The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Hungarian Connection

  May 1, 1989. East Berlin. An aging Erich Honecker, seventy-seven, stood atop the reviewing stand for the annual May Day parade, flanked by his top Politburo henchmen. To his left was one of the most feared men in the East bloc, the murderous Erich Mielke, minister of state security, head of the ubiquitous East German secret police. To his right, the toothy Egon Krenz, general secretary of the Central Committee, and not far away, Gunter Schabowski, first secretary of the Berlin communist party.

  Both Krenz and Schabowski would soon be plotting against him, though it would scarcely matter. The real threat, invisible as yet, lay shaping far away, hundreds of miles to the south. But on this day there was no sign of intrigue. The sun was shining. A warm breeze, a sign of an early spring, tousled Honecker’s fluffy, grandfatherly white hair. Outwardly he was the very image of the revered leader, a benign First Comrade, doting on children and beloved by his people, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic.

  Every religion has its symbols. They give voice and shape to faith. When violated, especially if deliberately, it is not merely a desecration. It is a challenge to orthodoxy, a heresy, even treason. Among the believers of communist Europe, few symbols were dearer than May Day. Those who did not grow up during the Cold War will not remember the tanks, missile launchers and armies of troops parading each spring through Red Square. Atop Lenin’s Tomb, generations of Soviet leaders paid homage to these emblems of socialist might. The satraps of Moscow’s colonies celebrated no less fervently. Within the East bloc, this was not merely a commemoration of the 1917 revolution. It was a legitimation of their rule. As wine and wafers are to Christians, May Day was to communist officialdom.

  This particular May Day in Berlin was special. It was a Jubilee year, marking the East German regime’s fortieth anniversary in power. The annual parade was thus even more colossal than usual. Banners flew, bands played. The youth of the communist party, the Freie Deutsche Jugend, saluted smartly as they marched proudly by, cheered by thousands mustered by fiat for the occasion. Honecker and his men waved back, warm in the sun, basking in the display, secure in their cocoon of power. Could it be two years since Honecker had triumphantly returned from his first state visit to the West German Federal Republic, a de facto recognition of himself and his nation that he had yearned for over decades? To him, it seemed only yesterday.

  Erich Honecker built the Wall, behind which he ruled as master. His predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, ordered it. But Honecker personally oversaw its construction and was its guarantor. Every year, East German border police shot a handful of citizens who dared to try to escape—“wall-jumpers,” malcontents. “Die Mauer bleibt noch hundert Jahre,” Honecker had declared in January, marking the beginning of this auspicious year. “The Wall will last another hundred years.” Nothing on his political horizon clouded his prospects. To the east, Mikhail Gorbachev might be championing change. Poland and Hungary were chasing their aberrant path to socialism. But the GDR itself had never seemed so outwardly solid. There was no hint that this day, this very day, would be its high-water mark. Nothing in the cloudless skies over Honecker’s head suggested the tempest that would soon engulf him. Indeed, he scarcely saw that first mortal blow as it fell. It came as a bolt out of the blue.

  Shift to Budapest, four hundred miles distant. As Erich Honecker luxuriated in the welcoming spring sun, Karoly Grosz trudged through a sullen rain. Nor was there a parade. Change was afoot, and communist party officials decided they had best put on a fresh face.

  Instead of the traditional May Day ceremony, as in East Berlin, they opted for a People’s Picnic. At a nearby park, a vast feast awaited—food and drink, balloons and tents, ready to receive tens of thousands of guests. The rain was not to blame that only a thousand showed up, mostly aging party stalwarts and their damp and unsmiling spouses. Across town, a rally by Hungary’s new opposition political parties drew more than one hundred thousand people. Their banners proclaimed DOWN WITH COMMUNISM!

  There were student groups, ecology groups, artist groups, new political groups of every description, each with its own tent lining the paths of a city park, all busily signing up members and discussing programs for change. Jazz bands played; people danced in the mud. “The communists are finished,” shouted one political organizer who would go on to become a leader of his country. Not long ago he would have been arrested. Today, he was the young face of Hungary’s future.

