Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (148 page)

Historians will argue for many years whether the Reagan-Thatcher strategy of rearming and deploying advanced weapons in Europe, while offering the USSR a way out through verified disarmament, was effective in bringing about a fundamental change in Soviet foreign and defence policy, which ended the Cold War.
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The evidence of timing seems to suggest that the strategy helped to push Gorbachev in a direction he was already inclined to take, and in particular to win over doubting colleagues. In 1986–7 there were still real doubts about Gorbachev’s sincerity and the reality of the changes he was introducing. In the words of Henry Kissinger, ‘Afghanistan will be the test.’
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Gorbachev had told Reagan at Geneva that the first he had heard of the Soviet invasion was on the radio, indicating he had no responsibility for it, ‘and little enthusiasm,’ added Reagan.
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Hence the announcement of the withdrawal, and its completion on schedule, came as a welcome reassurance to Western leaders, and thereafter they – and particularly Reagan, his successor Bush and Mrs Thatcher – regarded Gorbachev as the man they wished to remain in charge of the USSR. This was of some importance to him, since from 1987 his own popularity at home, once considerable, began to fall steadily.
What Western leaders did not then know, however, was that a decision even more important than the withdrawal from Afghanistan had been taken in Moscow: a determination not to use the Red Army (as in 1953, 1956 and 1968) to prop up failing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Once this decision was taken, events moved swiftly, though the process that destroyed Stalin’s satellite empire is not entirely clear. Most of the East European regimes were slipping into the same kind of economic crisis that had engulfed Russia in the 1980s, and for the same reason: the cumulative failure of the collectivist system and the so-called ‘command economy’. The detonator was, in all probability, a malfunction in the capitalist world itself. The years of growth in the West which were distinguished by ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganomics’, and by the rapid development of world financial centres, led to breakneck rises in stocks and the inevitable
dégringolade.
This came first on 19 October 1987, when the Dow Jones index in New York fell 508 points, or 23 per cent, in one day. It was not, as some feared, a repeat of the ‘Black Thursday’ of 1929, but the prolegomenon to the end of a long period of economic expansion, and in due course it produced a recession in 1990–1. At the time it was a warning to many banks that their credit lines were over-extended. Banks which were heavy lenders to East European governments and their agencies were already concerned by their credit-worthiness, and after October 1987 no further cash was available east of the Oder-Neiser line; indeed pressure to repay capital and interest intensified. This in turn led to domestic measures by East European governments which reduced goods in the shops and raised their prices. Public anger grew, especially as the feeling spread that the ‘evil empire’ – the phrase was much relished by its subjects – was losing the will to govern by force.

Thus the year 1989, which the Left throughout the world had planned as a celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution – the beginning of modern radical politics, as it was argued – turned into something quite different: a Year of Revolutions indeed, but of revolutions against the established order of Marxism-Leninism. Not all of them succeeded. In March 1989 riots in Tibet against the Chinese occupation and its policy of genocide were put down with savage force. The next month, Chinese students in Peking used the occasion of the death and funeral (22 April) of the Communist leader Hu Yaobang, who had been popular with the masses but deposed by hardliners in 1987, to stage a major demonstration. By 27 April this had developed into an occupation by students of the vast Tiananmen Square in central Peking. Other mass demonstrations occurred in various Chinese cities,
including Shanghai. On 15 May, student demonstrators, to the shame and fury of the Chinese leadership, disrupted a visit by Gorbachev to Peking, designed to be the first Sino-Soviet summit for thirty years. On 30 May, a 30-foot fibre-and-glass replica of the Statue of Liberty was erected in the square. This seems to have goaded the authorities, who had been holding inconclusive discussions with student leaders about ‘reforms’, into action. Large forces of China’s Red Army, overwhelmingly drawn from peasant soldiers from remote regions, to whom city-dwellers were natural enemies and students ‘parasites’, were concentrated around Peking. On the night of 4 June, the regime attacked, using tanks and infantry in overwhelming numbers, clearing Tiananmen Square, and in the process killing 2,600 people and injuring over 10,000. Despite rumours of divisions in the leadership and army commanders, the unrest was put down everywhere with great severity, and thousands were jailed.

