The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  The next morning, Czechoslovakia’s communist party chief, Milos Jakes, laughed uproariously at the notion that he might be deposed. That Havel. “Do you know why he stopped writing plays?” Jakes asked in the accents of the plumber he once was. “Because they’re no good.”

  We had asked Havel what question he would put to Jakes. It was, do you not realize the depth of social discontent, and your own impotence, that this is the last moment to solve the crisis without strikes, unrest or violence? The answer, Havel anticipated, would be to ask why Western journalists always visited Havel. This is a man who always complicates the situation, who wants only to destabilize society. We know the problems Czechoslovakia faces, and we will solve them.

  Jakes answered precisely as predicted. Havel was a troublemaker, a cynic. Authorities could not be accused of persecuting him, however. “He is at large,” Jakes said, as though this icon of humanity and Czech culture were a bank robber or murderer. As for the structure of Czech society, “we see no reason to change… The communist party plays the recognized leading role in society… We are not going to tread the path of private ownership.” Yes, the situation at the West German embassy was “quite unpleasant.” But now the border was closed. The problem was resolved, except for one detail, said Jakes. “What are we going to do with all these abandoned cars?”

  October 6. As Prague stayed fretfully still, waiting, Hungary approached the culmination of its refolution, a term coined by Timothy Garton Ash to describe the country’s unique admixture of reform and revolution.

  “Communism is dead,” Mark Palmer, the American ambassador, told us over dinner the evening we arrived. All that remained was to hammer a few final nails into the coffin. Only a month had passed since the Hungarians had opened the border, but the effect had been like pulling the plug in a bathtub. The foul waters of four decades of tyranny, repression and brute failure ran out, seemingly in an instant. In Palmer’s analogy, it was all over but the death rattle.

  Who would write the obit? Most likely Imre Pozsgay, rumored to be planning to officially abolish the party at a meeting of the Central Committee next week. Pozsgay hoped to be elected president in the country’s first popular vote, a presidential plebiscite scheduled for late November, but Palmer thought he was deluding himself. Remember Poland? “People want revenge. They hate communism.” It wouldn’t matter that men like Pozsgay and Miklos Nemeth brought it down and ushered in democracy. “They, too, were communists,” said Palmer. “They will go.”

  It seemed a terrible irony, an almost disgraceful ingratitude. After all, Pozsgay was one of Hungary’s best. He had pushed for change when it was dangerous to do so. It was he who called 1956 what it was: a national uprising of the people against a system that was no good. “Communism does not work,” he had said when we first met. “We must start again from zero.” He was the hidden impresario behind the Pan-European Picnic, priming the pump for the Great Escape, one of the first men to deliver a hammer blow to the Wall itself. Yet he would not be elected president of Hungary in November. Palmer was right: revenge. A cabdriver spat when I asked to be taken to the headquarters of the Central Committee, a marble hulk on the Danube that the citizens of Budapest derisively called “our White House.” Across the city, workers were removing the socialist hammer and sickle from official buildings. The flowers planted in a red star at one city traffic circle had been dug up. Motorists kept driving through them.

  Still, there was Pozsgay, the next morning, hammer ready and coffin nails in hand. Communism is “finished,” he said again, as declaratively as ever, obviously relishing his role as coexecutioner. The Hungary of the future will be similar to West European social democracies, he explained. The party state will cease to exist. Dictatorial socialism will disappear. Hungary will be a constitutional state, with a government freely elected from among competing parties, much as Kalman Kulcsar and Miklos Nemeth had told me nine months before. “We have always been like a ferryboat, plying the river between East and West,” said Pozsgay. “For too long we have been moored to the Eastern bank. Perhaps soon we will have a berth on the Western shore.”

  Almost parenthetically, as we prepared to leave, he added that he was preparing a four-day party congress, to begin the next day. Why didn’t I come back when it was over, say on October 11 at 8:30 a.m.? He might have a little story for Newsweek.

