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The 4th of June 1989. That Sunday was not just a turning point in China’s modern history but also a landmark date for Poland and for Eastern Europe’s evolution out of the Cold War. Many observers proclaimed it as the day of Poland’s first ‘free’ and democratic elections since the Second World War.

Yet that wasn’t quite right: Poland’s exit from communist dictatorship began with a rigged vote gone wrong. The Polish Communist Party – locked since 1980 in an enervating power struggle with the Solidarity trade union movement – conceded the demand for elections in the hope of controlling the process of reform. This was intended to be the reinvention of communism, Polish-style. As US reporter John Tagliabue observed, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the party leader, wanted to ‘use the vote to sweep reform-minded leaders into key posts’ and ‘sweep away apparatchiks resistant to change so that new blood can be pumped into the party’ – as Gorbachev had tried to do in the USSR.[1] The regime’s resort to democracy was largely a facade. All one hundred seats of the upper house, or Senate, were openly contested, but this was the case for only 161 (35%) of the 460 seats in the all-important lower house (Sejm). The rest were reserved for the communists (38%) and fellow-traveller parties (27%). What’s more, thirty-five seats of the communists’ quota were allotted to prominent government and party officials. These candidates faced no challengers and were put on a special, separate ‘national list’. The only ‘choice’ open to voters was to cross out as many names from the various lists as they wished. The regime knew some people would do so but did not expect this on a large scale: hence its requirement as regards the special ‘national list’ that each candidate gain the support of 50% of voters. On the face of it, then, there was no reason to believe that the Polish Communist Party’s monopoly on power would be threatened by this tepid experiment in democracy.[2]

In fact, many people that Sunday had their eyes on what was happening to ‘democracy’ on the other side of the world: a story not of ballots but of bullets. Press and TV were full of Tiananmen, six hours ahead of Warsaw and twelve in advance of Washington. British journalist and commentator Timothy Garton Ash, in the Polish capital to cover the elections, sat that morning in the makeshift offices of the recently founded opposition daily Gazeta Wyborcza (motto ‘Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności’, ‘There’s no freedom without Solidarity’). But he and his Polish friends became mesmerised by footage of dead or wounded Chinese protestors being carried out of the Forbidden City.[3] The New York Times that morning featured a front-page banner headline ‘TROOPS ATTACK AND CRUSH BEIJING PROTEST; THOUSANDS FIGHT BACK, SCORES ARE KILLED’. Tucked away at the bottom of the page, a small box entitled ‘The Polish Vote’ noted: ‘Some say that, four years hence, the opposition will be in control.’[4]

In fact, change in Poland was only hours away. Although official results were not expected until a few days later, it was clear by that evening that the opposition would win virtually all the seats in the Senate. What’s more, in the elections for the Sejm, millions of voters defied the government by crossing out huge numbers of names on the official list, so that dozens of key party functionaries – including the prime minister, the defence minister and the minister of internal affairs – failed to get over the 50% hurdle. This was a stunning outcome: Solidarity had outpolled the communists. Not only was the election a slap in the face for the party, it also undermined the foundations of effective government. The regime had lost control of its reinvention of communism. The people were taking over.

And yet the mood across Poland was not exuberant on that sunny evening. The populace appeared unsettled. Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa expressed anxiety about the implications of what seemed like a landslide for his trade union movement: ‘I think that too big a percentage of our people getting through would be disturbing.’ After a decade of bruising struggle with the regime, he was wary of how the Jaruzelski government would react. Party spokesman Jan Bisztyga warned: ‘If feelings of triumph and adventurism cause anarchy in Poland, democracy and social peace will be seriously threatened.’ He added darkly, ‘Authorities, the coalition and the opposition cannot allow such a situation.’[5]

Garton Ash witnessed how the Solidarity leaders ‘plunged into fevered discussions, tortuous negotiations, and late-night cabals’ – their reaction to the polls ‘a curious mixture of exaltation, incredulity, and alarm. Alarm at the new responsibilities that now faced them – indeed the problems of success – but also a sneaking fear that things could not continue to go so well.’[6] That fear, of course, was heightened by the news from China. Both Solidarity and reform communist leaders had been suddenly and painfully reminded of what could happen if violence broke out – not least given the presence of some 55,000 Red Army troops on Polish soil.[7] And so they did everything possible to avoid it.

The Solidarity leadership now realised that it must dare to engage in national politics – to move beyond its original role of ‘the opposition’ and take on the responsibilities that came with electoral success. The government, too, was stunned by the results. It had solicited a qualified vote of confidence from the people, who instead had delivered a damning verdict on more than four decades of communist rule sustained by the external force of Soviet military power. With Poland entering uncharted waters, both sides were being forced to work together – fearful of risking another Tiananmen if they did not. Solidarity and the communists were seemingly bound in a community of fate – incapable of acting for Poland without each other.

In Moscow, Gorbachev and his advisers were shocked by the news from Warsaw. They had expected that perestroika-style reforms would be met with gratitude in the satellite states, enabling reform communists to stay in charge. The Soviet leadership put the result down to Polish peculiarities. After all, as aide Andrei Grachev remarked, the Poles were the ‘weak link’ in the Soviet bloc. What happened in Poland would most likely stay there.[8] Gorbachev, therefore, stuck to the principles he had enunciated before the UN. The Brezhnev Doctrine was dead; ‘freedom of choice’ was now paramount. The Polish people had spoken. So be it – as long as Poland remained a member of the Warsaw Pact.[9]

No one foresaw the cascade of falling dominoes that would follow Poland’s electoral revolution. But the problems had been gestating for years.

*

In retrospect, the whole Soviet bloc seems like a house of cards. First, because it was rooted in the presence of the Red Army ever since the end of the Second World War. Soviet control of these territories had developed incrementally – rapidly in the Polish case, more slowly, for instance, in Czechoslovakia – but single-party communist regimes tied to Moscow were essentially imposed by force. In 1955 that iron fist was covered with a thin velvet glove in the form of an international alliance among independent states, ostensibly mirroring NATO and colloquially known in the West as the Warsaw Pact, but this was in fact a convenient cover for Soviet dominance. In 1956 the pact backed up the Red Army when it put down the anti-communist protests in Budapest; in 1968 it did the same to crush the Prague Spring. Ultimately the bloc was held together by fear of the tank. Of course, the United States was the unquestioned hegemon of NATO, essential provider of nuclear security and using bases on Allied soil. But, if Western Europe was part of an American ‘empire’, this was empire both by ‘invitation’ and by ‘integration’. In Eastern Europe, however, the Soviet bloc was always ‘empire by imposition’.[10]

What also held the satellite states together (under the umbrella of Comecon, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, founded in 1949) was common adherence to concepts of economic planning that emanated from Moscow. ‘The Plan’ set government targets for total production, for performance within each industry and indeed each factory and farm, thereby eliminating market forces but also personal incentives. Building on wholesale nationalisation programmes pushed through after 1945, the Plan promoted rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of hitherto largely agrarian societies and initially led to a sharp growth of living standards and welfare provision for much of the population. But these gains were soon exhausted and by the 1970s the inflexibilities of the command economies became palpable. Resentment grew about the paucity and poverty of consumer goods. Because the bloc was intended to be autarkic, it was also largely sealed from Western imports, even during the détente years of the 1970s. By then the system was surviving to a great extent thanks to infusions of Western credits and the subsidised price of Soviet oil. A decade later, as the West’s IT revolution was taking off, the inefficiencies of Comecon and the fragility of the Soviet bloc generally seemed transparent.[11]

These grave structural flaws notwithstanding, the ‘revolution of 1989’ was in no way preordained. Neither CIA analysts nor international relations theorists predicted the bloc’s sudden disintegration in 1989.[12] The turmoil of that year was not simply the culmination of popular discontent and protest in the streets: transformation was instigated in part by national leaders, in struggles between reformers and conservatives. There was ‘revolution from above’ as much as ‘revolution from below’. Moreover, national leaders operated in an international context – responding to signals initially from Gorbachev and later from the West. In view of this lateral dynamic we might even speak of a ‘revolution from across’. And one of the most crucial ‘across’ factors that would determine the success or failure of reform would be the actions of the Red Army – because the Soviet military presence was the fons et origo of the bloc as a whole.

Yet 1989 was not just simply a bloc-wide uprising against the Soviet ‘empire by imposition’. Change resulted from specific circumstances in individual states, with their different societies, cultures and religions. The catalysts occurred at different times and unfolded at different speeds, driven by diverse national and local circumstances. Many of their roots lay in long-simmering grievances; and many of the historical reference points came from earlier revolutions, not just in the communist era (Berlin, 1953; Poznan, 1956; Budapest, 1956; Prague, 1968) but also going back, say, to 1848 or 1918.

In the case of Poland[13] nationalist resentment against alien rule was channelled through the Catholic Church, which held a unique position of authority there compared with anywhere else in the bloc. For centuries the church had embodied Polish values against both Russian Orthodoxy and Prussian Protestantism, especially at times when Poland had been erased from the map during various periods of partition. In the communist era, it successfully retained its independence from the state and ruling party and functioned as almost an alternative ideology. The election of the charismatic cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła in October 1978 as the first Polish pope (John Paul II), and his triumphal visit to his homeland the following June, elevated him into an alternative leader who championed human rights and freedom of speech yet who, by virtue of his office, was now resident in the West. Such were his authority and aura that the regime was left virtually impotent as the people discovered a surrogate voice.[14]

Poland also had another well-organised force capable of standing up to the state. Solidarity, the independent trade union, had been formed in 1980 during a rash of strikes that spread along the Baltic coast of Poland from Gdańsk north to Gdynia and then west to Szczecin in response to massive price rises imposed by the government. The crucible of the movement was the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland’s leading port, where some 20,000 workers and their families formed a significant and cohesive force of resistance, and the leader who emerged was Lech Wałęsa, a forceful and feisty workers’ organiser, who became an international icon with his big, bushy moustache. After months of unrest, the regime – now led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski who, unlike his predecessor, had Moscow’s full backing – eventually imposed martial law in December 1981. It was a crackdown Polish-style, but at least there was no Warsaw Pact intervention akin to Prague 1968. Political deadlock ensued. The authorities were unable to eliminate Solidarity, but the outlawed union was in no position to overthrow the government either.[15]

The Polish economy continued in spiralling decline until another round of price hikes in winter 1988 as part of what the government described as a broad programme of economic and political change. But while retail prices jumped 45% in the first quarter of 1988, in the case of household fuel going up 200%, much of the programme ground to a halt almost as soon as it had begun.[16] During the spring and summer strikes and protests spread across the country, enveloping all branches of industry – from the shipyards to the buses, from steelworks to coal mines – at a time when Gorbachev was encouraging reform from Moscow and spurring Jaruzelski into further ‘socialist renewal’. When a new wave of strikes in August paralysed Poland’s key export industries, especially coal and steel, the government’s facade of self-confidence began to crack. ‘A very powerful thing came out of the last strike,’ said Wieslaw Wojtas, the leader at Stalowa Wola, the heart of Poland’s steel industry and epicentre of the 1988 strikes. He and his fellow workers had had the audacity to end the August strike by marching through the city, together with 30,000 of the city’s 70,000 residents, to the local Catholic church. ‘We broke the barriers of fear,’ he declared proudly. ‘And I think the authorities realised we won.’[17]

Wojtas was right. Now that the fear of the tank had dissipated, the Poles could no longer be forced into silent submission. Jaruzelski agreed to discuss economic, social and political reforms. Round-table talks opened in February 1989 with Solidarity, the church and communists sitting as equals around the same bagel-shaped table.[18] On 5 April they reached an agreement that would amend the 1952 constitution and take the Polish polity a long way towards representative government, including a restored upper house to complement the Sejm. What’s more the former would be chosen entirely by free elections, thereby paving the way for the legalisation of Solidarity and the election of 4 June.

Poland – Refolution at the round table

Wałęsa had called off the strikes in September 1988, in return for Jaruzelski’s commitment to round table discussions.[19] Popular protests would never be repeated on such a large scale. From the autumn of 1988 what happened in Poland was ‘entirely an elite-managed crisis, with the masses only stepping onto the political stage to cast their votes, on June 4 and 18, 1989’, bringing to an end the communist monopoly on power.[20] Indeed this was an elite affair on both sides, with the deals largely hammered out between ruling and opposition leaders. Hence commentator Timothy Garton Ash’s neologism ‘refolution’, signifying reform from above prompted by revolutionary pressure from below.[21]

In Hungary in 1988–9, the dynamic was similar though the logic and pace of the narrative were different. There was no rash of strikes to act as a catalyst, and no trade union movement or rallying around the church; instead the crucial trigger was a power struggle within the party elite. In May 1988 the ailing János Kádár, now in his mid-seventies, who had held power since his installation by the Kremlin in 1956, was finally toppled. His departure opened the door for a new generation of communists, all of them in their forties or fifties and mostly reformers.[22] Their outlook was defined by the complex legacy of November 1956, when Soviet tanks had rumbled into the capital, Budapest, to put down popular demonstrations against Russian oppression and to overthrow a reformist communist government that had committed itself to free elections and the country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In the bloody crackdown, an estimated 2,700 Hungarians died and 20,000 were injured.[23]

After the Soviet tanks rolled in, the Kremlin expected its puppet Kádár to sort out the mess. His first move was to send some 20,000 people to prison and execute 230, including the ringleaders of the ‘counter-revolution’ (the Soviet bloc’s official description of this popular insurrection). Imre Nagy, his predecessor, was tried in secret, hanged in the prison yard, and then buried face down in an unmarked grave with his hands and feet tied by barbed wire. Although no mourning or commemoration was allowed in Hungary, Nagy became a cult figure for Hungarians and in the West.[24]

Kádár, having proved his loyalty to Moscow, gradually and quietly jettisoned Marxist dogma and allowed a measure of free enterprise. The command economy was loosened to free many goods from price controls and to introduce a new programme for agricultural collectivisation, including revised household plot regulations that permitted people to grow food for the market on private land.[25] This was the origin of Hungary’s so-called ‘goulash economy’ of the 1960s – officially termed the ‘New Economic Mechanism’.[26] Kádár’s economic and political reforms made possible rising living standards and a relatively relaxed ideological climate. He also cautiously opened up Hungary socially; Western radio broadcasts were no longer jammed and the restrictions on travel across the Iron Curtain were relaxed. In 1963, 120,000 Hungarians travelled to the West, four times more than in 1958. All this made the country one of the most prosperous and tolerant states in the Soviet bloc.[27] Kádár became a popular figure – at least for the moment.

By the mid-1980s, however, overshadowed by Gorbachev, the aged Hungarian leader had passed his sell-by date. Certainly that was the view of the younger generation of his party who were keen to embrace the new ideas and dynamism emanating from the Kremlin. Kádár had lost the appetite for change, rather like the Moscow gerontocrats from the Brezhnev era in the early 1980s. During 1987 Kádár tried to shore up his own position as party secretary by appointing to the premiership Károly Grósz, a party functionary with conservative credentials. But Grósz defied Kádár and sided with the reform faction, whittling down state controls and subsidies and encouraging private entreprise. In a climate of slackening financial discipline Hungary acquired the highest per capita debt in Eastern Europe.[28]

Amid the deepening crisis, dissidents grew in confidence, creating with the acquiescence of the party a profusion of opposition groups. It was these new political forces that increasingly set the political agenda. In response, communist reformers defeated the conservatives and replaced Kádár as party general secretary with Grósz at a special party conference in May 1988; the young economist Miklós Németh took over as prime minister from Grósz in the autumn. The strategy of the reformers – like that of their Polish counterparts – was for the party to retreat and renew itself without relinquishing control. As in Poland, these hopes would prove illusory. Hungary would become the bloc’s second domino.

