The Year that Changed the World Read online

  By this point, Washington realized it had little to say about developments on the ground in Eastern Europe, and even less influence. As one national security aide somewhat ruefully put it, “Events proceeded with such bewildering speed that U.S. and other Western policies could not hope to keep pace. We in Washington often found ourselves in the role of thrilled, if not to say astonished, onlookers.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Vortex of Change

  Each year, every year, the herds of East Africa’s Serengeti Plain begin a vast migration. They gather by the millions: wildebeests, giraffes, zebras, antelope, lions and hyenas. It is impossible to predict precisely when it will begin, but there are unmistakable signs. The animals grow impatient. They mill about, clashing with one another, pawing the ground in rising uncertainty and irritation. The atmosphere, the very air, becomes heavy with their heat. This may go on for weeks. Then one day, seemingly for no particular reason, they bolt—abruptly, all at once, a pell-mell, headlong run in this or that direction. They move as one, an irresistible force. Nothing could stop it, nothing can guide it.

  By autumn, this was the mood in Eastern Europe. The air was heavy with a brooding, unpredictable inevitability. From afar, the prospects were exciting. A Warsaw Pact without Poland or Hungary was easily imaginable. So was another Prague Spring, even the fall of the Wall. Privately, Helmut Kohl began to talk about an end of communism and hinted at a reunified Germany. Yet those living the events were fearful. Where there are herds, there are also predators. Where there is change, there is danger. Who knew what abrupt ugliness the times might bring? Hope was checked by caution, bred of the bitter experience of 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980.

  Traveling through the region in late September and early October was to run with the herds. By then, the sheer velocity of change had, in itself, become the most powerful force for change. Events in one country immediately spilled over to others. Overnight, Eastern Europe became less a geography than a volatile physics: plasma in motion, a blinding and bewildering kaleidoscopic whirl. Everyone seemed to be going at different speeds, in different directions, toward destinations unknown. In Poland, only months before, Solidarity had sought at most a restoration of its legal standing; now, it was grappling with the ambiguous spoils of victory. Hungary stood on the very threshold of success in its drive to bring down communism. By contrast, Czechoslovakia had scarcely begun to move. Tantalizing glimpses of what might be possible were obscured by dust, commotion, frenzy and fear.

  My editors in New York suggested I take a sweep through the region, to look at it as one story rather than several, to watch it as a process and try to figure out where it might all lead. Stephen Smith, the executive editor of Newsweek, came along. We dubbed ourselves the Marx Brothers, lost in the unrecognizable terrain of Absurdistan. Down was up, and up was down. Sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes from the villains. No fantasy could match the bizarre realities and jarring contrasts that we encountered. Certainly, no fantasy could match its pregnant drama.

  We began in Poland. Once again, Solidarity was fighting for its life, only this time as a government rather than a broken opposition. What a curious evolution! In early July, after its tumultuous election win, the once-banned union found itself to be the dominant political force in the country. When the new Polish parliament convened for the first time, a smiling and joking Lech Walesa found himself seated next to a dour Jaruzelski, the man who had imprisoned him eight years before. Indeed, the general’s very presence was an eloquent symbol of the communist party’s comeuppance. For the new parliament to elect him president—as both sides had planned—Solidarity’s leaders found themselves in the bizarre position of voting with the communists to thrust their former nemesis into power. On July 19, they got him into office by a margin of one vote. At the swearing-in ceremony, his entire cabinet watched from the visitors’ gallery. Not one had won a seat of his own.

  After that, events took on a life of their own. When Jaruzelski and his communists proved unable to create a government, Solidarity negotiated a power-sharing arrangement: “Your president, our prime minister,” one of its leaders, Adam Michnik, famously quipped. At the time, Michnik’s compromise was laughed off. “Oh, come on, Adam,” replied Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who had guided that winter’s Round Table talks. “We have to go slow. It will be years before we enter the government.” Yet just a few weeks later, on August 24, Mazowiecki became the government—Poland’s new prime minister, the first noncommunist since the Soviet army swept across his country in 1944. On his first day of work, he skipped the official limo waiting outside his humble apartment and rode his bike to work. Exploring his new office, he pressed a hidden button. An armed guard leaped out from behind a partition. Mazowiecki was aghast.

