The Year that Changed the World (6 page)

Winds of change may have been blowing from Moscow, but the German Democratic Republic was not about to bend. Its leaders, the ruling Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, had grown white-haired and inflexible, convinced of the rightness of their path and determined to hold power. Popularly they were known as the
Alt-Herren Riege,
the team of old men. Honecker was seventy-six as the year began; Mielke was over eighty. They knew the party line and cleaved to it uncompromisingly. Unification with the Federal Republic was an “impossibility,” Honecker would declaim again and again. “Socialism and capitalism are like fire and water.”

Yet deep within, Honecker was fearful. He knew that East Germany's command economy was feeble and growing weaker. The sputtering two-stroke Trabant automobile, made of plastic and belching plumes of exhaust as it bounced flimsily across the communist landscape, bore testimony to reality: the GDR was not on an economic plane with Spain, an only slightly less efficient model of traditional German industry than the Federal Republic, as we journalists often wrote. It was a basket case. Shortages of basic goods were endemic and people lived in suppressed despair and deprivation.

The other thing Honecker feared was Mikhail Gorbachev. East Germans had cheered when he last visited Berlin. “Gorbi, Gorbi,” they called out. “The people made it clear,” writes Peter Wyden in his masterful history,
Wall.
“They longed for the fresh air he was breathing into communism.” They, too, wanted change. Honecker and his men could sense it. They saw it when East Berliners tried to approach the Wall to hear Ronald Reagan speak in 1987, and again a few months later when they again approached the Wall to overhear a performance on the Western side by the rock band Genesis. They could see it in the jokes East Germans told.

The Volkspolizei were favorite targets, as in: Two Stasi agents on a surveillance mission grew bored. Said one, “Hey, what are you thinking about?” Replied the other, “Oh, nothing special—the same as you.” First agent: “In that case you're under arrest!”

The people made fun of the shortages of basic foods, and especially luxuries such as bananas: “How do you use a banana as a compass? Place it atop the Berlin Wall. East is where a bite has been taken out of it.”

Political jokes took on a particularly hard edge: Honecker meets Mao and asks, “How many political opponents do you have in China?” The Chinese leader answers, “I estimate seventeen million.” To which Honecker replies, “Oh, that's pretty much the same here,” which of course was the entire population of East Germany.

The 2007 Oscar-winning movie
Das Leben der Anderen
(The Lives of Others) featured an especially sharp jab at Honecker and communism in general:

Early one morning, Honecker arrives at his office and opens his window. He sees the sun and says, “Good morning, dear sun!”

The sun replies, “Good morning, dear Erich!”

Honecker begins his work, then, at noon, looks out the window and exclaims, “Good afternoon, dear sun!” And the sun replies, “Good afternoon, dear Erich!”

In the evening, Honecker calls it a day and goes once more to the window. “Good evening, dear sun!” But the sun is silent, so Honecker says again, “Good evening, dear sun! What is the matter with you?”

The sun replies, “Kiss my ass. I'm in the West now.”

This was the mood across the East bloc as 1989 began. It may have
been hard to see from the West, but in the East the signs were unmistakable. The climate was changing, a thaw was breaking up the frozen landscape. Gorbachev was in Moscow. In Poland, there was movement. The famous trade union of yesteryear, Solidarity, was showing signs of renewed life. In Prague, with a wary eye to the east, communist hard-liners were trying to read the winds and talking cautiously about “reform,” like the Soviet leader, even if they did not really mean it. In all the communist realm, Hungary was the place to watch. It was there that the first real spark of revolution was lit—not by its people, in the form of a popular uprising, but rather by a small band of pirates, numbering no more than half a dozen, who decided to light the fuse on a powder keg that would blow up the communist world.

