The New Penguin History of the World (213 page)

At the end of 1990, the condition of what had once seemed an almost monolithic east European bloc already defied generalization or brief description. As some former communist countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary) applied to join the EC, or got ready to do so (Bulgaria), observers speculated about a potentially wider degree of European unity than ever before. More cautious judgements were made by those who noted the virulent emergence of new – or re-emergence of old – national and communal divisions. Over all eastern Europe there gathered the storm clouds of economic failure and the turbulence they might bring. Liberation might be coming, but to peoples and societies of very different levels of sophistication and development, and with very different historical origins. Prediction was unwise and just how unwise became clear in 1991. In that year, a jolt was given to optimism over the prospects of peaceful change when two of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia announced their decision to separate from the federal state.

The ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, which had appeared as the successor to Serbia and Montenegro in 1918, had as long ago as 1929
changed its name to ‘Yugoslavia’ in an attempt to obliterate old divisions, accompanied by the establishment of a royal dictatorship. But the new kingdom was always seen by too many of its subjects, Serbs and non-Serbs alike, as essentially a manifestation of an old historical dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’. When its second king, Alexander, had been assassinated in 1934 in France, it was by a Macedonian aided by Croats, acting with the support of the Hungarian and Italian governments. The bitterness of the country’s own divisions had thus soon attracted outsiders to dabble in its affairs, and local politicians to seek outsiders’ support; Croatians subsequently declared their own independence as a state when German troops arrived in 1941.

Besides its demographic and communal diversity (the Yugoslav census of 1931 distinguished Serbo-Croats, Slovenes, Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, ‘Other Slavs’, Jews, Gypsies and Italians), Yugoslavia also displayed wide disparities of custom, wealth and economic development. In parts of it, the Middle Ages had barely faded away in 1950, while others were modern, urbanized and contained significant industry. Overall, what were mainly agricultural economies had been impoverished by fast-growing populations. Yet Yugoslav politics between the German wars had turned out to be in the main about a Croat–Serb antagonism and this was deepened by wartime atrocity and struggle in a three-sided civil war between Croatians, the mainly Serb communists (themselves led by the Croatian, Tito) and Serb royalists after 1941. This struggle began with a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing launched against the two million Serbs of the new Croatia (which included Bosnia and Herzegovina). It ended in communist victory in 1945, and the effective containment of nationalities by Tito’s dictatorship within a federal structure; this seemed to solve the old Bosnian and Macedonian problems and was likely to be able to ward off the territorial ambitions of outsiders. Forty-five years later and ten years after Tito’s death, however, the old issues suddenly revealed themselves to be still vigorously alive.

In 1990 the Yugoslav federal government’s attempts to deal with its economic troubles were accompanied by accelerating political fragmentation. Democratic self-determination finally undid the Tito achievement as Yugoslavs of different nationalities began to cast about to find ways of filling the political vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Parties formed representing Serb, Croat, Macedonian and Slovene interests as well as one in favour of the Yugoslav idea and the federation itself. Soon, all the republican governments, except that of Macedonia, rested on elected majorities, and new national minority parties had even begun to make themselves heard inside the individual republics. Croatian Serbs declared their own autonomy and there was bloodshed in the Serbian province of
Kosovo, four-fifths of whose inhabitants were Albanian. The proclamation of an independent republic there had been a major symbolic affront to the Serbians – as well as of concern to the Greek and Bulgarian governments, whose predecessors had not ceased to cherish Macedonian ambitions since the days of the Balkan wars. In August, sporadic fighting by air and ground forces had begun between Serbs and Croats. Precedents for intervention by outsiders did not ever seem promising – though different views were held by different EC countries – and prospects for it became even less attractive when the USSR in July uttered a warning about the dangers of spreading local conflict to the international level. By the end of the year Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia had all, like Croatia, declared themselves independent.

