At around midnight on the day Jaruzelski agreed to allow a Solidarity government, the Soviet Foreign Ministry received an urgent telex from Bucharest. Nicolae Ceauescu had been frantically cabling Warsaw Pact capitals urging them to intervene ‘to rescue socialism in Poland’. He denounced Solidarity as ‘the hireling of international imperialism’. The note to the Poles called on Jaruzelski to form ‘a government of national salvation’. In the message to the Soviets, the man who twenty-one years earlier had denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as interference in a sovereign state’s affairs now urged ‘collective military action’ against Poland. He demanded the presence of Eduard Shevardnadze in Bucharest for talks about a crisis in the ‘camp’ and wanted an immediate Warsaw Pact summit to plan an intervention in Poland.
He was not the only worried dictator in Eastern Europe. At the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest the previous month, Honecker, Ceauescu and Milo Jake, had formed a united front to urge Gor bachev to halt the drift in Poland and in Hungary. Honecker warned that there was a ‘grave danger to communism - and to all of us here’. Gorbachev’s response was: ‘The fears that socialism is threatened . . . are not founded. And those who are afraid had better hold on because perestroika has only just begun . . . We are going from one international order to another.’ The response left them indignant.
Most of the Soviet leaders were on holiday when the latest Polish crisis brewed. Gorbachev was at his seaside villa at Foros in the Crimea. He was more concerned with domestic issues than foreign ones, even developments as dramatic and revolutionary as were happening in Poland. He had given his blessing to Jaruzelski to do what he thought was best and was determined not to interfere. The policy was simply put by one of its architects, Alexander Yakovlev, and Gorbachev was essentially true to its spirit and letter. ‘There never was a formal decision to refrain from using force in Eastern Europe,’ he said. ‘We simply stopped being hypocritical. For years we had told the entire world that these countries were free and independent, even though this was obviously not the case. There was no need to take a formal decision. We just had to implement what was formal policy.’ When Gorbachev heard of the Ceausescu demand he simply told his aides, ‘Don’t worry. Ceausescu is just worried for his own skin’, and then concentrated his mind on Soviet matters. Those were consuming him throughout the year, not events in the satellite states.14
Shevardnadze was holidaying in Georgia. His chief adviser, Sergei Tarasenko, showed him the cable while the Foreign Minister was sun-bathing on the beach.
He took it calmly. There was no way he was going to take any action. He said ‘Forget about it.’ We remained on the beach and started talking in general and posed a question to ourselves in our swimming trunks. ‘Do you understand what is going to happen?’ he said. ‘We are going to lose our allies, the Warsaw Pact. These countries will go their own ways . . . yes we will suffer. We will lose our jobs.’ It was no problem to project the collapse of the empire. Our empire was doomed. But we did not think it would come so soon.15
FORTY
TRAIL OF THE TRABANTS
Sopron, western Hungary, 19 August 1989
THE IDEA ORIGINALLY BELONGED to Otto von Habsburg, eldest son of the last Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary, Karl I. The seventy-seven-year-old von Habsburg was a staunchly conservative member of the European Parliament, who had fought the Cold War for decades with much passion and some flair for propaganda. He saw a way to publicise the plight of the East German refugees who were flooding into Hungary, and to embarrass the regimes which would not let them freely enter Austria. There were around 85,000 of them now, on top of the 35,000 or so Romanians fleeing the rigours of life under Ceausescu. The swelling numbers were causing a humanitarian crisis within Hungary, and a political dilemma for the government. They could not decide what to do with the refugees and continued to dither for weeks. The Hungarian authorities hoped the problem would go away and they could avoid a more serious confrontation with their supposed fraternal socialist allies in Berlin. Clearly that was wishful thinking.
