The Year that Changed the World Read online

  By then, the bolder of Hungary’s reformers were already telling Teltschik that Grosz “wasn’t working out.” The communist party chief shared Nemeth’s desire to retool Hungary’s economy—but only that. Economic reform, yes; social reform, no. In their frustration, Nemeth and his small group of allies again approached Kohl through Teltschik. “They felt they had to take over themselves,” Teltschik recalled. Once again, the Germans’ answer was the same. “We supported them very closely,” Teltschik told me. “It was a deal: we will help you, if you will help us,” whenever and however the need arose.

  Throughout that summer and fall and into the spring of 1989, Teltschik and the Hungarians shuttled back and forth between Bonn and Budapest. Everything was done in the utmost secrecy. During one trip, Kohl’s adviser encountered a delegation of high-ranking Soviet Politburo members strolling through a park in downtown Budapest. “It was a very funny situation. They were there to see what was happening, trying to figure out what they could learn. And there I was, meeting with the same people, talking about how to undermine the system!

  “Fortunately,” said Teltschik with a laugh, “they did not recognize me.” Nor would they recognize his hand in their downfall, so well concealed, until long after it was too late.

  Three months into his presidency, George H. W. Bush faced his first European crisis. It had little to do with recent events in Hungary or Poland. Indeed, those seemed not to fully register on the new administration’s radar. No, this crisis centered on Germany and one of the sacred cows of the Cold War—nuclear deterrence.

  A pair of Germany’s most senior officials bore the brunt of Washington’s dissatisfaction when they arrived at the State Department on the morning of April 24. It was a beautiful spring day; daffodils bloomed in the gardens. But inside, the reception was glacial. For fifteen minutes they were conspicuously kept waiting—no small breach of diplomatic nicety, considering that the visitors were Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg. Nor was there the usual grin-and-grip photo op for the newspapers. With a perfunctory handshake, Secretary of State James A. Baker III icily cut to the chase: “We are deeply disappointed in your attitude.”

  With all that was happening in the East bloc, from Poland to Hungary to Russia itself, the issue in dispute might have seemed arcane, if not outright anachronistic. Washington wanted to upgrade its arsenal of short-range nuclear weapons in Europe—the missiles, bombs and artillery shells that constituted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s main deterrent against Soviet aggression. Specifically, it sought to modernize and deploy a new generation of Lance missiles, with a range of 280 miles rather than 70. A crucial NATO summit was coming up toward the end of May. A decision had to be made, and the Germans were resisting.

  Genscher hadn’t wanted to come to Washington. He had been pushed to do so, against his better judgment, by Chancellor Kohl. The conversation he was now caught up in was purposeless, as he saw it. Even this most diplomatic of diplomats was hard-pressed to conceal his impatience. Genscher believed the whole modernization debate was moot, out of touch with the times—“eerily unreal,” he recalled it in his memoirs, given the changes under way in Europe and the Soviet Union.

  Back home in Germany, the country’s energetic antiwar left had seized upon the nuclear issue to attack Kohl and his government. Opinion polls told it all. A survey by the Allensbach Institute showed that 79 percent of Germans wanted all nukes withdrawn from Europe; 44 percent favored a withdrawal from NATO. Increasingly, the alliance was seen as a throwback, a vestige of an era fast receding into history. Germans were tired of hosting three hundred thousand foreign troops. They were tired of jets flying low over their houses, tired of American soldiers crawling through their flower beds on “maneuvers,” tired of the Cold War. It’s over, they were saying. Why is all this necessary? The only people who didn’t seem to understand were those who made the decisions, politicians in gray suits talking nukes.

  When I visited one of Kohl’s senior foreign policy advisers, the man reminded me of Gorbachev’s frustration in trying to get through to President Reagan’s hard-line advisers, to impress upon them that times had changed. With the exception of Secretary of State George Shultz, who was able to separate reality from ideology—and, ironically, Reagan himself—Gorbachev had complained about the U.S. administration’s “caveman mentality.” They were so wedded to their Cold War point of view as to be slow or even unable to grasp the significance of what he represented, a chance for peace and a breakthrough. Kohl’s adviser himself shrugged, confessing that he largely shared Gorbachev’s view. Pushing for more nukes in Europe at a time when “Gorbi” was taking Germany by storm? “Wake up, boys,” he said. “Smell the coffee brewing.” As far as Germans were concerned, Gorbachev was the peacemaker, the man of the future. Americans with their nukes were seen as dinosaurs, retrogrades, warmongers.

