Revolution 1989 (43 page)

Gorbachev went away slightly mollified. He trusted Thatcher and he knew that everything he said would be passed on to Washington. As it was. Thatcher tended to agree with the Soviet leader. She had already, six weeks earlier, told Baker that she was ‘worried by the apparent air of relaxation in Washington’. She advised the Americans: ‘Don’t let things linger. Don’t let them lie fallow.’ Now, immediately after Gorbachev left her office, she sent Bush a note telling him how angry Gorbachev had been - ‘and with good reason’. She said the administration was taking an awfully long time to make its mind up.
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Bush had another reason to be hesitant. He had often said that personal relationships among leaders were vital. ‘If a foreign leader knows the character and heartbeat of [another] there is apt to be less miscalculation on either side,’ he wrote. He still had doubts about Gorbachev’s character, dating from the Russian’s visit to Washington in 1987 when the INF Treaty was signed. Bush felt that ‘Gorbymania’ had turned the Soviet leader’s head. He had seen it for himself, he told Scowcroft. ‘We were to go from the Soviet Embassy to the White House in the same motorcade and he was running a little late, although it didn’t seem to concern him,’ Bush said. ‘He impulsively asked me . . . to get in the same limousine with him. As we drove along, the crowds were enormous . . . At one point, I told him I wished he had time to stop and speak to people, and that he would be well received. A minute later the limo screeched to a halt . . . Secret service agents from both the Soviet Union and the US rushed to get into position as he plunged into a surprised and responsive crowd . . . shaking hands and greeting them in Russian . . . it was like adrenaline to him. He got back in the car visibly uplifted.’
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Bush was envious of Gorbachev’s popularity - he seldom saw adoring crowds like that at his own appearances. But there was a larger point. Gorbachev’s skill at public relations, his headline-grabbing initiatives, put pressure on him to match the Russian for rhetoric. ‘I’ll be damned if Gorbachev should dominate world public opinion forever,’ Bush wrote with frustration in a private letter to an old friend of his, the Aga Khan.
¹⁰

After many revisions - because the President did not think the document imaginative enough - Condoleezza Rice was finally given the job of producing the Bush administration’s policy on the Soviet Union and Central Europe. The top-secret National Intelligence Estimate 11-4-89 was far better written and much more positive about reforms in the USSR. ‘The Soviet Union’s use of military power as a lever abroad is likely to reduce further,’ it said. ‘The process Gorbachev has set in motion . . . is likely to lead to lasting changes in Soviet behaviour.’ Its final conclusion, though, was typical Bush. The Soviet empire would probably crumble on its own. America did not have to do anything to hasten the process. He decided, with due caution, to wait and see.
^II

THIRTY-THREE

Warsaw, Tuesday 4 April 1989

 

IN POLAND THE FORMER JAILERS had been talking with their former prisoners for nearly two months. At last a historic deal was struck between Lech Wałesa and General Jaruzelski which paved the way for the first democratic elections in the Soviet bloc for nearly forty-five years. It was hard and often painful going and at the end neither side left the Round Table entirely satisfied. But both the Solidarity leader and the Communist Party boss knew they could sell the agreement to their sceptical followers.

The deal did not seem like a surrender by the regime. It legalised Solidarity and recognised the union as an official opposition. This was a victory for the union. But after weeks of haggling the best Wałsa’s team of negotiators were offered was a semi-free election, which on the face of it seemed gerrymandered to ensure that the Communist Party could not lose. Thirty-five per cent of the seats in the Lower House, the Sejm, would be contested freely. The rest would be reserved for the Communists and their allies. The 100 seats in the Upper House, the Senate, would all be elected freely, but the arithmetic suggested that there was no way that Solidarity could win outright. The arrangement was based on the elections that had just been held nine days earlier in the Soviet Union, which had allowed opposition candidates to stand for the first time. That, too, was fixed to guarantee a Communist victory in a Gorbachev-designed Congress of People’s Deputies, though it saw the election of a sizeable group of former dissidents including Andrei Sakharov. Wałsa particularly disliked the part of the deal that established a presidency, specially created with Jaruzelski in mind, who had control of the army and the police. He told Kiszczak that ‘there has to be a more democratic President. A presidency as you suggest would probably end up as a President for life and you could probably only get rid of him by execution . . . We don’t want to end up in a corner worse than Stalinism.’ Yet he eventually agreed, convinced that an imperfect deal was better than no deal. He shrewdly saw further than his advisers the historic possibilities that it could offer Solidarity.
¹

