The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  Hungary’s foreign minister, Gyula Horn, himself a 1956 represser, opened the border for the thousands milling around Sopron and had sent his deputy, László Kovács, to ask the Russians, who made no objection; anyway the wire and mines had gone. Twelve thousand transports of East Germans went off in three days and some with little Trabants, while 7,000 in the Warsaw and Prague embassies left by trains through East Germany; another 10,000 invaded the Lobkowitz gardens in Prague. Three months of high drama followed. Communists dropped out of the Polish government and Wałęsa took over. On 7 October the Hungarian Party changed its name to ‘socialist’ and on 23 October, the anniversary of the Revolution, the Communists’ own parliament proclaimed the restoration of the republic plus old flags. There was an equivalent in Berlin, as various efforts were made to vary the SED formula; there was even a last appearance of the Menshevik USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) element, as Neues Forum was allowed at last in October, with a well-meaning earnest painter, Bärbel Bohley, to make critical comments about consumer goods and the refugees. The Leipzig church became too small, as the 5,000 marchers of 25 September became 10,000 a week later: even the factory militia started to be used with the police. Honecker did not mention it at all, but on 6-7 October Gorbachev visited for the fortieth anniversary — ritual kissing at the airport, Politburo servility and a soggy little joke from Honecker. The Russians were openly in ridicule mode, and Gerasimov remarked, ‘If you are late it’s a life sentence.’ Next day at a Politburo meeting Honecker went on about the success of the East German microchip and later denounced the ‘large-scale manoeuvre’ against him; indeed, Valentin Falin, the reigning German expert, seems to have encouraged Hans Modrow, the Dresden secretary, and Markus Wolf, the espionage chief, to get rid of this tiresome little know-all. They no doubt encouraged the demonstrators for Gorbachev on 9 October in Leipzig, 120,000 of them on the 16th. Apparently ammunition was distributed, but half a dozen people supervened, including Kurt Masur of the Gewandhaus. On the 18th Honecker resigned, with others, for ‘health reasons’: Soviet generals were privately saying that if the Wall went they would not intervene, and Shevardnadze had said as much to James Baker on 25 September. The extraordinary aspect of it all was the slowness among West Germans, and some of them were downright silly, right up to the last moment. The Left had been trapped: even Bahr in November 1988 was saying that talk of unification was ‘environmental pollution’, though he later tried to take credit for it. Some of the CDU put ‘Europe’ before unification and Strauss himself was making money out of the Moscow trade. Peter Glotz, an otherwise intelligent man who saw through the Yugoslav problem, rejected use of the word ‘unification’ as late as 21 October 1989. Norbert Gansel saved the Party’s honour when he recommended the expression Wandel durch Abstand as the hundreds of thousands of East Germans fled. Joschka Fischer for the Greens said, ‘We should strike the reunification commandment from the constitution’, in 1989 of all years, and Otto Schily had said the same in 1984. Both men went on to high government posts. Certainly no-one seems to have given any thought to how West and East Germany could be properly unified, and the subsequent story was unhappy: very high unemployment and empty cities.

  Egon Krenz at fifty-two, representing ‘Youth’, took over. He had noisily approved of Tiananmen Square and had been head of Internal Security. The satirist Wolf Biermann called him a ‘standing invitation to flee the republic’. This figure now talked democracy on television, there was an amnesty for Republic-flight on 27 October and the clergymen managed the demonstrations that went on with 250,000 shouting, ‘Wir wollen raus.’ Krenz went to see Gorbachev and sacked five of the Politburo members. The Czechs then released their own East Germans (10,000) and now even in the Alexander-Platz on 4 November hundreds of thousands took to the streets shouting, ‘Wir sind das Volk.’ One and a half million had applied to leave permanently and 120,000 had already left, only a quarter legally. On 6 November the government said anyone might go for a month, and then resigned. Television now broadcast everything and Modrow was invited to take over. Cars from the West were no longer searched. There was a fear that the Brandenburg Gate would be stormed, and on 9 November Günter Schabowski, an East Berlin politician and member of the SED Politburo, made a muddled utterance as to exit visas, while a rumour went round that the Bornholmerstrasse crossing would be opened. The streets filled up and Vopo — Volkspolizei, or People’s Police — water cannon were used against people climbing the Brandenburger Tor, but other people attacked the Wall with picks, and on 10 November the Gedächtniskirche bells rang out as crowds mingled in the Kurfürstendamm; a Rostropovitch concert was held for the Stalin victims at the Gate itself. The East Germans gave out 7 million exit visas, and almost half of the population left. The absurd French Communist Georges Marchais sent congratulations to Krenz, although he was not to last too long.

