The Year that Changed the World (32 page)

The Wall began a long slow fade into historical imagination. Much of it was quickly knocked down. A 260-foot stretch stands today, as a tourist destination, near the old Gestapo headquarters in central Berlin, midway between Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie. Another stretch runs along the river Spree near the Oberbaumbrücke, dubbed the East Side Gallery for its graffiti-covered face (all painted post-Fall). Still more chunks have been exported around the world—mainly to the capitals of the perceived victors in the Cold War: London, New York, Washington. They stand here and there, vaguely incongruous, providing shade for lunching bankers or secretaries, oblivious to their once ominous portent.

Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit. He was the geopolitical demiurge, the prime mover that set all else in motion. Without him, the history of Eastern Europe and the end of communism would have been vastly different. His reward for services to humanity was to be unceremoniously ousted, after an attempted coup, when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Egon Krenz tried to claim credit. In an interview the summer after the Wall came down, he told me that he had “instructed border officials to open the frontiers,” sometime around 9:15 p.m. But that simply doesn't jibe with the facts. He was thrown out as the GDR's last communist head of state on December 7, 1989, by a party desperate to change its image. In 1997, he was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for crimes against humanity, specifically manslaughter of Germans attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall.

Erich Honecker fled to Moscow after the collapse of the GDR, to be extradited in 1992, tried for treason and jailed in the Federal Republic. He died in exile in Chile on May 29, 1994, of cancer, unrepentant.

Gunter Schabowski would be one of the few top leaders to repudiate communism. I met him in early 1999, just after his seventieth
birthday. He was helping a local newspaper in little Rotenberg am Fulda with their graphic design. Photoshop! Quark! “Are you a computer freak?” he asked disarmingly when I arrived to spend half a day with him. He chatted about his Macintosh and lamented its lack of processing power. Only 160 RAM! And it took so long to download digital photos. Even then the resolution was poor, he said, muttering about pixel counts. At the close of our interview, he took a picture of the two of us and processed it through his computer. “Just so you'll remember meeting this old toad,” he said.

In Warsaw, Lech Walesa went on to become Poland's president, replacing General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1990. Jaruzelski subsequently faced charges for murder during the period of martial law and was defended by former leaders of Solidarity. In 2005, he apologized for his role in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, calling it a great “political and moral mistake.”

On Sunday, December 10, 1989, International Human Rights Day, President Gustav Husak swore in Czechoslovakia's first noncommunist government since World War II. Then he himself resigned. Who would replace him? Jan Urban, tired but jubilant, wore the answer on his lapel, a little campaign button reading
HAVEL FOR PRESIDENT
. He was sworn in on December 29, 1989. The celebrations on Wenceslas Square went on all night.

We had one last conversation. Outwardly, Havel looked the same as ever, down to his faded green army jacket. But he seemed distracted, even evasive. The revolution was over and we both had the odd feeling that, for the moment at least, everything had been said. We spoke a bit about the whimsy of fortune, from jail to the presidency in six months. “Yes, a lot has happened,” Havel said. “I learned in prison that everything is possible, so I should not be amazed. But I am amazed.”

Then he told a story I've often heard repeated: “For a long time, I thought that all this might just have been a colorful dream, and that I would wake up in my cell and tell my fellow inmates about this dream. ‘Oh, Havel,' they would tell me, ‘you are becoming bigheaded about being an important dissident.' So from time to time during these days—we must still decide what to call these events—I would ask my friends if we were dreaming. They would say, ‘No,' but it was not until
yesterday that I really felt that it was so. I took a stroll through Pruhonice Park, outside Prague. It was the first time in a month that I could spend some time in the open air and feel the heavens above me, and for the first time I felt that from now on I could live in a different way, less dependent on messages of encouragement from, say, the Dalai Lama!”

