Revolution 1989 (53 page)

When the refugee trains arrived in Hof, Bavaria, ecstatic crowds of West German well-wishers welcomed their brothers and sisters from the East. It was a highly charged, emotional ceremony televised live on the Federal Republic’s TV and beamed to Eastern homes. Within hours, thousands more Berliners and Leipzigers had filled up their Trabis and Wartburgs and headed east to Czechoslovakia.

FORTY-THREE

East Berlin, Saturday 7 October 1989

 

THE LAST THING THE SOVIET LEADER WANTED to do this weekend was to go to Berlin. He had complained about the trip numerous times to his foreign policy adviser, Anatoli Chernyaev, but it was clear that there was no way of avoiding it. The Soviet Communist Party boss could not fail to attend the fortieth birthday party of the East German state. Gorbachev still thought the existence of the GDR worthwhile, if not as important to the interests of the USSR as it once was. But he loathed the atrophied country it had become and, in particular, he despised its leader and the Stalinist henchmen around him. Gorbachev had heard through the KGB that despite his illness, Erich Honecker had been talking about seeking a new term as East German Party Secretary from the following year. Gorbachev thought that could not be allowed to happen, though he was insistent that the Soviets would do nothing directly to remove him. He was determined, this time, that when he went to Berlin he would show what he thought of Honecker and his cronies.
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Elaborate celebrations had been planned for the big anniversary. Most of the leading figures of world communism would be in attendance. To Honecker, this was a huge event, another of his crowning achievements, and further recognition of the GDR as an important state. Never known for his modesty, he was determined that nothing should go wrong with the celebrations, nor that his own role in the shining success of the GDR should go unnoticed. Over the last few days, the Stasi had arrested some known troublemakers in Berlin, opposition elements who might, if unchecked, have tried to spoil the party by holding demonstrations. He was assured that there would be no unanticipated problems.

Gorbachev had arrived the evening before and had talks with Honecker. They did not go at all well, according to Joachim Hermann, who sat in on the meeting: ‘It was as if two people were talking to each other but speaking about entirely different things. It was a dialogue of the deaf.’ Honecker was bitter at the way the Soviets were treating East Germany, that ‘suddenly, they renounced [our long] . . . friendship and dropped us in a manner you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy’, Hermann said. Gorbachev met the rest of the leadership at an encounter that both the Russians and the Germans said was ‘painfully embarrassing’. Gorbachev made one of his wide-ranging speeches about ‘new thinking’, the changing shape of a transformed world and the end of the Cold War. It was a typical ‘big picture’ performance. He gave a pointed look at Honecker when he said that ‘Life punishes those who fall behind.’ Its meaning was clear to everyone.
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Honecker replied with a sonorous list of statistics to show the unique success of the GDR as one of the world’s great economies and how East Germany was moving from triumph to triumph. The proof ‘is that soon we will be producing, in our modern and high-technology industry, a four-megabyte computer chip’. Members of his own leadership team began whispering to each other and looking dumbfounded. As the GDR’s State Planning chief, Gerhard Schürer, said: ‘We couldn’t believe this . . . here was Gorbachev talking about the fate of the world and here’s our General Secretary talking about computer chips.’ Others were in despair: ‘We were assholes,’ said Schabowski. ‘We acted like dummies. We should have banged our fists on the table and said “Erich, you can’t do that.” But of course that’s pure fantasy. We would have been put out of action immediately. It would have created a scandal.’ A serious plot to oust Honecker began on this day, but it was far too late.
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The high point of the celebrations was a huge torchlight procession through Berlin. Tanks and weaponry and military bands passed the dignitaries on a raised podium, followed by column after column of strapping members of the Communist Youth group, the Frei Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), in blue shirts and red scarves. These were supposed to be the most obedient sons and daughters of the nomenklatura, born and raised in the bosom of the Party. Now many were heard to shout ‘Gorby, help us. Gorby, help us.’ The Polish Communist Party boss, Mieczysław Rakowksi, was sitting next to Gorbachev. He asked the Soviet leader whether he understood what they were saying. Gorbachev said he did not know German well but he thought so. ‘They are demanding Gorbachev, rescue us,’ Rakowski said. ‘And these are supposed to be the cream of Party activists. This is the end.’ Honecker was plainly nonplussed at first, but then began to grasp what was happening. Then he looked hurt rather than angry at the humiliating public insult.

