Revolution 1989 (35 page)

Joking apart, Czechs heeded the warnings and generally they were obedient. As Havel - who proudly boasted that he was a Lennonist - pointed out, two decades of forgetting had created apathy and hypocrisy:

The placemen in the regime were still relatively unconcerned by the John Lennon Club, and the other similar groups with names like the Jazz Section and The Society for a Merrier Present. But they were worried that Gustáv Husák was starting to lose his grip. A group of hardliners had long been plotting to oust him as Party leader on the grounds, they said, that seventy-five-year-old Husák was showing a fatal weakness against opposition. Rumours were spread that he was beginning to favour the bottle too much and was exhausted. They made their move soon after the Kampa Park rally and the Charter 77 demonstration that followed. Husák made no effort to keep his job. He admitted he was tired and went with grace. On 17 December he was ‘promoted’ to the largely ceremonial post of State President.

When Czechs learned who his successor was they were aghast. Miloš Jakes was a slightly younger version (he was sixty-five) of Husak in his Stalinist prime. A dark-haired, pasty-faced, burly former electrician, he had been among the hardliners who hated the reforms of the Prague Spring, had requested the Kremlin to send troops to invade his country, and had been responsible for humiliating Dubek. He had been the witchfinder-general in charge of the purges after 1968. He performed the task with relish. Around half a million Communists were thrown out of the Party; thousands of academics, teachers, civil servants and journalists were sacked. He personally supervised many of the interviews in which people were required to sign loyalty pledges to the State and to the Party. If he suspected hesitation, he ensured the sceptic lost his or her job. He was a poor public speaker, mumbling and bumbling through laboured speeches full of jargon. Some officials who worked for him held his intellectual capacities in contempt. A widespread joke in Communist Party circles in Prague was that ‘Jakeš would fail a lie detector test if he began a sentence with the words I think.’

The men around him who engineered his succession were brighter, but also in their mid-sixties and implicated in the brutal suppression of the dreams of 1968. Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal was a known thug, with close links to the KGB. Vasil Bil’ak, a crucial Party power-broker for the last twenty-five years, firmly believed that Gorbachev-style ‘restructuring’ was a betrayal of communism. The US Senator John Glenn, who led an American delegation to Prague, asked him why the Czechs would not emulate the Soviet reforms. He replied: ‘You Americans used to accuse us of being Soviet puppets, of slavishly following the Soviet model. Now you accuse us of not following the Soviet model closely enough.’ Ideology chief Jan Fojtík warned that Party members would face expulsion if they raised the issue of the Soviet invasion: ‘I am sure we can establish a dialogue with reasonable people,’ he said. ‘But there can be no dialogue with those who set out to destroy our society.’
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The Soviets wanted to be rid of Husák, but were stunned by the rise of Jakeš, who they knew was no friend of their new thinking. But Gorbachev’s team did nothing to prevent it - proof, an adviser of the Soviet leader said, that he had lost interest in his East European empire.

 

The sharks who circled around János Kádár in Budapest six months after Husák was dethroned were altogether different. They were a younger generation from the Party elite, impatient that the old man was keeping them from power - and they believed that communism was doomed. Unlike Poland, where revolution came from below, from the workers’ movement Solidarity, in Hungary change came from the top. The retreat from communism was led by Communists. Kádár had dominated Hungary for three decades, but he was starting to lose the grudging respect he had earned even from many of his opponents. Gulyás communism had been daring and original in its time. But its defects were now clear for all to see.

Kádár had been an authoritarian figure, though he was a relatively benign despot by Cold War standards. He lived modestly with his wife Mária, and had not been corrupted by gracious country homes full of servants, foreign bank accounts and Savile Row suits. He had never let a personality cult develop around himself. It was hard to find a picture of him in Budapest, and the Party newspaper
Népszabadság
(
A Free People
) seldom carried photographs of him. But he was visibly decaying and started to look like an old Stalinist, which in reality he had never been. He was forgetful, repeating himself at meetings and losing his thread in long rambling monologues. Some among those who worked for him felt embarrassed for him and wished he would voluntarily stand down. At night he could barely sleep, racked by guilt, said some of his friends, by his role in the brutal crackdown after 1956, and particularly his decision to hang his then rival, Imre Nagy. He was not so senile that he was unable to see his reform vision was failing. His answer was to return to the orthodox and familiar path - at least on economic policies. He feared that Gorbachev was making serious mistakes and would drive communism to its grave. In the summer of 1987, a group of economists and Communist theoreticians presented him with a package of deeper reforms. He vetoed the ideas and expelled from the Party the advisers who dared to suggest them.

