Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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 Churches, 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.