DOPO LA TIRANNIA. (After the tyranny)

After the shooting stopped in 1945, thousands of children and teenagers in Berlin’s ruins were left to their own devices. One in five schoolchildren had lost a parent. Despair gripped the adults in the capital, all of which was still under Soviet control.

In the western district of Neukölln, a group of young people decided to take matters into their own hands. Announcing on the day before the Allied victory that they would help rebuild the city, they formed a civic group and called it “anti-fascist.” Two weeks later, they had 600 members, had cleared the rubble from two sports stadiums and had organized five orphanages.

Inspired by their example, other young Germans began organizing similar anti-fascist groups in Berlin, but they didn’t last long. On July 31, the Soviet Military Administration banned all unregistered organizations. After that, many groups, clubs and associations were denied permission to exist.

This decision was not an aberration. Newly opened archives show that the persecution of civic activists, frequently enforced by violence, often took precedence over Communist parties’ other political and economic goals in the Soviet bloc at that time. Selective violence was carefully aimed at elites — intellectuals, businessmen, priests, police officers, anti-Nazi partisans — and above all at anyone capable of founding and leading any kind of spontaneous organization, no matter how apolitical. Scout groups, Freemasons and Catholic youth leaders all figure among the early victims of these regimes.

In later decades, this Soviet pattern of “totalitarianization” — the pursuit of total control over all aspects of public life — was widely imitated. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya got Soviet and East German advice on secret police methods, as did Chinese, Egyptian, Syrian, Angolan, Cuban and North Korean governments on those and other aspects of societal control.

As we now know, these methods never worked as they were meant to do in Eastern Europe, and they were never entirely successful in Asia, Africa, Latin America or, as we’ve lately seen, in the Arab world. Nevertheless, they did great damage.

In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks and their East European acolytes eliminated or undermined churches, charities, newspapers, guilds, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, unions, banks, sports clubs and centuries-old universities. If nothing else, Eastern Europe’s postwar history proves just how fragile human organizations are. If enough people are sufficiently determined, they can utterly destroy ancient and seemingly permanent legal, political, educational and religious institutions of all kinds.

As a result of this damage, post-Communist countries required far more than elections, political campaigns and political parties to become functioning liberal societies again, and far more than a few economic reforms to become prosperous. They also needed independent media, private enterprise, flourishing civic life, a legal and regulatory system, and a culture that tolerated independent groups and organizations.

Not accidentally, the most successful post-Communist states have been those that managed to preserve some elements of civil society throughout the Communist period, or were eager to emulate Western Europe’s laws and attitudes concerning civic culture. The least successful are those, like Russia, where even the memory of grass-roots civil society had faded by 1991.

Although post-totalitarian Europe has little in common with the Arab world culturally and politically, the two regions do share this: their dictators repressed (or tried to repress) civic activism and independent organizations. One reason the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islamists have emerged in the post-revolutionary Arab world with so much political power and popular support is that so much of their potential competition was destroyed.

Islamists proved more resilient to repression for many reasons — because their adherents were motivated by faith as well as civic spirit, because they had cross-border links and financing from the Persian Gulf states — and now, in some places, they are the only groups with any organization or reputation on the ground.

But as they contend for power, they pose large questions for the Middle East. Will they recreate the methods of the autocracies and suppress other organizations? Or will they encourage a wider range of civic activism? That argument is now unfolding: some inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood want the group to remain cohesive, univocal and dominant, while others push for more diversity in both the group and the country.

Elsewhere — though you wouldn’t know it from the headlines — there are signs of wider social mobilization. The single most heartening encounter I had on a trip to Libya last spring was with a group called Cleaning Up Tripoli, which organizes volunteer brigades of trash collectors. Its leader was negotiating with the city sanitation department over the site of a new dump, a straightforward effort that the young anti-fascists of 1945 Berlin would have approved.

Perhaps such efforts will help Libya build a political culture that is democratic in the best sense — with citizens participating in decisions that affect them. But the infrastructure required for such activity is complex. To sustain it, Libya will need good laws on nonprofit organizations, regulation of charitable donations, a press that is free and professional enough to chronicle such efforts, and government officials who respond to the public.

Though I’d like to believe otherwise, the outside world is of limited use in supporting such changes. Private and government organizations can give material help, and nongovernmental organizations can advise, particularly on legal and regulatory issues that often are ignored. Officials and activists who have lived through turbulent transitions elsewhere can share experiences, as Poles and Czechs now do with Tunisians and Egyptians.

But above all, a repressed society needs a motivated populace if it is to become politically vibrant again. To be more precise, it needs patriotism, historical consciousness, education, ambition, optimism and, especially, patience. The destruction wrought by totalitarian governments always takes decades even generations to repair.

(The New York Times)