Revolution 1989 (39 page)

This was another issue, like the Danube dam, that galvanised Hungarians. It was even more powerfully emotional than an environmental cause, as it touched a still-raw nationalist nerve. At first the government did not sense danger. The Communists thought that anti-Romanian protests could turn out to be a release valve that might reduce some of the pressure against them. One of the most prominent of the Communist reformers, Imre Pozsgay, placed himself at the forefront of the campaign against Ceausescu, whose ‘incomprehensible and idiotic political posturing is an injury to European civilisation and a crime against humanity’.
¹

In the spring and summer of 1988, a series of huge demonstrations were held in Budapest and other big towns. They began with demands that the government should provide assistance for the Transylvanian refugees but they quickly turned into anti-Communist rallies. ‘Of course we went because we cared about the Hungarians in Transylvania, but mainly we went because we hated the Communists,’ Sándor Zsindely, whose family looked after several of the refugees, said. ‘These demonstrations were the only way to show it.’
²

The coup against Kádár was intended to buy time for the reformers in the Party. They believed that if the old man went, the public would think the
ancien regime
had gone and would warm to his successors. They were mistaken. The biggest of the demonstrations, on 28 June, was held six weeks after Kádár was ousted. More than 90,000 people marched on the streets of Budapest, a city of around one and a half million people. Pressure increased on Grósz, from outside and inside the country. Ceauescu summoned the new Hungarian leader to a conference at Arad, a small town just inside Romania, to discuss the refugees. Grósz accepted, against the advice of his close aides, leading Communist Party officials and most voices in the growing opposition, who wondered what the Hungarians could possibly gain from the encounter. They met at the end of August and Ceauescu seemed on his best behaviour. He was affable, and though he made none of the firm commitments Grósz wanted, on reopening the Cluj consulate for example, Ceauescu assured him he would guarantee civil rights to the Hungarian minority and ensure that Hungarian was taught in Transylvanian schools. Grósz went back to Budapest convinced that he had a deal with the Romanian dictator. But he had been ambushed. As soon as Ceauescu returned from Arad he bitterly denounced ‘Hungary’s intolerable interference in Romanian affairs’. The Romanian Party newspaper,
Scînteia
, declared that Hungary ‘was now making demands that not even the fascist Admiral Horthy dared to make in the 1930s’.
³

Leading figures in his own party accused Grósz of naïvety for accepting Ceauescu’s assurances and showing weakness. He never recovered his authority and was forced into making excessive concessions he had not intended to make. A new company law was announced that had far-reaching implications for communism, though the financial consequences were not seen for some time. In effect, central planning was abolished. Private share ownership was allowed for the first time; no limits were placed on the size of private firms; joint stock companies could be formed; foreign firms were allowed to buy entire Hungarian companies. A whole range of new tax incentives were introduced. ‘We have entered uncharted waters,’ Reszö Nyers, one of the economists who produced the plan, declared.
⁴

The war of words with Romania grew increasingly bitter. In November diplomats were withdrawn from both sides. Ceauescu demanded the return of the refugees. Hungary responded by granting the refugees asylum and signing the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. It was a first - none of the Soviet bloc countries had signed the document before. It was intended to give the Hungarians a legal cover for refusing to send the Transylvanians back, as the agreement between the two countries stipulated. The Party’s lawyers advised the government that the UN treaty superseded any agreement signed by countries within the Warsaw Pact. Ceauescu warned that if it came to an armed conflict, ‘Romania has the capability to build nuclear weapons’. It was a dubious claim, but Grósz could not be entirely certain it was a bluff. He had been surprised a few months earlier to discover that the Soviets had based nuclear weapons in his own country. Even as Prime Minister nobody had told him that. In Hungary it was a secret known only by the Communist Party chief, the Defence Minister and two army generals.

As the new year started, Ceauscu was reinforcing the border fence yet further and sounding more bellicose. The Romanian army was three times the size of Hungary’s. If it came to an armed conflict the outcome was unclear. The latest reports from Moscow were calmer and suggested that the Romanian Conductor was merely sabre-rattling and the row between the neighbouring states would blow over, but Grósz was not celebrating. He had been a Communist loyalist all his life and he was beginning to realise how quickly changes were about to take place. That day the Party paper,
Népszabadság
, had removed its ‘Workers of the World Unite’ emblem from its front page. In ten days’ time, on 11 January, under his leadership and against all his instincts, Hungary would become the first country in the socialist bloc to allow the formation of rival parties to the Communists.

