The Post-Communist Condition

Ivailo Dichev, “The Post-Communist Condition,” presentation at Dubrovnik, October 1990.
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Post-communist countries today are haunted by the idea that there was nothing symbolic in the defeat of communism. Tzvetan Todorov wrote that the feeling was like what happened to the woman in Maupassant’s story: she borrowed a necklace and lost it, and then worked her whole life to pay its price, only to find out that the pearls were a cheap imitation and that she had ruined her life in vain. Actually it was even worse, as everyone realized the project of communism was but an act of will; on both sides of the Berlin Wall they knew it was not a symbolic reality [in the sense of being] something imposed on men by God or the like—they knew it was a “political decision.” The Wall separated neither nations, nor cultures, nor natures of some sort; it was absolutely arbitrary, running between towns, houses, households: it vanished into thin air (except for souvenirs and tourist-guidebooks), as if it had never existed. Thus there is nothing to learn from the fall of communism, no moral to be taken. The enemy left no corpse behind—you have ruined economies, killed people, polluted land, but the transcendence as artifact [communism’s “act of will”] is nowhere to be seen; the will to power disappeared in being defeated and one could ask oneself whether one’s life had been real at all.

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