classes, lectures, etc. on immigration.
Richard Adams's Citizens is, by contrast, mostly about those Poles who, after arriving in America, continued to be socially and politically active despite the hardships of the readjustment period. I have to confess that because of my friendship with Dick, who allowed me to hang around as he was working on his film and was kind enough to ask occasionally for my advice, my judgment cannot be objective. Let me thus state it clearly at the beginning: I like this film very much. Adams was getting ready to go to Poland to shoot a documentary on Solidarity when martial law was imposed. Stranded in New York and still driven by a desire to learn more about the Polish situation, he started interviewing Poles who, like himself, decided it unwise to go to Poland. As he put it, he wanted to see what was universal in this latest of Polish struggles, what was the deeper meaning of those extraordinary events that swept Poland in 1981. To me, he succeeds in this task admirably. Through an aesthetically diverse yet logical collage of music, Polish cabaret and Church in Greenpoint, NY, and several songs by Jacek Kacmarski, the most famous Polish author of "protest songs", images emotional rallies in front of the Polish Consulate in NYC and refined aesthetism of Tadeus Antor's theater), and interviews, the film recreates the elated mood, intellectual vitality, and political inventiveness of Solidarity. It does not ignore some of the darker sides of the movement either (Seweryn Blumstain reflecting on Polish xenophobia and impulsiveness). Citizens is not a boring sequence of "talking heads" but a true "picture;" its carefully crafted visual dimension is further developed than in more conventional documentaries, yet the essential sense of certain historical events is conveyed with amazing faithfulness. This accurate rendition of the "spirit of history" is also achieved through other means. For instance, two initial interviews with Stanislaw Barancak, a renowned Polish poet, founding member of KOR and professor of Polish literature at Harvard and anonymous Rudolf, a worker from Ursus tractor factory near Warsaw, one of the strongholds of Solidarity, are so skillfully intertwined that they convey one of the essential characteristics of the movement--the alliance of workers and intellectuals--with great precision. In brief, Citizens is much more than a documentary rendition of historical events; it succeeds in conveying a deeper meaning of Solidarity (to Adams it seems to be the enthusiastic, spontaneous participation in democracy) and reconstructing the Zeitgeist. If you want to help people understand this spirit show them Citizens .
Finally, Nothing to Loose is a record of a young American journalist's visit to Poland in the summer of 1985. It was a fateful summer; the most powerful wave of strikes since 1981 swept the country leading eventually to the historical "round table accords." Charles Steiner and his Polish friend set out to explore the role young workers played in these events. These young workers were challenging the authority of the older leaders including Lech Walesa. The filmmakers traveled around the country in August and recorded several instances of the youth rebellion. In 8 episodes shot in 8 different locations they relate a story of a totally disillusioned young generation. We see and hear a group of young workers in Gdansk. One of them sings: "...and the seventh sin is to a be worker in this workers' country", a few Polish "yuppies"-- cynical young "capitalists," a Woodstock-like gathering of rock-fans, and a punk band from Cracow. As a Pole I reacted to the film emotionally reading dozens of messages in its words, images and sounds; and I liked it. My wife, an American, was largely confused by choppy editing and a number of unexplained cultural details and nuances. For someone interested in politics the most informative part of the film was shot in Gdansk. An extensive interview with the young workers and a briefer conversation with Walesa, document well the simmering inter-generational conflict. Someone interested in the mood of Polish youth in the late 1980s will appreciate the whole film, but some preparatory reading and perhaps a commentary by an expert will be necessary to grasp its full meaning. Unprepared viewers (undergraduates) may enjoy witnessing some "excesses" of Polish youth but are likely to end up confused as to the actual sense of what really happened in Poland in 1988.
Four films under review:
1. Tales of the Round Table (in Polish), by Piotr Bikont. Available from Gdansk Video [for more information call Jan Kubik (216) 263-2219). 70 minutes.
2. After Solidarity: Three Polish Families in America by Gaylen Poss. Available from Filmmakers Library Inc. 124E 40th Street, Suite 901, New York, NY 10016, tel.: (212) 808-4980. 58 minutes.
3. Citizens, An American Film Portrait of Polish Solidarity, by Richard W. Adams. Available from: Richard W. Adams, Documentary Films, 340E 58th St., #5c, New York, NY 10022, tel.: (212) 832-3254. 58 minutes.
4. Nothing to Lose, by Charles Steiner. Available from: Vagabond Video, 61 2nd Avenue, New York, NY 10003, tel. (212) 777-0813. 59 minutes.
Catherine Portuges
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
At the Twenty-Second Annual Film Week in Budapest in early February, an unprecedented majority of the forty-three entries representing Hungary's 1989 studio productions were documentary films and videos. In the wake of the transformations sweeping East-Central Europe, the festival was inevitably suffused with politics, as the Hungarian film industry debated strategies for re-structuring the studio system in line with the country's move toward private-sector joint ventures.
