Rebels who had a cause.

• Author: Gewen, Barry
• Position: 'An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik,' 'The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution' - Book review

Elzbieta Matynia, ed., An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Vaclav Havel & Adam Michnik (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 264 pp., $25.00.

Adam Michnik, The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 208 pp., $25.00.

What happens to revolutionaries after the revolution? If the revolution fails, the answer is easy: they end up in exile, in prison or dead. But what if the uprising succeeds? Then the answer is more complicated. Successful rebels scatter across the political landscape, with former brothers-in-arms often becoming fierce enemies--professional radicals on one side, upholders of the new status quo on the other.

In one of the fascinating exchanges included in a collection of letters, interviews and essays called An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Vaclav Havel & Adam Michnik, two of the preeminent heroes of the upheavals that destroyed the Soviet empire and brought the Cold War to an end survey the fates of their colleagues among the dissidents. Some returned to their normal careers because protest had been only a temporary disruption in the course of their lives. Others chose more public avenues, plunging into politics full-time. Havel and Michnik, of course, both went on to hold positions of great distinction--Havel as president of Czechoslovakia and then, after his country's breakup, of the Czech Republic; Michnik as editor-in-chief of the influential Warsaw daily Gazeta Wyborcza. Still others, however, turned bitter, disillusioned. A few, bereft of hope and their dreams shattered, went mad.

Post-Communist Eastern Europe, with its Hieronymus Bosch panorama of greed, corruption, hedonism and cynicism, gave the former revolutionaries much to be disillusioned about. Was this the freedom they had sacrificed so much to attain? Did it amount to nothing more than enrichissez vousl "We changed the human rights charter into a credit card," Michnik writes. Both Havel (until his death in 2011) and Michnik struggled to maintain their bearings in a low, dishonest time, and An Uncanny Em, together with a companion volume of essays by Michnik entitled The Trouble with History, can be read as a plea to keep the revolutionary faith, to uphold the idealism that motivated the battle against Communism--even if it's not clear what idealism means in a postideological age.

What's more, since Havel and Michnik believe that the intellectual and spiritual shortcomings they perceive extend far beyond their own societies, they see themselves as prophets of a kind, addressing not only Eastern Europeans at sea in an era of predatory capitalism and toxic nationalism, but also readers throughout the West, all standing before an abyss of corrosive cynicism. As the always-hopeful Havel told Michnik:

That means that we would take upon ourselves a bigger responsibility and in some sense we will become a source of inspiration for the wealthy West. This could happen if we were able well ahead of time to notice the dangers lurking in the contemporary world and to articulate them in the right way thanks to the specific experience of...