The Balts were determined to prove that they were tougher than the Kremlin, that their moral certainty would result in either victory or annihilation. Perhaps what gave them their confidence, and what distinguished them from most of the rest of the Soviet Union, was that the Lithuanians, the Estonians, and the Latvians enjoyed and remembered a legacy of at least intermittent independence. The Lithuanians, for example, had been dominated by the Danes, the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, the Russians, and the Nazis, but there were periods of freedom, most lately between 1918 and 1940. In the most recent period of domination, under the Soviet Union, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia and “replaced” them with Russian workers. But now the Baltic leaders would not accept a middle ground, for the middle ground meant continued occupation. And they were right. The Kremlin capitulated, slowly, step by step. On July 23, Aleksandr Yakovlev, as chairman of a legislative investigating committee, conceded the obvious: the secret protocols existed. Landsbergis could not help but be amused. “This announcement,” he said, “comes to us as a great shock.” History had once more been returned.
A few months after Yakovlev’s announcement, I had a chance to see glimpses of the worst nightmare of those who had once dreamed of an eternal Soviet empire.
In early October 1989, Gorbachev visited Berlin, ostensibly to help celebrate the anniversary of East German statehood. The cracks in the wall were already visible. Thousands of East Germans were fleeing across border points for West Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. But the East German leader, Erich Honecker, was as obstinate as any of the Eastern European dictators; he was the sort of tyrant who could begin a proclamation, “If I die …” He had every intention of outlasting Gorbachev and the pressure to change. To make himself understood, Honecker orchestrated a grand ceremony of state in Gorbachev’s presence: a day of speechmaking in the main government palace, a goose-stepping military parade, fireworks. One night, tens of thousands of the Party youth league members marched through the streets of Berlin carrying flaming torches and singing songs of socialist brotherhood. (In a few weeks, they’d be marching through the Berlin Wall to buy steaks and singing praises of the gods Nike and Reebok.)
The Berlin visit was one of Gorbachev’s finest moments, the sort of subtle exchange that he was made for. A year later, when blunt decisiveness was needed at home, when democratic politics demanded an end to backroom maneuvering, Gorbachev would hesitate and fail. Boris Yeltsin would fill the vacuum. But Gorbachev was the man for this moment. In public, he played along nicely with the East German leadership. In his own speeches and comments, he never drifted far from his host. He kissed Herr Honecker firm on the lips. But in the end that kiss was the kiss of farewell. In private, Gorbachev hinted broadly that the leadership could either begin its own massive reforms or end up defeated and defunct. Gorbachev trotted out one of his favorite aphorisms for the occasion: “Life itself punishes those who delay.” He repeated it here and there, and his spokesman made sure to emphasize it at a press conference.
Such hints can spark a revolution. As the East German folksinger and dissident Wolf Bierman said of Gorbachev’s phrase, “the tritest common places, launched into the world at the right moment, become magic spells.” Many factors led to the collapse of the East German regime—the action along the border, dissension in the ruling Politburo, the rise of opposition groups—but Gorbachev’s hint surely let the people know where the Kremlin, the center of the empire, stood. Within hours after he left for Moscow, an uprising had begun, angry confrontations between demonstrators shouting “Freiheit! Freiheit!” and the Stasi police on the Alexanderplatz. According to reports on the radio, the demonstrations were far bigger in Leipzig. Erich Honecker may not have been listening to Gorbachev, but the people of East Germany were. On November 9, just one month after Gorbachev’s visit, the Berlin Wall collapsed.
To live anywhere between Bonn and Moscow in 1989 was to be witness to a year-long political fantasy. You had the feeling you could wander into history on the way to the bank or the seashore. Esther and I had bought cheap tickets to Prague for Thanksgiving week, thinking we’d have time to see the city and some friends and relax. There was little chance of that. The day we arrived, we checked in at the hotel and walked to Wenceslas Square, where there were no fewer than 200,000 people marching for an end to the Communist regime. A couple of days later at an even bigger demonstration, I was leaning out a window watching Alexander Dubcek, fifty feet away, declare his return to Prague after two decades of shame.
Dubcek’s return was remarkable enough—he was the living personification of the 1968 Prague Spring—but it was even more extraordinary that he now seemed antique. The crowds roared for him when he walked out on the balcony, but the enthusiasm faded steadily as they listened to him. His was still the old dream of “socialism with a human face.” The tens of thousands of students who led the 1989 revolution, who were pouring into factories and bringing the workers out to join them on the city squares, looked on Dubcek as a well-intentioned but slightly out-of-it grandfather. Dubcek sounded as if he had been frozen in time from the moment he was arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1968. His language was still stiff, his cadences metronomic. Like Len Karpinsky’s articles, Dubcek’s speech could not quite dispense with the Communist Party habit of euphemism, pomposity, and cliché. By the time he finished that day on Wenceslas Square, the applause was only polite.
