carnaval - slavic review

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A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 by Padraic Kenney

Kristian Gerner

Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3. (Autumn, 2003), pp. 577-578.

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ookReviews

strategic choice. Clearly, the depth and strength of national identity has provided the

Baltic states with much greater resolve and efficiency, allowing them to adopt the contro-

versial and demanding strategy of exit. But can one treat national identity as a more or less

fixed constant?nd

should we no t integrate the variable of national identity into broaderstudies of the entire cornplex of variables contributing to the formulation of foreign pol-

icy strategies rather than isolating this factor as if single-factor causality were at hand

(something Andrei P. Tsygankov himself readily admits is not the case)?

METTESKAK

University of Aarhus Denmark

Carnival o Revolutimz Central Europe 1989 By Padraic Kenney. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2002. vii, 341 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Maps.

$29.95, hard bound.

Th e revolutions in central Europe in 1989 did not happen. They just came about. The

communist regimes were not toppled. They just became superfluous. And all these non-

events originated in Poland. This is the gist of the book under review.

Padraic Kenney's analysis is a fine example of the history of a moment. The point of

departure is not autobiographical, but the parameters are highly personal. In the late

1980s, the author, an American historian, spent a few years in the city of Wroclaw. He was

not a contemporary John Reed, a partisan journalist going there to experience the rev-

olution in the land of the famous Solidarity. He was simply a young person from the west

on the threshold of his career as a scholar who went to Wroclaw to learn Polish and study

Polish history. While there, he also experienced what seemed to be a carnival but turned

out to be a manifestation of the changkover of a political system. Th e carnival was the real

thing.The three main facets of Kenney's book are: the theory of the carnival as a counter-

culture, once advanced by the Soviet literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin and applied to So-

viet society under Mikhail Gorbachev by the Ukrainian philosopher Vladimir Zviglyanych;

the image of the revolutions of 1989 as made by intellectual dissidents; and the tradition

of historical narration after the linguistic turn.

Concerning the choice of the carnival as the master frame, the author notes that a

carnival breaks down borders of all kinds. It forces a suspension of the usual rules in

society, issuing a challenge to the existing order and reversing social and political hier-

archies 4) . Thus the protagonists are young people staging performances of different

kinds, not assaulting the authorities, but mocking them. Posing as a Smurf in a blue dress

in Wroclaw might seem innocent and innocuous. But because the police also wore blue,

there was a sardonic quality to these Smurfs.

The author experienced the Karnawal RIObotniczy in Wrociaw, organized or, as

Kenney puts it, called into being by the Orange Alternative in February 1988. Ten years

later, he not only recollected what had happened in the streets of Wrociaw in 1988-1989

but added a number of central European cities to his list. He went to Krakbw, Prague,

Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, L'viv, and Leipzig, interviewing those who had been ac-

tive. In each place the performances had been different, but everywhere it was a matter of

youth externalizing the regime, defying the police by nonviolent manifestations, and in-

spiring bystanders to join in. Sometimes the police attacked brutally, and people were of-

ten detained for several hours. Some were jailed. This was no joke. But everywhere the po-

litical order was ridiculed and thus delegitimized.

Although Kenney does not really take issue with earlier research, he does argue that

opposition politics in central Europe in 1988-1989 were not made primarily by middle-

aged intellectuals. This point is directed against mainstream elite-oriented political sci-ence analyses and against Timothy Garton Ash's famous quip about the revolutions, or re-

folutions. In Ash's book The Ma pc Lantern (1990), Ash recounts how he informed the

Czech dissident and president-in- the-making Vkclav Have1 that whereas the Poles had

spent ten years toppling communism, the Hungarians ten months and the East Germans



Slavic Review

ten weeks, perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days (296). Kenney's argument is

that the quip conflated civic mobilization, which had beer1 going on for two years even in

Czechoslovakia, and the nonviolent endgame, which was short everywhere; in Poland it

only lasted from February to August 1989.Besides using the concept of carnival, Kenney applies the concept of network. He ex-

plains how young people met one another and made contacts in informal ways and then

used their connections to distribute and spread information about what was going on in

different places. The author also gives information on the ambivalent attitude of peace

movements in the west toward their seemingly anarchist and certainly anticommunist

sisters and brothers in central Europe. The Westerners were equally irrelevant as the local

intellectuals for the undermining of communism.

Concerning the linguistic turn, Kenney refrains from probing the protagonists' mo-

tives and intentions. He analyzes what they did and what they accomplished, giving us a

book that is full of details and thick descriptions. Narration and analysis are interwoven in

the text. A Carnival of Revolution is certainly not an overview. Instead, it is a vivid recollec-

tion of how life was for young people in centra l Europe before and during 1989.

KRISTI NGERNER

CTnzversity jl u n d Sweden

Post-Socialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructionsof Identity in Eastern Europe East Asia

and the ormer Soviet Union. Ed. Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff. New York: Pal-

grave, 2002. ix, 225 pp. Notes. Index. Figures. $65.00, hard bound.

This essay collection investigates changing urban-rural relations in countries where the

command economies of socialist states have given way over recent decades to state policy

emphasizing the free market and large-scale privatization. Drawing on intimate knowl-edge of contemporary life in the countryside, but representing diverse academic disci-

plines, the authors discuss how intellectuals, rural inhabitants, and representatives of the

state conceptualize the peasantry. Constructions of peasant identity are examined as a

manifestation of persisting dichotomies between the countryside and centers of power

holding influence over rural or peripheral populations. Adopting largely the perspective

of rurally based groups and actors-those who commonly are without voice in the aca-

demic and policy discourses affecting their lives-the authors seek through empirical

accounts of specific localities to improve our understanding of the many paradoxes and

misconceptions that have informed professional and political understandings of rural

agrarian populations.

In their introduction to the book, Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff present the

idea of the peasantry as it has figured in both western academic discourse and in the for-mation of policy in socialist countries. Emphasizing the peasantry as both a cultura l con-

struction and a componen t of the political economy, they propose a perspective for study-

ing rural-urban relations that emphasizes investigation of the peasantry as a referent for

social categorization and self-ascription. The following briefly accounts for the diverse

contributions to this book.

John Flower begins the book's Asian chapters. In contrast to the other authors, his

analysis favors written sources over local observation and he focuses on the role of intel-

lectuals and state agents in constructing and maintaining a negative peasant category in

China. From the time of Mao to the present, he explores elite discourse about peasant

consciousness and demonstrates its continuity with western conceptualizations of the

peasantry, attributing the growing rural-urban split in China partly to the persistence of

stereotypes legitimated through this discourse. Pamela Leonard takes a very different

stance by investigating how rural dwellers in Sichuan province construct their identity with

reference to economic decisions and social values maintained in local society; their deci-

sion to plant old or new corn, at the core of her investigation, is seen to reflect who they

are in the context of China's current modernization process. Finally, Regina M Abrami

considers how the peasantry figures in market development in northe rn Vietnam. With a

carnaval - slavic review

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