The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

      Dr. Mart Laar was born in 1960 in Estonia. He studied history at Tartu University, where he obtained his MA in 1995 and PhD in 2005. He participated actively in the restoration of Estonian independence and has been a member of the Estonian parliament since 1992. Mart Laar was the Prime Minister of Estonia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2002. During his tenure, he launched reforms that paved the way for Estonia’s rapid economic growth in the course of “Baltic Tiger” period and its admission to E.U. and NATO entry talks. He has also been an economic adviser to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Laar has received several international honours and awards such as the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty from the Cato Institute, the Faith & Freedom Award from the Acton Institute and is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Mart Laar has written several books on Estonian and Soviet history, including War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival, 1944–1956, and is a founding member of the Unitas Foundation.

      Acknowledgments

      Scores of books have been written on topics related to the Cold War, the Fall of Communism and the transition of captive nations into democracies. Most of these books have been written by people from the side of the Iron Curtain where freedom and prosperity were enjoyed. But considering the events of 1989 and the ensuing developments, a different perspective is in order. It is important to understand what the citizens of Central and Eastern Europe felt and thought under Communism and how they brought the Evil Empire to its long overdue end.

      This book would never have been possible without the help of numerous people and organisations. First and foremost I am indebted to the Centre for European Studies, whose aid and cooperation enabled us to accomplish this enormous task. Roland Freudenstein, Tomi Huhtanen, Katarína Králiková and many others provided invaluable help in the process. My gratitude also belongs to the Unitas Foundation, which worked hard to make this “mission impossible” possible. Many thanks go to Uve Poom, Veiko Lukmann, Heiko Unt, Sophie Williams and Henri Perkmann, among others.

      Instrumental assistance in research for the book came from Andres Klaar and Fredo Arias King. The information and data gathered by them was enormously valuable and made it possible to finish the book on time. Their comments and observations helped me to significantly improve the book. I am indeed extremely thankful for everyone’s contributions, rigour and patience in the publishing process.

      Moreover, this book would not have materialised without Marko Mihkelson, who devoted himself to writing the chapter on the reintegration of Europe. I am also very thankful to the Terror House Museum in Budapest, the National Remembrance Institute in Poland, Tunne Kelam’s Bureau in the European Parliament and the many friends who provided illustrations for this book.

      I also owe a great deal to my wife Katrin and my children. I took time to write this book from time that actually belonged to my family and for that I am grateful.

      Last but not least, this book is inspired by and dedicated to the brave people who never ceased to dream, continued to fight and in the end achieved their long-awaited and much-desired aspiration – FREEDOM.

      Foreword

      ‘I trust that these times will vanish like a horrible nightmare. It gives me strength to stand here and breathe. Our nation has suffered much and therefore we will survive these dark times,’ announced the Latvian freedom fighter Gunārs Astra, on 15 December 1983, to the Supreme Court of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic sentencing him for the second time to the GULAG prison camps in Siberia for anti-Soviet activities.

      Astra was right. The dark times of totalitarian Communism really did vanish and today, in 2010, Europe can celebrate the 20th anniversary of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe, which ended the 50-year division of Europe by the Iron Curtain. On one side of this curtain, there was freedom, democracy, the rule of law and a market economy ruled. On the other people had to live under terror, violence, totalitarianism and the socialist command economy. Under the Communist dictatorships, millions of people were killed, arrested, tortured and sent to labour camps. These countries were cut off from the rest of the world and the peoples’ rights were taken away from them. This resulted in the destruction of the economy, civil society and the environment in these countries. Most destructive of all were the wounds inflicted on human souls.

      It all ended in 1989. During peaceful revolutions, Central and Eastern Europe freed itself from Communism and took its first steps on the road back to a common civilisation of freedom, law and democracy. Revolutions are usually bloody affairs; violent transfers of power. But revolutions need not be violent in order to qualify as such. When Nicolaus Copernicus analysed the position of stars in the sky, he formulated the first scientific definition of revolution as a process whereby the stars return to their original positions. Hannah Arendt applied this observation to politics and concluded that revolutions are actually a return to the original freedom of man.

      So in 1989, Central and Eastern Europe was free again and it was only then that its populations discovered what Communism had really done to their countries and people over the previous 50 years. Communism culminated in total economic failure, the collapse of social networks, poverty and the rapid growth of criminality. New democratic governments elected to power during the first free elections had to lead their countries out of these crises, build democratic institutions and establish the rule of law and market economies. There was no textbook available to guide such an undertaking, nobody had done it before. It was certainly not an easy task, but the results have been better than anybody expected during the difficult times of the final years of Communism.

      Now, 20 years on, it is time to draw the first conclusions and look at what we have achieved and what we have not. It is hard to deny that it has been a real success story; Europe has been united and there is now far greater stability and prosperity. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have changed beyond recognition, although it has not been possible to overcome all of the problems created by 50 years of Communist rule, however. Compared to Western Europe, the new Member States are still poor even though they have moved closer to matching average European standards of living.

      Unfortunately, the 20th anniversary of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe coincides with the biggest global economic crisis since the Second World War and, indeed, this crisis has hit many Central and Eastern European countries hard. This has raised certain questions: have democratic and market reforms been at all successful? Was life not better under Communism? These questions must be answered quickly. Now, during the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolutions and the fall of Communism, is the best time to do so. Unfortunately, we have not given due credit to this success story, with the result that the enlargement of Europe has more often been regarded as a problem than a success. It is at last time to put events in Central and Eastern Europe into perspective, demonstrating to all how freedom works.

      This is especially important as the developments in Central and Eastern Europe during the bloody twentieth century are often misunderstood and misused. One such misunderstanding, for example, is the way in which totalitarian Communism is evaluated by many scholars and by public opinion across the world. The magnitude of Communist crimes, the level of violence and the total number of victims of Communist terror are all underestimated. Communism is perceived as a political system that is only slightly different to our own, one that is associated with limitations on political freedom, but which nonetheless helped to modernise backward Central and Eastern European countries, achieving literacy, economic development, full employment and social guarantees such as free health care and education to their populations.

      In reality, however, Communism was a complete failure. To understand this, rather than compare the level of development in Central and Eastern European countries’ in 1989 with their level in 1945, it should be compared with the level of development in Western countries in 1989: countries such as West Germany, Greece, Finland, Spain and Portugal. Such a comparison clearly demonstrates that West European countries, starting from the same or an even lower level at the end of World War II, had achieved markedly more success in all areas than the countries that found themselves trapped under the Communist yoke.

      This is a book about Communism, about what it really accomplished and about the destruction it caused during