by Peter Millar
I wrote it as I had experienced it, trying to give form in the limited vocabulary of journalism to a popular movement in the truest sense of the term, the cadences of the sentence matching the extraordinary celebration performed by the people of the Czechoslovak capital as communism crumbled:
‘A hands-across-Prague protest designed as a human chain became instead a merry dance, a living tableau from a Brueghel painting, as laughing, skipping people in warm mufflers and long scarves formed an endless twisting snake around the trees, through the snowy park, up to the floodlit spires, the castle itself and the archbishop’s palace, then helter-skelter slithered giggling down steep, slippery, narrow cobbled streets and, holding hands with exaggerated formality, like a pastiche mazurka, passed across the fifteenth-century Charles Bridge, watched by all the statues of all the saints, and on to Wenceslas Square.’
Over the top? Maybe. But as we stood in the square looking up at the magnificent old statue of Good King Wenceslas on his horse, we all felt it was going to be a truly magical Christmas across the whole of Eastern Europe. Even if it would be black magic in one particular godforsaken corner. True to my family-work ratio in this extraordinary, chaotic year, I managed two days back in Britain with my wife and children before returning to Berlin (already we were no longer saying ‘East’ and ‘West’). Egon Krenz, the stopgap successor to Honecker had already gone, in his place Hans Modrow, the mayor of Dresden, tried to lead a ‘reform coalition’ but on the streets it was slowly becoming clear that the whole communist-led system had lost not only the credibility it never had, but the power to enforce its position. The open frontier was an open door to an increasingly – almost unbelievably – inevitable German unification. As long as there wasn’t a Soviet veto. And that veto, for so long assumed to be automatic, did not seem to be forthcoming.
A Soviet spokesman billed the superpower summit about to take place in warships on the choppy seas off Valletta in early December as the progress of history ‘from Yalta to Malta’. In effect Gorbachev was making it clear that Moscow no longer claimed the advantage Stalin had wrestled from Churchill and Roosevelt as they partitioned the world in the elegant drawing room of Livadia Palace in the Crimea in February 1945. But not in Washington, not in London, not in Paris, nor even Bonn – and least of all Brussels – was there a blueprint for Europe to replace the strategic certainties of the Cold War. Wolf Biermann was right: ‘We had already half-swallowed the lie that the sun could never rise again in the East’. In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl prepared his ‘ten-point-plan’, a steady, long-term timetable for progress towards German unity. But in Washington, George Bush paid little more than lip service to the idea. US Secretary of State James Baker told reporters that talk about German reunification was premature. In London Margaret Thatcher was all but openly hostile, implying even consideration of such a topic was ‘destabilising’. She had clearly not heard what Gorbachev had told Honecker that he (or she) ‘who is too late will be punished by history.’
History on the ground was not about to wait for the men on the boats to tell it what to do. And it was not just happening in Berlin. After my by now customary one weekend in three at home, events in Prague summoned me back to the middle of a rapidly unfolding new map of Europe. In the wake of the euphoria in Berlin, Prague, which had until then been merely a backdrop for the East German drama, had been swept up in demonstrations in which one young man had died. Václav Havel, the playwright, who for two decades had been a thorn in the communist regime’s side was a guiding light in the overnight foundation of Civic Forum, a citizens’ group that was trying to assume the role of Poland’s Solidarity union and the East German grass-roots protest movement in one go. It succeeded faster than they could have imagined. The Berlin Wall was the Iron Curtain, and its collapse was the crucial event that meant the domino effect would go all the way to the end. Even with a resounding thud that only came a year later, to the fall of the ‘Evil Empire’ itself.
Civic Forum was founded on November 19th, ten days after the Wall came down, and over the next three days it filled the streets of Prague with tens then hundreds of thousands of protesters. On November 23rd, in a wholly surreal moment, Havel appeared on a balcony on Wenceslas Square before a crowd of half a million, and by his side, Alexander Dubcek, the man who had led the ill-fated Prague Spring of 1968. The following night we were sitting in the Laterna Magika (Magic Lantern) theatre that had become the would-be revolutionaries’ headquarters (where else for a rebellion led by a playwright) wondering what would happen next. We watched Havel sit on stage that Friday night, his legs crossed on a stool, for all the world like contemporary comedian Dave Allen about to tell a few yarns, when a student came rushing in with a tall tale that at first even Havel could not believe: the top members of the communist government had resigned en masse.
