Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  This time Zhivkov faced opposition outside the Party to his ruinous and vicious campaign against the Turks. None of the minuscule dissident groups had previously raised their voices in support of the minority Muslims. As the leaders of some of them admitted, it seemed like a side issue for most Bulgarians. Challenging the regime on behalf of the Turks would not have furthered their cause with the majority population. But now human rights groups which had before been silent spoke out. At the end of May six activists were arrested, including three leading figures from the fledgling free trade union organisation Podkrepa and Father Kristopher Subev, an Orthodox priest from the Religious Rights Committee. They were accused of inciting the Turks to riot and faced long prison terms. When they went on a hunger strike in jail they were painfully force-fed. Their plight became a cause célèbre on the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle. Though it was technically illegal to listen to foreign radio broadcasts, both stations were avidly heard in Bulgaria and had audiences as large as domestic radio. Though official state-controlled news barely mentioned the expulsion of the Turks, everyone in Bulgaria now knew about it.

  The Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost had been founded the previous summer. Originally it had around eighty members, nearly all of them prominent writers or academics and one-time Communists. The regime had kept a close watch on the organisation. Apart from Sigurnost surveillance, its launch meeting was attended by Goran Goranov, one of Zhivkov’s best-known aides. It had tried to navigate a careful path. All its material ‘was phrased to keep us out of trouble, or so we hoped. We deliberately used the slogans and ideas of perestroika and glasnost as political cover for ourselves. If Gorbachev, the most powerful Communist in the world, used them, who was the Bulgarian dictator to tell us that we could not?’ said Ivan Stanchev, one of the Club’s founders. The most influential member was Zhelyu Zhelev, a dapper, silver-haired fifty-four-year-old philosopher and long-time dissident, who had been thrown out of the Party in the late 1960s and spent six years in internal exile outside Sofia. Zhelev was the author of a clever and profound book, Fascism, in 1982, which again landed him in trouble with the regime, though he managed to stay out of prison. He had a shrewd flair for political tactics that matched his powerful intellect. His greatest early coup was in January 1989 when the French President, François Mitterrand, passed through Bulgaria on a fleeting visit. The French Embassy held a breakfast for him and wanted to gather twelve Bulgarian intellectuals to meet him. They asked Zhelev to compile the guest list. ‘This was a recognition that we were a serious opposition group,’ he said. ‘But . . . [we] were monitored much more closely by the secret police.’

  When Zhivkov expelled the Turks from Bulgaria, the Perestroika Club protested and presented a petition signed by more than 250 well-known figures of Bulgarian communism, including the distinguished research chemist Alexei Sheludko, who had once been the KGB’s chief of operations in Sofia. There were a few arrests of Club members, though not the most prominent ones, and of activists from Ecoglasnost, who had made a film, Breath, about pollution levels near Bulgaria’s industrial plants. It was a fairly muted response, but Zhivkov was planning more vigorous moves. He saw objections to his policy on the Turks as an attack on him personally.4

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE LANDSLIDE

  Warsaw, Sunday 4 June 1989

  SOLIDARITY ’ S ELECTION HEADQUARTERS were on the second floor of the Café Surprise, just off the main boulevard in the centre of the city. Late in the evening, union activists stared in disbelief at the TV screens as the first poll results began to be announced. It was clear that a revolution had taken place within the Soviet empire and it had happened, peacefully, in the polling booths of Poland. Almost nobody had expected the overwhelming scale of the Communists’ defeat. As the night wore on it became a humiliation for the Party that had ruled Poland for more than forty years. The electoral procedure was highly complex, but according to some figures the Communists won between 3 and 4 per cent of the vote. The election had been turned into a referendum on Communist and Soviet rule. The people’s verdict was a devastating indictment against the regime. In the first of two rounds of voting, Solidarity won thirty-three of the thirty-five seats that were up for free election in the Sejm. The Communists and their allies retained the uncontested 65 per cent of the seats reserved for them in the gerrymandered parliament. But that was little consolation to them. Solidarity won ninety-nine of the hundred freely elected Senate seats. Virtually the entire Communist leadership was defeated, including all the familiar names from the government that had ruled for so long: the Interior Minister Kiszczak, the Prime Minister Rakowski, the Defence Minister Florian Siwicki.