Von Habsburg had been barred from visiting Hungary until the autumn of the previous year. There were a few royalist supporters in the country. Their Habsburg flags and insignia could occasionally be spotted at demonstrations against the Danube dams and for better treatment of the Transylvanian refugees. It was a minuscule movement but the regime had taken no chances and kept him out of the country, for decades. Now von Habsburg could come and go as he pleased. Along with Hungarian human rights groups, and the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, he planned a ‘day of celebration to say farewell to the Iron Curtain’. There was to be a giant symbolic gate built at the border near the baroque town of Sopron, attended by delegations from Hungary and Austria. At 3 p.m. the delegations would cross sides, to represent freedom of movement. The public would be encouraged to watch the ceremony, eat a meal and raise a glass to celebrate. The event was billed as the Pan-European Picnic where, on a sunny day in Central Europe, people could commemorate freedom near the spot where a few months earlier border guards began dismantling the electrified fence that had separated East and West. At that point it was a small-scale event that might receive some publicity in Austria and Hungary. But the stakes were raised when Imre Pozsgay became involved as the co-sponsor of the picnic. He came up with the suggestion that turned a modest, though interesting, commemoration into a worldwide media event that had profound effects on the entire Soviet empire.1
Pozsgay was the acknowledged leader of the reform Communists. It was in his political interests to be seen to support the refugees wholeheartedly. His boldness and compassion, or so he thought, would shame his erstwhile Party comrades in Budapest who displayed indecision and weakness. He negotiated a deal with the government that would keep the ‘symbolic gate’ open for four hours in the afternoon. He made an informal deal with his old friend and reformist soulmate, the Interior Minister István Horváth, that the border guards should turn a blind eye to East Germans trying to cross illegally - at least for a few hours during the day. It was not planned as a mass breakout from Hungary. Von Habsburg believed that if even just a few score refugees arrived safely in Austria his point would have been made and thousands would soon follow.
The Trabis were on the road again, from Lake Balaton to western Hungary near the border areas. With an entrepreneurial spirit not quite suppressed over the past four decades, garages throughout the country had specially stocked up on the fuel their inefficient 2-stroke engines used. More refugees were arriving each day now on trains and buses, carrying bedding, camping equipment, cooking utensils. Leaflets publicising the ‘picnic’ were printed in German telling the refugees where to go so they could ‘clip off part of the iron curtain’. A convenient map guided them to the spot. In the few days before the picnic, large numbers - estimated at nearly 9,000 - began to appear in campsites and bed and breakfast guest houses around Sopron, said the head of the Hungarian border guard, Gyula Kovács. ‘The whole town appeared to be filled with East Germans . . . It was also a serious sign when the Austrian Red Cross and other Austrian officials put up tents on the other side of the border . . . They were obviously expecting a large number of East Germans to cross.’2
The West German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, had dispatched scores of extra consular officials to Sopron ‘to assist fellow Germans any way they could’. They acted as a form of pressure on the border guards, who would be more circumspect if they knew their actions were observed by foreign diplomats. Not that it was needed. The border guards, mostly young conscripts, had no intention of using force against the refugees. Kovács issued his men clear orders. ‘We gave instructions that there should be no border patrols in the area immediately next to the picnic site,’ he said. ‘In the areas beyond the picnic, if the patrols came across any East Germans trying to cross the border they should instruct them to stop and turn back. If they turned back, fine. If they didn’t then . . . O K , we should just count how many went across and then
carry on with normal duties.’3
Nevertheless, the East Germans who planned to escape were nervous and scared. They could not know what orders Hungarian soldiers had been given. Up to now the Hungarian people had been remarkably generous. But the regime, while expressing sympathy for their plight, had done little to help them. At least they had not been sent back to East Germany. Berlin teachers Sylvia and Harry Lux had left their home just over a month ago with their seven-year-old son Danny. As soon as they had heard about the Pan-European Picnic they were determined to try to make it into Austria this day. They arrived by train in Sopron, 120 kilometres west of Budapest, in the early morning. ‘Outside the railway station there were two or three taxis with their doors already open . . . it was all planned so perfectly that you wondered how it was possible,’ Mrs Lux said;
Then we were taken to a hotel and up to a room where we had to wait in hiding . . . We had to wait until 3 p.m. when the leaders of the festival were to join the picnic for the gate-opening ceremony. We were worried sick and shaking and time seemed to drag on forever. Then we were driven straight to the picnic . . . But there were so many different people from all nationalities there that we thought that we were too late . . . that it had happened . . . But we made our way away from the picnic, deeper into the countryside where we thought the border was, according to the map. When we crossed some high ground we saw a man from the West German Consulate in Budapest, whom we recognised and who knew us by . . . sight and said, ‘Ah, the Lux family, hurry up, there are some kind border guards up ahead and they’ve lifted up the wire fence for you. Good luck.’ My husband took Danny in his arms and we started off again and there really were border guards there and the barbed wire was lifted so you could crawl through.
