The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  As a final note, I should clarify my use of socialism and communism. The rulers of Eastern Europe employed the terms interchangeably. Needless to say, their “socialist” workers’ states, ruled autocratically by themselves, bore little resemblance to modern Europe’s socialist or social-welfare parties.

  CHAPTER 3

  Interviews with Nemeth, Kulcsar, Pozsgay and others, including many of the leaders of Hungary’s future political parties, were conducted in Budapest in November and December as part of a Newsweek International cover story dated December 12, 1988. The interview with Karoly Grosz was in Budapest in July 1988.

  The best book I’ve found on Hungary’s break with communism is Rudolf L. Tokes’s Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change and Political Succesion, 1996. For additional background: Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet–East European Relations in Transition, 1990; “Reforming Communist Systems: Lessons from the Communist Experience,” paper by Charles Gati, June 1988; Tabor Hajdu, “Setting the Points,” Hungarian Quarterly, Winter 1999.

  See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 1998. Gorbachev’s remarkable comments to President-elect George H. W. Bush can be found in The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era by Don Oberdorfer, 1991, as well as Richard Rhodes’s admirable case study in the perils of geopolitical blindness, Arsenals of Folly, 2007. See also CNN interview with George Bush and James Baker, October 1997.

  CHAPTER 4

  Reporting and interviews—with government officials, Solidarity activists and ordinary people—conducted during frequent trips to Poland for Newsweek beginning in September 1988 through June 1989. I am particularly indebted to Bronislaw Geremek and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the Solidarity activists I visited most in Warsaw, as well as Andrzej Wiecko, Newsweek’s office manager and translator extraordinaire.

  For further background, I recommend: speech by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, 105th Landon Lecture, Kent State University, March 11, 1996, in which the Polish leader likens himself to a geopolitical “Hamlet” caught between the rocks of Polish patriotism and what he considered the reality of Russian occupation. See transcript, Brezhnev-Jaruzelski telephone conversation, October 19, 1981, National Security Archive; text of oral message from Brezhnev to Jaruzelski dated November 21, 1981, the Cold War International History Project. For a vivid sketch of life in communist Poland, I refer to Janine Wedel, The Private Poland, 1986, as well as The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism, Tina Rosenberg, 1996. Perhaps the best reportage on the breakup of the East bloc, including Poland, is Timothy Garton Ash’s The Revolutions of ’89, 1990.

  General Jaruzelski’s critics often accused him of misrepresenting the Soviet threat in 1981. Though not “quivering with desire for military intervention,” as he put it in his speech at Kent State, the Russians nonetheless sent unmistakable signals. Under the pretext of holding maneuvers, they mobilized the Red Army on Poland’s eastern border. Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian leader, telephoned Jaruzelski on October 19, urging him to “take the decisive measures you intend to use against the counterrevolution,” according to the official transcript of the telephone call. On November 21, the Soviet ambassador demanded a private meeting and read out an oral message from Brezhnev, suggesting that Poland was “losing control of the situation” to the point that the very existence of socialism in Poland (and elsewhere) might be threatened. “Doesn’t this suggest to you that a failure to take harsh measures will cost you?” Brezhnev asked, urging the Poles to increase their “combat readiness.”

  That letter, for all its threatening rhetoric, was a masterpiece of ambiguity. Never did it specifically direct Jaruzelski to use force; neither did it indicate whether the Soviets were prepared to intervene. Yet he had no doubt. “Brezhnev’s message was very similar in tone to the notorious letters addressed to Alexander Dubcek in 1968,” he later said. No less threatening, he added, was an ultimatum announcing a drastic cut in gas and energy deliveries, to take effect on January 1, 1982—a use of Russia’s energy weapon that, in Poland’s economic straits, would have proved devastating.

  By early December, the pressures had apparently grown too great. At a meeting with the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces, according to CIA documents, Jaruzelski ordered his generals meeting with their USSR counterparts to endorse a plan to admit into Poland, under the pretext of maneuvers, the Soviet Army, the National People’s Army of the GDR and the Czechoslovak People’s Army. Documents presented at the meeting showed that the Soviets were readying three armies consisting of eighteen divisions across Poland’s borders. The invasion date was set for December 8. According to the Soviet plan, the Polish Army was to remain in its bases. Source: Wilson Center, Cold War History Project, document dated December 1, 1980. As Jaruzelski told it in his Kent State address, his only choice was the “lesser evil”—cracking down on Solidarity.

  CHAPTER 5

  The story of Nemeth’s mission to Moscow in March 1989 is drawn from interviews with Nemeth in March 1995 and April 2008. Nemeth was absolutely right in fearing that Grosz would seek to undercut him. See “Memorandum of Conversation between M. S. Gorbachev and Karoly Grosz, General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Moscow, 23–24 March 1989,” National Security Archive. According to the secret minutes, Hungary’s communist leader briefed Gorbachev on events in Hungary and, while praising their general direction, suggested that “their pace is somewhat disconcerting.” Ideally, Grosz said, the communist party would “retain power by political means, avoiding armed conflict.” Gorbachev’s response was revealing. “Democracy is needed,” he agreed, yet he added that it was important to “clearly draw boundaries.” The “limit,” he suggested, should be “the safekeeping of socialism and the assurance of stability.” He apparently did not recognize the degree to which those twin goals had grown incompatible.

