Russia (47 page)

None of this was allowed to reduce the momentum of reform, however. In 1988 a law on enterprise was passed and Gorbachev introduced the
concept of separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary. But the reformers were already beginning to face stiffening resistance within the Party, and Yegor Ligachev, the second-ranking man in the Party and up to this point Gorbachev’s most important ally, was near the point of breaking with him. Ligachev was of the view that the reforms had gone far enough, that any more would be destabilizing. As
Moscow News
reported, leaflets were being circulated which claimed that
perestroika
would lead to ‘economic disaster and social upheaval and then to the country’s enslavement by imperialist states’.
¹⁰

Support for the challenge came not only from conservative ‘Stalinists’ but from officialdom generally, especially in the provinces, and from others who found the prospect of further radical change unnerving. The challenge was faced down at a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee. Even though most members probably felt as Ligachev did, the conditioning of decades led them to stifle their misgivings, show solidarity, and rally behind the leader. The chance of a genuine democracy had been lost when it was decided not to split the Party, and now perhaps the last chance for stability had gone too.

The final act of the Soviet tragedy was heralded in December 1988 by an earthquake in Soviet Armenia which killed 25,000 people, made many more homeless, and required massive spending on relief. With the strain on the budget mounting higher than ever, the decision had already been taken to cut the expenses of empire. It was announced that from 1 January 1989 world market prices would be charged for Soviet oil and gas exported to members of the Bloc. No longer able to pay the piper, Moscow would no longer be entitled to call the tune. So the satellites in Eastern Europe were freed from their slavish obligation to follow the Kremlin’s directions. Nevertheless, Gorbachev hoped that they would follow his line voluntarily and accept reformed Communism, or at least coalition governments, with a gradual transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Continuing withdrawals of Soviet troops from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany pleased the inhabitants. So did the advent of democracy in the first two countries. At the election held in June 1989 Poles celebrated by voting overwhelmingly for opposition Solidarity candidates. But for the fact that they had been guaranteed 173 of the 460 seats in parliament, the Communists would not have been represented there at all.
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Then in July, at a Warsaw Treaty Organization meeting in Bucharest, Gorbachev proclaimed a reversal of the Brezhnev Doctrine.
The politically correct principle henceforth was to be non-interference in the affairs of the countries of the Bloc. In East Germany a committee was formed to consider changes to the constitution, while in the Soviet Union itself political reforms proceeded apace, though not without reverses.

Gorbachev was open, and apparently somewhat uncertain, as to the form the new Soviet democracy should take. ‘The existence of a particular number of political parties does not represent a solution,’ he remarked in the early spring of 1989. ‘[But] we shall open up the possibilities of our system.’
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Not only the Party but ‘social organizations’ were to be able to field candidates for elections, and he pledged continuing improvements to electoral practices. At the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies held a few days later the public reacted by rejecting some candidates who had not been opposed.

As the economic position deteriorated over the summer, Gorbachev began to sound increasingly desperate about political and constitutional reform. At a plenary session of the Party Central Committee in mid-July his concern was chiefly about the Party itself and how to restructure its organization from the top. It was his most efficient instrument of government, but it was becoming increasing loath to follow him into these unfamiliar waters. ‘It is impossible to decree the Party’s authority,’ he warned. The Party was ‘lagging behind society’, and a ‘dangerous discrepancy’ would arise if it proved itself to be ‘less dynamic than the people’.
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However, it was difficult to know how interested the people really were in constitutional reform.

On 3 August Professor Vorontsov, a technocrat who was not a Party member, was appointed to membership of the Council of Ministers. Eleven days later a draft law to make suffrage ‘genuinely direct’ was tabled.
¹⁴
To those who argued that democracy threatened solidarity, Gorbachev retorted that ‘a plurality of views cannot be an obstacle to unity of action.’
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The debates continued into late September. But the focus on ‘constitutional construction’ was distracting attention from looming economic and political problems. Striking miners in Siberia were bought off by pay hikes. Indeed money was thrown at every problem, demanding considerable increases in the money supply which fuelled inflation. Estonia reserved the right to veto Union legislation; there were signs of restiveness among other groups, and opposition was voiced not only by those who wanted to put brakes on the reform processes, but by some who urged a faster pace.