She stopped for a short while just in front of the gap, watched by some Austrians on the other side. ‘I was not able to grasp that this really was it. And then one of [them] said, “Come on you can do it” . . . grabbed hold of me from the other side and pulled me through . . . and on the other side he shook my hand and said, “You’re free now.” I asked, “Is that true, they really can’t come and take me back?” We all cried and hugged each other.’4
More than 600 made it to Austria that day through the ‘symbolic’ gate and around 1,400 through the borders nearby. It was not a huge number; they were replaced within a couple of days by new refugees pouring into Hungary. East German television reported, without any pictures of the scenes at the picnic, that some ‘GDRcitizens had been seduced and paid to emigrate by the Federal Republic in order to slander our state’.
The Hungarian government realised it could not sit on its hands and do nothing for much longer. That was graphically driven home to the Prime Minister, Miklós Németh. ‘I was visiting a friend of mine who happened to live near the West German Consul General’s house. I had to step over bodies lying on the pavement waiting for the Consulate to open in the morning . . . to get West German passports. I could see the problem with my own eyes, we had to have a clear-cut solution.’
Minor disturbances had broken out in some parts of Budapest and a decision could not be delayed much longer. The East Germans wanted to send planes and trains to Hungary to take their citizens back: ‘We refused. We told them it was absolutely out of the question for you to hunt them here in Hungary and take them,’ Németh said. But they were allowed to send ‘diplomatic observers’. These turned out to be Stasi officers who kept a watch on the refugees. At one of the refugee centres in a church on the Buda side of the River Danube run by Csilla, Baroness von Boeselager and the Catholic priest Imre Kozma, a Stasi captain asked her for the names of everyone who was in the building or who had passed through it over the past weeks. She refused, outraged, but she agreed they could run an office in a van on a side street outside the gates. The intelligence agents started taking photographs of people entering and leaving the centre and an angry crowd gathered, shouting at them and pelting stones. Local police had to be called to keep the peace. The next night the van was vandalised and the following day it was withdrawn.5
The Hungarians were put under intense pressure from the West to let the East Germans go. The Americans turned the screws. The US Ambassador, Mark Palmer, demanded to meet the Foreign Minister, Gyula Horn. ‘I told him they could forget about trade and investment from the US if they sent the East Germans back,’ he said. But despite all the encouraging signals the Hungarians had been receiving for months, they were still unsure what the Russians would do if they allowed the East Germans to head West. It would have serious implications for the Soviet bloc.6 ‘We were very worried about how the Soviets would react,’ said László Kovács, Hungary’s Deputy Foreign Minister. ‘We knew that the East German reaction would be virulent. We expected economic reprisals and we made contingency plans for that. But we were troubled by the response from Moscow.’ After several weeks’ hesitation they sent a note to Shevardnadze discreetly suggesting that they were considering opening the border. ‘We got a reply back quickly saying very simply that “this is an affair that concerns only Hungary, the GDR and West Germany”.’7
In Berlin the government was paralysed by the serious illness of Erich Honecker. On 8 July, at the annual Warsaw Pact leaders’ summit held this year in Bucharest, he had collapsed in agony clutching the right side of his abdomen and his back, shortly after making a speech to his peers warning of the great perils facing communism. He was rushed to the best hospital in the city, reserved for the top Party officials, where he was diagnosed with stones in his gall-bladder. After one night, he was flown back to Berlin. There it quickly became obvious that his condition was more serious: he had cancerous tumours in his bladder and surgeons had to operate urgently. Honecker was out of action for weeks and the extent of his illness was kept from the public. In dictatorships like the GDR nothing of importance could be decided without the supreme leader’s authority. ‘For a long time we were unable to say anything about the refugee crisis because of Honecker’s absence,’ Günter Schabowski said. ‘We were insecure about it, but we felt helpless. So we said OK let’s wait until he returns.’ But he was ill the whole of the summer and all efforts in the leadership to talk about the biggest issue facing the country were shelved until late September.
