The Year that Changed the World (15 page)

At this, the multitudes cheered. The music swelled to a triumphant finale. The funeral of Imre Nagy had just been turned into a political rally, televised nationally. Lost in the hubbub was the fact that
Nemeth, Pozsgay and others were on the verge of delivering all that Orban promised, and more, albeit less noisily. They had set the stage for fully free elections, without any protections for themselves, unlike Poland's communists. Soon they would announce a date. They had already won Moscow's agreement to remove its troops from Hungary. Indeed, the first withdrawals had begun in April. Orban would go on to become prime minister in 1998. Here was the new generation of Hungarian leaders, making their mark by laying claim to the victories of others. The moment was emblematic in another respect, as well, for Orban was giving voice to a sentiment shared by many others: no communists were to be trusted, even those who were setting the pace for change and who would ultimately win Hungarians their freedom.

As for Grosz, the standoff in the Politburo was his Waterloo. “He will be gone within weeks,” Pozsgay told me the day after the ceremony. In fact, it would be one week. For the past few months, the party chief's position had been eroding. As many as a hundred thousand people had turned in their membership cards, defecting from the communist camp. Nemeth and Pozsgay's nascent political groupings, begun late in the previous year, had gone mainstream and developed rapidly as bona fide parties, exerting real popular power. On June 24, the communist party Central Committee met in a fractious session that all but spelled the end. Concluding that the party had no future under its current leadership, it reorganized itself under four new “presidents.” Grosz was formally demoted, inveighing against enemies within until the last. Two weeks later, almost parenthetically, Janos Kadar, the embodiment of Hungarian communism, would die in his sleep. That same day, the Hungarian Supreme Court would “rehabilitate” the rebels of 1956 and formally award Imre Pozsgay his victory over history.

If Erich Honecker was fazed by events along his borders, he did not show it.

I had flown into Berlin from Warsaw for an interview a few days after the Polish elections. The plane was late and I tried to speed through Checkpoint Charlie by invoking a meeting with “Comrade Honecker.” The East German policeman who had by this time
become familiar with my comings and goings, and who usually treated me politely, gave me a stony look.
“Dokumenten, bitte,”
he said tersely. “Papers, please.”

He went through my shoulder bag, examining each notebook page by page. Also the book, Tom Clancy's
Red Storm Rising,
that I'd been reading on the flight, as well as my wallet.
“Was ist das?”
A receipt for coffee and some confection that I called a doughnut, I told him.
“Was ist doughnut, bitte?”

The interview took place at communist party headquarters, a gray-stone building on the main square of old Berlin where the Royal Palace once stood before being dynamited to make way for a bronze-tinted glass monstrosity known as the Volkskammer, or People's Parliament. Above the entrance was chiseled the crossed hammer and sickle of East German socialism; inside, the inevitable heroic workers tableaux of socialist realism. On one side of a long polished wood table in the cabinet room, where the Politburo usually presided, sat the reporters from
Newsweek
and its sister publication, the
Washington Post.
On the other, Honecker and a phalanx of aides.

It was a curious choreography, a ritual that governed every meeting with high communist leaders since the end of World War II. We from the West asked questions that we knew those of the East would not answer. Honecker gave replies that he knew we did not want and would not believe. His views could best be summed up as no glasnost, no perestroika, no Polish- or Hungarian-style tinkering with the system. Socialism might have its flaws, but look at heartless and warmongering America, with its crime and great gaps between rich and poor. The remedy was to advance toward communism, not retreat as his brethren were doing elsewhere.

Why preserve the Wall, we asked, this anachronism of the Cold War? To protect the East German people from the depredations of bourgeois capitalism. Was the shoot-to-kill policy at the border still in effect? We don't do that—except if people are “deserting,” which by definition includes anyone trying to leave. The massacres in Tiananmen Square? “The task of students is to study. The task of every government is to ensure law and order.” Beijing had shown great restraint, Honecker declared, despite the activities of agent provocateurs seeking to create an international incident. On it went. Thrust,
parry. Thrust, parry. A fan circled overhead in the stifling heat. Flies droned against the windows as if they, too, sought to escape.

