Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  HAVEL IN JAIL

  Prague, Monday 16 January 1989

  THE CZECH COMRADES were less gloomy about their prospects. They could see no reason to surrender power. They were bracing themselves for some opposition on the streets at the start of the year, and were making the usual preparations to handle it. The regular police, the militia and the secret service, the StB, were placed on high alert throughout the Czech capital and were warned by the Interior Ministry that they might have to deal with ‘the enemy . . . rowdy elements, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries’.1

  The regime knew that plans had been laid by Charter 77 and other groups to commemorate the suicide of Jan Palach. Twenty years ago this day, the Prague Economics School student stood on the steps outside the Czechoslovak National Theatre in Wenceslas Square. At precisely 4 p.m. he reached for a bottle inside the plastic bag he was carrying, poured petrol over himself and set his coat alight with a match. Three days later, with 85 per cent of his body covered by burns, he died, in agony, at a Prague hospital. Aged twenty, he had left behind a note explaining that he could see no other way to protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia five months earlier than to immolate himself. By a few brave voices since then he had been considered a martyr, but the regime regarded him as a non-person. His ashes had been removed from the cemetery outside Prague where they had originally been interred, replaced by the remains of an old-age pensioner entirely unconnected with the dead young man. Opposition groups announced they would mark the entire week from 15 to 21 January 1989 ‘Palach Week’ and would organise a series of events to commemorate the anniversary of his death.

  The name Jan Palach had barely been mentioned in the official media for two decades. Now the regime decided that it was time directly to confront his memory. On 12 January the Communist Party newspaper, Rudé Pravo (The Red Way), described his suicide as ‘a senseless, tragic act’ and declared that all commemorative rallies or demonstrations would be banned. Two days later the paper went on the attack again: ‘Dissidents who try to put at risk the lives of our youth will not be listened to,’ it said. ‘We shall not allow the republic to be threatened.’ Most Czechs, unconcerned with politics, did not know until then that any protests had been organised for an anniversary that had generally been forgotten. Opposition at the time, as one dissident admitted, ‘numbered a very few thousand throughout the country on the fringes, a few hundred at the centre, and fewer than a dozen in any position of leadership’. The unprecedented publicity ensured that there would be crowds turning up at the rallies, even if it was to see protesters being beaten up by the police.

  It was a mistake to draw attention to Palach Week, as Communist leaders like the increasingly loathed Milo Jakes - usually nicknamed Dumpling Face because of his heavy build - confessed later. But it was intended to show where power resided in People’s Czechoslovakia. In the past year the regime had sent contradictory signals to the opposi tion. Two months earlier Jakes had allowed Alexander Dubek to receive an honorary degree from the University of Bologna. Over the past twenty years Dubek had maintained a discreet silence on politics, working for most of that period as a junior official in the Slovak Forestry Commission. In Italy he broke his silence for the first time, with a passionate defence of his own actions during the Prague Spring and spoke of the ‘incomparable moral failure’ of the Czech regime since then. The government said that it was only with reluctance that it allowed Dubek to return home. It made a firm decision then to crack down on dissent. On Human Rights Day, 10 December 1988, the Prague Party boss, Miroslav tpán, personally supervised police as they sprayed protesters in the centre of the city with water cannons. ‘There will be no dialogue,’ he declared.2

  At the first of the Palach commemorative demonstrations on 15 January, around four and a half thousand people gathered in Wenceslas Square, far more than had shown themselves at an overtly political demonstration since 1968. It was an entirely peaceful protest. Riot police charged the demonstrators, arrested ninety-one people and beat up many more. There were protests from abroad, as expected, but it was the reaction of Czechs that surprised the dissident groups. In the past, most people, apathetic and ‘in a death-like torpor’ as a Charter 77 activist put it, would have left the scene to keep out of harm’s way. Now many uninvolved passers-by protested against the brutality of the police.

