Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

  Warsaw, Tuesday 4 April 1989

  IN POLAND THE FORMER JAILERS had been talking with their former prisoners for nearly two months. At last a historic deal was struck between Lech Wałesa and General Jaruzelski which paved the way for the first democratic elections in the Soviet bloc for nearly forty-five years. It was hard and often painful going and at the end neither side left the Round Table entirely satisfied. But both the Solidarity leader and the Communist Party boss knew they could sell the agreement to their sceptical followers.

  The deal did not seem like a surrender by the regime. It legalised Solidarity and recognised the union as an official opposition. This was a victory for the union. But after weeks of haggling the best Wałsa’s team of negotiators were offered was a semi-free election, which on the face of it seemed gerrymandered to ensure that the Communist Party could not lose. Thirty-five per cent of the seats in the Lower House, the Sejm, would be contested freely. The rest would be reserved for the Communists and their allies. The 100 seats in the Upper House, the Senate, would all be elected freely, but the arithmetic suggested that there was no way that Solidarity could win outright. The arrangement was based on the elections that had just been held nine days earlier in the Soviet Union, which had allowed opposition candidates to stand for the first time. That, too, was fixed to guarantee a Communist victory in a Gorbachev-designed Congress of People’s Deputies, though it saw the election of a sizeable group of former dissidents including Andrei Sakharov. Wałsa particularly disliked the part of the deal that established a presidency, specially created with Jaruzelski in mind, who had control of the army and the police. He told Kiszczak that ‘there has to be a more democratic President. A presidency as you suggest would probably end up as a President for life and you could probably only get rid of him by execution . . . We don’t want to end up in a corner worse than Stalinism.’ Yet he eventually agreed, convinced that an imperfect deal was better than no deal. He shrewdly saw further than his advisers the historic possibilities that it could offer Solidarity.1

  The Communist chieftains never imagined that they would lose power. ‘We do not see that as possibly on the horizon,’ Prime Minister Rakowski told the General. ‘We will create a position where we share power with the opposition . . . it would be a ten- to fifteen-year process.’ Jaruzelski was willing to go along with the agreement, though some high-ranking officials counselled caution. Professor Wiatr, the Warsaw University politics professor and influential Party figure, warned: ‘They massively underestimated the calibre of the opposition. They became victims of their own wishful thinking.’2

  Wałsa agreed about the timetable. He was telling supporters that Solidarity would be sharing power ‘at the end of the century’. Bronisław Geremek said that the aim of the Party bosses was to preserve their position. At the negotiating table ‘they used to say, flatly, that they had the power. We could only answer, yes, but don’t forget we are the people and that is why you have come to find us . . . We insisted we would accept limited elections this time, but never again.’3

  Some Solidarity activists, the radicals, accused Wałsa of selling out. Anna Walentynowycz, whose sacking from the Lenin Shipyard nine years earlier was the spark for the Solidarity revolution, was a mar ginalised figure now. But many listened to her when she begged the union not to sign an agreement. ‘Up until the Round Table Communism was a dying corpse,’ she said. A deal with the regime now would bring it back to life. Wałsa pointed out that the Party was still in control of the army and the police, the Russians could invade if they believed their empire was under threat and Poland was surrounded by Communist countries. He repeatedly insisted that Solidarity had to be ‘realistic’.4

  The deal was finally agreed with a shake of the hands between Wałsa and Kiszczak at Magdalenka. A bishop blessed the agreement ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. The Communist secret policeman, a devout atheist and cynic all his life, looked bemused and simply shrugged his shoulders.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE DICTATOR PAYS HIS DEBTS

  Bucharest, Wednesday 12 April 1989

  THE DICTATOR HAD LET IT BE KNOWN that he would be making an important announcement. Romanians were weary of their duty to pay attention to the leader’s grand statements of intent. They invariably went on for an exceedingly long time, were drearily read out in meaningless Marxist-Leninist jargon, and spelled bad news. Nevertheless, if it happened to coincide with the two hours a day that power was switched on in their neighbourhoods, people with TVs watched their sets. This time it really was important - and in a country now so inured to grinding hardship, exceptionally bad news. Ceauscu announced triumphantly that all of Romania’s foreign debt had been cleared, seven months ahead of schedule. Today, the statement said, was a great day for national independence.

