Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (59 page)

Attempts to reform the economics of the Soviet bloc were thus deeply destabilising to its political existence. Gorbachev resented the resistance of the old Soviet stooges in Eastern Europe to his changes, though in fact Honecker and Ceausescu showed more wisdom than the upstart from Stavropol about what kept Communism in being. Gorbachev, needless to say, was offended by the presumption of the leaders of the little fraternal states, that because they had been active Communists since he was in short trousers, they knew best. Ironically, Gorbachev was most dogmatic about asserting his rights as the lineal heir of Lenin and Stalin and the true interpreter of Marxism-Leninism only when he was bulldozing their heritage.

By August 1991 Gorbachev’s clique had encouraged such a disintegration of authority that when some of his comrades tried to call a halt to the slide to chaos it was too late. Gorbachev’s own naivety was revealed by his behaviour on his return from captivity. Instead of trying to rescue his own position from the wreckage by a cynical attack on the prostrate Communist party as many expected, the Louis XVI of Soviet Communism still talked about the party’s role in regenerating society. His embarrassing comments were proof of how out of touch with reality he was. Only in the West was he taken seriously.

Perestroika
accelerated the decay of the Soviet Union’s infrastructure. Far from enhancing the Soviet economy’s ability to compete in high-tech goods, the effect of Gorbachev’s ‘katastroika’ was to undermine even those areas of the economy in which the Soviet state could still muddle along in its own way. The energy and raw-material base of the old Soviet economy has been woefully mismanaged, squandered and simply stolen since 1985. The rupture of oil and natural gas pipelines - with concomitant human and ecological casualties - has become commonplace in recent years. Even the old Soviet system was not so careless. (It is true that Stalin was indifferent to the human cost of his projects, but he did not like waste of material resources. Only with the decay of discipline did the neglect of infrastructure take on catastrophic proportions.)

Particularly since 1991, the exploitation of the Soviet Union’s stockpile of raw materials (such as non-ferrous metals) and its oil and natural gas resources has taken on a frenzied character as erstwhile state managers line their pockets and pay off their political masters in an unprecedented spree of asset-stripping. The effect has been to drive down world market prices for these goods further and to undermine the state’s viability, as the same new capitalist entrepreneurs have little time for filing tax returns. The unsteady tax base of the new post-Soviet states must call into question their viability especially as these assets are irreplaceable. Although it is commonplace to compare the current phase of asset-stripping capitalism in the ex-Soviet Union with the so-called ‘robber baron’ period in the USA a century ago, in fact a stark contrast exists between today’s bargain basement sale of the ex-Soviet Union’s assets and the ruthless construction of pipelines, railroads and steel mills by the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the late nineteenth century. In effect, many post-Soviet traders in raw materials are busy sawing off the economic branch upon which they are sitting.

Perestroika
and ‘shock therapy’ have so far only destroyed the asset-base and infrastructure of the Soviet Union. Whether they have produced much material benefit for the population remains debatable. But, unlike the economy of poverty produced by the Stalinist economic model, the reformed version does not even produce the sinews of power. Stagnation may not be a desirable model, but it served the Soviet Union better than
perestroika.
In retrospect, its mortality was exaggerated. As a system for producing the wherewithal of political and military power it still served. Certainly, its long-term ability to compete with the West at the high-tech end of weaponry was questionable; but the West was not likely to test the defences of the USSR even in the medium term. In any case, a state-controlled export of raw materials and fuel would have provided the funds for the continuation of the Soviet Union’s traditional practice of illicit purchase of technology, as well as consumer goodies for the
nomenklatura.
If $17 billion can nowadays flow out annually into Western bank accounts and real estate never to return, a less dramatic sell-off of moveable assets could have funded a lot of stabilising measures inside the USSR.

Far from objective economic criteria forcing the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the false intellectual analysis and expectations of the Soviet elite which were responsible. No doubt Gorbymania in the West encouraged hubris on the part of the General Secretary: if the capitalists were so impressed surely the muzhiki down on the collective farm would be won over too!

The West’s subsequent relations with China after the Tiananmen Square events in 1989 or the West’s reactions to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Russian invasion of Chechnya suggest that the preservation of the Soviet bloc would not have caused too much regret among the bulk of the political establishment in Europe or America.

