The Year that Changed the World Read online

  How odd that it should be that word, on this particular slab, the first to be torn from the Wall in the heart of old Berlin. That evening, as the sun settled in the west, a huge and perfect orange ball burning into the earth, the moon had risen to the east, as perfectly full and round as the sun, cool and bluish white. It was as though they were in balance, moving on an invisible axis, with Berlin poised between them equidistant, at once suspended and a fulcrum. Freiheit. It was almost enough to make one believe in destiny, here in this haunted land of ghosts. The word felt ambiguous then, more so now. Freedom to do … what?

  Most immediately, it was the freedom to go shopping. East German noses pressed up against the storefronts of the West. My journals are full of images: traffic jams up to thirty miles long at border crossings. A new Berlin airlift—to get goods into stores, all the things Easterners could not for so long buy: stockings, decent electronics, sex magazines. An East Berliner riding around West Berlin on his battered old bike with big balloon tires, a map taped to his handlebars and a plump stalk of bananas on his back—all for him, who probably never had one. A farmer driving his smoke-belching pre–World War II tractor down the Ku’damm, Berlin’s fanciest shopping drag, shouting, “Freedom for all” and shaking marimba gourds.

  Intellectuals gazed loftily upon the scene. Freedom as travel and window-shopping? Yet what could be more human, after all these years? Of course, freedom meant freedom to think. East Germans had that. Lacking was the right to speak, which they began to do, cautiously at first and in small ways, but then all at once and as loud as possible, trumpeting, “Berlin is one again!”

  Egon Krenz had been thinking, too. He had made his calculations to oust Honecker, to intervene in Leipzig, to free East Germans to travel. Go for it, his instincts told him now. The day after the Wall came down, he held a rally on the steps of the old State Museum on Unter den Linden. Ten thousand people came, chanting, “Keep going, Egon!” “We are the communists!” Half of them wore Stasistyle leather jackets and waved posters proclaiming such exhilarating sentiments as WE ARE FOR ACTION WITH A PROGRAM! Obviously, most of the people there were friendly plants. Krenz waded into their midst like a Boston pol, glad-handing everyone in sight and later talking for half an hour with reporters. He was convinced he could get out in front and lead the new changes. But other people were thinking. Toward the end of the rally, a man shouted out, “I wonder whether we really need a communist party in this country. I’m not even sure we need you.” Party elders quickly beckoned the man with crooked fingers, among them Gunter Schabowski, as if to say, “You need a good talking-to.”

  Here was a face in the crowd. Everyone saw, everyone heard. Just as they would in Leipzig, the next week, at yet another of the city’s huge rallies. Would the communists lose power after the Fall? Now that the Wall was gone, what would the people be marching for?

  It was a freezing-cold night. Outside the Nikolaikirche, where the demonstrators gathered, a new mood was in the air. People were chanting the usual slogans: Wir sind das Volk, “We are the people.” But they also sang a hymn to the German fatherland. Then, as if from nowhere, came the call, as immediately clear and commanding as a clarion. Not Wir sind das Volk but Wir sind ein Volk. “We are one people.” Instantly it was taken up, and the rest was writ. Here, too, was a face in the crowd.

  Jens Reich, the opposition leader who emerged from quiescence in the autumn of 1989 to help found the New Forum and went on to become a member of the German parliament, talked about the phenomenon of the individual within crowds. He told of addressing half a million people in Alexanderplatz on November 4, the largest protest in German history. “It was an almost mystical experience. You do not see just a black crowd. You see individual faces. It is impossible to say how such a crowd will react. That day, I feared it might march en masse to the Wall, where military force would have been applied to stop them. Why did they not? Why do some things happen one way, and not another?”

  Within the crowd, within what he called the “exhilarating, uplifting mass of people moving and acting,” said Reich, there is choice, oddly and persistently individualistic. The man who called out, “We are one people!” The one who asked Krenz whether he was needed—publicly posing the unwanted question, forcing the answer, desecrating the symbol. These were people making choices. This was not the crowd but the faces in the crowd, voices that moved it. Perhaps this is so obvious as to verge on banality. Yet so often we write and think of history as somehow inevitable, a culmination of great grinding forces and structures that can only lead to where they end up. Not so. The reality of 1989, said Reich, is that “it was possible at any point, at any time, for events to take a different course.” Why this, not that? The answer seems to be those countless individual choices at key moments, the accidents of human messiness, such as Schabowski’s “botch,” so small and so understandable yet so earthshaking. Among them, too, were Reich’s own choices: not to stay quiet anymore, to risk a beating and speak out, so as to not have to answer to the next generation, “We sat and waited.”

  It is immensely heartening, this view of history. So intimate, so uplifting, so human. Yes, the revolutions in Eastern Europe owed much to the power of the people. They also owed much to the power of some people, to what a few did or failed to do, to individuals fumbling about in the face of tottering totalitarianism, to courageous dissidents writing and smoking and plotting, to inspired reformers, to frightened conspirators, and later to powerful thugs manufacturing wars.