  It was the Communists who had insisted on quick elections after the Round Table agreement was signed. They thought a snap poll would give them even more of an advantage and would wrongfoot Solidarity. The Party may not have had much experience in democratic electioneering, but it had money, organisation, staff and, most important of all, monopoly control of television, which it expected to use ruthlessly. During the Round Table talks Jerzy Urban, the deeply unloved chief spin doctor for General Jaruzelski, and for years the scourge of Western and domestic journalists, told the Solidarity activist Jacek Kuro with his usual cynicism that ‘we will give you the ZOMO [riot police] before we give you the TV’. Kuro replied, ‘We’d much rather have the television, thanks’. Urban orchestrated coverage of the election on all the national broadcasting networks, which had been wholly biased against the opposition. He was one of the most heavily defeated Communist candidates.

  Solidarity had not wanted an immediate election. They would have to build an organisation from scratch, raise money, rent office space, hire staff, all within a few weeks. It would be a vast undertaking. Wałesa complained repeatedly: ‘These elections ... They’re the terrible price we have to pay to get our union back.’ He feared that the public, after so many years of apathy, would not respond and turn out to vote. His advisers thought that Solidarity would do well to win a quarter of the contested seats in the Lower House and perhaps two-thirds of the Senate. Yet, relying mainly on inexperienced volunteers, Solidarity improvised and was brilliantly effective. From 1 May when Wałsa launched the campaign at St Brigid’s Church in Gdask, his message was optimistic and upbeat. It was the Polish people’s chance to ‘tell them we’ve had enough’, he used to say in his stump speech. He had his picture taken at the Lenin Shipyard with every Solidarity candidate. In the fortnight leading up to polling day these pictures were visible as posters everywhere, on trees, walls, windows in apartment blocks, along with the Solidarity logo in the national colours of red, white and blue. Underneath the picture was the message, in Wałsa’s hand writing: ‘We must win’.

  The Church had done well out of the Round Table agreement. Some of its property was returned gratis and it was allowed to buy back a great deal more. It could run schools and radio stations; priests could now qualify for state pensions. The Church was unashamedly campaigning for Solidarity, despite Cardinal Glemp’s initial reluctance to alienate the regime, his dislike of the union and his contempt for Lech Wałsa. While state-controlled broadcasting was in the hands of the Party, the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe, which had Polish audiences of millions, made no effort to hide their support for Solidarity. With extraordinary speed Solidarity set up an excellent daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza (Election Gazette), which was full of wit and sparkle compared to the plodding Party organs. It was edited by Adam Michnik, but the vast majority of its journalists were talented young women.I

  The Communists ran a dull, complacent campaign. The leadership was convinced it would do well against an apparently disorganised opposition. It hardly bothered electioneering in some districts which the Party thought it easily controlled. Party headquarters in Warsaw decreed that none of its posters or printed material should appear in red, so many other colours were tried. This was designed to confuse voters, though to what end was hard to see. The campaign colour
that became most identified with the Communists was a faded blue. One of its most often used slogans simply stated ‘With us it’s safer’, which as one foreign reporter remarked sounded more like an advert for condoms than a slogan for a political candidate. ‘It was a hopeless, lifeless, lacklustre campaign,’ one Party chieftain admitted halfway through. ‘I don’t think we understand what the concept is of seeking people’s votes. We’ve been smug.’2

