by Tony Judt
With this treaty, which formally recognized the borders of a future Germany as those of the two present German states, the four-power status of Berlin was brought to an end, expiring at midnight on October 2nd 1990. The Soviet Union agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in NATO, and terms were reached for the withdrawal of the Red Army and the departure of all foreign troops from Berlin (to be completed four years hence, after which only a small complement of NATO troops would remain on German soil).
Why did Mikhail Gorbachev so readily allow German unification to go forward? For decades the Soviet Union’s primary strategic objective had been to maintain the territorial status quo in central Europe: Moscow—like London, Paris and Washington—had become comfortable with a divided Germany and had long since abandoned Stalin’s post-war goal of extricating Bonn from the Western alliance. And unlike the French and the British, the Soviet leadership was still in a position to block the process of unification, at least in principle.
Gorbachev, like everyone else in 1990, was flying blind. No-one, in East or West, had a plan telling them what to do if the GDR disintegrated; and there were no blueprints for German unification. But the Soviet leader, unlike his western counterparts, had no good options. He could not realistically hope to prevent German unity except by reversing his benign public announcements of recent years and seriously damaging his own credibility. He did initially oppose the absorption of a united Germany into NATO; and even after conceding the point in principle309 continued to insist that NATO troops not be allowed to move 300 kilometers east to the Polish border—something US Secretary of State James Baker actually promised to his Soviet counterpart in February 1990. But when that promise was later broken Gorbachev was helpless to intervene.
What he was able to do was extract, quite literally, a price for his concessions. As the West German Chancellor had foreseen, the USSR was open to financial persuasion. Gorbachev tried at first to hold the unification negotiations hostage for a ransom of $20 billion, before finally settling for approximately $8 billion, together with some $2 billion more in interest-free credits. Overall, from 1990 through 1994, Bonn transferred to the Soviet Union (and latterly Russia) the equivalent of $71 billion (with a further $36 billion going to the former Communist states of Eastern Europe). Helmut Kohl also agreed to alleviate Soviet (and Polish) fears of German irredentism by pledging, as we have seen, to accept as permanent his country’s eastern boundaries, a commitment enshrined the following year in a Treaty with Poland.
Having secured the best terms it could, Moscow agreed to abandon the GDR. Playing Sidney Greenstreet to Washington’s Bogart, the Soviet Union made the best of a bad hand and relinquished its diminutive, resentful East German sidekick with the requisite protestation but few real regrets. It made more sense to build a strategic relationship with a friendly and appreciative new Germany than to make an enemy of it, and from the Soviet perspective a united Germany, firmly grasped—and contained—in the Western embrace, was not such a bad outcome.
The GDR was not much loved. But it did not pass entirely unlamented. In addition to West German intellectuals like Günter Grass and Jürgen Habermas who feared for the soul of a reunited ‘greater’ Germany310, many East Germans who had known no other homeland had mixed feelings when ‘their’ Germany was swept away from under them. Two generations had grown up in the GDR. They might not have believed its more egregiously absurd self-descriptions, but they could not be entirely deaf to official propaganda. We should not be surprised to learn that long after 1989 children in eastern German secondary schools continued to believe that East German troops had fought alongside the Red Army to liberate their country from Hitler.
This inculcated misperception was part of the GDR’s core identity and did nothing to ease its disoriented former citizens’ transition ‘back’ into Germany, particularly as ‘their’ Germany was systematically excised from the official record. The names of towns, streets, buildings and counties were changed, often reverting to pre-1933 usage. Rituals and memorials were restored. This was not the recovery of history, however, but rather its erasure—it was as though the GDR had never been. When Erich Mielke was prosecuted and sentenced for murder it was not for crimes he authorized as head of the Stasi but rather for a political assassination committed in the 1930s, the evidence provided by Nazi interrogation records.
