Revolution 1989 (38 page)
Authors: Victor Sebestyen
Some of the influential Communist oligarchs who had chosen him began to regret it. Gromyko had done more than anyone else to ease Gorbachev into office. For the past year he had been telling Party officials that he had made a ‘mistake’ and called the team around Gorbachev ‘the Martians’ for failing to understand the world most people inhabited and for their ignorance of realpolitik. ‘I wonder how puzzled the US and other Nato countries must be . . . It is a mystery for them why Gorbachev and his friends . . . cannot comprehend how to use pressure for defending state interests.’
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He overcame a series of bruising encounters with Party traditionalists. A month before Gorbachev’s United States trip, the Party leaders discussed restoring Russian citizenship to the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was living in exile in Massachusetts. The KGB boss, Viktor Chebrikov, was adamantly against the idea. He advised Gorbachev: ‘We must leave in force the decree stripping the citizenship of a traitor to the Motherland.’ Gorbachev replied: ‘Yes, Solzhenitsyn is a staunch and irreconcilable enemy of the regime. But highly principled. And in a law-governed state, we won’t prosecute people for their convictions. As for “treason” there’s really no substance to the charge. And in general, all the procedural norms were violated in this case, there wasn’t even a trial . . . so this proposal won’t do.’ Chebrikov growled: ‘But he did betray . . .’ and left the sentence unfinished. Gorbachev just cleared his throat, expressing annoyance. But it was two years before he signed the decree restoring the writer’s citizenship.
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Two weeks before Gorbachev’s UN speech, he faced a major clash with the military over the troop cuts he was planning to announce in New York. The Defence Minister, Yazov, and most of the generals were adamantly opposed. It would show weakness, they argued, and the troops were needed to protect the empire. Gorbachev harangued them:
Why do we need such a big army? The truth is that we need quality, not quantity. Why do we spend two and a half times more on defence than the United States? No country in the world - except the underdeveloped ones, whom we flood with arms without ever being paid back - spends more per capita on the military . . . Do we want to continue to be like Angola? . . . [The military] still gets the scientific and technical talent, the best financial support, always provided without questions . . . Why do we need an army of six million people? What are we doing? Knocking our best young talent out of the intellectual pool. Who are we going to implement reforms with?
He bludgeoned his will through and defence cuts were made, albeit slowly. But he faced growing resistance as it became clearer to many people that his domestic policies were not showing the intended results.
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Consistently, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze battled with the chief spokesman for the Kremlin conservatives, Yegor Ligachev, a grey and uninspired apparatchik a decade older than Gorbachev, who was number two in the Soviet leadership. Initially Ligachev had supported the anti-corruption campaigns and helped to ease some of the incompetent Communist barons from the provinces. But within a couple of years he began complaining that Gorbachev wanted to ‘destroy’ the socialist order and began to manoeuvre against him. Ligachev was demoted from his position in early 1988, but he continued to be a powerful figure in the leadership. He warned Gorbachev that he risked ‘the demolition’ of the Soviet bloc. ‘Arguably, we will muddle through and will survive,’ he said. ‘But there are socialist countries, the world Communist movement, what do we do about them? Would we risk breaking up this powerful support that has existed side by side [with us] . . . We should think not only about the past but about the future.’ Gorbachev ridiculed him and others he saw as ‘panic-mongers who feared the destruction of what was built up by Stalin’. Shevardnadze made an outburst that appalled Ligachev and the rest of the Party old guard. ‘As far as the Communist and working class movement today is concerned, there isn’t much to rescue,’ he declared. ‘Take for instance Bulgaria, and the old leadership in Poland, take the current position in the GDR, and in Romania. Is this socialism?’