It was a historic moment, as faithful old comrades were telling Grósz this new year, that made him the gravedigger of communism. For a brief moment he considered taking drastic action. He ordered his most trusted aides to make a contingency plan to declare martial law in Hungary, in case of war with Romania or total economic collapse. It could also be the only way to keep the Party in power. He discussed the idea with few people in Hungary, but according to his foreign policy adviser, Gyula Thürmer, Grósz sought the advice of General Jaruzelski, who firmly warned him against the plan. It had done little good in Poland. ‘We won that battle, but the war was lost,’ the General said. He advised Grósz to stick to the route of making a deal with the opposition. Grósz resigned himself to his likely fate of being one of the shortest-lived leaders in Communist history.
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TWENTY-SEVEN

Prague, Monday 16 January 1989

 

THE CZECH COMRADES were less gloomy about their prospects. They could see no reason to surrender power. They were bracing themselves for some opposition on the streets at the start of the year, and were making the usual preparations to handle it. The regular police, the militia and the secret service, the StB, were placed on high alert throughout the Czech capital and were warned by the Interior Ministry that they might have to deal with ‘the enemy . . . rowdy elements, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries’.
¹

The regime knew that plans had been laid by Charter 77 and other groups to commemorate the suicide of Jan Palach. Twenty years ago this day, the Prague Economics School student stood on the steps outside the Czechoslovak National Theatre in Wenceslas Square. At precisely 4 p.m. he reached for a bottle inside the plastic bag he was carrying, poured petrol over himself and set his coat alight with a match. Three days later, with 85 per cent of his body covered by burns, he died, in agony, at a Prague hospital. Aged twenty, he had left behind a note explaining that he could see no other way to protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia five months earlier than to immolate himself. By a few brave voices since then he had been considered a martyr, but the regime regarded him as a non-person. His ashes had been removed from the cemetery outside Prague where they had originally been interred, replaced by the remains of an old-age pensioner entirely unconnected with the dead young man. Opposition groups announced they would mark the entire week from 15 to 21 January 1989 ‘Palach Week’ and would organise a series of events to commemorate the anniversary of his death.

The name Jan Palach had barely been mentioned in the official media for two decades. Now the regime decided that it was time directly to confront his memory. On 12 January the Communist Party newspaper,
Rudé Pravo
(
The Red Way
), described his suicide as ‘a senseless, tragic act’ and declared that all commemorative rallies or demonstrations would be banned. Two days later the paper went on the attack again: ‘Dissidents who try to put at risk the lives of our youth will not be listened to,’ it said. ‘We shall not allow the republic to be threatened.’ Most Czechs, unconcerned with politics, did not know until then that any protests had been organised for an anniversary that had generally been forgotten. Opposition at the time, as one dissident admitted, ‘numbered a very few thousand throughout the country on the fringes, a few hundred at the centre, and fewer than a dozen in any position of leadership’. The unprecedented publicity ensured that there would be crowds turning up at the rallies, even if it was to see protesters being beaten up by the police.

It was a mistake to draw attention to Palach Week, as Communist leaders like the increasingly loathed Milo Jakes - usually nicknamed Dumpling Face because of his heavy build - confessed later. But it was intended to show where power resided in People’s Czechoslovakia. In the past year the regime had sent contradictory signals to the opposi tion. Two months earlier Jakes had allowed Alexander Dubek to receive an honorary degree from the University of Bologna. Over the past twenty years Dubek had maintained a discreet silence on politics, working for most of that period as a junior official in the Slovak Forestry Commission. In Italy he broke his silence for the first time, with a passionate defence of his own actions during the Prague Spring and spoke of the ‘incomparable moral failure’ of the Czech regime since then. The government said that it was only with reluctance that it allowed Dubek to return home. It made a firm decision then to crack down on dissent. On Human Rights Day, 10 December 1988, the Prague Party boss, Miroslav tpán, personally supervised police as they sprayed protesters in the centre of the city with water cannons. ‘There will be no dialogue,’ he declared.
²

At the first of the Palach commemorative demonstrations on 15 January, around four and a half thousand people gathered in Wenceslas Square, far more than had shown themselves at an overtly political demonstration since 1968. It was an entirely peaceful protest. Riot police charged the demonstrators, arrested ninety-one people and beat up many more. There were protests from abroad, as expected, but it was the reaction of Czechs that surprised the dissident groups. In the past, most people, apathetic and ‘in a death-like torpor’ as a Charter 77 activist put it, would have left the scene to keep out of harm’s way. Now many uninvolved passers-by protested against the brutality of the police.

