Revolution 1989 (58 page)

The quartet had been conspiring in a vague way since Zhivkov launched his campaign in May to expel the Turks. But they had to tread with care. They could not meet in the open because Zhivkov’s personal spies would be suspicious. ‘We were living in a glasshouse, closely observed,’ said Lukanov. ‘Everyone knew that everything we said was bugged, so we only talked about business or personal things when we knew we were being overheard. We used to write notes to each other and slip them across the desk. Obviously it was impossible to phone each other. We couldn’t trust anyone else.’ They had to engineer meetings outside in the street, where they were unlikely to be overheard. That was where Dzhurov’s final, crucial agreement to join the conspiracy was reached - on a pavement.

Lukanov and Mladenov were convinced that they needed Moscow’s blessing to proceed. That had to be handled with great care. Gorbachev was personally told about their intentions by Mladenov at the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest on 7 July. The Bulgarian took a copy of one of Gorbachev’s books and during a break in the proceedings he went up to the Soviet leader and asked him to sign the volume. ‘Then Gorbachev said, “I want to talk to you.” We went into a corner where there was nobody else,’ Mladenov recalled. ‘In . . . our system it was inconceivable to have the Foreign Minister, rather than the First Secretary, talking to Gorbachev. I was not authorised to have private discussions with him . . . I told Gorbachev that we intended to carry out this change . . . he said “This is entirely your business. You have to sort it out yourselves.” Probably Zhivkov knew what we were doing. He had strong intuition. But ... it was another thing to have proof.’
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Three people in the Soviet Union were kept informed all along: Gorbachev, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze. In Sofia the Soviet Ambassador, Viktor Sharapov, knew about the plot. But they did not play an active role, apart from wishing the conspirators well. The KGB was deliberately kept in the dark, for fear of a leak. Nobody in the Lubyanka was told and General Vladilen Fyodorov, the KGB’s Resident in Sofia, did not know until the next day from the TV news. The Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence services were exceptionally close - they had co-operated on numerous operations, such as the murder of the writer Georgi Markov. The conspirators wanted to be especially sure that the Sigurnost should have no inkling of the plot.

The final act began on 24 October, when Mladenov suddenly resigned as Foreign Minister. Zhivkov was deeply concerned. He tried to talk Mladenov out of it but his charm failed to work on this occasion. Mladenov sent the letter to all the senior Communist Party oligarchs, knowing it would soon be widely leaked throughout Sofia. It was a devastating indictment of Zhivkov’s leadership and personality. He wrote:

Mladenov had taken the precaution of sending a copy to Gorbachev ‘because I wanted to have a record there for history if something were to happen to us’, he said. Zhivkov wanted to be assured of the Soviet Union’s support and on 31 October he sent a message to Gorbachev asking for an urgent meeting in Moscow. Gorbachev refused, saying he was too busy to see him and that he was ‘neutral’ about internal issues in Sofia, which were entirely the business of Bulgarians.
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Zhivkov was drinking more heavily than usual and sleeping poorly. He had been a strong man all his life, though now he began to look physically weak. But he was not yet broken. He met Dzhurov at around ten on the morning of Wednesday 8 November, who delivered a heavy blow. His old friend told him that it was time for him to step down and that there were enough members of the top leadership ready to vote him out of office if he did not resign. But he played for time, hoping that he could organise a counter-coup against the plotters. ‘When I tried to go a year ago and asked all the others whether I should resign they all said No,’ he said. ‘Now you all say Yes. What’s happened in a year? I am prepared to resign, I’ll go soon, but not just yet. I need to do a few things first.’ The plotters knew ‘that it would have to be now or never’, according to Lukanov. ‘We can’t afford any postponement,’ he told Atanasov and Dzhurov. Mladenov was in China and would not return until late the following night. ‘If you give Zhivkov a week everything could be finished, and we could be finished too.’

