Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Now it was far harder for the satellite regimes to deal with dissidents. The East was no longer cut off from the rest of Europe. Writers, journalists and artists had better contacts with the West than before. Gone were the days when a troublesome poet or painter could be hauled off and quietly executed or dispatched to the gulag to languish away for years. In September 1978 the Bulgarian secret service - with active help from the KG B - murdered the exiled writer Georgi Markov at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in the middle of London. He was poisoned with ricin which had been placed in a pellet on the end of an umbrella that was then used to scratch him, lightly, on the shin. Markov died after a few days in hospital and nobody knew the details of his murder until some years later. Two exiled Romanian journalists who worked for Radio Free Europe were killed in Germany by the Securitate. But these were crude exceptions from the cruder regimes. Elsewhere, dissidents were handled with more subtlety - or at least with less overt brutality. The satiric singer and songwriter Wolf Biermann had for long been a thorn in the side of the East German regime. His witty and wry ballads proved the point that bullies fear mockery above all things. When in November 1976 the regime wanted rid of Biermann, the East Germans waited until he was on a concert tour in West Germany. After a performance in Cologne the GDR government simply announced that he had been stripped of his citizenship and would not be permitted to return East.

  Until 1968, most of the internal opposition to the regimes had come from within the Party. The anti-Communists had been suppressed or cowed into silence, so the thinkers who spoke up were careful to say they were examining from a Marxist perspective what had gone wrong with the system. There had been ‘false moves along a true path’ and they suggested liberalised ‘socialism with a human face’ reforms of the kind instituted by the socialist leader of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubnek. ‘We were trying to find flaws in the blueprint,’ as Milan Šimecka said. But after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia it became clear that the Party would permit no challenges to strict orthodoxy. Among intellectuals, deep pessimism - deeper than usual in Central Europe - descended. Even true believers grew cynical, or despaired. The gloom was lifted by Havel and others who pointed a way which, as the novelist Ludvík Vaculík explained, allowed people to survive as ‘a citizen of a state which I will never abandon but in which I cannot contentedly live’.18

  Some could not see that ‘living in truth’ was much of a strategy at all, though. The Czech author Milan Kundera said that ‘it was not only idealistic but stupid to confront an immovable regime with meaningless small deeds such as passing around carbon copies of manifestos’. He abandoned any form of hope and escaped to the Left Bank of Paris. Havel responded to Kundera’s emigration with a typical comment. He too had been encouraged to go elsewhere, but he decided to stay. ‘The solution . . . does not exist in leaving. Fourteen million people can’t just go and leave Czechoslovakia,’ he said.19

  Most of the dissidents did not like the term, said Michnik. ‘A dissident is a renegade, a rebel, a rare bird, whereas we . . . believed we represented the majority of the nation.’ Nevertheless dissidents are what they were called in the Western media and for the rebellious intellectuals who remained in their countries life was hard, though easier than it had been. The Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Tamas described their existence:Dissent was an anomaly. Dissidents . . . led a life where satisfactions, successes, defeats and frustrations were very different from those felt by the population at large. While our academic or . . . other colleagues looked for preferment, authorial fame, international travel, second homes and the like, our pride lay in our work appearing in smudgy, primitively stencilled little pamphlets . . . and success as distributing a couple of hundred copies before the secret police arrived . . . A secret police officer - unforgettably dressed in a University of Texas T-shirt - asked me once: ‘You consider yourself an intelligent man I suppose? Then how can you explain that you are acting against your own interests?’ The powers that be . . . were puzzled, nay, appalled, at the phenomenon of dissidence. Non-conformism and eccentricity are conflated with madness even in freer and more permissive societies than in Eastern Europe. Dissidence was regarded as an expression of anomie by many and, well, I could not deny that there were a few strange types among us . . . The dissidents said strange things. They began to talk about . . . ‘parallel public spheres’ and ‘dissident sub cultures’ and the like, as though they were content with the murky underworld of political, artistic and moral avant-garde. Dissidents wore beards, did not save up to buy East German automobiles, spoke foreign languages and were the first to carry their children in pouches. Many were Jewish. In 1968, when many good Hungarians and East Germans drunk themselves into oblivion with happiness at the sight of the humiliation of their ancient foe, Czechoslovakia, the dissidents took the side of the foreigner. In short, they were a pain in the neck.20

  The ruling oligarchs had more pressing problems than were posed by a few long-haired rock musicians or playwrights. Their regimes were going bankrupt - and they believed that they could only be rescued by Western capitalists. Leaders like Husák made a social contract with their people. ‘If you conform outwardly and cause no trouble, we the Party will guarantee enough food, a reasonable, constantly improving standard of living and various social provisions. Just forget about freedom or other “bourgeois democratic” ideas, and there will be enough material benefits to satisfy you.’ At this time, as the émigré Czech novelist Josef Škvorecky put it, ‘the butcher’s shop became the barometer of East European contentment’. The pact worked for a while, but began to unravel in the early 1980s. The Communist regimes could not keep their side of the bargain without massive borrowing from the West. Over time, the basic flaws in the system grew increasingly obvious. But although it had to change, it could not - for ideological and political reasons. The Party drew its authority from the conviction that it was infallible, that the tide of history was on its side. Problems began to be compounded when events failed to follow the script laid down by the socialist visionaries.