  The party’s humiliation was plain. It was a public desecration, a frontal challenge to orthodoxy and to communism itself. And it was so deliberate. Not a single senior official in Nemeth’s government bothered to attend, save for the prime minister himself, who felt obliged. “That was the day of my humiliation,” he remembers. He stood there as Grosz spoke to the party faithful, furiously attacking Nemeth and his government’s policies and all but charging him with treason to the socialist cause.

  “This may be your day,” Nemeth told Grosz icily, as they went their separate ways. “But my day is not far off.”

  This was no idle threat. For Nemeth had a plan: not merely to reform communism, but to bring it down—not only in Hungary but across the whole East bloc. Grosz had no inkling, of course. But he would, and soon. In fact, Nemeth would deliver his first, finely calculated blow the next day.

  On the morning of May 2, 1989, the Hungarian government announced that, for reasons of fiscal economy, it would “no longer maintain” the electrified security barrier running the length of its western border with Austria. The thing was an expensive “anachronism,” Nemeth informed his cabinet. His choice of language was deliberately bureaucratic, designed to veil his true intent. But his actions plainly spoke louder than his words. Within hours, a photo destined to become famous flashed over the international newswires: Hungarian soldiers cutting down a stretch of barbed-wire fence at the Austrian-Hungarian border.

  Let us pause, here, and think about that. A hole in the Iron Curtain. For the communist world, this was the equivalent of Martin Luther hammering Protestantism to the doors of the Catholic Church. It was like Sputnik, rousing America to the reality of a space race, or the urban riots of the sixties that awoke the nation to the depth of its racial divide. The image of Hungary snipping holes in the barrier separating East from West sent a profound tremor through East Berlin. “What are those Hungarians up to!” Honecker shouted at his assembled ministers, gathered the next morning, May 3, for the weekly meeting of the Politburo. But he knew very well what they were “up to.” He recognized the danger.

  He realized East German tourists would soon begin their summer travels. Hungary was a favorite destination. Locked behind the Iron Curtain, as they were, Budapest and the countryside around Lake Balaton was the closest ordinary East Europeans could come to paradise. With its unique brand of “goulash economics,” leavening Marxist industrial policy with a measure of free enterprise, Hungary offered the trappings of prosperity missing virtually everywhere else—nice restaurants and cafés, ample food and groceries, good wine, pleasant camping and a (comparatively) lively capital city.

  Neither Honecker nor anyone else at the top of his government needed to be briefed on the likely scenario to come. It was a nightmare straight from 1961, the reason the Berlin Wall had been built in the first place: to stop communism’s unhappy citizens from voting with their feet. If Hungary’s border to the West was open, those East German tourists, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, might not come back home. They would merrily go south to Hungary on “vacation,” then turn right, cross the border, and end up in Austria or West Germany. For Honecker, that would represent an existential crisis, a fatal blow to his legitimacy and consequently to his rule. It could even bring down the whole house of cards that was the GDR.

  Furious, Honecker stormed into the Politburo without even a hello and demanded a full report, immediately. “Call your counterpart in Hungary,” he instructed Defense Minister Heinz Kessler. “This border is their responsibi
lity!”

  Kessler left the meeting. Half an hour later, he returned. He had just spoken to Ferenc Karpati. “This is just those radicals,” the Hungarian defense minister told him. He said that he didn’t agree with the decision, either, but there was no cause for alarm. “The border will still be patrolled. There is no possibility of East German citizens leaking out through a hole in the fence.”

  Nemeth also remembered Kessler’s call. He and Karpati discussed how to reply. “Tell them it’s a symbolic act,” Nemeth suggested. “Tell them it is a question of money, as I told Gorbi. And by the way, tell them I consider that fence to be a barbarism. Tell them we intend to tear it down!”

  Karpati was aghast, until he realized Nemeth was joking. Neither he nor the defense minister would have said any such thing. “We were much more diplomatic,” Nemeth recalled, laughing. “We assured him we would not let East Germans flee across the border, and that the frontier would still be patrolled. But as I say, that was the diplomatic answer.”

