Revolution 1989 (57 page)

 

It was the biggest street party in the world, but not for everybody. Most of the Party chieftains were holed up in their Wandlitz compound and in bed by midnight. Schabowski’s Russian-born wife, Irina, noticed that there was barely a light on in any of the thirty or so houses. She would have liked to have talked with her husband about how he had triggered the fall of the Wall by a chance remark, but he was one of the few top Party men in the city. The others were asleep. Her elderly mother woke at one point and asked her what all the fuss was about on the television.

For four decades the Soviet Union had regarded Berlin as the most prized possession in its empire. It had cost the most blood to win, in the Second World War, and it stood as a supposedly solid symbol of Soviet power. It was thought central to the Soviets’ strategic interests. Nothing of importance was supposed to happen in East Berlin without the Soviet Union knowing about it beforehand - and approving it. Yet Berlin was not uppermost in the minds of any of the top leaders in Moscow on the day East Germany slipped peacefully out of the Soviet orbit. Mikhail Gorbachev did not know the Berlin Wall had fallen until he woke up the next day. Amazingly, no one in the Kremlin had thought to tell him earlier. The KGB had one of its biggest stations in Berlin, but nobody there warned Moscow Central that by the end of the day Moscow would lose control of Berlin. In the afternoon, the most senior Soviet Communists met in the walnut-panelled room for a routine session of the Party leadership. East Germany was not even discussed. They talked about possible changes to the Soviet constitution, moves towards separatism in Lithuania and a series of minor items that were soon to be debated at the Congress of People’s Deputies. But Moscow had not anticipated a crisis in Berlin. Rather, East Germany was always in crisis these days; they had not anticipated an imminent threat, within hours, to the existence of the state.

Krenz’s aides told the Soviet Ambassador, Vyacheslav Kochemasov, about the plan to let East Germans head to the FRG directly, rather than go through Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The Ambassador told the Soviet Foreign Ministry, which had no objections. But the Embassy knew nothing about the plan to let East Germans go back and forth across the Wall. That was so sensitive, Kochemasov thought, that the Soviet government was bound to be aware that it had been proposed. It affected the four-power status of Berlin, under which, in theory at least, Berlin was still divided between the Soviet Union and the three Western Allies. Kochemasov assumed that the issue had been discussed by Krenz and Gorbachev when they had met the previous week, without the Embassy knowing about it, or between the two leaders on the direct phone link between Berlin Party headquarters and the Kremlin. Nevertheless, he wanted to check.

