The Year that Changed the World (10 page)

I mentioned this conversation to Bronislaw Geremek, the scholarly medievalist who over these months emerged as the chief strategist behind Solidarity's rebirth. Bearded and bespectacled, as soft and gentle in manner as his patched and well-worn sweaters, Geremek was the epitome of the East European intellectual. This day, he sat in his book-lined study in a gray apartment block on a narrow backstreet in what remained of Warsaw's Old Town. I didn't call ahead, even in those changing times, because I preferred not to alert the secret police. Geremek nodded at the talk of “civil war.” Solidarity sought only one thing from the talks: legal recognition. The government was willing to offer everything but this, he explained. “They talk of ‘deep changes' in our politics and economy. They tell us the opposition might be represented in parliament or the government. They offer changes in the tax law to encourage private enterprise and speak of a new ‘law of association,' whatever might be meant by that. But on the issue of Solidarity, they say, ‘We can't do this right now.' From our perspective, this is the number one priority. Because it goes to the heart of democracy and the nation's social and economic troubles.” Failure to reach what Geremek called a new “social contract” could lead to more than a war within the party. It could easily touch off a social “explosion.”

The novelist Tom Wolfe, in his 1980s bestseller
Bonfire of the Vanities,
anointed one Reverend Bacon as the man who controlled “the steam” in New York, twisting a social safety valve to release pent-up pressure when racial relations approached the bursting point, or notching them up when he wanted to make a political point. In Poland in early 1989, that role fell to General Jaruzelski. As the talks between Solidarity and the government dragged on inconclusively, he would break the impasse. The Round Table had been his idea. He brought the two sides together. He faced down communist hard-liners threatening to bolt the party at that stormy January meeting of the Central Committee. Ultimately, he would push them to success. Those who led Solidarity would later admit that they “owed” Jaruzelski. Jacek Kuron, a union organizer who spent seven years in jail and
would go on to become minister of labor, put it bluntly: “Jaruzelski was the one who saw it just wasn't working anymore, not just communism but the whole system. He was big enough to see it.”

That Jaruzelski should reach out to the hated Solidarity, at a moment when he saw Poland threatened every bit as much as in 1981, was as much an act of courage as it was pragmatism or expedience. Neither he nor the opposition knew where the talks might lead. And it's striking how modestly each side defined their goals. At what would be a fateful watershed, Solidarity sought little more than recognition of its right to exist; beyond that, it would accept what it could get. The government may have hoped for a partner in culpability. If there was no glory in socialism, party leaders reasoned, at least they could spread the blame of failure by giving the opposition a modest voice in power. But Jaruzelski also hoped that Solidarity could help smooth the road through some tough economic belt-tightening that he was wise enough to foresee as necessary.

Only the true believers, the hardest of hard-liners, appear to have seen the threat as it was—the end of communism in Poland. Change began in Poland as it would across much of Eastern Europe, with a combination of blindness and expedience. The old guard knew their weakness and tried to remedy it. Yet they seemed to think they could control change, get out in front and lead. Seldom did they recognize the force of the events they set in motion.

By tradition, any new head of state in the East bloc traveled first to Moscow. Not Miklos Nemeth. He went to Vienna, then Warsaw. “Hungarians got the message,” he said—a “small sign” that the country's future lay to the west, not east.

As spring approached, however, Nemeth felt he could defer a visit no longer. Hungary's reforms were entering a crucial—and worrisome—phase. He would soon announce that free elections would be held, possibly before the end of the year. Kalman Kulcsar, his justice minister, was finishing the new constitution, with full guarantees of free speech and private property. It wasn't just socialism with a human face. It was… a human face, period.

Nemeth wanted to make sure he was not going too far, or too fast. Only one person could answer that question. So Nemeth wrote to Mikhail Gorbachev, asking for a meeting in the first week of March. His timing was influenced by another factor. Communist party secretary Karoly Grosz planned to see Gorbachev, as well. That visit was scheduled for March 23–24. Nemeth told Gorbachev that, as Hungary's head of state, he too should be meeting with the Soviet leader and, in recognition of diplomatic protocol, should be first. Privately he feared that Grosz would undermine both him and his government's reforms by casting them as a threat to the party's continued hold on power—which would, in fact, be precisely what happened.

