Revolution 1989 (48 page)

 

A month after Imre Nagy was reburied, thousands of mourners attended another funeral in Budapest that laid Hungary’s past to rest. János Kádár lived just long enough to see his old rival’s reinterment, though he was so senile and ill by then that he could not grasp what was happening. He died on the morning of 6 July and the news of his passing was met with surprising but genuine grief. Hungarians may have grown to hate much that Kádár stood for- and much that they themselves had done with him over the decades in a conspiracy of silence. Yet they respected the man. His funeral on 14 July was also a political event, a sombre occasion attended by 100,000 people at Kerepesi, Hungary’s national cemetery. Many had attended the Nagy funeral a few weeks earlier. Three million Hungarians watched live on television. The Hungarian leader for thirty-two years was buried in a section of the graveyard filled with other Communist ‘heroes’ known as the Pantheon of the Working Class. The inscription on his marble gravestone was intended as self-justification, but spoke for countless numbers of other Communists who fought for their cause during the twentieth century: ‘I was where I had to be. I did what I had to do.’

THIRTY-NINE

Warsaw, Monday 10 July 1989

 

IT WAS THE AMERICAN REPUBLICAN George Bush who convinced the Communist General Jaruzelski to stand as Poland’s President. Bush was worried that the pace of the changes in Poland and Hungary could career out of control and lead to serious instability. His tour to the two countries had been planned soon after his inauguration, but revolutionary events had happened since it had been arranged. He wondered to aides such as Condoleezza Rice if they ‘weren’t more than the market could bear’. Some of his advisers were surprised by the comment, but they understood the President’s natural caution. Bush told the speechwriters who were preparing material for the visit: ‘Whatever this trip is, it is
not
a victory tour with me running around over there pounding my chest . . . I don’t want to sound inflammatory or provocative. I don’t want what I do to complicate the lives of Gorbachev and the others. I don’t want to put a stick in Gorbachev’s eye.’ He was willing to take the risk of looking like a plodder, to achieve higher gains.

Repeatedly, he told his staff that he did not want to make the same mistakes as President Eisenhower in 1956: the US encouraged the Hungarian revolutionaries to rebel, but when Soviet tanks invaded the insurgents were left on their own. ‘I wanted to be careful,’ he said. ‘The traumatic uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were constantly on my mind . . . I did not want to encourage a course of events which might turn violent and get out of hand and which we then couldn’t - or wouldn’t - support, leaving people stranded on the barricades. I hoped to encourage liberation . . . without provoking an internal crackdown, as happened in Poland in 1981, or a Soviet backlash.’ In Warsaw and Budapest on his coming trip, he did not want ‘to foment unrest . . . or stimulate it unintentionally . . . If massive crowds gathered, intent on showing their opposition to Soviet domination, things [could] get out of control. An enthusiastic reception could erupt into a riot . . . with devastating consequences for the growing sense of optimism and progress that was beginning to sweep the region.’
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The President and his entourage had arrived the evening before - a sweltering, humid night, recalled the US National Security Advisor, General Scowcroft. ‘The air conditioning system in our hotel was not up to the demands of the weather. The inside temperature was worse than outdoors and with the windows not designed to open, we had a real problem. I finally managed to get a window propped open and I pulled the bedding on to the floor where there was . . . a wisp of a breeze. The hotel explained that there was simply not enough . . . power for the system to run properly - a painful reminder of how backward the Polish economy was.
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After a sleepless night Bush saw Jaruzelski at the Belvedere Palace soon after 9 a.m. They had met two years earlier when Bush was Vice President and briefly passed through Poland. He had advised the General to legalise Solidarity and negotiate with it, but Jaruzelski baulked at the suggestion and declared that it would ‘be suicidal for the Government’. Nevertheless Bush liked Jaruzelski, respected him and thought he was astute. He described him to his advisers as ‘a real class act’. Now that the General had struck a deal with Solidarity, the US President did not want to see him and the Communist regime suddenly swept aside. Bush was convinced that Jaruzelski could ‘be a force for stability’. The irony was obvious. The Americans had for nearly half a century wanted to free the satellite states from the Soviet orbit. They had spent many billions of dollars on defence, espionage and propaganda with that objective. Now some of these regimes, loathed by their subjects, were teetering on the edge of destruction. Barely a month ago, in their first taste of democracy for sixty years, Poles had resoundingly voted against their Communist rulers. Yet the American President wanted to keep them in power - at least for a while. The ultra-cautious Bush thought it was a way of preventing anarchy in Eastern Europe.

