1989 (18 page)

In fact, Paterson’s inspired eccentricity was the prime motor in pulling together one of the most remarkably talented groups of journalists ever to work, drink and play together on Fleet Street. It included Bruce Anderson, Patrick Bishop, David Blundy, Walter Ellis, Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, Ronald Payne and Megan Tressider to name but a few. From a newspaper that up until then had read as almost an afterthought to the daily, a stolid but uninspired and pedestrian review of the week, the
Sunday Telegraph
became – for a brief few years – an anarchic mix of radical opinion, fired by Worsthorne’s erratic and often outrageous leaders, off-beat news stories, and lovingly-crafted, semi-literary, in-depth focus pieces. With far more limited resources it attempted to tackle the
market-leading
Sunday Times
head-on. From 1985 to 1988, it was one hell of a place to work: we worked hard, played hard and lunched hard, doing our best to maintain Fleet Street standards of alcohol-fuelled eccentricity even as we were forced to migrate from the fabled Street of Shame itself to the more sterile surroundings of the then still near empty docklands around Canary Wharf.

But at last I was able to write the sort of longer, more thoughtful stories about a Europe that was changing faster than many people in Britain noticed or cared to notice. For someone who had spent years watching Eastern Europe in particular, there were definite early signs of rust on the Iron Curtain. Martial law in Poland had come to an end in 1983 but there were still severe restrictions on political rights and although Solidarity was still not the force it had once been, there were fresh rustlings in the undergrowth. These were encouraged by the award to Lech Walesa, recently released from prison, of the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he sent his wife Danuta to collect it, fearing that if he left the country himself the government might not let him return.

In the other two Eastern bloc states that had tried and failed in the past to shake off the crypto-colonial dead hand of Moscow,
Czechoslovakia
and Hungary, eyes were still watchfully trained on events
in Poland. In Prague, Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel had just been released after a four-year spell of imprisonment, though he was still under surveillance and subject to harassment. In Hungary, the communist leader János Kádár had sought to soften the blows inflicted in 1956 by a relatively liberal attitude to economic reform and less active harassment of political dissidents who did not make a nuisance of themselves. He had replaced the old hardline slogan of ‘He who is not with us is against us’, with ‘He who is not against us is with us’. It was the kind of subtle difference – uncannily
familiar
to the Bush and Obama regimes in Washington – that has to be understood to get a grasp of what came to be known as ‘goulash communism’. In short, the Hungarian party allowed a degree of political discussion and economic activity (including a flourishing black market in agricultural products which meant far better
supplies
) as long as lip service was paid to communist supremacy and the country’s membership of the Warsaw Pact. The important thing was to play the game softly softly and make sure that Moscow either didn’t notice or didn’t care. It had worked for nearly two decades. Then along came Gorbachev. He did notice; in fact, he was rather impressed.

In Moscow itself, it was becoming clear that
perestroika
was not just another empty slogan: Gorbachev really did intend reform of the hidebound Soviet economy. There was a story told by a French diplomat that under Chernenko, when Gorbachev had been put in charge of the agricultural sector, he had arrived late for a state dinner with visiting French President François Mitterrand. When Chernenko asked what was wrong he said, ‘Nothing works
properly
’. ‘How long has this been going on?’ asked Chernenko, shocked by the revelation. ‘Since 1917,’ Gorbachev replied. Apocryphal or not, the anecdote was certainly prophetic.

Similarly if
glasnost
did not yet mean the total transparency it proclaimed, there was at least a reduction in the climate of paranoid secrecy. And a more human face on display to the world. Gorbachev had retired foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, the dour face of the Soviet Union abroad for nearly three decades and nicknamed Mr Nyet. He had suspended the deployment of SS-20 missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and preparations were apace for him
to meet Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik. Britain’s Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher had said he was a man she could ‘do business with’.