Afterward, we went to the garden for a photo. Honecker hammed it up for the cameras, smelling the roses growing luxuriantly in a brilliant sun, his white hair fluffy in the breeze. He seemed so calmly in control. It was hard to imagine him as a killer. He had joined the communist party as a youth. He was one of the courageous few to openly resist Hitler. He was hounded by Nazi secret police, beaten, jailed from 1935 to 1945. By all odds he should have died in the concentration camps. Yet he came out after the war, rose to the top of the communist party—and did to his countrymen what the German fascists had done to him.

This man who seemed to have learned so little from history and from life, what would he do if the people turned against him, as in Poland or Hungary? Watching him, I did not doubt his capacity for a German Tiananmen. It wasn't the cliché of the banality of evil, though that also was clear. Nor was it the mercilessness of true belief. Honecker seemed to have passed from passion into rote. What struck me was his apparent blindness, an inability to see the world other than as he willed it. I wondered if Honecker actually smelled those roses. Was their fragrance lost to him, an abstract irrelevance? Or did he take pleasure in them, the way he did in his pet dogs, in things that were not human or prone toward unorderliness?

As it turned out, Honecker's calm was deceptive. He had said nothing more to his cabinet on May 3, after his explosion over Hungary's treachery. But during the following weeks he watched events with growing concern. West German television kept airing footage of the wire along Hungary's border being snipped. Scenes of bulldozers uprooting the concrete posts that secured the fence and knocking down watch-towers were broadcast deep into the GDR. This was exactly what the Hungarians had assured Honecker would not happen. Bits of the Iron Curtain were already being sold as souvenirs in Vienna and New York.

None of this, he knew, would be lost on East Germans as they prepared for the summer holidays. At the communist summit in Havana, in early June, Honecker reported that Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze had told him that he found the Polish situation to be
“disquieting.” Honecker said he replied that, in his personal view, Hungary was almost “lost” to socialism. Something had to be done, he told Shevardnadze, and he was prepared to do it.

Just what that meant was unknown to anyone but Honecker. “It was clear to the entire leadership that we had a problem,” Gunter Schabowski would later tell me. “But was it discussed? Not once.” Instead, East Germany's leader made his own moves, typically looking to what had worked in the past. On November 26, 1980, as strikes organized by Solidarity threatened to paralyze Poland, Honecker had written an urgent letter to the personal attention of Leonid Brezhnev, calling for a formal meeting of the Warsaw Pact to consider “fraternal assistance” to the besieged Warsaw government. “Counterrevolutionary forces in the People's Republic of Poland are on the constant offensive,” he told the Soviet leader. “Any delay in acting against them would mean death—the death of socialist Poland. Yesterday our collective efforts may perhaps have been premature; today they are essential; and tomorrow they would already be too late.”

As Honecker saw it, Hungary now posed a similar threat. He could not imagine Moscow viewing it otherwise. Thus in late May, he sent Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer to Moscow with a personal letter addressed to “Dear Comrade Gorbachev,” insisting that “the Hungary problem” be added to the agenda for discussion at the Warsaw Pact's July 7–8 annual summit in Bucharest. “Of course, he did not intend to just ‘discuss' the Hungarians,” said Schabowski, describing the gambit. “He wanted to stop them. As he saw it, it was time for the entire bloc to hold together.”

Honecker obviously misjudged Gorbachev. He could not have missed the Soviet leader's repeated disavowals of the Brezhnev Doctrine, nor his insistence that Eastern Europe's communist regimes had to change with the times. But Honecker appears to simply not have accepted it. Perhaps he believed Gorbachev's rhetoric was ultimately mere propaganda, and that faced with a genuine threat to socialism's survival he would be quick to roll back change. If Miklos Nemeth could have harbored similar concerns, traveling previously to Moscow to judge for himself, it is not illogical to conclude that a man as cloistered and conventionally communist as Honecker would have thought so even more strongly.