Rather than engage the GDR’s troubled history, in other words, its former subjects were encouraged to forget it—an ironic replay of West Germany’s own age of forgetting in the Fifties. And as in the early years of the Federal Republic, so after 1989: prosperity was to be the answer. Germany would buy its way out of history. To be sure, the GDR was a decidedly suitable case for treatment. It was not just its institutions that were falling apart—much of its material infrastructure was decrepit. Two dwellings in five were built before 1914 (in West Germany in 1989 the figure was less than one in five); a quarter of all houses lacked a bath, one third had only an outdoor toilet, and more than 60 percent lacked any form of central heating.
As in its dealings with Moscow, Bonn’s response was to throw very large sums of money at the problem. In the three years following unification total transfers from Western into Eastern Germany amounted to the equivalent of 1,200 billion euros; by the end of 2003 the cost of absorbing the former GDR had reached 1.2 trillion euros. East Germans were subsidized into the Federal Republic: their jobs, pensions, transport, education and housing underwritten by huge increases in government expenditure. In the short run this worked—confirming East Germans’ faith not so much in the free market as in the unplumbed resources of the West German exchequer. But after the first flush of reunion, many ‘Ossies’ were actually put off by the patronizing triumphalism of their Western cousins—a sentiment on which the former Communists would trade with some success in future elections.
Meanwhile, to avoid upsetting West German voters—by no means all of whom had greeted unification with unalloyed enthusiasm—Kohl chose not to raise taxes. Instead, in order to meet its vast new commitments the Federal Republic—which had hitherto run substantial current account surpluses—had no choice but to go into deficit. The Bundesbank, aghast at the inflationary impact of such a policy, accordingly began steadily to raise interest rates, starting in 1991—at precisely the moment when the Deutschmark was being locked for ever into a planned European currency. The knock-on effect of these interest rates—increased unemployment and slower economic growth—would be felt not just in Germany but throughout the European Monetary System. In effect, Helmut Kohl exported the cost of his country’s unification and Germany’s European partners were made to share the burden.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s concessions on Germany surely contributed to the decline in his domestic standing—indeed he had warned James Baker that a united Germany inside NATO might ‘be the end of perestroika’. To lose the other east European satellite states could be attributed to misfortune; but to relinquish Germany as well looked like carelessness. The Soviet Defense Minister, Marshall Sergei Akhromeyev, was convinced that Gorbachev could have got better terms from the West had he paid attention to the problem in time; and he was not alone. But that, of course, was Gorbachev’s problem: by the end of the 1980s he was so absorbed in domestic challenges that his response to the rapid onset of problems in the USSR’s ‘near-West’ was, as we have seen, to leave the latter increasingly to its own devices.
But benign neglect was not an option when it came to addressing comparable challenges within the Soviet Union’s own frontiers. The Russian empire had grown by conquest and accretion over the centuries and much of what had once been foreign territory was now intimately associated with the homeland. There appeared to be no question of ‘releasing’ it in the sense that Poland or Hungary had now been ‘released’. But the more recent Soviet conquests remained only half-digested and vulnerable, as we have seen, to foreign influence and example: in central Asia, in the Caucasus, but above all on the far western edge of the empire along the Baltic Sea.
The Baltic republics of the Union—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—were distinctive in three significant respects. In the first place they were more exposed to the West than any other region of the Soviet Union proper. Estonians especially were in touch with the Scandinavian countries, watching Finnish television since the 1970s and ever-conscious of the contrast between their own condition and that of their prosperous neighbours. Lithuanians, whose primary historical and geographical affinity was with neighbouring Poland, could hardly fail to notice that even under Communism Poles were decidedly freer and better off than them.
Secondly, and despite the unflattering comparison with foreign neighbours, the Baltic states were nonetheless prosperous by Soviet standards. They were the major Soviet producers of a large number of industrial products—railroad cars, radio sets, paper goods—as well as a leading source of fish, dairy produce and cotton. Between the commodities that they produced and those that passed through their docks Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had at least a passing acquaintance with a way of life and a standard of living of which most of the rest of the Soviet Union could but dream.
