Revolution 1989 (44 page)

The next day Gorbachev was shown around the Unirii market in central Bucharest, the city’s biggest. Run-down of late, it had been recently refurbished for the Soviet leader’s visit and specially stocked with all kinds of produce most Romanians had not seen for a long time. The shelves were overflowing with fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. As the limousines of the two leaders were leaving, a riot erupted, in Ceauescu’s view. Bystanders broke through the police perimeter and stoned the store, trying to force their way inside before waiting trucks took the food away for sale at the shops used by Party chieftains and Securitate officers. Gorbachev did not see it, but his aides told him what had happened later. Just before he left Romania Gorbachev made a speech calling for the removal throughout Eastern Europe ‘of all those who cannot keep up with the times . . . who have tarnished themselves with dishonesty, lack of principle and nepotism, and who, in the pursuit of profit, have sacrificed the moral image proper for a Party member’. He criticised Romania’s treatment of its Hungarian minority. Ceauescu, standing close to the Soviet leader on the podium, was visibly seething with rage. He was convinced from then on that the Soviet Union was waiting for the right moment to overthrow him.
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Much of the Ceauescus’ time was spent in the late 1980s on a new grand project for the capital that would prove their greatness. He and Elena were obsessed with a plan for a building that would leave their mark on history for ever as benefactors of their nation. The People’s Palace, they decided, would be the biggest building in the world. Even Hitler and Albert Speer in their plans for rebuilding Berlin did not promise anything so gigantic. Stalin’s wedding cake-style palaces of culture, copies of which he generously donated after the war to most of the capital cities in his new domains, were positively puny by comparison. The destruction it unleashed on Bucharest was monumental. The Ceauescus decreed that the whitewashed front of the 200-metre wide, 100-metre-high structure should face a broad ‘Victory of Social ism Avenue’ that had to be at least as long as the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The project would require two ancient districts of Bucharest famed for their charm to be bulldozed. Arsenal Hill was a beauty spot from which the entire city could be seen. Uranus was an old, mainly residential area of gracious houses, many of them with lovely gardens, a monastery and several churches, chestnut trees, schools, shops and tramlines. Both would be entirely destroyed, replaced by the Palace and huge concrete apartment blocks along the newly created Avenue. It vandalised nearly a sixth of the city, in order to create a building that would bring all the state and Party offices on to one site, as well as living space and a nuclear bunker for the Ceauescus. The architect was Anna Petrescu,
^q
a young woman barely out of college, who in 1978 won an open competition at which the only judges were the President and the First Lady.

It was six years before work began, but then the Ceauescus became more directly involved. Soon Ms Petrescu regretted that she had won the competition. The Ceauescus meddled constantly. They would visit the site two or three times a week. Every Saturday morning they spent at least two hours there. No item of decoration or furniture was considered too small for their personal consideration. They decided everything, from the size of the lights and fountains along Victory of Socialism Avenue to the shape of the door handles and the patterns of the inlay on Elena’s cherry-wood desk. By the middle of 1989 the People’s Palace was close to completion. The cost was originally estimated to be five hundred million lei, but new demands by the Ceauescus kept increas- ing the final bill. The project was delayed for months because they could not decide whether to opt for Doric or Ionic columns (after several changes of mind they went for Doric). Then the Ceauescus, almost as an afterthought, decided to add on two extra storeys to the building, for office space. It took several months for a tunnel to be dug for a small underground railway for the First Couple’s personal use, linking the Palace with downtown Bucharest. Eventually the cost rose twelvefold to around six billion lei. Dark jokes aside, there was a shortage of almost everything in Romania during 1989. While his people were freezing and queuing for bread, each year the President was spending almost the entire national welfare budget of the country on his new Palace.