  By polling day, the opposition appeared far better organised than the Party. Most priests throughout the country in their Sunday sermons that morning reminded congregants, ‘I think you know who God would vote for in today’s election.’ When they got to the polling stations electors were presented with complicated ballot papers. They were thick sheets and voters were required to cross out the names of candidates they did not want. Solidarity realised these might bewilder many voters. So outside all of the country’s 20,000 polling stations, the opposition set up information booths where voters were helped to cope with the lists. They displayed a mock ballot paper filled in to show which names - i.e. the Communists - should be deleted. Once voters got the hang of what to do, they reacted with alacrity. It was ‘a complicated method, but uniquely satisfying to cross out the names you don’t like’, one observer said.3

  Even on the morning of polling day the Communists were still convinced they would do reasonably well. Rakowski admitted that they did not anticipate the possibility of a big defeat, or imagine that, given the opportunity, the people would reject the Party outright. ‘In May, after the Round Table talks, our opinion polls showed that 14 per cent would vote for us and our coalition partners while 40 per cent would vote for Solidarity,’ he said. ‘The rest were “don’t knows”. I don’t know why we imagined the rest would vote for us. We were prisoners of the past when elections were not free. It just didn’t register that the “don’t knows” would not support us.’ The Soviet Embassy and the KG B were reporting back to Moscow that the likeliest outcome of the election was that Solidarity would do moderately well and it would gain a voice in government over the next few years. There would be a gradual move towards power-sharing and liberal reforms. These were just the kind of predictions that Gorbachev and his advisers wanted to hear. So no alarm bells had rung during the elections and the Soviets were relaxed about them.4

  Among the few to call the result accurately before the votes were counted was the US Ambassador to Poland, John Davis. A sixty-two-year-old career diplomat, he had served in Warsaw for six years - unusually long for an American diplomat to stay in one posting. He had developed close links with the Solidarity leadership over the past months, since the Round Table talks began. Frequently, they would spend evenings together at the Ambassador’s Warsaw residence ‘social ising, watching recent American movies and eating large amounts of beef Stroganoff,’ as he said. While senior Solidarity figures such as Geremek and Mazowiecki were pessimistic about the election outcome, Davis was reporting back to Washington that Solidarity ‘will win - and win big’. On 19 April he had cabled to the State Department: ‘The Communist authorities are . . . likely to meet total defeat and great embarrassment.’ On 2 June, two days before polling day, he predicted ‘a nearly total Solidarity victory’, which he said was not an entirely welcome prospect. There was a danger it could provoke ‘a sharp defensive reaction from the government’ that could destabilise the whole of Eastern Europe.5

  Wałsa was amazed by the size of his victory. ‘I face the disaster of having a good crop,’ he joked. ‘Too much grain has ripened for me and I can’t store it all in my granary.’ But he had heard other news that disturbed him greatly. Earlier in the day, hundreds of unarmed Chinese students had been murdered in Beijing when troops and tanks had been dispatched to crush demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It was unlikely, but not impossible, that the Soviets or the generals at the head of the Polish regime would react violently to the humiliating defeat at the polls. Geremek, one of the coolest of heads around Wałsa, was also sounding warning hints: ‘Yes, of course, we knew we had won. But . . . we also knew they had all the guns.’6

  Early the next morning the Party chieftains met in a state of shock for a post-mortem. ‘The results are terrible, worse than we could have expected,’ Jaruzelski said. ‘I blame the Church. They are the main culprits. We will have to meet with the Catholic hierarchy urgently.’ Stanisław Ciosek, who had played a prominent part in the Round Table talks and met the bishops frequently, agreed. ‘We trusted the Church - and they have turned out to be Jesuits,’ he said bizarrely. But then he went on to castigate the Party, as many of the Communist oligarchs did throughout the day. ‘The guilt is on our side. We overestimated our strength and we have turned out to be completely without a base,’ he lamented. Alexander Kwasniewski, the youngest and one of the smartest among the Polish leadership, said: ‘There were large numbers of Communist Party members who were crossing out our own candidates. ’ Jerzy Urban, who had masterminded the publicity for the campaign, said that the second round of votes, due in a fortnight’s time, for the few remaining contested seats could be an equal disaster. ‘We could ridicule ourselves before our own base. The results prove that the Party has outlived itself . . . We face disintegration. This was not only an election defeat, but the end of an age.’7