Havel, like his country, was beginning a new life, not merely as president but as a person. But instead of asking more about this, continuing the conversation as a conversation, I lapsed into journalist mode. How did he feel about a writer as president? “Well, I could at least write my own speeches.” He laughed, but he was torn. He wanted to return to being a playwright, and he wanted to be president. If asked, he said, “I would accept this post on the condition that I hold it only until another president is elected to a full five-year term.” After that, he would prefer to complete the play he was writing when events interrupted. What would it be called? He didn't know, just yet. But his last one was aptly titled, didn't I think?
Slum Clearance.
It was about to open in New York, he added, and close in Prague.

As if in keeping with the quiet way in which it began, the year ended in Budapest with only the faintest echo of the celebrations elsewhere. A new national parliament adopted Kalman Kulcsar's cherished Constitution, modeled on that of the United States and enshrining free speech and private property (not to mention the pursuit of happiness) as inalienable rights of man.

Imre Pozsgay abolished the communist party and expected to lead a revived Socialist Party to the presidency. But voters would not elect a former communist to high office, however heroic a patriot he might have been, and he returned to teaching at the University of Debrecen, just as when he was on the outs with the ruling regime of yore.

In contrast to Poland, whose communists enjoyed a protected place in parliament, Hungary had scheduled completely free elections for March 1990. That fully democratic free-for-all would unseat all those most responsible for Hungary's freedom. Unlike Pozsgay, Miklos Nemeth anticipated that his term as prime minister would end with that historic ballot. “I saw it coming long before,” he told me. “I belonged to the party. A member of the former regime could never last, no matter how good his works.” His reward for changing the
world would, when I first saw him again ten years later, be a job as a mid- to upper-level vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, in charge of human resources.

Yet Nemeth had one last victory in those final days, a secret one that few ever knew about. Toward year's end, he received a letter hand-delivered from the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, accompanied by armed guards. The ambassador did not know what the letter contained, nor was he allowed to stay while Nemeth read it.

Privately he opened it. The Soviet Union is pleased to inform you, it read, that all nuclear weapons have been removed from Hungarian soil—weapons that Moscow had always denied deploying in Hungary or other Warsaw Pact nations.

This was the grim secret that Nemeth had become privy to in December 1988, after being named prime minister. He had raised the matter with Gorbachev in March, insisting that the weapons be withdrawn despite his only being in office four months. “I'll get back to you,” the Russian leader had said. To this day, Nemeth does not know how the Soviets got them out without anyone in his government knowing, just as he does not know how they got them into Hungary in the first place. He went to inspect the bunkers, not far from his mother's village near Lake Balaton: empty, stripped to their twenty-foot-thick concrete walls. He liked to think of it as an independence gift.

“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

Some memories fade, others remain vivid despite the passing years. Why? Perhaps they carry some bit of unrealized experience, a message not fully decoded that can help us decipher the future.

For whatever reason, I've never forgotten an image from nearly twenty years ago, scribbled in a reporter's notebook dated November 2, 1990. It was a beautiful autumn day in Berlin. The first anniversary of the fall of the Wall was coming up. A few weeks earlier, East and West Germany had been reunited. Almost overnight, it seemed, the once-divided city had become the world's top tourist destination. We journalists joked about it as a Cold War theme park, a sort of Disney East. Everyone wanted to come—to see what communism was really like, to savor victory—before it all disappeared.

Among the dinosaurs in this park, besides the remnants of the Wall and the oddly dressed
Volk
who lived to the east of it, was the Soviet Red Army. Within a few short months of diplomatic negotiations, Moscow had agreed to call its soldiers home—380,000 in twenty-one battle-ready divisions across a geography stretching a thousand miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Meanwhile, there they were, smack in the heart of what was now democratic Europe.

This made for some surreal experiences. Driving in the newly
open countryside of East Germany, or hiking in dense woods, you might hear a low heavy rumble. Suddenly, a long line of troop carriers and tanks would come into view, emblazoned with the Red Star. Hello, you were in the middle of a Warsaw Pact military exercise. Not so long ago, you got shot for less. On one such excursion, I drove south to Wuensdorf, headquarters of the Soviet high command. I had heard rumors that Russian forces were selling off weapons on a new black market and thought I would investigate. For reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, this adventure culminated in my climbing a pine tree to see over the concrete wall of a Russian base deep in a forest accessible only by a rutted logging road. I fell, broke my arm and had to be transported, whimpering, back to a hospital in Berlin. The doctor laughed at this tale. “You don't have to fall out of trees to see Russians,” he told me. “Just go to the city dump.”

