The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early ‘90s — what seemed at the time an earth-shaking change — has come to feel in the light of subsequent events like something of an anticlimax. Russia never became a functioning democracy and is particularly far from one now. Defense spending still takes up a huge chunk of the U.S. budget. Nuclear weapons continue to threaten the world (even if climate catastrophe has now taken the place of atomic Armageddon at the top of our worry lists).

But the fall of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and Europe, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union; and the sudden, peaceful resolution of a 40-year politico-military standoff that most people — experts included — assumed would last at least another 40 years really was a big deal. It’s a transformation well worth remembering and studying despite (or maybe because of) all that’s happened since.

In the popular imagination, the spark for that transformation was the breach on November 9, 1989, of the wall that had bisected Berlin for almost 30 years. But Matthew Longo, an expatriate American political-science professor teaching in the Netherlands, locates the start of the massive change in a less-familiar event that happened a few months earlier. The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain is about a pivotal outdoor party held on August 19th on the border between Hungary (a member of the Eastern bloc) and Austria, a neutral partner of the West.

The story is treated with the respect, even reverence, it deserves. Unfortunately, it unspools at the sluggish pace of an after-meal tale told just before a midday nap. That’s fitting given the title of the book but doesn’t make for an exciting read. The pace only picks up occasionally, when Longo relates almost minute by minute the excited anguish of Eastern Europeans, poised on the edge of their constricted worlds, calculating the costs of trying to break free — and then summoning the courage to do so. There are races through the woods and long, anxious nights lying in fields, listening for the footfalls of soldiers.

The picnic is, understandably, less important in itself than as a metaphor for the larger effort to reunite Europe. And even though we learn a lot about its planning, it’s surprising how little we’re told about the actual event that gives the book its name. Also, though the gathering was organized by Hungarians and took place in the dangerous no man’s land between Hungary and Austria, the folks breaking through to the West were almost all from East Germany, ruled by the strictest regime among the Warsaw Pact countries.

Longo is obviously moved by the happenings of that summer and fall and impressed by the characters involved, many of whom he has apparently developed personal bonds with during the course of his research. His reflections sometimes lead to insightful and poetic observations, such as this description of the fragile founding in 1988 of an opposition-party chapter in a Hungarian town bordering the Iron Curtain:

“And so, the MDF in Sopron was born, baptized with words that should have not been uttered, in a room with organizers standing beside undercover agents, everyone exercised and confused, each in their own way cognizant of the change they were experiencing but equally unsure of what it meant.”

But often, he’s shooting philosophical blanks: “Usually, we separate facts from their retelling. History from the historian. Politics from the archive.” What?

Both camps in the Cold War developed distorted views of what life was like on the other side. Westerners pictured thoroughly controlled and regimented societies — the “totality” of totalitarianism. But as with every human institution, within the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its political satellites were mistakes and indecision, spaces and gaps in which people could hide and dream. These gaps began to widen with the ascension to Soviet leadership of the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, so that by the end of that decade, events like the picnic were possible.

Similarly, many Eastern bloc citizens either bought their regimes’ propaganda about the decaying West or imagined it a paradise. Some of the daring escapees to the West in Longo’s story wind up returning home disgusted by the primacy of individual freedoms over community values they discover on the other side.

Perhaps the biggest intellectual error committed by the West during the Cold War was to misinterpret inherent nationalism — in Vietnam, El Salvador, and elsewhere — as fealty to communism. Paradoxically, the West has made a similar mistake about post-Cold-War Eastern Europe. We’re confused and disappointed that the current leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is an authoritarian ally of the nation’s former colonizer, Russia. We assumed the desire of erstwhile Warsaw Pact nations to throw off the Soviet yoke was necessarily in pursuit of Western-style democracy. Turns out, it was in good part just a yearning to regain control of their countries — with no guarantee of how they’d run them once back in charge.

William Rice is a writer for political and policy-advocacy organizations.

comments powered by Disqus