The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  There was a strange moment in the summer of 1985 which was characteristic of underlying realities. Since 1918 Moscow had refused to pay a very large sum owed to the British, partly because of war debts and partly because oil companies had been expropriated without compensation. At each Anglo-Soviet meeting, the British side would propose a discussion of this, and the Soviet would refuse. But in that summer the new foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, greatly astonished his interlocutors by saying that the matter might indeed be discussed. There was some Tsarist Russian money still held in London, at Barings Bank, and that sum — a fraction, but £40m — was now handed over, in final settlement. It all had to do with the son of Duncan Sandys and grandson of Churchill; he had connections with oil, and when the deal was done, it turned out that everybody had been cheating everybody; they all sued. But the Moscow PR machine was in action. It had always been easy for Moscow to rope together writers and actors, traditionally the most absurd commentators on public matters, no doubt because subject in a higher degree than other professionals to a combination of vanity, boredom and resentment of the capricious free market. Now a clever attempt was made at the television audiences, by people who had watched American television and the mass media. They had appreciated the importance of the visual, now that devices could convey images almost ‘live’, to masses of people who would take in a very simple message. ‘Gorby’ became a star, especially in Germany, where his book was on the bestseller list for mysterious months and months.

  Back home was another matter, and there Gorbachev was far more of an Andropov than his admirers in the West thought. One thing the regime did do, and it greatly damaged its own finances. Russians drank, and governments, proclaiming a monopoly of drink production, made money out of it. This weird episode was studied by Stephen White (Russia Goes Dry). Russians famously had a weakness for drink, and there was public understanding for drunkenness. A good part of the State’s income, in Soviet as in Tsarist times, came from the spirits monopoly. There was a puritanical side to the early Communists, who staged ‘battles on the alcohol front’, but drink was quite an easy way of keeping the people quiescent, and the battles became bottles. By the seventies there was an evident problem, and the census revealed less and less of life in the USSR — sixteen volumes for 1959, seven for 1970, but only one, summary, for 1979. Figures for life expectancy were suppressed, and after 1963 the figures for alcohol consumption were ‘managed’, almost ignoring moonshine, which represented nearly half of the consumption. The ten litres per head of 1965 turned into fifteen in 1979, but from the railways alone 7 million litres were stolen, and nearly a tenth of families spent 40 per cent of their income on spirits (which were relatively expensive). Under Gorbachev the statistics re-emerged, revealing that life expectancy had fallen to sixty-two for a man and that pure alcohol consumption per capita had risen four times since 1940, and consumption of all drink as much as eight times. The KGB stated that university students drank all day; 15 per cent of the population was alcoholic; and Pravda was complaining that building workers started only on Tuesdays or that collective farmers were useless after midday. The police under Andropov even went round the bathhouses arresting absentees, but they could hardly interfere with the third of the workforce that was absent in order to consult a doctor.

