The Year that Changed the World Read online

  It usurped Western culture, which in turn diffused throughout the world. In American schools of the 1950s and early 1960s, kids “ducked and tucked” under their desks against atomic blasts. When they grew up, they explored the trade-offs between guns and butter in Economics 101. They were fluent in the lexicon of confrontation: containment, mutually assured destruction, the domino theory. Everyone knew about the nuclear button, the “hotline” between Washington and Moscow, the briefcase, aka the football, the satchel of nuclear codes that to this day accompanies the president everywhere. The Cold War was hip: James Bond, The Third Man, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Tom Clancy. It was the stuff of pop-culture thrillers and avant-garde films: Z, State of Siege, Dr. Strangelove. It wasn’t enough to be merely American. The best and the brightest were all-American—patriots, not pinkos. The Cold War was counterculture, too. The Generation Gap. The antiwar activists of the Vietnam era. Rock ’n’ roll grew up as a protest song against the Cold War.

  We told ourselves that we won it. But it is equally fair to say that we also lost it, or at least shared amply in the loss. Clearly and simply, the Cold War was a catastrophe. Seldom in history had a conflict lasted so long, swept up so much of the world and cost so dearly. Within a few decades, as living memory dies, the Cold War will seem as distant as the Thirty Years’ War. We will read about it as ancient history, much as we read about the battles of the kings and princes of 1648. We will forget that this greatest of the world’s conflicts came at a commensurate cost, perhaps because we perceive ourselves to be the uncompromised victors and have never had to fully reckon the magnitude of the expense: how much treasure we expended, how economies were distorted, how we ourselves and our societies were changed by a half century’s obsession. Our view is Churchill’s, not Gorbachev’s, when in truth it should be both.

  Some have attempted an accounting, a Cold War “butcher’s bill,” if you will. Focusing purely on defense expenditures, the Brookings Institution in 1998 performed a so-called Nuclear Audit. Since atomic weapons constituted the backbone of Cold War deterrence and absorbed the lion’s share of resources for military research, it was thought that the amount of money devoted to them would serve as a revealing index of the nation’s sacrifice. By that reckoning, the United States between 1940 and 1996 spent $5.8 trillion (in constant 1995 dollars) on nuclear weapons and infrastructure. How much is that? According to Brookings, a stack of a billion $1 bills would rise about eighty miles. A trillion would tower 79,000 miles. As for nearly 6 trillion—the stack would reach the moon, encircle it and reach roughly a quarter of the way back. Put another way, the researchers estimated, the amount would paper every state east of the Mississippi, with enough left over to cover half the American West, including Texas. Put yet another way, it exceeds the amount of all outstanding mortgages on all homes and buildings in the country. It is roughly half of U.S. GDP—the amount Americans spend every year on everything from chewing gum and iPods to second homes in Vail. If you throw in military spending in the round—unfair, yes, but only partly since the Cold War inflated all defense spending, establishing a base that governs today—that total would balloon to $51.6 trillion, according to Brookings.

  How to even begin to count the human cost? The Korean War claimed the lives of 32,629 American soldiers and approximately 3 million Korean civilians. One of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam became a casualty: 58,148 died and 304,000 were wounded. An estimated 1.2 million Vietnamese were killed over seven years of fighting. Half a million people died in Angola’s twenty-seven-year civil war, waged among factions variously backed by the Soviets or the United States. The decade-long civil war in El Salvador, waged between Cold War proxies—leftist guerrillas versus a U.S.-backed military junta and its infamous “death squads”—claimed 75,000 dead. A similar conflict raged in neighboring Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, taking some 200,000 lives. Such numbers pale next to the 30 million Chinese who died in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or the million or so who perished in Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, or the 30 million who died in Stalin’s wars and purges. These events, too, grew out of the Cold War and are part of its dark heritage.

  The symbol of all this was the Berlin Wall, the grim icon to half a century of human misery, oppression, struggle and hope.

  For most Germans, as for most others, 1989 came out of the blue. That winter, on the cusp of the year that would change the world, there seemed almost no impetus for change. Only the most romantic West Germans dreamed of a day when the Wall might fall. Certainly Chancellor Helmut Kohl did not, nor any of his advisers that I spoke to. Neither did his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for all his talk of Ostpolitik, who, in an interview with Newsweek at the time, dismissed Thatcher’s and Reagan’s harder-line advisers as “people who stick to the old enemy images and act as if nothing has changed or could ever change.”

  Virtually no one even spoke (except rhetorically in the most hazy future tense) of Wiedervereinigung, or reunification. Politicians might steadfastly refuse to recognize Germany’s division, at least officially. Yet most Germans were perfectly at ease with it. Everywhere, there was a cocoonlike sense of self-sufficiency, a basic contentment with the idea of two Germanys and a resistance to the continued pretense that there was only one. West Germans described themselves as just that—West Germans, or “Europeans,” hardly German at all. Polls documented this sense of estrangement. In 1983, 43 percent of German students under the age of twenty-one described their titular East German brethren as Ausländer, or foreigners. In the summer of 1985, Allensbach researchers asked how long people thought the Berlin Wall would stand. The average response: thirty-four years. Amid the tens of thousands of documents released by the government Office on Intra-German Affairs concerning Deutsche Einheit, 1989–90, there was almost no discussion or evidence of planning for eventual unification. The topic was not verboten; it simply seemed… irrelevant.

