The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  The campaign soon became more than a campaign. It took on the feeling of tectonic movement, a change of climate that penetrated deep into society. The cautious repression that so dominated Polish life suddenly lifted, which struck me vividly one afternoon in Kraków. Two months earlier, before the Round Table, inflammatory antigovernment rhetoric could land a man in jail. Yet there, in the center of the old town’s Market Square, a speaker for the Confederation of an Independent Poland, a radical independent party, stood amidst a crowd of several hundred people and breathed political fire. “We want to remove the communists from power,” he shouted. “They waste everything. If the West lends them money, they will use it to buy cattle prods.” He paused to look at three policemen lounging on a park bench across the square—and turned up the volume on his megaphone.

  The carnival that was the Polish election should have been a spectacle that commanded world attention, especially in America. Here was democracy, bursting forth with tremendous vitality in a communist nation that was a linchpin of the Soviet bloc. America had championed Solidarity for more than a decade. Lech Walesa was a household name. How was it, then, that these dramatic events failed to spark a realization that change was on the march in Eastern Europe, that the Cold War world was profoundly and quickly changing?

  The answer was Tiananmen Square. The massacre of demonstrating students in China—with its dramatic TV footage of rumbling tanks, riot police firing tear gas, screams, shots and bodies in the streets—occurred on the same day as the Polish election. June 4 also brought news of the death, at eighty-nine, of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, the father of the Iranian Revolution. The imagery from China, coupled with the fanatical turmoil of Khomeini’s funeral, thrust Poland’s political transformation to the background of the news. “After that,” one Bush aide later told me, “it was almost impossible to focus on anything else. It was Tiananmen, Tiananmen, Tiananmen. And then Iran. Eastern Europe? Yes, it was on the radar. But not really.”

  In retrospect, this made Poland’s election all the more remarkable. First, the communists abided by the results. If hard-liners were looking for an excuse to crack down and preserve their power, they had all the cover they needed in Tiananmen. At Solidarity headquarters that evening, there was champagne and celebration but also fear. “This is the worst thing that could have happened,” an editor of Solidarity’s weekly Election Gazette told me as the scale of the government’s defeat became apparent. He worried that an angry regime might yet lash out, as China had just done.

  Second, not only did the communists abide by the result, but they ran a clean ballot. There was no evidence of vote-rigging, ballot-box stuffing or the political gamesmanship normally associated with communist elections where official candidates would routinely be elected with pluralities of 98 percent. This, as much as anything, testified to the determination of Poland’s leadership to change. And so, on that black Monday evening, the official communist party spokesman went on TV, sitting next to a top Solidarity official, not only to concede defeat but to call for calm and good grace from a reluctant rank and file. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the man who had once personally jailed Walesa, even called his friend “Lech” to offer his “hearty congratulations.” From then on they worked in partnership to complete a transition, later in the summer, to a Solidarity government—the first noncommunist government in Eastern Europe’s postwar history.

  Perhaps only Poles could fully appreciate the irony. Preceding political transitions had almost invariably been marked by bitter strife: alternating cycles of liberalization followed by bloody repression, workers’ protests met with security-police crackdowns. Yet at the moment of Solidarity’s glory, Walesa himself called it a triumph of “evolution over revolution.” Poles’ brave history of challenging dictatorship in the end came to sitting down with the enemy, talking out a deal, then voting. It was precisely the reverse of how outsiders usually remember it. First came negotiation, then democracy—and only afterward revolution.

  Third, Solidarity’s peaceful victory became a lesson for the rest of Eastern Europe. For anticommunists everywhere, it was like drinking a large draft of courage. Thanks to Poland, what had only days earlier been thought impossible was, suddenly, possible.

  A spring fever gripped Budapest, too. On June 16, 1989, Hungary buried a man and, in doing so, held a funeral for communism. Truth conquered power.

  Thirty-one years before, the hero of the infamous 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Imre Nagy, was hanged as a traitor to his country. One year earlier, activists marking the anniversary were beaten by police. This day, he would be given a state funeral. Church bells tolled across the land.