  And so, on the appointed day, I showed up early at his offices in the houses of parliament. “We don’t know how all this will end,” Pozsgay told me over coffee, making small talk about the changes taking place across the bloc. I was a little puzzled as to why I was there. Then, around nine o’clock, he smiled like the Cheshire Cat and got up, as if to go. He walked me to a door, different from the one I had entered by, and opened it, not for me but for himself. It was the entrance to the Assembly of the People. This morning, he explained, he would abolish the communist party. The Hungarian Socialist Workers Party would be no more. The old apparatchiks, the hoary edifice of deadwood and social repression, the whole rank legacy, we could kiss it all good-bye. Pozsgay put his hand on the doorknob, smiled broadly and, with a hint of a chuckle, walked through the door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Kiss of Death

  History can be intimate, accidental, impersonal, ironic. It can seemingly just happen, implacably, or it can be cruel, as if by design, animated now and again by some cosmic sense of justice. How else to explain the bizarre fall of Erich Honecker, with all its uncanny symmetry?

  The iconic May Day parade marked the zenith of Honecker’s rule. No less important a date marked its nadir: October 7, the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the German Democratic Republic. It was to be the celebration of a communist lifetime. There would be a torchlight parade; one hundred thousand fresh-faced Freie Deutsche Jugend—Free German Youth—would march. Very Important People were arriving—the leaders of the East bloc, among them Mikhail Gorbachev. None knew, of course, that for most it would be their last hurrah. As for Honecker himself, it was as if fate were weaving three final strands into his destiny. The first bore the face of a titular ally, Gorbachev. The second was the secret conspiracy within. The third was the East German people, awakening from their long sleep and chanting, “Wir sind das Volk, We are the people,” and who would no longer be ignored.

  Thus the final drama commenced. Gorbachev starred as a sort of modern Cassandra, she of Greek legend whose prophecies, unheeded, came to pass. Honecker greeted him at the airport. They kissed in the style of communist leaders, on the mouth. It was an infamous photo: a pair of aging men, lip-locked. It quickly became an anticommunist opposition poster across Eastern Europe: THIS, it proclaimed, featuring a pair of young lovers; NOT THIS, with a red X over Gorbi and Erich. Honecker imagined it to be a seal of fraternal kinship. In fact, it was a kiss of death.

  I had been told in Prague that Russian foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, two weeks earlier, delivered a stiff warning to his East German counterpart. Resolve the situation of the East German refugees in the West German embassy in Prague, or Gorbachev would cancel his trip. To what degree that element of added pressure figured in Honecker’s mishandling of the crisis is not known, but it must have been considerable. In Budapest, a senior Hungarian official, also briefed by Shevardnadze, told me that Gorbachev’s visit had only one purpose: to persuade Honecker to change. If he did not abandon policies of force and coercion, if he did not embrace some measure of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev would diss him at his own party.

  Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the conspirators plotted. Between October 2 and October 6, the day Gorbachev and other East bloc leaders arrived, Egon Krenz and Gunter Schabowski secretly approached ten or so of their most trusted colleagues. Schabowski spoke with Werner Eberlein, the communist party chief of Magdeburg, and Harry Tisch, head of the workers’ union, as well as several district secretaries. Krenz contacted Willi Stoph, the Politburo’s elder statesman and head of the Council of Ministers, among others. They were surprised how little re
sistance they encountered. It was clear to all that Honecker had to go.

  Ignorant of the net closing around him, Honecker welcomed his guests. But he wasn’t always first to do so. Milos Jakes later told BBC–Spiegel Television how Egon Krenz had met him at the airport and driven with him to his hotel. “He told me that changes could be expected within the next few days,” Jakes said. “The general secretary would no longer be Erich Honecker but Comrade Krenz himself.” That evening’s festivities brought a more visible sign of Honecker’s troubles, in the shape of East Germany’s communist youth marching in the torchlight parade. It was a stirring sight, all those young people with their uniforms in the firelight. But what did they cry out, according to Schabowski? “ ‘Gorbi! Gorbi! Gorbi!’ They did not shout, ‘Erich! Erich!’ It was a clear repudiation.”