  The next day a smaller group returned to Wenceslas Square to lay flowers at the spot where Palach had set fire to himself. Václav Havel was there and described what happened: ‘I decided to stand on the sidewalk and observe the ceremony on the sidelines so that if the police intervened I would be able to deliver a report to friends and the foreign media,’ he said. ‘The police did intervene, but so clumsily that it aroused the interest of passers-by and immediately mushroomed into a large spontaneous demonstration. I watched the whole thing from a distance, fascinated, although I knew that sooner or later they could arrest me. And then I walked away from Wenceslas Square, to prepare my report. They arrested me on my way home.’

  There were demonstrations for the next four days, all violently broken up by the police. More than five hundred people were arrested and half of them tried, mostly for hooliganism or disturbing the peace. Ota Veverka of the John Lennon Peace Club was sentenced to a year in jail. Charter 77 spokesman Alexander Vondra, who managed to lay three daffodil blossoms in honour of Palach before his arrest, received a suspended sentence and a fine of about one hundred dollars. Havel was charged with ‘inciting public unrest and resisting the authorities in connection with a proscribed demonstration’. He was sent to jail for nine months. The protests from foreign governments and human rights groups abroad could safely be ignored. It was harder to dismiss the petitions calling for Havel’s release at home, from people who would formerly have kept silent, like official writers’ organisations and the Actors’ Union. More than four thousand people signed the main petition, an unheard-of number for a protest of this kind in Czechoslovakia. ‘The regime clearly had not been expecting this and did not know how to respond,’ Havel said. ‘It’s not a problem to lock up individual dissidents, but locking up all the famous actors in the country? That was something they no longer dared to do.’

  On this occasion the government gave Havel national publicity as a ‘troublemaker’ in an effort to discredit him. There were profiles in the press of the jailbird intellectual, emphasising his privileged upbringing and wealth. They did not have the effect intended. Most Czechs had never heard of him before. Now they knew who he was and he became established as a daring anti-Communist. ‘I was a rather special prisoner, ’ he said. ‘I was strictly isolated from the others and under strict surveillance, but nonetheless enjoying very circumspect treatment. Compared with my previous stints in jail, this was almost like a holiday. Among other things I was in a cell with two handpicked communists who had been locked up for many years for economic crimes and were afraid to speak to me at all for fear of making their own situation worse.’3

  The regime was satisfied that its show of strength had taught the opposition a lesson and dealt with Václav Havel. When, at a West German Embassy party, the ideology chief Jan Fojtik was asked about the playwright by an American official he was told: ‘Havel’s morally insignificant and has no popular appeal. Communism [here] will prevail.’4

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE ROUND TABLE

  Warsaw, Monday 16 January 1989

  AROUND THE SAME TIME that Václav Havel was arrested in Prague, General Jaruzelski was receiving the kind of rough treatment in Poland that he had not encountered for years. The General was unused to being insulted, least of all by stalwart Communists of a certain age who usually understood how to respect rank. But today a session of the Polish Communist Party began where veteran Party members harangued him for showing weakness against the enemy and for abandoning the cause of socialism. There was an unwritten rule within the Polish Communist Party that Jaruzelski would not receive the kind of personal criticism a
civilian politician might face. Deference would be shown to him in public. That was ignored when the country’s most senior Communists met at the vast, ugly white headquarters of the Polish United Workers’ Party on the corner of New World Street and Jerusalem Avenue in the centre of Warsaw. Jaruzelski was determined to start talks with Solidarity and to reach a settlement that might ensure industrial peace in Polish factories. For the last three months Solidarity had been ready to begin negotiations. As Wałesa said with Churchillian echoes, ‘I’d be prepared to talk with the devil himself if it would do some good for Poland.’ Now the General faced a showdown with Communists who wanted to block any deal with the opposition that would surrender Party power.1

