by Tony Judt
Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet Union since 1985 had progressively removed itself from direct oversight of its client states. But the implications of this growing detachment remained unclear. The peoples’ democracies were still run by authoritarian party cliques whose power rested upon a massive repressive apparatus. Their police and intelligence services remained closely bound and beholden to the Soviet Union’s own security apparatus and continued to operate semi-independently of local authorities. And while the rulers in Prague or Warsaw or East Berlin were starting to appreciate that they could no longer count on Moscow’s unconditional support, neither they nor their subjects had a clear sense of what this meant.
The situation in Poland encapsulated these uncertainties. On the one hand, the declaration of martial law had re-asserted the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party. On the other hand, the suppression of Solidarity and the silencing of its leaders did nothing to ease the country’s underlying problems. Quite the contrary: Poland was still in debt, but now—thanks to international condemnation of the repression—its rulers could no longer extricate themselves from difficulty by further borrowing abroad. In effect, Poland’s rulers were facing the same dilemma they had tried to address in the 1970s, but with even fewer options.
Meanwhile, the opposition might have been criminalized but it had not evaporated. Clandestine publishing continued, as did lectures, discussions, theatrical performances and much else. Solidarity itself, though banned, maintained a virtual existence, especially after its best-known spokesman, Lech Wałesa, was released from internment in November 1982 (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, the following year). The regime could not take the risk of forbidding a return visit from the Pope, in June 1983, after which the Church became ever more engaged in underground and semi-official activities
The political police favored repression: in one notorious instance in 1984 they orchestrated the kidnap and murder of a popular radical priest, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko—pour décourager les autres. But Jaruzelski and most of his colleagues already understood that such provocations and confrontations would no longer work. Popiełuszko’s funeral drew a crowd of 350,000; and far from frightening off opposition the incident merely publicized the scale of popular support for the Church and for Solidarity, legal or no. By the mid-‘80s Poland was fast approaching a stand-off between a recalcitrant society and an increasingly desperate state.
The natural instinct of the Party leadership (in Warsaw as in Moscow) was to propose ‘reforms’. In 1986 Jaruzelski, now state President, released Adam Michnik and other Solidarity leaders from prison and through a newly installed ‘Ministry of Economic Reform’ offered a modest raft of economic changes designed, among other objectives, to attract renewed foreign funding of Poland’s national debt, now fast approaching $40 billion.285 In a bizarre nod to democracy, the government actually began asking Poles in 1987 what sort of economic ‘reform’ they would like: ‘Would you prefer’, they were asked, ‘a fifty percent rise in the price of bread and one hundred percent on petrol, or sixty percent for petrol and a hundred percent for bread?’ Unsurprisingly, the public’s response was, in essence, ‘none of the above’.
The question—and the decision to pose it—nicely illustrated the political as well as the economic bankruptcy of Poland’s Communist rulers. Indeed, it says something about the authorities’ crumbling credibility that Poland’s membership of the IMF was made possible in part by the consent of Solidarity itself. Despite being banned, the union had managed to maintain its organization abroad and it was Solidarity’s Brussels office that advised the IMF Managing Director in September 1985 to admit Poland—while insisting that Jaruzelski’s partial improvements were foredoomed and that only a package of thoroughgoing reforms could address the country’s troubles.286
By 1987 the most arresting aspect of the Polish situation was the sheer helplessness of the Party and its organs. Without actually facing any visible threat to its monopoly of power, the Polish United Workers Party was slipping into irrelevance. The ‘counter-society’ theorized by Michnik and others a decade earlier was emerging as a de facto source of authority and initiative. After 1986, debate within the Polish opposition turned not so much on teaching society to be free as on how much the opposition should agree to engage with the regime, and to what end.
