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This is the first history of the revolutions that toppled communism in Europe to look behind the scenes at the grassroots movements that made those revolutions happen. It looks for answers not in the salons of power brokers and famed intellectuals, not in decrepit economies--but in the whirlwind of activity that stirred so crucially, unstoppably, on the street. Melding his experience in Solidarity-era Poland with the sensibility of a historian, Padraic Kenney takes us into the hearts and minds of those revolutionaries across much of Central Europe who have since faded namelessly back into everyday life. This is a riveting story of musicians, artists, and guerrilla theater collectives subverting traditions and state power; a story of youthful social movements emerging in the 1980s in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and parts of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
Kenney argues that these movements were active well before glasnost. Some protested military or environmental policy. Others sought to revive national traditions or to help those at the margins of society. Many crossed forbidden borders to meet their counterparts in neighboring countries. They all conquered fear and apathy to bring people out into the streets. The result was a revolution unlike any other before: nonviolent, exuberant, even light-hearted, but also with a relentless political focus--a revolution that leapt from country to country in the exciting events of 1988 and 1989.
A Carnival of Revolution resounds with the atmosphere of those turbulent years: the daring of new movements, the unpredictability of street demonstrations, and the hopes and regrets of the young participants. A vivid photo-essay complements engaging prose to fully capture the drama. Based on over two hundred interviews in twelve countries, and drawing on samizdat and other writings in six languages, this is among the most insightful and compelling accounts ever published of the historical milestone that ushered in our age.
- Sales Rank: #1368819 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Princeton University Press
- Published on: 2003-08-31
- Released on: 2003-08-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .88" w x 6.00" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Library Journal
The stunning events of 1989 have been described many times by both the participants and the foreign journalists on the scene. Unlike other accounts, this work focuses on the many dissident groups who quickly put their many years of organization and opposition skills to good use as soon as they perceived regime weakness and who mobilized the seemingly spontaneous street demonstrations. Kenney (Univ. of Colorado) was a graduate student researcher in Wrocl/aw, Poland, in 1986 and 1989, where he observed the many groups that protested (often successfully) environmental and other issues not immediately threatening to the regime. Others channeled their energies into underground rock music or theater groups. Such groups were active in most Eastern European capitals, and their leaders were able to travel frequently to other cities, spreading their successful ideas and tactics. Using oral history techniques and underground literature, Kenney has woven together stories of many individuals, disillusioned by the martial law decrees in Poland in 1981, who went underground to continue their protests, then emerged as a highly organized and stunning festival of street theater to topple several regimes. This new approach is a valuable contribution to the topic and will appeal to both historians and political scientists. Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Seminal and indispensable. Using his first-hand acquaintance with many of the key participants in the movements . . . Kenney has given us a pioneering oral history. . . . Strikingly well written, A Carnival of Revolution weaves personal narratives of protest into an illuminating historical analysis of the changing environment in which a new kind of politics developed."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement
"In wondering at the overnight collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Western observers have often focused on Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, the storied opposition in Poland, and the measures of regime failure. These accounts have missed something. Kenney goes back and uncovers the more complex bubbling of events--that helped prepare the way for democracy."--Foreign Affairs
"Using oral history techniques and underground literature, Kenney has woven together stories of many individuals. . . . This new approach is a valuable contribution to the topic and will appeal to both historians and political scientists."--Library Journal
"A Carnival of Revolution acts as a potent corrective to the simplistic and often self-serving accounts of the fall of the Iron Curtain currently in vogue. . . . Padraic Kenney's careful account returns history to its rightful owners, the thousands who risked what little security they had to sneak a little joy into their lives."--Mother Jones
"Assiduous in searching out sources in several countries and languages . . . [Kenney] has gathered together information that no one else has or will. As a result, he has written an account that is essential reading for a full understanding of the revolutions of 1989 and of the younger generations that haunted the last days of Communism."--John J. Kulczycki, International History Review
"I know of no other book telling of so many lesser-known groups and activists involved in a social movement wave across so many countries (not to mention languages). Kenney cobbles their stories together like a master sleuth writing a whodunit, culminating with a series of sketches putting the pieces together as 1989 approaches. It . . . will be a crucial reference for a long time to come."--David Ost, American Historical Review
"Essential reading for a full understanding of the revolution of 1989 and of the younger generation that haunted the last days on Communism."--John J. Kulczycki, International History Review
From the Inside Flap
"Marvelously written, this book gives a strong sense of what it must have felt like to participate in various anticommunist movements in the mid- and late 1980s in Eastern Europe. The stories are well told, with great authority and a deep understanding of many of the complexities actors had to face."--�kos R�na-Tas, University of California San Diego
"This is a pathbreaking, indispensable book for grasping the complexities of both the pre-1989 and post-revolutionary situation in central Europe. Truly pioneering in both scope and depth, it offers a comprehensive, unconventional, and gripping perspective on the motivations of political mobilization and anti-authoritarian activism. I read it with immense interest and pleasure."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland, author of Fantasies of Salvation
"Padraic Kenney is the first scholar to draw a historical map of the secret reunification of Europe 'from below' that occurred well before the 1989 revolutions brought the results of that job to the surface. This job was accomplished by activists from both communist Central Europe and the West, all of them 'dissidents' at the time in their own societies. Thanks to Kenney's sensitivity to the decidedly 'American' ideas of the founding fathers of the post-1989 new democracies and thanks also to his knowledge of the field, which is unsurpassed by any European researcher, A Carnival of Revolution is a key contribution to the saga of the Central European civil rights movements."--Mikl�s Haraszti, author of Velvet Prison, founding member of Hungary's Democratic Opposition in the 1970s and 1980s, member of the Hungarian Parliament from 1990-1994
"With a profound first-hand knowledge of participants, encompassing linguistic competence, and engaging prose, Padraic Kenney recreates the simultaneously serious and playful currents of East Europe's overthrow of repressive state socialism. What an invaluable guide to the elusive exhilaration that motivated the actors and captivated all of us who followed the transformation with such hope! We can appreciate neither the ebullience of 1989 nor the disappointment with the quotidian reality that followed without understanding Kenney's 'carnival.'"--Charles S. Maier, Harvard University
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great writing great subject
By Michael Sander
Great writing great subject
22 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Very Disappointing
By pnotley@hotmail.com
A few years ago Padraic Kenney wrote an important monograph on the contrasting experience of workers in two very different cities in early Stalinist Poland. Kenney's work was important because it brought questions from the field of labor history and larger trends in Anglo-American historiography into an area where they had previously been ignored. This book appeared very promising since it would appear to offer a similar historical depth to the journalistic accounts of the revolutions of 1989.