  Briefly, some Romanians may have imagined that at last the regime might stock the shelves with food that had been sold to Western Europe to repay the debts. They were wrong. All the exports would continue in the interests of sovereignty so that Romania would remain independent. The tight rationing of meat, eggs, milk, flour, sugar - almost all foodstuffs - would stay in place. Some, according to the statement, might even become stricter in coming months. All the restrictions on using energy would continue. In the ugly and crumbling apartment blocks where most of the people lived, the past winter had been bitterly cold. Hundreds of old people had been found in their beds, wrapped in overcoats but dead from hypothermia. Queues for bread were getting longer; fresh vegetables were almost impossible to find. Now Romanians were told there would be no improvement to living standards. They realised they would never benefit from the sacrifices that they had been forced to make for so many years. ‘That was the most miserable time of all,’ teacher Alex Serban said. ‘And we had to put up with being told we were in a Golden Age. Our hatred of Ceauescu was a national obsession, and hatred of ourselves too for just accepting what he had done to the country as an unalterable fact of life.’1

  The Ceaucus turned Romania’s back on the outside world, and the world ignored Romania. The country was less significant to the West than it had been. The changes in Poland and Hungary, the Soviet Union’s warmer relationship with the US, had made Romania irrelevant to the West’s strategic interests. Ceauescu was no longer welcome in Western capitals and foreign leaders no longer sang his praises. But he was seldom criticised either. Romania was a closed country. The regime rarely permitted Western journalists to visit and little reliable information came out. There were hardly any protests of any kind against the dictatorship, but occasionally they happened and merited brief paragraphs in Western news reports. A few weeks before the announcement about foreign debt, on 2 March the forty-seven-year-old painter Liviu Babe died after setting himself alight in front of a group of Western tourists in Braov, drawing attention to the abuses of the regime. He carried a placard reading ‘Romania = Auschwitz’.

  Romanians are passionate about football and twice matches were a catalyst for rare anti-Ceauescu demonstrations. There were scuffles between the police and a few fans at a local derby between the two big Bucharest teams, Steaua and Dinamo, the previous June. It began as the kind of hooliganism common at soccer matches, but turned into a small anti-government protest. The crowd was quickly dispersed. Several demonstrators were beaten up and arrested. A few months later there was a riot in the centre of Cluj after Romania beat Denmark in a World Cup qualifying match. Wild cheers of joy turned into shouts of ‘Down With Ceauescu’ - words hardly ever heard in Romania.

  The previous March six veteran Communists, who had all in the past held prominent positions in the regime, wrote an open letter to the Party complaining that Ceauescu was ‘betraying socialism’. They were all aged men in their seventies, but they still carried weight as ‘loyal Party members’ as they put it. Two had been former prime ministers, including Gheorghe Apostol, who had originally proposed Ceauescu as Romanian Communist Party
boss. Now they complained about the dictator’s human rights abuses and said that Ceauescu was taking Romania to the brink of disaster. This ‘Letter of the Six’ found its way to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, where it was covered ‘as a statement from Romania’s National Salvation Front’. It had been delivered to the foreign media by Silviu Brucan, one of the most fascinating, if sinister, of all the Romanian Communists.

  Born Saul Bruckner in 1916, he changed his name in his teens - in Romania between the wars it did not help ambitious young men to sound Jewish. He was a gifted and witty journalist, for decades a stern Stalinist. He had close ties to the KGB. When the Communists took power after the war, Brucan became editor of the Party newspaper Scînteia. His wife, the frightening but highly clever Alexandra Sidorovici, was a public prosecutor at the People’s Tribunals which sent thousands of people to their deaths on bogus charges during successive purges. Brucan rose to become Romanian Ambassador to theUSand to the UN. Then he returned to Bucharest as head of Romanian Television. He was a fawning associate of the Ceauescus for years, but they never entirely trusted him. He began, privately, to be critical of the dictator in the late 1970s and then, more publicly, from 1987. He gave an interview to the BBC World Service criticising the regime. Brucan had to be punished for his ‘treachery’, but Ceauescu was careful about how it was done. Brucan was an inveterate schemer and he managed to keep friends in the Kremlin, in the Lubyanka, in Washington and New York from his seven years in the United States, and also in the high reaches of the Securitate at home.

