Danut Manastireanu
The Trauma of Transition When freedom came to Eastern Europe, one former communist leader declared that people in my country “will need 20 years in order to learn democracy and freedom.” When people heard this, they were very annoyed. This man was accused of being too pessimistic. People said to themselves, “What does he mean? We are smart people. We will certainly learn how to live in democracy in a very short period of time.” It has been more than 20 years since that “prophecy,” and most people in former communist countries are still very far from having worked out how to live in a free world. Maybe this “prophet” was in fact too optimistic. What if people need not 20 but 40 years, like the Israelites in the desert, to learn how to fully enjoy freedom? Here are a few observations from the biblical narrative to open dialogue on this subject:
- Times of transition that follow immediately after oppression are very ambiguous; people are out of oppression, but the oppression is not out of them – the Israelites were out of Egypt, but Egypt was alive and well inside their thinking and hearts (Exodus 16:3).
- Freedom confronts believers with temptation to conform to the ways of the world without God (Deuteronomy 12: 29-32).
- Freedom carries a high price; when confronted with the difficulties and responsibilities that freedom brings, people who have lived for a long time under oppression have a tendency to forget the pain quickly and remember with nostalgia only the good things of the past, few as they were, thereby idealizing their oppression; thus many would rather go back than endure the challenges of the present (Exodus 16:3; Numbers 14: 1-6).
- Those who lead in times of transition have to be prepared to have their authority challenged. This does not mean that leaders should be weak and easy to manipulate, but that real leaders will be more concerned to safeguard God’s glory than to cling desperately to their own positions of authority (Numbers 16:1–40).
- During transition people may change in some ways, but other aspects of their life under oppression are so ingrained that they will carry them to the grave; therefore, some will never be able to enjoy fully the benefits of freedom (Numbers 14: 21-24).
The Legacy of the Past
The leadership style of any authoritarian system is exclusively one of manipulation and control. The party (or the junta) forcibly maintains absolute control over the lives of its citizens. Often, this approach to leadership is replicated at every level of society, even the church.
Instead of looking for and submitting to proud and controlling rulers, Christians are called to follow and mentor leaders who learn to become humble and trustworthy servants. Such a change of mentality is rare throughout humanity; that is why Christians need to call upon the grace of God to inspire and raise up servant leaders.
Under oppression, dictatorship is likely the only leadership paradigm available, even among church leaders. Under freedom, some church and community leaders become even more abusive towards their people than the old dictatorial masters. This behavior is incompatible with Christian faith and needs to be exposed and combatted because it is a disgrace to a humanity created in the image of God.
Soon after the collapse of communism, I met with the head of one of the Christian denominations in my country. He explained to me that during communist times the leadership of the church had been perceived as a dictatorial body. After the changes of 1989, denominational leaders were pressed by believers to adopt a more democratic structure. “And guess what happened?” he told me, “Now every local church has its own dictators in its pastors and elders.”
Such authoritarian approaches to leadership cannot function effectively in democracy. Under freedom, people simply cannot be controlled. Even if it were possible to do so, control is not God’s preferred leadership style. As human history shows, the practice of authoritarianism debilitates people and keeps them in a chronic state of immaturity. It is not only much safer and wiser, but also more compatible with biblical principles, to help people develop their own convictions and become able to make decisions for themselves.
Unrealistic Expectations of the State
Because of their fundamental lack of trust in people, authoritarian regimes tend to treat their citizens like children. Therefore, the state assumes responsibility for making all important decisions and for providing for those needs of people that the state considers legitimate. This model creates in people a fundamental lack of initiative and a chronic dependence on the state, which is expected to meet all people’s needs (at least so far as the state agrees to recognize the extent of “needs”).
It is not surprising, then, that when communism fell in Eastern Europe, people continued to expect the same provision from the state. Most people refused to assume personal responsibility for meeting their own needs and held the state responsible for everything that would normally have been their own duty in a free-market economy. Since the state now refused to fulfill these functions, or was unable to do so because of economic collapse, those people who had never valued freedom in any case started to become nostalgic for times when the supposedly benevolent authoritarian state took “good” care of them.
Clearly people and communities who hold to such unrealistic expectations are incapable of functioning normally in a free society and may sooner or later have to “die in the desert,” as did their Israelite counterparts, if real promise for a democratic future is to be realized.