  Jaruzelski seriously considered imposing a new version of martial law. He called a meeting of the Military Council and the army General Staff. The Interior Minister, Kiszczak, was there and they spoke of announcing a state of emergency and calling the election null and void. ‘We still had the levers of power in our hands,’ Jaruzelski said. But he knew that it was too late for that sort of violent solution now. He had spoken with Gorbachev’s aides in the Kremlin who were stunned by the election results, but knew that the Soviet leader would not support any military crackdown. It could not work. Moscow would continue to encourage a political settlement of a political problem, they told him. Jaruzelski announced that he would accept the election results and learn to live with them. But he was prone to self-pity and was sent into a dark gloom. His advisers claimed that he brooded deeply over a comment Rakowski had made early in the morning, which seemed like a straightforward reportage of fact: ‘The people simply didn’t want us any more.’ Why? He felt that he had made the right choice to go down the path of compromise, that he had behaved properly, and he should not have been punished for it. Jaruzelski always thought he was a great patriot who acted in the national interest. Yet he had a poor understanding of the Polish people.8

  His principal concern now, and that of his entourage, was to make sure that he was elected President when the new parliament was convened the following month. The electoral arithmetic made it a close-run thing. He needed thirty-five votes in the Lower House, which seemed unlikely without the acquiescence of Solidarity. There could be no effective government until the issue of the presidency was settled. The administration tried to limp on, but power was visibly slipping from the regime. It was an unwritten assumption of the Round Table talks that Jaruzelski would be elected President. The post was created with him in mind, as the negotiators from both sides knew. Some of the more cautious Solidarity leaders- Wałsa in particular - feared that if they did not deliver that part of the agreement, the entire framework of the deal would come apart. The Communists were exerting pressure to ensure the General’s election. Some senior army officers warned the government that they would feel ‘personally threatened’ if Jaruzelski was not elected and would ‘move to overturn the Round Table agreements and the election results’. In other words, they threatened a coup against their own generals. Kiszczak met Cardinal Glemp and other Church leaders privately. He issued a stark warning: ‘If Jaruzelski is not elected . . . we would face further destabilisation and the whole process of political transformation would have to end. No other President would be listened to in the security forces and in the army.’9

  The General himself was doing some head-counting and began to hesitate. For three weeks he dropped vague hints that he would
not run, if the country did not want him. At first he was grandstanding, according to his aides. He had held on to power for so long and with such determination that he had not imagined that he could simply retire. But if the numbers did not look right he would think again and decline the nomination. He told his advisers he ‘did not want to creep into the presidency’. Nor did he want to face another public humiliation after the disastrous first round of the elections. By the end of the month he had decided that he was not prepared to risk losing another election - and more face. He decided to pull out of the race unless a rabbit was found from a hat somewhere and he could be assured of the nomination.10

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  FUNERAL IN BUDAPEST

  Budapest, Friday 16 June 1989

  BY 9 A.M. MORE THAN two hundred thousand people were already packed into Heroes’ Square, an impressive neo-classical space, where most of Hungary’s great men and women are commemorated in epic statuary. The crowd was growing all the time, spilling over into the broad Avenue of the People, and to the nearby City Park. For most of the last thirty-three years it had been taboo even to mention the name of Imre Nagy. Now the political leader of the Revolution of 1956, judicially murdered two years later, was reburied in a dramatic and emotional ceremony. It was a funeral of a long-dead man. But everyone who witnessed this extraordinary day could see it also buried an entire era of Hungarian history. On the same date a year earlier, when some of Nagy’s old friends and family tried to hold a small protest march to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death, truncheon-wielding police broke up the demonstration. Now Nagy’s funeral had been turned into a great state occasion, given live coverage by the government-controlled television. The police co-operated with former dissidents, political activists and Nagy’s relatives to ensure that the event was conducted peacefully and with due solemnity.