Europe: A History (231 page)

Meanwhile, as Delors flourished, Gorbachev flashed, floundered, and flopped. His analysis of the Soviet crisis can be deduced from his subsequent actions.
Much of it was explicitly stated in his book,
Perestroika
(1989). It was a sorry catalogue. Further expansion of the Soviet arsenal did not promise greater security. Military spending had reached levels which precluded any improvement in civilian living standards. Indeed, the Soviet economy could no longer sustain established patterns of expenditure. Communist planning methods had failed, the technology gap with the West was widening every day. The Party was corrupt and dispirited; the young were turning their backs on communist ideology; the citizenry had lost patience with empty promises. Soviet society was beset by apathy. Soviet foreign policy was in disarray. The war in Afghanistan, like all the other revolutionary struggles, was a bottomless drain; Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe paid no dividends. Gorbachev’s strategy lay first in defusing the Cold War climate of fear and hatred on which the old system had thrived, and then, having cleared the air, to move on to the trickier problems of internal reform. On the external front he was brilliantly successful. On visits to the USA and to West Germany, he was hailed as a conquering hero. Gorbymania raged. Notwithstanding his continuing support for traditional communist subversion in Western countries, he was eager to welcome President Reagan to Moscow.

Gorbachev’s internal policies were encapsulated in two programmatic buzzwords that went round the world.
Perestroika
, ‘restructuring’, envisaged the injection of market principles into economic management and of non-Party interests into political life.
Glasnost’
was wrongly translated as ‘openness’. It was, in fact, a standard Russian word for ‘publicity’, the opposite of ‘silence’ or ‘taboo’. It was initially intended as a goad for the Party comrades to propose solutions to problems whose very existence had hitherto been denied. Gorbachev set out to stimulate debate; and for this, it was essential that outspoken views should not be punished. So the Party began to talk, and then the media, and eventually the public. For the first time in their lives, Soviet people found that censorship and the police were not going to be used against them. With some delay, therefore,
Glasnost’ did
turn into openness, in an unprecedented, unrestrained, unstoppable torrent of argument. The strongest stream within that torrent was the near-universal denunciation of communism.

Very soon, therefore, General Secretary Gorbachev found himself in an anomalous position. In spite of his liberal reputation in the West, he was a convinced communist who wanted to humanize and revitalize the system, not to dump it. He stood for ‘democratization’, not democracy. Like Brezhnev before him, he arranged to be given the office of state ‘President’—as if he were the equivalent of the American President. Yet he never faced the electorate, and never sought to relinquish his main, unelected office of Party leader. His six years of reform, therefore, could never proceed beyond half- or quarter-measures. He supplemented the central Party organs with a new Congress of hand-picked People’s Deputies; but he never granted free elections. In the economic sphere he toyed repeatedly with marketization, but rejected all the more radical plans. He refused to decollectivize agriculture or to desubsidize prices; he delayed the legalization of private property. As a result, the planned economy started to collapse in
conditions where the market economy could not start to function. On the nationality issue, he encouraged the republics to state their demands, then refused to grant them.

Gorbachev was a political tactician of consummate skill, coaxing the conservatives and restraining the radicals; but he did not win any substantial degree of public confidence. In the eyes of the ordinary Russian, he was
tipicheskiy komu-nisticheskiy aktivist
—a typical Communist activist. Gorbachev, and his Western admirers, seemed to grasp neither the elementary features of the Soviet system which he was running nor the unavoidable consequences of Soviet history. They ignored the implications of removing coercion from a machine that had known no other driving force. They abandoned the Party’s dictatorial powers, the spine of the body politic, and were surprised when the limbs stopped responding to the brain. They underestimated the effects of decades of Party indoctrination which rendered the majority of administrators incapable of independent thought. They persisted in thinking of the Soviet Union as a natural, national entity—
moya strana
(‘my country’), as Gorbachev was still calling it in 1991. Above all, they misjudged the effect of Glasnost on the suppressed nationalities, for most of whom freedom of expression was equivalent to demands for independence. Tinkering was the worst possible course of action.

