The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [33]
Stephen Kotkin, a noted expert of Soviet history at Princeton University, has argued that the myth of civil society as a driver of anticommunist change was mostly invented by Western academics, donors, and journalists. “In 1989 ‘civil society’ could not have shattered Soviet-style socialism for the simple reason that civil society in Eastern Europe did not then actually exist.” And Kotkin has got the evidence to back it up: In early 1989 the Czechoslovak intelligence apparatus estimated that the country’s active dissidents were no more than five hundred people, with a core of about sixty (and even as the protests broke out in Prague, the dissidents were calling for elections rather than a complete overthrow of the communist regime). The late Tony Judt, another gifted historian of Eastern European history, observed that Václav Havel’s Charter 77 attracted fewer than 2,000 signatures in a Czechoslovak population of fifteen million. Similarly, the East German dissident movement did not play a significant role in getting people onto the streets of Leipzig and Berlin, and such movements almost did not exist in Romania or Bulgaria. Something like civil society did exist in Poland, but it was also one of the few countries with virtually no significant protests in 1989. Kotkin is thus justified in concluding that “just like the ‘bourgeoisie’ were mostly an outcome of 1789, so ‘civil society’ was more a consequence than a primary cause of 1989.”
But even if civil society didn’t exist as such, people did come out to Prague’s Wenceslas Square, choosing to spend cold November days chanting antigovernment slogans under the ubiquitous gaze of police forces. Whatever their role, the crowds certainly didn’t hurt the cause of democratization. If one believes that the crowds matter, then a more effective tool of getting them into the streets would be a welcome addition; thus, the introduction of a powerful new technology—a photocopier to copy the leaflets at rates ten times faster than before—is a genuine improvement. So are any changes in the way by which people can reveal their incentives to each other. If you know that twenty of your friends will join a protest, you may be more likely to join as well. Facebook is, thus, something of a godsend to protest movements. It would be silly to deny that new means of communications can alter the likelihood and the size of a protest.
Nevertheless, if the Eastern European regimes had not already been dead, they would have mounted a defense that would have prevented any “information cascades” (the preferred scholarly term for such snowball-like public participation) from forming in the first place. On this reading, the East German regime was simply unwilling to crack down on the first wave of protests in Leipzig, well aware that it was heading for a collective suicide. Furthermore, in 1989, unlike in 1956 or 1968, the Kremlin, ruled by a new generation of leaders who still had vivid memories of the brutality of their predecessors, didn’t think that bloody crackdowns were a good idea, and East Germany’s senior leaders were too weak and hesitant to do it alone. As Perry Anderson, one of the most insightful students of contemporary European history, once remarked, “nothing fundamental could change in Eastern Europe so long as the Red Army remained ready to fire. Everything was possible once fundamental change started in Russia itself.” To argue that it was the photocopies that triggered change in Russia and then the rest of the region is to engage in such a grotesque simplification of history that one may as well abandon practicing history altogether. This is not to deny that