Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Just because glasnost was prevailing in Moscow did not mean it would apply in Berlin. Chief Party ideologist Kurt Hager made that plain: ‘Just because your neighbour changes the wallpaper in his home does not mean you have to redecorate yours,’ he said. Some Soviet newspapers and periodicals were banned in East Germany - for example, the magazine Sputnik - because Honecker reckoned their support for Gorbachev-style reforms was subversive. He would not allow Party spokesmen in public speeches to utter the words perestroika or glasnost. In January 1988 Honecker laid on a large shoot at his hunting lodge in Thuringia for the diplomatic circuit. It was an annual event and usually a formal occasion. At one point he took the Soviet Ambassador, Vyacheslav Kochemasov, aside for a word in private. According to the Ambassador he said:I want to tell you that from now on we are not going to use the word perestroika and I want you to understand why and then you are welcome to tell everyone who needs to hear it in the Soviet Union. Perestroika is a step back from Leninism and we . . . are categorically opposed to this kind of revisionism in the way we interpret Soviet history. We are against blackening and undermining the achievements of the Soviet people. There are some matters we can’t agree with. One can’t say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, as your journal New Times did recently. That is why we will not allow the translation of that into German . . . We are against destroying everything that millions of people, including those in the GDR, have believed in over many years.5

  Censorship of books became more heavy-handed and suspect writers and artists were kept under increasingly tight surveillance. The Stasi doubled the number of agents watching the novelist Stefan Heym, who had fled to the US in the Nazi years and who out of conviction chose to return to the East rather than West after the war. Occasionally, on cold days, he would take cups of coffee out to them on a tray. His concern for their welfare ceased after he discovered that his cleaner was an agent paid to inform on him and was stealing his manuscripts so that the Stasi could photocopy them. Writers had been used to an elaborate system of censorship in East Germany. Like elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, nothing could be published without the regime’s permission. The state owned the country’s seventy-eight publishing houses. But in the GDR literature became part of the Plan. Some writers could do fabulously well, as their royalties depended on how many copies of a work were produced, not on the numbers sold. Favoured authors would be awarded enormous print runs for their often turgid works. Bizarrely, writers whose works were banned in the East were often permitted to publish them in the West - as long as they paid three-quarters of the royalties and advances to the state. The government decided how many books would be published years ahead, and which ones. This did not improve the topicality of the books produced. But worse, the East German system under which each writer before publication was assigned a ‘helper’, something between an editor and a mentor - and often a Stasi agent - who would ‘assist’ the work through to the printing press. The structure encouraged an insidious form of self-censorship described by the poet and novelist Günter Kunert:As authors we were always trying to be ahead of the censor, to second-guess his instinct about what was ‘in’ and what was ‘off ’. That means we put ourselves in the position of the censor . . . After a couple of decades of doing this, we got so used to this second opinion lurking in our own heads that we considered it our own. We believed we were writing in freedom, and under our own influence, but we weren’t. That was the most odious aspect of the system - it allowed us to believe we were free and we wanted to believe [it] too. So we played along with our own oppression.

  Amongst the words the censors now found problematic were ‘Soviet’, ‘glasnost’, ‘reform’ and ‘environment’.6

  Honecker made an agreement with the West Germans when he was in Bonn which had far-reaching implications. Soon his aides and the Stasi began to realise it was a mistake. Since the Berlin Wall was built, almost nobody except the people most highly vetted by the security forces, or the prisoners sold to the Federal Republic for profit, was allowed to travel to the West, even on short visits. Now, for the first time, Honecker relaxed the rules and allowed older people who had close relatives in West Germany to see their families. It was a slow and laborious process getting the visas authorised, but it was possible and soon it caused the regime serious problems. Now there were two classes of East Germans: those who could leave, even temporarily, and those who could not. Talk of travelling ‘over there’ became the subject of most East German dinner tables and the dreams of millions of people were focused on leaving their country.

