On Wednesday 24 February, a panel of experts met to discuss the legacy of war and communism in eastern Europe. A full house convened for the event to mark the release of the latest edition of Granta, No Man’s Land, which focuses on the ground between opposing forces, twenty five years since the fall of communism. 

Themes of amnesia, nostalgia, construction, rebuilding, liberal democracy, end of history, paranoia, and conspiracy theories led the body of the rich discussion.

Oliver Bullough, journalist and author of The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great who has lived and worked extensively in Russia, chaired the event. Joining him were senior fellow at the Legatum institute and author of Nothing is True and Nothing is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia, Peter Pomerantsev, and Philip Ó Ceallaigh, author of Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day.

The event began with Pomerantsev and Ó Ceallaigh reading excerpts from their Granta pieces – ‘Propagandalands’ and ‘Bucharest, Broken City’ –  and drawing the audience into the landscape that was to be discussed.

Bullough engaged with the theme of truth being an irrelevant concept in eastern Europe. “This idea that the victory belongs to the persuasive… How pervasive is that? How quickly do you doubt everything?”

“Ukraine is a laboratory of contemporary propaganda… The problem that people have is they have too many sources of information… In all the sociology they say ‘we don’t believe anyone anymore,'” Pomerantsev responded. He went on to say that this phenomenon is not unique to Ukraine but is seen across the world – particularly in the United States.

Ó Ceallaigh commented later on the mistrust that was prevalent in Romania during the time of communism. “One of the deepest wounds of the Communist years was the fact that everyone was snitching on everyone else.” He shared that the younger generation are different in that sense.

Bullough then moved the discussion onto the subject of nostalgia, questioning its significance in the contexts of Ukraine and Romania.

“I think nostalgia might be more about not being happy with the present… The phrase that the separatists used, ‘things will be like they always were’; they’re talking about some kind of dreamscape. On the one hand the internet breaks our idea of reality, fragments it, and in this fragmented space people start dreaming of sort of lost nostalgias… But at the same time when you go and pull down a statue of Lenin no-one seems to care,” Pomerantsev responded. 

“It’s a nostalgia for a fictional past,” added Ó Ceallaigh.

Fascinating @GrantaMag/@frontlineclub talk last night with @OliverBullough & @peterpomeranzev. Now to dive into this pic.twitter.com/Uc5RKAtrT9

— Jack Losh (@jacklosh) February 25, 2016

The discussion moved to the notion of conspiracy theories, with Bullough asking: “Is conspiracy theory essentially yearning for a higher power?”

Pomerantsev commented, “Confronted with the chaos of globalisation, the chaos of too many information sources for our little minds to cope with… people revert to conspiracy theories. And that is a reflection of some of the nasty political movements.”  

“Victims of the violence are actually being confused with the perpetrators, which is exactly what you had in the wake of the Paris attacks… The media suddenly flips and you see things completely backwards. It happens over and over again. This is what we need to recognise,” Ó Ceallaigh said.

An audience member asked the panel to comment on how the West could feasibly improve the current situation in Ukraine and Romania.

Ó Ceallaigh responded, “Throw money at it. In a way it’s as simple as that. It’s crude and usually goes wrong at the beginning, because when you throw money at a corrupt society the people there who are going to take advantage are those in power.”

The young Harvard-educated economist Miklós Németh didn’t dream he would play a decisive role in the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was appointed Prime Minister by Hungary’s Communist Party to fix the nation’s finances in late 1988. Only a year later he was at the centre of it all.

On Wednesday 5 November, the Frontline Club tuned in to the world premier of 1989, a new documentary by Anders Østergaard detailing the months and days of Németh’s tense political manoeuvring that precipitated demolition of the wall, as it was shown in 57 cities across Europe during the 2014 Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX).

Stitching together archival footage seamlessly with reenactments of behind-the-scenes political moves, 1989 shows how Németh’s decision to dismantle one of the biggest drains on Hungary’s budget – a 240 kilometre-long electrical fence bordering Austria – reverberated through the former communist block. Just months later, tens of thousands of East Germans were scrambling across the divide.

Post-screening, Németh joined Danish Broadcast Corperation news anchor, Lene Johansen; professor and EU analyst, Lykke Friis; Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre, Hans Martens; and former Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, to reflect on 25 years of changes his decisions brought to Europe.