A group of young economists at Warsaw’s School of Planning and Statistics, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, was already drawing up plans for an autonomous private business sector freed from central planning—i.e. a market; these and other proposals were intensely debated among ‘unofficial’ Poles and widely discussed abroad. But the guiding tenets of political ‘realism’ and the ‘self-limiting’ objectives of 1980-81 remained in force—confrontation and violence, which could only play into the hands of Party hardliners, were studiously and successfully avoided. Conversations were one thing, ‘adventures’ something else.
The trigger for the Party’s final eclipse, predictably enough, was yet another attempt to ‘reform’ the economy—or, more modestly, to reduce the country’s un-sustainable debt. In 1987 consumer prices were raised by some 25 percent; in 1988 by a further 60 percent. As in 1970, 1976 and again in 1980, so now: the sharp price rises sparked a round of strikes, culminating in a massive movement of stoppages and occupations in the spring and summer of 1988. In the past, lacking any leverage over the workforce, the Communist authorities had either abandoned efforts to raise prices or else resorted to force—or both. On this occasion they had a third option—appealing to the workers’ own leaders for help. In August 1988 General Czesław Kiszczak, the Interior Minister, urged Lech Wałesa—nominally a private citizen, the unacknowledged leader of an unrecognized organization—to meet him and negotiate an end to the country’s labor protests. Initially reluctant, Wałesa at last agreed.
Wałesa had little difficulty appealing to the strikers—the moral authority of Solidarity had only grown in the years since 1981—but the underlying issues remained: the country’s inflation rate was now approaching 1000 percent p.a. There ensued four months of sporadic unofficial contacts between Solidarity and the government, stimulating more public calls for ‘reform’. Drifting helplessly, the authorities oscillated between gestures and threats: replacing ministers, denying any plans for negotiations, promising economic change, threatening to close the Gdansk shipyard. The public’s confidence in the state, such as it was, collapsed.
On December 18th 1988—symptomatically if coincidentally just one week after Gorbachev’s seminal UN speech—a Solidarity ‘Citizens Committee’ was formed in Warsaw to plan for full-scale negotiations with the government. Jaruzelski, his options seemingly exhausted, at last conceded the obvious and forced a somewhat reluctant Central Committee to agree to talks. On February 6th 1989 the Communists officially recognized Solidarity as a negotiating partner and opened ‘round table’ negotiations with its representatives. The talks lasted until April 5th. On that day (once again a week after major Soviet developments, this time the open elections to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies), all sides agreed to the legalization of independent trade unions, far-reaching economic legislation and, above all, a new elected Assembly.
In hindsight the outcome of the round-table talks was a negotiated termination of Communism in Poland, and at least to some of the participants this much was already clear. But no-one anticipated the speed of the dénouement. The elections to be held on June 4th, while allowing an unprecedented element of real choice, were rigged to ensure a Communist majority: voting for the national Senate was to be genuinely open, but in the elections to the Sejm (Parliamentary Assembly) half the seats were reserved for official (i.e. Communist) candidates. And by scheduling the elections so soon, the government hoped to capitalize on the disorganization and inexperience of its opponents.
The results came as a shock to everyone. Backed by Adam Michnik’s impromptu new daily ‘Election Gazette’ (Gazeta Wyborcza), Solidarity won 99/100 seats for the Senate and
all the seats it was allowed to contest for the Sejm. Meanwhile only two of the Communist candidates standing for ‘reserved’ seats secured the 50 percent of the vote required to take up their places. Faced with a complete rout and unprecedented public humiliation, the Communist rulers of Poland had the option of ignoring the vote; declaring martial law once again; or else accepting defeat and relinquishing power.
Put thus, the choice was clear—as Gorbachev made quite explicit to Jaruzelski in a private phone conversation, the election must stand. Jaruzelski’s first thought was to secure a face-saving compromise by inviting Solidarity to join him in a coalition government, but this was rebuffed. Instead, after some weeks of further negotiation and unsuccessful Communist efforts to nominate their own prime minister, the Party leadership bowed to the inevitable and on September 12th 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki was approved as post-war Poland’s first non-Communist Prime Minister (although the Communists retained control of certain key ministries).