By February 1989 the government’s attempt to co-opt the opposition had failed. What emerged was a kind of competitive cooperation. Many of the opposition groups had evolved into political parties and the Communist Party felt obliged to declare its support in principle for Hungary’s transition to a multiparty democracy. Indeed the party soon abandoned the formal Leninist principle of ‘democratic centralism’, which had legitimised its monopoly on power. Within this fraught political process, historical memory also played a part.[29] The 15th March was traditionally Hungary’s national day – commemorating the outbreak of the abortive nationalist revolt of 1848 against the Austrian empire, which had eventually been crushed by troops of its ally, the Russian tsar Nicholas I. During the communist era, all celebration of that day had been banned for fear of generating anti-Russian protests, but in 1989 the reformist government – hoping to appease the opposition through a collective commemoration and thereby garner credit for its current political course – declared that 15 March would again be a national holiday. However, the government-sponsored event on the steps of the National Museum was dwarfed by a throng of no less than 100,000 people who took to the streets that morning to re-enact 1848.[30]

In this heady atmosphere the regime’s opponents felt emboldened to form an opposition round table (ORT). Eight of these came together, seeking to unify around a clear negotiating strategy in the face of the regime’s own reform agenda. This seemed essential in order to give Hungary’s opposition the same kind of weight and influence as Solidarity had achieved in Poland. After some weeks of haggling about how to conduct the talks, negotiations between the ORT and the government began in earnest on 13 June, and then in secret (again unlike Poland).[31]

Three days later, on 16 June – the thirty-first anniversary of Imre Nagy’s execution – the opposition disinterred his remains and finally gave him and several other prominent figures of the 1956 revolution a public funeral in Heroes Square in the centre of Budapest, amid crowds that even the government admitted topped 200,000. The whole funeral was screened on state television, and was attended by four reformist members of the ruling Communist Party, led by Prime Minister Németh. Not that it did them any good. A twenty-six-year-old spokesman for the ‘Federation of Young Democrats’ by the name of Viktor Orbán paid tribute to Nagy as a man who, though a communist, ‘identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire [sic] and the dictatorship of a single party’. Gesturing at the four communist leaders present, he continued scathingly, ‘we cannot understand that those who were eager to slander the revolution and its prime minister have suddenly changed into great supporters and followers of Imre Nagy. Nor can we understand that the party leaders, who made us study from books that falsified the revolution, now rush to touch the coffins as if they were charms of good luck.’ A note of malice had crept into the proceedings: Orbán’s remarks signalled a sharp rejection of the reform-communist narrative of managed transformation and national reconciliation, and it anticipated the spirit of resentment and the purge mentality that would come to suffuse Hungarian politics.[32]

Nagy’s reburial catalysed strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist nationalism at the grass roots – rather like the papal visit to Poland, but in this case through memory politics instead of religious fervour. Both of these political transformations were largely shaped by specific national experiences, and were also contained within national boundaries. Yet they occurred at much the same time and each fed on and into the other. What was happening in both Poland and Hungary represented extrication from dictatorship through the creation of new institutional structures for new regimes. In addition, there was also a wider diffusion of revolutionary ideas,[33] even beyond Eastern Europe. Indeed it is telling that the conservative hardliners in Beijing likened this to a contagion emanating from Poland and Hungary.[34] In due course the ‘disease’ of economic reform combined with political democratisation[35] would spread as the year went on, infecting the bloc from Estonia on the Baltic coast to Bulgaria on the shores of the Black Sea.

But contagion affecting a plethora of communist states was not the only dynamic of 1989. In one of these countries, Hungary, reform had the power to act as a solvent for the whole Soviet bloc and indeed for Cold War Europe itself.

*

This became clear on 27 June 1989, in a graphic image that rapidly made its way around the globe: two men, smartly dressed in business suits but standing in open country, wielded bolt cutters to nip holes in a rusty barbed-wire fence. The duo – Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock had travelled specially to the Austria–Hungary border to send a deliberate signal. Side by side, cutting through the wire fence, they seemed to be conveying the good news that the division of post-war Europe was coming to an end.

Horn and Mock cut the Iron Curtain

It was, of course, something of a public-relations stunt. When Horn proposed the fence-cutting ceremony, Németh jokingly replied: ‘Gyula, do it, but hurry up – there isn’t much barbed wire left.’[36] In reality, the two governments had started to remove the border installations, including watchtowers and alarm system, on 2 May and the actual decision to do so dated back to the end of 1988 when Németh, as part of his package of reforms, had scrapped the budget for the maintenance of the whole decrepit system. The alarm was still going off – around 4,000 times a year, but mostly caused by rabbits, deer, pheasants and the occasional drunk. The bankrupt government did not have the money to repair it and, in any case, earlier that year travel restrictions for Hungarians had been lifted entirely: twelve months on, by the end of 1988 6 million Hungarian tourists had travelled abroad, mostly to the West.[37]

Németh checked his decision to take down the iron fencing around his country with Gorbachev when visiting Moscow on 3 March and the Soviet leader raised no objection: ‘We have a strict regime on our borders, but we are also becoming more open.’ But, as Németh admitted to Gorbachev, the situation was more complex for Budapest, because the only remaining purpose of the fence was to catch citizens from East Germany who were trying to escape illegally to the West via Hungary. ‘Of course,’ he therefore added, ‘we will have to talk to the comrades from the GDR.’[38]

The East German regime, led by Erich Honecker since 1971, received the news of the border opening with a mixture of anger and anxiety. Anger, because the Hungarians had done it alone – with Gorbachev’s blessing but without consulting the rest of the Warsaw Pact allies. And real anxiety because any East German with valid travel documents to Hungary could conceivably escape the bloc into Austria and then on to automatic citizenship in West Germany. In other words, Hungary would become a fatal loophole in the Iron Curtain that the GDR had struggled so long to preserve in order to maintain its political existence.

Nevertheless, when Hungary began the removal in early May the East German defence minister General Heinz Kessler appears to have still been relatively unstressed. He told Honecker that his Hungarian counterpart General Ferenc Kárpáti had assured him that the dismantling was being done ‘entirely for financial reasons’ and that Hungary would obviously continue to secure the border through more watchtowers and ‘intensified patrols’ with sniffer dogs. Kárpáti, of course, was following instructions from Németh who had told him to play for time and keep things vague with East Berlin. ‘If we start to explain the full situation we’ll give ourselves away and get into even worse trouble.’ Crucially, Kessler took Kárpáti at his word and dutifully reported to Honecker that the dismantling of the 260-kilometre border fence was intended as a gradual process that would last until the end of 1990, at a rate of about four kilometres a week, and starting in the vicinity of four of the eight border crossings. Hungary, he explained, was undertaking this ‘cosmetic venture’ in a timely manner to advance good neighbourly relations with Austria and as part of a general relaxation of tensions in Europe.[39]

With barbed wire disappearing every day, however, East Berlin remained on edge. Honecker sent his foreign minister Oskar Fischer to Moscow to complain, only to be told by Shevardnadze that the GDR had to resolve this matter directly with Hungary.[40] And so East Germany found itself alone, without any support from Moscow – sandwiched between a reforming Poland in the East, its capitalist German rival in the West and an ever more liberal and open Hungary further south.

Initially, as Kárpáti had promised, Hungarian border guards did detain East German ‘fugitives’ at those first de-fenced sections near border checkpoints. The Iron Curtain seemed to be holding. But, as news got out and especially after seeing the images of Horn and Mock on 27 June, people felt increasingly emboldened. And so, as the weeks wore on, the so-called ‘green border’ (the dismantled sections farther away from the crossings and therefore less thoroughly patrolled) offered better opportunities for escapees. By August some 1,600 East Germans had successfully taken this route to reach the West.[41]

The Honecker regime did its level best to keep all this out of the papers and off the TV. But it was too late. East Germans had got the message: Hungary was their gateway to freedom.

*

Hungary’s simmering international crisis was also the top item on the agenda when Gorbachev met Kohl in Bonn on 12 June 1989 for his first state visit to the FRG since he took office.[42] ‘We are watching the developments in Hungary with great interest,’ the chancellor declared. ‘I told Bush that as far as Hungary is concerned, we are acting on the basis of an old German proverb: let the church remain in the village. It means that the Hungarians should decide themselves what they want, but nobody should interfere in their affairs.’ Gorbachev agreed: ‘We have a similar proverb: you do not go to somebody’s monastery with your charter.’ They both laughed. ‘Beautiful folk wisdom,’ exclaimed Kohl.

Then the Soviet leader became more sombre. ‘I am telling you honestly – there are serious shifts under way in the socialist countries. Their direction originates from concrete situations in each country. The West should not be concerned about it. Everything moves in the direction of a strengthening of the democratic basis.’ Here was Gorbachev’s endorsement of socialist renewal on a national level. But he also issued a guarded warning to Kohl, mindful of pressures on the chancellor to offer financial support to opposition groups in the Soviet bloc. ‘Every country decides on its own how it does it. It is their internal affair. I think you would agree with me that you should not stick a pole into an anthill. The consequences of such an act could be absolutely unpredictable.’

Rather than get into that argument, Kohl simply said that there was ‘a common opinion’ in the USSR, the USA and the FRG that ‘we should not interfere with anybody’s development’. But Gorbachev wanted to underline his point. If anyone tried to destabilise the situation, he said, ‘it would disrupt the process of building trust between the West and the East, and destroy everything that has been achieved so far.’[43] Next day, 13 June, he and Kohl signed no less than eleven agreements expanding economic, technological and cultural ties and a joint declaration affirming the right of peoples and states to self-determination – a significant step, especially from the German perspective.[44]

Yet the ‘Bonn Declaration’ was much more. It was the centrepiece of a state visit whose primary importance for the West Germans was the symbolic reconciliation of two nations whose brutal struggle had left Germany and Europe divided. It defined what both deemed to be a new and more promising phase in Soviet–West German relations. This was reflected in the conclusion expressing ‘the deep, long-cherished yearning’ of the two peoples ‘to heal the wounds of the past through understanding and reconciliation and to build jointly a better future’.[45]

Gorbachev and Kohl: A toast to peace and understanding

Buoyed up by the achievement and the atmosphere, the two men really bonded over the course of three days. They talked in private on a total of three separate occasions. And in contrast to the usually stilted meetings between a Western leader and a communist, they developed the confidence to exchange very candid assessments of their ‘mutual friends’. Both of them respected Jaruzelski; both were keen to support Poland’s transformation under his leadership and also Hungary’s reform course, as long as the latter was not spinning out of control. Each of them had problems with the diehard socialist regime of Erich Honecker, and neither could stand Nicolae Ceaușescu. In Kohl’s opinion the old dictator had plunged his country into ‘darkness and stagnation’; Gorbachev called Romania ‘a primitive phenomenon’, akin to North Korea, ‘in the centre of civilised Europe’.[46]

As human beings they also developed a real closeness, sharing childhood memories and reflecting on their families’ wartime sufferings: ‘There is not a single family’ in either country, said Kohl quietly, ‘whom the war did not touch’.[47] He told Gorbachev that his government saw the visit as marking nothing less than ‘the end of hostilities between Russians and Germans, as the beginning of a period of genuinely friendly, good neighbourly relations’. He added that ‘these are words supported by the will of all the people, by the will of the people who greet you in the streets and squares’. Without doubt, this was another striking feature of the visit. Gorbachev had been welcomed ecstatically in West Germany – the little Rhineland towns, as much as the Ruhr steelworks he visited, were all mobbed with people shouting ‘Gorby, Gorby.’ The conversation between the leaders became increasingly intimate. ‘I like your policy, and I like you as a person,’ confessed Kohl; ‘let’s communicate more often, let’s call each other on the phone. I think we could accomplish many things ourselves without delegating to the bureaucracies.’ Gorbachev agreed: he felt that mutual trust was growing ‘with every meeting’.[48]

On their last evening, after a long and relaxed dinner in the Chancellery bungalow, Kohl and Gorbachev, with only a translator in tow, wandered into the park and down the steps to the Rhine. There they sat on a low wall, chatting occasionally to passers-by, and gazing at the Siebengebirge hills beyond. Kohl never forgot this moment. The two men imagined a comprehensive reordering of Soviet–German relations to be codified in a ‘Grand Treaty’[49] that would open new perspectives for the future. But Kohl warned that it was impossible as long as Germany remained divided. Gorbachev was unmoved: ‘The division is the result of a logical historical development.’ Kohl did not let go. On that balmy night, in a haze of wine and goodwill, he sensed a not-to-be-missed opportunity. Pointing to the broad, steadily flowing Rhine, the chancellor mused: ‘The river symbolises history. It’s nothing static. Technically you can build a dam … But then the river will overflow and find another way to the sea. Thus it is with German unity. You can try to prevent unification, in which case we won’t experience this in our lifetimes. But as certainly as the Rhine flows towards the sea, as certainly German unity will come – and also European unity.’

Gorbachev listened and this time he did not demur. That evening on the bank of the Rhine, so Kohl thought looking back, was truly a turning point in Gorbachev’s thinking and also in their whole relationship. As they parted the two men hugged each other. An unlikely combination, perhaps: the stocky Kremlin leader and the massive, six-foot four, 250-pound chancellor. But the feeling was real: a political friendship had been born.What’s more, for Gorbachev West Germany had become what he called Moscow’s ‘major foreign partner’ – after the United States – and was therefore playing nothing less than a ‘global role’.[50]

Kohl could now bask in the glow of hugely successful state visits in quick succession from each of the superpower leaders – Bush and Gorbachev. He told the press exultantly: ‘within three weeks the two most powerful men from two different systems visited Germany. This new era brings new responsibilities to Germany’, and also, he added, ‘for peace’.[51]

Gorbachev’s evaluation of the summit was also warm and positive. ‘I think we have come out of a period of Cold War, even if there are still some chills and drafts,’ he announced before leaving. ‘We are simply bound to a new stage of relations, one I would call the peaceful period in the development of international relations.’ He even suggested that the Berlin Wall could ‘disappear when those conditions that created it fall away. I don’t see a major problem here.’ This was a scarcely veiled snub to the Honecker regime. And, alluding to the division of Germany itself, he stated ‘we hope that time will resolve this’. But while speculating about the end of one great geopolitical barrier, Gorbachev also aired his fears of a new, ‘impenetrable wall across Europe’ – referring to the European Community’s plans for a totally integrated single market by 1992. ‘So far we have not heard the economic or political arguments convincing enough to dispell such apprehensions.’ Here is a reminder that in June 1989 the process of ‘European integration’ seemed like a way of deepening the division between the two halves of the continent, rather than a unifying force of the sort that Gorbachev envisaged when he spoke of a ‘Common European Home’ stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.[52]

For Gorbachev, Bonn was part of a series of visits around Europe in mid-1989 during which – like Bush with his speaking tour in the spring – the Soviet leader presented his evolving ideas about the new Eastern Europe that was emerging through his programme of political and economic restructuring.