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Gorbachev never thought through a consistent policy on the satellite states. He did not want the burden of empire, but it is clear that he never clearly calculated the consequences of retreating. He regarded Soviet relations with the bigger Western countries as much more important than the old ‘fraternal ties’ with the socialist commonwealth. It was clear when he met Helmut Kohl for the first time, in October 1988, that Gorbachev saw the summit as far more significant - and more congenial - than his frosty meetings with Honecker. West Germany counted substantially more in Soviet policy-making than East Germany. As domestic considerations began to overwhelm him, he left others to handle mundane matters to do with Eastern and Central Europe. He had long ago ruled out in his own mind using force to maintain Soviet control over the satellites. He had said it many times - not least to the dictators who relied on Soviet troops to keep them in power. Most of his advisers agreed with him. As one of his most knowledgeable experts on Eastern Europe, Georgi Shakhnazarov, told him, the best way of maintaining influence in the region was ‘to use the force of example, not the example of force’.
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Yakovlev and Shevardnadze now managed to persuade a reluctant bureaucracy to set non-intervention down as an absolute principle of Soviet foreign policy. For more than forty years, maintaining its European empire had been a Soviet priority. Now a highly secret Soviet Foreign Ministry policy declaration on the future of Eastern Europe said that the satellite states were not worth keeping:
The allies are displaying an attempt to get more from the Warsaw Pact, mainly from the Soviet Union, than they contribute to it and showing independence to the detriment of common interests. At the same time it seems improbable that in the foreseeable future any of the allied countries will raise the question of leaving the Warsaw Pact. The Western powers do not wish confrontation with us on account of Eastern Europe. In the event of worsening crises . . . in individual countries they will most likely deploy restraint and not intervene in [their] internal affairs, least of all militarily, counting on their patience being rewarded in time. We ought to keep in mind that our friends have recently received the impression that, in conditions of intensive dialogue between the USSR and the US, our relations with the socialist countries have become secondary for us . . . We should proceed from the fact that the use of military force on our part in relations with the socialist countries . . . is completely excluded even in the most extreme situation (except in cases of external aggression against our allies). Military intervention would not prevent but worsen the social and political crises, cause mass outbreaks of protest even as far as armed resistance and lead in the final account to the opposite effect, the reinforcement of anti-Sovietism. It would seriously undermine the authority of the Soviet Union, would worsen our relations with the Western powers . . . and would lead to the isolation of the Soviet Union. If the situation worsens in one or other of the socialist countries, we should refrain . . . from giving public support to repressive actions of the authorities.
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Gorbachev did not believe that the satellite states would rush to independence. It was his greatest miscalculation. He thought that when he visited Berlin or Prague, greeted by large crowds cheering ‘Gorby, Gorby’ and waving placards reading ‘Perestroika’, that the people supported his style of reform communism. He was convinced they would choose to stay allied to the Soviet Union. He did not realise that he had been wrong until after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Gorbachev failed to see that the demonstrators were hiding behind him as a way of protesting against their own rulers. But occasionally the thought that they might want their freedom had occurred to him. As he told aides at the end of 1988: ‘The people of these countries will ask “what about the Soviet Union . . . what kind of leash will it use to keep our countries in?” They simply do not know that if they pulled this leash harder, it would break.’
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PART THREE
REVOLUTION
TWENTY-SIX
THE WAR OF WORDS
Budapest, Sunday 1 January 1989
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS in both the superpowers were growing increasingly worried about unprecedented troop movements along the 100-kilometre border between Hungary and Romania. It seemed barely conceivable that there could be a war between two countries allied together in the Warsaw Pact. Yet the signs were ominous. The Romanians had for many weeks been building a fortified wire fence on their side of the frontier. This was a second Iron Curtain, mainly to keep people imprisoned inside Romania. But when newly mobilised and heavily armed divisions of soldiers began appearing in the area, tension mounted. The Hungarians responded. The new Communist Party leader in Budapest, Károly Grósz, who had been in power for little more than six months, moved a crack regiment that had been deployed on the Austrian border to confront the Romanians. It was more than a symbolic gesture to indicate that Hungary now saw itself facing westwards. It was a response to genuine fear that Romania’s dictator might launch an invasion.
