The Year that Changed the World (23 page)

It was an extraordinary scene. The squares and street around St. Nikolaus Cathedral near the embassy were crowded with abandoned Trabants. They were parked everywhere: on streets, sidewalks, in parks. The keys were often left in the ignition. Some were even left running, as East Germans, loaded with belongings, jumped out to dash for the embassy, fearing that they would somehow be stopped. A crowd of a thousand or more stood before the ornate wrought-iron gates of the embassy itself, an ancient baroque palace in the heart of the old city. Hundreds more trooped up the street behind us, lugging their belongings in suitcases and rucksacks, holding young children aloft so they would not be hurt in the crush. Czech police tried to cope, pitifully. “Where are you going?” one Czech policeman demanded. “To West Germany,” responded a young couple with their suitcases, defiantly pushing past.

Not all waited patiently to be let in the front door. Many worked their way around to the back of the embassy, where a shoulder-high fence surrounded the gardens. By now, roughly five thousand people were there, living in tents, their numbers growing by the hour as East Germans vaulted, climbed or were pulled up and over the barrier.
“Entschuldigen,”
said one young man, politely accosting me as I stood by the fence talking with a few of those inside. “Excuse me.” I moved to the side so he could loft a heavy suitcase into the embassy compound. Then he clambered up, holding a hand to his wife to help her over. With a boost from me, she quickly joined him.

The first trains to the Federal Republic had left on September 30 and run steadily ever since. Every evening, with almost military precision, the West Germans marched refugees out of the embassy and into waiting buses for the trip to the station. As soon as one group left, the space they occupied filled with new arrivals. But soon the flow would stop. At 3 p.m. that afternoon, October 3, East Germany closed its borders. “I was on the last train from Dresden,” one young man told me, speaking through the embassy fence as a light rain pattered on the plastic-sheet tents. “I knew we had to get out now or we never would. I fear a crackdown is coming. A catastrophe as in China. This regime would fire on its own people.”

We escorted Havel away. He was elated, not only by the size of the crowds but by the reaction among Czechs. “This is solidarity,” he enthused. “People are taking children into their houses and offering the East Germans food. This speaks not only of the social situation in the German Democratic Republic, but also of the situation in Czechoslovakia.” Standing on a street corner, he politely thanked us, turning to give a diffident little wave as he departed. He would be fifty-three the next day. I remember wondering, could this shaggy-haired, amiable man with his well-worn army jacket and gentle manner have what it takes to channel an uprising, if and when it came?

The next morning, Czechoslovakia's communist party chief, Milos Jakes, laughed uproariously at the notion that he might be deposed. That Havel. “Do you know why he stopped writing plays?” Jakes asked in the accents of the plumber he once was. “Because they're no good.”

We had asked Havel what question he would put to Jakes. It was, do you not realize the depth of social discontent, and your own impotence, that this is the last moment to solve the crisis without strikes, unrest or violence? The answer, Havel anticipated, would be to ask why Western journalists always visited Havel. This is a man who always complicates the situation, who wants only to destabilize society. We know the problems Czechoslovakia faces, and we will solve them.

Jakes answered precisely as predicted. Havel was a troublemaker, a cynic. Authorities could not be accused of persecuting him, however. “He is at large,” Jakes said, as though this icon of humanity and Czech culture were a bank robber or murderer. As for the structure of Czech society, “we see no reason to change… The communist party plays the recognized leading role in society… We are not going to tread the path of private ownership.” Yes, the situation at the West German embassy was “quite unpleasant.” But now the border was closed. The problem was resolved, except for one detail, said Jakes. “What are we going to do with all these abandoned cars?”

October 6. As Prague stayed fretfully still, waiting, Hungary approached the culmination of its
refolution,
a term coined by Timothy Garton Ash to describe the country's unique admixture of reform and revolution.

“Communism is dead,” Mark Palmer, the American ambassador, told us over dinner the evening we arrived. All that remained was to hammer a few final nails into the coffin. Only a month had passed since the Hungarians had opened the border, but the effect had been like pulling the plug in a bathtub. The foul waters of four decades of tyranny, repression and brute failure ran out, seemingly in an instant. In Palmer's analogy, it was all over but the death rattle.

