Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Gorbachev abandoned the old dogmas about the Soviet Union’s place in the world. When he talked about ‘new thinking’ he meant it. He blamed his predecessors for isolating the USSR from the outside world, where it had to return if the country was to modernise itself and compete with the West. He was always urging ‘new thinking’ on his aides, a phrase he used in conversation far more often than either the words perestroika or glasnost. Many apparatchiks had become so used to hearing meaningless slogans from their leaders and to the launch of insincere campaigns which would soon be dropped, that they assumed this was mere rhetoric and propaganda. But they were wrong. When some of the diehards realised Gorbachev was in earnest, they were shocked. From the first, Gorbachev had to be careful not to push the conservatives around him - many of the people who chose him for his job - too far. The veteran head of the Party’s international section, Boris Ponomarev, a highly influential man in Kremlin circles and among the ruling Parties in the satellite states, was heard to grumble: ‘What is this new thinking? Let the Americans change their thinking instead . . . Are we now against force, which is the only language imperialism understands?’ But he would not dare to say so publicly to the leader, who, once selected, had almost dictatorial powers if he chose to use them. ‘Foreigners have a hard time understanding to what extent the post of General Secretary was influential in the Soviet mentality,’ said Anatoli Gromyko, son of the former Foreign Minister. ‘You see, to object to [the top leader] or even worse to debate his opinions in public - at that time I don’t think anyone would dare to do that.’ Valeri Boldin, Gorbachev’s confidential secretary, who saw him every day and went with him everywhere,i said that foreign affairs were the prerogative of the leader and a small group of trusted intimates. ‘Nobody dared venture into the sphere of international relations unless invited or instructed by him to work on a given subject.’6

  Gorbachev relied on a core of intimates and political soulmates. By far the cleverest and most talented was Alexander Yakovlev, the intellectual inspiration behind Perestroika and a behind-the-scenes fixer in the Kremlin bureaucracy of subtle skills. Born in 1923, Yakovlev was almost a decade older than Gorbachev. His most formative experience was the Great Patriotic War, in which he served as a lieutenant in the marines. Half his friends were killed and he survived only because four of his comrades sacrificed their own lives to rescue his bullet-ridden body from the battlefield. He was left semi-crippled for life.

  Yakovlev rose through the ranks of the nomenklatura performing sensitive political tasks with distinction. He seemed like a Party man, if an unusually bright and interesting one, but he started to have doubts. The first came in February 1956 when he sat through Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ and heard for the first time details of Stalin’s crimes. They were fuelled when he went to Prague in the days after the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was acting head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department. While he trotted out the line that the Russians were saving the Czechs from American imperialism and fascism, he did not believe a word of it. He said later that crushing the Prague Spring was ‘a sign that the system was doomed’.

  Yakovlev was one of the very few members of the Soviet leadership with any significant experience of the West. In 1958 he had been an exchange student at Columbia University. He hated his year in New York. He admired American technological know-how and enterprise, but loathed being harangued about the superiority of the Western way of life. He repeatedly told the story of how in a Manhattan shop he was once asked to take off his hat to show that it was true that Russians did not have horns. The future godfather of perestroika wrote vitriolic anti-American articles in the Soviet press containing observations such as this: ‘American monopolistic monsters believe that their domination of the world would offer the best solutions to the problems of international politics. They consider war a peerless catalyst to achieve this goal . . . The weapons makers and the brass hats have formed an alliance with death . . . postwar American leaders have always behaved like fighting cocks with nuclear talons, straining to fight Communism and the Soviet Union.’7

  A rising star in the Party, Yakovlev landed himself in serious trouble in 1972 for writing an article criticising anti-Semitism and Russian nationalism. As ‘punishment’ he was dispatched to an out-of-the-way posting as Soviet Ambassador to Canada. In this comfortable exile, where he remained for more than a decade, he started to rethink his entire world view and, in the strictest secrecy, to write a critique of Marxism-Leninism, which he began saying in private was ‘a philosophy concerned only about the idler, not the worker’.

