Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Hotel Splendide bar was harshly lit, though electricity might abruptly cease, from power failure or something else . Party bosses and their tarts demanding rooms rented by the half-hour jostled with municipal dignitaries, political toadies, KGB minions. Far preferable was the newer Hotel Viru, dim, cosmopolitan, casual. Russians, many oriental, with close-cropped heads and thin mouths, drank and played cards with Poles, Germans, some nonchalant British and American and Swedish journalists, whores in short sparkling dresses and artificial furs.

Talk was careless, oblivious to secret listeners. I met railway supremos, metallurgists, arms touts, jobless army officers, South American uranium specialists, ferry captains, Finnish quarry surveyors, a Lithuanian oculist with a sister married ‘high up’ but now scared, senatorial pharmaceutical savants, Armenian mineralogists, Israeli novelists, Iranian royalist exiles superbly double-breasted, the usual nondescripts mysteriously subsidized, some political zealots murmuring about ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’.

More congenial were free-spending Swedes licensed, by notorious bribery, to prospect magnesium. Sinuous, soft-spoken drug purveyors intermingled with pimps, and vaguer figures, perhaps Former People, well dressed but with some dignity and humour, cadging from border-town black marketers and from youthful Soviet pilots with thick wallets, easily gulled by both sexes. The soundless advance of AIDS had scarcely reached the frontier.

A dry, acrid smell was inescapable, of cheap perfumes, skimpily soaped flesh, of ill-managed kitchens and drains, pushing me back to shore air crisp as chicory or to the grass and pools of Kadnorg Park. Here a man, chatty, with Schweizerdeutsch accent, offered to sell me lottery tickets, American cigarettes, dollars. Undeterred by refusal, as if peeling a vegetable, he handed me a list of names that ‘a gentleman of your distinction must know’. Saul Bellow, Dustin Hoffman, Salman Rushdie, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henry Jonas, Margarita Kovalevska, whom he appeared to have successfully swindled. Intrigued by my indifference, he drove me to Kopti Harbour on the peninsula, site of wartime camps, long sheds, sinister poles, death ditches, one of scores of such boils suppurating in Eastern Europe, another reminder of Meinnenberg where, united in viciousness, starved creatures, once lawyers, editors, teachers, frantically clawed rations from the dead or dying.

Roofs were torn from the sheds, the rail track was ruined, but the watchtower remained, stark, giant, dogs nosing at smashed acetylene lamps heaped around iron struts. I wondered what was my companion’s tale, what he was telling me.

‘Plenty of future,’ he said on return, but I doubted it.

Alone again, I stared at the town hall on which a night rider had daubed Whoever Fights Is Right, Neutrals Are Losers and felt momentary self-reproach. Lenin’s statue was overthrown within sight of the Central Police Barracks; fire damaged KGB offices in a small medieval Danish fortress; three commissars were found dead under a cliff, then a trade delegate was strangled in a wood.

Defiantly neutral, I repeated Gunars Salins’ verse:

The decade was ending, rapidly, almost headlong. Despite Soviet deadweight, open hostility was heard towards the USSR, also suspicion of the European Community and its billionaire multinationals, West Germany with its full treasury and far-reaching ambitions. Illegal newspapers were scanned in the streets, watched by impassive police. From many towns, small incidents, brawls, stone-throwing, horseplay, were reported as party rallies. Despite prohibition, old festivals were being revived, others invented, excuses to flaunt national costumes, traditional dances, ballads, hymns, satirical rhymes, insulting earlier oppressors, Danes, Swedes, Germans. Long forbidden, organ recitals resumed in a packed St Nicholas’s Cathedral, the sounds of Bach and Sibelius strong as spires and columns.

The State Radio admitted crisis in the Polish shipyards, the Solidarity leader, Walesa, achieving his demands for reform. With the Bear in stumbling retreat, Church rights were restored, Solidarity legalized, a supporter was elected premier. Everywhere, applause greeted the successful anti-Communist moves of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Hungary was extracting Kremlin permission for political parties. Prague Soviet officials were being pressurized by boos, boycotts, obscene jokes and found reserved seats and theatre boxes usurped by others, grinning insolently.

After forty years the Warsaw Pact was menaced by torchlight vigils, contested elections, leaked Central Committee disputes. The security fence along the Austrian–Hungarian border was rumoured cut; in Budapest and Belgrade, Red control tottered, government speeches sabotaged by wrecked microphones, soot-bombs, fireworks, swathes of empty seats. Public mirth demoralized a Russian minister, sent to Warsaw to strengthen the regime, at a meeting of Gratitude to Our Protector and Brother. Turning to thank the chairman for an occasion solemn, inspiring, nay, historical, he awoke the assembly by revealing a note with Missing Goods glued to his trousers.

Tallinn newspaper warnings slammed us in thick headlines but could not disguise the extraordinary. Gorbachev flying to Bonn and acknowledging the freedom of all European states to choose their rulers. Counter-attacking, the Stasi ordering barricades against the West, doubling the defences on the anti-Fascist barrier, the Wall, while street violence paralysed transport and electricity. Leipzig was in uproar, a general strike immobilized Czechoslovakia, accompanied by angry slogans from the French Revolution, its own bicentenary celebrations making topical the seizure of the Bastille, invasion of a palace, lynching of ministers. Agitation was fermented at news of the Chinese People’s Army shooting down young democrats in Tiananmen Square. The Lithuanian Reform Movement, Sajudis , despite militia bullets, was parading for democratic independence and distributing lists of the deported, tortured, shot. The Latvian Popular Front risked proclaiming imminent secession from Russia.

At the Hotel Splendide, Russian heavies, silent, glum, heard that the Estonian Civic Committee, created almost overnight, had reiterated over a secret radio that no nation could be guilty of reneging on what it had never agreed, that the 1939 Secret Protocol signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop was illegal, that Estonian independence had been guaranteed by Lenin himself. A general, shouting that God had spoken and given believers wings, jumped from a lofty window and survived, uninjured.

Soviet patrols still guarded key centres, tensely, fortified by assurances that Russian tanks would soon relieve them.

That autumn, with a crash that shook the world, the Berlin Wall was stormed, East German Party dictatorship punctured. In turbulent Bucharest, Ceausescu decreed martial law, but the army sided with the rioters. I almost expected a postcard from Alex, gleefully recounting the brute’s exclamation when his wife, pitiless Elena, was led to the firing squad, ‘But she’s a graduate!’

In Ragnarok, twilight of gods and monsters, the ancient writ had sounded:

The monolithic Soviet state, even to expert political forecasters, had appeared immovable. Now, as the Eastern Bloc collapsed, Moscow itself was shaky.

In Tallinn, counter-attack by the pro-Russian National Salvation Committee was suppressed, and, on Christmas Eve, Edgar Savisor, whatever his private convictions, broadcast to the nation, ‘We know that war will not free us from the Soviet Union. Nor can money buy deliverance. Only wisdom and shrewdness.’