  It is interesting to note that (1) Nemeth first met Gorbachev in 1985, when the future Soviet leader visited Hungary for three weeks to study Hungarian agriculture. Excerpt from an unaired CNN interview dated October 1997: “That was the first time I [Nemeth] saw him in action, not like that sort of stupid old-guard representative from the Politburo, but someone who really asked real questions.” Hence Nemeth’s surprise at Gorbachev’s subsequent hard-line defense of socialism. (2) In the run-up to this phase (late 1987 and early 1988) Gorbachev asked working groups headed by Alexander Yakovlev and others to delve into the relationship of Leninism to perestroika and to investigate how and why classic socialism had gone wrong. He seemed to think that if communism could be put back on the right track, it could be saved and even become a model for egalitarian prosperity.

  Sources for the material on the Bush transition include A World Transformed, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, 1998; Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, 1995; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, 1993; James Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 1995; American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, Robert L. Hutchings, 1997; Adam Michnik, Sleepwalking through History, 1999; Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall, 1993; Harvey Sicherman, “The Rest of Reagan,” Orbis 44, 2000. For an analysis of the CIA National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in the original, few compilations are better than At Cold War’s End, edited by Benjamin B. Fischer, available on the Internet at www.cia.gov/csi.

  The quote from Cheney concerning Gorbachev’s possible ouster comes from an interview with CNN on April 29, 1989, as cited by Hutchings. The astonishing admission by Rice that she “missed” the revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine—one of the decisive moments of the century—comes from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July/August 2004. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock describes his fruitless efforts to persuade the Bush transition team, and later the White house, of Gorbachev’s bona fides in his memoir Autopsy on an Empire, 1995.

  George H. W. Bush’s inaugural address was rather like the man, decent but a bit wooden. H
e spoke about the passing of the totalitarian era, “its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree,” and about a new American engagement in the world, refreshed by its freedoms but circumspect in the use of power. “Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that,” he said in one memorable passage of the speech, as personally revealing as it was wise. “But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds.”

  A former colleague of Condoleezza Rice recalled a discussion of Gorbachev and Soviet military capabilities from the time when she sat on the board of the Institute of East-West Strategic Studies in New York. Rice insisted that the Soviet leader’s talk of peace and a “common house of Europe” was merely a facade for a dangerous Warsaw Pact military buildup. To her mind, it was a ruse to lull the West into complacency. She spoke forcefully of the money Moscow was spending on new weapons, and the prospect of Soviet tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap on the intra-German border and on toward Frankfurt and the heart of Western Europe.

  “Condi,” said the colleague, a former British diplomat and intelligence officer named Ian Cuthbertson, director of studies at the think tank, “this simply is not a true picture.” He walked her through his particular specialty, the Soviet order of battle. His picture of the real Red Army was very different from the impressive force on paper. He essentially counted out which tank battalions had been cannibalized for spare parts, how badly trained Warsaw Pact forces had become, how low on supplies they were, from ammunition to petrol. (Of a typical eight-hundred-tank division, usually no more than a hundred tanks would be operational; a small fraction of that number could be considered combat-ready; and an even smaller number had crews well enough trained to do more than drive the tanks around a parade ground.) His bottom line, as he told Rice: “The Soviet army can barely roll out of its barracks, let alone through the Fulda Gap.” Subsequent scholarship has borne him out. At the time that Rice was urging uncompromised vigilance against the Soviet threat, the enemy was essentially decomposing.

  CHAPTER 6

  Material for the May Day celebrations is based on a reporting trip to Budapest for Newsweek. The reconstruction of the critical events of May 1–3 and their aftermath is told by Miklos Nemeth and Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo and party chief of Berlin who had formerly been editor in chief of East Germany’s official newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Both Nemeth and Schabowski have been interviewed elsewhere concerning the exchange between Kessler and Karpati, including an exceptional BBC–Spiegel TV documentary The Fall of the Wall, by Brian Lapping Associates (under the direction of David Ash and Stephen Clark) in 1994, and CNN’s 1998 series called The Cold War Project. All quotes either appear here for the first time or were confirmed with the original source.

  A further word on Schabowski. Among the most powerful men in the country, he was at one point considered a possible successor to Erich Honecker. I met him in early 1999, just after his seventieth birthday. A genial and engaging man, he was remarkably straightforward (and startlingly critical) in discussing his central role in the events of 1989. It was long ago, but they remained vivid. No one who was immersed in them forgets. Unlike Schabowski, some never move on.

