Revolution 1989 (25 page)

The predictable result was an explosion in the size of a second, ‘black’ economy outside the state that was never officially acknowledged. This was not only tolerated but encouraged by the regime. Naturally, the black economy operated much more efficiently than the official one. In the mid-1980s around 80,000 artisans working privately were meeting nearly two-thirds of the demands for all kinds of services from plumbing to lap-dancing. The economists behind the NEM said that without these reforms the entire Communist system would disintegrate into poverty - ‘reproducing shortage’, as the best-known of them, János Kornai, said. The NEM had many admirers in the West. More circumspectly, it had growing support in countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, whose regimes had turned their faces against reforms. As Honecker maintained: ‘Capitalism and communism were as different and incompatible as fire and water.’ The GDR, he said, ‘was not going to be a field for experimentation’.

One big problem faced the NEM: it did not work. Hungarian prosperity was an illusion, as all the moonlighting builders, taxi drivers, electricians and cooks desperately doing their second and third jobs to make ends meet knew well from personal experience. ‘Every time visiting journalists or academics came here telling us what a success story Hungary was, we would try to explain the truth patiently and their eyes would glaze over,’ Sándor Zsindely, a research chemist at an institute in Budapest during the 1980s, said. ‘It was not the story they wanted to hear. They thought we were just miserable Central Europeans who enjoyed our melancholy.’
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The reforms failed because they ended in the worst of both worlds. Hungary had the constraints of communism without the benefits of capitalism. The Party was still not prepared to surrender the commanding heights of the economy, because that risked losing power politically. Hungary was forced to adopt the same methods of staying afloat as its neighbours: borrowing on a huge scale. By the mid-1980s it had foreign debts of around US$ 18.5 billion - more than US$200 for each Hungarian, not far short of the average person’s annual income. The country had the highest per capita debt in Europe.

 

On the morning of 8 February 1986 a group of around 400 people took a walk near the village of Nagymáros in one of the most picturesque parts of Hungary. It was a freezing cold day, but this was a popular route taken at all times of the year to see the glorious Danube Bend where, fifteen kilometres north of Budapest, the majestic river sweeps through a narrow valley in the Carpathian Basin. The views here are stunning but these hikers were not there that day to see one of the natural wonders of Europe. They were there to protest against a joint plan by the Hungarian and Czech governments that would forever destroy the beauty of this bucolic spot. Soon after ten a.m. the marchers reached a quiet glade on the riverbank that was cordoned off by wire. This was where work was scheduled to begin on a huge new hydroelectric dam - a great feat of engineering, the two governments explained, one of those gigantic projects with which the Communists proposed to serve humanity by taming nature.

As they approached the cordon the demonstrators saw they were not alone. Dozens of riot police confronted them wielding plastic shields and truncheons. János Várgha, the leader of the group, a bearded, forty-three-year-old former biologist turned science journalist, remonstrated with the officer in charge that this was ‘a peaceful nature walk, we are doing nothing against the law, nothing political’. But this was ignored. The police were under orders to break up the demonstration. They fired tear gas grenades and beat up around thirty of the protesters. When Várgha returned to Budapest he heard that he had lost his job on the magazine
Buvar
.

But if the regime thought it had silenced protest against the US$ 3 billion Nagymáros dam project, it was forced to think again. Várgha’s Danube Circle gained publicity around the world. In Hungary it attracted overwhelming support even from people who did not care about the environment and thought - as the majority in the West did during the 1980s - that the Greens were kooks. Within weeks more than 10,000 people signed a petition calling for the two regimes to halt the project. This was an extraordinary number in a country where, for thirty years, since the revolution against the Soviets, people had been careful not to push at the limits under which they were constrained by ‘gulyás communism’.