  None of this made much impression on the president’s men. Baker listened politely but coolly. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney abruptly got up and left in the middle of the meeting—rudely, Genscher felt—to make a speech on this very topic at the National Defense University. “We must not fall into this dangerous trap,” Cheney told his audience. “One of the Kremlin’s primary goals remains the denuclearization of Europe.”

  The Germans departed, wondering whether the Americans lived in a different universe. Behind their backs, the Bush team talked of them as sellouts. Genscher was “devious,” suspected of conniving to pull Germany out of the Western camp and negotiate a “separate peace” with the Soviets. Kohl, they agreed, was in a “panic,” playing politics and wooing the left in a tight reelection race. Condoleezza Rice decried Gorbachev’s “propaganda” and cast about for ways to “demonstrate American leadership.” Little real consideration was given to the Germans’ chief concern: that Europe’s political climate was changing so fast as to make any agreement obsolete almost before the ink was dry.

  In retrospect, that April 24 meeting in Washington was a window on a more profound problem, with implications far beyond nukes. That was a question of mind-set: the inability to break free of a Cold War view of the world, even as the system was about to come unglued.

  I remember thinking this at the time, as if those of us on the ground in Europe inhabited one world and Washington another. Toward the end of winter, I visited the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment in Fulda, the center of NATO’s most forward defensive line. The highway I was driving dropped down from the Thuringian mountains, then cut north across a rolling, wooded plain. A tourist would see pretty fields, streams and rustic farmhouses. A soldier saw the killing fields of the famous Fulda Gap. Hannibal passed this way. So did Napoleon and Patton. So might the Russians, in theory, as their armored battalions “knifed” (such were the words usually employed to describe the Russian threat to the West, even then) across the border in a run for Frankfurt, the financial hub of Europe, just sixty miles away, and beyond that the English Channel. “This is the NFL,” growled Colonel John Abrams, who commanded the sector. “We stop ’em here or not at all.”

  It was all hugely theatrical. Abrams was the son of the Vietnam general; his tanks were Abrams tanks. We boarded a helicopter for a tour of the intra-German frontier, hugging the ground and swooping just over the treetops as if in combat. “The Fulda Gap is the shortest distance to the Rhine,” Abrams shouted over the din of the chopper’s rotors. “It is the most perfect tank battlefield in the world.” It was also one of the toughest, if your forty-six hundred men were outgunned three or four to one. Abrams scanned the open, rolling terrain. In his mind’s eye, he watched as hundreds of Soviet tanks churned through the neatly tilled fields. He pointed out the enfilades, valleys and forests where his units, operating in small platoons, would lie in wait. Here, just over the lip of this ridge, his tanks could dig in. There, from the edge of that woods, antitank guns could savage the Soviet flank. Just back from the immediate front, behind those hills, helicopter gunships like th
e one we were in could pop up, launch their missiles, then duck back down before enemy gunners found them.

  In the face of Abrams’s confidence that NATO could repel a Soviet invasion, I mentioned a conversation with one of his West German counterparts, a Bundeswehr commander stationed nearby. “All these weapons; all this training. It will, of course, kill mostly Germans,” he had told me. Could NATO stop the Russians? “Yes,” he replied. “But we would lose a third of the territory of the Federal Republic,” not to mention most of the German army. Abrams blinked when he heard this. “He said that? No wonder they’re talking with Gorbachev.”

