Sampson was so traumatized by the horror she had witnessed that, close to collapse, she caught a flight to Hong Kong to be with Mary Dejevsky (in her last weeks there before taking up residence in Moscow) who was filing valuable supplementary reports from the British colony. Dejevsky protected her (not least from an irate foreign desk at Wapping who felt she had deserted her post) and, several days later, Sampson summoned the courage to return to Peking where she reported on the ensuing crackdown. Dejevsky, meanwhile, had been stalwart not only in the defence of her distraught colleague but also on the pages of the newspaper (although Wilson was angry with her not being in situ in Peking). As the massacre unfolded, she immediately filed a comment article arguing that the deed would cause the Chinese government the loss of its people’s confidence as well as that of foreign investors and the nervous community in Hong Kong which was due to be transferred to Peking’s care in eight years time. ‘It could also strike the first nail in the coffin of Chinese communism,’ she wrote. ‘In Peking in the last three weeks I witnessed the spirit of hope and common purpose represented by the student protests. The barricades erected to keep the army out of the city were built and manned by ordinary people, not those of an anti-government persuasion.’28
The leading column was unsparing in its criticism. It was written by Rosemary Righter, a forthright intellect who exemplified the most noble traditions of ‘The Thunderer’. Righter was an accomplished duellist with the pen against tyranny’s swords. Deng Xiaoping, long seen as the leader of reform in China, had opted to hang ‘on to power at the expense of his own revolution’. The Times argued that Britain should review its 1984 agreement with China over Hong Kong, suspending negotiations on the Basic Law under which the colony was to be governed after the handover. For its part, the Hong Kong government should proceed without delay to introduce democratic institutions while, in Whitehall, the Home Office should review its policy on Hong Kong citizens’ entitlement to British residency.29 When the Government subsequently insisted on restricting entitlement, The Times and, in particular its columnist Woodrow Wyatt, were appalled.
Would the Communist old guard clinging onto power in Eastern Europe crush the emerging voices of dissent with equal ruthlessness? On 4 June 1989, just as China’s rulers were ordering the suppression of the student protests, Solidarity swept to power in Poland’s first free elections since the Second World War and two months later its first post-war non-Communist prime minister took office. There was no bloodshed. Also that August two million people formed a human chain across the three Baltic republics to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their Soviet annexation. It was a potent message of dignified defiance to rule from Moscow. The winds of change were blowing across the continent. In September, Hungary opened its border with East Germany and within four weeks socialists had replaced Communists in power in Budapest.
The flow of migration from East Germany was turning into a flood. Yet, some felt that the events of the Second World War meant that the Soviet Union would never tolerate a united Germany and the toppling of the Communist emblem over East Berlin. As the pressures for political reform and migration mounted in East Germany, two fears loomed large: would its leaders crack down and, if they did not, would Moscow do so on its satellite’s behalf? Brezhnev’s intimidation of the government in Warsaw in the face of the rise of Solidarity in 1981 was one precedent. But the Brezhnev Doctrine of defending Marxist-Leninism in Eastern Europe, with tanks if necessary, appeared to have disintegrated. Gorbachev was made from more malleable metal. After all, Solidarity had been allowed to form a government in Warsaw. Indeed, far from having their resolve stiffened, the leadership in East Berlin came under pressure from Moscow to pursue a policy of glasnost rather than repression. That, at any rate, seemed to make more sense that risking a complete surrender to democratic forces that, if allowed to triumph, could even dismantle the Warsaw Pact, a risk Moscow was not prepared to countenance. The East German regime, however, appeared more resistant to glasnost than those who wielded power in the Kremlin. Alarmingly, Egon Krenz, who succeeded Erich Honecker in October 1989, had publicly supported the Chinese government’s massacre in Tiananmen Square.
No emblem was more totemic of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall. Two and a half million East Germans had fled to the West while the borders were porous between 1949 and 1961, when the wall was erected to stop them, officially as an ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’. Border guards operated a shoot-to-kill policy rescinded only in 1989. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had both stood before it and condemned it in ringing tones of high oratory. Yet, on 9 November, astonishing news broke. The wall had been breached.