  The rulers saw economic reform as dangerous. The system might have been hopeless and unworkable - but, they thought, it protected their hold on power. They saw, correctly, that their authority depended on maintaining a centrally planned economy where decisions were taken as much for reasons of political advantage as of economic sense. Above all, central planning ensured that the decisions were taken by them, the Communists. Decentralising decision-making - introducing a market - would disperse power and put in question the Party’s claim to sole authority. The system was still no good at making consumer products. An example was motor cars - an obvious and visible sign of the differences between East and West. They were a symbol of consumerism, wealth, independence and economic efficiency. Everybody could see the difference between a Mercedes and a Trabant, which was a joke inside East Germany, let alone in the rest of the world. The Communist countries were bad at producing cars. The reason was not technical or even economic. It was the way they were ‘sold’. Owning them had as much to do with official position as wealth. The state allocated cars - as it did all luxury items, homes and holidays. For instance, in Czechoslovakia the right to buy a car was withdrawn from purge victims after the Soviet invasion in 1968. It took several years before car ownership there returned to ‘normal’ - as in the rest of the socialist bloc. First for the nomenklatura; second to friends of the nomenklatura; and only third, those who could afford them.

  The only way to stock shelves in the East was to borrow large amounts of money from the West. The new vision, as Adam Michnik put it, was ‘to build Communism on the US dollar’. Communists and Western bankers fell into each other’s arms in a bizarre danse macabre. The Communist regimes saw Western capital as a means of buying off public opinion at home and of delaying the introduction of much-needed radical changes. They used the foreign credits not on new investment in technology or diversifying their industrial base, but on food and consumer goods, which they could pass on to their ow
n people at unrealistically subsidised prices. At first the East Europeans were content. As were Western bankers, who beat a well-worn path from the City of London and Wall Street to Warsaw, Berlin and Budapest. Half the loans were from private banks guaranteed by Western governments, which had encouraged them to lend behind the Iron Curtain. The other half was unsecured, but the East Europeans were regarded as responsible borrowers. The bankers with short-term memories saw the regimes as highly stable, with a well-trained workforce. Crucially, they believed that the Soviet ‘guarantee’ over the socialist bloc would rule out any chance of defaults.21

  They were cynical and at the same time stunningly naïve about the political systems they were dealing with. In the long term the most realistic hope of getting their money back was to encourage a more open democracy, but that idea seemed never to have occurred to them. Instead, many of them greeted martial law in Poland as an excellent thing. The General would make the trains run on time. ‘Who knows which political system works?’ explained the head of Citibank’s international division in a Commentary magazine article in 1982. ‘The only test we care about is: can they pay their bills?’22

  In the longer term the loans did not ease the plight of communism. They made it far worse. Poland was the most heavily indebted - or, as one Polish economist described it, ‘addicted, as with the most dangerous of drugs’. In the six years leading up to the martial law declaration Poland’s foreign debt increased fifteen-fold, to US$ 66 billion. But every East European regime began using these platinum credit cards, to ruinous effect. Paying interest soon began to consume national budgets. In East Germany, by the early 1980s, 60 per cent of income went towards loan repayment - a level that became impossible to maintain. Miklós Németh, the chief official in Hungary’s Economic Ministry throughout most of the 1980s, and later to become Hungarian Prime Minister, explained, despairingly, how the credits were used: ‘We spent two-thirds of it on paying interest,’ he said. ‘The remaining third went towards importing consumer goods to ease the impression of economic crisis.’ Most of the ageing men in charge of these economies hid their heads in the sand. Naturally they never let on to their people how heavily in hock they were to those they were describing each day in the state-owned media as the hyenas of capitalism.23

  The Soviets were in as bad an economic mess as the rest of their empire - far worse than some parts of it. Protecting their territorial possessions was becoming an increasing burden, though the exhausted men in the Kremlin refused to acknowledge it. They were not prepared to consider any sort of cost benefit analysis about maintaining the empire they had won just a few decades earlier. Their determination to remain a superpower - for ideological and prestige reasons - was resolute. It did not concern them that they were driving the USSR to penury. The Soviets were building bigger and heavier weapons on a vast scale. Soviet industry in the 1970s and early 1980s was still geared to military production, not to providing what consumers and Soviet citizens wanted - or, towards the end of the twentieth century, what they needed. The Plan still contained a ‘dual purpose’ element. Every factory which made industrial products like cars or electrical goods was required to have a military application, too, and could quickly be converted to a war footing. This distorted Soviet industry up to the end of the Union. Huge numbers of weapons of all kinds were produced. Hundreds of intercontinental missiles were made a year. They were called, strangely for a regime supposedly run by atheists, ‘The Satans’. Thousands of tanks annually rolled off Soviet production lines. The Russians continually added to their arsenal out of ideology - and from an inferiority complex. They sought to catch up with the West’s technological superiority by weight of numbers. Their military theory was that they needed superiority not just with the US, but with all of Nato, the British and French nuclear weapons, and also the Chinese. The Soviet military thought the quality of their weapons was almost certainly inferior to equivalent American armaments. So they were determined to compensate with quantity. As Viktor Starodubov, an assistant to Defence Minister Ustinov, said: ‘We built so many weapons of mass destruction because they are one of the few things we can build well.’24