The Communist chieftains never imagined that they would lose power. ‘We do not see that as possibly on the horizon,’ Prime Minister Rakowski told the General. ‘We will create a position where we share power with the opposition . . . it would be a ten- to fifteen-year process.’ Jaruzelski was willing to go along with the agreement, though some high-ranking officials counselled caution. Professor Wiatr, the Warsaw University politics professor and influential Party figure, warned: ‘They massively underestimated the calibre of the opposition. They became victims of their own wishful thinking.’
²

Wałsa agreed about the timetable. He was telling supporters that Solidarity would be sharing power ‘at the end of the century’. Bronisław Geremek said that the aim of the Party bosses was to preserve their position. At the negotiating table ‘they used to say, flatly, that they had the power. We could only answer, yes, but don’t forget we are the people and that is why you have come to find us . . . We insisted we would accept limited elections this time, but never again.’
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Some Solidarity activists, the radicals, accused Wałsa of selling out. Anna Walentynowycz, whose sacking from the Lenin Shipyard nine years earlier was the spark for the Solidarity revolution, was a mar ginalised figure now. But many listened to her when she begged the union not to sign an agreement. ‘Up until the Round Table Communism was a dying corpse,’ she said. A deal with the regime now would bring it back to life. Wałsa pointed out that the Party was still in control of the army and the police, the Russians could invade if they believed their empire was under threat and Poland was surrounded by Communist countries. He repeatedly insisted that Solidarity had to be ‘realistic’.
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The deal was finally agreed with a shake of the hands between Wałsa and Kiszczak at Magdalenka. A bishop blessed the agreement ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. The Communist secret policeman, a devout atheist and cynic all his life, looked bemused and simply shrugged his shoulders.

THIRTY-FOUR

Bucharest, Wednesday 12 April 1989

 

THE DICTATOR HAD LET IT BE KNOWN that he would be making an important announcement. Romanians were weary of their duty to pay attention to the leader’s grand statements of intent. They invariably went on for an exceedingly long time, were drearily read out in meaningless Marxist-Leninist jargon, and spelled bad news. Nevertheless, if it happened to coincide with the two hours a day that power was switched on in their neighbourhoods, people with TVs watched their sets. This time it really was important - and in a country now so inured to grinding hardship, exceptionally bad news. Ceauscu announced triumphantly that all of Romania’s foreign debt had been cleared, seven months ahead of schedule. Today, the statement said, was a great day for national independence.

Briefly, some Romanians may have imagined that at last the regime might stock the shelves with food that had been sold to Western Europe to repay the debts. They were wrong. All the exports would continue in the interests of sovereignty so that Romania would remain independent. The tight rationing of meat, eggs, milk, flour, sugar - almost all foodstuffs - would stay in place. Some, according to the statement, might even become stricter in coming months. All the restrictions on using energy would continue. In the ugly and crumbling apartment blocks where most of the people lived, the past winter had been bitterly cold. Hundreds of old people had been found in their beds, wrapped in overcoats but dead from hypothermia. Queues for bread were getting longer; fresh vegetables were almost impossible to find. Now Romanians were told there would be no improvement to living standards. They realised they would never benefit from the sacrifices that they had been forced to make for so many years. ‘That was the most miserable time of all,’ teacher Alex Serban said. ‘And we had to put up with being told we were in a Golden Age. Our hatred of Ceauescu was a national obsession, and hatred of ourselves too for just accepting what he had done to the country as an unalterable fact of life.’
¹

The Ceaucus turned Romania’s back on the outside world, and the world ignored Romania. The country was less significant to the West than it had been. The changes in Poland and Hungary, the Soviet Union’s warmer relationship with the US, had made Romania irrelevant to the West’s strategic interests. Ceauescu was no longer welcome in Western capitals and foreign leaders no longer sang his praises. But he was seldom criticised either. Romania was a closed country. The regime rarely permitted Western journalists to visit and little reliable information came out. There were hardly any protests of any kind against the dictatorship, but occasionally they happened and merited brief paragraphs in Western news reports. A few weeks before the announcement about foreign debt, on 2 March the forty-seven-year-old painter Liviu Babe died after setting himself alight in front of a group of Western tourists in Braov, drawing attention to the abuses of the regime. He carried a placard reading ‘Romania = Auschwitz’.

