Revolution 1989 (21 page)

 

Four days after his accession, Gorbachev presided over his predecessor’s traditionally lavish funeral in Red Square and hosted a magnificent banquet in the vast, marble St George’s Hall in the Kremlin. That was the first glimpse most world leaders had of the new Soviet Tsar. He met some of the more important dignitaries in private, including a session of about an hour and a half with the American Vice President, George Bush, and Secretary of State George Shultz. Often, people who met Gorbachev came away thinking about him whatever they wanted to believe. This was a valuable gift for a politician to possess. A fine example was the contrasting cables President Reagan read the next morning from his emissaries at the Moscow funeral. Shultz was enthusiastic and gushing with hope about the new man in the Kremlin: ‘In Gorbachev we have an entirely different kind of leader in the Soviet Union,’ he wrote. ‘Gorbachev was quick, fresh, engaging and wide-ranging. I came away genuinely impressed with his quality of thought, the intensity and the intellectual energy of this new man on the scene.’ Bush was more cautious. He described Gorbachev as ‘an impressive ideas salesman’ but doubted whether there would be any significant changes in the Soviet Union:

In the days following his succession, Gorbachev had spoken on the phone to each of the Communist leaders in Eastern Europe. They had all rung Moscow to pledge fealty, as to an overlord. Now, immediately after the funeral, he met them in a group and told them he wanted ‘relations on an equal footing with them . . . [with] more respect for their independence and sovereignty. I told them they should take more responsibility for the situation in their own countries.’ Gorbachev declared that he ‘had the feeling that they were not taking it altogether seriously’. He should not have been surprised. As General Jaruzelski said: ‘Brezhnev used to use very similar words. It didn’t mean very much at the time.’
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TWELVE

East Berlin, April 1985

 

EVERY TUESDAY AFTERNOON at three o’clock the two most powerful men in East Germany met in an ornate office on the second floor of the Communist Party headquarters in Werderscher Markt, central Berlin. Party boss, Erich Honecker, and his secret police chief, Erich Mielke, talked usually for about an hour and a half in private. There was always just one subject on the agenda: the security of the state, interpreted by these two ageing Bolsheviks as the security of the Party, officially called the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the SED).

In the spring of 1985 Honecker approved an ambitious, if Orwellian, plan to start collating computerised files and reports on every citizen in the country - around sixteen and a half million people. The dour Honecker, now seventy-three, had by then already been the supreme leader in East Germany for fourteen years. He was highly enthusiastic about a computerised snooping system. It chimed with his view of East Germany as a go-ahead country, progressive, on the cutting edge of modernity. Mielke, seventy-seven, a squat, bull-necked man seldom without a sneer on his face, was more sceptical. He did not altogether like the idea, conceived by young and keen juniors at the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, the Stasi, which he had run almost as a personal fiefdom for more than a quarter of a century. Mielke believed in card indexes and paper files. He said they were preferable to computers, not least when there was a power cut - an important consideration under ‘actually existing socialism’, which was the politically correct way East Germans described the condition of their state.

Under Mielke the Stasi held a staggering number of files. The sheer volume was barely conceivable. By the late 1980s they took up 125 miles of shelf space, each mile containing seventeen million sheets of paper weighing fifty tons. Every country in the Soviet empire had a secret police force closely linked in a symbiotic partnership with the KGB. None was as thorough or had as high a reputation for well-oiled efficiency as the Stasi. Most East Germans called it by its euphemism, The Firm. ‘Even when it wasn’t watching you or listening to you, we thought it might be,’ recalls Dr Matthias Mueller, who grew up in East Berlin in the 1970s. ‘We imagined it knew everything. That was its mystique, its power and its reach.’
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It did not know everything. But it knew a lot. The Stasi was one of the single biggest employers in a country where there was no official unemployment and the staffing levels of some enterprises were enormous. In the middle of 1975 the Stasi had 59,478 full-time paid staff. A decade later there were 105,000, not counting the part- time informers of various levels of activity. There were about 15,000 full-timers in the hideous Normannenstrasse headquarters, a group of several heavily fortified buildings in the Lichtenberg district of East Berlin. More than half a million ‘active informers’ were recruited by the Stasi over the years. At the height of the Third Reich it is estimated that there was a Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens. In the mid-1980s there was a Stasi officer or regular informer for every sixty-three. The opening-up of East Germany to the West from the 1970s was welcomed by Honecker and his henchmen. Ending the GDR’s isolation was considered a triumph for the supreme leader’s diplomacy. It reduced Honecker’s paranoia on the international stage, the sense that the world did not regard East Germany as a legitimate country. But in many ways it meant that internal surveillance was perceived by the Party as even more important.

When citizens retreated into their private lives the Stasi pursued them. Those who for whatever reason became the agency’s targets were never alone. The Stasi corrupted their relationships and undermined trust within families. A top-secret directive from the highest levels close to Erich Mielke made clear in stark terms what was expected. Agents, it decreed, ‘should seek the disintegration of opponents by means of systematically discrediting reputations . . . the systematic organisation of professional and social failure to undermine self-confidence . . . the creation of doubts . . . sowing mistrust and mutual suspicion . . . determined exploitation of personal weaknesses’.

Officers performed tasks that ranged from the banal to the utterly chilling. They seemed to think of everything. Even the
smells
of individuals were collected. At every police station and Stasi interrogation room in the country the chairs had an extra adhesive layer of foam on the seat. These collected the odours of everyone brought in for questioning. They were preserved in jars and used to assist tracker dogs in pursuit of their quarry. A mere handful of people were captured this way. But nothing was too much effort for state security, which was given four billion Marks a year to spend - not much below 5 per cent of the country’s budget.