  I brought this up one night in February in a smoky bar in Kreuzberg, then West Berlin’s bohemian district. A framed photo from the 1950s showed the establishment’s patrons, East and West Berliners, casually sharing a beer over the little picket fence that then demarcated the border. A glossy bit of nostalgia, scoffed the member of the Berlin parliament who had brought me to the place. “We may talk about reunification,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we want it.” Foreigners from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, many of them ethnic Germans who had paid their way out of captivity or been bought out by the West German government to the tune of some $10,000 a head, were flooding into Germany—three hundred thousand in 1988 alone. Imagine what it would be like without the Wall? The lawmaker shuddered at the thought.

  In the East, meanwhile, life went on. Crossing over, I always felt as though I were entering a parallel universe—familiar in its essential lineaments, with cars and streetlights and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, yet somehow dimmer, drearier, shabbier and indefinably oppressive. At Checkpoint Charlie, there was always the same tedious routine, sometimes lasting hours. You would join a long queue, shuffling slowly forward. East German guards rummaged through every paper, wrote down every telephone number. What would I be doing? Who would I be seeing? Drivers leaving East Berlin were ordered to open the trunk and hood of their car; guards inserted a probe into the gas tank to ensure that it contained only gasoline and not would-be escapees. Before the war, Berlin was always famous for its Berliner Luft, its fresh and invigorating air. Once in the East, that sense of lightness would instantly vanish. The air suddenly felt heavier, constricting. East Berliners referred to it as “sticky,” something that clung to you, vaguely menacing.

  This was the effect of a police state. The German Democratic Republic under its leader for life Erich Honecker, the man who oversaw the actual erection of the Wall and who wanted to be known to his people as Papi, however deadly his instincts, was the most rigidly controlled, totalitarian state in the East bloc with the possible exception of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. The secret
police, the infamous Stasi, were ubiquitous. They could be your neighbors, your friends, even your family. Citizens were seduced, suborned, blackmailed and coerced into working for them. If you fell sick, vital medication might be withheld until you cooperated by informing on those you worked with or knew in private. If you wished to travel abroad, attend university or be promoted, you made a compact with the devil: collaborate, or pay the price. “The Stasi targeted everyone,” writes Alexandra Richie in her aptly titled Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, from miners and waitresses to Intourist guides, musicians and kindergarten teachers. Files were kept on more than 6 million people. The regime’s infamous Order No. 2, introduced by Stasi chief Erich Mielke in 1985 after Gorbachev came to power, directed the secret police to “prevent, discover and combat” all underground political activity using all means. Dissidents, critics and even mere moaners, Richie notes, were “checked, followed and documented in files which were regularly updated” in a campaign of “total information.” By its own official count, the regime at the end of its life had 97,000 employees and 173,000 informers. In a nation of 17 million, that translates to one in every sixty-three people working for state security. No wonder the air felt sticky. No wonder politics was taboo as a topic of conversation. No wonder no one trusted anyone—fathers or sons, mothers or daughters, lovers.

  From time to time, I would go to a small private restaurant named Papillon, one of a handful in East Berlin, where I would casually talk to locals. One evening I met a trio of young musicians, a pair of young men and a girl. They spoke quietly with bowed heads, as if fearing to be overheard. “We don’t have feelings of nationalism,” said one of the men, echoing his compatriots in the West. “Why not two nations? It works fine.” His biggest regret was not the presumed impossibility of unification, nor even necessarily East Germany’s low living standards. He chaffed at his inability to travel, as if the country’s leaders sincerely believed their world would collapse if citizens were allowed to move freely. This truly irked him, to the point of deep alienation. Would he come back if he was allowed to visit the West? “Of course,” he replied. “I only want to see it, not live there. This is my home.” Then two men sat down at the next table and lit cigarettes, and the atmosphere changed. “Socialism must be preserved,” the young man said abruptly, speaking suddenly more loudly. And for the first time the girl opened her mouth. “Honecker is right,” she exclaimed, also rather too loudly. The men at the next table looked at us, ignoring the waitress who asked if she could serve them, and my companions got up and left.

  Winds of change may have been blowing from Moscow, but the German Democratic Republic was not about to bend. Its leaders, the ruling Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, had grown white-haired and inflexible, convinced of the rightness of their path and determined to hold power. Popularly they were known as the Alt-Herren Riege, the team of old men. Honecker was seventy-six as the year began; Mielke was over eighty. They knew the party line and cleaved to it uncompromisingly. Unification with the Federal Republic was an “impossibility,” Honecker would declaim again and again. “Socialism and capitalism are like fire and water.”