As President Bush showed in his infamous ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in the summer of 1991, the United States did not want the Soviet empire to disappear. Referring to the ‘Soviet nation’, to the bemusement of even Communist Ukrainian deputies, Bush intoned against the threat posed to Gorbachev’s empire by ‘suicidal nationalism’. At the same time of course, his Secretary of State, James Baker III, was regularly announcing that the USA would never recognise secessionist Slovenia or Croatia. Bush, it might be said, was the Metternich of the end of Communism. Like his predecessor in the nineteenth century, he struggled manfully to preserve an old order under democratic and nationalist assault and, like Metternich, he failed.
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Early in his presidency, Bush made clear that gunning down anti-Communist demonstrators would not affect his international policy. He sent two of his closest advisers, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing in July 1989 to reassure the Communist gerontocrats that the disorders in Tiananmen Square need not damage US-Chinese trade and security relations. (Eagleburger and Scowcroft were also two of the loudest voices backing Belgrade’s ‘federal’ case in the Yugoslav conflict.) Since then, Bush’s successor, Clinton, has ended the hypocrisy of linking China’s Most Favoured Nation-status to its human rights record. Now China is free to flood US markets with goods from its own
gulag
without the annual pretence that it might lose this right. If elderly Chinese mass murderers could get away with their well-publicised actions in June 1989, would the West really have taken mortal offence at a few bullets whistling around East Berlin or Leipzig? (As an example of the complicity between the White House and hardliners, it is worth recalling that, when Iraq seized Kuwait in August 1990, Bush expected Chinese support for UN sanctions ‘since he had tempered his criticism of the previous year’s slaughter of students in Tiananmen Square’.)
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Apart from Thatcher’s Britain - and policy changed under Major - Bush’s European allies were equally prepared to see the Cold War order maintained across Europe. In October 1989, Kohl’s supposedly closest ally, François Mitterrand, was still insisting: ‘Those who talk about German reunification understand nothing. The Soviet Union would never accept that. That would be the death of the Warsaw Pact. Can you imagine that? The GDR is Prussia. It will never accept the yoke of Bavaria.’ Even after Kohl’s cautious opening to reunification on 27 November, eighteen days after the opening of the Wall, the French President still looked to the Kremlin to halt the tide of German unity: ‘Gorbachev will be furious. He won’t accept that. Impossible! I don’t need to oppose it myself, the Soviets will do it for me. They will never accept a great Germany ...’
¹⁴
Mitterrand was equally hostile to Gorbachev’s opponents. His regime was still reluctant to receive Yeltsin in April 1991. The President of the Russian Federation was subject to a dressing-down by Jean-Pierre Cot when he visited the European Parliament, whose President, Baron Crespo, assured him, ‘we prefer Gorbachev’. This was of course shortly after the massacre of unarmed Lithuanians at the television tower in Vilnius, and not so long after Soviet troops killed scores of people in Baku. At the time of the anti-Gorbachev coup in August 1991, Mitterrand assured French television viewers, ‘The putsch has succeeded in its first phase.’ He went on to refer to the ‘new Soviet authorities’.
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(Of course, later on, when Yeltsin was the boss sending in the tanks to attack the Russian Parliament or Chechnya, he became the object of Western concern, anxious that moralising reactions should not weaken his position.)

Alongside Mitterrand, other European heads of government would have been only too happy to see the Soviet Union hinder German reunification by force if necessary. For instance, the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, was opposed to reunification and advocated using tanks on the streets (‘sometimes they are necessary’) to crush anti-Soviet demonstrations in Vilnius and elsewhere - as might have been expected from a proud honorary doctor of Beijing University and an alleged ‘man of honour’. Only Margaret Thatcher showed any democratic principles, regretting reunification but welcoming the fall of the Wall and the tyranny which it symbolised.
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Chancellor Kohl would have found a Tiananmen Square-style massacre on his doorstep awkward to handle, but no doubt his opponents would have been hamstrung by the propaganda argument that the East German demonstrators were endangering detente and awakening neo-Nazi nostalgia for a reunited Germany. Kohl would have made do with bluster before trying to rebuild his fences with the East. Certainly, the Social Democrats and the West German intellectual elite would have backed any attempt to leave the Leipzig demonstrators to bury their own dead while the sacred rites of renewed detente went on. After all, the West German Social Democrats refused to support an attempt by East Germans to form their own (illegal) Social Democratic party as late as 1989. Instead they carefully cultivated their round of joint papers and conferences with the ‘comrades’ in East Berlin.