  Not long after Gorbachev acceded, in May 1985, a campaign against drink began. He himself did not touch it, and had inveighed against it long before. He had allies as well — a reformed alcoholic named Mikhail Solomentsev in the Central Committee, and Yegor Ligachev, chief secretary in Tomsk, which he made ‘dry’. Others protested, even Aliev in Baku, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, the later prime minister, who simply said that Prohibition had never worked. Boris Yeltsin in Moscow protested, but did none the less close nine tenths of the wine shops. State output went down; vines were uprooted in the Crimea, in Georgia and — most disastrously — in Nagorny Karabakh. That area, formally part of Azerbaidjan, was largely Armenian in population, but had been handed to Azerbaidjan early on, as a way of softening the blow of Soviet conquest. Wine was a principal product, and its suppression (and a subsequent calamitous earthquake) meant general impoverishment, and a considerable worsening of relations between the two peoples. But the campaign against alcohol was, generally, farcical. In Moscow there were only seventy-nine places to drink, and hotels would not serve alcohol until 2 p.m. Some towns declared themselves ‘dry’, and drunks were sacked or fined. Diplomatic gatherings were widely deserted, but of course the counterpart was a rise in the output of moonshine, as had happened in twenties America. A Temperance Society by 1988 had 428,000 branches and over 14 million members, three quarters of them over thirty. Fifty films were suppressed because they showed drunken scenes; on the radio La Traviata was shortened to cut out the drinking; an ‘agitational steamer’ went down the Volga, and medical research teams jumped onto the bandwagon, working from the Serbsky Institute of Criminal Psychiatry, with an enormous research centre for the causes and consequences of drink (one head of department was sacked for suggesting moderation). In 1986 there were victories — output of vodka down by a third. Men were denounced by their mothers-in-law and packed off to ‘cure-labour prophylactorias’ without any judicial process. However, it was all more than somewhat ridiculous. Very little could be done to stop people making samogon, and of course they did this with ingenuity. The rural background of so many told them how. There was even a computer-programmed process, and it was often superior to the state product (and sold for more). Sugar sales from 1985 to 1987 reflected this, increasing more than they had done between 1970 and 1980, and yeast also boomed, for instance in Kamchatka. Fruit was stolen in large quantities, and criminal gangs went around with tankers full of neat spirits. In Tatarstan there was an underground distillery in the very Party headquarters; a fishing trawler was found to contain 576 bottles of vodka to celebrate the navigator’s wedding; soldiers used to shave the top of their heads and then place upon them a piece of bread, soaked in boot polish that had been left to melt into it under the sun for a day or two. One workman in Vladikavkaz complained on behalf of his hundred-odd fellows that ‘ordinary people have no holidays and everyone walks around in a foul mood, like jackals’. In 1988 the whole campaign was relaxed, and soon collapsed. By 1993 Russians were ahead of Frenchmen as drinkers, but over sixty drink factories had been destroyed and there were thousands of hectares of uprooted vineyards, whether in Yalta or in the Caucasus; Georgian wines had been famous. Now, even Armenia suffered, because she had produced the corks. It all added to the great tension and the disruption of supplies in general that went ahead in 1987-8.

  27. Restoration

  As Goebbels, bombs raining down on his ministry, and the Russians liberating Auschwitz, had noted in his diaries, when he heard about the Yalta conference, the real battle between the Allies had not been about Poland; it had been about Germany. So it was, and forty years later the Yalta settlement was starting to unravel, beginning, for that matter, with Poland. However, the crucial decisions were taken in Moscow, as a clever Hungarian had predicted, back in 1956. The 27th Congress of the Party, held at the turn of February/March 1986, was the stage. At the time, no-one really noticed what was happening: the proceedings of the Congress amounted to the usual tidal wave of liquid concrete. The Party rewrote its statutes, modifying earlier remarks as to class war and imperialism. Even Xan Smiley, astutest of the foreign correspondents, and the Economist did not notice that something decisive had happened — a forgivable mistake (this writer has reason to hope), given the needle-in-haystack nature of truth in that system. But what was really meant was that Moscow was giving up the Berlin Wall. Within months, Solidarność was discussing a new Poland, and within a few more months the Berlin Wall had indeed gone, and so, thereafter, did everything else go, including, by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. There was a romantic theory that this had been achieved by ‘We, the People’, a theory that could only elicit a chuckle from the grave of Andropov. The people w
ere Mussorgsky extras, in an operetta where Polish pretenders made trouble for Old Believers. The Politburo were stupefied by Poland: they would not send in troops, and knew that their Polish puppets were lost: what were you to do with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, marching on their knees, to a religious symbol? If the proletariat went on strike against the Communists, how were you to deal with it?