Younger men thought the only way they could save their own posi- tions was by removing Kádár. A majority of Party members were behind them. But bringing down an institution was a hazardous and difficult process. The logical replacement was the Prime Minister, Károly Grósz, a middle-of-the-road technocrat aged fifty-seven, a Party man through and through. A short, wiry man, he was usually cautious and pragmatic, but he could be ruthless. His chief accomplice - though they were to fall out spectacularly soon - was chief spokesman for the reform wing of the Party, Imre Pozsgay, an ebullient, jolly, fat and brash charmer who even then was telling Western journalists that in a few years’ time he thought that Hungary would be ‘like Austria - or perhaps Sweden’. This was a heretical belief at the time. But even though the Party rank and file agreed that it was time for Kádár to go, the assassins needed help and a nudge from a broad.
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Grósz had regarded Kádár as a father figure for many years, but he told him early in 1988 that it was time for him to retire because of his age, ‘in the interests of the Party.’ Kádár was not prepared to listen. Grósz then dispatched an intermediary to Moscow, Gyula Thürmer, the Hungarian Party’s leading specialist on the Soviet Union. Thürmer had a short interview with Gorbachev. Though he respected Kádár as an elder statesman of communism, the Soviet leader thought it was now time for him to go and he wished to encourage the reformers in Budapest. But Gorbachev did not want to be seen to interfere. Gone were the days, he continually said, when the Soviet Union should pick and choose who were the leaders of other countries. He told Thürmer, diplomatically, that Kádár was a distinguished man ‘who should know what he should do in such a historic situation’. He added that ‘this is an entirely unofficial suggestion’. When Thürmer returned to Budapest, Kádár asked him what the Russians had said to him and he reported the exact words Gorbachev used. ‘He heard my words without comment, ’ said Thürmer.

The Soviet President, Gromyko, visited Budapest at the end of February. Kádár told him that he planned to stay in power until 1990. When Gorbachev’s advisers heard that they began to warn him of ‘grave risks of serious . . . convulsions’ in Hungary if Kadar clung on to power. The Soviet Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Vadim Medve- dev, told Gorbachev that Kádár should be persuaded to go and Grósz supported as a replacement, but it must all be done ‘within the accepted norms of the relations between the two parties’. The Soviet Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, passed through Budapest in April. Kádár asked him what he should do about his future and Ryzhkov replied point-blank, ‘You should retire.’ Kádár replied balefully: ‘You too say that?’ Grósz, exasperated, went public in April and spoke of ‘the biological laws’ that affected elderly leaders. Late in the evening of 2 May Kádár summoned Grósz to his office and said he was willing to retire. Yet he continually delayed. He did not step down without direct Soviet involvement. The KGB’s Deputy Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, arranged it. He had been a diplomat/intelligence officer in Hungary during the 1956 Rebellion and knew the Hungarian leader from those painful and violent days. He worked out a deal that gave Kádár a newly created figurehead position - Party President - if he went graciously. Even then Kádár tried to cling on. At a Party meeting on 20 May, in a giant trade union building in central Budapest, he made a long ram- bling statement justifying his actions. He was heard in silence. Grósz took over from him as Party leader that evening. At the end Kádár stayed in the hall, talking to nobody, waiting for his wife to drive him home. It was a pathetic finale to an extraordinary and dramatic career.
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The West German government played a significant role in the removal of Kádár. During Grósz’s manoeuvres, Horst Teltschik, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s foreign policy adviser, told the coup plotters that if they succeeded in removing Kádár and began economic reforms ‘then the West German government would support this programme . . . with financial credits . . . We kept our word . . . in the shape of a billion Deutschmark credit.’ Why should the West German government help to topple a long-serving Hungarian leader? ‘What we were doing was to support policies of reform, wherever they began to develop, but obviously . . . we were hoping that this would increase pressure on East Germany.’ It was claimed in return that the new leaders in Budapest passed on Warsaw Pact secrets to Bonn - in effect turning Hungary into a spying organisation for the West. But this has always been denied and though the suspicion may remain, there is no evidence to prove one of the most fascinating conspiracy theories about the fall of communism.
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The money went straight into paying interest on the other out standing foreign loans, explained Miklós Németh, the forty-year-old economist who took over from Grósz as Prime Minister. Németh had realised earlier that ‘in a nutshell, everything had gone wrong with communism. We were close to an abyss at this point, close to total crisis. The killing of the socialist bloc, of the Communist system, began at the moment the Western banks and financial institutions gave loans to countries like Hungary. At that point we were on a hook.’ A shrewd, intelligent, intense-looking and quietly spoken man, Németh was appointed as a Communist Prime Minister. ‘But I knew that under the one-party system there was no way to make life better, to make reforms work,’ he said. ‘If you wanted to achieve basic reforms you had to make major changes not just in the economy, but politically as well. It meant overthrowing the Communist system.’
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TWENTY-THREE