  The material on Horst Teltschik’s secret visits to Budapest and his relationship with Hungary’s reformers, and Nemeth in particular, is drawn from a conversation in the spring of 1999 in Munich at the headquarters of BMW, where Teltschik was a member of the board of directors. Nemeth confirmed details of these meetings, saying that Kohl offered to ship “trains full of coal” to Hungary to counter a cutoff of Soviet energy supplies, should it occur. Kohl also promised to intervene with the International Monetary Fund in lightening the burden of Hungary’s debt. “The Hungarian government had lied to the IMF, cheated them for years,” Nemeth told me in April 2008. “I wanted to set the record straight—but also to protect ourselves in doing so.” He stressed his desire to move toward what was then the European Community and away from the Soviet counterpart, COMECON. In all this, said Nemeth, “I got Kohl’s very, very strong support.”

  Genscher’s visit to Washington is described in his memoir, Rebuilding a House Divided, 1998. See also Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 1995, for the insider reaction to Genscher’s visit and to the subsequent flap over the Lance missiles. What made this diplomatic interlude so surreal was its almost complete geopolitical irrelevance. By April, nearly all aspects of military power had become open to negotiation, from intercontinental missiles to chemical weapons and conventional armaments. Following his agreement with Ronald Reagan to reduce ballistic warheads, initialed the previous year, Gorbachev had in December announced massive unilateral cuts in Russian forces in Eastern Europe—a move that the New York Times editorial board likened in global effect to the 1918 declaration of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, or Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter of 1941. Adding insult to injury, many of the United States’ other European allies had begun lining up with Germany. With the exception of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whom Kohl irritably referred to as “that woman,” few saw the logic of pushing new weapons on Europe at the very moment that the threat was receding.

  How vast was the gulf between the doyens of the Bush administration and someone such as Teltschik. In contrast to the American national security team, he saw events in the East as a “historic opportunity,” as he put it to me at the time. His individual role was critical to events in Hungary, and therefore to the revolutions elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Yet it is almost entirely unknown, even in Germany. “No one has told this history,” Teltschik told me in our meeting in Munich. “Not even me in my book, nor Kohl in his.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I took a series of reporting trips to Poland during the election campaign and its aftermath, traveling and interviewing extensively around the country. I was repeatedly struck by the comparative innocence of both sides. Solidarity had no inkling of how well it would do. Lech Walesa, in particular, railed at being drawn into early elections, convinced they would favor the communists—who he assumed, mistakenly, would use their superior organizational power to stage an effective, all-out campaign.

  Solidarity’s spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz laughed when I asked him how he thought the vote would go. “We have no organization. We have no money. Poland is a complete political wilderness. No one has any idea what will happen.” The communist party’s chief political pollster and campaign strategist, Colonel Stanislaw Kwiatkowski, advised official candidates that their “personality,” rather than their political affiliation would be what counts with voters. “We are confident,” he told me, sharing his projections that the communist party would win anywhere from a quarter to half of the Senate, as well as a majority of the contested seats in the lower house. Other party leaders, however, did not share his optimism. Jerzy Urban, the information minister, who was running as an independent in Warsaw, grumbled that Solidarity looked unstoppable. What would he do if he lost? He joked about opening a porno magazine. At least, I took him to be joking. In fact, that’s just what he did—and wound up making millions.

  While Solidarity won the election decisively, it can be argued that both sides lost, as the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash notes with trademark irony in his account of 1989, We the People. Often forgotten in the hoopla accompanying Solidarity’s victory was an important fact: only 62 percent of Poles voted in this most important election in the nation’s history—far less than the 79 percent in the 1975 parliamentary elections, when only communists ran. Most Poles were too tired, too dispirited, too fed up with politics and politicians to bother. Those who did vote crossed out communists with the flair and vigor—pfft, pfft, pfft—bred of decades of anger, frustration and disappointment. But few thought Poland would much change with Solidarity in the government, or that their own lives would improve. Yes, June 4 marke
d the death of communism in Poland. But it died as much with a whimper as a bang.

  I moved on to Budapest shortly after the Polish elections, meeting Erich Honecker in Berlin as a sort of geopolitical detour. The behind-the-scenes dimension comes from interviews with the principals, Pozsgay and Nemeth in particular, as well as members of the Committee for Historical Justice. Grosz’s calumny against Nagy at that decisive meeting of the Central Committee in the days leading up the funeral come from an interview with Nemeth by the National Security Archive in Washington, backstopped by Tokes, who also chronicled the downfall of Karoly Grosz and the mass defections from the party that would seal his fate. I also relied on the NSA interview for the material on the death threats Nemeth received during this period, as well as a CNN interview undertaken as part of the network’s 1997 Cold War History Project.

  The interview with Honecker took place on June 7, 1989, with the Washington Post and Newsweek. For Honecker’s visit to Cuba, see Charles S. Maier’s brilliant Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, 1998. The segment on the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest and the genesis of the plot against Honecker is based on interviews with Schabowski and Nemeth as well as transcripts of Honecker’s and Ceausescu’s speeches of July 7, 1989. Honecker’s mirror-image letters to Moscow, in 1980 and 1989, can be found online in the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War Archive. And, of course, Oskar Fischer should not be confused with Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005.