  On 11 November Kohl telephoned Gorbachev to reassure him and there was a to-do about unification — Mitterrand visited Bonn and promised support and then did what he could to delay it, attempting to use Margaret Thatcher, who was somewhat wrong-footed. There were maybe illusions as to the survival of East Germany as a sort of Austria, and for two weeks after 9 November Moscow seems to have supposed that East Germany would keep going under the reform Communists. This was quite wrong, and the German events inspired imitation. In astutely managed parties there was anticipation. Czechoslovakia was slow off the mark, but demonstrations started on 17 November and on 24 November Miloš Jakeš, the General Secretary, resigned; a new Party hierarchy came in: the demonstrations carried on, and on 10 December old Gustáv Husák went, to be replaced by museum pieces of 1968.

  George Bush and Gorbachev were to talk. This was a secret affair at the outset, apparently suggested by General Jaruzelski, the previous July. Shevardnadze and Baker had talked in Paris about Cambodia and much else and Aleksandr Bessmertnykh with his outstanding English managed things: Bush and Gorbachev met on 2-3 December on tossing seas off Malta, an odd echo of the original Yalta. It was the seventeenth ‘summit’ and a list was ticked without teams of experts: there was understanding about German unification and by this stage the Soviet economy had been unravelling so far that Gorbachev was somewhat desperate for German credits and membership of the international economic institutions. By June 1990 he even told Congress as much, unaware that he was being recorded. In July Kohl came to Stavropol to discuss Soviet army withdrawal and Gorbachev agreed that East Germany could be in NATO: the German payment in the end amounted to DM60bn. However, it seems all to have gone back west, to Swiss accounts held by people who understood what was happening. The crisis now affected the Soviet Union itself. Just as the 28th Congress got going Ryzhkov ineptly announced price rises and in summer 1990 its component peoples (or their local bosses) began to break away.

  There was a strong element of mise-en-scène in what had happened: the revolutions, though presented as such, were staged by the KGB. The general idea was to replace the old guard with ‘reform Communists’ such as Krenz who would be acceptable in the West. On 17 November a provocation was staged by the Czechoslovak secret police, at the order of a KGB general, Viktor Gruchko: a student demonstration was set up in Prague, and was fired on, complete with a student victim (who was filmed, walking away, once his ‘death’ had been recorded), and, this time round, back came Alexandr Dubček, flanked by Václav Havel, quite willing to co-operate with Gorbachev over German unification. Romania’s was the classic case. Ceauşescu was a true grotesque, and besides had on occasion challenged Moscow. He had held all possible jobs, and moved in relatives as he vacated them. A press law of 1974 laid down prison sentences for the diffusion of unauthorized information, and illegal crossing of the border attracted a sentence of three years; even the typeface of typewriters had to be registered with the Security Police, and informers were everywhere. The absurdities of the regime hardly had bounds: for instance, in 1967 contraception was made a crime and since abortions then grew to outnumber live births,
that too became a crime, punishable with ten years’ imprisonment (1984). Ceauşescu had been very anxious to outdo Tito, and indeed he flourished because the West cultivated him. He was three times in Washington, and was so impressed by the fireside chats in the Oval Office that he had his own fireplace installed and kept lit even at the height of summer. His wife had aspirations as a natural scientist, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by London University. As she was being led out to execution, her last words were, ‘How can you do this to an honorary doctor? ’ Ceauşescu described himself as the ‘Danube of Thought’, and his stock-in-trade was a stupid nationalism, making much of the Latin connection (because of which the country’s name was changed from the Greek ‘Rumania’ into a ‘Romania’ which had been used to describe the Crusader and Latin state in Constantinople). But the 1980s went badly. Reagan did not have Nixon’s tenderness for Ceauşescu: the minute a reformist regime appeared in Moscow, he had lost his utility. The IMF did not renew its loans, but he went ahead with manic projects — tearing down old Bucharest, putting up a vast palace, and agro-villages which were meant to deprive peasants of any individuality. There was a Hungarian minority in Transylvania, and culturally it had a bad time, though the Hungarian towns were generally better-off and cleaner. In much of the country the people lived at a very low level, with revolting food and energy shortages.