But the third distinguishing feature of the Baltic republics, and by far the most significant, was that they alone had a recent history of genuine independence. After initially winning their freedom in 1919 following the collapse of the Czarist Empire they had been forcibly re-absorbed twenty years later by the Romanovs’ Soviet heirs, in the secret clauses of the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But the invasion of 1940 was still very much part of living memory. In the Baltics, Gorbachev’s glasnost—which elsewhere in the Soviet Union prompted demands for greater civil or economic rights—inevitably re-opened the question of independence. Samizdat in this region was always and necessarily nationalist in tone.
An additional reason for this was the ‘Russian’ question. In 1945 the population of all three Baltic republics was quite homogenous, with most residents belonging to the dominant national group and speaking the local language. But by the early 1980s, thanks to forced expulsions during and after the war and a steady inflow of Russian soldiers, administrators and workers, the population was far more mixed, especially in the northern republics. In Lithuania some 80 percent of the residents of the republic were still Lithuanian; but in Estonia only an estimated 64 percent of the population was ethnically Estonian and Estonian-speaking; while in Latvia the share of native Latvians in the population, at the 1980 census, was 1.35 million out of a total of some 2.5 million: just 54 percent. The countryside was still peopled by Balts, but the cities were increasingly Russian, and Russian-speaking: a much resented transformation.
The first stirrings of protest in the region were thus directed at questions of language and nationality, and the associated memory of Soviet deportations to Siberia of thousands of local ‘subversives’. On August 23rd 1987, there were simultaneous demonstrations in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn to mark the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, followed three months later in Riga alone by a public meeting to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 declaration of Latvian independence. Emboldened by their success—or, more precisely, by the authorities’ unprecedented tolerance of such public expressions of implied dissent—independent groups and gatherings started to emerge across the region.
Thus on March 25th 1988 in Riga hundreds gathered to commemorate the Latvian deportations of 1949, followed by a demonstration in June to mark the expulsions of 1940. There followed an uncharacteristically lively meeting of the hitherto quiescent Latvian Writers’ Union, with talk of a ‘Latvian Popular Front’. A few weeks later, under the auspices of the ostensibly a-political ‘Environmental Protection Club’ (EPC), the Latvian National Independence Movement was born. The course of events in Estonia was virtually identical: following the commemorations of 1987 and a series of environmentalist protests there was born first the ‘Estonian Heritage Society’, dedicated to the preservation and restoration of local cultural monuments; then, in April 1988, a ‘Popular Front of Estonia’; and finally, in August—one month after its Latvian confrère—the Estonian National Independence Movement.
The most dramatic aspect of these nascent political movements in Estonia and Latvia was their mere existence—and their unusually subversive nomenclature. But it was in Lithuania, where the Russian presence was far less obtrusive, that the challenge to Soviet power was made explicit. On July 9th 1988 a demonstration in Vilnius to demand environmental protections, democracy and greater autonomy for Lithuania attracted 100,000 people in support of Sajudis, the newly-formed ‘Lithuanian Reorganization Movement’, openly critical of the Lithuanian Communist Party for its ‘subservience’ to Moscow and with ‘Red Army Go Home’ emblazoned on their banners . By February 1989 Sajudis had been transformed into a nationwide political party. The following month, in the elections to the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, it won 36 of Lithuania’s 42 seats.
The elections in all three republics were a marked victory for independent candidates and triggered a growing awareness of a common Baltic trajectory. This was symbolically re-confirmed on August 23rd 1989 by the forging of a human chain (‘Hands across the Baltic’) 650 kilometers in length, reaching from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. An estimated 1.8 million people—one quarter of the entire population of the region— took part. With the Estonian and Latvian independence movements now echoing their Lithuanian counterpart and openly proclaiming national independence as their goal, confrontation with Moscow seemed inevitable.
