Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Some hours later Belgrade was waking up when the train crossed the last flat cornfields of the Voivodina and pulled into Beograd station. I had just finished shaving when a jolt sending brush and razor into the basin announced our arrival. A twenty-minute walk in the rain brought me to the Hotel Moskva with its spacious smoke-filled café, down-at-heel reception and gaudily decorated rooms, fitted out in the latest Marshal Tito revival style: vast ashtrays, hideous oil paintings in vulgar frames and a view across the concrete roofscape towards the brave new world of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade), shrouded in foggy pollution. All this seemed to match a strange sour smell in the air. On the table was a bottle of Dom Pérignon ’82 with a card from The Times veteran Belgrade correspondent, Dessa Trevisan. The message on the reverse was terse: ‘Welcome to ghastly Belgrade. Dinner 8 p.m. Writers’ Club.’

  The Writers’ Club, like the PEN Club in Ljubljana, boasted the best restaurant in the city. Why writers throughout the Balkans deserved this gastronomic distinction puzzled me. In England, most writers could barely afford a sandwich. Perhaps it was a legacy from the late nineteenth century, when the written word proved as capable as the sword and rifle in inspiring the Balkan nations to liberty. In any event, the habitués of these restaurants had long ceased to be drawn exclusively from the literary world. In Belgrade, the club was run with dignified solicitude by Ivo, former footman to the last pre-war Papal Nuncio to be accredited to the court of the Regent Prince Michael.

  Ivo, tall, dignified and taciturn, was as always benign and calm. There may have been an economic crisis in Yugoslavia with inflation running at over 100 per cent but somehow Ivo always secured the choicest delicacies: escargots from the Voivodina, foie gras from the Banat, sea bream from Dalmatia and veal from Bosnia. The wine was mostly from Montenegro with a sprinkling of Dalmatian whites. Each evening ambassadors, foreign correspondents and other actors on the Belgrade political stage gathered to sample these delights.

  Resplendent in a 1950s Hermès scarf, Dessa held court, scattering scathing comments at colleagues and politicians. The rather eccentric new British Ambassador to Belgrade pricked up his ears when I was introduced as having just arrived from Slovenia. ‘I am most concerned at the activities of Austrian military intelligence in Ljubljana,’ he muttered in a conspiratorial hush. It was hard to stifle my mirth at this observation. Many Slovenes hated the Austrians almost as much as they did the Serbs. The idea that the military apparatus of the Second Austrian Republic was capable of staging anything more threatening than a spirited performance of The Merry Widow would have struck anyone familiar with modern Viennese capacities as completely risible. Yet here was one of our ‘brightest and best’ suggesting that Belgrade’s problems with the truculent Slovenes were caused by the ghost of Marshal Radetzky. I tried to look suitably concerned. As an old friend who knew much about the art of secret analysis, Nicholas Elliott, once memorably insisted: ‘The Foreign Office are generally always wrong on issues of critical importance and, rather helpfully, even publish a book of their documents every ten years or so setting out how wrong they were.’

  The following morning, hitching a lift with the collegial Guardian correspondent, I set off for Montenegro. Travelling through a landscape as picturesque as any in the Balkans, we passed the ruins of an old narrow-gauge railway which the Austrians and then the Germans had financed in the run-up to the First World War. After an hour of rocky defiles, the landscape opened into a vast plain studded with pine-trees set at intervals. We reached the old Austrian port of Herceg Novi (Castelnuovo) where Gottfried Banfield had been born in 1890, and wound our way up the dramatic Lovćen road to Cetinje.

  I had long been captivated by the charm of this former royal capital, whose only principal buildings seem to be the palaces, consulates and legations long abandoned by the great powers in 1914. None of these exceeded two storeys in height. That evening I arrived to find them all candle-lit and echoing to the sound of merriment and the chink of glasses. In 1982, I had stayed with an English friend at Gospođja Marija’s rooms above a chemist’s, so I headed there to find the proprietor still in situ. The accommodation was simple, cheap and spotless, the bedrooms high up in the roof with a fine view towards the mountains. Mrs Marija remembered me and my ‘beautiful companion’ from seven years earlier. Marija’s own granddaughter had now reached the age of sixteen and I was introduced to her smile and lively eyes. Both grandmother and granddaughter were excited at the prospect of the imminent festivities. As we talked about Cetinje, exploding fireworks began to fill the air from the direction of the Royal Palace. Anxious not to be late for the party, I hurried off.