  Martial law had been declared at the end of 1981, and had solved nothing: Poland still had the debts, and after a week or two the black market ran things as before. In effect it was the Pope (with the American embassy) that now ran affairs. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. If he had called for a revolution, it would have happened. He did not. The virtues of capitalism and democracy did not much interest him and in 1984 Jaruzelski himself said that the Church was an ally. There was a curious aspect, that many of the people in the Reagan administration were Catholic: Haig’s brother was a priest, and there was William Casey at the CIA. Oleg Bogomolov, for the Institute of Socialist Relations, had written a report in 1978 about what the Pope would do. It is worth noting that both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with Ukrainian involvement, disliked the Uniates as fake. John Paul went again in 1987 and three quarters of a million people attended the Mass at Gdańsk. There had been a referendum on economic reform, boycotted at the behest of Solidarność, and strikes had followed in the spring (1988). Lech Wałęsa was needed, and in January 1989 he appeared on television again. Mieczysław Rakowski took over as prime minister, and in February 1989 there was a round table over the price increases. The elections then occurred in June, and by now Gorbachev and the Pope were co-operating. Gorbachev informed Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in Moscow in the ineffable words: ‘The most important thing is the human being. The human being must be at the centre of international relations. That is the point of departure for our New Thinking.’ And he did release the Lithuanian Cardinal Vincentas Sladkevičius, after twenty-five years in prison. In return he had a present: the Virgin of Fatima had promised that Russia would be freed. In the summer of 1989 Poland acquired a non-Communist government, the members of which undertook to leave the Communists alone. Opinions greatly varied as to the wisdom of this, and Alain Besançon made himself unpopular, as he talked of another Convention of Targowice, or sell-out. But was there a serious alternative? Gorbachev, by now doing the rounds of ‘our common European home’, had to act over Poland, and if the Church and the Americans pushed the Poles towards a compromise element, so be it. But he would also have to get rid of ugly, tiresome little Honecker as well.

  Poland was really about Germany, and another important People’s Democracy also supervened. Act two was set in Hungary. János Kádár, the general secretary, had promised some economic liberalization and had impressed Mitterrand. Hungary had always had a strange relationship with Austria, and Austria was now, in her way, a considerable success story. Why was Budapest, capital of what was in the end a rather more interesting civilization, such a lifeless ruin? Something of an effort was made to do something with Budapest, and at least the Váci utca and the old Gerbeaud café were very smudgy copies of the Herrengasse and the Sacher in Vienna, though if you went two or three tram stops down the Rákóczy út you were well and truly in the Communist bloc. Kádár was a prime opportunist, and the Russians needed him: he was very adept at making sure that he had no obvious successor. Besides, there was an enormous and very influential Hungarian diaspora, and after Ostpolitik its members came back and forth — latterly in the shape of George Soros. Hungary built up the largest per capita dollar debt in the world, $2bn, but the industrial showcases were not a success. In the recession of the early 1980s exports to the West ran down, and half of the earnings were needed just to pay the debt interest. Wages were blocked, there was notable inflation, and purchasing power fell by 15 per cent. Hungary had a degree of liberalization, Kádár announcing that who was not against was for, and there were opposition movements, with openings in the press. By 1985 there were public meetings, and in 1987 when Kádár was already 75 there was something of a turning point: the state enterprises were allowed to charge their own prices, but on the other side personal taxes were introduced. Imre Pozsgay circulated a document by the main economists, saying that the regime had led the country to near disaster, and in March 1988 — the anniversary of the revolution in 1848 — thousands of demonstrators gathered in Budapest. Viktor Orbán started to make his reputation as orator (and eventual prime minister). At the next Party conference, Kádár himself was voted out, and at another anniversary, the execution of Imre Nagy in 1958, the end of the Party itself was spelled out. Nagy had said that he feared being rehabilitated by his own executioners and that is what happened: the Communists shed their name and carried on as social democrats, or even as liberals.

  Soviet leaders all along had tried to split Germany from the Atlantic alliance. In the later 1970s Brezhnev visited Bonn. There were German neutralists, and it even became chic in West Germany to talk as if all differences with the USSR could somehow be smoothed over. But the central problem remained, that the State which called itself the ‘German Democratic Republic’ was an embarrassment. It remained a place where the inhabitants had to be contained by a wall, and a very ugly one at that, complete with minefields and yapping hounds on dog-runs, in case they all decided to move out, as they had done before 1961, when the Wall was built. Erich Honecker was saying that the Wall would last for fifty years, and there was another very odd aspect to it, that many Germans agreed. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger wrote an essay saying the Wall would be an historical curiosity, and there were many West Germans with egg on their faces when it came down.

