Dark Continent, page 46
“The principal reason for the December 13 coup [introduction of martial law],” wrote Adam Michnik, “was not the radicalism of Solidarity but the weakness of the base of the PUWP.” Party numbers fell from 3.1 million in 1980 to 2.1 million in 1984: worryingly, it was primarily the young who were leaving; more than half the Party membership by 1987 were over fifty years old. The true state of relations between populace and governing class was expressed in the martial law which Jaruzelski proclaimed, and which lasted for nearly two years. “For the first time,” writes the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, “the apparatus of communist power was compelled to wage war … against its own society.”16
Nowhere else in the communist bloc was the Party’s situation or outlook as obviously desperate as in Poland; nevertheless, outside East Germany and Czechoslovakia, it could hardly be said to function as a cohesive administrative force. Mostly it had been displaced by the “little Stalins” at its head, and their coteries. Yet these elderly figures who clung to power across the region seemed by their very age to point to the dangers of predicting what might follow their demise: by 1985 the oldest in the bloc, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, was seventy-six, the youngest (apart from Jaruzelski), Ceaušescu, was sixty-seven; the seventy-four-year-old Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov had come to power in 1954; Honecker, the newcomer, had succeeded to the East German leadership in 1971. This was an elite of arthritic geriatrics, bitterly resisting change. The succession crisis which followed the octogenarian Tito’s death in Yugoslavia in 1980 was a worrying portent.
The danger of personal rule was that, especially in the Balkans, it encouraged the creation of family dynasties. Romania was the most egregious instance—wags called it “Ceauschwitz”—turned virtually into a personal fiefdom. Even the most senior echelons of the nomenklatura were sidelined, as all decisions were taken, without prior discussion, by the Conducator and his powerful, sinister wife, Elena. Party officials were treated much like their Ottoman predecessors, moved from posting to posting, to prevent their building power bases which might threaten their master. After the Ceaušescus’ daughter Zoia, a mathematics student, tried to flee her parents, her angry father closed down the Bucharest Mathematical Institute, provoking a massive brain drain of some two hundred of the country’s leading mathematicians. Even in less flagrant abuses of power, accusations and rumours of nepotism were common, indicating the deep popular mistrust of an elite regarded as having betrayed its own principles.17
Romania also exemplified another way in which communist elites tried to regain some popularity—through the cultivation of national aspirations. Ceaušescu pushed the use of nationalism further than any other leader, and achieved an apparent detachment from Moscow which brought rich rewards from the West. But national communism became part of a common strategy for clinging on to power. Older gods from the nationalist pantheon were introduced into the Marxist-Leninist liturgy: Marshal Pilsudski started to appear on Polish postage stamps; Luther and Frederick the Great were commemorated in East Germany. Compliant professors produced works like the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ fourteen-volume history of the country, or the infamous nationalist memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archaeology, history and ethnography all helpfully uncovered socialism’s deep roots in the nation. “Folk art has been a powerful active factor in the history of the people,” wrote an Albanian professor, “because for centuries on end it has transmitted the democratic, patriotic and revolutionary ideals of the working masses.”18
But national communism also involved a tenser and more antagonistic relationship towards the surviving remnants of the region’s ethnic minorities: anti-Semitism, for instance, surfaced briefly in Poland in 1968, despite the almost total disappearance of what had once been the largest Jewish community in Europe. Tito’s legacy was abandoned in Yugoslavia as Milošević used the issue of Kosovo to play to reawakening Serb nationalism. In Bulgaria, decades of a centralizing assimilationist policy towards the minorities culminated in the 1984–5 drive to rename the Turkish population, or rather, to “restore” their original Bulgarian names. When Romania similarly sanctioned the official persecution of its Hungarian minority, it enflamed a grievance with Hungary which, as we shall see, would play an important part in the events of 1989.
Nationalism was anyway an unpredictable card for the elite to play, since the communists’ subservience to Moscow was always in the back of people’s minds. Other groups, more independent of Moscow, could pose as more convincing voices for national aspirations. But did such groups exist in the 1980s? This raises the question of the state of the political opposition, its goals and limits. A quick survey reveals two things: first, that the opposition was no longer primarily interested in national independence—the lessons of 1956 and 1968 had been well learned; and second, that apart from Poland its ability to force change was very limited indeed. The revival of nationalism, in other words, was far more a consequence than a cause of 1989.
There were, however, various ways in which opposition manifested itself beyond outright, public confrontation, a very rare event indeed. There was widespread withdrawal from the system—most directly expressed by the millions who fled to the West (a net flow of some 3.5 million East Germans, hundreds of thousands of Poles and others). A Polish opinion poll taken in 1987 showed that 70 per cent of young people wanted to leave the country either temporarily or for good. Their motivation could certainly not be reduced to consumer envy, or to a desire to have the freedom to travel, strong though both these elements were; the Stasi noted that it also implied “a rejection of the social system.” In 1989 this form of opposition would be crucial in triggering off change across the region.19
Leaving the country, though, was not merely discouraged by the rulers of eastern Europe; it was also frowned upon by many of their opponents, by the Church, by reformers inside the Party and outside who had elected to stay and fight for change at home. This was the path followed by Church leaders and many intellectuals, but it did not—outside Poland—seriously threaten the regimes themselves. Intellectuals as an opposition varied from complete irrelevance—as in Romania and Bulgaria—to outspoken sources of irritation and hope in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Political opposition outside Marxism had been crushed in the Stalin years; within it, it remained hesitant and sectarian. Where the Marxist tradition remained strong, as among the most prominent dissidents in East Germany, one heard voices calling for improvements to socialism, not its abandonment. The greater emphasis on ethics, human and civil rights which came across with Charter 77 in Prague, or the KOR group in Poland, made opposition a broader and less sectarian issue; yet it also meant sidestepping the question of a political alternative to communism.