  In 1983 Gorbachev, then in charge of Soviet agriculture, was on a ten-day official visit to Canada and Yakovlev was given the job of looking after him. They toured around Canada in a small plane, stopping off in out-of-the-way towns and villages, and became firm friends. Soon they talked honestly with each other about the state of the Soviet Union and found that their views were remarkably similar. Yakovlev describes how at one stop the pair had a two-hour walk in cornfields. ‘I took advantage of the circumstances and told him what I really thought. He did the same.’ Within a few weeks of their meeting, Gorbachev brought him back to Moscow as head of the influential think-tank, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. When Gorbachev became General Secretary Yakovlev was made head of the leader’s brains trust and a key member of the new team in the Kremlin. Yakovlev had effectively abandoned communism - though not yet the Party - and became a social democrat. He always urged Gorbachev to ‘take that extra step’ towards radical reform. He produced proposals for far-reaching democratic changes aimed at abolishing the one-party state and introducing the beginnings of a market economy. Gorbachev was not ready to go as far - but he listened to Yakovlev’s ideas, and his tactical acumen, with great care. One of Yakovlev’s regular refrains was to refer to the satellite states as ‘parasite socialism’ and he urged the leader to make an urgent reappraisal of their importance to the Soviet Union.8

  The greatest influence on Gorbachev, though, was his wife. Jack Matlock, when American Ambassador to Moscow, was told by a senior official in the Kremlin - obviously expecting the story to get back to Washington - that ‘he was unable to make decisions without her advice’. Many of Gorbachev’s aides say the same. Raisa was a clever woman, and did not mind the world knowing it. She was a novelty to Kremlin officials, who did not at first understand how to react to her. There was no formal role for a Soviet leader’s wife, but as Boldin, who dealt with her every day - sometimes many times a day - and disliked her intensely, said: ‘She became the First Lady of the Soviet Union quickly, or at least in less time than it took Gorbachev to feel that he had truly established himself as leader of the Party and the State.’9

  When the couple arrived in Moscow from Stavropol - their only child, Irina, was already in her twenties and had left home - Raisa immersed herself in the world of think-tanks, discussion groups and conferences. She loved being in the intellectual centre of the country, but she was careful about too obviously involving herself in politics. That changed when her husband was chosen as leader. While Kremlin wives had earlier confined themselves to running a household, Raisa was a true feminist and wanted to be treated as a serious person. That was the way Gorbachev regarded her. Almost everyone else around him was male and middle-aged. Many of them resented the fact that Gorbachev listened to her. Aides gossiped amongst themselves about how bossy she was, how Gorbachev would defer to her. As Boldin put it, ‘with his rather mild character and his inability to stand his ground, Gorbachev often found himself under his wife’s influence . . . she was a political figure in her own right, who asserted herself’. The couple continued their tradition of taking a walk every evening and some officials were furious, not just with her ‘lordly manner’ but with the extra workload the habit imposed on them. ‘He often phoned at a very late hour to issue instructions on unexpected matters that had occurred after his evening walk with Raisa,’ Boldin said. ‘His wife’s attitud
e played a decisive role in Gorbachev’s fate - and of that of the Party and the entire country.’10