  The East German state had already been reduced to a formality, kept going by the West. The Lutheran Church managed the sale of prisoners — 2,300 in 1983 and 1984, and emigration was anyway going ahead: a worker cost DM50,000 and a graduate DM200,000. From 1965 to 1988 30,000 were thus bought out, for DM2bn. Thirty thousand left legally every year while about 40,000 managed to escape (1961-88) and ten-day family visits went west (1.3 million in 1987). In 1981 East Germany owed $13bn and that took 43 per cent of export earnings; the Soviets did give loans but also cut back on cheap oil (hence the stink of lignite in Erfurt). In July 1983 it was Franz Josef Strauss (ambitious to be foreign minister) who negotiated with East Berlin — West German banks lending an interest-free billion Marks and another billion in 1984. The East Germans had reduced their trade with the West generally but it rose with West Germany. There were no customs barriers, and Strauss extracted two secret notes from Honecker as to the relaxation of border controls so as to prevent the strip-searching of children. Richard von Weizsäcker, as mayor of West Berlin, used to cross the border to discuss the S-Bahn and matters of pollution as no predecessor had done. Schmidt visited Honecker in 1981 and Honecker wanted to return but there were problems with Moscow and the Czechs and Poles, and besides Moscow had said that there would be no more such rapprochement if the Euro-missiles went ahead. Honecker therefore had to say in 1984 that he would not go, although in 1987 he indeed did. There he found a West Germany that gave him a welcome.

  The SPD to Schmidt’s great disapproval now flirted with him, and in 1985 Oskar Lafontaine, minister-president of the Saarland, talked of accepting a separate nationality; in 1986 he even proposed a nuclear-free zone, though there had been the absurd ceremony for twenty-five years of the Wall, including a preposterous DDR stamp of a young girl giving flowers to soldiers shooting refugees. There was even a ridiculous ‘Values Commission’ of the SPD and the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, and when the end came the Lutheran Churches were forbidden to ring their bells. It remains extraordinary that Bonn did not see the end coming: it was only in the spring of 1989 that Chancellor Kohl told the French he could see great problems coming for the East German state. In 1988 9,000 East Germans had got out through a country of the bloc where holidays were allowed — mainly Poland. In 1989, in the summer, tens of thousands moved out via Hungary and Austria. This was voting with feet, and Mosc
ow did nothing to prevent it. The heart of the whole business was Germany. Russia and Germany had had the key relationship, and by 1988 the Gorbachev team were in creative mode. How could they get rid of Honecker and his colleagues? The answer lay in Hungary. The prime minister, Miklós Németh, had been promised DM500m if the border were opened (April, in Bonn). In June 1989 Gorbachev came to Bonn on an official visit. He told Kohl that whole areas of the USSR might need immediate help. Kohl consulted no-one and said the first despatches would happen at once. The East German parliament had approved of Tiananmen Square and on 13 June Gorbachev said that it would not happen in Red Square, and the communiqué of 13 June in Bonn spoke of ‘self-determination’. Much was made of an East German resistance that was now mostly stage-managed. The Protestants were restive and 120 young protestants who sat in before a church, protesting against local elections with their 98.5 per cent yes vote, were arrested, but then the church went to court over the electoral fraud and the prisoners were released (May). Even the SPD ‘Values Commission’ protested in March against long prison sentences for the Justice and Peace Work Circle. In July at the Kirchentag, or Church congress, there were clashes and from then on at the Nikolai-Kirche growing numbers appeared every Monday protesting at not being allowed to go west: curious that Saxony, the heart of the wretched state, was also its end. Honecker was quite remote and cushioned by Stasi reports, but on 10 September the Hungarians opened the border with Austria.