  Cetinje in those days possessed only one hotel and all its rooms had been taken by the extensive cousinhood of dispossessed Balkan royalty. Like long-lost family, the relicts of the clans which had once held the peninsula in their grip greeted each other in the smoke-filled foyer with exaggerated gestures of affection and formality. In one corner sat the pretender to the Montenegrin throne, Prince Nikola, with his sultry dark-eyed Parisian wife, sketching with a silver-topped pencil the outline of the speech he hoped to make later that evening. His wife, attired in voluptuous deep-purple velvet, was enveloped in ever-widening circles of blue cigarette smoke as her black-gloved hands snapped shut an enamel and gold cigarette box upon whose lid the Royal Montenegrin cipher was emblazoned. A contingent of Austrian, Bavarian and Hungarian legitimists noisily exchanged ‘Halli! Hallo!’ greetings before rushing over to the royal couple to beg obsequiously for autographs. A distinguished Scot wearing a grey pinstripe suit and Brigade tie watched on. He was the British military attaché and told me he would be wearing trews the following day in a demonstration of Highland solidarity with the Montenegrins.

  Outside, the entire town was filled with smiling crowds enjoying a nocturnal Volksfest. Every door was open and every house appeared to be at the disposal of any passer-by. Everywhere, the Montenegrins were eager to celebrate the return of their King’s remains and the presence of his extended family. The sound of champagne corks popping, the sombre, melancholy notes of the one-stringed gusla and the ubiquitous candle-light utterly transformed the city into a romantic stage-set for some unwritten scene in a Lehár operetta. Wandering among the former consulates I soon found myself in front of the old palace. Even these doors were thrown open to passers-by. A young man in a bow tie asked if I required a tour, but I only had to say ‘Novinar’ (Journalist) to be allowed to wander by myself throughout the palace.

  What events these rooms, unchanged since 1914, had witnessed: the stormy meetings of the Montenegrin sovereign with the representatives of the Great Powers in 1913, the arrival of the generals of the Austrian army after ascending Mount Lovćen in early 1916. When back in Vienna these officers had later tried to bully the old Emperor, Franz Josef, into annexing Montenegro, he had refused, apparently on the grounds that the fleeing Montenegrin sovereign had left a large portrait of the Habsburg Emperor prominently displayed in his bedroom. Such was monarchical solidarity even during war. Of that portrait there was alas now no trace, although a fine painting of Queen Victoria did adorn the green-walled bedroom, an atmospheric space of heavy black furniture and nineteenth-century gouaches of Vesuvius, perhaps a gift from King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, the last Montenegrin King’s Italian son-in-law.

  The following day, as the city emerged into the blinking sunlight as though nursing a collective hangover, the preparations for the reburial ceremony were in full swing. At midday, a muffled gun announced the imminent arrival of a long cortège and a band struck up Chopin’s Funeral March. To capture a better view of the procession, I clambered up some steps at the back of the Atlas Tourist Office where I found myself under the roof in a room with an enormous old bed and a balcony on which were squeezed two young women leaning over the railings. At first I tried to remain inconspicuous but this ruse failed. One of the women, with the blackest hair I have ever seen, turned round, seized my hand and dragged me to the railings where I was promptly sandw
iched between her and her friend. They urged me to lean over more fully for a better view of the procession below. In this state of intimacy we gazed down at the cortège winding its way below us.

