The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  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 delud
ed 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.

  Like Jaruzelski, he too was full of confidence. It did not matter whether the communist party liked the deal or not. “The army is the true power in Poland,” he said. “Jaruzelski will deliver. The conventional wisdom that the party would step in to prevent an erosion of its power is wrong.” Of course, he added, the general would be named president. Though elated at all that Solidarity had won, Geremek did not foresee a dramatic change in Poland’s political landscape, let alone a rapid transition to democracy. The June elections would merely be a prelude to fully free elections four years later. It would be a decade, he suggested, before Poland might actually see a noncommunist government.

  Never did he imagine it would be four months.

  On January 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-first president of the United States. Shortly after taking office, he ordered a strategic review of U.S.-Soviet relations. It arrived on the president’s desk in mid-March, not long after Miklos Nemeth’s secret Moscow summit.

  Brent Scowcroft, the new national security adviser, was unimpressed. “Disappointing,” he called it, a bland interagency overview, cobbled together from cursory CIA reports and State Department memos. Its fatal flaw in his eyes, however, was that it represented “continuity,” as one of his senior deputies would describe it. There was too much of the old administration, and too little of the new. Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker wanted a complete break, not some Reagan-Bush hybrid. Scowcroft set the review aside and began working instead with a “think piece” on Gorbachev’s intentions and policies, drawn up by an energetic and smart young protégée on the NSC named Condoleezza Rice.

  Rice’s revealing memo laid out a strategy for “coping with Gorbachev,” as Scowcroft put it, premised on the “need to underscore the credibility of NATO’s nuclear deterrent” and a deep wariness about Soviet intentions. The new national security team saw the Soviet leader as a “propagandist,” seeking to lull the United States into a false sense of security. Ronald Reagan was too popular to publicly repudiate, but the incoming administration believed that the former president had gone too far in his rapprochement with Moscow. Reagan trusted Gorbachev too much. It was time to dial back. Reagan’s more ambitious disarmament initiatives were put on hold. The new defense secretary, Dick Cheney, pushed for tougher policies of confrontation to “test” the Russian leader, coupled with increases in U.S. military spending to counter what he presented as an escalating rather than a diminishing Soviet threat. A sudden East-West chill set in.

  I found this troubling, even from afar. It was as if the movie Back to the Future, the sequel to which was then being filmed, were playing out in geopolitics. On the ground, I saw Nemeth dismantling communism in Hungary. Here was Poland, on the brink of democratic elections. Gorbachev was everywhere, the hero of a newly vigorous Europe. Yet in Washington a new administration took power with a frame of reference best summed up as Cold War Lite. This seemed especially ironic given that the main theme of the transition, as Bush himself described it, was to “dream big dreams” and see the world fresh. The beflummoxed outgoing secretary of state, George Shultz, leaving office in January, wrote in his memoir, “It was as if the Bush administration did not understand or accept that the Cold War was over.”

  This skepticism ran deep. Scowcroft and his team were well aware of events in Hungary and Poland. They noted, for instance, the publication in Moscow of a long newspaper article praising Lech Walesa, a clear signal that the Kremlin approved of the course Jaruzelski was charting. The successful conclusion of the Round Table, with its promise of elections, was recognized as a breakthrough. But Scowcroft, in particular, advocated caution. He was a military man and a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He had seen previous eras of détente turn sour, and he worried that Gorbachev’s strategy was to fool the United States into lowering its military guard in Europe, toward whatever unforeseen end. “I was suspicious of Gorbachev’s motives and skeptical of his prospects,” he wrote in his memoir with George Bush, A World Transformed. Gorbachev’s goal was to revitalize the Soviet Union so as to “better compete” with the West. “To me,” said Scowcroft, “this made Gorbachev potentially more dangerous than his predecessors, each of whom, through some aggressive move, had saved the West from the dangers of its own wishful thinking.”

  Others in the administration were no less wary. Never mind that, in April, George Kennan, dean of American Sovietologists and the original author of America’s bedrock strategy of containment, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Soviet Union no longer posed a threat. Never mind that Margaret Thatcher declared the Cold War to be over. James Baker would suggest that “Gorbachev’s strategy was premised on splitting the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe.” Hard-liners within the Defense Department, led by Cheney and a phalanx of aides who would become famous in a later Bush administration—among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—argued against more moderate State Department officials who saw the changes gathering force in the East bloc as an opportunity for closer engagement. Cheney was especially virulent in his suspicions, all but calling Gorbachev an impostor and a “fraud.” Giving too much credence to Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” he told CNN in late April, exposed the United States to the risk, indeed the likelihood, that he would fail and be replaced by someone “far more hostile” to the United States.

  U.S. intelligence analyses did little to reshape the discussion. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate dated November 23, 1988, focused on the Soviet Union’s deteriorating economic situation, accurately suggesting that internal reforms offered scant prospect of solving the country’s growing troubles. But in reference to developments elsewhere in the bloc, it projected rather tamely that “attempts at political reform in the USSR are likely to generate pressure on East European countries for similar reforms”—neglecting to note that changes there were already running well ahead of anything happening in Moscow. A second intelligence estimate a month later, focusing specifically on Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe, concluded that Gorbachev’s “agenda” for the region had “increased the potential for instability.” Any changes would most likely be “evolutionary,” however, leading to “greater diversity” but far short of radical transformation. “In extremis,” the CIA judged, “there is no reason to doubt [Gorbachev’s] willingness to intervene to preserve party rule and decisive Soviet influence in the region.”

  The agency would stick by this view in a National Intelligence Estimate dated as late as November 18, 1989, even as Eastern Europe slipped ever more out of communist contro
l and after the Wall itself had toppled. Indeed, the closest it came to calling events right came in a dissent to that document written by Deputy Director for Intelligence John Helgerson. Presciently, it argued that Gorbachev would avoid a crackdown in the East but would “progressively lose control of events” and be forced to give up his “still authoritarian vision in favor of a truly democratic one.”

  For both the intelligence community and the White House, the ruling assumption through most of 1989 was that Moscow still called the shots in Eastern Europe, despite all Gorbachev was saying and doing. More than once, the Soviet leader implicitly—and, as time went on, increasingly explicitly—renounced the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine. His chief advisers, Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Bogomolov, unequivocally said as much in face-to-face meetings with senior U.S. and European officials. There were Gorbachev’s assurances to Miklos Nemeth, who promptly relayed them to his tennis partner, Ambassador Mark Palmer, who sent them on to Washington. In Poland, Czeslaw Kiszczak, chairing the government side in the Round Table talks, relayed the essence of Gorbachev’s message to Jaruzelski to Solidarity’s negotiators, who quickly told the Americans. Meanwhile, classified cables flooded into the White House and State Department from the likes of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, flatly describing the Brezhnev Doctrine as “dead” and casting Gorbachev as a bona fide “revolutionary” who represented a historic opportunity for the United States to reshape relations with the Soviet Union.

  Years later, Rice would admit that the new administration, focusing on Gorbachev’s troop withdrawals and the implications for U.S. nuclear doctrine, had missed the bigger picture entirely. “I missed completely, really, the revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine.” All the while, communism continued to crumble, increasingly visibly as the spring went on. Yet none of it quite seemed to sink in. As the Solidarity activist Adam Michnik would bitingly put it, America at this decisive moment was “sleepwalking through history.”