  Yet deep within, Honecker was fearful. He knew that East Germany’s command economy was feeble and growing weaker. The sputtering two-stroke Trabant automobile, made of plastic and belching plumes of exhaust as it bounced flimsily across the communist landscape, bore testimony to reality: the GDR was not on an economic plane with Spain, an only slightly less efficient model of traditional German industry than the Federal Republic, as we journalists often wrote. It was a basket case. Shortages of basic goods were endemic and people lived in suppressed despair and deprivation.

  The other thing Honecker feared was Mikhail Gorbachev. East Germans had cheered when he last visited Berlin. “Gorbi, Gorbi,” they called out. “The people made it clear,” writes Peter Wyden in his masterful history, Wall. “They longed for the fresh air he was breathing into communism.” They, too, wanted change. Honecker and his men could sense it. They saw it when East Berliners tried to approach the Wall to hear Ronald Reagan speak in 1987, and again a few months later when they again approached the Wall to overhear a performance on the Western side by the rock band Genesis. They could see it in the jokes East Germans told.

  The Volkspolizei were favorite targets, as in: Two Stasi agents on a surveillance mission grew bored. Said one, “Hey, what are you thinking about?” Replied the other, “Oh, nothing special—the same as you.” First agent: “In that case you’re under arrest!”

  The people made fun of the shortages of basic foods, and especially luxuries such as bananas: “How do you use a banana as a compass? Place it atop the Berlin Wall. East is where a bite has been taken out of it.”

  Political jokes took on a particularly hard edge: Honecker meets Mao and asks, “How many political opponents do you have in China?” The Chinese leader answers, “I estimate seventeen million.” To which Honecker replies, “Oh, that’s pretty much the same here,” which of course was the entire population of East Germany.

  The 2007 Oscar-winning movie Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) featured an especially sharp jab at Honecker and communism in general:

  Early one morning, Honecker arrives at his office and opens his window. He sees the sun and says, “Good morning, dear sun!”

  The sun replies, “Good morning, dear Erich!”

  Honecker begins his work, then, at noon, looks out the window and exclaims, “Good afternoon, dear sun!” And the sun replies, “Good afternoon, dear Erich!”

  In the evening, Honecker calls it a day and goes once more to the window. “Good evening, dear sun!” But the sun is silent, so Honecker says again, “Good evening, dear sun! What is the matter with you?”

  The sun replies, “Kiss my ass. I’m in the West now.”

  This was the mood across the East bloc as 1989 began. It may have been hard to see from the West, but in the East the signs were unmistakable. The climate was changing, a thaw was breaking up the frozen landscape. Gorbachev was in Moscow. In Poland, there was movement. The famous trade union of yesteryear, Solidarity, was showing signs of renewed life. In Prague, with a wary eye to the east, communist hard-liners were trying to read the winds and talking cautiously about “reform,” like the Soviet leader, even if they did not really mean it. In all the communist realm, Hungary was the place to watch. It was there that the first real spark of revolution was lit—not by its people, in the form of a popular uprising, but rather by a small band of pirates, numbering no more than half a dozen, who decided to light the fuse on a powder keg that would blow up the communist world.

  Among them was a man few Americans have ever heard of. His name: Miklos Nemeth, Hungary’s Harvard-educated prime minister. Working secretly with a few Western allies, chiefly in the West German chancellery, Nemeth and his small crew of communist subversives consciously set out to bring down the Iron Curtain that separated Hungary from the West. Their goal, as he put it, was to “join Europe” and restore their country to the ranks of the modern world. To do so, he knew he had to destroy the whole communist system. The means they chose, and the cunning and courage with which they executed their intricate plan, was one of the great subterfuges in the annals of diplomatic history—on the order of the legendary Operation Fortitude, and the tale of Britain’s gambit to fool Hitler into thinking the Allied invasion of 1944 would come near Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy, effectively winning World War II.

  This is the untold story of 1989.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Democracy on the Danube

  That was the thing about the man. He sat there so imperturbably, so genial and seemingly genuine. It was impossible not to like him, hard not to trust him. But could you? After all, he was the justice minister of the People’s Republic of Hungary. By virtue of his title, he was the ultimate enforcer in Hungary’s communist regime, charged with jailing dissidents and hounding would-be democrats—a principal in the country’s vast
secret police and security apparatus.

  Yet here he was, this friendly bear, a onetime law professor with florid cheeks and curly graying hair, talking animatedly about James Madison and the Federalist Papers and sounding every bit like a Hungarian Thomas Jefferson. A new prime minister had brought him into the government, just a few weeks earlier, and already he was elbow-deep in paperwork, he said, authoring a new national constitution. “We must guarantee the rights of the individual against the state,” he declared with forceful energy. Free speech, free association and free property are “inalienable rights.” And that wasn’t all from this card-carrying commie. “Our goal is to create a parliamentary democracy,” he went on, identical to those in Western Europe.