Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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.