  Early in the morning of 8 December 1987, the Czech police and officers from the StB security service began ringing Kampa Park, the charming little open space in central Prague directly below Charles Bridge. For the last five years on this date there had been rallies attended by thousands of young people to commemorate the death of John Lennon. Apart from football matches, they had been the largest public gatherings in Czechoslovakia since the Prague Spring. They had attracted more than five thousand people. The last two of the events, organised by the John Lennon Peace Club, had begun as festivals where the late musician’s songs were played. They turned rowdy later, though, and were broken up by riot police who had beaten some of the fans and made scores of arrests. This year the regime had considered banning the rally. But the Lennonists, as they called themselves, had become well known in the West, so the government let it go ahead, ordering the group to ensure that it would not become a political demonstration. The Communists reckoned they knew how to counter groups of young people whom they regarded as hippies, malcontents and assorted pacifists with a devotion to a dead pop star.

  By early in the afternoon about 1,500 people had gathered in Kampa Park and Beatles music was being played on the loudspeaker system, as well as a few forbidden songs by the Czech composer Karel Kryl. Some people were dancing, despite the bitterly chill wind. The police took no action. A few were even seen singing along with the Lennon tunes. Then one of the organisers of the rally, Ota Veverka, a writer, musician and an original signatory of the 1977 Charter, stood on a platform to speak. He read out, as he put it, ‘a petition against nuclear weapons, against the “fraternal army” temporarily stationed in our country (though temporary . . . doesn’t seem to end), and against other measures that I don’t like. And I guess the rest of us don’t like them either.’ He was quickly surrounded by knots of people eager to see the petition. The police took this as their cue. They arrested Veverka and about a dozen other activists, beat up a few more and declared the rally over.7

  It was not strange that the most vocal protest in Czechoslovakia came from disaffected youth and was expressed through rock music. A decade earlier The Plastic People of the Universe had been the catalyst for disaffection. Samizdat literature was read by a handful of intellectuals in Prague and Bratislava. In ten years of underground activity, and with relatively wide coverage in the Western media, Charter 77 had gained small numbers of new supporters. By the end of 1988 only around a thousand people were brave enough to attach their names to the document and attract the attention of the StB. The Chartists held a demonstration in Wenceslas Square two days after the John Lennon rally in Kampa Park. It was attended by around 200 people. Compared with Poland, where the Church had become almost an independent state within the State, or even East Germany, where a few Lutheran pastors had begun in halting fashion to voice opposition, Czechoslovakia was an irreligious society. This was partly historic. Church attendance had been falling off since the Enlightenment. Partly it was because the Czech regime since the war had been successful at suppressing, harassing and corrupting established religion.

  The majority Catholic Church was viciously persecuted in the 1950s. Parishes simply ceased to exist. More than 10,000 priests and monks were thrown into labour camps and many were never seen again. The Catholics allowed the Party to dictate who could be a priest. Those who preached sermons which the authorities disliked were sacked. The Vatican in the late 1970s named Father Miloslav Vlk as Bisho
p of Hradec Králové, a traditionally important centre of pilgrimage eighty kilometres east of Prague. The regime vetoed him because in his parish he had attracted too many young people to the Church. For good measure they withdrew his licence to preach and he was reduced to finding work as a milkman. The clergy in the Protestant churches were riddled with police collaborators and agents. Religion played little part in life in the Czech lands, though slightly more in overwhelmingly Catholic Slovakia. But even there the Church seemed crushed. With neither a political nor a religious voice, young people especially found a way to express their discontent through music.

  After twenty years of ‘normalisation’, Czechs learned to be afraid. There was plenty to be scared about. The human rights activist Jií Wolf served three and a half years in jail for Charter 77 activities. Almost immediately after he was released he wrote a letter to the Austrian Embassy in Prague about poor prison conditions in Czechoslovakia. He was arrested again, charged with subversion and sentenced to a further six years. Typically, Czechs resorted to black humour in response. Protests against the harsh jail term recalled a joke in The Good Soldier Švejk: ‘I never imagined they’d sentence an innocent man to ten years . . . sentencing an innocent man to five years, that I’ve heard of, but ten? That’s a bit much.’8