  FOURTEEN

  SILENT MEMORIES

  Budapest, Saturday 18 January 1986

  THE SOVIETS SAW one part of their empire as a laboratory testing-ground for some of the reforms proposed by the new thinkers around Gorbachev. Hungary was often hailed, in the West at any rate, as ‘the merriest barracks in the camp’. From the outside it seemed more easy-going, welcoming and a lot less dreary than elsewhere in the socialist bloc. Travel restrictions had been relaxed in the 1970s, though it was so expensive for Hungarians to visit anywhere outside the COMECON states that limited numbers enjoyed the freedom. Yet knowing it was possible to leave, unlike in neighbouring Czechoslovakia or Romania, made a big psychological difference. Nobody by the mid-1980s was scared for political reasons of talking openly to foreign visitors, about almost anything. Budapest was the first capital city in a Communist country to get a Hilton hotel, typically a modern eyesore commanding beautiful views over the Danube, built above the ruins of an ancient monastery. It was the first to receive a pilgrimage from the American evangelist Billy Graham, who thought it such fertile territory, and with such fine cuisine, that he returned three times in the 1980s. It was the first to receive, in February 1984, a visit from Margaret Thatcher, who was allowed to extol the virtues of consumer capitalism on state-controlled television. Around the same time she was in Budapest, the Hungarians entertained another important visitor, one of their colonial masters from Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev, then in charge of Soviet agriculture, toured Hungary for three weeks ‘studying the achieve- ments and the results of our reforms’, said Miklós Németh, one of the officials who showed him around. ‘He said then that . . . he saw a lot in the Hungarian example that he would like to see in the Soviet Union.’1

  From the Soviet perspective Hungary appeared to be a positive signpost towards sensibly managed transformation. ‘It wasn’t a basket case like Poland,’ one of Gorbachev’s advisers said. ‘It was stable, prosperous and didn’t look like it was going to blow up at any moment.’ But Hungary, and especially Budapest, displayed surface gloss that tried to hide deep-rooted problems and national neuroses. A visitor from the West, who in the mid-1980s strolled with a local down Budapest’s principal shopping street, Vaci utca, would have been surprised by the Hungarian’s reaction. First there would have been a measure of pride - even, for example, that some of the shops were filled with a few luxurious Western items that were unobtainable in Prague, Warsaw or Berlin, let alone in Moscow or Bucharest. Then, most likely, would follow the complaints, similar to those that were heard elsewhere in the socialist bloc: housing was so scarce that divorced couples were forced to live together for months and years before they could find somewhere else; young couples waited seven years or more to find a home. Women had a tough time under communism - in Hungary as in all the countries of ‘actually existing socialism’. There was supposed to be full employment, so practically all women worked. But on average in Hungary in the 1980s women were paid 30 per cent less than men for doing the same jobs - on the factory floor or the office. Then they had another job. On the whole East European countries were traditional male-dominated societies where men performed few domestic tasks and women ran the home.

  The regime was proud of ‘gulyás communism’, as the country’s successful and talented spin doctors called it. Hungary had begun experimenting with a New Economic Mechanism in 1968, but it did not take off until the early 1970s. It conducted the most liberal and decentralised foreign trade policy of any COMECON country. Collective farms were given substantial amounts of freedom to run themselves. Farmers were encouraged to set up their own plots of land on the side and take the produce they grew to local markets. Predictably, given the freedom, within a few years almost as much was grown on these small privately farmed plots as in all the big co-operatives. A few of the monopolies were broken up. Factory managers were given more autonomy and told to make profits - previously considered a dirty word - rather than simply meet arbitrarily set production targets. Some commodity prices were linked to world markets and no longer to the unrealistically fixed prices in the Five Year Plans. Some privately owned shops and small business were permitted - restaurants, clothing stores, service suppliers like electricians.

  The predictable result was an explosion in the size of a second, ‘black’ economy outside the state that was never officially acknowledged. This was not only tolerated but encouraged by the regime. Naturally, the black economy operated much more efficiently than the official one. In the mid-1980s around 80,000 artisans working privately were meeting nearly two-thirds of the demands for all kinds of services from plumbing to lap-dancing. The economists behind the NEM said that without these reforms the entire Communist system would disintegrate into poverty - ‘reproducing shortage’, as the best-known of them, János Kornai, said. The NEM had many admirers in the West. More circumspectly, it had growing support in countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, whose regimes had turned their faces against reforms. As Honecker maintained: ‘Capitalism and communism were as different and incompatible as fire and water.’ The GDR, he said, ‘was not going to be a field for experimentation’.