Nemeth had requested an hour's audience. Instead, he was offered twenty minutes. “Gorbachev and I were alone, each with an aide.” Describing his plans for democracy in Hungary, and why he thought it necessary, Nemeth told Gorbachev plainly what the consequences
could be—a popular vote that might drive the communists from office. How would Moscow react, he wanted to know.

Gorbachev was taken aback. The longer the two men spoke, the more agitated Gorbachev became. “He was very angry,” Nemeth recalled years later. “‘I do not agree with this “Hungarian way,”' Gorbachev said. ‘The proper path is to go back to the roots of Leninism.'” He sternly urged Nemeth to follow the guidance of his boss, the correct-thinking General Secretary Grosz, who opposed any course that might undermine the authority and leading role of the communist party.

Now it was Nemeth's turn to be shocked. He had expected to find a fellow reformer, a sympathetic ear, even an ally in his fight against Grosz and others who resisted too-rapid change. But no. “I realized, very strongly at this moment, that Gorbachev was a socialist to his core. He outlined for me how socialism could find its way again, by going back to the time before Stalin. I felt completely the opposite and said so. When I told him we were considering elections, and not merely talking to the opposition, he was especially angered.” It was a blow against socialism, Gorbachev argued heatedly, a violation of the party's right to create a just society. You couldn't just leave that to chance, for the people to decide.

Nemeth remembers feeling physically sick. He feared that all he had been working toward was about to crumble. How could he possibly go ahead without Gorbachev's blessing? Images of Soviet troops in Budapest flickered through his head. At the very least, Moscow's resistance to his policies would mean the end of his own career. For a fleeting moment, Nemeth wondered whether he might even be thrown in jail. Then, abruptly, Gorbachev changed his tone. “But of course, comrade,” he said, “you are responsible, not me.” Hungary's direction was for Hungarians to decide, not Moscow.

Suddenly, the immense pressure lifted. Nemeth pressed the point, posing again the elemental question. “I asked him specifically, ‘If we set a date for an election and are voted out, would you intervene as in 1956?' ” Without a hint of hesitation, Gorbachev answered,
“Nyet.”
Then he paused and, with a ghost of a smile, added a telling caveat: “At least, not as long as I am sitting in this chair.”

This
no
was of immense importance to Nemeth. “It meant we
could go ahead. It opened the way for everything that would follow,” he said, from the creation of a democratic Hungary to, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall. This brief encounter with Gorbachev, coming with the first breath of spring after a long winter, would prove to be a hidden but decisive turning point in the end of the Cold War.

Yet Nemeth was not finished. Having accomplished his chief mission, he dropped a second bomb, in some ways even bigger than the first. He told Gorbachev that he wanted to pull Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet military alliance established as a counterweight to NATO.

In late December, shortly before Christmas, Nemeth had been summoned to a secret meeting at the Hungarian Defense Ministry. Karoly Grosz informed him that, as the country's new prime minister, he had to review and sign some papers. “So I went. Never will I forget that terrible day.” Military security guards met Nemeth at the gate and escorted him into the bowels of the building. A small group of senior officials awaited him, including the commanding general of Soviet forces in Hungary. There he was briefed on the threat from the West. “NATO plans to invade from Italy,” he was informed. Maps showed the likely movements of Allied and Warsaw Pact forces. Nemeth's personal command bunker was, coincidentally, located in his native village in eastern Hungary. “Then came the really secret part,” according to Nemeth. “I was informed that nuclear warheads were stored in Hungary,” secured in bunkers in the forests around Lake Balaton, where he loved to sail. After signing some documents and a statement agreeing not to disclose the information, he left.