As he was leaving Berlin, Gorbachev gave a clear blessing to East German Party officials to act against Honecker. The Soviet Ambassador to the GDR, Kochemasov, told Gorbachev that he knew that ‘comrades were planning’ to remove the old man. Gorbachev told him to watch and listen, but not to become directly involved. ‘What is to be done about him?’ Gorbachev said, according to the Ambassador. ‘He doesn’t take anything in. Then let him look to the consequences for himself. But it is not going to be done by our hands. They have to do it themselves.’
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There were 380,000 Soviet troops on East German soil. They were the force which the GDR leadership had thought would be the ultimate protection of the socialist state - and of themselves if there was ever a real danger of ‘counter-revolution’. Gorbachev wanted to make absolutely sure that Soviet soldiers would not be drawn into any potential conflict between the regime and its own citizens. Late in the evening, the Ambassador called General Boris Snetkov, commander of Soviet forces in East Germany. Snetkov was a wheezing sixty-five-year-old, a veteran of World War Two, who was coming up to retirement. He was popular with his men. He had little wish to use them fighting against demonstrators crying out ‘Gorby, save us’. He was delighted by the request the Ambassador was now making. ‘We have to think about how we’re going to react to possible unrest on the streets,’ Kochemasov said. ‘The matter is very serious and I ask you immediately to give orders for all troops to go back to barracks as soon as possible. You should stop all manoeuvres and stop all flights of military planes if possible. Do not interfere in any way with internal GDR developments. Let them take their course.’ Like a good officer, Snetkov double-checked with the Soviet General Staff and was issued the same orders from his superiors in Moscow.
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Within an hour of Gorbachev’s departure that evening demonstrations erupted in towns and cities all over the country. The authorities reacted with the brutal force they had rarely used in the last few weeks. In the Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin, thousands of people gathered to shout the day’s catchphrase, ‘Gorby, save us’. As they marched towards the ornate state council building, they were stopped in their tracks by a convoy of police trucks. Seconds later Erich Mielke, now eighty-one, appeared from his own bullet-proof car in a state of high agitation. Accompanied by his head of domestic counter-intelligence, General Günter Katsch, he screamed at the police: ‘Club those pigs into submission.’ They waded into the crowd, beat up scores of the demonstrators and arrested many more. Elsewhere in the city, the police and the militia attacked protesters with dogs and water cannon, and broke up a candle-lit march outside the Gethsemane Church, where nine young people were in their fourth day of a hunger strike. Altogether in Berlin 1,067 people were arrested that night and the next day. Many reported later that they faced a long night of abuse and beatings at the hands of Stasi interrogators.

Around 200 demonstrators were arrested in the centre of Dresden. They were driven to the barracks of the riot police and mercilessly beaten up. Student Catrin Ulbricht was among them: ‘When we got out of the lorries, we were separated, women to the right, men to the left,’ she said. ‘There I saw some sort of garage and watched as men were placed against the wall legs apart and they were being beaten. We women were taken off to a kind of shower room, and that was pretty brutal.’
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The main trial of strength was on the following night, 9 October, in Leipzig, where the epicentre of protest had been for the past weeks. Despite the violence of the police and Stasi over the weekend, the opposition was determined to go ahead with the regular Monday night ‘event’. As usual, the plan was to begin the march at the Nikolaikirche and head clockwise around the inner ring road. They hoped this would be the biggest rally so far, in a mass display of defiance. ‘Of course we were scared at this time,’ said Ulrike Poppe, one of the founders of the Democracy Now organisation. ‘I was not courageous. But I was angry and hard-headed . . . There were many who feared that there might be a Chinese solution - that they would use weapons. That could never be excluded as a possibility. And sometimes we thought that Soviet troops might appear. There was fear, because our army, police and State were so well armed and prepared that we had to reckon with there being a violent reaction.’ But numbers at the marches had been growing so quickly that the opposition now called the GDR ‘The German Demonstrating Republic’.
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The regime was divided. Honecker wanted a tough response against the demonstrators. But he issued no specific instructions at any stage that the army or the Stasi should open fire on them. By now his authority was visibly draining away. ‘He would not have got an order through even if he had given it,’ one of his aides said. His wife, Margot, was fond of saying, ‘We have to defend socialism with all means. With words, deeds and, yes, with arms.’ But she had limited power in the land.
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Mielke did issue draconian orders that gave his men the power to shoot ‘troublemakers’. Without consulting anyone else in the leadership he issued secret Directive No. 1/89 on the morning of Sunday 8 October.