  The shameful story is legend. Imre Nagy had sought to give socialism a human face. Soviet tanks rolled in and ten thousand Hungarians died. Lured from their haven in the Yugoslav embassy with a written promise of safe passage from the man who had deposed them, Janos Kadar, Nagy and other leaders of the uprising were abducted by Russian secret police, interrogated, tortured, kept in solitary confinement and, after a mockery of a show trial, hanged as “counterrevolutionaries.” Nagy was buried in an unmarked grave. For thirty years, the whereabouts was an official secret. But Hungarians knew: plot 301, tucked away in a remote and overgrown corner of a cemetery on the far outskirts of the city. They also knew how Kadar and his communists had lied—lied about their role in Nagy’s death, about their collusion with the Soviets in suppressing the rebellion, in rewriting history to cover up their infamy.

  For Hungarians, it was a powerful memory, all the more so for being repressed. This, too, the country’s reformers would play to brilliant advantage. They did not organize Nagy’s reburial; that was the work of a small group of relatives and courageous activists known as the Committee for Historical Justice. But they gave their permission. Miklos Nemeth and Imre Pozsgay, especially, offered protection and help. As they saw it, Nagy’s rehabilitation—culminating in the hero’s reburial he deserved—was a means of discrediting the current regime, the very system they themselves sought to bring down.

  Pozsgay had worked for the better part of a year, in fact, to rewrite official history and, at long last, represent 1956 for what it was—a nationalist uprising against communist oppression, a plea for membership in the wider democratic Europe to which by culture and tradition Hungary belonged. In February, his special committee made it official. No longer would 1956 be considered a “counterrevolution,” as Moscow’s ideologists insisted. It was, instead, a “popular uprising.” Nagy and his aides were victims of a “show trial.” Pozsgay went so far as to call the 1917 Bolshevik revolution a “mistake.” The true patriots of 1956, he said, were Nagy and his reformers—and, by association in 1989, themselves. The villains were Kadar and his stooges—and, again by association, communist party general secretary Karoly Grosz and his old guard. It was, in effect, a repudiation of communism and the entire postwar history of Hungary.

  This historic day thus became a war of symbols—a clash of opposing faiths, as bitter as any wars of religion and as deadly. Standing amid the crowds at the ceremony, I remember making a mental catalog of all that was going on behind the triumphal scene. The proscenium, the mise-en-scéne, was the steps of the National Gallery of Art on Heroes’ Square, its great columns swathed in black. Green, red and white national flags hung between, each with a hole in the center: farewell, hammer and sickle. Was it an homage to the 1956 revolutionaries, who cut their flags this way? Or was it an acknowledgment that today’s reformers were taking up the struggle, this time to win? Gathered as witnesses, a sort of Greek chorus, were some two hundred thousand people. On the ascending esplanade of steps to the National Gallery stood six coffins, also draped in black. Five contained the exhumed remains of Nagy and four others executed with him. One stood eloquently empty. Officially, it was for unnamed freedom fighters who had also perished in the uprising. Unofficially, it was for communism itself.

  Grosz had summoned his Politburo several days before. “We have nothing to be ashamed about,” he to
ld the assembled ministers and top party officials. Grosz was angry that Nemeth authorized the ceremony. He had strongly resisted Pozsgay’s efforts to recast Nagy’s death as anything but the deserved fate of a counterrevolutionary. Already, in November, he had warned of a “white terror” if reform went too far. He alluded to Nagy’s perfidy, unknown to most of those present, and would later distribute to the Central Committee copies of secret papers from Soviet archives showing that Nagy had long served as a KGB spy, incriminating friends and allies, as well as personal enemies, within Hungarian military and political circles, who then disappeared into jail, or worse. This is your national hero, he would say—this traitor, justly accused. As for this democracy you say he represented? Why, it would be political suicide for the party, as events in Poland had just proved. This staged funeral, he told his men, was another step into a dangerous morass. He ordered them not to attend.