  Ceauescu had a 100-page file on him detailing every personal foible, every domestic quarrel with his family or conversation he had with journalists from theBBCand the International Herald Tribune. He was kept under strict surveillance, but he was so well connected that he was handled with kid gloves. Brucan and the other signatories of the notorious Letter of the Six were placed under house arrest. But he was evicted from the comfortable villa where he had lived for years in the smartest district of Bucharest, among all the top officials, and moved to a run-down shack with no running water in the remote countryside. He was given a brand-new passport and encouraged to use it, in the hope that he would leave the country and not return. He did leave - on visits to the Soviet Union and to the US - but he kept going back to Romania.2

  Ceauescu was not worried about football hooligans, or even the tiny number of dissident intellectuals with access to the foreign media. He was scared that the Soviet Union would try to topple him in a coup. All his food was now tasted by two people well before it reached him or Elena. His fears doubled after Gorbachev’s disastrous visit to Bucharest in the summer of 1987. Gorbachev had not wanted to go, and it showed throughout the two and a half days he was there. On the first night the two men had a shouting match at a private dinner while the wives maintained a sullen silence, barely even looking at each other. At one point Ceauescu ordered that all the doors and windows be shut so that nobody, not even the bodyguards, should hear what the argument was about. Gorbachev was trying to persuade Ceauscu to relax his Stalinist grip and embrace perestroika. ‘You are running a dictatorship here ... you must open yourselves up to the world,’ he said. Ceauescu insisted that Gorbachev was destroying communism and the whole edifice would crumble if the Soviets continued along their dangerous road.

  The next day Gorbachev was shown around the Unirii market in central Bucharest, the city’s biggest. Run-down of late, it had been recently refurbished for the Soviet leader’s visit and specially stocked with all kinds of produce most Romanians had not seen for a long time. The shelves were overflowing with fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. As the limousines of the two leaders were leaving, a riot erupted, in Ceauescu’s view. Bystanders broke through the police perimeter and stoned the store, trying to force their way inside before waiting trucks took the food away for sale at the shops used by Party chieftains and Securitate officers. Gorbachev did not see it, but his aides told him what had happened later. Just before he left Romania Gorbachev made a speech calling for the removal throughout Eastern Europe ‘of all those who cannot keep up with the times . . . who have tarnished themselves with dishonesty, lack of principle and nepotism, and who, in the pursuit of profit, have sacrificed the moral image proper for a Party member’. He criticised Romania’s treatment of its Hungarian minority. Ceauescu, standing close to the Soviet leader on the podium, was visibly seething with rage. He was convinced from then on that the Soviet Union was waiting for the right moment to overthrow him.3

  Much of the Ceauescus’ time was spent in the late 1980s on a new grand project for the capital that would prove their greatness. He and Elena were obsessed with a plan for a building that would leave their mark on history for ever as benefactors of their nation. The People’s Palace, they decided, would be the biggest building in the world. Even Hitler and Albert Speer in their plans for rebuilding Berlin did not promise anything so gigantic. Stalin’s wedding cake-style palaces of culture, copies of which he generously donated after the war to most of the capital cities in his new domains, were positively puny by comparison. The destruction it unleashed on Bucharest was monumental. The Ceauescus decreed that the whitewashed front of the 200-metre wide, 100-metre-high structure should face a broad ‘Victory of Social ism Avenue’ that had to be at least as long as the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The project would require two ancient districts of Bucharest famed for their charm to be bulldozed. Arsenal Hill was a beauty spot from which the entire city could be seen. Uranus was an old, mainly residential area of gracious houses, many of them with lovely gardens, a monastery and several churches, chestnut trees, schools, shops and tramlines. Both would be entirely destroyed, replaced by the Palace and huge concrete apartment blocks along the newly created Avenue. It vandalised nearly a sixth of the city, in order to create a building that would bring all the state and Party offices on to one site, as well as living space and a nuclear bunker for the Ceauescus. The architect was Anna Petrescu,q a young woman barely out of college, who in 1978 won an open competition at which the only judges were the President and the First Lady.

