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Templeton Essay

Among many other things, the year 1945 marked one of the most extraordinary population movements in Polish history. Hundreds of thousands of people were returning home from Soviet exile, from forced labor in Germany, from prisoner of war camps, from territory still under Soviet occupation. The roads, footpaths, trains, and especially railway stations of Poland were crammed full of ragged, displaced people as a result. At times, the scenes in these railway stations were horrific to behold: Starving mothers, sick children, entire families were camped out on filthy cement floors, waiting for the next available train, sometimes for days on end. In the city of Łódz, a group of women, members of the pre-war Women's League—an energetic, liberal-minded, charitable and patriotic organization founded in 1913—decided they had to do something about it. They regrouped and reorganized the league, in order to help the impoverished travelers. In Łódz, and across the country, Women's League members set up "women and children's shelters" at train stations and staffed them with volunteers, doctors, and nurses. They began supplying travelers with hot food, medicine, and blankets.

Their motives, in 1945, were the same as the organization's motives would have been in 1935: charity and patriotism. Janina Suska, a former Women's League member from Łódz who is now in her eighties, told me in a recent interview that she remembers these early efforts as completely apolitical: "no one received money for charitable work…. everyone who had a free minute helped."

In fact, the re-creation of the Polish Women's League in the desperate postwar years was a classic example of the workings of what we now call "civil society." A group of women were witnesses to a social emergency. Without being asked or paid, let alone ordered or coerced, they organized themselves in order to help people cope with it. None of them expected the state to be involved in their charitable activity. Certainly none of them feared the consequences. To put it differently: At this stage in immediate Polish postwar history, the women of Łódz still felt a powerful sense of individual liberty and personal responsibility, and still knew how to organize themselves in order to exercise them.

That was 1945; by 1948, the Women's League would be well on its way to becoming something rather different. As the Soviet-backed Polish Communist party slowly took over the organs of power in the country, as it imposed its far more limited vision of personal liberty and civil society on the Poles, organizations like the Women's League gradually lost their independence. Volunteers became employees, working at the behest of state bureaucrats, paid out of the state budget. Their offices were no longer in homes or private buildings, but in state-owned buildings. Their leaders were no longer independent-minded patriots, but Communist party members, or at least party sympathizers. The Women's League was no longer free to choose all of its own activities, but was expected, among other things, to help organize May Day parades, to make posters, leaflets, and other Communist party propaganda, and to use its network to recruit Communist party members too. Anyone who objected to any of this—anyone who refused, for example, to march in the May Day parades—could be kicked out of the Women's League, or eventually arrested. Not surprisingly, the organization ceased to be independent. And the women who continued to work for it ceased to have the same goals and motivations as they had in 1945. They were no longer free agents, but bureaucrats, working in the service of the state and the Communist party.

I HAVE SIMPLIFIED THIS story somewhat, in order to make a point: Of course there were some women who continued to make use of the Women's League's resources for good purposes, particularly in later years. But I'm describing the organization's general trajectory because it is typical, precisely reflecting the fate of many other once-independent institutions in central and Eastern Europe following the Communist occupation of the 1940s, and in the Soviet Union, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Nowhere was this massive suppression of civil society accidental: Everywhere, it was deliberately orchestrated from above. In Hungary, some 1,500 organizations were banned by the interior ministry as early as 1946, following attacks on Communist party functionaries and police. Violence was frequent: In East Germany, a wide range of youth groups, including Catholic and Social Democratic groups, were forcibly unified under the banner of the Free German Youth, the Communist youth club, in 1948. Those who objected were often arrested, sometimes killed. Nor was it an accident that civil society flourished in moments of relative freedom: The Czech Boy Scout movement happily reconstituted itself during the 1968 Prague Spring, only to be crushed again after the Soviet invasion.

Much the same pressure was applied to private businesses, of course, as well as to individuals. Book publishers who did not agree to print a certain number of the Communist party leader's memoirs might find themselves deprived of paper. Artists who did not join the official "Artists' Union" might not be able to buy paint. Writers who did not toe the party line were not published, and lost their right to vacation in the state-subsidized writers' colony. Some went on refusing to toe the line: a generation of Czech intellectuals made their living stoking furnaces. Others bent to economic and political pressure and conformed.

