The Red Flag: A History of Communism (98 page)

The Orange Alternative, whilst unusual in many ways, captured much of the character of East European dissent in the late 1980s, at least in the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (including the Western Ukraine). A new younger generation of dissidents was emerging, who were less interested in grand protests and demonstrations against the regime than in creating an alternative, counter-cultural ‘civil society’, free of the control of the state. The new style was ‘carnivalesque’, as Padraic Kenney has called it, rather than militantly confrontational, and owed much to the Situationists and Western youth culture of the 1960s. Indeed, the spirit of 1989 was a non-violent adaptation of the spirit of 1968. As the Wrocław display showed, their approach could not have been more different from the old Communist model of mass
mobilization. But the goals of many groups (in contrast with the Orange Alternative) were often very specific and ostensibly non-political – campaigning for environmental causes or peace, for example.
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This was perhaps to be expected after the suppression of the Solidarity movement. The regimes had lost even more prestige, but it was clear that open opposition would only be met by force, and outside Poland it was difficult for intellectuals to mobilize workers. A new, less confrontational style was therefore required.

Whilst social activism – and ridicule – played its part in the end of Communism, more important was Moscow and the signals it was sending to the East European Communist parties. Gorbachev had told the leaders in private as early as 1985 that they could not depend on the Red Army for help, though he expected them to remain in the Soviet bloc. Ever the optimist, he believed that more popular leaders would restore Communist legitimacy. But just as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956 had undermined the ‘little Stalins’ by encouraging reformers and splitting the parties, so
perestroika
in the USSR shook the foundations of the East European regimes. The supporters of liberal reform within the parties were strengthened, and in some cases leaders now realized they could no longer rely on repression but would have to expand the base of their social support. Opponents of the regimes also realized that they now had less to fear; when, in the winter of 1987–8, the Polish historian Wacław Felczak went to lecture in Budapest, his audience asked him what the lessons of Solidarity were for them. ‘Found a party,’ he replied. ‘They will probably lock you up for it, but all the signs suggest that you won’t be in jail for long.’
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Hungary was the first to respond to the signals from Moscow. Having subjected itself to multi-candidate elections where the old guard performed less well than expected, a younger, reformist group of Communist leaders, including the effectively Social Democratic Imre Pozsgay, succeeded in March 1988 in forcing the ageing János Kádár to retire. The party split; a democratic opposition now formed outside the party, and by February 1989 reformers within the regime had accepted multi-party elections. Moscow’s willingness to accept this fundamental change made it crystal-clear to all that the Soviet Union would no longer underwrite the old order in Eastern Europe.

In Poland, as in Hungary, the signals from Moscow were heeded from an early stage. General Jaruzelski, one of the leaders closest to
Gorbachev, began liberal reforms in September 1986, but in August 1988 worker unrest against austerity measures again shook Communist rule. By February 1989 the government, under pressure from Gorbachev, had accepted round-table discussions with the opposition, and elections were held in June 1989, in which Solidarity swept the board. In August 1989 Tadeuz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist head of a coalition government for over forty years.

The more hard-line regimes showed a greater determination to hold on, but soon they too were forced to heed the writing on the Wall – in East Germany. The beginning of the end was in May 1989, when the Hungarian authorities reduced controls for Hungarians at the Austrian border. East Germans then began to organize ‘holidays’ to Hungary to take advantage of the breach in the iron curtain, even though the border was supposed to be open for Hungarians only. On 19 August at the border town of Sopron, the Hungarian opposition, with the support of an odd duo – Imre Poszgay and Otto von Habsburg, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire – organized a ‘Pan-European picnic’ during which they planned to open a disused border crossing and allow the East Germans to cross. The Germans forced their way through the border, and three weeks later the Hungarians removed all restrictions. The GDR responded by closing its border with Hungary, and this renewed repression invigorated the opposition in East Germany. Demonstrations erupted throughout the GDR, and the party began to lose control. Honecker’s rigid regime was further dented when Gorbachev visited to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR. Welcomed by enthusiastic crowds, he distinctly failed to support its leader. ‘Life itself punishes those who delay’, he is reported to have declared.
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Shortly afterwards (in a palace coup on 17–18 October) Honecker was replaced by Egon Krenz.