In Paris three weeks later, he developed the line taken with Kohl on Poland and Hungary, insisting that communist countries ‘now in transition’ would ‘find a new quality of life within a socialist system, a socialist democracy’ as the ‘process of democratisation’ ultimately transformed all of Eastern Europe. In other words, what was going on within the Soviet bloc was reconstruction not deconstruction. Yet, pointing to the historical connections between 1789 and 1917, he declared that perestroika was also a ‘revolution’. Speaking to a packed and eager audience of professors, writers and students in the Sorbonne – a venue he had specially requested – Gorbachev felt like the intellectual that he yearned to be. He philosophised about the fundamentally ‘new global problems facing mankind at the end of the twentieth century’ to which his ‘new thinking’ provided answers. He warned the West not to expect Eastern Europe’s ‘return to the capitalist fold’ or to cherish ‘the illusion that only bourgeois society represents eternal values’.[53]

Lurking beneath these comments was Gorbachev’s real irritation with those addresses Bush had delivered in April and May. He did not see any ‘realism’ or a ‘constructive line’ in those statements and in fact found them ‘quite unpleasant’, he told Kohl in Bonn. ‘Frankly speaking, those statements reminded us of Reagan’s statements about the “crusade” against socialism.’ Like Reagan, Bush ‘appealed to the forces of freedom, called for the end to the “status quo”, and for “pushing socialism back”. And all this’, Gorbachev fumed, ‘at a time when we are calling for the de-ideologisation of relations. Unwillingly, questions come to mind – where is Bush genuine, and where is Bush rhetorical?’[54]

When the topic came up between Mitterrand and Gorbachev on 5 July in the Elysée Palace, the French president did not mince words about his own quite different views. ‘George Bush would conduct a very moderate policy even without congressional constraint because he is conservative.’ In fact, he added, Bush ‘has a very big drawback – he lacks original thinking altogether’. Mitterrand’s frustration about his own lack of influence and France’s diminished status in global affairs was palpable. He also felt sidelined by the active European diplomacy of Bush and Kohl – a theme to which I will return in chapters four and five. Conversely, the Soviet leader must have relished the Frenchman’s dig at the foot-dragging US president as much as he appreciated Mitterrand’s profession of ‘faith in the success of perestroika’.[55]

Nevertheless, determined to take the initiative from the ‘crusading’ Bush and regain the moral high ground, the Soviet leader pulled out the stops when speaking to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Declaring that ‘the post-war period and the Cold War are becoming a thing of the past’, Gorbachev offered an eye-catching disarmament package, proposing cuts in Soviet short-range nuclear missiles ‘without delay’ if NATO agreed, and the ultimate goal of eliminating all these weapons. Mindful of recent Alliance arguments over the ‘third zero’, he mischievously claimed that the USSR was holding fast to its ‘non-nuclear ideals’, while the West was clinging on to its dated concept of ‘minimum deterrence’.

The Soviet leader also elaborated on his vision of a Common European Home. This ruled out ‘the very possibility of the use or threat of force’ and postulated ‘a doctrine of restraint to replace the doctrine of deterrence’. He envisaged, as the Soviet Union moved towards a ‘more open economy’, the eventual ‘emergence of a vast economic space’ right across the continent in which the ‘eastern and western parts would be strongly interlocked’. He continued to believe in the ‘competition between different types of society’ and saw these kinds of tensions as ‘creating better material and spiritual conditions of life for people’. But he was looking forward to the day when ‘the only battlefield would be markets open for trade and minds open to ideas’.

Admitting that he had ‘no finished blueprint’ in his pocket for the Common European Home, he reminded his listeners of the work of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), when thirty-five nations had agreed common principles and values. It was now time, he declared, for the present generations of leaders in Europe and North America ‘to discuss, in addition to the most immediate issues, how they contemplate future stages of progress towards a European Community of the twenty-first century’. At the cornerstone of Helsinki 1975 were the two superpowers and, Gorbachev believed, that situation had not changed. ‘The realities of today and the prospects for the foreseeable future are obvious: the Soviet Union and the United States are a natural part of the European international and political structure. Their involvement in its evolution is not only justified, but also historically conditioned. No other approach is acceptable.’[56]

Gorbachev returned home via Romania, where he led a Warsaw Pact meeting that formally and publicly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine – in other words cementing his statements in New York and more recently Strasbourg that force would not be used to control the development of individual socialist states. Combined with Gorbachev’s PR offensive of drastic, unilateral Soviet force reductions in Eastern Europe and his express desire for the Warsaw Pact states to make progress with NATO countries on producing a conventional arms accord by 1992,[57] this was another deeply worrying moment for Honecker and the other hardliners in the bloc – Ceaușescu and Miloš Jakeš of Czechoslovakia – especially considering that they had used the summit to lobby vehemently for Warsaw Pact military intervention in Hungary. Champions of repression and intransigence, they must have felt that the Kremlin was abandoning them.[58] Gorbachev certainly left his fellow communist leaders in no doubt what he thought about the dinosaurs among them. He stressed that ‘new changes in the party and in the economy are needed … Even V. I. Lenin said that new policies need new people. And this does not depend on subjective wishes any more. The very process of democratisation demands it.’[59]

The Soviet leader left Bucharest on 9 July, just as the president of the United States was arriving in Warsaw. Each superpower was putting down markers on a Europe in turmoil.

*

Bush had been alarmed by the Soviet leader’s peace offensive around Europe, not least because America’s NATO allies appeared to be in the grip of some kind of ‘Gorbymania’ which made them susceptible to Soviet blandishments about arms reduction. His own European tour – to Poland and Hungary ahead of the G7 meeting in France – had been planned in May but it was now all the more imperative, in order to ‘offset the appeal’ of Gorbachev’s message.[60]

Indeed, before even setting off for Europe, Bush made a point of quickly and strongly rebuffing Gorbachev’s Paris proposals: ‘I see no reason to stand here and try to change a collective decision taken by NATO,’ he declared, and reiterated that there would be no talks on SNFs until agreement had been reached in Vienna on reducing conventional forces in Europe, an area in which the USSR was vastly superior. He wrote sarcastically in his memoirs about Gorbachev’s attempt to persuade the West that it ‘need not wait for concrete actions by the Soviet Union before lowering its guard and military preparedness’.[61]

That said, Bush did not want his European trip to be about scoring points off Gorbachev. The president had already laid down his own ideological principles in the spring and, far from wishing to mount a ‘crusade’, he was sensitive both to the volatile situation in Eastern Europe and to Gorbachev’s delicate political position at home. He did not intend to ‘back off’ from his own values of freedom and democracy but was acutely conscious that ‘hot rhetoric would needlessly antagonise the militant elements within the Soviet Union and the Pact’. He even worried about the impact of his own presence, regardless of what he said. While wanting to be what he called a ‘responsible catalyst, where possible, for democratic change in Eastern Europe’, he did not want to be a stimulus for unrest: ‘If massive crowds gathered, intent on showing their opposition to Soviet dominance, things could get out of control. An enthusiastic reception could erupt into a violent riot.’ Although he and Gorbachev were jockeying for position, the two leaders agreed on the importance of stability within a bloc that was in flux.[62]

Bush and his entourage arrived at Warsaw’s military airport around 10 p.m. on 9 July. It was a humid summer evening as they descended from Air Force One to be greeted by a large official welcoming party. Jaruzelski was in the forefront but, for the first time ever during a state visit, representatives of Solidarity were also present. No spectators were allowed near the plane, but en route from the airport to the government guest house in the city centre, where George and Barbara Bush would be staying, thousands of people lined the streets, three or four deep, waving flags and giving the Solidarity ‘V’ for victory symbol. Others leant from the balconies of their apartments, throwing down flowers onto the passing motorcade. The mood, contrary to Bush’s fears, was that of a friendly welcome, not a political demonstration.[63] In fact, this was typical of the whole trip. There were no massed throngs cheering in adulation – nothing like Pope John Paul II in 1979 or Kennedy in Berlin in 1963. The public mood seemed uncertain, characterised by what American journalist Maureen Dowd called a mixture of ‘urgency and tentativeness’ as Poles contemplated a strange future in which the ‘jailors’ and those they had jailed would now have to try to govern together.[64]

Bush and Jaruzelski managed to turn their scheduled ‘ten-minute cup of coffee’ in the morning of 10 July into an extended and frank conversation that lasted almost an hour. Their tour d’horizon spanned Polish politics and economic reforms, US financial aid, superpower relations, the German question and Bush’s vision of ‘a united Europe without foreign troops’.[65] The president’s meeting with Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski – a veteran communist journalist until he was suddenly appointed premier the previous September – was similarly businesslike and also opened up some of the complexities underlying the glib word ‘reform’. Poland’s ‘chief problem’, Rakowski explained, was to ‘introduce reforms while avoiding serious unrest’. Privatisation would be an important step but he warned it would take ‘a full generation’ before Poles accepted the Western-style ‘stratification of wealth’ that would necessarily follow. What Polish people did not need, he added, was an American ‘blank check’ – in other words ‘untied credits’ from the West. Instead he hoped Bush could encourage the World Bank and IMF to display flexibility about the staggering of debt repayments. Rakowski conceded his party’s ‘economic errors of the past’ but insisted that these ‘constitute a closed chapter’ and that Polish leaders now understood the need to turn the page. Bush promised that the West would help but stated that he had no intention of supporting the radical, indeed frankly utopian, demands by the labour unions that would ‘break the Treasury’. In that way Bush stood closer to the aims of Polish communist reformers including Jaruzelski and Rakowski, who sought managed economic cooperation with the USA and the West, than to Wałęsa and the opposition, who wanted immediate and large-scale direct aid to ease the pain of transition and thus maintain popular support.[66]

The president did talk about economic aid when he addressed the Polish parliament on the afternoon of the 10th, but what was grandly described as his ‘Six-Point Plan’ received a mixed reception. To be sure, the need was clear: Poland’s debt to Western creditors in summer 1989 stood at around $40 billion, with the country’s growth rate barely above 1% while inflation was running at almost 60%. But although Bush promised to ask the US Congress for a $100 million enterprise fund to invigorate Poland’s private sector, he hoped that the rest of the aid package he proposed ($325 million in fresh loans and a debt rescheduling of $5 billion) would come from the World Bank, the Paris Club, the G7 and other Western institutions.[67] It was all a bit vague and certainly nothing like the $10 billion that Wałęsa, for one, had requested. Nor did it even come close to the $740 million in aid that Reagan, at the height of the Cold War, had offered the communist government before martial law was declared in December 1981.[68] That, of course, was prior to the USA’s foreign debt going through the roof as a result of Reaganomics – from $500 billion in 1981 to $1.7 trillion in 1989.[69] Certainly the public reaction in Poland was almost openly critical. ‘Very little concrete material’, a government spokesman complained, and ‘too much repeated emphasis on the need for further sacrifices by the Polish people’. So much for popular hopes in Poland of a ‘mini-Marshall Plan’. While Bush saw himself as being ‘prudent’, Scowcroft told journalists defensively that the value of the aid was ‘political and psychological’ as much as ‘substantive’.[70]

Next day Bush flew to Gdańsk to meet Wałęsa for lunch at his modest but cosy two-storey stucco house on the outskirts of the city. This was a deliberately informal, down-home affair. George and Barbara chatted with Lech and Danuta as ‘private citizens’, because the Solidarity leader had not stood for election and therefore had no official political role now. Looking around the rooms, the president was struck by the ‘lack of modern appliances and furnishings that most American families take for granted’. ‘Stylish waiters’ borrowed from a nearby hotel and a ‘fancy’ Baltic meal served on silver salvers did not cover up those realities. After more of what Bush described as Wałęsa’s ‘uncertain and unrealistic’ financial requests, backed by lurid warnings of ‘a second Tiananmen in the middle of Europe’ if Polish economic reforms failed, the president was happy to escape from their uneasy get-together and drive to the Lenin Shipyard to address 25,000 dockworkers. He considered standing outside the factory gate in front of the monument commemorating the forty-five workers killed by the security forces during the 1970 strikes – three anchors nailed to giant steel crosses – the ‘emotional peak’ of his Polish trip. Bush felt ‘heart and soul, emotionally involved’ as he spoke, with a ‘heady sense’ that he was ‘witnessing history being made on the spot’.[71]

Trumping Lenin in Gdańsk – Bush with Wałȩsa

His trip to Poland had been brief (9–11 July) but it underlined the magnitude of the political and economic problems that had to be surmounted. One presidential adviser told the press, it would ‘take hundreds of millions of dollars, from us and lots of other people, and even that won’t guarantee success’.[72]

That evening Bush arrived in Budapest during a heavy thunderstorm. He and Barbara were driven straight to Kossuth Square – named for the leader of Hungary’s failed revolution of 1848 and one of the centres of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule. As the motorcade pulled into the square in front of the Parliament building it was greeted by a huge mass of people, some 100,000 strong – a crowd in an ebullient mood, full of expectation, despite being drenched by the rain. Bush, too, was very excited. It was the first ever visit of an American president to Hungary.[73]

The rain continued to fall while Hungary’s president Bruno Straub droned on for a full quarter-hour of plodding introductions. When Bush finally got a chance to speak, he waved away an umbrella, dispensed with his notecards and made a few extempore remarks ‘from the heart’ on the changes taking place in Hungary and on its reform-minded leadership. Just as he finished, the evening sun broke through the dark clouds. There was another special moment. Out of the corner of his eye, Bush noticed an elderly lady near the podium who was soaked to the skin. He took off his raincoat (which actually belonged to one of his security agents) and put it round her shoulders. The spectators roared with approval. Then Bush plunged into their midst, shaking their hands and shouting good wishes. Scowcroft noted: ‘The empathy between him and the crowd was total.’[74]

Next day, 12 July, Bush followed a similar script to his Warsaw visit. He was careful not to be seen associating with any opposition-party officials too closely. Indeed his meetings with both opposition and Communist Party figures were behind closed doors while in public he expressed his support for the communist reformers who now ran the government. Still, the difference in overall atmospherics between Budapest and Warsaw was clear: Hungary had enjoyed for two decades ‘more political freedom – nightclubs feature biting satirical sketches about the government – and more economic energy, with food markets piled high with fruits and vegetables, than the other Warsaw Pact countries’.[75]

In his talks with Bush, Prime Minister Miklós Németh emphasised his firm belief that the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) could ‘renew itself and will be able to, through electoral means, gain a dominant position in the coalition. The danger is that if the HSWP is defeated, the opposition is not yet ready to rule.’ Bush agreed. As regards the ‘political system for Hungary’, the president stated that ‘the principles articulated by the prime minister are ones that Americans support’ and promised that he would ‘do nothing to complicate the process of reform’. Being inclined toward stability, Bush believed that it was the reform communists who were uniquely equipped to successfully engineer a gradual exit from Moscow’s orbit.[76]

In Hungary – unlike Poland where the political situation was rather precarious in the wake of the elections – the question was not whether reform would proceed but how fast and on whose terms. Currently the reform communists were driving the transformation, and they did so with confidence. Internationally Hungary had more room for manoeuvre than Poland, a strategically more pivotal country for the Soviet Union. And Budapest also knew that it benefited from following in Warsaw’s slipstream. Poland had clearly managed to get away with its reform course by staying within the Warsaw Pact, and the Hungarian reformers also saw this as the best path – especially after Gorbachev had held firm to his non-interventionist position in the Bucharest summit. (Leaving the Warsaw Pact had been the step too far by Hungary in 1956.)