The East German Foreign Minister, Oskar Fischer, sent diplomatic notes to Budapest demanding the return of the East German citizens who had ‘illegally overstayed their visa regulations’. He reminded his counterpart, Horn, that apart from the Warsaw Pact agreement that all member states would honour each other’s travel laws, there was a treaty between the two countries signed on 20 June 1969 repeating the pledge. Horn said that an international treaty, like the Geneva Convention on Refugees, superseded bi-party agreements. They had reached an impasse. Fischer began talking to West German officials, but those negotiations broke down too.
The Exodus, as East Germans called it, was the main topic of conversation throughout the country. ‘Within every family there was at least one person asking the question: do we go, or do we stay here and keep hoping? The choice was agonising for people who may have hated the regime, but still had friends, families, jobs they liked, homes. The Exodus dominated life,’ Matthias Mueller, a history student in Berlin at the time, said. It dominated West German television news. Every day there were reports from Hungary about the refugees and footage from the Trabi trail with interviews of the mainly young families who were leaving.8 On East German TV it was hardly ever mentioned. Orders came from above to keep silent, said radio journalist Ferdinand Nor. ‘Then when it was no longer possible to hide the vacant apartments, the empty desks in offices and at schools, we began to denounce the refugees as politically illiterate and “criminal elements”.’ Instructions were given in the summer to journalists on Neues Deutschland from the Party leadership:Our task is the propagation of the values of socialism and the effective revelation of the crimes of capitalism. Do not publish material on conflicts with foreigners in the country . . . We will deny ourselves any comment on shortages .
. . The theme of ‘Exodus’ should not dominate daily conversation in the GDR. The events are damaging our image. With the aid of the media in the West the unimaginable successes of 40 years of socialist policies in the GDR are being disputed because the GDR does not fit into the picture of communism in crisis. We will not let ourselves be provoked . . . We will report nothing of those returning from the West to the GDR.9
The Soviets were not prepared to help the East German regime. They thought the refugee crisis was a ‘good thing’ because it might make Berlin rethink, remove Honecker and spur it on to reform. Fischer met Shevardnadze privately. The Soviet Foreign Minister told him to allow free emigration. ‘It will not be bad. It will ease your economic burdens, too,’ Shevardnadze said. ‘You should talk to opposition groups as comrades are doing elsewhere.’ When he returned to Berlin, Fischer told his colleagues that they should expect no help from Moscow in this crisis of existence for the East German state.10
FORTY-ONE
A GOVERNMENT OF DISSIDENTS
Warsaw, Thursday 24 August 1989
IN HIS ROLE AS KINGMAKER, Wałesa considered three candidates for Prime Minister. All had served time in jail for varying periods as subversives. The presence of any of them as head of a Warsaw Pact government would have appalled Ceausescu or Honecker, who had now given up any hope that the Soviets would step in and halt the collapse of socialism in Poland. The prospect of dealing with any of them would have shocked almost every Communist Party official in Moscow just four years earlier. Now, shortly after eight minutes past one, when Tadeusz Mazowiecki was officially elected Polish Premier, the first message of congratulations he received was from his Soviet counterpart in the Kremlin.
Revolution 1989 Page 39