Who would write the obit? Most likely Imre Pozsgay, rumored to be planning to officially abolish the party at a meeting of the Central Committee next week. Pozsgay hoped to be elected president in the country's first popular vote, a presidential plebiscite scheduled for late November, but Palmer thought he was deluding himself. Remember Poland? “People want revenge. They hate communism.” It wouldn't matter that men like Pozsgay and Miklos Nemeth brought it down and ushered in democracy. “They, too, were communists,” said Palmer. “They will go.”

It seemed a terrible irony, an almost disgraceful ingratitude. After all, Pozsgay was one of Hungary's best. He had pushed for change when it was dangerous to do so. It was he who called 1956 what it was: a national uprising of the people against a system that was no good. “Communism does not work,” he had said when we first met. “We must start again from zero.” He was the hidden impresario behind the Pan-European Picnic, priming the pump for the Great Escape, one of the first men to deliver a hammer blow to the Wall itself. Yet he would not be elected president of Hungary in November. Palmer was right: revenge. A cabdriver spat when I asked to be taken to the headquarters of the Central Committee, a marble hulk on the Danube that the citizens of Budapest derisively called “our White House.” Across the city, workers were removing the socialist hammer and sickle from official buildings. The flowers planted in a red star at one city traffic circle had been dug up. Motorists kept driving through them.

Still, there was Pozsgay, the next morning, hammer ready and coffin nails in hand. Communism is “finished,” he said again, as declaratively as ever, obviously relishing his role as coexecutioner. The Hungary of the future will be similar to West European social democracies, he explained. The party state will cease to exist. Dictatorial socialism will disappear. Hungary will be a constitutional state,
with a government freely elected from among competing parties, much as Kalman Kulcsar and Miklos Nemeth had told me nine months before. “We have always been like a ferryboat, plying the river between East and West,” said Pozsgay. “For too long we have been moored to the Eastern bank. Perhaps soon we will have a berth on the Western shore.”

Almost parenthetically, as we prepared to leave, he added that he was preparing a four-day party congress, to begin the next day. Why didn't I come back when it was over, say on October 11 at 8:30 a.m.? He might have a little story for
Newsweek.

And so, on the appointed day, I showed up early at his offices in the houses of parliament. “We don't know how all this will end,” Pozsgay told me over coffee, making small talk about the changes taking place across the bloc. I was a little puzzled as to why I was there. Then, around nine o'clock, he smiled like the Cheshire Cat and got up, as if to go. He walked me to a door, different from the one I had entered by, and opened it, not for me but for himself. It was the entrance to the Assembly of the People. This morning, he explained, he would abolish the communist party. The Hungarian Socialist Workers Party would be no more. The old apparatchiks, the hoary edifice of deadwood and social repression, the whole rank legacy, we could kiss it all good-bye. Pozsgay put his hand on the doorknob, smiled broadly and, with a hint of a chuckle, walked through the door.

History can be intimate, accidental, impersonal, ironic. It can seemingly just happen, implacably, or it can be cruel, as if by design, animated now and again by some cosmic sense of justice. How else to explain the bizarre fall of Erich Honecker, with all its uncanny symmetry?

The iconic May Day parade marked the zenith of Honecker's rule. No less important a date marked its nadir: October 7, the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the German Democratic Republic. It was to be the celebration of a communist lifetime. There would be a torchlight parade; one hundred thousand fresh-faced Freie Deutsche Jugend—Free German Youth—would march. Very Important People were arriving—the leaders of the East bloc, among them Mikhail Gorbachev. None knew, of course, that for most it would be their last hurrah. As for Honecker himself, it was as if fate were weaving three final strands into his destiny. The first bore the face of a titular ally, Gorbachev. The second was the secret conspiracy within. The third was the East German people, awakening from their long sleep and chanting,
“Wir sind das Volk
, We are the people,
”
and who would no longer be ignored.

Thus the final drama commenced. Gorbachev starred as a sort of modern Cassandra, she of Greek legend whose prophecies, unheeded, came to pass. Honecker greeted him at the airport. They kissed in the style of communist leaders, on the mouth. It was an infamous photo: a pair of aging men, lip-locked. It quickly became an anticommunist opposition poster across Eastern Europe: THIS, it proclaimed, featuring a pair of young lovers;
NOT THIS
, with a red
X
over Gorbi and Erich. Honecker imagined it to be a seal of fraternal kinship. In fact, it was a kiss of death.