THIRTY-FIVE

East Berlin, Sunday 7 May 1989

 

IT WAS POLLING DAY in the East German municipal elections and everything seemed to be running as normal. The results were not exactly close. When they were announced, late in the evening, the National Front list of officially approved candidates - the Communists and their sibling parties - won 98.6 per cent of the vote. In some districts the governing regime for the last forty years proved even more popular: in Erfurt, it polled 99.6 per cent and in Magdeburg an impressive 99.97 per cent, though in Dresden it took a mere 97.5 per cent. The results were in line with previous local elections, marginally better than the corresponding votes four years earlier. The Communist oligarchs, considering events from their Wandlitz villas, pronounced themselves satisfied. An editorial in the party organ
Neues Deutschland
declared: ‘The people of the GDR are determined to continue . . . with success on the road towards a developed socialist society and to strengthen the socialist fatherland. There exists a relationship of solid confidence and close unity between Party and People . . . The results are a step towards the further perfection of our democracy.’

The man in charge of the electoral commission, fifty-two-year-old Egon Krenz, heir apparent to Erich Honecker and the Party’s troubleshooter-in-chief, seemed content as he declared that the poll had been conducted entirely in the proper manner. Krenz, who had been a Communist apparatchik throughout his working life, had unfortunate large and protruding teeth and generally went by the nickname ‘Horse Face’ throughout East Germany, even in Party circles. Speaking in the style most of his listeners were accustomed to hearing from him, he said: ‘The results . . . are an impressive declaration of support for the politics of peace and socialism of the Party of the working class.’
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Voting in East German elections was a different process to exercising the franchise in a Western-style democracy. In an East German polling station voters appeared before a board of two or three electoral commission officials, presented their ID papers and were issued with a ballot paper. To vote for an approved candidate from the official slate was straightforward: you simply folded the paper and placed it into the box near the entrance to the polling station. To vote another way was daunting and required courage. You had to walk across the room to mark a ballot paper in a secret voting booth where at least one, often two, ‘Vopos’, Volkspolizei or People’s Police, stood. These voters’ names were carefully noted down and the consequences could be serious for their entire families. They faced the sack or demotion at work. Students could be thrown out of university. They would definitely be kept under close surveillance by the Stasi.

East Germans had been used to this electoral process for four decades. Generally, they conformed obediently, or did not take the business seriously. But at this election there was a difference. More people than before had taken the risk and bravely voted against the regime. On this occasion a sizeable number of people knew for sure that the results were fixed. For the first time, in a few score polling stations, the votes were monitored. A quietly-spoken forty-six-year-old Lutheran pastor from Berlin Friedrichshain, Father Rainer Eppelmann, and a few other priests had asked the government if Church groups could exercise the right laid down in the GDR constitution for the public to watch the casting of votes. They were joined by activists from a few fledgling peace groups and environmental organisations which were tolerated, though barely, by the regime. The government agreed. It was a bad mistake.
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The monitors saw as soon as the first results were announced that the election was a fraud. The figures they produced of the numbers who voted against the official candidates differed widely from the official claims. Overall, they said that between 9 and 10 per cent voted No. Among young people and students the figure was much higher - spectacularly so in some places. At the School of Fine Arts in Berlin, 105 students voted against the official candidates and 102 voted for. Nevertheless the official tally recorded 98.5 per cent in favour. In Dresden, Party boss Hans Modrow knew that four times the officially published number voted against the approved list, but he declared the doctored figures as a matter of routine.

Honecker and his henchmen realised quickly they should not have permitted the monitors anywhere near the polling booths. For several days West German television was full of well-informed coverage of how the election had been rigged. Often it repeated the point that in the Soviet Union a few weeks earlier there had been a free election of sorts - at least the counting appeared to have been fair. In Poland there would be an election a month ahead in which a real opposition was permitted to stand. Yet in East Germany the regime persisted with an old-fashioned, Soviet bloc-style stolen election in which intelligent people were expected to believe that barely one citizen in a hundred opposed the regime.