Although the East German politburo announced the wall would remain as a ‘reinforced state border’, the decision to open crossing points through which all the Democratic Republic’s citizens could pass from east to west spelt its doom. Whatever delusions were clung to by Krenz and his circle, The Times headline summed up the situation: ‘The Iron Curtain torn open: Berliners cross the Wall to freedom.’30 A photograph showed Berliners actually standing on top of the heavily graffitied structure. Such was the rate of copy and pictures coming through to Wapping on the evening the wall fell that the front page was changed eight times over the course of the night. In nearly thirty-five years at the paper, Tim Austin looked back on it as the most memorable night at The Times.31
A tide of humanity poured across the border, propelled by curiosity, better shopping, the exercise of a new liberty formally denied or to visit relations they had been separated from for years or generations. Over the first weekend, two million East Germans crossed the border. Holes were widened to accommodate the torrent. Rather than waiting for official sanction, Berliners took chisels to sections. The mayors of the divided city shook hands. Krenz announced free elections. A quarter of East Germans asked for visas. Anne McElvoy led The Times’s reporting from East Berlin and she was soon joined by Michael Binyon who arrived in West Berlin in time to witness the influx of ‘Oesties’ claiming their one hundred Deutschmark (£34) ‘welcome money’ to spend. Many milled about ‘unsure of where they were going’, Binyon observed. ‘They had no idea where the streets went, as East German maps print West Berlin simply as a huge white space.’ For some, freedom meant licence. ‘One of the most popular attractions were the famous sex shops, which were doing a roaring trade.’ A photograph of Leipzigerstrasse showed East Berlin deserted.32
Unlike Poland, where there was Solidarity, or in so many other revolutions, the crumbling of Communist power in the German Democratic Republic was the result of mass action but not of an organized opposition. Anne McElvoy was quick to point out the irrelevance of ‘New Forum’, the hastily cobbled together rainbow alliance. ‘An organization which is still debating by lunchtime whether or not to let the Press watch its debate will take at least a year before it knows its own mind on anything else,’ she wrote, warning that ‘the call for free elections, however, is only meaningful if there are parties worthy to fight them’.33 It was not exactly clear what East Germans wanted. Were they discontented with the politicians and their policies or did they actually want to replace the whole system of government? Within days the first banners demanding reunification were appearing at rallies in Leipzig, one of the centres for those agitating for reform. How strong the pressure for reunification was could not be easily gauged. Initial opinion polls suggested it was not strong and on 13 November The Times reported that ‘Herr Krenz, in his conversation with Herr Kohl, appears to have dismissed any talk of reunification’.34
Initially, West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl gave the public impression that reunification could be years away from realization. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher worried that a hasty endorsement of a united Germany would undermine Gorbachev and thereby hand back the Soviet Union to the rule of the hardliners. There were still 360,000 Soviet troops on East German soil and the other possible option for reuniting Germany – that it would leave NATO and become neutral – was also uncongenial to the Prime Mi
nister’s way of thinking. As East Germany went to the polls for its first free elections in March 1990, Thatcher held a private summit to discuss the German question with a team of historians that included Lord Dacre and Norman Stone. Most of the conclusions were positive although the subsequent leaking of a memorandum drawn up listing supposed Germanic character traits made the Prime Minister appear to be trapped in a 1940s mindset. The East German elections, however, produced sensational results: with a turnout of over 90 per cent, the pro-unification Christian Democratled ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 per cent and the former Communists were reduced to 16 per cent. From this moment, there was no diverting the emotional tide for one Germany. In June, the Deutschmark became legal tender in the east. On 2 October, Germany was reunified. Anne McElvoy conveyed the scenes in Berlin as its two halves counted down the hours to becoming one again. ‘Music rang out on every street corner and fireworks lit up the sky over the Brandenburg gate,’ she reported. ‘Older Germans burst into tears as midnight approached. “This is the end of a long punishment for my country,” said an old man.’ The East German Volkskammer convened for its last session. The British, American and French flags were lowered, as the occupying powers ceded their authority to the new free state. The former Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, penned a column on the Op-Ed page, appealing to his British friends to prevent a new German financial superpower by endorsing a new European central bank and single currency. ‘Germany is reborn today, and Europe should rejoice,’ proclaimed the leading article written by Daniel Johnson, before proceeding to call for a wider European Community that should incorporate Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.35 Enlargement of the EC became the Euro-sceptics’ solution to what was assumed would be a more powerful Germany just as the Euro-federalists believed the answer came in replacing the Deutschmark with the euro. In the event, both would follow.
