The Year that Changed the World (11 page)

Like Jaruzelski, he too was full of confidence. It did not matter whether the communist party liked the deal or not. “The army is the true power in Poland,” he said. “Jaruzelski will deliver. The conventional wisdom that the party would step in to prevent an erosion of its power is wrong.” Of course, he added, the general would be named president. Though elated at all that Solidarity had won, Geremek did not foresee a dramatic change in Poland's political landscape, let
alone a rapid transition to democracy. The June elections would merely be a prelude to fully free elections four years later. It would be a decade, he suggested, before Poland might actually see a noncommunist government.

Never did he imagine it would be four months.

On January 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-first president of the United States. Shortly after taking office, he ordered a strategic review of U.S.-Soviet relations. It arrived on the president's desk in mid-March, not long after Miklos Nemeth's secret Moscow summit.

Brent Scowcroft, the new national security adviser, was unimpressed. “Disappointing,” he called it, a bland interagency overview, cobbled together from cursory CIA reports and State Department memos. Its fatal flaw in his eyes, however, was that it represented “continuity,” as one of his senior deputies would describe it. There was too much of the old administration, and too little of the new. Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker wanted a complete break, not some Reagan-Bush hybrid. Scowcroft set the review aside and began working instead with a “think piece” on Gorbachev's intentions and policies, drawn up by an energetic and smart young protégée on the NSC named Condoleezza Rice.

Rice's revealing memo laid out a strategy for “coping with Gorbachev,” as Scowcroft put it, premised on the “need to underscore the credibility of NATO's nuclear deterrent” and a deep wariness about Soviet intentions. The new national security team saw the Soviet leader as a “propagandist,” seeking to lull the United States into a false sense of security. Ronald Reagan was too popular to publicly repudiate, but the incoming administration believed that the former president had gone too far in his rapprochement with Moscow. Reagan trusted Gorbachev too much. It was time to dial back. Reagan's more ambitious disarmament initiatives were put on hold. The new defense secretary, Dick Cheney, pushed for tougher policies of confrontation to “test” the Russian leader, coupled with increases in U.S. military spending to counter what he presented as an escalating rather than a diminishing Soviet threat. A sudden East-West chill set in.

I found this troubling, even from afar. It was as if the movie
Back to
the Future,
the sequel to which was then being filmed, were playing out in geopolitics. On the ground, I saw Nemeth dismantling communism in Hungary. Here was Poland, on the brink of democratic elections. Gorbachev was everywhere, the hero of a newly vigorous Europe. Yet in Washington a new administration took power with a frame of reference best summed up as Cold War Lite. This seemed especially ironic given that the main theme of the transition, as Bush himself described it, was to “dream big dreams” and see the world fresh. The beflummoxed outgoing secretary of state, George Shultz, leaving office in January, wrote in his memoir, “It was as if the Bush administration did not understand or accept that the Cold War was over.”

This skepticism ran deep. Scowcroft and his team were well aware of events in Hungary and Poland. They noted, for instance, the publication in Moscow of a long newspaper article praising Lech Walesa, a clear signal that the Kremlin approved of the course Jaruzelski was charting. The successful conclusion of the Round Table, with its promise of elections, was recognized as a breakthrough. But Scowcroft, in particular, advocated caution. He was a military man and a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He had seen previous eras of détente turn sour, and he worried that Gorbachev's strategy was to fool the United States into lowering its military guard in Europe, toward whatever unforeseen end. “I was suspicious of Gorbachev's motives and skeptical of his prospects,” he wrote in his memoir with George Bush,
A World Transformed.
Gorbachev's goal was to revitalize the Soviet Union so as to “better compete” with the West. “To me,” said Scowcroft, “this made Gorbachev potentially more dangerous than his predecessors, each of whom, through some aggressive move, had saved the West from the dangers of its own wishful thinking.”