  It seemed surreal, those preparations for what Abrams and his men routinely referred to as “the next war.” But it testified to the force of the status quo, the Cold War as a system with its own momentum. Inertia was a state of mind, a way of seeing. Psychologists are fond of saying we underestimate the force of habit. For forty-five years, we lived in the habit of East versus West, them and us, communism and democracy. So many years later, it’s not so hard to see how many of us missed what was happening, all the small ways in which the world was changing. Everything—economics, public attitudes, military strategy, our very way of living and being—argued for what was and would seemingly always be. Almost nothing cried out for change.

  As Hungary punched a hole in the Iron Curtain, and with Poland just a week from its first free and democratic elections since World War II, the allies at the last minute patched together a face-saving compromise resolving America’s “Europe crisis.” The Europeans agreed to “consider” an eventual and incremental deployment of the new missiles, should circumstances dictate—a formulation fuzzy enough to satisfy everyone. The White House could claim it had not bent to public pressure and had successfully defended the future of NATO and America’s leadership. Bush was able to go on to what aides called a “triumphant” May 26 summit in Brussels, where he called for a “Europe whole and free” and declared, Reaganesquely, “Let the Wall be next!”

  As for those Lance missiles? Nothing came of them, needless to say. They were defunct, relics of a history that had already moved on.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  High Noon

  Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! What’s that sound? Democracy in action.

  Solidarity’s election campaign featured a poster of a gun-slinging Gary Cooper as the sheriff in the classic western High Noon. It was June 4, 1989—reckoning day in Dodge City East. The polls had only been open an hour or so, but to journalists covering the story it was already obvious that Solidarity would win by a landslide. Yet neither the opposition nor the communists knew. The previous evening, flying in from Prague, I’d met Solidarity campaigners at the depressing Hotel Europejski. “We’re like students before an exam,” one said, nervously wondering whether they would pass. As for the communists, they still spoke about doing at least respectably.

  Lambs to the slaughter. Let us visit the abattoir.

  On this bright Sunday morning, a tentative spring had turned to summer. The grass ran long and wild in the parks. Clouds lounged carefree in a vast blue sky. People dressed for church, and on the way they stopped at the polls. Patiently, they queued to register and receive their ballots. Patiently, they entered the voting booths and carefully drew the curtains. Others sat at long tables, elbow to elbow with friends or neighbors. Younger ones squatted cross-legged on the floor. Amid the murmurings and shuffling of feet, the room was quiet but for that insistent sound. Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! It was the sound of pens and pencils being drawn across paper, fast and decisively.

  At their dying day, all but finished and out of steam, Poland’s communists mustered the strength for one last perversity, a final crowning act of unwitting but utter self-humiliation. They devised an electoral system whereby Poles would not vote for candidates of their choice. Instead, they would cross out those they did not like. Which is to say, each and every communist.

  Everywhere you looked, the people were excising them from their lives. Here, at long last, was Poland’s long-awaited popular uprising. Revolution by deletion! The pen, at last mightier than the sword, became a weapon of glorious retribution, wielded with style. Some voters slashed their ballots boldly, decapitating the old regime with flourishing strokes, like a charge of Polish cavalry, sabers drawn and glinting in the sun. Pfft! Pfft! Whole pages of communists were x-ed with disemboweling slashes. Others savored the moment, deleting slowly, perhaps puffing a cigarette as they paused over this or that name, not so much considering their choice as pleasuring in this or that special deletion. Oh, yes, he jailed my cousin. Pfft! Oh, that sponging apparatchik, living high on our penury. Pfft! Such delicious irony. Such sweet revenge. Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

  Here and there, a fair-minded few appreciated that communists such as General Czeslaw Kiszczak and others had made this day possible. They were working to reform the system. “I voted for a few of them,” said a woman in a chic fur coat and stylish hat. (I had her pegged as a communist for sure.) Said another, “I voted for one communist for every three candidates for Solidarity. That seemed fair.” Others might have felt as she did, but no matter. Forget rewards. Forget fairness. “Poles hate this regime. They’re dead!” one unusually farsighted U.S. diplomat told me a day or two before, and he was right.