Meanwhile, in a shrewd political move, the Solidarity parliamentary group simultaneously voted to make Jaruzelski Head of State, effectively co-opting the Communist ‘moderates’ into the ensuing transition and easing their embarrassment. The following month Mazowiecki’s government announced plans to institute a ‘market economy’, presented in a stabilization program—the so-called ‘Balcerowicz Plan’—that was approved by the Sejm on December 28th. One day later, the ‘leading role’ of Poland’s Communist Party was formally excised from the country’s constitution. Within four weeks, on January 27th 1990, the Party itself had been dissolved.
The helter-skelter quality of the last months of Communist Poland should not blind us to the long and quite slow build up that went before. Most of the actors in the drama of 1989—Jaruzelski, Kiszczak, Wałesa, Michnik, Mazowiecki—had already been on the stage for many years. The country had passed from a brief flourish of relative liberty in 1981 into martial law, followed by a lengthy, uncertain purgatory of repressive semi-tolerance that finally unraveled in a re-run of the previous decade’s economic crises. For all the strength of the Catholic Church, the countrywide popularity of Solidarity, and the Polish nation’s abiding loathing of its Communist rulers, the latter clung to power for so long that their final fall came as something of a surprise. It had been a long goodbye.
In Poland, martial law and its aftermath revealed the limits and inadequacies of the Party; but while repression solidified the opposition it also made it cautious. In Hungary, a comparable caution was born of very different experience. Two decades of ambiguous tolerance had obscured the precise limits of officially condoned dissent. Hungary, after all, was the Communist state where Hilton opened its first hotel behind the Iron Curtain, in December 1976; where Billy Graham undertook not one but three public tours in the course of the Eighties; and which was visited (and implicitly favored) by two US secretaries of State and Vice-President George Bush in that same decade. By 1988 Communist Hungary had a decidedly ‘good’ image.
Partly for this reason, opposition to Party rule took a long time to emerge into the open. Dissimulation and maneuver seemed the better part of valor, especially to anyone who remembered 1956; and life in János Kádár’s Hungary was tolerable, if drab. In reality, the official economy, as we saw in the previous chapter, was in no better condition than that of Poland, despite various reforms and ‘New Economic Mechanisms.’ To be sure, the ‘black’ or parallel economy enabled many people to get by on a standard of living somewhat higher than that of Hungary’s neighbors. But as research by Hungarian social statisticians was already revealing, the country was suffering significant inequalities of income, health and housing; social mobility and welfare were actually behind the West; and the long work hours (many people worked two or even three jobs), high levels of alcoholism and mental disorder, together with the highest suicide rate in eastern Europe, were taking their toll on the population.
There was, then, ample ground for discontent. But there was no organized political opposition. Although some independent organizations surfaced in the course of the 1980s, they were mostly confined to environmental issues or to protests against Romania’s mistreatment of its Hungarian minority—an issue on which they could count on the Communists’ tacit sympathy (which explains official tolerance of the decidedly nationalist Hungarian Democratic Forum, formed in September 1987). Hungary remained a ‘socialist republic’ (as it was officially described in the Constitutional revision of 1972). Dissent and criticism were largely confined within the ruling Party, although in the elections of June 1985 multiple candidacies were permitted for the first time and a handful of officially-approved independents got elected. But it was not until 1988 that serious changes began.
The catalyst for change in Hungary was the frustration of younger, ‘reform’ Communists—openly enthusiastic about the transformations Gorbachev was working in the CPSU—at the inflexibility of their own ageing Party leadership. In May 1988, at a special Communist Conference called for the purpose, they at last succeeded in removing the 76-year-old Kádár from the leadership and replacing him with Károly Grósz, the Prime Minister. The strictly practical consequences of this internal Party coup were limited to an economic austerity program aimed at strengthening ‘market forces’; but it had great symbolic force.