Among them was a man few Americans have ever heard of. His name: Miklos Nemeth, Hungary's Harvard-educated prime minister. Working secretly with a few Western allies, chiefly in the West German chancellery, Nemeth and his small crew of communist subversives consciously set out to bring down the Iron Curtain that separated Hungary from the West. Their goal, as he put it, was to “join Europe” and restore their country to the ranks of the modern world. To do so, he knew he had to destroy the whole communist system. The means they chose, and the cunning and courage with which they executed their intricate plan, was one of the great subterfuges in the annals of diplomatic history—on the order of the legendary Operation Fortitude, and the tale of Britain's gambit to fool Hitler into thinking the Allied invasion of 1944 would come near Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy, effectively winning World War II.

This is the untold story of 1989.

That was the thing about the man. He sat there so imperturbably, so genial and seemingly genuine. It was impossible not to like him, hard not to trust him. But could you? After all, he was the justice minister of the People's Republic of Hungary. By virtue of his title, he was the ultimate enforcer in Hungary's communist regime, charged with jailing dissidents and hounding would-be democrats—a principal in the country's vast secret police and security apparatus.

Yet here he was, this friendly bear, a onetime law professor with florid cheeks and curly graying hair, talking animatedly about James Madison and the Federalist Papers and sounding every bit like a Hungarian Thomas Jefferson. A new prime minister had brought him into the government, just a few weeks earlier, and already he was elbow-deep in paperwork, he said, authoring a new national constitution. “We must guarantee the rights of the individual against the state,” he declared with forceful energy. Free speech, free association and free property are “inalienable rights.” And that wasn't all from this card-carrying commie. “Our goal is to create a parliamentary democracy,” he went on, identical to those in Western Europe.

You mean free elections, I asked, incredulous.

“Absolutely.”

How long would this take—for real democracy?

“Oh,” he said breezily. “One to three years.”

And if the communists lose?

He didn't even hesitate. “We step down.”

At this, I laughed. Across Eastern Europe, so many “reformers” were spouting such talk of “openness” and “change,” echoing their
patron in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, chanting his mantra of glasnost and perestroika. But if Gorbachev seemed to mean it, the leaders of his Warsaw Pact satellite nations did not. These Hungarians appeared more sincere than most but this, I felt, was going too far.

Kalman Kulcsar frowned at my evident skepticism. “You don't believe me, Mr. Meyer?” He leaned over in his leather swivel chair and slid open a drawer of his carved wooden desk, pulled out a small booklet and waved it over his head. “What do you think this is?” It was a copy of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. “Mark my words,” the minister said, emphasizing each word with unsettling force. “Within nine months, this will be ours.”

He was wrong. It would be all of ten months. Still, it was a dramatic moment. Here in Budapest, unnoticed by the outside world, communists had become… anticommunists. My god, I thought. This is for real. And that was when I discovered that something I'd always taken as a figure of speech was, in fact, a physical phenomenon. Quite literally, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

By night, it would be easy to mistake the Hungarian parliament for the symbol of democracy it was meant to be. Bright with lights reflecting on the waters of the Danube, it's an unabashed imitation of the British Houses of Parliament, except for one significant detail. By design, it's precisely one meter longer and one meter wider than its inspiration. The architectural allusion was apt in late 1988. It was at once an ironic symbol of Hungary's historic aspirations and a reminder of its lesser attainments.

Not for long, though.

I had come to Budapest to investigate reports that after four decades under communism the first tender shoots of democracy were pushing up along the Danube. The city was in the grip of a December blizzard. But beneath the deep freeze, a political spring was indeed germinating.

Just a month before, in November, a small group of communist reformers had come to power. Kalman Kulcsar was but one of a number of Hungarian leaders who were saying (and doing) the most uncommunist things. Within the last few months, they had opened a stock market—a temple to the antipodal capitalist faith. They passed
new laws encouraging private enterprise, slashed subsidies for state-owned enterprises, abandoned communist-style price-fixing in favor of a free market. The cost of food, fuel and housing would henceforth be determined by supply and demand, they told the people, well aware of how painful that transition could be. Hello, Keynes. Goodbye, Marx?