  This was a turning point in a way the funeral itself was not. The schism dividing Hungary’s top leadership became, at that moment, unbridgeable. A line was drawn, and each person in the room had to choose sides. Imre Pozsgay spoke first. “I’m going,” he told Grosz, but he qualified that by saying he would go as a “private citizen.” Nemeth did not attend the day’s meeting; his relations with Grosz, he told me, had by that point reached “zero.” But when Pozsgay informed the party boss that Nemeth would also attend the funeral—in his official capacity as prime minister—Grosz turned nearly apoplectic. Nemeth might have been prime minister, but Grosz was general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party! He was the power!

  There was a moment of tense standoff. No one spoke. Pozsgay momentarily thought Grosz had lost the ability to do so. Then, abruptly, the party chief all but spat, “Go, then, and be damned!” And with that, he stalked from the room.

  So it was, on June 16, that Nemeth and Pozsgay stood beside the caskets, shoulder to shoulder with families of the victims and leaders of the political opposition that they helped create. Nemeth would later confide that he had been deeply worried for their safety. “I got quite interesting phone calls, some threatening my life,” he subsequently told an interviewer. “ ‘If you go there, we will kill you.’ ” Neither man spoke; that was for the organizers, who one by one called for tolerance and democracy. The crowd applauded politely. Then the last speaker, a young man, just twenty-six years old, stepped forward. He was Viktor Orban, the charismatic, wild-haired and outspoken leader of Fidesz, the League of Young Democrats, the new political party of Hungary’s youth. Enough of allusive symbolism. He said directly what everyone else was merely thinking. “In the sixth casket we bury communism!” he shouted. “If we have learned anything over the past four decades, it is that communism and democracy do not mix!” He went on to condemn the communists’ betrayal of the nation and its people. In 1956, he said, they promised forgiveness. Within weeks, they were shooting unarmed civilians. Thousands disappeared into jail. “We are not satisfied with the promises of communist politicians,” he thundered. “We must see to it that the ruling party can never use force against us again. We can force the party to submit itself to free elections! If we do not lose the ideals of 1956, we can elect a government that will demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops!”

  At this, the multitudes cheered. The music swelled to a triumphant finale. The funeral of Imre Nagy had just been turned into a political rally, televised nationally. Lost in the hubbub was the fact that Nemeth, Pozsgay and others were on the verge of delivering all that Orban promised, and more, albeit less noisily. They had set the stage for fully free elections, without any protections for themselves, unlike Poland’s communists. Soon they would announce a date. They had already won Moscow’s agreement to remove its troops from Hungary. Indeed, the first withdrawals had begun in April. Orban would go on to become prime minister in 1998. Here was the new generation of Hungarian leaders, making their mark by laying claim to the victories of others. The moment was emblematic in another respect, as well, for Orban was giving voice to a sentiment shared by many others: no communists were to be trusted, even those who were setting the pace for change and who would ultimately win Hungarians their freedom.

  As for Grosz, the standoff in the Politburo was his Waterloo. “He will be gone within weeks,” Pozsgay told me the day after the ceremony. In fact, it would be one week. For the past few months, the party chief’s position had been eroding. As many as a hundred thousand people had turned in their membership cards, defecting from the communist camp. Nemeth and Pozsgay’s nascent political groupings, begun late in the previous year, had gone mainstream and developed rapidly as bona fide parties, exerting real popular power. On June 24, the communist party Central Committee met in a fractious session that all but spelled the end. Concluding that the party had no future under its current leadership, it reorganized itself under four new “presidents.” Grosz was formally demoted, inveighing against enemies within until the last. Two weeks later, almost parenthetically, Janos Kadar, the embodiment of Hungarian communism, would die in his sleep. That same day, the Hungarian Supreme Court would “rehabilitate” the rebels of 1956 and formally award Imre Pozsgay his victory over history.