But although the nationalization of industry and the pressure on intellectuals made more headlines in the West, the removal of the right to form even a stamp-collectors' club or an amateur theater group without state involvement probably had a more profound impact on a wider swathe of the population of Communist countries over time. Without private ownership, citizens lost their ambition and work ethic. But without civil society, citizens lost the habit of organizing anything, whether economic activity, entertainment, education, politics, or charity, for themselves. To use the language of Edmund Burke, they lost the experience of the "small platoons," the small-scale social organizations from which public spirit arises. Or, in the idiom of Tocqueville, they were deprived of "associations" which "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form" and which, Tocqueville believed, helped Americans ward off dictatorship. "If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve," he wrote. By the same token, the enforced destruction of the art of associating in Eastern and Central Europe led quickly to a form of anti-civilization, in which all forms of human behavior were, in theory, controlled by the state and all independent institutions were under suspicion.

THOUGH IT MIGHT seem as if this all took place a long time ago, I am re-telling this history because it helps to explain some of the moral and practical difficulties inherent in re-establishing individual rights and liberties in Central and Eastern Europe today. In a very short period of time, between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, much that had been illegal in that part of the world became legal again. Once again, it became possible to speak freely, to organize independently, to work for a private business or charity. State surveillance was withdrawn; barriers to travel and investment were lifted. At least on paper, citizens became more free.

Yet the private, social, and charitable institutions through which citizens had once channeled their independent intellectual, political, benevolent, or athletic initiatives no longer existed. In the case of post-Soviet nations, they hadn't existed for several generations; in the case of Central Europe, they had been destroyed 40 years previously. Much has been written about the loss of the work ethic in Communist Europe, but by 1989, the habits, customs, and even etiquette associated with everything from the culture of a responsible newsroom to the organization of annual charity balls had vanished too.

Worse, some part of the population in virtually all of the ex-Soviet bloc countries was, at least to start with, actively opposed to their revival. In 1989, the notion of a newspaper that published articles critical of the government was bizarre, even suspect, to many ex-Soviet citizens. The very thought of a school organized according to a different philosophy from state schools seemed strange. The idea that a charity could be funded entirely by private people was, to many, unacceptable, even suspicious: What would be the motives of the people who contributed? Political parties engaging in uncontrolled debate were the most terrifying prospect of all: The spectacle of people disagreeing, in public, sometimes even shouting at each other seemed disruptive, divisive, even dangerous.

It is also true that, in the absence of civil society, words like "freedom" sometimes seemed like empty slogans. Prohibitions were gone—but positive ways to invest your energy or develop your intellect were lacking. You might be free to spend your time as you wanted, but the state-run football club you once played with had collapsed for lack of funding, nothing had replaced it, and your community had forgotten how to organize football teams on its own. You might be free to engage in politics, but political parties were weak, corrupt, and poorly organized. You might be free to read what newspaper you pleased, but many contained nothing but pornography and gossip. You might feel outraged about the poverty around you, but you no longer knew how to raise money to help.

With time, of course, many citizens of former Communist states adjusted to the new realities, grew accustomed to the idea of individual liberty, and enthusiastically began to rebuild civil society. Others, however, did not. Across the region, the size of these two groups has varied, depending on a particular country's history and culture. And, as it turned out, this has mattered a great deal: In the post-Communist world, citizens' attitudes to civil society have, to a surprising extent, affected the development of ideas about individual liberty, ultimately affecting the political situation of the country itself. To understand this point better, it is useful to look closely at two examples, on the opposite ends of the spectrum. First, Russia—a country whose citizens' have largely rejected the Western model of individual liberty as exercised through the institutions of civil society—and then, once again, to Poland, whose citizens largely accept it.

FOR MORE than a decade I have been closely involved with a new, post-Communist, charitable institution in Russia. The Moscow School of Political Studies was founded in the early 1990s by Lena Nemirovskaya, a Muscovite close to the old dissident movement, and Yuri Senokossov, her philosopher husband. Though this was an era of enormous optimism in Russia, Nemirovskaya's plans were modest. She wanted, in her words, simply to "civilize" Russia a little bit, by introducing her country's young leaders to the intellectual debates taking place in the West. Towards that end, she began organizing seminars for young Russian elected officials, mostly from the provinces, to discuss the meaning of federalism, the role of a free press, the means of ensuring an independent judiciary, and other abstract issues. She invited Western speakers, with a special emphasis on practitioners rather than theoreticians: working journalists, sitting congressmen, active members of parliament, current and former European officials as well as a few political scientists and historians.

By the year 2000 or so, the school was considered a huge success. It drew funding and attracted senior politicians from across Europe and the U.S., as well as Russia itself. Because the school was nonpartisan and non-ideological, its first Russian participants described their experience at its seminars with enormous enthusiasm, using words like "revelation." For some, it was the first time they'd ever heard issues properly debated, with two sides of an argument given equal time. For others, it was the first time they had ever discussed a philosophical question to which there was no right answer. For most it was the first time they'd met foreign politicians and journalists, and for everyone it was the first opportunity they'd had to ask them questions.