  A stage revolution was organized. Ion Iliescu was Moscow’s man and Ceauşescu had offended the Russians with his demands for abrogation of the treaty of 1940, which had allowed Stalin to annex the largely Romanian Bessarabia. Another stalwart was Silviu Brucan, a former ambassador in Washington; on occasion he wrote anonymously in the Western press; he was also visited every week by the correspondent of Pravda. In February 1989 Brucan, with five other senior figures, wrote an open letter to Ceauşescu, accusing him of ‘discrediting socialism, isolating Romania and failing to respect the Helsinki agreements’; when at the United Nations Romania was attacked by the French prime minister Michel Rocard, and the Human Rights Commission proposed an official visitation, the Soviet Union did not use its veto. Meanwhile there had been another piece of de — cisive action in Budapest. The chief foreign correspondent of Hungarian television, Aladár Chrudinák, was a brave and resourceful man who had managed to film the Cambodian horrors and reveal these in the West. Now he went to Transylvania, interviewed a young clergy-man, László Tőkés, and extracted from him a line to the effect that the wall of silence and lies had to be broken. Ceauşescu’s machine then went into action. He used Tőkés’s superior, the Bishop of Nagyvárad (it was a peculiarity of Hungarian Calvinism that it had bishops), to have him transferred from Timişoara in the Banat to a remote village in the mountainous north. Tőkés and his pregnant wife were then defended by parishioners, and the local Romanian population joined in (16 December). On the 17th the police used truncheons, even against the women and children who had been put at the head of the protesting demonstration, and Ceauşescu, on the verge of leaving for Teheran, complained at the ‘softness’ of the police. Troops opened fire, or so it was claimed, and rumours spread, partly through Budapest television, that thousands had been killed (Yugoslav television claimed 12,000). Ceauşescu broke off his visit to Iran, and decided to stage a mass meeting in his own support: thousands of people were brought in to demonstrate outside the Central Committee building, with orders to condemn the supposed Hungarian separatists — a device that in the past would have worked. However, this time round, it did not. A group of young people started shouting, ‘We are the people’, and there were catcalls. Bafflement spread over Ceauşescu’s face and his wife — the microphones had not been switched off — said, ‘Promise them something.’ He then promised a wage rise, but the offer was swamped, and, hurriedly, he made off, in a helicopter from the roof. On 22 December hundreds of thousands of people collected, and there was a general strike in Timişoara. Elsewhere, there were isolated outbreaks as crowds attacked Security Police buildings in Sibiu and Braşov, both in Transylvania, but the damage was very limited: much of the alleged fighting was staged, bullets deliberately fired in the air. This looked like revolution, but it was carefully managed, and Iliescu, wrapping himself in religion and nationalism, took over. Ceauşescu was subsequently tracked down, but of course he knew what had happened: ‘my fate was decided at Malta’, when Bush and Gorbachev had met; ‘everything that has happened in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria has been organized by the Soviet Union with the help of the Americans.’ He was shot, after a masquerade of a trial, in which the chief judge himself committed suicide. Iliescu, who had managed very cleverly to avoid contamination, took over, with a government of former Communists; soon he too was using ‘the organized discontent of the masses’ to put down the dissidents. This ‘revolution’ had been a montage if ever there was one, down to faked massacres: but it was soon followed by the greatest montage of them all, the coup of August 1991 in Moscow.