Continuing Conflict
The continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine was at the top of the agenda. “I am a great believer in dialogue and compromise. That is the way of finding your way out of a difficult situation,” Németh said of the fighting, adding that his good rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev helped guide him through difficult times.

“Putin is not stupid. I don’t like seeing a comment or an article in the paper that now we’re facing Cold War number two. This is not cold,” Németh said. “Last month Ukraine, Russia, and the EU signed a very important contract on the gas supply. So dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.”

What we’re seeing in Russia is a generation of people who never really accepted what happened in 1989, added Hans Martens. “I think they’re striking back now,” he said. “It’s not just about Ukraine and Crimea, it’s also about trying to reestablish a kind of Soviet Union or at least an empire like that. So dialogue is very good.”

Find out more about 1989 on the film’s website, where director Anders Østergaard will answer questions submitted by audiences from audiences all over Europe participating in this simultaneous screening.

On Wednesday 19 June, the Frontline Club audience burst into spontaneous applause to the precision choreography of a Transnistrian military parade. The footage was part of the documentary film Fortress, shown at the preview screening of Open City Docs Fest, supported by the Czech Centre London as part of One World Echoes in London.

Capturing aspects of everyday life in the unrecognised Pridnestrovian Moldovian Republic, from televised propaganda to school graduation ceremonies, the film offered rare insight into the little-known world that is also known as Transnistria. Czech director Lukáš Kokeš explained what his film was about:

“It’s not only about human rights, and not only a travelogue about an exotic country. The main topic for us was the atmosphere of that place, and we called it Fortress because we think that in every country there is a kind of a fortress. It shows us that Transnistria, with its corruption and its absurd regime is not so far away as we thought. So I think sometimes we all live in a small fortress called Transnistria.”

Moderator and Founding Director of Open City Docs Fest Michael Stewart kicked off the Q&A:  “As young chap who wasn’t, I’m sure, familiar with the occupation of your country by the great Russian forces, how come you made this particular film?”

“The biggest motivation for us to go there and make a film was that we didn’t know about the existence of this territory, or country,” replied Kokeš. “Often the territory is described as a dangerous place where you should never go; so we wanted to explore it and fill this black gap on the European map. … We felt we were connected to the reality there, as it was similar to the communist past of our country.”

“There are speculations,” responded Kokeš, to a question on arms smuggling:

“They may have been sold in the 90s. The main income for the state comes from smuggling. They are smuggling food, cigarettes, alcohol, everything that comes from Ukraine goes through Transnistria. And there it gets lost. The son of Igor Smirnov, the [former] President, was the head of border control.”

“The fear of the people,” was the main obstacle the team faced in filming:

“This situation is similar to the Czechoslovakian reality during the 70s or 80s,” said Kokeš. “Because people fear they could lose their jobs, they don’t want to criticise the regime.”

He added, “It’s very interesting that nowadays:

“The secret service in Transnistria, at that time when we were shooting it was called MGB, which means Ministry of State Security; after the new President was elected – he was perceived as big hope, as a democratic force – he changed the name from MGB to KGB again.”

On internet access in the territory,  Kokeš observed, “there’s only one internet provider, controlled by the state”:

“The internet is there, you can surf, find everything you want, but you are being watched. Last month they started to block all the opposition sites, or the forums where people are discussing political issues. So it’s very easy for them to control.”

Asked about the potential resolution of the territorial conflict with Moldova, Kokeš replied:

“The propaganda is very, very strong. After 20 years they succeeded to make this brainwashed generation, because even the young people, they told us that Moldova is enemy territory to them. Officially there is still war between Moldova and Transnistria. Only they are not fighting. So Moldovans are enemies to them.”

To conclude, Kokeš described how the project changed his own perception:

“I was expecting a Soviet open-air museum. I expected only old cars, but suddenly there were pink Hummers. So I started to think things are more complicated. We started to ask people how could they describe the regime: is it socialist or democratic or dictatorship or something in between? And they said: it’s very complicated. It’s anarchy, it’s oligarchy, it’s democracy but with its own rules, it’s a complex problem.”

Fortress was presented as part of the One World Echoes in London series, supported by the Czech Centre London and in collaboration with One World Prague.

Upcoming films in the series are Black Out and Stone Games, both at Open City Docs Fest on Sunday 23 June.