Nemeth was stunned. Moscow had always denied the presence of nuclear weapons in Hungary, but they were there in “quite substantial numbers.” Nemeth broke his pledge of secrecy immediately, telling his wife and two key advisers, one of them Defense Minister Ferenc Karpati. Even then, Nemeth had planned to inform Gorbachev that he wanted Soviet troops withdrawn from Hungary. Now he included Russia's nuclear weapons in the request. Gorbachev blinked. “I will get back to you,” he said, giving no hint of what he would decide. Both men understood that they were talking about a staggering development, as yet unimaginable in the West.

Nemeth left the Kremlin for the airport, his feelings weirdly
mixed. Elation coupled with relief, yet he felt a deep trepidation. He and his reformers had come a long way. They had just negotiated a passage that many among them had dreaded. But that only set the stage for greater dangers ahead. In the end, a meeting that was to last twenty minutes had stretched to nearly three hours.

If Miklos Nemeth's visit to Moscow cracked the edifice that was the Soviet bloc, another fissure opened a few weeks later in Poland, far more visibly. To the surprise of almost everyone, the Polish Round Table ended on April 7 with a historic pact. At a glittery ceremony in Warsaw's seventeenth-century Namiestnikowski Palace, the two sides toasted one another with vodka and champagne. Both got more than they bargained for. Neither knew it.

Solidarity had dreamed of regaining its legal standing, seven years after being outlawed under martial law. It came away not only with that, but also with the right to compete in Poland's next parliamentary elections, just two months away. For Poles, this was breathtaking—the country's first free elections since World War II. To be sure,
free
was a qualified term. Under the deal, Solidarity could contest only a third of the seats in the Sejm, the lower house of the national legislature; the remaining two-thirds were reserved for the communists. A new upper house, the Senate, was to be created, though its role would be confined to reviewing legislation proposed by the lower house. Key posts such as the Defense and Interior ministries would be kept by the communists, as well as the presidency—presumably Jaruzelski, who announced at the conclusion of the talks that Poland was “on the road to becoming a socialist parliamentary democracy.”

Evidently he believed it. Nothing suggests Jaruzelski had the least doubt that the party would retain power—that is, he chose to emphasize the “socialist” before “parliamentary” when it came to democracy. Perhaps he was seduced by his political experts' polls, purporting to show that Solidarity's popularity was declining as his own was rising. More likely, he simply couldn't imagine a different outcome. These elections would be like any other communist vote, he not illogically presumed: the results foreordained, the people grateful to participate and show their support for their government's leadership, which after all had only their best interests at heart. Not even the nation's dyspeptic
post-1981 mood, nor the economic hard times, appeared to shake his confidence.

The party rank and file did not share his optimism, Kat among them. As the Round Table progressed, his mood steadily deteriorated. “Socialism in Poland is being dismantled,” he complained bitterly late one night, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He was full of dark foreboding. The party was colluding in its own demise, he said. Jaruzelski and his men deluded themselves if they thought they could control events they were about to unleash. Kat had just learned with astonishment that the government itself had proposed that Solidarity field candidates for the June election. The opposition hadn't even asked for it. Talk about an instinct for self-destruction! “What a spectacle,” he declared, shaking his head in perplexity and contempt.

He guessed that, in a genuinely free election, the party would be lucky to retain a majority in Parliament. At a recent briefing for top communist officials, the government negotiator, Czeslaw Kiszczak, had been hooted down. “Attitudes within the party were hostile,” he reported. “The old guard, especially, asked, ‘Why do this? We risk sacrificing all our privileges, without any gain.' ” Even party liberals felt they were being dragged along against their will and own best interests. Hard-liners were angry enough, Kat believed, that they might try to oust Jaruzelski—a “traitor,” this time, to their cause.

As the Round Table neared its conclusion, I invited Solidarity's chief strategist in the talks, Bronislaw Geremek, for dinner at the Victoria Hotel in central Warsaw, facing the gargantuan square where Poland's communist elite staged their annual May Day parades. Ever the academic, in his mothy tweed jacket and well-worn sweater, he could not have afforded on his own to eat in such an establishment. Yet there he was, having just helped engineer one of the most extraordinary diplomatic coups in modern European history.