  First came a unit of hand-picked Montenegrin guards attired in suitably picturesque uniforms of Ruritanian splendour, every one of them exceptionally tall. They advanced solemnly, sabres drawn. After them, still marching to the doleful tones of the Marche Funèbre, came a naval band, resplendent in white uniforms. Following them, twelve grey-haired men in dark suits, sunglasses, white shirts and Italian tricolour armbands advanced slowly as if in a Sicilian mafia epic. These men, all collateral descendants of the last King of Italy, Umberto II, whose mother, Elena, had been a Montenegrin princess, escorted the coffin containing King Nikola’s remains. On their black ties was a single shield of the House of Savoy with the white cross on a red background. Between them, borne on a guncarriage decorated with black crêpe, the coffin trundled past.

  From our balcony, my companions felt compelled to cry ‘Hurra!’ I joined in with ‘Avanti Savoia!’ As the twelve solemn men passed by, this cry was taken up around us and the men, as if awoken from a trance, stirred slowly and turned their heads upwards, raising their arms to greet us. I tried to respond but my hand was still pressed too tightly to extricate itself from my neighbours.

  After the coffin came representatives of the modern Montenegrin ‘court’ in grey suits except for the military attaché in his Highland trews. Behind them marched a throng of Montenegrins in national costume, looking as though they had just stepped out of the Vienna Volksoper, the sun glinting on the silver and gold decorations of their headdresses. Then the entire city appeared to be following the cortège towards the reburial ceremony. There was little sign of the late twentieth century: no cars, no modern music, indeed virtually no modern clothes. Even the cigarette packets on sale bore portraits of the last Montenegrin king. For a few hours it really did feel that we had stepped back into an earlier age.

  Exhilarating though these days were I knew that I had to descend from the land of the Black Mountain to the coast and the modern world in order to find if not a telephone then at least a telex machine to file my story. An hour and a half’s drive brought me to the ‘pearl of the Adriatic’, Dubrovnik, still one of the most beautiful cities in the eastern Mediterranean. In Dubrovnik I dined with the son of Ksenya Tresčec-Branjski, a lady whose kindness to me in the early 1980s when I was studying Croatian here had cemented another lifelong friendship. Ksenya had been born into a noble Croat family with origins along the Military Frontier of the Habsburgs which witnessed centuries of incessant warfare against the Ottomans. She was fond of saying that, as there was so much fighting, ‘We all, if we survived, quickly became ennobled.’ Her son was a man of similar temperament, clearly destined for high rank once Croatia freed itself of the shackles of Belgrade. The future Captain of the port of Dubrovnik, who had spent many years at sea, had all his mother’s qualities of strong opinions and decisive thinking. The next generation of this family was under no illusions concerning the coming conflict. Even at this dinner, it was clear that the Croats were preparing for a showdown.

  ‘You see, Gospodin [Sir],’ the young man explained, ‘to me Communism says I must put a million in the hat and they put nothing in but … we divide it equally! … My friend! Let’s be serious here. This cannot continue.’

  He was equally frank about Italian pretensions in the eastern Adriatic. ‘The Italians believe they have rights here, but they were only in Dalmatia for three years, between 1941 and 1944,’ he said. ‘Yugoslavia is in a state of revolutionary chaos because certain people expect the same funds that they enjoyed for the last twenty years. Most of these people are Serbs.’ Had the British embassy in Belgrade had access to this sort of thinking, perhaps much muddled policy in London before the break-up of Yugoslavia might have been avoided.

  The spring of 1989 was dynamic. In Warsaw, the round-table talks between government and opposition brought the long-awaited political thaw. In Hungary a reformist government began introducing liberal economic and social measures. By the early summer, it was clear a transition to democracy in Poland was likely. In Hungary, the government began relaxing border controls, a move which encouraged East Germans to cross into Hungary and then seek political asylum at the West German embassy in Budapest. At the height of the summer holiday season, the pretender to the Habsburg throne, Otto von Habsburg, organized a Pan-Europa picnic along the Iron Curtain border between Austria and Hungary. In a move carefully choreographed in collaboration with reformist elements of the Hungarian Communist Party, the frontier was opened allowing hundreds of East Germans to flee to Austria. In a sensational, symbolic gesture, the Austrian Foreign Minister and his Hungarian counterpart cut open part of the wire beneath the shadow of the frontier watchtowers. The Hungarians, with Moscow’s tacit approval, had decided to remove the Stalinist infrastructure separating them from Austria. It was a bold initiative which did not just affect bilateral Austrian–Hungarian relations. Because East Germans were allowed to travel to Hungary, and would now be able to move more easily on from there to the West, the East German regime of Erich Honecker began to be seriously destabilized.