  The problems he faced. Inflation of 50 to 100 percent a month. Shortages of food and medical supplies. Panic buying that emptied stores. Endemic corruption. Economic incentives so skewed that barter threatened to displace currency. The specter of strikes if not social implosion. No wonder the communists had wanted to share power. How long would it be before they sighed with relief to be removed from responsibility altogether? Meeting for a late-evening interview, Mazowiecki inhaled hard on his cigarette. Fatigue was etched into his face. Perhaps, he joked, Solidarity should not have won the election, after all. For Solidarity’s new ministers, it was the revenge of Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

  Like so many other journalists before us, we asked the obvious: Solidarity won the election. Now what? The neophyte prime minister, so accustomed to his role as an opposition leader and a champion of human rights, thus spoke to us of tax reforms, the elimination of subsidies and state planning, how to spark entrepreneurship and replace Poland’s command economy with one based on demand. “The most important thing is to lift Poles out their sense of hopelessness,” he said. “We need a reawakening. That’s our first task, to release the energies of the people. Everything depends on it.” To another typically American question—in the face of such difficulty, how long did he think his political “honeymoon” would last?—he smiled ruefully. “What honeymoon?”

  At dinner that night in Warsaw’s faded Hotel Victoria, three Solidarity leaders seemed at sea. They needed time, but there was no time. They needed money and kept asking for it from the West, but so far none was to be had. They needed knowledge, but they had none: monetary policy, fiscal policy, supply and demand? “We don’t even know what a market is,” said one. Innocent of the mysteries of Economics 101, they talked authoritatively of quack remedies. “What we need is a good dose of corrective inflation.” By that they meant sudden price increases that would, in theory, put goods on store shelves and discourage panic buying. “Shock therapy,” said the man who would soon be finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz.

  These were good and simple men, the sort you might find in the Vermont statehouse, thrust into the middle of world-shaking events. Yet they were so inexperienced. “I’ve never eaten in a restaurant like this,” marveled a prominent member of parliament, as though the down-at-heel Victoria were the George V in Paris rather than a poor East European version of a Quality Inn. The man touted as a future defense minister spoke of commerce and history—that is to say, Germans. “Yes, we Poles have a thousand-year history with Germany. It is a thousand years of war.” Bafflingly he solemnly advised, “Beware of the German Jewish conspiracy against the Polish army.” It was an age-old shibboleth, too complicated to go into. Let’s merely note that victims of history are not always ennobled by their victimhood, nor are devils forever damned.

  Communists were quick to take advantage of Solidarity’s troubles by recasting themselves as progressive “social democrats.” Marek Krol, the newly appointed secretary of media relations for the party, was the epitome of the new New Man. Sleekly besuited and slick of hair, flaunting his uninflected English, he disdained the C-word. “Communism,” he explained with distaste. “I don’t like these religious attitudes, these socialist de
ities, holy leaders, the scriptural dogmas of belief. ‘Class struggle.’ ‘The working class.’ Paah. We have become the party of the lumpen proletariat. There is no future in that.” Poles, lazy and demoralized, have to change their “mind-set.” They must become more enterprising and self-reliant—in a word, more “Western.” The path of his party, Krol assured us, was unfettered capitalism, not the messy “third way” likely to be favored by Solidarity. Why, look at how many former top communists, leaving public life, were going into business. “Already, they are making piles of money!”

  The man they called the Fox would soon be counted among them. Prime minister a short season ago, now the new communist party chief, Mieczyslaw Rakowski likened himself to an Eastern “Reagan Republican.” The effrontery of the assertion, the sheer audacity, at once shocked and made us laugh—all the more so because he so evidently believed it, that with a wave of his hand he could reinvent himself as a new-age free marketeer. With his short, silvery hair and craggy face, he more closely resembled Julius Caesar. Affecting an emperor’s disdain for the masses he once led, Rakowski derided his countrymen for clinging to the comforts of the old system. “Society is not prepared to make sacrifices,” he said. “We are too attached to our peaceful life. We Poles would rather live in capitalism and work in socialism.”