  Jaruzelski and the Prime Minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, tried to explain the power-sharing arrangement they had in mind. A majority of the Party leadership seemed doubtful. ‘There was a lot of opposition, ’ said Dr Janusz Reykowski, a psychology professor in Warsaw and a prominent Communist who had been adviser to the Interior Ministry for twenty-five years. ‘Many people in the Party thought that Solidarity was a group of foreign agents and adventurers.’ The key issue was the legalisation of free trade unions. The General said that it was impossible to keep the economy stable without Solidarity, or maintain the kind of untrammelled power the Communists had possessed for decades. Then, speaking from martial law experience, he said the union could not be wiped out. ‘We do not have a choice but to start these talks,’ he said. The Prime Minister said there would be ‘revolutionary upheaval if the Party clung on to outdated ideas’. Several times he repeated that ‘we are not dreaming about giving up power . . . we are talking here about arranging to retain power’.2

  By now well over half of the fast-dwindling membership of the Communist Party were over fifty years old. The leadership comprised nearly all men in their mid-sixties, loyalists whose best days had been those of ‘socialist discipline’ before Solidarity was born. As Jerzy Wiatr, a political scientist at Warsaw University and a leading figure in Polish communism, admitted: ‘We could have succeeded in a confrontation with the intellectuals, but when [we] found ourselves in conflict with the workers, the whole mental house of cards began falling apart.’ Many Party members did not understand Solidarity, a loose, apparently undisciplined force entirely alien to them.3

  One of the main leaders of the Cement Group of Poland’s Party diehards was Alfred Miodowicz, head of the official government-backed trade union movement, entirely an adjunct of the Communist Party. Usually a bluff, cheery, avuncular figure fond of chewing his pipe and of a quiet life, he was now in a sombre and disturbed mood. He had remembered what had happened to his organisation, the OPZZ, in the first year and four months of Solidarity’s existence in 1980-81 when there had been competition between the two organisations. Solidarity had been triumphant, gaining almost ten million members, while his union and the Party were almost wiped out. Worse would happen if Solidarity was legalised, he said.

  Miodowicz had a personal motive for wishing to scupper talks with Solidarity. At the end of November he had appeared in a live television debate against Lech Wałesa. It was the first time most Poles had seen the Solidarity leader since 1981, and many people had forgotten what he looked like. Immediately, he seemed like a refreshing, encouraging and uplifting sight. Miodowicz was an experienced performer, accustomed to appearing on TV. But Wałesa trounced him. While the Communist spoke in jargon and statistics, Wałesa adopted his most bluff and charming ‘man of the people’ style. From the moment he said ‘The West goes by car - and we’re on a bike’ the entire audience was on his side. Miodowicz had no reply, looking humiliated. Now he stared at Jaruzelski pointedly as he said that it was dangerous to hand more propaganda weapons to a popular opponent who had plenty of charisma.4

  After more than ten hours of heated argument spread over two days, Jaruzelski finally insisted that a decision be made. He and his advisers knew the vote would be close. Some of his aides were convinced he would lose. He tried a risky new tactic. Suddenly, just before the vote was taken on legalising Solidarity, he threatened to resign if it went against him. ‘I could see no other way than to blackmail them.’ He persuaded the Interior Minister, General Kiszczak, his Defence Minister, General Florian Siwicki and Rakowski to resign too - ‘together, we represent a real force,’ he said. The General demanded an immediate vote of confidence in himself. If the Communists wanted to try governing in a constitutional crisis without the most powerful members of the regime, they would be welcome to try. The General won, overwhelmingly. The next day he announced that Round Table talks with Solidarity would begin on 6 February, at which he hoped a grand settlement of a long-running Polish crisis would be reached. It was the day the old Party died.5

  The talks began at the elaborate white-fronted, neo-classical Radziwill Palace in Warsaw’s Old Town on a blowy, grey and freezing morning. The Pope sent a message offering prayers for the success of the negotiators. Before they started he had explained to a visitor at the Vatican the dilemma that had to be solved in Poland: ‘The Government has all the physical power but no influence, and the opposition has influence but no physical power.’ The dissident Adam Michnik, a central figure in the negotiations, put it another way. Both sides were weak, and that is why they had to compromise. ‘The authorities are too weak to trample on us. And we are too weak to topple them,’ he said.6