Zhivkov tried to round up support that night, but it drained away. Dzhurov had tight control of the army. The leaders of the militia and even the Sigurnost, which been loyal to Zhivkov for decades, said they could not back him. A leadership meeting at the Party headquarters in central Sofia was called for 5 p.m. on 9 November. The conspirators gave him a last chance to resign. At 4 p.m. Dzhurov told the leader that army units loyal to the Defence Ministry were guarding the exits to the building and warned him that if he continued to resist the obvious and refused to resign voluntarily, there would be a resolution not only to remove him from office but to execute him. He finally caved in, amid floods of tears. An hour later he took the chair of the Communist oligarchs of Bulgaria for the last time. He said he was old and ill and wanted to be relieved of the cares of duty. He resigned, but tried to play one final card. He recommended Atanasov to replace him. Zhivkov lost that trick too. Atanasov declined and nominated Mladenov.

The next day, at a larger Party meeting, his resignation was officially accepted and Mladenov was formally elected in his place. At the end he was standing, alone, at the lift, waiting to leave the building. The man who had held power for thirty-five years, removed thousands of his enemies, and had allegedly stashed away upwards of US $100 million in Swiss banks for himself and his family, cut a pathetic figure. Mladenov went to him to try to say a consoling word. Zhivkov brightened up for a minute and stayed true to his character. ‘He started making several demands . . . could he continue to stay in his official residence, in Banyka, near Sofia . . . could he have a smaller residence . . . he asked about his pension . . . I said he could do as he pleased,’ said Mladenov.
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Zhivkov’s dictatorship was over. But the Communists tried to keep their monopoly on power. Mladenov made it clear that he proposed to stay in office and so would all the Party chieftains. It seemed that the principal beneficiaries of the coup would be the conspirators who ousted Zhivkov. Bulgarians felt cheated. They had watched Soviet TV and seen the crowds on the streets in Berlin. A wave of protests swept through the country on a scale never seen before. ‘The coup had worked for them,’ said Stefan Tafrov, a spokesman for the hastily formed Union of Democratic Forces, and later an Ambassador to the UK and to Paris. ‘We had to find something that would work for us.’ Massive demonstrations over the next three weeks forced Mladenov - like the East Germans before him - to cave in, start serious talks with the opposition and agree to democratic elections the following spring.
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FORTY-SEVEN

Prague, Friday 17 November 1989

 

IT WAS RITA KLIMOVA who invented the phrase ‘Velvet Revolution’. A petite, blonde, one-time politics lecturer at Prague’s ancient Charles University, she was the formidably erudite spokeswoman for the opposition that bustled the Communists out of power in Czechoslovakia. Klimova spoke impeccable English, but in a Manhattan accent with West Side idioms; she had been to school in New York where her father, the left-wing writer Batya Bat, had fled to escape the Nazis in 1938, when she was an infant. The family returned to Prague soon after the war. Her story was fairly typical for a Czech dissident of the 1980s. She had been a convinced Communist, like her husband Zdenek Mlyná, who had shared digs and a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev at Moscow State University in the 1950s. He rose high in the ranks of the Party, and she in academia, until the Prague Spring was crushed. Then they both lost their jobs - and their idealistic faith that communism could offer any hope for mankind. In the harsh years of ‘normalisation’ she found work as a translator, became active in Charter 77 and was a firm friend of Václav Havel.