The new Germany was, for the first time since the rise of Hitler, surrounded on all sides by democracies. A ‘Velvet Revolution’ had swept away Communist rule in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. Alexander Dubcek, hero of the Prague Spring, had addressed his first rally since the fateful days of 1968. On 10 December, the country’s first non-Communist government took office and two days before Christmas the playwright and victim of totalitarianism, Vaclav Havel, was declared the new President. Yet, while Prague celebrated the bloodless means through which it could re-engage with the rest of Europe, events were taking a very different turn in Romania. On 17 December 1989, there were massacres in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara, close to the country’s border with Yugoslavia. The Times was faced with a problem. Romania was clearly the lead story but with no reporter inside the country it had to rely on what Dessa Trevisan on the Yugoslav border and Ernest Beck on the Hungarian border were able to glean from a mixture of often second-hand accounts and rumour, together with what was being reported by Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency. The Romanian state media was making no mention of any atrocities, focusing instead on the state visit to Iran of President Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s ‘Conductor’. Of the available sources of information, Tanjug was the most reliable. Yugoslavia alone had a consulate in Timisoara. From there, unconfirmed reports were streaming in of a second Tiananmen Square massacre. Tanjug was reporting two thousand civilian deaths and the demolition of the city centre. The trouble had started when demonstrators had tried to block the eviction of a popular pastor, Laszlo Tokes, who had criticized Ceausescu’s persecution of the local Hungarian minority.
Romania was a country where even ownership of a typewriter was forbidden without a state licence. The Times was cautions about predicting Ceausescu’s demise, a leading article entitled ‘Balkan Caligula’ pointing out that whereas Gorbachev’s support for reform and refusal to enact the Brezhnev Doctrine had undermined the will of the rest of Eastern Europe’s regimes to cling to power at all costs, Ceausescu had isolated his country from Moscow’s political influence. Furthermore, ‘Romania lacks an obvious institution such as the Catholic Church in Poland around which popular discontent will clearly mobilize.’36 Pessimism was understandable. Until July 1988, the United States had rewarded Romania with most favoured trading status. The country had paid off most of its debts to the West and the IMF and had embarked upon reducing trade dependence as well. Romania was in the unusual situation of being a creditor with net assets while its citizens lived in penury. Western leverage on Bucharest was thus all but nonexistent. On the Op-Ed pages, Mark Almond, the Oxford don and Romania specialist, warned that the lamb-like collapse of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe was likely to make Ceausescu even more inclined to tough it out. He would draw the parallel instead from the repressive successes of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Indeed, ‘the visit to Peking by President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, will probably have persuaded Ceausescu that the US talks human rights but does business regardless. Gorbachev has now sent an envoy to Peking to pay his respects.’ Almond thought it possible that, ‘given Gorbachev’s growing domestic unpopularity and fundamental failure to reform the Soviet economy, the Ceausescus may still rule in Romania when perestroika is as fond a memory as the Prague Spring’.37
The hypothesis was perfectly plausible. However, Almond had overestimated both the intelligence and the tenacity of The Conductor. With news of the massacres at Timisoara spreading, Ceausescu returned to Bucharest from Tehran and called for a mass pro-government rally that he would address from the balcony of the presidential palace. With the hubris of a regime used to stage-managing emotion, the decision was taken to broadcast the performance live. It was a disastrous miscalculation. With the cameras rolling, the crowd did the unthinkable – Ceausescu was heckled mid-oration. Visibly losing control, he faltered and stepped back from the balcony. At this very moment, the live broadcast was cut.
