The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  None of this, he knew, would be lost on East Germans as they prepared for the summer holidays. At the communist summit in Havana, in early June, Honecker reported that Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze had told him that he found the Polish situation to be “disquieting.” Honecker said he replied that, in his personal view, Hungary was almost “lost” to socialism. Something had to be done, he told Shevardnadze, and he was prepared to do it.

  Just what that meant was unknown to anyone but Honecker. “It was clear to the entire leadership that we had a problem,” Gunter Schabowski would later tell me. “But was it discussed? Not once.” Instead, East Germany’s leader made his own moves, typically looking to what had worked in the past. On November 26, 1980, as strikes organized by Solidarity threatened to paralyze Poland, Honecker had written an urgent letter to the personal attention of Leonid Brezhnev, calling for a formal meeting of the Warsaw Pact to consider “fraternal assistance” to the besieged Warsaw government. “Counterrevolutionary forces in the People’s Republic of Poland are on the constant offensive,” he told the Soviet leader. “Any delay in acting against them would mean death—the death of socialist Poland. Yesterday our collective efforts may perhaps have been premature; today they are essential; and tomorrow they would already be too late.”

  As Honecker saw it, Hungary now posed a similar threat. He could not imagine Moscow viewing it otherwise. Thus in late May, he sent Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer to Moscow with a personal letter addressed to “Dear Comrade Gorbachev,” insisting that “the Hungary problem” be added to the agenda for discussion at the Warsaw Pact’s July 7–8 annual summit in Bucharest. “Of course, he did not intend to just ‘discuss’ the Hungarians,” said Schabowski, describing the gambit. “He wanted to stop them. As he saw it, it was time for the entire bloc to hold together.”

  Honecker obviously misjudged Gorbachev. He could not have missed the Soviet leader’s repeated disavowals of the Brezhnev Doctrine, nor his insistence that Eastern Europe’s communist regimes had to change with the times. But Honecker appears to simply not have accepted it. Perhaps he believed Gorbachev’s rhetoric was ultimately mere propaganda, and that faced with a genuine threat to socialism’s survival he would be quick to roll back change. If Miklos Nemeth could have harbored similar concerns, traveling previously to Moscow to judge for himself, it is not illogical to conclude that a man as cloistered and conventionally communist as Honecker would have thought so even more strongly.

  The masters of the Eastern empire converged on Bucharest, citadel of perhaps the most repressive of all the bloc’s regimes. They spoke of many things, but only one topic held their full attention. That, of course, was Nemeth and what his “reformist” policies portended for the rest of them. He was the quarry, the hunted. His host, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, made that plain, Nemeth would recall. “He would not address me as ‘comrade,’ I am proud to say.”

  As the meeting commenced, the leaders of the most reactionary states of the East bloc lined up against him: Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic. Like Honecker, they wanted to stop his “counterrevolution,” just as the alliance had in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Warsaw in 1981. “Ceausescu led the attack,” according to Nemeth. Seated next to Gorbachev, he rose to his feet, gesticulating and shouting his impassioned indictment. Hungary would “destroy socialism.” If these “dangerous experiments” were allowed to proceed, they could bring down the entire Soviet Union. Honecker and Czechoslovakia’s Milos Jakes soon joined in. General Jaruzelski of Poland sat silent, sphinxlike, betraying no emotion.

  Nemeth had been in office only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies could only act with Soviet support. The man who could give it, Mikhail Gorbachev, sat roughly opposite, about thirty feet away on the other side of the large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev… winked.

  “This happened at least four or five times,” Nemeth told me. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. “Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes. I don’t quite know how to describe it. But I clearly saw he was trying to tell me that he did not share these views.”

  For Nemeth, this was yet another important sign, as decisive in its way as the conversation the two men had had in March, when Gorbachev forswore any intervention in Hungary’s affairs, and as telling as Moscow’s silence in May when the Hungarians had cut their hole in the Iron Curtain. This was a signal, at a key moment, that it was safe to go on. It was as if Gorbachev were saying, “Don’t worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention,” as Nemeth put it to me. So he didn’t. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.