János Kádár had ruled Hungary ever since the revolution of 1956, in whose suppression he played the major part. Despite his rather favorable image abroad, he incarnated for Hungarians the official lie at the heart of ‘goulash Communism’: that the Hungarian reform movement had been nothing but a ‘counter-revolution’. Kádár was also the living embodiment of the conspiracy of silence surrounding Imre Nagy ever since his kidnapping, secret trial and even more secret execution and burial three decades before.287 The removal of Kádár thus seemed to suggest that something fundamental had shifted in Hungarian public life—an impression confirmed when his successors not only allowed a group of dissident young Communists and others to form Fidesz (Young Democrats), but in November 1988 officially condoned the appearance of independent political parties.
In the early months of 1989 the Communist legislature passed a series of measures recognizing the right of free assembly; officially sanctioning ‘transition’ to a multi-party system; and, in April, formally jettisoning ‘democratic centralism’ in the Party itself. Of even greater moment, Hungary’s Communist rulers—tacitly acknowledging that their Party could not hope to maintain its control of the countryunless it came clean about its past—announced their intention to exhume and rebury the troublesome remains of Imre Nagy. At the same time Imre Pozsgay and other reformers in the Hungarian Politburo convinced their colleagues to open a commission of inquiry into the events of 1956 and officially redefine them: no longer a ‘counter-revolution’, they were now officially a ‘popular uprising against an oligarchic rule that had debased the nation.’
On June 16th 1989—the thirty-first anniversary of his death—the remains of Imre Nagy and four of his colleagues were ceremoniously reburied as national heroes. An estimated 300,000 Hungarians lined the streets, with millions more watching the proceedings live on television. Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy’s reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.
This was true. It was a curiosity of the Hungarian exit from Communism that it was conducted by Communists themselves—only in June were round-table talks convened with opposition parties, in conscious imitation of the Polish precedent. This induced a certain skepticism among anti-Communist Hungarians, for whom Nagy’s resurrection, like his earlier execution, was an intra-Party affair of little concern to Communism’s many victims. But it would be wrong to underestimate the symbolic force of the reburial of Nagy. It was an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that the Party and its leadership had lived and taught and imposed a lie.
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When János Kádár died just three weeks later—on the very day that the Hungarian Supreme Court pronounced Nagy’s full rehabilitation—Hungarian Communism died with him. All that remained was to agree on the formalities of its passing. The ‘leading role’ of the Party was abolished; multi-party elections were scheduled for the following March; and on October 7th the Communists—the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party—re-baptized themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party. On October 23rd Parliament, still overwhelmingly composed of Communist deputies elected under the old Party regime, in turn voted to rename the country itself as, simply, the Hungarian Republic.
The Hungarian ‘revolution’ of 1989 had two distinguishing features. The first, as we have seen, is that it was the only passage from a Communist regime to a genuine multi-party system effected entirely from within. The second point of note is that whereas in Poland, as later in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the events of 1989 were largely self-referential, the Hungarian transition played a vital role in the unraveling of another Communist regime, that of East Germany.
To outside observers, the German Democratic Republic appeared among the least vulnerable of Communist regimes, and not only because it was universally assumed that no Soviet leader would ever allow it to fall. The physical environment of the GDR, notably its cities, might appear tawdry and dilapidated; its security police, the Stasi, were notoriously omnipresent; and the Wall in Berlin remained a moral and aesthetic outrage. But the East German economy was widely believed to be in better shape than that of its socialist neighbors. When First Secretary Erich Honecker boasted at the country’s fortieth anniversary celebrations in October 1989 that the GDR was one of the world’s top ten economic performers, his guest Mikhail Gorbachev was heard to emit an audible snort; but if nothing else, the regime was efficient in the manufacture and export of bogus data: many Western observers took Honecker at his word.