Others in the administration were no less wary. Never mind that, in April, George Kennan, dean of American Sovietologists and the original author of America's bedrock strategy of containment, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Soviet Union no longer posed a threat. Never mind that Margaret Thatcher declared the Cold War to be over. James Baker would suggest that “Gorbachev's strategy was premised on splitting the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe.” Hard-liners within the Defense Department, led by Cheney and a phalanx of aides who would become famous in a later
Bush administration—among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby—argued against more moderate State Department officials who saw the changes gathering force in the East bloc as an opportunity for closer engagement. Cheney was especially virulent in his suspicions, all but calling Gorbachev an impostor and a “fraud.” Giving too much credence to Gorbachev's “new thinking,” he told CNN in late April, exposed the United States to the risk, indeed the likelihood, that he would fail and be replaced by someone “far more hostile” to the United States.

U.S. intelligence analyses did little to reshape the discussion. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate dated November 23, 1988, focused on the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic situation, accurately suggesting that internal reforms offered scant prospect of solving the country's growing troubles. But in reference to developments elsewhere in the bloc, it projected rather tamely that “attempts at political reform in the USSR are likely to generate pressure on East European countries for similar reforms”—neglecting to note that changes there were already running well ahead of anything happening in Moscow. A second intelligence estimate a month later, focusing specifically on Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe, concluded that Gorbachev's “agenda” for the region had “increased the potential for instability.” Any changes would most likely be “evolutionary,” however, leading to “greater diversity” but far short of radical transformation. “In extremis,” the CIA judged, “there is no reason to doubt [Gorbachev's] willingness to intervene to preserve party rule and decisive Soviet influence in the region.”

The agency would stick by this view in a National Intelligence Estimate dated as late as November 18, 1989, even as Eastern Europe slipped ever more out of communist control and after the Wall itself had toppled. Indeed, the closest it came to calling events right came in a dissent to that document written by Deputy Director for Intelligence John Helgerson. Presciently, it argued that Gorbachev would avoid a crackdown in the East but would “progressively lose control of events” and be forced to give up his “still authoritarian vision in favor of a truly democratic one.”

For both the intelligence community and the White House, the ruling assumption through most of 1989 was that Moscow still called the
shots in Eastern Europe, despite all Gorbachev was saying and doing. More than once, the Soviet leader implicitly—and, as time went on, increasingly explicitly—renounced the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine. His chief advisers, Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Bogomolov, unequivocally said as much in face-to-face meetings with senior U.S. and European officials. There were Gorbachev's assurances to Miklos Nemeth, who promptly relayed them to his tennis partner, Ambassador Mark Palmer, who sent them on to Washington. In Poland, Czeslaw Kiszczak, chairing the government side in the Round Table talks, relayed the essence of Gorbachev's message to Jaruzelski to Solidarity's negotiators, who quickly told the Americans. Meanwhile, classified cables flooded into the White House and State Department from the likes of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, flatly describing the Brezhnev Doctrine as “dead” and casting Gorbachev as a bona fide “revolutionary” who represented a historic opportunity for the United States to reshape relations with the Soviet Union.

Years later, Rice would admit that the new administration, focusing on Gorbachev's troop withdrawals and the implications for U.S. nuclear doctrine, had missed the bigger picture entirely. “I missed completely, really, the revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine.” All the while, communism continued to crumble, increasingly visibly as the spring went on. Yet none of it quite seemed to sink in. As the Solidarity activist Adam Michnik would bitingly put it, America at this decisive moment was “sleepwalking through history.”

May 1, 1989. East Berlin. An aging Erich Honecker, seventy-seven, stood atop the reviewing stand for the annual May Day parade, flanked by his top Politburo henchmen. To his left was one of the most feared men in the East bloc, the murderous Erich Mielke, minister of state security, head of the ubiquitous East German secret police. To his right, the toothy Egon Krenz, general secretary of the Central Committee, and not far away, Gunter Schabowski, first secretary of the Berlin communist party.