  Honecker’s defeat in Bucharest had a deeper consequence back home in Berlin. By failing to stop his enemies in Hungary, he called attention to his own weakness. Not only could he not influence Gorbachev, but he seemed not to grasp the implications. Schabowski explained, “Our dilemma was that of the East German state itself. We needed the support of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union to survive. Without it, our leadership always feared, we would fall like a ripe plum into the hands of the West Germans.” Yet there was Honecker, talking about his close friendship with Ceausescu and Jakes and ridiculing Gorbachev, mocking his anti-alcohol campaign in Russia and the corruption of his so-called Soviet reformists. Meanwhile, Gorbachev himself was cutting a swath through Europe. From Bucharest, he had flown straight to France, where he called for a “Common European House.” In Bonn, a few weeks before that, he had been mobbed by tens of thousands of Germans chanting, “Gorbi! Gorbi! Gorbi!” All this planted a seed of doubt within the East German Politburo, according to Schabowski. “To ally with Ceausescu and resist Gorbachev, and to boast of it? Some of us thought it odd. It made us think about a change in leadership. For the German Democratic Republic to continue to exist, we had to get in step with Gorbachev. If Honecker could not cooperate with him…” Schabowski completed the thought with a shrug.

  From that moment on, Honecker was a marked man. Just as Karoly Grosz effectively met his end at the sharp point of a symbol, so Honecker’s fate was sealed with Gorbachev’s wink. Henceforth, the East German caesar would be surrounded by conspirators, awaiting with knives. Et tu, Brute?

  Of course, neither Schabowski nor anyone else on the Politburo said anything that might reveal themselves. They did not discuss their unease with one another. Silence ruled, as it always did. “You must understand that Honecker’s authority was absolute. What if you were denounced?” Treason, said Schabowski, begins first in the heart, then in the mind, a party of one. “You start by having your own ideas. A heresy, such as wondering whether Honecker should go. Then you watch the reactions of the people sitting around you, to sense if they are thinking as you are. You might make a remark to test them and judge whether to go further.” In May, Schabowski saw little sign that others shared his doubts. After Bucharest, he was certain that they did.

  Miklos Nemeth also flew home from Bucharest to a world markedly different from the one he had left. Suddenly, America woke up.

  In early July, President Bush embarked on his first official trip through Eastern Europe. At a reception in Warsaw, he regaled guests with a list of Polish baseball “greats”—Stan Musial, Tony Kubek, Phil Niekro. He went on for half an hour about the American-Polish connection. The next day in Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, he shot V-for-Victory signs and reveled in the crowds and banners reading DOWN WITH COMMUNISM and SOVIETS GO HOME. We like democracy, he told anyone who would listen. Try it. You’ll like it, too.

  Writing of the trip in his memoir, A World Transformed, Bush noted that “change was in the air” in Poland and Hungary, and that the West had an obligation to act as a “responsible catalyst” in shaping events in Eastern Europe. A
s they followed the president around Warsaw and Gdansk, many reporters wondered. Baseball greats? Change in the air? The horse was out of the barn. The train had left the station. Communism, by the time Bush visited, was all but officially dead in both Poland and Hungary. To speak of “catalyzing” events that were accelerating faster than any of us could comprehend seemed either arrogant or, worse, out of touch. Naturally, any administration would want to claim a role in such dramatic history. But the facts were otherwise.