Especially impressive to me as a Western observer, although no doubt less extraordinary for Hungarians, was the focus of nearly a half dozen films on the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its tragic aftermath. Among the best of these were Schiffer's Engesztelo 1956-1989 (Atonement), Janos Zsombolyai's Halalraiteltek '56 (Condemned to Death), and A Halalraitelt (On Death Row), Andras Sipos'Statarium (Martial Law), Zsigmond Erdelyi's Verrel es Kotellel (With Blood and Rope), and Janos Veszi's A Halal Villamosa (The Tram of Death). Taken together, these titles offer a powerful indictment of the human toll exacted upon a small nation of fiercely proud traditions.
The subject of Schiffer's 75-minute color film Atonement is the kidnapping and subsequent murder of two National Guard leaders from the Salgotarjan Steel Works by former officers of the state secret police. An eloquent "narrative documentary," it follows the trajectory of the officers' relatives in their efforts to uncover the circumstances surrounding the torture and murder of their husbands and fathers. As the film unfolds, individuals who have lived in fear for three decades gradually find the courage to speak, accepting the struggle to come to terms with the lies, evasions and silences of the post-Stalinist past. The filmmaker becomes a participant in the families' quest for answers to questions that could not even have been asked in 1956 nor during the succeeding decades of reprisals and intimidation. It is a powerfully moving film, dignified yet unflinching. On Death Row, awarded the prize for best feature, takes place in 1958 when Imre Nagy, a leader of the 1956 uprising, was executed together with other anonymous martyrs; their subsequent rehabilitation and ceremonial burial in June 1988 only adds to the film's impact, and underscores the uncanny connections between historical events and cinematic representation in Eastern Europe.
As one harrowing narrative after another unfolded, I found myself riveted by the emotional honesty and the relentless solemnity of these films; several documented formal accusations against army officers and party officials by citizens who recalled in vivid detail their suffering and betrayal during those years of "organized forgetting." Consequently, I was quite surprised to hear, in a rather desultory "Open Discussion” in the Conference Center adjacent to Budapest's Novotel, speakers deploring the proliferation of "impermissibly long" documentaries, and accusing filmmakers of indulging their own obsessions at the expense of the audience.
Among the documentaries shown (which constituted over two-thirds of the festival entries) was Balladak Filmje (Film of Ballads: A Transylvanian Sociography), a tribute by directors Gyula and Janos Gulyas to ethnographer Zoltan Kallos and the authentic Transylvanian folklore he has helped to preserve. Against the sound track of Hungarian folk music and dances from the Mezsoseg and Kalotaszeg regions, its archaic rituals are documented with anthropological care in village weddings, funerals and christening rituals. The onstage appearance afterwards of the principal musicians and subjects, resplendent in traditional embroidered costume and accompanied by Kallos himself, was greeted with the most sustained applause of any screening I attended that week, and demonstrated the emotional attachment of Hungarians to their compatriots in Transylvania.
Felrevert Harangok (Tolling Church-Bells), Alajos Paulus's feature-length documentary about the lives of Hungarian and Romanian refugees from Transylvania, concludes that even the most humanitarian assistance cannot resolve the tragedy of their dislocation. Shot against the background of the Romanian revolution, the film is a powerful indictment of the human toll exacted by the interethnic conflict in that much-contested terrain. Swab Passio (Swabian Passion-Play), foregrounds the deportation to West Germany in 1946 of another ethnic minority, the Swabs of Budaors, a community of German origin which settled in Hungary some 250 years ago. In that village near Budapest in the 1930s, local peasants and craftsmens constructed an exquisite replica of Jerusalem and performed, with great success, a Swabian version of the Passion Play. One of my favorite documentaries was Fenyykep a Tanitvanyoknak Balazs Belarol (Photo of Bela Balazs for his Followers). This two-hour black-and-white 16mm film reunited colleagues, friends and former disciples of the great theorist, including Geza Radvanyi, Istvan Szots, Karoly Makk and Andras Kovacs, in a visual and narrative memoir that is also a long overdue interrogation of Hungarian cinema. Another remarkable documentary, Eros Karokkal Fogjatok le szepen (Restrain Me Gently With Your Strong Arms), was produced by the MOVI Helios Film Studio, for over forty years a center of award-winning popular-scientific and education films. A respectful yet dramatic inquiry into suicide (one out of thirty Hungarians takes his or her own life-- purportedly the world's highest rate), the film interviews patients and psychiatrists, allowing them to speak freely of their experiences and fears. Without attempting to theorize or explain, the film suggests that suicide has for generations in Hungary been considered a "solution to the problems of life."