This was the first time West German TV played a serious role in the GDR’s politics. Most East Germans watched - except around Dresden, where for some reason reception was unavailable. That area was called The Valley of the Clueless. The faces of many West German broadcasters were as familiar as those of the presenters on their own television. On the whole, people watched West German TV for entertainment; East German television was exceptionally dull and never showed any American soaps or films. West German news so far had made marginal impact, but that was now changing. Viewers could see alternative interpretations of East German reality beamed into their living rooms in their own language. If they wished - and increasingly many people did - they could watch a half-hour 7 p.m. news bulletin on West German ZDF, followed by the East’s official news broadcast at 7.30 p.m. and then an 8 p.m. news and current affairs programme on the Federal Republic’s ARD channel.

The availability of Western media in East Germany was to have a profound effect, starting with the stunned and angry response to the fraudulent election. Spontaneous, but peaceful, demonstrations erupted in the main cities, at first numbering just handfuls of people. Allegations of electoral malpractice poured into Party committees throughout the country. Government propaganda claimed they were ‘groundless calumnies inspired by the Western media and agents of imperialism in an attempt to smear the State’. But the public knew which version of German truth to believe. In the church at Berlin Friedrichshain a week after the poll, 400 people gathered to formulate a letter asking the government to launch an official inquiry into the conduct of the elections. As they left the church, a Stasi truck appeared. Security guards attacked them with sticks and truncheons. Around twenty were taken to Stasi headquarters, where they were beaten up more thoroughly.

Later, Communist chiefs admitted the fraud. Some in the leadership had reckoned there would be a ‘dissent’ rate of 5 to 7 per cent. ‘But district mayors were convinced that the Party wanted better results,’ Günter Schabowski said. ‘The tally was doctored. The offiicials accepted it ... as their task in life and set about it. They did it out of habit and Party discipline.’
³

 

The Party bosses in Berlin did not need an election to tell them that opposition was growing. Accurate Stasi reports about the level of discontent went to Mielke, though it is unclear how many of them he showed to Honecker. One, produced by a senior officer at the Stasi’s Normannenstrasse headquarters, stated clearly that there had always been grumbling and complaints among workers but now,

One report that landed on Mielke’s desk around the time of the local elections worried the Stasi boss. This did go to the rest of the top leadership. It said that there was an air of gloom and despondency within the lower and middle ranks of the Party itself. ‘There is widespread demoralisation,’ it said. ‘People no longer believe in the goals of the Party and the regime. Such attitudes are especially evident among those who hitherto were socially active but have . . . become tired, resigned or have finally given up.’ As apparently efficient as ever, the Stasi calculated opposition numbers in a report sent to Mielke and, on this occasion, circulated to Honecker a few days after the election. There were 160 scattered groups - ‘including pacifists, feminists, environmentalists . . . 2,500 people are involved and 600 were in leading positions . . . 60 people are hard core activists’.
⁵

It was an understatement, but not by much in the early summer of 1989. Nobody emerged as an inspirational figure like Lech Wałesa or with the reputation of Václav Havel. Some Protestant pastors were politically active, such as Eppelmann in Berlin, a one-time bricklayer who went to jail for nine months for refusing army service. Like many young people who wound up in the East German clergy, he retrained as a theology student for pragmatic rather than spiritual reasons: ‘I asked myself, what can you become for a contented, or even happy life in this country? The only answer which occurred to me was: pastor. Only the study of theology was able to offer me a little mental freedom.’ Christian Führer, pastor at the beautiful and famous Nikolaikirche in East Germany’s second city, Leipzig, had originally started a peace group in the mid-1980s to campaign for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Iron Curtain. At first these peace groups were permitted, even encouraged by the regime, which thought they were harmless and were as great an irritant to the West as to the East. But Führer’s congregation became a thorn in Honecker’s flesh. Regular demonstrations began after prayers each Monday night from the week after the rigged election. At the beginning a few hundred attended; then, during the summer, numbers grew to thousands.