Gone were the days, by the 1980s, when people were locked up for long periods, physically tortured and left to rot in camps. But there was twenty-four-hour surveillance of thousands of people. Most of the information painstakingly recorded in every detail in the tonnage of the Stasi’s files was mind-numbingly boring and irrelevant. The writer Lutz Rathenow, who was working on a guidebook of Berlin, was followed for months. His secret service minders rarely got anything more significant than this:

The Stasi produced 40,000 pages of reports on Wolf Biermann before he was exiled to West Germany. Most were entirely unhelpful in protecting the state from subversion; Biermann was a notorious womaniser, but he would never say anything of political significance at his home because he knew eavesdropping equipment was placed in every room. ‘W.B. had sexual relations with a woman. Afterwards he asked her if she was hungry . . . she replied that she would like a drink of cognac. She is Eva Hagen. Then it was quiet inside.’
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Ulrike Poppe was one of a very few political activists in the GDR. She belonged to a peace group and an environmental group that was looking at pollution levels in Berlin. Her husband Gerd was a highly regarded physicist. ‘We had a microphone in our apartment,’ Ms Poppe said. ‘It was not a small device - a big one connected to a cable that led to another apartment two floors below where the receiver must have been. There was a video camera installed in the building opposite us, which was trained on our window. Every private word we said, every dispute about who had to do the dishes, every argument with the children was listened to and noted down. Everyone who entered the house was videotaped.’
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They were harassed and targeted by The Firm. They lost their jobs. Stasi agents did their best to break up the Poppes’ marriage and turn their son Jonas against them. A Stasi report explained how they could achieve their objective:

Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant.
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The most unsettling was perhaps the case of Vera Lengsfeld. Her father had been a Stasi officer from its inception after the war. Throughout her youth she was a loyal and obedient nomenklatura child, but later she rebelled. She became a member of the Communist Party but was expelled in 1982 when she became a Christian convert. She joined a peace group linked to the Lutheran Church, which began to protest against nuclear missiles based in Europe - including the presence in the GDR of Soviet missiles. She was constantly watched, jailed for brief periods and was fired from her job as a teacher at a Berlin social research academy. Sixty Stasi officers were on permanent assignment to keep tabs on her and report on her every move. The busiest of them turned out to be her husband, the mathematician Knud Wollenberger, father of her two sons, who to all intents and purposes appeared to be a loving companion and a doting parent. He reported to his Stasi handler under the codename ‘Daniel’. He passed on every detail of her life, their intimate moments and pillow talk, her every headache, shopping trip, bad mood, emotional vulnerability and telephone call. Wollenberger met, courted and married her on orders from the Stasi. ‘The marriage was false from the start,’ she said. ‘Our home life, everything . . . was a lie.’ It was ‘unimaginable’ that a man could marry a woman just to spy on her and ‘still more incomprehensible that he could father children in the process’.
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When she found out ‘it was as if one had died for a moment and then returned to life . . . the surprising thing was that the reports were written as if about a stranger, not a wife . . . To him I was an enemy of the State and he had done everything, to fight me, the enemy.’ He said that he had been a loyal citizen of the GDR and when the Stasi asked him to help them, ‘I felt I couldn’t say no’. He said that when he went to work from home it was ‘like going through a mirror and being in a totally different world’.
^h
6

Many thousands of East Germans felt they could not refuse what the Stasi asked of them. Of course the fattest files were on writers, artists, journalists and people married to foreigners - including from Eastern bloc countries. But they were interested in performers of all kinds - sportsmen and -women who went abroad for international competitions, which were extremely important for the rulers’ prestige. Stasi officers seemed obsessively interested - probably because most of them were men - in the Miss GDR beauty contests. All the competitors were routinely spied on. The extent to which people were willing to denounce their neighbours is unnerving. There are many reports from informers with acquaintances whose daughters were seen wearing a cross on a chain around their necks, or whose sons cut their hair in a style that ‘seemed to be punk’. As time went on the regime began to be seriously worried by rebellious youth and, like the neighbouring Czechs, began mounting campaigns against rock music. Informers reported on contacts who they had observed, or suspected, had received mail from
Drüben
- ‘over there’ (meaning West Germany).

Mielke had been an intelligence agent for more than fifty years. A street thug who had fought for the Communists against the Nazis in the 1920s, the Soviets spirited him out of Germany to Moscow in 1931 after he had murdered two policemen and loudly boasted of the achievement one night in a Berlin bar. He became a full-time KGB officer. In the Spanish Civil War he earned medals not, as a former colleague said, ‘for fighting the fascists, but for killing Trotskyites and anarchists’. Immediately after the Russians liberated Berlin, he was sent to help establish a ‘sword and shield’ for the Party in East Germany. Mielke was convinced that he ran the most efficient spying organisation in the Communist world and he had set opinions about intelligence work. The most effective spies, he maintained, were simply those who had the most contact with the public. The Stasi cultivated tram conductors, cleaning women, doctors and nurses. Teachers, for example, were particularly good at identifying children whose families watched Western television - those people who Mielke said ‘emigrated to another country at eight o’clock in the evening’. It was permitted to watch Western broadcasts from the late 1970s. In fact the regime tolerated it as a form of nightly political amnesia. But nonetheless the Stasi wanted to know about these watching habits. Informers did not receive much payment - approximately 400 East Marks, around 10 per cent of the average wage. Most did not do it for the money, but from a desire for approval, the hope of better job prospects or a place for a relative’s son or daughter at a better university. As the Stasi became a state within the state, spies spied on other spies. And Mielke kept extensive files on all his fellow Communist oligarchs in the GDR - including his long-time colleague Erich Honecker, who the Stasi chief knew had plenty of secrets to conceal.
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