His conversation with Jaruzelski on this morning was bizarre. The General said he had thought long and hard but was now reluctant to stand for President and face possible humiliation. Defeat, he said, was ‘unacceptable. I can’t win without Solidarity support, and I don’t think that will come. What role do you think I should play?’ Bush replied instantly that he should seek the nomination: ‘I told him his refusal to run might inadvertently lead to serious instability and I urged him to reconsider.’ Bush admitted it was a strange feeling trying to persuade a senior Communist to run for office. ‘But I felt that Jaruzelski’s experience was the best hope for a smooth transition in Poland.’ For the next day and a half he continually praised Jaruzelski’s patriotic efforts to transform his country. The opposition was deeply disappointed. Most of the intellectuals in Solidarity were instinctively pro-American. Yet they showed their displeasure at the words they were hearing.
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They were yet angrier when they heard the details of a US$ 100 million aid package Bush had brought with him. The President was aware how meagre it was. Secretary of State James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and General Scowcroft had all urged much more generous assistance as a way of encouraging the democratic changes in Poland. But the UST reasury Secretary, Nicholas Brady, said the cupboard was bare. ‘We can’t throw good money down a Polish rat-hole,’ he had said, and the President listened. Bush announced the aid at a speech to Solidarity parliamentarians, along with an additional offer of US$ 15 million to help clean up the pollution around Kraków. He was heard in silence. Government leaders and the opposition were united in their fury when they discovered that John Sununu, the President’s Chief of Staff, had been telling reporters that more money for Poland ‘would be like a young person in a candy store . . . [who] lacked the self-discipline to spend it wisely’.
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The next day Bush flew to Gdask to meet Lech Wałsa. The Presi dent disliked and distrusted the Solidarity leader, in contrast with his growing sympathy and fondness for Jaruzelski. He thought Wałsa was too quixotic, too radical and not solid or reliable enough. When they had met two years earlier Bush was taken aback by Wałsa’s answer when he asked if Solidarity would be legalised. Wałsa had said that if such an unlikely event occurred it ‘would cause a lot of trouble for us’ because Solidarity might then be blamed for the economic disaster in Poland. Bush and his wife Barbara had an uneasy lunch in the Wałas’ modest flat - prepared by Danuta - which ended in a near-shouting match. The Pole complained about the ‘pathetic, paltry’ aid offer and declared that Poland deserved far more generous treatment. He demanded US$ 10 billion over three years to get the Polish economy moving. When Bush replied that it was impossible the union leader angrily said that there could be mass poverty and unemployment in Poland and then ‘we will have civil war. We’re at the end of our rope.’
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Glad to be out of Poland, the President received a rapturous welcome in Budapest. Air Force One landed in a tremendous thun derstorm. Thousands of people turned up to greet him, which buoyed him after his difficult time in Gdask. Bush rarely played the showman, but he sensed a good photo opportunity on this occasion and after he walked down the steps in the driving rain he offered an elderly woman his overcoat.
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He was drenched after a walkabout, shaking hands on the tarmac. But when he settled down to business, as in Poland, he got on well with the conservative voices in the Communist regime, rather less so with radicals in the opposition. When he was handed a small piece of the barbed-wire fence, the Iron Curtain, which the Hungarians had dismantled in May, he declared himself moved to tears. He praised the government, which had ordered the fence removed, not the opposi tion, which had put pressure on the regime to remove it. Németh, Grósz, and the economist Rezsö Nyers, the trio now at the helm in Hungary, impressed him and he promised American support. Bush told them: ‘We’re with you. What you’re doing is exciting. It’s what we have always wanted. We are not going to complicate things for you. We know that the better we get along with the Soviets, the better it is for you too . . . We have no intention of making you choose between East and West.’