As the television coverage came to its abrupt and alarming halt, The Times’s reporters were moving across the border. Peter Law arrived in Timisoara where the bodies of more than four thousand victims were being uncovered in a ditch. Michael Hornsby made straight for Bucharest. It seemed the Securitate had shot dead the Defence Minister ‘because he had tried to keep soldiers in their barracks’. Fighting was breaking out all over the city between insurgents and army units loyal to a regime whose leader had just been dramatically helicoptered off the roof of The Central Committee building to an unknown fate. The Securitate were using underground passageways to make a bloody stand in The Conductor’s absence. Back in Wapping, the dramatic, if conflicting, reports were contributing towards an equally dramatic front page. ‘Bloodbath in Bucharest’ ran the headline beside a photograph of cheering Romanian troops joining the revolt. It was an image that would not have looked out of place in a 1945 edition of Picture Post. A second photograph caught Ceausescu’s helicopter lifting off from the roof of the Central Committee building.38
On Christmas Day news spread that both Ceausescu and his hated wife Elena had been caught, tried for two hours and shot. Michael Hornsby travelled round a Bucharest that was increasingly under the control of the makeshift anti-Ceausescu alliance, the National Salvation Front. While some signs of normality had returned, there were also lynchings of Securitate members, Hornsby witnessing one of them being shot through the head with his own revolver. ‘Others were dragged from cars and beaten to death.’39
Whatever the scenes of summary justice in Bucharest, Christmas 1989 was celebrated across Europe with an unusual degree of hope, expectation and, for some, a measure of unease. The process would take another giant stride forward a mere five weeks into the new year when the Soviet Central Committee voted to end the USSR as a one-party state. For all its overuse, it was hard to avoid the metaphor of the toppling dominoes, as first Poland shrugged off Communist rule, then Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the last days of the year it looked as if Romania, too, was poised to follow suit, albeit after blood on the streets. In fact, while it freed itself from the shadow of Ceausescu, it would shy away from electing a non-Communist go
vernment until November 1996. It had been a momentous last six months of 1989 nonetheless. When, back in July, Paris had celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution, world leaders had gathered there only six weeks after reform in China had been crushed at Tiananmen Square and half of Europe was still under Communist rule. Reflecting on the ‘Year of Revolution’, The Times observed, ‘For Europe, at least, the year of France’s revolutionary bicentennial has lived up to the nobler part of its inheritance.’40
It was an end to old certainties. The American academic Francis Fukuyama rushed to provide the first of a series of explanations. His suggestion that the world had reached the ‘end of history’ naturally attracted considerable attention. According to Fukuyama, the future might contain all manner of trouble and strife, but it would not be an ideological battle of wills because the world had arrived at a point where it was merely divided between those countries that had embraced liberalism, those that were in the course of doing so and those for which the day could not long be postponed. Only a few small states with crank rulers still failed to acknowledge that liberal values were not, at least in principle, a good thing. This theory would soon be put to a sterner test by the re-emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, leading other theorists to warn that the world was, in fact, in thrall to a ‘clash of civilisations’. This, however, was for the future. Among those in The Times who rejected the Fukuyama theory when it was first expounded in 1989 was the Oxford philosopher John Gray who thought not that history had ended but rather that it would rediscover its old rhythms:
The aftermath of totalitarianism will not be a global tranquilization of the sort imagined by American triumphalist theorists of liberal democracy. Instead, the end of totalitarianism in most of the world is likely to see the resumption of history on decidedly traditional lines: not the history invented in the hallucinatory perspectives of Marxism and American liberalism, but the history of authoritarian regimes, great-power rivalries, secret diplomacy, irredentist claims and ethnic and religious conflicts. It is to this world, harsh but familiar, that we are now returning, and for whose trials we should be preparing.41
The History of the Times Page 49