The idea of damming the Danube had first been suggested in Stalin’s time. It fitted with the big Soviet dreams of turning small agricultural countries into ‘nations of iron and steel’. The plan was dropped in the 1950s but resurrected in the 1970s and the two governments signed an agreement to go ahead with the project in 1979. It involved building an enormous and complex system of dams, reservoirs and canals along a 200-kilometre stretch of the Danube that runs through Slovakia and Hungary. The Danube is a relatively slow-moving river at this point, but that did not deter the Planners. Twice a day water would be dammed at Gabikovo, a plant on the Czechoslovak side, creating a swell in the river. Water would also be diverted into a twenty-kilometre- long canal on the Czech side, leading to a second dam at Nagymáros, on the Hungarian side, where there would be a huge energy-creating turbine. The main attraction for the two Communist governments was that most of the cost would be met by the Austrian government, which insisted on taking 60 per cent of the energy. It was a deeply cynical move from the Austrians, who a couple of years earlier had planned a dam further upstream at Hainburg, but were stopped from proceeding by their own environmental campaigners. The two Communist regimes imagined they would benefit from hard currency, even though their own energy supplies would be increased only moderately - in Hungary’s case by just 5 per cent.
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In Czechoslovakia objectors to the scheme were suppressed. The moment the Husák regime heard of the formation of any protest groups it closed them down and jailed their leaders. In Hungary, at first, objections were permitted. The Party was careful to burnish its liberal image for Western consumption and did not immediately see that an environmental protest would become a political threat. It allowed objectors to argue publicly in the state-owned press that the scheme would have serious consequences. Várgha formed the Danube Circle in 1984 after he began to write a series of articles about the potential ecological impact of the scheme. He discovered that 150,000 hectares of land would be flooded, including riverbanks, the wetland habitats of 200 species of animals, and prime agricultural fields. The beautiful, medieval town of Visegrád would be destroyed, wonderful scenery would be marred by huge and hideous power plants and the shipping industry along the river would be severely dislocated. At first the Danube Circle remained a small group that received more attention outside than inside Hungary. But when details of the Austrian deal emerged in late 1985, and now three governments seemed determined to press ahead with the scheme despite the protests, support grew fast. Here, at last, was a popular issue that could galvanise Hungarians. ‘This could unite people,’ the dissident activist Miklós Haraszti said. ‘We could say look, these are real concrete issues about the environment, about health, the land. It wasn’t about largely theoretical things like civil rights, human freedoms and so on.’
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Dissident opposition groups in Hungary had been allowed increasing freedom since the mid-1960s, but were tiny and had little influence. They operated in a climate not so much of fear but of officially encouraged amnesia. The Communists ruled, as in Czechoslovakia, on ‘silent memories of a stolen past’, as one of the underground writers put it. For three decades the country had been led by a clever, subtle and masterly political tactician, János Kádár. He was the only East European Communist who merited an ‘ism’ after his name. Kádárism depended on people appearing to forget about the trauma of 1956 and particularly Kádár’s own less than heroic role in those dramatic events. Hungarians had to accept the basic tenets of socialism - even if they did not believe any of them - and they had to accept colonial status with 75,000 Soviet troops stationed in the country. In return Kádár would provide material benefits, peace, stability and as little visible interference from the Russians as he could negotiate from Moscow.

Dissidents were permitted to operate - within carefully circumscribed limits. Intellectuals in the centre of Budapest were allowed to produce samizdat publications and hold meetings. They were watched, of course, by the secret police. But that was not a particularly onerous job. Haraszti estimated that in the mid-1980s there were probably no more than a thousand regular opposition activists in the entire country. The main groups published two magazines,
Beszélö
(
Speaker
) and
Hirmondó
(
Messenger
), but there were dozens of smaller ones. Every Monday night a ‘samizdat boutique’ was held at the Budapest apartment of the architect László Rajk. The various publications would be laid out on a long table. The ‘customers’, whose names would never be taken, would say which magazine they wanted, and Rajk’s team of ‘copiers’ would produce the texts in time for them to be collected the following week. It was a remarkably efficient system.

Every now and then a writer or activist would be picked up by the police and interrogated, but on the whole the dissidents were left alone as long as they stayed in the capital and talked amongst themselves or within the Communist Party, where a reform wing was starting to grow. If they began stirring up labourers on the land or industrial workers they were stopped. The last political prisoner was Haraszti in 1973, who took a job in a factory for six months and wrote a compelling book,
A Worker in a Worker’s State
, about the dreadful conditions in Hungarian industry, and its woeful inefficiency. He was jailed for eight months after the book was circulated in samizdat. The social contract between Kádár and his cowed people worked - up to a point. Over time he became a popular and widely admired figure. But the deal was now disintegrating.