‘I think it is time for champagne,’ Havel said with a strange, disbelieving smile. ‘I think it is time to be cautious and wait and see what tomorrow brings,’ said the venerable Dubcek at his side. Tomorrow brought confirmation. But it was Sunday night before it dawned on all of Czechoslovakia that their ‘Velvet Revolution’ had worked and they had taken their celebration to that extraordinary gavotte around their beautiful medieval and baroque city that once again had escaped intact without a fight. The rumours of Soviet tanks massing on the outskirts had proved to be a canard. Gorbachev had not done it in East Germany, he would not do it here. The Sinatra Doctrine was for real. And The Sunday Times foreign editor’s efforts to retrieve his wordy correspondent’s literary artifice were to be rewarded too when historian Martin Gilbert, compiling his History of the Twentieth Century a decade later, included that preposterous piece of prose intact. I had achieved one ambition: I had genuinely become a footnote in history.
Within days the Czechoslovak Communist Party had removed the reference in the constitution to its own ‘leading role’ and committed the ultimate political sin of revisionism, declaring that the Soviet invasion of 1968 had after all been ‘unjustified’. All over Europe, history was not just being written; it was being rewritten. The border to Austria was opened before the end of the week and a few days later travel restrictions to all other countries were abolished, the fortifications along the frontier with West Germany, from where I had looked over at the old Sudeten town of Eger, now Cheb, dismantled. Nobody in Prague feared their citizens all clamouring for union with another country; though nor had anyone yet realised that before long they would be clamouring for their own country to be split in two. By the end of the year Havel, the shy self-deprecating dramatist, was president. Democracy, installed overnight, would decide the rest.
I had my own eyes set on a family Christmas back in Britain, but not before at least one more trip back to East Berlin, where Erich Honecker, only two months earlier supreme dictator in his country and master of his party, was an ailing private pensioner about to be expelled by his former comrades. Yet even his going had something sinister about it, as if the communists were now fighting for their very existence as a political party. They had renounced their past, as though the Wall and forty years of repression behind it had never happened, and renamed themselves the Party of Democratic Socialism. They had done with Stalinism, yet they still forced their former leader to undergo a humiliation uncannily akin to a Stalinist show trial. From his sickbed – he was now revealed to have long been suffering from cancer – he was forced to recant his own mistakes, including losing touch with reality.
My friend Axel, the television producer from Metzer Eck, had already joined a new party called Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Breakthrough) and was talking as its representative to West Berlin politicians about launching a full-scale campaign for German unification. But in Bonn the physically larger-than-life but personally underwhelming chancellor Helmut Kohl was about to seize the appealing nettle offered to him: achieving German unity would be a painful exercise, but it would give him a place in history beyond anything he had ever dared imagine. But was the door to a brave ne
w world just waiting to be pushed? And if it was, could he be sure what lay on the other side. The labels ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany were geographical tags not actual state entities. The men in Bonn, with a pragmatism born of the years, had eventually recognised the ‘other Germany’ as a state in its own right, but if the people of the German Democratic Republic effectively voted their own state out of existence, then the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany required that they be accepted within it. So far, so easy, but East Germany was an economic basket case, home to seventeen million people whose currency was virtually valueless. Could the West German economic miracle survive under the pressure of taking in so many impoverished cousins?