Unfortunately, that has not occured. Kenney's book deals with the carnivalesque, anti-authoritarian elements of the opposition to the Communists. The focus is Central Europe, with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Ukraine and Slovenia. One should point out the disingenuousness of the term "Central Europe," which the Czechoslovak dissident Milan Simecka pointed out at the time and Perry Anderson has also recently criticized. With its emphasis on Central Europe's links to the West, it could imply that "Eastern Europe" were lesser breeds unworthy of the law. Certainly the absence of Serbia, Croatia and the rest of Yugoslavia is rather striking. During the eighties most people would have thought Yugoslavia was the most liberal of the communist states. But during the bloody attacks of Bosnia, it was very convenient for those who didn't want to help that "civil strife" was the inevitable result of Yugoslavia's atavistic Balkanness. By leaving out Serbian and Croatian politics before 1990 Kenney appears to imply that they too were foredoomed to failure, in part because they were not as hip and stylish as Slovenia's activists.
For although Kenney constantly praises the Central Europeans for their "internal pluralism," his book concentrates on the "carnival," those activists who engaged in ingenious forms of confrontational street politics. These people were often young and indeed made a politics of their youth, such as the Hungarian Association of Young Democrats who banned anyone over 35 from joining their party. They found new ways of raising issues embarrassing to the authorities, like the environment, worker's pensions, homelessness. They (and they were mostly Polish) found new ways of contacting with other countries in both the West and the East. In groups like the Orange Alternative, they engaged in ingenious forms of peaceful mass protest as they worked with hippies, punks, greens, admirers of John Lennon, while engaging in surrealist antics or dressing up like elfs or the smurfs. It was this ingenious, carnivalesque politics, Kenney argues, which played a key role in the fall of Communism.
While there is certainly a lot of information about some of these groups, there are some major weaknesses in this account. Who belongs to these groups? Aside from the young and the fact that they are concentrated in Wroclaw, there's not much systematic detail about them. What did the larger public think about them? Possibly everybody, since Kenney does not grant the regimes any base of support, possibly less, since the fuddie-duddies of Solidarity appear to show a disconcerting lack of faith, and there references to apathy in the larger population. The portrait of politics is one of minorities, groups of benign bohemian leninist vanguards against communism. It is important to note what is left out. In discussing Hungary Kenney concentrates on the hip young Association of Free Democrats, and it is only at the end that we find that the conservative, somewhat chauvinist Democratic Forum won the first free elections in 1990. But then they're not as cool. Almost all questions arising after 1989 are downplayed or ignored. The transformation of Slovak and Ukrainian nationalism into a demagogic sinister authoritarianism only gets a couple of sentences. There is certainly no discussion of whether Slovaks, Ukrainians or Slovenes actually wanted to be in a new separate country before Vaclav Kraus, Boris Yeltsin and Slobodan Milosevic make the decisions before them. And there is certainly no discussion of why one of Jaruzelski's cabinet ministers has been twice freely elected president of Poland, or the return to popularity of the ex-Communists in East Germany or Hungary. Kenney notes how the carnival used the problems of homelessness, alcoholism and workers' pensions as sticks to beat the Communists. It is rather disconcerting that there is no discussion of these issues after 1989 to see whether they did any better at solving these problems.
Kenney wishes to give these radicals credit for overthrowing Communism and take much of it away from Gorbachev. This certainly accepts the mindset of the Polish radicals, but is it accurate? After all in East Germany many of the dissidents were sympathetic to socialism until almost the very end, the Slovenian opposition grew out of the local Communist party and the Hungarian government had agreed to multicandidate elections in 1985 and multiparty ones in 1988. And one cannot weigh the influence of the carnival without paying more attention to the weight of the Church, Solidarity, the Party, the Soviets and the continuing economic crisis in a more systematic matter than Kenney has done. The consequence is a book in which the carnival's worldview is taken on its own terms and all the complexities and messiness of politics are either ignored or happily viewed as inevitable. This book does not so much analyze their enthusiasm, as indulge it.
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