Krenz soon realized he needed to make some concessions to retain control. Following a demonstration of half a million people in East Berlin on 4 November, he decided on a limited lifting of travel restrictions, but the order was garbled at the press conference, and confused guards simply opened the gate to the west of the city and allowed the crowds through.
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This was to prove to be one of the most momentous ‘misspeaks’ in history. That night some 50,000 Germans flooded out of the East and in to West Berlin, crying ‘we are one people’. This was a massive party as much as a revolution, the culmination of the ‘carnivalesque’, non-violent demonstrations and ‘picnics’ pursued by the East European
oppositions in the 1980s. The breaching of the Berlin Wall justifiably became the symbol of 1989. The opposition’s vision of revolution – non-violent, joyful, even hedonistic – seemed so much more attractive and modern than the Communists’ antiquated ideal of the mobilized worker, struggling against enemies. As the Wall crumbled, so did the East German Communist Party’s will to govern.

The house of cards continued to fold and events in East Germany inspired resistance to other hard-line regimes. Demonstrations in early November helped party reformers to force Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov from power, and precipitated a challenge to the party itself from a group of opposition forces. In Czechoslovakia the regime, under Husák’s conservative successor Miloš Jakeš, had been facing unrest and demonstrations since the previous year, but had resolutely set its face against reform; it even put the portrait of the old Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald on the new hundred-crown banknote, an enormously provocative act. However events in the GDR – the regime ideologically closest to the Czechoslovak – emboldened the opposition. The anniversary of the student opposition to the Nazi takeover in 1939 fell on 17 November, and demonstrations were normal. This time, though, the numbers were enormous, and the police panicked. Police brutality in turn sparked off mass strikes and demonstrations and forced the party to begin negotiations with the opposition.

Despite some violence (in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere) the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe were remarkably swift and peaceful. In part, this was because the new opposition movements embraced non-violence, but it also reflected the weaknesses of the regimes once the USSR changed its attitude towards repression. Communist parties were divided, to varying degrees, and there were normally reformists waiting in the wings, prepared to negotiate with the opposition. These were relatively peaceful, ‘velvet’ revolutions, as the Czechoslovak transition was described.

As might be expected, given their autonomy from the USSR and their repressiveness, the Romanian and Albanian regimes were the last to collapse. The extraordinarily harsh austerity imposed by the Romanian leader in the 1980s put Nicolae Ceauşescu under pressure; serious industrial unrest broke out in Braşov in 1987, and Ion Iliescu, a former Central Committee member sacked in 1984, levelled veiled criticism. But Romania could not insulate itself from the events in the
Soviet bloc proper. In December 1989 unrest amongst the Hungarian minority in Timişoara led to police repression, and this in turn promoted further unrest in Bucharest. Ceauşescu organized a demonstration in support of the regime and spoke from the Central Committee building balcony, hoping for a repeat of the adulation he had received in 1968. He had, however, catastrophically misjudged the mood of the truculent crowd: rather than cheering, people began to jeer the dictator in a shocking display of
lèse majesté
. The disorder was broadcast on TV, after which the army joined the opposition and the regime soon lost control. The Ceauşescus fled from Bucharest but were later captured and executed. Power was then seized by Iliescu, in charge of a new ‘National Salvation Front’.

Albania was the last of the East European dominoes to fall. Ramez Alia, Hoxha’s successor in 1985, had begun to make piecemeal liberal reforms, but by 1990 student demonstrations had forced him into holding multi-party elections, and although the Communists took the largest number of votes they were now part of a coalition government. The following year the coalition collapsed, and the Communists were voted out of power.