Romanians are passionate about football and twice matches were a catalyst for rare anti-Ceauescu demonstrations. There were scuffles between the police and a few fans at a local derby between the two big Bucharest teams, Steaua and Dinamo, the previous June. It began as the kind of hooliganism common at soccer matches, but turned into a small anti-government protest. The crowd was quickly dispersed. Several demonstrators were beaten up and arrested. A few months later there was a riot in the centre of Cluj after Romania beat Denmark in a World Cup qualifying match. Wild cheers of joy turned into shouts of ‘Down With Ceauescu’ - words hardly ever heard in Romania.

The previous March six veteran Communists, who had all in the past held prominent positions in the regime, wrote an open letter to the Party complaining that Ceauescu was ‘betraying socialism’. They were all aged men in their seventies, but they still carried weight as ‘loyal Party members’ as they put it. Two had been former prime ministers, including Gheorghe Apostol, who had originally proposed Ceauescu as Romanian Communist Party boss. Now they complained about the dictator’s human rights abuses and said that Ceauescu was taking Romania to the brink of disaster. This ‘Letter of the Six’ found its way to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, where it was covered ‘as a statement from Romania’s National Salvation Front’. It had been delivered to the foreign media by Silviu Brucan, one of the most fascinating, if sinister, of all the Romanian Communists.

Born Saul Bruckner in 1916, he changed his name in his teens - in Romania between the wars it did not help ambitious young men to sound Jewish. He was a gifted and witty journalist, for decades a stern Stalinist. He had close ties to the KGB. When the Communists took power after the war, Brucan became editor of the Party newspaper
Scînteia
. His wife, the frightening but highly clever Alexandra Sidorovici, was a public prosecutor at the People’s Tribunals which sent thousands of people to their deaths on bogus charges during successive purges. Brucan rose to become Romanian Ambassador to theUSand to the UN. Then he returned to Bucharest as head of Romanian Television. He was a fawning associate of the Ceauescus for years, but they never entirely trusted him. He began, privately, to be critical of the dictator in the late 1970s and then, more publicly, from 1987. He gave an interview to the BBC World Service criticising the regime. Brucan had to be punished for his ‘treachery’, but Ceauescu was careful about how it was done. Brucan was an inveterate schemer and he managed to keep friends in the Kremlin, in the Lubyanka, in Washington and New York from his seven years in the United States, and also in the high reaches of the Securitate at home.

Ceauescu had a 100-page file on him detailing every personal foible, every domestic quarrel with his family or conversation he had with journalists from theBBCand the
International Herald Tribune
. He was kept under strict surveillance, but he was so well connected that he was handled with kid gloves. Brucan and the other signatories of the notorious Letter of the Six were placed under house arrest. But he was evicted from the comfortable villa where he had lived for years in the smartest district of Bucharest, among all the top officials, and moved to a run-down shack with no running water in the remote countryside. He was given a brand-new passport and encouraged to use it, in the hope that he would leave the country and not return. He did leave - on visits to the Soviet Union and to the US - but he kept going back to Romania.
²

Ceauescu was not worried about football hooligans, or even the tiny number of dissident intellectuals with access to the foreign media. He was scared that the Soviet Union would try to topple him in a coup. All his food was now tasted by two people well before it reached him or Elena. His fears doubled after Gorbachev’s disastrous visit to Bucharest in the summer of 1987. Gorbachev had not wanted to go, and it showed throughout the two and a half days he was there. On the first night the two men had a shouting match at a private dinner while the wives maintained a sullen silence, barely even looking at each other. At one point Ceauescu ordered that all the doors and windows be shut so that nobody, not even the bodyguards, should hear what the argument was about. Gorbachev was trying to persuade Ceauscu to relax his Stalinist grip and embrace perestroika. ‘You are running a dictatorship here ... you must open yourselves up to the world,’ he said. Ceauescu insisted that Gorbachev was destroying communism and the whole edifice would crumble if the Soviets continued along their dangerous road.