Both Krenz and Schabowski would soon be plotting against him, though it would scarcely matter. The real threat, invisible as yet, lay shaping far away, hundreds of miles to the south. But on this day there was no sign of intrigue. The sun was shining. A warm breeze, a sign of an early spring, tousled Honecker's fluffy, grandfatherly white hair. Outwardly he was the very image of the revered leader, a benign First Comrade, doting on children and beloved by his people, the citizens of the German Democratic Republic.

Every religion has its symbols. They give voice and shape to faith. When violated, especially if deliberately, it is not merely a desecration. It is a challenge to orthodoxy, a heresy, even treason. Among the believers of communist Europe, few symbols were dearer than May Day. Those who did not grow up during the Cold War will not remember the tanks, missile launchers and armies of troops parading each spring through Red Square. Atop Lenin's Tomb, generations of Soviet leaders paid homage to these emblems of socialist might. The satraps of Moscow's colonies celebrated no less fervently. Within the East bloc, this was not merely a commemoration of the 1917 revolution.
It was a legitimation of their rule. As wine and wafers are to Christians, May Day was to communist officialdom.

This particular May Day in Berlin was special. It was a Jubilee year, marking the East German regime's fortieth anniversary in power. The annual parade was thus even more colossal than usual. Banners flew, bands played. The youth of the communist party, the Freie Deutsche Jugend, saluted smartly as they marched proudly by, cheered by thousands mustered by fiat for the occasion. Honecker and his men waved back, warm in the sun, basking in the display, secure in their cocoon of power. Could it be two years since Honecker had triumphantly returned from his first state visit to the West German Federal Republic, a de facto recognition of himself and his nation that he had yearned for over decades? To him, it seemed only yesterday.

Erich Honecker built the Wall, behind which he ruled as master. His predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, ordered it. But Honecker personally oversaw its construction and was its guarantor. Every year, East German border police shot a handful of citizens who dared to try to escape—“wall-jumpers,” malcontents.
“Die Mauer bleibt noch hundert Jahre,”
Honecker had declared in January, marking the beginning of this auspicious year. “The Wall will last another hundred years.” Nothing on his political horizon clouded his prospects. To the east, Mikhail Gorbachev might be championing change. Poland and Hungary were chasing their aberrant path to socialism. But the GDR itself had never seemed so outwardly solid. There was no hint that this day, this very day, would be its high-water mark. Nothing in the cloudless skies over Honecker's head suggested the tempest that would soon engulf him. Indeed, he scarcely saw that first mortal blow as it fell. It came as a bolt out of the blue.

Shift to Budapest, four hundred miles distant. As Erich Honecker luxuriated in the welcoming spring sun, Karoly Grosz trudged through a sullen rain. Nor was there a parade. Change was afoot, and communist party officials decided they had best put on a fresh face.

Instead of the traditional May Day ceremony, as in East Berlin, they opted for a People's Picnic. At a nearby park, a vast feast awaited—food and drink, balloons and tents, ready to receive tens of thousands of guests. The rain was not to blame that only a thousand
showed up, mostly aging party stalwarts and their damp and unsmiling spouses. Across town, a rally by Hungary's new opposition political parties drew more than one hundred thousand people. Their banners proclaimed
DOWN WITH COMMUNISM!

There were student groups, ecology groups, artist groups, new political groups of every description, each with its own tent lining the paths of a city park, all busily signing up members and discussing programs for change. Jazz bands played; people danced in the mud. “The communists are finished,” shouted one political organizer who would go on to become a leader of his country. Not long ago he would have been arrested. Today, he was the young face of Hungary's future.

The party's humiliation was plain. It was a public desecration, a frontal challenge to orthodoxy and to communism itself. And it was so deliberate. Not a single senior official in Nemeth's government bothered to attend, save for the prime minister himself, who felt obliged. “That was the day of my humiliation,” he remembers. He stood there as Grosz spoke to the party faithful, furiously attacking Nemeth and his government's policies and all but charging him with treason to the socialist cause.