The next day a smaller group returned to Wenceslas Square to lay flowers at the spot where Palach had set fire to himself. Václav Havel was there and described what happened: ‘I decided to stand on the sidewalk and observe the ceremony on the sidelines so that if the police intervened I would be able to deliver a report to friends and the foreign media,’ he said. ‘The police did intervene, but so clumsily that it aroused the interest of passers-by and immediately mushroomed into a large spontaneous demonstration. I watched the whole thing from a distance, fascinated, although I knew that sooner or later they could arrest me. And then I walked away from Wenceslas Square, to prepare my report. They arrested me on my way home.’

There were demonstrations for the next four days, all violently broken up by the police. More than five hundred people were arrested and half of them tried, mostly for hooliganism or disturbing the peace. Ota Veverka of the John Lennon Peace Club was sentenced to a year in jail. Charter 77 spokesman Alexander Vondra, who managed to lay three daffodil blossoms in honour of Palach before his arrest, received a suspended sentence and a fine of about one hundred dollars. Havel was charged with ‘inciting public unrest and resisting the authorities in connection with a proscribed demonstration’. He was sent to jail for nine months. The protests from foreign governments and human rights groups abroad could safely be ignored. It was harder to dismiss the petitions calling for Havel’s release at home, from people who would formerly have kept silent, like official writers’ organisations and the Actors’ Union. More than four thousand people signed the main petition, an unheard-of number for a protest of this kind in Czechoslovakia. ‘The regime clearly had not been expecting this and did not know how to respond,’ Havel said. ‘It’s not a problem to lock up individual dissidents, but locking up all the famous actors in the country? That was something they no longer dared to do.’

On this occasion the government gave Havel national publicity as a ‘troublemaker’ in an effort to discredit him. There were profiles in the press of the jailbird intellectual, emphasising his privileged upbringing and wealth. They did not have the effect intended. Most Czechs had never heard of him before. Now they knew who he was and he became established as a daring anti-Communist. ‘I was a rather special prisoner, ’ he said. ‘I was strictly isolated from the others and under strict surveillance, but nonetheless enjoying very circumspect treatment. Compared with my previous stints in jail, this was almost like a holiday. Among other things I was in a cell with two handpicked communists who had been locked up for many years for economic crimes and were afraid to speak to me at all for fear of making their own situation worse.’
³

The regime was satisfied that its show of strength had taught the opposition a lesson and dealt with Václav Havel. When, at a West German Embassy party, the ideology chief Jan Fojtik was asked about the playwright by an American official he was told: ‘Havel’s morally insignificant and has no popular appeal. Communism [here] will prevail.’
⁴

TWENTY-EIGHT

Warsaw, Monday 16 January 1989

 

AROUND THE SAME TIME that Václav Havel was arrested in Prague, General Jaruzelski was receiving the kind of rough treatment in Poland that he had not encountered for years. The General was unused to being insulted, least of all by stalwart Communists of a certain age who usually understood how to respect rank. But today a session of the Polish Communist Party began where veteran Party members harangued him for showing weakness against the enemy and for abandoning the cause of socialism. There was an unwritten rule within the Polish Communist Party that Jaruzelski would not receive the kind of personal criticism a civilian politician might face. Deference would be shown to him in public. That was ignored when the country’s most senior Communists met at the vast, ugly white headquarters of the Polish United Workers’ Party on the corner of New World Street and Jerusalem Avenue in the centre of Warsaw. Jaruzelski was determined to start talks with Solidarity and to reach a settlement that might ensure industrial peace in Polish factories. For the last three months Solidarity had been ready to begin negotiations. As Wałesa said with Churchillian echoes, ‘I’d be prepared to talk with the devil himself if it would do some good for Poland.’ Now the General faced a showdown with Communists who wanted to block any deal with the opposition that would surrender Party power.
¹