Understanding the new rules of the game, Hungarians were also willing to test the limits of the possible. In fact, they had done so already with the dismantling of the barbed wire. As Imre Pozsgay – effectively Hungary’s deputy prime minister under Németh – explained to Bush, there were only two situations that might attract Soviet intervention: ‘the emergence of civil war’ or ‘a Hungarian declaration of neutrality’. The former he deemed unlikely: he was sure Hungary would undergo a ‘peaceful’ transformation. And the latter was simply ‘not possible’ for Hungary: as in Poland’s case, Hungary’s Warsaw Pact membership was non-negotiable to avoid provoking the Kremlin. Bush entirely agreed that Hungarians should not have to choose between East and West. What was important, he declared, was ‘for Soviet reforms to go forward’ while the United States did not ‘exacerbate Gorbachev’s situation or make the Hungarian course more difficult’.[77]

Bush found the reformers’ buzz and energy infectious. Quite contrary to a Poland that had seemed drab, subdued and worried about its new political pluralism, Hungary, opening rapidly towards the West, seemed really full of vitality. And Bush conveyed this in his speech at Karl Marx University on the afternoon of 12 July. ‘I see people in motion,’ he said. ‘I see colour, creativity, experimentation. The very atmosphere of Budapest is electric, alive with optimism.’ Bush wanted his words to act as an accelerator of the process of change ahead of the multiparty elections, so the country would not get stuck in half-measures. ‘The United States will offer assistance not to prop up the status quo but to propel reform,’ he declared, before reminding his audience that here, as in Poland and across the bloc, simple solutions did not exist: ‘There are remnants of the Stalinist economy – huge, inefficient industrial plants and a bewildering price system that is hard for anyone to understand, and the massive subsidies that cloud economic decisions.’ But, he added, ‘the Hungarian government is increasingly leaving the business of running the shops to the shopkeepers, the farms to the farmers. And the creative drive of the people, once unleashed, will create momentum of its own. And this will … give each of you control over your own destiny – a Hungarian destiny.’[78]

In spite of this passionate rhetoric, as in Warsaw the president offered relatively meagre economic aid: $25 million for a private-enterprise fund; $5 million for a regional environmental centre; the promise of ‘most favoured nation’ status as soon as Hungary liberalised its emigration laws. He also made much about sending a delegation of Peace Corps volunteers to teach Hungarians English.[79]

His audience listened quietly but intently throughout the address. The most emotional moment was Bush’s comments on ‘the ugly symbol of Europe’s division and Hungary’s isolation’ – the barbed-wire fences that, he said, were being ‘rolled and stacked into bales’. Bush declared grandly: ‘For the first time, the Iron Curtain has begun to part … And Hungary, your great country, is leading the way.’ What’s more, with the Soviet Union withdrawing troops, he promised, ‘I am determined that we will work together to move beyond containment, beyond the Cold War.’ He ended ringingly with the invocation: ‘Let us have history write of us that we were the generation that made Europe whole and free.’ It won him a standing ovation.[80]

*

On Thursday 13 July, as Bush flew from Budapest to Paris for the G7 summit, he and Scowcroft reflected on the ‘new Europe being born’. During the flight the president also shared his impressions with members of the press corps, huddled around him on Air Force One. He said he had come away with ‘this real acute sense’ of the change that was taking place in Eastern Europe – a change he described as ‘absolutely amazing’, ‘vibrant’ and ‘vital’. He declared his determination to ‘play a constructive role’ in that process of change. The meetings, especially with the Hungarian leaders, had been ‘very good, very frank’. Warming up, Bush added, ‘I mean it was with emotion, and it wasn’t your traditional “I’ll read my cards, and you read your cards” kind of diplomacy.’ There had been ‘an intensity to it, a fervour to it’ that, he said, ‘moved me very much’.[81]

The president had no idea what lay ahead and so he remained cautious, but he was certainly encouraged by what he had seen. ‘I am firmly convinced that this wave of freedom, if you will, is the wave of the future,’ said Bush buoyantly. To some, it seemed that he was too cautious and overly sympathetic to the communist old guard. Yet others, including his deputy national security adviser Robert Gates, argued that the president was playing a more complex game. While preaching democratic freedoms and national independence to the crowds, he talked the language of pragmatism and conciliation to the old-guard leaders – in a deliberate attempt to ‘grease their path out of power’.[82]

Certainly, the challenge faced by his administration was to encourage reform in Eastern Europe without going so far and fast as to provoke turmoil and then a backlash. A fraught economic transition could easily result in inflation, unemployment and food shortages – all of which would force reform-oriented leaders to reverse course. Above all, Bush wanted to be sure to avoid triggering a Soviet reaction – possibly a crackdown in the style of 1953, 1956 and 1968. The key to successful change in the Soviet bloc was Soviet acquiescence, and Bush was keen to make it easy for Gorbachev to provide this. ‘We’re not there to poke a stick in the eye of Mr Gorbachev,’ he told the reporters. ‘Just the opposite – to encourage the very kind of reforms that he is championing and more reforms.’[83]

Fresh from witnessing revolutionary change, Bush arrived in a city obsessed with commemorating revolution. 14 July 1989 would mark the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille, the starting point of France’s quarter-century roller coaster of demotic politics and imperial autocracy. French president François Mitterrand was determined to impress his international guests with an extravagant celebration of French grandeur – and his own quasi-regal position. Yet, given the dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe, France’s historical pageant had particular resonance in July 1989.

As soon as Bush arrived, he was whisked off to the Place du Trocadéro opposite the Eiffel Tower. He sat with the six other leaders of the major industrialised nations, together with over twenty leaders from developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas, for a ceremony to commemorate the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Actors read excerpts from the declaration and quotations from the revolutionary leaders, wreaths were laid at a stone inscription of the document and 500 doves were released into the blue Paris sky. Mitterrand’s intent was clear: France’s pioneering revolution was to be remembered not for the blood in the gutters but for its enduring values: liberté, fraternité, égalité. Then followed an evening at the brand-new, gleaming mammoth Opera House in the Place de la Bastille, on the site of the once-dreaded royal prison. On this occasion too Mitterrand’s special twenty guests were present, together with the leaders of the G7 – as they were for the Bastille Day Parade the next morning, when the French president put on a massive display of France’s ‘world class’ military prowess down the Champs-Elysées. Nobody could mistake the implicit message: the Fifth Republic was still a power with global reach. Watching 300 tanks, 5,000 troops and a mobile nuclear missile unit go by along Paris’s grand boulevard, Scowcroft couldn’t help being reminded of ‘a Soviet May Day parade’.[84]

Mitterrand’s friends from the Third World really irritated the Americans. After all, the Paris G7 economic summit had been prepared especially to deal with the pressing issues of debt relief and the global environment. But the US delegation emphatically did not want to get the G7 meeting conflated with an impromptu North–South gathering on the margins of the French national celebrations, especially after the debtor countries had already seized the spotlight in Paris to appeal for relief from the developing world’s $1.3 trillion debt. The White House worried about the risk that in such an ex tempore meeting between creditors and debtors, as advocated by France, the ‘South’ as a bloc would dress up their demands to the ‘North’ as ‘reparations’ for years of colonial ‘exploitation’, laced with Marxist–Leninist-inspired rhetoric. And generally, the US strongly opposed collective debtor action. In its view, debt problems should be resolved country by country and in this vein the Americans announced a $1–2 billion short-term loan to neighbouring Mexico and then picked up the case of Poland.[85]

Given the G7 summit’s central focus on debt relief, General Jaruzelski saw his opportunity and appealed to the Big Seven for a two-year, multibillion-dollar rescue programme on 13 July. Published in all major Polish party newspapers, his six-point programme included seeking $1 billion to reorganise food supplies, $2 billion in new credits, as well as a reduction and rescheduling of Poland’s debt of roughly $40 billion, plus financing for an assortment of specific projects. Significantly, the Solidarity movement endorsed Jaruzelski’s appeal; indeed, Wałęsa had just come out in support of an approved Communist Party candidate for the presidency, which made General Jaruzelski’s victory much more likely – thus helping to end the political deadlock of the post-election weeks.[86]

Still elated by his recent visits, Bush was happy to use Jaruzelski’s financial demands to put Eastern Europe on the top of the summit agenda, wresting the initiative away from Mitterrand and his supporting cast of global little leaguers. But if support for democratic change were to be the centrepiece of the meeting, this meant the summit also had to engage with a less palatable issue for the Americans: the crushed revolution in China. And so the Paris G7 came to be dominated by two burning political issues of the moment – problems that potentially threatened global order.

As soon as the summit got under way on the afternoon of Friday 14 July – in the new glass pyramid entrance of the Louvre – the leaders started by arguing over how far they should go in condemning China. Most Europeans, led by the French president, wanted to punish the PRC with exemplary sanctions, but Bush (as well as Prime Minister Thatcher, who was worried about the fate of Hong Kong[87]) urged them to be prudent. The US president wanted as little damage as possible to the Sino-American relationship that was so important to world peace. Yet he was going out on a limb in Paris, because the US Senate voted that very day by eighty-one to ten to impose more stringent US sanctions against the PRC.

Japan’s prime minister Sosuke Uno, Asia’s sole voice among the G7, also urged caution. Tokyo did not want to see Beijing isolated and by default pushed into Moscow’s arms. Moreover, given Japan’s long history of invading China, it lacked the moral high ground to punish Beijing. Japan saw itself in a unique position. If it could keep channels to China open while using its position as America’s key Pacific ally, it might be able to broker the restoration of Sino-American cooperation. Seeing real benefits in this, Bush worked hard with Uno to soften the language on China in the summit communiqué. In the end, the leaders issued a strong condemnation of the PRC’s ‘violent repression’ but they did not announce any additional sanctions and merely urged the Chinese to ‘create conditions which enable them to avoid isolation’.[88]

With the prickly topic of China out of the way, on Saturday the G7 moved quickly to achieve agreement on Poland and Hungary. Their ‘Declaration on East–West Relations’ stated: ‘We recognise that the political changes taking place in these countries will be difficult to sustain without economic progress.’[89] In order to facilitate this progress, they agreed to impose somewhat easier conditions than on a normal IMF loan, by allowing Poland to postpone its $5 billion tranche of foreign debt repayment due in 1989. They also agreed to consider an array of economic aid options for Poland and Hungary (investments, joint ventures, professional training and an infusion of skilled managers), as well as emergency food supplies.

None of this was particularly surprising. What was much more noteworthy and eventually significant was the decision that the economic and food aid for Eastern bloc countries would be coordinated by the European Community – a striking novelty in international politics.[90] Bush got what he wanted. Enlisting support for Eastern Europe endowed his largely symbolic visit to Warsaw, Gdańsk and Budapest with real substance. But he had never intended to bear the burden alone. The G7 had readily bought his concept of ‘concerted Western action’ in support of Poland and Hungary which, Bush hoped, would lift Western engagement with Eastern Europe out of the superpower domain, spread the burden and make possible a larger, more synchronised and less competitive Western effort. The White House also believed that, couched within this broader multilateral framework, US action would look less threatening to the Soviets. Working with and through allies would become a hallmark of Bush’s diplomatic style.

It was Chancellor Kohl who proposed, with prompt agreement from the others, to ask the European Commission to head a group of donor countries to provide assistance to Poland and Hungary. This eventually became the G24: twenty-four industrialised states both from within the EC and outside it. Commission president Jacques Delors – always keen to assume a larger role for himself at the head of this supranational body – was very ready to oversee what was effectively a ‘clearing house for aid’. After all, in 1988 the EC had already established loose links with the Comecon as a trading bloc and Hungary had intimated its desire to work towards an association agreement. So, while the USA was content to take a back seat, the EC gained a position of leadership that signalled its growing political power.

The Eastern European aid package was the first time the European Community had been chosen as a follow-up agency for a G7 decision. It was a harbinger of things to come. Just three weeks earlier in Madrid on 26–7 June the EC had agreed to consummate a closer union – both political and economic – in 1992. And it was no accident that the specific blueprint for tighter economic and monetary union had been mapped out by Delors himself.[91]

Delors had been propelled into the presidency of the European Commission in 1984, following a strikingly effective three-year stint under Mitterrand as France’s finance minister which highlighted his skills as a political broker. He had successfully persuaded his notoriously obstinate boss to temper his socialist Keynesianism with a policy of austerity and fiscal consolidation. This shored up the failing franc and enabled France to remain within the European Monetary System. On the back of these achievements, moving on to Brussels as Commission president, Delors deftly steered the twelve often divergent members of the European Community towards the signing of the Single European Act in 1986, which embodied a firm commitment to move towards full economic and monetary union (EMU). Delors undoubtedly saw EMU as a way to advance the cause of European integration but he was not an avid federalist, passionate about a United States of Europe. His objections, both pragmatic and philosophical, to European federalism also help to explain his caution about highly centralised approaches to decision-making when developing the embryonic ‘Euro Area’. In 1988, at the EC Council meeting in Hanover, European leaders authorised Delors to chair a committee of central-bank governors and other experts to propose concrete stages towards EMU. Here, again, he showed his ability to forge compromises between proponents of different economic approaches, in particular building bridges between France and Germany.[92]

And so at Madrid in June 1989 it was agreed by the leaders of the EC 12 to launch the following year the first stage of EMU – completion of the single market by 1992. This would involve abolition of all foreign-exchange controls, a free market in financial services and strengthening of competition policy – which entailed a radical reduction in state subsidies. The other prong of this policy was the reinforcement of social cohesion, which involved freedom of movement between states and guaranteed workers’ rights. Achieving the single market with enhanced cohesion was top priority for this new and exciting chapter in the history of the Community. And with it came a visibly greater role in international affairs for the EC – and its Commission president. This was evident when Bush made a point of meeting Delors in Washington in June, two weeks before Madrid and five weeks ahead of the G7.

The meeting was intended to signal that the United States took seriously the Community and the ‘EC 92’ project (US shorthand for the transformation of the EC into the EU).[93] Keen to head off the danger of an economically protectionist Fortress Europe, Bush and Baker made it quite clear that America wanted to see the completion of the single European market linked with real progress in the so-called Uruguay Round negotatiations on a new agreement about global tariffs and trade – one that would replace the crumbling Cold War GATT system. Delors agreed that the EC 92 and global trade talks had to run together: if the Uruguay Round were not successful, it would not be possible for the Community to meet its EC 92 objectives. In fact, he emphasised, ‘it would be a contradiction for the Uruguay Round to fail and EC 92 to go forward’. The sticking points on all this, however, were French agriculture, because of the country’s entrenched farm lobby, and Japan, with its strong export economy but heavily protected domestic market. Delors hoped that ‘in the future the US, EC, and Canada could jointly put pressure on the Japanese’.[94]

Although apparently emerging as an independent actor, the EC always relied for its effectiveness on the key member states. Delors, for all his ambition, never forgot this. And the most significant economic power in the EC was the Federal Republic, so it was vital to work closely with Kohl. Bush, of course, knew this; and he also understood well that the German–American axis was one way of engaging with the West European engine. After all, the chancellor was genuinely supportive of EMU: as Delors told Bush, ‘Kohl reinforces the goals of the European Community.’ Of course, there was now a danger in the summer of 1989 that further Western European integration might be derailed by the incipient disintegration of Eastern Europe. Yet here again Germany was pivotal.