Suspicion of Democracy
Communist propaganda demonizes Western democracy, and such demonizing penetrates deep into the individual and social psyche under communist regimes. Because of constant propaganda bombardment, people who lived for many years under communism developed a sort of “ideological allergy” toward everything from the West. This “allergy” might become dormant during initial transition toward democracy but is reactivated as soon as the cost of living under freedom becomes apparent. In contrast, attitudes are quite different for younger people who did not live under communism long enough to be so effectively brainwashed by its propaganda. Therefore, the real hope for building a truly democratic society rests with the younger generations.
Devaluation of the Human Person
Under communism, people have value simply as numbers in a mass. At the center of Marxist anthropology, part and parcel of the ideal of creating the “new man” is the essentially pseudo-religious world view that people’s individual value is determined by the economic and political contribution they bring to society. Humanity has no more value than a cog in the machine, and as soon as individuals can no longer be useful for production purposes, their social value decreases dramatically.
This underlying attitude led to a major devaluing of the human person under communism, not just in the eyes of authorities but also among ordinary people, and may be one of the reasons communism has accounted for so many millions of deaths wherever it has been implemented. We who have lived under communism carry this kind of devaluation and dehumanization over with us into democracy. Such a diminished sense of the human person is unlikely to result immediately in societal frameworks based on responsibility and personal initiative.
Dignity in Community
According to the Christian understanding of humanity, people are created in the image of God. Therefore, humanity, collectively and individually, has both dignity and a purpose: to live for the glory of God. Every human being has a unique calling and has a role to play in the body of Christ. Christianity teaches that Christ died for the whole of humanity, but would have been ready to die for just one sinner. As a result, every human being is infinitely valuable because each person has been bought at the price of the supreme sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Human beings were not created either to be numbers or masses (characteristic of communist collectivism) or to live in isolation and selfishness (specific to capitalist individualism). In contrast to both these views, Christ calls people to live in community, according to the image of the Holy Trinity, where the divine persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live in perfect harmony. This is the model that underlines the Christian concept of person and the Christian definition of the ideal society.
The Post-Authoritarian
Mindset It is estimated that in most former communist countries at least one in every 10 people worked in one way or another for the secret police, including within churches and all other organizations. The only groups that could not be controlled by the communist regime were those meeting underground, but only until such groups were infiltrated by undercover agents or informers. People living under authoritarian regimes always had to be on their guard and exercise great care in everything they did so they would not be targeted as “enemies of the people.” Consequently, it can easily be imagined that a residue rampant in post-dictatorial contexts is a high degree of suspicion among people in all social structures. Another contributing factor in this ongoing sense of suspicion and skepticism is that many people who formerly held positions of responsibility in the leading party and the secret police not only have been rarely made responsible for their crimes, but frequently continue in positions of power in political and economic life, overtly or more discreetly.
When Hitler’s Nazi government fell, and Germany was occupied by the Allied armies, the international community set up the Nuremberg tribunal and condemned the crimes of the Nazis and Nazism itself. Then Germany and other European countries went through a thorough process of de-nazification.
It is very strange then to us who endured communism that even though communism caused far more deaths than Nazism—perhaps100 million (Mark Kramer, ed., The Black Book of Communism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999])— in our case there clearly is no political will, either in the international community or in former communist countries, to initiate a similar trial of communism. The only countries in which this influence has been limited, at least to some extent, are those which have passed through their parliaments a special law (called the law of lustration) preventing, for a number of years, former communist and secret police leaders from entering parliament or holding positions of authority in governing administrations and business.
Suspicion and Breakdown of Community
Paradoxical as it seems, communist collectivism, while setting out to seek the good of the masses, in fact destroyed the fabric of society and instilled in many people utter selfishness and lack of concern for the community. As a consequence of living under very difficult economic conditions for an extended time, people started to concern themselves only with their own interests and neglected “the common good.”
Situational Ethics
As an outworking of classic Marxist theory, which argues that private property is the root of all evils, whenever the communist system was instituted in a country, one of its first moves was to confiscate all major private property (factories, larger buildings, mineral reserves, land, etc.). What this confiscation produced in the hearts of country people and factory workers alike was, naturally, not great enthusiasm but rather a feeling of disconnection from the land and the means of production and a total lack of interest in their demeaned work status. Thus, in time, quality of work and levels of production decreased, leading in the end to total collapse of the communist economic system.
