Down with Big Brother (43 page)

Now that he was back in power, the quality that Deng prized above all else was stability.

As
LONG AS
G
ORBACHEV WAS IN
B
EIJING
, the students were assured a measure of protection. Indeed, knowing that the government would hesitate to use violence against them while the world was watching, they had timed their protest to coincide with his visit. But the sense of security provided by the presence of thousands of foreign journalists and live television coverage of events in Tiananmen Square was illusory. It took the Chinese authorities less than thirty-six hours after Gorbachev’s departure to begin to reassert their control.

At 12:55 a.m., on Saturday, May 20, the loudspeakers in the square suddenly came to life with a hysterical tirade from Li Peng, the hard-line prime minister. Drowsy students emerged from their tents and buses to hear the man they considered their archenemy announce that martial law was being imposed on Beijing. His voice rising to a shriek, Li said that the leadership had decided to take “decisive and firm measures to put an end to the turmoil” and protect the socialist system in China. Troops had been authorized to use force to clear the square of hunger strikers and their supporters.

The speech was greeted by a deafening chorus of boos and chants of “Down with Li Peng,” “Long live democracy,” and “Victory belongs to us.” By the time the prime minister finished speaking, tens of thousands of demonstrators were defiantly singing the “Internationale” and flashing victory signs. They scrawled their response to martial law on a banner plastered across the Monument to People’s Heroes, just opposite the mausoleum housing Chairman Mao’s embalmed remains: “We Came Here on Our Feet; We Will Leave Only on Our Backs.”

The government followed up on its declaration of martial law by pulling the plug on live television coverage of the drama in Tiananmen Square. “Your task is over,” a Foreign Ministry official told CNN. “You came here to report on Gorbachev. Gorbachev is gone.” But when troops were sent to reoccupy the square, their path was blocked by makeshift barricades and human ramparts erected by tens of thousands of ordinary Beijing citizens.

Over the next few days the mood of the students switched repeatedly between fear, exhilaration, paranoia, exhaustion, elation, and back to fear again. Gangs of motorcyclists roared from one end of the city to the other to gather information on behalf of the hunger strikers. Many of the reports contradicted each other. The army was advancing. No, it was retreating.
The reformers were winning, and Li Peng was about to resign. No, it was the hard-liners who were winning, and Zhao Ziyang, the liberal Communist Party chief sympathetic to the students, who was under house arrest.

Lost in all of this was the position of the diminutive eighty-four-year-old Communist who had rebounded from disgrace several times to become de facto emperor of China. It was Deng Xiaoping, the great survivor of Chinese politics, who would have the last word.

BEIJING
June 3–4, 1989

A
S RUMORS FLEW AROUND THE CITY
that the People’s Liberation Army was advancing on Tiananmen Square, thousands of Chinese students huddled around the base of the Monument to People’s Heroes. A rickety white foam-and-plaster “Goddess of Democracy” rose high above their heads, facing the huge portrait of Chairman Mao at the entrance to the Forbidden City. Raising their right hands, the students swore a solemn oath: “For the sake of our country’s democratization, for the sake of our country’s real prosperity, for the sake of preventing our country from being usurped by a small band of conspirators … I will devote my young life to protect Tiananmen and the Republic. I may be decapitated, my blood may flow, but the people’s square will not be lost. We are willing to lose our young lives to fight to the very last person.”
²⁴

Several miles away, in a special nuclear-safe command center in the Fragrant Hills district of the city’s western suburbs, China’s octogenarian leaders awaited news of the military operation against their own people.
²⁵
Deng Xiaoping later insisted that China’s future would have been “too terrible to imagine” had he not taken “firm action.”
²⁶
How could twenty-year-old students presume to know better than a veteran revolutionary, a man who had accompanied Mao on the Long March and survived the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution?

Over the past three weeks Deng had been humiliated in front of Gorbachev and the whole world. Not only had the students refused to allow him to revel in his greatest diplomatic triumph—the first Sino-Soviet summit in more than three decades—but they had publicly demanded his resignation. In an unsubtle pun on his given name, Xiaoping, which sounds like the Mandarin for “little bottle,” they had smashed bottles on the pavements outside the Great Hall of the People. A decade earlier students had paraded through the streets of Beijing carrying glass bottles to express their support for Deng in his struggle against the ultraradical Gang of Four.

The issue now was very simple. Who had the greater political legitimacy: the students or the Communist Party leadership? The answer to that question was equally obvious. He who controlled Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of China, had traditionally claimed the right to represent “the people.” It all boiled down to a question of power.

Shortly after the students swore to uphold democracy, a long column of tanks and armored cars started to move on the square from the west. Before going into battle, the troops had stood in front of their commanders and taken an oath of their own, to uphold law and order and prevent a recurrence of political “turmoil” in China. They were under orders to “recover the square” at any cost. This time they would not permit themselves to be deflected by unarmed protesters blocking their path as had happened just two weeks previously.

The first serious clashes occurred at a traffic circle at Gongzhufen, about ten blocks west of the square. As the motorized column forced its way through a barricade of buses and overturned taxis, demonstrators began pelting the troops with bricks and stones. The troops opened fire, first over the heads of the crowds but then directly at them. Enraged civilians grabbed hold of a couple of soldiers and tore them to pieces. A few blocks later the cycle of violence repeated itself, this time with greater fury. The Avenue of Heavenly Peace became a hellish battleground: flaming barricades; soldiers shooting indiscriminately from their AK-47s; panic-stricken civilians screaming abuse; army vehicles set alight with Molotov cocktails; bodies sprawled everywhere; the continuous wail of ambulance sirens. Eyewitnesses reported that the troops lost all sense of proportion, raking nearby apartment buildings with gunfire and slashing the dead with their bayonets.