  But the military and the industry that supported it appeared to have slipped out of any rational control. Vitali Katayev, an official in the Defence Ministry at the time, said the Soviets’ military ‘was a bull in a china shop, a sort of Soviet Texas. It always demanded as much weaponry as possible. A decision to introduce a new weapon was made not on the basis of military needs or technical merit, but rather on the basis of the authority of its sponsors and their relationship with the political leadership. Soviet military industry was supposed to increase by three per cent a year - it was in the Plan that it must do so - therefore “production of many types of weapons was not stopped even after the army was saturated with them”.’25

  The USSR was ‘massively overproducing armaments’, according to Georgi Arbatov, the influential head of the US and Canadian Studies Institute and chief adviser to a succession of top Kremlin magnates. ‘It undermined Western trust towards us . . . our actions encouraged the Americans to intensify the arms race.’ Accurate figures were extraordinarily hard to come by, but according to some numbers Brezhnev was shown in the last months of his life, direct military expenses such as the cost of armed forces and equipment were at least 15 per cent of the state budget, and direct defence-related spending was probably two and a half times that sum. A good estimate was that defence ate up around 40 per cent of the Soviet Union’s budget - far more than when the USSR was preparing for World War Two. When the rest of the economy was stagnating, this was a huge drain on the nation’s resources. Some of the leaders knew it. But there is no evidence they did anything about it - or even discussed it. There seem to have been no debates within the Kremlin on this most vital of issues for the country’s future. Even some of the most senior men in the army realised the military budget had become bloated. In the early 1980s Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, head of the Soviet General Staff, began to argue that there was too much waste in the military-industrial complex, too much inefficiency and far too many gigantic projects that did not seem worthwhile. He said it was ‘suicidal’ automatically to pursue the US in the arms race. Instead of initiating a debate on future Soviet military and geopolitical strategy, the Marshal was unceremoniously fired.26

  EIGHT

  ABLE ARCHER

  Washington DC, Wednesday 2 November 1983

  JUST A HANDFUL of people knew how close the world would come to nuclear obliteration over the next few days. The Cuban Missile Crisis of twenty-one years earlier was a drama played out in public. It had a gradual build-up, a centrepiece and a dénouement seen on live TV when a stunned and terrified world could breathe a sigh of relief. Everybody who lived through it would remember the fear and intensity they felt. The story of Able Archer 83 was entirely different. Barely anyone outside a few military bunkers and espionage headquarters knew anything out of the ordinary was happening. While the world went on as normal, the Soviet leaders in the Kremlin became convinced that the US and Nato were about to mount a surprise nuclear attack against them and ordered the Soviet military to begin a countdown to retaliate. Only since the collapse of communism have documents surfaced which establish that, through a series of misunderstandings and miscalculations, Armageddon was averted more by luck than sound judgement towards the end of 1983.

  Yuri Andropov finally achieved his lifelong ambition about a year earlier, on 10 November 1982, when he succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet Communist Party boss. But he was already a dying man, bitter, frightened and deeply pessimistic. His character and political convictions had been formed as a rising apparatchik in the years of Terror. ‘He was deeply traumatised by his years working under Stalin, like the majority of his generation,’ a long-time colleague said. Andropov was a master of ‘spin’. Somehow he had maintained a reputation as a ‘liberal’, though it is hard to see on what possible basis. It is true that he wrote some occasionally pretty lyric verse; in earlier day
s he liked to dance with attractive women - and they liked to dance with him. He had an entourage near him of bright, youngish cadres, some of them with progressive views, for whom he acted as mentor. However, he was a man of his era, austere, absolutely convinced in his own ideology and in the final victory of communism. He believed that for prestige and strategic reasons the USSR needed a ‘buffer’ zone - its European empire - and he was not going to be the General Secretary who lost any part of it. He was a resolutely orthodox Bolshevik. As KGB chief for nearly two decades it was he who enthusiastically orchestrated the campaigns against dissidents in the 1970s and Jewish refuseniks who wished to go to Israel. He had wanted to jail the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn rather than send him into exile. He supervised the trials of figures such as Yuri Orlov and Natan Sharansky, and approved the harassment of the physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, who was sent into internal exile with his wife Yelena Bonner. Much of this was down to Andropov’s insistence that ‘communism needed permanent vigilance’.I

  Andropov as KGB boss knew the real and parlous economic condition of the Soviet Union. He proposed a few economic reforms and he launched a big public relations drive for more ‘workplace discipline’, but he was as closely associated with what some Soviets were already calling ‘the years of stagnation’ as any of the other old men in the Kremlin. He did nothing to challenge the basic flaws in the Soviet system - the dead weight of central planning, the dominance of politics over economic reality. He imagined that all he needed to do was cleanse the system of the corruption and indolence of the Brezhnev years, fire a few of the more sleazy bureaucrats, and communism would return to the true path for which it was destined by history.