Azerbaijan is like a dynamic eagle that naturally links the cultures of the West and the East – that is how the state and local representatives attempt to portray the country internationally. Skyscrapers are growing in a country rich in oil, Azerbaijan has joined the UN Security Council and President Ilham Aliyev presses the flesh with some of the world’s most important statesmen.

Amazing Azerbaijan! is a tale of two countries: one a shiny democratic republic the government proudly puts on display for visiting journalists and dignitaries. The other country is a repressive and corrupt state with no respect for freedom of expression, in which peaceful protesters are violently beaten and journalists are threatened or even killed.

The excitement around Eurovision 2012 hosted in Baku, offers an unorthodox lens through which director Liz Mermin investigates basic issues of human rights and the position of journalists in this dynastic republic ruled by the Aliyev family since 1993.

Directed by Liz Mermin
Duration: 60′
Year: 2012

This screening is part of One World Echoes, an international tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of One World, Europe´s largest human rights film festival established in Prague in 1998 by Czech NGO People in Need.

One World Echoes are co-organized by the Czech Centre London, Open City London Documentary Festival (20-23 June) and the Frontline Club.

Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism.

This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm before a sold-out audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 21 January.

“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” she wondered before starting the book.

“Describe the scene for us,” Kamm began.

“It’s hard,” Applebaum answered. After the war, “the level of physical destruction…you had absolutely flat cities…totally destroyed transportation systems…economies that didn’t function – at all.”

“One of my most interesting interviews…was with a Polish writer… He was a Stalinist [at first], and he described that to me… Everything his parents had told him, and everything his schools had taught him, turned out to be wrong… The army failed. The government failed society collapsed… And that caused a kind of break in his mentality… he said…’you know, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the communists are right’.”

Applebaum described what followed:

“You had no good choices. You couldn’t just decide to be a freedom fighter and stand up for democracy. I mean, you could, then:  A. You would be arrested. B. Your wife would be arrested. C. Your child would get kicked out of college. D. Your mother would be thrown out of the hospital. Because the State had control over so many aspects of society, people had really very bad and hard decisions to make.”

But not even Stalin, totalitarianism’s maestro, couldn’t pull it off.

“The idea is that everyone will become convinced. They will be re-educated…and there will be no opposition… But somehow, it never works…[Even] at the very height of Stalinism in 1951 or ’52, they never actually made it.”

Yet for four decades, the Soviet bloc lived, and its unraveling still boggles Applebaum.

“It all seems so implausible to me. I mean: how did it happen? How can you explain it? Why did Gorbachev do what he did? Why did he just give up that enormous empire? Nobody was making him do it… Really, it could have gone on a lot longer.”

In much subtler shades, it has – under Vladimir Putin.

“He does care a lot, pretty inexplicably, in fact, about Pussy Riot,” Applebaum said. “There is a direct line from Putin to [Yuri] Andropov,” Soviet Ambassador to Budapest during Hungary’s rebellion 1956, and head of the KGB in the early 1980s.

“Putin came of age in Andropov’s KGB… He remembers ’89. He was taught by Andropov, who remembers ’56… The kind of treatment that dissidents or artists got in the Soviet Union in the first half of the ‘80s when Andropov was in power was almost as severe as in Stalin’s time… What was the conclusion? … all of these little groups who you thought weren’t important…you can let them go, [but] it can all unravel, and you can have an armed rebellion.”

Watch the full discussion here:

While Europe is preparing for Euro 2012 the political situation in one of the hosting countries, Ukraine, is becoming more controversial by the day.

European political leaders are set to agree on a boycott of the Ukrainian matches following the conditions in which former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is serving a contested 7-year jail sentence.

In Ukraine: From Democracy to Chaos Jill Emery explores this complex country, its geopolitical importance in Europe, and its unfinished struggle for democracy. The political divisions between east and west Ukraine that gave rise to the Orange revolution in 2004 have deep roots and still dictate today’s political reality.

The screening will be followed by a panel debate with:

Jill Emery: director of Ukraine: From Democracy to Chaos and The Putin System.

Neil Pattie:  former PR adviser to the party of the Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko and Managing Director of Ridge Consulting Ltd.

Orysia Lutsevych: researcher of civil society and democratisation in Ukraine and Georgia as a Robert Bosch Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House.

Director: Jill Emery
Year: 2012
Duration: 95′