This became clear during the Paris G7 summit over the question of how to channel aid to Poland and Hungary. It was Kohl who sponsored the idea of the EC as the conduit for Western financial assistance. For the chancellor – ever mindful of the German question – this route offered several advantages. First, West Germany (like America) was keen to maintain the momentum of change within the Eastern bloc but he wanted to keep the process peaceful and avoid bloodshed. A concerted Western economic initiative could prevent anarchy and forestall Soviet military intervention. Second, if the FRG sheltered under the EC umbrella, nobody could blame Kohl going it alone – edging away from West, cosying up to the East and even asserting German power in ways that raised the spectre of the Kaiser and the Führer.

What’s more, unlike Bush, Kohl was ready to put a substantial sum of money on the table. He had already told Bush on 28 June that he intended to offer Hungary an additional DM 1 billion (nearly $500 million) of ‘fresh money’, on top of a loan without conditions of the same amount that he had granted in 1987. Even if the fine print made clear that this funding was actually loans and credits for buying German goods and services rather than direct aid, the sum involved was forty times more than what the president himself had offered Budapest. The chancellor was also very keen to help Poland bilaterally, but this was currently on ice because the aid question was entangled with the position of the German minority in Poland – a sensitive matter for the Poles and for the political right in the FRG. This controversy, rooted in unsettled territorial legacies of the Second World War, was another reminder of the FRG’s limits as an independent international actor. The deadlock over a deal also frustrated Kohl’s aspiration to go to Warsaw. Initially planned for the summer to follow on the heels of Mitterrand and Bush, his state visit to Poland would not take place until 9 November.[95]

Delors and the G24 moved fast because Warsaw and Budapest feared that economic collapse might undermine democratic reform. Officials made a distinction between Hungary and Poland, however, since only the latter had requested short-term food aid to combat severe shortages. Hungary’s twenty-four-page wish list concentrated on better terms of trade with the industrialised world and the liberalisation of foreign investment. The Poles, of course, would come in for similar consideration once their immediate food crisis was resolved. On 18 August, as part of a $120 million package including meat, cereals, citrus fruit and olive oil, the EC announced its first delivery of 10,000 tons of beef to Poland, to arrive in early September. A further shipment of 200,000 tons of wheat stored in Germany, as well as 75,000 tons of barley from France and 25,000 tons from Belgium, were soon to follow – with 500,000 more in the pipeline. The idea was that the Polish government would sell the free food to the people and then reinvest the profits in their economies, especially the private farm sector. This arrangement was formalised in a counterpart fund agreement the G24 negotiated. The role played by EC/G24 in the late summer of 1989 would provide a template for further Eastern aid packages in the future.[96]

So, in the end, it was Brussels, not Washington, which oversaw Western support for change in Central and Eastern Europe. This somewhat undercut Bush’s claims that it was he and the United States who were ‘propelling’ reform in Poland and Hungary. Although his rhetoric had grown bolder since the spring, Bush’s actions revealed his preference for evolution over revolution, privileging stability and order, backed by a deliberate policy of burden-sharing with allies.[97] A mild recession in the USA and a legacy of debt from the Reagan years that had dramatically increased the federal budget deficit reinforced Bush’s apprehensions about the dangers of anarchy in a Europe that might become a bottomless pit for US dollars. The president was therefore pleased with the outcome of the G7 summit. What worried him most was a letter that Mitterrand read out on Bastille Day at the very start of their meeting.

*

The letter came from Gorbachev – it was the first time that a Soviet leader had written officially to the G7. And, it was also the first time the USSR had proposed not only expanded economic cooperation but even direct Soviet participation in such efforts.

‘The formation of a cohesive world economy implies that the multilateral economic partnership be placed on a qualitatively new level,’ Gorbachev wrote. ‘Multilateral East–West cooperation on global economic problems is far behind the development of bilateral ties. This state of things does not appear justified, taking account of the weight that our countries have in the world economy.’ That, he said, was the logical extension of his programme of domestic economic restructuring. ‘Our perestroika is inseparable from a policy aiming at our full participation in the world economy,’ he stated. ‘The world can only gain from the opening up of a market as big as the Soviet Union.’[98]

As with all of Gorbachev’s words, the rhetoric was impressive, even compelling. There was no mistaking the Soviet leader’s keenness to join the G7. But Bush was wary about the Soviets. Their reforms had not yet advanced far enough to warrant full membership in the top club of free-market economies.[99] And he could see that Soviet involvement would mostly be of benefit to Moscow. Yet Gorbachev’s letter, widely quoted in the international press, was impossible to ignore. The absence of the Soviet leader was felt throughout the summit, just as it had been during Bush’s visits to Warsaw and Budapest. Tiananmen was another ghost at the feast – an ugly reminder of what could happen if democratic reform went wrong.

After the summit ended on Sunday morning, 16 July, Bush chatted with Baker and Scowcroft on the steps of the Paris embassy overlooking the garden; they discussed their impressions and experiences of the past few days. Suddenly the president announced that the time had come for him to meet at long last with Gorbachev – speaking, as Scowcroft later recalled, ‘in that way he has when his mind is made up. Neither Baker nor I remonstrated with him. Baker had never been as negative as I about an early Gorbachev meeting, and I no longer felt so strongly about it.’[100]

It looked like a spontaneous impulse, but in fact Bush had been mulling over this for several weeks. Particular impetus came from the West Germans. On 6 June, in the Oval Office, FRG president Richard von Weizsäcker had warned Bush about the implications of the recent turbulence in Poland and Hungary. ‘It would be useful if the US had quiet talks with Moscow about the future of Eastern Europe,’ he said. The West European allies would do the same based, as he put it, ‘on the values of the Atlantic Alliance’ and the FRG would act within this framework to avoid any impression of an independent Ostpolitik.[fn1] Weizsäcker returned to the same point later in the conversation, warning Bush more bluntly that ‘in their foreign relations, the Soviets are approaching a time that is totally unknown to them, and they are legitimately worried’. He added firmly: ‘The West needs to talk to Moscow to alleviate these fears.’ The US president did not respond directly but segued to China, observing that he ‘had the feeling that the Soviets are saying “there but for the grace of God go I”. They may be worrying that reform could affect them in the same way.’[101]

The impressions gleaned from this conversation were reinforced on 15 June when Chancellor Kohl – immediately after his talks with Gorbachev in Bonn – called Bush on the phone to convey his impressions. The Soviet leader, he said, had been in ‘good shape’ and relatively ‘optimistic’, showing himself keen to support Polish and Hungarian reform efforts. But Kohl kept coming back to one issue: Gorbachev was ‘seeking ways of establishing personal contact with the president’. Laying it on thick, the chancellor claimed that he and Gorbachev had ‘talked for quite some time about the president’. It was clear, said Kohl, that Gorbachev had a ‘general suspicion towards the United States’ but also that he had ‘greater hope for establishing good contact with Bush than he had with President Reagan.’ At an intellectual level, Kohl insisted, Gorbachev saw ‘eye to eye with the president’ and wanted to ‘deepen contacts with the US and Bush personally.’ Kohl urged sending direct and personal messages to Gorbachev from time to time. This, he declared, would ‘signal the president’s confidence, which is a key word for Gorbachev, who places a high premium on “personal chemistry”’. Bush probably took it all with a pinch of salt – at the end, to quote the official US record, he merely ‘thanked the chancellor for his debrief and said he had listened very carefully’ – but the main point clearly registered.[102]

At the weekend Bush had a chance to reflect on the week’s events. On 18 June, three days after talking with Kohl, he wrote in his diary: ‘I’m thinking in the back of my mind what we should do about meeting with Gorbachev. I want to do it; but I don’t want to get bogged down on arms control.’ Bush hoped that ‘some cataclysmic world event’ might occur to give him and Gorbachev the chance to ‘do something that shows cooperation’ and in the process ‘talk quietly’ without raising expectations of some dramatic breakthrough on arms control. In short, the president wanted a chat not a summit.[103]

Bush’s visits to Poland and Hungary sharpened his awareness that reform might easily get out of hand and turn violent. He could not forget those images of Tiananmen Square, nor could he ignore Eastern Europe’s ‘traumatic uprisings’ of the past. If Eastern Europe was now in transition, this had to be managed by the superpowers: ‘to put off a meeting with Gorbachev was becoming dangerous’.[104] And Mitterrand had rammed this very point home on 13 July, the eve of the G7, dismissing Bush’s concerns about finding a pretext without raising expectations. The French president said the two of them could ‘simply meet as presidents who had not yet met – to exchange views’.[105]

The pressure from his European allies had become intense but Bush was both stubborn and circumspect: he had to make up his own mind in his own time. By mid-July 1989 he had finally done so. Seven months after his inauguration – having grown into the role of president and with his initial China opening now stalled – his focus was firmly on Europe and he had consolidated his own leadership position at the NATO summit in May and the recent G7. Bush had come a long way from that halting bit-part role on Governors Island in the wake of Gorbachev’s barnstorming performance in Manhattan. He now felt psychologically prepared to tangle with the Kremlin seducer.

This slow and deliberate approach to decision-making was characteristic of the Bush style, so different from that of Reagan, who had been nicknamed ‘the Great Communicator’ and ‘the Cowboy President’. There was no flamboyance or fireworks. Bush’s approach was more measured and pragmatic, based on long experience of government. Some commentators mistook Bush’s understated manner and preference for consultation as signs of weakness – an intimation, even, that America’s power was on the wane. But Bush understood cooperation, collegiality and persuasion to be the hallmarks of leadership and these required personal contact and the building of trust. By the time the G7 was over, Bush knew that these techniques had worked with his Western partners and he felt ready and able to try them out on his superpower counterpart, quietly confident that he could handle Gorbachev’s unsettling mixture of sweet talk and ‘one-upmanship’. Gorbachev had told Reagan that it took two to tango. Bush was now willing to join the dance.[106]

On Air Force One, flying home from Europe, the president drafted a personal letter to Gorbachev to explain how, as he put it, ‘my thinking is changing’. Previously, he explained, he had felt that a meeting between them would have to produce major agreements, especially on arms control – not least because of the hopes of the ‘watching world’. But now, after seeing the Soviet bloc first-hand, holding ‘fascinating conversations’ with other world leaders in Paris, and learning about Gorbachev’s recent visits to France and West Germany, he felt it was vital for the two of them to develop a personal relationship, so as to ‘reduce the chances that there could be misunderstandings between us’.

The president thus proposed an informal, no-agenda encounter, ‘without thousands of assistants hovering over our shoulders, without the ever-present briefing papers and certainly without the press yelling at us every 5 minutes about “who’s winning”’ and whether or not the meeting was a success or failure. In fact, Bush added firmly ‘it would be best to avoid the word “summit”’ altogether. He hoped they could meet very soon but he did not want to put Gorbachev under any undue pressure.

By early August, to Bush’s satisfaction, Gorbachev had replied affirmatively to his proposal. But it would still take several weeks to sort out schedules and location.[107]

*

Meanwhile, change in the once glacial Eastern Europe continued at an astonishing pace. As before, Poland was in the vanguard. The logjam over the new post of president suddenly broke. On 18 July Jaruzelski announced that he would actually be a candidate. Next day the combined houses of parliament met and voted in the general unopposed, albeit after a good deal of arm-twisting of recalcitrant Solidarity parliamentarians by their leaders. Jaruzelski promised to be a ‘president of consensus, a representative of all Poles’. It was, of course, bitterly ironic that this diehard communist and decade-long suppressor of the trade union movement was now appointed Poland’s president in the guise of a ‘reformer’ through a genuinely free vote essentially by those he had previously imprisoned. Many of the Solidarity rank and file were livid. But their political leadership argued that this was the best possible result in order to advance freedom while preserving stability. At the same time Jaruzelski’s narrowest of victories (he gained the necessary majority by one vote) showed who had the real legitimacy and political strength in the land: the freed workers, Solidarity.[108]

The next step was to replace the caretaker government under Prime Minister Rakowski. According to the round-table agreement, Solidarity was meant to stay in opposition while a new communist-led government ran the country. But the dramatic election results of 4 June had made a mockery of that original springtime arrangement. In consequence, the communists now sought a grand coalition with Solidarity (not least to try to shrug off some of the responsibility for the deepening economic crisis). But Solidarity was split over this course; most of their members did not want to participate in a government in which Communists would rule. And in any case, they believed that the June election results had actually given them the mandate to govern the country.

In the event, on 2 August Jaruzelski nominated his fellow communist General Czesław Kiszczak as prime minister. But the latter failed to form a Cabinet – because the Communist Party’s allies, the Peasant Party and Democratic Alliance, refused to cooperate. And so it was Lech Wałęsa who announced that he would put together a Cabinet under the Solidarity banner. With this daring move Wałęsa went way beyond the round-table agreement. What was now a highly volatile political situation was compounded by growing instability in the first weeks of August, amid a new wave of strikes against rampant inflation and food shortages in the industrial south around Katowice and in the Baltic shipyards.

Jaruzelski was in a bind. Should he cave in and accept the accelerating pace of the political transition? Or should he stand firm and dissolve the legislature? New and unconstrained elections would undoubtedly spell total disaster for the communists. The US ambassador in Warsaw warned that Poland was now ‘right on the brink’. If the situation escalated, how long would ‘the decaying power elite fail to defend itself’? How to prevent a conservative backlash? Or even civil war?[109]

Jaruzelski agonised for several days. What tipped him against a hard line was the prospect of political and economic chaos and also quiet but firm pressure from Gorbachev and the Kremlin. Wałęsa also made crucial concessions – promising that Poland would remain within the Warsaw Pact and offering the communists the key ministries of Defence and the Interior, in other words control of the army and the police. Both of these were important gestures to Moscow – or at least to the Moscow of 1956 and 1968, just in case that Cold War past was not as dead as Gorbachev claimed. Under these conditions Jaruzelski decided to take the step that would push Poland’s political system beyond anything being attempted elsewhere in the Eastern bloc – a ‘partnerlike cooperation’ between party and movement. The communist president accepted a Solidarity prime minister.[110]

The editor of the opposition newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – applying the ‘one for us and one for them’ rule – had a month earlier also proposed this solution in an opinion piece he entitled ‘Your president, our prime minister’. And so the chalice passed to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist and prominent Catholic layman since the 1950s. From the early days of Solidarity he had been a vital link between the progressive intelligentsia and the militant workers, and had worked as editor of Tygodnik Solidarność, the new Solidarity weekly, before being interned for a year under martial law. In 1988–9 he helped negotiate the end of the mass strikes and the construction of the round-table accords.[111]

On 24 August, Mazowiecki was confirmed prime minister by the Sejm, including the votes of most of the communist deputies, who thus indicated their willingness in principle to serve under him. He had become the first non-communist head of government in Eastern Europe since the early post-war years, yet nobody in the West was too jubilant. ‘A historic step,’ said a US State Department official, but ‘there is no sense of gloating here’ considering the immense economic challenges Mazowiecki faced.[112] In fact, the new Polish leader did not deny this, admitting ‘Nobody has previously taken the road that leads from socialism to capitalism.’[113]

On the plus side, it took only three weeks for the new Polish PM to present his government to parliament – where it was approved unanimously by 402 votes to nil, with thirteen abstentions. Yet it was perhaps symbolic that the sixty-two-year-old Mazowiecki suffered a dizzy spell while delivering his opening speech on 12 September, which forced him to take a break for nearly an hour. When he returned to the stage, to thunderous applause, he joked: ‘Excuse me, but I have reached the same state as the Polish economy.’ After the laughter had died down, he added ‘I have recovered – and I hope the economy will recover too.’ At the end, Mazowiecki stood at the prime minister’s bench ‘as a man of Solidarity’, arms raised in triumph, flashing the two-fingered Solidarity victory sign.[114]

Having fought each other for nearly a decade, Solidarity and communists were now working in uneasy collaboration, while most of the government bureaucracy simply remained in situ, adapting, often eagerly, to new goals and a fresh ethos. In place of the deadlocked triangle of Party–Solidarity–Church the country was now run by a novel configuration of forces: government, parliament and president, with Solidarity’s leading figurehead and strategist Lech Wałęsa looking on – effectively as president-in-waiting.