And yet it came very slowly. The Baltic independence movements spent 1989 pressing against the frontiers of the permissible. When the newly independence-minded Supreme Soviets of first Lithuania and then Latvia tried to imitate an Estonian law of November 1988 authorizing the privatization of local state enterprises, Moscow voided the decrees, as it had earlier voided the Estonian initiative; but otherwise the government refrained from any involvement. When, on October 8th 1989 (the day after Gorbachev’s public warning in East Berlin that ‘life punishes those who delay’), the Latvian Popular Front proclaimed its intention to move towards full independence, the Soviet authorities were too preoccupied with the escalating crisis in Germany to take any action.
But on December 18th the Lithuanian Communist Party split; an overwhelming majority declaring itself for immediate independence. Now Gorbachev could no longer remain silent. He traveled to Vilnius on January 11th 1990 to advise against the proposed secession, urging ‘moderation’. However—and not for the first time—his own example was working against him. Emboldened by the electoral victory of Sajudis, by the Soviet President’s own success in getting the Soviet Central Committee to abandon the constitutional guarantee of the Party’s ‘leading role’311, and by the ‘4+2’ negotiations then under way, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet on March 11th voted 124-0 to restore Lithuanian independence, symbolically reinstating the 1938 ‘Constitution of the State of Lithuania’ and nullifying the authority in the Republic of Lithuania of the Constitution of the USSR.
It says a lot about the uncertain state of affairs in 1990—when even the government of the Russian Republic itself was now asserting its ‘sovereignty’ and the precedence of Russian laws over ‘all-Union’ decrees—that the Soviet rulers’ response to the Vilnius declaration was to initiate nothing more threatening than an economic boycott: unable to prevent a Lithuanian breakaway, Gorbachev was nonetheless still capable of forestalling the military intervention that many of his hard-line colleagues were now demanding. Even the boycott itself was abandoned in June, in return for a Lithuanian agreement to ‘suspend’ the full implementation of its declaration of independence.
After a hectic six months during which virtually every other major Soviet republic asserted its ‘sovereignty’ if not yet its full independence, Gorbachev’s position was becoming untenable. His efforts to rein in the Baltic initiatives had substantially weakened his image as a ‘reformer’, while his failure to suppres
s talk of autonomy, sovereignty and independence was stirring up resentment among his colleagues and—more ominously—in the army and security forces. On December 20th 1990 his Foreign Minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, resigned and warned publicly of the growing risk of a coup.
On January 10th 1991, with the US and its allies thoroughly distracted by the Gulf War then getting under way in Iraq, Gorbachev issued an ultimatum to the Lithuanians, demanding in his capacity as President of the Union that they adhere forthwith to the Constitution of the USSR. The following day soldiers from the élite forces of the KGB and the Soviet Ministry of the Interior seized public buildings in Vilnius and installed a ‘National Salvation Committee’. Twenty four hours later they attacked the radio and television studios in the city, turning their guns on a large crowd of demonstrators who had gathered there: fourteen civilians were killed, 700 wounded. A week later troops from the same units stormed the Latvian Ministry of the Interior in Riga, killing four people.
The bloodshed in the Baltics signaled the opening of the endgame in the Soviet Union. Within a week over 150,000 people had gathered in Moscow to demonstrate against the shootings. Boris Yeltsin, erstwhile First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and—since May 1990—Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, traveled to Tallinn to sign a mutual recognition of ‘sovereignty’ between Russia and the Baltic Republics, bypassing altogether the Soviet authorities. In March 1991 referenda in Latvia and Estonia confirmed that electors there too overwhelmingly favored full independence. Gorbachev, who had half-heartedly started to repress the recalcitrant republics, now reverted to his earlier stance and vainly sought a modus vivendi with them instead.
But the Soviet President was now under attack from both sides. His reluctance to crush the Balts definitively alienated his military allies (two of the generals who staged the attacks in Vilnius and Riga would figure prominently in the subsequent coup in Moscow). But his former friends and admirers no longer trusted him. Yeltsin in March 1991 publicly denounced Gorbachev’s ‘lies and deceptions’ and called for his resignation, defying official pressure to remain silent or face impeachment. Meanwhile the Baltic example was being taken up in other republics.