For the last two weeks the East German army had been put on heightened alert, although so far troops had not been used at any of the demonstrations. Unusually, the conscripted men were cut off as much as possible from the outside world. ‘It was an absurd idea, but the senior officers reckoned they could keep information like that away from the men,’ said Klaus-Peter Renneberg, a captain in an infantry regiment. His rank was a ‘political officer’ - a Party job as well as a military one, with the task of ensuring ideological orthodoxy and obedience in the ranks. ‘They were not allowed to use radios, they didn’t receive letters, they were discouraged from using the telephone to contact family or friends. The television set in the mess was removed. It was ridiculous because everybody knew what was going on in the country. The official line was that there had been some outbreaks of trouble with counter-revolutionaries who were out to destroy the State.’ Troops were given double their normal issue of ammunition - 120 rounds instead of 60 - and were each issued with an extra first aid kit. Overnight a crack paratroop regiment was dispatched to Leipzig with orders to hold a position just outside the city centre. The hospitals had been emptied of routine patients and had been sent extra supplies of blood and plasma. The local Party newspaper,
Die Leipziger Volkszeitung
, ran an editorial declaring: ‘We will fight these enemies of our country, if necessary with arms.’
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When all the pieces seemed in place for a violent showdown in Leipzig later in the day, it was a musician who orchestrated a peaceful outcome. The conductor Kurt Masur was one of the most renowned celebrities in East Germany. Artistic director of the world famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he was a favoured son of the regime, which heaped awards on him. He had never been a Communist Party member, but he had kept a studied silence about politics while he became one of the most brilliant interpreters in the world of German Romantic music. He had gone along with official propaganda referring to him as one of the stars that made the GDR shine so bright. Now sixty-two, distinguished-looking with his neat white beard, he was beginning to speak out occasionally. When some street musicians in Leipzig had been arrested in the summer, he protested. He was appalled at the prospect of a bloody confrontation in Leipzig. If conflict erupted it could happen outside the delightful, neo-classical Gewandhaus concert hall on the city’s main ring road. On past Mondays the demonstrations usually marched past there at around 7.45 p.m., often while he had been conducting.

Masur spoke to other prominent Leipzigers in an attempt to prevent bloodshed. He called the Protestant pastor Peter Zimmermann and the actor Bernd Lutz Lange, both of whom were involved with moderate opposition groups in the city. Local Party chieftains were equally desperate to avoid a bloodbath. The Leipzig Party boss, Helmut Hackenburg, was ill, but two other high-ranking officials, Wilhelm Pommert and Roland Wötzel, went to meet Masur and the opposition activists, which in itself was a revolutionary act. Policy had always been to have no dialogue with them, so they did not tell Party headquarters in Berlin about the meeting. They hammered out the text of an appeal for peace and calm, signed jointly, which was repeated on the radio every half-hour from about 3 p.m. onwards in Kurt Masur’s voice. ‘We all need a free exchange of views on the future of socialism in our country. Therefore . . . we today promise to lend our strength and authority to ensure that this dialogue will be conducted not only in Leipzig but with our government. We urgently ask you for prudence, so that peaceful dialogue will become possible.’