  George Bush, visiting Warsaw in July, liked what he heard. “He told me I was the first Pole who hadn’t asked him for money,” Rakowski told us proudly. Never mind that he, too, had once hounded Polish dissidents seeking change, or that he had helped create this nation of “slackards,” as he called them. Ousted as prime minister when Solidarity came to power, an architect of Poland’s era of martial law as well as its later reforms, he counted himself a realist. Clearly, he was skilled in both realpolitik and aphorism. “If the economy is clinically dead,” he said, “we’d rather Solidarity were the undertaker.” Why? Because it would be that much easier for his communists to retake power. “Democratically, of course,” he added with a smile. He would have no way of knowing that, within three years, precisely that would happen.

  Nor were the communists the only opportunists. Lech Walesa, Solidarity’s leader, had been relegated to the sidelines under the new government. His problem was the perennial one for revolutionary politics. The elections were done. Solidarity was ascendant. What’s in it for me? Walesa had wanted to know. I’m the hero of Gdansk! Truth be told, Solidarity’s brass had turned against him, largely because of his high-handed arrogance. Behind his back, their tongues loosed by cognac, they called him “fatso” and “pontoon.” They derided his pinkie ring and penchant for riding in sleek black limos and hinted he was in the pay of the Catholic Church. The one job to which Walesa might have been suited—president—was occupied by Jaruzelski. So the man who had been the face of a movement, who perhaps did more than any other individual to bring Poland its independence, was out.

  Beware the fury of a founding father scorned. Poland’s first postcommunist government was only six weeks old, but Lech Walesa went after it like the Doberman he was. The scornful rhetoric he once reserved for the communists was refocused on his former allies. “The government is not moving fast enough,” he trumpeted in speeches. “It is making the wrong decisions. Society is furious and fed up. Poland is a powder keg that could erupt in civil war.” Ever the canny politician, and perhaps taking a leaf from the communists, Walesa was also distancing himself from the government he’d helped create. Fail or succeed, its reforms would cause deep and politically unpopular pain to a majority of the electorate. He was quite sure he wanted no part of that.

  Unlikable Lech showed his colors during an interview in Gdansk. I had flown in with a photographer, later in October. Violent winds and rain bounced the plane like a kite; visibility was zero. This being the national Polish airline (LOT, for lots of luck), we were not equipped for an instrument landing, nor was there enough fuel to return to Warsaw. We circled and circled before finally, through a break in the thunderclouds, diving onto the tarmac. It was lined with ambulances and fire trucks. Throughout the ordeal, Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes” played on the intercom. Music to die to, I thought ever after.

  Walesa sat at a desk reading (or pretending to read) Politika, an intellectual political journal. “He can barely read,” a former ally once boozily confided. True or not, Walesa had no time for the likes of me, now merely a lowly journalist. German businessmen, potential partners, awaited outside his door. “What do you think I am? An actor?” Walesa demanded when Newsweek’s photographer asked him to pose for a photo. “Hurry up. Hurry up. You are so slow. You would not earn much money from me!” I asked about his accusations against the new government: that its proposed economic reforms cut too deeply, that it risked igniting a “civil war,” that Poland would be better served by a traditional nationalist strongman such as Marshal Pilsudski (or himself) than by democracy.

  A shrug. “Walesa is an initiator,” he said in fitting third person. “He initiated political change, now he will initiate economic change.” It bothered him to hear talk of his being pushed aside; to the contrary, he insisted, it was his choice. “Such is life.” I asked whether other communist regimes of Eastern Europe would find inspiration in Poland, hoping for some insight on events to come in Czechoslovakia or East Germany. “Walesa is many things,” the Great Man replied. “But a fortune-teller he is not.” Were we through yet? “I am a slave of time! I am sorry. I know you are important. I should treat you better. But Walesa is a slave of time!” With that, he abruptly got up and hustled off to his Germans, beaming.