  If Erich Honecker was fazed by events along his borders, he did not show it.

  I had flown into Berlin from Warsaw for an interview a few days after the Polish elections. The plane was late and I tried to speed through Checkpoint Charlie by invoking a meeting with “Comrade Honecker.” The East German policeman who had by this time become familiar with my comings and goings, and who usually treated me politely, gave me a stony look. “Dokumenten, bitte,” he said tersely. “Papers, please.”

  He went through my shoulder bag, examining each notebook page by page. Also the book, Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, that I’d been reading on the flight, as well as my wallet. “Was ist das?” A receipt for coffee and some confection that I called a doughnut, I told him. “Was ist doughnut, bitte?”

  The interview took place at communist party headquarters, a gray-stone building on the main square of old Berlin where the Royal Palace once stood before being dynamited to make way for a bronze-tinted glass monstrosity known as the Volkskammer, or People’s Parliament. Above the entrance was chiseled the crossed hammer and sickle of East German socialism; inside, the inevitable heroic workers tableaux of socialist realism. On one side of a long polished wood table in the cabinet room, where the Politburo usually presided, sat the reporters from Newsweek and its sister publication, the Washington Post. On the other, Honecker and a phalanx of aides.

  It was a curious choreography, a ritual that governed every meeting with high communist leaders since the end of World War II. We from the West asked questions that we knew those of the East would not answer. Honecker gave replies that he knew we did not want and would not believe. His views could best be summed up as no glasnost, no perestroika, no Polish- or Hungarian-style tinkering with the system. Socialism might have its flaws, but look at heartless and warmongering America, with its crime and great gaps between rich and poor. The remedy was to advance toward communism, not retreat as his brethren were doing elsewhere.

  Why preserve the Wall, we asked, this anachronism of the Cold War? To protect the East German people from the depredations of bourgeois capitalism. Was the shoot-to-kill policy at the border still in effect? We don’t do that—except if people are “deserting,” which by definition includes anyone trying to leave. The massacres in Tiananmen Square? “The task of students is to study. The task of every government is to ensure law and order.” Beijing had shown great restraint, Honecker declared, despite the activities of agent provocateurs seeking to create an international incident. On it went. Thrust, parry. Thrust, parry. A fan circled overhead in the stifling heat. Flies droned against the windows as if they, too, sought to escape.

  Afterward, we went to the garden for a photo. Honecker hammed it up for the cameras, smelling the roses growing luxuriantly in a brilliant sun, his white hair fluffy in the breeze. He seemed so calmly in contr
ol. It was hard to imagine him as a killer. He had joined the communist party as a youth. He was one of the courageous few to openly resist Hitler. He was hounded by Nazi secret police, beaten, jailed from 1935 to 1945. By all odds he should have died in the concentration camps. Yet he came out after the war, rose to the top of the communist party—and did to his countrymen what the German fascists had done to him.

  This man who seemed to have learned so little from history and from life, what would he do if the people turned against him, as in Poland or Hungary? Watching him, I did not doubt his capacity for a German Tiananmen. It wasn’t the cliché of the banality of evil, though that also was clear. Nor was it the mercilessness of true belief. Honecker seemed to have passed from passion into rote. What struck me was his apparent blindness, an inability to see the world other than as he willed it. I wondered if Honecker actually smelled those roses. Was their fragrance lost to him, an abstract irrelevance? Or did he take pleasure in them, the way he did in his pet dogs, in things that were not human or prone toward unorderliness?

  As it turned out, Honecker’s calm was deceptive. He had said nothing more to his cabinet on May 3, after his explosion over Hungary’s treachery. But during the following weeks he watched events with growing concern. West German television kept airing footage of the wire along Hungary’s border being snipped. Scenes of bulldozers uprooting the concrete posts that secured the fence and knocking down watch-towers were broadcast deep into the GDR. This was exactly what the Hungarians had assured Honecker would not happen. Bits of the Iron Curtain were already being sold as souvenirs in Vienna and New York.