But while the future of Germany looked like dominating my New Year agenda, there was a bigger threat to my family Christmas looming. The wind of change had suddenly struck another domino, the Soviet Union’s most maverick satellite and the most cruel and repressive of all the communist dictatorships in what had once been civilised Europe: Romania. Under their diminutive megalomaniac leader Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania was a country notoriously hard to report on, relentlessly hostile to foreign journalists. I had been there only once before, several years previously, to write features about life in a society that tried to keep its doors closed to the outside world. Travelling as a tourist on my Irish passport which at that stage gave my profession as a ‘translator’, I had gone in by train from Budapest, on a rationale I hold still that long train journeys offer a peek at a nation’s underbelly.* Amongst those I met there were the German-speaking farmers of Transylvania, descendants of those warrior-peasants brought in by Wallachian princes five hundred years earlier to help defend their lands against the Turks. They told me heart-rending stories of medieval villages razed because they were in the way of Ceausescu’s insane plans to build vast agro-industrial collective farms, of families split up arbitrarily and members taken away for interrogation who never returned.
Now in this last most barbaric bastion of totalitarianism, the wind of change had turned into a hurricane. Only a couple of weeks earlier, as even Honecker was being ousted and the Czechoslovak communists were shaking in their boots, Ceausescu had been delivering a five-hour eulogy on the achievements of his own squalid rule to an audience of party placemen. During his endless peroration they had risen to their feet no fewer than sixty-seven times to interrupt him with applause. If Honecker had been ‘losing touch with reality’, Ceausescu was on a whole other planet. Most of the time he spent going over the plans for his vast folies de grandeur, notably his great House of the People, a vast marble palace at the end of a grandiose Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, which he had bulldozed several whole districts of historic Bucharest to construct. He termed himself the Conducator, the leader – a direct throwback to the days when Franco styled himself El Caudillo, Mussolini Il Duce, Hitler Der Führer and Stalin Vozhd. The man who terrorised the peasant farmers of Transylvania was perceived by his entire population as a bloodsucker.
His wife Elena was a fitting Bride of Dracula. In a bid to increase the population of workers and peasants, in a state with chronic housing shortages made worse by their mad master’s penchant for arbitrarily ripping down parts of the capital to create pleasure palaces, Elena posed as ‘mother of the nation’ and banned birth control. Romanians, many of whom lived in tiny one-bedroom flats or bedsits, were encouraged to have four children per couple. Their eldest son, Nicu, was a provincial Communist Party leader being groomed for the succession. But Elena used the dreaded Securitate – Romania’s Stasi – to spy on her other two children. Their daughter Zoia’s bedroom was bugged and fitted with hidden cameras so her mother could check up on her sexual activity. She and her husband disapproved of the marriage of their son Valentin, a nuclear physicist, to the daughter of a political rival and expelled her and their own grandchild to Canada.
Considering how they treated their own flesh and blood their attitude towards the rest of the population – patronisingly called ‘our children’ – was unsurprising. A strike in the city of Brasov in 1987 was brutally suppressed by the army, allegedly with several hundred dead. The ringleaders were treated to five-minute chest X-rays that gave them cancer. The national currency, the lei, was all but valueless; the consumer economy – such as it was – functioned as a black market in which goods were paid for in cigarettes, the ‘gold standard’ being curiously the American brand, Kent, which were worth twice as much as any other. In May 1988, the ‘leader’s’ determination to ratchet up agricultural production to industrial levels led him to announce that up to 8,000 traditional villages would be wiped off the map, an announcement that even drew protest from HRH, the Prince of Wales. That was not quite so laughable an intervention as it might sound; Ceausescu frequently boasted of his experiences in 1978 when thanks to an invitation from the Labour government of Jim Callaghan, this odious dictator was the guest of the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Now, at long last, even in downtrodden Romania there were fresh rumblings of discontent. A group of senior party figures purged by Ceausescu began to stir against him. In Transylvania, which until 1918 had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was not just a German-speaking minority but a much larger Hungarian-speaking population which now, inspired by the sudden transformation of their ‘mother country’ began fleeing across the frontier. The regime moved to deport László Tökés, an ethnic Hungarian pastor considered to be a troublemaker and based in the town Hungarian-speakers called Temesvar and Romanians, Timisoara. When local people gathered around him, refusing to let the police pass, Ceausescu ordered in the troops backed up by the hated Securitate. What should have been nothing more than a tough exercise in crowd control turned into bloodshed. But instead of the brutality causing the trouble to abate, it escalated. Ever more people came out into the streets. Securitate ordered the troops to fire point blank into the crowds. Those few who refused were summarily executed.