  It was six years before work began, but then the Ceauescus became more directly involved. Soon Ms Petrescu regretted that she had won the competition. The Ceauescus meddled constantly. They would visit the site two or three times a week. Every Saturday morning they spent at least two hours there. No item of decoration or furniture was considered too small for their personal consideration. They decided everything, from the size of the lights and fountains along Victory of Socialism Avenue to the shape of the door handles and the patterns of the inlay on Elena’s cherry-wood desk. By the middle of 1989 the People’s Palace was close to completion. The cost was originally estimated to be five hundred million lei, but new demands by the Ceauescus kept increas- ing the final bill. The project was delayed for months because they could not decide whether to opt for Doric or Ionic columns (after several changes of mind they went for Doric). Then the Ceauescus, almost as an afterthought, decided to add on two extra storeys to the building, for office space. It took several months for a tunnel to be dug for a small underground railway for the First Couple’s personal use, linking the Palace with downtown Bucharest. Eventually the cost rose twelvefold to around six billion lei. Dark jokes aside, there was a shortage of almost everything in Romania during 1989. While his people were freezing and queuing for bread, each year the President was spending almost the entire national welfare budget of the country on his new Palace.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  A STOLEN ELECTION

  East Berlin, Sunday 7 May 1989

  IT WAS POLLING DAY in the East German municipal elections and everything seemed to be running as normal. The results were not exactly close. When they were announced, late in the evening, the National Front list of officially approved candidates - the Communists and their sibling parties - won 98.6 per cent of the vote. In some districts the governing regime for the last forty years proved even more popular: in Erfurt, it polled 99.6 per cent and in Magdeburg
an impressive 99.97 per cent, though in Dresden it took a mere 97.5 per cent. The results were in line with previous local elections, marginally better than the corresponding votes four years earlier. The Communist oligarchs, considering events from their Wandlitz villas, pronounced themselves satisfied. An editorial in the party organ Neues Deutschland declared: ‘The people of the GDR are determined to continue . . . with success on the road towards a developed socialist society and to strengthen the socialist fatherland. There exists a relationship of solid confidence and close unity between Party and People . . . The results are a step towards the further perfection of our democracy.’

  The man in charge of the electoral commission, fifty-two-year-old Egon Krenz, heir apparent to Erich Honecker and the Party’s troubleshooter-in-chief, seemed content as he declared that the poll had been conducted entirely in the proper manner. Krenz, who had been a Communist apparatchik throughout his working life, had unfortunate large and protruding teeth and generally went by the nickname ‘Horse Face’ throughout East Germany, even in Party circles. Speaking in the style most of his listeners were accustomed to hearing from him, he said: ‘The results . . . are an impressive declaration of support for the politics of peace and socialism of the Party of the working class.’1

  Voting in East German elections was a different process to exercising the franchise in a Western-style democracy. In an East German polling station voters appeared before a board of two or three electoral commission officials, presented their ID papers and were issued with a ballot paper. To vote for an approved candidate from the official slate was straightforward: you simply folded the paper and placed it into the box near the entrance to the polling station. To vote another way was daunting and required courage. You had to walk across the room to mark a ballot paper in a secret voting booth where at least one, often two, ‘Vopos’, Volkspolizei or People’s Police, stood. These voters’ names were carefully noted down and the consequences could be serious for their entire families. They faced the sack or demotion at work. Students could be thrown out of university. They would definitely be kept under close surveillance by the Stasi.