  At least, that is how I felt at the time. We now know that, during that trip, Bush experienced something of a transformation. Once on the ground, he was quick to grasp the full dimension of what was happening in the East. In Warsaw, he met General Jaruzelski for what was to be a ten-minute tea. It turned into a two-hour heart-to-heart talk. Solidarity’s overwhelming victory meant the general might not have the votes to be elected president. He could not bear the humiliation of defeat and was thinking of resigning. That would leave Poland in potentially severe straits, because oddly enough Jaruzelski had emerged as the one man both Solidarity and the communists trusted enough to lead them through a perilous period. “I told him his refusal to run might inadvertently lead to serious instability and I urged him to reconsider,” Bush wrote in his memoir, conscious of the irony: “Here was an American president trying to persuade a senior Communist leader to run for office.” He also discussed the problem with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa the next day in Gdansk, where he drew a crowd of 250,000 people. His efforts helped. When Bush left for Hungary, James Baker would report, Jaruzelski was positively “beaming.”

  In Budapest, on July 13, the political situation was no less delicate. The anticipated flood of East German tourists was beginning. The campgrounds around Lake Balaton were filling up. Publicly, Bush came to Hungary offering a modest package of economic aid and trade concessions. Privately, he thanked Nemeth for all that he had done so far to dismantle the Iron Curtain and spark change at home and across the region. Then the president suggested that the time might not be far off to go even further. “We both knew what he was hinting at,” Nemeth said in a later television interview. “It was very simple. We could feel it in the air. Our East German ‘tourists’ were not going to go home.” As the men parted, Nemeth gave Bush a memento—a bit of barbed wire clipped from the Iron Curtain.

  The oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, asked why he did what he did, used to reply, “Il faut aller voir.” It’s necessary to go see. From the moment George Bush set foot in Eastern Europe and saw for himself, U.S. policy perceptibly changed. From a cautious wariness of Gorbachev and his intentions, it morphed into a realization that events had gone well beyond his ability to stop them, even had he wished. The focus quickly became how to help, even how to keep up. Cold War diehards allied with Cheney and others were pushed to the fringe. From then on, “these guys were excluded from the inner circle,” not entirely to be trusted, one White House adviser later told me. The trip also helped pry Scowcroft “out of his box,” the set way of seeing that characterized the conservative general’s worldview, according to this official. A policy of engagement, constant communication and partnership with America’s European allies—and even, to a surprising degree, the Soviet Union—became the order of the day. U.S. policy went from out of touch and even obstructionist to a model of restrained, sober and knowing competence, helping to shape the international climate for change and culminating in the brilliant management of something that at this moment still remained almost unthinkable: the fall of the Wall and, in its aftermath, German unification.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, or Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell

  Otto von Habsburg, scion of the Austrian monarchy, was driving from Vienna to Budapest, and hence to Debrecen in eastern Hungary, where he would deliver a lecture at the university founded by his father before the First World War. At dinner that night, following his talk, he mentioned how beautiful the border region was. Conversation soon turned to the political changes under way. The Iron Curtain still divided East from West, everywhere but in Hungary. Why not celebrate this fact, a local activist named Ferenc Meszaros suggested.

  He meant it as a joke, a sort of conversational lark. Those gathered convivially around the table, wineglasses in hand over a fine meal of game, vied with one another to come up with ever more inventive proposals. Among the more bizarre was to convene a picnic on the Austrian-Hungarian border. There would be a blazing bonfire, complete with a pig roasting on a spit. Hungarians could sit on one side of the border fence, while Austrians sat on the other. They would toss tasty morsels back and forth to one another over the Cold War barrier. What better way to call the world’s attention to the unfairness of this ugly geopolitical divide?

  Everyone had a good laugh. But ten days later, Meszaros again brought up the idea, this time more seriously, at a meeting of one of Hungary’s new political parties, the Democratic Forum. As before, it was treated as a joke by most, but not by a young woman named Maria Filep, who was organizing a political retreat called the Common Fate Camp for students from around the Soviet bloc. Thinking a picnic would be a fine way to wrap up her program, she and Meszaros set about organizing it.