The masters of the Eastern empire converged on Bucharest, citadel of perhaps the most repressive of all the bloc's regimes. They spoke of many things, but only one topic held their full attention. That, of course, was Nemeth and what his “reformist” policies portended for the rest of them. He was the quarry, the hunted. His host, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, made that plain, Nemeth would recall. “He would not address me as ‘comrade,' I am proud to say.”

As the meeting commenced, the leaders of the most reactionary states of the East bloc lined up against him: Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic. Like Honecker, they wanted to stop his “counterrevolution,” just as the alliance had in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Warsaw in 1981. “Ceausescu led the attack,” according to Nemeth. Seated next to Gorbachev, he rose to his feet, gesticulating and shouting his impassioned indictment. Hungary would “destroy socialism.” If these “dangerous experiments” were allowed to proceed, they could bring down the entire Soviet Union. Honecker and Czechoslovakia's Milos Jakes soon joined in. General Jaruzelski of Poland sat silent, sphinxlike, betraying no emotion.

Nemeth had been in office only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies could only act with Soviet support. The man who could give it, Mikhail Gorbachev, sat roughly opposite, about thirty feet away on the other side of the large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev… winked.

“This happened at least four or five times,” Nemeth told me. Strictly speaking, it wasn't a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. “Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes. I don't quite know how to describe it. But I clearly saw he was trying to tell me that he did not share these views.”

For Nemeth, this was yet another important sign, as decisive in its way as the conversation the two men had had in March, when Gorbachev forswore any intervention in Hungary's affairs, and as telling as Moscow's silence in May when the Hungarians had cut their hole in the Iron Curtain. This was a signal, at a key moment, that it was safe
to go on. It was as if Gorbachev were saying, “Don't worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention,” as Nemeth put it to me. So he didn't. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Honecker's defeat in Bucharest had a deeper consequence back home in Berlin. By failing to stop his enemies in Hungary, he called attention to his own weakness. Not only could he not influence Gorbachev, but he seemed not to grasp the implications. Schabowski explained, “Our dilemma was that of the East German state itself. We needed the support of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union to survive. Without it, our leadership always feared, we would fall like a ripe plum into the hands of the West Germans.” Yet there was Honecker, talking about his close friendship with Ceausescu and Jakes and ridiculing Gorbachev, mocking his anti-alcohol campaign in Russia and the corruption of his so-called Soviet reformists. Meanwhile, Gorbachev himself was cutting a swath through Europe. From Bucharest, he had flown straight to France, where he called for a “Common European House.” In Bonn, a few weeks before that, he had been mobbed by tens of thousands of Germans chanting, “Gorbi! Gorbi! Gorbi!” All this planted a seed of doubt within the East German Politburo, according to Schabowski. “To ally with Ceausescu and resist Gorbachev, and to boast of it? Some of us thought it odd. It made us think about a change in leadership. For the German Democratic Republic to continue to exist, we had to get in step with Gorbachev. If Honecker could not cooperate with him…” Schabowski completed the thought with a shrug.

From that moment on, Honecker was a marked man. Just as Karoly Grosz effectively met his end at the sharp point of a symbol, so Honecker's fate was sealed with Gorbachev's wink. Henceforth, the East German caesar would be surrounded by conspirators, awaiting with knives.
Et tu, Brute?

Of course, neither Schabowski nor anyone else on the Politburo said anything that might reveal themselves. They did not discuss their unease with one another. Silence ruled, as it always did. “You must understand that Honecker's authority was absolute. What if you were denounced?” Treason, said Schabowski, begins first in the heart, then in the mind, a party of one. “You start by having your own
ideas. A heresy, such as wondering whether Honecker should go. Then you watch the reactions of the people sitting around you, to sense if they are thinking as you are. You might make a remark to test them and judge whether to go further.” In May, Schabowski saw little sign that others shared his doubts. After Bucharest, he was certain that they did.