In Europe, however, it was a different story. The lead was taken by Hungary, which had earlier been in the van in introducing market factors into its crumbling ‘command economy’. Its much-hated leader, János Kádar, had been removed in May 1988 as Party General Secretary; now, on 8 May, he was dismissed as Party Chairman, and in due course the Hungarian Communist Party voted itself out of existence (10 October 1989), being replaced by a multi-party system. More important, however, was Hungary’s decision to dismantle the Iron Curtain itself, as this had a knock-on effect on other satellites. On 2 May Hungary began to roll up its border fence with Austria, opening the frontier to East-West traffic at will. Even more sensational was the decision to open its border to East Germany on 10 September.

The gathering force of anti-Marxist revolutionary fervour made this a move of critical significance. The Polish Communist Party had suffered a crushing defeat at the polls on 5 June, the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and on 12 September the first non-Communist government took over in Warsaw. The people of East Germany, who had been so brutally repressed by Soviet tanks in 1953, were unwilling to see their Slav and Hungarian neighbours liberate themselves while they remained chained to the gruesomely unpopular regime of Erich Honecker. Once the Hungarian frontier was opened, many of them poured across it, en route to West Germany. The Iron Curtain thus had a huge hole in it, and the effect was to destabilize the East German government, long regarded as one of the most Stalinist and secure. While some East Germans fled, others began to demonstrate. The same day the Hungarian
CP
dissolved itself, mass marches began throughout East
Germany, but especially in Berlin and Leipzig. Gorbachev, paying a long-arranged visit (7 October), was asked by an anxious Honecker to send in troops and tanks. He refused. He told the old Stalinist he must either enact reforms, quickly, or get out while he could. Publicly, Gorbachev said all the East European regimes were in danger unless they responded to what he called ‘the impulse’ of the times. Thus abandoned by his ally, Honecker resigned on 18 October, his colleagues having refused to authorize troops to open fire on the demonstrators. He was succeeded by ‘a brief and embarrassed phantom’ (to use Disraeli’s phrase) called Egon Krentz, who lasted exactly seven weeks. On 4 November a million marched in East Berlin. Five days later, at a historic press conference held by the East Berlin party boss, Gunter Schabowski, it was announced that frontier police would no longer try to prevent East Germans from leaving the country. A
Daily Telegraph
reporter asked the key question: ‘What about the Berlin Wall?’ and was told it was no longer an exit-barrier.
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That night the Berlin Wall, the ugly and despised testament to Communist oppression, where so many hundreds of German democrats had died trying to escape, was the scene of a wild orgy of rejoicing and destruction, as young Germans hacked at it with pickaxes. Television carried these historic scenes around the world and in other East European capitals, and, to use, ironically, a phrase of Marx’s, ‘the enflamed masses began to scream
ça ira, ça ira!’
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In Czechoslovakia, another satellite with a hardline Stalinist government, demonstrations began eight days later, on 17 November, and the following day in Bulgaria. There, the fall of the Stalinist government of Todor Zhivkov was followed, on 16 December, by the Bulgarian Communist Party renouncing its monopoly on political power and opening the way to a multi-party system. Meanwhile on 24 November, after almost continuous demonstrations in Prague, the entire Communist leadership resigned and a non-Communist government was formed under the writer Vaclav Havel, later elected President. In most cases, these momentous changes were brought about without much violence, or even peacefully. There was, happily, no lynch law, though the nature and number of the crimes committed by outgoing Communist leaders, which now came to light, were horrific. In East Germany, for instance, the secret police had been involved not only in international terrorism but in large-scale drug smuggling to the West, producing hard currency profits which had gone into Swiss bank accounts kept for the benefit of party leaders. Honecker saved his own skin by entering an army hospital in a military zone controlled by the Soviet forces, from whence he was spirited to Moscow early in 1991. Many other
satellite leaders, like Zhivkov, were arrested and in some cases brought to trial.

The one exception to the non-violent revolutionary pattern was Romania. The 24-year dictatorship of the party boss there, Nicolae Ceausescu, like that of his predecessor Gheorghiu-Dej, was exceptionally brutal and corrupt even by the standards of most Marxist regimes, his rule reinforced by a secret police organization known as the Securitate. Its members were recruited largely from state orphanages. Ceausescu, dreaming of a nation of 100 million Romanians, refused to allow the sale of contraceptives, banned abortions and penalized the unmarried and childless. In consequence there were large numbers of illegitimate or unwanted children. Suitable male orphans were taken into cadet battalions in their early teens and were trained, under Ceausescu’s supervision, to regard the regime as their parents and to serve it with fanatical loyalty. As adult members of the Securitate, they were given special privileges, and indeed were among the few Romanians who regularly got enough to eat. The Securitate was in some ways organized like Hitler’s ss, with its own tanks and aircraft, and had built a complex network of tunnels and strongpoints under Bucharest. Protected by this formidable force, Ceausescu engaged in large-scale exercises in social engineering, rather like the Shah’s in Iran, which involved the progressive destruction of over 8,000 traditional villages, and the herding of their inhabitants into big agricultural ‘towns .