  The ‘dissent’ that had the greatest explosive potential was indeed national. It was one and perhaps even the main factor in the very creation of the USSR that Russia consisted of several nations, some tiny, some large, some Slav, some Turkic. If you included the Ukraine among them, then half the population was non-Russian. The early Communists had found allies among these peoples, one remark being to the effect that the Revolution had been made by ‘Latvian rifles, Jewish brains and Russian fools’. Moslems in the Caucasus and Central Asia, like the Tatars in Russia proper, had made common cause with Lenin and at one level were rewarded, in that early schooling and basic newspapers were made available in native languages. However, in Stalin’s time Russification became the rule, and with let-ups from time to time so it remained. Because the regime operated strict censorship, the nationalist discontent hardly showed; when it did, there were vast camp-sentences for the people involved. In the 1950s semi-thaw, here and there, discontent emerged. Stalin had deported whole peoples, of whom a third would die during or just after the transport to some Central Asian waste, and the regime could also divide and rule, setting peoples against each other by the award of some territory to a different republic. This was done when the Crimea was handed to the Ukraine by Khrushchev, or, earlier, when Nagorny Karabakh, widely Armenian, was assigned to Azerbaidjan, in the capital of which, Baku, there was also a substantial Armenian population. Russians flooded into the Baltic states, though less so to Lithuania, for whatever reason. What was so very strange was that the Russians themselves were poorer than most of the others, imperial people though they might be, and the contrast with the satellites (except for Romania) was even more striking. Estonians ate 87 kilos of meat per head per annum and Russians 66 kilos; Estonians had three times as many motor cars; Baltic consumer goods were of higher quality as well; Azerbaidjan ate better because private plots were larger and less threatened. Russians muttered that they were parting with cheap energy to make these things possible, and also grumbled at the low levels of culture in Central Asia, which swallowed investment and made babies. However, as regards nationalities, tectonic plates were shifting.

  Something of a Russian cultural revival got under way, with, in 1965, a society for the preservation of old buildings (something vastly needed) with 15 million members. A cult of Andrey Rublev developed; Suzdal was restored as a ‘museum city’ and the Golden Ring towns, little Moscows, complete with jewel-like Kremlins of their own, such as Uglich or Rostov, followed. Historians who wished to avoid overt politics could work on medieval themes, and there were writers who lamented what was happening to the language and to nature itself (particularly Valentin Rasputin, but also a Kirghiz, Cingiz Aitmatov, who, later on, was promoted as an instance of multi-nationalism). There was always at least potentially an anti-semitic element in this, given that Jews were crudely accused of hating old Russia. Religion was, again, potentially involved in this, and the regime kept a close eye upon it, not a single bishop being appointed without Central Committee say-so. Orthodox clergymen sent to the West, for the World Council of Churche
s, were straightforwardly agents, spouting Moscow’s lines on peace. A council of religious affairs and KGB oversight meant infiltration and control, though in Central Asia (and especially in Chechnya) resistance was stoutly managed, the more so as Islam was a way of life and not just a cult. Khrushchev, in pursuit of modernization and the creation of ‘new Soviet man’, persecuted religion, and since it could buttress nationalism closed churches. In 1981 another atheist campaign brought about the demolition of 300 of them, mostly in the Ukraine, while the devout might also lose their jobs, and monks were sometimes sadistically persecuted. Khrushchev had also been quite harsh as regards lesser nationalities, and little Siberian peoples could almost be wiped out with drink. Under Brezhnev, there was some lightening, and ethnographic institutes studied the lesser nationalities quite thoroughly. Brezhnev himself spoke, at the 23rd Congress in 1966, of the need for ‘solicitude’ as regards ‘peculiarities’; he also claimed that ‘the national question is now resolved completely and irrevocably’; Andropov remarked that Russian ‘has entered quite naturally into the lives of millions of people of all nationalities’. Brezhnev’s policy had been to appoint loyal ‘natives’, which led to some odd outcomes.