  After the French revolution came the Glory. After the Glory came the Terror. So it was in Eastern Europe. Prague’s Velvet Revolution was a party, a glorious exultation in almost effortlessly bringing down another communist regime. Romania was a troubling interlude, part people’s uprising, part artfully concealed coup, with no happy denouement except for those who plotted Nicolae Ceausescu’s overthrow. Then came the war, the slaughterhouse of Yugoslavia. As Robespierre followed upon Danton, Milosevic followed upon Nemeth and Havel. We celebrated the happier expressions of the power of the people, so wildly and enthusiastically, that we tended to forget the power of some people, for evil as well as good.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Aftermath

  On the morning of November 10, Helmut Kohl flew from Warsaw to Berlin. That evening, returning to his residence in Bonn, he telephoned George Bush.

  “I have just arrived from Berlin,” he told the president. “It has the atmosphere of a carnival! The frontiers are absolutely open. At certain points they are literally tearing down the Wall. At Checkpoint Charlie, thousands of people are crossing both ways!”

  Everything depended on the new government of Egon Krenz. “If the people see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kohl said, they will stay home. Otherwise East Germans will leave en masse—“a catastrophe for the GDR. They are doctors, lawyers, specialists, who cannot be replaced.” The country would implode.

  The situation required delicate handling, both men agreed. Above all there should be no triumphant geopolitical crowing, no premature talk of a brave new world. “I want to see our people continue to avoid hot rhetoric that might by mistake cause a problem,” Bush said.

  “Excellent,” replied Kohl. “Give my best to Barbara.”

  Bush knew as well as Kohl that this was the endgame. From then on, they would work together for calm. The goal, as they would soon begin to discuss explicitly, was unification. Focused on Germany, they did not foresee how quickly the other dominoes of Eastern Europe would topple.

  “Mike, I think you should be here.”

  My Czech translator, Zdenka Gabalova, was calling from Prague. A “little gathering” would take place that evening in the old Vysehrad Cemetery, up in the hills overlooking the city. Fifty years ago, on November 17, 1939, nine Czech students were executed after demonstrations against the Nazi occupation. History, yes. But in the subtext of Czech dissidence, the commemoration would protest a more contemporary oppression. “It might be interesting for you,” Zdenka ventured.
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  But I was in Berlin, I protested. The Wall had just come down. Who knew what might happen next? I couldn’t leave now.

  The “little gathering” grew into a demonstration of twenty thousand people, most of them students. They lit candles amid the terraced gardens and rising church spires of Vysehrad, the burial grounds of Smetana and Dvorak. They sang the national anthem, “Where Is My Homeland?” Poland, Hungary and now even East Germany had sloughed off bankrupt communist regimes. “We don’t want to be last!” shouted the young people again and again.

  Down from the hills they came, their candles glimmering in the darkness along the embankment of the river Vltava. “Down with communism!” “Jakes out!” At the National Theater, lit up in gilt Hohenzollern splendor, they turned into the street whose name would within hours become known to the world, Narodni. Riot police blocked their way, three rows deep, white-helmeted with plastic shields and truncheons. Another phalanx closed in behind, trapping the vanguard of marchers. The crowds halted a few feet from the wall of police. Those in the front tried to hand them flowers, placed candles of peace on the pavement before them, raised their hands in a gesture of youthful innocence. Then, from behind, the security forces advanced, using armored bulldozers to squeeze the people—perhaps three thousand in all—more tightly into their trap. Police with megaphones ordered, “Disperse!” Yet they would not let anyone escape the ring of steel.

  Martin Mejstrik, a twenty-three-year-old theater student, worked for a year to organize the rally. Faced with a potential Tiananmen, he telephoned the police commander who had authorized the gathering and promised not to interfere. “You assured us there would be no violence,” said Mejstrik.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the man replied. “Nothing will happen.”

  Shortly after 9 p.m., Martin returned to Narodni Street, just in time to see the police hurl themselves upon the crowds.

  Ten years later, we walked the street where it happened. “People were pressed so closely together that they could hardly breathe, let alone run,” Martin recounted. “The police just beat them and beat them, swinging their clubs with all their force.” Here, in front of the chic new Café Louvre, the police stopped the march. Down there, not far from a recently opened outlet for Just Jeans, they sprang their trap. Just here, down this narrow side street, no wider than an alley, was the only way out. It became a gauntlet. Special antiterrorist units in distinctive red berets lined either side, separated by about six feet. People were clubbed and pummeled as they ran between them—men, women and children. Those who fell were hit and kicked where they lay.

  One young girl, a drama student, told me at the time how a policeman kicked out her candles, then slapped her. “Do you really need to do this?” she asked him. At that, he grabbed her by the hair and banged her head several times against a building, knocking her unconscious. A bland official announcement on state television later declared that order had been restored and that thirty-eight people had been treated for “light injuries.”

  Havel had predicted it. “Sooner or later,” he had said in June, “they will make a mistake, perhaps by beating up some people. Then forty thousand people will fill Wenceslas Square.” Black Friday, as the night of November 17 came to be known, was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. The challenge for Havel and his small band of dissident revolutionaries would be to fan that spark, stoke the fire and guide it.