  There were in fact eight tables - and they were doughnut-shaped, with an empty space at the centre. From this day Round Tables - shaped to reduce friction between negotiators and suggesting equality - became the symbols of revolution in Eastern Europe. Over the next two months various teams of Solidarity activists would painstakingly negotiate a package of detailed agreements with the generals and Party officials in ninety-two sessions of talks. There were talks on working practices on the shop floor, safety in industrial plants, health and education. But all the main deals about future elections, guaranteeing rights for Solidarity and the future shape of a democratic Poland, were made at five highly secret talks at a villa in Magdalenka, a small town twenty-five kilometres south-west of Warsaw, between Kiszczak and Wałesa. The plush house, set amidst woods and protected by round-the-clock guards, was used as a recreation centre by the SB.

  The fact that they were talking at all stunned even those Solidarity members who had worked hard towards bringing the negotiations about. When Adam Michnik arrived at the opening ceremony of the negotiations he had an uncomfortable moment. ‘To get to the debate room one had to go upstairs and there was General Kiszczak welcoming the guests,’ he said.

  I managed to hide in the bathroom so as not to be seen by anybody shaking hands with the former chief of police. I was afraid my wife would kick me out of the house. So I found a hiding place, waited for several minutes . . . but as I emerged Kiszczak was still there offering his hand to shake. Lights, camera, action. This was the way I lost my political virginity. Only two and a half years before I had been let out of prison, and there were my colleagues, friends from the Underground. I was aware that [something] historic was going on. The democratic opposition was finally taking a step over the threshold of legality.7

  The public was awakened from apathy. Solidarity had secured an important concession before the Round Table talks began that the union would receive equal access to the official state media. Every night on television Poles could see the Solidarity leaders patiently explaining what had happened at that day’s negotiations. Men like Geremek, Mazowiecki and Kuro looked intelligent, decent and patriotic, not as the ‘traitors’ and ‘hooligans’ official propaganda had portrayed them. Geremek was the figure Solidarity fielded most often, a quiet, serious, polite and patient former professor of medieval history whose mild manner was surprisingly persuasive. He became a household name simply for stating straightforward, reasonable opinions shared by the overwhelming majority of people.

  The Communists were equally surprised by the calibre of the oppon- ents they were dealing with. Krzysztof Dubiski, the Interior Ministe
r Kiszczak’s private secretary, said: ‘The authorities eventually saw that the people facing them were not enemies or foreign agents but normal people who were thinking in terms of the national interest.’ In fact, the regime knew almost everything about the Solidarity negotiators. Kiszczak may have turned himself into a reform Communist, but he was still a secret policeman by nature and profession. He authorised an eavesdropping operation on all their phones and placed listening devices in all the rooms used by the Solidarity team and by the Church’s observers at the talks.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SHOOT TO KILL

  East Berlin, Sunday 5 February 1989

  IT WAS A CLEAR but bitterly cold night,—3°C. Ice lay on the ground as two young East German men walked through the Treptow district of Berlin, laughing and joking with one another. Nobody looking at them could have guessed the desperate, bold and foolhardy deed they were about to perform. Chris Gueffroy was a twenty-year-old barman. In three months he was due to be conscripted into the army for compulsory two-year national service. He was not politically active, but he hated the idea of being ordered to join the armed forces. He used to watch a great deal of West German television, where he could learn about the outside world, and his dream was to travel. Above all he wanted to see America. His old friend, Christian Gaudian, had recently heard an extraordinary claim from an acquaintance who was a conscript with the border patrol in Thuringia. He was told that, secretly, the regime had abandoned the ‘shoot to kill’ policy under which guards were under strict instructions to fire on anybody who tried to cross the Berlin Wall illegally.