By 2:30 a.m. the troops had sealed off the square from three sides, leaving a small gap in the southeast corner, through which the students would be permitted to flee. A well-known rock star from Taiwan, Hou Dejian, negotiated with the army for a peaceful withdrawal. “The students sang the
Internationale, their hands tightly clasped together,” recalled Chai Linh, who had been elected commander of Tiananmen Square by her fellow students. “We were crying.”
²⁷
As the students made their retreat, chanting, “The People’s Army should not shoot at the people,” they were savagely beaten by riot police with long nightsticks. The troops moved in behind them, sweeping aside the tent city that had been home to the hunger strikers for the past month and knocking down the “Goddess of Democracy.” Later the army claimed that there were no killings within the narrow confines of the square. Nevertheless, it was clear to everybody that several thousand deaths had occurred within the immediate vicinity. Observing the carnage from the seventh floor of the Beijing Hotel, on the northeast corner of the square, the veteran American journalist Harrison Salisbury was reminded of Chairman Mao’s dictum: “All power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
²⁸

Determined not to allow its prize to slip from its grasp, the People’s Liberation Army established machine-gun posts around the square, and mowed down anybody who got too close. Later that morning Radio Beijing boasted that Tiananmen had been cleansed of “trash” and “returned to the people.” As far as China’s Communist rulers were concerned, they and “the people” were one.

MOSCOW
May 25-June 9, 1989

T
HE
M
ARQUIS DE
C
USTINE VISITED
R
USSIA
in 1839. Although he spent less than three months in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the French aristocrat wrote a travelogue that some have hailed as the best book ever written about Russia by a foreigner. A habitué of the literary salons of Paris, anxious to establish a reputation as an outstanding writer, the marquis was snobbish, opinionated, and frequently condescending. Unlike his more celebrated contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, who had toured America a few years earlier, Custine had little sympathy for the country that provided him with his material. But his observations about Russian despotism—a brutally repressive political system that had created what Custine described as a “nation of mutes”—contained insights that have stood the test of time.

Nations are mute only for a time—sooner or later the day of discussion arises; religion, policy, all speak and all explain themselves in the end. Thus, as soon as speech is restored to this silenced people, one will hear so much dispute that an astonished world will think it has returned to the confusion of Babel.… In a nation governed like this one, passions boil a long time before breaking out; while the danger approaches from hour to hour, the evil is prolonged, and the crisis delayed. Even our grandchildren may not see the explosion; but we can say to-day that explosion is inevitable, while we cannot predict the time.
²⁹

One and a half centuries later, when Mikhail Gorbachev granted the Soviet Union its first real parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, many of these prophecies were realized. In Custine’s phrase, the “day of discussion” had arrived.

It came in the form of a torrent of words that brought a country of 280 million people to a virtual standstill. For thirteen days Russians and Ukrainians, Balts and Uzbeks, Armenians and Azeris took part in a festival of free speech, the likes of which they had never seen before. Industrial production sank from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka as coal miners, factory managers, and government bureaucrats tuned in to the Kremlin soap opera. The debates were televised live, so there was no question of government censorship and no way of predicting what would happen next. At the beginning of the opening session a bearded actor from Latvia hijacked the proceedings by striding to the podium to call for a “minute’s silence in memory of those who died in Tbilisi.” Gorbachev and other Politburo members seemed taken aback by this unscripted intervention but were nonetheless forced to their feet.

Over the course of the next two weeks the deputies competed with one another to shatter long-standing political taboos. Everything was a matter for public discussion: from the war in Afghanistan to the spread of AIDS to the privileges of the Communist elite to the nature of the one-party system itself.

Every day brought a fresh sensation, the toppling of some hitherto sacrosanct Communist icon or a dramatic clash between reformers and conservatives. A truck driver from Kharkov accused Gorbachev of falling victim to flattery and allowing his wife, Raisa, to gain too much influence. He sarcastically compared the Soviet leader with the “great Napoleon,” who, under the influence of assorted sycophants, including his consort, Josephine, had transformed France from a republic into an empire.
³⁰
An Olympic weight-lifting champion launched an all-out attack on the KGB, which he said bore responsibility for “the destruction or persecution of millions of people.” He called on the security organs to vacate Lubyanka Prison, where people who were “the pride and flower of our nations” were tortured and hurt.
³¹

Not to be outdone, a historian, Yuri Karyakin, demanded that Lenin’s
body be removed from its mausoleum by the Kremlin wall, the pantheon of Communist heroes. “Tanks roll across Red Square and the body vibrates. Scientists and artists touch up his face. This is a nightmare. It’s all done for the sake of appearances. There is nothing there.”
³²
His words produced a stunned silence in the normally noisy hall.

One of the most riveting exchanges occurred when General Rodionov was called upon to explain his actions in Tbilisi on the night of April 9. Jeered by the radicals and cheered by the conservatives, the general depicted himself as the victim of a Stalinist witch-hunt by the mass media. He described the demonstration in front of the parliament building as a “provocation” and poured scorn on Georgian leaders for attempting to blame the military for what had happened. Minutes later the deputies were treated to an emotional speech from Patiashvili, who had resigned as Georgian first secretary immediately after the tragedy. Choking back tears, Patiashvili accused Rodionov of lying to him about the “degree of cruelty” that would be used against the population and concealing the use of entrenching tools and toxic gas.
³³