After the Schabowski press conference he tried to call both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze to discuss Berlin. But he was told that both were too busy to talk to him. So he simply watched events unfold on the television. According to the Deputy Ambassador, Igor Maksimichev, at about 5 a.m. Berlin time (7 a.m. in Moscow) the Embassy received a call from a panicky-sounding official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow. ‘What is happening there at the Wall?’ The Embassy political officer said they assumed Moscow knew all about it. ‘But has all this been agreed with us?’ the man from the Ministry asked. Apparently, in that day of errors and accidents in Berlin, nobody had kept the Soviets informed. Shortly after 6.15 a.m. Ambassador Kochemasov was called by a senior official from the East German Foreign Ministry. ‘Last night’s decision was forced upon us,’ the Ambassador was told. ‘Any delays could have had seriously dangerous consequences.’
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When Gorbachev was given the news the next morning he was surprisingly relaxed, say aides. Berlin was not at the forefront of his mind, but he had not expected the Wall to tumble down, certainly not in the dramatic way it did. He told Krenz, ‘You made the right decision because how could you shoot Germans who walk across the border to meet other Germans . . . the policy had to change.’ Later in the morning he grew more concerned, though. He did not want to see a united Germany. He thought his own people would not accept it and would put him under great pressure to halt it. He had often said a reunited Germany was unlikely for several decades, if at all. He had told Willy Brandt, the former West German Chancellor, and Mayor of Berlin for much of the 1950s, so in a private conversation just a few weeks earlier. He had said something similar in a speech the previous month. Now it looked like a distinct possibility, soon. Mid-morning, he sent a note to Helmut Kohl warning him ‘not to destabilise the situation in Germany’. And he sent another anxious and top-secret message to Bush, Thatcher and Mitterrand: ‘If statements are made in the F RG . . . that seek to generate emotional denials of the postwar realities, meaning the existence of two German states, the appearance of such political extremism cannot be viewed as anything other than attempts to destabilise . . . the GDR and subvert the ongoing process of democratisation . . . not only in Central Europe but also in other parts of the world.’ Two of the recipients agreed with him - Margaret Thatcher and the French President. But Gorbachev’s advisers, even that morning, were telling him that if the Germans wanted reunification, there was very little, short of war, that the Soviets could do to reverse the process.
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President Bush’s reaction the previous day to the astonishing drama in Berlin amazed many Americans. Never renowned as an orator or a phrase-maker, he gave a lacklustre performance even by his prosaic standards. Over the years, his predecessors had found noble and uplifting words hoping for this great, world-transforming event. Now that it had happened, Bush, the leader of the Free World, could say nothing to inspire, or even to sound happy. Unusually, his press office hand picked a few reporters to come to the Oval Office to interview him. His spin doctors asked for much of it to stay off the record. He mumbled and bumbled his way through a farcical half-hour. A reporter asked if this meant the end of the Iron Curtain. The President said, semi-coherently: ‘Well, I don’t think any single event is the end of what you might call the Iron Curtain, but clearly this is a long way from the harshest Iron Curtain days - a long way from that.’ Had he ever imagined such a development? ‘I didn’t foresee it, but imagining it? Yes.’ Told that he did not sound very elated, Bush said: ‘I’m not an emotional kind of guy . . . I’m very pleased. And I’ve been pleased by a lot of other developments . . . And so the fact that I’m not bubbling over - maybe because it’s getting along towards evening, because I feel very good about it.’ Bush knew he had flunked the opportunity. But he explained later that his first priority was not to overreact or sound triumphalist, for fear of provoking a reaction from the Soviet Union. ‘The stupidest thing that any President could have done then would have been to go over there, dance on the Wall, and stick his fingers in the eye of the Soviets. Who knows how they would have reacted?’
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Bush confessed privately to his advisers that it was only when he was watching the Wall fall on TV that he realised the Soviets genuinely intended to relinquish their empire. ‘If . . . [they] are going to let the Communists fall in East Germany, they’ve got to be really serious.’ Throughout the evening NSC staff - including Condi Rice - were in constant touch with the CIA to find out the latest news from Berlin. The Agency could not provide any, admitted its senior analyst on the Soviet bloc, Milt Bearden: ‘The harsh fact is that we didn’t have any spies in place who could give us much insight . . . into plans in East Germany, or, for that matter, in the Kremlin,’ he said. ‘It [was] CNN rather than the CIA that would keep Washington informed of the events in Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the first shot in an unspoken competition between the CIA and CNN that would continue throughout the closing years of the Cold War. The CIA had no human intelligence on events . . . none of our assets in the capitals of Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union, were in a position to tell us what was going on.’
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Helmut Kohl was in Warsaw when the Berlin Wall fell. Earlier in the day he had talks with the new Polish Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki and, separately, with Lech Wałesa. The Chancellor got on well with Wałesa, though they had a mild disagreement as they were discussing East Germany. Wałesa said, ‘You know, the Wall will come down soon. I don’t know when, but I really think very soon, maybe weeks.’ Kohl laughed one of his big belly-laughs and replied, ‘No, really, I don’t think so. You’re young and don’t understand some things. There are long historical processes going on and this will take many years.’ That evening Kohl cut short his visit - ‘I’m at the wrong party,’ he quipped - and went via Bonn to West Berlin, where the celebrations had only just begun.
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FORTY-SIX

Sofia, Friday 10 November 1989

 

IT HAPPENED ON THE MORNING of the night before. While the rest of the world’s eyes were on Berlin, the news emerged that the Bulgarian dictator for three decades had been removed in a neatly planned
coup d’état
. It was not people’s power on the streets that brought down Todor Zhivkov, as in Berlin. He did not negotiate his power away, as the Communists had done in Poland and Hungary. He lost his throne in a palace revolution led by a small clique of his most senior henchmen. It was said of Zhivkov, by one of his former toadies who joined the plot against him, that he had the ‘instinct for danger of a wild boar’. But the decaying despot in Sofia did not take the conspiracy against himself seriously, or he would have tried to avert it. In the end he went meekly, fearing for his skin. Fittingly, the crumbling old Communist institution in Sofia was toppled about two hours before the Wall in Berlin fell. Both were far weaker than they appeared.