Much ink has still to be spilled on the causes of communism’s collapse. Political scientists inevitably put their emphasis on systemic political causes, economists on the failings of the economy. It may be that equal attention should be paid to the everyday lives of ordinary people. There are some excellent anthropological studies of East Europeans struggling with the absurdities of life under communism. It now seems that a generation which had lost the pervasive fear of the Stalinist era suddenly decided that enough was enough. As the Party bosses lost the will to enforce their authority, millions of men and women simply lost the inclination to obey. Communist society was as rotten at its grass roots as it was at the top.
³³
Independent culture, especially religion, played a greater role than is often supposed. Artists and believers were often the only people who could imagine a world without communism. The rest were like the inhabitants of a submerged planet in a science fiction story which the censors had failed to spot. They had been trained with great difficulty to live under water; when the water began to subside, they had forgotten how to breathe in the open air.
³⁴

Once again, in this final round, the earliest cracks in the edifice appeared in Poland. Material conditions were deteriorating; renewed strikes loomed. Desperate ministers turned to the leader of the banned Solidarity union, Walesa. It was an admission of political bankruptcy. Early in 1989 they called round-table talks to discuss power-sharing with the illegal opposition. The result was an agreement whereby Solidarity would compete for a limited number of parliamentary seats. The elections produced a sensation: Walesa’s people swept the board in every constituency where they competed. Many prominent communists were unable to get themselves re-elected, even where they were the sole candidates:
voters simply crossed them off the ballot. In this most recently ‘normalized’ of ‘communist countries’, communist authority was fast approaching zero.

In June 1989 China showed the world what demons lurked beneath the skin of communists facing popular wrath. Gorbachev, on an official visit to Beijing, witnessed the protests though not the massacre. He could not fail to draw conclusions. Later, when visiting East Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the state, he let it be known that the DDR could not count on the use of Soviet troops. There was to be no Tiananmen Square in Europe. The Brezhnev Doctrine had died before anyone noticed.

In August Poland’s bewildered communists invited Solidarity to form a government under their own continuing communist constitutional and state presidency. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a devout Catholic, was accepted as Premier. He took his seat in the Council of the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet bloc was no longer a bloc. Hungary was engaged in its own roundtable talks. Regular demonstrations were being organized by the Protestant Churches of East Germany.

The decay was well advanced, therefore, when the avalanche began to slip in the autumn of that
annus mirabilis
. In Budapest, on 23 October, on the 33rd anniversary of the Hungarian national rising, the Hungarian People’s Republic was abolished. The Hungarian communists admitted the Opposition into the parliament, whilst turning themselves into a social democratic party. Still more astonishingly, in Berlin on 9 November 1989, East German border guards stood idly by as crowds on both sides of the Berlin Wall demolished it with gusto. The DDR government had lost the will to fight. In Prague, on the 17th, a student demo went wrong: a demonstrator was reported killed by the police. But then, a week later, Havel and Dubček appeared together on a balcony in Wenceslas Square before the adoring crowds; and a general strike soon finished off the unresisting authorities. The ‘velvet revolution’ was complete. The sharpest of foreign observers on the spot was moved to utter the much-repeated quip: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia … ten days.’
³⁵
Finally, over Christmas, a bloody uprising in Bucharest, where the hated Securitate defended itself to the death, culminated in the grisly execution of the Ceausescus.

Gorbachev’s role, though honourable, has been exaggerated. He was not the architect of East Europe’s freedom; he was the lock-keeper who, seeing the dam about to burst, decided to open the floodgates and to let the water flow. The dam burst in any case; but it did so without the threat of a violent catastrophe.