The Soviet warning was the last diplomatic
démarche
of the regime. It was soon eclipsed by a much more momentous event. On 19 August a still mysterious attempt was made to set aside Mikhail Gorbachev by
coup d’état
. It failed, and three days later he was again in occupation of the presidency. Nonetheless, his position was not the same; continual changes of side in a search for compromise had ruined his political credibility. He had clung too long to the Party and the Union; Soviet politics had taken a further lurch forward, in the eyes of many, towards disintegration. The circumstances of the coup had given an opportunity, which he seized, to Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian republic, the largest in the Union. The army, the only conceivable threat to his supporters, did not move against him. He now appeared both as the strong man of the Soviet scene, without whose concurrence nothing could be done, and as a possible standard-bearer for a Russian chauvinism that might threaten other republics. While foreign observers waited to understand, the purging of those who had supported or acquiesced in the coup was developed into a determined replacement of Union officialdom at all levels, the redefinition of roles for the KGB and a redistribution of control over it between the Union and the republics. The most striking change of all was the demolition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which began almost at once. Almost bloodlessly, at least to begin with, the huge creation which had grown out of the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was coming to an end. There seemed at first good grounds for rejoicing over that, although it was not clear that nothing but good would follow.

Nor was that easier to see as the year came to an end. With the decision to abandon price controls in the Russian republic in the near future, it seemed likely that not only inflation, unparalleled since the earliest days of the Soviet system, but also, perhaps, starvation too, would soon face millions of Russians. In another republic, Georgia, fighting had already
broken out between the supporters of the president elected after the first free elections there and the discontented opposition. Dwarfing all such facts, though, was the end of the giant superpower which had emerged from the bloody experiments of the Bolshevik revolution. For nearly seventy years and almost to the end it was the hope of revolutionaries around the world, and the generator of military strength that had won the greatest land campaigns in history. Now it dissolved suddenly and helplessly into a set of successor states. The last of the great European multinational empires disappeared when Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian leaders met at Minsk on 8 December and announced the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a new ‘Commonwealth’ of Independent States. On 21 December 1991, a gathering of representatives from eleven of the former republics met briefly at Alma-Ata to confirm this. They agreed that the formal end of the Union would come on the last day of the year. Almost immediately, Gorbachev resigned.

It was the climax of one of the most startling and important changes of modern history. Of what lay ahead, no one could be sure – except that it would be a period of danger, difficulty and, for many former Soviet citizens, misery. In other countries, politicians were rarely tempted to express more than caution over the turn events had taken. There was too much uncertainty ahead. As for the USSR’ s former friends, they were silent. A few of them had deplored the turn of events earlier in the year so much that they had expressed approval or encouragement for the failed coup of August. Libya and the PLO did so because any return to anything like Cold War groupings was bound to arouse their hopes of renewed possibilities of international manoeuvre that had been constricted first by
détente
between the USA and USSR and then by the growing powerlessness of the latter.

CHINA

Events in the USSR must have been followed with special interest in China. Its rulers had their own reasons for uneasiness about the direction in which events appeared to be going on the other side of their longest land frontier after the collapse of communism there. With the Soviet Union’s disappearance, they were the rulers of the only multinational empire still intact. Moreover, China had been engaged since 1978 in a continuing process of cautious and controlled modernization.

Deng Xiaoping came to be seen as the dominating influence in this, but he worked in a collective leadership. Scope was to be given to local and community enterprise and the profit motive. Commercial ties with noncommunist
countries began to be encouraged. Although the new course was defined in appropriately Marxist language, the outcome seemed to be a substantial liberalization (at least in the eyes of old-fashioned communists) of the economy, but in fact showed no weakening of the will to power of the regime. China’s rulers remained firmly in control and intended to do so. They were helped by the persistence of the old Chinese social disciplines, by the relief felt by millions that the Cultural Revolution had been left behind, by the cult (qualified though it might be) of Mao’s memory, and by the policy (contrary to that of Marxism as still expounded in Moscow until 1980) that economic rewards should flow through the system to the peasant. This built up rural purchasing power and that made for contentment in the countryside. There was a major swing of power away from the rural communes, which in many places practically ceased to be relevant, and by 1985 the family farm was back as the dominant form of rural production over much of China.