The Russians were worried. Within their empire it was theoretically impossible that ‘fraternal allies in the socialist commonwealth’ should be in conflict. In former days even minor disagreements between the satellite states were not supposed to be aired in public, while comrades displayed a traditional show of unity under the benign ‘leading role’ of the Soviet Union. Communists, so the theorists said, had progressed beyond the stage of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which had led to two world wars. But the Soviets had lost their sense of imperial mission. They no longer possessed the power to control all events in their domains, particularly events in Romania.
The Hungarians and Romanians were historic enemies. The main dispute between them was over the beautiful, mountainous, wooded region of Transylvania, with some of the most fertile farming land in Europe. Transylvania had been part of Hungary for centuries, until the end of World War One when it was awarded to Romania under the Trianon Treaty. The loss was grievously felt by a defeated Hungary, where there remained small groups of nationalists who believed they had a natural right to the region. About a million and a half Hungarian speakers, who culturally looked towards Budapest, formed a substantial minority inside Romania. Ceauescu had been mistreating them for a decade and a half. He banned the teaching of Hungarian in Transylvanian schools. He tried to suppress the Hungarian Reformed Church. He closed down Hungarian cultural centres in Transylvanian towns, and the Hungarian consulate in the main city in the region, Cluj. Ultimately, his vision was to destroy the Hungarians as an identifiable community within Romania.
Around a third of Hungarians possessed relations in Transylvania. Ceauescu tried to sever the links between them. Romanians were not allowed to visit Hungary, and he tried to stop Hungarians crossing into Transylvania. As conditions worsened in Romania throughout the 1980s, Hungarians were barred from sending food parcels to ease the plight of their relatives and friends in Transylvania. Ceauescu thought most of the reform ideas that came from Budapest were subversive. He banned the Hungarian newspapers from Romania, even the principal Communist Party organs. He had already banned the Soviet press, after his aides had shown him flattering references in some Russian papers to perestroika and glasnost.
In Transylvania, Ceauescu’s latest idea to reorder civilisation was perceived as the most dangerous threat yet to the Hungarian minority’s way of life. The dictator called his grand vision for the Romanian countryside ‘systemisation’. He planned to raze to the ground 8,000 of Romania’s 13,000 villages and replace them with 500 vast agroindustrial centres. The agricultural workers - nobody was to be called a peasant any longer - would live in the same kind of vast concrete blocks in which the urban proletariat were housed. Ceauescu imagined this was a progressive step to bring the benefits of Communist planning to ramshackle and poverty-ridden parts of the countryside without roads, electricity in some places, and plumbing. But no doubt he thought it would also be easier to keep an eye on the ‘agricultural workers’ in vast apartment blocks than in traditional villages dotted throughout Romania. By 1988 only three villages were destroyed, all close to Bucharest and near to already existing big collective farms. But the rumour was that the systemisation programme was to start - in Transylvania - soon and would be directed at Hungarian villages. The rumour alone caused an exodus of people to risk their lives and livelihoods in an effort to leave Romania. Over the years a trickle of Transylvanians had managed to cross into Hungary to begin new lives. Now, more than 25,000 went within a few weeks. Scores died in the attempt and thousands were arrested on their way to the border.
The refugees sparked a crisis in Hungary. In the past, the Kádár regime had frequently complained to the Romanians about their treatment of the Hungarian minority. Although an agreement between the two countries signed twenty years earlier stated that ‘illegal’ refugees should be returned to Romania, the Hungarians in fact had sent none back to the tender mercies of the Securitate. The few refugees who managed to reach Hungary were made welcome and provided with accommodation by the authorities. Now the larger numbers created a dilemma. They were looked after by relatives, friends, churches and charitable groups. The Hungarian people were generous. But the public was outraged that the government appeared to be doing little to help the new arrivals and had approved only small amounts of money to provide for them. Legally their status was unclear. They seemed to be in limbo, while Ceauescu was demanding that they should be handed back to Romania. The Hungarians suggested that independent intermediaries go to Transylvania to look at conditions there, but Ceauescu said he would refuse to let them enter the country.
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