It quickly became apparent that this revolution—for that was what it had already become—went far beyond the marketplace. Six months earlier, just before his first state visit to the United States in July, the thuggish chief of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, a former printing engineer named Karoly Grosz, sat down with
Newsweek.
Contemptuously he dismissed all talk of democracy and what, within opposition circles, was being discussed as the potential for “multiparty rule.” Anything but the classic dictatorship of the proletariat, meaning him and his Socialist Party henchmen, he said, was “an historic impossibility.” He declined even hypothetically to discuss sharing power or offering a role in government to opposing political parties. Yet that was precisely what Hungary's new government, appointed and duly installed by Grosz and his communists, was working to do.

Eager to stamp their more human face on the old order, they had just taken a step that no other East European regime dared—to create a real opposition to their own rule. This came in the form of a new law, enacted soon after the reformers took office, allowing the country's first independent political parties to organize. They could not officially recognize these groups as bona fide “parties,” at least not yet. That would violate the ironclad principle of Marxist Leninism: that there could be only one party—the socialist or communist party—whose destiny it was to guide the nation in all important matters. So they played games with names. They called them “clubs,” “movements” or “alternative organizations.” At a time when signs of a thawing in the Cold War were yet faint, this was a remarkable, even radical development.

Suddenly, the entire country was in ferment. Budapest's cafés buzzed with the D-word,
democracy.
You could virtually see the internal rift emerging—the young reformers on one side, the old guard on the other, each girding for a struggle that would unfold with astonishing speed. In September, a populist group called the Hungarian
Democratic Forum (which within the year would go on to form Hungary's first postcommunist government) set itself up as a “democratic spiritual-political movement.” Other groups soon followed, among them the League of Young Democrats (a student association better known as Fidesz) and the Alliance for Free Democrats, an organization of trade unions. All would go on, in future years, to dominate Hungary's political scene. Meanwhile, censorship was eased. A robustly free press began to emerge. Underground samizdat publications came into the open. The few dissidents who deserved the name either went mainstream by joining one of the parties or were ignored, both by people in the street and the authorities who once persecuted them. Dissent against what, you might ask, or whom?

How do you dissent, really, from someone like Miklos Nemeth, the man who put so much of this in motion. He was no Lech Walesa, Poland's archetypal charismatic leader, the hero of Solidarity, who in 1980 became famous in America and the world for leaping over the fence in the Gdansk shipyard and brandishing a fist in the face of Soviet authorities. No, Nemeth was the quiet man, a technocrat, a trained economist who spent a year at Harvard Business School and played tennis with the U.S. ambassador. He was only forty years old when the communist party appointed him prime minister on November 24, 1988. Sober-suited and bankerly, his mild manner masked inner toughness. His was a life-or-death situation. Hungary's economy was a shambles. The country's finances were in crisis. Everything was falling apart. His job was to step in and save the day—and his own career. To do so, he knew that mere “reform” would not be enough. He would have to dismantle the entire communist system.

He did not say as much when I first met him, less than a month after taking office. Perhaps he was too mindful of the dangers and all that could go wrong. Sitting at a long, dark oak conference table in his offices in the Gothic-style parliament building, flanked by half a dozen aides, he did not look like a man who would change the world. In our three-hour meeting, he dabbed perspiration from his brow with a white handkerchief and lapsed often into the opaque, excessively careful language of the high communist official. There was nothing communist about his message, however. When he said something
that he especially wanted to be heard, he delivered it crisply with a quick, direct look that meant
Listen up.

These clubs, these new political groups, I asked, could they eventually become bona fide American- or European-style political parties? “That is one of our greatest ambitions,” Nemeth replied.

For as long as it had existed, the communist party had insisted on its so-called “leading role” in society—meaning unchallenged power. Would he be prepared to give it up, as Kalman Kulcsar claimed?