  How brilliantly they performed! Prague was Eastern Europe’s happiest revolution, a delirium of good feeling. It was also the fastest, a revolution of passionate compression. Once it got going, the communists almost ran from power. This gentle revolution, this “Velvet Revolution” as Havel dubbed it, was sheer theater, a geopolitical spectacular as masterfully choreographed as the playwright’s own absurdist comedies. It unfolded in vignettes, scenes and acts, with cameo appearances by famous faces from the past. Alexander Dubcek. Joan Baez. Dissidents just released from jail. Eminent émigrés suddenly returned home. The theme music was the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” The stage was the Magic Lantern, the underground theater that served as Havel’s headquarters. The backdrop was Prague, impossibly romantic, the city of a hundred spires, tawny ocher houses and churches, sifting late-afternoon light, moonlight on the Vltava. The cast changed constantly, an immensely colorful cavalcade of friends and oddly assorted comrades-in-arms: philosophers, academics, journalists, students, boiler stokers, engineers, ditchdiggers, drunks, poets, hangers-on, hangers-out, pretty girls, all caught up in an intoxicating swirl of revolution, excitement, passion, sex and intrigue.

  The audience, of course, was the world. We watched it happen on TV. We saw the people, standing in the hundreds of thousands in Wenceslas Square. It was revolution as a street party, the climax of the story that was the Year of the Fall, a turning point in history: cliché transmuted into Truth. We knew our heroes would win. Everyone swept up by it felt young again, as though the world had suddenly, mysteriously, euphorically been made new.

  This revolution was counted in days. Day One was the “massacre,” as everyone called it. Day Two was a call to arms. Martin Mejstrik and other student leaders at the theater academy of Charles University called for a general strike. By afternoon, the journalist faculty had joined them. Then the actors. Then the artists and musicians. Meeting at the Realistic Theater, not far from Charles Bridge in a neighborhood of twisting cobblestone streets and tilting medieval houses, these various groups combined forces and set a date: Monday, November 27, from noon to 2 p.m. Thus the Velvet Revolution began.

  On Day Three, a Sunday, Vaclav Havel returned from his country house in northern Bohemia. He had chosen not to be in Prague the day of the Vysehrad march or the next, for fear of being arrested. In the early afternoon, a small group of dissidents met at his apartment overlooking the Vltava; the presidential palace, or Hrad, loomed in the distance. This was the time. They all knew it. They needed to create an organization, a Czech Solidarity. What to call it? A young dissident named Jan Urban—Rambo to his friends, in honor of his penchant for goading the police and leading them on chases across Prague’s rooftops—proposed Forum, after the New Forum in East Germany. Havel suggested Civic, for the democratic civil society they wished to create. “That was that,” Urban recalled. “Civic Forum was born.” Havel would lead it. Jan and his best friend, Ivan Gabal, my translator’s husband and a founder of a group called the Circle of Independent Intelligentsia, would be among the chief organizers.

  They wasted little time. They demanded the resignation of communist leaders responsible for the Soviet invasion of 1968, most prominently President Gustav Husak and the boss of the communist party, Milos Jakes. They called for an investigation into the authorities’ handling of the Friday-night massacre and the resignation of the men in charge. They appealed to all Czechs to support the students’ strike. Then they disappeared into the night, hiding out in friends’ apartments and other secret places, waiting to see how the regime would react.

  On Day Four, I arrived. Driving in from the airport late that Monday afternoon, my taxi took a circuitous route to avoid the main bridges into town. “Closed by tanks,” the driver explained. Shades of ’68. But at the central Wenceslas Square, a surprise awaited. It was teeming with people, bubbling with fun and good spirits—and not a policeman in sight. Over the weekend, thousands of students had begun gathering in the Square to protest Friday night’s beatings. Authorities did not intervene, and so the crowds grew. By Monday afternoon, they numbered in the tens of thousands, a mass of people already far too big for the police to easily disperse were they tempted to try. “I’ve never seen anything this big,” said a twenty-three-year-old art student named Renata. “We are ready to fight. We have had enough. We want to be free to speak our minds.” A well-dressed man with a briefcase told me that he had been a teenager in 1968. “I believe this is the end of the regime,” he predicted. “There will be no more violence. The police are afraid. Soon, they will start thinking about how to save themselves.�
�� Besides, how could they resist this, he added, gesturing toward the people milling about us. There, a father with a child on his shoulders. Here, an elderly couple, he with a cane, she in a fur hat. A young woman said incredulously, “My mother is taking part. She used to say, ‘Don’t get involved. Stay away from all this.’ And tonight, here she is!”

  This was revolution as a family outing. Exuberant crowds invented a new Czech national anthem. Anyone could play it. You just took your house keys out of your pocket and jingled them above your head. Tens of thousands were doing it, and the noise drowned out everything, like the ring of a thousand alarm clocks. Time to wake up. Your time is up. The din was deafening. “Jakes! Jakes! Jakes!” “Freedom!” “Democracy!” “Down with the government!” A spade was planted in a trampled municipal rose garden. Attached to it was a sign: WHO’S THIS FOR? The answer was already obvious.