A further problem for the intellectual opposition—especially that situated outside the Party—was that by itself it was powerless. The desire to retain some ability to shape events was precisely what made many opponents of the existing order hang on to their Party membership. For the rest, their influence depended crucially upon whether they could build alliances with other powerful social forces such as the Church or the workers. Yet a gulf divided the three groups for most of this period. The shadow of anti-Semitism, for instance, separated Church leaders and key intellectuals in Poland through the 1970s; even where this was not a factor, anti-clerical intellectuals often found it hard to reach an understanding with Church leaders. The divide between intellectuals and workers was exploited by the Party in Czechoslovakia, which made sure after 1968 to keep the workers loyal; in Poland, it weakened the opposition in 1970. Bridging it was part of the secret of Solidarity’s strength in the 1980s.
Also weakening opposition was the fact that all these groups were permeated by the system and to some extent compromised by it. This was true in the most obvious sense that they were often effectively penetrated by security services and their informers; the scale and terrifying intimacy of such operations—with husband spying on wife, for example—has only emerged with revelations from official archives after 1989. But compromise and collusion occurred more indirectly as well. The religious authorities, for example, rarely encouraged outright protest and preferred a more indirect and cautious attitude towards power; their primary goal, after all, was the protection and defence of their own institutions and privileges. The Catholic Church in Poland under Cardinal Glemp, a British observer noted in 1983, was “alarmed at its own strength” in the aftermath of Solidarity. If this was the case with the most vigorous potential opponent to communism behind the Iron Curtain, it is easy to see how limited a role the more subservient Catholic, Lutheran or Orthodox authorities elsewhere chose to play.20
Such an attitude rested on an assessment of the basic durability of East European communism which was broadly shared by another potentially powerful source of opposition—the West. Western governments—and in general, Western public opinion, too—never seriously challenged the communist hold over the region. In fact, given the West’s basic acquiescence—right through the 1980s—in the Cold War division of Europe, it is hard to criticize East Europeans for their lack of more vigorous opposition. Few people anywhere, after all, believed in the possibility—or even perhaps the desirability—of a rapid introduction of multi-party democracy.
On the contrary, the 1970s saw a new acceptance of communist rule by the capitalist West. Financially, as we have seen, this took the form of extensive credits. Politically, it was expressed in West German Ostpolitik, and superpower détente. By the early 1980s, too much was at stake to let Reaganite neo-conservatism, the onset of the so-called “second Cold War” and the row about nuclear-missile deployments in western Europe, erode this basic understanding. Western policy aimed to wear the Soviet Union down in the long run through an expensive arms race. But the other side of this “dual track” strategy was the continued provision of trade credits to eastern Europe, the decision not to declare Poland in default, and to prop up the Hungarian and East German banking system. West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl was as committed to Ostpolitik as his Social Democrat predecessors had been, buying out East German dissidents and massively subsidizing the communist economy, backing Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law, and eventually even allowing Honecker to make an official visit to the FRG in 1987.
In sum, the opposition which existed in the East was fragmented, inchoate and without determined foreign backing. Western individuals and NGOs offered their support to dissidents, but Western governments were chiefly interested in stability. In the 1980s, opposition to communism coalesced not around political reform but around more general issues of moral renewal, human rights, freedom and peace. In a one-party state these could not but be political in their implications, but they tended—and this was, of course, a condition of their existence—not to produce mass organizations or to offer political alternatives.
One key focus for protest was environmental pollution, especially after the Chernobyl disaster: the Stasi got very irritated by posters in an East German churchyard which read: “Ride a bike, don’t drive a car.” The Hungarian Danube Circle was an unofficial movement with thousands of signatories and strong links in Austria. In Czechoslovakia, Charter 77 circulated a document in 1987 entitled “Let the People Breathe,” which disclosed grim official estimates of the republic’s pollution levels. Yet arguably, even here, the level of activism was rather less than in the Soviet Union itself, and especially in the Baltic states.