  The snub was weighted with unintended meaning. All those journalists pestering him about the past: Would the communists ever cede full control of the government? Could Solidarity govern? What was the future? Pisssh. It didn’t matter anymore. As far as Walesa was concerned, the Polish revolution was over. Everything had changed. The future lay with commerce and the West, with his Germans, whose money would bring new prosperity, whose very presence, Walesa rightly saw, represented the Poland of the coming decades, firmly anchored in Europe. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he might have said, a phrase soon to be popularized in America by a rising young political candidate named Bill Clinton. Look West, not East. Look to the future, not to today. We journalists, with all our questions concerning the moment, didn’t see the bigger picture. We did not see the new world. Walesa did.

  If Poland was all motion and commotion, East Germany yet lay frozen, at least on the surface. Beneath, it was cracking up. Erich Honecker could not see it, or perhaps would not. But others in the regime surely did. They saw what was happening in Warsaw and Budapest. They saw the threat to the GDR. And they were appalled by Honecker’s gross mishandling of the crisis.

  Exhibit A was his latest folly—the decision to send East German refugees from Prague to the Federal Republic via rail through Dresden and Leipzig. Could he not foresee the popular reaction? An “idiocy,” Gunter Schabowski called it, scarcely able to believe it. Yet he welcomed the move, if only because it gave him a weapon. “You see,” he told me, “by this time Egon Krenz and I were in talks about how to end all this. Our solution was to push Honecker out.”

  A conspiracy was afoot. It had been slow in coming, for a variety of reasons: Honecker’s illness, his absolute power, the mutual mistrust among members of the Politburo, the sheer blindness of some, the silence of others. Schabowski sensed an ally in the head of East German internal security, Egon Krenz, widely regarded as Honecker’s eventual successor. The first sign came in early May, during the phony “elections” the communists periodically held to demonstrate their democratic bona fides. When the ballots were counted, it was announced that the party had garnered 98 percent of the votes. “It was rigged, of course,” said Schabowski. “But 98 percent?” It was so transparently nonsense, given the temper of the time. “We looked like clowns. Ridiculous. I looked at Krenz, and he looked at me, and we saw we were thinking the same.”

  Neither man spoke. Schabowski struggled to e
xplain why, to express how frustrating it felt to be so stymied. Here he was, this lively, intelligent man of immense energy and independence. Yet he felt utterly powerless, a ceremonial fixture in a government of one man—Honecker.

  In the third week of September, another occasion arose a few days after Honecker emerged from the hospital. At a wreath-laying ceremony commemorating some alleged socialist triumph or another, Krenz had been relegated to the second row of party officialdom. Normally, he would be in the first, as befit his rank as Honecker’s number two. But the head of the secret police, Erich Mielke, stood on one side of Honecker, and on the other was the party ideologist Kurt Hager. Schabowski found himself next to Krenz, so he tried a little experiment. “‘Egon,’ I said. ‘Why are you in the second row? You should be in the first. Why is this asshole Hager in there?’ Krenz laughed a little. He could tell, from the way I said it, that I was on his side.”

  A few days later, Krenz came by Schabowski’s office. “We began to speak,” he said, beginning with the recent lunacy of Honecker’s handling of the problem in Prague and moving on to the mounting crisis at home. They had to do something, they agreed, and soon met again, first at Schabowski’s house in Wandlitz, a leafy suburb of Berlin favored by senior communists, and again at his office near the Central Committee building, which Krenz could reach unseen using a secret underground corridor. “We both agreed that with Honecker the GDR could not survive. So we began our little conspiracy. The murder of kings begins like this. But how to do it? In a palace revolution, you can only speculate who will sympathize and who will not.”

  The two began to quietly approach a select few members of the Politburo they felt could be trusted and settled on a propitious date to make their first move: October 7. This was to be Honecker’s special day, his big Jubilee marking the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic. There would be parades, festivals, fireworks and many receptions where potential allies could innocently be approached. Mikhail Gorbachev would be there, along with the heads of the entire Warsaw Pact. The conspirators agreed that they would try to send the Soviet leader a signal, perhaps ask for his support for a change in leadership. “We could not try to contact him before then,” said Schabowski. “We could have been found out. We had to protect ourselves. We did not think it would matter whether we waited another week or two.”