  Certainly Gorbachev saw it that way. The next afternoon, on October 7, he met with the East German Politburo. He had carefully thought about what he wanted to say. “I polished the text to the last letter,” he told an aide over the phone. “You know they will scrutinize it under a microscope.” He began by talking about glasnost and perestroika, how difficult it was to change. He mentioned the “mess” Poland had made of its economy, and how wise it would be to avoid such problems by acting sooner than later. “That’s when he dropped that famous line, ‘He who arrives late is punished by life,’ ” Schabowski told me, reconstructing the scene. “He was very tactful, very polite. Though he spoke about his own problems in the Soviet Union, it was clearly an invitation to speak frankly about ours.”

  But Honecker did not. Instead, he painted a bright picture of the country’s future, congratulating himself that East Germany did not share in Russia’s troubles, let alone Poland’s. He boasted that East Germany had recently produced a four-megabyte computer chip. “It was surreal,” Schabowski said. “There are demonstrations in the streets, and everything is beautiful?”

  A long silence followed. “No one said anything,” according to Schabowski. The conspirators, half a dozen of whom were in the room, knew they should agree with Gorbachev. “We should have gotten up, banged the table and said, ‘Erich, enough of this foolishness.’ ” But knowing they would soon move against him, they stayed mum. Speaking out would only show their disloyalty and possibly jeopardize their plans. Gorbachev himself sat quietly for a moment, looking around the room as if astonished. No one met his eyes. “Then he snorted, a dismissive ‘Tsk-tsk’ of disbelief. He could not believe it. He shook his head, stood up and without any remark left the room. My impression was that this was the last straw. Gorbachev had concluded that nothing could be done with Erich Honecker.”

  At the state dinner that night, Honecker assigned the seat of honor on his right to Gorbachev. To his left sat old friend Jakes. Honecker rose to speak, flushed with high spirits and good feeling. As at the Politburo meeting that afternoon, he was unstinting in his praise of himself and his country and raised a toast to the GDR’s fiftieth anniversary a decade hence. The political allies gathered in his honor were less sanguine. Gorbachev was positively rude. “During Erich’s speech, he kept making sarcastic remarks,” Jakes said in a subsequent television interview. “He made it plain that he stood apart from the East German leadership. It was quite out of keeping with the occasion.”

  As the celebrants dined in the splendor of the Palace of the Republic, protesters gathered in the square outside. Even within the salon where Gorbachev and Honecker sat, their voices could be heard: “Gorbi, hilf uns! Gorbi, help us!” Police barricaded the street, so the demonstrators marched along the river Spree behind the palace. Krenz and Schabowski left the hall to see. They also compared notes. Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was at Schabowski’s table. “I told him things would change soon.” Krenz spoke with one of Gorbachev’s aides and made a similar allusion. Neither knew for sure whether the Soviet leader would know what they meant. Meanwhile, Schabowski noticed secret police chief Erich Mielke leaving the reception. The few hundred marchers outside the Palace of the Republic at the beginning of dinner had now been joined by thousands of others. Mielke had gone to tend to the messiness. How dare they, on this of all days? “He gave orders to beat them,” Schabowski said.

  I had arrived from Budapest that afternoon, too late for the official celebrations. The center of Berlin, near Honecker’s ministries, was empty of life. But some blocks to the north, in the gritty working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, young people were gathering in the thousands. At Gethsemane Church in Schonhauser Allee, known as the “rebel church” because of its support for the suddenly growing East German protest movement, so many people had come to debate the political situation that I could hardly wedge inside. In the surrounding streets, in windows and along tramlines, people held lit candles. “Keine Gewalt,” they called out. “No violence.” They did not want to provoke the riot-clad security forces who in the darkness were erecting metal barriers and deploying around the neighborhood.

  At one intersection, a crowd of several hundred protesters gathered to cheer themselves and jeer the regime. They waved to passing trams; the riders waved back or flashed victory signs. A double row of white-helmeted riot police, armed with clear-plastic shields and truncheons, faced off against them, closing the street. It was a close space and eerily intimate. Kids sat on the cobbled paving stones and sidewalks, candles cupped in their hands, flickering with a gentle yellow glow. A young man started up a conversation with one of the policemen:

  “If you are for law, why are you beating us up?”