Foremost of these was Boris Yeltsin. Promoted to the Secretariat of the Central Committee, he was put in charge of the Moscow Party, and soon
proved himself to be both dynamic and unreliable. He urged faster reform, but seemed to be devoid of political ideas or policies. He enjoyed power, but behaved in a domineering manner. To some he was the image of an heroic, patriotic man of action, to others the model of what had once been called a Party ‘careerist’, and to others again he was an alcoholic maverick. Given to offering his resignation in the expectation that it would not be accepted, he offered it once too often and was not allowed to withdraw it. So it was that in 1987 Yeltsin entered the political wilderness. He was full of resentment. But after two years of marginalization the fates were to offer him the chance of revenge.

Meanwhile the satellite countries, too, were in a state of political turmoil. Instead of gliding towards freedom, Poland had lurched into it. The transition had been smoother in Hungary, but elsewhere it was resisted. Chiefly the resistance came from established leaders who were reluctant to relinquish power, but in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria there was a wide measure of popular indifference to the issue except among intellectuals and they were a minority. Gorbachev was placed in a strange position. He had either to breach his own principle of non-interference and force the conservatives out of office, or else allow them to continue in their unreformed ways, letting them trail behind as anomalous and unwanted appendages, like rattling cans at the back of the Soviet wedding car. Rather than be embarrassed by them, he chose to prise them out of office. How this was done using Party and KGB connections is one of the strangest stories of the late Soviet period.
¹⁶

The process began in East Germany, where word suddenly began to spread that a new, safe, way of escaping to the West was to take a holiday in Hungary and then cross the frontier into Austria. Hungary had opened its frontier with Austria on 2 May 1989. By 1 July 25,000 people, including many East Germans, were waiting to cross. On 22 August unaccountably lax Czech security allowed crowds of East Germans to occupy the West German embassy in Prague. On 11 September Hungary removed restrictions on all its frontiers, and over the next few days 20,000 East Germans poured across them. By the end of the month thousands were escaping to the West through Czechoslovakia and Poland too. The Polish and Czech governments then urged the East German leader, Erich Honecker, to let would-be migrants leave for the West directly rather than across their frontiers. Late in August he finally agreed to allow those now trapped in West German embassies to leave, though on sealed trains that
would travel through East Germany only at night. But security was breached, and on the night of 4 October crowds stormed Dresden railway station trying to board the train as it passed through.

Honecker was about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the regime. On 7 October Gorbachev himself arrived in East Berlin, the guest of honour at the celebrations, and proceeded to rack the pressure up on his host several notches more. The fact that he received a warmer reception than his host from the crowds that turned out to see him was not surprising — Gorbachev was very popular outside the Soviet Union. But the broad hints he dropped to Honecker in public were unexpected. ‘Life punishes those who lag behind the times,’ he warned. As if on cue, large crowds of demonstrators gathered in Leipzig as well as East Berlin, and Honecker was left in no doubt that he should not expect the Soviet troops stationed in his country to save him. On the night of 18/19 October he was abandoned as Party leader and replaced by Egon Krenz, who was responsible for public order and the secret police. The appointment had received Gorbachev’s imprimatur. Honecker himself subsequently attributed his downfall to Gorbachev.
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The spotlight moved in quick succession from East Berlin to Prague and back again, and then to Sofia. In Prague, on 28 October, the seventy-first anniversary of the country’s foundation, a patriotic demonstration was held in Wenceslas Square. The police broke it up, and there were no obvious repercussions. A professor at Charles University who passed through Wenceslas Square regularly in the days that followed observed dissident activists trying to drum up support for another demonstration, but people walked on past them, apparently indifferent.
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In Berlin, however, excitement rose again when, on 6 November, the East German government finally lifted restrictions on foreign travel. This precipitated a popular craze to leave the country. Sometimes this meant only a few days’ sightseeing in the West; nevertheless, there was a haemorrhage of trained professionals, and health services were soon at the point of breakdown.