But the horizon was not without clouds. There were more
disconcerting
ripples of change running through Yugoslavia, the
self-appointed
leader of the ‘non-aligned’ movement that in the Soviet bloc was regarded by ordinary people as a soft semi-capitalist paradise and in the West as a cheap holiday destination ‘sort of’ behind the Iron Curtain. The ‘neither fish nor fowl’ state that was an amalgam of Balkan mini-nationalities with a history of bloody rivalry and vendetta, had been held together by two factors. One was the iron fist of Josip Tito, for whom communism was not so much an ideology as a means of clamping down on dissent which he believed would lead to a revival of old nationalisms and inevitable fragmentation. He was right.

After Tito had died in 1980, a ‘collective presidency’ had been established comprising representatives of each of the six
constituent
republics as well as from Serbia’s two ‘autonomous provinces’, Kosovo and Vojvodina, which had respectively large Albanian and Hungarian-speaking populations. At first it seemed to work well: in 1984, Sarajevo, the capital of the racially- and ethnically-mixed republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had hosted the Winter Olympics. But then for the moment the other crucial factor in holding
Yugoslavia
together was still in place: the pressure of the mutually hostile blocs that flanked it on either side. The Cold War had become a guarantor of the status quo. This theory implied that ending it could cause the pressure cooker to explode. But it was only a theory. Europe’s ideological divide was laid down in concrete: the physical concrete all too evident in the Berlin Wall. And no one was about to change that. It was as unimaginable as the idea that the beautiful old city that hosted the Winter Olympics would become a battlefield and its main thoroughfare earn the nickname Snipers’ Alley.

I persuaded Worsthorne to let me style myself Central Europe Correspondent, thereby not just inventing a job but revitalising a term – Central Europe – that had been current for centuries but dormant since the onset of the Cold War and the continent’s split down an ideological fault line. Central Europe prior to 1945 had been essentially everything north of the Alps from Germany’s Western
border to the Polish frontier with Russia, dipping down to include the Balkans. It was, in effect what had been the German and
Austro-Hungarian
empires. It would be nice to portray my new title as a prophetic glimpse of the new world order about to break through, and in truth there was just a hint of intuition if only that changing a name sometimes encourages people to look at things differently. The usual newspaper title of ‘Eastern European correspondent’ was, I felt, de facto collaboration with the existence of the Iron Curtain, which although it showed no likelihood of disappearing, was once again becoming just ever so slightly more permeable.

For three years I flitted across Europe, covering stories that were sometimes related to the Cold War, sometimes not. From time to time they overlapped in a way that made the reality of that
unnatural
divide stand out more clearly than ever. Rudolf Hess, the last prisoner in Spandau, whose demise I had so frequently anticipated when posted to Berlin, finally died, in dubious circumstances that suggested suicide or even foul play (he was found with an electrical extension cord twisted around his neck). I was gutted to miss the story, being on a family holiday in Spain at the time. As soon as I got back to the office I was expecting to be sent off to his funeral,
particularly
as there was widespread anticipation of neo-Nazi trouble. But his son Wolf-Rüdiger buried him secretly in a night-time ceremony in the little north Bavarian town of Wunsiedel where the old man’s parents were buried.

I could not resist the opportunity to go and see the grave – if only for closure on the longest ‘death watch’ I had ever undertaken, the next time I was in the area. As it turned out the chance presented itself quite soon with a protest by small farmers in Germany against new EU agricultural rules. Always keen to have a poke at ‘Europe’ (a little Britain enthusiasm I hardly shared) Worsthorne sent me to cover the story. As fate had it one of the groups of protesters, whose action involved lighting bonfires on high ground in their fields at night, were farmers near the Bavarian town of Marktredwitz, not far from Wunsiedel. The Hess grave was as unremarkable as I might have expected, but the visit to Marktredwitz gave me a new insight into the aftermath of the Second World War, of which the Cold War was in all but name an indirect and less bloody continuation.