Curiously enough, Ceausescu was not unpopular in the West; indeed he was praised for his unwillingness to follow all the twists and turns of Soviet foreign and defence policy, and for his ability to service and repay his debts and pay for Western goods on the nail – a policy made possible by starving the mass of the people of all but the barest necessities, leaving the rest for export.
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But Western support evaporated when the nature and scale of his rural destruction became known, as it did from 1988 onwards. Moreover, this policy brought the regime into direct conflict with its large Hungarian minority, and its troubles started in earnest when discontent burst into active revolt at the mainly Hungarian-speaking town of Timisoara. The Securitate hit back viciously, and it was later claimed that a mass grave had been discovered there filled by 4,630 bodies of their victims.
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Ceausescu believed himself secure from the tides of revolution toppling his Marxist colleagues elsewhere. At his last great party gathering, early in December, there were no less than sixty-seven standing ovations during his five-hour speech, and he felt safe enough to carry out a scheduled state visit to Iran. But news that
the Hungarian unrest was spreading, even into the capital, brought him scurrying back. On 21 December he addressed the crowd in front of his presidential palace. As a rule, Ceausescu’s oratory was listened to by the citizens of Bucharest in silence, with cheers and applause supplied by recordings piped from loudspeakers – all part of the political surrealism which characterized his gruesome regime. On this occasion, however, the crowd shouted and hurled abuse, and Ceausescu, accompanied by his furious wife Elena, equally hated, stumped back into the palace: an electrifying little scene, recorded on video. The following day he was forced to flee the palace by helicopter. What happened next is mysterious. His plans to hole up in a Securitate redoubt clearly misfired, and it may be that he was abandoned by close colleagues, who regarded his personal unpopularity as a threat to their own lives: his eventual successor, Ion Iliescu, was one of them. At all events, the Conducator, as he called himself, was captured, along with Elena; both were tried by a military court on Christmas Day, charged with ‘crimes against the people’, genocide and the murder of 60,000 men, women and children, convicted and immediately executed by firing squad. These events too were recorded on video. The fall of the Ceausescus had been made possible by a change of allegiance of the army, and its political masters, even though both had played a role in earlier Ceausescu-authorized killings. The Securitate, however, remained loyal to its master, even after he was dead, and fighting continued for a fortnight in tunnels and bunkers, as the army gradually established its control. Casualties were reported to be enormous but proved, on closer examination, to number a thousand or less.
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Listeners all over the world were moved to hear, on Christmas Day, the church bells of Bucharest ringing out, for the first time in forty-five years, to celebrate the death of ‘the Anti-Christ’, as he was called.

The aftermath, however, was less satisfactory for democracy. The changes in Romania, as in Bulgaria also, turned out to be more of persons than of regimes; in both countries the old Communist
nomenklatura
clung on to their police and military power, changed their titles and party names, got back control of broadcasting stations and newspapers, and staged ‘elections’, in the course of 1990, which kept them in power. In both countries there was unfinished business. Much the same could be said of Albania, most Stalinist of all the East European regimes, where trouble started in earnest early in 1991, and in Yugoslavia, where the unpopularity of the federal Communist regime was complicated by regional divisions. As we have already noted, the smouldering inter-racial tensions in this union of South Slavs had been deplored by its architect, Professor
Seton-Watson, as far back as the 1920s. The death of Marshal Tito in 1984 removed the one figure who commanded respect, or at any rate fear, and in the later 1980s and early 1990 the country sank slowly into bankruptcy and chaos. The heartland of Yugoslav Communism remained Serbia, which controlled 70 per cent of the federal army. But in 1990 both Slovenia and Croatia, the two most advanced states, voted non-Communist state governments into power, and by summer 1991 the stage was set either for civil war or for a break-up of the state.