  By the next day, the results were in. Out went Kiszczak. Out went everybody. Solidarity swept all but one seat in the newly created Senate, and that went to an independent. They won each and every contest for which they were eligible in the Sejm. (Under the Round Table agreement, two-thirds of these House seats were reserved for the communists and affiliated parties.) Worse, Solidarity humiliated a “national list” of thirty-five top government candidates. These partybacked VIPs ran unopposed but needed 50 percent of the vote to stay in parliament: ministers of defense, interior, foreign affairs, the head of the party. All but two went down. Afterward, with some justification, communist candidates complained that they would have lost to a monkey, had it run on the opposition’s ticket. Even mainstream party loyalists supported Solidarity. Districts where the communists were expected to do well went to the opposition: army bases, government enclaves, even security headquarters. At the Polish embassy in Mongolia, diplomats cast thirty absentee ballots; all went to Solidarity. Its victory was so complete, so utterly overwhelming, that the communists retained only a slender majority in Parliament—and that only thanks to the way the deal was tilted in the party’s favor. Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski and his entire cabinet faced the extraordinary prospect of being… booted out! The party even lacked the votes to elect General Jaruzelski president.

  My source within the party’s upper echelons, the man I had nicknamed Kat, was shocked. “Never in our darkest nightmares did anyone predict such a shameful rout,” he spluttered, gulping whiskeys and shaking his head in astonishment. It was late Monday night, a day after the vote. That afternoon, at 3 p.m., Jaruzelski summoned top government officials and party leaders to his office. He had spoken to Mikhail Gorbachev. “Our defeat is total,” he told them. “A political solution will have to be found.” By that he meant no violence. The communists would have to live with the result.

  Outsiders could see it coming, even if most insiders had not. During the weeks running up to the election, I traveled the Polish countryside, following the campaign. One Sunday in the rural hamlet of Bodzanow, a few hours’ drive from Warsaw toward the Russian border, I listened as a parish priest concluded his Sunday mass with an unusual announcement. “The candidates from Solidarity are waiting outside to talk with you, and you will now go and hear them.” The congregation dutifully filed out, mostly peasant farmers in baggy black pants and vests and floppy caps with gnarled hands and weathered faces, to hear four Solidarity candidates tear into the communist system. They nodded, accepting campaign brochures and sample ballots with a tip of their hats. “They don’t need much convincing,” said one organizer, a Solidarity activist from the capital. Almost as an aside, he noted that such conservative communities as Bodzanow were the
backbone support of the communist party. Back in Warsaw, billboards outside St. Anne’s Church were plastered with Solidarity’s posters. “Vote for the candidate with the deepest Christian values,” the priest instructed his flock. He might as well have said, “Throw the godless commies out.”

  Solidarity’s campaign was full of zest. In Warsaw, snappy jingles introduced the candidates on radio and TV. Buses, billboards and shop windows were papered with posters and jaunty red-and-white Solidarity banners. All the candidates had their photos taken with Lech Walesa. They smiled forth from every kiosk, billboard, wall and flat surface in the city. Union organizers passed out Solidarity lapel pins, organized fund-raising concerts and canvassed for support outside churches and on street corners. Walesa himself was ubiquitous. “Ride the Solidarity tank to freedom,” he exhorted voters.

  The communist party, by contrast, was invisible. In all of Warsaw, it seemed, only a couple of government candidates had bothered to put up campaign posters. In Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, the party’s electioneering went little further than publishing the candidates’ résumés in the newspapers. Some did not even campaign. Most counted on the party’s media monopoly to carry their message—a serious miscalculation, since the messages tended to be duds: “Vote for Leszek, a good communist.” The official state-controlled news media wasn’t much better, judging from this typical newswire report: Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak, the chief government negotiator at the recent Round Table and a candidate for the Sejm, drew a “group of several dozen people” to a big party rally in the eastern part of the country. Visiting the Stomil tire factory in Kraków, I discovered just how exciting a rally of “several dozen” could be. As I eyed the meager crowd, mostly elderly, an old man rose to speak. “We’re sick of seeing Solidarity posters all over town,” he complained, leaning on his cane. “Where is our campaign? The party seems to be cowering with fear.” At the government press office, a spokeswoman offered her opinion: “Well, they have decided they do not need to do anything special.” Certainly, they never had to in the past.