The fiercely intelligent Klimova could occasionally look stern and forbidding, but at fifty-eight she had a large girlish streak and a sense of fun. As Klimova used to say, it was fun that characterised the Velvet Revolution and made it so different from the others in Central Europe in the summer and autumn of 1989. Defeating the Communists was a serious matter. Nobody doubted that. But in Czechoslovakia it was done with plenty of music, wit, humour, laughter and a little absurdity, much of it scripted by a celebrated playwright. It happened with astonishing speed. As the acute observer on Central Europe Timothy Garton Ash pointed out, ‘In Poland it took ten years; in East Germany ten weeks; in Czechoslovakia ten days.’ Barely a month earlier, in mid-October, the Czech Communist Party chief, Miloš Jakeš, was assuring his fellow Communist oligarchs that ‘we’ll be all right. As long as the economy holds up here, and there’s food on the shelves.’ He was fooling himself. Like his peers in Berlin and Leipzig, by the time the hapless Jakeš and his colleagues in Prague Castle grasped what was happening to them it was too late to do anything about it.
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For a week after the Wall fell there had been an uneasy quiet in the Czech capital. Everyone had seen the pictures from the Brandenburg Gate, just 200 kilometres away. Communism in East Germany had collapsed. The Party had been defeated and was now negotiating the details of its capitulation. The comrades in Prague still imagined that somehow they could cling on, that the ‘infection’, as Vasil Bil’ak, one of the leading neo-Stalinists in the Czech leadership, called it, would not spread. They did not seek to negotiate with the opposition. Instead, they put the riot police and the StB on full alert. A secret report to the Czech Deputy Interior Minister in charge of security, Rudolf Hegenbart, written after the Wall was breached, detailed the preparations the security forces were making ‘to protect peace and stability against enemy elements, rowdies and counter-revolutionary forces’. Round-the-clock patrols in known troublespots in the centre of the city would increase. ‘We were living in a different place from the rest of the world’s population, in a bubble of our own,’ said one old comrade, who confessed that he did not see what was about to happen, despite all the evidence in front of him.
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Students sparked it. They had been given permission, through the official Communist Youth organisation, the SSM (Socialist Union of Youth), to hold a rally marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal. The regime had wanted to ban the march. But it could find no plausible reason. Opletal had hero status in People’s Czechoslovakia. The Communists had used his name in anti-fascist propaganda for four decades. He was shot by the Germans at a demonstration against the Nazi occupation, after which 1,000 of his fellow Czech students were sent to concentration camps and all Czech universities were closed for months. Three weeks before the anniversary march, a route was agreed between the SSM organisers and the police which avoided the centre of the city and would end at the National Cemetery at Vyšehrad, burial place of Dvoák, Smetana, a host of other Czech notables, and Jan Opletal. More than 50,000 well-behaved people had joined the march. The shouts heard most often were ‘Remember 68’, ‘Down with the Commies’, ‘Forty years are enough’ and ‘Perestroika, here’. A huge banner was unfurled halfway through the march bearing a saying attributed to Gorbachev in large red letters: ‘If not now, when?’ The police did nothing. They let the march go ahead.

According to the agreement with the authorities, the demonstration should have ended at the cemetery and most of the people left, particularly the older ones. It was now about 5.30 p.m., a freezing winter late afternoon and that familiar dense, foul, sulphuric fog had descended over Prague. A core of about 3,000 people, all students or young workers, stayed at the cemetery, standing around in the cold, doing nothing in particular At around 6.30 p.m. a few of them shouted ‘To Wenceslas Square’ and they turned back, hastening towards the centre of Prague. As they reached the Czech National Theatre on Národní Street, which leads to the Square, they were confronted by riot police wearing white helmets and carrying plastic shields and by anti-terrorist squads in red berets wielding heavy truncheons.

The students sat down in the street and started singing - hymns, the national anthem, old Beatles hits, ‘We Shall Overcome’. ‘We chanted “We have no weapons”. The only things we had with us were candles and flowers, which we gave to the police. They used loudhailers and shouted “Go home”, but they had blocked our path,’ said Charles University economics student Pavlina Rousova. Another squad of riot police had come up behind the students. They could not move.

They continued to sit in the freezing cold, wrapped in their coats, hugging each other to keep warm, and out of fear. They waited, singing, for around two hours, staring at the riot squad behind their shields. Occasionally one of the students would get up and try to ask an officer to release them from the trap and let them go home. They were ignored. Just after 9 p.m. a riot squad van appeared from behind the line of police. It deliberately rammed into the crowd, causing panic. The police attacked the students, beating them with truncheons as they scattered. ‘There was blood everywhere and I could hear bones cracking,’ said student Dasa Antelova, who managed to hide in a narrow alleyway and later make a getaway. ‘They selected people from the first row of the demonstration, and they beat them mercilessly. They would not let the young people go. They brought in buses and arrested them all.’