  One big problem faced the NEM: it did not work. Hungarian prosperity was an illusion, as all the moonlighting builders, taxi drivers, electricians and cooks desperately doing their second and third jobs to make ends meet knew well from personal experience. ‘Every time visiting journalists or academics came here telling us what a success story Hungary was, we would try to explain the truth patiently and their eyes would glaze over,’ Sándor Zsindely, a research chemist at an institute in Budapest during the 1980s, said. ‘It was not the story they wanted to hear. They thought we were just miserable Central Europeans who enjoyed our melancholy.’2 The reforms failed because they ended in the worst of both worlds. Hungary had the constraints of communism without the benefits of capitalism. The Party was still not prepared to surrender the commanding heights of the economy, because that risked losing power politically. Hungary was forced to adopt the same methods of staying afloat as its neighbours: borrowing on a huge scale. By the mid-1980s it had foreign debts of around US$ 18.5 billion - more than US$200 for each Hungarian, not far short of the average person’s annual income. The country had the highest per capita debt in Europe.

  On the morning of 8 February 1986 a group of around 400 people took a walk near the village of Nagymáros in one of the most picturesque parts of Hungary. It was a freezing cold day, but this was a popular route taken at all times of the year to see the glorious Danube Bend where, fifteen kilometres north of Budapest, the majestic river sweeps through a narrow valley in the Carpathian Basin. The views here are stunning but these hikers were not there that day to see one of the natural wonders of Europe. They were there to protest against a joint plan by the Hungarian and Czech governments that would forever destroy the beauty of this bucolic spot. Soon after ten a.m. the marchers reached a quiet glade on the riverbank that was cordoned off by wire. This was where work was scheduled to begin on a huge new hydroelectric dam - a great feat of engineering, the two governments explained, one of those gigantic projects with which the Communists proposed to serve humanity by taming nature.

  As they approached the cordon the demonstrators saw they were not alone. Dozens of riot police confronted them wielding plastic shields and truncheons. János Várgha, the leader of the group, a bearded, forty-three-year-old former biologist turned science journalist, remonstrated with the officer in charge that this was ‘a peaceful nature walk, we are doing nothing against the law, nothing political’. But this was ignored. The police were under orders to break up the demonstration. They fired tear gas grenades and beat up around thirty of the protesters. When Várgha returned to Budapest he heard that he had lost his job on the magazine Buvar.

  But if the regime thought it had silenced protest against the US$ 3 billion Nagymáros dam project, it was forced to think again. V�
�rgha’s Danube Circle gained publicity around the world. In Hungary it attracted overwhelming support even from people who did not care about the environment and thought - as the majority in the West did during the 1980s - that the Greens were kooks. Within weeks more than 10,000 people signed a petition calling for the two regimes to halt the project. This was an extraordinary number in a country where, for thirty years, since the revolution against the Soviets, people had been careful not to push at the limits under which they were constrained by ‘gulyás communism’.

  The idea of damming the Danube had first been suggested in Stalin’s time. It fitted with the big Soviet dreams of turning small agricultural countries into ‘nations of iron and steel’. The plan was dropped in the 1950s but resurrected in the 1970s and the two governments signed an agreement to go ahead with the project in 1979. It involved building an enormous and complex system of dams, reservoirs and canals along a 200-kilometre stretch of the Danube that runs through Slovakia and Hungary. The Danube is a relatively slow-moving river at this point, but that did not deter the Planners. Twice a day water would be dammed at Gabikovo, a plant on the Czechoslovak side, creating a swell in the river. Water would also be diverted into a twenty-kilometre- long canal on the Czech side, leading to a second dam at Nagymáros, on the Hungarian side, where there would be a huge energy-creating turbine. The main attraction for the two Communist governments was that most of the cost would be met by the Austrian government, which insisted on taking 60 per cent of the energy. It was a deeply cynical move from the Austrians, who a couple of years earlier had planned a dam further upstream at Hainburg, but were stopped from proceeding by their own environmental campaigners. The two Communist regimes imagined they would benefit from hard currency, even though their own energy supplies would be increased only moderately - in Hungary’s case by just 5 per cent.3