Warsaw, Wednesday 31 August 1988

 

STRIKERS WERE ON THE PICKET LINES in Poland - again. There was an air of familiarity about the wave of industrial protest that had swept across the country since the early summer. Poland had been here often in the past dozen years. But this time the sense of crisis and chaos were overwhelming and the regime ran out of options to deal with them. The government had tried all the usual methods of rule: bribery, coercion and finally a civil war against its own people. None had worked. The country was in a state of economic, political and moral collapse. The regime, still largely run by military men though martial law had been lifted long ago, embarked on something new: serious talks with Solidarity. When the Interior Minister and former spy chief General Czesław Kiszczak met Lech Wałesa on a searingly hot day in central Warsaw and offered to ‘discuss everything’ with him, it began a direct process of negotiations that led to the collapse of East European communism.

Martial law offered temporary relief, but no solutions. It enfeebled the Communist Party, which according to a senior official had ‘used up all its strength and imagination in the battle against Solidarity in 1980-82’. The Party had fatally lost confidence in itself. More than half of its three million members had left in the past five years. An internal Party in 1986 showed that nearly a third admitted to attending Catholic mass regularly, while a further 20 per cent went to church but would not admit to it. Membership now was made up of older people and those who had joined principally in order to keep their jobs. Barely any young people were joining. They could sense that it was no longer as advantageous to be a Party member as it was: the nomenklatura system was breaking down.

In an attempt to break the logjam, Jaruzelski took a huge tactical gamble, and lost. The previous November - after consultations with Gorbachev - he hastily called a referendum designed to win support for a package of perestroika-style reforms. He tried to present himself anew as a liberal, though he represented, as Adam Michnik said, ‘not so much Communism with a human face, as Communism with some of its teeth knocked out’. The referendum asked strange, detailed questions about how much voters thought prices should increase - and whether ‘you approve of the government’s economic reforms, even if it means two or three years of sacrifice?’ Then it asked vague questions: ‘Do you favour the Polish model of profound democratisation? ’ The General’s advisers assured him the plebiscite was a clever way to put the opposition on the spot. If Solidarity urged a Yes vote, the union was co-opted as a partner of the regime. If it came out against, it could be portrayed as being against reform. But the referendum proved to be a spectacular mistake. The turnout was 67 per cent, and of those 66 per cent voted Yes. That was still a defeat for the regime, though. Jaruzelski himself had added a provision in the rules to ensure that 51 per cent of registered voters had to approve the measures - a suicidal amendment. Adding up the abstentions, the General had ‘won’ 44 per cent of the vote. The referendum was meant to show that the government was as democratic as Solidarity. Instead, Jaruzelski appeared like a loser.