Although Poland’s ravaged economy had hardly begun to move from the Plan to the market, the first and crucial phase of political transition – guided but not defined by the round-table pact – had been concluded without conflict. There had been no civil war and no Soviet military intervention. This peaceful ‘refolution’ had a dynamic effect not only in Poland but also in other communist-ruled countries, signalling that the once inconceivable was now possible.

As events in Poland unfolded, the superpowers looked on as bystanders. To be sure, the State Department favoured a more adventurous and openly supportive policy. But the White House remained more guarded – placing the onus firmly on Warsaw. ‘Only the Poles can see that they succeed,’ Scowcroft told CNN when asked why the president was not rushing to offer the Poles more aid. ‘We can help, but we can only help if money goes into structures which can make it used properly.’ His message was clear: let’s wait and see. Bush felt it ‘important to act carefully and to avoid pouring money down a rat-hole’.[115]

As for the USSR, Gorbachev appeared to cling to the illusion that the ‘democratising socialism’ of Poland and Hungary had a future. Be that as it may, the Kremlin had neither the will nor the resources to police Eastern Europe in the style of Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev. In any case, Gorbachev was being severely challenged just to hold on to power at home and keep the Soviet Union together. He was now operating within a very different political system, the consequence of the USSR’s first free election since 1917. Having persuaded the Communist Party to abolish the Supreme Soviet and create a functioning parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, in March 1989, he found that this triumph of perestroika created a more independent body that gradually undermined his power. As biographer William Taubman observed, he was ‘replacing the old political “game”, at which he excelled, with a new one that he never really mastered’. In the process new nationalist, even secessionist, energies were set loose as more and more power was devolved to the republics. These centrifugal forces emerged dramatically in Georgia – prompting the intervention of the Red Army in Tbilisi in April, when twenty-one people were killed – and became even more visible as far as Europe was concerned in the Baltic States on the USSR’s western rim.[116]

On 23 August, the day before Mazowiecki was confirmed as Poland’s premier, an estimated 2 million people formed a human chain some 400 miles right across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 that assigned these three Baltic States, independent since 1918, to the Soviet Union. The ‘Baltic Chain’ or ‘Chain of Freedom’ was a graphic reminder that the USSR and the Soviet empire had been held together by force. Both the Polish Assembly and the Polish Communist Party publicly condemned the Pact, as had Gorbachev himself just a few days before. But none of them was, as yet, willing to grapple with the logical implication of their words. The Pact had pulled not only the Baltic States within the USSR but also much of eastern Poland. Denouncing Stalinist policies was therefore not simply a political act; it was another sign that the Soviet bloc’s burgeoning revolution was also opening up buried questions about European geopolitics – questions that affected basic relations between the superpowers.[117]

And so Poland served almost as the icebreaker of the Cold War in the summer of 1989. Hungary followed in its wake, pursuing its own round-table talks for the reform of the electoral process and the governmental structure. In this case, though, the table was not round but triangular – as befitted the more pointed configuration of Hungarian politics in which the key players were the communists, the opposition parties and the non-party organisations. Having started on 13 June, the three groupings reached agreement on 18 September on the transition to a multiparty parliamentary democracy via fully-free national elections. The plan was that, before the elections, a president would be elected by the old, existing parliament – indeed, there was a certain understanding that Imre Pozsgay was the most likely candidate. Yet, as soon as that idea was aired, the Free Democrats, Young Democrats and Independent Trade Unions broke the consensus, refusing to sign the agreement. Quickly Hungary’s triangular politics began to fragment. The opposition parties started to feud among themselves, while on 7 October the Communist Party (in other words, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) voted to dissolve and then rebrand itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party led by Rezső Nyers. This proved a fatal move, because the public saw through the cosmetic change. Over the following months, in the run-up to the elections, the ‘new-old party’ would fail to grow in membership, unlike its opposition rivals. Meanwhile some communists around Grósz formed, under the old name, their own ‘new-old’ splinter party which was to become even more marginal in Hungarian political life.[118]

These dramatic shifts left Hungarian politics totally up for grabs. On 18 October the parliament went ahead and passed the constitutional amendments agreed by the national round table, not least renaming the country the ‘Hungarian Republic’ – dropping the word ‘People’s’. Free elections were scheduled for 25 March 1990 and the presidential election for the summer. So Hungary had moved to multiparty politics before becoming a democracy. And for longer than in Poland an old – albeit now reform-oriented – government led by the renamed communists would continue to run political affairs. Whereas in Poland, the 4 June elections were the decisive turning point in the exit from communism, the emotional and symbolic roots of Hungary’s renewal as a nation were dramatised on 16 June, with the reburial of Nagy and the renunciation of 1956.

So the Poles were in the vanguard of democratisation. But this was a process that took place within the boundaries of a single state, just as in the Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was in Hungary that Europe’s Iron Curtain would be lifted.

*

August was the continent’s main holiday month. Paris almost closed down. Italians cooled off in the coastal resorts of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. West Germans disappeared to the mountains of Bavaria or to the North Sea coast. In the communist East, sunseekers headed to Bulgaria’s Black Sea beaches or relaxed by the Baltic Sea, while large numbers of East Germans piled into their little, candy-coloured Trabants and drove off to Hungary. The shores of Lake Balaton were a particularly popular destination for those who loved camping. But this year, many campers were planning a one-way trip, having read or seen news reports about the end of Hungary’s barbed-wire border. They glimpsed the chance of slipping into the West. As historian Mary Sarotte has pointed out, the East German secret police, the Stasi, wrote up a ‘surprisingly honest internal summary’ of their citizens’ motives for wanting out of the GDR: lack of consumer goods, inadequate services, poor medical care, limited opportunities for travel, bad workplace conditions, the relentlessly bureaucratic attitude of the state, and the lack of a free media.[119]

Material reasons aside, there was another more political cause for flight. Inspired by the amazing political transformations in Poland and Hungary – countries they knew well and had visited in their hundreds of thousands – many East Germans saw Honecker, by contrast, as an immovable obstacle to progress in their own country. He was ‘giving yesterday’s answers to today’s questions’. Resentment first broke into the open in May when local elections, which many East Germans hoped would be held in the spirit of the USSR’s democratisation, had in fact been as tightly controlled as ever by the party. At the polling station everyone was merely expected to approve the list of candidates put forward by the ruling party. There was no opposition and no choice – other than rejecting candidates, which many did. Those who ‘forgot’ to vote were promptly visited with a helpful reminder from the Stasi. When on election night, 7 May 1989, the results were announced, 98.85% had voted for the official lists. Everything was ‘in order’: that’s at least what state election director Egon Krenz proclaimed.[120]

The election was a travesty and the result obviously bore no relation to the real mood of GDR citizens. They felt conned by this charade of democracy. One of the few protest posters read sarcastically ‘Always on board for election fraud’ (Nie genug vom Wahlbetrug). It was as if East Germans were being treated as children in a playpen, whereas the Poles and Hungarians were allowed to behave like adults – free to voice independent political views and help shape political change for themselves. ‘Many people can no longer tolerate the kindergarten atmosphere, or being constantly led by the nose on all fronts,’ said Reinhard Schult, a leading East German activist. ‘People are leaving East Germany because they have lost all hope of change.’[121] In 1988 a total of 29,000 people from the GDR had legally exited west. In just the first six months of 1989, 37,000 had been granted permission to do so.[122]

Economic prospects and political despair were the ‘push’ factors. On the ‘pull’ side, Hungary’s increasingly porous border with Austria was obviously significant. Yet that in itself was not sufficient because, if people got caught ‘preparing’ or ‘trying’ to run away illegally, the Hungarian authorities were obliged to send them back to the GDR under a secret protocol to a 1969 bilateral treaty. But on 12 June 1989 there was a new legal twist when the Hungarian government started to adhere to the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees – honouring a commitment it had made in March. This striking substitution of political principles suggested that Hungary might no longer force East Germans back to the GDR: to borrow Gorbachev’s language, the government now placed allegiance to universal values above any obligations to fellow communist states. Rather than being illegal defectors, East German escapees could now hope to obtain the status of ‘political refugee’ in international law and thereby give legitimacy to their flight.[123]

The situation on the ground, however, was still somewhat opaque. The Hungarian bureaucracy had so far not decided on the status of GDR citizens: they argued that those desiring to leave (ausreisewillige DDR-Bürger) were not in the same category as those deemed to be politically persecuted (politisch Verfolgte) under the UN convention. But even if Hungarian border officials were still hindering escape attempts by East Germans, sometimes with firearms as happened on 21 August, the number of those being returned to the GDR security forces or even just notified by name to East Berlin as attempted escapees was dwindling. Clearly close cooperation between the Stasi and the Hungarian security forces (and also those in Poland) was a thing of the past; this was another sign that the bloc was beginning to crumble.[124]

By late August an estimated 150,000–200,000 East Germans were vacationing in Hungary, mostly near Lake Balaton. Campsites were full and roads were jammed. Many GDR visitors had overstayed their originally planned and officially approved two- or three-week holidays. Some were simply hanging around in the hope of dramatic new political developments; others were watching for the right moment to slip through the increasing number of open stretches of border fences through quiet fields or secluded woodland. Hundreds more tried a different route to freedom, squatting in the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest where they hoped to claim their automatic right to citizenship in the Federal Republic. Whatever their route, the East Germans were becoming a serious refugee problem for Hungary.[125]

The 19th of August would prove a pivotal moment. The MEP Otto von Habsburg – eldest son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor – together with human-rights activists and the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, had planned a party to say ‘farewell to the Iron Curtain’. What became known as the ‘Pan-European Picnic’ was intended as a jolly gathering of Austrians and Hungarians to celebrate freedom on a sunny summer afternoon in meadows near a border crossing on the road from Sopron (Hungary) to Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland (Austria). This was where, several weeks earlier, foreign ministers Horn and Mock had cut open the barbed-wire fence between East and West.[126]

But these modest, local festivities turned into something much more political when, at the last minute, Imre Pozsgay got in on the act as the party’s co-sponsor. He arranged with his old friend István Horváth, the reformist interior minister, as well as Prime Minister Németh, that as a symbolic gesture the border gate would be open for three hours that afternoon. Border guards were instructed to carry no weapons and not to take any action. While the picnic posed no particular legal issues for Hungarian and Austrian citizens, who had permission to travel between their countries, the situation was different for East Germans. Leaflets publicising the event were printed in German and distributed beforehand; these included maps guiding people to the picnic spot and to where they could ‘clip off part of the Iron Curtain’. As a result the little border town of Sopron filled up with some 9,000 people camping or staying in B&Bs, and the West German Foreign Ministry had even dispatched extra consular staff there to ‘assist fellow Germans’. All this added to the pressure on the Hungarian border guards who were now, in effect, being observed by Western diplomats.[127]

Nevertheless most of the East Germans who toyed with escaping were really scared. They did not know about the orders given to the Hungarian soldiers. But then the picnic began. A brass band played, the beer flowed and folk dancers in traditional Hungarian and Burgenlandish attire mingled with the crowd. Some 660 East Germans who attended the picnic took heart that day. As soon as the wooden gate was opened, there was a stampede. They rushed through and, unhindered by the border guards, they entered Austria – surprised and elated. It was the largest mass escape of East Germans since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Another 320 managed to cross to freedom elsewhere that weekend.[128]

Such numbers were not in themselves spectacular. Thousands more East Germans stayed behind, hesitating. Over the next few days the Hungarian government increased the number of guards patrolling its western border, which resulted in far fewer refugees reaching the West. Nevertheless, every day more East Germans poured into Hungary. Behind the scenes the FRG government kept pressing the Hungarian authorities to clarify the UN refugee status of the East Germans. But Bonn’s aim was not to turn the flow into a flood – far from it: the FRG was desperate to avoid disorder and instability. Frantic efforts were made to prevent the media getting their hands on an escapee crossing the border or an embassy-occupier (Festsetzer) lest such publicity would fan East German hopes of an easy exit at a time when the FRG had agreed nothing formally with either Hungary or the GDR. And the historic shadow of the Red Army also still loomed in the background. What if the situation suddenly got out of hand? What if a crowd of refugees rioted or some soldiers or secret police panicked and started shooting? Would the Soviets suddenly get drawn in? It was in this edgy atmosphere that the transnational migration crisis gathered momentum. Alarmingly, there was still no international solution.[129]

In the end, however, what forced matters to a head was not the toing and froing on Hungary’s borders but the humanitarian crisis in Budapest. The Németh government realised that it could no longer sit on its hands and watch events unfold: before its eyes the crowd of GDR refugees outside the German embassy was growing every day. Some 800 were now camped out near the building. There were also 181 in the embassy grounds and the mission itself had been forced to close to the public on 13 August. Several emergency reception camps were then created in the vicinity by the Red Cross, the Order of Malta and other aid agencies: in the Budapest suburbs of Zugliget (capacity 600 people) and Csillebérc (2,200 people) and later around Lake Balaton for another 2,000 or so. In all the camps food and water were desperately short. There were not enough toilets and showers, let alone sleeping bags, pillows, clothing and toiletries.[130]

In the intense glare of the world media, Bonn was desperate to alleviate the distress of the East Germans and contain the international crisis. But the two German governments were deadlocked about how to deal with these people. The Honecker regime was obsessed with holding on to communist orthodoxy and not letting the GDR drift into ‘the bourgeois camp’. It took no fewer than six conversations between 11 and 31 August 1989 before East Berlin grudgingly promised Bonn that it would not ‘persecute’ embassy-occupiers and would process applications for exit – but without any commitment to give a positive response for immediate permanent emigration. Meanwhile in East Berlin the pressure for such permits was mounting almost exponentially day by day, because of the GDR’s bureaucracy’s restrictive practices and its citizenry’s alienation in the light of Poland and Hungary’s liberalisation.[131]

