The Left Transformed in Post-Communist Societies: The Cases of East-Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

Edited by Jane Leftwich Curry and Joan Barth Urban. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 304p. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The fate of communist successor parties in countries of the former Eastern Bloc has already received considerable scholarly attention, with notable contributions by John Ishiyama, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Attila Agh, among others. The new volume edited by Jane Curry and Joan Urban adds to this growing body of research by offering case studies of the Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, East German, Russian, and Ukrainian communist party organizations within a broader social and political context of their respective countries.

The chief puzzle to be explained is the vast divergence of trajectories among communist successor organizations. In Hungary and Poland, the trajectory has been one of rapid (though hardly instantaneous) distancing from the Leninist past in favor of Western-style social democracy. In both countries, long-standing cultural identification with western Europe, a “national consensus” (to use Herbert Kitschelt's term) type of state socialism, a history of organized societal opposition to the regime, the presence of reformist elements within the communist parties, and, in the postcommunist era, political institutionalization along western European lines (prompted in no small way by preparations for European Union membership) make this “social-democratic” path relatively easy to explain. Nevertheless, the chapters on Hungary and Poland (by Diana Morlang and Jane Curry, respectively) offer detailed and valuable insights into the kinds of calculations, choices, and decisions that communist successor organizations in these two countries faced along the way.

The trajectory of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is in many ways a polar opposite of its Polish and Hungarian counterparts. This is not to say that Russian communists remain firmly attached to Marxism-Leninism. Far from it. Luke March's case study of the CPRF presented in this volume traces this organization's gradual distancing from its Leninist heritage, but in the completely opposite direction: Instead of westernization, there is the attempt to write the communist period into the broad sweep of Russian history. The CPRF does not see the Bolshevik Revolution as a historical break, but as a natural consequence of thousand-year-old national traditions of collectivism and of a particular form of imperial state power. Consequently, the author characterizes the party's current ideological mix of nationalism and communism as an updated form of “national bolshevism.”

The most interesting cases, however, lie between these polar opposites: In places such as Lithuania, the former East Germany, and Ukraine, the demands and pressures on communist successor parties were less one-sided, and therefore their post-1989 trajectories are arguably more difficult to explain. Why is it, for example, that Lithuania, alone among the three Baltic republics, is a case of successful social-democratization of the former communists? (In both Latvia and Estonia the parties failed to break out of the Leninist mold.) As Algis Krupavicius's contribution to the book shows, the answer appears to lie in the fact that only in Lithuania, the Communist Party was not thoroughly dominated by ethnic Russians, and therefore its successor organization did not marginalize itself as a party catering to ethnic Russian nostalgia for the Soviet past.

In Ukraine, according to Andrew Wilson's chapter, the explanation for the lack of transformation on the part of the former communists appears to reflect the country's arrested state of political development: not quite Soviet anymore, but not quite democratic either, and with plenty of residual identification with and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In the former East Germany, the societal context was diametrically different from the Ukrainian one—political and economic change was rapid and thorough—but the fate of the country's ex-communists had much in common with that of their Ukrainian counterparts: As Thomas Baylis shows in his contribution to the volume, it was characterized by stagnation and shaped by what the party activists perceived as nostalgia for a political entity (East Germany) that was no more.

The final chapter of The Left Transformed in Post-Communist Societies, written by Joan Urban, seeks to place the above findings within a broader theoretical framework. Unfortunately, it is the book's weakest point: Much more analytical mileage could have been extracted from the fascinating case studies presented in this volume. As it stands, it is up to the readers to read the cases and draw their own conclusions.