  “We don’t have to be having this conversation,” the policeman replied.

  “There’s only one way to avoid violence. That’s to talk.”

  “Why don’t you talk through the newspapers? Or wait to see what happens in 1990,” at the upcoming party congress.

  The youth lit a cigarette for the cop, who lifted the Plexiglas visor shielding his face, saying, “We have to start now. That’s why we are on the streets tonight.”

  At precisely that instant, the commander of the guard barked an order through his megaphone. “This is the People’s Police! Disperse!” Abruptly, the visors went down and the police charged into the line of protesters. With surprised shouts, the crowd turned and fled. Some went down and were manhandled into police vans. Police dogs strained at their leashes. I’d taken off, too, an Olympic sprinter going for the gold. In all my travels through Eastern Europe’s turmoil, this was my first brush with violence. I did not shine.

  The demonstrations that erupted that night and the next were the first in Berlin and, so far, the largest in the country. Similar protests broke out in Dresden, Leipzig, Plauen, Chemnitz, Jena and Potsdam. Mielke dispatched sixteen thousand police into the streets of Berlin alone that night, wielding truncheons and spraying demonstrators with tear gas and water cannon. Many came from special antiterrorist units; others were thugs from the so-called People’s Militia, uniformed in jeans, white sneakers and leather bomber jackets. They were particularly vicious, swaggering and cocksure, picking fights and randomly grabbing people and kicking them to the ground. More than a thousand people were arrested, many spending more than a week in jail, where they were beaten and packed into densely crowded cells. Hundreds were injured. Foreign journalists were expelled from East Berlin. Phone lines to the West were cut. “Happy birthday, police state!” one protester shouted as he fled. Another described the scene as a “Stasi Oktoberfest.” Gorbachev was not impressed.

  For years there was no opposition to speak of in East Germany. The ubiquitous Stasi, the largest and best-trained secret police in Eastern Europe, ruthlessly rooted out dissent in virtually every sphere of life. But the landscape had recently begun to change. A nascent opposition emerged and quickly gathered strength. As Havel put it of the Czechs, East Germans were finally “finding their courage.” The question was how far Erich Honecker would go in putting them down. The fear in all quarters was a German Tiananmen.

  At first, these groups were not overtly polit
ical. That spring, a tiny group of eco-activists, Umwelt Bibliothek, called on the government to take sterner measures to combat pollution. A group of several dozen rock musicians wrote an open letter to a West Berlin newspaper complaining that they were “sick of being criminalized” by the regime. An association of several hundred union and party officials calling themselves the United Left emerged over the summer promoting “free democratic socialism.” Then, in mid-September, as East Germans began their sprint through the hole in the Iron Curtain cut by Hungary, four thousand people in Leipzig signed a petition supporting a new independent party known as Neues Forum, or New Forum. In a country where initialing a political manifesto could mean interrogation, loss of work and possibly jail, this was a dramatic development. Significantly, the signatories included a large number of young, reform-minded party officials, including a deputy chairman of Honecker’s ruling State Council. Clearly, people were beginning to feel safety in numbers. The implications were not lost on East German authorities. When leaders of the New Forum applied to register their organization in twelve of the country’s fifteen election districts, they were summarily rejected as “hostile to the state,” an accusation nearly tantamount to treason.

  Honecker himself gave this fledgling opposition both a louder voice and a broadly populist cause. The deal he conceived with the Czech government, allowing East German refugees free transit to the West by rail through the GDR, was the proverbial spark that ignited a firestorm. If so many other East Germans were winning their freedom, via Hungary or Prague, why couldn’t others be free to travel, as well? On October 4 in Dresden, where the trains were still passing through to the Federal Republic, a mob of demonstrators gathered near the station, hurling paving stones and shouting epithets at police, who forcibly repelled them, beating many severely. The clashes became daily confrontations, featuring as many as thirty thousand citizens on October 7. The following day, with the security forces preparing more draconian measures, Dresden’s mayor met with local churchmen and a citizens’ committee to negotiate a “dialogue”—a sign of flexibility by the East German authorities that turned what otherwise promised to be a bloody riot into a delirious street party.