The vast security services which monitored popular opinion do not appear to have been unduly alarmed by levels of opposition. “Conformity and grumbling” was the pattern discerned by the Stasi, and the former had probably grown rather than diminished over time. Soviet-sponsored Stalinism had come to be seen as the region’s fate, against which only the headstrong or saintly rebelled. Compared with the Nazi Gestapo, the Stasi and the Romanian Securitate were enormous, technically advanced apparatuses of terror, easily able to coerce and intimidate the mass of the population into compliance. Only one source of destabilization eluded their control—Moscow itself. In 1987 Poland’s deputy prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, musing on the ever-present threat that “somebody” might intervene in the country’s internal affairs, was struck by a sudden thought: “What if that somebody, bearing in mind his own interests, does not want to intervene?” And what, indeed, if he did intervene—to challenge the old order? It is to this possibility that we must now turn.21
THE EVOLUTION OF SOVIET POLICY
Murder or suicide? Revolution or retreat? The same questions which are often asked of the ending of British rule in India, or of the Dutch in Indonesia, can be posed in the case of 1989 too. This is not by chance: communism’s demise formed part of the broader canvas of European decolonization.
The long age of empire, begun by Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth century, came to an end in the middle of our own. After the Second World War, itself a defeat for German imperial ambitions, the remaining European powers reluctantly divested themselves of their colonies too. The speed varied, but overall the process of decolonization was incredibly fast—a matter of decades—set against the lengthier rhythms of imperial conquest and consolidation. Whatever Marxist theorists of neo-imperialism may have felt—and it is true that Western economic influence did not in general decline after decolonization—the political act of dismantling empires was an act of tremendous significance.
Explaining the causes of decolonization—and especially its speed—has occupied historians ever since. Several points have become clearer. First, empire did not, on the whole, pay; to be more specific, while it offered huge profits to some individuals and companies, it burdened the treasuries of most imperial powers. Thus the exploitation of colonial peoples was not incompatible with net losses to taxpayers at home. Second, imperial powers were rarely forced to retreat as a direct result of military insurrection—Algeria was the exception not the rule. Insurgencies could usually be squashed; the problem was at what cost in lives and money. Nationalist historians like to argue that brave resistance fighters threw off the shackles of imperial rule; in practice, the warders in Whitehall and Paris usually decided when to close down (or unlock) the prison and retire.
Their decision was a compound of considerations—financial, military and politico-ideological. Imperial powers always had a choice whether or not to resort to force to uphold their rule. When they did—like the French in Algeria and Vietnam or the Portuguese in southern Africa—they often ended up jeopardizing political stability at home. Increasingly, in the post-war era, they chose not to do so. One reason, of course, was that they came to realize that military domination was an expensive and clumsy way of getting what they wanted. Another for the Western powers was that their continued grip on empire suited neither their patron, the United States, nor their own domestic publics, who were chiefly concerned about prosperity inside a new Europe. The glamour of empire looked increasingly tarnished, its morality and rationality thrown into question in a continent which operated not according to global imperial rivalries and the possession of territory, but through transnational economic cooperation.
Thus, in the modern era, military defeat was not necessary to bring empires to their knees. It brought the collapse of the Ottoman, Spanish and Habsburg empires of course, but hardly that of the mightiest empire of them all, the British. As for Russia, the Tsarist empire had collapsed in 1917 under the pressure of war, yet Stalin’s empire survived and prospered after an even more vicious and destructive war only to collapse with such speed in a period of peace. One way to look at Soviet rule in eastern Europe is simply as an anachronism, a relic of past modes of rule no longer suited to the modern world. With a swiftness and political sophistication comparable to the British pull-out from India in 1947 or from West Africa a little later, the Kremlin chose to pull out from eastern Europe and the empire disintegrated almost overnight. Suicide, then, not murder. The reasoning underlying the Kremlin’s choice—the priority attached to domestic economic reform, the disillusion which followed the Afghanistan quagmire—becomes the key to the events of 1989.22
Although the Brezhnev years were ones of stagnation and ideological conservatism—the high priest of Soviet doctrinal purity, Mikhail Suslov, only died in 1982—beneath the surface there were indications of new ways of thinking about Soviet relations with eastern Europe. Brezhnev’s eventual successor, Yuri Andropov, had been Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, before heading the Kremlin’s main liaison department with east European communist parties. There he gathered around him a group of reformers who would rise to senior positions in the 1980s. Andropov himself, who headed the KGB for most of the Brezhnev era, had a better idea than most in the Kremlin of the ruinous state of the communist empire, and after the Polish crisis of 1980–81 he spoke bluntly of the need for fresh thinking and urgent economic reform.
From the Soviet perspective, several factors encouraged new approaches towards eastern Europe. In the first place, the region, after acting as a net asset to Moscow in Stalin’s time, had now become an enormous economic burden, equivalent on one reckoning to 2 per cent of GNP per year: in the 1970s, massive subsidies, chiefly through cheap Soviet exports of fuels, meant that poorly-off Russians were subsidizing better-off Poles and Czechs. Eastern Europe’s CMEA, unlike the Common Market, was failing to generate a virtuous circle of greater productivity and wealth; rather it ossified bilateral trading arrangements (95 per cent of all CMEA activity) and encouraged mutual accusations of exploitation. Brezhnev’s 1971 plan for “socialist integration” was a damp squib compared with its capitalist counterpart. By the 1980s CMEA looked to the east Europeans like an instrument of Soviet nationalism; it was, in the words of one commentator, “a framework without much substance.” In the second half of the 1980s, the overall volume of Soviet-east European trade failed to grow at all.23