  More than anything else, these events hinted that Moscow under Gorbachev had decided to begin a careful Soviet retreat from Central and Eastern Europe. By exploiting the emerging progressive tendencies of the emerging Hungarian and Polish governments, pressure was relentlessly applied to the hard-line regimes of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania. Every day, Gorbachev’s antagonism towards the leaders of the governments in Prague, East Berlin and Bucharest became increasingly apparent. For several years Hungary had been used by Moscow as a kind of experimental station for tinkering with command economies. It was now being encouraged to adopt a new role as a kind of Trojan horse against the hard-line regimes of Eastern Europe. Even if the East German tourists who got to Hungary failed to make it to Austria, they could jump over the wall of the West German embassy in Budapest where, thanks to the articles of the West German constitution, they automatically became eligible for West German citizenship.

  In Vienna that summer all the talk was of imminent change. ‘Reform’ was on everyone’s lips and only the most cynical continued to imagine that the status quo in Eastern Europe was sustainable. The perceptive correspondent of the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl, summed it up neatly after a briefing at his embassy in June 1989 in Warsaw. ‘It is impossible to imagine the cohesion of the eastern bloc prevailing once Poland and Hungary embrace western values.’ The question arose as to how the hard-line regimes of Bucharest, Prague and East Berlin could be changed without violence. Each of their Communist elites had benefited from the deep corruption which had been their monopoly: they were unlikely to give up their wealth and privileges easily. Moreover, the Chinese massacre of the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 showed that a determined government could in extremis retain power by mobilizing its army.

  Were the hard-line regimes prepared to use force, as the Chinese had, to disperse their opponents? A few weeks before the Tiananmen Square massacre, Gorbachev had visited Peking where he had sealed a pact of Sino-Soviet friendship. He would have been left in no doubt that the Chinese regime was prepared to crush the opposition. It is tempting to think that he used the following months to devise a strategy which would cut the ground from beneath those of the Soviet satellites’ leaders who might be tempted to deploy a similar approach.

  At lunch at the Liechtensteins’ in Vienna in early September, a former Japanese ambassador formulated an interesting theory that we might be about to see the end of the Cold War division of Europe, but that it could only become a reality with Soviet help. Success would depend on Moscow. As events were soon to show, he was absolutely right.

  A few weeks later I flew to East Berlin on a half-empty Austrian Airlines flight. It was 6 October and I had little idea how busy the next few weeks were to become. The destruction of the old order in
Prague and East Berlin were seismic events such as occur only once in most people’s lifetimes. That such regimes could be gone by Christmas seemed unlikely. The dramatic events of Berlin and Prague over the coming months provided a conspicuous contrast to the lower-key transition by reform-inclined governments in Hungary and Poland. The riot police had surrounded the shipyards of Gdańsk for the last time, and in Hungary reforms were dominating the political agenda.

  At Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin, these exciting events in Warsaw and Hungary appeared to have made no impression on the loyal Deutsches Volk. The border guards scrutinized passports with the same rigid faces I had encountered so often before. Flying from Vienna to East Berlin in fact was a ruse. In those days Austrian Airlines was (along with the Swiss) the only non-Communist European airline which flew to East Berlin Schönefeld. The advantage of landing ‘behind the lines’, rather than passing through one of the more rigidly controlled entry-posts such as Checkpoint Charlie, was that one was guaranteed a twenty-four-hour visa to traverse East Berlin and reach the West. Those twenty-four hours would be invaluable for gauging the mood and opinions of younger East Berliners and discovering what they thought of the changes occurring within neighbouring countries, and the increasing exodus of East Germans through Hungary. Gorbachev was due in East Berlin for a formal visit the following day. Some young friends in the Huszemann Allee thought it unlikely that the Soviet embrace would contain much warmth. More probably, they thought, it would be the proverbial ‘kiss of death’ for the East German leader.