  Joking apart, Czechs heeded the warnings and generally they were obedient. As Havel - who proudly boasted that he was a Lennonist - pointed out, two decades of forgetting had created apathy and hypocrisy:The number of people who sincerely believe everything that the official propaganda says . . . is smaller than it has ever been. But the number of hypocrites rises steadily; up to a point that every citizen is, in fact, forced to be one . . . Seldom . . . has a social system offered scope so openly and so brazenly to people willing to support anything so long as it brings them some advantage; to unprincipled and spineless men prepared to do anything in their craving for power and personal gain; to born lackeys . . . It is not surprising that so many public and influential positions are occupied, more than ever before, by notorious careerists, opportunists, charlatans, and men of dubious records; in short, by typical collaborators.9

  The placemen in the regime were still relatively unconcerned by the John Lennon Club, and the other similar groups with names like the Jazz Section and The Society for a Merrier Present. But they were worried that Gustáv Husák was starting to lose his grip. A group of hardliners had long been plotting to oust him as Party leader on the grounds, they said, that seventy-five-year-old Husák was showing a fatal weakness against opposition. Rumours were spread that he was beginning to favour the bottle too much and was exhausted. They made their move soon after the Kampa Park rally and the Charter 77 demonstration that followed. Husák made no effort to keep his job. He admitted he was tired and went with grace. On 17 December he was ‘promoted’ to the largely ceremonial post of State President.

  When Czechs learned who his successor was they were aghast. Miloš Jakes was a slightly younger version (he was sixty-five) of Husak in his Stalinist prime. A dark-haired, pasty-faced, burly former electrician, he had been among the hardliners who hated the reforms of the Prague Spring, had requested the Kremlin to send troops to invade his country, and had been responsible for humiliating Dubek. He had been the witchfinder-general in charge of the purges after 1968. He performed the task with relish. Around half a million Communists were thrown out of the Party; thousands of academics, teachers, civil servants and journalists were sacked. He personally supervised many of the interviews in which people were required to sign loyalty pledges to the State and to the Party. If he suspected hesitation, he ensured the sceptic lost his or her job. He was a poor public speaker, mumbling and bumbling through laboured speeches full of jargon. Some officials who worked for him held his intellectual capacities in contempt. A widespread joke in Communist Party circles in Prague was that ‘Jakeš would fail a lie detector test if he began a sentence with the words I think.’

  The men around him who engineered his succession were brighter, but also in their mid-sixties and implicated in the brutal suppression of the dreams of 1968. Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal was a known thug, with close links to the KGB. Vasil Bil’ak, a crucial Party power-broker for the last twenty-five years, firmly believed that Gorbachev-style ‘restructuring’ was a betrayal of communism. The US Senator John Glenn, who led an American delegation to Prague, asked him why the Czechs would not emulate the Soviet reforms. He replied: ‘You Americans used to accuse us of being Soviet puppets, of slavishly following the Soviet model. Now you accuse us of not following the Soviet model closely enough.’ Ideology chief Jan Fojtík warned that Party members would face expulsion if they raised the issue of the Soviet invasion: ‘I am sure we can establish a dialogue with reasonable people,’ he said. ‘But there can be no dialogue with those who set out to destroy our society.’10

  The Soviets wanted to be rid of Husák, but were stunned by the rise of Jakeš, who they knew was no friend of their new thinking. But Gorbachev’s team did nothing to prevent it - proof, an adviser of the Soviet leader said, that he had lost interest in his East European empire.

  The sharks who circled around János Kádár in Budapest six months after Husák was dethroned were altogether different. They were a younger generation from the Party elite, impatient that the old man was keeping them from power - and they believed that communism was doomed. Unlike Poland, where revolution came from below, from the workers’ movement Solidarity, in Hungary change came from the top. The retreat from communism was led by Communists. Kádár had dominated Hungary for three decades, but he was starting to lose the grudging respect he had earned even from many of his opponents. Gulyás communism had been daring and original in its time. But its defects were now clear for all to see.