With each demonstration Václav Havel’s voice grew more and more hoarse, but his expressions of liberty and passion transcended the dead language of the official newspapers and Party pronouncements. It was as if by writing and speaking clearly, honestly, Havel helped keep alive principles and a language that would inevitably triumph over the regime. His opposition was to act outside the system, to act decently. How lucky the Czechs were to have such a voice among them! Havel was no less a hero than Sakharov or Walesa, and his greatness, like theirs, was in his absolute belief in himself and the rightness of his cause.
In Prague I read a collection of letters Havel sent to his wife, Olga, from prison. They were filled with philosophical discussion, abstract exploration of the reasons for existence and faith, but I found myself just as moved by “overhearing” Havel describe the routine of prison life, his reading of Max Brod’s biography of Kafka and Bellow’s Herzog; his progress in English and German; his hemorrhoids; the pleasure of smoking two cigarettes a day and intensifying that pleasure by smoking slowly in front of a mirror; his reasons for living, his reasons for hope. Most of all, I found myself nodding with admiration at Havel’s description of the insidious way the Prague regime (or the Moscow or Beijing regimes) had made language “weightless” by twisting it, pacifying and corrupting it.
“Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight,” Havel wrote, “which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.”
A man of the theater, Havel held his press conferences onstage during those weeks of revolution. On November 24, after Dubcek’s speech on the square, he and Dubcek answered the nightly questions from the press at the Magic Lantern Theater and even got into a mild debate on socialism. Dubcek was all for a “purified” socialism, once rinsed of Stalinist “deformations.” A familiar, Gorbachevian theme. Havel said he could no longer discuss “socialism,” that it was a word and idea that had been rendered meaningless. After about an hour of this meeting of the generations, Havel’s brother walked on the stage, which was still set for a production of Dürrenmatt’s play Minotaurus. He whispered in Havel’s ear. Havel smiled, a radiant smile. Dubcek was talking, and Havel interrupted with a polite gesture.
“The entire Politburo has resigned,” Havel announced.
Havel and Dubcek rose and toasted a free Czechoslovakia.
Curtain.
In the epilogue a few weeks later, Havel appeared not onstage, but on state television. He was now president of Czechoslovakia. Citizens, he declared, “your government has been returned to you!” This was not theater. This was really happening.
Inside the Soviet Union itself, republican independence leaders celebrated the end of the external empire. Except for Romania, where the revolution ended in bloodshed and political ambiguity, the liberation of Eastern Europe seemed almost effortless. But they were careful not to let themselves believe that their own freedom would come soon. The Kremlin gave them every reason to think otherwise. Writing in Sovetskaya Kultura, the Kremlin’s arch spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, said that the West was showing “malignant pleasure” in the Baltic independence movements. Such movements, he wrote ominously, “threaten our reforms and are provoking use of the ‘iron fist.’ ”
In early 1990, after the string of revolutions in Eastern Europe had come to an end, an American historian, Eric Foner, conducted a seminar with his history students at Moscow State University. Foner was a specialist in the American Civil War, and the afternoon I sat in on his class, he and his students discussed the parallels between Gorbachev and Lincoln and their quests to keep together a union. For a while, Foner and his students compared the two leaders, but soon the students began to talk about what they thought their country would look like in a few years. Every one of them predicted collapse, and every one was frightened that the old regime would resist to the end.
The Soviet Union is a great empire, and we are now watching its disintegration, Igor, a student from Byelorussia, said. “Assuming that by my early thirties I have not been killed in a civil war, I think what will be left will be Russia—the original core territory. And that is what happened to the Roman Empire, isn’t it? It shrank. I just hope that it all happens without haste, and peacefully.”
“I’m frightened,” said another student, a Russian, Aleksandr Petrov. “Power is still in the hands of the Communist Party and the KGB. They can stir it all up if they want. And if there is violence, they’ll say they had to do it all to preserve peace.”
Their fears and visions of the future differed, but all of Foner’s students fully expected the Union to collapse. “The old regime,” Petrov said, “is not just old. It’s dead.”
As I traveled around the Union, opinions varied on when and where the old regime died. Uzbeks in Tashkent and Samarkand told me that the exposure in around 1988 and 1989 of the callous way Moscow had turned all of Central Asia into a vast cotton plantation—in the process destroying the Aral Sea and nearly every other area of the economy—was the turning point. In the Baltic states, the official “discovery” of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet pact was the key moment. But it was in Ukraine that I found the most unifying event, the absolute metaphor for the explosion of the last empire on earth.