Which brings me to that image from long ago, a mental snapshot of a day trip to a Berlin suburb called Dallgow, home to a municipal garbage dump and a Soviet garrison. Picking through mountains of stinking debris were a dozen uniformed Russian soldiers. These were not conscripts, notoriously underfed and seldom paid. They were officers: lieutenants, captains, colonels—field commanders in the vaunted Red Army that had vanquished Hitler and held half of Europe in thrall. One carried a plastic bag into which he stuffed recovered treasures: a broken toaster, an abandoned toy. Another stood amid the garbage casually smoking a cigarette, a scrap of frayed carpet rolled under his arm, along with a soiled corduroy pillow. He looked me in the eye and spat.

For decades Americans lived in fear of these men. Braced for war, we stationed hundreds of thousands of troops in Germany. We spent trillions of dollars on weapons, waged a nuclear arms race, battled the communist menace in Vietnam and Korea and underwrote proxy wars in a dozen countries from Somalia and Nicaragua to Afghanistan. All to fight off … these poor scavengers? Here was the true Russian army, a shell of a once mighty force, capable of spitting at a victorious America but scarcely able to clothe and equip itself let alone charge through the Fulda Gap into West Germany and on to the English Channel.

I wrote a colorful post–Cold War feature article to this effect, full of
moody atmospherics. Recalling it twenty years later, I am a bit embarrassed, most of all by its triumphalist tone. Humbled though it may have been, the Red Army remained formidable. Russia was still a great power and remains so today, as its sway in Europe's energy markets amply demonstrates. As a matter of historical record, I knew the Russians were the chief victors in World War II. They bore the brunt of Nazi Germany's aggression; they battled back from the gates of Moscow and across the map of Europe to Berlin. They paid for that victory with 23 million lives. (U.S. losses were less than half a million.) And yet there I was, in that dump at Dallgow, spinning out my yarn that put us at the center of everything, from defeating Hitler to facing down the “Red menace” and, finally, emerging triumphant at the end of the Cold War.

Of the various interpretations one could give to this scene, more or less accurately, I chose what I wanted to see. Lewis Carroll's metaphor is apt. The world is always partly a mirror of ourselves. We see all things, enemies especially, through the lens of our own hopes and fears and desires, inevitably distorted. Memory works not only backward but forward, shaping the present and prefiguring the future. We live as much by what we believe happened to us as by what actually did.

I found myself thinking about all this, not long ago, at the George Bush Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. It is an odd place, so starkly in contrast to, say, the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta. Carter's memorial is a quiet refuge in a leafy park, a sober and respected center for scholarly research and substantive conversation on weighty global issues—climate change, child health care in Africa, the war against world poverty. The Bush library, by comparison, felt like a huckster's carnival. The former president's baseball glove from his college days is lovingly displayed, along with bats, balls, uniforms and photos of the star Yale athlete running, diving, catching and lounging—just a few of the two million photos, ten thousand videos, innumerable souvenirs and mementos documenting his life. The 1947 Studebaker in which he drove to Texas is there, not to mention the plane he flew as a pilot during the war and the cigarette boat in which he liked to race around Kennebunkport, Maine. Then, amid all this boy-racer bric-a-brac, one comes across something much more serious:
a slab of the Berlin Wall, encased in Plexiglas. An accompanying video explains what it represented and how it came to fall, with America and the Bush administration very much at the center of the narrative. Lest one miss the point, a massive bronze sculpture of a herd of wild horses, unbridled and free, stands outside the library doors. The symbolism is far from subtle, and it takes only a moment to grasp the meaning of this Ceausescu-scale statuary: beneath the flashing hoofs of these mighty mustangs is the rubble of the wall that once separated the West from those oppressed under communism.