The opening night feature, Judith Elek's Tutajosok (Memoirs of a River), a Franco-Hungarian feature co-production, concerns the disappearance and presumed ritual murder in the 1880s of a young woman from the village of Tiszaeszlar. The film is, according to the director, one she had wanted to make from the time she was a film student: "But I couldn't have done it because, up to the middle of the 1980s, it was impossible to speak openly about anti-Semitism...We must know who we are, and what we can become; and that is impossible without digging down to the roots and uncovering our past." I would be remiss in closing without at least mentioning a few of the other excellent film artists to whose work I cannot do justice here. Gyorgy Szomjas' Konnyu Ver (Fast and Loose), features the erotic adventures of two blond models at the Academy of Fine Arts, Ildi and Margo, who supplement their income by "curing" foreign men. Winner of the Directors' Prize, the film's popularity may also be read as an index of current reactions to decades of censorship through its open exploration of sexuality. Similarly, Gyorgy Dobray's Ejszai Lanyok (Ladies of the Night), and Damak, a colorful inquiry into the phenomenon of Cicciolina, the frequently unclothed blonde member of the Italian parliament, suggest the attraction of newfound freedoms in their display of the (mostly female) body. Szomjas' concert video film Mulatsag (Days of Peace and Music, subtitled "Twenty Years After Woodstock") an "hommage" to the TEKA Folk Ensemble's summer dance camp at Nagykallo in eastern Hungary, conveys the pleasure-oriented spirit of 1960s rock-and-roll combined with today's culture of folk music and dance. Based on the true story of a parricide by a teenage boy from Miskolc, the screenplay for Arpad Sopsits' once-censored Cellovolde (Shooting Range) was awarded the Festival's Special Prize. Krisztina Deak, recipient of the Budapest Council Prize for her first feature, Eszter Konyv (Book of Esther), directed the story of a woman caught between the need to escape from the Gestapo with her husband and the desire to remain behind with her daughter from another marriage. Finally, first-time feature director Andras Monory's Meteo marked a departure from the somber style of many films in the Festival and was a favorite of audiences, perhaps in large part on account of its appeal to Western tastes. Still, the film's technical skill is commendable, with its impressively suggestive apocalyptic vision of urban underground tunnels and nightclubs.
In contrast to previous National Film Festivals, this year there was a widely acknowledged sense of disappointment in the overall quality of feature productions (no prize was awarded for "best film"), and a prevailing sense of uncertainty as Hungary awaited its first free elections in forty-five years. Yet it was encouraging to learn that, despite considerable tension between "younger," "older," and "in-between" generations of film directors, most of the sixteen features represented the first directorial efforts of filmmakers born in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a turbulent moment for the film industry, marked by intense debates among filmmakers concerning its future structure, the outcome of which, like other aspects of East European culture, will be shaped increasingly by politics and foreign capital.
Andrei Simic
University of Southern California
Kamenko Katic (producer/director-- TV-Belgrade)
In 1953, Joel and Barbara Halpern began what was to become a longitudinal study of the Serbian village of Orasac spanning more than 35 years. At this time, the villagers still traveled along mud roads dating from Turkish times, only two households out of 480 had tractors, a scant five percent of the houses were electrified and indoor plumbing was unkown. In most ways, Orasac conformed closely to the model of a traditional preindustrial peasant community. In contrast, during the summer of 1986, the Halperns returned to a transformed village in which almost every family owned a tractor, most had electricity and many had constructed new, modern houses alongside the now-paved main road. This was no surprise to the Halperns who had observed this metamorphosis taking place over a number of years during their frequent visits to Orasac. This time, however, they were accompanied by Kamenko Katic, the host of a popular TV-Belgrade series, who filmed for his program a 43-minute segment entitled "The Halperns in Orasac." This production is now available on video with an English-language voice-over translation of the original Serbo-Croatian narration and dialogue, and with a segment added by the Halpems explaining through the use of slides how the film was made. An English transcription of the dialogue is also included as a study guide. The film's unifying theme is the longterm relationship between the Halperns and the villagers as expressed by their mutual reminiscences about the changes that have occured in Orasac and their own lives over the past three and a half decades. The approach is a broad-brushed one encompassing a spectrum of topics ranging from the zadruga, epic poetry, folk medicine and blood-sisterhood, on the one hand, to the introduction of modern agricultural technology, the growth of a cash economy and the overall lessening of the cultural differences between rural and urban life, on the other. Reading between the lines, the underlying theoretical motif is the concept of stability in change, that is, the ability of many aspects of folk culture to adjust to new political, economic and demographic conditions.
At times, the viewer will surely find "The Halperns in Orasac" overly staged and somewhat self-conscious. However, it should be kept in mind that this film was produced by a Serb for an exclusively home audience. In this respect, it is perhaps as much a cultural artifact as it is an "ethnographic" film in the usual sense. For instance, there is a recurrent overtone of "Isn't it remarkable that two American professors found the background and quaint ways of our countryside so intriguing! Of course, as you see, we are hardly like that any more!" Nevertheless, this production does, in fact, make amply clear that in spite of modernization, much of the legacy of the past and the mentality associated with it still lie barely below the surface in Orasac. For the anthropologist, this film suggests a number of theoretical and methodological issues related to problems of visual representation in ethnography. Specifically, I make reference to the question of reflexivity as it pertains to the Halperns, the villagers and the intended Yugoslav audience. For the student, it can provide an instructive supplement for the Halperns' written work, especially the 1986 Waveland Press edition of A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective.
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