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Later the same day he met leading opposition figures at the residence of the American Ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer. The party did not go well. When Imre Pozsgay told Bush that the Communists would lose power the moment free and fair elections were called - ‘My Party is doing too little, too late,’ he said - Bush looked worried. Palmer had built good contacts with the dissidents and reform Communists over the last three years but the ‘extreme caution’ of his President and his boss at the State Department frustrated him. ‘Bush and Baker kept cautioning these people . . . in my living room . . . not to go too far, too fast,’ he said. When Bush told the former dissidents that their Communist government ‘was moving in the right direction. Your country is taking things one step at a time. Surely that is prudent,’ they did not pretend to hide their amazement. There was a culture shock, as Palmer described it. The godfather of underground dissident activity in Hungary, the philosopher János Kis, was at the Ambassador’s reception. He was a highly influential man in opposition circles throughout the Communist world, and he looked precisely what he was: a Central European intellectual. ‘When I introduced the President and Jim Baker to János Kis,’ said Palmer, ‘it was, like, “who is this strange man with a beard who looks like Woody Allen?”’ Bush told his aides afterwards: ‘These really aren’t the right guys to be running the place. At least not yet. They’re just not ready.’ He thought the Communists he had met were far better placed to introduce democracy and free markets to Hungary.
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Bush’s influence was powerful with Jaruzelski, who announced soon after the Americans left Poland that he would run for President after all. The US Ambassador, John Davis, was influential in persuading Solidarity to help elect him. Wałsa believed that the Soviets, as well as the Polish army and security forces, would accept no other candidate. So he made a deal with Jaruzelski that would guarantee the General’s victory. But it was a close-run thing. Wałsa had to strong arm newly elected Solidarity MPs into abstaining during the vote. Many simply refused: they could not support the man who had jailed them and caused their families to suffer. But finally he persuaded seven of them to agree. ‘Vote with your consciences,’ he told them, and then explained that Solidarity needed this ‘vital’ deal. ‘We held our noses, but went through with it in the end,’ one Solidarity legislator declared. At a point during the voting when it seemed possible that the General might lose, Solidarity activists had to scour the bars looking for MPs to go through the lobby for Jaruzelski. He scraped home by just one vote. On 19 July General Jaruzelski, the man who had turned Poland into a military dictatorship, became the democratically chosen President of the country.
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One of the cleverest of the Communist chieftains in Poland was Janusz Reykowski, the former psychology professor from Warsaw and the chief negotiator for the Party at the Round Table talks. He said: ‘There are plenty of Marxist-Leninist textbooks about taking power; but there are none about giving it up.’ Over the next month of tortured negotiations, Poland experienced its first taste of real parliamentary democracy since the 1920s. It was not always a pretty sight. Jaruzelski was President, but he could not find a working government. He gave up his position as Party boss, but he had not abandoned the idea of ensuring that the Communists should retain power in Poland. On Tuesday 25 July he summoned Wałesa and asked him to join a Com munist-led Grand Coalition, as the General called it. The Party would hold the top positions, Solidarity could have four junior posts - Health, Environment, Housing, Industry. ‘Solidarity must grow into power,’ Jaruzelski said. Wałsa refused immediately and would not budge. A week later Jaruzelski appointed Kiszczak Prime Minister, but support for the Communists had drained away. The former head of state security could not form a government. Even some old Party stalwarts refused to serve with him or the other men in uniform, old familiar faces who he thought could lead Poland into a new democratic dawn.
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Wałesa had not intended to take Solidarity into government, despite long consideration of the electoral position following the second round of voting on Sunday 18 June. Solidarity had lost just one contested seat in which it fielded a candidate for the Sejm and took 99 per cent of the seats in the Senate. The bizarre exception in the Upper House was an Independent, Henryk Stokłosa, an ex-Communist-turned-millionaire entrepreneur, who claimed he spent US$ 100,000 on his election, a fortune in Poland at the time. Wałsa had said before the elections: ‘We are a trade union . . . What we want is autonomy and independence from the government. Let the Communists govern.’ That caution was partly for Soviet consumption. He was not sure the Russians would let Solidarity take power and he did not want to provoke them. Gorbachev had said all the right things, but Wałsa could not trust the Soviets. They still had thousands of troops on Polish soil. Also, he was not sure that Solidarity was yet ready for power. Wide splits were opening up within the union. As one of its leading figures said, not entirely as a joke: ‘Lech deserved a second Nobel Prize for keeping the peace within Solidarity.’ There had been factions in the union from the beginning, but seldom was the infighting as intense as now, when the Communists were on the verge of defeat.
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