In West Germany, no serious political force agitated for reunification. The Greens were against it. The Social Democrats no longer even paid lip-service to the ideal. The Free Democrats ignored the question. Their coalition partners, the Christian Democrats, prided themselves on their scoop in enticing Erich Honecker to visit the Federal Republic in September 1987, something which Brandt and Schmidt had never managed, or dared, to do. Even Axel Springer’s newspaper,
Die Welt
, gave up its lonely refusal to recognise the existence of the German Democratic Republic - with impeccable timing - in the summer of 1989, when it finally dropped the obligatory inverted commas which had always surrounded any mention of the ‘DDR’ (German Democratic Republic) before. Whoever was working for German reunification, it was not the West.
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Apart from anything else, West Germany was a thoroughly ‘penetrated’ society. Agents of Markus Wolf’s Stasi intelligence were everywhere in Bonn, but also in key centres of West German economy and culture. From secretaries in the Chancellor’s official bungalow to opinion-makers in the media, the Stasi had its eyes, ears and, when necessary, lips. It would take a book as long as the Bonn telephone directory to list all of the
Stasi’s
contacts in the Federal Republic, but a few are worth recalling. A bug had been placed in the bedside telephone of Manfred Wörner, West German Defence Minister, then NATO Secretary-General. At the beginning of the 1980s, West German politics was rocked by the Flick scandal when it was discovered that hosts of leading German politicians across the spectrum had been receiving cash payments from the Flick concern; a central figure in the distribution of this cash was Adolf Kanter, a CDU member who also worked for the Stasi.
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As late as September 1989, Willy Brandt was dismissive of reunification as the ‘Lebenslüge’ (‘living lie’) of the Federal Republic. In January 1989, the new mayor of West Berlin, Walter Momper, announced that the question of reunification was dead. In private conversations with East German officials, Momper argued that the most objectionable aspect of the Wall for West Berliners was the regulation forbidding them to bring their pet dogs with them on a visit to the ‘capital city of the German Democratic Republic’. Ever obliging, Comrade Honecker changed the rules to remove this egregiously offensive aspect of his ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’. A month later, the last victim of the Wall, Chris Gueffroy, was shot down - like a dog - by Honecker’s border-guards.
¹⁹

Ingrained anti-Polish feelings among the Germans were commonplace on left as well as right. Brandt refused to meet Walesa in 1985 (though he invited the Communist Polish Premier, Rakowski, to his birthday party). Germany’s Chancellor Kohl was thoroughly antagonistic towards any kind of popular Polish movement which might challenge the stability which had allowed West Germans to grow fat in security. Kohl told Mitterrand, in March 1985: ‘We will have to help Jaruzelski. Anything that came after him would be worse. The Poles have always had eyes bigger than their stomachs and ambitions beyond their means.’
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If it is true that already in 1987 Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were envisaging reunification on the grounds that ‘without the resolution of the German question’ no normal relations could be created in Europe, then Gorbachev was actually opening a door which the vast majority of the West German establishment wished to leave firmly shut.
²¹
Although Kohl was happy to grab unity in 1990 when it was offered on a plate by Gorbachev, even he had long since reconciled himself to its unachievability.

As a politician Kohl lays great emphasis on personal empathy and contact with his negotiating partners. Apart from his physical bulk he is quite unlike the first unifier of Germany: Bismarck would never have shared Kohl’s petit-bourgeois sentimentality about foreign statesmen. It is impossible to imagine a Bismarck (or an Adenauer) reacting with unfeigned personal sympathy to a foreign leader’s domestic crisis as Kohl did after Yeltsin unleashed his armed forces against Chechnya in December 1994. Then Kohl told the Bundestag: ‘I’m proud that I was able to build a friendly relationship with Yeltsin.
What a pitiful sort of man I would be if one of my friends had difficulties and I refused to support him
. ... Even if Yeltsin has made mistakes, I will not write him off now.’
²²
Would the ‘Gorby’ who aroused so much West German hysteria during his visit in June 1989 have been completely decried if Honecker’s troops had beaten down the opposition a few months later? Surely Gorbachev could have arranged to be ‘asleep’ then, as he was whenever Soviet troops clamped down in his own empire? (It is odd that Ronald Reagan’s somnolence during moments of crisis was taken as a sign of unfitness for office, but Gorbachev’s jet-lag on 9 April 1989, when his special forces were killing people in Tbilisi, was yet further proof of his saintliness.) And, if Gorbachev had found himself in ‘difficulties’ with recalcitrant subjects, would Kohl have denied him the support he lent when Boris Yeltsin sent in the tanks and strategic bombers in December 1994? It is only necessary to recall the reaction of joy elsewhere in the West when Yeltsin unleashed a ferocious bombardment against his elected, if left-wing, rivals in the Russian Parliament in October 1993. Immediately after the bombardment, Clinton telephoned Yeltsin and gushed: ‘You get stronger and better.’
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