To resolve the crisis, the West German leadership took the initiative to deal with matters at the highest level, both with East Berlin and Budapest.[132] Normally East German leavers or escapees – being a German–German matter rather than an issue of ‘foreign’ relations – came under the aegis of the Chancellery. But most refugees were in third countries, moreover in or around FRG embassies, so the Foreign Ministry had to be involved. It was run by the forceful Hans-Dietrich Genscher – a man with his own agenda. Born in 1927 in Halle – a town that became East German after 1945 – Genscher felt he had a personal interest, almost a mission, to sort out this issue, going far beyond the call of duty. What’s more, Kohl headed a coalition government, formed by his own Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), whose party leader was Genscher. This made the foreign minister also the political ‘kingmaker’ on whom the chancellor depended for his working majority in the Bundestag. So Kohl had to tolerate a certain amount of independence by Genscher in the handling of this deeply national and highly emotional problem, and their relationship was certainly not devoid of rivalry. The result was something like a dual-track policy as the FRG responded to the refugee crisis in the summer and autumn of 1989. The Foreign Ministry handled Budapest and Gyula Horn (as well as Warsaw and Prague), while the Chancellery dealt with East Berlin and Erich Honecker.[133]

But the German–German track was not much use that summer. The West German mission (or ‘permanent representation’) in East Berlin had also been obliged to close, in part because of the crush of would-be escapees. What’s more, Honecker himself was seriously ill with what proved to be cancer and was largely out of active politics for three months from July to late September, as party underlings began to jockey for power.[134]

So the onus fell on the Hungarian government, amid all the other political and economic problems on its plate, to try to square the diplomatic circle as a human drama unfolded in the muddy, squalid camps. It was obliged now to deal in totally novel ways with the FRG in order to address the crisis at the heart of Budapest. Yet, at the same time, the government had no desire to break entirely and openly with the GDR: Horn did not want to repudiate Hungary’s bilateral secret treaty of 1969 about how to deal with ‘criminal offenders’ who got caught planning or attempting ‘desertion from the Republic’. And he also kept resisting West German pressure to recognise the East Germans officially as ‘refugees’ under international law and to call in the UNHCR to deal with them. In short, his government was in a kind of no man’s land between one international order and another. At the end of his tether, Horn told one of Genscher’s staff: ‘Hungary is in a precarious situation.’[135]

Whatever the protocols of Bonn’s informal dual track, it would take the intervention of Chancellor Kohl to force matters to a head – engaging directly with his counterpart in Budapest, Prime Minister Németh. On 25 August Németh and Horn travelled secretly to Bonn to meet with Kohl and Genscher at Schloss Gymnich, a restored castle and government guest house. In a two-and-a-half-hour meeting followed by lunch, Hungarians and West Germans sought to resolve the matter irrespective of what the East Germans wanted.[136]

Kohl and Genscher convinced their Hungarian visitors that the most sensible way forward was to cooperate wholeheartedly with the West on the issue of East German refugees. It was an emotional moment. Németh assured Kohl that ‘deportations’ back to the GDR were ‘out of the question’ and added ‘we will open the border’ by mid-September. ‘If no military or political force from the outside compels us to act differently, we will keep the border open for East German citizens’ as an exit route. Taking in these words, Kohl had difficulty in containing his emotions. Indeed he was moved to tears.[137]

Németh then went on to agree with Kohl that, such was the severity of Hungary’s economic crisis, he would need the help of the West to get on top of it. By contrast, the GDR could do nothing for Hungary; nor could Gorbachev because of his ‘difficult position’ at home, though Németh said it was important to do everything possible to ‘ensure the success of Gorbachev’s policies’ because that was the only way to keep peace in the bloc. In short, by doing as Bonn wanted with regard to the touchstone issue of the East Germans, Németh seems to have hoped to encourage both Bonn and also Washington to offer Hungary financial support and to develop more extensive trade relations. Kohl did not make any commitments then, but promised to speak to West German bankers (and to Bush). A substantive DM 1 billion financial support package duly followed for Hungary’s democratisation and market reforms – comprising a 500 million credit guarantee by Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and 500 million from the Federal German government. By the end of the visit Németh had made a fateful decision: Hungary would fully open its border to the West for GDR citizens in return for Kohl’s DM to help his country emerge from the bloc into the Western world.[138]

It was a sign of the times that this deal was struck before Budapest officially informed the Kremlin of its border decision. An intense few days of ‘travel diplomacy’ ensued. But once Horn spoke to Shevardnadze, it was clear that the Soviets were willing to grant the Hungarians a free hand in their actions.[139] And Kohl’s telephone conversation with Gorbachev himself also produced a green light, with the Soviet leader’s laconic, even banal, observation ‘the Hungarians are good people’.[140]

The Hungarians were, however, much less successful in sorting out arrangements with the GDR. In East Berlin on 31 August Horn told Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer he was willing to send the East Germans home if the GDR pledged it would grant the escapees immunity from prosecution and guaranteed their right to emigrate legally. Yet Fischer offered only immunity and kept insisting that upon their return these East Germans would have to ‘pursue their individual exit visas’ with legal assistance but with no promise that permanent exit permits would be automatically granted. He also demanded that Hungary close its borders for East Germans, which Horn rejected. East Berlin also tried to convene a meeting of Warsaw Pact foreign ministers to put pressure on Budapest – but Soviet, Polish and Hungarian officials all objected, arguing that the Pact was not an appropriate forum to deal with the matter. So by 5 September the SED Politburo was reduced to old-fashioned communist bluster, accusing Hungary of ‘doing the bidding of Bonn’ and ‘betraying socialism’.[141]

On 10 September Horn made his public announcement that the Hungarian government would allow East Germans to cross freely into Austria, from where they could continue to the Federal Republic. Hungary, Horn declared, did not want to become ‘a country of refugee camps’ and was determined to ‘resolve the situation on humanitarian gounds’. His deputy Ferenc Somogyi told the international press – carefully choosing his words, delivered in English. ‘We want to open up and diversify relations with Western Europe and the West in general.’ In this vein, Somogyi said, Hungary had accepted a general European attitude and thereby moved ‘closer to the West’, placing ‘absolute primacy on universal humanitarian values’. What’s more, he added approvingly, ‘similar considerations’ now also characterised Soviet policy.[142]

The drama then unfolded on TV screens across the world. From the early hours of 11 September a mass exodus ensued. The East Germans, many of them young people in their twenties and thirties (mainly craftsmen such as bricklayers and masons, plumbers and electricians), poured across the Austrian border in cars, buses and trains. Austrian Interior Ministry officials said that by late that evening 8,100 East Germans had entered Austria en route to West Germany and that the flow was increasing steadily. And with this stream of people, Craig Whitney of the New York Times remarked that the ‘German question’, that ‘dream, or fear, of German reunification, also came alive with them’. He quoted a senior US diplomat: ‘It’s still not going to happen any time soon, but there’s beginning to be serious thought about it. It’s not just a pious platitude any more.’[143]

On 12 September Kohl sent Németh a telegram thanking him for this ‘generous act of humanity’. The same day, the chancellor exploited the euphoric mood in West Germany to full effect at his party convention in Bremen where some Christian Democrats were trying to overthrow him. He declared that it could never be the policy of responsible West German officials to urge East Germans to flee. But ‘it is a matter of course that everyone who comes to us from East Germany will be greeted by us as a German among Germans’. Appealing to national sentiments and presenting himself as a true patriot chancellor, Kohl managed to fend off the leadership challenge and secure reconfirmation as party leader. Not for the first or last time in these turbulent years, international politics reverberated in domestic affairs.[144]

By the end of September, between 30,000 and 40,000 people – far more than even informed circles had ever anticipated – had gone West via this route.[145] The Honecker regime was furious but East Germany was now diplomatically isolated in the Warsaw Pact. Crucially, Moscow hardly protested at all. On the contrary, Gennady Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, merely said that the border opening was ‘a very unusual and unexpected step’ but that it did not affect the USSR directly. That the Soviet Union went along with the Hungarian decision, thereby distancing the Kremlin even further from East Berlin, was a serious blow to the Honecker regime’s morale. There were even question marks over Gorbachev’s much-anticipated attendance at the upcoming fortieth-anniversary celebrations of the GDR’s foundation on 7 October. It was no secret that Gorbachev deeply disliked the ‘scumbag’ (mudak) Honecker, as he told Chernyaev. And the Soviet leader certainly did not want to be seen as supporting Honecker’s hard-line position against more reform-minded East German communists. Indeed, after his triumphant trip to Bonn, he had explained to Honecker in no uncertain terms that the USSR was changing. ‘This is the destiny of the Soviet Union,’ he declared, ‘but not only its destiny; it is also our common destiny.’ Nor was he keen to jeopardise his budding political friendship with Kohl: like Németh, Gorbachev’s policy towards the GDR was now being framed against hopes of West German financial injections, which the chancellor had promised during the Soviet leader’s June visit in Bonn.[146]

Unable to mobilise the Warsaw Pact in its support, the East German government used its own powers to the utmost. During September it imposed severe restrictions on GDR citizens travelling to Hungary. Although many still managed to get through, this policy simply had the effect of diverting the human traffic towards the West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague. By 27 September there were 500 East Germans seeking refuge at the Warsaw embassy and 1,300 in the Prague mission.[147]

Camp out for freedom – East Germans besiege the FRG Embassy in Prague

Prague was particularly hard hit because Czechoslovakia was in any case the transit route for East Germans hoping to head West via Hungary. And the moment East Berlin denied permission to travel to Hungary, GDR emigrants simply stayed in Czechoslovakia rather than returning home. These were people who had so far neither applied for a permanent exit visa to West Germany nor did they have adequate papers to enter Hungary. For fear of being picked up by the Czechoslovak authorities and then deported to the GDR, they hoped to achieve their goal of getting to the West by sitting it out in the grounds of the West German embassy – an eighteenth-century palace in the centre of Prague, whose beautiful park became a squalid and unsanitary refugee camp.

By the end of the month, more than 3,000 people lived in and around the main embassy building, 800 of whom were children. They had four toilets between them. The women and children bedded down at night on foam-rubber pads, while the men slept in shifts in tents spread out incongruously under black baroque statues of goddesses in the once-elegant gardens. Food was at best simple: coffee, tea, bread and jam for breakfast, and a thick soup that the Germans call ‘one-pot’ (Eintopf) for the other meals – served from field kitchens that steamed and smoked behind the wrought-iron garden gates. ‘There’s an occasional orange for every two or three children, for vitamins,’ a young mother said bleakly.[148]

Bonn was desperate to negotiate a deal to release these GDR squatters to the West, and the UN General Assembly on 27–9 September in New York offered Genscher the perfect opportunity. On the margins of the conference he was able to discuss the matter quietly with his Soviet, Czechoslovak and East German counterparts.[149] As a result of Genscher’s pleas, it appears, Shevardnadze pressed East Berlin to ‘do something’ and Honecker, with approval of the Politburo on the 29th, offered Bonn a one-off deal: the embassy-occupiers’ could go West as long as their ‘exit’ to the FRG would be presented as their ‘expulsion’ from East Germany. Honecker would thereby be able to demonstrate that he remained in control by seeming to oust these traitors from his state. To further show that he was orchestrating the whole business, the East German leader insisted that the refugees travel on sealed trains from Prague back to the GDR before being transported to West Germany. Honecker wanted to use the train journey to record the identities of the escapees, so that GDR authorities could confiscate their property. Sealed trains had, of course, a dark historical connotation, summoning up images of Nazi Germany’s transports to the concentration camps. There were also fears that the trains could be stopped in the GDR. Still, the Kohl government agreed to Honecker’s offer because this was at least an arrangement under which the East German escapees were being treated as legal emigrants rather than illegal fugitives – part of the general effort to bring the crisis within the domain of international law and universal humanitarian values.[150]

As soon as Genscher got back to Bonn from New York at dawn on 30 September, he found himself on a mission to implement the plan. With a small team of officials he headed for Prague. Other FRG diplomats set out on a similar mission to Warsaw. Both groups had the daunting task of overseeing an orderly exodus and ensuring that the GDR honoured its grudging concessions. Genscher landed in the Czechoslovak capital in the afternoon, only to learn that – contrary to earlier understandings – he would not be allowed to accompany the refugees on their freedom train. Honecker had now decided that only lower-level West German officials could travel: he did not want the added publicity from the foreign minister’s presence with the freedom riders.[151]

Undeterred, Genscher hurried to the West German embassy. There, an air of excitement had been building up over the course of the day. Suddenly, just after dusk and without any fanfare, Genscher stepped onto the baroque balcony and looked out at the huge crowd beneath him. Visibly moved, he announced ‘Dear fellow Germans, we have come to you to inform you that today your departure to West Germany has been approved.’ That magic word ‘departure’ was enough: the rest of his sentence was drowned in cries of jubilation.[152]

‘It was unbelievable,’ exclaimed a man from Leipzig. ‘Genscher was there like the incarnation of freedom.’ The people at the Prague embassy, some of whom had been there for eleven weeks, began hastily packing. It’s ‘like Christmas and Easter in one shot’, a young man told a journalist before he hurriedly boarded a bus to the train station with his wife and infant child in tow.[153]

For Hans-Dietrich Genscher, this was a hugely emotional moment. The fate of Germans in the GDR was a gut issue for him, in a way it could never have been for Kohl, a man from the Franco-German borderlands of the Rhineland-Palatinate, because Genscher had once literally been an East German refugee himself – he had fled to West Germany in 1952. Genscher had never lost his distinctive Saxon accent. Having started his legal studies in the GDR, he completed them in Hamburg before moving into West German politics.[154] These personal roots explain Genscher’s profound commitment to German unification and also his belief that this should be done through legal agreements as a peaceful embrace of the Soviet bloc. Hence his passion for West Germany’s Ostpolitik, and for the principles outlined in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which were enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, affirming both the borders of Cold War Europe and also the shared values of universal human rights. His grand ambition was to transcend the Cold War and German division not by unilateral Western actions but by consensual pan-European solutions. Therefore it was an added bonus that he was the one who commanded the show at the Prague embassy, not his ally-rival Chancellor Kohl. Little wonder that Genscher a few days later described that moment on the balcony as ‘the most moving hour in my political career’. The wheel was coming full circle for him, as he encountered the escapees of a younger generation who wanted to take the same path. ‘You can see what people will go through so that they can live like we do,’ he added, ‘not in the material sense, but to have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their lives.’[155]

And so on that night of 30 September, Prague police rerouted normal traffic to allow more than a dozen buses to evacuate the West German embassy. At Prague-Liben train station, just out of town, the throng of exuberant East Germans waiting for their trains grew ever larger. Applause rippled through the crowd at the arrival of West Germany’s ambassador to Czecholsovakia, Hermann Huber. Faces glowed with excitement, they pressed close, hugging and kissing him, even handing their children for a kind of benediction. A knot of Czechoslovak police officers stood at a distance, observing but not interfering. After many delays, six trains finally rolled out of Prague, in the company of a few token West German officials, who hoped to keep people calm.[156]

The trains had to travel for seven hours along the circuitous route from Prague through Schönau, Reichenbach, Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), Plauen, Zwickau and Gutenfürst. The tensest moments occurred inside the GDR when East German security officials got on the trains. No one could be sure that they wouldn’t try to force the passengers to disembark and end their journey to freedom. But nothing worse happened than recording the names of those leaving and collecting their official identity cards. These moments passed without incident. The train stopped in Dresden and Karl-Marx-Stadt, where more émigrés managed to clamber aboard – without impediment or punishment. Other East Germans gathered along the track to wave as the special trains of the Deutsche Bahn sped past.[157]

When the trains reached FRG territory at Hof in north-eastern Bavaria, hundreds of West Germans packed the station, cheering and waving as each train pulled in. They had stacked up mounds of used clothing, shoes, toys and prams for the newcomers. Some pressed cash into the hands of exhausted parents or gave their children candy bars. For others, it was all too much: they stood silent, weighed down by emotions they could not put into words. In the minds of many older bystanders in this border town, the scene evoked memories of the time they – like Genscher – had gathered up their few belongings after the war to begin new lives in the West.