  They settled on a name, place and date—the Pan-European Picnic, to be held in Sopron, Hungary, at 3 p.m. on August 19, 1989—and invited Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay to act as sponsors. For the passionate Pozsgay, the invitation was a godsend. Fresh from his triumph in revising the official history of 1956, he was looking for ways to publicize that Hungary was quietly opening its borders and bolting from the communist bloc. He immediately went to see Nemeth. Right then and there, the two men decided. “That’s when we began to make the picnic into something else, something much bigger,” Nemeth told me. “It was to be the solution to our East German problem.”

  As anticipated, East German tourists had begun their summer travels. Tens of thousands had already arrived, filling hostels in Budapest and descending on the campgrounds around Lake Balaton; many more thousands would soon follow. Nor had they missed the message in the very public dismantling of the border fence. Since May and early June, hundreds had ditched their cars in fields and woods along the border and hiked toward the frontier with Austria. When caught, they were politely turned back by Hungarian guards, often with a smile suggesting they were free to try again as soon as the patrol had passed. Many of them found their way to the West. But so far, those were an intrepid few. The vast majority of East Germans seemed too frightened to try to escape. For Nemeth and Pozsgay, the challenge was how to embolden them.

  So these poor East Germans became pawns in an elaborate plot, one of the most creative geopolitical double games ever played. Under a 1969 treaty, East Germany and Hungary were obliged to honor one another’s travel laws. Hungarians enjoyed remarkable freedom; they passed to and from Austria and other European countries largely without restraint. East Germans, by contrast, were confined to the East bloc. The Hungarians could not simply ignore the treaty, throw open their checkpoints and, like pharaoh, let their people go.

  Besides, what they were doing was dangerous. Twice in the past year, communist hard-liners made moves to cast out the reformers, once even contemplating the use of force. Only a few months before, Russian troops had brutally put down pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Uzbekistan. Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre was a more recent reminder. Immense subtlety was therefore required, and the Pan-European Picnic seemed the perfect instrument. “This invitation gave me a chance to do something quite different, not what the picnic organizers had in mind at all,” Pozsgay said in an interview. “We decided to make the picnic a precedent. We would use it to show that East Germans could freely leave Hungarian territory.”

  Officially, the organizers went about planning their picnic. With backing from the sponsors, they put together a group of partners: students, activists from political parties in Sopron such as the Democratic Forum, local environmentalists and civic action societies. They settled on a logo—a white
dove breaking through barbed wire (on some, a white rose)—and arranged for food, tents and buses to ferry guests to the site. T-shirts were made, maps were drawn up, invitations went out by fax to national and international media. Radio Free Europe would be there, broadcasting news of the event on its Germanlanguage programs. Western television networks arrived, including many from West Germany, which were viewed daily throughout the German Democratic Republic, as well as in Hungary. Of course, the organizers duly applied for permission from the local authorities, especially the commander of the Sopron border guard. They assumed that Hungarian police would keep a close watch. This was the frontier, after all. But they requested a special dispensation: to symbolically open a border gate that had been closed for the past forty years so that a small number of Austrians who wished to attend the festival could do so and be greeted as they arrived by an even smaller group of official Hungarian delegates.

  Behind the scenes, Pozsgay moved to put his parallel plan in place. He telephoned an ally in the government, Interior Minister Istvan Horvath, and told him of the invitation. Then they sat down with Nemeth. Would Horvath please arrange for the border to be opened, as the organizers had requested? “Horvath’s involvement was vital,” Nemeth later told me. “He supervised the police and militia. Without his instructions, the whole affair could have ended in tragedy.” They also contacted the head of the Hungarian border guard, Gyula Kovacs, who relayed the instructions to the commander in Sopron: not only was the border to be opened, but guards were not to be stationed in the immediate vicinity. The only barrier separating Hungary from Austria would be a small mesh net designed to keep wild animals away. All this had to be done in strictest secrecy,” Nemeth recalled. “I did not tell anyone else in the government.”