On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1989, I met with small groups of nationalists who promised that “one day” their republic of over fifty million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out for independence and do far more damage to the union than the tiny Baltic states ever could. They knew their history. “For us,” Lenin once wrote, “to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head.” Bogdan and Mikhail Horyn, brothers who had spent long terms in jail for their pro-independence activities before Gorbachev took power, said that while an independent, post-Soviet Ukraine may be years off, the old regime collapsed, practically and metaphorically, at 1:23 A.M., April 26, 1986, the moment of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. That devastating instant had from the start been wrapped in a mystical aura. Within weeks of the accident, people realized that “Chernobyl” meant “Wormwood” and then pointed to Revelations 8:10–11; “A great star shot from the sky, flaming like a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs. The name of the star was Wormwood; and a third of the water turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it was poisoned.”
The accident at Chernobyl embodied every curse of the Soviet system, the decay and arrogance, the willful ignorance and self-deception. Before leaving for Chernobyl, I arranged to see Anatoly Aleksandrov, the physicist who designed the reactor model at Chernobyl. Aleksandrov was in his nineties, the dean of Soviet science. He was the former head of the Academy of Sciences and the head man at the Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy. During the Brezhnev era, Aleksandrov had written that nuclear power plants were 100 percent safe and ought to be built as close to population centers as possible, the better to solve the country’s heating problems during the winter.
Aleksandrov’s office was grander than any I had seen before, grander even than most of the palatial offices at the Kremlin. He and a group of his top aides and engineers sat in a semicircle and he talked of the accident. No, he felt no remorse. Yes, the reactor was sound and reports of future accidents were absurd. “If there was a defect or two, we’ve fixed it, you see.” And as for reports that hundreds, if not thousands, of people would die over the years from the effects of radioactivity unleashed at Chernobyl, Aleksandrov lifted his enormous, aged hand and flapped it in derision.
“Oh, really now,” he said. “That’s wild exaggeration. Stop worrying so much!”
There remains every reason to worry. The Chernobyl explosion released a radioactive cloud ten times more deadly than the radiation following the blast at Hiroshima. There were children in the region who absorbed radiation equivalent to a thousand chest X rays. More than 600,000 workers took part in the cleanup, a deadly job; more than 200,000 people were evacuated from the region, but only after a thirty-six-hour delay and after absorbing dangerous amounts of radioactivity. There are thousands of people in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and other republics who eat food grown in radioactive earth and drink contaminated water. At the Petrovsky Collective Farm in Narodichi, the farm directors reported that sixty-four farm animals were born with serious deformities in 1987: calves without heads, limbs, ribs, eyes; pigs with abnormal skulls. In 1988, the rate continued to rise. They recalled only three or four such instances before the accident. Moscow News said that the radiation readings in the area were thirty times greater than normal, but that local farm animals were still fed fodder from the contaminated fields. People in the region received 35 rubles a month from the state as a subsidy—money the people called the “coffin bonus.” The various bureaucracies seemed not to care about, or believe in, the perils of radiation. As late as 1990, more than 180 tons of contaminated meat was shipped to stores in Siberia and northern Russia from a processing plant in Bryansk where the sausage was being made from beef and pork with radiation levels ten times normal.
“Chernobyl was not like the Communist system. They were one and the same,” said Yuri Shcherbak, a physician and journalist who led the fight in Ukraine to publicize the medical and ecological hazards of the accident. “The system ate into our bones the same way radiation did, and the powers that be—or the powers that were—did everything they could to cover it all up, to wish it all away.”
From the moment that the engineers in the control room of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl reported a disaster beyond imagining, their superiors refused to act. The top bureaucrats at Chernobyl kept repeating the same fiction: that there had been a “mishap,” but nothing terrible, the reactor had not been destroyed. They quickly passed on this fiction to the leadership in Moscow. The next day, the people of Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the neighboring villages acted out their lives under a radioactive cloud. Children played soccer in radioactive dust. There were sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Young Communist League. Old men fished in a contaminated river and ate the contaminated fish. When he was told by his engineers that the radiation at the plant was millions of times higher than normal, the plant director, Viktor Bryuchanov, said the meter was obviously defective and must be thrown
away. For more than a day, Boris Shcherbina, a deputy prime minister, refused suggestions to carry out a mass evacuation. “Panic is worse than radiation,” he said. The world got word of the seriousness of the accident only when Scandinavian scientists reported dramatic increases in radiation levels. Even as they were evacuating their own families, Ukrainian Communist Party officials insisted on holding the annual May Day parade; the children of Kiev kicked up radioactive dust to celebrate the victories of socialism. After a long filibuster in the Politburo and strict controls on public information about the disaster, Gorbachev went on television to discuss Chernobyl a full sixteen days after the accident, and much of his talk was taken up with denunciations of the Western press.
“Meanwhile the reactor was burning away,” wrote Grigori Medvedev, an engineer who once worked at Chernobyl. “The graphite was burning, belching into the sky millions of curies of radioactivity. However, the reactor was not all that was finished. An abscess, long hidden within our society, had just burst: the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, of corruption and protectionism, of narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege. Now, as it rotted, the corpse of a bygone era—the age of lies and spiritual decay—filled the air with the stench of radiation.”
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