Although not allowed to participate in the exodus itself, Genscher sensed history in the making and relished his personal role in it. That moment on the embassy balcony in Prague had got him into the limelight of the unfolding unification drama ahead of Kohl, who also coveted a place in history. ‘What has happened shows that we are in a historical period of change which cannot be reversed and will continue,’ Genscher told the press. ‘I hope that the East German leadership realises this and will not isolate itself by refusing to change. Gorbachev is coming and I hope he will convince East Germany that reform lies in its best interests, that reform means more, not less stability.’[158]

But the very opposite happened: Honecker, ill and out of his depth, chose to box himself in. Just days before East Germany’s grand fortieth-birthday celebrations, he felt humiliated, even threatened. The stark images now flickering incessantly across TV screens of innumerable East Germans clambering over fences, besieging trains, overrunning embassies and finally clenching their fists in triumph on West German soil were a glaring indictment of his government.[159]

On 3 October Honecker sealed off all of East Germany from the outside world, even the rest of the Warsaw Pact. This was an unprecedented act. Now, for the first time, the crossing of any of the GDR’s borders required both a passport, possessed by only a minority of citizens, and a specific permit for each trip – documentation that in the current circumstances was highly unlikely to be issued.[160] East Germans were really angry. With the autumn school holidays just around the corner, thousands of East Germans had booked trips either to or through Czechoslovakia. Now with passport- and visa-free travel suspended, they were stuck at the GDR–Czechoslovak border in Saxony. Consequently it was here that demonstrations became the largest anywhere in the GDR. And as the last vents closed, the East German state was turning into a pressure cooker.[161]

Ironically, between 1 and 3 October, yet another 6,000 East Germans had poured into the West German Prague embassy. In all, some 10,000 to 11,000 would-be escapees were in limbo in and around Prague. On a smaller scale similar scenes occurred in Warsaw. And so another series of sealed trains was hastily arranged – whose departure was followed avidly by a multitude of local and foreign TV companies as well as the international press. It took eight trains from Prague to Hof to clear the backlog in Czechoslovakia; two more, carrying 1,445 people, left Warsaw for Hanover.[162] During this latest transit operation, thousands of East Germans – now feeling like prisoners in their own state – flocked to the tracks and stations to watch what became known as ‘the last trains to freedom’. Many hoped to sneak aboard. The situation in Dresden became so fraught that police had use force to clear the station and tracks – overrun by some 2,500 people – and the doors of trains were sealed from the outside. It took until the early hours of 5 October to get three of the trains through Dresden Hauptbahnhof. The rest had to be rerouted through other cities.[163]

Meanwhile, a mob of some 20,000 angry people were left milling around outside on Dresden’s Lenin-Platz (now Wiener Platz) and in the adjoining streets. Police and troops went in hard with rubber truncheons and water cannons to disperse the crowd; the demonstrators fought back, hurling paving stones at the police, in what observers called the worst outbreak of civil disobedience since 1953.[164]

The East German security forces did their rough stuff under the watchful eye of officials from Dresden’s outpost of the Soviet KGB. It may well be that one of them was a young special officer by the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. As a KGB man, Putin sympathised with Honecker and his crackdown on state-traitors. What most disturbed him – as we know from later statements – was the deafening silence from his political superiors in Moscow. The call from the Kremlin never came: not one soldier of the Red Army was deployed to help the East German comrades reimpose order. The truth was that Gorbachev despised the ailing Honecker and his Stalinist henchmen; totally committed to his mission as a reformer, the Soviet leader abandoned this atrophied country that had no intention of renewing itself. His aide Anatoly Chernyaev lamented in his diary the ‘terrible scenes’ of violence damaging the East German and Soviet regimes alike. The brutal scenes in Dresden, played out in the media, only worsened the split between Honecker and Gorbachev, between East Berlin and its Soviet patron.[165]

By contrast, Honecker – fed up with the man in the Kremlin – turned to another communist ally: the People’s Republic of China. In June his regime expressed effusive support for Beijing’s use of force. The way Deng Xiaoping’s China had simply crushed the ‘counter-revolutionary unrest’ in Tiananmen Square was in Honecker’s mind an example to the whole bloc and a ray of hope for the future of real socialism, given Gorbachev’s failure to slap down protest and subversion.[166] The summer had shown how, as a direct result of the USSR stepping back, the Polish and Hungarian contagion of liberalisation was spreading across Eastern Europe. It had infected the GDR itself, causing first a haemorrhage of people and now, as Dresden demonstrated, unrest on the streets in the once-secure police state. Amid this domestic upheaval, the GDR was determined to shore up the international image of communism. That’s why Honecker sent Egon Krenz, his number two, on a high-profile week-long visit to Beijing, to celebrate the PRC’s fortieth anniversary on 1 October 1989, just days before the GDR’s own fortieth-birthday party. This was definitely a time for solidarity among true communists.

Throughout his trip, Krenz was eager to learn from the Chinese communist leadership about how to deal with protestors and reinforce the status quo.[167] Talking with party secretary Jiang Zemin on 26 September, Krenz expressed his pleasure in visiting an ‘impenetrable bastion of socialism in Asia’ where ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party, the most populous country in the world was freed from its half-colonial chains’. Jiang and Krenz agreed that the events of June 1989 had revealed the true hostile intent behind the Western strategy of ‘so-called peaceful evolution’ in relations with China, exposing it as ‘an aggressive programme of undermining socialism’.[168] Qiao Shi, another top CCP Politburo member and a key figure in implementing martial law, impressed on Krenz how closely he and his colleagues were following events in Europe, especially ‘developments in Poland and Hungary’. While these were a source of alarm, Qiao voiced great satisfaction at the East German refusal to take the same path and his resolve to ‘hold on to socialism’. After all, ‘we are all communists, our life consists of struggle’ – in ‘politics, ideology and the economy’.[169] The Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping told Krenz emphatically ‘We defend socialism together – you in the GDR, we in the People’s Republic of China.’[170] Krenz in turn declared: ‘In the struggles of our time, the GDR and China stand side by side.’[171] They saw themselves as two beacons of socialism, shining out in a darkening and hostile world.

Krenz was one of very few VIPs on the strikingly meagre official list of foreigners to grace the PRC’s fortieth-anniversary festivities. The rest were minor figures from relatively marginal countries – a Czechoslovak Politburo member, a Cuban Communist Party official and Cabinet ministers from Ecuador and Mongolia. The Soviet Union was represented by the deputy chairman of the Soviet–Chinese Friendship Society. Largely because of international outrage about the 4 June events, no heads of government had come to take part. Even many ambassadors – from the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Japan – stayed away. Krenz, as deputy to the head of a major communist state in Europe, together with his North Korean counterpart Vice President Li Jong-ok, was the most senior foreign friend to sit with the ageing Chinese elite on the rostrum as they looked out over the restored tranquillity of Tiananmen Square. As Deng told Li, ‘When you go home, please tell President Kim Il-sung that China’s social order has returned to normal … What happened in Beijing not long ago was bad, but in the final analysis it is beneficial to us, because it made us more sober-minded.’ Li replied, ‘I am sure President Kim will be very happy about this.’[172]

The foreign dignitaries were treated to a massive fireworks display and a performance of colourful dances by 100,000 flowers of communist youth. Their mood, however, seemed more ‘languid’ than ‘joyous’. And instead of a huge military parade as five years earlier, only a token group of forty-five soldiers goose-stepped in front of the stage to symbolise the power of the state. Given the stiff security, ordinary Chinese could not get within a mile of the birthday party for their ‘People’s Republic’. What’s more, martial law remained in force in Beijing, almost three months since it was imposed at the height of student demonstrations. And so soldiers armed with machine guns continued to patrol the city centre. The tone of the PRC at forty was not, then, one of jubilation; indeed until recently the plans had been for something very low-key and even austere. Yet by October the party, with regained inner confidence, wanted to show and celebrate the fact that it was fully in control. ‘National Day this year is of unusual significance,’ stated Li Ruihuan, a senior politburo member in charge of propaganda. Because, he added, ‘we have just won a victory in curbing the turmoil and quelling the counter-revolutionary rebellion’.[173]

*

Whereas communist China marked its fortieth birthday with what might be called a muted certainty, still shaken by 4 June but discerning a clear path ahead, its German comrades had been planning a grand jamboree for months, only to be faced at the last moment with mounting social upheaval that threatened their political control. The intention was that 6–7 October in East Berlin would be a huge media extravaganza, with parades of the military and party youth, lavish banquets in the glittering Palace of the Republic and endless self-congratulatory speeches. In further contrast to Beijing, most of the leading figures of global communism would be in attendance, above all China’s vice premier Yao Yilin and Gorbachev himself. For Honecker this was to be a huge event, the pinnacle of almost two decades at the top and further recognition of the GDR’s status in the communist world. To ensure that everything went to plan, visits from West Berliners were curtailed for the period of the celebrations while a precisely ‘organised and coordinated’ operation of intelligence sharing and security enforcement was launched to ensure that any attempt at protest was put down immediately. His model, in short, was Beijing not Moscow.[174]

At first all seemed to go according to plan. When Gorbachev arrived at Berlin’s Schönefeld airport on 6 October, he and Honecker put on a public diplay of socialist brotherhood for the cameras. They embraced sweetly before driving into a city ‘festooned with banners and glowing under crisscrossing beams of light’ where they stood shoulder to shoulder late into the night reviewing the massive torchlight parade of 100,000 members of the German communist youth organisation (FDJ). All evening GDR television showed the two leaders smiling and waving at the youthful throng as it flowed down Unter den Linden holding high their flags and torches. Occasionally the Soviet leader drew cheers and chants of ‘Gorby, Gorby!’ from some admiring young Germans. Then to Gorbachev’s astonishment some 300 FDJ members started chanting ‘Gorby help us! Gorby save us!’ – almost as a code word for the reforms they were demanding from their unyielding government. Honecker must have been infuriated at this turn of events, but it was still a minor aberration from an otherwise perfectly orchestrated event in which the two leaders showed themselves in total harmony.[175]

Next morning, however, the atmosphere was very different. Gorbachev again stood beside Honecker, this time on the VIP stand on Karl-Marx-Allee as they watched a military parade – an annual affair which on this occasion was considerably smaller, to demonstrate the Warsaw Pact’s commitment to disarmament. But the Soviet leader now appeared ‘distracted and impatient’ as line upon line of troops marched past: the contrived festivities seemed to be taking their toll on him.[176]

Happy birthday or last rites? East Berlin, 7 October 1989

After the parade, ‘Gorby’ and ‘Honni’ met for almost three hours alone and then with the whole SED Politburo. Little went to plan; in fact Honecker and Gorbachev were simply not on the same page. They ended up talking past each other. Gorbachev, in a typical big-picture performance, enthused about his new thinking and the current ‘revolution within a revolution’ (in other words, not negating October 1917) while also underlining communism’s ongoing historical competition with capitalism, albeit in a changing world. Honecker, on the other hand, heaped praise on the GDR as one of the world’s great economies. Fifteen billion Ostmark had been invested in the microchip industry, including the great state conglomerates Mikroelektronik Erfurt, Carl Zeiss Jena and Robotron Dresden. Systems had been automated and production raised by 300–700%. He left nobody in doubt that he was determined to stick to the old form of state socialism. ‘We will solve our problems ourselves with socialist means,’ he insisted.

Their speeches to the Politburo followed similarly divergent courses. But by now Gorbachev had heard enough. He told his East German audience a story about miners in Donetsk who ‘taught a good lesson’ to the secretary of the regional party: ‘we often see that some leaders cannot pull the cart any more, but we don’t replace them, we are afraid to offend them’. As he looked knowingly around the SED Politburo members, no one could be under any illusions that here was a direct reference to the seventy-seven-year-old hardliner Honecker. ‘If we lag behind, life will punish us straight away,’ he concluded pithily. Later, before the world media, his press spokesman Gerassimov condensed this into what became a celebrated aphorism: ‘Life punishes those who come too late!’[177]

The clock is ticking, Erich! Gorbachev with Honecker

It had been twenty-four hours of mixed messages. Having eventually decided to attend the GDR’s festivities, Gorbachev clearly intended to offer the Soviet Union’s most prized Cold War ally a measured show of solidarity. After the extraordinary images of the recent exodus and escalating popular demands for reform and democracy across the cities of East Germany, Gorbachev’s primary mission was to soothe the frazzled nerves in East Berlin and to help prevent a combination of social frustration and political paralysis from increasing to the point where it could destabilise the East German state. At the same time, however, Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would not interfere in East Germany’s problems – problems, as he put it, that were not merely about ‘sausage and bread’ but about the need for ‘more oxygen in society’ which demanded a totally new approach by the GDR. Ultimately Honecker himself would have to have the courage to undertake political reform. Gorbachev was no longer prepared to prop him up.[178]

As regards the international situation, however, standing on the Cold War front line in the heart of Europe, the Soviet leader was defiant. In his speech during the gala dinner on the 6th, he rebutted accusations that Moscow bore sole responsibility for the continent’s post-war division and he took issue with West Germany for seizing on his reforms to ‘reanimate’ dreams of a German Reich ‘within the boundaries of 1937’. He also specifically rejected demands that Moscow dismantle the Berlin Wall – a call made by Reagan in 1987 and again by Bush in 1989. ‘We are constantly called on to liquidate this or that division,’ Gorbachev complained. ‘We often have to hear, “Let the USSR get rid of the Berlin Wall, then we’ll believe in its peaceful intentions.”’ He was adamant that ‘we don’t idealise the order that has settled on Europe. But the fact is that until now the recognition of the post-war reality has insured peace on the continent. Every time the West has tried to reshape the post-war map of Europe it has meant a worsening of the international situation.’ Gorbachev wanted his socialist comrades to embrace renewal, but he had no intention of dismantling the Warsaw Pact or abruptly dissolving the Cold War borders that had given stability to the continent for the last forty years.[179]

And so, each in his own way, these two communist leaders were hanging on to the past. Gorbachev adhered to existing geopolitical realities, despite the cracks opening up in the Iron Curtain. Honecker clung to the illusion that East Germany remained a socialist nation, united by adherence to the doctrines of the party.

The intransigence of the GDR regime during the celebrations, and the growing social unrest of recent weeks, made for a potentially explosive mix. Within less than two weeks Honecker had been ousted. And only a month after the GDR’s fortieth-birthday party, on 9 November, the Berlin Wall fell without a fight. The Wall had been the prime symbol of the Cold War, the barrier that contained the East German population and the structure that held the whole bloc together. The party of 7 October proved to be a theatre of illusions. Yet there was nothing inevitable about what came next.