For all the complaints of critics that China was resuming the ‘capitalist road’, tender consciences were assuaged by talk of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and a prudent pragmatism about local interests and regional differences. Village industrial and commercial enterprise emerged from the ‘communes’ and ‘brigades’ of the era of the Great Leap. By the mid-1980s a half of rural income was drawn from industrial employment.

In some regions special economic areas, enclaves for free trade with the capitalist world, were set up; the first as at Canton, the historic point of contact of China with the West. By 1986, too, China was the largest coal producer in the world, and the fourth largest of steel. GDP, it was claimed, rose at a rate of more than 10 per cent a year between 1978 and 1986, industrial output doubled in that time, and per capita peasant income nearly tripled (by 1988 the average peasant family was said to have about six months’ income in the savings bank). In a longer perspective, the value of foreign trade per capita multiplied roughly twenty-five times between 1950 and the mid-1980s. Psychologically, the regime’s success was buttressed, too, by the agreements for the resumption of Hong Kong and Macao.

The new policy was not without costs, however. Growing urban markets encouraged farmers and gave them profits to plough back, but the city dwellers began to feel the effects of rising prices. As the decade progressed, though, domestic difficulties increased. Foreign debt had shot up and inflation was running at an annual rate of about 30 per cent by the end of the decade. There was anger over evidence of corruption, and divisions in the leadership (some following upon the deaths and illness among the gerontocrats who dominated the Party) were widely known to exist. Those believing that a reassertion of political control was needed began to gain
ground, and there were signs that they were manoeuvring to win over Deng Xiaoping. Yet western observers and perhaps some Chinese had been led by the policy of economic liberalization to take unrealistic and over-optimistic views about the possibility of political relaxation. The exciting changes in eastern Europe stimulated further hopes of this. But the illusions suddenly crumbled.

As 1989 began, China’s city-dwellers were feeling the pressures both of the acute inflation and of an austerity programme that had been imposed to deal with it. This was the background to a new wave of student demands. Encouraged by the presence of sympathizers with liberalization in the governing oligarchy, they demanded that the Party and government should open a dialogue with a newly formed and unofficial student union about corruption and reform. Posters and rallies began to champion calls for greater ‘democracy’. The regime’s leadership was alarmed, refusing to recognize the union, which, it was feared, might be the harbinger of a new Red Guards movement. As the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th Movement approached, activists invoked its memory so as to give a broad patriotic colour to their campaign. They were not able to arouse much support in the countryside although there were sympathetic demonstrations in many cities, but, encouraged by the obviously benevolent attitude of the general secretary of the CCP, Zhao Ziyang, they began a mass hunger strike that won widespread popular sympathy and support in Beijing. It had started only shortly before Gorbachev arrived in the capital; his state visit, instead of providing further reassuring evidence of China’s international standing, only served to remind people of what was going on in the USSR as a result of policies of liberalization. This cut both ways, encouraging would-be reformers and frightening conservatives.

By this time the most senior members of the government, including Deng Xiaoping, seem to have become thoroughly alarmed. Widespread disorder might be in the offing; they believed China faced a major crisis. Some feared a new Cultural Revolution if things got out of control. On 20 May 1989 martial law was declared. There were signs for a moment that a divided government might not be able to impose its will, but the army’s reliability was soon assured. The repression that followed two weeks later was ruthless. The student leaders had moved the focus of their efforts to an encampment in Beijing in Tiananmen Square, where, forty years before, Mao had proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic, and they had been joined there by other dissidents. From one of the gates of the old Forbidden City a huge portrait of Mao looked down on the symbol of the protesters: a plaster figure of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, deliberately evocative of New York’s Statue of Liberty. On 2 June the first military units entered the suburbs of
Beijing on their way to the square. There was resistance with extemporized weapons and barricades that they forced their way through. On 3 June the demonstrators were overcome by rifle-fire, tear-gas, and a brutal crushing of the encampment under the treads of tanks that swept into the square. Killing went on for some days, mass arrests followed (perhaps as many as 10,000 in all). Much of what happened took place before the eyes of the world, thanks to the presence of foreign film-crews who had for days familiarized television audiences with the demonstrators’ encampment.