  Kádár had been an authoritarian figure, though he was a relatively benign despot by Cold War standards. He lived modestly with his wife Mária, and had not been corrupted by gracious country homes full of servants, foreign bank accounts and Savile Row suits. He had never let a personality cult develop around himself. It was hard to find a picture of him in Budapest, and the Party newspaper Népszabadság (A Free People) seldom carried photographs of him. But he was visibly decaying and started to look like an old Stalinist, which in reality he had never been. He was forgetful, repeating himself at meetings and losing his thread in long rambling monologues. Some among those who worked for him felt embarrassed for him and wished he would voluntarily stand down. At night he could barely sleep, racked by guilt, said some of his friends, by his role in the brutal crackdown after 1956, and particularly his decision to hang his then rival, Imre Nagy. He was not so senile that he was unable to see his reform vision was failing. His answer was to return to the orthodox and familiar path - at least on economic policies. He feared that Gorbachev was making serious mistakes and would drive communism to its grave. In the summer of 1987, a group of economists and Communist theoreticians presented him with a package of deeper reforms. He vetoed the ideas and expelled from the Party the advisers who dared to suggest them.

  Younger men thought the only way they could save their own posi- tions was by removing Kádár. A majority of Party members were behind them. But bringing down an institution was a hazardous and difficult process. The logical replacement was the Prime Minister, Károly Grósz, a middle-of-the-road technocrat aged fifty-seven, a Party man through and through. A short, wiry man, he was usually cautious and pragmatic, but he could be ruthless. His chief accomplice - though they were to fall out spectacularly soon - was chief spokesman for the reform wing of the Party, Imre Pozsgay, an ebullient, jolly, fat and brash charmer who even then was telling Western journalists that in a few years’ time he thought that Hungary would be ‘like Austria - or perhaps Sweden’. This was a heretical belief at the time. But even though the Party rank and file agreed that it was time for Kádár to go, the assassins needed help and a nudge from a broad.11

  Grósz had regarded Kádár as a father figure for many years, but he told him
early in 1988 that it was time for him to retire because of his age, ‘in the interests of the Party.’ Kádár was not prepared to listen. Grósz then dispatched an intermediary to Moscow, Gyula Thürmer, the Hungarian Party’s leading specialist on the Soviet Union. Thürmer had a short interview with Gorbachev. Though he respected Kádár as an elder statesman of communism, the Soviet leader thought it was now time for him to go and he wished to encourage the reformers in Budapest. But Gorbachev did not want to be seen to interfere. Gone were the days, he continually said, when the Soviet Union should pick and choose who were the leaders of other countries. He told Thürmer, diplomatically, that Kádár was a distinguished man ‘who should know what he should do in such a historic situation’. He added that ‘this is an entirely unofficial suggestion’. When Thürmer returned to Budapest, Kádár asked him what the Russians had said to him and he reported the exact words Gorbachev used. ‘He heard my words without comment, ’ said Thürmer.

  The Soviet President, Gromyko, visited Budapest at the end of February. Kádár told him that he planned to stay in power until 1990. When Gorbachev’s advisers heard that they began to warn him of ‘grave risks of serious . . . convulsions’ in Hungary if Kadar clung on to power. The Soviet Communist Party’s chief ideologist, Vadim Medve- dev, told Gorbachev that Kádár should be persuaded to go and Grósz supported as a replacement, but it must all be done ‘within the accepted norms of the relations between the two parties’. The Soviet Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, passed through Budapest in April. Kádár asked him what he should do about his future and Ryzhkov replied point-blank, ‘You should retire.’ Kádár replied balefully: ‘You too say that?’ Grósz, exasperated, went public in April and spoke of ‘the biological laws’ that affected elderly leaders. Late in the evening of 2 May Kádár summoned Grósz to his office and said he was willing to retire. Yet he continually delayed. He did not step down without direct Soviet involvement. The KGB’s Deputy Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, arranged it. He had been a diplomat/intelligence officer in Hungary during the 1956 Rebellion and knew the Hungarian leader from those painful and violent days. He worked out a deal that gave Kádár a newly created figurehead position - Party President - if he went graciously. Even then Kádár tried to cling on. At a Party meeting on 20 May, in a giant trade union building in central Budapest, he made a long ram- bling statement justifying his actions. He was heard in silence. Grósz took over from him as Party leader that evening. At the end Kádár stayed in the hall, talking to nobody, waiting for his wife to drive him home. It was a pathetic finale to an extraordinary and dramatic career.12