Hard pressed on every side, economically, politically, and not least of all spiritually, people living under authoritarian regimes developed a sort of situational ethics. To survive, people in the countryside stole from the fields, and workers stole from their factories anything that could be sold in the market or could be made use of in the home. A key consequence of this situation was the total undermining of society’s ethical fiber and value system. When loss of shared ethics is coupled with an ineffective police force and a corrupt legal system, the unavoidable outcome is the reign of lawlessness.
Lack of Respect for Law
When people’s common attitude towards compliance with laws is downgraded, the democratic ideal of building a “state of law” is very difficult if not impossible to accomplish. Further complicating matters, authoritarian regimes operate in the juridical sphere with the purpose of creating a very complicated legal system, making it unintelligible and compliance impossible. In such a system courts become totally corrupt and operate under political control. Authoritarian regimes allow no place for the concept of the independence of the judicial system. It is obvious then that establishment of a modern democratic society could only be hindered and slowed down by perpetuation of this kind of mentality in the period of transition from dictatorship to a free society.
The Road to Corruption
People living in dictatorial societies rarely hold genuine respect for authority and government, which are invariably seen as inherently oppressive. This attitude frequently carries over into the period of transition to democracy, creating all sorts of anti-social behavior. One area in which this situation affects nearly every ordinary citizen is that of government administration. Officials of state bureaucracy generally have a very arrogant attitude to all who come to ask them for some legitimate service that they are paid to provide, making the life of any petitioner absolute misery. As a result, people tend to offer bribes or to use the influence of some acquaintance in a high position in order to obtain what they want, whether or not it is legitimate to do so. This practice breeds rampant corruption, which is a chronic problem for most dictatorial and postauthoritarian administrations.
Creation of a modern society in which different institutions work effectively in the public interest requires radical change in individual and community mentality and behavior. To that end, citizens living in post-dictatorial contexts need to engage in a process of social transformation that could take at least two generations, which brings us back to the metaphor of “40 years in the desert.”
Freedom or Anarchy?
When people have lived for generations under oppression, it is very difficult for them to understand what freedom really entails, and it is also very easy to idealize freedom. For many, freedom means simply the ability or “right” to do whatever they want, without any restrictions. This belief, however, is not about freedom, but anarchy, and is certainly not conducive to democracy.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom. We are all conditioned by our past. When we realize that we all have our limitations – and there is nothing wrong with that – we become aware that we are not gods but simply God’s creation. This reality establishes the rules of the game of life, and if we try to avoid playing by God’s rules we will bear the consequences of those decisions. The filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille once famously summarized the lesson of his “Ten Commandments”: “We cannot break the laws of God. We can only break ourselves against them.”
True freedom involves responsibility, for oneself and for others. Freedom also involves a significant cost, a price not easy to pay. When people living under oppression entertain naïve and idealistic dreams about freedom, they are simply deceiving themselves and are bound for bitter disappointment.
Inability to Communicate
Oppressive regimes do not encourage open, sincere communication among people. To survive, people very early learn the art of dissimulation: thinking one thing and saying something else. Because of heavy ideological control exercised by the system, people living in such societies do not learn how to discover and evaluate different options, to form their own convictions, and to argue for them. Nor do they understand the importance of acknowledging and respecting the positions of those holding opposing views. Dictators never encourage such communication skills because their aim is to create obedient and subservient citizens, not mature, independent-minded, reasoning, and responsible personalities.
During transition from dictatorship to democracy, even highly-educated people may appear utterly incapable of respect for someone whose ideas they reject. Negative impacts of this state of affairs on social cohesion and abilities of people and communities to negotiate and solve conflicts are obvious.
Deeply rooted behavioral patterns need to undergo progressive change, but change will not happen overnight or by simply letting things take their natural course. Developing societies need to be consciously involved in a process of transformation that includes a number of contributing resources: reformed approaches to education as discovery rather than institutionalized propaganda, renewal of media integrity, rebuilt infrastructures, and new social networks, among other initiatives.
Danut Manastireanu, based in Romania, is Director for Faith and Development for the Middle East and Eastern Europe for World Vision International.
Edited excerpts reprinted with permission from Danut Manastireanu, After Liberation, Then What? Enabling and Protecting Communities in PostAuthoritarian Contexts (Monrovia, CA: World Vision International, 2012). For a pdf version of the full text, contact the author at