In 1990, the practical consequences of the previous year’s crash began to work themselves out. First the CMEA, then the Warsaw Pact, ceased to function. One after another, the ruling communist parties bowed out. Every new government declared itself for democratic politics and a free market economy. With varying degrees of haste, treaties and timetables were drawn up for the phased withdrawal of Soviet troops. In Germany, the drive for reunification accelerated. The organs of the DDR simply evaporated. The. West German parties began to campaign in the East, and a general election was won by Chancellor Kohl. In October the
Federal Republic formally absorbed the citizens, territory, and assets of East Germany. The fires of freedom spread far and wide on the westerly wind. Bulgaria and Albania ignited, as did the constituent republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Slovenia and Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Chechenia all declared their independence, as yet unrecognized. Bosnia and Macedonia, Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia, and Ukraine were poised to follow suit.

The pulverization of the Yugoslav Federation was specially vicious. Democratic elections had brought militant nationalists to the fore both in Serbia and in Croatia. In Belgrade, the Federal State Council was overtaken by the designs of a Serbian leadership stoking the passions of a ‘Greater Serbia’. When in August 1990 the Serbs of Knin in Croatia rebelled against Zagreb, the stage was set for the open wars, which erupted the following Spring. After a miserable rout in Slovenia, the Serbian-led Yugoslav army launched its assault on Croatia. Panic and intercom-munal violence rapidly gripped several parts of a disintegrating state, where ethnic minorities were as common as compact majorities. Just before his death, Tito had sighed: ‘I am the only Yugoslav.’
³⁶
It was not true. But, with the genie of ethnic violence on the wing, it was all but impossible for supranational ‘Yugoslav’ policies to be asserted, [
CRAVATE
[
ILLYRIA
] [
MAKEDON
] [
SARAJEVO
]

Only in Poland did the pace slacken. The country which had been the first to loosen the communist yoke was the last to cast it off. The Mazowiecki Government gave priority to economics. In December 1990 Walesa pushed his way to the presidency after losing a quarter of the votes to a stooge of the ex-security service. Liberation from a parliament still dominated by communists took ten months more. According to the old stereotypes, the Polish Revolution was rather un-Polish.

The reunification of Germany was undertaken impetuously, not to say thoughtlessly. No one questioned the propriety of reunification. ‘What belongs together’, said Willy Brandt, ‘is now growing together.’ But when the ex-DDR became part of the Federal Republic, it was automatically joined to the European Community with no questions asked; and, contrary to the advice of the Bundesbank, the O-Mark was exchanged for the D-Mark at the rate of one for one. Little thought was given to the political and financial costs for Germany or for Germany’s neighbours. The Government in Bonn took it for granted that East Germans, being Germans, would welcome the imposition of the institutions of the Federal Republic, and that the West Germans, being Germans, would pay for it cheerfully. The prospect dawned that a united Germany might not be so interested in Europe as a disunited Germany had been. As public opinion grew more anxious and self-centred, the Federal Government felt obliged to reassert its commitment to European integration. ‘In a symbolic act of profound significance, the same Article 23 of the Basic Law under which German unification had been achieved was amended… so that the Federal Republic, instead of being open “for other parts of Germany”, was now committed to “the realisation of a united Europe”.’
³⁷

Decommunization proved a thorny problem in all post-communist countries.
The prevailing laws, though lacking legitimacy, could not be abandoned wholesale. The communist
nomenklatura
, now declaring undying devotion to democracy, could not be dismissed
en masse
. The ex-secret policemen could not be easily unmasked. Germany was rocked by the exposure of thousands and thousands of Stasi informers; Poland reopened investigations into political murders; in Romania, the new regime was actually opposed to decommunization. Czechoslovakia was alone in passing its
Lustracni zakon
, or ‘Verification Law’, which sought to exclude corrupt or criminal officials.

The legacy of Soviet-type economies was dire. Despite initial successes, such as the currency reform and the conquest of hyperinflation under Poland’s Balcerowicz Plan (1990–1), it became painfully clear that no overnight remedy was to hand. All the former members of the bloc faced decades of agonizing reorganization on the way to a viable market economy.
³⁸
In the mean time, their problems could be used to exclude them from the European Community.