  The East Germans did not believe this explanation, not for a moment. Gunter Schabowski, the Berlin party chief who had stood in the sun on that reviewing platform just two days before, was among those attending the meeting. The jarring thing, what stood out, he recalled, was not merely what Hungary had done, but its manner. It was clearly sabotage, almost insolently so. “There was no warning, that was the thing,” he told me. “Here was Hungary, a member of the Warsaw Pact, a tiny member, going off on its own and doing something that challenged the very existence of the bloc, that was so opposed to its ideology. It was a very dangerous situation, quite obviously. It was the first concrete sign of the breakup of the bloc. And if there were no bloc, where would that leave us?”

  Around the cabinet table, Schabowski recalled, there was a long silence. The question on everyone’s mind was left unanswered, not even discussed. One can only imagine what passed through their minds. Was this the fatal moment when they instinctively knew the jig was up, perhaps like Hitler learning that morning in June 1944 that the Allies had invaded Normandy, not Calais as expected?

  The meeting broke up. Though inwardly seething, the East German leader pronounced himself satisfied with Hungary’s explanation. Who could disagree? “After all,” Schabowski noted, “he was the one who built the Wall.” It seemed surreal that May Day could have been only the day before yesterday. How abruptly Honecker’s cocoon of sunshine and security had been pricked.

  All this was precisely as the Hungarians intended. Nemeth and his men had been plotting just this scenario for the better part of two years, first among themselves and later, secretly, with the West German Federal Republic. And so began an intimate choreography. For on that day, May 2, they delivered the first of a series of strategic blows that would knock the Iron Curtain into the trash bin of history.

  The script—and we can call it that—was crafted for maximum publicity. It kicked off with a press conference, well attended by several hundred foreign journalists alerted in advance and transported from Budapest to the border crossing at Hegyeshalom, the gateway on the main highway to Vienna. There, Hungarian authorities announced with high ceremony before the international TV cameras that, henceforth, the electronic alarm and surveillance system along the frontier would be switched off. An officer ostentatiously pulled a lever in a circuit box and, lo, it was so. Then guards got to work with outsize wire cutters. The photo instantly flashed around the world: Hungarian soldiers taking down large sections of barbed wire and carting them away.

  The symbolism had many layers. Most obvious, it was a declaration that, as far as Hungary was concerned, the Cold War was over. The future lay to the west. It was time for Hungarians to live normally, without artificial geopolitical divides. Beyond that, according to Nemeth, “it was a test of Moscow’s tolerance, especially Gorbachev’s.” What would he do? How angry would he be? Would he wake up and take a hard look at all that was going on in Hungary and realize, to his dismay, that events were spinning out of control? With a bit of encouragement from Moscow, Hungary’s hard-liners would only too willingly put down Budapest’s experiment with democracy. But to his surprise, Nemeth got no complaint. “I met the Russian ambassador ten times after the event and not once did it come up.”

  Nemeth saw this, too, as a sign.

  Here, beneath the surface, is a consummate tale of Cold War intrigue. Nemeth had not blindsided Gorbachev. He had told him on his visit to Moscow in March that he planned to dismantle the border. But he had not told the whole truth.

  During their meeting, Gorbachev spent an immense amount of time talking about money—how there wasn’t any. Oil prices had plunged, from a high around $40 a barrel in the spring of 1980 to less than $9 in 1988, falling by 50 percent in 1986 alone, Gorbachev’s first year in power. Russian production fell as well, partly because Moscow could not afford to invest in new capacity and exploration. Export revenues were down even more, eaten up by interest on heavy foreign borrowing. Rejuvenating the Soviet economy—Gorbachev’s cherished perestroika—was proving far more difficult than he expected. The Soviets required massive investment in new industrial technology, all of which had to be imported from the West and paid for with increasingly scarce hard currency. Growth rates fell to a third of what they were in the mid-1970s under Brezhnev. Much-in-demand consumer goods became more expensive and harder than ever to find; per capita consumer income shrank by two-thirds or more as food prices doubled. The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate of November 1988 had it right in one respect: Gorbachev faced severe economic challenges, possibly beyond his ability to solve.