The year 1989 clearly ranks with the revolutionary years of 1848, 1917–19 and 1968, but how similar was it to those earlier upheavals? Some of the transitions from Communism were clearly more revolutionary than others. Throughout Europe, Gorbachev’s willingness to abandon the Soviet empire was crucial, but the different nature of the regimes led to wide divergences. In Hungary and Poland, well-established reformist traditions within the Communist parties led to peaceful, negotiated transitions, whilst in Czechoslovakia and the GDR more unified conservative leaderships only fell after short periods of mass popular mobilization. Events in Romania were the most violent and ‘revolutionary’, although the effects of the regime change – the victory of the semi-authoritarian apparatchik Iliescu – was one of the least radical. If we look at popular participation in the revolutions, we see a slightly different pattern. Poland and Czechoslovakia, both unified against past Soviet oppression, and to some extent Romania, were closer to the 1917 pattern, in that they involved all classes, including workers. In Hungary and the GDR, where Communists had bought off working-class discontent more effectively, the transitions were much more intelligentsia and white-collar affairs.
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Similar differences can be found in the end of Communist rule in the Soviet informal empire outside Europe. Gorbachev, once determined to compete with the United States outside Europe, increasingly saw his Third World allies as a liability. His advisers had indeed been losing faith in the possibility of Communism in the developing world for some time. They were convinced that Communist ambitions were just too radical, given the level of development of their societies. But with the Reagan revolution and the economic crises of the early 1980s, the USSR found itself in an even more difficult situation. There were now significant numbers of Marxist regimes, and they all demanded subsidies at a time when Soviet citizens were themselves suffering hardship. Moreover, as they came under mounting economic pressure, regimes split between moderate liberalizers and radicals, and – in contrast with the situation in Europe – radicals often had a good deal of support; their victories increased disillusionment in a Moscow that had lost faith in fundamental social transformation. In Grenada, Maurice Bishop, who had been seeking rapprochement with the United States, was toppled by the radical Bernard Coard (a former student at Sussex University and teacher for the left-wing Inner London Education Authority), precipitating the American invasion in 1983. Similarly in South Yemen, three years later, the reformist Soviet-trained Ali Nasir Muhammed was removed by the more doctrinaire Marxist ‘Abd al-Fattah Isma’il, in a bloody coup. Gorbachev would have agreed entirely with Honecker’s comment: ‘just like in Grenada, the events in Yemen show what left-wing childishness can lead to’.
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Equally unpopular in Moscow was Ethiopia’s Mengistu. The Ethiopian famine had damaged the reputation of Third World Marxism, especially amongst Eurocommunists, and Gorbachev had little love for the regime. In 1988 he told Mengistu that aid would be dependent on liberalization and the peaceful settlement of wars in Eritrea and Tigray, and soon afterwards the Ethiopian party split between reformers and hard-liners. The now ex-Marxist Eritrean and Tigray separatists joined together and advanced against the Mengistu regime. In 1990 Mengistu formally renounced Marxism-Leninism, and in 1991 was forced to flee the country for exile in Zimbabwe. On his departure the huge bronze statue of Lenin in Addis Ababa was unceremoniously destroyed.

Nevertheless, Gorbachev was reluctant to cut off aid to his allies, partly because he still believed in some of them, and partly because the
Americans were continuing to support anti-Marxist forces. In Afghanistan, the Soviets removed the hard-line Babrak Karmal, and replaced him with the more pragmatic Najibullah, who then tried to forge a broad alliance against the Islamists. The Soviets were desperate to withdraw their troops, but Reagan was implacable and refused to make a deal. As the war became increasingly unpopular in the USSR, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would leave in February 1989. Najibullah’s remained one of the most long-lasting Communist regimes, surviving until 1992. With his demise, the way was open for a succession of Islamist regimes, culminating in the victory of the radically puritan Taliban.

The civil war in Angola also continued until the fall of the USSR. The Cubans and South Africans withdrew in 1988, and the MPLA abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1990, but the Americans continued to fund Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA group. Only in 1992, once the MPLA had won elections, did the United States switch sides and support the former Marxists. The civil war, however, lasted until 2002, when Savimbi was killed.