In the midst of all this Ceausescu, thinking himself omnipotent, went on a three-day state visit to Iran, leaving his Securitate thugs to put down a crisis he refused to acknowledge. When he returned he was astounded to find the global condemnation of events in Timisoara included his erstwhile allies in Budapest, Warsaw and now even East Berlin. Ceausescu made a dramatic television speech blaming the trouble on ‘hooligans’ and ‘external agitators’, banned all foreigners from entering country, and declared a state of emergency.
Back in London, with reports pouring out from the few reporters, notably Reuters, permanently based in the country, nobody was watching the situation more anxiously than me. I had just returned from East Berlin yet again, watching the preparations for the ceremonial opening of a crossing point at that so symbolic focus of division, the spot where I had taken Jackie on her fist night in Berlin to point to our future home on the other side of the Wall: the Brandenburg Gate. I had made something like a hundred flights in the course of the past twelve months, spent far more time apart from my family than with them, and now, with only days to go to Christmas, and my parents coming to stay, I was determined to spend it home. So when the phone call came from the foreign desk, as I knew it must, I joined the crowds of those doing the unthinkable: I said no. Politely, but firmly, pleading for understanding. And I got it, up to a point: at least I got the reprieve. Another journalist, Walter Ellis, a friend of mine, but already divorced, was sent instead.
But the story would not wait for him to get there. I took my place on the foreign desk, watching the wires, monitoring the television broadcasts, putting in my own knowledge and analysis and pulling together a two-page special. The next day, Thursday, Ceausescu organised a demonstration of support outside the presidential palace. Suddenly his placemen realised they were outnumbered. His speech from the balcony, filled with the usual platitudes about ‘the inevitable victory of the socialist revolution’, suddenly encountered revolution. The planned applause was weak, and then came the unimaginable: heckling. Within minutes the demonstration designed to illustrat
e his power proved it had evaporated as the crowd below him began shouting ‘Down with Ceausescu’. Within minutes, a big Securitate man motioned the confused ‘great leader’ back inside his palace. The army moved in against a crowd that had proved itself unfaithful and within minutes the square rang out with the sound of gunshots and tear gas filled the air. The Ceausescus fled, taking a helicopter from the palace courtyard to a nearby airport of Targoviste. When they landed they were informed that the army had closed all airspace and was not about to reopen it, even for their leader. The tide was beginning to turn, irrevocably.
That was as much as I, or anyone in the Western world, knew as I left The Sunday Times office in Wapping on Saturday night, December 23rd, 1989, and went home for a long-anticipated and much-needed family Christmas. There was no holiday however for the reporters on the ground, nor for the people of Romania. The Ceausescus, it turned out, had tried to continue their escape from the vengeance of their ‘children’ by car, a little red Dacia rustbucket rather than the armourplated Mercedes limousines they were used to. But they did not get far. With revolution in the air across an entire country, the police were setting up roadblocks. Those outside Targoviste were astonished to find who they had stopped. The former ruling couple were arrested and held while the police listened to the radio to find out which way the tide was flowing. Then they made their decision: they handed them over to the army. And the army had already decided it was now behind the people instead of against them.
The Ceausescus were taken to a secret military base as prisoners. Amid rumours that loyalists were planning to rescue them and mount a counter-revolution, they were summarily tried on Christmas Day, on a confused multiplicity of charges, including genocide, then taken out immediately and shot. Elena allegedly turned on the soldiers to say, ‘I was like a mother to you.’ One replied without thinking, ‘You murdered our mothers.’ Within hours of the event the summary trial and the Ceausescus’ execution were shown live on Romanian television, the station itself having been the scene of bloody battles between Securitate and the rebels. The broadcast effectively ended the battle for the old guard who had lost their figurehead. By that stage each and every one of them knew there was no point looking towards Moscow for backup. A message from Gorbachev’s Kremlin advised Ceausescu loyalists to lay down their arms.