  No one was more aware of this than Nemeth. After all, he was in charge of the government’s economic reform team before becoming prime minister. Now he moved to take advantage of Gorbachev’s dilemma. Hungary faced equally serious financial constraints, he told the Soviet leader during his March visit. “Comrade General Secretary, we can no longer afford to maintain the frontier barrier,” Nemeth said, describing it as outdated and falling apart. “Rabbits were always setting off the alarms.” He gave a figure—astronomical, by East bloc standards—for renovation costs. Much of that expense would be in foreign currency, he added, because Russia had ceased manufacturing the stainless-steel fencing that would be required, which meant that replacements would have to be imported from the West. “I told Gorbachev, ‘I won’t spend a forint to fix that fence. It’s a Warsaw Pact fence. They should pay for it.’ Gorbachev replied, ‘No way. The funding is not there.’ ”

  In relating all this, Nemeth paused for a moment, looking bemused. Then he continued, with a sly smile, “This is only what we told Gorbachev. We Hungarians had very different reasons for opening the border.” Subtly, Nemeth had tapped on the door of the Kremlin castle, offering a Trojan horse.

  For the past several months, Nemeth and his foreign minister, Gyula Horn, had secretly been conferring with the Austrians and West Germans. In late April, as the Hungarians were preparing their May Day surprise, Nemeth telephoned Chancellor Kohl’s key foreign policy aide, Horst Teltschik. “He called me at home and asked if he could come to Bonn immediately. He said it was very urgent,” Teltschik told me a decade later, speaking in his director’s office at BMW in Munich. Taking great care not to be detected, Teltschik himself drove to a private airport near Cologne to pick up the Hungarian conspirators and took them to meet Chancellor Kohl—not at the chancellery, but at his private home. Nemeth told the Germans that he intended to cut the border fence within the next few days. He told them why he was doing it, at just this moment. He wanted ample time, he said, for word to get out before the annual onslaught of vacationing East Germans arrived in Hungary. He feared that the Warsaw Pact would retaliate, perhaps by cutting off supplies of energy or imposing economic sanctions.

  “Will you support us?” Nemeth asked Kohl. According to Teltschik, the German chancellor’s response was unhesitating. “We offered him any support he needed. The amount of money was not important. We wanted him to be sure he felt he was on the ri
ght side, economically.” Significantly, this took place on Kohl’s initiative alone. German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was not informed.

  It was not the first such contact, nor would it be the last. To understand the revolution in Hungary, and how the Berlin Wall came down, it is critical to understand West Germany’s role. Teltschik was the point man. Curly-haired and almost elfin, easygoing and quick to laugh, youthful despite his forty-nine years, he could easily be mistaken as “just another aide” among the legions serving Kohl. In fact, he was a rarity: a serious, long-range thinker, a doer like Kohl himself and a believer in the power of the few to accomplish the work of many. Most important, having worked for Kohl since 1972, he enjoyed the chancellor’s complete trust.

  Teltschik had been in contact with the reformers around Nemeth since the mid-1980s, when one of their number, Istvan Horvath, the ambassador to Germany, came to his office in Bonn. “He was so outspoken, so radical, that in the beginning I distrusted him,” said Teltschik of that first meeting. “What does he want? For a communist, he was so… different. I learned, later, that I could trust him, as well as the others.”

  Teltschik quietly visited Budapest in late 1987, when he first met Nemeth. He kept up his contacts as Nemeth rose through the ranks to become the communist party’s chief economist. Officially, Teltschik told me, their meetings were all business—economic reform and negotiating the terms of a billion-mark credit that the Hungarian government sought from Deutsche Bank. Unofficially, the conversation was how to bring decisive change to the GDR.

  In the summer of 1988, Teltschik approached Gorbachev to get Nemeth appointed prime minister. He was exactly the sort of “new man” that was needed, he told the Soviet leader. Nemeth could help bring about the economic reforms that could revive the economies of the East bloc. Teltschik said the same to Karoly Grosz. Nemeth was “clean,” Teltschik added, untainted by the internecine political infighting that compromised other candidates for the job. Coincidence or not, Nemeth was appointed prime minister on November 24.