I had been told in Prague that Russian foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, two weeks earlier, delivered a stiff warning to his East German counterpart. Resolve the situation of the East German refugees in the West German embassy in Prague, or Gorbachev would cancel his trip. To what degree that element of added pressure figured in Honecker's mishandling of the crisis is not known, but it must have been considerable. In Budapest, a senior Hungarian official, also briefed by Shevardnadze, told me that Gorbachev's visit had only one purpose: to persuade Honecker to change. If he did not abandon policies of force and coercion, if he did not embrace some measure of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev would diss him at his own party.

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the conspirators plotted. Between October 2 and October 6, the day Gorbachev and other East bloc leaders arrived, Egon Krenz and Gunter Schabowski secretly approached ten or so of their most trusted colleagues. Schabowski spoke with Werner Eberlein, the communist party chief of Magdeburg, and Harry Tisch, head of the workers' union, as well as several district secretaries. Krenz contacted Willi Stoph, the Politburo's elder statesman and head of the Council of Ministers, among others. They were surprised how little resistance they encountered. It was clear to all that Honecker had to go.

Ignorant of the net closing around him, Honecker welcomed his guests. But he wasn't always first to do so. Milos Jakes later told BBC–Spiegel Television how Egon Krenz had met him at the airport and driven with him to his hotel. “He told me that changes could be expected within the next few days,” Jakes said. “The general secretary would no longer be Erich Honecker but Comrade Krenz himself.” That evening's festivities brought a more visible sign of Honecker's troubles, in the shape of East Germany's communist youth marching in the torchlight parade. It was a stirring sight, all those young people with their uniforms in the firelight. But what did they cry out, according to Schabowski? “ ‘Gorbi! Gorbi! Gorbi!' They did not shout, ‘Erich! Erich!' It was a clear repudiation.”

Certainly Gorbachev saw it that way. The next afternoon, on October
7, he met with the East German Politburo. He had carefully thought about what he wanted to say. “I polished the text to the last letter,” he told an aide over the phone. “You know they will scrutinize it under a microscope.” He began by talking about glasnost and perestroika, how difficult it was to change. He mentioned the “mess” Poland had made of its economy, and how wise it would be to avoid such problems by acting sooner than later. “That's when he dropped that famous line, ‘He who arrives late is punished by life,' ” Schabowski told me, reconstructing the scene. “He was very tactful, very polite. Though he spoke about his own problems in the Soviet Union, it was clearly an invitation to speak frankly about ours.”

But Honecker did not. Instead, he painted a bright picture of the country's future, congratulating himself that East Germany did not share in Russia's troubles, let alone Poland's. He boasted that East Germany had recently produced a four-megabyte computer chip. “It was surreal,” Schabowski said. “There are demonstrations in the streets, and everything is beautiful?”

A long silence followed. “No one said anything,” according to Schabowski. The conspirators, half a dozen of whom were in the room, knew they should agree with Gorbachev. “We should have gotten up, banged the table and said, ‘Erich, enough of this foolishness.' ” But knowing they would soon move against him, they stayed mum. Speaking out would only show their disloyalty and possibly jeopardize their plans. Gorbachev himself sat quietly for a moment, looking around the room as if astonished. No one met his eyes. “Then he snorted, a dismissive ‘Tsk-tsk' of disbelief. He could not believe it. He shook his head, stood up and without any remark left the room. My impression was that this was the last straw. Gorbachev had concluded that nothing could be done with Erich Honecker.”

At the state dinner that night, Honecker assigned the seat of honor on his right to Gorbachev. To his left sat old friend Jakes. Honecker rose to speak, flushed with high spirits and good feeling. As at the Politburo meeting that afternoon, he was unstinting in his praise of himself and his country and raised a toast to the GDR's fiftieth anniversary a decade hence. The political allies gathered in his honor were less sanguine. Gorbachev was positively rude. “During Erich's speech, he kept making sarcastic remarks,” Jakes said in a subsequent television interview.
“He made it plain that he stood apart from the East German leadership. It was quite out of keeping with the occasion.”