 

János Kádár was still in his mid-seventies a good-looking man, tall, sandy-haired, with an ascetic manner. He was born János Czermanik, illegitimate, on 25 May 1912 in the port town of Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia. His mother was a Slovak servant girl and his father, a private soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, abandoned them both at his birth. He always remembered his tough childhood. He left school at fourteen and trained as an apprentice toolmaker. He drifted into the Communist Party in his early teens, when it was a banned organisation under the authoritarian rule of Admiral Miklós Horthy. He found a faith he never lost. As an underground Party organiser, he was jailed in 1937 for nearly three years. During the war, he ran the Communist underground, under the pseudonym Kádár (meaning a cooper, or barrel-maker) which he kept for the rest of his life. When the Communists took over Hungary, he rose through the Party ranks as an able apparatchik. The ruler Stalin placed in charge of Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, ran at that time, in the early 1950s, the most brutal regime in the Soviet imperium. Kádár was always careful to give little away about his opinions. He had a dry sense of humour but was too circumspect to show it often in public. An apparently cheerful man with a frank look, it was during the purge years, when Communists turned on each other, that Kádár displayed the shiftiness and untrustworthiness that lay in his character. He betrayed his best friend, László Rajk, in a macabre and chilling manner.
^j
He was then forced to witness Rajk’s execution in 1949. A couple of years later it was Kádár’s turn to be a victim. Arrested on bogus treason charges, he spent three years in jail.

In 1956 Kádár was initially on the side of the revolution. He became Communist Party boss, but a few days later turned coat. When the Russians dispatched tanks to crush the Uprising with overwhelming force, he was installed as head of the puppet Soviet regime. At first his methods were brutal. Around 300 so-called ‘rebels and counterrevolutionaries’ were executed. Kádár ensured that the political leader of the revolution, his rival Imre Nagy, was hanged - initially against the wishes of Moscow. For years he was the most hated man in Hungary. But over time and in stages he relaxed his iron grip. He declared often from the early 1960s that ‘those who are not against us are with us’, and he tried to gain as much independence as he could from Moscow. He developed the brand of communism that eventually attracted the interest of reformers such as Gorbachev, though the ‘merry barracks’ had the highest suicide rate in Europe. Kádár hardly ever talked about the tragedy of 1956 and his social contract with Hungarians depended entirely on the people keeping their silence too. It was the one big taboo subject for dissidents and Party reformers. Kádár became crustier as he grew older and more forgetful.

As the economic news worsened he tried to row back from the reforms he had inspired and led. He tried to crack down on the Danube Circle, though when he realised how popular the group had become he shied away from a serious confrontation. He declared in private that he had little time for Gorbachev - ‘an upstart’. He was beginning to look like an old-fashioned Stalinist and the young, ambitious Communist Party apparatchiks around him were beginning to say more and more openly that Comrade Kádár had hung around too long.
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FIFTEEN

Moscow, January 1986

 

TWO MONTHS AFTER Mikhail Gorbachev took power he handed one of the cleverest generals on the Soviet high command a highly secret and sensitive task. Anatoli Zaitsev, a tall, lean, dark-haired forty-four-year-old, was ordered to Kabul to produce an honest answer to the question: can the Soviet Union win the Afghanistan War? Zaitsev was a highly skilled military planner and though he had seen some action in the Afghan War, he was not responsible for the debacle the Russians faced on their south-eastern border. Zaitsev returned to Moscow with, essentially, a one-word answer: no. He concluded that the only way the war could end on Soviet terms was hermetically to seal Afghanistan’s borders with Pakistan and Iran, to prevent shipments of arms to the Mujahideen and keep the guerrillas trapped inside the country. That was impossible without sending hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers into a conflict that had already dragged on for five and a half years and had by now cost the lives of around 7,500 Soviet soldiers.
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