Just down the hill from where the farmers lit their bonfire we could see the outline of an old medieval town. ‘That’s Eger,’ said one of them. ‘We used to farm a lot of land round there.’ ‘Used to?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he turned to me as if I was an idiot. That’s the Sudeten. They threw everybody out in 1945, millions of us. They call that town Cheb now, but it’s still Eger. Always will be.’ I kept quiet. I knew that the 1945 universal expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland they had always lived in had been cruel. But they might have reflected on that in 1938 before so enthusiastically rejoicing at being ‘reunited’ with the Reich they had never belonged to. Even so, I could see the wicked logic of the Iron Curtain when they pointed out that the main road north ran straight through ‘Eger’, not that it would have done them any good: when it returned to what was now German soil a few kilometres further on, it was East German soil. These people, these simple farmers with all their old gripes and prejudices had gone from living in the centre of the continent to living at the edge of the world.

It was inevitably – as things would turn out – Gorbachev who took me back to East Berlin, in May 1987, when he chaired a meeting of the Warsaw Pact leaders there, held in honour of the city’s 750th anniversary. It was an anniversary that the East decided belonged solely to them because nothing now in the West had been part of tiny thirteenth-century Berlin. The East Germans rounded up the usual crowds of impressed citizens to line the route, but for once they need not have bothered: large numbers turned out unprompted. East Berliners, glued to West German news on their televisions, were curious to see the man from the hated empire to the East in whom Westerners were all of a sudden placing such hopes. A few wondered if they dared entrust him with their own, though most decided that on balance they would not.

If several thousand East Berliners had genuinely turned out to watch the motorcades flash by, they were still outnumbered by the plainclothes Stasi goons who fronted the lines, pumping their fists into the air and shouting ‘Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!’, the traditional,
militarised
old Prussian version of ‘Hip, Hip, Hooray!’ The East German and Soviet leaders still greeted each other on arrival and departure with the old comrades’ kiss – just as they had done in Brezhnev’s day – even if those of us who considered Soviet kisses another branch of
Kremlinology couldn’t help but notice that Gorbachev puckered up as if kissing a lemon.

Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and delivered a challenge to the Soviet leader that would, more than two years later, seem like a prophetic demand: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Reagan’s speech has since been hailed as a decisive factor, if only because Gorbachev’s actions – or rather inaction – were key to the events of 1989. At the time, it just seemed Reagan was trying to compete with the ghost of John F. Kennedy. There were many in the White House who advised him to leave it out, rather than embarrass a relatively new Soviet leader with whom he was getting on remarkably well.

West German President Richard von Weizsäcker visited Moscow a month later and raised the ‘German Question’ more as a
traditional
tease than with any real hope of an encouraging answer.
Gorbachev’s
reply was slightly more encouraging than that of any of his predecessors, but only slightly. History would decide, he said, ‘what will happen in the next 100 years’. Back in Berlin Honecker was smiling: centuries were the sort of time frame he had in mind for the Wall he boasted as his own.

After all he had only just cemented his position, hadn’t he? In September Honecker made the first ever visit by an East German leader to West Germany. To many West Germans it was an
uncomfortably
alien sight to see the flag of the German Democratic
Republic
– which many still felt stood for a part of their country under alien occupation – flying over the Bonn chancellery: the way a
naturally
conservative Englishman might react to seeing a version of the Union Jack with a hammer and sickle on it flying over Westminster. (Or emblazoned with a swastika for an earlier generation.)

Honecker, who had been born in West Germany’s Saarland,
strutted
and preened on the Bonn stage like a diminutive monochrome peacock alongside the overlarge Humpty Dumpty figure of West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. For Kohl it was a chance to parade as a statesman, to show that he was ready to match Gorbachev’s
expressions of goodwill with a show of at least superficial cordiality towards the Kremlin’s puppet state on German soil. There was a bit of stage-managed humble pie for Honecker too. For several years the West German rock star Udo Lindenberg had been on a
blacklist
of performers not allowed to cross the Wall and perform in the East. In revenge he had penned a bestselling hit, a rock ballad to the tune of Chatanooga Choo Choo, which included the lines: ‘
Honi, ich weiss… bist du heimlich auch ein Rocker, du ziehst dir ganz heimlich auch gerne mal die Lederjacke an, schliesst dich ein auf das Kloh und hörst Westradio
.’(‘Honi, I know…/That you are secretly a rocker./At home on your own, you quietly put your leather jacket on,/ lock yourself in the loo and listen to West radio.’)