Consentful Contention in Revolutionary Times: Debating Elite Corruption at Communist Party Congresses in Poland and East Germany

Abstract

Existing scholarship treats congresses of the ruling communist parties in the Eastern Bloc as staged performances intended to manufacture support and signal new policy trends. This article, using the examples of extraordinary party congresses held during revolutionary times in Poland (1981) and the German Democratic Republic (1989) offers another per¬spective. It looks at the events as spaces where rank-and-file delegates could contest par¬ticular decisions of their organization, while simultaneously straying away from more radi¬cal forms of dissent. This article follows and compares the actions of delegates in both countries by highlighting how they disrupted the agenda of the congresses over the ques¬tion of elite corruption committed by former members of the party leadership and account¬ability for these wrongdoings. These episodes show that anti-corruption was a genuinely important moral preoccupation, as well as an argument for demanding change, and that, during the 1980s, ideas grounded in socialism still possessed major legitimacy.

Keywords

• corruption
• poland
• gdr
• congress
• communist party
• pzpr
• sed
• contention
• revolution