Paul Anderson, review of From Yalta to Glasnost by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher (Blackwell, £30), Tribune, 18 January 1991
Since they left their native Hungary in 1977 to continue their academic careers in the west, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher have been extraordinarily prolific social theorists. As well as Dictatorship Over Needs, their innovative democratic left critique (with Gyorgy Markus) of the "actually existing socialism" of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they have co-written a vast number of fiery iconoclastic political and philosophical essays, a book on the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and, most controversially, a polemical assault on what they saw as the iditotic ideology of the west European peace movements. Heller has also published several volumes of philosophy on her own.
From Yalta to Glasnost collects the most important of the recent political essays that were missed out of Eastern Left, Western Left in 1987 and a few extracts from books. All the pieces are provocative and some brilliant. Those in defence of the Hungarian revolution's democratic credentials and relevance to the whole of eastern Europe 25 years on are superb exercises in historical re-evaluation; the essays on the contrasting "reform communism" of the Prague Spring and Janos Kadar's Hungary are almost as good.
But on some things Heller and Feher were way off the mark. On Germany, the focus of the longest essay here, they were in some ways perceptive in raising the prospect of unification at a time (1984) when no one else was taking it at all seriously. Yet their prognosis of how unification might come about, as the result of German appeasement of the Soviet Union leading to Moscow offering Bonn unification in return for neutrality and economic aid, was quite wrong.
In particular, their identification of the West German peace movement of the early eighties as a Trojan horse for German nationalism has turned out to be bunk: in 1989-90, it was the Greens and left Social Democrats who had formed the backbone of the peace movement who were the most vocal opponents of unification.
Had "Better Red than dead" actually been the dominant thrust of the early eighties peace movement, Heller and Feher's analysis might have more purchase. In reality, however, the greater part of the peace movement in West Germany, as elsewhere in western Europe, opposed new NATO nuclear arms because it believed the Soviet Union had no desire or ability to expand its influence in Western Europe.
It is certainly arguable that the peace movement didn't, on the whole, think through the question of the Soviet Union's long-term goals in Europe. The idea that the Soviet Union might like to have Germany "Finlandised" was barely discussed. This was a weakness, but hardly, as Heller and Feher would have it, willful blindness to the dangers of Soviet expansionism. Contrary to their core assumption that the Soviet nomenklatura not only wanted to expand its influence in western Europe but was actually capable of pursuing such a policy, the rulers of the Soviet Union were increasingly paralysed by the ever-deepening economic, social and cultural crisis of their empire.