Pressure from outside the top rung of the regime played a part in Zhivkov’s downfall, but no more than a supporting role. The rulers were divided about how to deal with opposition groups, which had grown in strength, though they were still a minor irritant to Zhivkov, not a revolutionary force against him. Civil rights campaigners seized a chance for maximum publicity when a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) summit on the environment was scheduled to be held in Sofia for two weeks, starting on 16 October. ‘We saw that as a great opportunity to get more widely known,’ said Krassen Stanchev, one of the founders of Ecoglasnost. ‘There would be foreign politicians, civil servants and journalists here and the police and security services couldn’t keep us away from these delegates. We were still campaigning on environmental issues, like the hydroelectric dam project and Rila Monastery. But these were a pretext, our activities were really anti-regime in general and everyone knew it.’
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For the first time Ecoglasnost was given permission to mount press conferences with Western and domestic journalists. It was allowed to hold public meetings, though they were sparsely attended. They organised demonstrations against the appalling pollution levels in the Black Sea and held screenings of the film
Breath
. In a popular spot in the centre of the city, the Crystal Garden, they were allowed to set up a table where they could collect signatures for an environmental petition. For twelve days they were watched carefully by the security services but were left alone. Then, on Thursday 26 October, Zhivkov lost patience. Durzhavna Sigurnost officers told the Ecoglasnost activists and their supporters to move from downtown Sofia to a remote spot in the suburbs. They refused. Shortly after midday uniformed militia and DS thugs savagely broke up the demonstration, beating up and arresting forty people in full view of American and French diplomats, conference delegates and foreign journalists. They then rounded up and assaulted around three dozen other opposition activists, drove them out to the countryside and left them to walk back to Sofia. One woman was severely wounded in the stomach. Most of them were charged with minor offences, but one, Lyubimor Sobadijev, faced prosecution for espionage, which carried a possible death sentence. This level of state violence had not been seen in Sofia for decades and shocked citizens who were used to submission and apathy, but not to bloodshed on their city streets.

The reaction from the foreign dignitaries at the conference was predictable and swift. Every government represented at the CSCE - including the Soviet Union - protested. Delegates threatened to walk out of the conference. Zhivkov had not bargained for an international outcry that threatened to isolate Bulgaria. The Environment Minister, Nikolai Dyulgerov, was forced to make a grovelling public apology the next day when he admitted that the security forces ‘had overstepped the mark’. The damage had been done, though. There were unprecedented murmurings within the rank and file of the Party that it was time for Zhivkov to go. At one research institute staffed entirely by Communists, Party members tabled a resolution urging him to resign - an impermissible offence just a few weeks ago. The security service did nothing, a sure sign of weakness from the man at the top.

 

The conspirators saw that this was the time to strike. The most active among them was the Finance Minister, Andrei Lukanov, a sharp, silver-haired fifty-one-year-old, fluent in seven languages and for years a favourite of Zhivkov, whom he used to flatter outrageously. Born in the USSR, he slithered upwards in the Sofia regime largely through sycophancy on an epic scale but also through his powerful contacts in the Kremlin. Lukanov was chief fixer in the plot, but it was decided that Zhivkov’s successor would be Petar Mladenov, a moderate technocrat aged fifty-three, popular in the Party, who burnished an image as a reformer. He had been Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister for nearly twenty years, admired on the international circuit as a cool head, who could present a plausible face to the outside world. Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov had seemed a mere cipher of Zhivkov, a pen-pusher whose abilities were average but whose ambitions were not. The key player, though, was the Defence Minister for the last twenty-eight years, Dobri Dzhurov, whose role was to ensure that Zhivkov was in no position to fight back. A long-time crony and drinking companion of Zhivkov, the gruff, uncouth seventy-three-year-old was one of the few men the dictator felt he could trust. All the plotters thought the only way of saving their own positions was to remove Zhivkov, as the Hungarian Communists had ousted Kádár, and the East Germans Honecker. But they had another, personal reason. They were convinced that the dictator was planning to appoint as his successor his son Vladimir, aged forty, whom he had been fast promoting up the Party hierarchy over the last few years. Zhivkov had groomed his bright and interesting daughter Ludmilla for high office, but she had unexpectedly died in mysterious circumstances aged thirty-nine in 1981 and since then all his hopes rested on Vladimir, who, as Atanasov said, ‘we all regarded as half-witted’. Jealousy and ambition motivated the plot.
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