Three days after restrictions had been lifted there was fresh excitement when crowds began to tear down the Berlin Wall. On 12 November it was announced that eleven of the twenty-four ministries in East Germany’s government were being allotted to members of non-Communist parties. This accorded with the Kremlin’s latest political line favouring coalition governments, but the fact that Krenz had allowed himself to be overtaken by events did not please Moscow. On 10 November the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, was voted out of office by a majority of one in the Central Committee. His successor, Petar Mladenov, had only just returned from a meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, and the critical vote was thought by
some to have been that of Dobri Dzurov, who was reputed to be very close to Moscow.

Circumstantial evidence suggested that the Kremlin was engineering the political changes taking place in the Bloc, and this was shortly to be confirmed in the case of the Czech revolution. The critical incident — recorded on camera — took place in Prague on 17 November, when police apparently attacked demonstrating students, beating one up so badly that he died. This prompted a storm of public outrage and immense crowds bearing banners soon filled Wenceslas Square. The very next day an umbrella opposition movement called Civic Forum headed by Havel was formed, and within ten days there were changes of government and of Party leader, the Party having surrendered its political monopoly. Images of the police killing the student, the inception the Prague Revolution, and the crowd scenes that followed were seen by millions the world over, giving rise to the idea that the people had toppled Communism.

Yet the images were deceptive. A Czech parliamentary inquiry into the police violence of 17 November was quietly discontinued once it was learned that no one had been killed and that the blood spilled had been stage blood. The ‘victim’ turned out to be a member of the secret police. The public had been treated to a piece of political theatre, staged by Czech security in conjunction with the KGB - a drama worthy of Havel himself. But it had served to launch a genuine revolution. Early in December Civic Forum transformed itself into a political party; on 7 December Communist Party leader Adamec resigned. By the end of the year Havel was installed in the Hradshin Castle as provisional president pending elections. Meanwhile only Ceausescu, of all the old Communist leaders, remained to be disposed of - and Gorbachev and the KGB had a discreet hand in the resolution of that problem too.

The critical date in Bucharest was 22 December. Ceausescu, just returned from a state visit to Iran, appeared on the balcony of the Party headquarters building to make a speech and receive the dutiful plaudits of the crowd assembled in the open space below, as he had done on several occasions in the past. Only this time, instead of applauding, the crowd began to jeer. As the situation became threatening, the dictator and his wife were taken to the roof and flown away by helicopter. But they were soon caught, tried by a summary court martial, and shot. As it transpired, leading figures in the regime which replaced his were already in the building when Ceausescu had begun to speak. In what had been, until the last instalment, a series of bloodless revolutions Gorbachev had cut the satellites loose. He had yet to ensure the security of the Soviet Union in its new
circumstances, however, and to shore up his own, increasingly fragile, position as its leader.

The Soviet standard of living deteriorated steadily during 1989. Food rationing became commonplace in many areas, political protests more frequent, and in April there were nineteen fatal casualties in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, when troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators. In August, on the anniversary of the Nazi—Soviet Pact, there were demonstrations in the Baltic republics too, and nationalists soon began to organize in Ukraine. Averting his eyes from the deterioration in the economy and from the threat of dynamic nationalism, Gorbachev persevered with political and constitutional reform. In February 1990 he asked the Central Committee to discontinue the Soviet Party’s political monopoly, and, true to its tradition of obedience to the leader, it complied, albeit unhappily. In foreign affairs, however, matters did not go well for Gorbachev.